Anarcho-Liberalism – Dark Nights

This conversation between Paul Cudenec and the Italian group Resistenze al nanomondo was first published in the July 2022 issue of the printed journal L’urlo della Terra and has recently also been made available online, again in Italian.

1. Resistenze al nanomondo: Can you can tell us about your story, your path, when you started developing a critique of techno-scientific developments and what thinkers you learned from?

Paul Cudenec: I don’t think I could separate my critique of techno-scientific developments from the rest of my opinions and analysis. I have been an anarchist for 30 years now, but even before then, in my youth, I felt a strong instinctive aversion to high-tech consumer society. On the one hand it was associated with everything that I most disliked – big business, the state, the military, authority and control in general. On the other hand it stood against everything that I most appreciated – nature, freedom, community, a sense of historical and cultural continuity. The arrival of CCTV cameras in England was a wake-up moment for me. I worked at the time as a journalist with a local newspaper in one of the first towns to have cameras installed and, since I knew for a fact that there was very little crime there, it was clear to me that this project was nothing to do with fighting crime, as was claimed, but was the roll-out of something much more sinister. I wrote a punk song about this in the mid-1990s (which I put online last year), warning about “the cameras that steal our liberty” and the techno-tyrants who were going to scan our DNA, put microchips in our brains and turn us into robots. With the local anarchist group, which I subsequently helped to create, we used to hold annual protests against the cameras, marking the anniversary of their installation as “Big Brother’s Birthday”.

As you will gather from the above, George Orwell was, unsurprisingly, an influence on me. The history of the Luddites was another inspiration (via Kirkpatrick Sale among others), along with anarcho-publications like Green Anarchist, SchNEWS, Do or Die, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and various EF! publications. I also read David Watson’s Against the Megamachine, Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan, the Unabomber Manifesto plus a lot by John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen. I have more recently been influenced by reading the likes of Miguel Amorós, Jacques Ellul, Theodore Roszak, Charlene Spretnak, Renaud Garcia… But intertwined with that thread of my self-education have been other inspirations. The English nature mystic Richard Jefferies has been very important to me, as has René Guénon, who combined his metaphysics with a strong critique of modernity. I have also read elsewhere about sufism, Taoism, comparative mythology, English folklore, Indian philosophy, German idealism, Jewish anti-capitalist romanticism, Jungian psychology… What interests me, above all, are the connections between these accounts and traditions, or rather, perhaps, the new space that is opened up for our reflection when we consider them together, in the same conceptual context. Continue reading “Resisting Techno-Tyranny: A Dialogue” →

DN: We re-post this text from 2018 that we feel is still relevant and even more on an international level in the present, against the supposed ‘unquestionably oppressed’, against those identity politicians and academics who just do not comprehend their involvement in the recuperation of anarchy into a passive joke! All part of the civil anarchism & activist psychosis that is due a much updated critique that will be forthcoming in future publications.

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Anarchism in the UK is a joke. Once symbolising hard-fought struggles for freedom, the word has been stripped bare to make way for narrow-minded, separatist and hateful identity politics by middle class activists keen to protect their own privileges. We write this leaflet to reclaim anarchism from these identity politicians.

We write as self-identified anarchists who see our roots in the political struggles of the past. We are anti-fascists, anti-racists, feminists. We want to see an end to all oppressions and we take an active part in those fights. Our starting point though is not the dense language of lefty liberal academics, but anarchism and its principles: freedom, cooperation, mutual aid, solidarity and equality for all regardless. Hierarchies of power, however they manifest, are our enemies.

Identity politics is part of the society we want to destroy.

Identity politics is not liberatory, but reformist. It is nothing but a breeding ground for aspiring middle class identity politicians. Their long-term vision is the full incorporation of traditionally oppressed groups into the hierarchical, competitive social system that is capitalism, rather than the destruction of that system. The end result is Rainbow Capitalism – a more efficient & sophisticated form of social control where everyone gets a chance to play a part! Confined to the ‘safe space’ of people like them, identity politicians become increasingly detached from the real world.

A good example is ‘queer theory’ and how it has sold out to corporate masters. The concept of queer was not long ago something subversive, suggesting indefinable sexuality, a desire to escape society’s attempts to define and study and diagnose everything, from our mental health to our sexuality. However, with little in the way of class critique, the concept was readily appropriated by identity politicians and academics to create yet another exclusive label for a cool clique that is, ironically, anything but liberatory. Increasingly, queer is a nice badge adopted by some to pretend they too are oppressed, and avoid being called out on their shit, bourgeois politics.

We don’t want hear about the next DIY event, queer night or squatter fest that excludes all but those who have the right language, dress code, or social circles.. Come back when you have something genuinely meaningful, subversive and dangerous to the status quo. Continue reading “Against Anarcho-Liberalism and the curse of identity politics” →