This article was submitted to the magazine Fifth Estate and was printed in the Summer issue of 2010. Unfortunately, is was edited without my consultation and parts were also re-written without my consultation! Thus, one of the major arguments of the article was lost and, in fact, something was put in which goes against the whole point of what I was trying to say. The point of submitting the article to FE in the first place was to try to engage ‘anarcho-primitivists’, but the editing and re-writing by Fifth Estate abolished any real chance of that.

I have therefore disowned the article printed by Fifth Estate.

– Le Garcon Dupont
September 2009 – April 2010

Below is the original text:

Cul de Sac

This article explores the possibility that humanity has already been extinguished and that there may be no hope, certainly no hope contained within our conscious will, of resurrecting this particular species.

When many of the original people who inhabited Australia realised that their culture was being wiped out they refused the entreaties of anthropologists and took their knowledge with them when they died. They knew that the world was being changed, that human things were being snuffed out in favour of a new, anti-human form of social organisation. To enable the survival of an empty culture, one with form but no content, would be a clownish absurdity. The culture would become an academic product, an ideological or political product, and a product for sale. The heroes who took their knowledge with them may not have articulated this possibility in the way I just have, but they knew it. Their intelligence far outstripped the intelligence of those kind anthropological scientists, who blew in on a blood-soaked breeze. Their intelligence was greater but, in this battle between two forms of social organisation, their power was less. They were strong enough to be still and quiet in the last breaths of their community; when they could have been remembered and celebrated in the new culture as the last of the true people – because, you see, they knew that their words and their knowledge, if spoken out loud, would be put on show, to be derided, and worse: to be misunderstood. In the face of circumstances that were consuming them they remained tight-lipped.

When I talk about the original inhabitants of Australia I also mean all people across the world that genuinely lived in pre-civilisation societies. In its most basic definition ‘civilisation’ means ‘living in cities’, and I feel the best definition of civilisation is this: a society organised by the power residing in cities. Other definitions of the word ‘civilisation’, for example, the one where it is defined in opposition to ‘savage’, or ‘primitive’, only strengthen the validity of the above definition. Civilisation, therefore, has only occurred whenever city power has arisen.

The civilisation we live under today is, and has been for a century, at least, global. The ‘sameness’ that we are able to witness throughout the world is due to the fact that all means of living are now provided for by one economic system. This system is referred to as capitalism. It is a perfected form of civilisation.

The dictionary says that Capital (the root word of capitalism) is wealth available for use in the production of further wealth.

Wealth, it says, is all goods and services which have monetary or productive value.

Productive, it says, means: producing goods and services that have exchange value.

Exchange, it transpires, is to hand over goods in return for the equivalent value in kind…

The key phrase here is exchange value… What things in this world have exchange value…? It is disconcerting when you realise that the only useful part of you… is that which can somehow be ‘sold’, or made part of the economy. Have I really exchanged my time and effort, my life, for the dubious pleasure of continuing to live?

Ah, but, we are no longer tied to an endless search for food and shelter; we can rest and relax. We have our time after work, our weekends, our retirement – it is in these moments that we can do exactly as we please and pursue our own idle pleasures; listen to music, play computer games, carve wood or go camping. Life is not so hard now as it once was…? But modern academic research is now finally beginning to tell us that most mediaeval European serfs only worked for two-thirds of the year and that pre-civilisation humans generally lived in a state of relative abundance. Certainly, when the Aboriginal people of Australia met the Europeans they had no concept of work. They did not understand when Europeans told them that if they did some tasks for them they would be paid in food or other items. They could not make the connections that underlie the system of exchange.

Why are we always being led to believe that the past was a place of hardship? Maybe it is because there was indeed one period of history that fitted that description, and it was quite recent. Of course, this period happened in ‘the West’, just as the modern good times are happening in ‘the West’ too. My mother and father lived through the end of this period; they saw the world change from one of genuine struggle to survive, to one where survival was ensured. This period lasted from the end of mediaeval times to the years immediately after the Second World War. This is the period that encompasses The Industrial Revolution and World Colonisation, and was the time during which the modern economy, capitalism, established itself and refined its operations. People of my age grew up being told that we were getting everything on a plate, and we heard the stories of hardship from our parents. We grew up thinking that the past was hard and uncomfortable. Maybe this is why we think that ‘progress’, in general terms, is a good thing.

There is a film called Dead Man, by Jim Jarmusch. It is set in the ‘wild west’ days of the USA. The hero of the film comes across an indigenous man who was seized by Europeans when he was young, paraded in front of them as a curio and then ‘educated’ and sent to England. This man is then unable to live either in either culture. He relates the story of his capture and subsequent events. He says that when he was put on show in different towns and cities across America, it was always the same people who came to see him. They moved all the people who saw him in one place to the next place to see him again. Why did he think they were the same people? It would have been because they dressed the same, had the same language, and behaved in the same way. These people who turned out to see the primitive savage, no matter which part of the country they lived in, all had the same reference points, all thought the same things, all had the same foods, materials and equipment; they were all the same. Today we get this phenomenon across the entire globe: the true horror is not that we see the same shops everywhere, it is the fact that the same people are everywhere.

All societies are determined by the way people ‘make a living’. In pre-civilisation societies that living was directly connected to the land. In modern society we all make a living by serving some function (i.e., not necessarily working) in the economy, for which we are paid money; once we have this money we are able to buy what we need to live. This process occurs even for those who make their living, or rather, I should say earn their money, from the land.

And worse: capitalism, which has replaced all other modes of living, is an economic system that has reached so deeply into the heart of humankind that it is able to recreate itself automatically within the mind, brain and creative impulse of human beings. We must not forget that our economic system is based on the large-scale brutalism which resulted in the success of the Industrial Revolution, combined with the brutalism which has resulted in the successful spread of the one economic system to all parts of the world. In this massive process of revolutionising the way the world works we have also changed as human beings. It would be absurd to think otherwise.

When rural workers were drawn from the land to work in factories in Europe they were physically shocked at the new work routines they had to cope with. They fought these new regimes by not coming to work. They would claim spurious Holy Days as justifications for a sleep in and a day off. Of course, such obstruction could not be allowed to continue, so life in the factories became more authoritarian and brutal. This new regime for living spread beyond the workplace. Towards the end of the 19th Century the British authorities had to shorten the school day for the new mass school population because children were dying from overwork and stress. When pre-civilisation people were used in factory situations in new empires across the world, they simply died from the trauma of it. In Medieval Europe ordinary people worked far less than we do now. They would be aghast at how little we know of the land, and how much of our time we spend working for faceless others. They would understand, however, why we are consumed by stress and mental illness. We are not the same people that our distant ancestors were. The survivors amongst us are harder, we glint, like steel. We have lost our sensitivity, our kindness.

To understand the real difference between pre-civilisation humanity and present-day humanity we have to comprehend the underlying difference in their modes of existence, the way they ‘make a living’.

In pre-civilisation times the occupants of the land travelled and exchanged tools and artefacts across the continents and beyond. This was a kind of economy, but it in no way resembles the economy under which the world lives today. The whole point of anything done in a pre-civilisation society was to reproduce the human community in which the people lived. The ‘capital’ of this society (and any ‘pre-civilisation’ society) is the human being. It is the human being that is recreated and reproduced. In modern society we live under an economy which only reproduces humans as a bi-product. What is recreated and reproduced now is wealth, or capital (which is why our economy is described as capitalist). Modern society is geared to recreate the wealth of individuals, business and corporations; and most other humans play only a part in this process. Their part is equal to the materials or land used. Just like oil or land, most humans are now a commodity to be used in the re-creation of profit and wealth. Even those individuals who seem to benefit from great wealth are only part of a process in which they have also sold themselves. Like the rest of us, they are commodities too.

Humanity has lost its animal status, and this is not a good thing. All animals need to adapt to their environment in order to keep that environment healthy. Non-adaptation results in strange phenomena. It can result in massive population explosions, for example amongst rabbits introduced into Australia, or amongst humans who have been divorced from the land and turned into the slaves of wages. These population explosions are signs of non-suitability; they will be accompanied by massive, periodic epidemics, or constant battle. They show that the animal that is undergoing a population explosion has lost its connectedness to the land, as it rides roughshod over it. The introduced rabbit has changed the nature of the flora in the areas it has conquered in Australia, just as the new human converts the landscape into a product that serves the economy and the generation of money and wealth.

The human species is ‘out of control’ because the economic system has taken human beings away from the land; because capitalism has put a barrier between human beings and the natural world. This barrier is created daily in even the most dirt poor rural places, and here the misery is even more extreme; travelling to the outskirts of the city is the only option for survival. We skid and slide inside this bubble that has been created inside the bubble of the world’s tiny atmosphere. We do not know what we are doing anymore. This life no longer retains any animal content.

Humans are conscious beings, they are able to treat their own lives as an object, something they can consciously change and affect; they are therefore able to imagine possible futures and strive to achieve them. Their consciousness of the possibilities of their own existence gives them a practical, individual freedom. Humans are able to decide to live differently. A human being could decide to live alone in a cave on a mountain top, thereby going against the tendency for humans to live in a social organization. A human could decide to live with another animal group, endeavour to be accepted by them, and then write a book about it. It is this which separates humans from other animals. But, given this incredible ability, do we see a huge diversity in the way people live across the world?

This freedom is determined and restricted by material circumstances. In the present day the activity of humans is bound within the parameters set by the way the economy is organized and the way that humans must secure a means of living. The activity of humans in the present day is, therefore, not free activity.

In pre-civilisation societies humans were also restricted in their ability to pursue free activity. They made their own history, their own lives, but within a certain framework. Their activity was not free either.

The human mind is a victim of the material circumstances it finds itself in.
Since humans are conscious of their activity and life (even if they are often misguided about what is really happening) they are able to stand apart from it. Unlike animals, which are defined largely by their activities, human activity is not what defines them. It is the consciousness of their activity which defines them.

The chances they have to change their way of living, however, are not to be found in their ideas because their ideas are always bound by the parameters determined by material circumstance. The only successful genuine revolutionary event that has been well documented is the revolution from the Medieval mode of production to the Capitalist mode of production. Capitalism was a burgeoning economic force, which was already superseding Feudalism by the time of the English Revolution, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution… which were all instances of the economic order overturning the established political regime. These revolutions did not happen because people had ideas, they happened because of economic forces. But we have misled ourselves about the power of ideas. We now think that ideas can change the world. But they don’t. The only thing they can do is strengthen the current economic system. Thus, workers struggles tend to produce democracy, or a welfare state; revolt generally helps expand markets or create new ones; thus religious adventures will reflect the current mode of living; thus plans for the new world, as drawn up by the ‘revolutionaries’, will reflect current economic modes. The ‘revolution’ is more likely to be a self-managed counter-revolution than anything else.

What we have now, in this era of capitalist civilisation, are possibilities based on our recent history, our experiences, our ideologies, our emotions – all shaped by our existence, our material circumstance. This existence is dominated by the way in which each of us needs to live in order to survive. We have to do things in order to be paid money so that we can buy our survival.

What people had in pre-civilisation societies was, on this level, no different. The possibilities they thought they were faced with were conditioned by their material circumstance. The possibilities open to them were based on their recent history, their experiences, their ideologies, their emotions.

Both types of society, therefore, lack that individualist freedom that is so highly valued in modern civilized society. Freedom is a bourgeois concept. We might look back at pre-civilisation societies and see that there were more fluid relations between people, that people could change their minds about things without risking estrangement, but, in such glimpses into past societies, we might mistake these eye-opening discoveries for manifestations of the modern concept of freedom, when, in fact, they are the expressions of a society more closely aligned to human community. Freedom did not exist in pre-civilisation times. The ideals of ‘freedom’, or ‘love’, or ‘friendship’, have developed in a society that is based on the alienation of humans from their daily existence and from each other. They are romantic ideals conceived to alleviate the existential despair of living in a society which champions individualism over community.

What pre-civilisation societies retained was a conscious symbiosis with the land that made their existence closer to that of animals. This connection is now often described as one of being owned by the land rather than owning it. Although the parameters of their thought were constrained by this symbiosis they had more than us. They existed as part of something, whereas we exist in isolation from any reference points apart from those given by the economic system. We can no longer feel and know the earth, even as it falls through our fingers. We do no longer look around us and know the trees and the hills as our real home, our real parent. This is the progress of the human species. The highpoints of human culture and sophistication, which are only to be found in pre-civilised societies, have long gone.

Being human was a risky business. We became divorced from the animal state in the process of becoming aware of our lives as an object and we went on to totally kill the animal inside us by leaving the land and letting it, and ourselves, be sold.

And, because our ideas are governed by the material circumstances of our existence, every opposition that we throw against the social and economic organization of our lives only feeds into that structure and makes it stronger. The highpoints of human culture and sophistication have been erased; and we are caught inside an existential loop from which there is no escape.