Revision as of 10:24, 6 December 2024

Template:Clear

File:Cover.jpg.png

X

[Front Matter]

[Title Page]

Template:Clear

File:9781782833802.jpg.png

Template:Anchor File:Fm.jpg.png

[About the Author]

Abi Andrews was born in 1991 in the Midlands, and now lives and works in South East London. She studied English and creative writing at Goldsmiths, and her work has been published in The Dark Mountain Project, Tender, Five Dials and The Bohemyth, amongst others.

Template:Anchor Template:Clear

File:Title.jpg.png

Template:Anchor [Copyright]

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

3 Holford Yard

Bevin Way

London

WC1X 9HD

www.serpentstail.com

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 380 2

Template:Anchor dedicated to

Tilikum (Tilly) the whale

who perhaps had his own name in whale dialect

1981–2017

Template:Anchor File:Fvii-01.jpg.png

Template:Anchor THE WORD FOR WOMAN IS WILDERNESS

PASSING THROUGH THE HELIOPAUSE

The space probe Voyager 1 left the planet in 1977. Any month, day, minute, second now it will enter interstellar space and become the furthest-reaching man-made object, and the first to leave the heliosphere. This will be one of the biggest moments in scientific history and we will never know exactly when it happened. Three things would signify that Voyager 1 had crossed the border of the heliopause: an increase in galactic cosmic rays, reversal of the direction of the magnetic field, and a decrease in the temperature of charged particles. Voyager 1 reports show a 25 per cent increase per month of cosmic rays. But its signals take seventeen hours to travel back to Earth at the speed of light.

When did my journey begin? At the moment of its conception? When I left home in a delivery van with a friend of my dad’s who was going north with some furniture? My parents waved me off with the dog; I filmed it, my mum cried. That felt like a beginning. Or was it the moment the freighter pulled away into the mopbucket waters off Immingham on a grey day in March?

It came about like this: I was watching a film about a runaway called Chris McCandless, who ditched his ivy-league-trust-fund life and travelled all across America to get to Alaska and live the Jack London dream, where he ate some poisonous potatoes and died. This was 1992, the year before I was born. I cried and promised myself I would start a savings account to fund a trip to Alaska, where I too could live in the wilderness in total solitude. Then I went through the film step by step and analysed how it would have been different if the guy had been a girl.

Really, it would have been a completely different film. Not just in the sense that there were situations in it that would likely have different outcomes for the different sexes (e.g. when he got beaten up by a conductor who finds him stowing away on his freight train) but more fundamentally because a girl wanting to shun modern society and go AWOL into the wilderness to live by killing and eating small animals and scavenged plants would just be considered unsettling.

Wood-cutting mystic Henry David Thoreau shares some of the blame for this. He said things like ‘chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it’, as though even having sex with a woman would ruin your transcendentalism. ‘Man’ is used to refer to humanity as a whole. When ‘Man’ is pitted against nature in a dynamic of conquest, nature is usually ‘she’.

Wildness in women does not mean autonomy and freedom; their wildness is instead an irrational fever. Simultaneously, in survivalist terms we are the weaker sex and cannot prosper individually outside of the social sphere or without the protection of a manly man. Women both are excluded from, and banished to, nature.

Even on those documentary channels that do programmes on whole families homesteading in the wilderness the woman is always Mountain Man’s wife, never, ever Mountain Woman, just an annexe of the Mountain Man along with his beard, pipe and gun. In Coming into the Country: Travels in Alaska, the writer John McPhee describes lots of Mountain Men in careful detail and a few mountain women in passing comments. One of the Mountain Men tells John McPhee that he wanted to be utterly and totally alone, cut off deep in the country, with only three daughters and one wife, or his ‘womenfolks’, as he liked to call them.

There are exceptions to the invisibility spell, of course. There is Calamity Jane the cowgirl. Nellie Bly, who did a trip around the world in seventy-two days. Freya Stark, the travel writer of the Middle East. Mary Kingsley the explorer, and that old lady who went over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. But the problem is exactly that there are exceptions. It is as though there is something significant to learn in the wild but it can only be accessed by men. In the wild, men carve out their individual and manly selves, as though women are not allowed individual and authentic selves. The story has the exact same plot, but ‘a woman alone in wilderness’ means something totally inverted. So I had this idea for a journey to Alaska.

Maybe I have read too many Lord of the Rings quest-type fantasies, but I cannot shift the notion that to be deserving of a destination that is really far away you should have undergone some sort of expedition to get there, like how people make a pilgrimage out of piety. So the other element of its ethos came from an aversion to aeroplanes, a combination of carbon-footprint guilt and a suspicion towards the paradox of crossing time zones in a matter of hours to exist suddenly and indifferently in a place you should not naturally be. Not just flying to a place and kind of congregating like these ‘all-inclusive sun, sand, sea, collect your tokens in the Daily Mail’ package holidays.

We were one of those families that always went abroad, apart from years when Dad was out of work. By the time I left home I had travelled to nine different countries. If asked to describe those countries I could have told you that beaches in Spain are busier than beaches in Greece, that in the Caribbean you are advised against going onto beaches that are not owned and segregated by your hotel, and that Disneyworld is too far away from the shore to go to the beach but you can go to a pretend beach at the parks anyway and one even has a slide that is a tube going underwater through a tank with dolphins in it.

Living in a technological era means that in an abstract sense the other side of the world is just a few clicks away. Everywhere on Earth has been explored and put in an encyclopaedia. And the internet has brought all of those encyclopaedias together and ordered them into a messy but functional directory. There are no more enigmas. But it also means that passage of travel has become a lot less elitist. I can utilise the internet in the same way that a man of old might have clutched a quill-written recommendation allowing him passage on his father’s tobacco-merchant friend’s ship.

It is very easy to feel nowadays that humanity has saturated everything; that we have conquered the world. If you were to watch a time-lapse of Earth from the beginning of its history up to the present day, for a very, very long time not a lot would happen. The continental land masses would gradually drift, asteroids would impact intermittently, and you might catch an erupting supervolcano, tiny button mushrooms of smoke diffusing. Earth would remain a relatively tranquil marble, its atmosphere pearly eddies and swirls. Then, in the eighteenth century AD, you would see a metamorphosis: cities growing like bruises, fertile soil turning to desert, debris gradually accumulating in a dull metallic orbital constellation.

There are now satellites in the sky that will far outlive us, as big as football fields, suspended in the Clarke Belt, 35,786 miles above sea level, at a distance that means they rotate in geosynchronous orbit. They experience little to no atmospheric drag and because of this they will not ever be pulled back to Earth. They might cease to exist only when everything in proximity to Earth is swallowed by our expanding sun. Until then these will be one of humankind’s longest-lasting artefacts, and a legacy of the twenty-first century. Our civilisation will be immortalised by these grey exoskeletons, usurping the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Māori, etc.

Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Anything that is living on it 6 billion years from now will be vaporised when the sun dies and will be as far from us as we are from those little fish that jumped out of the sea. But we are myopic. In the scheme of things, the rate of change over the past one hundred years is just a blink to the universe, and yet shit, it took so long for me to get to nineteen years. I want the trip to remind me that I am small and getting smaller. (I am stood on a dot on a balloon, all the dots are evenly spaced, as the balloon gets bigger the other dots seem to get further away but it’s only because I am standing on a dot.)

Alaska is the place to feel this. It figures in the collective psyche as the Land of the Mountain Men, the Last Great Wilderness. It is big and vast and mostly unpeopled. The British Isles would fit inside it seven times and about a seventh of Alaska is set aside as protected wilderness. Its entire population is ten times smaller than London’s.

I saved up £2000, the approximate cost of a return plane ticket to Alaska, after a few months of working full-time post-A-levels and living scrupulously. This is to be used for travel expenses only, and must get me from the UK to Iceland to Greenland to Canada and across into Alaska. Any money I need to exist will be made along the way. All of the above will be summarised in a tasteful voiceover on top of some sort of video montage of all the places I go looking mysterious and cloudy.

Travelling by sea and land, it will be an Odyssean epic, only with me, a girl, on a female quest for authenticity.

HAUNTED BY THOUGHTS OF AN ELSEWHERE

I have a cabin on a corridor with all the other cabins; each cabin has two bunks, two lamps, two lockers and a porthole. The cabin doors do not have locks and next door keeps walking into my cabin mistaking it for his. From what I gather he works in shifts, engineering things. Most of the employees are Icelandic but speak at least partial English. I get by with a kind of pidgin formed from their rudimentary vocab and my pocket phrase book.

There are also two students: Kristján and Urla, a guy and a girl from Manchester and Leeds Universities who use the freighter to travel home to Iceland cheaply in the uni holidays. They live in different cities and only met on their first trip. They now make their trips home coincide so they can keep each other company, and they have a rapport with the regular employees. Everyone seems to be under the impression that they are, or are to be, in love.

I am trying to capture the ‘essence’ of life on board Blárfoss for the documentary. Can I do that by filling a memory card with pictures and videos of every inch of the ship, enough to make a 3D mosaicked replica? As though to get at the essence of something is to cover its every angle, like a method of scientific inquiry, exhausting its possibilities? Probably not, because the memory card is nearly a quarter full already. I have also interviewed just about every English speaker afloat. Urla especially thinks the documentary is ‘totally cool’. Everyone was taking part as a way of alleviating boredom but it has evolved into some strange kind of fame-ritual, because in the tiny world of the ship the interviewee becomes something akin to a celebrity. At first I was worried about this tainting the documentary, but I suppose I can make it a case in point.

The ship’s interior is functional and plain, with dull and unengaging shapes and cold pastel colours that work to intensify the inside of the lounge, the colours of the board games and the humming of the heaters. Aside from the ubiquity of the ship’s engine, which can be felt more than heard, outside the lounge there is rarely any sound apart from the intermittent tannoy presence of our captain (who we have nicknamed Capt. Oz). We have all found ourselves taking an unusual interest in food and meal times, which are almost always the same. Plokkfiskur, it is called: fish stew, in all its variants. Then underpinning the whole experience is a feeling that I would tentatively call weariness or dreaminess or, combining both, dreariness. A kind of suspension, being both still and unstill, wonky, caused by the weird sensation of movement when nothing visible is moving, the force of gravity contending with the swell of the ocean. Being on an object that is floating makes you more conscious of gravity. With time to think about this, I have come to an arbitrary decision as to what zero gravity might feel like.

In outer space I figure you develop a stronger sense of proprioception, which is the sense of the body parts in relation to each other. (I read this in one of the only English magazines from the lounge, Pro Bodybuilding Weekly.) The brain can adapt the senses to compensate each other, so a blind person might hear and feel better. In outer space, with minimal stimuli of sound, sight, smell, taste and touch, perhaps proprioception becomes enhanced. Weightlessness makes any body movement effortless. Forces would radiate from the inside of your body, your pulse would throb through your limbs and you would feel ‘embodied’ in the most literal sense. This is all just boredom-speculation. I also like to think I can imagine what it would feel like to not have an arm, or to have a third arm, or a penis.

LAND OF THE ICE-QUEENS

Every star is a sun. Every sun has its own planets. Every planet has its own constellations. The 3D world is a hologram of a 2D world projected from the edge of a black hole.

OUTER

SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE

We do not make enough of outer space. The only remaining frontier and it is no longer of much interest to most of the public. I suppose that is a good thing, and practical. Things would be trickier if everyone was ultra-conscious of their infinitesimality. My mum does not believe in space. I asked her once when I was young if she believed in aliens and she said don’t be silly, Erin. I said it seems far more likely that there are aliens if space goes on for ever. She said she had never really thought about it. I asked a bit more because I wanted to know what was past the blue sky in her head if she did not think about space. She told me to shut up, she had more important things to think about, like working overtime to make money now that Dad had lost his job at the Cadbury factory because it got bought by America.

Having busy parents meant spending a lot of summer holidays in kids’ clubs and eating mainly breadcrumbed/fun-shaped frozen foods. Our domestic life was founded on convenience. Remove foil before heating quickedy-quick Micro Chips I feel like Chicken Tonight like Chicken Tonight. Only modern convenience did not bring the liberation they said it would because Mum still had to work a job and vacuum as well, thank you, Mr Dyson. So really she can be excused for not stopping to think about infinity.

I have been standing out on deck and looking out to sea. The sea that goes on unbroken to the horizon. There is nothing, no things but gulls, and you think, how do the gulls fly without tiring? Do they not feel panic that there is nowhere for them to rest their wings apart from actually on the ocean, and here they might get eaten by something big that comes from what to them must seem another dimension? No place to rest their eyes and sleep? The empty space makes me think of a diagram in a physics book of a ball on a plane of Newton’s, a single arrangement of matter rolling on a grid of space, the loneliest object in the world. We are the ball and the sea is the grid. I have only been on an unbroken and empty plane like this on a P&O ferry to France once, and that was only for a matter of hours. By day three I feel like the Ancient Mariner.

Urla likes to read and we got along quickly. We have formed a kind of two-way book club where we swap and then discuss. We have been dipping into Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Elizabeth Bishop’s Questions of Travel. Urla says she likes Le Guin; the book’s world Winter reminds her a little of her own icy home, but she is not so keen on Bishop, maybe because some of the intricacies of language are lost on her, maybe because her BA is in Business Studies. I have read a little of her book, Lean In, by her hero Sheryl Sandberg. It is all about how women in business can help themselves to succeed in a male-dominated workplace by learning to be more like men.

Part of the trip obviously had to be about personal growth, and I have resolved to take the extended opportunity to make myself a more well-rounded human being. The six-point plan goes like this:

– Read lots of insightful books

– Know rough history of every place before visiting

– Immerse self in culture of each place

– Learn important phrases in each language

– Write. Every day

Urla’s parents are separated. Her mum is Icelandic but her dad is English. He lives near to her in Leeds and she has split her time between England and Iceland since she was ten. I was planning on staying in a cheap hostel in Reykjavík but Urla’s mum has a spare room that I can stay in for free for as long as it takes me to figure out how to get to Greenland. So instead of having to infiltrate my first foreign city with the blunt ram of a tourist I have Urla to show me around and she has an SUV, so we can even go see the best bits of the landscape of Iceland, something that would have taken some logistics considering my budget. Urla talks like everyone should listen and has a way of draping herself over everything like a languid cat. I think it would be fair to say that I have a girl-crush on Urla, a kind of feeling of affinity and admiration that is completely free from jealousy.

WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST CONSPIRACY FROM HELL

INT. MESS ROOM – Urla reclining on sofa with dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick in hands – room is large with three sofas arranged in square and coffee table centre with books and magazines – small television with VHR mounted to wall – bookcase with videos, CDs – CD player on top of bookshelf – bookshelf modified with balconied shelves to stop books sliding off with sway – outside wide windows ocean – white ocean birds – wall of ocean rises, falls, rises, falls with motion of boat – one other sofa occupied by two men – legs splayed reading magazines –

ERIN: (BEHIND CAMERA) So maybe you could just talk a little about feminism in Iceland

URLA: Okay, sure

– sits up and turns to men on adjacent sofa –

URLA: Do you wanna talk about feminism in Iceland with me?

– the men look up from their magazines, shrug –

URLA: They speak little English. So. There are many surveys say Iceland is the best country in the world in which to be a woman. Because it is the best country in the world in which to be a person. We have no army. We run on renewable energy. People are mostly very happy apart from those that get sad of the darkness in winter

– the man on the left is reading an Icelandic magazine on 4x4s – he is watching Urla over the brim of the page –

URLA: Let me think, so, in nineteeeeeen seventy-five 90 per cent of Icelandic women went on strike over equal pay and then they got equal pay. We elected the first female president in Europe in 1980. Finnbogadóttir. She was a divorced single mother like my mum and she was re-elected three times until she retired. And then our prime minister was the world’s first openly gay prime minister and she started out as an air hostess. The state church bishop is a woman. And we are the only country in the world to make strip clubs illegal for feminist reasons

– 4x4 magazine man makes a semi-discreet ‘humph’ sound – Urla turns to him pointedly – he looks down and flicks the pages of his magazine straight –

ERIN: Do you think that has to do with nakedness being starker because in the cold climate you have to wear so many layers on a day-to-day basis? Kind of an anonymising of the human figure that might take away some issues of sexualising the body. Like in The Left Hand of Darkness, where cold and androgyny made a society with no misogyny and no war?

– 4x4 magazine man shakes his head disbelievingly – Urla does not notice – she looks down at her body in high-necked woollen jumper, thick grey joggers tucked into woollen socks –

URLA: I don’t know. Probably (PAUSE) what else. So women do not have to change their surname if they marry. And when a baby is born its parents get equal leave. BUT

– she raises her right index finger in a scholarly manner, holding the book to her chest with her other arm –

URLA: Even in the best place in the world in which to be a woman it is still better to be a man

– she looks at 4x4 mag man, who is leafing through his pages with a look of nonchalance –

ERIN: Nowhere has completely got rid of gender inequality and the attitude of some people here now is like, Okay, we get it. You have everything you want now. You have it the best in the world so stop being so righteous. Other women don’t have it so great. You can give it a rest now. Although it’s totally cute when you get all angry

CUT

HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP IN A POST-FEMINIST SOCIETY

You are fourteen years old and you have just started your job as a waitress in a small restaurant owned by a family, each member of which fills a role in the kitchen and also deals drugs. Having never had a job you take everything here to be archetypical of the working world. You are not a feminist because feminists are lesbians and hate men and you don’t. You like boys more than girls, girls are lame and preoccupied and bitchy and you’d rather hang out with boys and skate and mess around. The only girls you do like want to be boys too.

Stuart is the father of the family and the manager of the restaurant. He is short, fat, bald, and has buggy eyes. When you are introduced from across the worktop he grabs your hand in his stubby, sweaty hands and kisses you up your arm with his fat wet lips. You squeak and recoil and the other girls laugh at you. When you are outside the kitchen one of the older girls tells you you get used to it.

You do get used to it and after a time you manage not to squirm when Stuart strokes your pubescent arse, which is taut in those tight-fitting Tammy Girl trousers he makes you wear because he likes it when you squirm. When he creeps up behind you when you’re standing behind the till counter on the restaurant floor and kisses you on the neck, making a squelchy sound, none of the customers ever say anything and some of them must catch him sometimes.

You watch a seventy-year-old man dine an escort while he strokes the downy hairs at the dip of your back and hips, while you tell yourself ‘the dip of my back and hips is merely the concave of a crescent in an assembly of matter which is a body in which I reside’. When your mum asks how was work you say yeah, fine, because if you told her it’d be embarrassing. She’d call the police or something. None of the other girls have told anyone, the customers never say anything, so what makes you so special you call the police? It’s something you’re mature enough to ignore. It’s a part of being a woman. When Jodie the new girl starts you even get a bit annoyed when she keeps going on about how Stuart likes her because she’s prettier than you.

It’s an easy job and you don’t want to lose your job cus then you won’t be able to go to the cinema or anything. If you quit you’d have to come up with a good reason for Mum and you can’t think of one. And you’re lucky to have this job because you’re really shit at it, they tell you that all the time. You do everything wrong and you’re really slow and clumsy and you never smile. And the other girls are always saying he’s good to us, he looks after us, he gives us free food and he’s like a dad really.

You let Stuart do it because it turns him on if you don’t. When you are in the cloakroom one time he calls your bluff and puts his fingers all the way down your pants, which are the ones with ducks on. You don’t tell the other girls because they’ll just think that you think that you’re something special. Nobody else is complaining, don’t be such a crybaby. When you close your eyes to sleep you can see clearly the spittle on his fat wet lips.

SYMBIOSIS OF ALGAE AND ANIMALS

Urla’s mother’s name is Thilda. Her house sits behind Reykjavík and from it you can look out over the backs of all the buildings looking out to the sea. It is spring and the trees and parks are very green and the water and sky very blue. The buildings get so close to the sea that in certain lights, when you can’t see the horizon and the harbours and the lakes are filled with sky, it can look as if the city is sitting on the edge of infinity. The sun sets but seems to sleep just out of sight, and I had to buy a sleep mask to convince my body it was night-time. Although it is getting warm for Iceland it is still cold, and whenever outside I wear my ski jacket.

Leaving Blárfoss had the potential to be emotional, but because for most of the others it was more of a suspension of the experience rather than an end – because most of the others would be repeating the journey again and again with slight variations in crew – it wasn’t. I will have to learn not to get emotionally attached to transitory places, seeing as a journey is entirely transition. Even Urla and Kristján treated their goodbye with admirable stoicism. She says that their relationship is Blárfoss, that they have agreed not to see each other outside of it before university finishes, and she does not think it can even exist independently of it. I think it is very sensible.

She seems to be able to look at their relationship with a manly and objective clarity that I admire. She seems totally indifferent to Kristján, in fact, spending most of her days on the boat with me, aside from joining him in their shared cabin at night. If they were together and I approached them Kristján would make any excuse and leave, which became an ongoing joke to Urla, she would laugh and shout ‘Bye, Kristján!’ after him. I got to feeling really bad about it and started to leave them be, but then Urla took to abandoning him for me.

She says as soon as university finishes she wants to do a trip like mine, that the trip is brave and important. She made me swell up, as if with her approval I become a little bit like her. She is sure of herself in a way that I envy, in the way that she talks and holds herself. You can tell she was one of the girls at school that everybody wanted to be friends with, or wanted to at least not to be not-friends with, to be in the focus of her dislike, which I imagine to be conducted with precision and ruthlessness.

At school I preferred to be on my own. I would ride my bike places on weekends, with my rucksack – an antidote to the typical feminine handbag – full of practical stuff that I would find use for even when it was tenuous, just for the sake of being able to cut everything neatly with my pocket knife even where I could use my teeth, nursing the smallest of wounds with my first aid kit, using my compass even when I knew the way just for the reassuring comfort I found in knowing exactly where north was, its orderliness and its simple truth, comfortable in apt autonomy like Thoreau.

There was one place in particular that I would cycle, an hour by bike, across the river and down empty country lanes, to a tree that I used as a hide that looked out over the top of an abandoned limestone quarry, and it was here that I would sit with my binoculars and bird-watch. Back in the town the only birds you ever saw were little common garden birds like tits and chaffinches and sparrows and wagtails but out in the quarry and away from the town there were birds that prey on other things, other birds, predatory and exciting.

I had myself an Identification of British Birdlife book and would sit still for hours just to collect the sight of them and the sound of the name of them like talismans. There were plentiful buzzards and kestrels that would slip in and out of the area on their hunting routes, sliding on the warm air to hang and observe like snorkellers at the water’s surface, periscoping their necks then locking still before the dive, limiting any movement to the final flurry. Or the thrill of the goshawks that would sometimes weave and dip in and out of the trees either in the valley beyond the quarry or on the opposite ravine. Sometimes the goshawks display-danced, spreading their tail feathers like splayed fingers and falling through the sky like grabbing hands.

But what I really held out for were the days when I got to see one or both of the rare pair of peregrine falcons that nested somewhere in the trees around the quarry. They would always fill me up with the magic of hope, their tiny defiant bodies wheeling against the sky so small against the big, so dark against the blue, and so free. In their sky dance they revelled disobediently against their declared local extinction.

To be able to tell the difference in these birds by their shape and their movements and to point at them and call them by their names has always been to me an affirmation of the solid truth of the natural world as a system that can be described with taxonomy, and a reminder of my place in it. It is also a reassurance; it shows me that these things still exist because I can collect them. That there are still places to watch and be a part of a realer order outside of severed civilisation.

Template:Clear

File:F0017-01.jpg.png

I do not know if Urla can tell that I was the kind of person to spend my lunchtimes at school in toilet cubicles with my feet up so no one would recognise my shoes. My parents can’t reconcile this sudden bid for independence and shrugging off of domesticity with what they think of as my nature; introverted and docile. They are confused by my surety and think that instead this impulse must stem from some malady; that I overthink things, that I feel too much, that I should not watch the news if it scares me so much that it makes me want to leave what I must see as the train wreck of modern society.

What they could not seem to see was that this limiting aspect of me is in part the drive for my leaving, that I want to learn how to be without it. To prove to myself and everyone else that solitude is as much mine as any Mountain Man’s and that I do not have to be relegated to loneliness and displacement just for being female. It is rational and deliberate and it had always been part of the plan. I have always been obedient, the model daughter. Mum and Dad said finish school and try hard at it so I did. I kept my nose clean and I always ate my vegetables (frozen for goodness).

Already I feel something changing. I look at Urla and the way she oozes and I think, does doing this project make her think that of me? Am I that person, even if only from certain angles? Is it having a camera and a plan that gives me that authority? Or actually, just being nineteen and female and travelling alone, does it do that? It is possible that Kris’s discomfort around me came from a place of awe, like the awe he shows for Urla in never talking back to her.

Yesterday Thilda took us to a geothermal spring. Neither of us remembered to pack swimming things so we had to go in our pants and bras. It did not matter because it was raining so we only saw a few hikers and they weren’t close enough to distinguish underwear from swimwear anyway.

‘The best time to go to the springs is when there is rain, because the tourists like to stay dry. But in Iceland we think, if you are going to get wet, you might as well get wet, okay?’ Thilda had said.

We parked the SUV where the off-road terrain offered no more leeway, still a bit of a distance from the pools, whose grey iridescence we could just make out. The sky hung low like the pelt of a sad, wet sheep, the rain fading all outlines into each other like a bleeding watercolour and the mossy ground skirting the rocks and water, luminous in contrast. We took off our clothes and shoes, slammed the doors, and ran towards steaming water laughing and screaming. The rain stung our skin pink.

We fell on our fronts into the hot water, slipping and flailing, trying to submerge every inch from the cold and spitting and coughing and laughing at the water filling our mouths. Then we settled still and quiet with just our eyes and the tops of our heads out of the water, blinking the rain off our lashes and bringing our noses up for air like seals. Thilda started to tell us a story.

‘The famous saga of Eric the Red may be called so but it is really about a skörungur, which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his wife, and she lived in the tenth century.’

Iceland is steeped in sagas and mysticism because the landscape is animated as if it is telling its own story. Glaciers walk, the ground moves and magma seeps, and geysers erupt like blowholes on the humped back of some giant. It is as though these are living parts acting out their own narratives. The Icelandic legends are shaped by the elements, because here the elements are all-pervasive.

And the landscape is volatile and fierce. Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea winds which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong.

In the landscape the elements merge like there is no limit to their pervasiveness, no clearly defined contours. You can feel it seeping into you; trading off with the algae in the water and the mud between your toes like nourishment. You can feel the shuddering of the water making everything on your body reach out in reciprocity, every hair a tentacle. Half submerged in the hot spring; in and out; half still and warm, half cold and lashed; ears under, eyes out; the patter of rain on the surface, the gasping of the spring.

Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place. Like finding an object you never noticed was missing until you found it and realised its lack had been haunting you all along. I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my own home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The outside that I know is broken to pieces and scattered.

Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factory, a sugar beet factory, and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a thirty-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their gardens because the power station left radon in the topsoil.

The outside that I know is pastoral, a grid of owned and regimented spaces, moderated for production. Some people think the English countryside is pretty but that is the tragedy of it. It is a result of the way our small country was built, when a bunch of rich men parcelled up what was once shared land to make it easier to go about ploughing and producing more crops. Our common wilderness became a commodity. On an island so small the mark of this is hard to not see: a monotonous quilt of rectangles divided by hedgerows. Especially in the Midlands, where there are not many mountains or bogs or other bits of stubbornly unprofitable land, and where the remains of failed industry create a graveyard landscape, the stumps covered over with prosthetic suburbia.

Template:Clear

File:F0020-01.jpg.png

The peregrine quarry was the one place I knew that had a semblance of wildness to it, of richness and possibility. This is an invisible kind of poverty, this lack of all of the complexity that Urla and her mother are born from.

Gudrid lived in the days of longboats and raging seas. She travelled to what we now call Newfoundland, which is my own first port of call in Canada. This was before lucky-lost explorer Christopher Columbus, and Thilda proudly points out that although the Spanish like to think that the sagas are make-believe, Icelanders know who really found the New World. Gudrid was the first European mother in the western hemisphere.

She had a son; they called him Snorri. But with their small clan and without the guns the Spanish had, they were driven away by the natives. Or savages, as Thilda called them.

She concludes her story by saying, ‘Gudrid travelled further than all of her husbands, who died one after another and proved early in our history that you don’t need a penis between your legs to make you a great adventurer.’ I look up at the bulking hills and think about how Gudrid personifies them, and the geysers and the winds, and the looming, enduring volcanoes, the shifting ground. And how so much of Thilda is in Urla, and Gudrid in them both. And it feels kind of feminine, all this entering. It feels like pregnation.

It is this harsh softness. Of a landscape that is fertile and hostile. And it takes on this significance for me and for my journey so that I have to squeak into bubbles under the water, because I feel like for the first time ever I know exactly why I am where I am right then in that moment.

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

Our plans for Greenland have undergone sudden and fantastic developments. Urla and Thilda had been plotting the whole time to put us on a boat with Urla’s uncle Larus, who is a whale scientist. Larus has his own research boat and is intending to go out into the Denmark Strait, the channel in between Iceland and Greenland, to survey a pod of long-finned pilot whales. They hadn’t told me in case it didn’t work out, but it has and we leave for Greenland in four days’ time.

It is against protocol because the boat is only supposed to carry two people, but Urla threatened to stow away if her uncle took me and went without her. She will come with me as far as she can before she has to get back and work her summer job, so we will be in the double cabin and Larus will sleep in the steering room on the floor. Urla will then carry on through Greenland with me until I find a way to follow in the wake of Gudrid on to Canada. It is perfect because she can translate for me in Greenland, and she said she would write up the subtitles for the Danish when I edit the footage for the documentary. Because her uncle Larus still has to do his research it will be a slow journey of five days but we get to go whale watching and learn about the behavioural patterns of the long-finned pilot whale.

It jarred how easily Thilda let Urla go across a foreign country with a stranger so soon after they reunited after so long. I suppose we will be with her uncle and then her family friends in Nuuk once we find a way to reach the west coast, so the prospect seems safe to her. Maybe also she is used to Urla leaving, what with her being at university and having spent half her childhood away at her dad’s because of the separation. But the contrast to my own parents’ response is stark.

Why can’t you just be simple like other girls your age, get a job somewhere in town and work your way up, or at least go away to go to university, make something of yourself?

What did we do to you that made you so determined to leave us?

We won’t sleep until you return.

We won’t sleep ever again.

I could not make them understand that my breaking-away-from is inevitable and keeps the history of the world in motion. The young always leave. At least the male young of the species always does. My leaving would have been a casting out, an initiation ritual, had I been a boy. Women who leave always abandon. Imagine the pinnacle form of this, the mother who leaves her children to her husband. Unnatural! Monstrous! And the man who does it? My bet is he ends up smug with a younger wife paying minimal child support.

Urla does not need to lurch away from Thilda because Thilda lets her go. The two of them are twinned in ease, in their mannerisms, in a way that makes them seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. I prefer to be definitive about my being, where it ends and what its characteristics are. I have my dad’s nose, my mother’s green eyes and dark brown hair. I have his stubbornness and her impulse to over-empathise, weeping easily. But I try hard to also not be like them.

Peregrine; chaffinch; woodpigeon.

Field; hedgerow; river.

Mother; father; me.

THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH

Larus has given me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring because ‘it is one of the most important books you will ever read’. In 1962 Silent Spring was published to tell of how different chemicals invented for killing people in the world wars were being used for killing pests on food crops and were then having unexpected repercussions, like the death of birds and children. This is in the sixties, so everyone was doubly pissed with the government for also putting them in range of nuclear weapons that might come at any time without warning and telling them they would be safe under desks.

Widespread use of DDT was stopped because of Rachel Carson’s book and the US got a mainstream environmental conscience. Acceptance of the ‘ambivalence’ of the oppressors could be scrutinised. Women could have rights, black people could have rights, gay people could have rights, animals could have rights, even grass and trees could have rights, and if you took to the street in a crowd with billboards you could make anything happen.

Larus overuses his own coined collective nouns like ‘the nascent youth of today’ and ‘the ignorant herd’. He is exactly the kind of man you imagine when you imagine the kind of man who would get upset about bees. He speaks as if he is playing an internal monologue on constant reel, projecting it into the world like his mouth is a loudspeaker. Just by looking at him I can tell he probably actually weeps at the mention of Arctic drilling.

There are certain stereotypes that fit with giving a shit about the planet, and funnily enough these are generally in some way feminine. To be a socially acceptable environmentalist you have to be female, a child, or an eccentric (which itself entails being kind of effeminate, if you are already a man). I have come to the conclusion that this is because environmental issues are perceived to be melodramatic and melodrama belongs to the feminine because women are of course by default hysterical, ‘in touch with nature’, and so easily brought to tears by images of seagulls stuck in Coke cans in conjunction with sad piano music. Melodramatic because there are more pressing issues like terrorists and fascism and the looming employment crisis of the robot workforce, never mind the bees. Women just like animals because they are cute and summon their maternal instinct.

It is a vicious circle because there is no way of talking about the issues without evoking a whole discourse that is by now tainted by this idea of melodrama. Caring about the environment is lame, Greenpeace is run by scaremongers and weirdo conspiracy theorists, and the bees have gone somewhere, but it is a boring mystery.

Can YOU give just one pound a month? JUST ONE POUND A MONTH?! One pound could feed cats like Maurice for a whole year and provide shelter on wet nights and windy days and buy the love he so cherishes. Maurice loved his owners (cue sad piano music, image of wet Maurice sat in a box at the side of a road) but one day they took him out in the car and just left him at the side of the road because he had fleas and he smelled. We must protect animals like Maurice, the furry little creatures that god gave us to steward.

But bees do kind of pollinate about everything we eat. So really, though, Larus, where have the bees gone?

I USE SONAR TO EXPRESS MYSELF

We have found the pod of long-finned pilot whales. There are over one hundred of them and it is incredible to look at, their bodies rising smooth and bulbous from the grey water like bubble wrap, blowing air from their blowholes, spraying water like saliva from a blown-up balloon let loose. After two days of tailing them I am reassured that they are not going to rise up as one and overturn our little boat. I was pacified by realising that they also hang around with dolphins. Dolphins are an animal I can trust. In our pod there are a group of Atlantic white-sided dolphins; Larus says they herd the fish together with the whales. The dolphins are curious about us and come right up to the boat to play around in the foam that comes off our propeller. Their faces and noises are the epitome of happiness, just pure unbridled joy at this strange thing chopping up their water and making it foamy. So simple and pure, like the joy of children.

I have won the tolerance of grumpy Larus. He was moaning about how it is ‘people like me’ who have ruined Bali by thinking they are all spiritual and swamping the place with their yoga mats. He sees this as something flawed in the psyche of the youth of today. I asked him how many children he had and he said he has five from three different mothers because that is just how it was in the sixties. I asked him if Bali’s overcrowding was not just the inevitable outcome of overpopulation and that there were the same annoying yoga mat tourists in the sixties, but in the sixties there were fewer people so there was less yoga mat crowding and that maybe it is actually his generation’s fault for breeding so much. He grumbled some stuff but since then has been actually quite amicable towards me.

On top of his research for the Ocean Association, Larus is conducting his own. The pod is particularly interesting to him because of the dolphins. He uses the equipment on the boat to record and plot their sonar and by measuring patterns he hopes to be able to crack their language. The graphs in the office already prove that the dolphins are talking; Larus has plotted the quantified appearance of each distinct vocalisation in ascending order across a horizontal axis, the times occurring across a vertical axis. The plot of a graph where information is being communicated always results in an angle of 45 degrees because all languages have units that range on a spectrum from frequent to infrequent. If it is not a 45-degree angle then the noises are random and uncommunicative. This is the same for any language, Icelandic, English, Dolphin.

Template:Clear

File:F0026-01.jpg.png

Larus says he can apply this method to any long piece of sound data. His other focus is noise picked up by dishes aimed at outer space. A friend in America has built his own dish behind his house in the desert and he and Larus work on the data because the only government-funded dish used specifically to listen for aliens, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio, was taken down in 1998 to clear space for a golf course. It ran for twenty-two years and it actually picked up the kind of thing they were looking for. It appeared to come from north-west of the globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius. It lasted for seventy-two seconds and they called it the Wow! Signal because that is exactly what astronomer Jerry R. Ehman wrote on the computer printout.

But the signal it picked up only occurred once, so after searching for it they eventually presumed it was some sort of fluke, the logic being that any intelligent civilisation would keep on sending a signal over and over to make it more likely to be heard. A three-minute-long radio signal was sent from Earth to a cluster of stars at the limits of the Milky Way one time in 1974 and never again. By the time any hypothetical civilisation had got it and then sent a reply it would be around about AD 52,000. The sustained attention span of the average human ranges from between five to twenty minutes. The guys that sent the signal referred to themselves as the Order of the Dolphin. They called themselves this because one of their members, the marine biologist John C. Lilly, used to take hallucinogens and climb into tanks with dolphins to explore interspecies communication. John Lilly found that dolphins can process linguistic syntax. He taught them to differentiate between commands such as bring the ball to the doll and bring the doll to the ball.

He would talk about them like he thought they were people. Larus played us a track by a lady spoken-word poet that I liked. She imagined what a whale might say to John Lilly if it could speak telepathically to him, and what the whale asked as it swam circles in its ceramic-tiled prison was whether every ocean has walls.

Because of the difficulty of relaying a message through both deep space and deep time, Larus thinks we also need to consider that aliens might have come to Earth billions of years ago and encoded a message into our DNA, in the genes that do not do a lot apart from sit around. He says that some decoders are looking for mathematical patterns because intelligent civilisations must understand pi and prime numbers and things as universal truths that transcend language. What Pythagoras said: the whole cosmos is a harmony and a number.

Some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin, like the turtle-necked celebrity cosmologist Carl Sagan, also worked on the Golden Records that were sent into space with Voyager 1, which by now could be outside the solar system and on its way to somebody else’s. The Golden Records were a kind of time capsule. In it they sent pictures of a whole range of cultures and creatures, sounds from Earth like screaming and laughter and greetings in lots of different languages. President Jimmy Carter left a written message for the aliens inside the time capsule:

‘This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO SURVIVE OUR TIME SO WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS.’

– President Carter

The time capsule is President Carter’s baby. With it he has conceptually colonised the future.

THE CEILING IN THE SKY

I nominated myself to help Larus while Urla fished for dinner because I like to sit and listen to him talk about space. I am helping group all of the sound bites that Larus has from the dolphin recordings into categories that are similar sounding. He plays them from the computer and we decide which of seven folders to put them into.

When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut up until age thirteen, when at careers day I sat with my parents and told my head of year about how I wanted to be an astronaut; they all laughed as though it were cute and he signed me up for work experience at a paragliding centre on the basis that I must have liked the idea of flying.

Larus was at Kennedy for the lift-off of the Apollo 11 mission. He was there to protest, stood in a line with its back to the launch pad holding a sign that read ‘Meanwhile in Harlem’, but as soon as he heard the roar from the propulsion engines he turned around and could not take his eyes away. There is a photo somewhere of the group with him turning and gaping; he did not ever cut it out of the newspaper because he had spoiled the integrity of the group’s statement. He told me this confidingly and made me promise not to tell Urla because she would never let it go.

My being an astronaut was something I did not ever doubt as a child because Mum always told me the whole world is your oyster and until that careers day I had no cause to doubt her. It did not matter to me that all the cartoon astronauts were men. I think I always positioned myself as male without actually being aware of it. Whenever I watched films or read books with a male hero I totally imagined myself as that hero. Call me Ishmael. Call me Ralf, call me John McClane. It is not fair that only the boys get the fun parts.

I said this to Mum and Dad about fun parts when they started protesting at the idea of me doing this trip after college. It took a while to dawn on them that I was being serious and had come of legal age to do it without their permission anyway. Mum said, ‘Your father and I have decided that we can’t help you financially with this trip because we are not behind it.’ I told them that was fine and I could fund it myself. ‘What if you are in an unsafe place and have one of your spells?’ (By this she means my propensity to kind of faint for no apparent reason sometimes.) Of course I have not told them the real tundra-wilderness plan and the full extent of the ‘survivalism’ experiment, because, well, that would just have been cruel when I know they would suffer for it.

When America shot a rocket to the moon, even with the sexual revolution in full swing, it was still too soon to let women have a cosmic one. Larus was telling me about an independent programme called Mercury 13 (which he agreed to talk about to the camera), which took accomplished female pilots and put them through the testing that NASA did on their own astronauts, the Mercury 7 programme, the theory being that for various biological reasons women were actually better suited to space flight. It was a success but NASA just could not have ladies on the moon before men, so they kept the requirement that all NASA astronauts be a member of the air force, and women were still not allowed to join the military. So none of the Mercury 13 pilots were taken on, although they had more air experience than a lot of the men at NASA (some of whom secretly did not have all of the requirements anyway). When Larus told me this I remembered how bitter I felt at the paragliding centre while two boys in my year got sent to Leicester Space Centre on ‘limited allocation’ work experience.

Maybe America sent a man to the moon to undermine Russia’s female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She was ten years younger than the youngest NASA astronaut and had spent more time in space than all Americans combined, orbiting the earth forty-eight times. Man astronaut Neil Armstrong did not go for all of mankind and he certainly did not go for women. America only went to space in the first place to show that communism could not be more progressive than capitalism. Tereshkova worked in a textile factory before she became a cosmonaut. Her mother before her worked in the textile factory and her father was a tractor driver. What if Apollo had crash-landed? Would Russia rule the world now?

But Tereshkova was a human propaganda pawn: the Russian female programme was dissolved the year of the Apollo moon landing. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s official birthday was moved a day so that there were no records that he was really born on International Women’s Day; Russia could not have had him as a national hero if he were born on International Women’s Day. That would make him a sissy.

MANNED SPACE FLIGHT IS THE TROPHY WIFE OF THE SUPER-PHALLUS

INT. BEDROOM CABIN – Erin and Urla sit on opposite sides of the bed facing each other – on her head Urla has a cone with wings coloured with felt-tip pens to look like a rocket – on its side it says NASA under a penis with flames coming out from beneath the testicles – they are talking into walkie-talkies –

Erin (Jerrie Cobb) (PUTTING ON AN AMERICAN ACCENT): Oh hey, NASA. It’s Jerrie Cobb from the Mercury 13. So I did everything you said I should

URLA (NASA) (BAD AMERICAN ACCENT. DEEP FOR MALE): Mm-hmm. What’s that?

– Erin bursts into laughter –

URLA(IN HER NORMAL VOICE/LAUGHING): Hey. What? Are you laughing at my accent?

Erin: Sshhhh

– Erin clears her throat and resumes her serious-American tone –

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): I did all the tests like all the guys did. And hey, it’s funny. I actually kinda blew them out the water

URLA (NASA) (ACCENT) (THEATRICALLY SUSPICIOUS): What tests?

ERIN ( Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHING): You know. All the secret tests you make the guys do so they can go into space

URLA (NASA) (PAUSE): I don’t know what tests you’re talking about

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): I’ll remind you then. I put freezing water in my ears to see what it feels like with no balance. I spent days alone inside a box. I ran on a treadmill till I thought I might die. I drank radiation

URLA (NASA) (SCOLDING): How’d you find out about the secret tests? They’re secret

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): Er, well now. We have a scientist friend. He invited us to do them. He said you didn’t have your own programme for ladies so he made one to show you that you should have

URLA (NASA) (THEATRICALLY CONDESCENDING): And why’s that?

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): Because all his evidence suggests that it is way more logical to put a woman in space than a man

URLA (NASA) (GRINNING): There is no NASA-led evidence to prove this

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (WHINING): Oh please, NASA. I promise I won’t let you down. I coped just as well in the physical tests. I’ve got a higher pain threshold. I beat all the guys in the psychological ones. I’m so small you’ll hardly even notice me, I swear. I won’t take as much food or oxygen. I could even go up there in a smaller shuttle. And all of my reproductive organs are inside of me so I’m less likely to have radioactive children

– the girls both laugh then recompose themselves –

URLA (NASA): That’s all very nice but we won’t be taking the female programme any further

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): But why? We worked so hard. Some of us lost our jobs or our husbands

– Urla/NASA waves her hands dismissively –

URLA (NASA): There are many reasons

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (SMIRKING): Give me one good reason

URLA (NASA): Er. I’m, er. I am not authorised to divulge that information to third parties who are not associated with any official NASA programme

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHS/MOCK ANGER): Well, why the hell not?

URLA (NASA) (DRAWLING): Let it drop now. You’re like a dog with a bone. Do you have a husband? Think of how you’re making your husband feel. If not think about your daddy. You know your daddy wouldn’t want you up there

ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): But gee. All the tests show I’d do just fine

URLA (NASA): The tests are not fully conclusive. You might well get up there and just faint or something. And what if you got to space and got yourself raped by an alien? Imagine if you were the courier for an extraterrestrial being back on our planet

– Urla straightens up and wags a finger on her free hand pointedly – continues in her best pretend-self-righteous voice –

We will not continue the female programme because of the risks it would bring to the American public. My word is final

– at this Erin/Jerrie Cobb screams in frustration and throws her walkie-talkie into the duvet – Urla jumps and her rocket hat falls off – both the girls are laughing –

CUT

NOT THE WHITE BULL JUPITER SWIMMING

INT. CABIN – MORNING – Erin is sat on the bed with laptop – Urla has camcorder – zoom in – Erin’s face – zoom out – sudden noise from outside –

LARUS (SHOUTING): GIRLS – GIRLS COME – SHI—

– Larus bursts into cabin, knocks into Urla with camera – Urla turns – camera focuses on Larus – excitement –

LARUS (WHISPERING): Girls. Come quickly. Outside

ERIN: What? What is it?

LARUS: You’ll see. Come quickly. Quietly.

– girls follow Larus into corridor – Urla is in front with camera – Erin out of shot – out onto deck – Larus looks over deck – girls gather round – water slaps against side of boat – Greenland is faint on horizon – iceberg – no whales/dolphins –

ERIN: What are we supposed to be looking at?

larUS: Shush. You’ll see

– the group stands silently for fourteen seconds – four metres away from the boat the water breaks – gush of air from blowhole – ridged back of sperm whale breaks surface – Urla shrieks –

ERIN (YELLS): OHMYGOD—

LARUS (SHOUTING): CHRIST. It’s nearer than before

– boat rocks –

URLA: Is it safe?

LARUS: Jesus. Sorry. It took me by surprise. Yes, we should be safe. Just no more screaming, girls

URLA (LAUGHING): You screamed loudest. I have it all here. I can play it back to you

ERIN: It’s so big. I’ve never seen anything so big. Is it a sperm whale?

LARUS: Yes, it’s a sperm whale. We will be safe, they’re not that curious. But it’s very close

– creature resurfaces further from boat – Erin jumps –

ERIN: Oh god, it got me again

– nervous laughing – group stand and watch the whale resurface twice more before sinking into the calm water, its mass leaving its imprint in tiny bubbles –

CUT

THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE

KULUSUK: looks pretend. It is a tiny island ‘settlement’ with only five hundred people in it, which is, apparently, quite large for Greenland. The houses look like they were erected from a flat-pack box, as if they could be neatly folded away and taken with the people if they migrated. They are painted block primary colours: little toy houses, stage props. They are set into the rocks at jaunty angles. The slopes sit vertical against the still water, as if the island is built on the tips of a mountain range that lies just below the surface. The water must not get stormy because some of the houses sit just metres from its edge.

Urla is glad to be back on shore. She was short and restless and pacing in her catlike way, flitting between being happier reading on her own in the bedroom cabin and coming into the wheelhouse to sit with us but not saying anything, as though to remind us of her presence before slinking off back to her book.

I can’t sleep now, my womb feels like it is full of acid and lined with tar, and I can’t flail around like I would in my own bed because I will wake Urla. One of the nearby houses has huskies and they have been howling all night at the moonless sky. My eye mask itches, my Mooncup is uncomfortable and I am scared of leaking on the sheets on our last night with Larus.

This is the kind of period that requires a big fat nappy towel but I am trying to be good to the environment. I am still so glad to have my periods back that I feel no resentment towards it. The pill had stopped them and I went without for the whole time I was on it. I went on it like a lot of teenage girls do, because my periods hurt a lot and would interrupt that steady forward march to the drumbeat of patriarchy, making me take time off work and school. As though being female is an ailment to be cured with medicine.

I have been staring at the first ever picture of Earth for about an hour now. The one taken from the Apollo mission where they flew around the moon to take pictures of craters, the mission before they actually landed. They went up there to take these pictures of the moon’s craters but the astronauts decided to turn the camera around and film Earth rising from behind the moon.

At that moment, for the first time ever, images were appearing on the screens at NASA of Earth from outside Earth. They were watching themselves watching themselves almost in real time from 238,857 miles away. Right then, they reached a new level of self-consciousness that will probably never be recreated outside that room and moment ever again. A Copernican Revolution.

In the 1960s, the space race expanded the human psyche to incorporate a concept of deep space and deep time. The Earthrise photo made people stop and think about Earth more holistically. Maybe that is why people of the sixties cared more about each other and the future.

It is the most reproduced image on Earth, and has become more and more abstract until it has been reduced to an icon for human achievement in the twenty-first century, its significance totally inverted. I am starting to feel a bit strange about it. Because I have been exposed to it so many times that it has numbed me to what I am actually looking at, I am staring at it to try and really see it. It stays on my retina when I blink hard, so when I open my eyes it bleeds into the image on the screen and I can kind of imagine it rising.

They gave a name to the feeling astronauts get when they look back at Earth; they call it the ‘Overview Effect’. When they are going round in orbit and they are trying to put it into words and it is all cauliflower clouds and dancing green ribbons of aurora and lightning like flicking modem lights and any way they put it sounds so stupid, they get frustrated with their words because it is the most earthly thing on Earth but at the same time it is outside our earthly logic.

It is the same in parts of science that deal with a reality that evades our logic. The scientists have to simplify things using a language we can all understand. Three guesses whose language they use!

But they have to use one language to talk to other scientists, and to distil their complicated theories until they make sense to us laypeople. But in so doing they make them into something nothing like what they wanted to say in the first place and we believe in this end product because it came from the mouths of scientists. They talk about quantum soup and quark flavour mixing and you wonder if it looks more like a minestrone or something smooth like pea soup. And they call their instruments things like THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER-COLLIDER, so you wonder if they left the naming jobs down to earnest five-year-olds.

My favourite example of this is physics king and wife manipulator Albert Einstein’s name for non-local faster-than-light interaction of atoms that are separated in space. The particles were created in the same instant in space but then got widely separated, but they can still be said to be the same particle, and if you measure one it immediately affects the other. I do not understand it fully but I just like what he called it. He called it spooky action at a distance.

And astronauts say things that seem so obvious and dumb, like ‘you realise that the whole world is interconnected’, and you snort at how obvious and dumb these clever astronauts sound, but then you think about it and actually maybe they are on to something. They say things like, ‘You realise that we are all already in space, on a giant spaceship, spaceship Earth’, and you think they are just saying that in a condescending sort of subterfuge to everyone who is not really on a spaceship, until you realise that you had been thinking of yourself as on this anchored point from which they send rockets to space, when you have been out there the whole time. There is nothing underneath you and nothing above or either side for a very, very long way. The moon rolls around a groove in the space–time fabric created by the gravity of Earth.

There should be a flight about every five years that takes all of the current world leaders into orbit so that they can look down at Earth. If the UN wants world peace why have they not thought of that one?

MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH

Urla has taught me how to say: Hello, my name is Erin, thank you, yes, no, and the food was very nice. There is a Kalaallit Inuit family from the settlement that were travelling today to pick up supplies from Kangerlussuaq (gan-ker-schloo-schooak) on the west coast, where there is a DIY shop that has something specific that they need, and a family member that needs ferrying, and various other menial things which all seem insane to have to travel FIVE HUNDRED MILES for.

They intend to return with a heavy load, so the family are sending the dad and son out with two almost empty dog sleds. The dogs can run between forty and sixty miles in a day, so the thing should take us thirteen or fourteen days. It is too mountainous to get into Nuuk from the east side, but the ferry that goes from Kangerlussauq to Nuuk only goes once a week. If all goes well, I should get into Kangerlussauq the day before the ferry.

The dad is called Amos and he loves his dogs. When Amos put me on the sled with his son Umik he made things awkward from the offset by explaining that he might be a bit shy with me because he did not get to meet many girls in the village. Umik is about fifteen, does not say or smile much, wears a beanie with Miley Cyrus on it and a pair of neon orange-framed sunglasses which he never takes off.

Urla switched her mood as soon as we started moving again. She seems erratic, as though a cloud passes its shadow over her but lifts and then sunshine again. I was a little worried that maybe she had become bored with me; she seemed frustrated by the conversations that me and Larus had. It was the only way to keep time moving through the days at sea, but she would groan ‘boooringggg’, Larus would throw a small object at her, and then she would leave the room.

When we left, Urla hugged her uncle aggressively. I was sad to leave him, but it feels like he has a place in my future as some kind of surrogate uncle or something. He gave me a pile of books and a badge that says Save The Bees which I put on my rucksack, and a knife for gutting fish. He also gave me his Skype and his mobile number, saying that I had to keep in touch weekly, and that he would worry about me once I had left his niece behind. This paternalism irritated me a little.

Urla is riding with Amos and I am with Umik and Genen, the lame dog who refuses to be left back at the house without the pack. He is sweet but a bit much. He has taken a shine to me and is keeping my legs warm but cutting off their circulation intermittently. He also smells, all of them smell, from being fed almost entirely on preserved seafood.

I have tried talking a bit with Umik using the Greenlandic phrase book but I am appalling at pronouncing the words. I think he resorted to putting his iPod on to stop me trying. I thought it would be nice of us to try Greenlandic in case they are sore about still being a colony. I got the phrase book from the harbour office in exchange for my Icelandic one and eight Danish krone. It is a thin thing and useless for actual conversation. I can only pick from utilitarian phrases that are laid out in this odd way that falls into accidental narratives at points:

Please

Thank you

How much does it cost?

This gentleman/lady will pay for everything

Would you like to dance?

I love you

Best wishes

Leave me alone!

Help!

Call the police!

I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services. Oh, our hero is at a bakery. Now they are at a flower market. Oh, now they need an ambulance, holiday over! The phrases are like the names scientists come up with for things, almost useless but better than nothing, I suppose.

I am starting to really need a wee. I have asked Urla how to broach the subject and tried to convince her to tell Amos she needs to go so that we both can because I do not want to. I am just going to hold on until we stop, whenever that is, nightfall, which won’t actually fall but just become a state that we suddenly find ourselves in at some point in the unforeseeable future. By midnight the sun will just about disappear for a few hours.

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

The command to make the dogs stop is extremely satisfying. They say ‘aaahhh’ really loud just like that, like letting out a massive sigh. The dogs lose momentum and the sleds come to a prompt but smooth halt, proportionate to the length of the sigh/command. Aaaaaaahhhhhhh. We did not head off until the afternoon today so we have had a full seven-hour stint without breaks. It was about eight in the evening when we stopped, very hungry and sore. I was almost definitely sure my period had leaked in my salopettes but no one could tell through the thickness so it was fine. Bit of a panic as to what to do but we have now figured out the toilet situation. One of us holds up a piece of tarpaulin while the other goes, but we have not yet found an explanation for Umik and Amos for the hysterics that Urla goes into as I try to take care of my Mooncup discreetly.

It makes me think about the Inuit relationship to the land, how consciously gentle they are to it, how aware they are that every single human being leaves an imprint, a mark on the land behind itself. Out on the ice with no plumbing and no soil this becomes stark. Every time you have to expel your waste a mark is left in the sparkling white snow and that impact is made so very concrete. Starting from our beginning anyone could track us right to where we end no matter how hard we try to leave everything in this place as we found it, could follow our paw marks and scratches and dug-up snow and buried bones.

The two tents Amos has look so tiny and bright against the vast white of the ice; accidental, futile, defiant, out-of-depth. Like a single plant clinging to the side of a cliff. We are sharing a one-man between the two of us, which at least guarantees maximum body heat exchange. Without the swooshing sound the moving sleds make, and with the dogs all panting and sleeping, this place is eeriesilent. Apart from when the wind makes the tents crackle, their taut skins whipping frantically. The quiet is ominous; we all feel it, the act of writing this itself feels like pathetic fallacy. But there is nothing but us for miles around, the nearest town is the one we headed off from. Urla says polar bears never come this far south, so not to worry too much about attracting them with my blood. It had not occurred to me to worry until she said.

Urla got a really great interview with Amos today. She did all the speaking, of course, with me filming. We watched it back and Urla translated it for me. He talks about being out on the ice, especially alone (he does most of his trips without Umik but he brings Genen).

I took it so that he was sat cross-legged on the ice with Genen, with nothing else in shot. It was almost perfect, like it encapsulated this ethereal feeling we have both tried and failed to describe: something just less than emptiness, a white collage.

What Thoreau said: in wildness is the preservation of the world. He is often misquoted as having said wilderness, but he meant pure wild-ness. Not wilderness in the sense you usually conceive it, a space set aside to be chaotic or fierce or biodiverse. He meant it in the sense of ‘wild’ as in ‘self-will’ in the past participle. Like looking out over the ocean, or into space, a blank and human-void place, and feeling tiny; this is what Thoreau meant. The very opposite of culture or civilisation.

It is an overwhelming feeling because it reminds you of how you are not like it; vast, indifferent, unfathomable. The ice will erase you. When you and everything living here leave, the ice will swallow up all of your traces. No symbols at all. You. Not you.

The ice sheet refuses human cartography utterly. It is an empty and markless expanse with nothing to anchor the lines of a map to. Well, probably there are glaciologists who can map it in some way, density of ice maybe, accumulation of atmospheric particles perhaps, but this can only be seen with a very specific kind of vision. An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.

It makes me feel light-headed, this nullification, if I stand and look out into the expanse. But it is not like a paralysing onset of agoraphobia; instead it is the jolt of a sudden release, the severing of an anchor. It is so not at all like home, where cartography is inescapable, knitted into the soil, and there is no chance to get lost, not really. This is a place for walking, this is not, Welcome to the County of Worcestershire, Private Property, Do Not Walk On The Grass.

I asked Amos if he thinks we are on course to get there in time for the ferry. He just said immaqa, which kind of means maybe and is the catchphrase of Greenland. Bodes well. Most methods of transport here only happen on a weekly basis.

ON BEING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO MY SEX

Sledding across all this snow it kind of feels like we are doing an antithetical version of messianic explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctica expedition. I watched the Herbert Ponting documentary for inspiration before we left England. At the beginning there is a slide with a quote from King George V along to some jolly colonial-era trumpeting. King George said, I WISH THAT EVERY BRITISH BOY COULD SEE THIS FILM FOR IT WOULD HELP TO FOSTER THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE ON WHICH THE EMPIRE WAS FOUNDED.

I wanted some of that spirit, even being of the 50 per cent already excluded by KG. Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.

We hunt and shoot some seals, but we have to feed the dogs that way so it is not too bad of us. They introduce me to the camp mascot, the black cat Nigger, at which point I am reminded of the terrible inconsistencies of their moral vision. And then they start to anthropomorphise the seals, which is kind of sweet, oh, nice guys, right? But we get all fond of this one seal and her pup, who is too fat and small to clamber out onto the ice when some killer whales chase it because they are hungry. Then we harpoon the killer whales to rescue the baby. Then we sit down to a bowl of seal stew.

Scott and his men died to put a flag at the South Pole. This is where the fine line between exploration and imperialism was crossed. The expedition was not an exercise in curiosity and adventure but a race of nationalistic pride. Men just love to stick their flags in places. North Pole, South Pole, on the seabed underneath the North Pole, on the tops of mountains, on the moon. Like territorial animals pissing on things.

Annie Smith Peck was a mountaineer who beat Indiana Jones to the summit of Mount Coropuna and stuck a ‘votes for women’ flag on the top of it. She was one of a handful of female explorers to be recognised for her success. Okay, ladies, Annie Smith Peck can have that one, although she is a ‘superwoman’ so don’t you mere mortal women go getting any ideas.

People go mad for that stuff still now, this boyish British Peter Pan nostalgia for exploration and empire. Scouting and wilderness techniques and Bear Grylls, the zealous Christian outdoorsman on the Discovery Channel. When it came out Scouting for Boys was only beaten as a bestseller by the Bible. It actually came out after the imperial age of Scott and Shackleton when British masculinity was feeling threatened by the waning strength of empire and the rise of the women’s rights movement. The emasculation of men. Which is maybe what the current resurgence of Mountain Man documentaries on television is all about. And they made Bear Grylls the new Chief Scout.

I want my documentary to be the opposite of colonial exploitation. I want it to explore, quietly, without imprinting. To be porous to all things without contaminating. I want it to be conscious of its tracks in the snow (I did get footage of this to use to that purpose).

THE RESURRECTION OF RACHEL CARSON

Today I ride with Genen again. I go to the furthest places at times like this, when I am stationary in transit and alone with just my own head. I fell asleep and had a dream about Rachel Carson. I was in the ‘woods’ that are near my house, which really is just a square of lank trees they did not cut down when they built the estate. It is also laced with radon. It is kind of a recreational area for the housing estate, where everyone walks their dogs. It stinks of dog shit. Mum told me not to play in there when I was young in case it somehow got in my eyes and I got blinded by the shit.

I was in the woods, standing in the woods and being very still because I could hear buzzing and I was trying to figure out which way not to walk. Then next to me what I had taken for a very ordinary mound of undergrowth started to move. It began to rise in the horizontal shape of a human body. The human shape pulled up all the turf around it as it began to sit up, plucking the plant roots out of the soil like snapping violin strings. They made a noise like that, pluck pluck pluck. When the human shape had sat up it started to brush itself down, its clothes caked in mud and its skin smeared with dirt and dog shit. I recognised Rachel Carson even though I don’t know what she looks like and her face was just a smudge with lichen for eyes.

‘Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead.’

I was not sure if she was addressing me. It was hard to tell what way her lichen eyes were facing, but her head was turned away from me anyway. Then I woke up from pins and needles because Genen was sat with his femur digging into my shin.

FIRST FOOTPRINTS IN THE FRESH SNOW

Every day here is just a slight variation on the first, differentiated by switching sledges, sluggish topics of conversation, and a sky that will sometimes bleed dramatically pink to orange like the belly of a rainbow trout. Sometimes there are strong winds. The constants are the smell of the dogs, wincing at the whip-crack, tensing for the snowdrifts, pins and needles, and the white nothing. I am trying to stay proactive and read but I am kind of too bored to concentrate.

A THOUGHT: This nothingness is going to be a very prominent part of the trip. Lots and lots of sitting around, waiting on things, being in transit, but out on the ice like on the ocean this is intensified, your own small contours marked out against the vastness of ether, so that you look at your hands out in front of you and follow the line of your fingers up and down and think, I end here, all of me fills up this container that is my body.

Like proprioception. I keep on thinking that this is the closest I will ever come to moonwalking. There are parallels: the same bulky outerwear, the same being-in-emptiness. Yes, it is almost like moonwalking.

All day I was with Urla and we did not speak more than ten words. Today is day nine, entries are sparse because, mostly, I had nothing to say. It is hard to think with no stimulation. Doing nothing is exhausting. We have slipped into this kind of mental hibernation, except Umik and Amos, who have their tasks to occupy them. Mostly I have been sleeping lots and dreaming vividly. And the ice has saturated my dreams. After a while nothingness becomes potent and textured because of the sense of what is absent. Things are evoked more than if they were actually there: colours, heights, depths. Slight changes in the monochrome landscape come out in relief. When the ice-mountains precipitate onto the horizon they appear as a whisper and disappear as quietly. The horizon is the only spatial marker and it is always on the horizon. We are perpetually at the centre of nothing.

It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through. I cannot put a word on it and when I try I can only think ‘primordial’, but that word entails potential because a beginning initiates a narrative. The one I want is the very opposite of origin.

Words are getting harder and I am starting to think like the ice; without contrast there is no definition. The ice is self-referential and there is no way into the tautology. I cannot get my bearings if there is nothing to grasp.

THESE ARE SHINING PARTS

I was sorry to leave Umik behind to look after the dogs and sleds. We all hugged goodbye awkwardly, which made him visibly uncomfortable. It felt strange to be walking, and to be walking off the packed snow. I thought permafrost was a permanent frost that kept the ground crispy, but Amos explained it is underneath the ground, and keeps the water up so everything is actually wet and boggy. It was a difficult walk with all the sucking mud, and the weight of our rucksacks. It got a bit warm, even with the wind, so we had to take our coats off, but the wet brings all the insects out and some of them were biting through our thinner sleeves.

I had managed to walk all that way without looking up much from where my feet were going and what insects I was slapping into my skin so it did not even occur to me that the ice was gone until we started driving. Amos was so excited to be in a car, he drove the whole way with the window down and his arm resting on the door, which made it cold in the back but neither of us wanted to say anything. He was talking to his brother, who picked us up in his 4x4, all animated, which suited me because I like to zone out when people are talking a language I do not understand.

Then I started to look out of the window and it hit me how colourful everything was. Not really objectively, but in such contrast it nearly hurt my eyes. All this space just mossy and vaguely pink and it just went on and on and on. It hardly changed for the whole journey, flickering on in muted colours, and in front and behind the road was a thin wisp existing through it. The only shape to change was the twisting spine of the mountains.

Wilderness, vast open spaces untouched and just left be. Not a reserve portioned off as a space where you are supposed to go and be recreational. It made me think of Alaska, and how much left I have to see, and how out here it is easy to imagine yourself alone and happy in it.

As I watched the landscape thaw I thought I felt my spirit thawing a little with it. As if there was something deep inside me that was frozen and had maybe always been frozen and like an Alaskan wood frog frozen dormant for winter it was beginning to wake up to the world again with the spring.

A RECURRING FEELING: getting excited like forgetting something and then remembering you already did it, like I was waiting for a phone call from Mum asking me what the hell I thought I was doing, young lady, and to come home right now, but realising, nope, she was not going to.

Amos was really apologetic about leaving us at the hostel and seemed genuinely distressed that he did not have room to accommodate us, which was very sweet. We gave him money, which he took with some sort of feigned coaxing; he kept saying, ‘Lovely girls, lovely girls.’

Kangerlussuaq was only built quite recently by America for the airport. The hostel seems like it is made from slotted-together foam board, partition walls. Like knocking into it would just make it collapse. All of the furniture looks like it was bought from Staples and the mattresses are made from foam.

There is a television with American cable and the Discovery Channel. I am taking notes from Bear Grylls for the documentary, both for handy tips and for a character profile of the kind of idea of ‘man and wild’ I keep going on about. As though modern feminism is more ubiquitous than ever before (or so it seems to me, as maybe it does to each new generation) and in backlash, with renewed fanaticism, a strain of hyper-masculinity has occurred. Compensating; which men have always liked to do!

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ENDURING THE MOST DRAMATIC HARDSHIPS YOU CAN IMAGINE

INT. – Erin sits on the corner of a bed with a notebook and pen in hand facing a television – outdoor survivalist show with presenter Bear Grylls – interior is sparse: desk, table, chair, window, rucksacks and possessions spilt on the floor – Erin turns to notice camera and snorts – zoom in on her face – then on television screen – Bear Grylls is hoisting himself up a waterfall –

BEAR GRYLLS (ON SCREEN) (YELLING): SURVIVAL can be summed up in three words (PAUSE) Never. Give. Up.

– camera pans back to Erin –

ERIN (PUTTING ON AN IMPRESSIVE IMITATION): I have penetrated every crevice of the planet and conquered the WORST nature can haul at me. There is nowhere I haven’t taken on. I’m going to show you the skills I invented that you need to be as man as I am. And survive anywhere on this unforgiving planet

– Urla is laughing behind camera – camera back to TV screen – zooms in and out erratically on presenter struggling against onslaught of water –

ERIN: If you’re stranded in the wilderness you need a weapon. Ideally a rifle. If you don’t have a rifle nature will sometimes throw you a rope in the form of a makeshift weapon. Behold. For example

– Erin flourishes her pen to the camera –

ERIN: This thousand-year-old arrowhead I found on the floor. I will tie it to a stick with the cord from my parachute. If you don’t have an arrowhead or a parachute cord, use your initiative. Initiative is man’s best weapon

– she winks – Urla laughs –

ERIN: I am on a journey of SURVIVAL. (THROWS BACK HER HEAD AS SHE SHOUTS) Every step of this journey is me. Man. Surviving. Not dying. Never succumbing to the weakness that is death

CUT TO –

INT. – still in same interior but props have moved – belongings piled in corner – Erin has T-shirt tied to her head turban style and is brandishing a broom handle like a scythe –

ERIN(GESTICULATING BROOMSTICK ON EMPHASISED WORDS): The tropics are home to most of the plants and animals in the world, most of which are trying to KILL YOU. Not every creature in the jungle wants to kill you. Instead these ones want to EAT YOU ALIVE. Sometimes in the jungle it can feel like everything is out to get you. BECAUSE IT IS. Man must reassert his dominance in the jungle. I flick the tarantula off my leg

– Erin mimes flicking her leg –

ERIN: Petty bug

– pan to television – presenter is in a desert, talking with spear-clad barefoot gentleman who is holding up to him the corpse of something furry – pan back to Erin, who is looking at the screen –

ERIN: If you are stranded in the desert you can expect a visit. FROM DEATH. It would take years to learn all the skills of the sand bushmen but I have done it in a matter of hours. They eat every morsel of the desert hare and respect its soul. I will bite out its liver and leave the rest because its liver contains a vitamin that is vital for preventing something bad I mentioned earlier

– onscreen presenter passes the carcass back to the sand bushman –

ERIN: Take the rest of the carcass. I have no use for it. No, you may NOT have one of my adventure-sports-sponsorship power-bars, Sand Bushman

– camera shakes with laughter –

CUT TO –

EXT. FROZEN LAKESIDE – Erin in snow next to a body of frozen water – she is now brandishing a large stick –

ERIN: Here in the Arctic there are fish under the ice. I have a frozen deer leg so that’s what I’m going to use to smash through the ice. If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative. I’m going to make a line using some cord from my parachute. And some other really useful stuff I found in my pocket

– she takes to hitting the ice with the stick –

CUT

Template:Anchor HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH

CONTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE

I was back standing on the ice sheet in a blizzard. There were two figures in orange jackets with their hoods against the blizzard and goggles on, glaciologists. They were peering over one of those big drills they use to get ice core samples. As the core came up its gradation changed, from glowy green like a nuclear ore on top down to pure white. The glaciologists conferred.

‘Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned,’ said Rachel Carson from beside me.

I could hear clearly what the glaciologists were saying even though they were very far away.

‘The core shows residue,’ said the one. ‘Hmm, yes, they also found it in the underground rivers,’ said the other.

‘When some of the Eskimos themselves were checked by analysis of fat samples, small residues of DDT were found (0 to 1.9 parts per million).’ Rachel Carson always spoke with no lilt of emphasis in her voice. Not to me or anyone really. Maybe to herself.

‘It’s much worse than we thought.’

‘Much worse.’

‘The fat samples were taken from people who had left their native villages to enter the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery.’

I asked, ‘Where have the bees gone, Ms Carson?’ But my voice was lost to the wind.

‘For their brief stay in civilisation the Eskimos were rewarded with a taint of poison,’ she said instead.

‘Quick, empty it and let’s go.’ The glaciologists emptied their lab pockets into the core hole. There was a pause as they leaned and peered into it, then a succession of plops like pebbles in still water. Then they replaced the core.

The noise took me back home to the cul-de-sac between the two lamp-posts that marked the boundary of where I was allowed to play when I was little, where Mum could still see me from the living room as she did the polishing and listened to Boyzone. There is a wall, the side of Marge and Graham’s house, where Charlotte from next door was sat facing it, making the noise, crack crack crack, that the snails made when we would throw them against it if we were bored so their shells burst and their guts spilled out. We would have to kick them down the drain in time before Graham would come out to shout at us when he guessed what we were doing to his wall. Down into the underground sewage, plop plop plop.

When I was little I was fascinated by the sewage system. To get rid of anything all you had to do was flush it down a drain. In the garden there was a drain lid, and if you lifted it you could watch all the things coming through the drains in the house on the way off to wherever they were going. We used to put the dog poo in it then flush the downstairs toilet to send it away. If there was ever any evidence of something bad I had done I would lift up the drain lid, put it inside, run in to flush, then run back, in time to see it being washed into oblivion.

One day I sat on the toilet and I jumped up because something had tickled my leg. A snail was sliming its way out of the sparkly white basin. It had come from this elsewhere place and made its way through the plumbing inside our house to the top-floor toilet. This changed something fundamental about how I saw the drains from then on, my own miniature Copernican Revolution. Suddenly the philosophical implications of flushing into the black-hole-void needed to be scrutinised because drains were now not the portal to the place-of-no-return I had thought them, a bit like how Jerry R. Ehman who got the Wow! Signal must have felt, like, ‘I am not alone something has come out of the void to me wow!’

Maybe in the dream of the glaciologists on the ice sheet I am realising the similar always-there-but-not-appreciated thing that haunted Rachel Carson. That sometimes there are things that need to be spotlit against a stark white backdrop for you to perceive them because when ever present you do not interrogate them.

The Eskimos did not invent the invisible death. We did. The ice sheet is not-so-pure wilderness. You and I can’t see it but the glaciologists can. They can read the core samples like testimonies to our guilt as geomorphic agents, as ushers of the Anthropocene. And of all the corruptions we will leave behind us there is one that will outlive them all. We are the first civilisation on this planet to have made an invisible death that will outlive all relics of all civilisations ever. We made nuclear waste.

With this comes a responsibility, but how to convey invisible death to the future is a problem unique to our age. Larus told me that some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin and the Golden Records also worked as part of the Human Interference Task Force. The Task Force was set up to solve the Forever Problem, the problem of relaying warnings at nuclear waste sights to possible future civilisations, possibly as far away as the half-life of plutonium 239, some 24,000 years into the future.

They could not use a single language because language is always dying, so they tried to come up with universal symbols: a monolith with warnings in multiple languages, cats that glowed when they got close to nuclear waste sites, invented fables for the future, majorly complex booby traps, and an Atomic Priesthood cult who would pass down the dark secrets to each new generation within their elite.

The waste will survive us. It is our most enduring time capsule, our ugly baby. What does it say about us? What did we do when we discovered its power? Of course we went and made a superweapon.

Since the Cold War the world has existed in equilibrium and this equilibrium is still enough for us to have almost forgotten that it is holding us up. The Nash Equilibrium is the concept that once all sides are armed with nuclear weapons, none has the incentive to disarm or to use their weapons, based on the premise of MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION, the idea being we are at a point where if one country attacked another, we would all be fucked, so it benefits nobody to do so. But to keep the equilibrium each side’s defences must be taken into account. If one side has more fallout shelters than another, and more of the population could theoretically be spared, then they are unfairly favoured, and the balance is tipped. Because of this there could not be nationwide plans for fallout shelters built by the government during the Cold War. Covert shelters were built, under town halls, in people’s gardens. There are secret underground time capsules all over the Western world. What would a future archaeologist make of them?

For the Nash Equilibrium to work each country has to look as though it would blow the shit out of its enemy in retaliation for an attack on the homeland. America has adopted the policy that any attack on America would be responded to with all-out retaliation under any circumstance. Russia take this one step further with their ‘Dead Hand’, which automatically releases all their warheads as soon as an attack is detected by seismic sensors.

I was on Skype talking to Larus about this and told him that Britain has a peculiar response. We have the Letters of Last Resort, to be opened and read at the end of a chain of events. The British government has been destroyed and the prime minister and the ‘second person’ to the prime minister have been killed. Our submarines float deep in the Atlantic and almost no one on board knows where they are at any given time. The submarines presume the homeland to have been destroyed if a) there have been no naval broadcasts in four hours or b) BBC Radio 4 has stopped broadcasting. In this event the four submarine commanders open the safe inside the safe and read the four handwritten letters from the now-dead prime minister, written the very day that she/he assumed office. Then they have to follow the instructions, which will be one of three things:

1. blow the shit out of the buggers

2. spare the blighters

3. your call, commander

The letters are destroyed when each prime minister leaves office, so history will never know what was written by them. Larus said that is the most British thing he has ever heard.

I think given our colonial record the submarines probably have on board their own carefully designed time capsules, for the preservation of the nation, something that says WE ARE NOT NUMINOUS OR ERASABLE. Our submarines are called Vanguard, Victorious, Vigilant and Vengeance. (And who came up with those names?) So, floating portentously in the Atlantic right now, the decision has already been made.

A paradox: what is the point of retaliation if you are dead and gone already and have no way of knowing any better? What is the point of causing immense suffering to the innocent civilians of the enemy?

The point is, apparently, you can’t exist when we do not. It is we will be remembered. It is WRATH OF THE EMPIRE.

I asked Urla if she knew about the Letters of Last Resort and she said no so I told her. She just looked a little confused.

‘Didn’t Uncle Larus ask to talk to me?’

I paused to think about it, and said no, he didn’t mention it, although he went in a rush, which when I thought about it then did seem a little unusual. She looked at me strangely and changed the subject.

WOMEN INTERESTED IN TOPPLING CONSUMER HOLIDAYS

I stood at the bow of the ferry watching the water and eating very Continental-tasting biscuits. It became surreal if you watched it long enough with your chin on the handrail. Like a glassy Rorschach Test, all the icebergs twinned in the water, which was a sky itself, obscured only when a floe passed, or when ice fell from one of the cliff sides and shattered the mirror. There was a cracking sound when this happened, like the noise an ice cube makes when it cracks in a tepid drink.

NUUK: a surreal city. Like Kulusuk but bigger and denser. Buildings are still toy houses but multi-storey and apartment style, set at angles to each other so that they sit in the rock like a doggedly arranged model village, a Playmobil city. Slate grey is the base of everything, it is the colour of the cliffs and the colour of the boulders and the pebbles. Everything in blocks of colour, as if cut and stuck from sugar paper. For the first hour or so in I could not put my finger on what was missing. There are nearly no trees or plants apart from the wiry grass.

There is a new mall, apparently a point of contention for people, usually dividing the old and the young. Some of the older people see it as Nuuk becoming too ‘European’. Greenland is a country in the midst of change, not least because global warming is melting the ice sheet. Complete melt would mean that resources that were hidden by the ice before are revealed to be reaped. If they could be more self-reliant then they would be able to manage independently from Denmark, which would make them the only Inuit country in the world. But looking further ahead in time there is a chance that the amount of water it would create could turn Greenland into an archipelago. Their Inuit culture would have to change beyond recognition. Could they then be called Inuit?

Of Urla’s family friends: the daughter, Naaja, is about Umik’s age, she speaks quite good Danish, is a bit shy with me but she looks at Urla with adoration whenever she talks. The dad, Klas, is Danish and the mum, Kalistiina, is Inuit. The inside of their house is interesting because it is like a museum for their hybrid cultures. Lots of fish- and whale-based ornaments, and a cupboard full of weird votive figures that Naaja tells us are made by the family when they have bad feelings, to dispel the feelings. They are eerie, but apparently customary. Some of them are made out of bones and teeth, and what looks like Kinder Egg toy parts. I also keep noticing extravagant fake flower vases in the windows of houses we pass, I suppose because the flora in Greenland is so limited and this makes them a novelty.

MANKIND’S MOST NOBLE GOAL: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND UNDERSTANDING

From Nuuk, Klas drove me, Urla and Naaja twenty miles into the tundra with a tent, some of Kalistiina’s seal-fur blankets, a gas stove, our bags, canned food and lots of bottled water, and will return to pick us up in four days’ time. Some Danish hikers found Naaja on the tundra already. She went off from camp on a walk on her own just because she likes to do that. She took her phone in case she twisted her ankle or anything. She came on in the afternoon and said she was with two men. She asked Urla to talk to them and tell them she was camping out with older friends and that she was okay because the men would not take her word for it.

They walked Naaja back to the tent even though it took them an hour or so. They must have been bored with their afternoon of dramatic hardship, so bored that they were ready to transcend it already and instruct us on how to be in communion with it successfully (as many Mountain Men are prone to). When we came out to meet them, they conferred conspicuously out of the sides of their mouths, and told us we were too young to be camping out alone. They said it was very dangerous to be out because a polar bear had been spotted in the area and that the ranger had told them this on their way out. As though by avoiding this abstract and likely nonexistent danger they had already conquered wilderness and were in a position of authority on the subject by now.

Naaja would not believe them, and asked them what they were doing out without guns or flares if they knew there was a bear. Naaja has spent her whole young life knowing this place, but these men on a walking holiday of course boasted superior knowledge just by virtue of being older and being men.

They asked us to pack up and walk back with them and we declined as politely as we could. They were pissed off and said they would tell the ranger we were out, and that the ranger would be angry that we wasted his time in worrying over us. We promised them we had the number for the ranger saved in our phones and we would call him if we needed rescue. I got this all on camera without them seeing. They walked away, disappointed that their damsels had repudiated them.

Naaja assured us when they had gone that polar bears rarely ever come this far south, and besides we were too far inland. The hikers were either too stupid to realise their lie was almost impossible, or else they did not know what they were talking about and would believe anything they heard from any wise Greenlandic tundra man with a sense of humour that they might have met.

TWILIGHT THIS MORNING: I went to sit outside for a bit because I was feeling restless. It was probably about two but I am finding it difficult to sleep. The light through the tent is like a red lamp and gives me headaches, makes everything inside strange colours. The tundra was waking up with all the subtly hopeful colours of a new day: rust and pink from the tiny coarse flowers that blanketed the soil but still shadowless, the sun still just below the horizon and no stamp of cloud shadow, no elongation to the small and lonely trees. It all just stood, luminous and itemised like a child’s non-dimensional painting. I walked away a little to sit on a rise so that the tent was below and chalky red in the half-light. My home that will shape-shift into each new space I stop to sleep. A compact and portable idea of home. It was so pretty that I cried a little bit.

THE PILL REFUGEE FORUM

Urla got an interview with Naaja where she told us that lots of her friends (Naaja included) had had abortions. It was in Danish, of course, so Urla had to explain. She asked and Naaja did not mind at all, did not seem fazed by it as long as I promised to cut it out of the film. Of course I promised to, but I struggled a bit with coming to terms with it. I managed to convince myself that it would be dishonest of me as a documentary maker to cut it out, mostly because it would have been such an interesting and relevant sequence.

I asked if they did not have the pill in Greenland. She said no one ever talked about the pill or sex or anything, so no one really thought to use it. Her sex education at school was to have a doll that had a chip inside and could tell at the end of the week if it would have stayed alive, had it been a real baby. She said that mostly it just made her classmates think it would be fun to have a baby. They were thirteen when they did the exercise.

From what she said they seem stuck between two cultures. The Inuit leaners go back to the villages and have babies, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and the modernisers abort their babies and stay in the towns. But still living with traditional myths of transmigrating souls means the soul of the dead fetus can go on into a tree or a rock or an animal or another baby. So what is there to moralise about?

Naaja’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, teaches her Inuit myth. I wanted to know about the transmigration. It is a concept that underpins the myths of Inuits through Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. It holds that not only animals and plants but also inanimate objects and landscapes can have souls. Anything can be viewed as ‘spiritually charged’. The souls transmigrate between vessels. When such radically different vessels can be chosen by any soul, and a male vessel can take on a female soul and vice versa, is there as much of a concept of gender? Are they a queer culture?

They do not see humans as different from the animals; there are not separate taxonomical categories of being. A person can become a man or a woman, a tree or a stone. All life is a continuum and a horizontal one. For Inuit all soul vessels are equally important no matter if they talk or not: dolphins, rocks, women. In fact they are all talking, they have something to say, just maybe not in words.

Naaja’s dad is a Christian. She told us he came to her mother’s town with the town planning service, to talk to the council about telling the village people the benefits of moving to the city. The government wanted the villagers to move out because it was costing them too much money to send supplies, it being the only village for miles around. They knew if they could get the young to leave the old would eventually die out and the village would not need to exist.

We told Naaja how the pill is handed out like sweets in Britain. I told her it is great that not many of my friends got pregnant but it is not so great that it makes lots of girls numb. That it makes some of us so numb sometimes it is countered with antidepressants. That it can stop you menstruating, the feeling of which is like an ever-absent something that I could only compare to displacement, to homesickness, as though homesick for a body. But it does not make you as sad as having a baby would. For this we must be grateful. The pill is progress.

Naaja’s mother followed her dad to Nuuk because she loved him. They married two years later. Naaja’s mother’s parents did not come to the wedding. They stayed in the village until they had to be evicted. They will not talk to Naaja’s dad, but she goes with her mother to visit them in their new, bigger village on the coast. When her dad hears her mother talking to her about myth, he tells her to stop telling fairy stories. Mostly they talk with her grandmother. Her dad wants Greenland to melt so that the resources can be got at and it can be rich like Denmark.

What do you want Naaja?

I want what you want, of course. I want to see the world and make a life for myself. I want to leave Greenland and its small way of life.

But somebody has to stay and be Inuit!

Why should we stay when others do not? Where does it come from, this obligation? Where is yours?

We aren’t so different. You could come with me.

But we are very different. You are so free.

DO PELICANS LOVE TO SOAR?

The others are sleeping. Outside, the tundra is putting itself together for us. Yesterday we spent the day walking and filming, trying to find something for the documentary. We walked inland through the mountains against the meltwater of the glacier as it found its way to the sea. It was urgent, dense and grey; panicked like a jar of paintbrush water knocked onto a meticulous landscape.

I’m looking for something but I am not sure what. An idea, perhaps, that I had of the place before I was here. Of the trip before I was on it. I am actually here now, I have arrived. But where am I really? It is hard enough to actually be there, let alone convey it with a hand-held camera.

In the morning we startled a herd of reindeer. Must have smelled us and bolted. They ran fast, even the tiny babies and the heavily pregnant ones. A unified movement like a cloud of starlings, all the more magical for its silence. All of our mouths made O’s and we let out a kind of wistful sigh, simultaneously. And after we laughed disbelievingly about where we were and what had just happened and how awake we were.

We hadn’t seen them until they started to run. In the evening we saw them again but this time before they noticed us. Must have been downwind. We had climbed to the top of a low peak to see what was on the other side and found the reindeer in a valley with a small lake down its length. We crawled on our bellies to a vantage point where they could not see us. The mosquitoes found us quickly and lying still very soon became difficult. There were more of them because of the lake. I watched the small animals through the pixellated window of the camera, which shook whenever I tried to swat away the flies with my other hand. The reindeer were tormented by them as well, shaking their heads every few seconds to keep them out of their ears.

Reindeer lope, as if they are always tiptoeing. These movements, so secretive, made me feel dishonest, like a voyeur. The footage was achromatic, as though there only to record the novelty of the experience itself. But it is more than that.

I am finding it difficult to separate things that say something from things that do not. It is also hard to find things that say what I want them to. I went over what I have so far and I can’t decide if I am saying what I set out to say, or if I am saying anything at all, or if I just have lots of records of my own sentiments. Unsure if the things themselves are saying things or if I am projecting this on to them, in the way that there are feelings evoked when you look at a postcard image you are very fond of; these might not translate when you show the postcard to someone else.

I guess I am taking what I see and making it iconographic but I am finding it difficult to translate the feeling of being present in the moment, which is itself the thing left untranslated in the nature documentaries and encyclopaedias of exotic species which have been my only prior experience of nature on this scale. Or maybe not left untranslated, but translated back and forth until really it has disintegrated, like the Earthrise photo.

I do not want to imbue this film with empty codes that seem talismanic to me. But then maybe it does not matter, maybe it is a vessel for me and I am just now waking up to see the sea. And we have to try to translate or else no one would ever understand anyone. We have to make icons of faraway unexperienceable animals or else people like me would not know to care about them.

I watched the reindeer film over and over. One reindeer I had not noticed before is muzzling a rock around the floor. You can only just make it out, but it goes about muzzling this rock on its own for the entirety of me filming it. After a while watching I felt something new about it that I had not felt before. Maybe even empty moments are never really empty. I am beginning to wonder if this is part of the documentary making itself.

DOG VOICE NOW YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

We etched our names into a smooth part of a boulder that was grazed out of the moss next to where we pitched. It felt very chapter-defining, one of those things you always remember, like it could be a figurative scratch that etches out some more of what will one day make up my fully formed soul.

We asked Klas soon after we started to drive out of the tundra, and there was no polar bear. There have not been any sightings for months. I feel very strange about going on without Urla and Naaja. It would be nice to go traipsing round the world in a girl-caravan. But as integral as they seem now (and especially Urla) we need to go our separate ways, just like we did with Larus.

Really, though, it is amazing to me that just by chance of circumstance and necessity two or three quite different people can begin to exist in a kind of symbiosis, what in ecology is termed a mutually beneficial relationship between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical proximity, and somewhat defies Darwinian ideas of evolution as purely competitive. Like a cleaner wrasse that eats only the ectoparasites from the lips of the sweetlips, a larger fish. The wrasse gets fed and the sweetlips rids its itchy lips of parasites. One must feel a kind of relief at least when encountering the other in the wide expanse of the ocean. And maybe in their own way you could say, taking this a little further, that these fish are also friends.

Sometimes, in the literature, it is acknowledged that symbiotic associations between species can be so integral to their individual biology and identity that actually their individual biology and identity have little meaning outside of the relationship anyway.

I think that being real friends with someone is a kind of integration like this. In the way that you let that person know every detail of you in order to get close, even the horrible little things that mostly only you know and that make you an individual by virtue of their small uniqueness. You share all of these with only this person of certain closeness so that the contours of both of you are chipped away, you are porous and receptive and there is almost nothing left to define where you end and where they begin. Intertwined like trees grown together and fused. Inosculation, that is what this is called. Trees that grow together and then apart.

It might seem portentous to say this of someone I have only known a short time but that seems to be what happens when your situations are so transitory. They are on fast-forward because really you might never see this person again. So you are simply the most visceral version of yourself.

I am going to really miss Urla. I did a lot of crying when we said goodbye. I think she was alarmed and misinterpreted a little; she said, ‘Hey, don’t be scared, you’ve got this.’ I laughed and said I know I’ve got this, I am just going to really miss you. I smiled resolutely and thought to myself that this is the thing I can’t get caught up in, this is the noose of homesickness. I am doing this journey alone by and for myself and this tug is the over-socialisation expected of women which traps us, and is precisely what I am striking against.

Naaja says she looks around herself in the village at her friends and their lives and she feels so different to them. I understand that because sometimes I would do the same, would look around me at the vacant expression of the cashier in Tesco, the foundation faces of the girls with arms heavy with bags at the shopping centre, the tired faces in the ill-yellow lighting at the bowling-cinema complex, tired from a week’s work and a weekend not to be wasted. I did not recognise myself in these places and tried very hard not to.

But I know my own mum would love for me to go back to my home town and get married and never leave, and sometimes I feel very sorry that I do not want to do this. A lot of girls from my school had their babies and never left and seem genuinely happy for it. If all the girls were to up and leave like the boys can then how would any culture preserve itself?

But is it not just the inescapable itch of youth, its boredom, its listlessness, that makes you want to up and leave? The youth are always and always have been churning. Fields must be ploughed so that planted seeds will germinate: a period of customary churning prior to the germination of adulthood. Why do the girls suppress it?

I had a worry before I left, that I would get out here and just pine for home. When I was little my favourite film was Homeward Bound. In the film two dogs and a cat get left on a ranch with minders while their human family go on holiday; they think they have been abandoned but instead of feeling betrayed they presume something is up and decide to escape the ranch and just walk home. But this takes them through the Californian wilderness and the whole thing is about their treacherous journey home through this forbidding place full of wildcats and porcupines.

Sometimes when I was little I wished I was an orphan because they always had the fun lives in the stories. They had no familial ties keeping them bound with guilt. Most of the good adventure stories are about grown men or boy orphans. I planned to run away from home just for the adventure, wade down the river until I got to the sea because the sniffer dogs could not follow your scent through water. But I would get down the road to the lamp-post boundary marker and my mum would poke her head out and offer me a piece of carrot cake or something and I just could not break her heart.

I worried that Homeward Bound might have brainwashed me into losing my sense of adventure once the journey was under way, because really what the film says is pets are pets, not wild animals, same as humans are not wild animals, and do not go into the wilderness because it is bad out there. That it had ingrained this static idea of belonging and origin and the outside.

You will leave me behind.

Please go to university.

I am too headstrong not to.

But also after, go back to the village. Fight for your culture!

We won’t ever speak again.

We will stay in touch.

We don’t even speak the same language.

It is a shame that Greenland wants to move away from its old ways in order to keep up with the rest of the world. But how can we say they should not, that we want to keep all the wealth for ourselves? What do we want? This idea of its beauty and uniqueness, as culture-porn for ourselves too? Soon all I will have of Naaja are these memories and our footage of her. Then I will carry her with me if she can’t go.

THE RIGHTS OF NATURE

Back on a boat again. This one is the Modet, a commercial fishing boat. The wonky feeling from Blárfoss is worse here, what with the boat being much smaller. But I have got my sea legs now. There is an animosity, or it feels like it anyway, because all of the men are really superstitious in a hit-one-knee-got-to-hit-the-other-or-the-boat-will-sink kind of way, and the oldest guys especially believe it is very bad luck to have a woman on board. The aversion gets gentler down the age range. Logan is the oldest, older than Jon, who is Uncle Larus’s age and older than the rest of the crew by at least two decades. He has not spoken to me once.

He reminds me of a seafaring Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski posted letter bombs from his cabin in the Montanan wilderness. He was called the Unabomber because for years no one knew his identity, but bombs kept appearing via the mail in universities and airliners around the United States. He posted bombs to universities because he wanted to destabilise The Machine, symbolically at least if not literally. To punish The Machine for oppressing him and encroaching on his wilderness. For him a university was a hub of intellect, which really means ‘symbolic culture’ and the very opposite to his wilderness, a place devoid of human impositions. He must have hated the Golden Records.

Before he went to the wilderness he was a genius mathematician at Berkeley. He is worshipped as the God of the Mountain Men by some. Uncle Larus is a Kaczynski sympathiser; he even gave me a copy of Kaczynski’s story ’Ship of Fools’. He says he is a misunderstood environmental defender and not a terrorist.

When he looks at me it is as though Logan is trying really hard to post me letter bombs, like his squinted eyes could be sending out envelope bomb blades, like those chakra disk weapons the Hindu god Vishnu uses, if only he could just squint hard enough.

I have my own cabin, which is a store cupboard with a camp bed in it. There is a spare bed in the dorm cabin with the others but the captain seems to find the idea of me cohabiting with them indecent. Probably I won’t dwell on this too much since I quite like my little cupboard. It does not have a working light but it is quiet and I have a head torch.

It transpires that Modet used to be a whaling ship. I did a little interview with Jon, which somehow became a defensive rant. Greenland always hunted whales for subsistence. Why should they not hunt them for subsistence? Now it is illegal to hunt them. Since the whaling ban they fish haddock. Sometimes they catch whales and they die and they have to throw the dead whales back into the ocean or they will be fined. The problem that came about was simply one of crowding. Fisherman and boat crowding. Ratio of whales to fishermen unbalanced. For him there was no issue of morality. No sympathy for the souls of the whales. A direct quote from Jon: ‘The money was good. It is hard to think about the future when the money is good.’

Jon speaks like an echo of the whalers of old times. They needed to understand whales as swimming hunks of meat and oil because they were very, very valuable commodities. It would not do for commodities to have feelings. Whale blubber and especially the oil of the sperm whales were our main energy source before fossil fuels. They were instrumental in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Traumatised by the slaughtering of their species, whales began to attack whaling fleets and therefore became monsters to us. They were nearly driven to extinction by the nineteenth century. Then we reached peak whale oil. The sperm whale was saved by the alternative invention of kerosene and the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. They do not attack ships any more.

They aren’t sentient. They are fish. Fish are there to be eaten.

Whales are not fish.

What next? Haddock have feelings too? We can’t eat the haddock? Then what do we eat?

Maybe one day whales might be classed as non-human people and this whole conversation would be considered highly offensive, like how we look at the times before the women’s rights movement.

Ha! You can’t say that as a woman. That is comparing women to animals. Very unfeminist.

Maybe that is what people said about the idea of women’s rights before the suffragettes and in the context of the abolishment of slavery.

That is not a comparison.

I think about saying these things but they would make for an even more uncomfortable ocean passage. I figure I should keep my mouth shut for now. It is fine, they don’t hunt whales any more.

But that is not the issue. The issue is that the bad seeds are still there.

When I found out about the whaling, I thought, how can Larus be friends with these people? He comes to help them if he is near by, if they have caught a whale. He helps them place the whale back into the water and he tags the whale. He tries to educate them on the whales, so that they might understand them better, and in understating, develop some kind of empathy. He is not their friend. He is just cavorting with the enemy to further his own agenda.

THE SUPER-TRENDY SPONGE CLUB

Whales have now become the mascot of environmental stewardship, our very own symbol of empathy for other animals because they represent the idea that humans are not the only self-conscious creatures on Earth. We only recently started to acknowledge this and it has led us to wonder if there are other animals, especially cetaceans, who are so emotionally sophisticated that they might even be more emotionally sophisticated than we are.

In the limbic system of orcas or killer whales, for example – that is, the emotional processing bit – some parts are much bigger and more complicated than in the human brain. Something evolved there that has not evolved in humans. Because they have so much social cohesion scientists think that this part of the brain could be working on something crazy like a distributed sense of self. Like they can kind of transmigrate into each other in real time, like mega-empathy, or telepathy. Which is really bloody sad if you think about mass strandings: they just can’t imagine living disconnected from the social group because of their innate collectivism. Like women!

Were Scott and his men beached whales, dying in sacrifice with the rest of the pod, laying down their life for their kingdom, fundamentally collectivist, subsuming their ‘selves’ into the identity of the British Empire?

I would say no because what I think they had in mind when they kept pushing on into the obliterating snow was not death, as the end of self, but rather immortality (which is the conceptual opposite of a whale giving up any individualised notion of self in its suicide, dying with the colony because without the colony there is no self). The men on Scott’s expedition were demanding to be individualised; honoured; glorified; remembered for ever. (In a bee colony, around twelve males get to mate with the queen and pass on their DNA. Male bees explode after impregnating the queen, but it is not just anyone gets to say they impregnated the queen.)

Think of Lawrence Oates of Scott’s mission, who left the tent saying I am just going outside. Maybe what he had in mind was some kind of cryogenic freezing. Maybe he was really going outside to make a time capsule of his body.

According to the International Time Capsule Society based out of Oglethorpe University in Georgia, the dawn of the millennium saw an intense increase in the amount of time-capsulisation around the globe. Perhaps because the millennium is a marker of deep time. Perhaps because of our sense of infinitesimality in our new view of our place in the universe, perhaps because of the prospect of nuclear dawn.

What could be more representative than a fully formed and cryogenically frozen self? The desire to be reanimated in the future, a whole human self projected into the uncharted future. Maybe Lawrence Oates was really doing a President Carter.

In Shark Bay, Australia, a group of dolphins has formed a little clique that you can only get in to if you are what they call a ‘sponger’. It is called the Sponge Club. It was started by a dolphin they called Sponging Eve, who showed some of her girlfriends how to hold a sponge on the end of the snout so as not to get grazes when shuffling in the grit for food. Spongers only really hang around with other spongers, or dolphins that want to learn to sponge. This is what we describe in humans as cultural transmission. All but one of the dolphins in the Sponge Club are female; they seem to be better at keeping up relationships and therefore cultural transmission. Probably while the males hang out around the fringe of the group hassling other males and being macho.

The realisation that things like culture that we once thought were distinctly human are being found in other animals is blurring the rankings of our very meticulous taxonomies. But New Age idiosyncrasies are obscuring the science. Where it is being discussed, it is quite often hampered by mystical and totemic portrayals of these animals by people who think they are magical.

John Lilly has to answer for some of this. His maverick experimentation with hallucinogens and his obsession with decoding dolphin language in order to talk to them has tarnished dolphin study as pseudo-science. Plus he was still looking at it the wrong way. John Lilly was ranking language as the highest form of intelligence, as though we are ahead of the animals on a scale of progression, as though animals have not just adapted themselves as we have to the skills most required by their environments. He was still setting humans outside of the rest of nature and looking for the next best contender to invite into our elevated realm. John Lilly was Narcissus looking for something that reflected John Lilly back at himself.

The understanding that humans are just animals is maybe already there in children, who feel a kind of empathy towards animals because they see them as furry, scaly, feathery people. But of course children’s understanding of animal experience is not perfect because they take human-like responses to mean what they would mean in people.

When I was little I went to SeaWorld and loved every second of it. I thought the whales were happy and had a genuine best-friendship with their human trainers. You expect a super-friendly place like Florida where they invented orange juice and Mickey Mouse to be really good to their animals. And they are in the biggest pools you had ever seen and they really love what they do – look at the way they leap and smile and splash, all obvious expressions of joy and excitement.

YAAAAAY, goes the internal monologue of the dolphin. And the whales are far from home but they have each other and they love to be a family. They get the tastiest fish and the best care and fun toys and stimulation from people that they would not get in the wild and they are safe from those nasty Japanese poachers. Shamu has been alive for ever so they must have long, happy lives in captivity.

You would never guess that the big one they get out at the end to do the big splash is not really called Shamu and would go on to kill lots of people because he is so emotionally traumatised from being masturbated by humans so his sperm could be sold for millions and being stuck in a concrete box with strangers who do not speak his dialect of whale and who rake him with their teeth for being different.

Cetaceans are intensely social. They have coded clicks that they use around each other. We can’t decode what they are communicating, but they seem to be repeating a pattern. These clicks seem to be social affirmations. If they are saying anything it might be HELLO HELLO HELLO in their specific dialect. The sad whales of captivity could just be repeating HELLO HELLO HELLO in mutually unintelligible dialects.

Cetaceans are women’s allies in the war against patriarchy because patriarchy holds the cetaceans down with us. Orcas travel in matriarchal pods. The root of the word dolphin, delphus, means womb.

SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

Either I won Jon over or he invited me to watch the second haul because he was worried I would tell Larus they neglected me on the boat. He was hesitant in everything before I got out there, though, taking ages over giving me a bright orange anorak that drowned me already in case I fell in the water. He pointed out where the whistle was built into the collar and made me blow on it.

It was obvious as soon as I followed him out why he was being so cagey. A couple of the guys swore blatantly, one of them being Logan, who came straight from the other side of the deck and pushed past me back into the cabin, to go into his quarters, take his shoes off, put them back on again and masturbate in frustration over my pillow or something.

When the netted fish break the surface of the water they seem to be dead already and the gulls appear from nowhere to hover over and peck at them until they realise they can’t lift them from inside the net. All pouched up inside the net, they spiral jaggedly but still quite mesmerisingly into each other because they are slippery and they swirl from the squeeze of the net and the pull of the water. It is the kind of movement that if you concentrate seems self-perpetuating, like a siphon flow, and you can’t imagine how it might have started or when it will stop. A perpetual motion machine. (But this is an illusion. A perpetual motion machine is an epistemic impossibility; energy always dissipates. Second law of thermodynamics.)

AN ANALOGY: Once upon a time a bunch of people were on a ship too and they went hubris crazy from their own seamanship and they steered their ship into more and more perilous waters in order just to test their ever more brilliant feats of seamanship. Then the people on the ship started to argue amongst themselves, complaining about conditions on the ship. A lady on the ship complained that ladies do not get as many blankets as men. A Mexican on the ship complained he did not get paid as much as his Anglo counterparts. A Native American on the ship complained that he was owed compensation for the theft of his ancestral lands. A gay man on the ship complained at being called names for sucking cock. An animal lover on the ship complained that the dog on the ship was frequently kicked.

A lowly cabin boy piped up that everyone should stop arguing because really the issue was that the ship was headed for wreckage in the more perilous waters and that none of their problems would matter if the ship was wrecked, but nobody listened to him because he was just a lowly cabin boy. They called him a fascist and continued to argue amongst themselves about their personal issues, and nobody turned the ship around. Meanwhile the captain distracted them with condolences (an extra blanket for the lady, for example) that were always slight enough to placate but never for long, in order that they would not revolt and the ship could keep steaming ahead.

The ship went on sailing north until it was crushed between icebergs and sank to the bottom of the sea.

This is an analogy of civilisation written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Obviously it has some major flaws. Why is the captain suicidal? Is there really one malicious captain steering the helm of civilisation? If we sabotage the ship, like he wants us to, then wouldn’t we drown in freezing waters? But mostly my issue with it is that he does not seem to see that the problems of the people on the ship stem from the same place that built the ship badly (hint: patriarchy!). That to address the root of all their problems is to also steer the ship responsibly. As though the people on the ship were separate from the ship, as though the ship were sturdy and eternal, not contingent and always in the process of being reconstructed. I decided I should demonstrate this to Logan when the guys finally broached the subject of my presence on the ship.

‘We thought you might be a spy that Larus sent to try and dig up the dirt on our whale data,’ said Jon.

‘I just need to get to Canada, and Larus said you’d take me. I can’t say I disagree with how he feels about the whales, though.’

‘That’s exactly the sentimentality a woman would come up with,’ Logan piped up from nowhere.

Everyone paused for a second with cutlery midway to mouth because it was the first thing he had said directly to me the whole trip.

‘I’d kill a whale catch if I had my way. I’d stab it in the jugular and let it bleed out slowly. It’s how we’ve always done it. No amount of squeals from folk like you will stop it, as much as you like to think it does.’

Thinking I would meet him on his own territory, I said, ‘A curse on you and your boat,’ which I thought was quite funny. I did not think he would take it so seriously. He called me a witch, said something about how the catch had been bad and the boat was headed for doom now and slammed out of the room.

There was a big old awkward silence until Ethan, the warmest to me, said, ‘You really shouldn’t have said something like that,’ and a few of the guys exhaled loudly and let out low whistles.

Logan is like Ted Kaczynski in that he does not realise it is his own issues with me that was sending his ship to imaginary doom in the first place. It comes from inside him. It is a thing they have both imposed but are thinking is an essential thing.

The ‘curse’ will be lifted, so I suppose I did cast a spell on the boat in a way. Because when Logan realises it is he who is cursing the ship he will have to change his views on women (although there my own analogy falls down; Logan and the Unabomber are not synonymous because Ted Kaczynski would never kill whales).

I am partially onside with the Unabomber on the green issues, but like a lot of primitivists he believes in a Darwinian world of individual strength and combat where women have a subservient role because that is just essential human nature. And he really does not like feminists.

What he says: feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and capable as men.

What Charles Darwin the sexist Victorian naturalist said: the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.

What is ‘strong’? Why is it ‘good’? They are as superstitious as Logan. They believe in the perpetual motion machine, without seeing that something started it, something gives energy to the machine. What the Unabomber needs is a feminist revision.

What YOU need is a feminist revision.

Get off my ship you witch-whore.

Template:Anchor THE RECEDING HORIZON

GO CAREFULLY BRAVE SPACE PROBE FOR MY DREAMS GO WITH YOU

I had to steer clear of the northernmost mainland of Canada because it is sparsely populated and so logistics would have been difficult. It made more sense to go south to Saint John’s, North America’s oldest city. It’s on the bigger-sized chunk called Newfoundland just off the bottom tip of Labrador, near where they excavated a Viking settlement that could have been Gudrid’s. Means I have to ferry over to the mainland again across the Gulf of St Lawrence.

Thank god for the Trans-Canada Highway. I can use it to get all the way across the country to Yukon near the border with Alaska. You can get the whole way using Greyhound buses but they are way too expensive, so I am hoping to be able to do most of it with carpools and just a couple of coaches.

If I get completely stuck I suppose I will just have to hitchhike. I keep bringing up pages on the computer about women going missing while walking near the highway. A guy got beheaded and eaten on a Greyhound from Winnipeg, though, so none of my options are perfect.

The whole dynamic and landscape of the journey is to change now completely. Physically, it is all so lush and green and so many trees, such big trees! So weird to not be on rolling water. I think for the first few days the sensation will carry through, like how liquid that has been shaken about carries on sloshing even when its vessel has stilled. And it is also strange to think that now for the first time I am really on my own, because all the way so far I have been with Urla or kind of passed between adult guardians. Now it is just me and the whole of Canada, each leg of the journey a level to complete, bonus points carried over to the next level for novelty and amount of budget spared. And something else as well. Perhaps velocity. Because I have a vast space to cover and not much time or budget to do it in.

The internet tells me that Voyager 1 has left the solar system after all. It is now 12 billion miles away from Earth. That is 121 astronomical units or 121 times the space between Earth and the Sun. There has not been much fanfare to accompany this, maybe because it does not fit into our dogma of linear time, there not being a point where NASA could sit cheering and giving high-fives. They figured it out by comparing the number of protons around it this year with those around it last year, and from that estimated that it must have crossed the heliopause in around August last year.

So before I even left England it was already gone. In retrospect we will slot it into the history of our progressive forward march. Like when Columbus accidentally discovered a world that had already been discovered, several times over. Convinced it was India, he called the people he found there Indians, but more embarrassing is that we still preserve that mistake in our speech today. Europe did not hear about it until he got back afterwards and then the spread of the news would have been slow compared to our instantaneous world. It was an event that set into motion the beginnings of Western world domination, so from our perspective I suppose we are bound to distil it. Is this the drive behind time capsules? Are they a way to feign control over time by chronologising, a way of saying I MARK TIME THEREFORE I AM in order to assert existence?

It is cool that something made in the 1970s is still sending us signals from so far away when you consider what computers looked like in the seventies. On his way back from the New World Columbus threw a bottle overboard, with a message inside addressed to the Queen of Castile detailing what he had found in case he drowned in a storm (I MARKED TIME THEREFORE I WAS). Voyager 1 will carry on sending messages for maybe ten more years until its plutonium runs out, after which it will carry on into interstellar space without us for a billion years before disintegrating.

In Port aux Basques I found a cheap hostel. I was invited out to drink with two obnoxious American boys I met in my dorm but I passed because they were obnoxious and because I was tired and had arranged already to Skype Larus.

WOMEN’S BLOOD MYSTERIES

I had decided to ask for a lift just to Truro so that if I ended up in the car with a weirdo I could get out in plenty of time before it got too late, then if the driver happened to be taking the route on to Moncton I could decide to stay with them or not to. I won’t pretend I was not uncertain as I stood with my thumb out at the side of the road feeling small. When she pulled in for me she did it almost erratically as though on seeing my small uncertain self up close she could not sail past and just leave me there. I am very aware that in this context my youth and gender will be a blessing and could also very easily be a curse. As it happened, Jules was driving back from seeing friends in Sydney to her home in Riverview just outside Moncton.

Jules: long brown hair speckled with grey and a denim pinafore with a roll-neck sweater on underneath. A big voice and a way of asking questions that makes you think she genuinely wants your life story, as though she collects them. I told her everything about the documentary, about the journey so far. She told me to go ahead and get the camera out if I wanted to ask her anything, she would love to be a part of it.

She told me about how when she was a bit older than me she had done the entire Trans-Canada Highway from British Columbia to Newfoundland with her boyfriend. She spent some time after that living in a commune near an Indian reservation learning about Native American spirituality under some white New Age spiritual leader reborn as Raven-Wildheart or something. Then when she was hiking back home to BC alone afterwards she took a ride in a van. The guy was jittery and kept licking his lips, which were cracked; she had a bad feeling from the offset but his was the only vehicle she had seen in hours because she was in backcountry. It got dark fast and she had no idea where they were when he pulled over and took his cock out for her to suck.

She got out of the car but it was prairie land and she had nowhere to run or hide. The flat, indifferent plains lay out before her on every side. She started to walk as fast as stoicism allowed but she heard the gears crunch into reverse and he rolled down the passenger-side window to ask her ‘where ya goin’, little lady?’ as he crawled her. She ran back off the road so that he would have to turn the car around to chase her.

The moon was behind a cloud. She was out of the beam of the tail-lights, and by the time he had aligned the car to the way she had gone, he could not see her running. And besides, his eyesight was bad, she had seen him squinting at the road signs. She turned and could see the car had stopped from the still of its lights, stiffening to the sight of his figure hunched in the car under the weak glow of the interior light. He took something out of the glove compartment and straightened up, holding it out ahead of him. The torch stammered feebly, he tapped it on his palm and it flickered out completely. She heard faintly the clunk of its loose parts as he kicked it into the dark.

Jules did not know which way to head. She had tried to aim herself away from the road in a westerly direction, but in the opposite direction to which they had come so as not to stumble onto a road he might still be following. After walking half the night she curled exhausted into a dip in the ground and let the grasses wash around her. She lay awake all night, whispering to the prairie dogs for comfort and listening for the sound of an engine, until it was light enough to make out a farmhouse not too far away. The people inside were sympathetic to her, giving her breakfast and then a ride all the way home, a three-hour drive.

The pervert had a generic van and for years afterwards when she saw a similar van she would go clammy.

‘But all the other amazing journeys I had apart from that one stupid one… I never let it stop me. It’s the kind of thing that just happens sometimes. You gotta roll with it. Assert your freedom!’

Yes. Like Sylvia Plath said in her journal, why should women be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of infants, feeder of soul, body, and pride of man? A consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar-room regulars – that is what Sylvia Plath had. To be part of this scene, anonymous, listening and recording. We can’t because we are females, always in danger of assault and battery. Oh, to be free to sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!

Looking out of the window and thinking, in this part of the world there are so many spaces between people that are just for trees. Conifers tower over the highway, making flashing striped shadows, and eagles are in the sky above them. Grass creeps back into the rubble fringing the asphalt. Lakes start to appear as flashes in gaps between the trees, like looking inside a zoetrope. There are spindly top-heavy trees that stand twice the height of the tips of the conifers. We are entering taiga land now, boreal forest.

‘You know if you just drive through this you miss it all?’ Jules said. I told her yes but I have to get all the way to Alaska before half of my money runs out, then head back on the rest. She asked, ‘Why’ve you got to do that, sounds like a lot of pressure?’ I told her I have to do it for the project, and that it is constructive pressure.

‘Why Alaska? What’s Alaska got that New Brunswick doesn’t?’ ‘Gold fever. The mythology of gold rush country. Frontiers land. Jack London land. I don’t know what it has but that’s what I’m going to find out.’

She laughed. ‘You going to disappear into the wild, then?’

I told her about the wilderness plan. She smiled and laughed and grimaced and seemed altogether perplexed about her feelings towards it all. Like with the story she had told me, I could not tell if she was being encouraging or cautionary. I asked her why this was.

‘I don’t mean to patronise you, but you’re so young! And I surprise myself. See, you remind me of a younger me, I was around your age when I did similar things and was sure of them while I did them and when I look back on them now even. But you also remind me of my daughter and that makes me worry for you. Of course I worry for her because she is my daughter. Isn’t that messed up? You’ll understand one day when you are a mother. Where is your mother anyways?’

And from out of nowhere and without hesitation I said,

‘She’s dead.’

Maybe because I thought she would not press any more after that, but in her uninhibited New World way she said softly,

‘And what about your dad?’ ‘He’s dead too.’

I stared right ahead after that but could see her taking snatched glances at me, searching my emotionless face to find the vulnerability there. When she could not find it we sat in silence a while, between us the sombre reverence of the orphan, so young and so blameless and yet wizened beyond years.

After some time had passed she said, ‘Won’t you get lonely out there?’

I asked her did she think Henry D. Thoreau was ever lonely. He was not, he was in a state of solitude. And besides, even that state was not ever pure. I will bring the camera with me, and this presumes an audience. Thoreau meditating on solitude by conversing with a diary is a paradox if you think about it. There is never solitude, only degrees of separation. You have to know something to know it is not there.

No man is an island, not even Ted Kaczynski, the man-island of all man-islands. When Ted Kaczynski was a boy genius at Harvard he was used as a subject by Henry Murray as part of the CIA’s secret illegal MK ULTRA mind control programme. The aim of the programme was to find methods and drugs that could be used in interrogations and torture, to weaken the subject and elicit a confession. They chose geniuses because in theory their minds would be more resilient to intrusion. His code name was ‘Lawful’ and he was seventeen years old. Murray used ‘vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks’ against the child Unabomber’s ideas, beliefs and his ego.

After such an attack on his idea of his self and his place in the world, is it any wonder he subsumed himself into something bigger (nature) and so different from the institution of Harvard (civilisation)? Ted Kaczynski was no island. He was another product of the Cold War.

After Jules dropped me in the city centre and I walked away feeling her tear-filled eyes on my back I found a bench right away and rang my parents because I felt so bad that I killed them like that. I have been keeping my promise to email weekly, but that was the first time I have heard their voices in fifty-two days. At the start they texted almost daily, like a check-in to make sure I made it to the end of the day; it would come always around 9 p.m. They must have adjusted based on my time zone so that they would always catch me just before I settled down. But they are becoming less and less persistent with it.

‘Oh, there she is!’

‘I’m sat on a park bench in Moncton in New Brunswick.’

‘Where’s that, love?’

‘Canada.’

‘She told you before she’s in Canada now.’

‘Well, I never heard of New Brunswick! What can you see, lovely?’

‘Lots of tall buildings, a neat little park, no pigeons.’

‘What time is it there?’

‘It’s about six p.m.’

‘And are you on your own?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, love.’

‘What time is it in England?’

‘It’s one fifteen.’

I skirted around the hitchhiking aspect of the journey and told them I had been getting coaches and, yes, my budget was doing all right, it is pretty cheap out here actually. We chatted for a while about things at home, how one of the neighbours had got a new dog that seemed to disagree with our own dog, how the weather had been especially hot for May and how the house was empty without me. And then there was a long pause with lots of little gasps that meant she was crying.

‘Don’t go getting all upset, she’s fine. Listen! She sounds so happy! Aren’t you happy, Erin?’

‘Yes, very happy.’

‘You see, she’s doing just fine.’

I went to wrap it up then because I was about to start crying too and if she heard me cry, well, that would just be it, she would set in with her mantra that I had made a terrible and malady-driven mistake. But then she said in a very small voice, ‘Yes, I know she’s doing just fine, of course she is,’ and that did me in. I waited until we were off the phone and then I sat and wept quietly alone on that park bench in Moncton, New Brunswick, for a full minute until I had exorcised those cumbersome feelings from me and I got up to find a hostel for the night.

THE POLLINATOR HEALTH TASK FORCE

QUEBEC CITY: This whole couch-surfing thing is really novel. All Lucie gets out of it is someone to show her city to, and I suppose a little cultural exchange. Seems to run on a backpacker mentality that sees meeting new people and sharing as the ultimate human rewards. I keep thinking of it like outside your customary social sphere you do not have any prerequisites and can be yourself more than you are yourself at home, become a really exaggerated version of yourself or whatever self you choose to accentuate for a short while.

It feels so natural that the strangest thing about it is that there will be a point in just a few days when it is all undone and I am a stranger to these people again. That we will stop existing to each other apart from in rare and passing thoughts.

She and all the friends I met identify as ‘Pure Laine’; of pure French descent. We did not stop at the Citadelle, the massively serene City Hall or any of the other strikingly majestic/oppressive buildings of the British colonial era, but she lingered at anything built before the British took Quebec in the Seven Years’ War: the Notre-Dame de Quebec, the cobbled architecture of the Haute-Ville and the Basse-Ville of the Old Town. The ramparts are the only fortified city walls north of Mexico. It is like the architecture itself is vying for prominence, a physical manifestation of historical egos. But a thought kept bugging me: it forgets that the sparring ground was appropriated and the fighting was imperial on both sides.

Lucie told the story as if it began with France and that is how the exhibition at the Musée de la Civilisation told it too, which I suppose it did in terms of written histories we can understand.

Cultures indigenous to the Americas had no written history before Europeans came and Latinised (or in some nicer cases invented a new syllabic alphabet for) their speech. Writing is the time-capsulation of language, pinning it so it can’t float away on the wind. (An airborne language is the kind of which Ted Kaczynski would approve.) Their history is oral, is ‘prehistory’. So in a way it is as though they did not exist.

Museums are time capsules. Sometimes they are time capsules of the other but by what taxonomies do they become ‘of the other’? The Golden Records time-capsulised different cultures and species under the umbrella of ‘life on earth’. It could be that the relics of past civilisations that we sanctimoniously preserve and curate were meant for the future anyway. Maybe this is the most basic human impulse. (I mark time therefore I am, I marked time remember me, this is how I marked my time.)

At the time-capsule museum in Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia, there is an underground chamber sealed in 1940 by the founder of the university, the ‘father of the modern time capsule’, Thornwell Jacobs. It is called the Crypt of Civilisation. It contains all the great literature, voice recordings of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Popeye, objects like a toaster and a typewriter, scientific instruments, the contents of a woman’s purse, a black doll. By ‘our civilisation’ they meant ‘the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century’, according to the inscription on the door. Next to this is a ‘language integrator’ based on the Rosetta Stone, for teaching a subset of English called ‘basic English’ in case it is not spoken any more (a gesture towards solving the Forever Problem).

This is taxonomy of sorts; an order to say this culture is different from that culture. They are because I have known them. A discovered animal exists but an undiscovered one does not. Divided they can be ranked. And if not denying the existence of native cultures we are at least able to say, they are behind us, primitive, not-quite-there-yet like animals.

It bothered Thornwell Jacobs that there was so little preserved of ancient cultures. He wanted to make future archaeologists’ jobs easy for them. He thought of it in 1936, and figured that date to be the halfway point to the future, 6,177 years after the Egyptian calendar had been established at ‘the beginning of history’ in 4241 BC. So he set the date for the crypt to be opened at AD 8113. And he based the idea of the crypt on the 1920s openings of Egyptian pyramids and tombs. (But still he was the father?)

The crypt is an old underground swimming pool built in the bedrock underneath one of the university buildings. Buried in the bedrock underneath Eurajoki in Finland is the world’s only deep geological depository for nuclear waste. It is called Onkalo, which means cave. There are tunnels excavated from the bedrock. The tunnels will be filled with nuclear waste and sealed with concrete. Then the sealed tunnels will be marked with warning signs, or maybe they will not be marked at all; Finland has not decided yet. Because surely to mark them with symbols that will die is only to draw attention to them. And if a future civilisation digs up the Crypt of Civilisation then they might expect Onkalo to contain similar archaeological delights.

At the Musée de la Civilisation there was an exhibition on the very first French settlement in Canada, which had been excavated in 2005. The settlement burnt down but they have not figured out whether the scorch marks told of accident or arson. The exhibition does not speculate much about the arsonists. I got so caught up in Lucie’s turbulent history that I forgot that it erased thousands of years of culture, indigenous Canadians killed or cultivated or penned up by Europeans as if they were livestock or an unfortunate feature of the landscape.

AND LIVE ALONE IN THE BEE-LOUD GLADE

Sat in a diner eating on my own, waiting for the coach to Ottawa. I am thinking about how the small autonomy of just being alone in public for a woman is also a right that needs to be claimed and kept on being claimed until it is a given. In order to do away with the anxiety that is shaping you from outside, like the deer in the glade that twitches its ears as it grazes, looking up and behind itself always in anticipation of predatory eyes. Women can’t eat alone unless we claim it, can’t go to a bar and sit alone, be in solitude in social places, as though always the female body is a lonely body, an invitation.

But tonight I sit in a diner on my own and nobody has looked at me. There are not many people in here, granted, but nobody has questioned or tested my being there with their looks. The waitress brought me a complimentary basket of bread and a jug of water without me asking, and smiled, as if to say, you are welcome here, this table is your own.

Growing out of the girl and into the woman sitting in cafés alone, libraries alone, anywhere alone, really, without feeling the itch of the out-of-place, displaced, mistaken. With the self-assuredness of the intentionally-put-in-place. I am starting to feel that now. A body that says, before they think to ask, no thank you, I am where I intend to be.

IS THERE WATER ON MARS CUS WE’RE THIRSTY

I have showered and put my least dirty clothes on, and looked at my reflection properly for the first time in weeks. I looked different, perhaps just dirty or tanned, or perhaps I have forgotten myself a little.

Now that I am not on the ice sheet or the ocean or moving in a car it is like I am back in real life and that before was unreality. It feels uncomfortable. Like the velocity is gone and now I am at standstill. I feel restless.

I have been on the move now for two months so I need to get to Alaska ASAP but I am about on target. So far I have spent about £470, just under a third of my original budget. I also have an extra £200 I won in a travel-writing competition for a thing I wrote about sledging in Greenland, so I am doing all right, but it still makes sense to stop and work while I am in the more populous part of the country and work is theoretically easier to come by, before I move back up north and west. I found a job in a hostel in Ottawa city on a helpshare website so I will stay put for a few weeks and come up for some air.

A girl called Jackie who is hitchhiking to the west coast of America, following in the steps of serial narcissist-road-trip-writer Jack Kerouac, keeps a blog I have been following closely. She has a big following, and some of them are other girls doing similar things, an online-feminist-adventure-blog-vanguard. It is exciting to feel like I am a part of something bigger. I reckon feminism would have worked a lot faster if Annie Peck could have connected with all the other unnamed women who were taking on man-roles, mountaineering and shit, and realised she was not as remarkable as her male counterparts said she was. I think she would have liked that. What Annie Peck was missing was the internet.

Benny runs the hostel. He takes on backpackers because they attract other backpackers and also work for a pittance because they mostly don’t have work visas. I cover shifts on the bar, reception, kitchen, wherever there is work, for about £5 per hour. On top of this I get my own single room, food and drink. I have to work eight-hour shifts every day so that is £200 per week with a couple of days off. If I keep it up for two weeks I can make a little bit of money to tide me over.

Everyone who works at Benny’s is under thirty and the hostel is full with travellers. You’d almost call it a melting pot if it weren’t so homogeneous. Maybe let us say it is a bunch of at-least-onetime-Europeans but some of them speak differently.

An Ottawan guy, a friend of Benny’s called Tom, has stayed at the bar talking to me every night I have been here. Tom is quite attractive, I would say. He has deep-set eyes that bore in a bit in a sexy way when I am talking. So far, though, even though he has had opportunity to try it, he has not suggested coming back to my room. I am glad about this. I have a few weeks and it is more fun to be stretching it out, but also should it be an ill-suited pairing then I have less time left to dwell in the regret of it.

I did do a few interviews with people around the hostel. I got onto this topic that everyone seems to bring up without really knowing that they are. Lots of the interviews come back to the same elusive thing and this is coming from people from all sorts of nationalities. It makes you think that the world is really a very small place after all, if everyone can be saying the same thing that is not really saying anything, without knowing it. It has something to do with what freedom feels like, and how it is always just ahead of you, a bright little light like an orb, but if you run hard enough at times and in places like this, you catch it up and you can float it in your hands.

Otherwise I suppose everything documentary-wise is on the back burner because I am keeping the laptop in a safe and there is hardly ever time to get it out. It is making me agitated; sometimes instead of sleeping I am thinking of all the things that are waiting to be captured. Like gathering butterflies, and butterflies are really slow and plentiful so I won’t run out or anything, but I might miss a good one while I am not looking. And maybe there is someone else out there butterfly-gathering, gathering them quicker and better.

It makes me empathise with the anxiety that must have been felt on both sides during the space race. The not knowing where the Russians were at, and oh my god, what if they get there first, what if tomorrow even they announce it, we made it here, the moon is ours. This panic drove them, it rushed them into cutting corners they should not have. Russia had many people die in the process. A fire burned up over one hundred spectators in a launch-pad accident. This was kept classified until the nineties. But what else do we not know? Maybe Yuri Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut. Two Italian brothers with a home-made radio claimed they were picking up transmissions from other, abandoned cosmonauts. They thought maybe Yuri Gagarin was just the first to return alive.

But besides what we don’t know, we do know perhaps the most heart-breaking best-friend-sacrifice story in history. When Yuri Gagarin inspected Soyuz 1 he found 203 structural problems and he urged his superiors to delay the mission but they would not. Scheduled to fly the mission was his best friend, co-pilot Vladimir Komarov, and Vladimir Komarov would not back out of this mission he knew to be a suicide mission because his back-up was Yuri Gagarin. On the day of the launch Yuri Gagarin tried to halt the mission, demanding that he go in Komarov’s place. Of all the design flaws Komarov overcame it was the very last hurdle that got him. After surviving the multiple perils of space he died as he hit the ground in Russia when his parachute did not unfurl.

And then even where they pulled it off, if you look at the minute details they are embarrassingly botched. Like when cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first human being to space-walk, he nearly could not get back inside because his spacesuit was badly designed and it inflated. He went up in a spaceship made for only one person, with co-pilot Pavel Belyayev. When they had to calculate re-entry it was so cramped in their shuttle that they could not go through the motions in time and their orbital module did not disconnect from their landing module when it should have and they ended up landing 386 kilometres from where they intended in a forest on a mountain in the taiga, where they had to spend two days fending off bears and wolves frenzied in mating season before help arrived on skis.

America had the Apollo 1 fire. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reckoned they had a fifty-fifty chance of coming back alive and President Richard Nixon had two scenario speeches prepared for him. The worst-case scenario speech said very noble and chauvinistic things like THEY BIND MORE TIGHTLY THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN and THEY WILL BE MOURNED BY A MOTHER EARTH THAT DARED SEND TWO OF HER SONS INTO THE UNKNOWN and EVERY HUMAN BEING WHO LOOKS UP AT THE MOON IN THE NIGHTS TO COME WILL KNOW THAT THERE IS SOME CORNER OF ANOTHER WORLD THAT IS FOREVER MANKIIIIIIND.

So really they did not have much of a clue and they were just going for it and hoping for the best. How the hell did they even pull off the moon landings? I mean, imagine having almost no deep space technology and then setting the task, guys, you have eight years to put an actual human being on the actual moon, okay, great, thanks, Mr President Kennedy, sir, we’ll get on it. How did they even test the rockets before using them? I suppose they just pointed them at the sky and crossed their fingers. And they had no clue what would happen to people if and when they got up there. Maybe they would spontaneously combust. Maybe their organs would be sucked out. Maybe they would bring flesh-eating alien microbes back to Earth with them. So maybe I should not freak out too much and it is best not to rush the project.

Considering all this I wonder a bit when Larus teasingly says he thinks they faked the moon landings. You were there, I say, you saw it happen. Yes, but maybe they just flew around the world, maybe they never made it past the Van Allen belt where the radiation gets too much, is it really more far fetched to think that it could be the whole thing was a scam directed by Kubrick so they could have one over the Russians and become Kings of the World than to think that they really risked the lives of men and the whole planet live on television, sending them up there in a little tin can propelled by explosives, all the way to the moon, which is a very, very long way? And that almost all seven of the landing missions went without a hitch of the death-causing kind? And then we never went back there? Why does the flag wave? Why no impact crater? Where are the stars? The rock with the ‘c’ on it? And besides, Watergate?

WOMEN INCENSED AT TELEPHONE COMPANY HARASSMENT

I took it upon myself to make the moves on Tom because sufficient anticipatory time had passed. This being week two. He said, ‘I knew you wanted me, I was just making you work to get it’ or something equally arrogant, but he was drunk and I know he was just saying it to try to be alluring.

Today he took me around Ottawa because we both had a spare day. I think we are not compatible but it does not matter under the circumstances. For one he is boring on his own, and also he tried to insist on buying all my drinks and then he just did not get it and we had to agree to disagree so things did not get awkward.

In physics the Zone of Middle Dimensions refers to physicist Isaac Newton’s world of falling apples, where the physical rules Newton laid down still apply to an extent and the progress made in modern physics that undermine all of Newton’s rules is kind of put to one side just to make more of an easy and livable life for everyone in ‘the zone’ of everyday life. Sometimes I think of my everyday life as a zone of middle dimensions where it is best to not always be a precise and righteous feminist even when you know you are right. Sometimes you have to do that for the sake of simplicity; suspend your indignation like, yeah, if you say so, Newton. But I did try asking Tom why he thought he should buy my drinks, which he thought about quietly for a while, then came up with, ‘It’s just what guys do.’ He said, ‘You’re an idiot anyway, if guys were always offering me free drinks I’d just take them.’

I tried to explain to him that accepting a drink is like agreeing to buy something that does not have a price on it and if something does not have a price on it is usually very expensive; that it is like that story about making a deal with the devil when the devil says ‘I get to have whatever is in your garden’ and you think he can only mean the tyre swing but really he meant your garden.

Tom did say something very suddenly illuminating and not in a good way. We were sat looking over the confluence of the rivers Rideau, Ottawa and another one I don’t remember the name of (that is three rivers all colliding, picture it: one large body of water rushing into another, undulating. At what point does one river become another river?)

‘I think Benny’s kind of pissed that we are on a date.’

I asked him why he said pissed, rather than something less angry, like sad, or disappointed, but I did not get why Benny would be that either. He asked if I thought everybody got the same special treatment, their own bedroom. And I realised for the first time that, yes, the two other backpacking girls who worked the bar had beds in a dormitory.

It is so stupidly transparent, so unassumingly obvious and self-assured and so without deviousness, that I failed to notice. But I guess they think I have been playing their game all along.

I didn’t react because, well, I bet Einstein, after he disproved Newton, did not just bumble through life coming to loggerheads all the time having to explain fundamental physical laws to people who were just completely ignorant, I bet most of the time he just got on with things. There is being a good feminist and then there is not having any friends. I had told myself two weeks and had made all my next plans accordingly, so I have to make it work for a few more days. But I did make a point of not inviting Tom back to my room tonight.

WOMEN STILL APPRECIATE CHIVALRY FROM MEN ACCORDING TO STUDY

I packed up my stuff and quickly left this morning without anyone seeing me, even as I got my things from the locker in the common room, where Benny was passed out on the sofa asleep. The keys were still in his hand. I took them gently and opened the safe behind the reception desk to get to the moneybox, and took the wages he owed me from last week. Then I took a hundred more. And then I put the hundred back.

Last night after my shift I had been in bed maybe half an hour without Tom, who I jilted at the bar, and I heard a knock on my door. The first was soft, but when I didn’t answer he knocked louder to try to wake me. I kept quiet, feeling indignant, and then thought, no, I don’t want him to think I am asleep, I want him to know that I am sending him away. So I said, ‘Go away, Tom.’ And a really slurred voice said let me in but it was not Tom’s.

Then I heard metal scratching metal where he was trying to fit the key inside the lock. I jumped out of bed to stop the door opening fully and Benny leant into the room leering. He said, ‘Hey, let me in’ and leaned heavily on the door. He is a lot bigger than me and I knew he would be able to force his way in so I stood back and let him fall on his weight and I stood straight and spoke loudly at him so everyone would hear.

‘No, you can’t come in my room, Benny, now go away. You’re drunk.’

Next door’s dorm had opened up at this point from the banging and two of the guys came out to ask if I was okay. Benny turned around pitifully from the floor.

‘It’s fine. She’s fine. I’m leaving. I was just… checking on her.’ He dragged himself from the floor and wiped his arm slowly over his mouth to try to be inconspicuous, calling me an ungrateful bitch as he left the room. I mouthed thank you to the others, who nodded and one gave a fingers to eyes signal, to imply he would keep an eye on me. After that I did not sleep too well even with the chair wedged firmly under the door handle.

The guys would not say anything today because Benny shelters and feeds them, and why would they jeopardise their comfortable situation? I wonder what else he gets away with; that makes me angry.

One thing that Kerouac Jackie does on her blog that is really interesting, she is deadpan about all the people she has slept with along the way. The thing that makes it interesting is that her blog is pretty big, big enough to have attracted trolls. These trolls sit and write petty things, mostly calling Jackie a slut. I don’t know if the trolls have read Kerouac or not, so I don’t know if they condone male sexuality and lusting over thirteen-year-old girls and wifebeating. I bet Benny likes Kerouac.

Anyway, I am away and on a coach to Sault Ste. Marie on some of the money I earned because I can afford it and because I wasn’t really feeling like jumping in a vehicle with a stranger right away. It is a ten-hour coach then I have a room booked the other end. I have a lucky last-minute carpool tomorrow all the way to Thunder Bay and from there I will figure out how to get to Winnipeg.

Larus has sent me not one but two follow-up emails to an email that I have not had a chance to see let alone reply to. The first one being a catch-up and a how’s things, here, look at some stuff I found for you to read. The second being a follow-on to the first with an enquiry into why I did not reply and some inane stuff about what he has been keeping himself busy with. The third is a little parental, chiding me for ‘going off the radar’. I think he is enjoying living life through me or something, or it is some weird kind of deflected paternalism. Urla would have thought of some great way to enact revenge on Benny. I wish she had been there. I wrote her an email to enlist her in effecting Benny’s karmic retribution, but she hasn’t replied to me in a while now.

OF THE SHINING BIG-SEA WATER

Trees clear for a diner and some cabins, then the trees clear altogether and we hit the lakeside. And suddenly a whole new perspective, a landscape with depth and a horizon instead of a belt of evergreens. It is so blue and glittering and vast that for a second I am thrown. How did we end up by the sea? But the water is still and we are so near that I can make out the pebbles in the shallows, like the lake is clear plastic in a miniature replica, and for a second the entire world feels like we have been shrunk to thumb size with this model landscape that is simultaneously tiny and proportionally huge to our new tiny selves. Low concrete bollards separate the highway from the water. My mind is surprised into silence. Lake Superior.

From back behind our green conveyor we arrive at a break in the trees again and the coach slows to elongate our passing it. The driver says ‘over there is America’ and there it is, the stretch of the lake unbroken, America so far away and blue with distance, like Calais from Dover on a good day. I know from the map that if we were looking directly south we would be looking at Hiawatha National Park.

We pass some holiday condos. The lake now must feel very different from when Henry Longfellow, the old poet, wrote The Song of Hiawatha. You can write about a lake and a landscape but then when something is worth writing about this usually leads on to something beyond admiration, reduces it to something people want to come and see for themselves. Then everyone wants to get touchy-feely and build their condos right there so that they can own their lake-view property. Now Longfellow could do away with his birch canoe with paddles and circumnavigate the entire lake in his pick-up in just a few hours. It was because fancy new cabins kept creeping into his lovely wilderness that Ted Kaczynski retreated further and started to send the letter bombs.

Looking at the glassy surface of the lake I remembered that the micro-beads from your facewash are not biodegradable and they leave the sewage system to collect in constellations on the surface of all of the Great Lakes. I squinted and imagined I could see them glinting.

This morning, back to hitchhiking. I settled for a short ride out of Thunder Bay to where the road forks off at Kakabeka Falls to ease myself in with a quiet businessman I could not have spoken more than ten words to. I set up after the turn-off where the highway stretches on to Dryden in an area with thin traffic, in view of a lonely reservoir, and where the aspens bled the landscape yellow and lethargic. Small insects hummed around me as I slumped on my bag and half dozed, sitting up to the sound of any approaching traffic. I was not making good time but the sky was milky with cloud and the air thick with warmth and pollen. If I wanted to do it for free or cheaply, I was going to have to travel the 450 miles to Winnipeg at whatever pace the day or days decreed, and the character of this day was languid. I was thinking this and just laughed out loud.

It is interesting to watch the faces of people as they pass me in cars. If I am stood with my thumb out then nobody drives by without noticing. The majority avert their eyes, as though to look at me would pull them in out of guilt, I guess because I must look the furthest from threatening, a cute siren on a rock. Those that realise they are going the wrong way to take me seem to take absolution from theatrically signalling they are going the wrong way, with big sorry mouths and shrugging shoulders. Some stare and pass, some shake their heads disapprovingly and some, inexplicably, just honk.

At around eleven a car pulled over and offered me a ride to Dryden, an old man who seemed concerned for my welfare. I watched time peel away through the window. There was a speck of bird poo on the window and by moving my head up and down I could jump it over the conveyor belt of variable treetops like in a 2D video game. It felt good to watch the world flicker by as though we were still and it was moving around us, and the illusion would be crystallised when a train would appear on the railway where the road and the rail were adjacent and the train would converge with us in speed, making it and us appear static.

My driver dropped me at a service station. Touchingly, he was projecting vulnerability onto me; the kindly chauvinism of an old man towards a young woman. Irritating, yes, but also he is just old and sweet and well-meaning and of-his-time. He tried to give me money, which I refused, laughing. But the look on his face as he drove away really did make me feel alone and vulnerable for a moment, as though I had transformed into his idea of me. I felt pangs of guilt for this stranger who I would never see again and who would probably worry about me from time to time, wonder if I found my way. God, not even orphans are free of the guilt of people, are they?

I found a cardboard box in a bin behind the building and broke it down to make a sign, then positioned myself conspicuously with it on an embankment at the exit, where anyone about to leave could pull over for me or had to sail by my imploring cherubic face. I thought how Urla would probably say I should use my feminine powers to my advantage, so I unzipped my hoody to show a little cleavage. Then I thought, that’s not very feminist, is it? Then I decided that either way it made me feel weird, and I zipped myself back up.

Traffic coming through is so thin that I only see someone pass every fifteen minutes or so. There are some lorries parked and drivers mill to and from them. The sparrows have got used to me by now and are pecking around at the crumbs I am throwing to them. I managed to get one so close that I touched it gently with my foot before it flew away to a small sapling, where it sat scolding me.

THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING

The lorry cab had two seats in the front and a raised compartment behind with a mattress for sleeping. It was very clean and neat. There were no pornographic photos pinned to the dashboard. There was a little meter up where the rear-view mirror goes in cars and he typed something into it before we started to pull out of the service station. He was very particular that I sit up front next to him, which did not seem too out of the ordinary, just in fitting with his extreme orderliness. The bed compartment behind, where he showed me to put my bag, was out his range of vision, so I put the camera hidden just behind, where he could not see it on, and it could witness everything.

Template:Clear

File:F0100-01.jpg.png

He offered me little cakes from out of a cool box under his seat in a way that made me nervous about eating them. I declined and patted my stomach to show I was full. I figured I had better stay alert just to be safe rather than sorry. I sat saying things about the landscape at awkward interludes and he nodded and said something or other in another language and stared at my legs a lot.

The journey went on so slowly and so uneventfully at lorry speed that now and then I would feel the exhilaration again at my distance to Alaska getting smaller and smaller while I sat still, and that pushed my suspicion and paranoia out of my mind for a while. Even the Stanley knife on the dashboard had become benign by virtue of its sustained uneventful just being there. There was the meter which said how far there was to go and he had checkpoints and a schedule so he could not just take me out into the middle of nowhere and do something bad. A lorry was the most sensible place to be, if I thought about it.

We pulled in at another service stop at which he managed to communicate to me without English that he was going to go have a cigarette. We were in the lorry-designated area of the services, where regular vehicle paraphernalia like petrol pumps and parking spaces are upped to lorry scale, and men stand around leaning against their wheels smoking and talking. I thought of Plath mingling with truckers. The driver got out and went over to the nearest group for a few minutes; they were talking and looking over to me and smoking their fags and they all laughed together, then he came back to the lorry. He said something to me, half turned round in the driver’s seat and laughed a little spittle out of his mouth, and then he pinched my leg. Between the thumb and forefinger, the part of my leg that indents where the muscle meets the fatter bit of thigh.

The group of men outside were staring in. They stared as we pulled away. As we passed them he held up his hand in salute to them. We rolled back onto the road. I was too caught up unravelling the situation to realise until we were moving that I probably should have got out of the lorry at that point.

Later we passed a road sign that showed a turning up ahead for the road to Winnipeg – +207 km – but we passed the slip road and he did not even glance at it.

‘That was our turning.’

He looked at me.

‘That was the road to Winnipeg.’

‘What?’

‘Why didn’t you turn?’

‘Sorry, no understand.’

I stabbed my finger to the right.

‘That was the road for Winnipeg.’

He smiled and shrugged.

‘Winnipeg,’ I said slowly, stabbing my finger again.

‘Ah! Winnipeg,’ he said, motioning forward.

I did not know what to do. I must have looked forlorn and he smiled, said ‘Winnipeg’ cheerfully and motioned forward again. I did not believe him but what could I do, jump out of a moving vehicle? Was I certain enough to tell him to stop and leave me at the side of the road? It was going to start to get dark soon and it might be better to presume we would end up in a floodlit lorry park than to risk the side of the road at night. He had to stop somewhere legit, another service station with other lorries and people. You can’t just go off-road and incognito with a lorry.

‘How far?’

I tried to act out distance with my hands.

‘How long until Winnipeg?’

‘Ah! Winnipeg soon soon. Yes, soon,’ he said.

‘Soon?’

‘Soon.’

We drove on; the yolk of the sun spilt on the horizon and the sky got inky. He turned his headlights on and with the dark I began to feel panic really set in. I could see a reservation coming up to our left. An indigenous woman stood at the side of the road in a very short skirt. He pointed at her and laughed like a hyena. The woman winced when the headlights and the sound of his horn hit her face.

A little later, as the headlights breached the trees, you could see the land where the forest had been clear-cut. It stuck in your throat how it was so dense and dark and enclosing then, suddenly, barren, the sky bursting through, the weak light of it pooling out over the feebler trees they left behind, scattered like redundant matchsticks. It must have stretched for miles, naked and vulnerable like a head shaved for neurosurgery. In the far distance a town sat lit up like a cluster of glow-worms. The tick-tick of his indicator started up and we steered onto a gravel path, up towards a closed diner cabin and a portaloo where one other lorry was parked with its lights out. No floodlights.

We ground to a halt and he tapped something into the meter, which played a triumphant little jingle. He said something and patted then shook my knee, grinning, and there was the spittle again. I pulled away and asked where we were. And he said something else with his hand back on my knee. I said Winnipeg really resolutely this time. He made the universal sign for sleeping and nodded up to the bed.

‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’

‘No. I’m not sleeping here. I need to get to Winnipeg now.’

‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’

‘No, I—’ I started to say through gritted teeth. He said something very firmly, then grabbed my thigh and ran his hand up to my groin.

I pushed then kicked his arm away from me. We faced each other for a few seconds, each waiting to see what the other would do next. I had to move closer to him to move around the seat so I snaked my body without breaking eye contact so that I could see where his hands were. I grabbed my rucksack and camera strap with one hand, pulled myself back over with the other and, panicky, wrestled with the stiff door handle.

Meanwhile he sat back into his seat, saying things between his jerky hyena cackles. As I prised the door open and threw my bag out he lurched for me. I threw myself down from the tall cab on top of my bag as I felt his hand tighten on my ankle, lose grip, and clutch at my shoe. My foot slipped from it as I fell.

I scrambled up, swung my bag on my shoulder and put the camera strap around my neck. Then at a safe distance, I glared back at him. He held my shoe in his hand, laughing, and I was filled with so much furious hatred for him I wanted to take a stone and smash his greasy head with it. I wanted to wrestle my shoe back out of his hands and slap it on his face. I thought maybe I would, maybe the danger had passed now, maybe the danger was only ever his violating hands, which were no longer on me. But then he lurched towards me again, making a mocking sort of animal grunt; I started to run.

I ran flat out back down the gravel path towards the dark highway. On the road I headed the way we had come, back in the direction of the reservation, I suppose because taking the road towards the town would have meant running parallel to the park, where he could have scrambled down the slope and intercepted me. The ground where the trees were cut was littered with stumps and amputations. I ran hard, away from the lorry park and the distant lights of the town and towards the blotted darkness of the forest.

I was running running running and everything hurt but blind panic kept me moving forward and clouded the jolts in my left heel, the one that had no shoe. I had been running for about ten minutes when the pain of it got too much and I limped to a halt, bent with my hands on my knees, looking behind.

Can he see me?

No, can’t see the park now.

But he would have seen which way, following the road.

I started to walk forward, trying to keep my heel off the ground and looking behind me. I stopped, remembering my boots tied to my bag. Brushing the bottom of my foot, I squinted at my hands. It was too dark to see much properly, but I felt stickiness between my fingers. My heel was bleeding.

I did not want to stop so I shoved the boots on and kept pressure off the heel, abandoning the other shoe in the scree by the road. Eventually I decided that probably he had not followed but I could not turn back, had to carry on ahead, just keep moving.

I felt really suddenly like I wanted to scream and hit myself. How could I have been so stupid? And look at me now, stupid and limping and alone in the dark on a road god knows where at night being what I set out not to be reduced to, fulfilling for everyone who worried and foresaw it, and what now? This is not my world to walk in. I wanted without thinking my phone from my bag. I needed a voice to be with me. I rummaged inside and brought out the torch.

Don’t put the torch on!

Fuck! I scrabbled to turn it off. I hugged the rucksack to me and started to shake and whimper pathetically. Who would I call exactly? What could they do from the other side of the world? I told myself out loud this is your mess, sniffled into my sleeve and started walking quickly onward. The weak moonlight was strobing through the moving canopy, lighting things up in jolts like club lighting.

Into the forest?

I don’t want to get lost in the forest.

But it’s so risky to keep to the road.

I decided to carry on up the road to the reservation. Sit behind a building where I was not in the open. Find a shed or something. Until the morning. I broke into a little trot again. The indifferent trees spun, they were so high above me; the tough long grass lashed against my legs from the roadside. The road itself was lit up like a silver beacon by the moon, leading up and on and on. The trees were hush-hushing, but the sound of panic beat on my eardrums. I had to keep stopping to get my breath and readjust my rucksack. Then at some point I remembered the camera.

I need something to complete the sequence.

You and that fucking documentary!

I took a bit of footage of the road shaking with my running. Then I noticed the figure on the road up ahead. I stopped running but carried on approaching at limping pace because there was nowhere else to go, and besides, they had already seen me. They raised their hand. They were just ahead of the reservation.

I put my hand in the air. The figure put theirs down. As I got nearer I could tell it was a woman, which made me feel easier. Nearer still, the woman from the headlights. Then I was stood in front of her, gasping.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a soft voice. I could not answer from panting. ‘I saw you running.’

‘I ran from. The lorry park,’ I managed.

‘Why were you running?’

‘There was a man. In the lorry—’

But then I do not know because the sky dimmed to black and some sirens started and my knees buckled under a huge pressure that came both from above my head and out of my body at once, and I fell to the floor. The woman went to catch me, I think, because when I came to I was half on the ground and half in her arms, but my leg was twisted under me and she had got on her knees to scoop me into a sitting position. My knees were gashed. It struck me how lost and young I must have seemed right then to this stranger. I feel embarrassed now at this image of me like a broken doll but I did not feel embarrassed right then, because I felt too much relief that the sick pressure was gone from my stomach, that the loss of consciousness had come on me like an anaesthetising sleep that takes pain away and the sweat all over my body was now a cooling balm to the heat. It is a familiar feeling, and by now I am used to the loss of control, and feel less disempowered just letting it happen rather than struggling against it. It makes me feel Victorian and weak.

‘Oh no. All right. All right. Will you be okay here for five minutes? I can go and get my truck. You’re exhausted. I’ll go and get my truck. I’m Rochelle. I’ll be right back.’ Then she got up and ran up the path into the reservation. As she left, I wanted so badly for her not to go and leave me to be enveloped by the darkness. I sat and tore at blades of dry grass and shook, from adrenaline or shock, or something.

After a few minutes Rochelle came back with her truck and drove me to her caravan, where she picked out the gravel from my foot and put a brown ointment from a jam jar on it then bandaged it up with plasters. She gave me this thing called ‘flybread’ to eat and a savoury tea, telling me the history of the bread. It was made from flour and lard, invented in 1860-something by the Navajo people, who were given the ingredients by the US when they were forced into a 300-mile relocation from Arizona to New Mexico. She told me her mother was Navajo and had died of diabetes from eating too much flybread. She ate it too without a tinge of irony and so I thanked her for it.

Rochelle gave me blankets and set up her electric heater next to me on her sofa. I woke up when she came into the room with the sun in the morning wearing a full velour tracksuit and wrapping herself in a thick leather coat from the back of the door. She lit a cigarette and started making a pot of coffee without saying anything. I wondered if she had forgotten I was there, if it was even possible to miss me in this tiny space. I had the feeling I should not talk. I shifted my position so I could look out of the window.

Outside I could see the neighbouring trailer, its smashed window blocked up with a bin-liner that tremored in the wind. Next to the trailer was the exoskeleton of a car, its tyres deflated and so sunk into the ground that it looked as though it was melting. It was brown with rust, rainbowed with spray-paint, with no glass in the windows and bullet holes in its side, dark and ringed at the edges like pockmarks of disease.

Rochelle placed the coffee on the coffee table in front of me and sat opposite on a stool that she moved directly into the beam of light from the window, even though it made her squint, and basked like a lizard does. Dust drifted past her face and caught the light like glitter. Her cigarette smoke was dense in the light, an eel curling through the dust motes. She poured the coffee carefully with the cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth, talking around it.

She said a lot of stuff too that I did not process all of, being hazy and still reeling and replaying things as she talked. ‘I suppose I should say you shouldn’t have put yourself in danger like that but I guess you weren’t to know any better. It happens. Sometimes girls go missing, but not usually white girls.’ I remember that bit because her tone changed. ‘It can happen out here because it’s kind of a forgotten backwater. But anyway it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. You were lucky. Or unlucky or neither, a close call. That’s all.’ Then she looked directly at me and I had to look away.

She was surprisingly forthcoming but in a very detached way, as though thinking aloud to herself. Nothing she said really invited participation. She looked out of the window as she spoke, at two small children who had started poking sticks into the bullet holes. Making a porcupine, she said.

Rochelle has lived on the reservation all her life, apart from four years when she lived on the road with her ex-boyfriend. They met in one of the bars, in the town I saw lit up in the distance the night before. Her ex-boyfriend was a hippy and had always wanted an Indian girlfriend, called her his Pocahontas. They broke up because he wanted to move onto the reservation with her, but it made her more and more uneasy the way he would braid his hair and wear a headband and keep pestering her to arrange a naming ceremony for him, how his favourite film was Dances with Wolves.

The transcendental open-mindedness of the liberal white man! So free of cultural constraints, free-spirited and open to the other! Many levels progressed from the Enlightenment specimen collectors! What almond skin, what glossy hair, I can’t kill and stuff it, no no, how barbaric. I will parade it around living and glorious! We only view our animals on safari now!

She started to feel as though he wanted her as a prized possession, or maybe even just a ticket to somewhere else. As though casting off his own civilisation and shrugging on something antithetical, her culture, the uncivilised one.

It seemed to bug her to talk to me, like it made her squirm, but a silence would be too heavy with my presence inside her small home. We got on to the topic of the documentary and she asked about it. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her explicitly, right after what just happened. But I decided, she will get it, I mean, the white man is her historical enemy. She laughed, not in a condescending way, really just a non-committal laugh that could have meant anything. She said, ‘The freedom to roam free like a white man, hey?’

Later on she said she wanted to show me something and then she would take me to town. When we left the reservation people were sat and stood about in groups, chatting and smoking. A couple of dark and long-haired guys loped coolly on actual frisky-spirited horses. They all stared at me. I got right into the truck under Rochelle’s instruction. Someone called out ‘Hey, Rochelle’, and she just called back hey, climbing in the driver’s side and starting the engine before she had even shut the door. A twenty-something boy scooted up to her window and tapped on it. She let out a sigh then rolled down the window a couple of inches.

‘Hey, Walt.’

‘Hey, Rochelle. Hey,’ he said to me, craning around her door to where I sat in the back and grinning. I said hello back and I felt the most British and accented I have done since leaving.

‘Where you going, hey?’ he asked her.

‘Just to town.’

‘What you goin’ to town for?’

‘Just got to drop some things, is all. Mind it.’ And she pulled the truck away jerkily.

We drove a little way away from the reservation in the truck. She took us into the trees that skirt the far side. We walked uphill a little way until we came to a clearing. There were bottles strewn everywhere, tyres and large black scaffolds and needles, almost chaos but arranged in a rough circle around a nucleus, a fire pit.

‘We tell the kids not to come here so of course they come. We used to put up fences but they just pushed them down. If we stand here too long you’ll get a headache. They like to get dizzy off the fumes.’

She points out the still pool gathered where the dirt slopes down. There is a filmy rainbow spilt across it. A dead crow floats bloated belly up in it and I notice then that no birds are singing. There is not a sound aside from the trees swaying, and there is a tangy smell that makes your eyes sting a little. Even the sunlight seems anaemic where it reaches the pool’s surface.

‘The younger kids have mostly given up on the land, when they just see it dumped on like this. Nobody else wants it in their backyard so the state pays us to dump their shit here. The elders are angry at the young for trading the land for money. The young are angry with the reservation and think there’s better stuff for them on the outside that money can buy. They don’t speak the language much any more. But most of them will never leave. You know, before white men came we had a matriarchy. Figure that into your documentary.’

At this point I realised that she was putting herself through telling me this even though it made her uncomfortable, because she felt it was important. I had the thought that she was telling me because she attached importance to me making a documentary, like she had found a vessel for her message to the outside world. But then I dismissed it, because it did not feel like that at all. It felt like she had a lesson for me.

The cesspool sticks with me and the smell will follow me for days. Dump waste on poor people because they are non-people and even if they shout about it no one can hear them. Indians are just layabouts and alcoholics who refuse to get jobs and live off the money they were given for their sacred lands, not so sacred if they chose to sell them anyway, hey? Somebody has to take the collateral damage, to aid progress. In On the Road Jack Kerouac had the foresight to say that ‘the earth is an Indian thing’, right before he went to a whorehouse to purchase some Mexican Indian women.

I asked Rochelle if she knew who Henrietta Lacks was. She did not. Henrietta Lacks is a mascot of bioethics, and systematic medical experimentation on poor and invisible people. Henrietta Lacks was a working-class African-American woman in the 1950s, which made her a non-person too. Scientists sewed a piece of radium inside her and told her it was aggressive treatment for her cervical cancer. She died eight months later at the age of thirty-one. Without asking they sliced two pieces of tissue from her cervix. They called these cells HeLa.

Thousands of metric tonnes of HeLa have been grown and used for research. The cells of her lady-parts were used to find a polio vaccine and a treatment for Parkinson’s and NASA sent some into orbit to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Pharmaceutical companies made billions off the back of her but she is barely remembered and her family live in poverty. They did not even know about HeLa until scientists asked them twenty-five years after she died if they could take their cells too. In 2010, fifty-nine years after she died, her grave got an epitaph.

Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever.

Her story is a sad one. But it has light to it. Henrietta Lacks is immortal, she is a time capsule, a legacy in the lady-parts of a poor African-American woman.

Rochelle said, ‘What good is that to Henrietta Lacks?’

After that she hardly spoke but insisted on driving me the rest of the way to Winnipeg. She would not take any petrol money but let me buy her a coffee in a diner in town. We had a stilted conversation about my plans, where I was headed next, but it all felt hopelessly futile and I could see her thinking so as she picked at the rim of her Styrofoam cup. After the coffee I said a clumsy thank-you. She said don’t mention it and swung herself into her truck. Before she drove away she leant out and said, you take care. I watched it kick up gravel as it clutched its way back onto the road, winding out back in the direction of the distant hunching conifers that camouflage the reservation.

When she had gone I felt a relief I could not put my finger on.

You take care now, white girl.

I don’t think she meant to seem like she was helping me begrudgingly. She did not take the money and she wrapped my foot up kindly. It seemed like I called something home for her. Like probably she knows somebody that something much, much worse happened to.

Well, yeah, duh. She was a prostitute. Probably knows a lot about it.

For a few minutes I felt intensely sick at myself for such an ugly thought. Was I actually put out that Rochelle had not acted like what had happened was a big enough deal, for not taking me to the police or suggesting I should go?

Of course she didn’t suggest it. What the hell would I say to them? Something bad maybe nearly happened to me, not sure what something. Rochelle is just a really nice lady that took me in when I was in trouble, she is an angel. When I was not, even. Because nothing bad has happened.

THE LICHENS OF MANITOBA

Rochelle was right: nothing had happened at all. Although maybe I came close enough for it to mean something. Perhaps my abstract statistic has been accounted for now, so I am pretty much invincible. In a way, I could say that I am a real woman, a real vulnerable woman. An invincible woman.

I have been thinking probably he was not being malevolent, probably if he had known I did not want to he would have tried to make me stay anyway, that he must have thought I was up for it and been surprised when I was not or else he would not have let his catch go so easily. When he realised his mistake he let me go. I reiterate this in a way that sounds both beat and resolute, a promise no one’s sure they believe in. Does he still have my shoe?

I stayed in my motel room with comfort food and watched daytime television and started to see about how I get out of here but it gets more complex now as I am leaving the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere just after Winnipeg.

GREEN IS THE NEW RED

I took time in the motel to Skype Larus, seeing as he has been feeling so neglected. He had been explaining what has been going on with fracking in the UK while I was away. I got a bit down while he was talking, thinking about how far away from it all I am, and the area where the kids hung out behind the reservation, and how I had been avoiding checking home news in too much detail since I left. My home town has been marked out as one of the possible areas to be fracked. There are not even otters in the river like there should be, and the anglers that actually eat the fish are seen as tramps. I think they are smart. Why pay money for a fish bred in a cesspool and pumped with hormones when you can get one with equivalent danger levels of chemicals from the river, for free?

Our rivers are already lifeless and inert, so the threat of chemical contamination is met with a shrug and well, there is nothing to destroy anyway, we need the energy! There is no mass resistance in the UK because not enough people can see anything worth the bother of saving. The environment was smuggled off a long time ago, as far back as the Enclosure Acts, when the peasants were denied the right to graze or forage so the land could be exploited more efficiently and the peasants had to leave en masse for the cities so that they could lube up the Industrial Revolution with whale oil, and begin the colonisation of the New World. The upheaval can still be seen now where I am from, where the abandoned towering furnaces of industry still cast their shadows. They are immortalised by J. R. R. Tolkien: that exodus from the green and balmy shires of the Midlands to the fiery forges, the slags and the mine pits of the urbanised Black Country (or Mordor; elvish for ‘dark land’).

The Environmental Protection Agency in America is downplaying the dangers of fracking and of leaking pipelines. The EPA was started because of the legacy of Rachel Carson. I told Larus about my weird dreams about her. This got Larus on to telling me Rachel Carson’s saga.

Rachel Carson worked in a very masculine field, but at home on her 65-acre family farm she was surrounded by women. From a young age she liked to write and read stories about animals and the ocean. Her dad died when she was young and she took over as the provider of the family, supporting her ageing mother. She spent all her time working in biology and looking after her ill family, who just kept dying, taking her two nieces in when her older sister died. She still loved to write and did write many beautiful and scientifically important essays and books about the ocean. She started a strong friendship, which may or may not have been romantic, with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. Dorothy was married and their friendship was mainly through letters, which Dorothy had to share with her husband to prove they were not having a lesbian affair.

A lot of the Big Dogs did not like Ms Carson because they saw her attack on Big Chemical Corporations as a threat to the paradigm of Scientific Progress in post-war America, and also because she was a woman. A jealous man scientist wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in which he said that because Rachel Carson was physically attractive and not married, she was probably a communist. After working really hard to save the planet she died of cancer at the age of fifty-six, and she never made a deal over the fact that her cancer was probably from the pesticides they sprayed over her home. She kept her cancer secret while she wrote Silent Spring. Rachel Carson knew very well that her body was not her own, its health in the hands of chemical corporations.

So I was already feeling emotionally fraught when Larus asked me what had happened since we last spoke. There was a big cavernous hole in my narrative so I had to tell him about how I ended up at Rochelle’s. I just told him, really casual, no emphasis, and at first he found the thing almost a little funny. He asked me to send him over some of the videos from the lorry. I sent them while we were talking about other things then he opened one up and started to watch. After a minute or so he rubbed his eyebrows in the fashion of someone tired by the weight of something heavy and spherically shaped and difficult to hold.

Larus speaks a little Russian from a fleeting obsession in his twenties while trying on communism for size. The man was speaking Russian. He might have been Siberian. He most likely spoke English. How could he be driving through Canada if he didn’t speak basic English, Erin? Either way Larus said he could tell the driver understood me by the way he was talking.

Then Larus ran through the clips with me and translated. What’s wrong, little sourface, are you a long way from home? It was after that that I started to have what I think might have been a panic attack; something sat on my head and stopped me from breathing, the room went bright as though the walls and ceiling had exploded away from me and I felt simultaneously this gravity and this weightlessness, like falling and floating both at the same time and every breath empty of air.

‘Erin?’ Larus’s voice came at me. ‘I think you’re having a panic attack, calm down, breathe slow, sloooooow,’ and my breathing got shallower but had more substance to it. Because he could not hear me gasping any more Larus freaked out, raising his voice, saying Erin, Erin are you still there, are you okay, can you hear me? It was all very embarrassing.

Because he could not look at my face he looked directly into the webcam, a serious look that wavered the longer he tried to hold it. It only lasted about five seconds but that is uncomfortably long to hold a look on webcam if you think about it. Slowed down by the lag it went through micro-cycles of intensity, reasserting itself. It said, Look into my eyes and see how serious I am. My face is saying it so hard it can’t even keep it up, like it’s a wet bar of soap or something. Like, we are that close now. I can be your rock.

‘Erin, I’m really concerned about you and I have a suggestion.’

‘What?’

‘I have some time now I’ve finished with the whale data. Let me come and meet you.’

Is he mad? At first I just laugh, but with time for it to sink in I get a little angry. Why is everyone concerned for me? Why is everyone stifling me? Apart from Rochelle, who maybe is trying to liberate me with her cool indifference. TO WALK FREELY AT NIGHT!

‘You aren’t infallible, Erin.’

I told him that if I were a boy he would not be dwelling on my in/fallibility. He said that’s the point. I think if I blur the driver’s face I can probably still use it in the documentary.

INTO A WORMHOLE

I do not think the tight feeling in my chest, the struggle breathing, like my lungs were filled with tar and every breath in and out was sucked and pushed through this viscous liquid, I do not think it had just to do with the lorry driver.

It is everything. The lorry driver was just the shake that rattled like passing debris, so that I felt the shuttle’s fragility. The documentary is my shuttle and it keeps me going, it is the only vehicle for carrying on with purpose-propulsion-direction, it stops me from floating aimlessly into the ether, it keeps me on track towards that shining light ahead and the feeling that comes from it.

The rattling of the debris made me look around and realise the enormity of this task, my journey, its sudden height and distance. A kind of vertigo, a very sudden awareness. But this is just a dizzy spell. Because if I do not have this project as a vessel to move me forward, then what the fuck am I doing and where am I going, what authority do I have being here?

Today I want very badly to call Mum and Dad, but if I did I would likely burst into tears, and what for? Imagine how much it would upset her. She would freak the fuck out. There was nothing she could do about it from home, so what was the point in putting her through it?

They say in emails that I never call, that they want to speak with me more often, but they do not understand that I can’t do it that way. We can’t carry on in tandem; like the Voyagers dividing from their rocket engines I had to break away completely in order to use the break-off as a kind of propulsion too. I feel bad but it is the way it has got to be.

I checked out coaches and car shares but there is nothing any time soon. I really need to leave Winnipeg so I can catch the carpool I have arranged out of Saskatoon. Then I am staying on a farm outside Edmonton and they are picking me up from outside the town hall on Monday at 4 p.m. The only thing that seems viable is that I hitch again.

I know this is the kind of thing I wanted to prove should not stop women exerting their right to individual freedom.

That is the spirit.

MUSHROOM SPORES MAY FLOAT IN OUTER SPACE

So I stood again in a little layby on Portage Avenue at the city limits extending onto the Trans-Canada Highway, with my thumb out. A lorry breached the road; as it got close enough to see me I dropped my arm. The lorry sailed past; like holding out a titbit of meat for a falcon at the country fair and baulking at the last second of its swoop to your gloved hand. I thought of Jules and her white van. I swore to keep my arm up the next time.

After half an hour another lorry appeared and as it drew nearer I noticed it was slowing. I said to myself, Come on, let’s not be stupid, you just need to get back on the horse, remember.

Roy chatted on about his home town Allgood in Alabama, US, how he had a little baby girl and had to be a trucker because it paid well and he wanted his baby to go to a good college. But he did not like being a trucker because he was sad about leaving his baby and his wife. He showed me a picture of his baby and wife. His wife was called Amelia, which he said ‘Melia’, unless that was just what her name was, and his baby was called Jade. I was thinking a guy who comes from a place called Allgood can’t be that bad, and I kept telling myself that. I sat awake daydreaming about how to deal with the recent events when making the narrative of the doc.

There is not much footage of Rochelle; she has been more or less the only person to not be enthusiastic and obliging. And the problem is: how do I show it so that I can make it real like it happened? I have enough that I worry I might inadvertently frame it like she had more significance to what happened than she did, something I do not want to do. I can’t figure out how to use her when I edit, without it seeming like I latched on because she had said something that made her sound like a wise old Mother Willow. It was only because of an accident that she happened to me. Just an act of decency or maybe of obligation to humanity.

But I need something to tie the story together, from running in the night and onwards, a bit of narrative over the top of some of the story-less shots of her and the reservation. I thought I might as well play my feelings out with Roy, seeing as we would never meet again.

‘Oh, those natives are touchy folks.’

Like he was letting me on his team in a kind of us versus them. I was not sure whose team I was more on, Woman vs White? But it made me think, do I have more of a propensity to feel self-conscious as a kind of voyeur making this film? As a woman, knowing already what it feels like to be an exhibition, to feel eyes on my body? Like the embarrassment I feel when I look in on the glass boxes of taxidermy, towards the possessiveness of ‘collect and display’.

I am doing this for you too, Rochelle!

You are doing this for yourself.

Before this trip I had a pretty obscure idea of what an Indian reservation would even look like; horses, totem poles and alcoholics, based on what I had seen on a programme on the National Geographic channel once. Mum had come in with the vacuum and stood looking a little perplexed at the TV for a few minutes before saying, ‘You know, I didn’t realise that Indians still existed,’ and I had not even thought that was very strange. I do not want Rochelle to be so much a part of the narrative that it seems like I am yoking my feminist problems with hers, even if we share some.

In the late afternoon, where the highway met Regina, I said goodbye to Roy and hopped down from his lorry into a sodden layby a walkable distance from the city. The rain had stopped but the air was damp and clung to the smells and made them sticky; cloying diesel fumes, turf, and the wet on wet of the lakes as I skirted round them.

TAMING THE SAVAGES

I had a dream about Ms Carson again last night. She was underwater conferring with a concerned-looking delegation of fish who held in their wafered fore-fins tiny hermaphrodite fish infants. The Queen of the Fish was distraught, she wanted some answers.

In all these millions of years the ocean hasn’t changed, now there is a new taste in it, she said. The taste came after your people came so you must have brought it, sour, sharp and fizzing. What is it? Rachel Carson told her that the taste that made the babies hermaphrodites was called synthetic oestrogen and her Womankind had been taking it because they were made to think it would emancipate them but what it also had done was to take their bodies from them, mechanised and controlled, warped to fit the jigsaw.

The Fish Queen did sympathise. She said, ‘As fish we know of the Man tyranny that your Womankind face because we are also subject to the tyranny of Mankind, have also been subdued and controlled, but we must come to a compromise.’ Rachel Carson promised to be an Ambassador of the Fish to the dry world of above. Like Thoreau casting off the sins of the flesh to attain greater spiritual purity, she swore her chastity to the Fish Queen in order to best fulfil her role as ambassador and prove her devoted kinship.

It is funny that, how a woman denying her biological breeding function is abhorrent, yet men like Thoreau or the virginal Isaac Newton denying their biological breeding functions are chaste, as though theirs were an admirable choice. What this says is that a woman’s body is not her own to choose to keep from a man.

She swore she would never take the pill because it a) would cause the decline of the Fish Kingdom, which could have a knock-on effect on the rest of the underwater realm, her favourite realm, and b) ruined the integrity of the Fish Queen, and she liked the Fish Queen. Plus the pill was made by Bayer, who were disappearing the bees with their neonicotinoids. The Fish Queen swore her in as Ambassador of the Fish.

In Regina I look at a map of Canada and it reads like a pictogram of clusters of neurons. The shape is uniform; where the lines might have been pliant and organic they are neat right angles. The states of Canada are divided in horizontal strips as if Descartes or someone threw down a quadrat and declared it an enlightened territory. Illuminated and user friendly like the satisfying angularity of Enlightenment taxonomies of life; rational flow charts of stable and quantifiable kingdoms that can be pinned to a table and dissected, taken apart and reassembled.

Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald was the father of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built from east to west in four years from 1881. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company sold the land around its railway in cheap little acred packages marketed and sold to European homesteaders as a Dream of a similar model to the American one. The Wild West was crazy and big and scary but rapid subdivision into super-manageable chunks made it easy to domesticate. Everything within each quadrat was quantified, named, tamed, land and natives included. From their new stronghold of the south-western cities, the CPRC could frontier-bust again into the north, where they built cities on the Gold Fever of the 1890s.

The dawn of railways in Britain brought about the invention of Unanimous Time. Some anthropologists think that marking time was the first step in the construction of the symbolic world, before language, before art. Because, like Einstein said, time is not something absolute. He said different observers order an event differently in time if they are moving with different velocities relative to the observed event. A seemingly simultaneous event can occur differently for other observers (also true of history). That means all measurements involving time as a constant lose their absoluteness.

But the invention of Unanimous Time in Greenwich made the world fall into our order just like the cities are order and the roads and railways are order and the animals are order and genders are order. We invented time and we have sped it up by our own making. The Clock of the Long Now is a clock designed to mark time into the deep, deep future, 10,000 years at a time. It would be built by the Long Now Foundation, in the hope of counterbalancing modern myopia and making us more responsible to the future. But it seems to me just a louder assertion, just a bigger claw reaching. (I REALLY mark time therefore I VERY am.)

In the north, where the highway does not reach, the roadveins are less tangled, like a tree spilling out and reaching all its twig-fingers to the sky in whichever way it feels to fill the space around it. In the north, where the landscape is more immutable, the settlers have been made to oblige it. In the northernmost territories the permanent villages are mostly native because the First Nations and the Metis and the Inuit know how to bend to the land rather than make the land bend to them. And like Naaja said, they see the animal/mineral/vegetable worlds as a continuum of which we are a part in the same way that Inuit gender is a continuum.

The Trans-Canada Highway was built in the 1950s to link up the cities that Macdonald and the CPR spawned. And all of this came to happen so that the rational concrete highway could unravel underneath me and lead me forward on my journey like my very own yellow brick road. After two hours or so a young couple picked me up and took me to Saskatoon. The journey was treeless and flat, I could see the clouds move all the way to the horizon, where they would lose their shape and amalgamate into one big haze, the blue sky stretching over me like a dome.

THE BUFFALO AND THE PASSENGER PIGEON

INT. CAR – camera in Erin’s hand taking in the outside of her window – road sign flashes past, ‘You are leaving Saskatoon, please come back soon!’ – flat plains behind a low flickering fence, stretched out as far as one can see, sickie-yellow and bleached by the sun – no glint like there should be – no pastoral quilt trimmed with hedgerows – monotonous sprawling land, dirty and dead and coaxed and quenched with rotating sprinklers, wide and uniform and on giant scales – a humming that should be insects but is diminished and croaky like an echo from giant machines that even look small against the crop desert – now and then a metal structure bent like a crouching pterodactyl butting the ground –

Template:Clear

File:F0121-01.jpg.png

ERIN: It smells

STEVE: Yep. Welcome to the hydraulic fracturing capital of Canada. There’s been fracking here for fifty years, but nowadays it’s goin’ haywire. Around abouts third-biggest petroleum reserve in the world

– Erin turns the camera to face Steve in the driver’s seat – red cap, dark green North Face gilet – he turns to the camera, smiles haltingly, turns back to the road, shifts his hands on the wheel to steer from the top –

STEVE: Then there’s your tar sands. And the forests. Half of Alberta is forest. It’s all in the north. And over half of the forest is ripe for harvest. Yep. You could say Alberta runs on selling itself. Alberta is a goddam whore

– he laughs, a short honk of a laugh – a shadow passes over his face because a cloud goes under the sun – he points to a harrier out of the window, silhouetted in the sky –

STEVE: That’s a harrier. My pop used to point out all the birds to me. I don’t remember most of the birds. But for some reason I always remember to recognise the harrier

– he carries on glancing back at the bird from the road until he cannot any more without craning his neck –

STEVE: I used to think all these environmental types were just out to scaremonger. But then when I worked the tar sands I changed my mind. And you know, I can’t get my head around why I ever doubted them. These guys who just want to see the world green. Over these corporations with big money in their pockets

– he talks about it all with an odd kind of affection – custodial attentiveness that makes it seem as though he is talking as part of the Albertan psyche rather than out of a personal fondness or interest –

STEVE: But hey. Who am I to moan? Driving my car?

– he sits quietly for a few seconds, as though waiting for her to cut the camera – agitatedly, he fidgets his hands, reaches to the glove box –

STEVE: You want a mint?

– he unwraps a mint between his fingers with his wrists steering the wheel from the top – the camera shudders as Erin reaches for a mint –

CUT

GOT LAND? THANK AN INDIAN

Steve drove me all way into Edmonton to where I was being picked up even though it was out of his way. He took the petrol money and gave me his email so he could see himself in the finished product when it came about. I thought about all the footage I have, about how Steve was not really talking about what I had told him my documentary was about. But he was talking about how Alberta is a whore and even if he did not quite know it, he was talking indirectly about women too, and the significance that it took a woman with a stolen body to write Silent Spring.

Sam’s parents left the farm a few days ago for a fortnight, to visit his mum’s family on their reservation over in British Columbia. Sam is a couple of years older than me and Berry is seventeen. They both have similar chin-length raven-black hair, but Berry’s face is much too soft and pretty for them to look too much alike, although they both have the same defiant jawbone. I had to do a bit of introspection and even read back over our emails to try to figure out why I had presumed they were a white family. Maybe it was the all-Canadian-sounding names.

The homestead is just north of Rocky Mountain House, a small town around two hours away from Edmonton. The drive leading up to the homestead from the main road is unpaved and winds through pine trees. Two chickens scuttled out of the way of the car as we pulled up the drive. In the clearing of the forest that surrounds their house, which is a large cabin, there is a totem pole reaching the height of the cabin and half again. I did not want to ask just yet how typical this is. There is a small shed to the right of the cabin and behind the trees fall out onto a meadow where they have a vegetable plot, paddies, a chicken coop and a shed with four yellow plastic kayaks stacked against it. At the far end a wide stream marks the boundary to their land.

Around the chicken-roost shed I counted five chickens, and more wandering around. They collect the eggs from the roost every morning and sometimes they eat the chickens. In a pen next to the roost were three speckled pigs, mucking about, two larger and one smaller. They take the bigger ones for breeding every year and raise up the piglets for market, keeping just one back to slaughter themselves for cured meat. The smaller of the three pigs was the keeper and they were fattening her up. The chickens, one pig, fish they catch from the river and the things they shoot hunting are the only meat they eat.

We grazed the pigs, letting them out from the paddy to forage through the forest for mushrooms and roots and berries and worms and things. We were assigned one pig each. I learned to move them by tap-tapping them on the flank with a stick and manoeuvring them with my legs. I followed my pig close because he kept moving and I was frightened of losing him.

The forest was awake with sound, a medley of territorial and cat calls. Now and again I would zone in on a trill I thought I knew, like picking up on a phrase recognised on a foreign street. Blackbird, wren, wood thrush, starling. And squirrels chattering at us from the trees, him digging up their nuts with his snout.

Sunlight filtered down through the canopy in diagonal beams and motes floated through them. My pig chattered happily and I was thinking to myself, yes, pig, this is what happiness is; when alone, being alone without people or people things, noticing selfacutely, and with a kind of fondness.

I asked if the chickens ever run away. Sam said they don’t because they feed them and the chickens are happy here. I asked if they ever get eaten. He said Grey the dog chases away the weasels and the cats, but sometimes he misses one and they lose chickens. This just happens sometimes, and since the chickens are not exactly theirs they can’t get angry about them being taken away, they just feed them and sometimes the chickens give them eggs and seem to accept that every now and then they kill one to eat. I think this is very philosophical.

For dinner we had fish that had been smoked in their smoke house, and vegetables and potatoes from their plot. I am staying put for a few weeks, to decompress before the final push. This is going to be the perfect place to go into the whole helping-out-a-stranger-in-exchange-for-food-and-board thing. Like being a Samaritan in old times, but the idea is that I learn shit about organic living.

In the documentary this will be a few weeks of time-out skimmed over in a few short clips of idyllic pastoral living, like Kerouac, McCandless et al. working on flour mills and the like to pay their way across the States. Rest time and recuperation, a big breath before the deep plunge. Since I got to Sam’s I have this enduring feeling of serenity. I have caught it up for now, the thing, and its glow gives off enough warmth to bask in.

BECOMING A RIVER AND SLEEPING LIKE A RIVER

Sam and I took kayaks out today. The lake was pellucid and the air barely moved. As we cut into the water with our paddles we startled fish. We could see them a metre underneath us the water was so clear. There was the sound of moving water and the feeling of being pulled away. The feeling of sitting in a little vessel on top of an indifferent intensity, the feeling of being buoyant on the skin of depth. Big swathes of time would pass where neither of us would say anything to the other, just the rhythmical dipping of the paddles and the tinkle of drips from the blades. Behind us the mountains rose, diminished into lethargy by a hazy film of distance. Above the deep green forest, black shapes hovered and dipped.

We made it most of the way back upriver but in the end, when I especially was lagging and hardly pushing back against the current, we landed the kayaks and walked the rest. Sam drove to pick them up later and I went with him for company while a friend of his who had come to stay, a guy from the town called Ollie, made dinner with Berry. I can’t help but stare at Sam every time his talking gives me an excuse to. His hands are always dirty. Not gross dirty, but earthy from the farm. I might have been paying a lot of attention to him to notice that his hands are always earthy. Heavy eyelids like crescent moons.

In the truck he said, half joking, you’re good in a kayak, I didn’t know you had kayaks in England. I told him we do, and that I was good because I had been in kayaks lots as a Girl Guide. He found the fact that I was a Girl Guide really amusing. He said, ‘I hear you sing Indian songs around the campfire too?’

I told him there was a song about an Indian in a kayak we used to sing actually.

He said, ‘That’s funny. We never sing about Girl Scouts.’

A REAL MOUNTAIN

Sam said he did not know why I would want to go there, but he took me anyway: the famous Banff Park. The sky was practically cloudless and everything crisp with colour. Ollie rode up front with Sam, so I sat in the truck bed with Grey. To look out over the top of the van’s roof from the back meant positioning my face in the stream of air forced over it, which stung my eyes and wrapped my hair into tight little knots. The only viable way to sit was facing backwards on the bench with Grey wrapped over me, because even though Sam said he always rode in the back I was nervous about him getting excited and bailing over the side.

Not being able to see ahead on the journey gave me a novel perspective. The Rockies started to crawl into my view. Grey knew them, his eyes twitching to them frantically. I watched the fixed point where the road disappeared at the horizon as it all rushed past and towards it, the mountains sluggishly because they had further to go.

I am getting towards the real Wild North now, like I had imagined the frontiers-land, the Yukon, to look. Not quite there yet but I can start to feel its tremor. Looking at it, you get why all the Mountain Men do not care to keep any company if they can just keep company with the mountains, so sure and majestic and other-than-you-are.

But the road rushing away underneath does something strange. Makes it feel spectral, staged, to be seen but not really felt, like how walking through an underwater tunnel at the Sealife Centre is not anything like swimming in it. Every now and then the sides of the road would rise up and show the flat innards of some great rock or crust, layers of sediment and scars where the road cuts through.

Walking through the forest, Sam chose the least scenic but most secluded route, leading through thick pine forest. Grey rushed around in a frenzy, snuffing up stories, like maybe the coyote that killed its prey dead here, or a three-year-old hare that was caught by its leg already lamed a week ago in another scuffle, that time with a wolverine, and it knew that it could not be so lucky twice. It ran some way then lay down so as not to prolong the inevitable and gave itself to the coyote.

Template:Clear

File:F0127-01.jpg.png

Grey smelled its before and its death smell, then much later in the walk its after, where the coyote had passed it in its scat days after. He smelled the terror of the ground squirrel in its burrow but he catalogued the scent and left it because it was too deep out of the reach of his snout and there was much too much else to read to make time for digging. There was smell around a grand old tree with a thick trunk like the leg of a diplodocus and he ran around it excitedly yapping and cocked his leg to it. Perhaps it was a wolf smell and he was calling out to them and leaving a message in case they came back. Perhaps he was accepting the challenge of the scent of his primordial nemesis: the cat of the wild, the mountain lion.

Sam walked us through like a heritage tour guide who has been decades in the game so has all the knowledge but waning enthusiasm. He pointed out the Polyporaceae fungi, of the Badius genus, jutting from a tree, a pruned brown palm cupping water. He took a skeletal beehive, paper thin, a snakeskin doubled and redoubled, folded and helixed on itself, broke it apart in his hands to show us the chambered innards and crumbled it absently. It fell away like ashes.

He said, ‘Don’t you see that that is what it is? Empty? It is a museum to itself, like someone took the whole thing and replaced it with a replica, put it aside for us to experience.’ At first I thought he meant the beehive and I thought, that is very deep to get about a beehive, I am sure the bees have just moved home. But as we went along I began to think he might be talking about the park itself, like it was all a vacant symbol to him.

We walked for maybe a couple of hours and eventually came onto a lake from inside the trees. It was that opaque and turquoise blue that you can just about accept in photographs but on seeing it there in the real-world landscape I was incredulous. It had a kind of powdered texture, as if a giant had painted the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds and then swilled out their paintbrush in the water of the lake. Peyto Lake is fed by a glacier, Sam said, and in the warmer months the meltwater takes the rock flour it ground up underneath itself and spills it into the lake. When this happens the water of the lake gets called glacial milk.

I told them I had seen this before, in the very wildest place I know at home: my old quarry. The quarry was for limestone but it had been abandoned for years so filled up with rainwater. The rainwater mixing with the limestone dust makes a similar rock milk, although it is not as dramatic, but eerie, the hacked cliffs and flats still and blinding white like a moonscape doused with floodlights.

The quarry was fenced off because it was dangerous and also because it was a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Hunks of orange rust char it, the remains of miscellaneous pieces of machinery, but it is heavy with the presence of the fossils in its 430-million-year-old sediment. There are trilobites from the Silurian period when life was just beginning to crawl out of the sea, and as though to mirror this there are shallow pools writhing with rare newts. There is my nesting pair of peregrine falcons, which Sam says are considered particularly spiritual by Native Americans and Ancient Egyptians. Driven to local extinction in places by DDT in the 1960s, I tell them, but clawing back in this graveyard to humanity. Sometimes when I am there I imagine it is the far future and I am the last human on earth.

But the wild of Peyto Lake is the conceptual opposite. It is modelled on life before, but really it is just a simulation. Sam made me see this. He seemed unfazed by the place and sat on the pebbled shore throwing sticks into the water for Grey. On the far shore we could see ants looking down into the lake from an overhang which Ollie told us was designated the most scenic viewpoint in Canada. He asked us if we didn’t think it could be as beautiful seen from the other way round.

I was glad that being with the boys gave me a backstage pass into the park and made me different to all the other tourists, even though that was exactly what I was. Sam probably couldn’t help thinking I was not any better than them either.

‘It’s just a spectacle to them,’ Sam said.

Ollie laughed and told him to shut up, the park was beautiful, and if it weren’t for all the tourists they would not have the money to keep it open and conserved.

‘It’s beautiful, yes, but in a different way to how it should be. Doesn’t it worry you that it will end up with only preserving real mountains, picture-postcard ones? With waterfalls and snow on top and its image reflected in a lake? What about where we live? How long until the river is polluted because people have real mountains put aside to go visit in a park?’

And Sam is right. At home our quilted landscape is fully exploited and the wild is relegated to special parks. Spaces set aside for preservation are museums, and their segregation makes it okay to debase anything outside of them. Parks are time capsules and that itself seems a futile admission of the falling-apart of nature.

I chewed on my sandwich. Ollie took his time formulating a reply. ‘But no one would care about mountains at all if there wasn’t somewhere for them to come and see real ones.’ I could not disagree with him either.

NO PERSON IS AN ISLAND

Mum had sent me frantic messages over Facebook and to my email to say she had had a really bad dream about something happening to me and to ring her. My phone had been dead for a week at the bottom of my bag so I had not seen Mum ring. I phoned her up and she had a fit, first begging me to come home if I was going to keep on pulling stupid stunts like that, disappearing without contact, then when I promised I would not again she burst into tears.

My only child, my daughter.

But Mum on the phone is just a little voice, so small and so far away. She is standing on a dot and the balloon gets bigger and worse still Dad on the phone, standing on another dot, sounding tired and saying why do you have to do things like this to your mother, you know what her nerves are like. Tired in a way I have heard many times before. Tired, like you are always so far away, always have been so distant, we have always been stood on these dots getting further and further away from each other.

This is only the second time I have heard their voices since I left. I should call home more. But she is crying on the phone and yes it hurts a little, I miss you but you know I’d never say, but also it feels good; she is crying but she can’t bring me home. The power of their summons has nothing on me now. I am becoming my own person apart from them.

Before me her name was Jennifer and she worked as a secretary and before that she was as young as I am and she had ideas about who Jennifer was and what Jennifer wanted and what she wanted was to go to Italy and learn Italian and be an au pair and before that still she was a child, a little girl called Jennifer who wanted to be a ballerina, like she later wanted me to be. She had a whole self before me and I will never get to that part of her. She is a person with a name: Jennifer. Jennifer and Brian. Not just Mum and Dad. But I have always been Erin first and daughter after. Mum, Dad, Erin. Why is it we do that?

It is a burden to have a mother that wants so much of you, but it must also be a burden to be an overly attached mother, like why can’t I just shake the daughter from me? You grew out of me but you never really grew away?

I am reminding you that your name is Jennifer.

Daughter; my parasitic twin.

THERE IS NO WORD FOR ANIMAL IN THE DAKOTA LANGUAGE

There is the bigger picture and then there is sex. Having sex grounds you and brings you out of the bigger picture. It makes life more livable and less giant and incomprehensible. It makes sense why people settle down and have babies really. It makes sense to push an idea of love and stability to stop people from feeling so rebellious and righteous and born to save the world. I suppose that was why Thoreau and the Unabomber and all those guys took oaths of abstinence. Plus it was a handy way to illegitimise women.

Because when it suited men historically, sexuality was a thing that women had and they were above. In Greek times and in the story of the Fall, we were not allowed a say in decision-making because we were completely and utterly ruled by our sexy, lusty desires. Men could do without sex and did not see the point in dirtying themselves in such a way, and could therefore keep rational heads on their unsexy bodies.

What must have happened in recent times is that the male genome mutated like a grasshopper driven into frenzy and meta-morphosing into a locust for lack of food. And now the clitoris is just a relic of that bygone time when women needed pleasure from sex to encourage procreation. Like the appendix is a relic of a time when people ate grass. No one eats grass any more.

Sam feels heavy to lie with. He feels anchored. He feels like he bends space–time and the groove of it pulls at me. He smells like dirt, in a good way, like his skin is smoothed over with clay. We were tentative and very precious, a bit clumsy also, like children holding tiny mice. He has a freckle on his right eyelid. It is in the crease of his eyelid so that you can only see it when he is sleeping. When I pointed it out to him he said, ‘Yeah, I know, my ex used to like that one,’ and this made me inconceivably sad for just a millisecond.

We started on the big talks that often come post-sex. The ones you use to excavate the depths of others. I said I did not know why everyone did not take themselves off to new places, that it didn’t even cost much if you did it right.

‘If everyone did it then the world would grind to a halt.’

‘Well, would that be so bad a thing?’

‘If everyone did it how would any culture preserve itself?’

I thought of Naaja then, walking herself into the big tundra all alone, waif-small on the grey iced turf, a burden on her tiny shoulders, my own so easily thrown off and abandoned.

And why does she not throw hers down?

‘What about places you care about? Who would look after places? Most Indians were nomadic once, but now they sit around in poverty fighting oil and mineral prospectors off land they see as sacred.’

That one stumped me. A pang of guilt for the small cold ring of protesters gathered around the would-be drill site back home.

‘I just think if there’s something you don’t like about something you shouldn’t go off in search of something better just for yourself. You should fix it, take what you have and make it better for everyone. Things don’t change just by wanting them too,’ he said.

But you don’t understand that is what I am doing.

We lay awake talking and he started to tell me more and more, peeling away each layer of his skin, and in a way I wish he had not because now I have seen his innards I am going to end up really liking him. And that really will not do when I have to leave soon. He told me the story of the totem pole.

‘On the bottom there is an orca, our family crest. It brings luck and will come to the help of the family when any of them are vulnerable. From my nana’s house you can see an ocean cove and sometimes when they are near, in the shallows herding fish to eat, you can see the orcas arching out of the water, you can go out in a boat to meet them. Underneath it is the salmon carving, the symbol of the reservation of Salmon Water because all of the family crests are water animals in Salmon Water.

‘We also have a guardian animal. This is the carving above that looks a bit like a dog but more like a bird with ears, I think. The wolf is a really charged animal and helps with sickness. Not so much physical sickness, that’s more the orca, this one stands for the sickness of our family’s heart, or sadness.

‘And the otter is above the wolf. The otter is thought of as being mischievous and bright, happy and curious. The otter is my ma as a child because she was always sunny and laughing and hiding herself away so that my nana would get scared but my grandpa never did because he knew she would always let herself be found in the end. The otter is from the times they had before she got taken away.

‘And then the thunderbird stands above them. The thunderbird is a commemoration of bad things that are acknowledged but best not talked about. It brings thunder by beating its wings and lightning when it blinks its eyes, and it is a killer of the orca. We show reverence towards it. It broke apart our family.

‘My aunt and uncle carved and painted it from a cedar my grandpa had picked out years before he died, because he knew she would let herself be found again one day even though they hadn’t seen her since she was three years old. The first time they met again was when she was twenty-six, they held a potlatch feast and gave her the totem, and my ma cried herself to sleep for days in secret.

‘She couldn’t move back to the reservation and neither could dad to his. They didn’t have the identity cards to prove their indigenous heritage, because when they were both children they were taken from their parents by Indian agents and put into adoption with white families. Dad only had his two sisters left when they repatriated. Before he got taken he was being brought up by his grandparents because his dad left and his ma died, and they are dead now too.’

He stopped talking but in a deliberate kind of way, like he was done now and that was all there was to say of the matter. I suppose he has rationalised it so well as to be able to talk it through, seeing as that is what his parents do, he says, with their speaking jobs. For the first time there was not a laughing cadence through every sentence he spoke.

This made me sad for two reasons; because it was sad in itself, and because by telling me he was signifying that he expected never to see me again after my short stay and it was therefore entirely reasonable to open up so soon about something so personal.

He said he did not know how to feel about his white grandparents. That his mum’s adoptive parents were paid to take her in and his dad’s saw themselves as martyrs for saving him from the reservation where his real parents killed themselves with alcohol.

He also at some point said something really specific that I have not ever thought about before. He says they are being disappeared, but no other culture gets worn on so many T-shirts. He was being light-hearted, so for something to say I thought it would be okay to bring up Rochelle and all the things she had said about her white boyfriend’s nicknames for her. I laughed and said it was kind of funny, and surely that is all you could find it now looking over it because it was so stupid.

‘How did you manage to get into a reservation with a camera anyway?’

I had to tell him the whole story because I suppose that was the only credible way I was getting in there uninvited. He listened with a frown on his face. When I had finished he made me want to cry again by telling me a girl on his course at university had been researching murdered indigenous women who disappeared off the highways in Canada for her dissertation, and was murdered by two white men before she finished it. I just mumbled that it could have been a lot worse, then.

He looked redder with the light from the window on him and my own arms looked yellow. I listened to the sound of my voice as if on playback and wondered how I had ever got there, in that unfamiliar room, feeling suddenly blank and inert.

MONOCULTURES OF THE SPIRIT

Agitations. Larus desperately in contact. Reiterated points: you’ve been stayed put a while, you’re planning on leaving soon, right, you need to keep well ahead of winter, don’t forget what you set out to do.

‘I haven’t. I’m still working on it here.’

‘Do you not think you might be making excuses to stay put?’

‘No, I think—’

‘Just have a think about it. I’m surprised at you is all. Didn’t think you of all people would get distracted by a boy.’

Sam could tell I was irritated afterwards. He asked what Larus had said to make me so sour. I did not tell him in case he thought I had taken it to heart. He kept asking questions about Larus, like how much we talk, how old he was, things that irritated me more with their connotations.

‘I just wonder why a man old enough to be your dad, who begot five children and who probably thinks we we’re all “children of Earth” and that age sets no boundaries for kindred spirits, is interested in your “feminist project”.’

‘I really don’t think that it’s any of your business.’

I wanted to make it sting like I did not care what he thought. For a second he looked like a cat I had splashed with water for no reason other than to see it squirm. I should not have. It was my fault for making Larus sound worse than he is when I described him just for comedic effect, really.

Ah, the burden of being a feeling woman! But I am not about to let myself fulfil the very expectations I set out to subvert. I am fully committed to the project and ready to get on with it because winter is catching me up.

I told Sam I needed to leave because his friend Ollie had mentioned driving to Dawson Creek via Prince George to make some deliveries in his pick-up, and it would be stupid to miss the lift. He said it was an indirect route to Dawson and that I could hitch later on or he would drive me. When I said I hadn’t been doing much on the documentary and I had to get on with things, he said, ‘Oh, of course, for art’s sake’ sarcastically.

That was just one of his momentary lapses, he was soon right back to his jovial self, only being at the same time distant with me. In the morning I could not even tell if we was mad or not.

‘Well, I’m going, then.’

‘Have a nice trip, thanks for stopping by.’

‘It’s been really nice to meet you.’

‘Yeah, same with you.’

‘Aren’t you going to at least pretend to be sad that I’m going?’

‘What, try to stop you? That wouldn’t be very feminist of me.’ It was a deliberate game of trying to be the most unaffected. So I shrugged and shouted bye to Berry and turned down the path towards Ollie waiting in his pick-up.

TOP TIPS ON HOW TO BE A TRAVEL WRITER

The highway was empty, and our headlights pooled out ahead. For miles we would see other vehicles in the opposite lane only, and only sporadically. A hump in the road appeared, so that we could not see the behind of it as we rose and trees spilled on either side to its edge. Mounting the rise, we saw a large dark shape up ahead, maybe twenty metres. Ollie slowed the van and as our light poured up and over it we saw it was a small black bear. It stopped in the opposite lane, one paw raised limply, and looked at us. Ollie stopped the van to let it pass.

The bear stayed put, lowering its head like a dog in submission. It was small and misplaced against the wide cut of the road. It tapped the ground with its paw, hesitant, testing the cool density of the concrete, warily reading the dead-eyed, no-legged creature that stood still before it. Then it bunched itself up and bounded in front of the van, its four legs gambolling, and we watched as its rump shimmied off into the trees.

From outside Edmonton we had rejoined the Yellowhead Highway, a branch of the Trans-Canada Highway system which veers north-west, breaking off from the due westerly route and connecting Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta with British Columbia. The Yellowhead is named for Tête Jaune, aka Pierre Bostonais, an Iroquois-Metis fur trader and explorer who in turn got his name from his blond hair, homage to his part-white origin.

In 1819 Tête Jaune led a brigade of the Hudson Bay Company through a pass in the Rocky Mountains, a piper with a ditty of bounties and a whole band of rats to follow. The pass now bears his name and from this the highway takes its.

I was back on the road and it felt good to see the horizon reeling in, all the temporary things staying just where I left them. The feeling that had kept me still the past few weeks was less of a captivation and more like a rabbit trap, wire noose on my leg. It was not aligned with my purpose.

And what is that exactly?

From Edmonton the highway slides though the Rockies of Jasper National Park fast and sure like a river. The weather was sullen, and low clouds sulked around the grey and shadowed mountains, brooding thunder. Pine smells crept osmotically through the damp air and the open windows. Breaks in the cloud cover would stream down sun in spotlights, directing me further and further on the unfolding road, enchanting, pied-pipering me like Tête Jaune with all his little rodents. Big eagles perched on telephone wires, silhouetted in the low light.

We arrived at our halfway point after Ollie had made a stop for his delivery.

‘This is Prince George, where we leave the Yellowhead Highway and strike out north to Dawson. Yellowhead continues right the way into the Pacific, then by ferry onto Graham Island.’

The Hudson Bay Company drew a straight line right across Canada, not even conceding to the ocean. A branding of ownership. The other side of Prince George is nicknamed the Highway of Tears for all the unsolved murders. Sam said between Prince George and Prince Rupert at the coast, from the sixties until the last one a few months ago, something like forty have happened. Women picked up off the side of the road. Almost exclusively indigenous women.

Ollie said, ‘Bet ya glad you don’t have to hitch that highway.’

Could I ever have hitched that highway? I mean, could it have been the same highway for me as for them?

The next day we left the Yellowhead exactly where the designated murder zone started. Yellowhead spilled out, continuing Tête Jaune’s trail through the Rockies, stalking a century and a half behind him. Him stone cold dead and unaware of his namesake (and yes, well, at least he will be remembered for ever) or of the legacy of highways for indigenous women who have no namesake, only anonymous tears.

And along such a highway by 1 p.m. we had reached Dawson Creek. Ollie left me at Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway, where Chris McCandless took a picture with the big road sign, extending 1,523 miles, all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska. Tomorrow just past Fort Nelson I will enter the Yukon, the crazy Wild North and the place that cast a spell on so many Mountain Men, where the ghosts of old miners made Kerouac wonder. The Klondike, where Jack London the wolf-man found himself.

Template:Clear

File:F0138-01.jpg.png

GOLD FEVER IN THE YUKON

From Fort Nelson I got completely stuck. Two full days to get a ride. I was not the only one trying to hitch and I had stayed down-road from the others in a long, sparse queue. There was a woman in first place who looked to be in her late twenties when I passed her in the morning after staying overnight in a hostel near the road. I wanted to interview her but she was not very approachable. She had been waiting for a lift for three whole days. Then I passed a guy who was maybe in his mid-thirties, scruffy with long, lank hair. He said he had been waiting two days but he felt good about today and he wished me luck. I watched him stand and wave and jab out his thumb, jumping up and down, and wondered how he thought he would ever get a lift acting like a crazy person.

The girl got a lift on my first day. I only counted fifty-four cars that day. There was one woman who gave me a look that was not just judgemental, it had, considering her strangeness to me, a terrible anger to it like I had not seen before. I gave her the finger and the woman gave an even angrier honk.

I felt bored and restless but of course there would be times when I did not get picked up right away. I imagine the guy has had a much less fluid journey from wherever he came from. The next day, monotonous, feeling quite hopeless, I set myself down again at a distance from the guy, who looked like he might have stayed out all night. Then a really bad thing happened. A lorry pulled in in front of where I was sat on my bag. The window rolled down and the guy inside said, ‘Hey, I can take you to Whitehorse.’ I could see down the road that the thirty-something guy was stood with his arms out above his head imploringly.

‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I usually only pick up girls. You can’t always trust the guys. Especially if they look like bums.’

I tried to compute the ethics quickly as I collected my things from the ground as slowly as I could.

It would be completely hypocritical to take advantage.

Well, if I didn’t take the lift he certainly was not going to pick up the guy. I raised my hand to the guy in what I hoped was an apologetic salute, but I do not think he took it that way because he threw his rucksack to the floor and started kicking it.

‘Don’t worry too much about him, he’s just another bum trying to get to Alaska. They’re usually younger and sometimes they look sweet so someone picks them up. I reckon he’ll wait maybe a week. Maybe his luck will come in and it will rain, then some old dude might take pity on him.’

The driver’s name was Ron. Ron said sometimes there are ten hitchhikers at any one time trying to get to Fairbanks. He asked me where I was heading and I told him, Fairbanks. This made him laugh. I told him about the documentary.

He said, ‘I like that. And why not ladies, hey? I got a little clue for you, though. You might not get a great reception when you tell the folk you meet in Alaska what you’re doing. Alaskans hate these guys.’

‘Why do they hate them?’

He said they are hated because they flock from all over North America and some from Europe too. He said they hear the call of the wild and they come running like apostles to it. Usually they get themselves in trouble somewhere and some rescue team has to bail them out.

Is that not everyone’s problem the whole world over? Shall I call it saturation? Like Larus’s yoga-mat tourists. We live in an overpopulated world now, much to the annoyance of Ted Kaczynski. There is almost not enough space left for the Mountain Men. Back when there were just a couple of hapless truth seekers then maybe they were viewed with a kind of affection. Maybe McCandless of hapless potato fame was viewed with a kind of affection, before his followers followed him.

When we crossed into the Yukon after Fort Nelson Ron pointed out the little white sign and said ‘Welcome to Yukon!’ just as I read it. I pointed the camera at everything I was seeing, not much, just a long, long road lined with tall thin trees. I think he found it endearing or something. He started to talk pointedly, like he was giving me something useful for the camera, so I directed it at him. He spoke like an overly trained actor.

‘You know the real pull of the north has always been minerals. You know the Klondike Stampede, right? In the 1800s? Well, there’s a brand-new one going on right now.’

He nodded confidingly.

‘Not just gold, mind. Zinc and copper and uranium. It’s all different now, of course. Mostly the work’s done by big Chinese companies, with GPS and bulldozers. Ain’t as many beardy guys with pans. That’s what the north was built on. Guys came seeking their fortune and the hardy ones stuck around. But a bunch came and couldn’t hack it. Like these young guys now, they had this romantic idea of what it’ll be like. But it’ll kill ya. They went running home to the sunny south with scurvy and their toes missing.’

He paused for a bit to whistle and look out of the window. The trees to our left began to slope down and behind them a whole other sea of them rose up. Then we had a view of the mountains in the distance, the green trees blanketing right the way over them.

The first Klondike gold rush was in 1896. Adam Smith, the amoral moral philosopher, wrote The Wealth of Nations a century before that. Adam Smith saw the wilderness as if it were made of bricks of gold and timber, to be utilised to create wealth, and he saw the creation of wealth as a moral agenda and he reduced complexity to simple constituents as though the illusion of things could be stripped away to reveal their basic and authentic and truthful essences. But what he was doing was taking paper and cutting it to shape, saying ‘Look what shape I found when I trimmed away the excess, a chair!’, when what he really did was to cut the paper to the shape of a chair.

He broke the world into mechanical pieces and put the natural world outside the world of man so as to justify a particular form of economic and political organisation (capitalism) and philosophical position (individualism) as natural. He was trying to morally justify selfishness. A sperm whale is so called because stabbing one in the head with a harpoon makes it spurt forth oil in a way that reminded whale hunters of ejaculation. And if a sperm whale is just an oil ejaculator and not an emotionally complex being then it is okay to go about slaughtering them.

‘It’s beautiful, ain’t it? Don’t it look quiet? The last great wilderness.’

He took it all in, sucked it all in through his nostrils. I am so close now and I can feel it. It feels like humming in your mouth, but masked by something loud like engine noise so no one else can really hear it but the vibrations take over your whole face and throat.

‘But we got things like the Peel Watershed. Places like pristine wilderness. Mines’re leaking arsenic and crap into the water. Some folk think it’ll be a shame if the Peel gets contaminated. But Yukon is mining. It’s kind of its soul. It’s a place the little guy can make something of his lot. Cut down some trees, build himself a cabin, live a simple life. You know, still now in theory anyone can stake a claim to mine someplace out here. It’s a free country. Libertarian. And it won’t stop. Them people are crazed. They’re thinking, “I gotta go get it cus if I don’t then some other asshole will”.’

He chuckled to himself. Then a song came on the radio and he stopped talking to half-sing to it. He sang it quietly, and only the words he knew, which were not many, and the rest he kind of mumbled. He whistled the bridge to the chorus.

While he whistled I looked out of the window. Beautiful, yes, but in a different kind of way, with a creeping melancholy to it. My first felt elation had sapped away and left something hollowed out. I thought about the ghosts of miners that Jack Kerouac wondered about. What would they have said to Kerouac if they could have talked? Would they have told him that the emissions his exhaust was pumping, driving all over America and not giving much of a damn about anything but himself, were poisoning the air like the coal did their black lungs? That their mines had dug up uranium and mercury and cadmium, making bonds in his nostrils each breath he took? If we’d have known then what we know now, maybe they would have said.

And what would I have to say to the ghost of Jack Kerouac? It was all very well and good for you, Jack Kerouac, but things were different then. The not giving a damn thing is harder to get behind now. Not just because I am a woman, but because the yoke is not so easy to throw down when you know the weight just gets transferred to the many other beasts of burden.

Template:Clear

File:F0142-01.jpg.png

ARE MUTUALISMS A FORM OF LOVE?

My first lift took me as far as Haines Junction, where I had to wait only another couple of hours for a lift all the way to Beaver Creek. The roadside trees cloaked pools of water that held their own strange colours. Behind them the mountains grew again, some in the far parts ephemeral and almost-there, the snow on top like cut ice against the sharp sky today but probably gone tomorrow.

Then the road ran straight towards a big mountain, washed out by the sun, the huge long lake at its base luminously blue, bluer than the sky blue. Kluane Lake grew wider and wider as we got closer until it was as wide as an ocean and we were right on top of it. The water almost touched the road but just kept away, lapping against the gold sand for miles and miles. The road then curved over the sand towards the mountain, and for a moment there was so much of the sand that you could squint so as not to see the vague plant-life in it and pretend it was a desert and the rest was mirage.

Then the road ran brassy under the foot of the mountain and around the lake edge as if to brag about what it had tamed, as though this great feat of engineering should be lauded for its arrogance. But the mountains and the lakes do not care because they can’t. And under the road the rivers flow on and on back to the sky.

Online, a little yellow envelope flashed itself at me, from Sam. I did not open it. It is best to leave it for now. Soon I cross into Alaska. There is nothing to do but feel glad that things are back the way they were always supposed to be. And this evening the mountains look rich and blue and fully dimensional.

ENGLAND, JUST LIKE AMERICA, BUT DIFFERENT

TO REMEMBER: A deer on the road running from our vehicle, confused and running with the road, not from it. We slow the vehicle to a crawl, honking, trying to throw it off. It half turns, its eyes bulging in fear and confusion at its entrapment. And then its epiphany; it breaks away to the forest.

From Beaver Creek the highway crosses the border and goes on a long way before it splits to Fairbanks or Anchorage. I took a lift across the border to get out where the road forks so that I could hitch with the traffic that was solely headed for Fairbanks. The geographical border had a ‘Welcome to Alaska’ sign and four flags erected. They were Canada, America, Alaska and I suppose the other must have been the Yukon’s flag. I almost forget that Alaska is a part of America; it seems to me a far nobler place.

I caught a ride with a young couple who seemed to have had an argument about picking me up. The man at the border inspection station was wearing a blue uniform instead of the nostalgic red one. He said, ‘Welcome to the United States of America,’ just to be pedantic. Ahead the sign read Fairbanks 298.

After a couple of hours the road splits at Tok. I walked a little way out of Tok, where the couple dropped me, up the highway until I got to a layby and set down my bag. Right down the road, where it shrunk to a dot at the centre of perspective, with the line of trees dragged into it on either side, real Alaskan snowcapped mountains stood still behind and waited blue and moody. The sky had dimmed grey and heavy with rain and suspense and I hoped out loud that it wouldn’t fall.

It felt colder already and different, as if every place becomes itself by virtue of how it is collectively imagined. It felt like Alaska. I tried to explain this with the camera but could not figure how. There is so much important feeling to it that is frustratingly unquantifiable. Words come closer to it because they can dance around it, etch it, bring it out in relief like a lithograph. Vast, empty but full, potent and good, full of understanding and unfathomable fathoms, deep, enigmatic, but everything you want of it absolutely. It is harder with images.

The very next car gave me a lift. I swung my bag into the open back of the truck, next to some animal skins, and covered it with the tarp. We arrived in Fairbanks at around three. I rang my next host, Stan, to let him know I had arrived and went to grab a sandwich.

Stan is a guy I have been in touch with on the couch-surfing website. He had offered me a place to stay for a week while I figure out my little adventure. I am consistently surprised at the ease of finding a free place to sleep when I approach young men online. I just had to wait until the French girl he was hosting had moved on. Stan said he would come to pick me up from my spot just south of Fairbanks.

CHIVALRY ISN’T DEAD, GUYS JUST GET SICK OF UNGRATEFUL BITCHES

Stan works in the Denali Park Centre. Got the job through his uncle, who is a park warden. Told me how he would come to Alaska as a child to live with his uncle in school holidays (he’s originally from Florida). He said even as a child he could not deal with the way of life down there. Said his father and he were nothing alike. He said his father has a Chevy and two jet skis and a speedboat on the lake they live on and that he wished his uncle was his father.

In the house there are trophy pictures of Stan or his uncle with big fish and stags. There is one of his uncle with his foot on a dead grizzlie’s head. His uncle the stereotypical Mountain Man, wearing buckskin and a coonskin cap, carrying a rifle and a scalping knife and with a big old bushy beard. Not forgetting the pipe.

It turns out that Stan is the douchey kind of Mountain Man, the exclusionary, self-righteous kind. It started when I saw Stan had Jack London on the shelf and I thought I would try to make friends by letting him know I really like London. He had a pretty reductive interpretation of him, so I bated him a little.

‘Don’t get offended, but Call of the Wild is not really a girl’s book.’

‘Well, whose book is it? Is it a dog’s book? It’s a really good imagining of what’s going on in a dog’s head and it works because it is eerie when dogs howl at wolves on TV. And because they do look like they are dreaming about primitive things when they snarl in their sleep.’

‘Yeah, but it’s not just a story about a dog, is it?’

‘Well, it’s about a dog that wants to be a wolf.’

‘You really think a book would be timeless and never out of print because it just makes people think about what their dog is thinking? This is what I mean, you just don’t get it because you’re a girl.’

‘What?’

‘Girls are just naturally social. You could never know what it means to be called on by nature. Society is unnatural for men, it’s damaging for the spirit. The call of the wild is the call of the ancestors.’

‘There is nothing more primordial than childbirth.’

He thinks I can’t understand what a dog feels because I am a girl! He thinks dogs and human men have analogous feelings! Stan is talking Darwin like Ted Kaczynski talks Darwin to shut up women, but Darwin was writing to justify capitalism! He wrote Origin of the Species eighty-three years after Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations. They are all cutting paper into chair shapes. They are talking large organisations, interpreted in terms of self-interest and the maximisation of personal well-being, like in the free market, where firms or individuals succeed or fail based on ‘survival of the fittest’. They think personal maximisation side-handedly benefits the rest of the society or ecosystem. Adam Smith called this the Invisible Hand. Darwin was channelling Smith like a medium; he was a product of his time and primed to think in terms of competitive individuals.

Russia called their automatically launched assured nuclear destruction machine the Dead Hand. The nuclear Dead Hand will automatically and amorally dish out justice to Russia’s enemy. It now behaves without them. Perhaps they were saying, well, if that is how you want to play it, this is where your Adam Smith’s logic takes you. Could be they were trolling when they called it the Dead Hand. (Dead hand also means an undesirable and persisting influence, which it is also.)

But there were other theories of the origin of the human species and it took thinkers who were outside the shadow of Adam Smith like women and communists to come up with them. Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski came up with symbiogenesis, the evolutionary theory that complex life came about because of a symbiosis of separate single-celled organisms. It takes symbiosis like the symbiosis of ectoparasites and sweetlips one step further and says that a whole new species can come out of the evolutionary dependence of two or more species. Darwin could not think like this because he was thinking too much Adam Smith.

In the 1960s Lynn Margulis, the microbiolo-gist, expanded on Mere-schkowski and revitalised his and the ideas of her predecessors like they were all the collective author (in this way she not only lectured symbiosis but also lived it). She argued with all the neo-Darwinists like omniscient god-denier Richard Dawkins, who gave her the condescending, goddess-invoking nickname science’s unruly earth mother.

Template:Clear

File:F0147-01.jpg.png

Eukaryotic life is organisms with larger cells that have a bounded nucleus and organelles. Prokaryotic life is organisms without a bounded nucleus and these are the most abundant life forms on Earth. All eukaryotic life has a symbiotic relationship with prokaryotic life – think bacteria in your stomach.

What Lynn Margulis said was that the emergence of eukaryotic cells billions of years ago happened because of symbiogenesis. That a prokaryote + a prokaryote in symbiosis = a eukaryote. That a prokaryote + a eukaryote = a more successful eukaryote. That a more successful eukaryote x 2 = multicellular life (us). That the image of the tree of life should be reimagined to include the inosculation of its branches.

Lynn Margulis was Carl Sagan’s first wife and they had two sons together. After her second divorce Lynn Margulis said ‘it is not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother and a first-class scientist, something has to go’, so it is not hard to imagine the kind of husband that Carl Sagan was. I think I have a girl-crush on Lynn Margulis.

On the Golden Records there is a sound piece that is like a load of firecrackers going off. It is a famous love story; Ann Druyan was thinking about how in love she was with Carl Sagan and now a token of their love floats for ever into the void with the Voyagers and will outlive us all. Carl Sagan volunteered her when it was suggested they put an electric reading of human brainwaves on the record. Then he called her up the night before the EEG to tell her he wanted to be with her, which was very coordinated of him. What is often missed out from this love story is that Ann Druyan had a boyfriend and Carl Sagan had a second wife, Linda Salzman; a forgotten and left-behind wife of history.

To rub it in a little bit further the couple were very public about their love token. Ann Druyan said, ‘For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death.’

Note: fear of death; immortalisation; conceptual colonising of Carl Sagan to usurp any future wife he may decide to have (our love will live for ever). They sent their love seed to pioneer into the absolute wilderness of deep, deep outer space, and it unravels this wilderness as it touches it. If Ted Kaczynski was thinking tactically he might have sent a letter bomb to Carl Sagan, who has maybe of all men ejaculated the very furthest.

Stan was not interested in any of this. I asked him if he had read White Fang. He said yes, he did not like that one as much. I pointed out that in White Fang, White Fang domesticated himself because he realised that hanging out with people was easier than living in the wild (symbiosis). Dogs live with humans for mutual aid too. There were obvious inconsistencies to Stan’s dog-lore logic.

The original bona fide Mountain Men were self-sufficient trapper/explorer types who lived alone in the North American wilderness. Their numbers were highest in the 1800s during the period of western expansion and homesteading and they were mainly found in the Rockies. They were drawn to the western wild by its virgin lands and the good old challenge to their manliness. They traded with the natives and often took native wives. This was pre-Jack London.

They are thought of as honourable and chivalrous loners with a high moral code. When the fur trade began to fail, owing to over-trapping and the silk trade, many Mountain Men had to get jobs as army scouts, guides and settlers, bringing the crowds of homesteaders into the wild land they had opened up through the Emigrant Trails they had established. They initiated the corrosion of their precious wilderness. A memory of Mountain Men still lingers in the portrait of the Real Modern American Man: resourceful, masculine, hardy, provider and free.

My driver Ron told me that the modern Mountain Men living on the frontiers now, in cabins standing on the wilderness, get annoyed at other wilderness stander-on-ers, but they make the money they need to live as Mountain Men by working a few months a year on the pipeline. Really it does not matter if the pipeline fucks the future eventually, as long as the Mountain Men can live their lives alone in a pristine wilderness. They rely on machines like guns and snowploughs. But they pride themselves on their otherwise completely and utterly and totally unadulterated independence.

Stan is what you might call an environmental chauvinist. Like he thinks it is his job to open the door for nature. And when he becomes the warden he will become the benevolent King of Denali. Stan is a Real Modern American Man. But if running into the wild is so often a wounded retreat from societal constraints and oppressions, then shouldn’t anyone but straight white men be doing it more?

BUT HE’S A HIPPY, HOW CAN HE ALSO BE A MISOGYNIST?

I have had to rein in the indignant feelings I have towards Stan because, as much as I hate to admit it, I need him. Maybe sometimes symbiosis is taken up reluctantly, calculatedly. I keep him sweet by acting dumb and playing up to his idea of himself. There are ways to have covert fun with him, though. For example, I had been thinking about all the parallels between him and Chris McCandless and about what Ron had said about that phenomenon. So I told Stan he reminded me of Chris McCandless.

‘Chris McCandless? Fucking Chris McCandless?’

‘The guy that died in the bus?’

‘I know who fucking Chris McCandless is. You think I could work in Denali and not know who Chris McCandless is? Why do you think I remind you of him?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Only slightly. Just, you know, coming to Alaska from the lower forty-eight and being all resourceful and everything?’

‘Chris McCandless was a suicidal idiot. A fucking greenhorn. Any true survivalist would have known to take a map and not go into the bush without knowledge. He died because of his own stupidity. And now his little cult wastes my uncle’s time, they waste Alaskan taxes, and the little piece of “wild” he went into is now a well-trodden mecca. Kids drown trying to cross the river to get there. Broken kids with stupid fantasies about how the wild will complete them.’

Stan is not even Alaskan. The main difference between Stan and Chris McCandless is that Stan has had the luck to not have died yet. I wonder what the Athabaskans and the Eskimos have to say about guys like Stan.

Stan is also a lesser Mountain Man; he is a wannabe. He lives in a house! Made from bricks! In a town! There is a post office! And a health centre! The ratio in his fridge of shop-bought convenience over foraged/killed is 9:1! There are degrees, and more evolved Mountain Men get points for living in a house they built themselves in a place where, if their appendix burst, they would die.

I have made a list and am sourcing equipment for my trip from the outdoors shops in the town. Stan saw my list and tutted and added some things to it and I let him explain the particular merit of these items to me. I have to nurture his ego because he found me a cabin and he said he will lend me a gun and not tell his uncle that I am out there without a permit. Part of me wonders why he wants to help me when he does not seem to like me. The fact seems to be that he revels so much in his superior authority that he will subject me to the challenge he imagines me so unfit for, sadistically, just to prove himself right. He seems to find me amusing. He wants to see me fail.

I need to make my pack as light as it can be so I will remove all unnecessary items and leave them at Stan’s, seeing as I have to come back to return the gun anyway. He is taking my things hostage as a kind of deposit on the gun.

REGRET IN RATS, ALTRUISM IN BONOBOS

Before casting out I had to begin neatening up all of my frayed edges in order to disengage smoothly. I have told my parents that I am going to volunteer on a community project in an Eskimo village with no phone signal or internet for a few weeks because I do not know how else to put it to them. I sent them a link to a website that organises such excursions to make it more believable.

Then I Skyped Larus to tell him bye for now and to vent some of my pent-up frustration at Stan, but he took things in a very different direction and now I wish I had not at all. He was worrying about how we had not spoken in a while again. Then he got all strange about why he thought that was.

Template:Clear

File:F0152-01.jpg.png

‘Does Sam not approve of our little chats? My girlfriend doesn’t like me talking to you so much either.’

It was the way he said this, like so nail-pickingly nonchalant as to be glaringly pointed. I suppose I realised the conversation was going to go one of two ways from there. I guess part of me had known without wanting to all along that this had been building, like a bird sidling over for crumbs so slowly you don’t even notice until, oh, it is there.

‘Your girlfriend?’

‘Yes, my American girlfriend Jose.’

I involuntarily said that he kept that one quiet.

‘I’m just surprised, that’s all. That we’ve been talking for so long and I didn’t know that about you.’

‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me.’

This made my legs twitch because I did not know what to do with myself. I turned off the webcam so he could not see me flapping my hands. Neither of us said anything for an uncomfortably long time. I was unsure how to navigate my way back out of it, before anything said became an answer I did not want to hear to a question I had not even asked.

‘She finds it strange that I talk so much to a girl young enough to be my daughter.’

Please stop talking. I could not think of anything to say. He waited, then carried on.

‘I explain to her that you’re a very interesting young lady and that I enjoy helping you with your project.’

I want to cry. I try to make light. From here, maybe, I could back-paddle. I ask if she knows I am a friend of Urla’s and pointedly call him Uncle Larus.

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s just weird, don’t you think?’

I don’t dare ask why some more. I tell him I have to go because Stan is on his way through the door. I tried to make it convincing but do not remember what I said. As he hangs up the camera freezes and lingers on his face for three seconds. His left eye, no, right for him, left for me, is half closed where he got caught off guard.

I realised that it had been instinct twinging all along whenever I thought of Urla, and the way she changed so totally when we were the three of us, and how she emailed less and less. I had ignored it because I was stubborn to prove that it did not have to be like that, that two people can span a gender gap and a generational gap and have a level of understanding without any funny business, like a kind of apprenticeship arrangement.

And how Sam had put it, giving me a look like ‘yeah, really’ when he asked what Larus had to do with anything. And I got pissed at him for insinuating that I was being stupid and naive and that a person I held to be a friend and mentor was not just that. And Larus doing the same of him, the two of them like male narwhals clashing their horns together, telepathically. And it is like that but grosser still because he is old enough to be my old dad or even almost my very young grandfather. I got annoyed at Sam for denying me platonic camaraderie in such a reductive way, but god, he was right after all.

And thinking of Sam and how I got angry at him, well, it makes my stomach flip and it also makes me squirm, like if I think of being back there and the last day and our plain shunning of each other I feel shit and I might have done a shit thing by behaving like that but so did he and I do not want to think about it, best really just to forget about it all. It’s not like we will ever see each other again anyway.

And I am trying hard not to but if I do think about it, I can’t quite get my head around why it got so suddenly weird. It was after he tried to get me to stay and I did not because of course I had to carry on. As though he was hurt that I wanted to leave and carry on without him.

Left behind during the Apollo missions were all of the astronauts’ wives and children. This is perhaps more significant during the Apollo missions than on modern-day missions because they were so rushed what with the race on, all the nationalistic pressure, and so much could go wrong so easily. So the wives left behind had to go to lift-off with all their children in tow and smile for the media cameras and wave and say WE ARE PROUD, THRILLED AND HAPPY and watch their husbands and their children’s fathers and their monetary means of living shoot up into the sky in a hunk of aluminium and disappear into a dimension they might not have even been completely sure existed, maybe thought of in a very abstract way like my mum does.

And if I had been an Apollo wife I would probably have thought fuck you in a lot of ways. Fuck you, husband, for wanting to risk giving up on our marriage bed and the beautiful faces of our children and my great cooking and our cosy life and our vows to stay together and try to see out this one life to its fullest, for some idea of eternal glory, and yeah, you will be remembered for all of history but the most you will remember of me is how I stopped sleeping at night and started getting craggy and how you eventually left me for a young fan girl and I had to spend the rest of the one life I have on this planet angry at another planet for taking you away. And maybe I would have liked to have gone up there with you too but I was just not allowed and on some level I am just jealous that you get the chance to abandon it all and be seen as a selfless hero and not a selfish egomaniac, and I do not, will not ever, I have to stay here and dress all our children for school.

Most of the marriages of the moonwalkers did not last through the strain of fame and affairs and, probably, some feeling of comedown on the part of the astronauts, a feeling of life having peaked and all nuclear-family-life-events paled in comparison; the births and the first words and the graduations and the first grandchildren, all the prototypical life-milestones. You would think they could have sent up bachelors to be fair to all the future absent-fathered children, but of course the astronauts had to be role models, they had to be figureheads of nice productive nuclear families. Even if there were other more suitable candidates (single and childless females included).

So not to say that Sam is like my sore wife but that maybe in a very small way, on a very micro level, he felt a similar kind of anger-at-abandonment. And I get that. But historically it is women that have to deal with chronic desertion (I see you, Linda Salzman) and this is exactly what I am working against so Sam can just deal with it. I am doing this for all the bitter left-behind wives of history! (Close relatives of the commonly found dragged-around woman.)

Online a little envelope flashed at me from him. Maybe I miss him and maybe I wish he had made an effort to come with me or something but ha-ha! that would not do. He did not take me seriously. Neither does Stan and even Larus didn’t in the end, all that interest just feigned for an interest in something else. But it is my whole reason for being right now. And if I get disheartened then they all win and I let down all of the left-behind wives of history.

ATLAS SHRUGGED

The more I think about the deal with Larus the more frustrated I get and the less I blame myself. I had come to see us as a kind of master and student, this is a well-established trope, and none of those guys ever had problems with sexual dynamics. Like Plato and Socrates, Harry and Dumbledore, Yoda and Skywalker. I thought Larus was in on this too.

I can’t tell if I am noticing weirdness in retrospect because I am on to him or if I am seeing things where they were not because he has taken on a new face for me. Sigmund Freud, the phallusobsessed psychoanalyst, said people cannot hear or see things that do not fit with the way they see the world or themselves. Anyway, it is going to make this disappearing into the wilderness thing all the more easy to throw myself into.

The park centre that Stan works in is Denali National Park, and within it is the Denali Wilderness Area. At the far north-east corner of this is the trail that McCandless took and where the bus he died in still is now, actually on the border of parklands. I will not be anywhere near it but it is strange to think of it existing across the tundra from where I plan to stay. As much as Stan despises him I feel a bit of a kinship with him. Like we are both allied idealists. We differ on a lot of things; for example, I will not be sending out overdramatic maybe-forever-goodbyes by postcard and phone call. I have not even told my parents what I am going to be doing because I know it would worry them sick. I do not intend to be stupid with my life either but I have read my Thoreau too, well, some anyway, and I get what McCandless was trying to find by going out there. It was a claiming of autonomy and a rite of passage that I want to go through too and I bet he died happy doing it.

The area I will go to is trail-less. I can get a lift to the visitors’ centre with Stan, where I can catch a bus to drop me on the road that leads through the park. Then I can hike out from the road for a long day and hopefully arrive at the cabin that Stan has earmarked on the map for me by late evening.

Part of me says you can’t trust Stan not to tell and another part says you can trust his obsession to see how far you can be pushed, to see you fail and a small part of me says is this a girlfriend test and if I pass I become worthy in his eyes of his tolerance which for him equates to kinship? If so, gross.

When he dropped me he said, ‘So I’ll see you in around three days’ time, then,’ grinning in a way that was almost flirty. I laughed sweetly and he said, ‘No, really, what’s the limit past which if you haven’t turned up on my doorstep to bring the gun back I send the search parties out after you?’

‘Five weeks, please.’

‘Okay, so honestly, why are you doing this? Did something bad happen to you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, usually that’s why people do things like this, they are running away.’

‘Why do you go camping, Stan? Did something bad happen to you?’

‘No.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But like, you don’t even come from a place that would prepare you for this. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’

‘I thought you said you came from Florida?’

‘You know bears in Denali maul twenty people to death every year, right?’

Then I smiled at him and passed him my Collected Works of Jack London with all of the feminist and socialist stories and passages earmarked and annotated for his consideration. I know he is lying about the bear statistic because I already looked it up.

What happened to me? Nothing. I think that that is the point. I need to experience something visceral to placate the hunger. And I am sick of the men that want to keep it from me. Maybe you could say patriarchy happened to me. So like a dog cast out into the rain maybe I do leave, to go cry myself a big fat fucking two-hearted river. To sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!

Template:Anchor INTO THE WILDNESS

GOING FERAL

She stood out vivid and present in the temperature-controlled half-light of her glass coffin, upright and at full human stature, her cloak hung to give the impression of a human figure underneath. She radiated epiphany. She filled the room with a smell like the seal-fur blankets Naaja’s mother gave us and an undertone of perhaps honey. It was strangely familiar and pleasant, not at all sickly. Her staff with the two-pronged antlers, still velvety with fur, sashed to it. On little fronds she had tiny bird skulls and shells. If she weren’t so very still they would click together like a cartoon skeleton falling to pieces. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.

In the park centre where I waited for the bus, there were displays on the natural and cultural history of the park. I floated around the room; there was movement from nothing but me. Time had stopped, looking exactly about to happen. There were irides-cent wings clamped open, feigning flight, above italicised names I could not get my tongue around. There were eyes, but we had taken the real ones out to put glass ones in and they stared from inside mounted skins, on placarded walls, from under glass domes, contorted majestically on rocks, on wooden plates, in awkward glory. There were tiny mottled eggs in counterfeit nests that looked as though they were about to burst out into life. And there were Dall sheep horns, a grizzly’s paw pad, skulls which though dry had all once held tiny brains, capillaries and veins.

There were artefacts of the original human inhabitants too: Athabaskan shawls, pipes and pottery. A model of a traditional toboggan and a crusty, worn dog harness. Grainy photographs of vacant-looking Eskimo men and women stood limpidly side by side with priests in robes. The plaque said missionaries won their trust with magical gifts of tobacco and medicine.

Prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries to the New World, indigenous religion was animistic, comprised of a worldview where humans are part of an on-going spiritual interchange between all manifestations of organic matter, often including the inanimate matter of the elements. A shaman was a human who was a seer into the spirit world.

Both men and women could be shamans, but many of the shamans were of female form as the idea of creation was sacred and bestowed to the feminine. However men could also have ‘feminine’ attributes. Gender was considered fluid, and there were thought to be at least four genders approximately: masculine men, feminine men, masculine women and feminine women. People who embodied the two opposites were known as Twospirit People.

In the rest of the world Eskimo is a pejorative term and Inuit is preferred instead, but in Alaska the Eskimos prefer to be called Eskimos. There was a poster, a kind of family tree of the Alaskan indigenous peoples. Eskimo and Inuit are both the collective terms for distinct but similar cultures like the Yupik and Inupiat. Other natives of Alaska of separate cultures mostly distinguished by language are the Athabaskans, Aleuts, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian.

Template:Clear

File:F0162-01.jpg.png

The distinctions are complicated because there are overlaps between the different cultures, and although they are distinguished by language, some of the languages are maybe not entirely separate languages. And why would the indigenous people care about absolutely distinguishing cultures if souls can transmigrate to rocks, are forever in animal-mineral-plant continuum?

On the 9 a.m. bus into the park, before disembarking, I kept my eyes porous out of the window, funnelling it all in. There were just two other people on the bus, a pair of middle-aged day hikers, and I could feel them staring at the gun leant against my seat while I jotted in my notebook.

I was waiting for the mountains to begin on the left and the treeline, which I knew to be mile 52 of the Park Road and the calculated point of my disembarkation.

The scenery flickered. It was gradual, like well-thought build-up in a feel-good coming-of-age story about a girl like me getting close to something sought. It was layer on layer. Each breaching hill might have been the one to reveal the mountains like a shroud, ghostly, slipping down. Each pre-emptive revealing was excited pressure hoarded.

Finally they were there. Mountains as turnstiles, thresholds to becomings. What do these ones mark? The ground crawled meekly to them, green and a blemished kind of red like blood soaked into moss, up and up until it rendered at rusty brown and rocky tips. Behind, another sort of brown, and behind still grey and white-capped. Each row of mountains was coloured a little differently. Layered and assembled like a collage, foreground in green. But no background of sky, instead clouds that hung and panelled forward as an overlay, disturbing the order of the layers. The mountains encroached into the sky, a challenge to its separateness.

I do not remember stepping off the bus, in a way that slightly alarms. But I do remember the light and colour: dappled impressions of moss and blood. Like Monet. Up close and in cardinal parts, tiny flowers and perfect tiny tear-shaped leaves of purple. Tiny but integral parts of a bigger whole. Micro/macro and indivisible. The timid parts actually prettier, like my own lone small journey to me. At the same time whole and partial, sublime and obscure but sentimental.

A couple of hours after disembarking from the bus and I am caught. Until that point I had been plodding along absent but receptive. Then it hits me very suddenly as I stop to drink some water from my bottle and sit on my haunches and look up at the sky, where a huge bloody eagle of some kind is wheeling about. This is it. This is everything. This is my moonwalk.

After the Apollo missions lots of the astronauts would talk about a similar sudden awareness of self. After giving all their concentration to lift-off and getting up there without exploding and feeling tense and so overridden by adrenaline that they were not even that aware of where they were and what they were doing, so that when it did hit them the feeling was potent and alarming. Others never experienced the feeling because they did not ever stop putting all their resources into the functionality of the mission. Many of the Apollo astronauts experienced their time in space not as selves but as detached scientists.

The tundra is always whistling and it is very empty. I have enough freeze-dried food as base rations to sustain me with hunted stuff for four weeks – the ecologist Aldo Leopold said that three is enough time to get to grips with real solitude and become truly immersed in wilderness. To get into the rhythms of it. Technically past two is classed as ‘settling’ rather than a camping trip and is against park regulations, but I have it from Stan that no one will notice. Stan showed me how to use a radio like the one that would be in the cabin to get in touch if I need him. He has one back in his house for when nobody is in the warden’s office.

It took me around nine hours’ marching with only a slight deviation. Stan told me, ‘If you hit the river where it leaves the forest then you are too far north,’ but I couldn’t see the river and had to just hope that this was because I was south of it. I was.

The cabin is everything I dreamed it would be. When I finally saw it from across the tundra I yelped and felt proud of my own tenacity. It is sat just left of some evergreens and looks out onto the tundra. There is an empty smokehouse outside and a tiny toilet shed, a collapsed and moss-covered pile of logs, and a broken pair of skis. Inside there is a mounted fox head, a row of gun mounts, where I have mounted Stan’s gun, some pots, a canvas cot, a fire grate, the radio on a desk with a chair and the supplies I bought. When I move about and unsettle the dust that is uniform and thick I have a sneezing fit. I fitted the radio with the batteries I bought first thing, but I turned it off this evening and intend to keep it so.

Of course, I also brought loads of books to the woods from a bookshop in town, a pile of the canonical texts on wilderness to help me decipher it. I have some Thoreau, Emerson, Hemingway, the Unabomber and a biographical book about various young male runaways. A heavy but a necessary burden. When Jack London went to the Klondike he read Origin of the Species (which explains a lot) and Paradise Lost.

Stan didn’t show me how to shoot the gun and I obviously did not ask. I have looked it over and it is pretty similar to a rifle I used to shoot with an ex-boyfriend whose family liked hunting. He used to say he was sad about hurting all the animals, and that was why he would just be the scarer that ran into the grass to get the pheasants up. The real reason was he was a terrible shot; he just didn’t want to say it to me because he was sore that I could shoot better than him. I would not shoot animals, mind, we just used to practise on targets in a field behind his house.

I am the only human being for miles around as far as I am aware. At least, that is what I was told by the bus driver, who thinks I am a day hiker too and was concerned enough for my welfare as it was that I did not correct him. He told me to look out for reindeer, caribou, foxes, pine martens, hares, wolves, wildcats and bears. Most are technically edible but I only fancy the smaller things. I have seen Bear Grylls killing and gutting many large animals and it always seems so unnecessary and superfluous. I mean, Bear Grylls obviously eats bears, that is where he gets his name from, right? He eats bears because it is essential to his identity as a born survivor. If he did not eat bears he would not have a job. I am only killing for one and I am only small. I think a hare a week will be more than enough to sustain me with the freeze-dried stuff.

Is it cheating to bring the ‘just add water’ survival packs? I had to really think about this before coming out. If I did not have them I would have to hunt for all my food. But people who do this kind of thing always bring supplies. Ernest Hemingway, writer of manly short sentences, took canned pork and beans. Inuits have supplies in the way of preserved foods. Modern Mountain Men buy sacks of pinto beans from Fairbanks. And if bringing supplies was cheating, maybe I should not really have technology like a gun or a radio. And that would not be survival technique, but a probable death-experiment. This thing, this authenticity, how close can you get to it? How pure can it be?

I also would not be able to make the video diary, which would undermine the entire point of the trip. The diary might seem a bit false, might add an inverted voyeurism so that it is really like I have company out here, but I don’t really know how to avoid this. When Bear Grylls cut open a camel to demonstrate how to sleep inside it I doubt if he actually stayed in there all night, snug in his authenticity, with his cameraman asleep in a tent pitched next to him.

How do you really front the essential facts of life authentically? Probably it is not even possible in our time of saturation. I can only try my best. Maybe writing is less inauthentic than the audience of a camera. But even then I am writing to be read, so again the ‘solitude’ is tainted by the inverse voyeurism. Go tell that to Thoreau and Heidegger and the Unabomber.

THE BEARD AND THE GUNS AND THE

LITTLE SHORT SENTENcES

I went for a walk around yesterday to get to grips with the area in order to draw my first rough map. I had taken for granted that it would be easy to find something to eat, but after a few hours it started getting dark so I had to head back without finding anything (I did find a water source, though, a spring that is only a ten-minute walk from the hut but took me hours to find). It is difficult because I spent a lot of time singing to myself so that the bears would hear me coming and keep out of the way but that also scares away the food. When I got back I settled into the hut, arranged all my blankets on the cot, and got a little fire going in the fire grate.

I tried for about fifteen minutes, rubbing sticks together, then gave up and used the gas lighter, and cooked some instant noodles. I did feel kind of fraudulent with my lighter and my sachet of flavour, but if it is good enough for Hemingway then it is good enough for me. I sat and watched the noodles bubble, then I sat and watched them cool as I fed Stan’s map to the flames in the grate, watching it curl to cinder. With it gone a pressure released; like McCandless I am alone, it is again a wilderness to me, the places I had not seen yet still to be discovered. Like vaporising Voyager 1 out of the sky with a laser beam, zap!

Today I tried again, but I headed out first thing in the morning to give myself plenty of time, thinking immaqa. I was awake for most of the night anyway. I had not given any thought to how it would feel the first night and alone. There was too much sound to sleep, sound I could not place, the cabin being saggy with age. Mostly I stayed awake because I had a feeling like something was about to happen, or like it had happened and I had not yet put my finger on it. Like everything for a while had been hyperreal sets and stage props but now I was in real real-life, everything with a shining core. It was so bright I could not sleep for it. It was not danger and I would not say I was scared. Just very, very awake.

Tips for being not-scared at night:

– Always sleep in tight corners facing outwards, towards the door

– Fill a rubber hot-water bottle with boiling water and curl around it like it is a live, heat-giving companion

– Hum songs to trick yourself into feeling calm

– Think of the cabin as a living guardian, then its creaks and groans will comfort not unnerve you. It affords you shelter. It is your best friend

– If you hear an alarming noise, imagine it over and over again until it no longer alarms you

– If you are still alarmed, try being just as alarming. Go outside and confront everything. Yell at it all. Send any wild animals scurrying into the night. Look at it a while, to convince yourself it is still and unthreatening

I went out as soon as the sun was up enough. I did not do any of the singing this time so that I could go in stealth. First thing I came across apart from the things that ran away before I could see them was a caribou. She was standing behind a tree just ahead of me and had not noticed me, but as soon as I saw her I stopped and must have drawn in breath or something because she looked right at me. She stood there looking at me and kind of puffing cold air out and looking nervous. I thought about shooting her and just living off her for the whole four weeks so that I only had the guilt of one soul on my conscience. But then she stepped forward slowly and her little baby stepped out from behind the tree after her and I was shaking so bad I do not think I would have hit her anyway. They both trotted away and the baby tripped a bit in panic and I had to sit down for a whole minute to stop the shaking.

After I had been out for a good five hours, although I could not really say because I don’t have a way of telling the time apart from on the laptop, and the sun moves at a pace I am still not accustomed to, I started feeling tired, hungry and irritable and began to carry the gun less half-heartedly so that I could just go ahead and shoot the next thing I saw. I wound myself up being all stealthy and peeking round the trees and jumping out, when I saw something dark move just ahead. I shot it before I even had time to worry.

I had not accounted for how loud the shot would be in the still air, how much the force would shock me backwards, how the jolt would hurt my shoulder. After the shot everything seemed to go really quiet, all the birds shut up as though they thought they might be next, and I ran over to where the thing was and got on my hands and knees by it. I was amazed to have even hit it because I had been knocked off balance by the force, and because I had only been half-truthing when I told Stan and the bus driver that I knew how to use it. It was very dead, which I was glad about, I did not want to see it half dead, twitching or whimpering.

I had never killed a thing before and had made a pact with myself to be stoic about it, not to drop the gun and stare at my hands in horror, all ‘what have I done?’ But as much as I wanted to make it a point of pride not to cry, because a Mountain Man would not cry, certainly, I cry very easily so of course I burst into tears.

When you are a young child you cry for yourself, you cry for the attention of your parents. Growing up is feeling for the first time for the outside world, it is evolving out of your juvenile solipsism (if you are a girl anyway). I remember the moment it happened to me for the first time clearly. It was when the Columbia rocket blew to pieces over Texas on re-entry.

It was a really sunny afternoon in England. I was in the car, sat in the back behind Dad, so it must have been a weekend because I was school age. They announced it on the radio. The radio presenter’s voice was all choked up. I looked up at the bright blue sky, where there was an airplane making candyfloss trails, and I cried. They played David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ on the radio and I felt like I was mourning the Columbia rocket with the whole of the rest of humanity. I remember my dad’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. As I remember it he looked moved, misty-eyed, to see his young daughter cry for the first time at something so outside herself.

So girls as a very general demographic cry more. Maybe you can say this is weak. Or maybe you can say that it takes a lot of strength to admit you feel so much all of the bloody time. Like how our pain threshold is higher from tidal womb pain.

I recognised it from my fauna and flora book as a large snowshoe hare, its blood all stark on its side and in a little pool beside it. It was pale brown and looked paler in a different way, from its loss of animation. My impulse was to cover it with dirt and leave it be. It affected me greatly to think that the blood had been making its way to its heart moments before and now it was outside it, going sticky.

I felt myself shaking, like all my feelings had turned to energy, buzzing around my body instead of turning into something I could understand. It felt like that with no causal link. Before there was a brown hare and now there is this corporeal object. The object is still and cold and looks like a hare, but different.

What is a thing? Is it a different thing without the essence that makes it what it is? Is an essence a soul? Before it was a hare and now it is a body and soon to be a piece of meat. This is why I have to do this thing that I am apparently going to find very disturbing. I need to know that I have it in me to live by acknowledging that I am living where living = not dead. And again for that intangible thing this authenticity, for the documentary.

Back at Stan’s I shot a video of him skinning, and I have it to watch back on the laptop. He said something snide about it but I really do not see the problem. I have never known how to do it because I have never lived in a place where I have had to learn, and it annoyed me that he was being smug when I was trying to rectify this.

The first thing to do (I will gladly be the oracle because I believe in communal knowledge) is to squeeze the animal’s bladder area, for obvious reasons. Then you make a little V shape at the top of the breast to get the knife under the skin, and you cut right down its belly. When this opens up all the bits are just there like you have unzipped a purse full of guts. I have only gutted fish before and it made me feel unusual. I was expecting lots of blood to spurt out and it all to be chaos and mess but it is not at all. You let a little blood out then it is neat, as if the hare was made just for you to eat it.

When the belly is open you just pull the guts out by running two fingers from top to bottom, which is a very odd sensation, and I don’t think I will be able to get the smell off my fingers for days. Then you take off the legs and head; without a meat cleaver not as easy as Stan made it seem. After that you take off the skin, disconcertingly easy, just like pulling a tight sock off apart from a few places that have to be picked apart with the knife.

You are left with a naked, headless, pawless thing, which then needs the remaining entrails taken out, including the duct the poo goes through, which made me feel kind of embarrassed for the hare. I did make a bit of a mess of things but still did well for a first time, I think. I cut it into three pieces, two to keep inside the Tupperware box covered in the salt I brought, and the other to boil tonight then take off the bone and eat with some form of vacuum-packed carbohydrate. I made a fire pit for the guts and set them on fire because that is how you make sure the bears do not smell them.

I had to stop myself from using up too much of the antibacterial hand rub to get rid of the death smell on my hands. I am going out to get some firewood and then I will cook and after some reading I will be very ready for bed, I am exhausted after not sleeping last night. I feel very resourceful. Like a bird must feel when it settles into its nest that it built with its own beak and claws. Birds must be capable of feelings of sorts. When a little bird settles down into its self-built nest and fluffs up its feathers and burrows into its own neck, it is the very image of immense satisfaction.

MORE SPACE WHERE NOBODY IS THAN WHERE ANYBODY IS

My plan is to make my map over four days. I already have my rough diagram but need to walk to each place to hone it and add finer details, like where is good for a lookout, or somewhere to maybe practise trapping. I want it to cover the area I am likely to use on a regular day so I will walk for half a day then turn back on myself. On day one I will head north, on day two east, and so on. I think I can walk about twenty miles in a very long day, so the map should cover approximately ten miles in radius from the hut at the centre.

Stan criticised Chris McCandless for the fact that he did not have an official map. If he had had an official map he would have seen that just downriver from where he could not make his crossing back to civilisation because of floodwater and subsequently ate the potato that killed him, there was a pulley system for transporting things and people across safely. But if Chris McCandless had had an official map, it would not have been his wilderness and he might as well have died anyway.

I am not in danger of that because I know exactly how to get back to the road to get the bus back to the visitors’ centre, and I also have radio contact if I want to turn the thing back on. It would not take them long to find the cabin if they needed to, because they know I was headed out without camping gear. I am conceptually isolated and alone, but in trouble I could radio Stan for help. Although I had thought about going further in and leaving the radio behind, finding somewhere else to sleep. With each day I feel a little more certain that Stan will try to rescue me. Actually I am thinking about it a lot.

South of the hut the forest becomes dense and backs all the way to where the mountains start, in the south and arcing west. In the lower foothills the trees stop growing from the altitude, then just behind the mountains rise higher and are sooty black with stripes of white where the meagre snow is. Further behind still somewhere is Denali, the highest point in North America.

Mount Denali was until very recently named Mount McKinley, and is still called that by some bitter Ohioans. It was called Denali from the Koyukon-Athabaskan Deenaalee, which means ‘the high one’. The Russians, when they owned Alaska, called it Bolshaya Gora, which means ‘big mountain’. Then an American gold prospector came along and called it McKinley, which means ‘President William McKinley’, bequeathed in a curious naming ritual used by colonising white men whereby the conquered entity is named after the conqueror or an adulated public figure.

The gold prospector called the mountain McKinley because William McKinley was a proponent of the gold standard and the prospector wanted to get one over on the silver miners, who wanted the president to be William Jennings Bryan, the proponent of the silver standard.

Then President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist called Leon Czolgosz because he was the ‘president of the money kings’ willing to exploit the poor to benefit the rich. So the name got officially etched into all of the maps in President William McKinley’s memory by the American government in 1917.

Years and years and they will not stop arguing about it because for America Alaska is still very much in the process of construction. Alaskans want the name to be Denali from Deenaalee, maybe mostly because they do not want to be out-Alaskaned by the Ohioans, who keep blocking the change because McKinley came from Ohio and they want their namesake on the biggest mountain in North America. In real life in Alaska people mostly just call it Denali. The Athabaskans never stopped calling it Deenaalee and maybe do not know what all the fuss is about, because they did not draw maps.

In 2015 President Barack Obama officially finally changed the name to Denali to show honour, respect and gratitude to the Athabaskan-speaking people (as if naming is owning and he was giving it back). Donald Trump declared this ‘an insult to Ohio’ and vowed to change it back, so let’s see how long that lasts. Does an orca care if it gets shunted from one entire species to a separate species dependent on how it hunts (which is what Larus said may be the case)? Probably the Athabaskans just shrug and say you do what you want, we are going to just carry on calling it Deenaalee under your shouting chins. The orcas say yeah, whatever, we are just going to carry on swimming and flipping seals or not flipping seals.

The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.

From where the tundra and taiga meet you see right across to the east, but you do not see the road because it is too far. The sky was very blue and clouds dragged shadows over the tundra, dimming the glare of the lake.

In the forest I worried about getting lost, but heading due south-west by the compass, towards the steeper foothills, I stayed on track fine. In this area the trees were dense. This route leads to a perfect fishing spot, where the stream is shallow enough to cross and brimming with fish. I headed further on past this in order to get to the foothills because I wanted to climb past the timberline to get a better look. The ground started to slope and the trees thinned so that I had a slight vantage, and I could see what I took to be a radio mast just a mile or so away in the east. I headed there instead for no reason other than that it intrigued me.

The radio mast is really a fire tower. The foliage around it is thick overhead, and after going back into the thicker trees I could not really get a view of it until I was almost directly underneath. There was a little clearing, and when I came into it the sudden view of the tower shocked me. A radio mast was benign in my mind but a watchtower reeked too much of people. It isn’t that I am hermitised already, just that I do not want to lose this game I am playing with myself so soon.

I hid back in the trees, where I was sure I could not be seen from above, and hunkered down to watch for movement in the lookout at the top. In real-life terms, I was also concerned that a park warden might ask to see my permit. Stan gave a resident permit from lost property to me, which he advised me to leave in my hut on the days I went out; that way if anyone dropped by they would leave me be thinking I was ‘P. S. Aldridge’. He did not actually explain what I should do if I met a warden while I was out, he just told me that where I was going was so far away and off-trail I would not meet one at all.

I stayed still, hunkered and watching for a good ten minutes. The tower was rusted and wind-battered. As I watched it, it gradually changed its appearance, began to seem hollower as its potential to expose me withered. But then the fire-watcher could just be sat where I could not see them, reading or sleeping or watching for fires. I decided the only way to know was to yell up. I would yell like some kind of animal from inside the trees and see if anything changed.

I yelled stupidly. Only crows noticed, lifting off from the tops of the trees and cawing at me because they were annoyed at themselves for startling so easily. Then I felt less stupid. Nobody came to the window.

At the base of the tower, with my foot on the ladder, I shouted up again just to make sure. This time, in a human voice, I asked hello? Nothing. The steps were made of sheet metal, like the steps to a lifeguard’s chair, and were rickety. They wound around the four legs of the tower in an angular spiral.

Towards the top the tower groaned against the slow wind. I came into the lookout through a trapdoor. The floor was coated with a coarse gristly dust, prints left where it came away on my hands. Apart from my marks it was print-less. Nobody had been up there for a very long time. I clambered inside and crawled to sit with my back to a wall.

There was nothing inside and the glass in the windows was grimy. I looked around for a sign for when there was last a person in there. The dust was felt-like on the floor. Light came up through the boards, rendering all my movements gold-dusty and ethereal.

I had the thought to maybe check the walls for some kind of graffiti. I imagine they turn up all over the place in spaces like this. There were two; they read:

Johnston Wills, 1952

P Harris, 1999

If I had not found them I could have been the first person to set foot in there since whenever I wanted to imagine. Maybe not objectively, but that would not have mattered. Like how a scientific discovery is a discovery until a new discovery is made that refutes the original one, like how Denali stays Deenaalee to the isolated Athabaskans, who choose not to read maps. Really in this way no one ever discovers anything, they only invent things (we invented nuclear bombs but we say we discovered them because that sounds less evil). I could have invented this place as an unpeopled wilderness for myself. I sat down cross-legged and looked at them and wondered if maybe P Harris had thought the same. Maybe he wrote his name in defiance: you can’t have this place all to yourself, Johnston Wills.

Then I remembered the rock in the Greenlandic tundra that stood to hold me and Urla and Naaja until enough rain, time and rock plants had eroded our names. I wondered what they were both doing right then. If Urla had really thought Larus and I were close in the wrong way, if he let her think that, if she hated me.

If I came back with supplies I could camp out in the tower for a few days. I did not want to cook any food and use the portable propane so soon, so I would have to bring it already cooked and cold. I only have one kind of container for bringing it so I could do maybe two nights if I filled the tub, before I got hungry again. I was brain tired, and my legs ached, and it felt safe to be so high up off the ground, rocking gently, a bird in a tree. I thought of all the canopy creatures; bees in hives, pine martens in tree hollows, porcupine sat in branches, everyone safely elevated from the prowlers, a hovering biome. I felt a comfort like fellowship, and decided to stay put until the morning.

HEROES FOR A GIRL SCOUT

In my dream I am sat at the bottom of the mighty Mekong river talking to a giant catfish, who tells me he is one hundred years old. His eyes and scales are the same dirt-brown as the river, like over time the dirt that settled on him crawled underneath his skin and became his skin. His voice sounds like bubbling custard. All the dead men that fell in the water in the Vietnam War had sheened themselves with DDT to keep mosquitoes away. Agent Orange collected in the waters and the soil and the bodies of the living things.

The bodies got eaten by the little fish, bigger fish ate the little fish, the catfish ate the bigger fish, all the DDT and Agent Orange from all their livers built up and up in the liver of the catfish. Now the catfish is poison. A hook and line plop and sink into the brown river to where I sit with the catfish. He takes the hook in his crêpe-like fin and pops it through his blubbery lip. Above, a little Vietnamese boy reels in his dinner.

I was sleeping deeply and was jerked quite suddenly awake by a strange, long noise. A bell. I shook all over and my teeth clanked from panic. I imagined looking over the spruces like a crow sees them, stretching on and on, an unbroken sea of green and dark shadows. And then the tower.

A bell needed somebody to ring it. From a vantage of anywhere over the forest, from the ridge or the semicircle of higher ground from the north, you need not be a crow. Had I lit the tower up like a beacon when I used the torch? Somebody had rung a bell.

I sat up when it came again, peeling away on the wind. It sounded distorted this time. Then right away, it came again. Only this time it sounded nothing like I thought it at all. It was unmistakable: a mournful warble as timeless and familiar as the pentatonic scale.

I grabbed the camera and scrambled to open up the window and look down into the dimly visible clearing. It was empty but the wolves were near. The howl had come so clear, and besides I could feel them. The forest was heavy with anticipation, the spires of the evergreens whispering like a crowd as the lights dim.

The howl came again, and it went right through me, could have been in the tower. It made my whole body shudder in a way that made me grin; a tingle of pseudo-fear like looking down from an airplane. My hackles raised of their own accord. Into the clearing came a dark shape, one, two, three, and then a white one, then one more black. They fanned around the base of the tower with their noses to the ground. I could hear an excited kind of whimpering.

Wolves are an animal I can trust. Their packs are hierarchical, but they are spearheaded by a male and female breeding pair, who rule together in equality. Wolf Wives are absent from The Call of the Wild. Two she-dogs are friendly so get killed, and the only strong female sled dog – Dolly – goes mad and has her head smashed in. Mercedes, the sole female human character in the book, spends her cameo crying and complaining. This has left a lasting impression on men-who-think-like-dogs like Stan.

For a moment of delicious fear I toyed with the vision of the wolves staying put and waiting for me. Sitting on their haunches and looking up at the tower with hungry eyes.

But they did not look up. One of them cocked his leg to the tower then yelped, and they filed away quickly into the trees with such a purpose I knew I would not see them again that night.

THE TIMESCALES OF HUMMINGBIRDS

When I returned to the cabin I was glad to find everything as I left it. My permit was in the exact same place on the desk, so I am pretty sure nobody came by. I will go back to camp in the tower at some other point but I need some proper food and my mosquito net. Stan was smug when he added it to my list and I had thought it an arbitrary appendage to make him feel like he had had one on me. I have to give him credit now as actually I would have been fucked without it. In the tower so high up they were not so bad, but in the cabin and outside on evenings they come in swarms. I can slap my arm and kill four at one time. I feel a little bad doing this because I know that only female mosquitoes bite and they have to do it to get enough iron and protein to make their eggs. They are only trying to feed their babies, just like everything is trying to feed its babies.

I decided to try fishing as I figured it would affect me a lot less than shooting a thing dead. I had bought some fishing line and hooks in Fairbanks, and for the rest I found a sturdy stick as my rod and tied the line to the end, where it splayed, so I could attach it around the adjoining part to make it more secure. I made the line long enough so that I could yank it out the water fast, but with no reel I can only use it in relatively shallow water.

I was stumped for a float until I remembered a redundant tampon at the bottom of my bag that I’d brought just in case I lost my Mooncup. It was still sealed with all the air in so it worked a dream. I attached this to the middle of the line before tying the hook to the end with a little ribbon of foil from a noodle packet just above it to act as the little fish-attracter thing. Then I upturned a log and collected myself some grubs and worms for bait in a rusty tin can.

I found salmonberries (they look a little like raspberries, more seedy and juicy) and harvested as many as I could carry inside a clean sock. Along the way I managed to find lots of dandelion leaves that I washed in a stream and nibbled. There was also a plant I came across that looked like the plant the pamphlet called goosetongue, but it warned that it also looks like arrowgrass, which is poisonous. I have learned enough from Chris McCandless to know that eating anything I was not sure of would be a no-no, but it felt wholesome to be learning the things by their names just to look at and touch, their tactile truth.

Although to be fair to McCandless it does not seem he confused a lethal plant for another, it was just his own fauna and flora book did not tell him that this certain potato he was always eating actually contained lethal toxins. It was a taxonomical failing and not ignorance that killed him, as I said to Stan.

The course of the stream widens out where another joins it. The water runs clear and shallow; underneath it you can see the shadows of the fish holding themselves against the current. They hold then dart away suddenly for reasons kept from you by the mirage-making surface. I watched one fish that seemed to enjoy holding itself against the exact point where the two waters met and did not move from this meditative state for a whole fifteen minutes. Do fish feel meditative? Without awareness, just some primitive state of tranquillity?

I set up the rod to dip into the water where shadow from the trees hung over. The forest was awake to me and gave its alarm call. I made sure the rod was wedged into the ground firmly and rested my leg against it so I could feel any movement. It is like all my senses are intensified, sounds are so loud they make me jumpy and my body reacts nervously to the slightest movement. I feel like an acrobat, every body part accountable for something.

After not too much time the birds took up their usual quarrels with each other and ignored me, and the sound came thick from the trees. For some time I lay on my side with my ear to the cool, damp ground. I could feel how far down the layers of earth went below me like vertigo, with soil and crust and mantle, lithosphere and asthenosphere, all the way down to the fiery nut of the earth. I could almost hear it, a mellow, churning grumble.

You can’t feel that in a built-up place. In a built-up place the ground is thick with artificiality. In a place that has been built and rebuilt many times over, old towns fallen, redeveloped, retarmacked, returfed, that turf in ready cylinders like grass-and-soil Swiss rolls rolled out, plastered new again and again; it feels too structured to feel dizzying. This is a part of the reason I like my lime quarry so much. All its layers. At the lime quarry the earth is bare and cut open like a quiche and inside the quarry you can feel closer to the heart of the earth, like touching the pit of someone else’s scar.

Template:Clear

File:F0180-01.jpg.png

The tundra is so big and open that animals are exposed everywhere, so they keep one eye on me warily, but go about doing their thing as I walk on past. How crawling with life the rough grasses are. Hares rush around and stand sentry, ground squirrels run in little bursts, stopping to gather fruits and buds in their cheeks. A weasel slinks through the grass after the voles, so frantic to gather food for the winter that they let their guard down. Summers are so short that everything is fighting against time to prepare, the predation of winter overshadowing that of everything else.

In Britain we used to have wolves and bears and lynx and bison and even elephants and rhinos a long time ago, but we are such a tiny island that we quickly killed them all and became kings of our little kingdom. Accounts for some of our colonial hubris?

The tundra is specked with water where the frost melts. The permafrost lies underground, starving the drier parts. Lusher grass surrounds waterholes, and elsewhere the grass is hardy and coarse and shrubs are dead-looking. It gives the tundra muted but multifaceted colour. The way the light plays on it from the big sky makes its depth and tone flicker.

As soon as I felt a tug I jumped up and had it over my shoulder before I even knew it and I am glad no one was around to see because the force from flinging it back brought the fish back at me and it hit my front as I turned to it, making me yell. The sound zigzagged away from me into the forest and took several birds with it. It took me a second to remember that there was no one around to hear, but when I realised I was alone, so utterly and completely alone, I laughed and laughed to myself, trying to hold the writhing fish.

And I could feel all of Jack Kerouac’s ghosts of the mountain cursing at me for desecrating the art. But if the art is to demonstrate skill rather than a simple utilitarianism then I don’t want to be a part of it. It is a man’s sport, a battle just to collect its name, possess its specificity, like the Enlightenment exotic specimen collector (one for the collection, a big one for the wall). And to do so skilfully, whatever that means, probably with minimal splashing and squealing. They can keep their art.

Once I had it still against the ground I had to stun it to knock it out before I bled it, like Larus showed me on the pilot whale boat. I worried about this part because perhaps it did have more culpability than pulling a trigger and watching a thing drop. The fish lay still for me, looking up at the sky through the canopy with its empty orb of an eye. I have thought for a long time that anything I am willing to eat I should be willing to kill. And although I back the philosophy all the way, in practice it is as hard as I hoped it wouldn’t be. I am not sure I will ever be able to kill anything without crying at least a little bit.

After it was bled I laid it out flat and took out the Fauna & Flora of the Denali Wilderness book to identify it. It was an Arctic grayling, I could tell easy from the fin on its back like a Chinese fan. It was quite little for a grayling, but I can make it last me two meals.

In the tundra I stumbled onto a spruce grouse sat on a clutch of eggs. It occurred to me that I could take her eggs to eat. She looked at me imploringly through one beady eye. I left her.

Other birds seen today:

Osprey

American kestrel

Pintail ducks

Snow geese

Tundra swans

Ring-necked ducks

Grey jay

Horned grebes

Plovers

Mourning doves

Cuckoo

In the south the mountains stood resolutely, still and intangible as a painting, until at one point a light aircraft cut across them, a slow and deliberate finger through perfect dust. When this happens there is a noise with it, a loud droning that I noticed for the first time while watching the first plane. It was lucky that I did because I might have spooked from hearing it without knowing what it came from. I threw myself to the ground on impulse but it was too far away to make me out. From here you could not tell the cabin from the treeline.

On the way back to the cabin I found my first bear print. It made my hairs stand on end; a first encounter. Its print a symbol of its self. A warning, a promise, a truth. But really it is just an imprint a big animal left without meaning to. How strange.

LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS

It confuses me to have nightmares about a thing I can barely remember now. I had thought it over so many times before that I could no longer tell what was memory and what got added or taken away. Then I stopped remembering it at all, but it came back last night in a bad way.

In the nightmare I found myself cold and dark. I was in an ice cave. In the Arctic. The walls were blue and jagged. It smelled like damp old fish and dead things. My breath billowed in silvery wisps in front of me. Then it would crystallise and fall to the floor in tinkles. On the back of my neck I felt my hair brushed to the side and hot sticky breath ran across it slowly. A hand came from behind and clasped over my mouth, a stubby, sweaty troll hand.

You are not in an ice cave. You are in the meat fridge at work. The hand is clasped tight over your mouth so your whimpering is muffled. The other hand fumbles with your small breasts over the top of the polka-dot starter bra your mum bought you because you are starting to blossom now. You can feel something hard pressing into where your thighs meet the crease in your arse. You know it will make it worse if you squirm but you want to get free. Then you get a chance because someone shouts at him from outside the fridge, his grip loosens and you dig your elbow into his bloated troll belly.

He grunts a troll grunt. He puts his hand around your neck and calls you a little bitch. But then you know it’s over because she is shouting to him from the kitchen. He lumbers to the door and as he closes it he leans his face in and runs his tongue over his fat wet lips. The door bangs shut.

You can’t cry you can’t cry you can’t cry because they will shout and send you home, and then what? If you yell Sandra will hear eventually and she will open the door from the outside and let you out and laugh at you for being scared of the dark and getting yourself stuck in the fridge again.

Was it as bad as the dream felt or was the dream just a collage from things the other girls had told you? No matter what you remember, it is nothing special, of course. Almost every girl you know has a troll to remind her that her body is not her own.

It tipped it down today so I stayed cooped up inside. The cabin is cosy with the little fire going, the tapping on the roof and sides adding sound contours that make it feel particularly safe, so I felt better. Because I had the time I made the fire with sticks from my kindling pile. I am very proud of the fire. It took me about ten minutes to get smoke, then another five to get it going properly. I have guarded and fed it all day like a little pet. Kaczynski complained in his diary that he failed to consistently make fire without striking matches and that it annoyed him greatly. I am more authentic than Ted Kaczynski!

I did go out just to see how bad it was and got a headache from the hammering of icy raindrops on my crown. It was too heavy to see much and I got soaked through, so I will have to stay put until it slackens off. I have enough food to last and a bit of fish. Hopefully it will have stopped overnight, though.

I watched back and edited a lot of footage and it is coming together but in a way I am not quite sure about. Mostly when I watch things back they do not feel like I remember them. People seem to be very different to how they really seemed at the time. There is so much responsibility in putting the pieces of what has happened together to follow a story. And there is Rochelle, who will not fit into my story. And then there are the things that can’t and do not say anything at all and lie vacant for my projections.

Am I pulling them out of the water like fish to look at? Like they are specimens and I am writing them into my field book? There is a gap between what they are and what I think they are and I am trying to talk about this gap with authority, declaring I know what I see and it is this.

I did a lot of reading. Then I did a video diary entry. Then I got bored and decided to search around the hut for hidden things. I had figured it must be at least fifty years old, maybe even one hundred. I had not bothered to check it properly for signatures like I had the tower, aside from a quick sweep. I felt sure I had missed something.

I checked all the obvious places again first, the walls around the cot, the desk with everything taken off it. Then I found them in a corner of the room. Now I have found them I do not know how I did not notice them before. It was not an obvious place, sure, and most are really faint, but there were enough of them. They are mostly names and dates, the earliest being 1929 and the most recent P Harris again, 1999. I counted seven authors of six signatures and five quotes. Some of the classics:

‘Going to the mountains is going home’ – John Muir

‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’ – Thoreau

I checked, out of curiosity, behind the fox head (there is also the compulsion to leave a mark that no one will ever notice). It just said Caroline, in very tiny print, with no date. It was the only obviously female name in here. Even where the names were ambiguous, the handwriting on the wall was all very masculine. What I mean by this is that maybe the men who wrote on the wall had learned to express themselves as men, to express their man-sized ideas in a handwriting that was reflective of how they held and thought of themselves.

Because they author these ideas like they belonged to them by virtue of being men. Thoreau and that bunch always talked, of course, in lofty terms of Man and He. In search of some inspirational wilderness quotes from women before I started the documentary most to be found came from low-brow memoirs of the self-help kind and had to do with inner journeys rather than the outer objective Truths of the Mountain Men, and had titles like The Single Woman: Life, Love and a Dash of Sass or Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer.

I wanted Caroline to know, if she ever came back, that I liked that she had hidden herself. I drew a little smiley face next to File:Smile.jpg.pngher name.

MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

INT. CABIN, AFTERNOON – Erin is sat on the cot – daylight bleeds inside, casts light over dust motes – camera is hand-held – in shot are cabin cot, Erin from shoulders up, and window – it is raining heavily –

ERIN: So this morning I found something really interesting.

After the autograph wall that I found yesterday. And the signature behind the fox head. I was sure there could be other more hidden things but I wasn’t sure where else they could be. I was actually under the desk—

– camera view turns towards the desk as Erin gets off the cot and directs the camera to it –

ERIN: As you can see, there isn’t anything there

– camera sweeps the underside of the desk –

ERIN: But. In checking under the desk I found something else. If you look here—

– camera view turns to the floor – Erin is kneeling, her right knee moves against the floorboard, which gives – the opposite end of the board rises, around one inch – Erin prises underneath with her free hand –

ERIN: Oh. I can’t do it one-handed

– camera is placed on the floor –

ERIN: And underneath. I hadn’t thought to check under the floor because I was sure there was just the foundations underneath there. But here, as you can see—

– camera is picked up and view is directed towards the floor – the floorboard now removed and placed to the side – camera takes two seconds to focus in low light –

ERIN: Someone has dug out the ground underneath the floorboards. And they have left a little parcel

– camera is now in focus – in the hole there is a package wrapped in tarpaulin, about the size of a shoebox – Erin takes the package out of the hole –

ERIN: Isn’t this exciting? So I found this little package. And now I suppose I should open it

– camera is placed on the desk with a view of the cot – Erin sits cross-legged on the cot with the package on her lap –

ERIN: It’s like Christmas

– she looks down at the package with her hands placed on top – pushes hair behind her ears –

ERIN: I’m kind of nervous. I hope it’s not a letter bomb

– she looks at the camera – pulls one corner of her mouth down in mock-nervousness –

ERIN: Okay, then

– she starts to unwrap the parcel – carefully, particularly –

ERIN: I wonder how long it’s been down there

– having undone the parcel string and peeled away each corner of the tarpaulin she takes out a fabric bundle – she carefully unwraps the fabric bundle –

ERIN (ABSENTLY): I suppose they wanted to make sure it kept dry

– inside the fabric bundle is a parcel wrapped in newspaper –

ERIN (ABSENTLY): It’s like a game of pass the bloody parcel

– she stops with a piece of the newspaper in her hand – studies it –

ERIN (ABSENTLY): Oh, I’ll check afterwards

– she lifts the objects from inside the paper one by one and lays them out on the cot very carefully –

ERIN: Okay, we have a roll of paper. A book. It’s maybe a diary. A folded piece of paper. Some postcards from Alaska

– she picks up the book and opens it –

ERIN: It’s a diary. The first entry is dated the 14th of May 1986. It’s signed Damon. Then inverted underneath. Nomad

– she brings the book towards the camera and holds up the name, pointing with her forefinger – in spidery handwriting DAMON is written, then backwards underneath its mirror image – DAMON –

ERIN: I don’t know if that’s an alias or just a happy coincidence. Or a self-fulfilling prophecy

– she sits back on the cot and picks up the scroll – unscrolls it –

ERIN: Okay. This is a manifesto. I won’t go into it now. We’ll look at it in detail later

– she studies it for a second then turns it to face the camera, holding it closer for inspection – then she turns it around and considers it again –

ERIN: Some kind of Ted Kaczynski manifesto

– she carefully rescrolls it and places it back on the cot – picks up the folded paper –

ERIN: And finally

– she unfolds it and pauses, brow crumpling – studies it for seven seconds –

ERIN (ABSENTLY): Damn it. I should have known it. (REMEMBERING THE CAMERA) Erm. It’s a map. Predictably

– she frowns at it some more –

ERIN: It’s better than my map (LAUGHING). Goddammit

– she folds it pedantically and tucks it into the back of the diary – she places the diary back on the cot – she sits with her hands in her lap then distractedly places the newspaper over the top of the diary –

ERIN: That’s exciting. What an exciting find

– she looks directly at the camera, holds her gaze for four seconds – fidgets –

ERIN: I’ll have to take a look at it all in more detail. Figure out this guy’s story

– she touches her face absently –

ERIN: Try and figure out if anyone found the package before

– she twists her hair round a finger –

ERIN (ABSENTLY): Yeah

– she stops twiddling her hair and stares into space, caught in a thought – five seconds – snaps out of it –

ERIN (SUDDENLY/BRIGHTLY): Anyway. Today is day three of the floods and the rain is still relentless

– looks out of the window –

ERIN: Doesn’t seem like it will subside very soon so no meat for Erin for a while. I’ll have to get outside today, though, because I’m almost out of water. I’ll wear my anorak. It will be nice to go outside. Yes

– she sits for a few seconds looking out of the window then snaps to – approaches the camera –

ERIN: Okay. Over and out. (MUTTERS) That was stupid

– she fumbles with the camera to cut –

CUT

HOW THE MOUNTAIN GOT ITS NAME

I attempted a video diary entry and retook it about five times. None of them seemed right to me. I am thinking about how far I have come now and whether I am passing Leopold’s test yet. I certainly feel more ‘in tune’ with the ‘rhythms of life’. It is hard to talk about something so personal and unspecific. I was shooting a sequence on the map that was in the parcel. In the first cut I was saying that I had to burn this map too, like I did Stan’s pocket map, had to burn it as quickly as I could before it embossed on my mind and corroded the claim of pure invention so that this place could still be mine. Then when I had the lighter to it I just could not do it. And the more I held it out with my thumb, scratching at the friction wheel, ready to light it, the more I looked at it. And the more I looked at it the more it embossed on my mind. Then the integrity was gone anyway so I figured I might as well not burn it. My thumb hurt from rubbing and rubbing the lighter without actually striking it.

So then I had to soliloquise about why I was not going to burn the map. But the map glared at me, making itself more and more familiar, and as I got madder at it I thought that I might still get rid of it like I did the other map, because I had seen that one too. Besides I could not just leave it, knowing it was so heavy. I mean like the heaviness you must feel when you find Roman vases in the dirt and you just know that they are not any old broken pottery because you can feel their heaviness from just looking. I had to acknowledge it, like holding a tiny funeral for a mouse that the cat brought in because it does not feel right to just let it be.

But Damon had made it and it was his time capsule and yet he would never know any better. And then again he left it here in the eighties and he could very well be planning on coming back for it one day. Maybe he really never meant anyone but himself to find it.

So I could not burn it. I had to put it back in the ground and pretend I never found it. I left out the diary and the manifesto for now because I need to study them. I do not think there is hypocrisy in this. He will never know I read the diary and the manifesto wants to be read and the map I could just try to forget.

A thing I did notice is that our maps are different. He marked different features on his to those I drew on mine. He marked some that I have not found, and some of mine were missing. I just have to be careful not to let seeing his infiltrate on my personal wilderness.

I AM THAT I AM AND THE REST IS WOMEN & WILDERNESS

INT. CABIN, MORNING – Erin is sat on the cot – camera is on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin sat cross-legged, and the window – it is raining heavily still –

ERIN: I have been sat inside the cabin for five days now without leaving except to use the toilet. The rain is relentless. I have been thinking lots about what it’s like to be alone for so long. It feels like right now the whole experiment is being intensified because I am not even outside and around nature. The only time I am solitary really is when I am inside alone. This is the biggest test

– her voice is low and sleepy – she yawns –

ERIN: It’s just me, myself and I

– she frowns as if she does not know why she said it –

ERIN: Oh, that was stupid. Reshoot

– she stares at the camera long enough so that she can cut out the first part in editing and begin talking as though she were just starting –

ERIN: It has been raining now for five days and I have been isolated inside the whole time. I don’t have much stimulation in here apart from these guys, who are sort of helping

– she nods to her pile of books –

ERIN: I can pretend we are in conversation. In here I don’t have nature to make me feel small. I am surrounded only by all this male intellect. It is the only thing that stops me from disappearing. But it is maddening because their words are not mine. They keep reminding me that. The wilderness is not mine. And at the same time it is all I am. I keep thinking zone of middle dimension. I keep thinking, okay, Newton

– her eyes keep darting to just next to the camera’s eye – she touches her face and hair, as though she is looking in a mirror, checking reflection – the viewfinder of the camera is probably turned towards her –

ERIN: I am so wholly excluded from the communion. And without being outside all I have is these abstracted unattainable thoughts on nature. Why the fuck am I even reading this. URGH

– she throws Emerson across the room –

ERIN: Am I doing it right? I need to get back outside

– she pauses then exhales suddenly through nose – puts face into hands – sits still, rubbing her eyelids with her fingers –

ERIN (TO HERSELF): Maybe I can’t do this. Will the spirit of the mountain disqualify me for wishing I just had someone female to talk to? Is a lone bird on a tree on a lonely mountain singing to itself? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Reshoot

– she rubs her face with both hands – slaps her cheeks – takes a deep breath – looks right into the camera –

ERIN: It’s okay to not be content one hundred per cent of the time. Right, mountain spirit? If it were easy then it wouldn’t be hardship. And maybe it’s right to feel lonely. I can do this. I am strong enough to do this. This is the hardest part. The rain will stop soon. The only time I am lonely is when I am inside too long. Besides. I am not lonely. I have the camera and my books

– her resolute smile lingers and then fades –

ERIN(MUTTERING): Oh, I can’t use that. This is useless

– she gets up from the cot and reaches over for the camera –

CUT

EMPTY THE TANKS!

I am confused about the postcards in Damon’s parcel. The postcards are written in Damon’s handwriting but are addressed to different people at different addresses all across North America, Canada and Alaska. They are all dated September 1987 and are all of the same kind of sentiment. Damon is thanking people for their hospitality, help and friendship. He is telling them they are beautiful people with room for improvement. Then he is telling them they can improve by living for themselves. He is telling them to cast off their chains and live like he will live, purposefully and free. Then he ends with an ostentatious phrase about casting out into the unknown. He insinuates that they might never meet again.

I suppose this is what he would have liked to say to these people, as though they were parting words, but something stopped him. The strange thing is that the postcards are stamped and bent at the corners and marked like they have travelled. I think maybe he did more than one journey like this, and he brought them to the cabin with him as some kind of token.

It is still raining. Last night I had the epiphany to leave out one of the cooking pans to fill up with rainwater so I did not need to venture out to get water from the spring. The rain battered against the hood of my anorak in a way that was exhilarating, an overload of stimulation after endless days inside the muted dry. I ran about in it yelping and laughing for a few minutes before retiring back inside like a fish that comes out from under its rock to dance a little in a flurry of excitement then catch itself and slink off back into the shadows. It was exhausting and after I wanted the stillness of the cabin again.

Inside I peeled off my anorak and my sodden leggings and hung them up next to the grate. Then I coaxed a fire and set myself on the cot in view of the pan through the window, with my books. I quickly forgot about the pan, though, and did not remember it until late afternoon, when my mouth was feeling suddenly dry. My clothes had dried and I was loathe to get them wet again, so I took off my trousers to fetch the pan in just my anorak. It was brimming with water, with a couple of drowned insects for good measure. I picked these out and put the pot on top of the fire to boil.

I filled my canteen with the boiled water and set it to cool. Then I made a broth from the rest of the water with one of the flavour packets from the instant noodles. I curled up on the cot and wrapped myself in the blanket and my sleeping bag with a tin mug of the hot savoury water. I smelled must from the blanket, and savoury, and me. The little excursion earlier in the day had made me overwhelmingly sleepy. I fell into it and slept for the rest of the day and long into the evening.

I usually like to rise early and keep myself busy but with the rain I have been dead heavy all the time and dull and lethargic, but I wake in the middle of the night and I have an interlude of energy before falling back to sleep again. I use this time to read and write and draw, and wish the rain would stop so I could go night walking. I am dreaming lots again.

A thing I have noticed is that they are all in the present tense. As in I am not dreaming about things from before here, no memories or other people or anything. No one I know, at least. Kind of spectral figures. Familiar strangers.

THE GOD PARTICLE, THE GOD TRICK

LOCATION: wooden cabin; Denali wilderness; Alaskan tundra; Alaska; Earth; 3rd planet of Sol; inner rim of Orion Arm; the Milky Way; the Local Group; Virgo Supercluster; The Universe; Everywhere Ever and All Over Again.

The tundra is always whistling. wwwwWWWWWhhhHHHHhhh. The tundra is empty. The tundra is partitioned by colour. There is the green-grey flat ground that I am on, the cabin, then the white-blue mountains. The mountains look like a backdrop. I feel like Truman Burbank.

If I sit still for long enough the whistling sounds like words. Big snowflake tumbleweed rolls just under my line of focused vision. I blink and it is gone.

If I sit still for long enough my eyes go blurry like a mirage. Like heat waves but cold, cold. It is hard to focus even when I blink hard.

Another sound starts behind the whistling. It sounds like a plane; I look around for one. Negative. It sounds like a person humming; I look around for a person. Negative. It sounds like bees. My hand tickles and there is a bee on it. Affirmative. The bee sits happy. I must be dreaming. The humming is louder.

In the shimmery mirage there is a dark shape coming closer. There is a figure in a cloak, furs, beads, skulls and with a staff. Her voice is very strange. I can’t see the features of her face because of the bees, which swarm in a flat mask. As if her face has no shape; no pits, no curves, no nose. It is hard to tell where the sound comes out from. There is a vibration on her voice, as if she’s speaking through a laryngophone, as if her voice emanates from all the tiny mouths of the bees in unison. It gives her what you might call an otherworldly aura. Almost techno-human. Like Professor Stephen Hawking. It is authorial.

Stephen Hawking has a daughter called Lucy and she grew up to be a writer. She wanted to inspire children to get excited about space and physics and all the things she grew up in awe of. She writes adventure books about a little boy called George who likes space. Isn’t that frustrating?

She moves to sit by my side on my log, which does not budge under her, as though she is weightless. I look at her closely and, sure, she has this shimmering quality, buzzing and wavery and nearly not there, like a model of an atom spinning on its axis, just slow enough for you to see the falter, its constituent parts flickering visible. I reach out to touch her and can’t seem to, her contours blurring as my hand gets close, but hovering just above I can feel her. A kind of soft quivering, a pulsating that feels like sound, low sirens in my temples. She draws in the dirt with the end of her staff. The gravelly sound makes me hungry. Like Coco Pops without milk. Her voice has an ungraspable familiarity to it; it is hard to concentrate on what she is saying because of her bee beard.

The circle is the antithesis of the triangle, because the circle stands for cycles which are even and infinite. In the centre of a circle you are always the same distance from the edge.

Template:Clear

File:Triangle.jpg.png

The ghost of Adam Smith sits on a triangle that is held upright by the shoulders of his crawling subordinates. He is hoarding all the power, and as it grows exponentially, the growth of others is depleted. But as the others are depleted, they are harmed to the point of abandonment (the bees are the first to leave him). As such, he loses his sense of self, which depended on a sense of the others.

So that is where the bees have gone. Around a week and a half has passed since I left Stan’s. I cannot be completely sure because I put a bit of tape over the date and time on the laptop for now and I have spent a lot of time sleeping when I should be awake and waking when I should be asleep. I have been inventing people for company, to talk to and mitigate the loneliness. Are invented people a corruption of solitude?

I have bathed once in the stream in all this time, little splash washes on my smelliest parts now and then. I smell but I only notice this when I take off my pants in the toilet shed. The rest of the time my smell is enveloped into me by my clothes. It worries me when I take off my pants that I may attract bears.

My face itches a lot because I keep touching it; I keep touching it because I think I am growing a beard; I think I am growing a beard because of the itching. There is not a mirror and the camcorder is just illusive enough to make me think I can see hair.

From the bee-figure dream I can pinpoint exactly in my subconscious the fodder for it. Back in the visitors’ centre at the entrance to Denali Park there were displays on all of the cultures indigenous to Alaska. I remember a diagram explaining the position of the individual in the Yupik Eskimo belief system in relation to the animals and plants it shared its home with, termed Cosmological Reproductive Cycling. In the diagram the human was part of a sort of energy transferral web, in the shape of a circle. It made me think at the time of a diagram we had in biology class, a food pyramid used to describe energy transferral in the animal kingdom. On the biggest pyramid and at the top sat the human, the unchallenged dominant omnivore at the top of the food chain.

Adam Smith casts himself as the dominant creature of the triangle and food chain and propagates this as the natural order of things. He eats a mass of lesser creatures who have themselves eaten a mass of even lesser creatures who have been grazing on chicken nuggets and apathy because their natural food source is inaccessible to them (these are the crawling subordinates). All of their power accumulates in Adam Smith. He uses this as an economic analogy, substituting for food or energy wealth or money.

The triangle food pyramid is used to explain hierarchy in nature and justify Adam Smith’s dominance. But it only looks that way because he said it does. The wolf does not sit on top of a pyramid. The wolf is dependent on the grass because when the grass dies the deer dies and when the deer thrives the wolf thrives and when the wolf overreaches the wolf is brought into check by its own hubris because the deer disappear and after a short period of thriving the wolf does too.

For the Yupik, like Naaja’s Inuit, nothing alive died but was reborn, and this was honoured in hunting ritual so power could never be accumulated but only transferred.

The orca and the wolf were seen as highly spiritual creatures that aided humans in hunting, and so offerings were made to both to maintain good relationships. The spirit that resided in each was interchangeable, in winter it was embodied in the wolf that brought the deer and in summer the orca that brought the walrus.

When an animal was killed as prey, it was returned to the wild to become complete again. To aid this, the bones of the carcass remained unbroken, and there was a farewell ritual where the animal would be entertained with drum music. If the animal was pleased with its treatment as a guest, it would return again in the future.

I am surprised Stan could retain his survival-of-the-fittest worldview when spending so much time in the park centre. I suppose he must not pay too much attention to the plaques.

THE WILD AS A PROJECT OF THE SELF

During the night the rain stopped! I woke up to its lack of noise. It took me a while to realise it had not stopped completely. The gentler rain was white noise. I fell to sleep again feeling looser.

The rain was slack still when I woke up and I decided to try some fishing. It has been days since I have eaten anything that is not beige and the urge to get outside was so great that I twitched with it.

Walking through the forest the rain was less dense still. It fell in fatter drops and at a different tempo to the rain as it hit the canopy above. The noise of rain inside the forest was both dulled and intensified, like a storm from underneath a high church roof. It was much more peaceful in the forest and I felt a stillness come over again for the first time in days.

I decided to try out on the lake in the tundra. I had been stupid to think I could just fish from the lake with my shoddy short rod. But lucky for me there was a rock that worked a bit like a jetty and let me sit with my short line in the deeper water. In the still water where the rod dripped, the beads skimmed on top for seconds like water beetles skating, before sinking.

It was luckily an okay spot. It took less than an hour to hook something and I wished I had a way to make the fish keep better so I could stock up and get all the death over in one go for a while. I stunned the fish against the rock jetty, trying to do it without thinking too much. A large ant struggled a tiny caterpillar that was twice its size over my rock and back to its queen. I attached the dead fish to the hook so I could walk it back without having to carry it in my hands. I wiped my hands on some damp grass with lake water to get rid of some of the sticky smell.

When I looked up I went stiff. On the opposite side of the lake there was a bear come out of nowhere while I was busy with the fish. A bloody big grizzly. I forgot my entire body and the rod fell out of my hands and the bear stilled too. It watched me watch it from my plinth on the rock, its fur flittering in the wind. It was close enough to see that but it was still small across the big lake. There was a potent unreality to it. It was still and mysterious in an accidental way and I felt very suddenly that something in me was going to be different from then on.

I put my hand on my chest to feel my heart beating vigorously but it was not. In fact I did not feel like I thought I would at all. Since I had got out to the cabin The Bear had existed like an aura, since before that even on the ice sheet, the Greenlandic tundra. It had felt conspicuous for not being there; lingering like a promise and quivering with anticipation and fear. And I had thought back then that it would feel like opening up, that I would see that Fire burning in its eyes and recognise myself in it. But instead after all there it was so suddenly. It looked so benign and abstract, an apparition. I wondered if perhaps it was.

I want to see myself in you.

But we are very different.

I felt like if I turned away it might disappear, and although some flight response was tugging me gently, telling me to get away, I did not want to turn my back on it. It seemed to be thinking the same of me. I started to think maybe we would be trapped like this for ever, perpetually watching each other watching in wary fascination.

My blood tingled vigorously and I could feel it filling me up all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, so that the sensation of my feet in my shoes felt like containment, like what it must feel like to be liquid and formless but held in shape, my hands like rubber gloves full of water. Like zero gravity. Like proprioception.

I put one foot behind the other on the rock, using my heel to feel out the stable parts, and climbed down off it without ever breaking contact with its eyes. I put down the rod in case it thought I was brandishing it. Then I started to tiptoe, desperately slow, closer towards it following the lakeside. I was trying to move so slowly that it might not even notice. To get closer to it and really feel its presence. To commune.

I have never felt such an acute kind of instinctual consideration of what it is to not be alive. It became clear then that any nostalgia that we feel from The Call of the Wild is the pang of what we remember but do not have, from where we are before we go in search of it. It is all of the prospects of having life taken and of not being and of things that you can never possess or control or put into words. In that moment I forgot the anxiety of having a body, I forgot the need to possess it.

While I was thinking all this I had got a lot closer and I could feel my heart then where I could not before, throbbing in my throat like a pulsar. I was shaking badly from concentrating so hard on my stealth. The grizzly bear stared at me, transfixed. Unmoved and hypnotic stare. We were both fixed on each other in fear and desire or morbid fascination. Or none of that. Just purely under spell.

But in that way I see me in you, in what I am not.

Then it jerked its head. A sudden lurch snapping the thread that had formed between us. It peeled its black lips back to show its teeth and it jolted me to notice I was so close as to see its teeth clearly. It padded one front paw behind the other, walking its front legs backwards into itself, then using the weight of the rest of its body and jumping a little to bring its forelegs up and stand bipedal, unfolding to its full height and stature. Huge. Fuck.

I could see the matting of its fur where its underbelly was wet. It huffed through its nostrils, short, deep grunts.

What am I doing what the fuck am I doing.

Abruptly out of trance now. I suddenly see myself from right up above, as though looking down. I am small and it is big and the lake is huge blue glass beside us and the grass goes on on on around us and there is nowhere for cover.

I keep absolutely still and try to think. What did the pamphlet say what did the pamphlet say. Direct eye contact. Did it not say never to make – very dangerous. I avert my eyes, lower my head, still trying to see it. Keep one hundred feet between you. Was it one hundred? Five hundred? Maybe fifty. How far is fifty feet? Either way it is too late now. What else? Do not go without pepper spray. Well, that one’s out. It said calm, monotone voice. Let it know you are human.

Hi bear. Nice bear. Gratey-shrill with fear. Be submissive. Shoulders down. Bow head. Respect respect, bowing like a Tibetan prostrating, bow-crawling a pilgrimage. Slowly slowly up the mountain. Back away slowly.

Where the bloody hell am I?

Rocks under heels making me unsteady. Cannot turn around cannot make it look like fleeing and initiate a chase. It does not come after me. It stands, watching me go. When I have reversed, undone my journey back where I started, let’s not do that again, it lets itself fall limply to its feet. Thud.

And then it walks away. And I have to say that I did not see the Fire and that its eyes were vague from where I stood. It has nothing to give me apart from its just being and its bear-ness. Probably it will never think of me again and I will remember it always. But that is because the bear does not have sensibilities because it does not need them. It already knows all of this. I did not have the camera for any of this so as far as the documentary is concerned it did not happen. Which makes me think, funny, it was the most happened to that I have ever felt.

Template:Clear

File:F0201-01.jpg.png

I think a boreal owl?

SISTER

This morning the strangest thing happened. I was sat around in the cabin doing a video diary entry when my back started to tingle and the hairs on my neck and arms stood up, and I got the sure feeling that I was being watched. At first I put it down to being on the camera but then I felt I could feel its direction, as if it were coming from behind.

I turned very carefully, as though whoever it was would not notice me turning if it was just slow enough. Outside the window, just inside the trees and standing half beneath a shadow, a reindeer was stood still as anything, its legs so straight the wind could knock it over. It just stood there looking and I stared back at it through the window and it just went on like that, looking right at me and not flinching a muscle.

Now I know there are not many reindeer in this part of Alaska at this time of year but here was this reindeer looking at me with an intensity and persistence. I went outside to it to see if it would turn and run away from me because it was creeping me out just standing there. I needed to get closer to see it was real and solid and breathing. I walked slowly towards it and my blood clunked in my ears every step I got nearer because it really was not budging any. Then, as I got within around five metres, it suddenly huffed and took a step backwards. It came to as if from out of a trance and started to back away, baby-step by baby-step. Then it half-circled around me as if at the distance of a force field, and loped slowly out towards the tundra. The whole time it kept looking back at me warily.

But the strangest thing about it was that the reindeer came to me first in a dream. Last night I was outside just kind of staring at the forest moving in the wind, waving like water, at the pinkish tundra evergreens dotted like Christmas cake decorations, at the rust-red mountains glinting back the sun in streaks, the clouds behind their own snowy mountain range, just gently spinning round to get everything in panorama, when the figure appeared in front of me again.

Child must have a comrade animal in order to be protected from the bad spirits.

My head reeled a little from the spinning. I must have looked scared at talk of bad spirits.

Not all spirits are bad. Most are good and watch over us. Besides, you will have the reindeer. I will find you one.

Who are the bad spirits?

The bad spirits are spirits without forms. Just spirits that are waiting to be in bodies again. They are not really bad. Just envious. They like to cause mischief to keep themselves occupied. Sometimes that mischief is death but really death only means to be made to change form again.

I was incredulous.

But I quite like my form.

And this is the tragedy of death. But it is a short-lived one.

She dissolved back into the forest, then promptly reappeared leading a reindeer.

This will be your reindeer. She is a herd mother so her imprint is very heavy.

Imprint?

All things have an imprint. It is the weight of the energy. Some are heavy and others are lighter.

What does it do?

It defines your potency. A heavier imprint leaves more of an effect. But an imprint can be positive or negative. If you have a heavier imprint you have a responsibility to be positive. But you must also remember that others with a weaker imprint are just as important but in different ways.

The bees droned around her. They bustled over each other, to the very edges of her eyes. I thought I knew those eyes, like a word trapped behind the tonsils. I touched the reindeer. Its fur was soft and downy like a kitten’s tummy and its skin hummed underneath with its charge.

You can find imprint everywhere.

Seeing the reindeer today brought it all back. What is going on here? Women are after all irrational and mystical, so maybe I was just being a girl about it? Would an actual real-life visitation feel any different to a hallucination anyway? If a hallucination is a work of your subconscious, it is already a message from another realm in a way. How do you tell the difference? For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods, said Thoreau of the days real people did not pop into his cabin by the pond at Walden.

The reindeer kept on loping and looking and stopping from time to time to turn and stare back at the hut. I stayed out there shivering in my pyjamas, watching it go.

HOW TO KILL AND DIE

After the reindeer incident the bee-figure keeps appearing to me in animal form. I will be walking through the woods and she will appear to me, for example as a brown ermine, springing from behind a tree so very suddenly there and sitting on her hind legs in a way that says I am no mortal brown ermine. I can always tell it is really her, sometimes by ways like this, as though me and the animal are communicating, and sometimes even when she chooses not to acknowledge me in this way, by signs from the physical world. I would call this other kind maybe an increase in density, like Roman-vase heaviness, for example the sudden pick-up of the wind when in the presence of the golden eagle, or a sudden stillness, or anything else that feels like it is hinting at significance.

I went far into the tundra today for more food. I saw another golden eagle, or the same golden eagle, and a gyrfalcon. I had been hungry for the taste of meat that was not fish and had to kill by my own hand again if I was ever to build up enough karma points to eat meat back at home. I thought about what she had said and it gave me motivation to take full responsibility for the transferral that maintains my own energy.

The clouds were moving fast in the direction I was walking and if I stood still with my head up to face them they would glide over and I would feel my belly go as if I were still moving too. The sun was hanging evening-low and its angle filled the clouds up with colour, so that they were pink in its face and purple in shadow and it was a big ball of orange, opaque enough to look at, leaking its hue onto the grass and making it orange too. The sky felt close and low like a projection inside a planetarium, the tundra wide and empty, and walking north as I was, they went on together uninterrupted until they disappeared behind the curve of the earth, and it made me feel big and small to look at it all.

I did it like she says to. This time when I saw the hare I wanted, and I saw more of them because of the flat of the tundra, I considered my shot carefully and struck it in the hind. It had seen me and stood semi-wary, but I suppose it did not bolt because it was too unused to the sight of me to understand. It looked me in the eye before it took my bullet. I ran over to where it dropped to witness the magnitude of what I had done. It was still alive, like she said I should hope it would be. I picked up its warm limp body and held it up to face my face, and looked in at the life fading there. I poured some water from my bottle into its mouth so that it would not be thirsty. I shook from the sobs and tried to share in its suffering. And I am sure that its was much worse than mine, but it felt less like cheating to let it see me cry.

I told it I was sorry. I thanked it for giving me its body. And I made a promise to it that when the time came I would offer my body back to the earth for it as nourishment and that I would be happy to do so. And in that moment, I knew it and I meant it and I felt the gravity of what it meant to say it.

REMEMBERING THE ANIMA MUNDI

INT. CABIN – VIEW THROUGH WINDOW – camera is in hand-held – position: on cot facing out of the window – outside a reindeer is stood, grazing, very close to the window –

ERIN (EXCITEDLY): Look. Look, there it is again

– the camera jerks with her hands and she moves to get a better view, cot squeaking – camera is steadied – focuses in on reindeer –

ERIN: I’m going to go out to her

– view of camera scrambled, bed, ceiling, floor, as Erin clambers off the cot – floorboards – padding feet – pause – readjust – door –

ERIN (WHISPERING): Got to be really quiet and careful. Don’t want to scare her

– door is pushed open and outside light spills in – camera adjusts to light – camera moves around the door – reindeer in view from behind, about five metres distance – it can be heard huffing into the dirt as it tears the grass up – door creaks –

ERIN (WHISPERING): Shhhhhssh

– reindeer suddenly picks up its head – turns to look directly at camera – bolts forward in surprise –

ERIN: Oh no oh no come back don’t go

– camera jolts side to side with her movement – jogging after it as it trots away into tree cover –

ERIN: Hahahaha

– she stops running after it, watches it go – reindeer disappears into the black of the dense trees –

CUT

WIKI HOW TO FIND YOUR POWER ANIMAL

Your power animal may come to you in a dream or meditation or in its actual physical form in waking life. Have you noticed unusual behaviour from a particular animal? Or do you keep encountering the same animal or the same animal species an amount that surprises you? Maybe you are noticing them regularly, as an image or as an object. Does the orca, for example, appear to you in the image form, emblazoned on everyday objects like T-shirts? Did you hear someone talking about going to watch Shamu at SeaWorld? Was Free Willy on when you turned on your television?

What animal intrigues and captivates you? What animal do you notice most, not only out in wild nature, but also in your everyday life as an image? If you feel attracted to an animal and it keeps appearing, in the physical world or in a dream, it may be a sign that the animal is seeking to reveal itself to you.

How does the animal make you feel? When you see the animal how does its presence make its impact on you? Do you feel its presence before you see it? What emotion does it evoke? Does it scare you? Does it elate you? Do the feeling and the apparitions/appearances coincide with particular situations in your life? Is there a sense of déjà vu? Do you feel about the animal as you feel about the situation?

The power animal could represent your feelings, or a situation that recurs in your mind, or a person or an event from your past, present or future.

If you answered mostly yes to the above in relation to a particular creature, then you have found your power animal! Learn to honour your power animal.

Another thing Sam said that I had never stopped to think about was that it is actually pretty offensive that suddenly young people on the internet want to know their ‘power animal’, a New Age corruption of a particular native belief, through an online quiz. What I wanted to say back but didn’t was that maybe aside from being appropriative and corruptive in its associations, this signifies a suppressed and lost desire for closer affinity with the animals. That rather than stealing a tradition because we think it sounds enlightened, maybe there could be a more careful way to go about remembering a connection that was always there before?

It is hard to feel a connection with any animal in a spiritual way as a British person when the only animals you are surrounded by are domesticated cats, dogs, cows, sheep, horses and then symbols or images of animals. If symbols are mostly what we have to go on, is this uselessly inauthentic, just too far removed? A symbol of a symbol, not a direct one like a bear track in the mud? Do they lose their potency when you take them from an advert on television?

But if we are to feel affinity in order to care, which we must, then symbols are all we have to work with. And if we each held an animal in affinity, a comrade animal, wouldn’t we care more about the continuation of its species? Maybe at birth we should all be given a comrade animal selected at random from a vast database. If you knew that a sea cucumber is an echinoderm from the class Holothuroidea and you were born into symbolic kinship with it, you would likely care more that it carried on slinking along the sea floor. You would feel the responsibility to help it along.

An animal’s symbolic meaning can be as potent an acknowledgement of our shared invention of that symbol as the animal itself, and maybe more so. Ted Kaczynski made a comrade of the snowshoe rabbit. He called it Grandfather Rabbit. Whenever he shot a snowshoe rabbit he would say ‘thank you, Grandfather Rabbit’. He would get a mystic desire to draw them. He drew and thought about them so much that he actually began to think like a rabbit.

Template:Clear

File:F0208-01.jpg.png

THE ATOMIc PRIESTHOOD

I am back on the old estate. As in most of suburbia there are always a lot of cats. Maybe every third house has a cat and almost all the rest have dogs. Only everyone is gathered around a fire pit that has been dug out of the concrete in the centre of our cul-de-sac. The limp little cat bodies are thrown into the pit because they are full of an invisible death.

There is a potion that has brewed itself from all the chemical run-offs, the Roundup and the Miracle Gro from every impossibly green lawn, trim as porn pubes, then the bleach from the sparkling toilet bowls, the suds of Fairy and Colgate, the nail varnish remover on cotton buds, the Dettol-soaked cloths. Carefully measured so as to be harmless alone but altogether in the cesspits under the roads forming new chemical combinations, transmutations, chance alchemies augmented by years of accumulation. Then pouring over the tarmac when drains fill up in rain, distributed as anomalies in the chain, distilled and distilled up and up, a fusion of the inorganic that leaves its mark as a negative imprint like she said, malignant and unseen, the tick that sucks the mouse dry.

But no one knows where the invisible death comes from because they can’t see it so all the dead cats must be burned to save the live ones. Some of the afflicted cats, the ones still alive but coughing, are also thrown onto the fire. Children are kept inside.

The voice comes from beside me, and I recognise it immediately, without the humming mediation. It is the voice that I had in my head the whole time I read Silent Spring, scrapped together from a brief interview Larus showed us; undeviatingly calm and certain, a little drawling, with a trail of whistle to the end of every word. She holds a staff in her right hand; the tiny bird skulls and shells go clack-clack-clack. A few singular bees crawl about the lichen of her skin. ‘Cats, who so meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to be most affected.’

‘It’s you, I knew it was you!’ but she says nothing.

We stand and watch as the last of the cats disappear into the flames. Some of the owners are weeping. Other cats watch from behind closed windows. The air smells that horrible smell, the one the adults would not answer for when you asked as a child, when all the pigs and cows had foot and mouth, and the significance makes you retch now. People file away back to their houses.

‘In central Java so many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled.’

I don’t know where Java is but I know it is far away. I wonder if the Javanese burned their cats too, to keep their problems atomised. Treating the maladies, treating the maladies like a very rational physician.

Then I woke up. The fact that the light inside was moving might have infiltrated my dream and brought about the fires. It was darker, but still light with the midnight sun, a dusky twilight. Shadows toned up and down and across the floorboards. My first thoughts on waking: The world is burning down! The coloured lights of nuclear holocaust!

What she has been saying about negative imprints and energy; we are a very potent species, we have a very heavy imprint. I think about what Larus said about aliens leaving messages in our DNA and, well, we have already left our own messages in the earth at Hiroshima. We made rockets to go to the moon and look at ourselves. But the technology that built the rockets to go to the moon was adapted from the same technology that the atom bomb was made from. Nuclear radiation is the negative imprint left by our glorious inventions. We did it! We made something to give us immortal remembrance!

What is the message of this, our most enduring time capsule? Its content is senseless, it is a messageless symbol, a dead language. But even where a message fails, the time capsule itself still conveys an intent. It is a pointing finger, you just can’t see at what it points. What is the prerequisite for intent? Just a self-conscious marking? With the Wow! Signal they were looking for a pattern repeated enough for it to seem unlikely to be a coincidental and natural occurrence. In his whale graphs Larus was looking for the frequency with which certain distinct data occurred. Maybe these graphs could not be used to interpret our waste depository sites because we use pictorial symbols rather than language as language is one more degree of symbolism removed. But the pattern and symmetry and frequency of the pictorial symbols should also suggest intent.

So the symbols at the waste depository sites would have to be something that can’t occur naturally like giant sculptures, rock carvings, detailed pictograms. Something with the human stink about it (patterns suggest a maker). But if you don’t know what is the human stink, then maybe you will not smell it (there are patterns and symmetry in nature and these have already been used to argue for a teleological proof of god, which I know to be misleading).

The occurrence of the waste depository sites would be infrequent, making them anomalies, and suggesting unnatural origin, unlike signs that are said to point to intelligent design, which are everywhere, so the intent would be recognised, and would colonise and corrupt the epistemological wilderness of the future. It says without saying SO THAT WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS. Any attempt to share meaning and a message with the future will probably fail but what probably will not fail is this meaningless scribble. It is a desire that manifests itself a lot in our culture, the desire to leave a mark; graffiti in a bathroom stall, vandalism, a signature: all a defiance of time. We have sown our signature into the soil. We have survived time.

And what is your message?

The light shapes shifted only slightly, it was their vague wave of intensity that had woken me up. As my eyes came to, their change in colour, at the shadows borders, dancing around the edges, rendered the billows of light like a petrol rainbow.

The T-shirt I had tucked into the window to keep the light out was clinging on by one sleeve where the stitching bunched the fabric, like it does sometimes when the wind makes the old latches slide down a little.

After having only seen the Northern Lights in time-lapse that is how I thought they moved. Licking the sky like a green flame. In real time they hardly move at all. Serves me right for knowing a natural phenomenon only by watching it on the internet. It jarred me, I had to move to check I was not having a sort of stroke and seeing everything in slow motion; a momentary lapse like climbing the last stair that is not there. They moved, but not in big winding ribbons, more rapid little flames within big ribbons that moved more slowly. There were different states of focus; a school of fish that ribbon like a sea serpent.

Eskimos think the lights are the spirits of the animals they hunted. Beluga whales, deer and seals. Native Americans from Wisconsin think that the lights are manabai’wok, giants who are the spirit form of great hunters and fishermen. Other natives see them as the spirits of ancestors, and all interpret them as a benevolent force. And in a way they are all right, given metaphoric licence. The lights are the physical manifestation of a magnetic field that deflects high-energy solar radiation, protecting life on Earth. The lights are particles that have made it through where the magnetic field is weaker at the poles, and collide with gas particles.

Cultures see in the constellation of stars things that feature in their vernacular of images. Carl Sagan said that when the ancient Egyptians saw the Big Dipper they saw a horse carrying a man leaning back followed by a hippo with a crocodile on its back. What will people of the future see in the nuclear trefoil? It looks a little like a peace sign, or an X-marking-the-spot.

Template:Clear

File:Xmark.jpg.png

In the narrative of conception the egg is the conquest, but in a photomicrographic image of sperm cells meeting an egg, what really looks like the most ‘powerful’ on a comparison of constructed scales of significance? Why do we talk of sex in terms of penetration, rather than a cave mouth swallowing? What is our own significance against the vastness of space?

Take something vague like the Lights and make it into something very specific depending on your myths. We are all saying the same thing in different ways. But that is just it; a vernacular. Aliens who find our time capsules would not share any kind of vernacular with we who are under the anthropological umbrella of ‘Life on Earth’, so Larus is wrong to be looking for pi in space. The Human Interference Task Force were wrong to try to find universal symbols.

Ah, Larus. The Northern Lights are super-rare in the Alaskan summer. I thought I must have still been sleeping. But then I remembered like an echo what he had said, that there was going to be a magnetic supercharge this year. He said that the sun’s activity goes in cycles that peak every eleven years, and that this year is the eleventh. I forgot everything for a second and got an urge to talk to him and tell him. He would have liked to know.

In a way I am starting to feel a little bit better about the betrayal, because the flaws it gives him free me from his tether. He taught me a lot, but he is still quite blinded by his man-vision. John Lilly did not treat the dolphins with the reverence he preached they deserved, he was a hypocrite and he brought a lot of discredit to the study of cetaceans. But that can’t undermine the few really pertinent things he also said about other-than-human consciousness. Larus and his ulterior motive do not make everything that I did learn from him null. Because imagine if we took the personal lives of great thinkers as their oeuvre. Sure, we should hate them for it, but if we ignored all of the wife beaters, all of the wife silencers, all of the wife killers, wouldn’t we have some gaping holes in history?

HOW MUSHROOMS CAN SAVE THE WORLD

My comrade reindeer came back again. I know for sure it is real now because I have pinched myself when I have seen it and I have filmed it on camera and watched it back several times over just to make sure. I find it very strange that the reindeer is always alone. This is not the usual behaviour of a reindeer, and this fact makes me think it really is my comrade. But then, this is the part that cannot be theoretically tested. The reindeer could just be a lost and lonely reindeer.

It has not tried to talk to me or tell my future like she said it might. But I do not know if maybe I am looking too hard and thinking too literally. Like looking too hard with my actual physical eyes instead of looking more indirectly with my third eye, which really only means feminine perspective, as in admitting there is not one truth, there are many narratives, there are many names for mountains, and by taking on the perspective of the reindeer I will actually see myself and my future. It is simple and rational, like how Jung said that you can predict the future if you just know how the present has evolved out of the past.

THE vANITy OF MODERN ExISTENcE

INT. CABIN, SUNLIGHT – Erin on cot, camera on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin and the window, legs draped over edge of cot, her hands stiffly under the diary as if at a lectern – she looks up from it and directly at the camera – there is something unsettling in the way her eyes look – wide, imploring/haunted –

ERIN: ‘KACZYNSKI IS GOD’ is scrawled in capitals on the title page of the diary. I have read the first half. Like the title suggests. Damon is pretty much Kaczynski

– she looks down at the diary and pauses with a hand hovering over her bookmarks, little scraps of paper – she picks the first and carefully turns to its page – pages are stiff from years sat pressed together –

ERIN: So like here he says

– she takes a breath –

Once upon a time there was a land covered with pristine virgin wilderness. Where colossal trees soared over lavish mountainsides and rivers ran crazy and free through deserts. Where eagles wheeled and beavers beavered at their dams and people lived in concord with bare nature. Achieving everything they needed to achieve by the day using only rocks. Bones and timber. Padding softly on the Earth and living to full personal potential. In a peaceful state of anarchy

– she looks back at the camera –

ERIN: Which is lifted right out of Kaczynski. And then this

– she turns to another page –

That summer there were too many people around my old cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I hear there are handlebars and viewing plateaus specifically plateaued for viewing at Yosemite now. They think that wildness can be put in a box and looked at. John Muir was a douchebag

ERIN: Saturation again. Damon must have been in another cabin somewhere a bit less remote before he came to this one. Kaczynski did that too. He got upset when some bulldozers tore down his favourite thinking spot and that’s what sent him further out into the wilderness and into madness and made him send the letter bombs

– she sits looking at the diary in her hands with slumped shoulders – she looks back at the camera –

ERIN (QUIETLY): It’s really fucking sad if you think about it

– then she smiles weakly, turning to another page –

ERIN: And then this. Before the forgetting existence was a mosaic of beauty. It is the iron fist of technology that has smashed that to smithereens. And we are the shards. Each just a remnant of this beautiful mosaic. Discordant from our true nature

– she stares at the page – looks up –

ERIN: And it’s all very hyperbolic but I get it

– she turns to another page –

Technological society is a leech on the soul. Existentialism is its result. Primitive man had a challenging existence. He had to fight off predators and other men and hunt and kill. He was raw and fully alive. He was not safe from failure but he was not hopeless to all of his threats. He could act on them. Modern man is under constant threat by things he has no power to control. Nuclear weapons. Pollution. Carcinogens. Our environment is already radically altered from its natural state. Soon man will be as radically different as his modern environment

ERIN: He man he. Of course. But he goes into this more. He says that

– she turns to another bookmark –

Nature is not a feminist. Nature is ruled by chaos and competition. Strength and cunning. Nature made a human creature that must fill the roles of care and duty to offspring. So that the species may flourish. They are weaker and domestically minded. This obviously makes them social beings and so more suited to civilisation. This is why the mountains are not peppered with women. They will be more cumbersome during the revolution and will also fare worse. But of course they will be necessary after the revolution. So we must take care to recruit them

– she frowns down at the diary – makes a kind of ‘huuumph’ sound – bounces the diary a little in her hands, absently – chews the inside of her lip – she turns to another bookmark – the pages stick together – she peels them apart –

The enemy is the machine. We should not make enemies of ourselves

– she looks back to the camera, bouncing the diary in her hands again – the stiff pages hardly move –

ERIN: You can see the way his philosophy develops. He starts going then into how the revolution should work and what his idea of utopia after will be like. All the time going back to this idea of freedom freedom freedom, which he always writes in capitals. He wants to destroy everything institutional and symbolic. Factories, of course, but also hospitals. And libraries. And he says there will be many casualties. He says that death and chaos are the sacrifice needed. That freedom and dignity are more valuable than a life free of pain. That to die fighting for survival is more fulfilling than a life void of purpose

– she is absorbed in her trail of thought – she does not notice the book in her hands – her hands play with it absently – apparently she does not notice because she does not treat it with the delicate reverence she did before –

ERIN: And then if you follow his logic. And you end up with this post-technological society. Then doesn’t feminism have what it wants anyway? Because if like I believe there is no natural way of being. And patriarchy is just scaffolding. Then does taking down the scaffolding not solve the problem?

– the diary slips from her hands and lands on the floor face down – a page is dislodged and slips across the floor with the gust the book’s landing made – Erin looks reproachfully at the piece of paper – she bends and reaches to pick it up, gathers the diary as she does – she sits back on the cot and looks at the paper, places the diary besides her – then she unfolds the piece of paper – her lips move silently as she begins to read –

– her face caves in on itself – she brings her hand to her mouth and the other begins shaking – she lets out a whine that is broken and animalistic –

– then her eyes dart suddenly to an area behind the camera and to the left – she brings away her hand as though to talk – her face has a receptivity to it now, like it is in the act of communication, all parts expressive in a way that had not been in evidence to the inanimate camera – as though there is someone in the room with her whom she is addressing –

ERIN: He… He killed himself

– and then, shaking her head desolately –

ERIN: I don’t. Don’t know

– in the background through the window looking out into the trees that get denser and denser until they are forest a dark shape comes forward from the obscurity – it is small because it is in the distance, it would be easy to miss – Erin slowly shakes her head at the point behind the camera with her mouth a big ‘O’ – eyes are drawn to it because it is sudden movement in a previously inert space – in contrast to the space around it it becomes clear – a large animal with long spindly legs –

– Erin’s expression droops and her eyes slip diagonally down to the camera – she blinks at it then slowly rises, slowly, like her body is almost too heavy to lift – she leans across the floor and reaches out –

CUT

WEST, WEST, WEST, DESTINy, DESTINy, DESTINy

After I read it I went a bit dizzy like I had to sit down and get moving acutely at the same time. I got the fear/adrenaline that perhaps a rabbit feels being run into the ground by a fox; a chemical consolation prize for its oncoming doom. And there must be one, a payoff, I think, otherwise the rabbit would just lie down and let the fox take it, not prolong its own suffering. There must be a small part to the death chase that feels good.

I packed up my bag to move back out to the fire tower. Damon’s quest and the distance he went on it had put my own feeble experiment into perspective; in contrast a glorified camping trip. He too saw the hypocrisy of the Mountain Man but he actually followed through on it with frenzied sincerity. A distance so far and so absolute as to never come back. In fact the only absolute solitude.

An event horizon is a place in space-time and events beyond this point can’t reach an observer who is outside of them. It is a point of no return and on the other side of this point the gravitational pull turns so intense that escape is impossible. This is a black hole.

Here in the cabin there is always looming the possibility that Stan will come to find me. This is reason enough to leave for somewhere more authentically distant. And I shall not take my map. A map is a corrupting thing, an imposition on the wilderness it tames, translates to the symbolic. And it is a mapping for others to follow, like Thoreau mapped for others to follow him on his philosophical terrain but by talking about it he took away its agency, its pure wildness. Because pure wildness is the absence of words, is self-willed. Damon found this out and had to give up all of his words.

I cannot take the camera because it is more than the documentary now. Documenting too throws a quadrant on a thing, pins a thing down like a specimen for dissection. You cannot document a wilderness because that undoes its wildness, its being apart and for itself, and now I understand this. To document is to litter, to litter photographs of the tundra in the tundra behind you. And besides, it diminishes the directness of the experience, which becomes once removed via a superficial lens of viewing. Can you even have a feminist documentary on wilderness? Can you even have a word for wilderness? Do the Eskimos and the Inuits have one?

It is like Sam told me; the categorising of indigenous people is a colonial pursuit that controls their identity with words. Like in the Indian Act. It is a way to distinguish in white law who gets status or non-status, who gets what.

We map them out, draw out their boundaries, like when I entered Denali Park or you enter any park and there is a visitors’ centre roping off the inside from the outside, nature from non-nature. Gender is another act of division, deciding who gets what admirable qualities. There are no Mountain Women because the Mountain Man will not call her Mountain Woman. The Mercury 13 were ready for space flight, but NASA wasn’t ready to call them astronauts. (Side note: Athabaskans had a matrilineal society before rights were given to their men in white law.)

All along I have been catching butterflies, pinning them in a glass case and putting a name to them: my own name. I had thought it so innocent, the calling of things by their real names. The good truth of speciesism; helping me to see difference. But it is not, it pins the animal to a system that pretends to be truth, static and mechanical, it reduces the luminous and the complex. This makes the thing, the animal, lose its deeper truth. William Blake the poet got upset at Newton and the Enlightenment scientists for ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’. I have been trying so hard to put it into words but I have been struggling because it can never really be worded without making its immediacy dissipate. I have been unweaving rainbows.

I set fire to the pile of man books like I did the animal guts, because I do not want The Bear to smell them either. In words they keep the wilderness from me. I am sick of their authority. I am sick of their exclusion, their air of expertise, their colonial intent. I am sick of their wording that which should not be worded. Maybe we need some gaping holes in history! I hate them! And I hate them all the more for being so hypocritical, with Damon so painfully true!

I watch the guts crackle but the books do not light because I threw them on whole in anger and the flames lick at them but do not take hold and snuffle and die. Are they fucking immortal? I pick them up one by one and tear the pages from them, reignite the flames, feed them in gently. They curl to black in my fingers, page by page.

But I have to do something with this, running away like a little squirrel who takes a strange object to its dray, and what to do with it when I have it there? A voyage that leaves everybody else behind. A voyage to see the moon’s second face.

Mike Collins was the astronaut left behind to see to things in the command module while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He drifted for a day in a hunk of metal that he had little control over, alone in the dizzy void, velvety infinity making him sick with perspective or lack of, no anchor for his soul and a brain telling him that whatever he thinks he can see he is probably still falling. And when he got to the dark side of the moon and he could not see Earth any more, he lost radio contact with Houston for forty-eight minutes.

Not since Adam has any human known such solitude, the loneliest man at the beginning of the world or in the world or out of it. Only, Mike Collins says he did not feel loneliness but awareness, satisfaction and exultation. The most crystalline and private solitude. Oh, Eve, why did you have to show up and tamper with the clarity?

We always had a preoccupation with the moon as this symbol of a philosophical island. A man is an island on the moon. It is so far away it is definitive exile. Is that Cain on the moon? Is he lonely? Is he drunk?

The moon has not been an island since Apollo, or it is an island like Crusoe’s but after the footprint. Someone already flew up and touched it and saw it from all sides and figured out there are no green men and no cheese. A solitude to be felt by no one since Adam and now Mike Collins.

And yet it could always have been purer still. If Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had died like they easily might have, and Collins had to do a return journey to Earth on his own, first the dark face then the burden and relief of being the survivor, the only one to escape the shipwreck, returned without the heroes empty-handed. But how pure would have been the level of solitude on that return? Does that thought corrupt it? Like it could always go deeper still? Like smashing the atom of solipsism to find out it does smash and it is actually made of weird squiggly things.

In Chinese mythology there is a woman on the moon and she has a whole band of moon rabbits for company. I felt spacey as I left the cabin, but much less heavy than when I walked out here. A flock of geese made a ‘V’ in the sky. This is called a skein.

NOW COMES GOOD SAILING MOOSE INDIAN

I stayed up all day and part of the night reading Damon’s journal to its end, only leaving the tower a couple of times to pee and just to stretch my cramping legs. I was sore all over from just sitting still, and so exhausted from crying and reading that I fell into a nightmare sleep that I could not pull myself out of until late this morning. The diary does not elaborate on how he chose to do it. It only suggests that he would not ever be found.

Damon is hanging by the neck from a tree, its branch groaning against the pull of his body, but it groans less and less with his diminished mass. The bears and the wolves found him before the ranger, like he planned. His legs are torn away where the lower-standing creatures have managed to reach, from his waist down, a hula skirt made of strands like earthworms, which wriggle as the torso sways. It takes a big bear to stand on its hind legs and wrench the forlorn body to the ground, where the lower-standing creatures wait with yelps and warbles that sound like ecstasy and pain at once. They feast on his body, frenzied but harmonious, creatures great and small.

Humankind has been the biggest leech on this planet. No creature has ever dominated so unanimously or pervasively.

It had crossed my mind that maybe his suicide was faked so that he could truly cast off all ties and live in his wilderness with no one ever coming after him. To be dead and mourned as the most unconditional form of liberation. But reading the diary, and especially towards its end, he writes so convincingly about how it feels to follow the deduction of his philosophy all the way to its conclusion, and know there is no way back, that I really have to believe he was there.

We are heading for collapse. Eventually the fortress we built will cave in on itself. But not until everything outside of it has been absorbed into it, remodelled in its image. Not until we have corrupted everything that is beautiful and whole and pure.

He talks and talks about how there is this innate thing, this selfishness in us, and that no matter our good intentions it always overrides. And it gets me thinking about the parallel on a macro-cosmic scale. That really, if there is no changing the course of our ‘advancement’ and its inevitable conclusion, why even struggle against it? Maybe we should meet it running, we should just run at death and the death of civilisation yelling and flailing like Damon did. The planet could regenerate with new interpretations of life, like after the dinosaurs or all the sea creatures in the Silurian period or everything in the Great Dying in the Permian period when 96 per cent of life forms perished and the 4 per cent that did not went on to become all life as we know it now.

And if at that end of it, when all the glittery dust motes settle and the black mushrooms start to metabolise the fallout, if there is nothing left that could contemplate our loss, then is nothing really lost? Even those with the capacity to feel, would they even care? Would the dolphins be sad to see us go if any of them survived?

The Doomsday Clock is a clock whose time is agreed upon by a group from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Midnight represents the apocalypse. The clock indicates the planet’s vulnerability to apocalypse from human-made existential risks, their main concerns being nuclear weapons and climate change.

Nuclear contaminates time and future wildness and will outlive us as a time capsule. Climate change permeates the now, every fibre of being on the surface of the planet touched and corrupted by it, even if only by the colour change of its cast shadow. Human-made change is already written into every little bit of wilderness.

No part of the planet will be untouched. Not the deepest ocean trench, not the never-seen portion of Siberian forest, not the unknown and unnamed underwater cave or the blind crabs living in it. All will bear our dirty fingerprints. We have left our negative imprint everywhere. And the first and worst felt of the human species losing their identity and culture will be the Eskimo and Inuit, who did very little to bring it about. The rocks will testify against us to the future, speaking of us as geomorphic agents.

The Mountain Men are dead now. All purity has been proved untrue. Alaska is owned privately, by natives, or is federal land. Can a wilderness ever be wild if it is owned? Does the wilderness reserved lose its self-will, its wildness? The human stink is everywhere, the smell is enough to almost paralyse me and at the same time frenzy, make me want to limp-run away, run towards, a cliff-lemming suicide tendency.

The clock has recently been set at three minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since the Cold War. In a press release, when they moved the clock hand, the scientists said the probability for global catastrophe is very high.

They sat around in a board meeting with other minds representing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, sitting around with dozens of Nobel laureates agreeing on that conclusion and feeling the full weight of its implications. How do the people building the way we know the world manage to stagger on with the weight on their shoulders so heavy?

There are just too many people on this finite planet now. I can only dream that there will be some virus, some superbug, a disaster, an earthquake along the fault lines of civilisation. Something to restore equilibrium.

And yet one cannot orchestrate this. One cannot inflict this philosophy onto others and remain sincere. Kaczynski got this wrong. For to be a human being is to be part of humankind. And to be part of humankind is to be in the ranks of the enemy. And so what is to be done? What can an individual do but quit the army that fights for a cause he does not believe in? He cannot hurt his brothers in arms whose only fault is their ignorance.

He is right and Kaczynski was wrong and even Thoreau was inauthentic. Thoreau’s writing was a time capsule and with it he colonised his wildness. It is to write intent everywhere, to sow it around like bad seeds. Wilderness is an absence of these seeds, or more than absence – the inexistence of them. A dead Damon is wilderness. Even more absolute wilderness is a Damon never born.

In the opinion of Stephen Hawking if we can just cling on for long enough to wait for the technology that will take us to space, we will come out okay. We can bugger off to Mars and live happily ever after. A select group of us on even finiter finite resources. As though moving the problem elsewhere could solve the problem. But we can’t escape the problem when it is inside us, plaited through us, inextricable.

After all I have said and thought about his diary and the parcel I really have to reassess because they were not left there as his intention. And without intent they can’t really said to be his time capsule. More an archaeology of him. There is no ego in an accidental archaeology.

The postcards were an obvious giveaway. I feel stupid for not having clocked it at all before. Of course he would not have sent them all and then collected them back. Somebody else had collected them for him, and along with his diary, brought them to his holy place as a little shrine.

It pains me to be here at the edge but I would fail my beliefs if I were not to do this. Is this not really the meaning of life and everything? Is it not the end of the quest, to have found your own truth and really lived by it? I feel fulfilled.

From what is said in the diary I think what must have happened is he left a letter for his family, presumably inside the cabin with a postal address to which it should be sent, for the next person who found it, or for the search party sent out for him.

He believed in something so hard that it undid him and he loved it so much he had to give it up. Maybe in part so he could not see it diminish (gouge out eyes, see less suffering). A lover’s suicide before the fervour subsides and a death in innocence before the debasement and a perfectly embalmed and beautiful corpse.

He came to the wilderness in the first place to claim his freedom and then found the only thing he could do to be true was to renounce it. He took his own life to repent for our sins, like Jesus minus the wide-open arms and the preaching and the son-of-god complex.

There is a sad kind of beauty in it, like a deep blue bruise that came from nowhere and you want it to go away but then again you don’t because you like how it makes you feel sad to look at it, and more real to touch it and hurt. And in his last days of life he must have felt so free finally of the burden, once he had made up his mind, so cathartically pure. So free of the burden of being because he had decided to do the one and only true thing he could do to live by what he believed in. He had found his truth.

I want to try to conjure what he did near the end so that I can try to live it too. If he went wandering, where he went wandering. From the window of the tower the mountains sit pink blue grey behind the trees, always chameleon to the sky. Was he drawn to them, sat impassive and anchored and true, did he climb to the top to see the world he had let go of, the entire world over?

He will not ever know that there was a girl from a small town in middle England to know and understand the sacrifice he made, because he did not want it to be known. What he wanted was an act of nothingness.

And I feel a little fear at the danger of my quest now. I am a little scared at the intensity of the ache and camaraderie I feel for this man I never knew. I find myself thinking by proxy about how I would do it, hypothetically, if I wanted to do it in the most sincere and poignant way.

What it would need: personal significance and the least amount of suffering and the fewest traces left behind. A desire to be eaten back up by the earth, to dissolve back into the quantum soup that you came from with the smallest smidgen or trace. Rocks on your feet to join Rachel Carson under the water and nourish the fish kingdom.

But what does personal significance matter if the act’s sole purpose is to deny completely your individuality? The one thing I have to lay down to offer is me, bye-bye, me, bye-bye. But then, if you are going to underwrite your life with that one act, and no one else is ever to know about the circumstances of it anyway, you might as well allow yourself poetic justice, right?

Did Rachel Carson choose not to intervene in her cancer to underwrite her whole life’s work for ever? Or did the universe perceive so much charge in her as a pinnacle figure in her sphere of existence that it attached this significance to her dying?

And the burning question: how do I go back from here? When I can see it so painfully wither to touch, and when just by my presence everything is undone? I am not alone here, there is something I bring with me. My bad seeds, and this place so easily inoculated.

Alfred Worden of Apollo 15 wrote a poem about the moon that went: she is forever moving just out of reach and I sail on/never touching, only watching and wanting to know.

Alfred Worden wanted to stalk, wanted to get his sticky fingers on that coy temptress, wanted to word the moon. I think of my map and my documentary and all of my lists, my collecting. Because the map is not just not the territory, it is also something rather sinister.

When we draw a map we are sewing our signature into it. When we map we divide and parcel. When we divide the forms of life in taxonomy and name them in our image, we set ourselves outside, omniscient. We structure our difference; we say, we are the only animals that name and order the other animals, the rest of them just exist. But how do we know the dolphins are not swimming around shouting ‘coral’ at coral in sonar?

And naming the animals and knowing the animals, it did not make us look after them better. It is another way for each ‘namer’ to survive time. Our separateness allowed us to bring everything to the brink of mass extinction, to say, oh well, we can do without them.

I might have learned to don a fraud penis to go to Scott’s Antarctica, but why would I want to now that I know what that entails? What Thilda was saying when she said you don’t need a penis between your legs is that you don’t need one there to make you a good coloniser, but why would I want to be a coloniser at all?

My documentary is a sinister and selfish one, a fraud penis. That is just it. There is a point of footage specifically that I watched back where Rochelle said ‘the freedom to roam free like a white man’.

I am wearing a big heavy robe and walking around and there is a line of faceless people trailing behind me and they are all dressed in white tunics. I am at the head of a glorious procession: roll up, follow me, throw off your imaginary shackles, the world is your oyster! Quit your job, sell your stuff, you can conquer the world, life is too short for regrets! They follow me everywhere in a long winding file like ants, my followers. There are so many of them. When we walk through grass the grass gets trampled to a dirt-dry path. When we walk through snow there are only sludge dirt tracks left after. When we walk through the deserts there are wagon tracks in the red sand.

The trail has been opened, stomp stomp stomp. Best-guarded travel secrets, too good not to share! Secluded beaches, untouched forests, pristine crystal mountain streams! And despite the lack of authenticity there are those that come to seek it anyway. In trying to find something authentic of their own they leave a well-worn trail behind.

My own time capsule, my documentary, my baby, like President Carter’s baby sent into space to colonise the wilderness of the future. The reason Damon’s legacy is different to Chris McCandless’s is that there was no time capsule sent out by or for Damon. This is the tragedy of Chris McCandless, because it was not him who wrote a book and made a film and brought the crowds to his wilderness. If I were to make one with the documentary then Damon too would become a mecca, and that would undermine his entire point. And mine.

I guess I knew deep down but I could not admit it to myself because it was my baby and no one thinks their own baby is ugly. And it gave me purpose-propulsion-direction in striking out and living vividly when I had none. And I did not want to kill my baby.

For the Eskimos secrecy holds potency and is essential in the continuum of magic. For example, if a hunter were to witness a singing animal, and the animal were an omen of good hunting in that area, the hunter could not tell other people of his or her discovery because this would make the magic lose its power.

Inside the forest where the trees are densest and the air is damp with exhumed gases condensing like inside closed windows, Damon had dug himself a hole. He got rid of the spade once the hole was dug, took it away from the grave so as not to leave a marker. Then he buried himself to the shoulders with dirt. His right arm stays outside to bury the other with. It is not perfect but it is the best he could do on his own. He knew enough botany to know which of the plants are poisonous.

Weeks later a whole ecosystem of microbes has made good work of his meat and tendrils of plants are redirecting his nitrogen to their leaves and ants march off, shards of him on their backs. Wasps have made a nest of his brain, they enter and leave through his nostrils and his eye sockets and the gateway to his soul becomes a wasp flyway. The buzzing and humming and pulsating are the sounds of rage and passion, of nature claiming back her flesh voraciously. It is exactly as he wanted.

SEEKING BUT NEVER QUITE FINDING

I am too confused and upset to reason over it any more, so I go for a walk. When I jump-turn down from the last rung of the ladder there it is, stock still as always. I have never seen it that far from the tundra, never. And right at that instant I hate the bloody thing, for being so illusive and taunting me so, and how fucking dare it appear with nothing to say when it knows I am struggling.

I yell at it. I bend for a stone and throw it at it. It is a pathetic throw, it bounces on the ground to the side of it and the reindeer flinches and sidesteps, eyeing me warily.

I yell at it some more, shouting, go on, then, go. Then sob.

But it doesn’t. It does not move. It stands just grazing a little for minutes on end with me just watching and sniffling snot onto my sleeve.

And then I think to myself that multiple exposures to coincidence accumulate into destiny. It must have something to show me, I only have to try my very hardest to follow it this time. Why else would it keep coming back and standing so persistently? It is ready to speak to me.

Sometimes it runs so then I run, only I can’t run too far until I get a stitch, but then it slows too, as though waiting for me to catch up.

Hours of this through the forest finds us out on the tundra and by the river, where it cuts deep against the banks before it becomes braided with sandbanks further down. The sun is in the centre of the sky. The insects come up from the grass in little clouds. The reindeer lopes into the river without even stopping for a thought.

It only takes it around ten seconds to make it across, being moved at a diagonal by the water only slightly because it is gliding so fast, then it struggles a little out the other side, its bandy legs tremoring slightly, a forlorn old man trying to lift himself off the floor with crutches. When it has heaved itself out, it turns to face me. There it stands, shakes itself down, and looks at me. It lowers its head and snorts.

So I hold my breath and jump in before I can think any better. The water is cold as hell, from running off the mountain after sitting around as ice up there. It is much harder to swim when your ears and mouth are full of ice water that makes your brain freeze and there are sirens in your ears and the water in your mouth makes you gasp and choke. And the sudden and real shock from the water brings me rapidly into the reality of the situation. For all of ten seconds I am flailing in the water in panic, being dragged along and not much able to sort myself out.

Flapping my arms down to bring my body up, I try to turn my head to where the reindeer had been but I cannot see it. Obviously it is not going to jump in for me, we are not about to have one of those inter-species rescue moments of empathy and connection. My comrade reindeer has renounced its one job, and I lose all hope.

I have thoughts like I had better think about my life in retrospect like you are supposed to and remember the time I found an injured squirrel and fed it water from a syringe and wrapped it in socks in a cardboard box but it died in the night. I wonder if my mum will feel a psychic maternal twinge, stop stirring her tea and drop the spoon. I see her ears prick up like Beethoven the St Bernard dog from the film franchise, when the little girl falls in the swimming pool ten blocks away. Thinking about things like this I feel so far away and apart as though I am in another life altogether, having a look through the eyes of some girl called Erin.

And in an instant I realise it is the first time I have really thought about elsewhere since being here. And in an instant I see everything all at once. ‘It was in this state that I experienced “myself” as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A membrain,’ said John Lilly from his isolation tank.

I see a bright light every time I go under the water and screw my eyes shut hard and watch the green shapes like in a lava lamp then emerge and the sun bursts through for my having been starved momentarily and therefore malnourished and more susceptible to its intensity.

But then the adrenaline kicks in and my body takes over and being the rational one manages to get me right and make me swim with my head up. My rucksack has the dry-bag inside, which is full of air along with all my valuables and is buoyant so keeps me from going too far under. I had the foresight to pack it in case I got caught in the rain. I am heavy with all the water in my boots and it crosses my mind to take them off to stop them dragging me down. But I cannot stay out here without shoes. I honestly think in that moment that I actually would rather die than give up and go home without having found out whatever it is I am trying to find out.

The crew of Apollo 13 did not get to land on the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to abort their landing, spending almost a week in space trying not to die. They had limited power, only enough to propel themselves around the moon back towards Earth then float on unaided, hoping they would hit the exact angle they needed so as not to skim off the atmosphere like a flat pebble off a placid lake. They essentially had to catapult themselves and hope for the best while steadily running out of oxygen and freezing.

While I am gulping water I wonder if they thought about making a suicide mission to the moon instead. With sudden clarity, as if seeing the moth that had been camouflaged against the tree’s bark, I get it. Looking down on the surface as they circled around, this place that they had seen as their life’s pinnacle, and everything built up to that promise of standing on the moon’s face, basking in majesty and in singularity; it might have seemed worth abandoning living for. To end at the crescendo.

But for whatever reason they chose to try to go back, even at the risk of miscalculating and veering off into the void. They said ‘Let’s go home’ and the whole world stopped turning to wait to see them tearing through the roof of the sky. It is strange how it is framed as what could have been the loneliest death in history. Not a death in solitude for the envy of Mike Collins and Adam.

The difference is the element of choice, of intent. It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness. Newton’s ball was lonely because he drew it, the ball did not will itself there. And like Newton’s ball a woman’s body like Rachel Carson’s body is not her own to choose to keep in chastity or solitude.

Marianne Moore said that solitude is the cure for loneliness, which was very crafty of her, and perhaps my trip’s whole mantra. She was saying take your lonely body and reclaim it as your own, think it solitude!

But drowning is hardly reclamation. That is why I do not want to let the river take me, or give up my shoes. After clambering onto the grassy bank, I lie panting on my back, trying to get steady, watching the clouds pass overhead in indifference. The mosquitoes are quick to jump on me like carrion. I am too tired to swat them away and get bitten to a pin-cushion through the fabric on my forearms.

It is a long walk back because I was dragged downriver quite fast, and my body is lead-heavy and stiff from cold. I fall over in the mud that goes slick when the rain starts pouring. I have to laugh at the sky opening up minutes after I start walking. I could wade my way back up the river and end up drier than I am. I go despondently back to the cabin and not the tower because in the cabin I can make a fire.

It takes me into the evening to get myself there and then it is all I can do to make the little fire in the grate to try to get warm by, because once I stop moving my body will not really do what I want it to. I just about peel off all my clothes and shake them out at the door, then place them on various surfaces and protrusions next to the fire. I lay down a makeshift rug and dry myself with my scanty micro-towel, not allowing myself the blanket until the fire has properly dried my skin off. My hair is matted with river bits in.

The panic starts when I notice that my feet are blue, like really blue, and it dawns on me that I have not yet stopped shaking. I remember reading a survival manual that went into the stages of hypothermia. The first stage that signals the onset of the severe and death-causing kind of hypothermia is called Paradoxical Undressing, where a person’s brain tells them wrongly that they are really warm, so that they take all their clothes off and seek out snow to roll around in. I try to decide if I feel warm or cold, and if my undressing could be classed as paradoxical. It is hard to tell when you feel so cold and yet your limbs are very definitely burning.

The survival handbook also said things about delirium, and the final stage to look out for has a sinister name; it is called Terminal Burrowing. When a dog can feel death coming it takes itself somewhere quiet and solitary to die if it can. The final stage of hypothermia triggers the same response; the afflicted will look for a small and enclosed space to curl up in.

I am just going outside and may be some time is what Lawrence Oates said, perhaps as a prelude to burrowing. Some German researchers decided that this is an automatic process triggered in the brain which sends us into a primitive mode that thinks up burrowing as a protection behaviour, the same trigger that sends animals into hibernation. So it is possible Lawrence Oates did not have cryogenics in mind. He could have instead been undone to the most basic level of his humanity (benefit of the doubt should be put into practice here, in fairness).

It hits me that Damon’s odyssey to this cabin was an elaborate Terminal Burrowing, was a dog’s death. After the onset of the burrowing mode it is already too late. It would not have been possible for him to change his mind.

I figure that as long as I am aware of this final stage and avoid it, I will not end up dead in a hollow. Just have to stay warm, warm. I scramble to put as many layers on as possible. I tell myself, even if you feel hot leave those clothes on. How hard can it be to stay dressed? I consider maybe tying my hands together to stop this, then think better of it. I settle for attaching a little note with a paperclip to the zip on my ski jacket. The note says ‘paradoxical undressing’; I hope that this will suffice to remind me to stay dressed. I put my hands in my pockets because they are making me anxious with how dead-looking they are, skin like tracing paper and all the veins blue crayon.

I feel so very tired. But sleep is hibernation, hibernation is burrowing, so sleep could not be a good idea. I try to think of ways to stop from sleeping. I so badly want to lie in the cot but instead I sit upright on the chair, so that if I slump I might fall off and wake.

MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES

How do I find a way back and do I even want to?

In the visitors’ centre were relics and photographs, each attractive in some visceral way that made a magpie of me. Sometimes an object appears before you and seems to fit itself into your chronology like a fusing cell.

There were eerie masks with grimaces and rectangular grins, on animal and people faces. The masks were worn for rituals and then destroyed directly after. They were an immediately physical way to don an identity for the expression of something particular and temporary. An uttering of varying identities.

When the Eskimos gave a name to a matured spirit, after the danger of childhood had passed and the spirit of the young person was thought to be well and truly lodged inside, the name given was always the name of the last departed person, because the spirits were thought to transmigrate through the generations. Young children were brought up in mind of the gender of the last person to have their ancestral name, and then usually reverted to roles based on their biological sex when they reached puberty. They have a very rudimentary taxonomy – animals have names so that they can talk about them but are not separated into families in such detail, are not unwoven. A person could don a mask and become any gender, any life form. Transmigration allows them to do away with taxonomy; a queering of the animals like their queering of gender that is really a way to acknowledge symbiotic association; like Lynn Margulis said, we cannot live apart from each other.

Template:Clear

File:F0234-01.jpg.png

And then along came the white Christian missionaries! They reorganised their society, imposing patrilineal names and social customs. They undermined the Eskimo women’s respected positions. They saw this animism as evidence that the Eskimos worshipped bad and ungodly spirits, that they needed to be saved from the burden of their devil worship and impure customs. In the missionaries’ myth, women were blamed for the mortality of Man, for even daring to eat an apple, which stood metaphorically for their knowledge or heaviness (myths are so easily inverted). Men were ambassadors for the people now; the missionaries’ one male god told them to go forth and fill the world and subdue it. To rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and everything in between. This god said SEW YOUR SIGNATURES INTO THEIR NAMES. Adam named the animals, and in so doing, he thought himself apart.

The stewarding approach to the natural world took the Eskimos outside of their circle and tried to make their thinking linear. The missionaries made them speak a language which divides everything into opposites, and pitches each against the other and categorises them good or bad, masculine or feminine. In this language the differences between each opposing pair justify the subjugation of one to the other. Better is determined by what is associated with masculine: rational, civilised, intellectual and strong, so anything that connotes these categories holds value. Worse is the opposites: natural, primitive, spiritual and all their associates. Masculine is better just because masculine is better. This is not a reflection of reality but a structuring of it. A breaking apart and stacking of what could otherwise be fluid and fluctuating, but languidly.

Once you divide things into constituent parts you can stack them and you can subdue some parts with others, and this way those doing the building can sit on the top. The missionaries had already trialled this technique in Europe. Casting shamans or strong female figures as demon worshippers and witches scared people into thinking that women who deviated from their new subordinate function were evil and bad. In a theft of body, women were burned at the stake for practising birth control and midwifery. We were enclosed at the same time the commons were enclosed. And women feel connection to what came before even if only because they are made to feel more vividly what has been lost or kept from them.

Like the animals were atomised by species and set apart from Adam, the physical world was stable and geometric and absolute. But now this myth is being undermined with a new one. Science is our rational way of seeing and knowing. We have been looking very hard, very closely, with new aids to vision. Now a new science is falsifying our apartness. A queer science of approximations and non-objectivity. Things are not absolute Mountain Men either/or. Another book that Larus gave me that I have been reading is The Tao of Physics. It told me that when Niels Bohr the physicist was knighted (Order of the Elephant) in Denmark in 1947 he had to choose a coat of arms and for it he chose the t’ai-chi symbol, the yin-yang, and that his inscription read ‘opposites are complementary’.

Template:Clear

File:Dot.jpg.png

Bohr said that dualisms – is it a particle or a wave? – do not describe exactly the true nature of things, but that the interplay between the two poles brings us closer to their reality, because everything is always both things at once depending on how you are looking. He said that ‘only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects’. Much like objectivity in naming animals or peoples does not describe exactly, leaves something diminished.

I think about Rochelle and all the words I can never find for her. I think instead of finding many, many almost true words for her. Then it all ties together in my head so suddenly, coming to shape like the image that emerges with just one missing puzzle piece and abruptly you know exactly how it will be. Now science, quantum physics, is our ally in the war against patriarchy because it says you can’t ever touch the atom of another thing, Alfred Worden, not really; there will always be a force between the electrons of you and it which repel each other on an unfathomably small level. Nothing is solid. Can you feel the hollowness of things as you touch them?

Rochelle is a little to me like the moon is to Alfred Worden. She does not want to be spoken of. I did not know if the best way round her was to omit her from the documentary completely. I did not know before why I could not just be a man about it. Just say it like I think it and possess it when the whole reason I set out was to make this documentary just to prove I could.

In the quantum realm this is called the Observer Effect. Your measuring of a thing alters the thing itself. The very act of measuring forces the universe to make a decision at random from a bunch of probabilities. When we measure, the probabilities become a single actuality and this is called a collapse of the wave function.

This is the reason I did not know what I wanted my documentary to say. I can’t talk about Rochelle without talking about my own subjective observation of her. I do not want to collapse her wave function and so I just should not talk about her at all. And the same of this place, this whole experience.

Maybe ‘a feminist documentary on wilderness’ is a semantic impossibility. A woman knows the burn of the power and impact of eyes on skin, she knows the observer effect, she feels herself behind the eyes when a man does not because a man does not know the burn, never has his vantage as detached observer brought into question.

The instant you speak about the thing or you try to pin it down it slips from your hands like soap. The thing can’t be pincered. Matter is a particle and a wave all at once. Both aspects are valid, it just depends on how you look at the matter. And the problem with symbols like words in place of things is that as time passes, like matter in entropy, a symbol will move away from the source at accelerating speed. The markers for nuclear waste sites are never truth, even before the language dies.

Now she is again vivid and present, so fully formed I could walk over and actually touch her if only I could muster the willpower to move. We are at the bottom of an ocean or maybe the moon, because the space is dark and heavy, the sand or surface is chalky-looking and grey, and in front of me is what I took at first to be an astronaut. It is Rachel Carson, without her shaman disguise this time, like an astronaut in her old diver’s suit. It is loud with bees, she is humming and nodding along to the bees but I can’t see where the bee noise comes from until I get near to her and realise that I have found the bees: they are inside the fish bowl of her diving suit.

Her voice has a new strange quality to it, as though it were song. It was always her voice in many guises, many mouths to help carry it along. Many layers all at once instead of one pulse. How do I explain it? As though the air moves with it, as though when she speaks the trees rustle and a hundred birds sing with her and the air blows leaves across the room, only the windows are shut and everything is still, no pages rustle on the desk, but I feel it in my temples, this vibration. She was a witness for them and they now a witness for her, reanimating her. Like her bees, tiny mouths in unison. And if it comes from inside my head, her thoughts, my thoughts, what does it matter? I am contaminated.

Why is my reindeer trying to kill me?

Why would you think that?

Because it led me into the river, and I nearly drowned, and now I don’t know if I am awake or asleep or dead or what. My hands and feet are blue and my head is filled through the ears with ice water.

It was not trying to kill you. It was trying to show you something. Then why would it go where it knew I could not follow?

Precisely.

I stare at the ceiling some. She goes shimmery, shimmery in the corner of my vision. My head starts to fizz, like it actually starts to fizz as though it is full of fizzy pop. The ceiling spins a vortex. It goes round in a swirl like a galaxy. Like the shape of a galaxy that is also the shape of a hurricane and a shell, it is a recurring shape, a pattern repeated throughout nature, also found in the ratio of your uterus. What does it mean? The Golden Ratio. It is a cosmic constant. It might make up space-time itself. I think I am fainting.

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR

Waking up I was cold and confused. For a whole five seconds I took in the sound of the hammering rain, smells of damp wood and glowing ash, with dust in my nostrils and grit on my face, and had no idea where I was. I lifted up my head and figured my position on the floor of the cabin, next to the fire, and registered that I must have been unconscious. I rubbed the dirt from the floorboards off my face. The bites on my forearms itched and my skin and my scalp especially tickled with the hundred tiny bits of plant and animal from the river. Where I scratched grime collected under my nails.

My head throbbed and was heavy to lift like it had taken in the water. Memories of the river came back to me and I laughed in the sudden appreciation that I was still alive. But then as quickly I felt stupid and vulnerable and vastly under-prepared. Apart from being gluey with cold and maybe some mental scars in the form of future dreams of cold dark rushing water I did not have much to show for my nearly-death. But so easily I could have been another stupid kid Stan’s uncle had to fish out the river with a wooden pole and wire noose. I coaxed the fire up again to heat some coffee.

And now I am back everything is okay again. As in I am a normal colour if a little pale and my fingers are their usual dexterous selves. But I can feel her now like anti-matter. I can feel her lack like an invisible density.

I like the way the plaques talk about the beliefs of the Eskimos like they are truth, because they are. They are narratives as science is a narrative and is both belief and truth also. Animist or mystical, i.e. non-linear, non-absolutist, ‘truths’ and knowledge are reduced to the feminine, seen as inferior, irrational, a cloud system knitted into being, induction over deduction. This is pitted against the masculine Mountain Man’s absolute foundational Truths. But a feminine mystic knows it is lying to say ‘I know that Truth’ when you can’t. That it is more accurate and honest to say that opposites are complementary. It does not matter if she is real or not. I am a mystic because owning a vagina is mystical.

What next? There is one more thing, a small envelope with Damon’s name on. I hesitated over it for a while because I thought I knew what might be in it and it felt just that little bit more intrusive. But then I reasoned I had gone through with it so far I might as well see the whole thing to its end. So I read the letter that his mother left when she built her shrine for him, all the things she wanted to say to him but could not because he was dead.

My son, my parasitic twin.

I stare up at the cobwebbed ceiling and feel hollow at the futility of it all. His mother’s voice reminds me of mine and now I miss her terribly. I feel a whole new size of emptiness, it amazes me I even have the processing space for all these feelings. For the very first time appreciating that I am like a Russian doll she made inside her as every baby girl is to its mother, each a little like the preceding but different, with the potential to birth another if she wishes, and my mum has watched me grow, warily, into her mannerisms and her image and then away from them, until eventually I abandon her and become less her and more myself. And this is a transmigration and I carry many shards of her with me always, as she does me.

And all her hopes and dreams and expectations for me are something that I am leaving behind, but to her they will always be there. And she had a mother that she came out of and that woman I hardly even knew but I am sure had similar sorts of feelings, because that is what can happen when you give something so many parts of yourself. This is a contamination also, and you can’t be mindful of it and still find an intact apartness. Even in death you are still felt in tremors. Even Damon’s purest act was not entirely pure, because he left his negative imprint with his mother.

I feel a change has come because even a few months ago I would have found these thoughts unacceptably sentimental. I am not sure if I am crying on my cabin bed and missing my mum because I am a girl and I was never going to be able to hack this odyssey of solitude for that reason, if it was always biologically determined, or if I have figured out truths about my life by my own will.

And they are all laughing, all of the Mountain Men of history laughing and chanting DARWIN WAS RIGHT, WE TOLD YOU SO, WE TOLD YOU SO, their voices echoed by the mountains, giving them a god-like veracity, and for them I have no answer. Did I cast out or did I just get lost and does it matter either way?

THE THIN VENEER

I can’t get to sleep tonight although I am exhausted. Not from the wakefulness that has kept me up often here; when I get that I can be content just reading or writing or toying with thoughts, because I know it does not matter too much when I do or do not sleep what with the days being all wrong anyway.

This time I can’t sleep from a feeling; that the sky is too big and the space between it and me is heavy like deep water; the deeper down you swim the more pressure there is pushing you down and up at the same time, and the more I think about how far there is between me and the sky the more my head feels the same pressure on it. And the space between me and the road, me and Fairbanks, me and every place underneath a big red arrow stretching from here all the way round the world and back again like on some old public service animation where I go black and white and zoom out and out until the tower is just a speck on a cartoon image of the world and the arrow makes a noise as it elongates like ‘vrrrraaaaawm’ going up in pitch with onomatopoeic tautness.

For almost all the times I have slept in my life until these weeks, that is around 6,935 sleeps, I have been comforted by the thought that in the room next to me are my parents sleeping, in the houses next to me are my neighbours sleeping, in the town around us people are sleeping, in fact the whole of England is sleeping and the Australians are keeping the world running by doing the day shift.

Sleeping with someone does things to your trust. As in by sleeping in close proximity to other people you are making yourself your most vulnerable for them, and maybe the proximity of trust could extend to all the people asleep in all the houses around you. It is a thing I am very aware of lacking right now.

But if I concentrate I can invert the deep pressure feeling, can make it feel safe and still and like the space is filled with Styrofoam. Because sometimes when I lie in the centre of suburbia falling asleep I have other thoughts. That lying down en masse to sleep makes you gravely vulnerable, a whole flock of sitting ducks, and it is then that I start to think in particular about nuclear dawn.

Everyone still and asleep and so much trust being channelled around, seeping out of pores and windows as a gaseous thread and into nostrils and mouths connecting them like string on a tin-can phone. And no one is thinking to look at the sky where an object is getting closer and closer silently. And then it happens and at ground zero most people do not even know any better because they are vaporised before the electrical signals even reach their brain to tell them so, but maybe some come to for just an instant of absurdity, to be confronted with a helix of colour and pain while their soul or their energy or whatever it is departs and then that is it, snuffed out, nothing.

To feel like I am in a box of Styrofoam here is to feel like safety-in-singularity. It is to not be afraid of all the crazy shit that I badly wanted away from, that affects me for being part of a macrocosmic world, that I do not conceive the complexity of because here I am in a world of my own, all on my own.

Really suddenly, like the clunk of a clock’s first chime, this makes me feel deeply sad. A night bird makes a noise outside and a small rodent probably scurries away from it and a shadow passes the gaping windows and the trees are hushing and maybe back home everything could already be blown away. My head throbs and my teeth will not fit together properly. If I try to keep them slightly apart they feel like magnets yearning for each other.

I could be the last person on Earth, or I could be the last person in my vicinity with any hope of ever finding the other last people in their vicinities, all of us running around frustratingly like little bugs that are lost and you want to yell at them ‘IT’S RIGHT THERE’ until you think about it and actually they are worlds away from the place you plucked them out of, from their perspective, which means the same thing anyway when you have no way of knowing any better.

And I realise if it is all gone I want to be gone with it. I want to throw myself onto the sand like a dolphin embracing death on the beach with its family by dehydration and the suffocation of its own chest crushing its lungs under the pressure of gravity. I want to be blown up in the big stupid mess that it is. I do not want to be a Born Survivor.

I could take my phone from the bottom of my bag, just try to call Mum, just to check the world is still there. We do not even have to talk. I could just get her on the phone just to hear her say ‘Erin?’, then hang up and turn it off again. Just to hear the sound of her alive and speaking.

It must be around midnight at home. She is probably asleep. Although she is my mother so there must be that thread connecting us, although we might not be so consciously aware of it. Like mother bonds and sister bonds and dolphin bonds. Like we are spooky action at a distance. And it is not New Agey if you are thinking analytically Jungian. Girls are just a little more aware of the secret power of bonds because being connected to them is part of being woman. Jung’s anima was a lady, not because the anima has a vagina but because she is an archetype we all agreed on.

And besides we observe something like it in other animals. A connection to something that is not what you would call direct experience. Like water buffalo in Thailand that looked out to sea half an hour before the 2004 tsunami hit, and just bellowed like mermaids with conch shells, and ran for higher ground, with villagers scrambling after.

There’s a suggestion we could make an early warning system for natural disasters based on this sense, a hotline people can call if their pets freak out. This data gets logged and if enough pets are freaking out in a particular area then the hotline sends out the warning and everyone runs for the hills. And even if it is only because the animals can ‘hear’ seismic activity in a literal sense, isn’t it the same thing really? Isn’t telepathy just listening to another plane of ‘sound’?

I fish for the phone from the bottom of the bag. I move into the beam of the dusky light from a slither of the window that is uncovered. In my head I say her name over and over and I imagine her face and I imagine her where she might be, her present, maybe awake on her back in bed and listening to the rhythm of Dad’s breathing. I press the button to turn it on.

I imagine her face twitch. She sits up in bed then looks at Dad to see if she woke him. She rubs her eyes then goes still, straining to hear. She slowly swings her legs out of the bed and slides herself off and moves towards the cabinet that has her phone on. It is really dark so she goes slowly, feeling with her feet and hands before bringing her body forward.

I clench my toes to try to squeeze some of the warm blood into them. I stare at the phone really hard. Another animal outside makes a sudden whooping noise and I flinch. It powers on but no signal. I wait ten seconds then twenty, staring at the gap where the bars should be, willing them to come. Of course there is no signal in the Alaskan tundra.

I exhale heavily and deflate. Then I turn the phone off, return it to the rucksack and crawl back into my sleeping bag. The bag is still a bit warm from my body before. I spend a few minutes fidgeting, imagining the friction of skin on fabric making heat like lots of little sticks and fires.

On the ceiling there is a spider that always has at least three carcases wrapped in mummy bundles on its silvery web. I have noticed that it rotates them, that its oldest kill is always the one it chooses to eat and then it is usually replaced and the next-oldest is eaten. I admire the spider’s diligent forward planning. The spider is always preparing for the future even though it consistently gets new things to eat. The spider knows that the world can always change in an instant; that the future is not to be counted on. It lives in a very delicate microcosm that can be blown away also, by a gust of wind, but that does not stop it weaving.

THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER

Back at the tower and I am preparing for the final voyage. Like Ishmael in his spiritual malaise casting out into the ocean to escape it all or else end it for good. Because that is the only thing for it, to give yourself up to the waves. And of course I am holding out for a coffin raft yet.

On my way to the tower I came across a sign. It could not have been more imbued with meaning if it had been written for a film, or more climactically timed, or perhaps I am weaving everything into a myth of myself. My reindeer is dead.

Some of the flesh had been stripped or pecked off but the flies were still in the process of infesting and their maggots had not hatched yet. It could have been brought down by wolves the very day it forsook me in the river. It sat warm in the sun and all around it smelled sickly, the buzz and the smell making the air dense so that I felt it way before I saw it. The antlers sat perfectly on the eyeless head that grinned mockingly, jaw chattering, laughing to itself like it was some macabre joke, leading me on all along when really it had nothing for me.

As if to say, ah, how easy it is to die. Just like that, so blunt and final and so very, very dead, a dead end and no clues or directions left behind. Whatever it was I was expecting the reindeer to tell me it very definitely was not going to tell it now. Its silence was corporeal and absolute.

No companion, no comrade and no project to give me purpose and nothing to guide me, just my naked self. And with it power in a way; I am real and vulnerable; there is no one watching over me; I am a self-willed woman.

I have never seen death so up close before. It was different to the hares, and the difference is not just scale. I would say it is familiarity and the fact that I imbued it with significance. Like in nature documentaries when David Attenborough puts a personified spin on things and you end up rooting for the baby tapir and then it goes and gets killed by a jaguar and it is not just the circle of life because David Attenborough went and made it personal. This is more than that still.

I did not even see the body of our first dog when he got put to sleep because I was ushered out of the room to sit on my own in the waiting room, surrounded by sympathetic-looking people with their sympathetic pets all whimpering along with ten-year-old me until my parents came out carrying just the worn brown dog collar. That had been death to me; just a dog collar without the dog in it. And this was it in concrete; the abrupt end to mystery and innocence that I had hitherto in life mostly evaded. And then I knew that the only thing that I had left now was to climb that mountain and see what Damon saw from up there.

I have been looking at the highest point of the range nearest to me. The ones behind look like they might be bigger and somewhere out there is Denali, the biggest of all, but the one I have been watching is tall and has snow on the very top and the clouds obscure it sometimes so that it looks like Olympus with its feet in the clouds and Olympus is plenty momentous enough for me. It just calls to me. If Damon went from here then I am sure that is the place he went to.

From its snow and the clouds I know it must be around two thousand metres. I remember reading in the park centre that the snowline starts at one and a half thousand metres. Two thousand metres is twice the size of Snowdon but it is still not high enough for altitude sickness. That is how tame the British peaks are. I climbed Snowdon and that took us five hours. So I am hoping I can do it in two, maybe three days. That is one day getting as high as I can, to just under the snowline if possible, then sleeping for the night. Then the next day I can head out with perhaps enough time to summit, and failing that spend one night in the snow and cold. Then the descent should take me no time.

I have test-walked to the lower slopes to judge how long it should take. North-west for around five miles the forest stays dense until reaching the slopes of the mountains when it starts to thin. I walked up high enough to see way out over the forest, to where it mottled out on to the tundra, and the braided river which glinted back the blue-silver sky, spread across the sediment like veins of mercury. On the mountainside above, the trees stopped and scree wound like lightning scars through the smoky green and purple skirting. Life waned up the mountainside and the peak was white and dead and here the crows had their kingdom.

Lower down where the plants clung still, bleached shapes poised spectral, luminous in the glare from the white sun. There were Dall sheep; they looked happy on the mountain and elegantly strange. I walked west across the ridge below the sheep until the afternoon, watching the colours change as the cloud ran its textures under the sun like a shadow puppet.

So I have rationed everything exactly and I have pared my rucksack down to the barest essentials so that there is not even a spare tampon of extra weight. I have just enough food to summit over the two days or two sleeps before coming back down, depending on hunger, but right now I have no appetite whatsoever so perhaps I will stay longer. I have sticks and a piece of tarp and some cable ties with which to construct some kind of shelter. If the rain comes again it will be miserable but there is nothing to be done about that. But please, spirit of the mountain, please don’t let it rain.

THE ABSTRACT WILD

We do not use mountains as metaphors for challenges for no good reason. It serves me right for being stupidly under-prepared for this and life and everything. Halfway through the day I left off wading through the snaring purple carpet of alpine tundra vegetation to hit scree and from then on I was stuck in a laborious cycle of climbing tentatively twenty metres or so only to slip back ten. I felt like Sisyphus without a boulder or the lustful in Dante’s inferno, doomed to swirl around in a stormy circle for eternity. Maybe if I kept on I would come across Damon’s soul too, both of us so lustful and hungry for something that we were doomed to keep after it for ever on this scree-skelter. That he just fell and died on his way to the top; that ironically he did not even get to make his one statement because the universe made it for him. But then that could have been his perfect death; willingly dead but not by his own hand, which means he did not have to feel bad about being selfish and breaking his mother’s heart (although it would still be broken because she would not know any better, I suppose).

Each slip on scree I would fall on my knees shaking and weak and too terrified to move in case I slid further. Where I had to sit to get everything back under control I would sit facing upwards, not really looking around me because I was looking at the ground to centre myself and so as not to trip up, and not wanting to look at everything below me until I was at the very top. I wanted this to be a grand revealing, velvet curtains drawn until the finale and for the finale to be one of those moments in life that needs a soundtrack with a loud and euphoric chorus followed by a quiet and melancholic bridge in a new key.

I kept at this for hours, slipping and crying and crawling and just lying where the scree left me on my side, gasping and sweating, sometimes laughing at how stupid and futile a figure I had made myself in each moment and in general, ready to give up only to get a second wind and an angry burst that would propel me upwards like a turbo boost on Mario Kart.

And then I got into a rhythm with it, perfecting the amount of pressure to put into each footstep to stop from upsetting the loose rocks. And once I had this it got easier again. I had gashed my knees up terribly and I had cuts all over my hands that smarted when I moved my fingers or when the salt from my own sweat got into them and they were full of grit but they felt good. Like the pain and difficulty made it more worth it. Like wanting to come out of the wreckage with a visible wound, wanting an impact with some tangible effect. Something to show for it all.

I came across some of the mountain sheep and they sprang off away from me barely dislodging a pebble, then turned to look back as if to say you, trunk-legged creature, are not made for here, before loping on. They really are ridiculous animals to look at until you realise that being wrapped in cotton wool makes falling on a mountain like falling over in a spacesuit in zero gravity; inconsequential. That rather than clouds with legs they are ingenious inventions of nature.

The wind would come very suddenly and with such force that it could knock me off balance so I found myself bracing for this, flinching for it like a bad puppy to a raised hand. It would scream like a Tolkien wraith when it came and rattle me so that the best I could do was to get close to the ground and stay down. One time doing this I came face to face with a delicate yellow flower struggling to grow isolated and friendless and I cried a little for it all alone on the crag and no way of knowing how by its loneliness it was diminished.

I kept on going with the snowline as my carrot until I let myself stop around one hundred metres below on a little forgiving plateau. As soon as I got to the mental place of ‘I will stop here’ my legs gave way and my knees were further damaged but I did not even feel it because the relief of a resting point was so great and it felt so good to be horizontal with the promise of a long interlude.

After a little nap I drank deeply from my water, leaving just enough to see me over in the morning, before I got to the snowline and could refill from melting the snow. Then I went about making my tent, forcing the sticks into the ground with difficulty and pegging the tarp on two sides so that it made a humble pentahedron, open at both ends. I tried to angle it so that the wind went over and not through it, but this made the sides whip back and forth.

I must have been walking for over ten hours. The light dimmed after what felt like not much time, just enough time for me to sit about recuperating and to warm up my meagre dinner on the propane. It was bitterly cold once the sun had dipped, even though it did not ever disappear completely. There was still the vague idea of sunshine, the sun hovering somewhere near by, but the wind undermined it ruthlessly.

I tried to sleep but the wind blew just so and rattled the tarp, which rattled the pebbles in a motion like a Mexican wave all around the perimeter, and this made it sound as though there was someone or something scuttling around outside, making circles around me. I would poke my head out and be reassured, then it would happen again a little later and I would think come on now, Erin, we have been through this numerous times, then, no, there really does sound like there is something, best go check, oh, no, all clear, okay, cool, time to sleep, but what was that? That wailing? Is it Damon, has he come for me? Like this so many times that I gave up and just went outside to sit sentry for myself and put the propane back on even though I needed it for cooking tomorrow because I was just so cold even with the ski jacket and there was not a scrap of wood to be found for a campfire.

But there I was alone and enduring and from outside my own head to any observer of course it would seem like I could do this as well as any man. I was ticking all the boxes and besides, Jack London’s men all had dogs and a dog is an invaluable asset in that scenario.

A dog like Buck, who gleams with the magnificence that inspired a cult to bask in him. It is the ghost of Buck that remains in Big Mountain gold country – Alaska, the Yukon, the wilds of North America. But anywhere can have its own Big Mountain Country. The philosophy of the cult can be transplanted onto any place and translated into any language. Russians have their own breed of Mountain Men from the days they tried to colonise Alaska. They called them promyshlenniki.

Buck sits by my side exuding pride and vitality and power and kingliness because he knows he is king of the dogs. But he is a dog and a dog is not a person. Jack London never meant to say that men should act like dogs, at least not so literally.

He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.

Okay, this primordial thing is in us all. But the call that came from the wild was specifically addressed to you, a dog. Dogs can regress back into the wild because they are just tame wolves. Big dogs are anyway. Specifically wolfy-looking dogs. You were a dog running round catching and killing and living by tenacity. There is no Neolithic man running round howling in the woods. Jack London only spent one bloody winter in the Klondike! And the call that brought him there was a siren song; it was a promise of gold, and a little house in the big woods on the banks of Plum Creek by the shores of a silver lake on the prairie.

To be a MAN was to write MAN in large capitals on my heart. I played what I conceived to be a MAN’S game, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.

Jack London wrote Call of the Wild when he was young and healthy and full of his own electricity. It is easy to be an individualist when you are a winner and you are too caught up in glory to think about how the losers fare, or how your conquest undoes the very thing that drew you out there.

There is not enough bounty for everyone to claim a piece, so for Big Mountain to keep on working it had to be understood that Man has no obligation to the happiness of anyone but himself. That to have the right to pursue happiness was to be free, even if free was only to be forever in pursuit.

This is what the Mountain Man was born from. A healthy white man’s ideal. What Ted Kaczynski does not acknowledge or maybe realise is that he is his own worst enemy; it is this rampant freedom to pursue which propagates the Machine. It is as though Ayn Rand wrote both their bibles.

Jack London was remembered only as a writer of macho survival stories for boys. A fascist. It was just that one story! What about the story he wrote about the woman who gets Thoreau? The voice he gave to class struggles? So maybe you were his young ego but you were not his only one.

He was in a bad place, you know that. His father had disowned him a second time. He quit Berkeley and ran to the Klondike because he was forced to be an individualist. But he realised something in the wild. He realised in its contrast how lacking he was. It is different for you, Buck, because you are a dog. They just cling to you, Buck, Stan and all these boys. They want a strict moral code. Something to believe in. Primordial truth. Sad, unhappy, suggestible people reading the works of sad, unhappy writers and taking their words as gospel.

They cannot take his oeuvre for its transgressions, his corrupted values; Wolf House, all those bedrooms. They want a noble truth, purity from their gods, and so they choose to hear you. You outlive him as a negative imprint, a Voyager he later regretted sending.

But you are just a dog. An imaginary dog at that. All your masculinity, it is a literary embellishment. Most wolf packs are headed by a male and a female breeding pair, who rule together in equality.

The dog is unnervingly blank. As though he feels indifference towards his creator now that he has his own life outside of him. Then the Call sounds from up out of the belly of the forest and Buck pricks up his ears to it. He rises and lopes to the limit of my night vision, turning with a look of contemptuous pity. He pads into the night to answer the Call and he will keep on answering as long as the Call sounds or until the paradigm shifts, because he is not quite immortal and it is this that will end his reign.

And after all, only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. Aldo Leopold said that. But man says I am civilised, and the rest is woman and wilderness. So what is woman? Is she where the symbols aren’t? Woman is wilderness, if she is man’s unwordable other. Woman is closer to the mountain and the wolf than man even if only because he put her there. Therefore, woman can listen better than man, if not as well as the mountain, to the real howl of the wolf.

Template:Anchor MY MOUNTAIN MY MOON

WHATEVER PARTICLE OF THAT SPIRIT IS IN ME

So I hardly slept and I was exhausted but this felt right, to struggle the last part as a disciple of asceticism after Thoreau’s own heart, like a monk head-butting the ground to nirvana. Like how they say that if something was easy it would not be a challenge and if something is not a challenge then it is not meaningful; so make every day a struggle and lo! you will feel the richer for it, like all those who struggle in poverty are really the richest and most meaningful people in the world, god smiles down on their suffering and they feel the radiance of his smile on their sunburnt backs.

I kept on thinking I was about to summit when looking up I would see the ground stop and sky behind it, but each time I got there I would be faced with another slope to climb. I learned not to be tricked in this way so that eventually when I reached the genuine last slope I was dubious, like yeah, right, that old hat, so that when I did clamber over and see the final point, stood alone and jaunty with an actual landscape beneath it, not just another mosaic of rocks, I felt like I had been hit in the stomach with a football.

I said no no don’t look yet not just yet get to the very top first so that you can drink it all in savour every last drop of it. So I took my rucksack off to make things easier and I kept my eyes down until I could not find a higher place to be. I settled down into my crossed legs and let myself look the whole place over and squealed like a proud eagle.

It was stupidly windy so that my hair unwrapped itself from my hairband and made little Medusa-snakes of itself, licking me in the eyeballs. I scraped it back, making an Alice band of my hands and using them as a sun visor also. The sun was almost unbearable so high up and with no cloud cover, but it made my vision heavenly bright and ecstatic. The clouds were thin and wispy and some stalked underneath me, motionless but transitory; still, ephemeral jellyfish taken by the current.

I felt giddy from the sheer euphoria of it all and also from vertigo at being so high and the world so tiny. I could see everything, my whole map over for what it really is. I mean, I could not see the cabin per se but I could see its vicinity, the place where the trees wound between me and it. But I could see my tower or I fancied I could just about, a spire amongst the deep green spruce of the taiga, and the tundra to the right of it spilling on, multi-faceted and textured and connoting so many things at once; fat salmons, a clutch of speckled blue eggs, the ripe and gravid feeling of harvest-time and the hazy nostalgia that distance gives to space as time does to memory.

There is so much colour, even on the bare mountains so much colour. They are rust and lilac and ochre and pink, all hues of deep contrast, the bright sun bits too bright to look at almost and the shadows so deep they look dimensional like mouths to deep caves. Each piece of contrasting colour is like its own object, can be taken alone like pieces of a paint-by-numbers, but take a step back and they come together and make something breathtakingly complete. If I am right in my bearings then they call these the Polychrome Mountains.

My Olympus, my castle in the sky, and down below my queendom all poured out. I feel good and full, brimming, like a fountain all full up and pouring over, like melting. And if Damon did come up here it is hard to imagine how he could climb back down and go through with it, renounce all this beauty. I feel accomplished. It is the feeling that I did it, all of this; they have not succeeded in keeping it from me.

But then, directly after, following it through the door like a fast black cat, the feeling of did what exactly?

A sudden pang of something when I realise I can see the road, far away but definite, barely visible yet I can feel it like an animal does a scent trail, an invisible ribbon through its terrain. A mixture of things, first like being Simba in The Lion King when Mufasa tells him everything that the light touches and beyond is the shadowy place, the road my perimeter of light. But also a vague kind of yearning, a sharp little tug.

The light starts to dim and the mountains’ shadow gets longer. He could not very well have stayed up here for ever, not alive anyway. So perhaps for someone in his state of mind it would be perfectly logical for this place to be the end of the story. After going to the moon some of the moonwalkers could not come to terms with the feeling of its climax, all of life after dulled in its light, made ugly under the scrutiny of this spotlight that would not leave them.

As the sun moves from off the peak the wind picks up, stinging and pulling at the skin of my face and arms, sore with sunburn. My lips are chapped and hard and my nose raw to touch. I take the ski jacket from around my waist and curl into it. I am suddenly and crushingly tired, with sunstroke maybe, and it becomes perfectly sensible to just stay put here, just curl up to sleep on myself, a tired eagle on its lonely scarp, its nose tucked under its own wing.

A DECLARATION FOR THE RIGHT OF CETACEANS

Damon and the Mountain Men, like old scientists, were searching for an absolute and true reality. They went about it by dissection, peeling it back in search of its kernel of truth, a foundation to build up from. The Greeks saw it in the Euclidean geometry they found recurring in nature. From the solid geometry of three dimensions Newton constructed a constant description of the world in his classical mechanics. The fourth dimension was uniform time, which flowed smoothly. Matter was full: indestructible particles moving through space, the void. From these separate unquestioned planes knowledge could be built deductively and a uniform map of matter and life could be built.

But then along came Einstein and said we must forget the Lapse of Time. He said Newton’s planes do not work on Newton’s planes, you can draw a square but space is really like a balloon not a flat plane, and you can’t draw a perfect square on a balloon.

It is considered very old and pagan yet new and post-Enlightenment to think of ourselves as not masters or stewards but members of the universe. We forgot this in the first place because Descartes would cut open dogs and when they would scream he would say ignore the screams, they are merely the creakings of a machine, and we ignored them.

They blasted the atom at the Large Hadron Collider and instead of the kernel of this atom they found a house of mirrors and in the middle a weird shaman sat cross-legged with a gong, who told them everything is everything and nothing all at once enigmatically, but what did they expect looking for a kernel inside a kernel when by definition a kernel’s kernel is a tautology?

The Mountain Men went looking in nature, as in outside of human (human Man), but this is a false dichotomy. They did not see that nature was what they threw at it. Somewhere in Texas there is a mountain and at its summit there is built a steel pyramid (I marked time, remember me), glittering back at the sky, and I think this object stands very well for Mountain Men everywhere.

You can’t break the world into independent existing units. Particles can’t even be said to exist in definite positions, they only show tendencies to exist. Probability, not certainty, is the fundamental feature of atomic reality, so the Mountain Man was doomed to fail. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and it forbids perfect knowledge. The new science says that it is only a web of approximations, it is an idealisation sometimes useful from a practical point of view like demographics of populations, or the construction of an identity.

Once he had figured it out Einstein thought of the implications of this and said it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built. Science had seemingly been undermined if the whole point was to find the very solid absolute foundational true description of everything.

But Thoreau anticipated Einstein when he said if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them, as though they were talking through time, saying, hey, so there is no such thing as the absolute after all! And absolute wild, absolute solitude; there is an absolutely pure form of neither!

And Thoreau said to Einstein that men making speeches (meaning scientists), they are banded together, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise. He said, I will tell you what is at the centre of the atom without even looking: just shitloads of tortoises! But, he said, it does not matter because the atoms together make the wood I chop to build a fire.

Thoreau was as imperfect as the rest of us, always seeking truth although he knew he could never find it. He still spoilt the magic of the mythically bottomless lake at Walden, by measuring it to its bottom standing on its centre while it froze over, and writing out the measurements so everyone would know it was he who had solved its mystery.

Subatomic science asks us to take what we can observe and fill in the gaps, intuitive like mysticism because it is just an abstraction of reality and we have to use instruments to pick it apart, we have no direct experience of it. In a similar way a mythical or spiritual belief system that is less restricted by deductive logic can get closer to the truth of the thing by admitting there is not one truth: there are many. Maybe my mum saying she does not think about space is really pretty enlightened.

Future civilisations might excavate the Large Hadron Collider from out of the ground when we are gone and try to interpret it like we do the Tarot, as a divination method that taps into archetypes we created. And in a way this is all it is.

BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART

I slept part of the night out on the peak, but it was too cold without the sun and I woke up. I had to crawl back down to my pack and get out everything warm to wrap up in. I did not get to greet the morning on the peak but now I know what it is like to wake up inside a cloud, and how many people can say that? The light got brighter at around 4 a.m. and I woke up to wonder if I had maybe died and gone to heaven. But the cloud passed, I took food from my bag and chewed it, looking at the landscape coming up all pink and new like a fresh layer of paint, and I decided not to move from off the ridge until I had found a conclusive reason to. All of my bones ached.

And as the sun came up I ached more to look at it. Nothing had moved but it looked different again and was permeated with feeling. We do not have a very good or specific word for the feeling of it but I suppose we tentatively call it love. A feeling can’t be mapped to a word without changing the feeling. I could exhaust the possibilities of descriptions, but to get the closest without ever actually touching is all science and words can do. Everything is beyond the touch of language. Why even bother to tell stories if language is so vacant?

When you are a very young child you do not understand that there are things outside of yourself, but as you begin to grow you start to feel sad or happy or affected by seemingly irrelevant things like the explosion of rockets or the size of the ocean or the contour of hills.

Everything looks happy and good in pink golden light but the beauty has sadness and sometimes this is difficult to distinguish from sadness itself and I wish I could have told Damon this. There is acute love for the thing then realising that one day one way or another it will leave you or you will leave it or the light will change, but the magnitude of this hurt is itself something that adds to the beauty. You let it enter: permeation, contamination, not-aloneness, shared knowing of this beauty. You grow with it like inosculation, and the sadness comes in knowing that it is so other to you, that it is like tree branches growing first together and then apart. We need this acute sad feeling to make us care about the preservation of otherness. Perhaps then the feeling is more accurately the love of sad beauty. Or nostalgia that has not happened yet.

Then in the distance cutting across the hue between the ground and blue the speed and effortlessness in its wings. I would know it anywhere from the way it writes itself in the sky. Peregrine. I knew that they lived here but in all my looking I had not found one. And there it was, for me and not for me. My knowing of it is not possessive; I know it in reverence. Not looking at it from below as I am used to, but eye-to-eye, I can see the world like it does, and to see with it is a mighty privilege.

What I see at that moment holds so much significance for me personally even though it means nothing really and nothing at all to the peregrine, but when I remember it all, this is how it will be capsulated; in this single image, pinky golden and perfect but impermanent and sad, but with all the promise of a new day and a new chapter in my time and I will order it as such in retrospect in my own narrative.

I want to tell Damon that this is it, this is exactly it or as close as we could come. It is the feeling of space-time in and out of you and connecting you to all of it and none of it. To be able to look down from a mountain and feel sad is the whole point. Damon renounced all of this because it was the one thing that was his to give up but the thing he gave up was the point in itself and the point does not still stand without him. His little death meant nothing to the mountain and it all goes on despite him. There is no wilderness when we are gone. It needs us and our words outside it like proprioception, to define its contours, the same as we need it. And from the realisation onwards, we can adapt and new synapses can be found.

And when I looked at the road this time I felt something different to the taint and diminishment of before. When I looked at the road I felt very small and I remembered Stan saying his bit about girls being social inherently, innately, by nature, like it is in our geometry. The tug I felt when I looked at it was of a thread in the fabric, a tendril through me and it. But that tug is the reminder that you were attached all along. A tug does not mean I failed to leave properly; I could never really leave. None of us, not even Mountain Men, can ever really leave.

I stayed put for most of the day, steadily brimming up with purpose. But I was also brimming up with urine from drinking the snow melted with the propane. My appetite was building back up and what little was left of the food was back down on the plateau. I considered briefly weeing up there just to be practical, but it conjured the image of a dog leaving its scent. I thought I would not want all the smelling animals that might come up there to think that of me, even if none ever did, probably just the crows went there and they can’t smell. Besides all of this I did not want to do that to the mountain.

I took a last long look, blinking my eyes like they were shutters and I was capturing still photographs of this scene to file away in the far crevices of my mind, the special self-defining crevices that stay secure and well preserved and accessible for life. Then I climbed down, set off to the place below the snowline and got there before dark, in time to make my tent up again and pee in privacy from whatever behind a rock, and heat up the last of the food.

ALL MY LIFE NOW APPEARS TO BE ONE HAPPY MOMENT

Trudging down the mountain was much easier than up because the scree that was a hindrance before became an ally and I got to the bottom in half the time. When I reached the timberline I turned to look up at my mountain from its most imposing angle before I was under the tree cover and could not see it any more.

Behind it in the pale blue sky the moon was full and almost exactly above the peak but skewed just a little, as if it was being floated there, as if it was a Malteser the mountain was blowing to hover over its mouth. The moon was a very pale white blue disk, only just not the colour of the sky. I had not seen it while I was up there, but I suppose it must have been behind me all along.

The mountain and the moon sat across from each other like telegraph hills, and I imagined I could light up a beacon on the mountain and the lady with the rabbits up on the moon would look down and see a small flare burst out of her image of Earth, an iridescent badge on the black felt of infinity.

From a mountain vast cities are pinpricks of light and from the moon they are tinier still. Follow it back further still, this image, of Earth in space getting smaller and smaller the further away you get, speeding much faster than the speed of light away after the Voyagers, but the stars behind Earth do not seem to move at all because they are already so far away, their constellations still look exactly the same as they do on Earth. You have to get about thirty-six light years away past Arcturus, which the Inuits call ‘The First Ones’, and only then do they start to merge into each other, and by this time you can’t see Earth at all.

Earth looks insignificant in the vastness of space, as everything does from far away. But we don’t live far away and can only imagine what this looks like because we made some very clever machinery that can change our viewpoints. New viewpoints give new perspectives. That is what astronauts mean when they get the Overview Effect. From very near by in the grand scheme of things Earth really looks perfect.

Larus told me that when NASA were working on ways to detect life on Mars for the Viking programme they called James Lovelock, maverick scientist and inventor from England, to California to come help them. Lovelock told NASA they need not send a spacecraft to Mars because he could tell from the atmosphere that there would be no life there because Mars’ atmosphere was at chemical equilibrium and lacked the dynamism of Earth’s atmosphere. This got Lovelock thinking about life altering its atmosphere and that is how he got on to the Gaia Hypothesis, which he wrote with Lynn Margulis, the symbiosis lady.

They were interested that the sun’s radioactive output had increased over aeons of time but that Earth had not heated up in turn. They postulated that Earth as a whole was self-regulating to maintain this stability, that all of life and non-life were part of one single ‘organism’ of sorts. All parts of the biota worked together to regulate the biosphere, the hydrospheres, the atmosphere, etc., and everything on Earth had evolved reciprocally with the end of keeping the planet stable and optimum for all life. This worked through a cybernetic feedback system that meant that things always fluctuate around the optimum, like a thermostat which changes its output dependent on its reading to maintain a relatively stable, but never perfect, temperature. This was homeostasis.

Lovelock decided that without biodiversity we might not just be lonely, we might actually not have a liveable and breathable climate and atmosphere, that as we upset the balance the planet will get more hostile to us.

In Timaeus Plato said our planet was alive and the rivers and lava were its circulatory system. From the eighteenth century onwards there were a few geologists and geochemists who posited that the biosphere could affect the geology and chemistry of its surroundings but they were pretty much ignored. The German Romantic Schelling would talk about Earth like it was alive and the American Transcendentalists Emerson and then Thoreau, they read Schelling.

This started a tradition that birthed John Muir, father of the American national parks, Jack London, who was in the Bohemian Club with John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, who pioneered environmental ethics. It also inspired the Beats, Jack Kerouac calling himself an ‘urban Thoreau’ and going by ‘Jack’ instead of his given name ‘Jean-Louis’, after London, and then the Beats led on to the counterculture of the sixties and John C. Lilly of dolphin tank fame, who hung out with the Beats. Rudolf Steiner also read Schelling, and it was William Golding who was friends with Lovelock and gave him the name of Gaia for his idea and put him on to Steiner. So really Lovelock was a product of a long tradition and his and Lynn Margulis’s ideas took off because they were compatible with the post-space race zeitgeist.

Metempsychosis. That is what the Ancient Greeks called the transmigration of souls, similar to what the Inuit believe in. E=mc²

is the famous equation by Einstein and what it means is that the amount of energy in a particle is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, and what this means is that the Inuits are right again. It means that energy and mass or matter are interchangeable. It means that matter can be transformed into other forms of energy. When Lovelock channels Plato, this is metempsychosis of sorts. Rachel Carson has gotten into me by metempsychosis, which is also like the homeostatic process that Lovelock called feedback.

Template:Clear

File:F0265-01.jpg.png

Homeostasis is also how we maintain a stable identity. We as individuals build from and into a shared image of ourselves. There are tendrils that anchor us to an adaptive and receptive way of knowing and being, building a view from a body, my body.

When we die we usually get an epitaph. Inuits in Greenland do not write words on the headstones of their dead, because they know an epitaph traps an identity and undermines its freedom to transmigrate.

Ideas and words are metempsychosis, are the weaving of the tapestry, are love for the mountain, are the deep relation between past, present, near and far, are the consciousness between us. Newton’s ball was never alone: it was cocooned by the fabric of space-time. Solitude is an illusion but so is loneliness and it was Emerson himself who said, ‘We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.’

I think of it, rather than a unanimous whole that underlies everything, more like a collaging of shards all patched up like a quilt, overlapping like a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram.

Lilly, Kerouac, Sagan, Einstein, Newton, none of them was unblemished by patriarchy but we had to have them all to get us to where we are now. We had to get to the moon with Apollo so that we could look back at ourselves like this. I had to come out here and follow Damon and get lost enough to realise that’s what I was, so that I could find my way again. We had to have Descartes and his dualisms even though they are atomising and not real and identify the self with an isolated ego that exists inside a body like a cage, and this inner fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation of Newton’s world of matter outside as a void within which separate objects and events happen all alone, forever lonely, so that we could have Einstein and the rockets that could take us up there to look at ourselves and see the seams of this, to use the moon like a mirror, like children or parrots recognising their reflection for the very first time.

These are our new visions, the macro and also the micro, the seeing for the first time and knowing and loving the microscopic creatures in our guts that we could not live without. And it is because we can look so closely and see things inside things and look so far away and see things outside our solar system that we can realise the arbitrariness of our distinctions. Our myopia undone.

The moon is our mountain. The Hubble telescope is finding higher mountains still. We had to get up there to look down with the eyes of Gaia (another useful myth), so that we could see how to mend our fragmentation, see that Earth self-regulates to keep everything in balance, as if we were allowed to get clever enough to get sad looking at mountains for Gaia to be able to see herself and think, bloody hell, isn’t that good. Be good now.

This sudden new knowing of deep connection is a new Copernican Revolution. It’s just that, as with the first Copernican Revolution, we do not quite know it yet, it is still filtering into us, we are in the process of many incremental viewpoint changes, so many and so quickly that we don’t have time to keep up. It will take decades for them to diffuse, but we are in the process of realising our new position and responsibilities as members rather than stewards.

And this dawning comes right at our make-or-break moment. In 1870 the novelist Wilkie Collins predicted ‘the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that war shall mean annihilation and men’s fears will force them to keep the peace’; and in 1951, just as he prophesised, the hydrogen bomb was invented, 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed and is still in the process of destroying Hiroshima.

The rocket technology that got us to the moon was originally created in mind of annihilation, and you can follow the creation of the atom bomb deductively to its logical and predictable conclusion, unravel unravel until you get to here, the singularity.

Millennial anxiety is anxiety about this annihilation aimed back at us in abstract, about things so far out of our control as to be seemingly self-perpetuating, is why we frantically mark time, time-capsulise. It is not an innate impulse but a situational one. What annihilation threatens is this web we have spent so long building and our means of transmigration and our sense of self. And Damon felt this anxiety and he gave up his identity because of it, by self-annihilation.

The concept of nuclear deterrent is your castle cannot go on existing after ours is gone. Nuclear is the power to wipe out a civilisation (including a future one), to blow up its centre, destroy its institutions, its means of preservation, its universities and its libraries, like Kaczynski wanted rid of. The threat is against our ideologies. In this way the colonisation of space and the veneer of ‘survival of the species’ mask the real agenda, ‘survival of the nation’. It is the threat of inexistence and the retaliation of blowing away the web of everything of the other (but now we know that to do so is to destroy small parts of ourselves too).

I used to think it very strange that the Nepalis did not try to climb all the way to the top of Everest, even though they obviously had the skill to climb because Tenzing Norgay must have been a skilled mountaineer before Edmund Hillary showed up, and so must lots of other Sherpas. But when they looked up at Everest in awe they did not think ‘I am going to conquer that mountain’, they thought, ‘ah, Chomolungma, goddess mother of the world’, and respected it and felt awe for it but no inclination to go about debasing it. Like presuming that there can’t be intelligent life on other planets or they would have made themselves known to us by now. Maybe they are already observing us, but they do not feel any drive to make themselves known to us.

Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said because it’s there. When Tenzing Norgay the Sherpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prayed to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay.

Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age in the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey, guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too.

These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination. They are little seeds we carry with us through life and which remain inert until the perfect conditions arise.

All these thoughts kept me busy for the hours and hours that I walked back. I had to stop to rest up and take off my shoes and let my blisters fill up so I could pop them. I fell asleep under a tree with my shoes off and slumped against it.

STRANGE MATTERS DARK MATTERS

It is peaceful, with the forest humming from everything busily making the most of the time before the rains come again. The sky is milky with a benevolent cloud, and the eagles are capital-ising on the vantage before they can’t see again. They hang under the cloud like mobiles.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time just looking. Standing at the open windows of the tower and looking out at all the stuff just gathered beneath me for contemplation. You can’t see a lot from the fire tower and a lot can’t see you, the trees grown tall around through its years of disuse. Before you might have seen it from all over. Only from the mountain could you see everything.

Template:Clear

File:F0269-01.jpg.png

But what I can see is still a lot. I can see the ocean of trees and I can see on and on to its edge. Boreal forest, the world’s lungs. Sometimes in the morning a mist hangs over like smudged chalk and it strikes you vividly that this is it breathing. Like the vapour you exhale on a cold day but a whole atmosphere respired. I drink it in deeply through my nostrils, all the newest oxygen all for me. I can see the river winding through to meet the tundra, or just about, I see it glinting in slithers. Over the millennia of that river’s course it will have snaked side to side, the trees clambering up or falling with the soil torn from under their feet. And the trees growing, dying, falling, rotting, each to feed another in its place.

And inside the forest the light spills green through the leaves as if through coloured film so that the light is green on my arms and on my face. The smell of spruce, and the spruce needles making the floor spongy like a play mat, dry and comfortable so that you can lie down on it to breathe it all in stronger.

I just listen. Can you hear the sound of the forest breathing? Underneath the ground is the forest’s brain. Can you hear it thinking, ticking away? Tiny threads of mycelium one cell thick branch out like neurons and link up to form a living network underneath the forest, miles long. The mycelium connects to trees’ roots, giving them a larger surface area and a higher absorption of nutrients and minerals, then breaks down with enzymes it excretes and reabsorbs from the soil, and in return the trees give it metabolised carbohydrates, the fruits of photosynthesis.

The tendrils of the mycelium are synapses and through them information travels. The mycelium is thinking and what it is thinking about is the health of the life around it. It is conscious and responsive to changes in its environment. It is planning for the long-term health of its environment.

Mycelium has inherited Earth several times over. It always surges after mass extinctions because it can metabolise and recycle the debris. It makes life-sustaining soil out of this debris, and so lays the ground for other life to follow, initiating the ecosystems that will diversify its food chain. Is it self-interested or is it just lonely? You can’t really say. Loneliness is a kind of self-interest anyway.

Mycelium is a half-being, an in-between shape-shifter. It looks like a plant but it breathes out carbon dioxide. It comes from the kingdom Eukarya, from which we branched hundreds of millions of years ago. Mycelia are more animal than plant really. But they bridge the kingdoms like diplomatic interpreters. They translate between organisms and their environments.

And mycelium is a shaman, a seer into the spirit world, or into death. It turns the inorganic into organic, can dismantle chains that otherwise tangle, smoothing the mess that might upset its system by processing pollutants and radiation. There are no clear polarities for mycelium, no life or death, no organic or non-organic, but inextricable interconnectedness. It is the dark matter of the organic world.

Everything we know and can see is called baryonic matter and this is made up of the atom. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light but we have to assume it exists until the Large Hadron Collider tells us so for sure because there is something that we can’t see exerting gravity on baryonic matter. We can’t ever see it, this strange dark thing, but computer simulations of what it might look like if visible show it as a web that interweaves with baryonic matter like a connective tissue between the infinite everything. Literally everything in this tangled web like sliding spaghetti. I am a strand being pulled through other strands of spaghetti, only the spaghetti is not a strand, it is an infinitely long tangle, a snake swallowing itself. The very fabric of being denies solitude!

The web-like pattern of dark matter is an archetype found anywhere information is organised. It is the same shape you see in diagrams of mycelium, neurons, of the internet and the universe. So is mycelium a kind of brain and is the universe conscious? All of the above are governed by the laws of physics, and this pattern recurs simply because it is the optimum way to organise and share information.

Mushrooms are the fruits of the network under the forest; the mycelium is the root system to colonies of mushrooms. Mushrooms at Fukushima are growing out of the contaminated forest. They are hyper-accumulating the radioactive waste out of the soil. They can be picked, burned, and the ash can be put into glass. And then the radiation is only as difficult to dispose of as all the other nuclear waste we have bottled up. Perhaps the universe wants to help us to help ourselves. Perhaps it leaves us clues. The particular shape of the cloud from a nuclear blast is a dome on a column. A mushroom.

Template:Clear

File:F0271-01.jpg.png

And so Sylvia Plath was being especially clever when she chose mushrooms as her vehicle for inheriting the earth. Mushrooms offer the chance of renewal. And the wilderness can always be renewed if we only stop sending Voyagers into it. The wilderness can be given back to itself. New Zealand has given the legal status of personhood to Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui river and its tributaries, which means they now have all of the rights and autonomy that a person does and cannot be exploited and are not owned.

As I lie on the forest floor, an ant or some small fast thing runs across my face and onto my lip and it tickles but I do not want to brush it off in case it gets crushed. I let it carry on making a planet of my face, running all directions, acknowledging its contours and using the information to paint itself a picture of my terrain, like the rover on Mars, like me here in Denali.

Template:Anchor HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

SOLASTALGIA

So really why am I out here and what am I looking for? I am looking for something that is lost and kept from me but I do not quite know what it is. When I find it I know it will be broken and that I need to fix it but I don’t know how to do that either. What I want right now is to be able to go back in time and talk to a younger lost me and tell her some things that I have found out.

You are sixteen years old and you are confused and lost and numb. You do not know your body or yourself and you mediate them through a little pill that you think is doing you good, reshaping you to fit in a world that will not otherwise accommodate you. You are told at the same time that it is yours now finally; you are lucky to be a modern woman. But it feels otherwise.

How do you feel about the place you call home? Crumbled industrial spaces, shiny new mega-stores, rivers yellow at the lips like disease with Coke-can flotsam, no space to be alone so that you can even know what it is to be together. You feel about it like you feel about your body, as though forces from outside are keeping you apart from it. You are helpless to possess it and you don’t understand that others have no right to. What is this homesickness?

Every time you switch on the news you are overwhelmed by the weight of the bad in the world. You cry because you feel so helpless about it. A whole aboriginal community is put on antidepressants because they are suffering from PTSD. They are suffering from PTSD because there was an oil spill off the coast of British Columbia and the oil washed up and it killed everything that was beautiful in their home. You think this is the saddest thing in the world. How big is home? How atomised? How atomised are you?

It makes sense that you are a little psychotic and sad. You have got raging hormones and fake ones too and you are living in a shattered world. If your body is not yours to put in the wilderness, then without choice you can only ever feel lonely; unhomely; displaced. And you have been trained, socialised into mega-empathy like a dolphin is. That is not to say you feel it more because you are closer to it by virtue of some innate characteristic. But you feel it a little when a whole forest on the other side of the world is felled, or when another animal becomes extinct, because you see a shard of your lost self in it.

To know yourself you need to know what you are not the same as, but there are shards of you everywhere. According to Greenlandic Inuits, you have many souls. As many as seven. The souls are tiny people scattered through your body. The tiny people are shards of bigger people that can be found in pieces, in places outside of you.

You are made up of webs of relation which are always in the process of reconfiguration, but it is when you tear away too quickly and too much that you uproot, like a plant can be transplanted if you are gentle and slow but if you rip it up and put it in a place that is hostile, it withers. Like the taking away of identity cards or the sticking of a little aboriginal girl into foster care or the extinction of animals; it is then that there is homesickness and there are fewer shards of a lost self to be found.

Likewise as part of the web you can feel its reverberations, and you can feel how everything you do too warps the fabric in some small way. You have to be aware of these reverberations. You have to be aware of the placement of your body, your specific viewpoint, your Observer Effect. To begin healing is to realise this and to make amends and to remember.

Sam said you should not just go off in search of something better for yourself. He said water protectors are living in a camp at Standing Rock where they want to stop an oil pipe being built through sacred land. And they must feel the most hopeless feeling of the panic of loss, but they will not just take themselves off alone somewhere quieter to be in peace and converse with their ego. They will stay and try to resist what is a corruption to the very core of their being, even if their resistance can only end in failure. Sam, I am so sorry I did not see it.

And how it must have seemed to him, my project of staking a claim to solitude and autonomy, trying to emulate the Mountain Men while at the same time there are other women being violently reminded of their lack of even more. It is all a game to you, he must have thought. I saw his resentment as a man-shackle, a reminder of myself as a dragged-around woman, and thought I was casting this off by ignoring him. I have been emulating and my whole journey has been compliance. I can Buck as well as any man, but now I understand it better, why would I want to be like them, the Mountain Men?

So this morning I have to say goodbye to the tower and the ghosts of P Harris and Johnston Wills and the wolves, leaving the spider to its flies, taking the little wooden boat from the side of the ship used for getting to the island back to the main ship again.

And probably I will never come back here. And probably nobody will for a long time. I am pulling myself back from deep space and into orbit, feeling sad and happy like the moonwalkers.

I have slept all those nights alone and far away, and I have proved to myself that I can be the kind of person who does those things and there is nothing in my biology stopping me. The documentary as proof never mattered. Maybe that is all but it feels enough, to know that if I wanted to I could be the kind of person who can handle it, that my character is strong enough to endure itself alone as a Mountain Man.

Even if at first it was terrifying and I thought maybe I could not do it and my nerves were so wound up that I had to act to myself, act to the part of me that was shit scared and lonely and in a continual feeling of fight or flight.

But the fight half-fought and in the end it overcame and it won. And this is the hugeness of my small voyage. Something has been stretched in me that makes the general elastic of my life more malleable and I will be able to always feel and notice this new plasticity.

Thoreau decided that as important as it was to be alone in his cabin he still did not want or need to do it for ever. No matter how Walden reads he still went back to Concord. Chris McCandless decided this too if his diary is anything to go by; he just died accidentally before he could do anything about it.

THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL

When I got back to the cabin I crawled into the cot and slept for a whole day. I was so tired I felt like I might never be able to move again, but eventually hunger got me up, I made some rice with salt and ate it and then slept for some hours more. When I woke up I decided what was to be done with my time capsule.

I gathered together Damon’s things neatly and reparcelled them in the tarp, then I put them back beneath the floorboards and left them exactly as I found them. And I hope hard that no one else ever finds them and that, if they do, they believe they are the only person to have found them, and that they are a woman (or Eskimo) too, because everyone knows girls are well versed at keeping secrets.

I laid everything out on the floor and sat cross-legged looking over it: the camera, my diary, the laptop, my notes. The collection felt like a snowshoe hare without a soul inside, an empty vessel. Now that I can’t use it for what it was for, what I wanted it to be, a feminist Golden Record, because there can be no such thing.

And then one of those last days I walked out onto the tundra in the evening when the sun was unusually orange like an extremely orange egg yolk, the kind of orange yolk that you know is full of goodness, and it spilt across the tundra making everything yolky and big. And on the tundra right behind the cabin, as if I had felt them and the inclination to go outside came to me because of this, there was an entire herd of reindeer just stood about together, munching on tundra grass and being reindeer.

And in that moment it occurred to me that my reindeer did not die because it was not my reindeer at all. It had always been this herd; it had been one after another crossing my path, the scouts to the herd, the forerunners preceding the main migration.

And I thought to myself, that is the point of reindeer, that is what she meant by my reindeer telling me my future. My reindeer tells me that I cannot follow it; it is the proprioception I need to know myself. Thoreau again: ‘We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.’

The reindeer tells me that my future is the linear continuity of whatever I build it from because I build and then preserve my own history. It is never complete or completely true but I have to hold on to things that relate to an idea of myself and what I am doing; my cloud castle. It is important to have a story. And this, my history, can be encapsulated in my time capsule. There is pushing a time capsule into the stratosphere and there is the utter negation of symbols, annihilating completely. Somewhere in between I know there is something meaningful. It is what I do with the time capsule, its intent, and not the time capsule itself, that matters.

Do you know the difference between a caribou and a reindeer?

No, I do not.

A caribou is larger and more slender and part of a wild herd. A reindeer is semi-wild but it has been domesticated. They are the same species. Reindeer were domesticated in Eurasia over 2000 years ago, then brought to Alaska by colonisers as food, in 1892, as part of the Reindeer Project, created to replace whale meat in the diet of indigenous peoples. The colonisers thought that the geography of the land would prevent the domesticated reindeer leaving to join the caribou herds. In 1997, all of the reindeer joined the Western Artic Caribou Herd and disappeared.

How tenacious.

Some may have already spread via Inuit tribes who share a cultural history with tribes of Eurasia, over in Siberia.

Oh.

But does all that make them any less potent?

I guess we all came from somewhere.

I felt the pulse of the whole great herd of caribou, calf mothers and babies and, yes, some males as well, stood out on the tundra making Dali-shadows in the molten bask of the sun. And I knew that it did not have to be a particular reindeer guarding me like an angel and it did not have to talk to me and tell me my future because there is enough magic in seeing a whole herd of anything just being, just being apart and for themselves.

This is it, the point of complexity and otherness and the thing that I needed to take away and the thing worth saving and the reason to not bugger off to Mars and the reason Damon should have stayed alive. I think I am ready to talk to Damon now. I think I have decided what I need to say.

Damon, I have been unravelling, unravelling, to try to get to where you were at, and I came undone, I was scared I might go all the way too and end as a tangled mess of unravelling. I followed your philosophy all the way to its genesis, like the deduction that led to the atom bomb. Of this unravelling and of the atom bomb you would say let it happen, let it all unravel and go up in nuclear flames, it’s sad but it’s for the best, the world is better off without us. But I have come so far. I thought there must be a reason to save something of it if I can. To let it all go is to lose too much. And I found a reason. Because it can all be written differently, we can change the direction of the story.

Nothing is lost with no one there to miss it, you said that.

Stay with me. The complexity of our symbols distinguishes us from all the other creatures (as it stands right now) and you think that from the symbols emanates the bad thing, the thing that propels us towards catastrophe. And perhaps it does right now, but I do not think it is inherent in the symbols. Yes, our language is dichotomising, but for now it is the only one we have to work with. The Enlightenment taxonomers wanted to posses and to control the natural world and they sewed their signatures into the names. Yes, as with the Earthrise photo we can lose the directness of the thing to symbolism, but shared meaning is potent too. We need our symbols so that we can feel the love of sad beauty. If the mountain had no symbolic meaning it would just be a chunk of rock. If I did not know the difference between a kestrel and a buzzard it would be easier to forget them both. Naming can be reverence and not possession.

Narratives are important. Narratives can be dangerous. The trick is to be critical, to always be trying to choose the right and good one. To be critical of your view from what body, to what limit. There would be no love of sad beauty without us. There would not be anything worth dying for without beauty.

Well, there might be some love of sad beauty without us but not felt by anything potent and influential enough to do anything about it apart from feel sad and in love. For example, the pack rat collects objects that interest it and it stores them all in its midden. Middens are considered by palaeo-ecologists to be reliable time capsules of natural life of millennia ago. And the bowerbird, when it builds a nest, gives its nest a garden and garden ornaments made from beetles’ wings and orchids and things. It might be to attract a mate but the bowerbird’s beautiful objects have to exist otherwise the world would be too easy to let go of. What do bowerbirds and pack rats mean by their collecting? Are these creatures saying ‘I too am in the appreciation of beauty club’ and at the base of it they are just as scared of being alone as the rest of us?

We need to realise that our categories are illusions, but we also need to be able to name the tiny things, the microscopic creatures that live inside us, we have to name them because how could we know them if we did not name them and how could we love them if we did not know them? We need to be able to find a place in the continuum to point at and say ‘me’.

Wilderness as a static boundary keeps humans out of nature, as though we are still two sides of a dichotomy when we are not. But it is also useful to stop from saturation, the unbalance of the system from too many Mountain Men. Thoreau wanted full libertarian ‘freedom’, like Buck the dog, but men are more destructive than dogs, which would leave wildness to fend for itself against many Mountain Men with guns and pickaxes, which it can’t. The ‘self-willed man’ stakes his claim to freedom while taking no care over anybody else’s.

This regulation does not take away the wildness. The plants and animals do not even think of it. You can call the mountain Mount McKinley but the Athabaskans will still call it Deenaalee. And wildness allows for renewal. Like the flux of Inuit identity, the wild is not static. The tamed can be feral can be wild again.

The categorisation of indigenous peoples was a colonial endeavour in the first place, an awarding of status and non-status. They mostly had no written language before white people arrived. But there is empowerment where communities can self-identify. Eskimo language is being written down, in order to preserve it, in order that young Eskimos can relearn the language that underpins their culture. They need a taxonomy of self to know themselves. The plaque in the visitors’ centre has a hopeful message of regeneration. It says that modern ethnically Eskimo and Athabaskan people are reclaiming and reviving their languages and cultures.

Once you realise the thing that would be missing when all is lost, you have a responsibility to it, to the future. Because trans-migration is a really beautiful concept and if you understand how potent it is you have a responsibility to help it carry on. Like the difference between a dead Damon and a Damon never born. You feel it too. You must have left your diary somewhere your mother could find it.

The yearning of lack and the panic of saturation are part of what sent me, but to try to shrug them off is to shake off the shackles of responsibility that are at the same time ribbons of meaning. It is important to have a story for yourself, in order to be in love with the world. And it is the love we feel when we look at the mountain which could save it. Maybe women are made more prone to loneliness, but is this a bad thing? We will be lonely without the plants and the animals and we feel their loss more acutely. There is no purity so there is always the possibility for renewal. Like mother goddess renewal, not like a male god of beginnings and ends.

Stop being so New Agey.

Why don’t you try not being so literal?

A LETTER FOR THE UNABOMBER

Ms Erin Miller

Cabin in the Wilderness

Denali Wilderness

Alaska

Ted Kaczynski 04475–046

USP FLORENCE ADMAX

U.S. PENITENTIARY

PO BOX 8500

FLORENCE, CO 81226

Dear Mr Kaczynski,

I am a girl writing to you from a cabin in the wilderness. I have read your manifesto while here from beginning to end because instead of taking for granted that everybody who said you were just a crazy person was right, I wanted to understand why you set off the bombs for myself. I am a big fan of your work; your understanding of the technological system and your predictions for the future of humanity echo worries that I have myself. You are right that this reckless and unsustainable system is causing climate change. But I have come to the conclusion that you take these things so far as to void them, and have actually given more ammunition to the system you despise. I think you need to know this because yours is a dangerous logic and while you spout it others are living and dying by it.

I know what happened to you at Berkeley and I am sorry that you can’t help that it made you the way you are. You are not wholly to blame for your legacy but I can’t resurrect Thoreau to chide him, or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, and evidently each has an influence on and on in infinite regress. But you are alive and with living disciples and you have a responsibility for your words while they are still mutable. You could be the last link in a chain that unravels from itself.

I am sure you get lots of letters, both fan mail and hate mail alike, but I wanted to ensure that you received the thoughtful perspective of a woman because I feel your philosophy would benefit from this greatly. I know you do not like girls and especially not feminists, or the English, so I am addressing you as a fellow member of the human race, specifically one who is uneasy about the future of humanity under the current technological regime. It worries me also to think that the time may come where there is complete discord between humans and nature. It terrifies me that our civilisation seems to think that we could exist happily as the sole inhabitants of a barren planet. This is not the way I want things to go either. However, I do not think that this outcome is an inevitable progression from where we are now, only a possible one. And I do not think your revolution of individualists who will destroy the system then return to life in the wilderness as loners or in small clans is a fair or just or helpful cause.

I did some maths. I am not very good at maths like you are but roughly I think I worked something out. So Earth has about 57,500,000 square miles of dry land and not all of it is habitable, but if you take away the 23 per cent of mountains and 33 per cent of desert which totals 32,200,000 square miles you are left with 25,300,000 square miles. Now divide this between the 7,107,663,700 (give or take a few) people on Earth circa 2013, and remember this is also rough, but just for the sake of argument then 25,300,000 ÷ 7,107,663,700 = 0.00355953813 square miles, or 9,219.2 square metres. 9,219.2 square metres per person, which is just a little larger than a football pitch. Enough room for your cabin but not for the woods or much land to grow things and generally be self-sufficient, even with each individual farming their own plot and trading with neighbours, even with some grouping together in order to farm animals. There is still not enough room to avoid the rest of humanity or to be immersed in nature because all the cabins would disrupt the grazing and migration land of animals and also many trees would have to be cut down for all the logs. Also by estimates, the amount of land that would be needed to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle far outweighs the amount of land available per head currently (only enough land to support around 100 million hunter-gatherers).

I am sure you would argue that population would not be an issue because after the revolution and subsequent fall of technology many drones would starve to death without the system to feed or medicate them. But here I think you underestimate people’s resourcefulness. Surely those with sense would not just curl up and die but loot the cities of their resources, and when these are spent they will drive their SUVs into your wilderness and shoot your wildlife with their machine-made rifles to feed their children, who cannot be fed by the system because of the revolution. Another danger is that the elite would monopolise the remaining resources due to their power and the availability they already have the upper hand on, and would therefore be the ones not to perish, leaving them with a foundation from which to build back up and become monolithic (they already have exclusive billionaire underground bunkers set up for the apocalypse in Germany somewhere). This for me is immoral, and very easy for you to say from your privileged position. Not everyone can have access to the freedom you condemn them for snubbing.

Maybe I am biased because my tiny female brain is 40 per cent social, but the way I see it, the biggest threat to the freedom of each individual is the patriarchal hierarchical structure of society and the waning of its resources, which puts strain on those at the bottom and is mostly caused by those at the top. I weigh this threat as the one which affects the most people, rather than that which weighs most heavily on certain individuals (i.e. you). A predominant concern for us both is population density, because the denser it gets, the more restricted becomes the individual’s freedom. Therefore your dismissal of the feminist and gay movements is a fatal flaw as their success is key to a social reform that could curb or decrease indiscriminate population growth.

Generally liberating poor people, liberating women, getting oppressed women into the workplace, or educating them on the options available to them and providing them with the means, could reduce reproduction. Around the world nearly 40 per cent of pregnancies are unintended. Around 350 million women in developing countries did not want their last child or do not want another, but they do not have access to information or services to help them. This means deconstructing patriarchy so that women can take control of their bodies. The deconstruction would also mean that the sole pressure is not on the woman when it comes to child-rearing. Equally shared roles between parents and even communal care would relieve this. The current paradigm does not want communal care because it means the child is not moulded in the image of its parents and is therefore not time-capsulised.

I think one of the sentiments that underpins this problem, perhaps the most significant sentiment, is actually the individualism that you advocate. A more collectivist sentiment would encourage alternative ways of fulfilling the desire to nurture, without feeling the need to immortalise the self in genes, and lead to an increase in adoption of children.

The concept of metempsychosis is a beautiful thing, and I think that once it is embraced the need for biological children will seem outmoded, we will think like the Inuits and name our children in plural. Every person around you gives and takes from the fabric of you. This is spiritual and intellectual more than it is biological. It is how men have been doing it throughout time. You can’t just spay people; you have to remind them that our shards don’t migrate with specificity of genes in mind.

But anyway, population is not everything; it is the individualist consumer mentality of the developed world that causes more emissions than the ‘overpopulated’ developing world. This can be reformed into a free and equal society based on cooperation and voluntary contribution from all for the good of everyone, which is the fairest way to liberate, spreading freedom as opposed to consolidating it. The technological system can be used to help reform, spreading the message and reminding the people that we are WORLD CITIZENS. Our skill for invention is not the issue, but the way that we are directing our skills. Scientific research and technology are vital in bringing basic rights and freedoms to such a large population. It is scientific research and technology that have given us an understanding of deep time and therefore of our future generations ahead. It is scientific invention that got us far enough to stop and consider ourselves.

This individualism is tied up in your invocation of FREEDOM. Your kind of freedom still requires a dualistic philosophy for it to be maintained. Searching for absolutes in nature builds just another dualistic metanarrative, one of good vs. evil and pure vs. impure. This kind of freedom is the philosophical driving force behind the Machine. You are worried about the subjugation of human nature, but see, essential human nature does not exist.

The thing that has been bugging me all this time is the influence of the idea of natural law in the arguments of the Mountain Men. Although I could just argue now that science or natural law is just a bunch of stories, I wanted to meet you on your own territory, so I have come up with some scientific proofs against the argument of the Mountain Men that civilisation is unnatural and women just biologically suck:

There is the evolutionary case of sexual dimorphism. Although I could just invoke Lynn Margulis and her whole argument for origins and cooperation over competition, I want to be specific. In our close relatives of the ape family, males have much more pronounced canines than do females (apart from bonobos, a matriarchal species). In the bones of our long-dead predecessors it has been noted that males had much more pronounced canines, which shrank and shrank until they are as they are now, in no way divergent between the sexes.

One theory is that this is because females, when selecting a mate, selected social and sharing males, reducing the evolutionary need for big old canines. The theory is that this is because there was not much or maybe any division of labour between the sexes, we all hunt-gathered, and likely took our meat from scavenging. Sexual specialisation probably came very late in human evolution, as late as the dawn of agriculture, the so-called Neolithic Revolution 12,500 years ago.

The Palaeolithic came before the Neolithic and had a very vast time span of around 2.5 million years. It has only been 12,500 years since the dawn of agriculture, and the birth of the ‘modern human’. The Palaeolithic world and way of being stayed static for all that time. They obviously had the formula for being human just right then, before things started to change.

The birdman with the boner painting in the caves at Lascaux is dated to the Upper Palaeolithic, the last division before the Neolithic and the birthing of behavioural modernity. Behavioural modernity is characterised by abstract thinking, planning depth and symbolic behaviour like art and ornamentation. So the birdman was painted at a time of upheaval and the caves are a time capsule of this period.

The message fails time, no one can agree on what the birdman means, but that does not matter. We are allowed to interpret it for our purpose like the palaeo-ecologist interprets the pack rat’s midden (narrative licence). So here goes:

I could, for example, say that the birdman is aroused by the dominance that at this point in history he had begun to exert on the natural world. The yak thing represents the natural world. Perhaps that is an enlarged vulva hanging below her abdomen, representing femininity. Lots of art from this time features the female body, so called Venus figures. As though at the time the people revered the female body as a life-giving deity. Perhaps what the painting represents is the rise of patriarchy, at the cusp of two opposing paradigms. But the bull is knocking the birdman down. Perhaps what it says is matriarchy WILL PERSEVERE!!!

My point is that I believe there is no proof that competition and dominance are essential and innate features of the human being. The subjugation of women is not necessarily an essential fact of life.

More facts (or speculations). Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with risk-taking and therefore adventure. It gives us a reward hit when we accomplish a task. The more risk involved in the task, the bigger the hit. A reason not everyone wants to be a Mountain Man could be that some people make less dopamine than others. Dopamine is associated with the left side of the brain while serotonin is associated with the right. As a general trend men are associated more with the left side of the brain and women with the right.

Template:Clear

File:F0289-01.jpg.png

Dopamine is associated more with antisocial personality disorders and serotonin with borderline personality disorders. A person with antisocial personality disorder lacks empathy for other people while a borderline personality disorder feels like empathy you can’t control, boundary issues making it difficult to share another’s pain without feeling it too much as your own (the process of osmosis until the saturation point is reached).

These are very general trends. There are more Mountain Men than Mountain Women. But a siphon movement can only start when an outside pressure has been added. A dead hand is an undesirable and persisting influence. And if you pour liquid into a mould to set it will set in the shape of the mould. Learned behaviour has been proved to actually change genetic make-up, so even biological sex is in a process of transformation always.

The evolutionary biologists say that maybe the dopamine in the brain was the thing that sent us out of Africa. Maybe it is the chemical of species proliferation. Maybe it made me leave home. Maybe it sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon.

But could be it is not quite an innate and natural impulse like that and the real reason is that NASA were very selective about who could join Apollo. Some psychologist did a personality assessment of all the Apollo astronauts and concluded that they were all ‘Type A’. A Type A personality is very competitive, rational, ambitious, you could say glory-hungry and selfish. And this could have to do, the psychologist said, with the fact that they were all the eldest sibling or the only son, and had patriarchal military-type fathers (remember the original desert solitude-seeking nature solace Mountain Man with the most famous absent father, our Lord Jesus Christ).

And women can be Type A too, but maybe it would be better if people stopped being Type A altogether, or if we at least stopped letting Type As do all the important and influential stuff. And if Type A is still the type that provides the most astronauts, then the space colonies are not going to be much fun, are they?

The ‘primitive’ necessarily gets meaning from the contrast of civilisation. And besides, you did not ever manage to shrug off civilisation. You worshipped mathematics as absolute.

But mathematics puts another false map on the world, which pretends to be a territory but is really just another map, same as the others. It is a thing we invented based on spatial allegories coming from our bodies and their interaction with the outside. There are different mathematics and they are inconsistent with each other, but are perfect systems. They are not real or true in your absolutist sense, so they went against your project of wilderness. It is the belief in this reduction that drives your Machine and you do not even see it.

My main point is we are at a place in time now where we can be reflective. It may have been almost inevitable that our symbols would do this to us, but now we have the reflectiveness to be critical of them. But we need our symbols in order to be able to talk and think about ourselves. And to change the paradigm.

Aldo Leopold said, ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ And I think this is a philosophy to live by. Our challenge is to remember that we are a part of this biotic community, and once we have remembered, to act accordingly.

In a way you are right for wanting to emulate ‘primitive’ cultures. Indigenous cultures generally are more partnership-oriented and feminine. But let us not also forget that they were not perfect; Palaeolithic man may have wiped out the woolly mammoth and some Native Americans used to run whole herds of buffalo off cliff-sides just to watch them disappear. And neither is the natural world a perfect system to emulate; Inuit get annoyed at orcas for killing so many seals just for the fun of it. But you are wrong to say there is a right-just-objective way and it is the old way, the law of the wild. There is no ahistorical way of being. If you burned all the libraries how would you have ‘known’ nature without the naturalists?

We can learn from the past but also need to adapt to the future. Women are, in our society, simultaneously social and maternal, crazy and wild. The relationship we need with the natural is one that is feminine. Admitting this and ending the unfair and ungrounded exclusion of women from your philosophy of wilderness is an important step in deconstruction. I am leaving my cabin now, but it is because I have got everything I need. I have got what you were trying to keep from me.

The Machine is perpetuated by us and we are inextricable from it. We need to change the collective conscious to change the direction of the Machine. You are not an isolated ego. Even you, the hermit, exist in relation to your polar antithesis, society. We find ourselves in relationship to the other. When we do not, complexity is lost and we are diminished selves.

I know of a pipe that you made for a friend on which you hand-carved the words ‘Mountain Men are always free’. Mountain Men shun society, yet their solitude relies on the continuation of the system to contain the rest of humanity and leave room for their wilderness. You cannot escape the fact that you are a human being and wherever you go others will want to follow. Scythes cutting through thickets.

On a final note, I know of some people who you might like to get in touch with. They are called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. With your fame I am sure you could rally to their cause by hunger-striking to death in prison. I have a friend who followed your logic and did exactly this. He was much braver and sincere to himself than you have been with your letter bombs. You could honour his life better by admitting your faults of logic.

Reform over revolution.

Down with patriarchy,

Erin Miller (QUEEN OF THE WILD)

THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX

Rachel Carson says it is finally time to lay her to rest. She has taught me what there was to learn. I lay her down in a long wooden canoe. This is so I can set her out, flowing back to the sea to commune with the whales. I set the canoe on fire. I have to set it on fire to fumigate her spirit. This is to try to get rid of some of the imprints the dead leave once the spirit has dissipated. She explains that, more and more, it is impossible to fumigate entirely. Left behind the body is always a fine powder, unnervingly green. It is a lifetime’s accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyl and endocrine disruptors and bisphenol-A from the liver (the chains that cannot be dismantled). These cannot transmigrate into the spiritual realm, but they can’t be reabsorbed back into the natural world either like the ashes can. They remain in the physical realm as a negative imprint.

(But there is also the positive charge and that stays too because ideas can’t be set on fire. I feel shards of it slide into me, like chakra disks that do not hurt.)

As the canoe glides across the ocean it burns up and gets less and less until nothing is left. Then the soul is completely free to transmigrate. Part of the soul slips into the ocean because that is where it wants to be. This soul attaches to a Siphonophore, an odd creature that looks like a jellyfish so that sometimes it is mistakenly identified as one.

Template:Clear

File:F0293-01.jpg.png

But these creatures are really a unity of tiny cellular creatures, simultaneously individual and collective and multicellular. Each member of the colony has a different function towards benefiting the organism as a whole. No member could survive independent of the others that do the things that it can’t. They are genetically the same and they live and die as one. And all are connected to a stem and to a circulatory system, and they develop from the same embryo, like sprouting a Siamese twin from your side again and again and again.

(But then, what with global warming and the acidification of the oceans, lots of the sea creatures will die and she will have to transmigrate again. Where will all the souls accumulate when there are not the billions of small creatures and no room for more big and potent ones? What havoc will they play, waiting for a body?)

WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END?

When the Helios 2 probe launched in 1976 it was the fastest spacecraft ever built, its top speed reaching 157,000 miles per hour. Proxima Centauri is our nearest star and it is 24 trillion miles away. If Helios 2 were to head directly for Proxima Centauri at its top speed it would take 17,000 years to reach it; 17,000 years is a span equivalent to the one that separates modern-day humans from Cro-Magnon cave painters. If Voyager 1 were to travel the same distance it would take it 74,000 years; 74,000 years ago early Palaeolithic people were almost killed off by a supervolcano that erupted in Indonesia and spread ash around the whole planet.

On and on the little spaceship goes. So far in time it is thirty-seven years away. The year Voyager 1 launched was 1977. That year there were eleven major plane crashes, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay elected official in the US, American man Roy Sullivan got struck by lightning for the seventh time, Spain had its first democratic election since Franco, Queen Elizabeth II opened the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand, the Bucharest earthquake killed 1,500 people, Jimmy Carter became the thirty-ninth president of America, Gary Gilmore from Utah was the first person to be executed after the death penalty was reintroduced in America, Hamida Djandoubi was the last person to be executed by guillotine in France, smallpox was eradicated, Elvis Presley died, optical fibre was first used to carry telephone signals and the Big Ear radio telescope, which would eventually be taken down to make way for a golf course, picked up its famous Wow! signal from deep space. This was on August the fifteenth, twenty-one days before Voyager 1 was launched.

The year I was born was 1993, the year of the Velvet Divorce, and when guys from the IRA perpetrated the biggest robbery in US history and set off a lot of bombs, the year the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed, Bill Clinton became president, Russians mounted the first art exhibition in space and no one went to see it, Kim Campbell became the first female prime minister of Canada and resigned the same year, a van bomb killed six at the World Trade Center, there was the Great Blizzard of 1993 on the east coast of the US, South Africa abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, the US Air Force let women fly war planes, a Unabomber bomb injured a computer scientist at Yale, a floating chapel sank and killed 266 people, the nineteenth G7 summit was held, the public were allowed into Buckingham Palace for the very first time, China undertook a nuclear test and it ended a worldwide moratorium, the European Union was established, A Brief History of Time became the longest-lasting bestseller and Freya Stark, Deke Slayton of the Mercury programme and William Golding all died.

Written into the Big Bang theory are Cosmological Horizons. These horizons mark the limit of our Observable Universe. The Observable Universe has a spherical distribution with an observer at its centre. Events outside this radius have not had time for their light to reach the observer yet and never will. The Cosmological Horizon is the shady border to the furthest point the observer can retrieve information from. Likewise, light emitted by the observer might not ever catch up to distant and exponentially receding objects in an expanding universe. This is the Future Horizon, and events which are past here the observer can have no influence on. Every single point in the universe can be the centre of a different observable universe and parts of all can overlap.

I will start my journey home a voyager called back like a well-trained falcon. Only there is no calling back the actual Voyagers; they will keep on going if we like it or not. Voyager 1 could go on travelling for ever and ever into the wild yonder on its own velocity. And Voyager 1 is its own central observer, it can leave our observable universe and enter a new one of its own.

Voyager 1 is our time capsule into another universe. It might be that no one who ever finds it will understand what it means. But they would likely understand that it has intent, and even though the intention fails it is the drive behind the intent that will live on, sinisterly, like the twitch of the almost-dead baddie at the end of the horror film.

The Voyagers are relics of a time when people thought missions to space held integrity and wonder. But the next big missions to space will be commercial ones because the public are bored now. The moon is awe-sapped enough that we do not mind mining it. And when the miners have opened the emigrant trails we might colonise our brand-new tabula rasa. Space X wants to launch missions to mine minerals from space and create the world’s first trillionaires. Virgin Galactic will take a bunch of rich and famous people to the moon. On board the inaugural flight will be James Lovelock. Either he had a change of heart in old age or he is going along as a suicide bomber.

And then if the Curiosity rover were to find a pictogram, or a bipedal vertebrate fossilised on Mars, or the archaeological remains of a complex civilisation, then it would mean that life had appeared elsewhere in another Cambrian Explosion, and that life is probably quite good at forming complex life elsewhere too. But it would also mean that it is not so great at making life whose destiny is to propagate apart from the other life that binds it. It could be a premonition. A great biblical fossil lizard to the Victorians. Or a cautionary symbol.

There is maybe one small redeeming thing, because the thing about horizons is you are never any closer to them. That is just the nature of horizons. Even Voyager 1 can never catch up with the future, and after billions of years I suppose it must disintegrate or something and that will be it, us out in a little plume, a little puff, but whether it does or not there will always be another horizon and there will always be epistemological wilderness just beyond it.

Once I had everything packed away in the cabin, the board replaced under the desk and the items exactly as they were when I came, all was ready for a layer of dust to settle again. The dust is made of particles of me now. It is also made of the particles of other things: pollen, spores, space rocks, spiders, wood from the cabin itself. Dust seems a nice legacy to leave behind. I did not even fumigate my litter in the fire. Instead I put it all in a plastic bag and carried it with me out of the wilderness, because to leave the plastic particles in the air from the burning to me seemed too much a desecration.

Could be I was always on it but I began my long journey home. When I left the cabin, my cabin, I pulled the door to quietly as though to not disturb the dust as I left, like I could have come and gone on that very first day and just left silently while the cabin slept and it never even noticed me. I turned around to look at it when I had got a little away, alone and small and heavy and dawny in the 4 a.m. morning light, and took a picture which I shall keep always but show no one.

I really hate goodbyes. I think goodbye when it is a forever goodbye is the saddest and most beautiful word. It is a contraction of god-be-with-you, which is touching because even without a god what you are saying all at once is ‘I hope that the shining light that guides you whatever it is is always with you and you don’t ever lose your way or yourself and we won’t ever meet again now but I want for you to always be safe and happy’.

It is saying you will be apart from me now but a shard of you will always remain. Another part of me will go with you, because we are always taking and giving shards from each other and you always lose a part of yourself when you say a forever goodbye. You lose the person they make you. Fear of this loss sometimes drives people to isolation, but this in itself is a tenfold loss. I will always carry Damon with me as a shard, like shrapnel.

We are perpetual motion and change, but there is something that endures and it changes, but gradually enough that some of it endures. You would not be able to know yourself, at least only a little and only sometimes, without this enduring thing. It is maybe ‘I do really hope the light is always with you even if the light can’t be said to be unchanging but whatever your new light is I hope there is one and I will always hope it will be with you still’.

Because it is the light that will guide you onwards to the next thing. If there is not this enduring thing, this kind of gravitational force, then we can lose our way completely and forget that carrying on and not losing the way as much as possible is the whole game. The light is a baton and life is the race and goodbye is the passing of the baton but you have to keep on running and keep on passing that baton but each time you pass it you actually swap it, someone gives you a new one.

That we can feel sad at this motion and this parting and feel a genuine want that although this thing or this person will go on in its own way without you, that it does so with this light even though you can never know it really, this is a beautiful thing. I bawled my eyes out as I walked away as I am in the habit of doing when I feel the pass of the baton occur.

The only astronaut to admit to crying on the moon was Alan Shepard of Mercury and Apollo 14, and this is just proof that they sent the wrong people to the moon because it is good to cry. Crying is the most honest way of saying (and better than with corrupting words), hey, outside world and other beings, I feel you being there.

A LETTER TO MY FUTURE SELF

Dear Erin of the future,

This all seems glaringly obvious to you now, but perhaps you will have forgotten some things. I want you to remember how you got there. That is why I decided it was okay to keep some of the project in Eskimo secret because that way the only person I can colonise is you and that is actually a desirable thing (I like to be consistent). It is to shout I EXIST, which is not a conceited thing to do if you only shout it in your own face.

Almost anything or any method of information transfer when intended for the future can be termed at one time or another a time capsule. So this written thing is a time capsule. Maybe all written words are time capsules. Virginia Woolf said of writing, arrange whatever pieces come your way, which sounds like time-capsule curation to me. Not collection as possession but a collection like that of the reverent bowerbird. So here it is, an affirmation of me, for you.

The Eskimo and the Inuit, known as Twospirit people, they know that genders are arbitrary because anyone can embody them, but they still use them to describe themselves. Identity and words are important for narrative. Scientific theories are only approximations to the true nature of things but sometimes the error is tiny enough for them to be pretty useful.

Like Newton’s world of solid bodies moving through empty space as an analogy for the realm of everyday life called the zone of middle dimensions. In the zone of middle dimensions you feel the effect of the apple that hits you on the head. It is not much use to tell Newton that the apple does not hit one’s head, not really.

I am not a singular organism but an amalgamation of organisms. I am the elected voice of this amalgamation, for the life inside my life and the mites in my eyelashes.

In taxonomy we separate things to make it easier to talk about difference. Taxonomy is a masculine language that dichotomises, like gender is a masculine language, structuring hierarchies. A colonising language; taxonomy is the colonisation of the natural world, but it is pretty useful because it helps you to tell the difference between goosetongue and arrowgrass and not die.

And if I am a woman I am a historically situated and contextual woman, but I am a woman all the same. And it only matters that in popular opinion I have been more social and permeable and collectivist and can identify more with trees and animals than a man can. But physics now says that everything is permeable. My feminisation was training in the interrelation of earth systems.

Lovelock gave Earth a feminine (historically defined) name because he valued the feminine (historically defined) characteristics of renewal, life-giving/-destroying and cooperation. History dictated that women understand more about empathy, starting with training in the home and ‘mother’ bonds. If women are better trained in empathy, then maybe women are a little more in love with the world.

The universe is perpetual motion and change but you can take a step back to where it comes into sharp focus as you look at it. Consciousness is integral to theories of matter because it is consciousness that creates the whole observation that changes the course of the universe, even if only in a very tiny way. It took a long time for things to get this complex and tangled and each of us is woven into this tangle inextricably.

Because it is densely tangled the web does not change very quickly or drastically, and in this way it gives the illusion of stability. When the speed of change is accelerated to an extent that it is a pace too fast for adaption, it gets very suddenly to a place where nothing is recognisable. Examples of this are mass extinctions, nuclear annihilation, or the loss of an indigenous culture. I call this danger velocity.

When they talk about space they still talk in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’ like the Inuit don’t have a word for, because the only way to talk about a thing is to pin it down and quantify it. It has to be outside you in language. Otherwise science can’t work. But Bohr said this is just a trick and that the properties of an atomic object can only be understood in relation to the object’s interaction with the observer and that you can’t talk about nature without talking about yourself. And it works the other way too, in inverse.

This whole time I have been looking so hard through binoculars that I have not even noticed that I am looking through binoculars, which are a pretty nifty thing to have, or that they have been hurting my eye where I have pressed them against it. And I have been looking so hard through binoculars at what looks so far away that I have not seen what was right in front of me. It is all very well and good to build a castle, but you have to make sure not to build it on top of people, and I could have crushed a few people.

Another thing Thoreau said about foundations is we have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization; here he meant literal houses and this is why he liked America, Land of the Free, more than Europe, where there were many civilisations under houses. The ambassador of American wilderness conveniently forgets his own impurity; he has still built his on top of a whole lot of native people.

Around me the cabin is still, quiet and dusty. Everything sits in its place as it has since the beginning, familiar and inexplicable. I feel how a swallow must feel getting the sudden inclination of the east, one day looking around itself and suddenly, nope, dislocated. It is all void of purpose now. The weather is turning, the berries are dropping, the gnats are dying off. The east, that is the place to be. The swallow can’t pinpoint when its purpose changed but it did and now everything has something different about it and it has to leave for home.

And its place and its nest and the time it spent there do not feel wasted or failed or empty because that is not the way it works for birds. And none of it matters for me either, all that time and all that work, it is not wasted but changed, stretched. It has fulfilled its purpose and the pieces of it do not fit together any more.

Like a reptile trying to shrug on the jacket of its old self to realise that it no longer fits. Only reptiles are not sentimental and do not keep their old skins in the dresser drawer with the other miscellaneous special things, but we do our baby teeth and that is part of what makes us human. Maybe you still have the baby teeth in the little silver box with the fairy on or maybe you lost them.

Somewhere in a parallel universe out east where summer is winter and winter is summer, it is winter and the swallows have already flown, and right now a swallow is pecking on a reptile’s discarded skin.

Enclosed in all of this are the maps, some pictures and drawings, the raw bits of film, my (our) diary. Because although I know my map is not this place, the map remembers an important place even though it only exists in the realm of my mind. Just because it can’t tell anyone else anything useful does not deny its significance to me (and you). That is the whole point of keeping postcards, right?

I would like to leave an epitaph because I think you will find it funny still, as I do now. It is a poem by a man called Stephen Crane. It goes:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

‘It is futile,’ I said,

‘You can never—’

‘You lie,’ he cried,

And ran on.

From Erin in the cabin in our wilderness,

Denali,

Alaska,

Earth

Template:Anchor ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I can’t give enough thanks to Jack Underwood for telling me to carry on in the early days, to Harriet Moore for ceaseless support and tender critique, to Nick Sheerin for caring editorial guidance, to all my friends, but especially Claire Liddiard, Hatty Nestor and Zina Sarris, to the Sarris family for allowing me space in their house to write, and to Mum, Dad, Nan and J. J. x

I would also like to express gratitude to the following writers who allowed me to draw on their words and work in this novel.

The lines of dialogue attributed to Rachel Carson on pages 44, 53, 209 and 210 and the chapter title ‘THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH’ are taken from Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1990 by Roger Christie) and are reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee.

The quotation from Ted Kaczynski on page 76 is taken from Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski (Feral House, 2010).

The chapter title ‘THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING’ and the quotation of the same line on page 110 are excerpts from On the Road by Jack Kerouac, copyright © 1955, 1957, by John Sampas, Literary Representative, the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac; John Lash, Executor of the Estate of Jan Kerouac; Nancy Bump; and Anthony M. Sampas. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The chapter title ‘THE BEARD AND THE GUNS AND THE LITTLE SHORT SENTENCES’ is copyright © 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin and first appeared in The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination, published by Shambhala in 2004, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

The chapter title ‘I AM THAT I AM AND THE REST IS WOMEN & WILDERNESS’ is an excerpt from Dancing at the Edge of the World, copyright © 1989 Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.

The chapter title ‘THE WILD AS A PROJECT OF THE SELF’ is a quotation from Jack Turner’s The Abstract Wild (University of Arizona Press, 1996).

The quotations from Aldo Leopold on pages 252 and 291 are taken from A Sand County Almanac and are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.

The chapter titles ‘THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL’ and ‘MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES’ are quotations from the work of Donna Haraway and are taken respectively from Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (Donna Haraway, Feminist Studies, Vol 14, No 3, Autumn 1988, pp.575–99) and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (Donna Haraway, Routledge, 1991).

The chapter title ‘THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX’ is taken from a billboard created by artist collective VNS Matrix.

The chapter title ‘WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END?’ is taken from Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press, 2015).

File:F0308-01.jpg.png

File:F0309-01.jpg.png

File:F0310-01.jpg.png

File:F0311-01.jpg.png

Template:Anchor ALSO FROM SERPENT’S TAIL

Template:Clear

File:Pub.jpg.png

Template:Clear

File:F0312-01.jpg.png

The Evening Chorus

Helen Humphreys

A story of four lives torn apart by war, falling in and out of love, and the unlikely moments that come to define a life.

ISBN 978 1 78125 303 8eISBN 978 1 78283 087 0

File:F0313-01.jpg.png

Eat My Heart Out

Zoe Pilger

Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.

ISBN 978 1 84668 963 5eISBN 978 1 84765 971 2

Template:Clear

File:F0313-02.jpg.png

Women & Power: A Manifesto

Mary Beard

The gender agenda revisited by Britain’s best-known classicist, Mary Beard.

ISBN 978 1 78816 060 5eISBN 978 1 78283 453 3

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-<div style="color:#000000;">{{clear}}
+{{clear}}
-[[Image:cover.jpg.png|center]]</div>
+[[Image:cover.jpg.png|center]]
-== Table of Contents ==
+= X =
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook1|Dedication and Acknowledgments]]</div>
+== X ==
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook3|Introduction]]</div>
+=== [Front Matter] ===
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook4|Chapter 1: Defining Anarchism]]</div>
+==== Table of Contents ====
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook5|Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework]]</div>
+[[#Topofcoverhtml|Cover]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook6|Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision]]</div>
+[[#Topoftitlehtml|Title Page]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook7|Chapter 4: Anarchist Strategy]]</div>
+[[#Topofcopyhtml|Copyright Page]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook8|Chapter 5: Anarchism and State Socialism]]</div>
+[[#Topofdedihtml|Dedication]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook9|Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism]]</div>
+[[#Topofch01html|The Word for Woman is Wilderness]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook10|Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism]]</div>
+[[#Topofch02html|How to Convey Invisible Death]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook11|Chapter 8: The History of Syndicalist Anarchism]]</div>
+[[#Topofch03html|The Receding Horizon]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook12|Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism]]</div>
+[[#Topofch04html|Into the Wildness]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook13|Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism: From Bakunin to the Platform]]</div>
+[[#Topofch05html|My Mountain My Moon]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook14|Chapter 11: Conclusion]]</div>
+[[#Topofch06html|How to say Goodbye]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook15|Bibliography]]</div>
+[[#Topofackhtml|Acknowledgements]]
-<div style="margin-left:0cm;">[[#TopofMeansandEndsINTebook16|Copyright]]</div><div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|MeansandEndsTheRevolution}} {{anchor|MeansandEndsTheRevolution1}} '''Means and Ends'''</div>
+[[#Topofbm01html|Also from Serpent’s Tail]]
-<div style="text-align:center;">The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States</div>
+==== [Title Page] ====
-<div style="text-align:center;">''by''</div>
-<div style="text-align:center;">ZOE BAKER</div>
 <div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
-[[Image:AKPressBWLogo_NoCities_half-inch.jpg.png|center]]</div>
+[[Image:9781782833802.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook1}} {{anchor|DedicationandAcknowledgments}} Dedication and Acknowledgments ==
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|Topoffm01html}} [[Image:fm.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-This book is dedicated to the vast number of anarchist workers whose names do not appear in history books but who nonetheless played a vital role in the struggle for universal human emancipation.
+==== [About the Author] ====
-This work, which began as a PhD thesis submitted to Loughborough University, greatly benefited from feedback provided by Ian Fraser, Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Paul Raekstad, Jesse Cohn, Shawn P. Wilbur, Mark Leier, David Berry, Kenyon Zimmer, Danny Evans, James Yeoman, Ruth Kinna, and Constance Bantman. Thanks to my editor Charles Weigl for making the book much nicer to read. Any errors are my responsibility.
+Abi Andrews was born in 1991 in the Midlands, and now lives and works in South East London. She studied English and creative writing at Goldsmiths, and her work has been published in ''The Dark Mountain Project, Tender, Five Dials'' and ''The Bohemyth'', amongst others.
-<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.127cm;margin-right:0.127cm;">“The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice. . . . The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” </div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|Topoftitlehtml}} {{clear}}
+[[Image:title.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="text-align:center;">''—''karl marx,'' theses on feuerbach ''(1845)</div>
+==== {{anchor|Topofcopyhtml}} [Copyright] ====
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook3}} {{anchor|IntroductionThehistoryofc}} Introduction ==
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd</div>
-The history of capitalism and the state is the history of attempts to abolish them and establish a free society without domination and exploitation. Revolutionary workers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries believed that another world was possible. It is still possible today. One of the main social movements that attempted to overthrow capitalism and the state during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was anarchism. Members of the historical anarchist movement not only attempted to change the world but also produced an elaborate body of ideas that guided their actions. This book is concerned with explaining what their ideas were. Historians sometimes unearth old ideas from the past because they are an interesting way of gaining insight into a different time and place. This is not my principal motivation. I wrote this book because I want to live in a society in which everyone is free. I am convinced that, if we are to achieve this goal, it is important to know the history of previous attempts to do so. My hope is that, through learning about how workers in the past sought to emancipate themselves, workers alive today can learn valuable lessons and develop new ideas that build on the ideas of previous generations.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">3 Holford Yard</div>
-How to define anarchism is a contentious topic and will be discussed in depth in chapter 1. For the purposes of this book, it will be understood as a form of revolutionary antistate socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the International Workingmen’s Association between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International between 1872 and 1878. During and after its birth as a social movement, it spread rapidly to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and parts of Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who were agnostic about the nature of the future society but advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I do not claim that this is the one true form of anarchism. It is only the kind of anarchism I am focusing on.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">Bevin Way</div>
-Anarchism so understood is one of the largest movements in the history of socialism. According to the historian Benedict Anderson, “international anarchism . . . was the main vehicle of global opposition to industrial capitalism, autocracy, latifundism, and imperialism” during the late nineteenth century.[[#1BenedictAndersonTheAgeof|1]] Even the hostile Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm is forced to concede that, between 1905 and 1914, “the main body of Marxists” belonged to increasingly reformist social-democratic political parties while “the bulk of the revolutionary left was anarcho-syndicalist, or at least much closer to the ideas and the mood of anarcho-syndicalism than to that of classical marxism.”[[#2EricHobsbawmRevolutionarie|2]] The vast amount of theory that the anarchist movement produced can be broken down into five main elements:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A theoretical framework for thinking about humans, society, and social change.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">London</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A set of ethical principles that form the value system of anarchism.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">An analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A vision of alternative social relations and structures that are achievable and would actually promote these ethical principles.</div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">A series of strategies (which are consistent with the ethical principles) for abolishing existing social relations and structures in favor of the proposed alternative social relations and structures.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">WC1X 9HD</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">[http://www.serpentstail.com www.serpentstail.com]</div>
-Fully explaining each aspect of anarchist theory, and how these ideas changed over time and varied around the world, goes far beyond the scope of what a single book can hope to achieve. The aim of this book is narrower. I shall rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism within Europe and the United States between 1868 and 1939. It is important to note that this exclusive focus on one part of the world is an artificial construction. The real historical anarchist movement was constituted by transnational networks that operated at a global scale and enabled ideas and people to flow between continents. The movements in different countries were so interconnected that a complete history of anarchism in Europe and the United States necessarily includes the history of anarchism in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania—and vice versa. The true history of anarchism can only be written as a global history. My book is a contribution toward this global history but only covers a small fragment of it.[[#3DavidBerryandConstanceBan|3]]
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">Copyright © 2018 Abi Andrews</div>
-In order to rationally reconstruct the revolutionary strategies of anarchism, it is necessary to explain the other four main elements of anarchist theory—theoretical framework, value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society—in depth. This is because what anarchists thought about strategy can only be understood within the context of anarchist theory as a whole. Although anarchists developed revolutionary strategies to abolish a variety of different oppressive structures, I shall primarily focus on their strategies to abolish capitalism and the state since this is what most anarchist texts discuss. I shall, when it is relevant, include anarchist views on how to abolish patriarchy, but it should be kept in mind that anarchist men, who were the majority of published anarchist authors, did not give this topic sufficient attention. When explaining anarchist ideas, I will write in the past tense because, for the purposes of this book, I am focused on anarchism during one time period. Many of the ideas I describe are still believed by anarchists today and are not exclusive to the past, such as a commitment to anticapitalism.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">The moral right of the author has been asserted.</div>
-I shall throughout this book refer extensively to, and quote from, a number of major anarchist authors who lived in Europe or the United States between 1868 and 1939. This includes, but is not limited to, Michael Bakunin (1814–1876), Élisée Reclus (1830–1905), Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921), James Guillaume (1844–1916), Carlo Cafiero (1846–1892), Errico Malatesta (1853–1932), Émile Pouget (1860–1931), Ricardo Mella (1861–1925), Luigi Galleani (1861–1931), Max Baginski (1864–1943), Voltairine de Cleyre (1866–1912),[[#4DeCleyrewasinitiallyanin|4]] Emma Goldman (1869–1940), Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Rudolf Rocker (1873–1958), Luigi Fabbri (1877–1935), and Charlotte Wilson (1854–1944). I shall supplement the quotations from major anarchist authors with quotations from sources collectively produced by the movement. These will include programs, congress resolutions, and manifestos of formal organizations or affinity groups. In order to maintain a consistent style, all quotes are rendered using American-English spelling.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.</div>
-A key factor determining which authors I have chosen to include within this book is the fact that I can only read English. This is a significant limitation given that the majority of anarchist primary sources within Europe and the United States were originally written in languages other than English—mainly French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, and Yiddish—and have yet to be translated.[[#5FedericoFerrettiAnarchyan|5]] As a result, there are authors who were historically important but whose ideas I cannot examine in any depth due to lacking access to them, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Saul Yanovsky or the Dutch anarchist Domela Nieuwenhuis. Even with authors who have been translated into English, such as Reclus, I often only have access to a small amount of their total output. It should therefore be kept in mind that generalizations I make about anarchism are based on the primary sources available in English, and these represent a small fragment of the total texts produced by the historical anarchist movement.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author.</div>
-I shall be quoting anarchist authors at length, rather than only rephrasing their ideas in my own words, because, in order to understand what anarchists thought historically, a modern reader must understand them on their own terms and so through their own language and exact ways of conceptualizing or expressing their ideas. Doing so will not only help ensure that my explanation of anarchist theory corresponds to what anarchists actually thought, but will also bring many obscure and not well-known passages to the reader’s attention. Although I shall sometimes have to, for the sake of clarity and consistent terminology, introduce new language when summarizing anarchist ideas in my own words, this shall only ever represent a change in language and not a change in ideas. I shall, in addition, attempt to use the same language as historical anarchists as much as possible. Throughout this book, I shall not be arguing that anarchist theory was correct or interjecting with my own personal views on which anarchist authors or ideas were best. I will instead only be concerned with establishing and explaining what anarchist authors themselves thought.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library</div>
-Through quoting these anarchist authors, I shall be rationally reconstructing the ideas of different thinkers into a coherent system of thought. A rational reconstruction is a reorganization of a set of ideas that highlights the logical relations between its different elements.[[#6MichaelBeaneyAnalyticPhi|6]] A rational reconstruction of a political theory, in other words, not only explains what its exponents claim about various topics, such as how they think about society or the forms of action they advocate to change society. A rational reconstruction also makes the logical connections between the different elements of a political theory explicit, such as how their social theory underpins their choice of tactics. It is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in this manner for two main reasons. First, the vast majority of anarchist texts are short articles, speeches, or pamphlets. Even texts that were published as books are often compilations of previously published articles. Given this, an understanding of what an anarchist author thought can only be reached through assembling the many different ideas they espoused in different places. Bakunin, for example, wrote several sentences and paragraphs about freedom within texts concerned with a more general topic, but did not write an extended essay or book devoted solely to the subject of freedom. In order to establish what Bakunin thought about freedom, one must assemble a collection of short sentences and paragraphs made by him in several different texts. Even when an anarchist author did write about a topic in more detail, it is still necessary to combine different texts together because the positions advocated in one short article can be misunderstood or misrepresented when not connected to the claims made in other short articles. The ideas of the anarchist movement can likewise only be understood by assembling the ideas of a large number of different authors.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">eISBN 978 1 78283 380 2</div>
-Second, a key reason why anarchist authors wrote political theory was that they aimed to spread revolutionary ideas to workers and inspire them to rise up against their oppressors. This led anarchists to write in a style that was accessible to a wide readership, but could also make their arguments appear simpler than they actually were. For example, on numerous occasions anarchist authors do not explicitly lay out the conceptual connections between their different beliefs. Even when anarchist authors do claim that certain ideas are connected, they do not always explain why this is the case or only explain briefly. Given this, it is necessary to rationally reconstruct anarchist ideas in order to build up the interconnected conceptual system that anarchist authors often left implicit or did not explain in sufficient depth.
+==== {{anchor|Topofdedihtml}} dedicated to ====
-The technique of rational reconstruction is usually applied to explaining the ideas of a single individual author, such as Marx or Descartes. Such efforts must be sensitive to the fact that an individual author changed their mind or developed their ideas over time. It would therefore be a mistake to unthinkingly place ideas from one period of their life alongside ideas from another period simply because they were written by the same person. This issue becomes greater when rationally reconstructing the ideas of an international social movement over several decades. Assembling together the ideas of a large number of different authors is straightforward when explaining ideas that all anarchists advocated, such as the abolition of capitalism and the state, but is more complicated when examining areas where anarchists disagreed with one another, an idea significantly changed over time, or a whole new idea emerged during a specific historical moment and did not exist prior to this. A rational reconstruction of the ideas of anarchism as a social movement must be sensitive to the fact that anarchist theory was not a single unchanging monolith, but a cluster of different tendencies in dialogue and debate with one another.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">''Tilikum (Tilly) the whale''</div>
-While this study will utilize the conceptual rigor of philosophy to summarize the arguments of anarchist authors, it will not examine these ideas in a historically anachronistic manner as if they existed outside of time and space. To truly understand the political theory of historical anarchism it is necessary to understand what these authors intended to mean and communicate to their audiences and how their texts were, independently of these authorial intentions, understood by readers at the time. This requires locating texts within a specific linguistic context—inherited assumptions from previous thinkers, ongoing debates and discussions, how certain words were used at the time, etc.—and the wider social, economic, and political world that these ideas were produced within and in reaction to—the social relations through which the production and consumption of goods were organized, what kinds of domination the ruling classes engaged in, how the oppressed classes resisted and struggled against their rulers, and so on.[[#7QuentinSkinnerMeaningand|7]]
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">''who perhaps had his own name in whale dialect''</div>
-A comprehensive study of anarchism that fully contextualizes its ideas within their historical moment goes far beyond the scope of this book. I shall, instead, be focusing on a single main context: the history of the anarchist movement itself. This will include not only the theoretical debates within the movement, but also its various actual attempts at overthrowing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. This is because the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was articulated by members of a social movement in order to be put into action. It is furthermore the case that the ideas different anarchist authors proposed were developed in response to the ongoing experiences of class struggle, such as the various actions of different working-class social movements, state repression of anarchist movements, and debates within anarchist organizations about how to act in a specific moment. In order to include this context, I shall combine a detailed textual interpretation of primary sources available in English with the secondary literature on the history of different anarchist movements in Europe and the United States.
+<div style="text-align:center;margin-left:0.004cm;">''1981–2017''</div>
-There are three limitations to this approach. First, the product of such a rational reconstruction will not correspond precisely to each individual author’s viewpoint and will contain propositions that some of the authors I cite may have objected to, because they disagreed with other anarchists on the topic. To minimize this issue, I shall, when it is relevant, point out when a view was distinct to a specific author and when there are important exceptions to a generalization.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|Topoffm02html}} [[Image:fvii-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-Second, this rational reconstruction will not exactly correspond to what the workers who composed the bulk of the anarchist movement thought. These workers were, after all, not automatons who blindly repeated word for word the ideas expressed by the major authors of anarchism. They had thoughts of their own about what anarchism was, and about what anarchists should do. They may have, in addition to this, disagreed with my interpretation of the authors I cite, not noticed features of these texts that I have, noticed features that I have failed to, and in general gained different ideas from reading these texts than I have. It is furthermore the case that I will have read texts that individual workers within the movement were unfamiliar with, and they would have read, or if they were illiterate had read to them, texts that I am unfamiliar with.
+=== {{anchor|Topofch01html}} THE WORD FOR WOMAN IS WILDERNESS ===
-It is difficult to find out what these anarchists thought because the majority of anarchists were not published authors and instead developed ideas through face-to-face conversations with their comrades. German anarchists in New York, to give one example, would discuss politics in a wide variety of locations, ranging from anarchist-run beer halls to singing societies to family picnics in the park.[[#8TomGoyensBeerandRevoluti|8]] The contents of these conversations have unfortunately been largely lost when those who experienced and remembered them died, since only a tiny fraction of them were ever recorded in writing. Given this, it should be kept in mind that it is often unclear whether a major anarchist author is expressing ideas that they themselves came up with or is merely repeating ideas that were developed through countless face-to-face discussions between anarchist workers. Influential anarchist authors themselves routinely pointed out that they were repeating ideas collectively developed within working-class social movements. To give one example, Malatesta wrote in 1899 that “the anarchist socialist program is the fruit of collective development which, even ignoring its forerunners, lasted several decades, and which no one individual could claim to have authored.”[[#9ErricoMalatestaTowardsAna|9]]
+==== PASSING THROUGH THE HELIOPAUSE ====
-Third, my reconstruction of anarchist political theory draws upon a small number of women authors. This is because, although large numbers of women played a significant role in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anarchist movement, most published anarchist authors appear to have been men.[[#10Fordiscussionsofwomensp|10]] Of those anarchist authors who were women, many of them cannot be included in my rational reconstruction since either they lived outside of Europe and the United States, such as the Chinese anarchist He-Yin Zhen, or they have not been translated into English, such as the Yiddish-speaking anarchist and doctor Katherina Yevzerov.[[#11LydiaHLiuRebeccaEKar|11]] Nor can my reconstruction, due to its focus on texts, include the perspectives of those women who were active within the anarchist movement but did not (as far as I am aware) have their ideas published by the anarchist press. This includes such individuals as the militant Concha Pérez, who took up arms in the Spanish revolution of 1936 and fought against fascists in Barcelona and on the Aragon Front.[[#12AckelsbergFreeWomen939|12]]
+The space probe Voyager 1 left the planet in 1977. Any month, day, minute, second now it will enter interstellar space and become the furthest-reaching man-made object, and the first to leave the heliosphere. This will be one of the biggest moments in scientific history and we will never know exactly when it happened. Three things would signify that Voyager 1 had crossed the border of the heliopause: an increase in galactic cosmic rays, reversal of the direction of the magnetic field, and a decrease in the temperature of charged particles. Voyager 1 reports show a 25 per cent increase per month of cosmic rays. But its signals take seventeen hours to travel back to Earth at the speed of light.
-Despite these shortcomings, a rational reconstruction of the ideas that can be found in the major theorists of anarchism who lived in Europe and the United States will provide a useful synthesis for thinking about the ideas that were prominent within the anarchist movement during the period I am examining. It should be kept in mind throughout that this reconstruction is primarily based on sources written by a small list of people who, despite exerting great influence on the movement, should not be conflated with the movement as a whole. Given this, when I write that “anarchists thought x” or “anarchism holds that y,” I am not committing myself to the strong position that every person within the anarchist movement held these views, since this is not something I could possibly know. I am instead using these phrases as shorthand for the more modest claim that the major anarchist authors, newspapers, and programs of organizations I cite did adhere to these views.
+When did my journey begin? At the moment of its conception? When I left home in a delivery van with a friend of my dad’s who was going north with some furniture? My parents waved me off with the dog; I filmed it, my mum cried. That felt like a beginning. Or was it the moment the freighter pulled away into the mopbucket waters off Immingham on a grey day in March?
-The central argument of this book is that the reasons anarchists gave for supporting or opposing particular strategies were grounded in a theoretical framework—the theory of practice—which maintained that, as people engage in activity, they simultaneously change the world and themselves. This theoretical framework was the foundation for the anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries proposed to achieve social change had to be constituted by forms of activity that would develop people into the kinds of individuals who were capable of, and were driven to, (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society.
+It came about like this: I was watching a film about a runaway called Chris McCandless, who ditched his ivy-league-trust-fund life and travelled all across America to get to Alaska and live the Jack London dream, where he ate some poisonous potatoes and died. This was 1992, the year before I was born. I cried and promised myself I would start a savings account to fund a trip to Alaska, where I too could live in the wilderness in total solitude. Then I went through the film step by step and analysed how it would have been different if the guy had been a girl.
-The structure of this book is as follows. In chapter 1, I define anarchism in depth. In chapter 2, I explain anarchism’s theoretical framework—the theory of practice. With this in place, I rationally reconstruct anarchism’s value system, critique of existing society, and vision of a future society in chapter 3. The core ideas on strategy that were in general shared by the anarchist movement are described in chapter 4. Chapter 5 reconstructs the anarchist critique of state socialism. Chapters 6 and 7 provide an overview of the two main schools of anarchist strategy: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Chapters 8 and 9 expand the discussion of mass anarchism by explaining the history, theory, and practice of one of its main forms: syndicalist anarchism, which is a kind of revolutionary trade unionism. Chapter 10 continues the discussion of mass anarchism by describing the history and theory of organizational dualism, which was the idea that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and smaller organizations composed exclusively of anarchists. Chapter 11 summarizes the main ideas of anarchist political theory and reaffirms my central argument that the revolutionary strategy of anarchism was grounded in the theory of practice.
+Really, it would have been a completely different film. Not just in the sense that there were situations in it that would likely have different outcomes for the different sexes (e.g. when he got beaten up by a conductor who finds him stowing away on his freight train) but more fundamentally because a girl wanting to shun modern society and go AWOL into the wilderness to live by killing and eating small animals and scavenged plants would just be considered unsettling.
-[[#1|1]]. Benedict Anderson, ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination'' (London: Verso 2013), 54.
+Wood-cutting mystic Henry David Thoreau shares some of the blame for this. He said things like ‘chastity is the flowering of man; and what are called Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits which succeed it’, as though even having sex with a woman would ruin your transcendentalism. ‘Man’ is used to refer to humanity as a whole. When ‘Man’ is pitted against nature in a dynamic of conquest, nature is usually ‘she’.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#2|2]]. Eric Hobsbawm, ''Revolutionaries ''(London: Phoenix, 1994), 61.</div>
+Wildness in women does not mean autonomy and freedom; their wildness is instead an irrational fever. Simultaneously, in survivalist terms we are the weaker sex and cannot prosper individually outside of the social sphere or without the protection of a manly man. Women both are excluded from, and banished to, nature.
-[[#3|3]]. David Berry and Constance Bantman, eds., ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational'' (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Constance Bantman and Bert Altena, eds., ''Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017); Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010).
+Even on those documentary channels that do programmes on whole families homesteading in the wilderness the woman is always Mountain Man’s wife, never, ever Mountain Woman, just an annexe of the Mountain Man along with his beard, pipe and gun. ''In Coming into the Country: Travels in Alaska'', the writer John McPhee describes lots of Mountain Men in careful detail and a few mountain women in passing comments. One of the Mountain Men tells John McPhee that he wanted to be utterly and totally alone, cut off deep in the country, with only three daughters and one wife, or his ‘womenfolks’, as he liked to call them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#4|4]]. De Cleyre was initially an individualist anarchist and mutualist but came to reject this position during the 1890s. Between 1897 and 1900, she came to identify as an anarchist without adjectives who was agnostic about the nature of the future society, while advocating the same strategies as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists. I shall only be including texts by her from this later period. See “Vision of an Alternative Society” in chapter 3 for a discussion of this view and the supporting references.</div>
+There are exceptions to the invisibility spell, of course. There is Calamity Jane the cowgirl. Nellie Bly, who did a trip around the world in seventy-two days. Freya Stark, the travel writer of the Middle East. Mary Kingsley the explorer, and that old lady who went over Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. But the problem is exactly that there are exceptions. It is as though there is something significant to learn in the wild but it can only be accessed by men. In the wild, men carve out their individual and manly selves, as though women are not allowed individual and authentic selves. The story has the exact same plot, but ‘a woman alone in wilderness’ means something totally inverted. So I had this idea for a journey to Alaska.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#5|5]]. Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 61–62; Kenyon Zimmer, “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility, and Language,” ''American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism'' 29, no. 1 (2019): 10–11.</div>
+Maybe I have read too many ''Lord of the Rings'' quest-type fantasies, but I cannot shift the notion that to be deserving of a destination that is really far away you should have undergone some sort of expedition to get there, like how people make a pilgrimage out of piety. So the other element of its ethos came from an aversion to aeroplanes, a combination of carbon-footprint guilt and a suspicion towards the paradox of crossing time zones in a matter of hours to exist suddenly and indifferently in a place you should not naturally be. Not just flying to a place and kind of congregating like these ‘all-inclusive sun, sand, sea, collect your tokens in the ''Daily Mail''’ package holidays.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#6|6]]. Michael Beaney, “Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction,” in ''The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy'', ed. Erich H. Reck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 253.</div>
+We were one of those families that always went abroad, apart from years when Dad was out of work. By the time I left home I had travelled to nine different countries. If asked to describe those countries I could have told you that beaches in Spain are busier than beaches in Greece, that in the Caribbean you are advised against going onto beaches that are not owned and segregated by your hotel, and that Disneyworld is too far away from the shore to go to the beach but you can go to a pretend beach at the parks anyway and one even has a slide that is a tube going underwater through a tank with dolphins in it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#7|7]]. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in ''Visions of Politics'','' ''vol. 1,'' Regarding Method ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 82–87; Skinner, “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts,” in ''Visions'', 110–14; Skinner, ''The Foundations of Modern Political Thought'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Renaissance'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), x–xiv; Ellen Meiksins Wood, ''Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages'' (London: Verso, 2011), 7–16.</div>
+Living in a technological era means that in an abstract sense the other side of the world is just a few clicks away. Everywhere on Earth has been explored and put in an encyclopaedia. And the internet has brought all of those encyclopaedias together and ordered them into a messy but functional directory. There are no more enigmas. But it also means that passage of travel has become a lot less elitist. I can utilise the internet in the same way that a man of old might have clutched a quill-written recommendation allowing him passage on his father’s tobacco-merchant friend’s ship.
-[[#8|8]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''34–51, 168–82.
+It is very easy to feel nowadays that humanity has saturated everything; that we have conquered the world. If you were to watch a time-lapse of Earth from the beginning of its history up to the present day, for a very, very long time not a lot would happen. The continental land masses would gradually drift, asteroids would impact intermittently, and you might catch an erupting supervolcano, tiny button mushrooms of smoke diffusing. Earth would remain a relatively tranquil marble, its atmosphere pearly eddies and swirls. Then, in the eighteenth century AD, you would see a metamorphosis: cities growing like bruises, fertile soil turning to desert, debris gradually accumulating in a dull metallic orbital constellation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#9|9]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''65.</div>
+There are now satellites in the sky that will far outlive us, as big as football fields, suspended in the Clarke Belt, 35,786 miles above sea level, at a distance that means they rotate in geosynchronous orbit. They experience little to no atmospheric drag and because of this they will not ever be pulled back to Earth. They might cease to exist only when everything in proximity to Earth is swallowed by our expanding sun. Until then these will be one of humankind’s longest-lasting artefacts, and a legacy of the twenty-first century. Our civilisation will be immortalised by these grey exoskeletons, usurping the Egyptians, the Mayans, the Māori, etc.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#10|10]]. For discussions of women’s participation in historical anarchist movements see David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''313–17; Jennifer Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City'','' 1880–1945 ''(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 139–75; Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005); Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''155–8; Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 43–47, 66–70; Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'', 91–111.</div>
+Earth is around 4.5 billion years old. Anything that is living on it 6 billion years from now will be vaporised when the sun dies and will be as far from us as we are from those little fish that jumped out of the sea. But we are myopic. In the scheme of things, the rate of change over the past one hundred years is just a blink to the universe, and yet ''shit'', it took so long for me to get to nineteen years. I want the trip to remind me that I am small and getting smaller. (I am stood on a dot on a balloon, all the dots are evenly spaced, as the balloon gets bigger the other dots seem to get further away but it’s only because I am standing on a dot.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#11|11]]. Lydia H. Liu, Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds., ''The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory'' (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 21, 44.</div>
+Alaska is the place to feel this. It figures in the collective psyche as the Land of the Mountain Men, the Last Great Wilderness. It is big and vast and mostly unpeopled. The British Isles would fit inside it seven times and about a seventh of Alaska is set aside as protected wilderness. Its entire population is ten times smaller than London’s.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#12|12]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 93–95.</div>
+I saved up £2000, the approximate cost of a return plane ticket to Alaska, after a few months of working full-time post-A-levels and living scrupulously. This is to be used for travel expenses only, and must get me from the UK to Iceland to Greenland to Canada and across into Alaska. Any money I need to exist will be made along the way. All of the above will be summarised in a tasteful voiceover on top of some sort of video montage of all the places I go looking mysterious and cloudy.
-== {{anchor|Chapter1DefiningAnarchism}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook4}} {{anchor|Chapter1DefiningAnarchism1}} Chapter 1: Defining Anarchism ==
+Travelling by sea and land, it will be an Odyssean epic, only with me, a girl, on a female quest for ''authenticity''.
-Overviews of anarchism often begin by claiming that it is incredibly broad, incoherent, and inherently difficult to define.[[#1ForexamplePeterMarshallD|1]] Being difficult to define is not a unique feature of anarchism. It is a general problem facing the intellectual historian because, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “only something which has no history can be defined.”[[#2FriedrichNietzscheOntheG|2]] That is to say, the reason why one can define hydrogen in terms of essential and unchanging necessary and jointly sufficient conditions is that it lies outside of history and so does not vary within and between human societies. What hydrogen is does not change between tenth-century France and twentieth-century Alaska. This remains true even though how humans have understood or thought about hydrogen has changed over time. But the same is not true of things that are historical in the sense of being inherently connected to and concerned with human activity, such as Christianity or anarchism.
+==== HAUNTED BY THOUGHTS OF AN ELSEWHERE ====
-Such historical entities have a beginning and boundaries that distinguish them from other parts of human existence, but the elements that compose them nonetheless change over time. Christianity, for example, emerged during the first century CE and was characterized by a set of beliefs and practices that made it different from other religions. It was subsequently modified numerous times during its history, such as by the invention of Catholicism and Protestantism. Historical entities are fluid and ever-changing because they are produced by and are about humans who are themselves constantly changing as they engage in activity within constantly evolving social structures. At any given moment in history, people will think and act differently in response to the same wider context. The consequence of this is that, as people articulate distinct perspectives, argue with one another, and act to ensure that their understanding remains dominant or becomes so, they also produce competing and contradictory versions of the same historically produced entity. Over time, this process of contestation causes the widespread version of a historically produced entity to change as some elements arise to prominence or fade into obscurity, whole new elements are added, and other elements are removed. There is no one true version of a historically produced entity. Instead, there is only what elements do or do not compose it according to different individuals or groups of people at the various stages of its development.
+I have a cabin on a corridor with all the other cabins; each cabin has two bunks, two lamps, two lockers and a porthole. The cabin doors do not have locks and next door keeps walking into my cabin mistaking it for his. From what I gather he works in shifts, engineering things. Most of the employees are Icelandic but speak at least partial English. I get by with a kind of pidgin formed from their rudimentary vocab and my pocket phrase book.
-This should not be mistaken for the claim that there are no characteristics that distinguish one historically produced entity from another. Christianity may be a constellation of disparate elements that changes over time, but it is nonetheless distinct from the religion of the Aztecs. Nor does Nietzsche’s view entail that all definitions of a historical entity are equally good and cannot be better or worse than another definition. A person who defined Christianity as a religion that believes in a single God would be failing to construct a useful definition, because it includes belief systems that should be excluded, such as other monotheistic religions like Islam, and fails to specify the distinct elements that compose Christianity historically and within modern society, such as the belief that Jesus was resurrected.
+There are also two students: Kristján and Urla, a guy and a girl from Manchester and Leeds Universities who use the freighter to travel home to Iceland cheaply in the uni holidays. They live in different cities and only met on their first trip. They now make their trips home coincide so they can keep each other company, and they have a rapport with the regular employees. Everyone seems to be under the impression that they are, or are to be, in love.
-Nietzsche’s views on historically produced entities have several consequences for thinking about how to define anarchism. Although anarchism will have an origin and some conceptual boundaries that have historically demarcated it from other ideologies, there will not be a single, unified body of thought called ''anarchism''. At a given historical moment, there will be a series of distinct individuals or groups of people who all happen to call themselves anarchists and are in a process of contestation with one another over what anarchism means or should mean. Since what anarchism means is historically variable, the best we can expect from a definition is that it provides a snapshot of how specific individuals or groups of people understood anarchism at a given moment of its historical development. Such a definition may be rendered incomplete by unexpected developments within anarchism, such as whole new elements arising or previously important elements fading into obscurity. The point is not to establish what anarchism truly means once and for all, but to construct a definition of anarchism that is useful for investigating a particular historical period, topic, or type of anarchism.
+I am trying to capture the ‘essence’ of life on board ''Blárfoss'' for the documentary. Can I do that by filling a memory card with pictures and videos of every inch of the ship, enough to make a 3D mosaicked replica? As though to get at the essence of something is to cover its every angle, like a method of scientific inquiry, exhausting its possibilities? Probably not, because the memory card is nearly a quarter full already. I have also interviewed just about every English speaker afloat. Urla especially thinks the documentary is ‘totally cool’. Everyone was taking part as a way of alleviating boredom but it has evolved into some strange kind of fame-ritual, because in the tiny world of the ship the interviewee becomes something akin to a celebrity. At first I was worried about this tainting the documentary, but I suppose I can make it a case in point.
-There are two main views on what anarchism is. Transhistoricists generally define anarchism as referring to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.[[#3MarshallDemandingtheImpos|3]] In response to this way of thinking about anarchism, historicists have argued that anarchism should instead be defined as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe and rapidly spread, during and after its birth as a social movement, to North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa through transnational networks, print media, and migration flows.[[#4MarieFlemingTheAnarchist|4]]
+The ship’s interior is functional and plain, with dull and unengaging shapes and cold pastel colours that work to intensify the inside of the lounge, the colours of the board games and the humming of the heaters. Aside from the ubiquity of the ship’s engine, which can be felt more than heard, outside the lounge there is rarely any sound apart from the intermittent tannoy presence of our captain (who we have nicknamed Capt. Oz). We have all found ourselves taking an unusual interest in food and meal times, which are almost always the same. ''Plokkfiskur'', it is called: fish stew, in all its variants. Then underpinning the whole experience is a feeling that I would tentatively call weariness or dreaminess or, combining both, dreariness. A kind of suspension, being both still and unstill, wonky, caused by the weird sensation of movement when nothing visible is moving, the force of gravity contending with the swell of the ocean. Being on an object that is floating makes you more conscious of gravity. With time to think about this, I have come to an arbitrary decision as to what zero gravity might feel like.
-The disagreement over when to date the birth of anarchism partly stems from the fact that how modern authors think about the history of anarchism has been shaped by the earliest historiographies of anarchism, which were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by members of the anarchist movement. These anarchists, like modern historians of anarchism, disagreed with one another about how anarchism should be defined and when anarchism first emerged. Some authors defined anarchism transhistorically. Peter Kropotkin, for example, remarked in 1913 that “there have always been anarchists and statists” and claimed to have found “anarchist ideas among the philosophers of antiquity, notably in Lao Tzu in China and in some of the earliest Greek philosophers.”[[#5PeterKropotkinModernScien|5]] This view was shared by Rudolf Rocker, who wrote in 1938 that anarchists advocate the abolition of “all political and social coercive institutions which stand in the way of the development of free humanity” and that, given this, “anarchist ideas are to be found in every period of known history.”[[#6RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndic|6]]
+In outer space I figure you develop a stronger sense of proprioception, which is the sense of the body parts in relation to each other. (I read this in one of the only English magazines from the lounge, ''Pro Bodybuilding Weekly''.) The brain can adapt the senses to compensate each other, so a blind person might hear and feel better. In outer space, with minimal stimuli of sound, sight, smell, taste and touch, perhaps proprioception becomes enhanced. Weightlessness makes any body movement effortless. Forces would radiate from the inside of your body, your pulse would throb through your limbs and you would feel ‘embodied’ in the most literal sense. This is all just boredom-speculation. I also like to think I can imagine what it would feel like to not have an arm, or to have a third arm, or a penis.
-Other anarchists adopted a historicist account of anarchism in which it referred exclusively to a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the oppression of capitalism and the state. In 1884, Charlotte Wilson claimed that “Anarchism is a new faith” and “the name assumed by a certain school of socialists” who advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state.[[#7CharlotteWilsonAnarchistE|7]] Decades later, Errico Malatesta wrote in 1925 that there was a distinction between “Anarchy,” which is a cooperative society without oppression and exploitation, and “Anarchism,” which “is the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[[#8ErricoMalatestaTheAnarchi|8]] The latter “was born” when people “sought to overthrow” both “capitalistic property and the State” and therefore did not exist prior to this.[[#9ErricoMalatestaLifeandId|9]]
+==== LAND OF THE ICE-QUEENS ====
-Importantly, this was not an exclusively European perspective. The Chinese anarchist Li Yaotang, who wrote under the pen name Ba Jin, argued in 1927 that “Anarchism is a product of the mass movement . . . not an idle dream that transcends time. It could not have emerged before the Industrial Revolution, and . . . the French revolution.”[[#10BaJinAnarchismandtheQ|10]] To him, it shared nothing with Daoism and the ideas of Lao Tzu. The Japanese anarchist Kubo Yuzuru likewise wrote in 1928 that “Anarchism originated from the fact of the struggle of the workers. Without that, there would be no anarchism.”[[#11KuboYuzuruOnClassStrug|11]]
+Every star is a sun. Every sun has its own planets. Every planet has its own constellations. The 3D world is a hologram of a 2D world projected from the edge of a black hole.
-Given my commitment to Nietzsche’s way of thinking about definitions, I shall be taking a historicist approach and defining anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe. It is of course the case that the idea of a free stateless society existed before people in nineteenth-century Europe decided to start calling themselves anarchists. The Chinese Daoist Bao Jingyan argued in the third<sup> </sup>century that the state was created by the strong to oppress the weak, and became the means through which the wealthy reproduced the servitude of the poor. He thought that prior to the rise of states there existed a free, harmonious society with “neither lord nor subject” and claimed that it would be better if the state ceased to exist. Although his one surviving text proposed no strategies to achieve this goal, he did believe that the poor would revolt against the wealthy.[[#12RappDaoismandAnarchism|12]] Even within Europe one can point to earlier authors who advocated the abolition of the state and property in favor of a free society based on communal ownership, such as the radical Christian Gerrard Winstanley in the seventeenth century.[[#13GerrardWinstanleyTheLaw|13]]
+'''OUTER'''
-The history of anti-statist thought includes not only a long list of dead authors, but also the large numbers of people who have lived in, or do live in, stateless societies around the world. This is something that historical anarchists were themselves aware of.[[#14EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|14]] The available anthropological evidence indicates that these people do not live in stateless societies by chance. They have, just like people who live under states, developed political philosophies about the kind of society they want to live in, and intentionally implemented these ideas throughout the course of their lives. They are aware that someone could establish themselves as ruler of the group and have, within the limits established by their ecological and social context, consciously and deliberately created social structures to prevent this from happening. This generally goes alongside an awareness of nearby societies with states. A striking illustration of this point is that, on numerous occasions, stateless societies have been created by people who have deliberately fled processes of state formation or expansion, such as stateless societies in the uplands of Southeast Asia.[[#15ChristopherBoehmHierarchy|15]]
+'''SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE'''
-Members of stateless societies have developed a variety of complex social relations and arrangements in order to realize their conscious political goals and ethical values. These include: making collective decisions through consensus, between all involved; ensuring that leaders lack the power to impose decisions on others through coercion and must instead persuade people to act in a certain way, through oratory skill alone; and utilizing various forms of social sanction to respond to behavior that threatens the freedom or equality of the group, such as bullying, being greedy, issuing orders, taking on airs of superiority, engaging in acts of physical violence, and so on. These social sanctions include, but are not limited to, criticism, gossiping, public ridicule, ignoring what they say, ostracism, expulsion from the group, and even, in some extreme cases, execution.[[#16BoehmHierarchyintheFore|16]]
+We do not make enough of outer space. The only remaining frontier and it is no longer of much interest to most of the public. I suppose that is a good thing, and practical. Things would be trickier if everyone was ultra-conscious of their infinitesimality. My mum does not believe in space. I asked her once when I was young if she believed in aliens and she said don’t be silly, Erin. I said it seems far more likely that there are aliens if space goes on for ever. She said she had never really thought about it. I asked a bit more because I wanted to know what was past the blue sky in her head if she did not think about space. She told me to shut up, she had more important things to think about, like working overtime to make money now that Dad had lost his job at the Cadbury factory because it got bought by America.
-The many different forms of stateless societies that have existed, and continue to exist, around the world should not be romanticized and viewed as utopias. Even societies without a state or a ruling class can contain other kinds of oppressive social relations, such as the oppression of children by adults or women by men. Nor should the stateless societies that anthropologists have studied be viewed as straightforward windows into the past or living fossils of what human life was like prior to the emergence of states. The members of these societies do not live in the paleolithic or the neolithic but the modern world. Their social relations have been shaped by, and are part of, modern history, including the history of colonialism.[[#17RobertLKellyTheLifeway|17]] Matters are only made more complicated by the fact that a significant number of stateless societies move between very different forms of social organization on a seasonal basis.[[#18DavidGraeberandDavidWeng|18]]
+Having busy parents meant spending a lot of summer holidays in kids’ clubs and eating mainly breadcrumbed/fun-shaped frozen foods. Our domestic life was founded on convenience. Remove foil before heating quickedy-quick Micro Chips I feel like Chicken Tonight like Chicken Tonight. Only modern convenience did not bring the liberation they said it would because Mum still had to work a job ''and'' vacuum as well, thank you, Mr Dyson. So really she can be excused for not stopping to think about infinity.
-In claiming that “anarchism” refers to a form of anti-state socialism that first emerged in nineteenth-century Europe, I am not denying the existence of other political philosophies that have advocated a free, stateless society prior to, in parallel with, or after the emergence of anarchism. Although this book aims to demonstrate the intellectual sophistication of historical anarchist political theory, I also believe that modern anarchism can greatly improve through engaging with these other political traditions and learning valuable insights and lessons from them. My point is only that the term “anarchism” should not be used to refer to any political theory in history that advocates the abolition of the state, or systems of rulership in general, in favor of a free stateless society without rulers.
+I have been standing out on deck and looking out to sea. The sea that goes on unbroken to the horizon. There is nothing, no things but gulls, and you think, how do the gulls fly without tiring? Do they not feel panic that there is nowhere for them to rest their wings apart from actually on the ocean, and here they might get eaten by something big that comes from what to them must seem another dimension? No place to rest their eyes and sleep? The empty space makes me think of a diagram in a physics book of a ball on a plane of Newton’s, a single arrangement of matter rolling on a grid of space, the loneliest object in the world. We are the ball and the sea is the grid. I have only been on an unbroken and empty plane like this on a P&O ferry to France once, and that was only for a matter of hours. By day three I feel like the Ancient Mariner.
-This is motivated by two main reasons. First, throughout the history of socialism, multiple theorists and social movements have advocated the long-term goal of abolishing the state and all systems of class rule in favor of a society of free producers, such as Louis Auguste Blanqui or all of Marxism.[[#19AlanBSpitzerTheRevolut|19]] If a transhistoricist wishes to label such figures as Bao Jingyan an “anarchist” due to their advocacy of a free stateless society without rulers, then they must, in order to be consistent, also refer to Blanqui and all of Marxism as “anarchists.” Doing so would be a mistake given that self-identified anarchists opposed these other forms of socialism on the grounds that they, unlike anarchists, advocated the conquest of state power as a means to achieve human emancipation. This includes not only individuals who anarchists had polemical debates with, such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, but also leaders of states who were responsible for the imprisonment, deportation, murder, and repression of anarchists, such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Joseph Stalin. Given this, any definition of anarchism must include strategies to achieve social change within its criteria and cannot define anarchism solely in terms of its goal.
+Urla likes to read and we got along quickly. We have formed a kind of two-way book club where we swap and then discuss. We have been dipping into Ursula Le Guin’s ''The Left Hand of Darkness'' and Elizabeth Bishop’s ''Questions of Travel''. Urla says she likes Le Guin; the book’s world Winter reminds her a little of her own icy home, but she is not so keen on Bishop, maybe because some of the intricacies of language are lost on her, maybe because her BA is in Business Studies. I have read a little of her book, ''Lean In'', by her hero Sheryl Sandberg. It is all about how women in business can help themselves to succeed in a male-dominated workplace by learning to be more like men.
-The second reason to reject transhistorical definitions of anarchism is that they are historically anachronistic. The many different people who have advocated the abolition of the state or rulership throughout human history did not refer to themselves as “anarchists” or belong to a social movement that called itself “anarchist.” At no point did they establish a historically contingent configuration of elements that were understood by people at the time to be what “anarchism” is. An author like Winstanley will not tell a historian anything about what “anarchism” as a historically produced entity means. A study of Winstanley’s 1649 ''The True Levellers Standard Advanced'' instead informs a historian about the political ideology that Winstanley understood himself to be an advocate of: the Diggers. To categorize Winstanley as an “anarchist ” is to anachronistically impose a later category onto him rather than understand him on his own terms.[[#20Forasummaryofthelanguag|20]]
+Part of the trip obviously had to be about personal growth, and I have resolved to take the extended opportunity to make myself a more well-rounded human being. The six-point plan goes like this:
-Although adopting a historicist approach significantly limits the scope of who can be considered an anarchist, it is not sufficient to develop a useful definition of anarchism for the purposes of studying it as a coherent political theory. This is because, during its history as a concept, people with fundamentally different commitments have called themselves anarchists and engaged in processes of contestation with one another over what anarchism is or should be. A brief and condensed summary of this history is as follows.
+– Read lots of insightful books
-'''From Anarchy to Anarchism'''
+– Know rough history of every place before visiting
-The term “anarchist” was sometimes used as an insult during the English Civil War and the French Revolution.[[#21WoodcockAnarchism1241|21]] It did not refer to a distinct political ideology until it was adopted by antistate socialists in the nineteenth century within the context of industrialization, and the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state (henceforth referred to as the state) as a global economic and political system. The earliest known occurrence of this was in 1840, when the French socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared himself an “anarchist” in his book ''What is Property?'' He defined “''Anarchy''” as “the absence of a master” and argued that the “highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.”[[#22PierreJosephProudhonWhat|22]] It is important to note that Proudhon was not consistent with his vocabulary and sometimes used the word “anarchy” to signify chaos and disorder.[[#23ProudhonPropertyisTheft|23]] On other occasions, Proudhon labeled himself an advocate of “mutuality,” “mutualism,” and “the mutualist system.”[[#24ProudhonPropertyisTheft|24]] This was a term that Proudhon borrowed from a previously existing social movement among silkworkers in Lyon.[[#25Forthehistoryoftheterm|25]]
+– Immerse self in culture of each place
-During the 1840s, Proudhon advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of a decentralized market socialist society in which the means of production and land were owned in common. In such a society, workers, either as individual producers or voluntary collective associations, would possess, but not own, the means of production and land that they personally used or occupied. To possess a resource was to have the right to control it. As a result, Proudhon envisioned a society where workers self-managed the organization of production and exchanged the products of their labor with one another.[[#26ProudhonWhatisProperty|26]] This was to be achieved through a process of gradual and peaceful social change. From the late 1840s onward, Proudhon advocated the strategy of workers forming cooperatives with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank, at low or no interest. He thought that, over time, these cooperatives could grow in number, trade with one another, and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established.[[#27ProudhonPropertyisTheft|27]]
+– Learn important phrases in each language
-Between the 1840s and 1860s, Proudhon’s version of anti-state market socialism influenced a number of individuals in the United States and Europe who also came to refer to themselves as mutualists.[[#28DavidBerryAHistoryofth|28]] Although these mutualists agreed with Proudhon’s broad vision of socialism and his strategy of forming cooperatives funded by loans from a people’s bank, they also had ideas of their own, were influenced by other authors such as Josiah Warren, and argued with one another about a wide variety of topics.[[#29JosiahWarrenThePractical|29]] Some of those influenced by Proudhon adopted the language of “anarchy” and “anarchist.” For example, in France the journalist Anselme Bellegarrigue wrote and published a short-lived journal called ''Anarchy, A Journal of Order ''in 1850. In the first issue of the journal he wrote, “I am an anarchist,” and insisted that “anarchy is order, whereas government is civil war.”[[#30AnselmeBellegarrigueAnar|30]] Around the same time a young Élisée Reclus, who would go onto become an important geographer and member of the anarchist movement, wrote an unpublished essay in order to clarify his thoughts. In it, he advocated the abolition of economic competition and “the tutelage of a government” in favor of socialism and “the absence of government . . . anarchy, the highest expression of order.”[[#31EliseeReclusTheDevelopm|31]]
+– Write. Every day
-An especially significant contribution was made by Joseph Déjacque, who was born in France and moved to the United States in the early 1850s. He not only repeated Proudhon’s language of “anarchy” and “anarchist” but was also the earliest known person to self-identify as an advocate of “anarchism.” Déjacque was the first person to use the word “libertarian” as a synonym for “anarchist” as well. In the August 18, 1859, edition of his paper ''Le Libertaire'', he defined “anarchism” as the abolition of government, property, religion, and the family in favor of liberty, equality, solidarity, and the right to work and love.[[#32MaxNettlauAShortHistory|32]] In contrast to Proudhon and mutualism in general, Déjacque advocated the long-term goals of common ownership of the products of labor, distribution according to need, and the emancipation of women from patriarchy.[[#33JosephDejacqueDownwitht|33]]
+Urla’s parents are separated. Her mum is Icelandic but her dad is English. He lives near to her in Leeds and she has split her time between England and Iceland since she was ten. I was planning on staying in a cheap hostel in Reykjavík but Urla’s mum has a spare room that I can stay in for free for as long as it takes me to figure out how to get to Greenland. So instead of having to infiltrate my first foreign city with the blunt ram of a tourist I have Urla to show me around and she has an SUV, so we can even go see the best bits of the landscape of Iceland, something that would have taken some logistics considering my budget. Urla talks like everyone should listen and has a way of draping herself over everything like a languid cat. I think it would be fair to say that I have a girl-crush on Urla, a kind of feeling of affinity and admiration that is completely free from jealousy.
-In order to achieve these goals, the ruling classes had to be overthrown. Déjacque proposed that this could be achieved via the violent strategy of mass armed insurrections and small secret societies assassinating capitalists and governors.[[#34DejacqueDownwiththeBoss|34]] Although Déjacque advocated the abolition of government, he thought that, given the current ideas and abilities of workers, a revolution would not establish anarchy immediately. There would instead be a period of transition in which decisions were made by workers themselves through universal and “direct legislation” within “the most democratic form of government.”[[#35DejacqueTheRevolutionary|35]] Déjacque’s proposed democratic government was constituted by self-governing communes of 50,000 people in which laws were passed by majority vote and government administrators were elected and recallable. The police were to be randomly selected by lottery and rotated over time such that everyone would engage in policing and there would be “no police outside the people.”[[#36DejacqueTheRevolutionary|36]] Those who broke the law would be subject to trial by jury and an elected magistrate. A person found guilty by an unanimous decision of the jury would not be executed or imprisoned—since the “prison” and the “scaffold” were “government monstrosities”—but would instead only be subject to “moral or material reparation” or “banishment.”[[#37DejacqueTheRevolutionary|37]] Over time, people would develop new and better ways of organizing society until government had been completely abolished and anarchy had been realized.
+==== WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST CONSPIRACY FROM HELL ====
-In parallel to these ideological developments, various organizations were formed by the working classes to achieve their emancipation and foster cooperation between workers of different countries.[[#38ArthurLehningFromBuonarr|38]] In September 1864, this culminated in the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association (henceforth referred to as the First International) at a meeting in St. Martin’s Hall, London. The International included a wide variety of different kinds of socialists, and this led to a great deal of debate about what aims and strategies the organization should adopt. At the 1869 Basel Congress, the majority of delegates voted in favor of the collective ownership of land as a goal. This was opposed by a minority of mutualists who, while advocating the collective ownership of the means of production, thought that land should be individually owned by those who occupied it. The socialists who advocated the collective ownership of land referred to themselves as collectivists or advocates of collectivism. Some collectivists continued to think of themselves as mutualists.[[#39ArcherFirstInternational|39]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''INT. MESS ROOM – Urla reclining on sofa with dog-eared copy of Moby-Dick in hands – room is large with three sofas arranged in square and coffee table centre with books and magazines – small television with VHR mounted to wall – bookcase with videos, CDs – CD player on top of bookshelf – bookshelf modified with balconied shelves to stop books sliding off with sway – outside wide windows ocean – white ocean birds – wall of ocean rises, falls, rises, falls with motion of boat – one other sofa occupied by two men – legs splayed reading magazines –''</div>
-During this period, a tendency emerged within the collectivist wing of the International that rejected participation in parliamentary politics and attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power. They, despite being influenced by Proudhon, dithered from mutualism and advocated revolutionary trade unionism and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state through an armed insurrection, which would forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[[#40Forageneraloverviewofho|40]] This tendency referred to itself, and was referred to by others, using a variety of labels. This included not only ''collectivist'' but also ''federalist'', ''revolutionary socialist'', and ''anarchist''. Between the mid-1870s and early 1880s, the labels of ''anarchist'' and ''anarchism'' became increasingly prominent until they were the dominant terms for this social movement.[[#41BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|41]] A number of individuals and groups continued to also use alternative language, such as ''autonomist'', ''libertarian'', ''libertarian socialist'', and ''libertarian communist''.[[#42PaulAvrichandKarenAvrich|42]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' (BEHIND CAMERA) So maybe you could just talk a little about feminism in Iceland</div>
-The anarchist tendency within the First International was primarily located within Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, and the Jura region of Switzerland. It began to form a distinct social movement during a series of congresses held in Spain (Barcelona June 1870, Valencia September 1871), Switzerland (La Chaux-de-Fonds April 1870, Sonvilier November 1871), and Italy (Rimini August 1872). During these congresses, delegates passed resolutions that rejected the strategy of achieving socialism via parliamentarism specifically and the conquest of state power in general. From November 1871 onward, congress resolutions were passed that opposed Marx and Engels’s attempt to convert the General Council of the First International, which was supposed to perform only an administrative role, into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections. Marx and Engels thought this was necessary due to their false belief that Bakunin was secretly conspiring to take over the International and impose his anarchist program onto it.[[#43WolfgangEckhardtTheFirst|43]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' Okay, sure</div>
-The conflict between the opponents and supporters of the General Council culminated in the International’s September 1872 Hague Congress.[[#44Foracondensedsummaryoft|44]] During this congress, resolutions were passed by majority vote that expelled the anarchists Bakunin and James Guillaume from the International, relocated the General Council from London to New York, and committed the organization to the goal of constituting the working class into a political party aimed at the conquest of political power. Marx and Engels achieved this majority by nefarious means. This included requesting blank mandates from various sections that did not specify who the delegate was or how they should vote. These blank mandates were then sent to supporters of the General Council. In multiple instances, these supporters even had their travel expenses paid for by Marx and Engels in order to ensure that they attended the congress. Several of the groups that issued blank mandates or pro–General Council mandates did not really exist as actual sections of the International, and had been created for the sole purpose of issuing a mandate at Marx and Engels’s request. The resolutions of the Hague Congress were subsequently rejected by the Jura, French, Belgian, Italian, Dutch, English, and Spanish sections of the International on the grounds that they had been passed by a fake majority and violated each section’s autonomy to determine its own strategy and program.[[#45ReneBerthierSocialDemocr|45]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– sits up and turns to men on adjacent sofa –''</div>
-Shortly after the end of the Hague Congress, delegates representing the Spanish, French, Italian, Jura, and American sections of the International met at a congress in Saint-Imier, Switzerland. In organizing this congress, which was held on September 15 and 16, 1872, the sections did not think they were forming a new distinct organization that split from the First International. They were rather, from their point of view, merely reorganizing or reconstituting the International on its original federalist basis. In order to avoid confusion, I shall refer to this organization as the Saint-Imier International but it should be kept in mind that this is anachronistic.[[#46BerthierSocialDemocracya|46]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' Do you wanna talk about feminism in Iceland with me?</div>
-During this congress, the delegates voted in favor of four resolutions. The first resolution rejected every resolution of the Hague Congress and the authority of the new General Council in New York. The second resolution declared a pact of mutual defense, solidarity, and friendship between the sections that attended the meeting and any section that subsequently wished to join. This pact consisted of a commitment to be in regular correspondence with one another and to stand in solidarity with any section whose freedom was violated by either government repression or the impositions of an authoritarian General Council. The only distinctly anarchist resolutions were the third and fourth. They advocated a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state simultaneously and established the free federation of free producers. This transformation of society was to be achieved by workers themselves organized within trade unions and autonomous communes. It was proposed that workers in the present should build toward the social revolution by organizing strikes. These forms of class struggle were advocated because they caused workers to develop an awareness of their distinct class interests, taught workers to act for themselves, and increased the power of workers against capitalists. Strikes prepared workers for the social revolution and established, or expanded, the systems of organization through which workers could successfully overthrow the ruling classes and reorganize production and distribution. The resolutions rejected the strategy of attempting to achieve socialism via the conquest of state power, because it would result in workers being dominated and exploited by a new minority of rulers who actually exercised state power, rather than the abolition of all systems of class rule.[[#47ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|47]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the men look up from their magazines, shrug –''</div>
-For several members of the historical anarchist movement, anarchism did not exist during the 1840s and 50s. Instead anarchism, as they understood it, first emerged within the First International and Saint-Imier International. In 1922, Luigi Fabbri referred to “the whole fifty-year history of anarchism” and so dated the birth of anarchism to 1872.[[#48LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|48]] A similar position was articulated by Malatesta on numerous occasions. In 1899, he wrote that “we, anarchist socialists, have existed as a separate party, with essentially the same program, since 1868, when Bakunin founded the ''Alliance'' . . . and we were the founders and soul of the anti-authoritarian wing of the ‘International Working Men’s Association.’”[[#49ErricoMalatestaTowardsAn|49]] In 1907, Malatesta claimed that “the first anarchists” belonged to “the international.”[[#50MaurizioAntonioliedThe|50]] He later wrote that “Anarchism was born” with the adoption of the resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress in September 1872 and thereby transitioned from the “individual thought of a few isolated men” into “the collective principle of groups distributed all over the world.”[[#51QuotedinDavideTurcatoMa|51]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' They speak little English. So. There are many surveys say Iceland is the best country in the world in which to be a woman. Because it is the best country in the world in which to be a person. We have no army. We run on renewable energy. People are mostly very happy apart from those that get sad of the darkness in winter</div>
-It should nonetheless be kept in mind that the Saint-Imier International was not an exclusively anarchist organization. The founding congress was attended by anarchist delegates representing Spain, France, Italy, and the Jura region of Switzerland, but it also included the delegate for America, Gustave Lefrançais, who, despite being a survivor of the Paris Commune, was not strictly speaking an anarchist. The organization soon grew to include a minority of state socialists from England, Germany, and Belgium. This led to a series of heated debates about strategy and the vision of the future society at the 1873, 1874, and 1876 congresses.[[#52BerthierSocialDemocracya|52]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the man on the left is reading an Icelandic magazine on 4x4s – he is watching Urla over the brim of the page –''</div>
-The pluralist nature of the organization can be seen in the fact that the founding 1872 resolutions declared that each section had the right to decide for itself what form of political struggle they engaged in and that it was “presumptuous,” “reactionary,” and “absurd” to impose “one line of conduct as the single path that might lead to its social emancipation.”[[#53ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|53]] This position was reaffirmed at the 1874 congress, where the delegates voted unanimously in favor of a resolution that each section should decide for itself whether or not to engage in parliamentary struggle. It was not until the final 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, which was attended by delegates representing anarchist groups in France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Greece, and Egypt, that the delegates were exclusively anarchist due to state socialists having left the organization. Anarchist-led sections in Argentina, Mexico, and Uruguay had affiliated with the Saint-Imier International but did not send delegates to the congress due to the distance.[[#54BerthierSocialDemocracya|54]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' Let me think, so, in nineteeeeeen seventy-five 90 per cent of Icelandic women went on strike over equal pay and then they got equal pay. We elected the first female president in Europe in 1980. Finnbogadóttir. She was a divorced single mother like my mum and she was re-elected three times until she retired. And then our prime minister was the world’s first openly gay prime minister and she started out as an air hostess. The state church bishop is a woman. And we are the only country in the world to make strip clubs illegal for feminist reasons</div>
-During the Verviers Congress, the anarchist delegates passed a series of resolutions that completely separated them from state socialism and thereby established anarchism as a fully distinct social movement, rather than one tendency within a pluralist International.[[#55BerthierSocialDemocracya|55]] The anarchist delegates declared that their goal was the self-abolition of the proletariat through an international social revolution that overthrew capitalism, via the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes. They proposed that the private property of capitalism should be replaced by the collective ownership of land and the means of production by federations of producers themselves, rather than state ownership and control of the economy. To achieve this, they advocated revolutionary trade unionism and rejected forming political parties that engaged in parliamentary politics.[[#56ResolutionsoftheCongress|56]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– 4x4 magazine man makes a semi-discreet ‘humph’ sound – Urla turns to him pointedly – he looks down and flicks the pages of his magazine straight –''</div>
-In many respects, the Verviers resolutions were almost the same as the resolutions adopted five years previously at Saint-Imier. There was one crucial difference. The delegates at Saint-Imier had qualified their critique of achieving socialism via the conquest of state power with a commitment to different views on political struggle coexisting within the same pluralist International. The resolutions of Verviers were, in comparison, actively hostile to state socialism. They declared that society is divided into two main classes with distinct class interests: workers and capitalists. The state exists to defend the interests of capitalists and economic privilege in general. As a result, the state, irrespective of which political party wields its power, cannot be used to abolish class society and will instead reproduce it. The goal of emancipation can only be achieved by workers themselves directly engaging in class struggle.[[#57ResolutionsoftheCongress|57]] Given this: “Congress declares that there is no difference between ''political'' parties, whether they are called socialist or not, all these parties without distinction forming in its eyes one reactionary mass and it sees its duty as fighting all of them. It hopes that workers who still travel in the ranks of these various parties, instructed by lessons from experience and by revolutionary propaganda, will open their eyes and abandon the way of politics to adopt that of revolutionary socialism.”[[#58ResolutionsoftheCongress|58]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Do you think that has to do with nakedness being starker because in the cold climate you have to wear so many layers on a day-to-day basis? Kind of an anonymising of the human figure that might take away some issues of sexualising the body. Like in ''The Left Hand of Darkness'', where cold and androgyny made a society with no misogyny and no war?</div>
-The theory and practice of the anarchist movement were not invented by a single founding father who developed the ideology in full and then transmitted it to workers. Anarchism was instead cocreated over several years by an international social network that formulated its common program through a process of debate and discussion in newspapers, pamphlets, books, formal congresses, informal meetings, and letters between key militants. This social network was mostly composed of workers, such as Jean-Louis Pindy and Adhémar Schwitzguébel, and a few formally educated individuals from privileged backgrounds, such as Bakunin and Carlo Cafiero.[[#59Accountsoftheanarchistle|59]] This point was understood by later anarchists. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad declared that “anarchism was born, not of the abstract deliberations of some sage or philosopher, but out of the direct struggle waged by the toilers against Capital, out of the toilers’ needs and requirements, their aspirations toward liberty and equality. . . . Anarchism’s leading thinkers: Bakunin, Kropotkin, and others, did not invent the idea of anarchism, but, having discovered it among the masses, they merely helped refine and propagate it through the excellence of their thinking and their learning.”[[#60TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|60]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– 4x4 magazine man shakes his head disbelievingly – Urla does not notice – she looks down at her body in high-necked woollen jumper, thick grey joggers tucked into woollen socks –''</div>
-'''How Collectivists Became Anarchists'''
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' I don’t know. Probably (PAUSE) what else. So women do not have to change their surname if they marry. And when a baby is born its parents get equal leave. BUT</div>
-The history of how anarchism as a social movement arose is not only the history of how its program was formulated. It also includes the history of how, and why, a tendency within the First International came to refer to themselves as “anarchists” in the first place. It is necessary to establish in detail how this happened because it clarifies the relationship between the anarchism of Proudhon, who in 1840 was the first person to self-identify as an anarchist, and the anarchism of the social movement that emerged from the late 1860s onward. In 1880, Kropotkin claimed that:
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she raises her right index finger in a scholarly manner, holding the book to her chest with her other arm –''</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">When in the heart of the International there rose up a party that fought against authority in all its forms, that party first took on the name of the federalist party, then called itself ''anti-statist ''or ''anti-authoritarian''. At that epoch it even avoided assuming the name of anarchist. The word ''an-archy ''(as it was written then) might have attached the party too closely to the Proudhonians, whose ideas of economic reform the International then combated. But it was precisely to create confusion that the adversaries of the anti-authoritarians took pleasure in using the name.[[#61PeterKropotkinWordsofa|61]]</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' Even in the best place in the world in which to be a woman it is still better to be a man</div>
-Nonetheless, as Kropotkin noted, anarchists came to accept the name. As he pointed out in 1910, “the name of ‘anarchists,’ which their adversaries insisted upon applying to them, prevailed, and finally it was revindicated.”[[#62PeterKropotkinDirectStru|62]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks at 4x4 mag man, who is leafing through his pages with a look of nonchalance –''</div>
-One potential problem with Kropotkin’s narrative is that Bakunin first publicly called himself an “anarchist” in August 1867 in “The Slavic Question,”'' ''which was printed in the Italian paper ''Freedom and Justice''. He wrote in response to Pan-Slavists that “they are unitarians at all costs, always preferring public order to freedom and I am an anarchist and prefer freedom to public order.”[[#63QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|63]] Crucially, this was written before Bakunin had even joined the First International in June or July 1868.[[#64EHCarrMichaelBakunin|64]] A few years later, Bakunin referred to himself as an “anarchist” in private in his 1870 letter to Sergei Nechaev and his unsent October 1872 letter to the editors of ''La Liberté''.[[#65MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|65]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Nowhere has completely got rid of gender inequality and the attitude of some people here now is like, Okay, we get it. You have everything you want now. You have it the best in the world so stop being so righteous. Other women don’t have it so great. You can give it a rest now. Although it’s totally cute when you get all angry</div>
-Bakunin continued to use this language in his published 1873 book ''Statism and Anarchy''. In it, he labeled the opponents of German state communists as “anti-state socialists, or anarchists” and endorsed what he called “the ''anarchist'' social revolution.”[[#66MichaelBakuninStatismand|66]] He wrote that “we revolutionary anarchists are proponents of universal popular education, liberation, and the broad development of social life, and hence are enemies of the state and of any form of statehood. . . . Those are the convictions of social revolutionaries, and for them we are called anarchists. We do not object to this term because we are in fact the enemies of all power, knowing that power corrupts those invested with it just as much as those compelled to submit to it.”[[#67BakuninStatismandAnarchy|67]]
+==== CUT ====
-It is difficult to determine how much impact Bakunin’s decision in ''Statism and Anarchy'' to refer to himself and the movement he belonged to as “anarchist” had on the language of anti-state socialists within the Saint-Imier International. This is because ''Statism and Anarchy'' was the only major revolutionary socialist text written by Bakunin in Russian, rather than French, and almost all of the 1,200 copies that were printed in Switzerland were smuggled to St. Petersburg and distributed among Russian revolutionary circles.[[#68MarshallShatzIntroductio|68]] In other texts, Bakunin used different language. For example, in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” which was written in 1871 and published posthumously in 1878, he referred to the movement he belonged to as “collectivists” and “revolutionary socialists.”[[#69BakuninSelectedWritings|69]] Even in ''Statism and Anarchy'' he also referred to anarchists as “revolutionary socialists.”[[#70BakuninStatismandAnarchy|70]]
+==== HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP IN A POST-FEMINIST SOCIETY ====
-It is rare to find other examples of people identifying as “anarchists” between 1867–1871. One notable example is the September 1871 declaration of principles written by the Geneva Section of Socialist Atheists. Its members referred to themselves as “Anarchists” who sought the abolition of the state and “the autonomy of the individual and of the commune,” which were to be achieved without “participation in politics, for to destroy the state, we cannot use the same means as those who support it.”[[#71QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|71]] On other occasions, the term “anarchist” was used to refer to federalist systems of organization, rather than a specific ideology or movement. For example, on December 31, 1871, the Spanish section of the First International reprinted the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular” with their own preface. This preface claimed that the First International had an “anarchist constitution,” despite the fact that the constitution was not committed to what would soon be regarded as core anarchist principles, such as the abolition of the state or abstention from parliamentary politics.[[#72QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|72]]
+You are fourteen years old and you have just started your job as a waitress in a small restaurant owned by a family, each member of which fills a role in the kitchen and also deals drugs. Having never had a job you take everything here to be archetypical of the working world. You are not a feminist because feminists are lesbians and hate men and you don’t. You like boys more than girls, girls are lame and preoccupied and bitchy and you’d rather hang out with boys and skate and mess around. The only girls you do like want to be boys too.
-The fact that people did not widely refer to themselves as “anarchist” during this period is demonstrated by the resolutions of the September 1871 London conference of the First International. The resolutions forbid sections from designating “themselves by sectarian names such as Positivists, Mutualists, Collectivists, Communists, etc.,” but did not include “Anarchists” within the list.[[#73KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|73]] If the label “anarchist” was already being widely used by anti-state socialists in late 1871, Marx and Engels, who wrote the resolutions, would have included the term in their list of forbidden section names, especially since they did include the anti-state socialist label “collectivist.” That the term “anarchist” was not widely used in early 1870s Switzerland is confirmed by Kropotkin’s eyewitness testimony in his autobiography. He recalled that, in early 1872, when he visited the Swiss sections of the First International, “the name ‘anarchist’ was not much in use then.”[[#74PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|74]] In 1899, Malatesta similarly remembered that, around 1868, “Bakunin came onto the scene, bringing with him the ideas that would later be called anarchist.”[[#75MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|75]] Anarchists in Italy initially just referred to themselves as socialists, because they were the first socialist movement in the country.[[#76MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|76]]
+Stuart is the father of the family and the manager of the restaurant. He is short, fat, bald, and has buggy eyes. When you are introduced from across the worktop he grabs your hand in his stubby, sweaty hands and kisses you up your arm with his fat wet lips. You squeak and recoil and the other girls laugh at you. When you are outside the kitchen one of the older girls tells you you get used to it.
-The adoption of the term “anarchist” became increasingly common in the build up to and aftermath of the First International’s September 1872 Hague Congress. In Spain, Francisco Tomás wrote, on September 8, 1872, that the First International was divided between two main factions:
+You do get used to it and after a time you manage not to squirm when Stuart strokes your pubescent arse, which is taut in those tight-fitting Tammy Girl trousers he makes you wear because he likes it when you squirm. When he creeps up behind you when you’re standing behind the till counter on the restaurant floor and kisses you on the neck, making a squelchy sound, none of the customers ever say anything and some of them must catch him sometimes.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">one founded in unitary and centralist principles, and the other in the principles of anti-authoritarianism and federalism. The former has as its aim the organization of the International as a political party and as its purpose the conquest of political power. The latter has as its aim the organization of all workers to demolish all the institutions of this corrupt society and the abolition of political-legal-authoritarian conditions providing a free worldwide federation of free associations of free producers. The Spanish Federation is in the ranks of the latter, that is, anarchist collectivism.[[#77QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|77]]</div>
+You watch a seventy-year-old man dine an escort while he strokes the downy hairs at the dip of your back and hips, while you tell yourself ‘the dip of my back and hips is merely the concave of a crescent in an assembly of matter which is a body in which I reside’. When your mum asks how was work you say yeah, fine, because if you told her it’d be embarrassing. She’d call the police or something. None of the other girls have told anyone, the customers never say anything, so what makes you so special you call the police? It’s something you’re mature enough to ignore. It’s a part of being a woman. When Jodie the new girl starts you even get a bit annoyed when she keeps going on about how Stuart likes her because she’s prettier than you.
-This is not to say that all anti-state socialists adopted the term “anarchist” when the Saint-Imier International was founded in September 1872. There was a great deal of debate and discussion around labels. Reclus, who first publicly called himself an anarchist in March 1876, argued in 1878 that the terms “anarchy” and “anarchist” should be adopted by the movement due to the etymology of the words, and the fact that supporters and opponents were already using the words to refer to them. This is an argument Reclus would not have felt the need to make if there was already a consensus within the movement about the terms.[[#78FlemingAnarchistWay126|78]]
+It’s an easy job and you don’t want to lose your job cus then you won’t be able to go to the cinema or anything. If you quit you’d have to come up with a good reason for Mum and you can’t think of one. And you’re lucky to have this job because you’re really shit at it, they tell you that all the time. You do everything wrong and you’re really slow and clumsy and you never smile. And the other girls are always saying he’s good to us, he looks after us, he gives us free food and he’s like a dad really.
-One of the main opponents of the term was Guillaume. Although he had declared his socialism to be “an-archist” in August 1870, he had changed his mind by January 1872. He wrote: “We have been wrong to use, without closely examining it, the terminology of Proudhon, from which we drew those famous words, ''abstention'' and ''an-archy''. . . . As to the word ''anarchy'', I have never liked it, and I have always asked that it be replaced by ''federation of autonomous communes''.”[[#79QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|79]] Guillaume rejected “anarchist” because of its negative connotations and preferred to continue to use the term “collectivists,” which had been used during the First International’s congresses in Brussels (1868) and Basel (1869) to refer to advocates of the collective ownership of land.[[#80Forasummaryofthesecongr|80]] The first usage of the word “collectivism” had itself, according to Guillaume, been in the early September 1869 issue of his paper ''Le Progrès''.[[#81CastletonTheOriginsof|81]] In 1876, Guillaume wrote in the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'':
+You let Stuart do it because it turns him on if you don’t. When you are in the cloakroom one time he calls your bluff and puts his fingers all the way down your pants, which are the ones with ducks on. You don’t tell the other girls because they’ll just think that you think that you’re something special. Nobody else is complaining, don’t be such a crybaby. When you close your eyes to sleep you can see clearly the spittle on his fat wet lips.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The words ''anarchy'' and ''anarchists'' are, in our eyes and in those of many of our friends, words we should stop using, because they only express a negative idea without giving any positive theory, and they lend themselves to unfortunate misrepresentations. No “anarchist program” has ever been formulated, as far as we know. . . . But there is a ''collectivist'' theory, articulated in the congresses of the International, and that’s the one we associate with, as do our friends from Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and Russia.[[#82Ihaveassembledthisquote|82]]</div>
+==== SYMBIOSIS OF ALGAE AND ANIMALS ====
-The label “anarchist” became increasingly common despite Guillaume’s opposition. In December 1876, Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero wrote a letter to the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'' in which they reported that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International was committed to an “anarchist, collectivist, revolutionary program.”[[#83MalatestaTheMethodofFre|83]] In his history of the International, Guillaume revealed that the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'' did not consciously adopt the label “anarchist” until April 1877.[[#84CahmKropotkin38|84]] A few months later, in July, the ''Bulletin'' referred to itself as belonging to “the revolutionary anarchist party.” In August, the French section of the Saint-Imier International held a congress where they adopted what they referred to as a “collectivist and anarchist program.”[[#85QuotedinGrahamWeDoNot|85]]
+Urla’s mother’s name is Thilda. Her house sits behind Reykjavík and from it you can look out over the backs of all the buildings looking out to the sea. It is spring and the trees and parks are very green and the water and sky very blue. The buildings get so close to the sea that in certain lights, when you can’t see the horizon and the harbours and the lakes are filled with sky, it can look as if the city is sitting on the edge of infinity. The sun sets but seems to sleep just out of sight, and I had to buy a sleep mask to convince my body it was night-time. Although it is getting warm for Iceland it is still cold, and whenever outside I wear my ski jacket.
-Even after 1876, the widespread adoption of the terms “anarchist” and “anarchism” did not happen overnight but took several years. As late as 1880, what would become the German-speaking anarchist movement in the United States had yet to adopt the label of anarchism. They instead referred to themselves as social revolutionaries in order to distinguish themselves from parliamentary social democrats. By December 1882, they had altered their language and were now declaring themselves in favor of anarchism.[[#86TomGoyensBeerandRevolut|86]] The widespread decision to adopt this language in the 1880s appears to have occurred independently of Déjacque’s previous usage of the term during the 1850s. The available evidence indicates that Déjacque was not widely known among anarchists until the 1890s. This can be seen in the fact that Max Nettlau’s first article on Déjacque was only published in 1890 in the German anarchist paper ''Freiheit''.[[#87LehningFromBuonarrotito|87]] Jean Grave’s republication of Déjacque’s'' ''book ''L’Humanisphère ''did not occur until 1899.[[#88WoodcockAnarchism233|88]] In 1910, Kropotkin referred to this text as having been only “lately discovered and reprinted.”[[#89KropotkinDirectStruggle|89]]
+Leaving ''Blárfoss'' had the potential to be emotional, but because for most of the others it was more of a suspension of the experience rather than an end – because most of the others would be repeating the journey again and again with slight variations in crew – it wasn’t. I will have to learn not to get emotionally attached to transitory places, seeing as a journey is entirely transition. Even Urla and Kristján treated their goodbye with admirable stoicism. She says that their relationship is ''Blárfoss'', that they have agreed not to see each other outside of it before university finishes, and she does not think it can even exist independently of it. I think it is very sensible.
-The social movement that emerged within the First International came to adopt the labels “anarchist” and “anarchism” through a complex and contingent historical process. This, in turn, raises the question: why did they end up adopting these words? They could, after all, have invented a new term or continued to use other terms, such as federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist. A clue to this puzzle can be found in the September 3, 1876, edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation''.'' ''An article distinguished between “those whose ideal is a popular state” and “the fraction that is called anarchist,” rather than the fraction that calls itself anarchist.[[#90QuotedinBerthierAnarchis|90]] A month later, the editor of the paper, Guillaume, gave a speech at the October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. In it, he claimed that they were usually called “anarchists or Bakuninists” by their political opponents.[[#91JamesGuillaumeOntheAbo|91]]
+She seems to be able to look at their relationship with a manly and objective clarity that I admire. She seems totally indifferent to Kristján, in fact, spending most of her days on the boat with me, aside from joining him in their shared cabin at night. If they were together and I approached them Kristján would make any excuse and leave, which became an ongoing joke to Urla, she would laugh and shout ‘Bye, Kristján!’ after him. I got to feeling really bad about it and started to leave them be, but then Urla took to abandoning him for me.
-Two of their main political opponents were Marx and Engels. Throughout their correspondence during the 1870s they usually referred to the collectivists as “Bakuninists.”[[#92ForexampleKarlMarxandF|92]] This label was rejected by the collectivists because, as Malatesta explained in 1876, “we do not share all the practical and theoretical ideas of Bakunin” and “follow ideas, not men . . . we reject the habit of incarnating a principle in a man.”[[#93QuotedinGeorgesHauptAsp|93]] Bakunin himself agreed. He wrote in his 1873 resignation letter from the Jura Federation that “the ‘Bakuninist label’ . . . was thrown in your face” by “our enemies,” but “you always knew, perfectly well, that your tendencies, opinions and actions arose entirely consciously, in spontaneous independence.”[[#94MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|94]]
+She says as soon as university finishes she wants to do a trip like mine, that the trip is brave and important. She made me swell up, as if with her approval I become a little bit like her. She is sure of herself in a way that I envy, in the way that she talks and holds herself. You can tell she was one of the girls at school that everybody wanted to be friends with, or wanted to at least not to be not-friends with, to be in the focus of her dislike, which I imagine to be conducted with precision and ruthlessness.
-The other term Marx and Engels publicly used during the early 1870s was “anarchists.” To take a few examples: in their May 1872 pamphlet ''Fictitious Split in the International'','' ''they labeled the Jura Federation’s “Sonvilier Circular”'' ''as “the anarchist decree”; Engels described the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International as “anarchists” in his July 1873 article, “From the International”; they sarcastically referred to “Saint-Michael Bakunin” as an “anarchist” and his ideas as “the anarchist gospel” in ''The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and the International Workingmen’s Association'', which was published between August and September 1873.[[#95KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|95]]
+At school I preferred to be on my own. I would ride my bike places on weekends, with my rucksack – an antidote to the typical feminine handbag – full of practical stuff that I would find use for even when it was tenuous, just for the sake of being able to cut everything neatly with my pocket knife even where I could use my teeth, nursing the smallest of wounds with my first aid kit, using my compass even when I knew the way just for the reassuring comfort I found in knowing exactly where north was, its orderliness and its simple truth, comfortable in apt autonomy like Thoreau.
-It is important to note that Marx and Engels referred to the Jura Federation as “anarchists” in May 1872, which was prior to most collectivists referring to themselves with the term. A key reason why Marx and Engels referred to the self-described federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists as “anarchists” was because they wrongly believed their views to be a simple rehashing of Proudhon. In November 1871, Marx wrote a letter to Friedrich Bolte in which he claimed that Bakunin’s views were “scraped together from Proudhon, St. Simon, etc.” and that Bakunin’s “main dogma” was “(Proudhonist) abstention from the political movement.”[[#96KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|96]] In January 1872, Engels described Bakunin’s ideas as “a potpourri of Proudhonism and communism” in a letter to Theodor Cuno.[[#97KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|97]]
+There was one place in particular that I would cycle, an hour by bike, across the river and down empty country lanes, to a tree that I used as a hide that looked out over the top of an abandoned limestone quarry, and it was here that I would sit with my binoculars and bird-watch. Back in the town the only birds you ever saw were little common garden birds like tits and chaffinches and sparrows and wagtails but out in the quarry and away from the town there were birds that prey on other things, other birds, predatory and exciting.
-The decision by individuals within the movement to adopt the “anarchist” label was not inevitable and occurred to a significant extent by chance. They could have continued to call themselves the federalist, collectivist, or revolutionary socialist movement. Guillaume could have successfully persuaded a large number of people to not refer to themselves as anarchists. They could have called themselves Bakuninists or invented a whole new label. One of the main reasons they adopted the term “anarchist” was that they were borrowing language from Proudhon. But this was not the only reason. Other people within the First International, in particular Marx and Engels, choose to call them “anarchists” due to the belief that they had the same politics as Proudhon. This led to a situation where the federalists, collectivists, or revolutionary socialists had to decide if they were going to adopt the label as their own.
+I had myself an ''Identification of British Birdlife'' book and would sit still for hours just to collect the sight of them and the sound of the name of them like talismans. There were plentiful buzzards and kestrels that would slip in and out of the area on their hunting routes, sliding on the warm air to hang and observe like snorkellers at the water’s surface, periscoping their necks then locking still before the dive, limiting any movement to the final flurry. Or the thrill of the goshawks that would sometimes weave and dip in and out of the trees either in the valley beyond the quarry or on the opposite ravine. Sometimes the goshawks display-danced, spreading their tail feathers like splayed fingers and falling through the sky like grabbing hands.
-It should not be automatically assumed that Proudhon and the collectivists of the First International belonged to the same political tradition because they both called themselves “anarchists.” It cannot be assumed that the collectivists would have ever used the term in such large numbers if it had not been imposed on them by their political opponents, and if there had been no feud with the General Council. If they are to be viewed as belonging to the same political tradition, it must be because of the ideas, rather than just the language that they held in common.
+But what I really held out for were the days when I got to see one or both of the rare pair of peregrine falcons that nested somewhere in the trees around the quarry. They would always fill me up with the magic of hope, their tiny defiant bodies wheeling against the sky so small against the big, so dark against the blue, and so free. In their sky dance they revelled disobediently against their declared local extinction.
-It is true that both Proudhon and the collectivists advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of the free federation of free producers.[[#98Thistopicismadeconfusing|98]] Anarchists like Bakunin and Kropotkin were deeply influenced by Proudhon.[[#99CastletonTheOriginsof|99]] The fact that Proudhon and the collectivists were both anti-state socialists does not, however, entail that they belonged to a single political tradition. Malatesta remarked in 1897 that although “Proudhon . . . first popularized, though amid a thousand contradictions, the idea of abolishing the State and organizing society anarchically,” it was “Bakunin to whom we anarchists of today trace most directly our lineage.”[[#100ErricoMalatestaALongan|100]] Bakunin had himself been careful to describe the politics of First International collectivism as being “the widely developed and pushed to the limit Proudhonism,” rather than a mere repetition.[[#101BakuninSelectedTexts10|101]] He was deeply critical of what he took to be aspects of Proudhon’s thought.[[#102Bakuninwasalsocriticalo|102]] In ''Statism and Anarchy ''he asserted that “there is a good deal of truth in the merciless critique” Marx “directed against Proudhon.”[[#103BakuninStatismandAnarch|103]] He described his own politics as “the anarchic system of Proudhon broadened and developed by us and freed from all its metaphysical, idealist and doctrinaire baggage, accepting matter and social economy as the basis of all development in science and history.”[[#104QuotedinJamesJollTheA|104]]
+To be able to tell the difference in these birds by their shape and their movements and to point at them and call them by their names has always been to me an affirmation of the solid truth of the natural world as a system that can be described with taxonomy, and a reminder of my place in it. It is also a reassurance; it shows me that these things still exist because I can collect them. That there are still places to watch and be a part of a realer order outside of severed civilisation.
-One of the main topics on which the collectivists differed from Proudhon was strategy. This is extremely important because, as noted above, socialists who called themselves “anarchists” were not distinguished from other kinds of socialism by advocating the abolition of the state. This was a long-term goal of several different kinds of state socialists, including Blanqui, Marx, and Engels. Anarchism must be defined in terms of both its goal and the strategies it proposed to reach this goal.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0017-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-Proudhon, like mutualists in general, rejected the idea of transforming society through violent insurrection while nonetheless viewing himself as a revolutionary. During the late 1840s, as already mentioned, he held that capitalism and the state could be gradually abolished through a process of workers forming cooperatives that would, with the aid of loans provided by a people’s bank at low or no interest, grow in number, trade with one another and take on more and more social functions until socialism as a society-wide economic system had been established. The collectivists, in contrast, viewed Proudhon’s strategy to achieve fundamental social change as misguided, since cooperatives would be out-competed by larger capitalist businesses (aided by government economic intervention); become like capitalist businesses due to pressure from market forces; or merely improve the living conditions of a small number of workers. If a cooperative movement became so successful that it was a genuine threat to ruling class power, then it would simply be crushed by state violence. According to collectivists, class society could only be abolished through the working classes launching a violent armed insurrection that smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the means of production and land from the ruling classes.[[#105BakuninStatismandAnarch|105]]
+I do not know if Urla can tell that I was the kind of person to spend my lunchtimes at school in toilet cubicles with my feet up so no one would recognise my shoes. My parents can’t reconcile this sudden bid for independence and shrugging off of domesticity with what they think of as my nature; introverted and docile. They are confused by my surety and think that instead this impulse must stem from some malady; that I overthink things, that I feel too much, that I should not watch the news if it scares me so much that it makes me want to leave what I must see as the train wreck of modern society.
-This key difference on strategy could justify three distinct ways of conceptualizing anarchism: (a) Proudhon and the collectivists represent subdivisions within anarchism as a single political tradition; (b) Proudhon was an anarchist and the collectivists were not anarchists due to diverging from Proudhon; (c) Proudhon was not an anarchist and the term “anarchism” should only be used to refer to the social movement that emerged in the First International. These three potential conceptualizations of Proudhon’s relationship to anarchism rest on the implicit premise that there is one true anarchism that Proudhon is or is not a part of. There is no one true anarchism. There is instead a series of distinct “anarchisms” that arose during the nineteenth century as different people at different historical moments articulated what they thought the words “anarchist” and/or “anarchism” meant or should mean.
+What they could not seem to see was that this limiting aspect of me is in part the drive for my leaving, that I want to learn how to be without it. To prove to myself and everyone else that solitude is as much mine as any Mountain Man’s and that I do not have to be relegated to loneliness and displacement just for being female. It is rational and deliberate and it had always been part of the plan. I have always been obedient, the model daughter. Mum and Dad said finish school and try hard at it so I did. I kept my nose clean and I always ate my vegetables (frozen for goodness).
-In 1840, the term “anarchist” picked out Proudhon’s political theory for the simple reason that Proudhon decided to call himself an anarchist. The term was subsequently used by a variety of socialists in the 1840s and 1850s to refer to the goal of a society without government or authority. This included Déjacque referring to his ideas as “anarchism” in the late 1850s while advocating what he regarded as a democratic government during the transition to a fully stateless society. Between 1868 and 1880, what the words “anarchist” and “anarchism” were understood to mean changed. This occurred due to an international social network within the First International and Saint-Imier International who were influenced by Proudhon, developing a distinct revolutionary political theory that they called anarchism but could have continued calling federalism, collectivism, autonomism, or revolutionary socialism.
+Already I feel something changing. I look at Urla and the way she oozes and I think, does doing this project make her think that of me? Am I that person, even if only from certain angles? Is it having a camera and a plan that gives me that authority? Or actually, just being nineteen and female and travelling alone, does it do that? It is possible that Kris’s discomfort around me came from a place of awe, like the awe he shows for Urla in never talking back to her.
-What matters for the purposes of studying anarchism as a historical concept is that Proudhon’s anarchism and the anarchism of the movement are viewed as distinct entities. Whether one chooses to conceptualize this as: (a) different phases of a single political tradition, or (b) a new political tradition developing out of a previous one does not change the differences between them. These are only alternative ways of viewing the differences. Given my focus on the revolutionary strategy of anarchism, I shall from now on be using the term “anarchism” to refer exclusively to the theory and practice of the anarchist movement, and not its intellectual precursors that can be found during the 1840s and 1850s.
+Yesterday Thilda took us to a geothermal spring. Neither of us remembered to pack swimming things so we had to go in our pants and bras. It did not matter because it was raining so we only saw a few hikers and they weren’t close enough to distinguish underwear from swimwear anyway.
-'''The Anarchist Movement'''
+‘The best time to go to the springs is when there is rain, because the tourists like to stay dry. But in Iceland we think, if you are going to get wet, you might as well get wet, okay?’ Thilda had said.
-Who did and did not belong to the anarchist movement is itself a controversial topic. This is because the social movement that emerged within the First International and the Saint-Imier International between 1864 and 1878 was not the only group of people to adopt the term during this period. In parallel to these developments, a small group of mutualists in the United States continued to advocate anti-state market socialism achieved through gradual peaceful means. From the early 1880s onward, they consciously adopted Proudhon’s label of “anarchist” as their own.[[#106BenjaminTuckerInsteadof|106]] Although they were largely an American phenomenon, they did also gain a few adherents in Europe.[[#107Forasummaryofthishisto|107]]
+We parked the SUV where the off-road terrain offered no more leeway, still a bit of a distance from the pools, whose grey iridescence we could just make out. The sky hung low like the pelt of a sad, wet sheep, the rain fading all outlines into each other like a bleeding watercolour and the mossy ground skirting the rocks and water, luminous in contrast. We took off our clothes and shoes, slammed the doors, and ran towards steaming water laughing and screaming. The rain stung our skin pink.
-This led to a situation in which two forms of anti-state socialism, which had both been influenced by Proudhon’s ideas and referred to themselves as “anarchists,” coexisted with one another. On the one side, anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists, and on the other side, individualist anarchists. The fact that they fundamentally disagreed with one another on such topics as their visions of a future society and strategies to achieve social change led to further contestation over what “anarchism” should mean. Both sides sometimes argued that they alone were the true anarchists, and their opponents were fake, pseudo, or inconsistent anarchists. The influential individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker, for example, gave a talk at the Boston Anarchist Club in November 1887. He drew a distinction between “real Anarchists like P. J. Proudhon, Josiah Warren, Lysander Spooner” and “miscalled Anarchists like Kropotkine,” who had wrongly “usurped the name of Anarchism for its own propaganda.”[[#108BenjaminTuckerInsteadof|108]] The German individualist anarchist John Henry Mackay shared this attitude and argued that anarchism and communism were incompatible with one another.[[#109JohnHenryMackayTheAnar|109]]
+We fell on our fronts into the hot water, slipping and flailing, trying to submerge every inch from the cold and spitting and coughing and laughing at the water filling our mouths. Then we settled still and quiet with just our eyes and the tops of our heads out of the water, blinking the rain off our lashes and bringing our noses up for air like seals. Thilda started to tell us a story.
-Similar remarks can be found among anarchist communists. The English paper ''Freedom'' published an editorial in 1892 that argued that “individualists,” such as Tucker, “are not Anarchists” because they advocate market competition and so “lack the fundamental principle of Socialism and Anarchism—solidarity.”[[#110QuotedinRyleyMakingAno|110]] Reclus wrote in an 1895 letter that “the only resemblance between individualist anarchists and us is that of a name.”[[#111QuotedinFlemingAnarchis|111]] In 1914, Kropotkin argued that “an Individualist, if he intends to remain Individualist, cannot be an Anarchist” because “Anarchy necessarily is ''Communist''.”[[#112KropotkinDirectStruggle|112]]
+‘The famous saga of Eric the Red may be called so but it is really about a ''skörungur'', which is what we call a strong woman hero. Her name was Gudrid the Far-Traveller, his wife, and she lived in the tenth century.’
-On other occasions, there were attempts at tolerance, cooperation, and even combining collectivist/communist anarchism and individualist anarchism together. To give a few examples, Kropotkin and Rocker included individualist anarchists in their summaries of anarchist history.[[#113KropotkinDirectStruggle|113]] The American bookbinder Dyer D. Lum advocated the broad goal of American individualist anarchists—stateless market socialism—achieved via the strategy of anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists—trade unionism and armed insurrection.[[#114DyerDLumOnAnarchy|114]] The anarchist paper ''The Alarm'', which Lum edited, published both individualist anarchist and anarchist-communist authors. In 1889, the anarchist-communist Johann Most reacted to this by verbally attacking Lum for publishing individualist anarchist views and insisted that, as a result of this, German workers should cancel their subscriptions to the paper.[[#115GoyensBeerandRevolution|115]] In response to these kinds of conflicts, Max Nettlau argued in 1914 that anarchist communists and individualist anarchists should cease to be dogmatic and learn to coexist and cooperate with one another, rather than “being divided into little chapels.”[[#116MaxNettlauAnarchismCo|116]] This idea was repeated in the 1920s, when Sébastian Faure and Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eikhenbaum, who wrote under the pen name Voline, attempted to form anarchist federations that would unite individualist anarchists, anarchist communists, and anarcho-syndicalists into a single organization and develop a new form of anarchism that would be a synthesis of each tendency’s best ideas.[[#117SebastienFaureTheAnarc|117]]
+Iceland is steeped in sagas and mysticism because the landscape is animated as if it is telling its own story. Glaciers walk, the ground moves and magma seeps, and geysers erupt like blowholes on the humped back of some giant. It is as though these are living parts acting out their own narratives. The Icelandic legends are shaped by the elements, because here the elements are all-pervasive.
-This topic is only made more complicated by the fact that what “individualist anarchism” even meant varied between contexts. Within Italian anarchism, a tendency developed during the 1880s and 1890s that referred to itself as “individualist anarchism.” In contrast to other self-described individualist anarchists, it was committed to the goal of anarchist communism, opposed formal organization, and advocated the strategy of individuals engaging in robberies, assassinations, and bombings.[[#118PerniconeItalianAnarchis|118]] This distinction can be seen in Malatesta’s 1897 remark that there are “the individualist anarchists of Tucker’s school” and “the individualist anarchists of the communist school.”[[#119MalatestaPatientWork80|119]]
+And the landscape is volatile and fierce. Like Thilda says, the Icelandic women are strong because they are descended from Vikings and conquerors and raised by the icy sea winds which sting their cheeks and the hot geyser steams which scald them. And in a land where fire and ice are in battle and care little for anything around them, all people must be strong.
-The different varieties of individualist anarchism in Europe and the United States also changed over time. For example, during the 1890s, the individualist anarchist writer Mackay popularized the previously obscure German philosopher Max Stirner. These ideas, in turn, influenced wider circles of individualist anarchists when editions of Stirner’s 1844 book ''The Unique and Its Property ''appeared in multiple languages from the early 1900s onward, including English, Italian, French, and Russian.[[#120RockerPioneersofAmerica|120]] Mackay went so far as to rewrite the history of anarchism and claim that Stirner, who never referred to himself as an anarchist, was one of its main founders alongside Proudhon.[[#121MackayTheAnarchistsix|121]]
+In the landscape the elements merge like there is no limit to their pervasiveness, no clearly defined contours. You can feel it seeping into you; trading off with the algae in the water and the mud between your toes like nourishment. You can feel the shuddering of the water making everything on your body reach out in reciprocity, every hair a tentacle. Half submerged in the hot spring; in and out; half still and warm, half cold and lashed; ears under, eyes out; the patter of rain on the surface, the gasping of the spring.
-The fact that several different and incompatible tendencies adopted the language of “individualist anarchism” is important for understanding Malatesta’s various remarks on the topic. In 1897, he critiqued “those who, in calling themselves individualists, see that as justification for any repugnant action, and who have about as much to do with anarchism as the police do with the public order they boast to protect.”[[#122MalatestaPatientWork77|122]] In response to such self-appointed “individualist anarchists,” Malatesta had argued a year earlier that, since “we cannot stop others adopting whatever title they choose,” our only option is to “differentiate ourselves clearly from those whose notion of anarchy differs from our own.”[[#123MalatestaMethodofFreedo|123]] In 1924, Malatesta continued to claim that some self-appointed “individualist anarchists” were not in fact anarchists, while advocating tolerance toward “individualists” who “are really anarchists.”[[#124MalatestaLifeandIdeas|124]] He even recommended a book by the French individualist anarchist E. Armand and described him as “one of the ablest individualist anarchists.”[[#125MalatestaLifeandIdeas|125]]
+Thilda’s story gives me a feeling like recognition, a sense of inevitability and completion, a slotting into place. Like finding an object you never noticed was missing until you found it and realised its lack had been haunting you all along. I recognise it by knowing its antithesis; my own home and environment. See, where I am from there is not this boundlessness. The ''outside'' that I know is broken to pieces and scattered.
-Given this history, there is no neutral and uncontested definition of the anarchist movement. What people in the nineteenth and early twentieth century took anarchism to mean was a product of ongoing debates and discussion between groups who all claimed to be anarchists but had conflicting and incompatible views on both what anarchism meant and who was and was not a genuine anarchist. Although it is impossible to find a neutral and entirely uncontested definition of anarchism, it is possible to pick out contingents that represented one side within the process of contestation over what anarchism meant and to view anarchism from their point of view.
+Our cul-de-sac is on a suburban estate built on the site of an old power station that had been running up until the eighties. All the houses look the same with neatly trimmed rectangular lawns and faux-Tudor beams, no weeds (there are sprays for those), and the streets are named after famous ships. Our town was typical of Midlands industry because it is well connected to the canal and river systems. There was a power station, a vinegar factory, a sugar beet factory, and several carpet factories, one of which my mum worked in as a secretary while I was in her belly. The power station was coal-fired and archaic and the factories moved to China so they knocked it all down and built the suburbs and a giant Tesco. My mum and dad got jobs a thirty-minute drive away, closer to the city, and no one could grow anything to eat in their gardens because the power station left radon in the topsoil.
-For the purposes of this book, anarchism will be defined as a form of revolutionary anti-state socialism that first emerged as a social movement in late nineteenth-century Europe within the First International between 1864 and 1872 and the subsequent Saint-Imier International, which included anarchist groups in Europe, South America, and Egypt, between 1872 and 1878. I will focus exclusively on anarchist collectivists, anarchist communists, and anarchists without adjectives who advocated the same strategy as anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists.
+The outside that I know is pastoral, a grid of owned and regimented spaces, moderated for production. Some people think the English countryside is pretty but that is the tragedy of it. It is a result of the way our small country was built, when a bunch of rich men parcelled up what was once shared land to make it easier to go about ploughing and producing more crops. Our common wilderness became a commodity. On an island so small the mark of this is hard to not see: a monotonous quilt of rectangles divided by hedgerows. Especially in the Midlands, where there are not many mountains or bogs or other bits of stubbornly unprofitable land, and where the remains of failed industry create a graveyard landscape, the stumps covered over with prosthetic suburbia.
-I will not examine the ideas of the intellectual precursors of the anarchist movement who wrote during the 1840s and 50s, such as Proudhon, or the individualist anarchists who operated in parallel with anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists from the 1880s onward. This is motivated by the fact that both Proudhon and individualist anarchists advocated distinct visions of a future society and strategies to achieve the abolition of capitalism and the state. Examining the ideas proposed by every single individual or movement who called themselves anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is not possible within the limited space of this book. I am not committing myself to the strong view that Proudhon and the individualist anarchists were not anarchists. My definition of anarchism only specifies the kind of anarchism I will be examining, and does not claim to establish the one true version of anarchism.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0020-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#11|1]]. For example Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''3; David Miller, ''Anarchism'' (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1984), 2–3; George Woodcock, ''Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements,'' 2nd ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 17–18.</div>
+The peregrine quarry was the one place I knew that had a semblance of wildness to it, of richness and possibility. This is an invisible kind of poverty, this lack of all of the complexity that Urla and her mother are born from.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#21|2]]. Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On the Genealogy of Morality'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53. For discussions of Nietzsche’s views on definitions, see Lawrence J. Hatab, ''Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: An Introduction ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 97–99; Raymond Geuss, ''History and Illusion in Politics'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 6–8, 69–72; ''Morality'','' Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9–14.</div>
+Gudrid lived in the days of longboats and raging seas. She travelled to what we now call Newfoundland, which is my own first port of call in Canada. This was before lucky-lost explorer Christopher Columbus, and Thilda proudly points out that although the Spanish like to think that the sagas are make-believe, Icelanders know who really found the New World. Gudrid was the first European mother in the western hemisphere.
-[[#31|3]]. Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible'', xiii–xiv, 3–5, 96–99; John A. Rapp, ''Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China'' (London: Continuum Books, 2012), 3–5; Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 2–3.
+She had a son; they called him Snorri. But with their small clan and without the guns the Spanish had, they were driven away by the natives. Or savages, as Thilda called them.
-[[#41|4]]. Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism:'' Élisée'' Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''15–23; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010), xxxvi–lv; Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun'' ''(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 510–15.
+She concludes her story by saying, ‘Gudrid travelled further than all of her husbands, who died one after another and proved early in our history that you don’t need a penis between your legs to make you a great adventurer.’ I look up at the bulking hills and think about how Gudrid personifies them, and the geysers and the winds, and the looming, enduring volcanoes, the shifting ground. And how so much of Thilda is in Urla, and Gudrid in them both. And it feels kind of feminine, all this entering. It feels like pregnation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#51|5]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''84, 136. On other occasions, Kropotkin appears to adopt a historicist perspective and defines anarchism as a historically specific form of antistate socialism. For an overview of this topic, see Zoe Baker, ''Kropotkin’s Definition of Anarchism ''(forthcoming).</div>
+It is this harsh softness. Of a landscape that is fertile and ''hostile''. And it takes on this significance for me and for my journey so that I have to squeak into bubbles under the water, because I feel like for the first time ever I know exactly why I am where I am right then in that moment.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#61|6]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 9, 3.</div>
+==== GO WEST, YOUNG MAN ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#71|7]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 28, 19. See also, 78.</div>
+Our plans for Greenland have undergone sudden and fantastic developments. Urla and Thilda had been plotting the whole time to put us on a boat with Urla’s uncle Larus, who is a whale scientist. Larus has his own research boat and is intending to go out into the Denmark Strait, the channel in between Iceland and Greenland, to survey a pod of long-finned pilot whales. They hadn’t told me in case it didn’t work out, but it has and we leave for Greenland in four days’ time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#81|8]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.</div>
+It is against protocol because the boat is only supposed to carry two people, but Urla threatened to stow away if her uncle took me and went without her. She will come with me as far as she can before she has to get back and work her summer job, so we will be in the double cabin and Larus will sleep in the steering room on the floor. Urla will then carry on through Greenland with me until I find a way to follow in the wake of Gudrid on to Canada. It is perfect because she can translate for me in Greenland, and she said she would write up the subtitles for the Danish when I edit the footage for the documentary. Because her uncle Larus still has to do his research it will be a slow journey of five days but we get to go whale watching and learn about the behavioural patterns of the long-finned pilot whale.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#91|9]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'', ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 13.</div>
+It jarred how easily Thilda let Urla go across a foreign country with a stranger so soon after they reunited after so long. I suppose we will be with her uncle and then her family friends in Nuuk once we find a way to reach the west coast, so the prospect seems safe to her. Maybe also she is used to Urla leaving, what with her being at university and having spent half her childhood away at her dad’s because of the separation. But the contrast to my own parents’ response is stark.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#101|10]]. Ba Jin, “Anarchism and the Question of Practice,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 362.</div>
+===== Why can’t you just be simple like other girls your age, get a job somewhere in town and work your way up, or at least go away to go to university, make something of yourself? =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|11]]. Kubo Yuzuru, “On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle,” in Graham, ed.,'' Anarchism'','' ''vol. 1, 380.</div>
+===== What did we do to you that made you so determined to leave us? =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#121|12]]. Rapp, ''Daoism and Anarchism'', 37–40, 227–29.</div>
+===== We won’t sleep until you return. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#13|13]]. Gerrard Winstanley, ''“The Law of Freedom” and other Writings'', ed. Christopher Hill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 77–95.</div>
+===== We won’t sleep ever again. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#14|14]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 120, 127.</div>
+I could not make them understand that my breaking-away-from is inevitable and keeps the history of the world in motion. The young always leave. At least the male young of the species always does. My leaving would have been a casting out, an initiation ritual, had I been a boy. Women who leave always abandon. Imagine the pinnacle form of this, the mother who leaves her children to her husband. Unnatural! Monstrous! And the man who does it? My bet is he ends up smug with a younger wife paying minimal child support.
-[[#15|15]]. Christopher Boehm, ''Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 10–12; James C. Scott, ''The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
+Urla does not need to lurch away from Thilda because Thilda lets her go. The two of them are twinned in ease, in their mannerisms, in a way that makes them seem more like sisters than mother and daughter. I prefer to be definitive about my being, where it ends and what its characteristics are. I have my dad’s nose, my mother’s green eyes and dark brown hair. I have his stubbornness and her impulse to over-empathise, weeping easily. But I try hard to also not be like them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#16|16]]. Boehm, ''Hierarchy in the For''est, 43–88, 101–24. This point was previously made, but with less empirical evidence, by Pierre Clastres, ''Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology ''(New York: Zone Books, 1989), 7–47, 189–218; Clastres, ''Archeology of Violence ''(New York: Semiotext(e), 1994), 87–92.</div>
+Peregrine; chaffinch; woodpigeon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#17|17]]. Robert L. Kelly, ''The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum'', 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 4–7, 15–18, 241–48. There is limited knowledge of what gender relations were like prior to the emergence of writing due to the nature of archaeological evidence. See Marcia-Anne Dobres, “Digging Up Gender in the Earliest Human Societies,” in ''A Companion to Gender History'', ed. Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks'' ''(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 211–26.</div>
+Field; hedgerow; river.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#18|18]]. David Graeber and David Wengrow, ''The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity ''(London: Allen Lane, 2021), 106–15.</div>
+Mother; father; me.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#19|19]]. Alan B. Spitzer, ''The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui ''(New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), 173n37; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx, ''Later Political Writings'','' ''ed. Terrell Carver'' ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 20; Vladimir Lenin, ''Selected Works ''(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 320, 335; Joseph Stalin, ''Works'','' ''vol. 1,'' 1901–1907'' (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954), 336–37.</div>
+==== THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#20|20]]. For a summary of the language Winstanley used to refer to himself and his companions, see John Gurney, ''Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy'' (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 59–64.</div>
+Larus has given me Rachel Carson’s ''Silent Spring'' because ‘it is one of the most important books you will ever read’. In 1962 ''Silent Spring'' was published to tell of how different chemicals invented for killing people in the world wars were being used for killing pests on food crops and were then having unexpected repercussions, like the death of birds and children. This is in the sixties, so everyone was doubly pissed with the government for also putting them in range of nuclear weapons that might come at any time without warning and telling them they would be safe under desks.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#21|21]]. Woodcock, ''Anarchism'', 12, 41. Some historical anarchists were themselves aware of its usage during the French Revolution. See Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 346–47, 350–60.</div>
+Widespread use of DDT was stopped because of Rachel Carson’s book and the US got a mainstream environmental conscience. Acceptance of the ‘ambivalence’ of the oppressors could be scrutinised. Women could have rights, black people could have rights, gay people could have rights, animals could have rights, even grass and trees could have rights, and if you took to the street in a crowd with billboards you could make anything happen.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#22|22]]. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''What is Property?'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 205, 209, 216. See also Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 205, 254, 480, 711. For an overview of Proudhon’s life and ideas see Steven K. Vincent, ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); George Woodcock, ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987).</div>
+Larus overuses his own coined collective nouns like ‘the nascent youth of today’ and ‘the ignorant herd’. He is exactly the kind of man you imagine when you imagine the kind of man who would get upset about bees. He speaks as if he is playing an internal monologue on constant reel, projecting it into the world like his mouth is a loudspeaker. Just by looking at him I can tell he probably actually weeps at the mention of Arctic drilling.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#23|23]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'', 61, 609–10, 742, 766.</div>
+There are certain stereotypes that fit with giving a shit about the planet, and funnily enough these are generally in some way feminine. To be a socially acceptable environmentalist you have to be female, a child, or an eccentric (which itself entails being kind of effeminate, if you are already a man). I have come to the conclusion that this is because environmental issues are perceived to be melodramatic and melodrama belongs to the feminine because women are of course by default hysterical, ‘in touch with nature’, and so easily brought to tears by images of seagulls stuck in Coke cans in conjunction with sad piano music. Melodramatic because there are more pressing issues like terrorists and fascism and the looming employment crisis of the robot workforce, never mind the bees. Women just like animals because they are cute and summon their maternal instinct.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#24|24]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''254–55, 291–92, 348, 615–16, 718, 725.</div>
+It is a vicious circle because there is no way of talking about the issues without evoking a whole discourse that is by now tainted by this idea of melodrama. Caring about the environment is lame, Greenpeace is run by scaremongers and weirdo conspiracy theorists, and the bees have gone somewhere, but it is a boring mystery.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#25|25]]. For the history of the term, see Shawn P. Wilbur, “Mutualism,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 213–24; Vincent, ''Proudhon'','' ''162–64.</div>
+Can YOU give just one pound a month? JUST ONE POUND A MONTH?! One pound could feed cats like Maurice for a whole year and provide shelter on wet nights and windy days and buy the love he so cherishes. Maurice loved his owners (cue sad piano music, image of wet Maurice sat in a box at the side of a road) but one day they took him out in the car and just left him at the side of the road because he had fleas and he smelled. We must protect animals like Maurice, the furry little creatures that god gave us to steward.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#26|26]]. Proudhon, ''What is Property'', 65–66, 73, 86, 94, 214–16. For a summary of Proudhon’s vision of a postcapitalist society, see Iain McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''28–35.</div>
+But bees do kind of pollinate about everything we eat. So really, though, Larus, where have the bees gone?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#27|27]]. Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'','' ''164, 281–93''<nowiki>; </nowiki>''McKay, “Introduction,” in Proudhon, ''Property is Theft'', 23–28; Vincent, ''Proudhon'', 142–51, 170–74. For the wider context and how Proudhon’s ideas developed during this period, see Edward Castleton, “The Many Revolutions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon,” in ''The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought ''ed. Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 39–69.</div>
+==== I USE SONAR TO EXPRESS MYSELF ====
-[[#28|28]]. ''David Berry, A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945 (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009)'','' ''16–17; Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 41–47, 66–75; James J. Martin, ''Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America'', 1827–1908 (Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1970), 103–66; Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 31–52.
+We have found the pod of long-finned pilot whales. There are over one hundred of them and it is incredible to look at, their bodies rising smooth and bulbous from the grey water like bubble wrap, blowing air from their blowholes, spraying water like saliva from a blown-up balloon let loose. After two days of tailing them I am reassured that they are not going to rise up as one and overturn our little boat. I was pacified by realising that they also hang around with dolphins. Dolphins are an animal I can trust. In our pod there are a group of Atlantic white-sided dolphins; Larus says they herd the fish together with the whales. The dolphins are curious about us and come right up to the boat to play around in the foam that comes off our propeller. Their faces and noises are the epitome of happiness, just pure unbridled joy at this strange thing chopping up their water and making it foamy. So simple and pure, like the joy of children.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#29|29]]. Josiah Warren, ''The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren'','' ''ed. Crispin Sartwell'' ''(New York: Fordham University Press, 2011); Martin, ''Men Against the State'', 1–102.</div>
+I have won the tolerance of grumpy Larus. He was moaning about how it is ‘people like me’ who have ruined Bali by thinking they are all spiritual and swamping the place with their yoga mats. He sees this as something flawed in the psyche of the youth of today. I asked him how many children he had and he said he has five from three different mothers because that is just how it was in the sixties. I asked him if Bali’s overcrowding was not just the inevitable outcome of overpopulation and that there were the same annoying yoga mat tourists in the sixties, but in the sixties there were fewer people so there was less yoga mat crowding and that maybe it is actually his generation’s fault for breeding so much. He grumbled some stuff but since then has been actually quite amicable towards me.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#30|30]]. Anselme Bellegarrigue, “Anarchy, A Journal of Order,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Anarchist Library website, http://www.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anselme-bellegarrigue-the-world-s-first-anarchist-manifesto.</div>
+On top of his research for the Ocean Association, Larus is conducting his own. The pod is particularly interesting to him because of the dolphins. He uses the equipment on the boat to record and plot their sonar and by measuring patterns he hopes to be able to crack their language. The graphs in the office already prove that the dolphins are talking; Larus has plotted the quantified appearance of each distinct vocalisation in ascending order across a horizontal axis, the times occurring across a vertical axis. The plot of a graph where information is being communicated always results in an angle of 45 degrees because all languages have units that range on a spectrum from frequent to infrequent. If it is not a 45-degree angle then the noises are random and uncommunicative. This is the same for any language, Icelandic, English, Dolphin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#31|31]]. Élisée Reclus, “The Development of Liberty in the World,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, September 2, 2016, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/elisee-reclus-the-development-of-liberty-in-the-world-c-1850.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0026-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#32|32]]. Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''74–76; Shawn P. Wilbur, “Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of Anarchism,” in ''Contr’un 5: Our Lost Continent ''(2016).</div>
+Larus says he can apply this method to any long piece of sound data. His other focus is noise picked up by dishes aimed at outer space. A friend in America has built his own dish behind his house in the desert and he and Larus work on the data because the only government-funded dish used specifically to listen for aliens, the Big Ear radio telescope in Ohio, was taken down in 1998 to clear space for a golf course. It ran for twenty-two years and it actually picked up the kind of thing they were looking for. It appeared to come from north-west of the globular cluster of M55 in the constellation Sagittarius. It lasted for seventy-two seconds and they called it the Wow! Signal because that is exactly what astronomer Jerry R. Ehman wrote on the computer printout.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#33|33]]. Joseph Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861'' (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 11–17, 40–41; Joseph Déjacque, “On the Human Being, Male and Female,” trans. Jonathan Mayo Crane, Libertarian Labyrinth website, April 4, 2011, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/from-the-archives/joseph-dejacque-the-human-being-i.</div>
+But the signal it picked up only occurred once, so after searching for it they eventually presumed it was some sort of fluke, the logic being that any ''intelligent'' civilisation would keep on sending a signal over and over to make it more likely to be heard. A three-minute-long radio signal was sent from Earth to a cluster of stars at the limits of the Milky Way one time in 1974 and never again. By the time any hypothetical civilisation had got it and then sent a reply it would be around about AD 52,000. The sustained attention span of the average human ranges from between five to twenty minutes. The guys that sent the signal referred to themselves as the Order of the Dolphin. They called themselves this because one of their members, the marine biologist John C. Lilly, used to take hallucinogens and climb into tanks with dolphins to explore interspecies communication. John Lilly found that dolphins can process linguistic syntax. He taught them to differentiate between commands such as bring the ball to the doll and ''bring the doll to the ball.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#34|34]]. Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses'','' ''20–21, 42–44.</div>
+He would talk about them like he thought they were people. Larus played us a track by a lady spoken-word poet that I liked. She imagined what a whale might say to John Lilly if it could speak telepathically to him, and what the whale asked as it swam circles in its ceramic-tiled prison was whether every ocean has walls.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#35|35]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, May 13, 2012, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-revolutionary-question.</div>
+Because of the difficulty of relaying a message through both deep space and deep time, Larus thinks we also need to consider that aliens might have come to Earth billions of years ago and encoded a message into our DNA, in the genes that do not do a lot apart from sit around. He says that some decoders are looking for mathematical patterns because intelligent civilisations must understand pi and prime numbers and things as universal truths that transcend language. What Pythagoras said: ''the whole cosmos is a harmony and a number''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#36|36]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”</div>
+Some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin, like the turtle-necked celebrity cosmologist Carl Sagan, also worked on the Golden Records that were sent into space with Voyager 1, which by now could be outside the solar system and on its way to somebody else’s. The Golden Records were a kind of time capsule. In it they sent pictures of a whole range of cultures and creatures, sounds from Earth like screaming and laughter and greetings in lots of different languages. President Jimmy Carter left a written message for the aliens inside the time capsule:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#37|37]]. Déjacque, “The Revolutionary Question.”</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">‘This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. WE ARE ATTEMPTING TO SURVIVE OUR TIME SO WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS.’</div>
-[[#38|38]]. Arthur Lehning, ''From Buonarroti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism'' (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1970), 150–210.
+<div style="text-align:center;">– President Carter</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#39|39]]. Archer, ''First International in France'', 100–101, 126–28, 168–72; Edward Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Contested Legacy and the Debate About Property in the International Workingmen’s Association and the League of Peace and Freedom,” ''Global Intellectual History'' 2, no. 2 (2017): 169–95.</div>
+The time capsule is President Carter’s baby. With it he has conceptually colonised the future.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#40|40]]. For a general overview of how this happened, see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy''.'' ''For greater detail, see Archer, ''First International in France''<nowiki>; Moss, </nowiki>''Origins of the French Labor Movement'','' ''52–82.</div>
+==== THE CEILING IN THE SKY ====
-[[#41|41]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''19; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''119, 126; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''225, 262.
+I nominated myself to help Larus while Urla fished for dinner because I like to sit and listen to him talk about space. I am helping group all of the sound bites that Larus has from the dolphin recordings into categories that are similar sounding. He plays them from the computer and we decide which of seven folders to put them into.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#42|42]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''44–47; Nettlau, ''Short History'','' ''144–45, 161–62, 184–85.</div>
+When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut up until age thirteen, when at careers day I sat with my parents and told my head of year about how I wanted to be an astronaut; they all laughed as though it were cute and he signed me up for work experience at a paragliding centre on the basis that I must have liked the idea of flying.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#43|43]]. Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''53–55, 104–9, 159–64, 166; Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''57–59; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 176–78.</div>
+Larus was at Kennedy for the lift-off of the Apollo 11 mission. He was there to protest, stood in a line with its back to the launch pad holding a sign that read ‘Meanwhile in Harlem’, but as soon as he heard the roar from the propulsion engines he turned around and could not take his eyes away. There is a photo somewhere of the group with him turning and gaping; he did not ever cut it out of the newspaper because he had spoiled the integrity of the group’s statement. He told me this confidingly and made me promise not to tell Urla because she would never let it go.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#44|44]]. For a condensed summary of the conflict within the International see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 167–92. For a detailed examination, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism''.</div>
+My being an astronaut was something I did not ever doubt as a child because Mum always told me ''the whole world is your oyster'' and until that careers day I had no cause to doubt her. It did not matter to me that all the cartoon astronauts were men. I think I always positioned myself as male without actually being aware of it. Whenever I watched films or read books with a male hero I totally imagined myself as that hero. Call me Ishmael. Call me Ralf, call me John McClane. It is not fair that only the boys get the fun parts.
-[[#45|45]]. René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 73–75; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 187–92, 199; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 283–352, 357–68, 383–97.
+I said this to Mum and Dad about fun parts when they started protesting at the idea of me doing this trip after college. It took a while to dawn on them that I was being serious and had come of legal age to do it without their permission anyway. Mum said, ‘Your father and I have decided that we can’t help you financially with this trip because we are not behind it.’ I told them that was fine and I could fund it myself. ‘What if you are in an unsafe place and have one of your spells?’ (By this she means my propensity to kind of faint for no apparent reason sometimes.) Of course I have not told them the ''real'' tundra-wilderness plan and the full extent of the ‘survivalism’ experiment, because, well, that would just have been cruel when I know they would suffer for it.
-[[#46|46]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 77–81; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 354–7.
+When America shot a rocket to the moon, even with the sexual revolution in full swing, it was still too soon to let women have a cosmic one. Larus was telling me about an independent programme called Mercury 13 (which he agreed to talk about to the camera), which took accomplished female pilots and put them through the testing that NASA did on their own astronauts, the Mercury 7 programme, the theory being that for various biological reasons women were actually better suited to space flight. It was a success but NASA just could not have ladies on the moon before men, so they kept the requirement that all NASA astronauts be a member of the air force, and women were still not allowed to join the military. So none of the Mercury 13 pilots were taken on, although they had more air experience than a lot of the men at NASA (some of whom secretly did not have all of the requirements anyway). When Larus told me this I remembered how bitter I felt at the paragliding centre while two boys in my year got sent to Leicester Space Centre on ‘limited allocation’ work experience.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#47|47]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September, 1872,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 179–83.</div>
+Maybe America sent a man to the moon to undermine Russia’s female cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova. She was ten years younger than the youngest NASA astronaut and had spent more time in space than all Americans combined, orbiting the earth forty-eight times. Man astronaut Neil Armstrong did not go for all of mankind and he certainly did not go for women. America only went to space in the first place to show that communism could not be more progressive than capitalism. Tereshkova worked in a textile factory before she became a cosmonaut. Her mother before her worked in the textile factory and her father was a tractor driver. What if Apollo had crash-landed? Would Russia rule the world now?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#48|48]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 18.</div>
+But Tereshkova was a human propaganda pawn: the Russian female programme was dissolved the year of the Apollo moon landing. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s official birthday was moved a day so that there were no records that he was ''really'' born on International Women’s Day; Russia could not have had him as a national hero if he were born on International Women’s Day. That would make him a sissy.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#49|49]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 150. In the original, Malatesta gives the incorrect date of 1867 for the founding of the Alliance. I have corrected this in order to avoid confusing the reader. In the nineteenth century, the word ''party'' was often used in a broad sense to refer to a social movement or a group of people who shared the same principles. For Malatesta’s definition, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 65.</div>
+==== MANNED SPACE FLIGHT IS THE TROPHY WIFE OF THE SUPER-PHALLUS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#50|50]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.</div>
+''INT. BEDROOM CABIN – Erin and Urla sit on opposite sides of the bed facing each other – on her head Urla has a cone with wings coloured with felt-tip pens to look like a rocket – on its side it says NASA under a penis with flames coming out from beneath the testicles – they are talking into walkie-talkies –''
-[[#51|51]]. Quoted in Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 18.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''Erin''' ('''Jerrie Cobb''') (PUTTING ON AN AMERICAN ACCENT): Oh hey, NASA. It’s Jerrie Cobb from the Mercury 13. So I did everything you said I should</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#52|52]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 80–81, 104–129; Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''29–34; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''197–220.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA (NASA)''' (BAD AMERICAN ACCENT. DEEP FOR MALE): Mm-hmm. What’s that?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#53|53]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” 181.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin bursts into laughter –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#54|54]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 130–40; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''225–27. For more information about the anarchist sections in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, and Egypt see Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 47–50, 115–18, 351–55; Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' ''252–54; Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, ''The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism'','' 1860–1914 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 114–15.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA'''(IN HER NORMAL VOICE/LAUGHING): Hey. What? Are you laughing at my accent?</div>
-[[#55|55]]. Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'','' ''153; Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement'','' ''79; A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 6n*.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''Erin:''' Sshhhh</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#56|56]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 188–91.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin clears her throat and resumes her serious-American tone –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#57|57]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): I did all the tests like all the guys did. And hey, it’s funny. I actually kinda blew them out the water</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#58|58]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers,” 189.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (ACCENT) (THEATRICALLY SUSPICIOUS): What tests?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#59|59]]. Accounts of the anarchist-led sections of the International typically refer to named delegates representing various workers’ associations, but do not specify the trade these anonymous workers were involved in. For detailed information on occupations in the Italian and Swiss movements, see Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 76–80; Eckhardt, ''First Socialism Schism'', 13–15.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN ( Jerrie Cobb)''' (LAUGHING): You know. All the secret tests you make the guys do so they can go into space</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#60|60]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 196.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (PAUSE): I don’t know what tests you’re talking about</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#61|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 77. For a summary of the strategies proposed by mutualists in the First International see Archer, ''First International in France'', 44–47, 79–82.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): I’ll remind you then. I put freezing water in my ears to see what it feels like with no balance. I spent days alone inside a box. I ran on a treadmill till I thought I might die. I drank radiation</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#62|62]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 170.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (SCOLDING): How’d you find out about the secret tests? They’re secret</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#63|63]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''453n47.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): Er, well now. We have a scientist friend. He invited us to do them. He said you didn’t have your own programme for ladies so he made one to show you that you should have</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#64|64]]. E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 307, 337.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (THEATRICALLY CONDESCENDING): And why’s that?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#65|65]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 191, 238.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): Because all his evidence suggests that it is way more logical to put a woman in space than a man</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#66|66]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 179, 133.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (GRINNING): There is no NASA-led evidence to prove this</div>
-[[#67|67]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''135–36.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb''') (WHINING): Oh please, NASA. I promise I won’t let you down. I coped just as well in the physical tests. I’ve got a higher pain threshold. I beat all the guys in the psychological ones. I’m so small you’ll hardly even notice me, I swear. I won’t take as much food or oxygen. I could even go up there in a smaller shuttle. And all of my reproductive organs are inside of me so I’m less likely to have radioactive children</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#68|68]]. Marshall Shatz, “Introduction” in Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', xxxv.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the girls both laugh then recompose themselves –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#69|69]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 197–98.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA'''): That’s all very nice but we won’t be taking the female programme any further</div>
-[[#70|70]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 186.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): But why? We worked so hard. Some of us lost our jobs or our husbands</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#71|71]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''375–76.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Urla/NASA waves her hands dismissively –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#72|72]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 175. For the 1867 English edition of the rules of the First International, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 20'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 441–46.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA'''): There are many reasons</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#73|73]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 22 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), 429.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb''') (SMIRKING): Give me one good reason</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#74|74]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 260.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA'''): Er. I’m, er. I am not authorised to divulge that information to third parties who are not associated with any official NASA programme</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#75|75]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''11.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb''') (LAUGHS/MOCK ANGER): Well, why the hell not?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#76|76]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 43n36, 150.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA''') (DRAWLING): Let it drop now. You’re like a dog with a bone. Do you have a husband? Think of how you’re making your husband feel. If not think about your daddy. You know your daddy wouldn’t want you up there</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#77|77]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''375. For other examples, see 180, 218–19, 252, 272, 278, 290, 334, 357, 362–63, 376–77, 387–88; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''72–73.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' ('''Jerrie Cobb'''): But gee. All the tests show I’d do just fine</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#78|78]]. Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'', 126.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' ('''NASA'''): The tests are not fully conclusive. You might well get up there and just faint or something. And what if you got to space and got yourself raped by an alien? Imagine if you were the courier for an extraterrestrial being back on our planet</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#79|79]]. Quoted in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''376.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Urla straightens up and wags a finger on her free hand pointedly – continues in her best pretend-self-righteous voice –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#80|80]]. For a summary of these congresses, see Archer, ''First International in France'','' ''119–29, 166–75.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">We will not continue the female programme because of the risks it would bring to the American public. My word is final</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#81|81]]. Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 169.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– at this Erin/Jerrie Cobb screams in frustration and throws her walkie-talkie into the duvet – Urla jumps and her rocket hat falls off – both the girls are laughing –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#82|82]]. I have assembled this quote from extracts in Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''376 and Marianne Enckell, “Bakunin and the Jura Federation,” in ''Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth: The First International in Global Perspective'','' ''ed. Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand'' ''(Leiden: Brill, 2018), 363n26.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#83|83]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''11.</div>
+==== NOT THE WHITE BULL JUPITER SWIMMING ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#84|84]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'','' ''38.</div>
+''INT. CABIN – MORNING – Erin is sat on the bed with laptop – Urla has camcorder – zoom in – Erin’s face – zoom out – sudden noise from outside –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#85|85]]. Quoted in Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 225.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS''' (SHOUTING): GIRLS – GIRLS COME – SHI—</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#86|86]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 11–13, 71–5,'' ''80–83, 96–97.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Larus bursts into cabin, knocks into Urla with camera – Urla turns – camera focuses on Larus – excitement –''</div>
-[[#87|87]]. Lehning, ''From Buonarroti to Bakunin'','' ''16–17.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS''' (WHISPERING): Girls. Come quickly. Outside</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#88|88]]. Woodcock, ''Anarchism'','' ''233.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' What? What is it?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#89|89]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 170.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS:''' You’ll see. Come quickly. Quietly.</div>
-[[#90|90]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Anarchism and Social Democracy'', 109.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– girls follow Larus into corridor – Urla is in front with camera – Erin out of shot – out onto deck – Larus looks over deck – girls gather round – water slaps against side of boat – Greenland is faint on horizon – iceberg – no whales/dolphins –''</div>
-[[#91|91]]. James Guillaume, “On the Abolition of the State,” in'' Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 192.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' What are we supposed to be looking at?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#92|92]]. For example, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 43'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 437, 479–80, 494.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''larUS:''' Shush. You’ll see</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#93|93]]. Quoted in Georges Haupt, ''Aspects of International Socialism'','' 1871–1914 ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 4.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the group stands silently for fourteen seconds – four metres away from the boat the water breaks – gush of air from blowhole – ridged back of sperm whale breaks surface – Urla shrieks –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#94|94]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''247–48.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (YELLS): OHMYGOD—</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#95|95]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 102, 450, 466, 468.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS''' (SHOUTING): CHRIST. It’s nearer than before</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#96|96]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 255.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– boat rocks –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#97|97]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44, 306. In 1886, Engels claimed, in comparison to his previous statement, that what Bakunin labeled anarchism was a blend of Proudhon and Max Stirner. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 382.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA:''' Is it safe?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#98|98]]. This topic is made confusing by the fact that, during the 1850s, Proudhon’s ideas and terminology underwent a complicated process of development. By the 1860s, he called for the abolition of government in favor of a federated society while claiming that the state in the sense of the “power of collectivity” would be a part of a free society and lack “authority.” See Shawn P. Wilbur, “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State,” Libertarian Labyrinth website, June 5, 2013, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/contrun/pierre-joseph-proudhon-self-government-and-the-citizen-state-2.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS:''' Jesus. Sorry. It took me by surprise. Yes, we should be safe. Just no more screaming, girls</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#99|99]]. Castleton, “The Origins of ‘Collectivism,’” 184; Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 279n30. For Proudhon and Bakunin’s friendship see Woodcock, ''Proudhon'', 87–89, 266; Carr, ''Bakunin'', 130–31.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''URLA''' (LAUGHING): You screamed loudest. I have it all here. I can play it back to you</div>
-[[#100|100]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 296.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s so big. I’ve never seen anything so big. Is it a sperm whale?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#101|101]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 105–6.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''LARUS''': Yes, it’s a sperm whale. We will be safe, they’re not that curious. But it’s very close</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#102|102]]. Bakunin was also critical of mutualists within the First International who viewed themselves, and not the collectivists, as the true successors of Proudhon. In April 1869, he wrote a letter to Guillaume in which he referred to Tolain and Chemallé, who were leading members of the French section of the First International, as “Proudhon-ians of the second and bad sort” who “want individual property” and to “debate and parade along with the bourgeoisie.” See Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 38.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– creature resurfaces further from boat – Erin jumps –''</div>
-[[#103|103]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 142.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''': Oh god, it got me again</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#104|104]]. Quoted in James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 108. I have corrected Joll’s translation such that the German word anarchische is translated as anarchic, rather than anarchist.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– nervous laughing – group stand and watch the whale resurface twice more before sinking into the calm water, its mass leaving its imprint in tiny bubbles –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#105|105]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''200–202; Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 151–54. This shift in strategy from advocating gradual change via co-ops in the 1840s to violent revolution in the 1870s was part of a wider process of development within French socialism. It included individuals who held similar views to anarchists but did not use the label, such as Eugène Varlin. See Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement'', 4–6, 31–102.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-[[#106|106]]. Benjamin Tucker, ''Instead of a Book'','' by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism'', 2nd ed. (New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897),'' ''ix, 14.
+==== THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#107|107]]. For a summary of this history, see Nettlau, ''Short History'','' ''30–42; Rudolf Rocker, ''Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1949), 145–54. For individualist anarchism in Britain, see Peter Ryley, ''Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain ''(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 87–111.</div>
+KULUSUK: looks pretend. It is a tiny island ‘settlement’ with only five hundred people in it, which is, apparently, quite large for Greenland. The houses look like they were erected from a flat-pack box, as if they could be neatly folded away and taken with the people if they migrated. They are painted block primary colours: little toy houses, stage props. They are set into the rocks at jaunty angles. The slopes sit vertical against the still water, as if the island is built on the tips of a mountain range that lies just below the surface. The water must not get stormy because some of the houses sit just metres from its edge.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#108|108]]. Benjamin Tucker, ''Instead of a Book'', 390. See also, 15–16, 111–12, 383–404.</div>
+Urla is glad to be back on shore. She was short and restless and pacing in her catlike way, flitting between being happier reading on her own in the bedroom cabin and coming into the wheelhouse to sit with us but not saying anything, as though to remind us of her presence before slinking off back to her book.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#109|109]]. John Henry Mackay, ''The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century'' (Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1891), ix. For Mackay’s fictional debate between an individualist anarchist and anarchist communist, see, 116–50.</div>
+I can’t sleep now, my womb feels like it is full of acid and lined with tar, and I can’t flail around like I would in my own bed because I will wake Urla. One of the nearby houses has huskies and they have been howling all night at the moonless sky. My eye mask itches, my Mooncup is uncomfortable and I am scared of leaking on the sheets on our last night with Larus.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#110|110]]. Quoted in Ryley, ''Making Another World'', 108.</div>
+This is the kind of period that requires a big fat nappy towel but I am trying to be good to the environment. I am still so glad to have my periods back that I feel no resentment towards it. The pill had stopped them and I went without for the whole time I was on it. I went on it like a lot of teenage girls do, because my periods hurt a lot and would interrupt that steady forward march to the drumbeat of patriarchy, making me take time off work and school. As though being female is an ailment to be cured with medicine.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|111]]. Quoted in Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''153.</div>
+I have been staring at the first ever picture of Earth for about an hour now. The one taken from the Apollo mission where they flew around the moon to take pictures of craters, the mission before they actually landed. They went up there to take these pictures of the moon’s craters but the astronauts decided to turn the camera around and film Earth rising from behind the moon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#112|112]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 203. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''139, 173.</div>
+At that moment, for the first time ever, images were appearing on the screens at NASA of Earth from outside Earth. They were watching themselves watching themselves almost in real time from 238,857 miles away. Right then, they reached a new level of self-consciousness that will probably never be recreated outside that room and moment ever again. A Copernican Revolution.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#113|113]]. Kropotkin,'' Direct Struggle'', 169,'' ''171–72; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 6, 9.</div>
+In the 1960s, the space race expanded the human psyche to incorporate a concept of deep space and deep time. The Earthrise photo made people stop and think about Earth more holistically. Maybe that is why people of the sixties cared more about each other and the future.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#114|114]]. Dyer D. Lum, “On Anarchy,” in ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'', ed. Albert Parsons (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 149–58; Dyer D. Lum, ''Philosophy of Trade Unions'' (New York: American Federation of Labor, 1892); Dyer D. Lum, “Why I Am a Social Revolutionist,” ''Twentieth Century ''5, no. 18 (October 1890). See also, Paul Avrich, ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 56–66.</div>
+It is the most reproduced image on Earth, and has become more and more abstract until it has been reduced to an icon for human achievement in the twenty-first century, its significance totally inverted. I am starting to feel a bit strange about it. Because I have been exposed to it so many times that it has numbed me to what I am actually looking at, I am staring at it to try and really see it. It stays on my retina when I blink hard, so when I open my eyes it bleeds into the image on the screen and I can kind of imagine it rising.
-[[#115|115]]. Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''214.
+They gave a name to the feeling astronauts get when they look back at Earth; they call it the ‘Overview Effect’. When they are going round in orbit and they are trying to put it into words and it is all cauliflower clouds and dancing green ribbons of aurora and lightning like flicking modem lights and any way they put it sounds so stupid, they get frustrated with their words because it is the most earthly thing on Earth but at the same time it is outside our earthly logic.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#116|116]]. Max Nettlau, “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both,” in ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', ed. Peter Glassgold (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 79–83.</div>
+It is the same in parts of science that deal with a reality that evades our logic. The scientists have to simplify things using a language we can all understand. Three guesses whose language they use!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#117|117]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828; Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197–205.</div>
+But they have to use one language to talk to other scientists, and to distil their complicated theories until they make sense to us laypeople. But in so doing they make them into something nothing like what they wanted to say in the first place and we believe in this end product because it came from the mouths of scientists. They talk about ''quantum soup'' and ''quark flavour mixing'' and you wonder if it looks more like a minestrone or something smooth like pea soup. And they call their instruments things like THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER-COLLIDER, so you wonder if they left the naming jobs down to earnest five-year-olds.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#118|118]]. Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'', 239–41, 270–72; Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 63–78; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''357, 415–7. For an overview of different strains of individualist anarchism in Milan, see Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(New Castle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 66–91.</div>
+My favourite example of this is physics king and wife manipulator Albert Einstein’s name for non-local faster-than-light interaction of atoms that are separated in space. The particles were created in the same instant in space but then got widely separated, but they can still be said to be the same particle, and if you measure one it immediately affects the other. I do not understand it fully but I just like what he called it. He called it ''spooky action at a distance''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#119|119]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 80.</div>
+And astronauts say things that seem so obvious and dumb, like ‘you realise that the whole world is interconnected’, and you snort at how obvious and dumb these clever astronauts sound, but then you think about it and actually maybe they are on to something. They say things like, ‘You realise that we are all already in space, on a giant spaceship, spaceship Earth’, and you think they are just saying that in a condescending sort of subterfuge to everyone who is not ''really'' on a spaceship, until you realise that you had been thinking of yourself as on this anchored point from which they send rockets to space, when you have been out there the whole time. There is nothing underneath you and nothing above or either side for a very, very long way. The moon rolls around a groove in the space–time fabric created by the gravity of Earth.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#120|120]]. Rocker, ''Pioneers of American Freedom'','' ''152–53; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''169; Laurence S. Stepelevitch, “The Revival of Max Stirner,” ''Journal of the History of Ideas ''35, no. 2 (1974): 324; Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads'','' ''75–6. For a summary of Stirner’s life see David Leopold, “A Solitary Life,” in ''Max Stirner'','' ''ed. Saul Newman'' ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 21–41.</div>
+There should be a flight about every five years that takes all of the current world leaders into orbit so that they can look down at Earth. If the UN wants world peace why have they not thought of that one?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#121|121]]. Mackay, ''The Anarchists'', ix. Stirner also influenced a few anarchist communists, but the majority rejected his ideas. For a review of Stirner’s book by a syndicalist anarchist, see Max Baginski, “Stirner: ‘The Ego and His Own,’” ''Mother Earth'' 2, no. 3 (1907),'' ''142–51. Bakunin briefly mentions Stirner on at least one occasion but does not claim that he was an anarchist or influenced anarchism. See Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''141–42.</div>
+==== MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#122|122]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 77.</div>
+Urla has taught me how to say: Hello, my name is Erin, thank you, yes, no, and the food was very nice. There is a Kalaallit Inuit family from the settlement that were travelling today to pick up supplies from Kangerlussuaq (gan-ker-schloo-schooak) on the west coast, where there is a DIY shop that has something specific that they need, and a family member that needs ferrying, and various other menial things which all seem insane to have to travel FIVE HUNDRED MILES for.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#123|123]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 199. See also ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''151.</div>
+They intend to return with a heavy load, so the family are sending the dad and son out with two almost empty dog sleds. The dogs can run between forty and sixty miles in a day, so the thing should take us thirteen or fourteen days. It is too mountainous to get into Nuuk from the east side, but the ferry that goes from Kangerlussauq to Nuuk only goes once a week. If all goes well, I should get into Kangerlussauq the day before the ferry.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#124|124]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 23.</div>
+The dad is called Amos and he loves his dogs. When Amos put me on the sled with his son Umik he made things awkward from the offset by explaining that he might be a bit shy with me because he did not get to meet many girls in the village. Umik is about fifteen, does not say or smile much, wears a beanie with Miley Cyrus on it and a pair of neon orange-framed sunglasses which he never takes off.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#125|125]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 24.Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework</div>
+Urla switched her mood as soon as we started moving again. She seems erratic, as though a cloud passes its shadow over her but lifts and then sunshine again. I was a little worried that maybe she had become bored with me; she seemed frustrated by the conversations that me and Larus had. It was the only way to keep time moving through the days at sea, but she would groan ‘boooringggg’, Larus would throw a small object at her, and then she would leave the room.
-== {{anchor|Chapter2TheoreticalFramework1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook5}} {{anchor|Chapter2TheoreticalFramework}} Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework ==
+When we left, Urla hugged her uncle aggressively. I was sad to leave him, but it feels like he has a place in my future as some kind of surrogate uncle or something. He gave me a pile of books and a badge that says ''Save The Bees'' which I put on my rucksack, and a knife for gutting fish. He also gave me his Skype and his mobile number, saying that I had to keep in touch weekly, and that he would worry about me once I had left his niece behind. This paternalism irritated me a little.
-To understand anarchist political theory, one must first understand the theoretical framework that anarchists used for thinking about humans, society, and social change. This is the theory of practice.[[#1Forpreviousreconstructions|1]] It is important to note that the theory of practice was often implicit in anarchist texts and not laid out in great detail. The vast majority of anarchist texts were short articles or pamphlets that focused on other topics, such as why capitalism should be abolished or concrete discussions about how to achieve anarchist goals. In addition, anarchist authors did not, in general, feel the need to write an explicit and detailed statement of their social theory’s foundational premises because it was already accepted as the common ground that underpinned their theorizing. A rational reconstruction of the theory of practice has to be made by piecing together different brief statements that anarchist authors made, and then supplementing these brief statements with my own examples in order to clearly illustrate what they thought.
+Urla is riding with Amos and I am with Umik and Genen, the lame dog who refuses to be left back at the house without the pack. He is sweet but a bit much. He has taken a shine to me and is keeping my legs warm but cutting off their circulation intermittently. He also smells, all of them smell, from being fed almost entirely on preserved seafood.
-'''Materialism and Human Nature'''
+I have tried talking a bit with Umik using the Greenlandic phrase book but I am appalling at pronouncing the words. I think he resorted to putting his iPod on to stop me trying. I thought it would be nice of us to try Greenlandic in case they are sore about still being a colony. I got the phrase book from the harbour office in exchange for my Icelandic one and eight Danish krone. It is a thin thing and useless for actual conversation. I can only pick from utilitarian phrases that are laid out in this odd way that falls into accidental narratives at points:
-Anarchists were, in general, materialists in the broad sense that they viewed matter as the fundamental building block of reality.[[#2MichaelBakuninThePolitica|2]] This materialism went alongside the view that the natural world must be conceptualized as a process that undergoes changes over time, rather than as a static entity. For Bakunin, the universe is the “infinite totality of the ceaseless transformations of all existing things.”[[#3BakuninPoliticalPhilosophy|3]] Cafiero similarly referred to the “continuous processes of transformation” that occur to the “infinity of matter” that constitutes the universe.[[#4CarloCafieroRevolutionEd|4]] The natural world so understood included human society. As Malatesta noted, “the social world” is “nothing but the continuing development of natural forms.”[[#5MalatestaMethodofFreedom|5]]
+Please
-Anarchists thought that the natural world, which included society, must be conceptualized as a totality or whole. This totality was constituted by interconnected parts that stand in relation to, and mutually shape, one another. Bakunin thought that the universe was a “totality” in which “each point acts upon the Whole” and “the Whole acts upon every point.”[[#6BakuninPoliticalPhilosophy|6]] As a result, he viewed the purpose of science as establishing the “related connections and mutual interaction and causality that really exist among real things and phenomena.”[[#7MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|7]] Reclus wrote that individuals living in society “are part of a whole” and that when “groups of men encounter one another, direct and indirect relations arise.”[[#8EliseeReclusAnarchyGeogr|8]] Kropotkin similarly held that the goal of his history of the French Revolution was “to reveal the intimate connection and interdependence of the various events that combined to produce the climax of the eighteenth century’s epic.”[[#9PeterKropotkinTheGreatFr|9]]
+Thank you
-Society, this totality of interconnected and mutually determining parts, changes over time due to the action of humans. According to Bakunin, “history is made, not by abstract individuals, but by acting, living and passing individuals. Abstractions advance only when borne forward by real men.”[[#10BakuninSelectedWritings|10]] For Rocker, since “every social process . . . arises from human intentions and human goal-setting and occurs within the limits of our volition” it follows that “history is . . . nothing but the great arena of human aims and ends.”[[#11RudolfRockerNationalisma|11]] Anarchist social theory rested on a particular understanding of what humans are, what human activity is, and how human activity both shapes and is shaped by society.
+How much does it cost?
-Anarchists viewed humans as unchanging and changing at the same time. They are unchanging in that there are certain characteristics that all humans across all societies have in common: they need food, water, and sleep to survive; reproduce through sex; have brains; are social animals who communicate through language; experience emotions; and so on.[[#12BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|12]] As Rocker wrote: “We are born, absorb nourishment, discard the waste material, move, procreate and approach dissolution without being able to change any part of the process. Necessities eventuate here which transcend our will. . . . We are not compelled to consume our food in the shape nature offers it to us or to lie down to rest in the first convenient place, but we cannot keep from eating or sleeping, lest our physical existence should come to a sudden end.”[[#13RockerNationalismandCult|13]]
+This gentleman/lady will pay for everything
-One of the distinguishing characteristics of humans as a species is their consciousness. Bakunin argued that, since this is the product “of the cerebral activity of man” and “our brain is wholly an organization of the material order . . . it follows that what we call ''matter'', or ''the material world'', does not by any means exclude, but, on the contrary, necessarily embraces the ideal world as well.”[[#14BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|14]] With this consciousness, humans think about themselves, other people, the world in which they live, and worlds that they have imagined. They make plans for the future and reflect on past events. They direct and alter their behavior. In short, humans are able to mentally stand apart from their immediate experience and make their own life an object of their thought.[[#15BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|15]] According to Reclus, “humanity is nature becoming self-conscious.”[[#16QuotedinJohnClarkAnIn|16]] Cafiero wrote that “the feeling of one’s ''self'' is without doubt the dominant sentiment of the human soul. The awareness of one’s being, its development and betterment, the satisfaction of its needs, these make up the essence of human life.”[[#17CafieroRevolution3|17]] Each individual human always possesses a particular form of consciousness, by which I mean the specific ways in which they experience, conceptualize, and understand the world in which they live. I will refer to this as “consciousness” for short.
+Would you like to dance?
-Since these characteristics are constant across all humans, they must stem from certain basic facts about human biology. Human biology and the natural environment are the starting points for human activity and the parameters in which it occurs. Crucially, human nature was not viewed by anarchists as a fixed, entirely static entity or an abstract essence that exists outside of history. They distinguished between the fundamental raw materials of human nature that constitute all humans and what these materials are shaped into during a person’s life within a historically specific society. Bakunin distinguished between innate “faculties and dispositions” and “the organization of society” that “develops them, or on the other hand halts, or falsifies their development.”[[#18BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|18]] Given this, “all individuals, with no exception, are at every moment of their lives what Nature and society have made them.”[[#19BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|19]]
+I love you
-Kropotkin, who was a geographer, similarly thought that “man is a result of both his inherited instincts and his education.”[[#20PeterKropotkinMutualAid|20]] Although there are “fundamental features of human character” that “can only be mediated by a very slow evolution,” the extent and manner in which these characteristics are expressed, Kropotkin claimed, is a result of a person’s social environment and the forms of activity they engage in.[[#21PeterKropotkinProposedC|21]] One of these fundamental characteristics with a strong biological basis, he believed, was the tendency for humans to cooperate with one another and engage in mutual aid in order to survive. Yet he also held that “the relative amounts of individualist and mutual aid spirit are among the most changeable features of man.”[[#22KropotkinProposedCommuni|22]]
+Best wishes
-Similar views were expressed by other anarchist authors. Emma Goldman declared that “those who insist that human nature remains the same at all times have learned nothing. . . . Human nature is by no means a fixed quantity. Rather, it is fluid and responsive to new conditions.”[[#23EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|23]] The extent to which anarchists thought that the expression of human nature was malleable or plastic can be seen in the fact that several anarchists claim that there is an infinite number of different kinds of person. Malatesta, for example, wrote that in an anarchist society “the full potential of human nature could develop in its infinite variations.”[[#24MalatestaMethodofFreedom|24]]
+Leave me alone!
-This was not to say that humans could transform themselves into anything they wanted. The nature of the raw materials that constitute humans places definite limits on what they can be shaped into. Humans cannot morph their arms into wings or lay eggs like a chicken. This is because, although a human can become an incredibly wide variety of different things during the course of their finite existence, the scope is predetermined by the kind of animal they are. As Rocker wrote, “man is unconditionally subject only to the laws of his physical being. He cannot change his constitution. He cannot suspend the fundamental conditions of his physical being nor alter them according to his wish.”[[#25RockerNationalismandCult|25]]
+Help!
-Stereotypes of anarchists depict them as having naive conceptions of human nature in which it is imagined that humans are innately good and kind. In reality, anarchists held that humans were defined by two main distinct tendencies: struggle/strife and sociability/solidarity.[[#26CafieroRevolution58Ma|26]] Malatesta thought that humans possessed both the “harsh instinct of wanting to predominate and to profit at the expense of others” and “another feeling which draws him closer to his neighbor, the feeling of sympathy, tolerance, of love.”[[#27ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|27]] As a result, human history contained “violence, wars, carnage (besides the ruthless exploitation of the labor of others) and innumerable tyrannies and slavery” alongside “mutual aid, unceasing and voluntary exchange of services, affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[[#28MalatestaLifeandIdeas6|28]] This position was shared by Kropotkin, who wrote in his ''Ethics'' that there are “two sets of diametrically opposed feelings which exist in man. . . . In one set are the feelings which induce man to subdue other men in order to utilize them for his individual ends, while those in the other set induce human beings to unite for attaining common ends by common effort: the first answering to that fundamental need of human nature—struggle, and the second representing another equally fundamental tendency—the desire of unity and mutual sympathy.”[[#29KropotkinEthics22Seea|29]]
+Call the police!
-'''The Theory of Practice'''
+I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services. Oh, our hero is at a bakery. Now they are at a flower market. Oh, now they need an ambulance, holiday over! The phrases are like the names scientists come up with for things, almost useless but better than nothing, I suppose.
-One of the main processes that modifies and develops the raw materials of human nature is human activity itself. This makes fundamental social change possible. If humans are conscious creatures who are able to modify themselves significantly through activity, then how humans are today is not inevitable or fixed but something that they can consciously change themselves. Human activity is conceptualized by anarchist social theory in terms of practice. By practice I mean the process whereby people with particular consciousness engage in activity—deploy their ''capacities'' to satisfy a psychological ''drive''—and through doing so, change the world and themselves simultaneously.
+I am starting to really need a wee. I have asked Urla how to broach the subject and tried to convince her to tell Amos she needs to go so that we both can because I do not want to. I am just going to hold on until we stop, whenever that is, nightfall, which won’t actually fall but just become a state that we suddenly find ourselves in at some point in the unforeseeable future. By midnight the sun will just about disappear for a few hours.
-A ''capacity'' is a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be, such as playing tennis or being physically fit. It is composed of two elements: (a) a set of external conditions which enable a person to do and/or be certain things, and (b) a set of internal abilities which the person requires in order to be able to take advantage of said external conditions. For example, a person’s capacity to play tennis consists of external conditions like a tennis court, a tennis racket, someone to play against, and so on. Internally, it consists of abilities such as being able to hold a racket, hit a ball, and know the rules of the game. In the absence of either the external or internal conditions, a person lacks the real possibility to achieve the doing of playing tennis and therefore lacks the capacity to play. A ''drive'', in comparison, is a person’s particular desires, intentions, motivations, goals, values, or concerns—such as wanting to play tennis.[[#30Thisinterpretationofcapac|30]]
+==== THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE ====
-Anarchists used a variety of different terms to describe this process. They mostly referred to the deployment of “capacities,” “powers,” or “capabilities” in order to satisfy “drives,” “urges,” “wants,” “desires,” or “needs.”[[#31ForexamplesseeBakuninPo|31]] Malatesta, for example, wrote that “social life became the necessary condition of man’s existence, in consequence of his capacity to modify his external surroundings and adapt them to his own wants, by the exercise of his primeval powers in co-operation with a greater or less number of associates. His desires have multiplied with the means of satisfying them, and they have become needs.”[[#32MalatestaMethodofFreedom|32]] In order to avoid confusion, I shall generally refer to capacities and drives.
+The command to make the dogs stop is extremely satisfying. They say ‘aaahhh’ really loud just like that, like letting out a massive sigh. The dogs lose momentum and the sleds come to a prompt but smooth halt, proportionate to the length of the sigh/command. Aaaaaaahhhhhhh. We did not head off until the afternoon today so we have had a full seven-hour stint without breaks. It was about eight in the evening when we stopped, very hungry and sore. I was almost definitely sure my period had leaked in my salopettes but no one could tell through the thickness so it was fine. Bit of a panic as to what to do but we have now figured out the toilet situation. One of us holds up a piece of tarpaulin while the other goes, but we have not yet found an explanation for Umik and Amos for the hysterics that Urla goes into as I try to take care of my Mooncup discreetly.
-As humans exercise their capacities to satisfy their drives, they continually develop and shape their existing capacities and drives, while also developing entirely new ones. A person who frequently plays the guitar will become better at playing a particular chord and finds their preexisting motivation to play grows. They learn whole new guitar techniques and discover drives that they did not have when they started, such as the desire to play heavy metal. As Alexander Berkman wrote, “the satisfaction of our wants creates new needs, gives birth to new desires and aspirations.”[[#33AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|33]] Were they to stop playing, their capacity to play guitar would diminish over time along, perhaps, with their inclination to do so. Capacities and drives are not fixed or static, but are rather in constant motion as human action maintains, alters, erodes, destroys, and creates them over time. When humans produce anything, they engage in an act of double-production. They simultaneously produce a particular thing, such as a good or service, and the capacities and drives exercised, developed, or created during the activity of production itself. When people engage in practice, they are also changing themselves. This theory can be seen in Kropotkin’s advocacy of “teaching which, by the practice of the hand on wood, stone, metal, will speak to the brain and help to develop it” and thereby produce a child whose brain is “developed at once by the work of hand and mind.”[[#34KropotkinDirectStruggle|34]]
+It makes me think about the Inuit relationship to the land, how consciously gentle they are to it, how aware they are that every single human being leaves an imprint, a mark on the land behind itself. Out on the ice with no plumbing and no soil this becomes stark. Every time you have to expel your waste a mark is left in the sparkling white snow and that impact is made so very concrete. Starting from our beginning anyone could track us right to where we end no matter how hard we try to leave everything in this place as we found it, could follow our paw marks and scratches and dug-up snow and buried bones.
-Engaging in practice not only affects a person’s capacities and drives, but also has a significant impact on their consciousness. Learning music theory will not only, for example, make us better at reading sheet music or acquire the motivation to learn more about the subject. It also changes how we experience, conceptualize, and understand music—or life in general—such as noticing a feature of a song or thinking of oneself as a person of culture and sophistication.
+The two tents Amos has look so tiny and bright against the vast white of the ice; accidental, futile, defiant, out-of-depth. Like a single plant clinging to the side of a cliff. We are sharing a one-man between the two of us, which at least guarantees maximum body heat exchange. Without the swooshing sound the moving sleds make, and with the dogs all panting and sleeping, this place is eeriesilent. Apart from when the wind makes the tents crackle, their taut skins whipping frantically. The quiet is ominous; we all feel it, the act of writing this itself feels like pathetic fallacy. But there is nothing but us for miles around, the nearest town is the one we headed off from. Urla says polar bears never come this far south, so not to worry too much about attracting them with my blood. It had not occurred to me to worry until she said.
-This is not to say that anarchists viewed the process of development as automatic or predetermined. Different people can develop different drives in response to the exact same kinds of practice. One person might eat dark chocolate and want to consume it daily, while another wants to avoid it at all costs. Two people can read the same book and develop distinct thoughts and feelings in response to it. Despite this, generalizations can still be made, such as the fact that people socialized to reproduce patriarchal gender roles will in general do so or that the activity of being a member of the Ku Klux Klan or the police (or both) will, in general, bring out the worst in someone.
+Urla got a really great interview with Amos today. She did all the speaking, of course, with me filming. We watched it back and Urla translated it for me. He talks about being out on the ice, especially alone (he does most of his trips without Umik but he brings Genen).
-This theory of practice can be clearly seen in the writings of Bakunin. He wrote that “all civilization, with all the marvels of industry, science, and the arts; with all the developments of humanity—religious, esthetic, philosophic, political, economic, and social” was created by humans through “the exercise of an active power . . . which tends to assimilate and transform the external world in accordance with everyone’s needs.”[[#35BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|35]] Bakunin thought that, as humans exercise their capacities, they develop them. Whereas “ants, bees, beavers, and other animals which live in societies do now precisely the same thing which they were doing 3,000 years ago,” humans have developed their powers such that they have invented new technology and gone from living in “huts” and using bows or spears to building “palaces” and manufacturing guns and artillery.[[#36BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|36]]
+I took it so that he was sat cross-legged on the ice with Genen, with nothing else in shot. It was almost perfect, like it encapsulated this ethereal feeling we have both tried and failed to describe: something just less than emptiness, a white collage.
-Such processes of development are, of course, not an entirely individual matter. Humans are, in Malatesta’s words, “a social animal whose existence depends on the continued physical and spiritual relations between human beings,” which are “based either on affinity, solidarity and love, or on hostility and struggle.”[[#37MalatestaLifeandIdeas6|37]] Humans experience life immersed in the actions, emotions, and ideas of other people, which in turn conditions and alters how people develop as individuals. A child will be taught to read and write by adults who are already literate, while a dancer may develop the desire to dance in a new style after watching a ballet performance. We adopt a particular perspective on the world due to reading books written by other people or by thinking with concepts that have been collectively produced and reproduced by our culture.[[#38BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|38]]
+What Thoreau said: in wildness is the preservation of the world. He is often misquoted as having said wilderness, but he meant pure wild-ness. Not wilderness in the sense you usually conceive it, a space set aside to be chaotic or fierce or biodiverse. He meant it in the sense of ‘wild’ as in ‘self-will’ in the past participle. Like looking out over the ocean, or into space, a blank and human-void place, and feeling tiny; this is what Thoreau meant. The very opposite of culture or civilisation.
-What capacities, drives, and consciousness people develop varies across social and historical contexts. The capacity to sail a longboat and the drive to die heroically in battle so that you will go to Valhalla developed from living as a warrior in a ninth-century Norse society. These traits are not widespread in modern Nordic societies because people are no longer engaging in that sort of Viking practice. Instead, people engage in practices that develop their capacity to assemble flat-pack furniture or their drive to go to melodic death metal concerts. The social and historical situation in which one lives also determines how universal aspects of human nature are experienced. For example, the universal drive of hunger may be experienced as hunger for beef burgers in a modern North American fast food restaurant, but as hunger for seal meat in a nineteenth-century Inuit house.
+It is an overwhelming feeling because it reminds you of how you are not like it; vast, indifferent, unfathomable. The ice will erase you. When you and everything living here leave, the ice will swallow up all of your traces. No symbols at all. You. Not you.
-Anarchist authors emphasized these points again and again. They generally conceptualized human history in terms of a series of economic periods characterized by specific kinds of technology and ways of organizing production. Their descriptive model held that humans had gone from living in hunter-gatherer societies to living in ancient agricultural societies based on slavery, feudal agricultural societies based on serfdom, and finally modern industrial societies based on wage labor.[[#39BakuninSelectedWritings|39]] This view of history included an awareness of the fact that European colonialism, and so the development of industrial societies, involved the enslavement of Black people.[[#40KropotkinDirectStruggle|40]] Anarchists were also aware that hunter-gatherer societies existed at the same time as industrial societies.[[#41BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|41]]
+The ice sheet refuses human cartography utterly. It is an empty and markless expanse with nothing to anchor the lines of a map to. Well, probably there are glaciologists who can map it in some way, density of ice maybe, accumulation of atmospheric particles perhaps, but this can only be seen with a very specific kind of vision. An esoteric landscape does not help a person to find their way if they are lost; you could walk from the centre of here and never find your way again.
-Anarchists inherited the broad model of human history as a series of economic stages from the French and Scottish Enlightenment and read it in early anthropology.[[#42Foranoverviewofhowthis|42]] Although the specifics of this model are outdated in light of the latest research, they nonetheless highlight what anarchists thought about capacities, drives, and consciousness. Different economic systems were constituted by specific kinds of practice, such as hunting with a bow and arrow as a nomad, collecting the harvest as a peasant, or working in a car factory as a wage laborer, and so developed distinct characteristics within people. This way of thinking can especially be seen in anarchist discussions of drives. Luigi Galleani, for example, thought that when a human develops themselves they acquire “a series of ever-more, growing and varied needs claiming satisfaction.”[[#43LuigiGalleaniTheEndofA|43]] These “needs vary, not only according to time and place, but also according to the temperament, disposition, and development of each individual.”[[#44GalleaniEndofAnarchism|44]] He wrote,
+It makes me feel light-headed, this nullification, if I stand and look out into the expanse. But it is not like a paralysing onset of agoraphobia; instead it is the jolt of a sudden release, the severing of an anchor. It is so not at all like home, where cartography is inescapable, knitted into the soil, and there is no chance to get lost, not really. ''This is a place for walking, this is not, Welcome to the County of Worcestershire, Private Property, Do Not Walk On The Grass.''
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">A farmer who lives in an Alpine valley, in the present conditions of his development, may have satisfied all his needs—eaten, drunk, and rested to his heart’s content; while a worker who lives in London, in Paris, or in Berlin, may willingly give up a quarter of his salary and several hours of his rest, in order to satisfy a whole category of needs totally unknown to the farmer stranded among the gorges of the Alps or the peaks of the Apennine mountains—to spend an hour of intense and moving life at the theater, at the museum or at the library, to buy a recently published book or the latest issue of a newspaper, to enjoy a performance of Wagner or a lecture at the Sorbonne.[[#45GalleaniEndofAnarchism|45]]</div>
+I asked Amos if he thinks we are on course to get there in time for the ferry. He just said immaqa, which kind of means maybe and is the catchphrase of Greenland. Bodes well. Most methods of transport here only happen on a weekly basis.
-The social environment in which capacities, drives, and consciousness develop is itself produced by practice. Society is the totality of social relations that individual and collective actions continuously constitute, reproduce, and transform. As Bakunin noted, “the real life of society, at every instant of its existence, is nothing but the sum total of all the lives, developments, relations, and actions of all the individuals comprising it.”[[#46BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|46]] Kropotkin likewise held that “humanity is not a rolling ball, nor even a marching column. It is a whole that evolves simultaneously in the multitude of millions of which it is composed. . . . The fact is that each phase of development of society is a resultant of all the activities of the intellects which compose that society; it bears the imprint of all those millions of wills.”[[#47KropotkinFugitiveWritings|47]] An implication of this, as Malatesta saw, is that social action “is not the negation, nor the complement of individual initiative, but it is the sum total of the initiatives, thoughts and actions of all the individuals composing society: a result which, other things equal, is more or less great according as the individual forces tend toward the same aim, or are divergent and opposed.”[[#48MalatestaMethodofFreedom|48]]
+==== ON BEING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO MY SEX ====
-Imagine a group of hunters who cooperate to find and kill animals for food. During this process, these hunters produce social relations among themselves, such as the most experienced member leading the hunt or everyone singing a song in victory afterward. The social relations that collective practice produce, in turn, determine the nature of the practice, since the practice is itself performed through these social relations. How hunters hunt both produces the social relation of singing songs in victory and is altered by this social relation. Importantly, collective practice is not necessarily friendly or egalitarian practice. The slave master owns and controls the slave. They nonetheless both engage in the collective practice of a cotton plantation, albeit in very different roles.
+Sledding across all this snow it kind of feels like we are doing an antithetical version of messianic explorer Robert Falcon Scott’s Antarctica expedition. I watched the Herbert Ponting documentary for inspiration before we left England. At the beginning there is a slide with a quote from King George V along to some jolly colonial-era trumpeting. King George said, I WISH THAT EVERY BRITISH BOY COULD SEE THIS FILM FOR IT WOULD HELP TO FOSTER THE SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE ON WHICH THE EMPIRE WAS FOUNDED.
-This interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice. They enable it by developing in people the necessary internal abilities, drives, and consciousness for practice and by producing many of the external conditions that the exercise of the internal abilities is preconditioned on. They teach people how to hunt and they organize the manufacture of hunting equipment. Social structures constrain practice by imposing limits and exerting pressure on which and how capacities are deployed, what drives are satisfied, and the direction in which new capacities, drives, and consciousness are developed. A hunter is unlikely to develop the desire to become a vegetarian.
+I wanted some of that spirit, even being of the 50 per cent already excluded by KG. Positioning myself as male again; my masculine counterpart who lives in my brain, appending a fraud penis so I can traverse Scott’s Antarctica in my imagination.
-Social structures are relatively stable, but they are not fixed entities. They are processes reproduced over time by the practice of humans, who are continually modifying themselves through action, and being modified by the action of others. In Bakunin’s words, “every man . . . is nothing else but the result of the countless actions, circumstances, and conditions, material and social, which continue shaping him as long as he lives.”[[#49BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|49]] Berkman also emphasized the manner in which people are shaped by simultaneous three-way interactions between social structures, consciousness, and their actions: “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are.”[[#50BerkmanAnarchism99|50]]
+We hunt and shoot some seals, but we have to feed the dogs that way so it is not too bad of us. They introduce me to the camp mascot, the black cat Nigger, at which point I am reminded of the terrible inconsistencies of their moral vision. And then they start to anthropomorphise the seals, which is kind of sweet, oh, nice guys, right? But we get all fond of this one seal and her pup, who is too fat and small to clamber out onto the ice when some killer whales chase it because they are hungry. Then we harpoon the killer whales to rescue the baby. Then we sit down to a bowl of seal stew.
-These changes to the humans that compose the social structure can, in turn, lead to the modification of the social structure itself. The group of hunters who sing songs to celebrate could, over time, become primarily concerned with their music and sing more often during hunts. They could even create a whole new social structure, such as deciding to form a band. As Rocker noted, “every form of his social existence, every social institution . . . is the work of men and can be changed by human will and action or made to serve new ends.”[[#51RockerNationalismandCult|51]]
+Scott and his men died to put a flag at the South Pole. This is where the fine line between exploration and imperialism was crossed. The expedition was not an exercise in curiosity and adventure but a race of nationalistic pride. Men just love to stick their flags in places. North Pole, South Pole, on the seabed underneath the North Pole, on the tops of mountains, on the moon. Like territorial animals pissing on things.
-The kinds of practice that people within social structures engage in is significantly determined by the social structure in question, due to its enabling and constraining aspects. People engage in the practices that turn them into people capable of, and driven to, reproduce the social structure itself. In Malatesta’s words: “Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are.”[[#52MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|52]] Given this, “man, like all living beings, adapts and habituates himself to the conditions in which he lives, and transmits by inheritance his acquired habits. Thus being born and having lived in bondage, being the descendant of a long line of slaves, man . . . believed that slavery was an essential condition of life, and liberty seemed to him an impossible thing.”[[#53MalatestaMethodofFreedom|53]] Social structures that consistently shape people in this manner come to be dominant structures when they underpin the reproduction and relative stability of the society in which they are embedded.
+Annie Smith Peck was a mountaineer who beat Indiana Jones to the summit of Mount Coropuna and stuck a ‘votes for women’ flag on the top of it. She was one of a handful of female explorers to be recognised for her success. Okay, ladies, Annie Smith Peck can have that one, although she is a ‘superwoman’ so don’t you mere mortal women go getting any ideas.
-Anarchist authors disagreed with one another about which dominant structures played the most important role in history or contemporary society. They also had distinct views on how to conceptualize the manner in which dominant structures interact with, shape, and mutually constitute one another. A significant number of historical anarchists endorsed various forms of economic determinism. Malatesta, who would later reject economic determinism, wrote in 1884 that, since “man’s primary need and the essential prerequisite of existence is that he is able to eat, it is only natural that the character of a society is determined primarily by the manner in which man secures the means of survival, how wealth is produced and distributed.”[[#54MalatestaMethodofFreedom|54]] He went so far as to claim that “''the economic question is fundamental'' in Sociology” and “other matters—political, religious, etc.—are merely its reflections, perhaps even the shadows it casts.”[[#55MalatestaMethodofFreedom|55]] If “political institutions and moral sentiments derive their raison d’être from economic conditions,” then it followed that “''economic inequality is the source of all moral, intellectual, political, etc. inequalities''.”[[#56MalatestaMethodofFreedom|56]]
+People go mad for that stuff still now, this boyish British Peter Pan nostalgia for exploration and empire. Scouting and wilderness techniques and Bear Grylls, the zealous Christian outdoorsman on the Discovery Channel. When it came out ''Scouting for Boys'' was only beaten as a bestseller by the Bible. It actually came out after the imperial age of Scott and Shackleton when British masculinity was feeling threatened by the waning strength of empire and the rise of the women’s rights movement. The emasculation of men. Which is maybe what the current resurgence of Mountain Man documentaries on television is all about. And they made Bear Grylls the new Chief Scout.
-Anarchists who advocated economic determinism appear to have done so due to the influence of inaccurate interpretations of Marx’s theory of history, which were popularized by socialist parties at the time. In 1887, the American anarchist Albert Parsons claimed that “the mode and manner of procuring our livelihood affects our whole life; the all-pervading cause is economic . . . and social institutions of every kind and degree result from, grow out of, and are created by the economic or industrial regulations of society.”[[#57AlbertParsonsAnarchismI|57]] The fact that Parsons was influenced by Marx can be seen in the fact that he quotes large sections of Marx’s ''Capital ''and ''Manifesto of the Communist Party''.[[#58AlbertParsonsAnarchism2|58]] Parsons was not unique in this respect. Rocker claimed that, in London during the 1880s, “the Jewish anarchists at that time and for some time after accepted the idea of economic materialism” and “the Marxist conception of history.”[[#59RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|59]] Malatesta noted in 1897 that, prior to the period in which anarchists discarded the mistakes of Marxism, they had been “more consistent or even more orthodox advocates” of Marxist theory “than those who professed to be Marxists and, perhaps, than Marx himself.”[[#60ErricoMalatestaALongand|60]] Elsewhere, he claimed that in Italy during the early 1870s, “though none of us had read Marx, we were still too Marxist” due to the influence of Bakunin’s views on political economy and history.[[#61MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|61]] The Italian anarchist Cafiero subsequently read Marx while in prison and published a summary of Marx’s ''Capital ''in 1879,'' ''which Marx himself approved of.[[#62NunzioPerniconeItalianAn|62]]
+I want my documentary to be the opposite of colonial exploitation. I want it to explore, quietly, without imprinting. To be porous to all things without contaminating. I want it to be conscious of its tracks in the snow (I did get footage of this to use to that purpose).
-Bakunin had a somewhat ambivalent attitude toward what he regarded as Marx’s social theory. In 1872, he simultaneously praised Marx for drawing attention to the importance of economic factors in history, while arguing that Marx wrongly ignored “other elements in history, such as the effect—obvious though it is—of political, judicial and religious institutions on the economic situation.”[[#63BakuninSelectedWritings|63]] This included the manner in which the temperament of specific cultures, which were “the product of a host of ethnographic, climatological and economic, as well as historical causes . . . exert a considerable influence over the destinies and even the development of a country’s economic forces, outside and independent of its economic conditions.”[[#64BakuninSelectedWritings|64]] Rocker and Kropotkin later developed a model in which a range of social structures—economic, political, religious, cultural etc.—were taken to mutually determine one another but no social structure or causal factor was thought to be necessarily primary. Which causal factor played the most important role varied among different moments and so could only be established through empirical investigation on a case-by-case basis.[[#65RockerNationalismandCult|65]]
+==== THE RESURRECTION OF RACHEL CARSON ====
-Irrespective of where anarchists stood on the question of economic determinism, they thought in terms of multicausal explanations in which events were the products of the relations between several social structures. Goldman, for example, insisted in 1910 that “it would be one-sided and extremely superficial to maintain that the economic factor is the only cause of prostitution. There are others no less important and vital,” such as gender relations or cultural norms around sex.[[#66GoldmanRedEmma181|66]] Rocker similarly argued that “all social phenomena are the result of a series of various causes, in most cases so inwardly related that it is quite impossible clearly to separate one from the other. We are always dealing with the interplay of various causes.”[[#67RockerNationalismandCult|67]]
+Today I ride with Genen again. I go to the furthest places at times like this, when I am stationary in transit and alone with just my own head. I fell asleep and had a dream about Rachel Carson. I was in the ‘woods’ that are near my house, which really is just a square of lank trees they did not cut down when they built the estate. It is also laced with radon. It is kind of a recreational area for the housing estate, where everyone walks their dogs. It stinks of dog shit. Mum told me not to play in there when I was young in case it somehow got in my eyes and I got blinded by the shit.
-This commitment to multicausality accompanied the view that dominant structures do not ever include or exhaust all the elements that constitute a particular society. Rather, they exist alongside a wide variety of less influential or smaller social structures that are constituted by and reproduced through distinct kinds of practice and their accompanying capacities, drives, and consciousness. These smaller social structures include ways of life as diverse as Romanticism, punk, Scientology, and the microstructure of a particular family. It is because of the existence of these less influential or smaller social structures that it is possible for alternative practices to emerge and modify or replace existing dominant structures. As Kropotkin argued, even within capitalist societies based on hierarchical social relations, production for profit, and economic competition, there are also numerous instances of people organizing horizontally to satisfy each other’s needs and engage in mutual aid. Such voluntary associations are “the seeds” of a “new life.”[[#68KropotkinModernScience3|68]] I will describe these forces that are fundamentally at odds with existing dominant structures as ''radical'': if universalized they would transform society and replace one dominant structure with another. The drive to not oppress women, for instance, is radical within a patriarchal society because its universalization is incompatible with the ongoing existence of patriarchy.[[#69Thislanguageisborrowedfr|69]]
+I was in the woods, standing in the woods and being very still because I could hear buzzing and I was trying to figure out which way not to walk. Then next to me what I had taken for a very ordinary mound of undergrowth started to move. It began to rise in the horizontal shape of a human body. The human shape pulled up all the turf around it as it began to sit up, plucking the plant roots out of the soil like snapping violin strings. They made a noise like that, pluck pluck pluck. When the human shape had sat up it started to brush itself down, its clothes caked in mud and its skin smeared with dirt and dog shit. I recognised Rachel Carson even though I don’t know what she looks like and her face was just a smudge with lichen for eyes.
-Anarchists held that a crucial factor in the modification or replacement of dominant structures are the attempts by both dominant and oppressed groups to shape society in their interests. Kropotkin noted that “history is nothing but a struggle between the rulers and the ruled, the oppressors and the oppressed.”[[#70KropotkinDirectStruggle|70]] Malatesta likewise held that “through a most complicated series of struggles of every description, of invasions, wars, rebellions, repressions, concessions won by struggle, associations of the oppressed united for defense and of the conquerors for attack, we have arrived at the present state of society.”[[#71MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|71]] Such conflicts between the oppressors and the oppressed are conflicts over how practice, and so the development of capacities, drives, and consciousness, is organized. They are, in short, struggles to determine what kinds of humans society produces.
+‘Pigeons are suddenly dropping out of the sky dead.’
-Ultimately, according to anarchists, to change society, it is necessary to engage in forms of practice that develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness and thereby replace existing dominant social structures with alternative social structures that produce fundamentally different kinds of people. This, of course, raises the question: why did anarchists think society should be changed, and what did they want it changed into?
+I was not sure if she was addressing me. It was hard to tell what way her lichen eyes were facing, but her head was turned away from me anyway. Then I woke up from pins and needles because Genen was sat with his femur digging into my shin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#12|1]]. For previous reconstructions of the theory of practice, see Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, ''We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism'' (London: Pluto Press, 2014), 21–59; Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 40–59.</div>
+==== FIRST FOOTPRINTS IN THE FRESH SNOW ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#22|2]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''57, 60–68; Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''89–92, 100–101, 125; Peter Kropotkin, ''Ethics: Origin and Development ''(London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1924), 1, 3–4;'' ''Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 137; Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''38, 132. For examples of Christian anarchists who rejected materialism, see Peter Ryley, ''Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain ''(New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 135–47.</div>
+Every day here is just a slight variation on the first, differentiated by switching sledges, sluggish topics of conversation, and a sky that will sometimes bleed dramatically pink to orange like the belly of a rainbow trout. Sometimes there are strong winds. The constants are the smell of the dogs, wincing at the whip-crack, tensing for the snowdrifts, pins and needles, and the white nothing. I am trying to stay proactive and read but I am kind of too bored to concentrate.
-[[#32|3]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 54.
+A THOUGHT: This nothingness is going to be a very prominent part of the trip. Lots and lots of sitting around, waiting on things, being in transit, but out on the ice like on the ocean this is intensified, your own small contours marked out against the vastness of ether, so that you look at your hands out in front of you and follow the line of your fingers up and down and think, ''I end here, all of me fills up this container that is my body.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#42|4]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 3. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 163; Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993),'' ''100–104; Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 3–4.</div>
+Like proprioception. I keep on thinking that this is the closest I will ever come to moonwalking. There are parallels: the same bulky outerwear, the same being-in-emptiness. Yes, it is almost like moonwalking.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#52|5]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''39. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 57, 69, 83–91; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''125.</div>
+All day I was with Urla and we did not speak more than ten words. Today is day nine, entries are sparse because, mostly, I had nothing to say. It is hard to think with no stimulation. Doing nothing is exhausting. We have slipped into this kind of mental hibernation, except Umik and Amos, who have their tasks to occupy them. Mostly I have been sleeping lots and dreaming vividly. And the ice has saturated my dreams. After a while nothingness becomes potent and textured because of the sense of what is absent. Things are evoked more than if they were actually there: colours, heights, depths. Slight changes in the monochrome landscape come out in relief. When the ice-mountains precipitate onto the horizon they appear as a whisper and disappear as quietly. The horizon is the only spatial marker and it is always on the horizon. We are perpetually at the centre of nothing.
-[[#62|6]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 54.
+It feels like trespassing to be alive in a place that is not dead but is inexistence, negation of potentiality. Anything alive is only ever passing through. I cannot put a word on it and when I try I can only think ‘primordial’, but that word entails potential because a beginning initiates a narrative. The one I want is the very opposite of origin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#72|7]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 155.</div>
+Words are getting harder and I am starting to think like the ice; without contrast there is no definition. The ice is self-referential and there is no way into the tautology. I cannot get my bearings if there is nothing to grasp.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#82|8]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 232,'' ''217.</div>
+==== THESE ARE SHINING PARTS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#92|9]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), xxx.</div>
+I was sorry to leave Umik behind to look after the dogs and sleds. We all hugged goodbye awkwardly, which made him visibly uncomfortable. It felt strange to be walking, and to be walking off the packed snow. I thought permafrost was a permanent frost that kept the ground crispy, but Amos explained it is underneath the ground, and keeps the water up so everything is actually wet and boggy. It was a difficult walk with all the sucking mud, and the weight of our rucksacks. It got a bit warm, even with the wind, so we had to take our coats off, but the wet brings all the insects out and some of them were biting through our thinner sleeves.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#102|10]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''162. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''76.</div>
+I had managed to walk all that way without looking up much from where my feet were going and what insects I was slapping into my skin so it did not even occur to me that the ice was gone until we started driving. Amos was so excited to be in a car, he drove the whole way with the window down and his arm resting on the door, which made it cold in the back but neither of us wanted to say anything. He was talking to his brother, who picked us up in his 4x4, all animated, which suited me because I like to zone out when people are talking a language I do not understand.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#112|11]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937),'' ''25, 26.</div>
+Then I started to look out of the window and it hit me how colourful everything was. Not really objectively, but in such contrast it nearly hurt my eyes. All this space just mossy and vaguely pink and it just went on and on and on. It hardly changed for the whole journey, flickering on in muted colours, and in front and behind the road was a thin wisp existing through it. The only shape to change was the twisting spine of the mountains.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#122|12]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''85–86, 92–93, 100; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''19, 121–22, 446–47, 456; Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''184; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 6, 21.</div>
+Wilderness, vast open spaces untouched and just left be. Not a reserve portioned off as a space where you are supposed to go and be recreational. It made me think of Alaska, and how much left I have to see, and how out here it is easy to imagine yourself alone and happy in it.
-[[#131|13]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''24.
+As I watched the landscape thaw I thought I felt my spirit thawing a little with it. As if there was something deep inside me that was frozen and had maybe always been frozen and like an Alaskan wood frog frozen dormant for winter it was beginning to wake up to the world again with the spring.
-[[#141|14]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''67.
+A RECURRING FEELING: getting excited like forgetting something and then remembering you already did it, like I was waiting for a phone call from Mum asking me what the hell I thought I was doing, young lady, and to come home right now, but realising, nope, she was not going to.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#151|15]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''84–85,'' ''92–94, 100–101, 108.</div>
+Amos was really apologetic about leaving us at the hostel and seemed genuinely distressed that he did not have room to accommodate us, which was very sweet. We gave him money, which he took with some sort of feigned coaxing; he kept saying, ‘Lovely girls, lovely girls.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#161|16]]. Quoted in John Clark, “An Introduction to Reclus’ Social Thought” in Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''3.</div>
+Kangerlussuaq was only built quite recently by America for the airport. The hostel seems like it is made from slotted-together foam board, partition walls. Like knocking into it would just make it collapse. All of the furniture looks like it was bought from Staples and the mattresses are made from foam.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#171|17]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''3.</div>
+There is a television with American cable and the Discovery Channel. I am taking notes from Bear Grylls for the documentary, both for handy tips and for a character profile of the kind of idea of ‘man and wild’ I keep going on about. As though modern feminism is more ubiquitous than ever before (or so it seems to me, as maybe it does to each new generation) and in backlash, with renewed fanaticism, a strain of hyper-masculinity has occurred. Compensating; which men have always liked to do!
-[[#181|18]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''155.
+==== THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ENDURING THE MOST DRAMATIC HARDSHIPS YOU CAN IMAGINE ====
-[[#191|19]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''155.
+''INT. – Erin sits on the corner of a bed with a notebook and pen in hand facing a television – outdoor survivalist show with presenter Bear Grylls – interior is sparse: desk, table, chair, window, rucksacks and possessions spilt on the floor – Erin turns to notice camera and snorts – zoom in on her face – then on television screen – Bear Grylls is hoisting himself up a waterfall –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#201|20]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution ''(Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006),'' ''228.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''BEAR GRYLLS''' (ON SCREEN) (YELLING): SURVIVAL can be summed up in three words (PAUSE) Never. Give. Up.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#211|21]]. Peter Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside,” ''The Newcastle Daily Chronicle'', February 20, 1895.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera pans back to Erin –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#221|22]]. Kropotkin, “Proposed Communist Settlement.” See also Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''77–78.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (PUTTING ON AN IMPRESSIVE IMITATION): I have penetrated every crevice of the planet and conquered the WORST nature can haul at me. There is nowhere I haven’t taken on. I’m going to show you the skills I invented that you need to be as man as I am. And survive anywhere on this unforgiving planet</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#231|23]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 438. See also, 73.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Urla is laughing behind camera – camera back to TV screen – zooms in and out erratically on presenter struggling against onslaught of water –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#241|24]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''402. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''149–50, 153–54, 330–31; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''105.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' If you’re stranded in the wilderness you need a weapon. Ideally a rifle. If you don’t have a rifle nature will sometimes throw you a rope in the form of a makeshift weapon. Behold. For example</div>
-[[#251|25]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'', 27.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin flourishes her pen to the camera –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#261|26]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''5–8; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''121.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' This thousand-year-old arrowhead I found on the floor. I will tie it to a stick with the cord from my parachute. If you don’t have an arrowhead or a parachute cord, use your initiative. Initiative is man’s best weapon</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#271|27]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 65–6.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she winks – Urla laughs –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#281|28]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''65,'' ''68.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I am on a journey of SURVIVAL. (THROWS BACK HER HEAD AS SHE SHOUTS) Every step of this journey is me. Man. Surviving. Not dying. Never succumbing to the weakness that is death</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#291|29]]. Kropotkin, ''Ethics'','' ''22. See also Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 38–39.</div>
+==== CUT TO – ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#301|30]]. This interpretation of capacities and drives is based on Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics'', 41–9; Paul Raekstad, ''Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism'' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 23–41.</div>
+''INT. – still in same interior but props have moved – belongings piled in corner – Erin has T-shirt tied to her head turban style and is brandishing a broom handle like a scythe –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#311|31]]. For examples see Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''86–88, 93–95; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 21, 26, 85; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007),'' ''137–8, 206; ''Direct Struggle'','' ''651–52.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN'''(GESTICULATING BROOMSTICK ON EMPHASISED WORDS): The tropics are home to most of the plants and animals in the world, most of which are trying to KILL YOU. Not every creature in the jungle wants to kill you. Instead these ones want to EAT YOU ALIVE. Sometimes in the jungle it can feel like everything is out to get you. BECAUSE IT IS. Man must reassert his dominance in the jungle. I flick the tarantula off my leg</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#321|32]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''122.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin mimes flicking her leg –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#331|33]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''175.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Petty bug</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#341|34]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 645.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– pan to television – presenter is in a desert, talking with spear-clad barefoot gentleman who is holding up to him the corpse of something furry – pan back to Erin, who is looking at the screen –''</div>
-[[#351|35]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''86.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' If you are stranded in the desert you can expect a visit. FROM DEATH. It would take years to learn all the skills of the sand bushmen but I have done it in a matter of hours. They eat every morsel of the desert hare and respect its soul. I will bite out its liver and leave the rest because its liver contains a vitamin that is vital for preventing something bad I mentioned earlier</div>
-[[#361|36]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''88.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– onscreen presenter passes the carcass back to the sand bushman –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#371|37]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''65.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Take the rest of the carcass. I have no use for it. No, you may NOT have one of my adventure-sports-sponsorship power-bars, Sand Bushman</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#381|38]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''159, 164, 167–68.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera shakes with laughter –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#391|39]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 121; Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 174, 188–91; Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''5–34; Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''44. Kropotkin had a more complicated model but the basic point remains the same. See Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid'', 62–247; Kropotkin, ''Ethics'','' ''17–18; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''276–77.</div>
+==== CUT TO – ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#401|40]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 609–10; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 150, 153; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 125.</div>
+''EXT. FROZEN LAKESIDE – Erin in snow next to a body of frozen water – she is now brandishing a large stick –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#411|41]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 229, 231; Kropotkin, ''Mutual Aid'', 64, 68–69; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 213–18.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Here in the Arctic there are fish under the ice. I have a frozen deer leg so that’s what I’m going to use to smash through the ice. If you don’t have a frozen deer leg, use your initiative. I’m going to make a line using some cord from my parachute. And some other really useful stuff I found in my pocket</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#421|42]]. For an overview of how this view of history developed, see Ronald L. Meek, ''Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought ''(Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 1977), 18–32; Christopher J. Berry, ''The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 91–115; Adam Kuper, ''The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth ''(London: Routledge, 2005), 3–81.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she takes to hitting the ice with the stick –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#431|43]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 43.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#441|44]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 45. See also Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''4; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 122, 456; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''163, 598; ''Conquest of Bread'','' ''137–9.</div>
+=== {{anchor|Topofch02html}} HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH ===
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#451|45]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''44–45.</div>
+==== CONTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE ====
-[[#461|46]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''158.
+I was back standing on the ice sheet in a blizzard. There were two figures in orange jackets with their hoods against the blizzard and goggles on, glaciologists. They were peering over one of those big drills they use to get ice core samples. As the core came up its gradation changed, from glowy green like a nuclear ore on top down to pure white. The glaciologists conferred.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#471|47]]. Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''119–20.</div>
+‘Witnesses described huge bonfires on which the bodies of the birds were burned,’ said Rachel Carson from beside me.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#481|48]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''132–33. See also Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''208.</div>
+I could hear clearly what the glaciologists were saying even though they were very far away.
-[[#491|49]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''95.
+‘The core shows residue,’ said the one. ‘Hmm, yes, they also found it in the underground rivers,’ said the other.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#501|50]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99.</div>
+‘When some of the Eskimos themselves were checked by analysis of fat samples, small residues of DDT were found (0 to 1.9 parts per million).’ Rachel Carson always spoke with no lilt of emphasis in her voice. Not to me or anyone really. Maybe to herself.
-[[#511|51]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''27.
+‘It’s much worse than we thought.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#521|52]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48.</div>
+‘Much worse.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#531|53]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''110. See also Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''272; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''66–68.</div>
+‘The fat samples were taken from people who had left their native villages to enter the United States Public Health Service Hospital in Anchorage for surgery.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#541|54]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 19.</div>
+I asked, ‘Where have the bees gone, Ms Carson?’ But my voice was lost to the wind.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#551|55]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 23.</div>
+‘For their brief stay in civilisation the Eskimos were rewarded with a taint of poison,’ she said instead.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#561|56]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' 24, ''39. For Malatesta’s later rejection of this position see Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 45–57; ''Method of Freedom'', 363–73, 445–48.</div>
+‘Quick, empty it and let’s go.’ The glaciologists emptied their lab pockets into the core hole. There was a pause as they leaned and peered into it, then a succession of plops like pebbles in still water. Then they replaced the core.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#571|57]]. Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 97.</div>
+The noise took me back home to the cul-de-sac between the two lamp-posts that marked the boundary of where I was allowed to play when I was little, where Mum could still see me from the living room as she did the polishing and listened to Boyzone. There is a wall, the side of Marge and Graham’s house, where Charlotte from next door was sat facing it, making the noise, crack crack crack, that the snails made when we would throw them against it if we were bored so their shells burst and their guts spilled out. We would have to kick them down the drain in time before Graham would come out to shout at us when he guessed what we were doing to his wall. Down into the underground sewage, plop plop plop.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#581|58]]. Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism'','' ''22–48.</div>
+When I was little I was fascinated by the sewage system. To get rid of anything all you had to do was flush it down a drain. In the garden there was a drain lid, and if you lifted it you could watch all the things coming through the drains in the house on the way off to wherever they were going. We used to put the dog poo in it then flush the downstairs toilet to send it away. If there was ever any evidence of something bad I had done I would lift up the drain lid, put it inside, run in to flush, then run back, in time to see it being washed into oblivion.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#591|59]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 58.</div>
+One day I sat on the toilet and I jumped up because something had tickled my leg. A snail was sliming its way out of the sparkly white basin. It had come from this elsewhere place and made its way through the plumbing inside our house to the top-floor toilet. This changed something fundamental about how I saw the drains from then on, my own miniature Copernican Revolution. Suddenly the philosophical implications of flushing into the black-hole-void needed to be scrutinised because drains were now not the portal to the place-of-no-return I had thought them, a bit like how Jerry R. Ehman who got the Wow! Signal must have felt, like, ''‘I am not alone something has come out of the void to me wow!’''
-[[#601|60]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 302.
+Maybe in the dream of the glaciologists on the ice sheet I am realising the similar always-there-but-not-appreciated thing that haunted Rachel Carson. That sometimes there are things that need to be spotlit against a stark white backdrop for you to perceive them because when ever present you do not interrogate them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#611|61]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 198–99.</div>
+The Eskimos did not invent the invisible death. We did. The ice sheet is not-so-pure wilderness. You and I can’t see it but the glaciologists can. They can read the core samples like testimonies to our guilt as geomorphic agents, as ushers of the Anthropocene. And of all the corruptions we will leave behind us there is one that will outlive them all. We are the first civilisation on this planet to have made an invisible death that will outlive all relics of all civilisations ever. We made nuclear waste.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#621|62]]. Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''135; Carlo Cafiero, ''Compendium of Capital'', trans. Paul M. Perrone (London: The Anarchist Communist Group, 2020).</div>
+With this comes a responsibility, but how to convey invisible death to the future is a problem unique to our age. Larus told me that some of the guys from the Order of the Dolphin and the Golden Records also worked as part of the Human Interference Task Force. The Task Force was set up to solve the Forever Problem, the problem of relaying warnings at nuclear waste sights to possible future civilisations, possibly as far away as the half-life of plutonium 239, some 24,000 years into the future.
-[[#631|63]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''256.
+They could not use a single language because language is always dying, so they tried to come up with universal symbols: a monolith with warnings in multiple languages, cats that glowed when they got close to nuclear waste sites, invented fables for the future, majorly complex booby traps, and an Atomic Priesthood cult who would pass down the dark secrets to each new generation within their elite.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#641|64]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''256. See also Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'','' ''64–65; Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''142. It is important to note that Bakunin is critiquing a strawman, since Marx held that the economy and other aspects of society mutually determined one another. In later editions of ''Capital'', which appeared just before Bakunin wrote his October 1872 critique,'' ''Marx added a footnote that clarified that during certain historical periods aspects of the superstructure could play a chief causal role, such as politics in ancient Athens and Rome or religion in the Middle Ages. The economy was nonetheless primary since it enabled politics or religion to play a chief part, such as by producing the food necessary for survival. See Karl Marx, ''Capital, A Critique of Political Economy'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(London: Penguin Books, 1990), 175–76n35.</div>
+The waste will survive us. It is our most enduring time capsule, our ugly baby. What does it say about us? What did we do when we discovered its power? Of course we went and made a superweapon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#651|65]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'', 23–41; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 125–28, 183–84, 197–99.</div>
+Since the Cold War the world has existed in equilibrium and this equilibrium is still enough for us to have almost forgotten that it is holding us up. The Nash Equilibrium is the concept that once all sides are armed with nuclear weapons, none has the incentive to disarm or to use their weapons, based on the premise of MUTUAL ASSURED DESTRUCTION, the idea being we are at a point where if one country attacked another, we would all be fucked, so it benefits nobody to do so. But to keep the equilibrium each side’s defences must be taken into account. If one side has more fallout shelters than another, and more of the population could theoretically be spared, then they are unfairly favoured, and the balance is tipped. Because of this there could not be nationwide plans for fallout shelters built by the government during the Cold War. Covert shelters were built, under town halls, in people’s gardens. There are secret underground time capsules all over the Western world. What would a future archaeologist make of them?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#661|66]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''181.</div>
+For the Nash Equilibrium to work each country has to look as though it would blow the shit out of its enemy in retaliation for an attack on the homeland. America has adopted the policy that any attack on America would be responded to with all-out retaliation under any circumstance. Russia take this one step further with their ‘Dead Hand’, which automatically releases all their warheads as soon as an attack is detected by seismic sensors.
-[[#671|67]]. Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture'','' ''28.
+I was on Skype talking to Larus about this and told him that Britain has a peculiar response. We have the Letters of Last Resort, to be opened and read at the end of a chain of events. The British government has been destroyed and the prime minister and the ‘second person’ to the prime minister have been killed. Our submarines float deep in the Atlantic and almost no one on board knows where they are at any given time. The submarines presume the homeland to have been destroyed if a) there have been no naval broadcasts in four hours or b) BBC Radio 4 has stopped broadcasting. In this event the four submarine commanders open the safe inside the safe and read the four handwritten letters from the now-dead prime minister, written the very day that she/he assumed office. Then they have to follow the instructions, which will be one of three things:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#681|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 367. See also 212–15; ''Mutual Aid ''188–89, 219–41.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:1.905cm;">1. blow the shit out of the buggers</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#691|69]]. This language is borrowed from Cox and Nilsen, ''We Make Our Own History'', 42–44, 53.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:1.905cm;">2. spare the blighters</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#701|70]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 611.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:1.905cm;">3. your call, commander</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#711|71]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''44.Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">The letters are destroyed when each prime minister leaves office, so history will never know what was written by them. Larus said that is the most British thing he has ever heard.</div>
-== {{anchor|Chapter3ValuesCritiqueand}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook6}} {{anchor|Chapter3ValuesCritiqueand1}} Chapter 3: Values, Critique, and Vision ==
+I think given our colonial record the submarines probably have on board their own carefully designed time capsules, for the preservation of the nation, something that says WE ARE NOT NUMINOUS OR ERASABLE. Our submarines are called ''Vanguard'', ''Victorious'', ''Vigilant'' and ''Vengeance''. (And who came up with those names?) So, floating portentously in the Atlantic right now, the decision has already been made.
-Anarchists were antistate socialists. They sought the emancipation of humanity and the abolition of all structures of domination and exploitation through the self-emancipation of the working classes. This position was grounded in a set of ethical principles that forms the value system of anarchism, an analysis and critique of existing social relations and structures in terms of their failure to promote these ethical principles, and a vision of alternative, achievable social relations and structures that promote these ethical principles.
+A paradox: what is the point of retaliation if you are dead and gone already and have no way of knowing any better? What is the point of causing immense suffering to the innocent civilians of the enemy?
-'''The Value System'''
+The point is, apparently, ''you can’t exist when we do not''. It is ''we will be remembered''. It is WRATH OF THE EMPIRE.
-Anarchism’s central ethical value is that individuals should lead free lives. Although anarchists focused on the freedom of the individual, they did not conceptualize this freedom in terms of an isolated, abstract entity who stands outside of society. For anarchists, an individual can, given the kind of animal that humans are, only be free if they belong to a community of equals bonded together through relations of solidarity.[[#1MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|1]] As the Black anarchist Lucy Parsons’s put it, “emancipation will inaugurate liberty, equality, fraternity.”[[#2LucyParsonsFreedomEquali|2]] Anarchists viewed the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity as interdependent such that they cannot be understood in isolation from one another. The realization of one of these values can only be achieved through the realization of all three at once.
+I asked Urla if she knew about the Letters of Last Resort and she said no so I told her. She just looked a little confused.
-Anarchists conceptualized freedom in two main ways: not being subject to domination or having the real possibility to do and/or to be. Although anarchist authors consistently valued both of these things, they did not all label them as freedom. Wilson, for example, defined freedom as nondomination, while at the same time arguing that having the real possibility to do and/or to be is important for human development and flourishing.
+‘Didn’t Uncle Larus ask to talk to me?’
-Freedom as nondomination holds that individuals are free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the power to impose their will on them. If a person is subject to the arbitrary power of another then, even if it is not currently being exercised, they are being dominated. To be free is to be able to live in accordance with one’s own will, rather than being subject to the will of another.[[#3Anarchismsharesthisemphasi|3]] In 1869, Bakunin claimed that freedom consists in “the full independence of the will of the individual with respect to the will of others.”[[#4MichaelBakuninTheBasicBa|4]] In the same text, he defines “freedom” as “independence … with respect to all laws that other human wills—collective and isolated [from the collectivity] impose.”[[#5BakuninBasicBakunin124|5]] During his subsequent 1871 lectures to Swiss members of the International, he said that “the negative condition of freedom is that no person owe obedience to another; the individual is free only if his will and his own convictions, and not those of others, determine his acts.”[[#6BakuninBasicBakunin46S|6]] In 1870, Bakunin explicitly connected this idea with nondomination when he advocated “''self-determination''” and “''the fullest human freedom in every direction, without the least interference from any sort of domination''.”[[#7BakuninSelectedWritings1|7]]
+I paused to think about it, and said no, he didn’t mention it, although he went in a rush, which when I thought about it then did seem a little unusual. She looked at me strangely and changed the subject.
-The same position was expressed by other anarchist authors. Wilson referred to the “impulse in men to dominate their fellows, i.e., impose their will upon them and assert their own superiority.”[[#8CharlotteWilsonAnarchistE|8]] She advocated the abolition of domination in favor of freedom such that every person had an equal claim to “direct his life from within by the light of his own consciousness,” rather than be subordinate to “the will of any other individual or collection of individuals.”[[#9WilsonAnarchistEssays54|9]] Galleani similarly defined “the broadest individual autonomy” in terms of “absolute independence from any domination by either a majority or a minority.”[[#10LuigiGalleaniTheEndofA|10]]
+==== WOMEN INTERESTED IN TOPPLING CONSUMER HOLIDAYS ====
-According to the real possibilities view of freedom, an individual becomes more free as what they can do and/or be increases, that is, the activities they can perform and the states they can experience. The possible beings and doings available to a person, and so the extent to which they are free, are a product of (a) the external conditions within their social and natural environment and (b) their internal abilities, which enable them to take advantage of external conditions. In order to have the real possibility to read ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar'','' ''a child must, among many other requirements, know how to read (internal ability), live in a society where ''The Very Hungry Caterpillar ''is produced, and possess a copy of the book (external conditions). As they grow older, they become better at reading (development of internal ability) and acquire a greater number of books (expansion of external conditions). This marks an increase in their freedom, since their range of possible beings and doings has increased. They can now become an expert on the history of the potato or read the ''Poetic Edda''.
+I stood at the bow of the ferry watching the water and eating very Continental-tasting biscuits. It became surreal if you watched it long enough with your chin on the handrail. Like a glassy Rorschach Test, all the icebergs twinned in the water, which was a sky itself, obscured only when a floe passed, or when ice fell from one of the cliff sides and shattered the mirror. There was a cracking sound when this happened, like the noise an ice cube makes when it cracks in a tepid drink.
-An individual’s freedom is restricted when obstacles decrease the number of real possibilities open to them. A slave owner who prevents their slaves from reading, further limits what possibilities they have and thereby makes them even less free. Such obstacles do not have to be directly established by the threat or exercise of violence. The cultural norm that homosexuality is unnatural and immoral can, by itself, limit a person’s opportunity to be gay, due to them internalizing these ideas and sensitizing them to the judgement of others. Crucially, though, obstacles can be removed or overcome. For instance, slaves can rise up and kill their slave masters, or gay people can gain the confidence to be themselves, and not care what homophobes think.
+NUUK: a surreal city. Like Kulusuk but bigger and denser. Buildings are still toy houses but multi-storey and apartment style, set at angles to each other so that they sit in the rock like a doggedly arranged model village, a Playmobil city. Slate grey is the base of everything, it is the colour of the cliffs and the colour of the boulders and the pebbles. Everything in blocks of colour, as if cut and stuck from sugar paper. For the first hour or so in I could not put my finger on what was missing. There are nearly no trees or plants apart from the wiry grass.
-This emphasis on having the actual means to lead a specific kind of life can be seen in Malatesta’s claim in 1884 that “true freedom is not the right but the opportunity, the strength to do what one will” and in his observation, decades later, that “freedom is a hollow word unless it is wedded to ability, which is to say, to the means whereby one can freely carry on his own activity.”[[#11ErricoMalatestaTheMethod|11]] Yet, people’s real possibility to do and/or to be can be restricted through domination by others. Malatesta also wrote that freedom “presupposes that everybody has the means to live and to act without being subjected to the wishes of others.”[[#12MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|12]] As a result, he advocated “the complete destruction of the domination and exploitation of man by man.”[[#13ErricoMalatestaTowardsAn|13]]
+There is a new mall, apparently a point of contention for people, usually dividing the old and the young. Some of the older people see it as Nuuk becoming too ‘European’. Greenland is a country in the midst of change, not least because global warming is melting the ice sheet. Complete melt would mean that resources that were hidden by the ice before are revealed to be reaped. If they could be more self-reliant then they would be able to manage independently from Denmark, which would make them the only Inuit country in the world. But looking further ahead in time there is a chance that the amount of water it would create could turn Greenland into an archipelago. Their Inuit culture would have to change beyond recognition. Could they then be called Inuit?
-Malatesta was not the only anarchist to define freedom as a person’s real possibility to do and/or to be. In 1927, Berkman distinguished between “negative liberty,” which is freedom from something, and “positive freedom,” which is “the opportunity to do, to act.”[[#14AlexanderBerkmanADecade|14]] Two years later, he wrote that “freedom really means opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants. If your freedom does not give you that opportunity, then it does you no good. Real freedom means opportunity and well-being. If it does not mean that, it means nothing.”[[#15AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|15]] His comrade Goldman similarly wrote in 1914 that “true liberty . . . is not a negative thing of being free from something. . . . Real freedom, true liberty is positive: it is freedom to something; it is the liberty to be, to do; in short, the liberty of actual and active opportunity.”[[#16EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|16]]
+Of Urla’s family friends: the daughter, Naaja, is about Umik’s age, she speaks quite good Danish, is a bit shy with me but she looks at Urla with adoration whenever she talks. The dad, Klas, is Danish and the mum, Kalistiina, is Inuit. The inside of their house is interesting because it is like a museum for their hybrid cultures. Lots of fish- and whale-based ornaments, and a cupboard full of weird votive figures that Naaja tells us are made by the family when they have bad feelings, to dispel the feelings. They are eerie, but apparently customary. Some of them are made out of bones and teeth, and what looks like Kinder Egg toy parts. I also keep noticing extravagant fake flower vases in the windows of houses we pass, I suppose because the flora in Greenland is so limited and this makes them a novelty.
-All anarchists thought that one of the main reasons why freedom is valuable is that it is a prerequisite for full human development in the sense of people improving their internal abilities in multiple directions and, in so doing, truly realizing their potential. Rocker claimed that “freedom is not an abstract philosophical concept, but the vital concrete possibility for every human being to bring to full development all the powers, capacities, and talents with which nature has endowed him.”[[#17RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi|17]] Goldman argued that “authority stultifies human development, while full freedom assures it.”[[#18GoldmanRedEmma438See|18]] Elsewhere she declared that “only in freedom can man grow to his full stature. Only in freedom will he learn to think and move, and give the very best in him. Only in freedom will he realize the true force of the social bonds which knit men together, and which are the true foundations of a normal social life.”[[#19GoldmanRedEmma7273|19]]
+==== MANKIND’S MOST NOBLE GOAL: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND UNDERSTANDING ====
-The same position was articulated by anarchists who defined freedom in terms of nondomination. Wilson thought that “the creed of Anarchism is the cultus of Liberty, not for itself, but for what it renders possible. Authority, as exercised by men over their fellows, it holds accursed, depraving those who rule and those who submit, and blocking the path of human progress. Liberty indeed is not all, but it is the foundation of all that is good and noble, it is essential to that many-sided advance of man’s nature, expanding in numberless and ever-conflicting directions.”[[#20WilsonAnarchistEssays27|20]]
+From Nuuk, Klas drove me, Urla and Naaja twenty miles into the tundra with a tent, some of Kalistiina’s seal-fur blankets, a gas stove, our bags, canned food and lots of bottled water, and will return to pick us up in four days’ time. Some Danish hikers found Naaja on the tundra already. She went off from camp on a walk on her own just because she likes to do that. She took her phone in case she twisted her ankle or anything. She came on in the afternoon and said she was with two men. She asked Urla to talk to them and tell them she was camping out with older friends and that she was okay because the men would not take her word for it.
-Although anarchist authors used different definitions of freedom, they agreed that not being dominated, having the real possibility to do and/or to be a broad range of things, and developing oneself as a human, were all valuable. This is because they feed off one another. In order to develop one’s internal abilities in multiple directions, a person must have the real possibility to do so, and in order to have this real possibility they must, among other things, not be subject to domination that deprives them of these real possibilities.
+They walked Naaja back to the tent even though it took them an hour or so. They must have been bored with their afternoon of dramatic hardship, so bored that they were ready to transcend it already and instruct us on how to be in communion with it successfully (as many Mountain Men are prone to). When we came out to meet them, they conferred conspicuously out of the sides of their mouths, and told us we were too young to be camping out alone. They said it was very dangerous to be out because a polar bear had been spotted in the area and that the ranger had told them this on their way out. As though by avoiding this abstract and likely nonexistent danger they had already conquered wilderness and were in a position of authority on the subject by now.
-Anarchists held that the freedom of the individual, however defined, is only possible in and through society. Humans are by nature social animals and so cannot achieve freedom outside of a social context. To quote Bakunin, “man completely realizes his individual freedom as well as his personality only through the individuals that surround him, and thanks to the labor and the collective power of society. . . . Society, far from decreasing his freedom, on the contrary creates the individual freedom of all human beings. Society is the root, the tree, and liberty is its fruit.”[[#21MichaelBakuninBakuninon|21]] Furthermore, “being free for man means being acknowledged, considered and treated as such by another man, and by all the men around him. Liberty is therefore a feature not of isolation but of interaction, not of exclusion but rather of connection.”[[#22BakuninSelectedWritings|22]]
+Naaja would not believe them, and asked them what they were doing out without guns or flares if they knew there was a bear. Naaja has spent her whole young life knowing this place, but these men on a walking holiday of course boasted superior knowledge just by virtue of being older and being men.
-For anarchists, in order for a society to be free over an extended period of time, it must be structured so that it both enables the freedom of the people who comprise it and prevents individuals from being able to oppress others. The social structures and relations that ensure the ongoing freedom of individuals are necessarily egalitarian ones. Anarchists thought that freedom and equality are so interconnected that it is in practice impossible to have one without the other. Bakunin wrote, “I am a convinced supporter of ''economic and social equality'', because I know that, outside that equality, freedom . . . will never be anything but lies.”[[#23BakuninSelectedWritings|23]] Kropotkin echoed this sentiment: “to have the individual free, they must strive to constitute a ''society of equals''.”[[#24KropotkinDirectStruggle|24]]
+They asked us to pack up and walk back with them and we declined as politely as we could. They were pissed off and said they would tell the ranger we were out, and that the ranger would be angry that we wasted his time in worrying over us. We promised them we had the number for the ranger saved in our phones and we would call him if we needed rescue. I got this all on camera without them seeing. They walked away, disappointed that their damsels had repudiated them.
-It is apparent that anarchists advocated equality, but it is not yet clear what exactly they meant by the term. My interpretation is that anarchists conceptualized equality as the ''equality of freedom'', or as Malatesta phrased it, the “equal freedom for all.”[[#25MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|25]] This is the idea that society should be structured such that there is, as far as is possible, equality of self-determination and equality of opportunity. Equality of self-determination was connected with nondomination, while equality of opportunity was connected to human development and the real possibility to do and/or to be.
+Naaja assured us when they had gone that polar bears rarely ever come this far south, and besides we were too far inland. The hikers were either too stupid to realise their lie was almost impossible, or else they did not know what they were talking about and would believe anything they heard from any wise Greenlandic tundra man with a sense of humour that they might have met.
-Equality of self-determination was conceptualized as having two components. First, each individual is equally free to live in accordance with their own will, unless they subject another person to their will through coercion—because doing so would establish a relation of domination, and thereby violate the equal freedom of all. As Berkman put it, “you are to be entirely free, and everybody else is to enjoy equal liberty, which means that no one has a right to compel or force another, for coercion of any kind is interference with your liberty.”[[#26BerkmanAnarchism156|26]] Malatesta similarly argued that anarchists advocate “freedom for all and in everything, with no limit other than the equal freedom of others: which does not mean . . . that we embrace and wish to respect the ‘freedom’ to exploit, oppress, command, which is oppression and not freedom.”[[#27MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|27]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">TWILIGHT THIS MORNING: I went to sit outside for a bit because I was feeling restless. It was probably about two but I am finding it difficult to sleep. The light through the tent is like a red lamp and gives me headaches, makes everything inside strange colours. The tundra was waking up with all the subtly hopeful colours of a new day: rust and pink from the tiny coarse flowers that blanketed the soil but still shadowless, the sun still just below the horizon and no stamp of cloud shadow, no elongation to the small and lonely trees. It all just stood, luminous and itemised like a child’s non-dimensional painting. I walked away a little to sit on a rise so that the tent was below and chalky red in the half-light. My home that will shape-shift into each new space I stop to sleep. A compact and portable idea of home. It was so pretty that I cried a little bit.</div>
-Second, organizations are structured in a horizontal, rather than hierarchical, manner such that there are no divisions between rulers who make decisions and subordinates who do as instructed and lack decision-making power. In horizontal organizations, each member has an equal say in collective decisions and so codetermines the organization with every other member.[[#28MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|28]] According to Malatesta, this kind of equality emerges from the fact that individuals within a group have three choices. Either they “submit to the will of others (be enslaved) or subject others to his will (be in authority) or live with others in fraternal agreement in the interests of the greatest good of all (be an associate).”[[#29MalatestaLifeandIdeas7|29]] Anarchists choose to be associates.
+==== THE PILL REFUGEE FORUM ====
-These two components of equality of self-determination can be seen in Bakunin’s remark that domination must be prevented by not giving anyone the opportunity, which should be achieved “''by the actual organization of the social environment, so constituted that while leaving each man to enjoy the utmost possible liberty it gives no one the power to set himself above others or to dominate them, except through the natural influence of his own intellectual or moral qualities'', which must never be allowed either to convert itself into a right or to be backed by any kind of political institution.”[[#30BakuninSelectedWritings|30]]
+Urla got an interview with Naaja where she told us that lots of her friends (Naaja included) had had abortions. It was in Danish, of course, so Urla had to explain. She asked and Naaja did not mind at all, did not seem fazed by it as long as I promised to cut it out of the film. Of course I promised to, but I struggled a bit with coming to terms with it. I managed to convince myself that it would be dishonest of me as a documentary maker to cut it out, mostly because it would have been such an interesting and relevant sequence.
-Equality of opportunity, or what Bakunin termed “''equality at the outset'',” was understood by anarchists to refer to a situation in which each individual had equal access to the external conditions necessary for the real possibility to do and/or to be, such as food, healthcare, and education.[[#31BakuninSelectedWritings|31]] According to Malatesta, anarchists “call liberty the possibility of doing something,” and, in order for this to be realized, society must “be constituted for the purpose of supplying everybody with the means for achieving the maximum well-being, the maximum possible moral and spiritual development.”[[#32ErricoMalatestaAttheCaf|32]] In the opinion of Berkman, “far from leveling, such equality opens the door for the greatest possible variety of activity and development.”[[#33BerkmanAnarchism165|33]] It would, in other words, result in an expansion of human development.
+I asked if they did not have the pill in Greenland. She said no one ever talked about the pill or sex or anything, so no one really thought to use it. Her sex education at school was to have a doll that had a chip inside and could tell at the end of the week if it would have stayed alive, had it been a real baby. She said that mostly it just made her classmates think it would be fun to have a baby. They were thirteen when they did the exercise.
-Anarchists held that freedom and equality are generally maintained over time by solidarity between individuals and groups.[[#34Thefollowinginterpretation|34]] By ''solidarity'', anarchists meant two different kinds of social relation. The first consisted in individuals cooperating with one another in pursuit of a common goal. This is the concrete means through which the external conditions necessary for people to exercise capacities and satisfy drives are established, such as the organization of a school where children can develop and transform themselves or the coordination of an economy that provides the materials a school needs. As Kropotkin noted, a free society “could not live even for a few months if the constant and daily co-operation of all did not uphold it.”[[#35PeterKropotkinModernScie|35]] According to Malatesta, “liberty,” in the sense of one’s real possibility to do and/or to be, “becomes greater as the agreement among men and the support they give each other grows.”[[#36MalatestaCafe57|36]]
+From what she said they seem stuck between two cultures. The Inuit leaners go back to the villages and have babies, but there are fewer and fewer of them, and the modernisers abort their babies and stay in the towns. But still living with traditional myths of transmigrating souls means the soul of the dead fetus can go on into a tree or a rock or an animal or another baby. So what is there to moralise about?
-The second kind of solidarity anarchists advocated was individuals forming reciprocal caring relationships, in which each individual acts to ensure the ongoing freedom and equality of those around them. Malatesta praised solidarity in the sense of “affection, love, friendship and all that which draws people closer together in brotherhood.”[[#37MalatestaLifeandIdeas61|37]] For him, “''solidarity'', that is, harmony of interests and sentiments, the sharing of each in the good of all, and of all in the good of each, is the state in which alone man can be true to his own nature. . . . It causes the liberty of each to find not its limits, but its complement, the necessary condition of its continual existence—in the liberty of all.”[[#38MalatestaMethodofFreedom|38]] In short, anarchists understood that, in order to be free, an individual needs positive social relationships, such as loving parents, a supportive teacher, and good friends. For anarchists, such reciprocal caring relationships could only genuinely occur between equals who horizontally associate with one another. As Reclus wrote, “between him who commands and him who obeys . . . there is no possibility of friendship” since “above is either pitying condescension or haughty contempt, below either envious admiration or hidden hate.”[[#39EliseeReclusAnAnarchist|39]]
+Naaja’s grandmother, her mother’s mother, teaches her Inuit myth. I wanted to know about the transmigration. It is a concept that underpins the myths of Inuits through Siberia, Alaska, Canada and Greenland. It holds that not only animals and plants but also inanimate objects and landscapes can have souls. Anything can be viewed as ‘spiritually charged’. The souls transmigrate between vessels. When such radically different vessels can be chosen by any soul, and a male vessel can take on a female soul and vice versa, is there as much of a concept of gender? Are they a queer culture?
-'''Critique of Existing Society'''
+They do not see humans as different from the animals; there are not separate taxonomical categories of being. A person can become a man or a woman, a tree or a stone. All life is a continuum and a horizontal one. For Inuit all soul vessels are equally important no matter if they talk or not: dolphins, rocks, women. In fact they are all talking, they have something to say, just maybe not in words.
-Equipped with this value system, anarchists critiqued existing society on the grounds that it systematically fails to promote freedom, equality, and solidarity. They understood that society is not the way it is merely because of the negative personality traits of some bad rulers. Rather, it is the consequence of the fundamental structure of society and the forms of practice that constitute and reproduce it over time. As Malatesta explained to a jury while on trial in 1921, “social wrongs do not depend on the wickedness of one master or the other, one governor or the other, but rather on masters and governments as institutions; therefore, the remedy does not lie in changing the individual rulers, instead it is necessary to demolish the principle itself by which men dominate over men.”[[#40MalatestaMethodofFreedom|40]]
+Naaja’s dad is a Christian. She told us he came to her mother’s town with the town planning service, to talk to the council about telling the village people the benefits of moving to the city. The government wanted the villagers to move out because it was costing them too much money to send supplies, it being the only village for miles around. They knew if they could get the young to leave the old would eventually die out and the village would not need to exist.
-Anarchists are best known for advocating the abolition of the state. While it is true that anarchists are anti-statists, it must also be emphasized that they do not view the state as the main oppressive social structure, or the singular root cause of social problems. Anarchists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries critiqued three main dominant structures: capitalism, landlordism, and the state. The structures of economic oppression (capitalism and landlordism) and political oppression (the state) were taken to constitute an interconnected global social system that I shall call ''class society''. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on the anarchist opposition to capitalism and the state and not discuss landlordism in the sense of feudal or semi-feudal economic relations.
+We told Naaja how the pill is handed out like sweets in Britain. I told her it is great that not many of my friends got pregnant but it is not so great that it makes lots of girls numb. That it makes some of us so numb sometimes it is countered with antidepressants. That it can stop you menstruating, the feeling of which is like an ever-absent ''something'' that I could only compare to displacement, to homesickness, as though homesick for a body. But it does not make you as sad as having a baby would. For this we must be grateful. The pill is progress.
-Anarchists viewed capitalism as a social system constituted by: (a) private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) wage labor; and (c) production of commodities for profit within a competitive market. Under capitalism, society is divided into two main economic classes: a minority of capitalists and landowners who privately own land, raw materials, and the means of production; and a majority of workers who do not own private property and who sell their labor to capitalists and landowners. The labor of workers produces goods and services that are sold by capitalists and landowners on the market in order to generate profit and thereby expand their wealth. Workers, in comparison, receive only a wage, which they then use to buy the necessities of life—food, shelter, and clothing—and thereby reproduce themselves.[[#41BerkmanAnarchism78Pet|41]]
+Naaja’s mother followed her dad to Nuuk because she loved him. They married two years later. Naaja’s mother’s parents did not come to the wedding. They stayed in the village until they had to be evicted. They will not talk to Naaja’s dad, but she goes with her mother to visit them in their new, bigger village on the coast. When her dad hears her mother talking to her about myth, he tells her to stop telling fairy stories. Mostly they talk with her grandmother. Her dad wants Greenland to melt so that the resources can be got at and it can be rich like Denmark.
-The terms ''working class'' and ''proletariat'' are sometimes used only to refer to industrial wage laborers who engage in manual labor, especially within factories. Anarchists often used these words in a much broader sense. In 1884, Malatesta wrote that humanity is divided “into two castes: one caste of haves, born with an entitlement to live without working; the other of proletarians whose lot from birth is wretchedness; subjection; exhausting, unrewarded toil.”[[#42MalatestaMethodofFreedom|42]] He defined a worker as “anybody plying a useful trade who does not exploit another person’s labors.”[[#43MalatestaMethodofFreedom|43]] Anarchists who claimed that society was divided into two main economic classes did not think that there were no subdivisions within the working class or proletariat broadly construed. They generally distinguished between urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans, and landless peasants.
+===== What do you want Naaja? =====
-Which specific classes anarchists referred to varied depending upon the context they were writing in. In 1873, Bakunin wrote that “Italy has a huge proletariat. . . . It consists of 2 or 3 million urban factory workers and small artisans, and some 20 million landless peasants.”[[#44MichaelBakuninStatismand|44]] He went onto claim that “the Slavic proletariat . . . must enter the International en masse [and] form factory, artisan, and agrarian sections.”[[#45BakuninStatismandAnarchy|45]] As capitalism developed, and the number of artisans dramatically declined due to their inability to compete with large-scale industry, anarchists updated their language and began to refer only to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, and landless peasants. In 1926, the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, who came from a society where peasants were still the majority of the population, claimed that capitalist society is split into “two very distinct camps . . . the proletariat (in the broadest sense of the word) and the bourgeoisie.”[[#46TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|46]] The proletariat so understood included “the urban working class” and “the peasant masses.”[[#47TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|47]]
+===== I want what you want, of course. I want to see the world and make a life for myself. I want to leave Greenland and its small way of life. =====
-Berkman, in an analysis for a predominantly North American audience, adopted a narrower definition of the working class or proletariat in 1929. He defined them as those people employed by capitalists in a range of industries—in mills and mines, in factories and shops, in transportation, and on the land.[[#48BerkmanAnarchism4|48]] For him, “the working class consists of the industrial wage earners and the agricultural toilers” or “farm laborers.”[[#49BerkmanAnarchism190|49]] Berkman only used the word “peasant” in descriptions of classes in Russia and continental Europe and consistently framed them as being distinct from “the proletariat” or “workers.” When Berkman referred to wage laborers and peasants as a group, he did so with such expressions as “the toilers” or “the masses.” Artisans, who were defined as skilled, self-employed laborers who own their own tools and small workshops, only featured as part of Berkman’s description of how the development of capitalism forced them to become wage laborers.[[#50BerkmanAnarchism125181|50]]
+===== But somebody has to stay and be Inuit! =====
-In this book, I will use the phrase ''the working classes'' to refer to urban wage laborers, rural wage laborers, artisans who did not exploit anybody else’s labor, and landless peasants. It should be kept in mind that these categories are not necessarily mutually exclusive. A person born into the peasantry could, for example, work as a wage laborer in a city during one season, and as a small farmer in the countryside during another.[[#51ThehistorianBernardMossh|51]]
+===== Why should we stay when others do not? Where does it come from, this obligation? Where is yours? =====
-Anarchists advocated the abolition of capitalism because it is based on the oppression and exploitation of the working classes. Wage laborers allegedly choose to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners, but only do so because they have no other option. Under capitalism, a small minority owns the land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions, such as their hat or sewing kit, but they do not own private property like a factory or mine. As a result, the majority of the population lacks the means to survive independently through their own labor. In order to gain access to the goods and services they need to survive—such as food, clothing, and shelter—workers have to purchase them with money. Given their social position, the only realistic way to earn this money is to sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage.[[#52MalatestaMethodofFreedom|52]] Workers choose to engage in wage labor in the same manner that a person might choose to hand over their possessions to an armed robber. The robbery victim makes this choice because the only realistic alternative is being attacked. Workers similarly sell their labor to capitalists and landowners because the only realistic alternative is extreme poverty, homelessness, starvation, and so on. It is an involuntary decision forced upon workers by the fundamental structure of capitalist society.[[#53BerkmanAnarchism1112M|53]]
+===== We aren’t so different. You could come with me. =====
-Wage labor is not only involuntary. It is based on a relationship of domination and subordination in which capitalists and landowners have the power to command workers to do as instructed. Malatesta described capitalism as a society in which “a few individuals have hoarded the land and all the instruments of production and can impose their will on the workers, in such a fashion that instead of producing to satisfy people’s needs and with these needs in view, production is geared toward making a profit for the employers.”[[#54MalatestaCafe32|54]] Goldman similarly wrote that, under capitalism, workers “are subordinated to the will of a master.”[[#55GoldmanRedEmma50|55]]
+===== But we are very different. You are so free. =====
-The economic ruling classes also determine what forms of labor workers engage in and so the kind of capacities, drives, and consciousness they develop during the process of production itself. Workers lack control over the kind of people they develop into. They engage in forms of labor that maximize profit but actively harm them. The process of capitalist production produces not only goods and services, but also broken people unable to develop in a positive direction and fulfill their human potential. This point was frequently made by anarchists through the metaphor of workers being turned into machines.[[#56RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|56]] Wilson thought that capitalism had a tendency to transform workers into a “steam-engine with wages for coal.”[[#57WilsonAnarchistEssays63|57]] For Goldman, each worker became “a mere particle of a machine, with less will and decision than his master of steel and iron. Man is being robbed not merely of the products of his labor, but of the power of free initiative, of originality and the interests in, or desire for, the things he is making.”[[#58GoldmanRedEmma67|58]] As a result, workers are reduced to being “living corpses without originality or power of initiative, human machines of flesh and blood who pile up mountains of wealth for others and pay for it with a grey, dull, and wretched existence for themselves.”[[#59GoldmanRedEmma50|59]]
+==== DO PELICANS LOVE TO SOAR? ====
-Under capitalism, labor is but one commodity for sale. Capitalism is a market economy in which “the whole economic life of society . . . [is] regulated by the ''competition'' and ''profit'' principle.”[[#60MalatestaMethodofFreedom|60]] The negative consequences of this are numerous. Capitalists hire a small number of workers and force them to work long hours in order to reduce costs, maximize profit, and out-compete rival companies. Improvements in technology make workers unemployed rather than enabling them to work less. Companies produce more commodities than they can sell and are then forced by this overproduction to close down and fire their workforce. This, in turn, leads to regular economic crises. Even when the capitalist market is operating more smoothly, it is based on an irrational organization of production in which a vast number of human needs that society has the means to fulfill are not satisfied because there is no profit in doing so, such as housing homeless people or adequately feeding poor people. On the international scale, economic competition, alongside a range of other factors like ambition and greed, results in states engaging in colonialism, imperialism, and war in order to find new markets, establish monopolies, maximize capital accumulation, and serve the interests of capitalists in their respective countries, especially those involved in the manufacturing of weapons, ammunition, warships etc.[[#61MalatestaMethodofFreedom|61]]
+The others are sleeping. Outside, the tundra is putting itself together for us. Yesterday we spent the day walking and filming, trying to find something for the documentary. We walked inland through the mountains against the meltwater of the glacier as it found its way to the sea. It was urgent, dense and grey; panicked like a jar of paintbrush water knocked onto a meticulous landscape.
-According to anarchists, the oppression and exploitation of capitalism is maintained over time by the violence of the modern state.[[#62Anarchistsdidnotalluset|62]] Bakunin claimed that “the historical formation of the modern concept of the state” occurred “in the mid-sixteenth century” and consisted in an ongoing process of “military, police, and bureaucratic centralization.”[[#63BakuninStatismandAnarchy|63]] This process of state formation occurred due to the requirements of “modern capitalist production,” which needed “enormous centralized states” in order to subject “many millions of laborers to their exploitation.”[[#64BakuninStatismandAnarchy|64]]
+I’m looking for something but I am not sure what. An idea, perhaps, that I had of the place before I was here. Of the trip before I was on it. I am actually here now, I have arrived. But where am I really? It is hard enough to actually be there, let alone convey it with a hand-held camera.
-Kropotkin later expanded upon this narrative by arguing that, the modern state developed as “a mutual insurance company formed by the landlord, the military, the judge, the priest, and later on the capitalist in order to assure each of them authority over the people and the exploitation of [their] poverty.”[[#65KropotkinModernScience1|65]] As a result, “the State, as a political and military power, along with modern governmental Justice, the Church, and Capitalism appear in our eyes as institutions that are impossible to separate from each other. In history these four institutions developed while supporting and reinforcing each other. . . . They are linked together by the bonds of cause and effect.”[[#66KropotkinModernScience1|66]] Rather than positing a one-sided perspective in which the modern state was created by capitalism, anarchists held that the modern state and capitalism cocreated one another.[[#67KropotkinModernScience2|67]]
+In the morning we startled a herd of reindeer. Must have smelled us and bolted. They ran fast, even the tiny babies and the heavily pregnant ones. A unified movement like a cloud of starlings, all the more magical for its silence. All of our mouths made O’s and we let out a kind of wistful sigh, simultaneously. And after we laughed disbelievingly about where we were and what had just happened and how awake we were.
-Through an analysis of the modern state (henceforth referred to as the state) as an actually-existing social structure, anarchists came to define it in terms of both its functions and its particular organizational forms and characteristics. The primary function of the state is to reproduce the power of the economic ruling classes through violence. For Malatesta, its “essential function is always that of oppressing and exploiting the masses, and of defending the oppressors and exploiters,” and, even when it performs other functions—such as acknowledging certain legal rights, maintaining roads, and organizing healthcare—it does so “with the spirit of domination” and remains a committed defender of the economic ruling classes.[[#68MalatestaMethodofFreedom|68]] The same point was made by Reclus, who held that “the present function of the state consists foremost of defending the interests of landowners and the ‘rights of capital.’”[[#69EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|69]]
+We hadn’t seen them until they started to run. In the evening we saw them again but this time before they noticed us. Must have been downwind. We had climbed to the top of a low peak to see what was on the other side and found the reindeer in a valley with a small lake down its length. We crawled on our bellies to a vantage point where they could not see us. The mosquitoes found us quickly and lying still very soon became difficult. There were more of them because of the lake. I watched the small animals through the pixellated window of the camera, which shook whenever I tried to swat away the flies with my other hand. The reindeer were tormented by them as well, shaking their heads every few seconds to keep them out of their ears.
-The capitalist state performs its essential function through many different means. Most obviously, it enforces private property rights. In Malatesta’s words, “the landowners are able to claim the land and its produce as theirs and the capitalists are able to claim as theirs the instruments of labor and other capital created by human activity” because “the dominant class . . . has created laws to legitimize the usurpations that it has already perpetrated, and has made them a means of new appropriations.”[[#70MalatestaCafe45|70]] The state, in addition to this, aids the economic ruling classes by establishing monopolies, subsidizing private companies, repressing social movements via the police and prisons, and maintaining an army in order to keep “the people in bondage” and conquer “new markets and new territory, to exploit them in the interests of the few.”[[#71KropotkinModernScience3|71]]
+Reindeer lope, as if they are always tiptoeing. These movements, so secretive, made me feel dishonest, like a voyeur. The footage was achromatic, as though there only to record the novelty of the experience itself. But it is more than that.
-The state can nonetheless not be defined solely in terms of its essential function. The state as a really existing institution is also characterized by a specific organizational form. Actual states are institutions that (i) perform the function of reproducing the power of the economic ruling classes; (ii) are hierarchically and centrally organized; (iii) are wielded by a minority political ruling class who sit at the top of the state hierarchy and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force.[[#72MichaelBakuninThePolitic|72]]
+I am finding it difficult to separate things that say something from things that do not. It is also hard to find things that say what I want them to. I went over what I have so far and I can’t decide if I am saying what I set out to say, or if I am saying anything at all, or if I just have lots of records of my own sentiments. Unsure if the things themselves are saying things or if I am projecting this on to them, in the way that there are feelings evoked when you look at a postcard image you are very fond of; these might not translate when you show the postcard to someone else.
-This definition of the state was mostly clearly expressed by Kropotkin and Malatesta. According to Kropotkin, the state “not only includes the existence of a power situated above society, but also of a ''territorial concentration'' and a ''concentration of many functions in the life of societies in the hands of a few''. . . . A whole mechanism of legislation and of policing is developed to subject some classes to the domination of other classes.”[[#73KropotkinModernScience2|73]] The state is therefore the “perfect example of a hierarchical institution, developed over centuries to subject all individuals and all of their possible groupings to the central will. The State is necessarily hierarchical, authoritarian—or it ceases to be the State.”[[#74KropotkinModernScience2|74]] Malatesta, in comparison, wrote that
+I guess I am taking what I see and making it iconographic but I am finding it difficult to translate the feeling of being present in the moment, which is itself the thing left untranslated in the nature documentaries and encyclopaedias of exotic species which have been my only prior experience of nature on this scale. Or maybe not left untranslated, but translated back and forth until really it has disintegrated, like the Earthrise photo.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">For us, the government is the aggregate of the governors, and the governors—kings, presidents, ministers, members of parliament, and what not—are those who have the power to make laws, to regulate the relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws. . . . In short, the governors are those who have the power, in a greater or lesser degree, to make use of the collective force of society, that is, of the physical, intellectual, and economic force of all, to oblige each to do the said governors’ wish. And this power constitutes, in our opinion, the very principle of government, the principle of authority.[[#75MalatestaMethodofFreedom|75]]</div>
+I do not want to imbue this film with empty codes that seem talismanic to me. But then maybe it does not matter, maybe it is a vessel for me and I am just now waking up to see the sea. And we have to try to translate or else no one would ever understand anyone. We have to make icons of faraway unexperienceable animals or else people like me would not know to care about them.
-Given this, anarchists did not define class solely in terms of a person’s relationship to the means of production. Class is also about a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. Those who directly controlled state power, such as politicians, monarchs, heads of the police, etc., were taken by anarchists to constitute a distinct political ruling class with interests of their own. As Malatesta wrote, while “the State is the defender, the agent, and the servant of the propertied class,” it “also constitutes a class by itself, with its own interests and passions. When the State, the Government, is not helping the propertied to oppress and rob people, it oppresses and robs them on its own behalf.”[[#76MalatestaPatientWork212|76]] This is not to say that these two classes are mutually exclusive. An individual can, for example, be a capitalist and a politician at the same time.
+I watched the reindeer film over and over. One reindeer I had not noticed before is muzzling a rock around the floor. You can only just make it out, but it goes about muzzling this rock on its own for the entirety of me filming it. After a while watching I felt something new about it that I had not felt before. Maybe even empty moments are never really empty. I am beginning to wonder if this is part of the documentary making itself.
-Anarchists opposed the state, to quote Bakunin, because it “is placed by its very nature and position above and outside the people and must inevitably work to subordinate the people under rules and for objectives foreign to them.”[[#77QuotedinZurbruggIntrodu|77]] In short, it “''means'' coercion, domination by means of coercion.”[[#78BakuninStatismandAnarchy|78]] Through this domination, the state not only prevents the working classes from living in accordance with their own wills, but also hinders their development as people and limits their real possibility to do and/or to be. It oppresses humanity in two main ways: either directly by physical violence, or indirectly, by enforcing private property rights and thereby depriving the majority of the population of access to the means of existence such that they are forced to work for the economic ruling classes.[[#79PeterKropotkinWordsofa|79]] In so doing, the state violates the equal freedom of all and promotes social relations of strife over solidarity because, “''so long as political power exists, there will be persons who dominate and persons dominated, masters and slaves, exploiters and the exploited.''”[[#80BakuninSelectedTexts63|80]]
+==== *DOG VOICE* NOW YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SAY GOODBYE ====
-Anarchists thought that this critique of the state applied not only to monarchies and dictatorships but also democratic republics in which a segment of the political ruling class were elected by the citizenry. Even if a state was somehow genuinely democratic, in the sense that it was one in which the majority ruled, it was still a state and so incompatible with freedom, equality, and solidarity. All states are social structures in which those who rule have the power to impose decisions on everyone within a given territory via institutionalized methods of coercion, such as the legal system, police, prisons, and the army. The rule of the majority would, even if it was preferable to the rule of the few, result in the domination of various minorities due to them being subject to this coercive power.[[#81GalleaniEndofAnarchism|81]] In a fundamentalist Christian society, for example, majority rule would most likely result in laws oppressing atheists, scientists, and gays. Anarchists did not, however, think that actual states have ever been based on majority rule. They consistently described them as institutions based on minority rule by a political ruling class in their interests and the interests of the economic ruling class. Malatesta, to give one example, wrote in 1924 that “even in the most democratic of democracies it is always a small minority that rules and imposes its will and interests by force.”[[#82MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|82]] As a result “Democracy is a lie, it is oppression and is in reality, oligarchy; that is, government by the few to the advantage of a privileged class.”[[#83MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|83]]
+We etched our names into a smooth part of a boulder that was grazed out of the moss next to where we pitched. It felt very chapter-defining, one of those things you always remember, like it could be a figurative scratch that etches out some more of what will one day make up my fully formed soul.
-Although capitalism and the state were two of the main social structures anarchists sought to abolish, they were not the only ones. Wilson concluded that “the solution of the social problem can only be wrought out from the equal consideration of the whole of the experience at our command, individual as well as social, internal as well as external.”[[#84WilsonAnarchistEssays50|84]] Kropotkin similarly thought “that the whole of the life of human societies, everything, from daily individual relationships between people to broader relationships between races across oceans, could and should be reformulated.”[[#85KropotkinDirectStruggle|85]] As a result, anarchists understood that humans are oppressed by a myriad of other social structures that must also be abolished if the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity are to be truly realized. These included racism,[[#86BerkmanAnarchism18990|86]] patriarchy,[[#87BakuninSelectedWritings|87]] homophobia,[[#88TerenceKissackFreeComrad|88]] hierarchically organized religion,[[#89BakuninSelectedWritings|89]] and authoritarian modes of education.[[#90GoldmanRedEmma13149P|90]] Some anarchists, such as Reclus, went beyond a singular focus on human emancipation and advocated vegetarianism, animal liberation, and the protection of the natural environment.[[#91ReclusAnarchy1367156|91]]
+We asked Klas soon after we started to drive out of the tundra, and there was no polar bear. There have not been any sightings for months. I feel very strange about going on without Urla and Naaja. It would be nice to go traipsing round the world in a girl-caravan. But as integral as they seem now (and especially Urla) we need to go our separate ways, just like we did with Larus.
-Unfortunately, a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory. To give a few examples: Bakunin was an antisemite,[[#92ZoeBakerBakuninwasaRa|92]] most male anarchists were sexist toward women in the movement,[[#93MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|93]] and some anarchists opposed Goldman giving talks on homosexuality for fear it would damage the reputation of the movement to discuss “perverted sex-forms.”[[#94EmmaGoldmanLivingMyLife|94]]
+Really, though, it is amazing to me that just by chance of circumstance and necessity two or three quite different people can begin to exist in a kind of ''symbiosis'', what in ecology is termed a mutually beneficial relationship between two dissimilar organisms living in close physical proximity, and somewhat defies Darwinian ideas of evolution as purely competitive. Like a cleaner wrasse that eats only the ectoparasites from the lips of the sweetlips, a larger fish. The wrasse gets fed and the sweetlips rids its itchy lips of parasites. One must feel a kind of relief at least when encountering the other in the wide expanse of the ocean. And maybe in their own way you could say, taking this a little further, that these fish are also ''friends''.
-'''Vision of an Alternative Society'''
+Sometimes, in the literature, it is acknowledged that symbiotic associations between species can be so integral to their individual biology and identity that actually their individual biology and identity have little meaning outside of the relationship anyway.
-Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state should be abolished in favor of a society in which humanity as a whole was free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society anarchy. In advocating anarchy as their ultimate end goal, anarchists were not using the term in the sense of a disorganized and chaotic society, a war of all against all. They were instead referring to a stateless, classless, and nonhierarchical society. In 1897, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy signifies ''society organized without authority'', authority being understood as the ability to ''impose'' one’s own wishes” on others through “coercion.”[[#95MalatestaPatientWork150|95]] A few years later in 1899, Malatesta defined “Anarchy” as “a society based on free and voluntary accord—a society in which no one can force his wishes on another and in which everyone can do as he pleases and together all will voluntarily contribute to the well-being of the community.”[[#96MalatestaMethodofFreedom|96]]
+I think that being real friends with someone is a kind of integration like this. In the way that you let that person know every detail of you in order to get close, even the horrible little things that mostly only you know and that make you an individual by virtue of their small uniqueness. You share all of these with only this person of certain closeness so that the contours of both of you are chipped away, you are porous and receptive and there is almost nothing left to define where you end and where they begin. Intertwined like trees grown together and fused. Inosculation, that is what this is called. Trees that grow together and then apart.
-Anarchist authors outlined visions of what anarchy would look like in numerous texts. They did not view themselves as utopians in the style of Charles Fourier who elaborated incredibly detailed blueprints of what a postcapitalist society would look like. Bakunin himself explicitly critiqued “Fourierists” for wrongly assuming “that it was theoretically and ''a priori'' possible to build a social paradise in which all of future humanity could recline. They had not realized that while we may well define the great principles of its future development we must leave the practical expression of those principles to the experience of the future.”[[#97BakuninSelectedWritings|97]] This way of thinking was shared by Malatesta, who wrote in 1891 that anarchists cannot, “in the name of Anarchy, prescribe for the coming man what time he should go to bed, or on what days he should cut his nails!”[[#98MalatestaMethodofFreedom|98]] Such practical questions can only be answered by those who actually live in and self-managed the future classless society. All any present-day anarchist can do is desire “that a society be constituted in which the exploitation and domination of man by man are impossible” and “indicate a method” to achieve this.[[#99MalatestaMethodofFreedom|99]] By this, Malatesta meant that anarchists should:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">envision anarchy as a society that successfully instantiates certain social conditions, such as people being free from domination, people having access to the external conditions that are necessary to develop themselves, or social relations being infused with a sense of solidarity.</div>
+It might seem portentous to say this of someone I have only known a short time but that seems to be what happens when your situations are so transitory. They are on fast-forward because really you might never see this person again. So you are simply the most visceral version of yourself.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">articulate general anarchist methods of organization and association that could successfully actualize these conditions, such as each person in a group having a vote, smaller groups federating together to form larger groups, or organizations electing instantly recallable mandated delegates to perform administrative tasks.</div>
+I am going to really miss Urla. I did a lot of crying when we said goodbye. I think she was alarmed and misinterpreted a little; she said, ‘Hey, don’t be scared, you’ve got this.’ I laughed and said I know I’ve got this, I am just going to really miss you. I smiled resolutely and thought to myself that this is the thing I can’t get caught up in, this is the noose of homesickness. I am doing this journey alone by and for myself and this tug is the over-socialisation expected of women which traps us, and is precisely what I am striking against.
+Naaja says she looks around herself in the village at her friends and their lives and she feels so different to them. I understand that because sometimes I would do the same, would look around me at the vacant expression of the cashier in Tesco, the foundation faces of the girls with arms heavy with bags at the shopping centre, the tired faces in the ill-yellow lighting at the bowling-cinema complex, tired from a week’s work and a weekend not to be wasted. I did not recognise myself in these places and tried very hard not to.
-According to this view, anarchists could not know with absolute certainty how, say, the education of children would be organized under anarchy, but they were in a position to indicate the method through which it would be organized. Parents, teachers, and other adults interested in the positive development of children would come together as equals within general assemblies to “meet, discuss, agree and differ, and then divide according to their various opinions, putting into practice the methods which they respectively hold to be best” and, in so doing, establish through a process of experimentation what the best system of education was.[[#100MalatestaMethodofFreedo|100]] How anarchy was organized would “be modified and improved as circumstances were modified and changed, according to the teachings of experience.”[[#101MalatestaMethodofFreedo|101]] It was for this reason that Malatesta saw anarchist ideals as “the experimental system brought from the field of research to that of social realization.”[[#102MalatestaMethodofFreedo|102]]
+But I know my own mum would love for me to go back to my home town and get married and never leave, and sometimes I feel very sorry that I do not want to do this. A lot of girls from my school had their babies and never left and seem genuinely happy for it. If all the girls were to up and leave like the boys can then how would any culture preserve itself?
-Some anarchist authors did articulate detailed models of how an anarchist society would function. They generally focused on how workers should reorganize production and distribution during a revolution and, as a result, largely discussed practical issues. The Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregori Maximoff, for example, developed proposals for how an anarchist revolution could reorganize agriculture, cattle rearing, fishing, hunting, manufacturing, forest management, mining, construction, transportation, healthcare, sanitation, and education. These proposals largely specify (a) how organizations should be structured, make decisions, and coordinate with one another; (b) what kind of organization is responsible for a specific aspect of the economy; and (c) general principles that should be implemented, such as the abolition of rent or both men and women receiving an education.[[#103GregoriPMaximoffProgra|103]]
+But is it not just the inescapable itch of youth, its boredom, its listlessness, that makes you want to up and leave? The youth are always and always have been churning. Fields must be ploughed so that planted seeds will germinate: a period of customary churning prior to the germination of adulthood. Why do the girls suppress it?
-The theorists of anarchism were not naive and understood that it would not be possible to establish anarchy as an ideal during or immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state. Cafiero distinguished between anarchy today and anarchy in the future: “Anarchy today is indignation, deadly hatred and eternal war against every oppressor and exploiter on the face of the earth. . . . But tomorrow, once the obstacles have been overcome, anarchy will be solidarity and love—complete freedom for all.”[[#104CafieroRevolution41|104]] He thought it would take a significant amount of time to achieve full anarchy. This can be seen in his claim that one generation would fight in the revolution and the next generation would work toward full anarchy in a postrevolutionary world. He wrote that contemporary anarchists would:
+I had a worry before I left, that I would get out here and just pine for home. When I was little my favourite film was ''Homeward Bound''. In the film two dogs and a cat get left on a ranch with minders while their human family go on holiday; they think they have been abandoned but instead of feeling betrayed they presume something is up and decide to escape the ranch and just walk home. But this takes them through the Californian wilderness and the whole thing is about their treacherous journey home through this forbidding place full of wildcats and porcupines.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">perhaps perish in a skirmish or during the first shots of the great day; some perhaps will be fortunate enough to see the first dawning of humanity’s great event. In all cases, we shall fall satisfied. Satisfied with having contributed to the certain ruin of this unjust, cruel and rotten world, whose collapse will bury us in the most glorious tomb ever made for a fighter.</div>
+Sometimes when I was little I wished I was an orphan because they always had the fun lives in the stories. They had no familial ties keeping them bound with guilt. Most of the good adventure stories are about grown men or boy orphans. I planned to run away from home just for the adventure, wade down the river until I got to the sea because the sniffer dogs could not follow your scent through water. But I would get down the road to the lamp-post boundary marker and my mum would poke her head out and offer me a piece of carrot cake or something and I just could not break her heart.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Other men will be born from the very entrails of the fertile revolution and take on the task of carrying out the positive, organic part of anarchy.</div>
+I worried that ''Homeward Bound'' might have brainwashed me into losing my sense of adventure once the journey was under way, because really what the film says is pets are pets, not wild animals, same as humans are not wild animals, and do not go into the wilderness because it is bad out there. That it had ingrained this static idea of belonging and origin and the ''outside''.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">For us—hatred, war and destruction; for them—love, peace and happiness.[[#105CafieroRevolution49|105]]</div>
+===== You will leave me behind. =====
-Malatesta, in comparison, conceded that “some comrades” mistakenly “expect Anarchy to come with one stroke—as the immediate result of an insurrection which violently attacks all that which exists and replaces it with institutions that are really new.”[[#106MalatestaMethodofFreedo|106]] These comrades, he said, were wrong, because the full achievement of anarchy requires that “all men will not only not want to be commanded but will not want to command . . . [and] have understood the advantages of solidarity and know how to organize a plan of social life wherein there will no longer be traces of violence and imposition.”[[#107MalatestaMethodofFreedo|107]] Such a significant transformation of individuals and social structures would take a long time to achieve.
+===== Please go to university. =====
-Malatesta thought that society immediately after the abolition of capitalism and the state “would not be Anarchy, yet, or it would be only for those few who want it, and only in those things they can accomplish without the cooperation of the non-anarchists.”[[#108MalatestaMethodofFreedo|108]] The development toward anarchy would be a product of “peaceful evolution” in which anarchist “ideas . . . extend to more men and more things until it will have embraced all mankind and all life’s manifestations.”[[#109MalatestaMethodofFreedo|109]] For Malatesta, “Anarchy cannot come but little by little—slowly, but surely, growing in intensity and extension. Therefore, the subject is not whether we accomplish Anarchy today, tomorrow or within ten centuries, but that we walk toward Anarchy today, tomorrow and always.”[[#110MalatestaMethodofFreedo|110]]
+===== I am too headstrong not to. =====
-Similar points were made by other anarchist authors. Berkman argued that the “revolution is the ''means'' of bringing Anarchy about but it is not Anarchy itself. It is to pave the road for Anarchy, to establish conditions which will make a life of liberty possible.”[[#111BerkmanAnarchism231|111]] Maximoff likewise thought that, during the process of abolishing capitalism and the state, there would be a transitional phase that laid the foundations from which anarchy would eventually arise. As a result, he was careful to distinguish between the “communal structure, which is the transitory step” and “the structure of full communism and anarchy.”[[#112MaximoffProgramofAnarch|112]]
+===== But also after, go back to the village. Fight for your culture! =====
-Anarchists, in other words, viewed the abolition of capitalism and the state as an act that created the preconditions for the achievement of anarchy and moved society closer to it but would not alone create anarchy as an ideal, universal social system. The task of anarchists during and immediately after the social revolution was to establish the basic forms of organization and association that would exist under anarchy and thereby establish the social conditions from which anarchy could emerge. In order to clearly differentiate these basic social structures from anarchy, I shall refer to the totality of these social structures as an anarchist society.
+===== We won’t ever speak again. =====
-Anarchists generally envisioned an anarchist society as having four main components.[[#113CafieroRevolution4962|113]] These were:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Humanity as a whole collectively owns land, raw materials, and the means of production. The division of society into economic classes is abolished such that there are no longer workers or proletarians but only people who engage in acts of production and consumption. Those who occupy or use a piece of land, raw materials, or the means of production on a daily basis directly control and self-manage the relevant sphere of production or distribution. Individuals can only own possessions they personally use without exploiting the labor of others. In other words, humanity owns the watch factory, those who labor in the watch factory directly control and self-manage watch production, and individuals own their personal watches.</div>
+===== We will stay in touch. =====
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Workplaces and communities are self-managed by the people who constitute them through general assemblies in which everyone involved has an equal say in collective decisions.[[#114Thissystemofdecisionmak|114]]</div>
+===== We don’t even speak the same language. =====
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Markets and money are replaced by a system of decentralized planning.</div>
+It is a shame that Greenland wants to move away from its old ways in order to keep up with the rest of the world. But how can we say they should not, that we want to keep all the wealth for ourselves? What do we want? This idea of its beauty and uniqueness, as culture-porn for ourselves too? Soon all I will have of Naaja are these memories and our footage of her. Then I will carry her with me if she can’t go.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">The rigid capitalist division of labor is abolished such that people do a combination of mental and physical labor, and unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers. Individuals would still specialize in specific skills, such as learning how to drive a train or build a house, but they would not be limited to one sphere of activity such that they only drove trains or built houses. This would go alongside a significant reduction to the length of the working day, such as four hours instead of ten.</div>
+==== THE RIGHTS OF NATURE ====
+Back on a boat again. This one is the ''Modet'', a commercial fishing boat. The wonky feeling from ''Blárfoss'' is worse here, what with the boat being much smaller. But I have got my sea legs now. There is an animosity, or it feels like it anyway, because all of the men are really superstitious in a hit-one-knee-got-to-hit-the-other-or-the-boat-will-sink kind of way, and the oldest guys especially believe it is very bad luck to have a woman on board. The aversion gets gentler down the age range. Logan is the oldest, older than Jon, who is Uncle Larus’s age and older than the rest of the crew by at least two decades. He has not spoken to me once.
+He reminds me of a seafaring Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Ted Kaczynski posted letter bombs from his cabin in the Montanan wilderness. He was called the Unabomber because for years no one knew his identity, but bombs kept appearing via the mail in universities and airliners around the United States. He posted bombs to universities because he wanted to destabilise The Machine, symbolically at least if not literally. To punish The Machine for oppressing him and encroaching on his wilderness. For him a university was a hub of intellect, which really means ‘symbolic culture’ and the very opposite to his wilderness, a place devoid of human impositions. He must have hated the Golden Records.
-In an anarchist society, “the relations between its members are regulated, not by laws . . . not by any authorities—whether they are elected or derive their power by right of inheritance—but by mutual agreements, freely made and always revocable, as well as [social] customs and habits, also freely accepted.”[[#115KropotkinModernScience|115]] Such statements are not advocating a society in which people are free to do absolutely anything, including acts that oppress others. Anarchists argued that, if a person imposes their will on another via violence or coercion, they are engaging in an act of domination and should be prevented from doing so, by force if necessary. Such force, providing it is proportionate and does not reconstitute the state, would not be a form of authority or a violation of the equal freedom of all. It would rather defend the freedom of all in a manner compatible with the goal of anarchy.[[#116MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|116]]
+Before he went to the wilderness he was a genius mathematician at Berkeley. He is worshipped as the God of the Mountain Men by some. Uncle Larus is a Kaczynski sympathiser; he even gave me a copy of Kaczynski’s story ’Ship of Fools’. He says he is a misunderstood environmental defender and not a terrorist.
-Collective decisions within an anarchist society would be made within workplace and community assemblies via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two.[[#117Anarchistauthorsusedava|117]] Malatesta personally thought that in an anarchist society, “everything is done to reach unanimity, and when this is impossible, one would vote and do what the majority wanted, or else put the decision in the hands of a third party who would act as arbitrator.”[[#118ErricoMalatestaBetweenP|118]] This is not to say that an anarchist society was based on the rule of the majority over the minority. Anarchists believed in free association and so held that decisions should not be imposed on others via the exercise or threat of violence. Given this, they rejected both the rule of the minority over the majority and the rule of the majority over the minority. Within a free association that makes collective decisions via majority vote, the majority and minority positions would coexist with one another when this was possible. If a collective decision required everyone involved to agree on a single course of action, such as when the next meeting would take place or what color a room would be painted, then minorities would voluntarily defer to the majority decision. If the minority strongly disagreed with this decision then they were free, not only to persuade others of their point of view, but also to leave and voluntarily disassociate. This freedom of association also included the freedom of majorities to voluntarily dissociate from minorities, such as a person who constantly shouted at and bullied other people during meetings being expelled from a group.[[#119MalatestaMethodofFreedo|119]]
+When he looks at me it is as though Logan is trying really hard to post me letter bombs, like his squinted eyes could be sending out envelope bomb blades, like those chakra disk weapons the Hindu god Vishnu uses, if only he could just squint hard enough.
-Although anarchists thought that collective decisions should be made in general assemblies, they also understood that it is often necessary or practical for an individual, or small group of people, to complete a specific task. As Malatesta wrote, “in every collective undertaking on a large scale there is need for division of labor, for technical direction, administration, etc.”[[#120MalatestaMethodofFreedo|120]] In such circumstances, anarchists proposed that general assemblies would elect mandated delegates to complete a task or perform a role, such as corresponding with other groups, editing a newspaper, or drawing up plans for a new public transportation system. These delegates would not be governors who wielded authority, since they did not have the right to command others and force people to obey them. Decision-making power would remain in the hands of the general assembly who elected them and retained the right to recall delegates, give them new instructions, accept or reject their suggestions, and so on.[[#121MalatestaBetweenPeasants|121]]
+I have my own cabin, which is a store cupboard with a camp bed in it. There is a spare bed in the dorm cabin with the others but the captain seems to find the idea of me cohabiting with them indecent. Probably I won’t dwell on this too much since I quite like my little cupboard. It does not have a working light but it is quiet and I have a head torch.
-In an anarchist society, decision-making would flow “from the bottom upwards and from the circumference inwards, in accordance with the principle of liberty, and not from the top downwards and from the center outwards, as is the way of all authority.”[[#122BakuninSelectedWritings|122]] Within such a society, “the free association of all” would establish “a social organization” structured “from the low to the high, from the simple to the complex, starting from the more immediate to arrive at the more distant and general interests.”[[#123MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|123]] Anarchists envisioned a decentralized and bottom-up system of decision-making in which workplace and community assemblies made their own decisions about how they operated at a local level. They then associated with one another via free agreement in order to form a network capable of achieving coordination and cooperation on a large scale. As will be explained in more detail in Chapters 6 and 7, there were two main positions on how to achieve large-scale coordination and cooperation during both the struggle against class society and the reproduction of an anarchist society. Antiorganizationalists, who appear to have been in the minority during the period I am examining, argued that coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks. Galleani, for example, endorsed “a society functioning on the basis of mutual agreement” between “free social groupings,” while rejecting formal organizations that had administrative committees, congresses, and constitutions.[[#124GalleaniEndofAnarchism|124]]
+It transpires that ''Modet'' used to be a whaling ship. I did a little interview with Jon, which somehow became a defensive rant. Greenland always hunted whales for subsistence. Why should they not hunt them for subsistence? Now it is illegal to hunt them. Since the whaling ban they fish haddock. Sometimes they catch whales and they die and they have to throw the dead whales back into the ocean or they will be fined. The problem that came about was simply one of crowding. Fisherman and boat crowding. Ratio of whales to fishermen unbalanced. For him there was no issue of morality. No sympathy for the souls of the whales. A direct quote from Jon: ‘The money was good. It is hard to think about the future when the money is good.’
-Organizationalists, in comparison, also advocated the establishment of formal federations.[[#125Thefollowingaccountisba|125]] These federations took three main forms: federations of producers belonging to the same branch of production; federations of all the workplace assemblies, regardless of industry, in a given geographical area; and federations of community assemblies in a given geographical area. Federations are free associations of autonomous groups that are formed in order to achieve shared objectives. Within a federation, these autonomous groups are formally linked together through a common program, a bottom-up organizational structure, and the various agreements made at meetings and congresses. In an anarchist society, the basic unit of a federation would be a group in which collective decisions were made in a general assembly. The different assemblies in a given area would voluntarily associate with one another to form a local federation. The local federations in a given region would then voluntarily associate with one another to form a regional federation. The regional federations would associate to form a national federation and the national federations of the world would form an international federation. Federations of federations were often called confederations. Although organizationalist anarchists advocated creating national confederations before and during a social revolution, it is likely that, in a stateless society without borders, new labels would be used to refer to a federation of this size.[[#126AnarchiststhroughoutLatin|126]]
+Jon speaks like an echo of the whalers of old times. They needed to understand whales as swimming hunks of meat and oil because they were very, very valuable commodities. It would not do for commodities to have feelings. Whale blubber and especially the oil of the sperm whales were our main energy source before fossil fuels. They were instrumental in the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. Traumatised by the slaughtering of their species, whales began to attack whaling fleets and therefore became monsters to us. They were nearly driven to extinction by the nineteenth century. Then we reached peak whale oil. The sperm whale was saved by the alternative invention of kerosene and the expansion of the fossil fuel industry. They do not attack ships any more.
-Federations would enable coordination at various scales. Collective agreements between different groups would be made at regular congresses held at local, regional, national, and international levels, each attended by delegates from smaller groups comprising the federation. Proponents of federations disagreed about whether resolutions passed at congresses by majority vote should be binding on every individual or group involved in the decision-making process, or on only those who voted in favor of the majority position.[[#127CompareMalatestaMethodo|127]] Between congresses, the day-to-day administration of a federation would be organized by a committee composed of elected delegates. What tasks these administrative committees performed would vary depending upon the kind of federation but would include such things as facilitating the exchange of information between sections, publishing bulletins on behalf of the federation, or compiling statistics.
+===== They aren’t sentient. They are fish. Fish are there to be eaten. =====
-The delegates of a federation, in contrast to representatives in capitalist parliaments, are not granted the power to make decisions independently and impose them on others. They can only act as spokespeople for the group that elected and mandated them on what to say and how to vote. If they fail to implement the group’s mandate, they can be instantly recalled and replaced by a newly elected delegate. The same principle would apply to delegates who perform other roles for the federation, such as the members of the administrative committees. As Kropotkin explained, within a federation, the members of a local group discuss “every aspect of the question that concerns them,” reach a decision, and then “choose someone and send him to reach an agreement with other delegates of the same kind.”[[#128KropotkinRebel133|128]] At this meeting “the delegate is not authorized to do more than explain to other delegates the considerations that have led his colleagues to their conclusion. Not being able to impose anything, he will seek an understanding and will return with a simple proposition which his mandatories can accept or refuse.”[[#129KropotkinRebel133See|129]] Malatesta similarly claimed that “the respective delegates would take their given mandates to the relative meetings and try to harmonize their various needs and desires. The deliberations would always be subject to the control and approval of those who delegated them.”[[#130MalatestaBetweenPeasants|130]]
+===== Whales are not fish. =====
-All anarchists, regardless of where they stood on the topic of federations, did not think that workplace and community assemblies would be the only organs of self-management in an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, advocated a society constituted by an “interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of groups and federations of all sizes and degrees, local, regional, national, and international—temporary or more or less permanent—for all possible purposes,” including not only production and consumption but also “communications, sanitary arrangements, education, mutual protection,” and “the satisfaction of an ever-increasing number of scientific, artistic, literary and sociable needs.”[[#131KropotkinDirectStruggle|131]]
+===== What next? Haddock have feelings too? We can’t eat the haddock? Then what do we eat? =====
-The forms of organization and decision-making that anarchists advocated were not invented by isolated theorists imagining abstract social possibilities from their studies. The anarchist vision of a future society was instead the generalization of the forms of association that working-class social movements had themselves developed and implemented during the course of the class struggle. As Kropotkin argued, “Anarchy” is an “ideal society” based upon “''the study of tendencies already emerging in the evolution of society''.”[[#132KropotkinModernScience|132]] One of the main tendencies Kropotkin focused on was the labor movement. He noted that the anarchist vision of a future society was “worked out, in theory and practice, from beneath” by workers themselves within the local sections, national federations, and international congresses of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals.[[#133PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|133]] This occurred through a process of workers collectively generating ideas via discussion, dialogue, and drawing upon their knowledge of a specific trade or region. They not only made proposals about how the future society should be organized, but based these proposals on their own experiences of participating in “a vast federation of workers groups representing the seeds of a society regenerated by social revolution.”[[#134KropotkinModernScience|134]]
+===== Maybe one day whales might be classed as non-human people and this whole conversation would be considered highly offensive, like how we look at the times before the women’s rights movement. =====
-Although anarchists agreed that land, raw materials, and the means of production should be owned in common by humanity as a whole, they disagreed about how the products of labor should be distributed in an anarchist society. Anarchist collectivists argued that the products of labor should be owned by those who produced them so that, as they saw it, each producer enjoyed the full product of their labor.[[#135BakuninSelectedWritings|135]] Bakunin, the most famous anarchist collectivist, proposed in 1868 that society should be structured such that it “allows each to share in the enjoyment of social wealth—which in fact is produced only by labor—only to the extent that he has contributed his own to its production.”[[#136BakuninSelectedWritings|136]] Anarchist collectivists within the First International did not initially specify how the products of collective labor would be distributed to those who produced them and argued that the question would be resolved in various ways by communities themselves depending upon their circumstances.[[#137GuillaumequotedinBakunin|137]] For example, at the 1877 Verviers Congress of the Saint-Imier International, Spanish anarchist collectivists advocated a society based on the collective ownership of the means of production and land, which “gives autonomy to each community of producers and each receives according to his production.”[[#138QuotedinCarolineCahmKr|138]] They did not, however, specify how this system of distribution would actually be organized.
+===== Ha! You can’t say that as a woman. That is comparing women to animals. Very unfeminist. =====
-A more concrete proposal was made by the anarchist collectivist Guillaume in 1874. He reaffirmed the collectivist position that each community should decide for itself how to distribute the products of labor, while suggesting a system of labor vouchers in which individuals receive a certain number of vouchers per hour of work or per type of work performed and then use them to acquire items at stores. Once the postrevolutionary society had stabilized and abundance was achieved, he thought this should be replaced by the principle of “from each according to ability, to each according to needs.”[[#139GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|139]]
+===== Maybe that is what people said about the idea of women’s rights before the suffragettes and in the context of the abolishment of slavery. =====
-From 1876 onward, a number of prominent anarchists, including Malatesta, Cafiero, and Reclus, rejected anarchist collectivism in favor of anarchist communism. This soon came to be the dominant position within the anarchist movement, although anarchist collectivism continued to be advocated by a significant segment of anarchists in Spain during the 1880s. Anarchist communism was seen as a society in which each person voluntarily contributes to production according to their abilities and the products of labor are collectively owned by humanity as a whole and distributed according to need. This would, during and immediately after the social revolution, be organized through a system of rationing. Once the economy was sufficiently developed and stable, rationing would be abolished in favor of free access to the products of labor. In contrast to Guillaume, who had previously proposed distribution according to need as the long-term goal, anarchist communists rejected the idea of distribution via labor vouchers as an intermediary system.[[#140MalatestaMethodofFreedo|140]]
+===== That is not a comparison. =====
-Over time, the debate between anarchist collectivists and anarchist communists became increasingly hostile, most notably in Spain during the 1880s where it was entangled with wider strategic debates.[[#141GeorgeRichardEsenweinAn|141]] In response, Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and Ricardo Mella formulated the idea of “anarchism without adjectives” in 1889. They argued that it was not possible for people living in class society to know with certainty which specific system of distribution would best realize anarchist values after the revolution. As a result, anarchists existing under capitalism should adopt a nondogmatic stance whereby collectivism and communism would coexist in the postrevolutionary society and the argument over which system was superior would be settled through actual experimentation in different economic arrangements. Until this had occurred, anarchists could make proposals about how they personally thought the economy would best be organized, but they would not be in a position to identify as either collectivist or communist. So long as anarchists lived within class society, they should simply call themselves anarchists who advocated socialism and not add to this label any particular adjective denoting a future system of distribution.[[#142MellaAnarchistSocialism|142]]
+I think about saying these things but they would make for an even more uncomfortable ocean passage. I figure I should keep my mouth shut for now. It is fine, they don’t hunt whales any more.
-This position would go onto influence some anarchists outside of Spain. A notable example is the American anarchist de Cleyre, who was initially an individualist anarchist and advocate of market socialism. Her perspective on anarchism changed due to her four-month visit to England and Scotland in 1897. During her lecture tour, she met and conversed with a variety of anarchist communists. This included both groups of English, Scottish, French, Spanish, and Jewish anarchist workers, and prominent anarchist authors and public speakers, such as Kropotkin, Nettlau, Grave, and Louise Michel. De Cleyre claimed that one of the most impressive people she met was Tarrida del Mármol, the advocate of anarchism without adjectives.[[#143PaulAvrichAnAmericanAn|143]] From at least 1900 onward, she advocated a stateless socialist society in which the means of production were owned in common, while referring to herself as an anarchist without economic label attached. In contrast to early Spanish advocates of anarchism without adjectives, de Cleyre claimed that experiments in different socialist economic arrangements would not only settle the debate between collectivists and communists. It would also establish an answer to the largely American debate between proponents of market socialism and advocates of a planned economy.[[#144AvrichAnAmericanAnarchi|144]]
+But that is not the issue. The issue is that the bad seeds are still there.
-For Kropotkin, who played a significant role in theorizing and popularizing anarchist communism, it was important to describe the nature of the future society, because how one envisions the future shapes how one acts in the present. A socialist who envisions a society based on producers owning and self-managing the means of production themselves will act differently, both under capitalism and during a revolution, from a socialist who envisions a society based on the state owning and managing the means of production through a vast bureaucracy. They each have a different vision and so will act differently to try and create very different worlds.[[#145KropotkinRebel2014|145]] This perspective can be seen in Kropotkin’s 1913 remark that the anarchist vision of a future society “soon separated the anarchists in their means of action from all political parties, as well as, to a large extent, from the socialist parties which thought they could retain the ancient Roman and Canonical idea of the State and carry it into the future society of their dreams.”[[#146KropotkinModernScience|146]]
+When I found out about the whaling, I thought, how can Larus be friends with these people? He comes to help them if he is near by, if they have caught a whale. He helps them place the whale back into the water and he tags the whale. He tries to educate them on the whales, so that they might understand them better, and in understating, develop some kind of empathy. He is not their friend. He is just cavorting with the enemy to further his own agenda.
-If the achievement of anarchy required that the working classes engage in forms of practice that actually produce an anarchist society, such as establishing workplace or community assemblies, then the working classes must first develop both the awareness of what an anarchist society would look like and the motivation to create such a society. As Kropotkin wrote, “no struggle can be successful . . . if it does not produce a concrete account of its actual aim. No destruction of what exists is possible without, during the struggles leading to the destruction and during the period of destruction itself, already visualizing mentally what will take the place of what you want to destroy.”[[#147KropotkinModernScience|147]]
+==== THE SUPER-TRENDY SPONGE CLUB ====
-The role of anarchist authors like Kropotkin or Cafiero was to articulate and spread this vision among the working classes, and thereby instill in them the radical drives that were necessary for achieving an anarchist society. Anarchists had to decide not only on “the ''aim'' which we ourselves propose to attain” but must also “make it known, by words and deeds, in such a way as to make it notably popular, so popular that on the day of action it will be on everybody’s lips.”[[#148KropotkinRebel203|148]] In outlining these visions of what an anarchist society would look like, anarchists did not think that they were establishing the permanent means through which society would be organized after the social revolution. Instead, they assumed that people living in a future anarchist society would develop new and better ways of organizing that they had not considered, and had not even been in a position to conceive.[[#149RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|149]]
+Whales have now become the mascot of environmental stewardship, our very own symbol of empathy for other animals because they represent the idea that humans are not the only self-conscious creatures on Earth. We only recently started to acknowledge this and it has led us to wonder if there are other animals, especially cetaceans, who are so emotionally sophisticated that they might even be more emotionally sophisticated than we are.
-'''The Problem of Socialist Transformation'''
+In the limbic system of orcas or killer whales, for example – that is, the emotional processing bit – some parts are much bigger and more complicated than in the human brain. Something evolved there that has not evolved in humans. Because they have so much social cohesion scientists think that this part of the brain could be working on something crazy like a ''distributed sense of self''. Like they can kind of transmigrate into each other in real time, like mega-empathy, or telepathy. Which is really bloody sad if you think about mass strandings: they just can’t imagine living disconnected from the social group because of their innate collectivism. Like women!
-Anarchists not only advocated the abolition of capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. They also constructed effective strategies for how to set about achieving their goals. One of the central problems that their strategies had to overcome was that both the abolition of class society in favor of an anarchist society and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society require the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the ability to make collective decisions in general assemblies, the desire to not dominate or exploit others, and the understanding that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society, however, produce people fit for the reproduction of that oppressive and unequal society, rather than its abolition. Class society cannot, by itself, produce the kinds of people that an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need.
+Were Scott and his men beached whales, dying in sacrifice with the rest of the pod, laying down their life for their kingdom, fundamentally collectivist, subsuming their ‘selves’ into the identity of the British Empire?
-Such individuals would arise in a properly functioning anarchist society due to the forms of practice they engaged in on a daily basis, such as participating in a workplace assembly or being taught how to horizontally associate as a child. These are exactly the kinds of people that anarchist social movements need in order to succeed. Anarchists, unfortunately, live in a class society. They therefore have a problem: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society. How then could anarchist social movements effectively transform society? This problem was succinctly expressed by Malatesta:
+I would say no because what I think they had in mind when they kept pushing on into the obliterating snow was not death, as the end of self, but rather ''immortality'' (which is the conceptual opposite of a whale giving up any individualised notion of self in its suicide, dying with the colony because without the colony there is no self). The men on Scott’s expedition were demanding to be individualised; honoured; glorified; remembered for ever. (In a bee colony, around twelve males get to mate with the queen and pass on their DNA. Male bees explode after impregnating the queen, but it is not just anyone gets to say they impregnated the queen.)
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Between man and his social environment there is a reciprocal action. Men make society what it is and society makes men what they are, and the result is therefore a kind of vicious circle. To transform society men must be changed, and to transform men, society must be changed. Poverty brutalizes man, and to abolish poverty men must have a social conscience and determination. Slavery teaches men to be slaves, and to free oneself from slavery there is a need for men who aspire to liberty. . . . Governments accustom people to submit to the Law and to believe that Law is essential to society; and to abolish government men must be convinced of the uselessness and the harmfulness of government.[[#150MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|150]]</div>
+Think of Lawrence Oates of Scott’s mission, who left the tent saying ''I am just going outside''. Maybe what he had in mind was some kind of cryogenic freezing. Maybe he was really going outside to make a time capsule of his body.
-Despite the self-reproducing nature of dominant structures, social change remains a possibility. This is because existing society is not solely the product of the “will of a dominating class” but is also “the result of a thousand internecine struggles, of a thousand human and natural factors acting indifferently, without directive criteria.”[[#151MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|151]] Social structures are not fixed monoliths, but webs of interconnected processes that “contain organic contradictions and are like the germs of death, which, as they develop, result in the dissolution of institutions and the need for transformation.”[[#152MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|152]] This can be seen in the history of class struggle, which contains numerous examples of the oppressed and exploited choosing to rebel against, modify, and sometimes overthrow, self-reproducing social structures. Given this, anarchists who “are besieged and buffeted on every side by hostile realities” must not “accept everything, and defer to everything because this is the situation in which history has placed us,” but should instead choose to “combat these realities” and thereby change what reality is.[[#153MalatestaMethodofFreedo|153]] De Cleyre said much the same. She argued in 1910 that, although humans are shaped by their circumstances, they are also at the same time “an active modifying agent, reacting on its environment and transforming circumstances, sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly, sometimes, though not often, entirely.”[[#154DeCleyreReader37|154]]
+According to the International Time Capsule Society based out of Oglethorpe University in Georgia, the dawn of the millennium saw an intense increase in the amount of time-capsulisation around the globe. Perhaps because the millennium is a marker of deep time. Perhaps because of our sense of infinitesimality in our new view of our place in the universe, perhaps because of the prospect of nuclear dawn.
-It is therefore possible for one segment of society to choose to engage in actions that, given the theory of practice, would simultaneously change social relations and themselves, constructing new social structures. To quote Mella,
+What could be more representative than a fully formed and cryogenically frozen self? The desire to be reanimated in the future, a whole human self projected into the uncharted future. Maybe Lawrence Oates was really doing a President Carter.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">We must realize that we will not suddenly find ourselves, one day, with men made in accordance with the future, suitable to realize the content of new ideals. And we must surrender to the evidence that, without the continual and growing exercise of individual faculties, without the habit of autonomy, as broad as possible, free men or at least men in conditions to be free will not be made so that the social deed changes the face of things. External and internal revolutions presuppose one another and should be simultaneous in order to be fruitful.[[#155MellaAnarchistSocialism|155]]</div>
+In Shark Bay, Australia, a group of dolphins has formed a little clique that you can only get in to if you are what they call a ‘sponger’. It is called the Sponge Club. It was started by a dolphin they called Sponging Eve, who showed some of her girlfriends how to hold a sponge on the end of the snout so as not to get grazes when shuffling in the grit for food. Spongers only really hang around with other spongers, or dolphins that want to learn to sponge. This is what we describe in humans as ''cultural transmission''. All but one of the dolphins in the Sponge Club are female; they seem to be better at keeping up relationships and therefore cultural transmission. Probably while the males hang out around the fringe of the group hassling other males and being macho.
-For example, workers choose to go on strike and win. In so doing, they change social relations—wages increase and workers gain more power over their bosses—and change people—workers learn how to organize a strike, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another and see the economy in a fundamentally different way. During the course of the strike, they construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a trade union. Long-term participation in this trade union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness in new directions. This would make the organization of new actions possible, such as strikes that mobilize workers in multiple industries. These kinds of action could continue and multiply over time as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. The anarchist solution to the problem of socialist transformation was, in short, that the working classes could become capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state, and establish and reproduce an anarchist society through engaging in revolutionary practice. As Malatesta put it, “progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between men and their environment.”[[#156MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|156]]
+The realisation that things like culture that we once thought were distinctly human are being found in other animals is blurring the rankings of our very meticulous taxonomies. But New Age idiosyncrasies are obscuring the science. Where it is being discussed, it is quite often hampered by mystical and totemic portrayals of these animals by people who think they are magical.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#13|1]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 148–49; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 70.</div>
+John Lilly has to answer for some of this. His maverick experimentation with hallucinogens and his obsession with decoding dolphin language in order to talk to them has tarnished dolphin study as pseudo-science. Plus he was still looking at it the wrong way. John Lilly was ranking language as the highest form of intelligence, as though we are ahead of the animals on a scale of progression, as though animals have not just adapted themselves as we have to the skills most required by their environments. He was still setting humans outside of the rest of nature and looking for the next best contender to invite into our elevated realm. John Lilly was Narcissus looking for something that reflected John Lilly back at himself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#23|2]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 38.</div>
+The understanding that humans are just animals is maybe already there in children, who feel a kind of empathy towards animals because they see them as furry, scaly, feathery people. But of course children’s understanding of animal experience is not perfect because they take human-like responses to mean what they would mean in people.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#33|3]]. Anarchism shares this emphasis on nondomination with republicanism. See Kinna and Alex Prichard, “Anarchism and Non-domination,” ''Journal of Political Ideologies'' 24, no. 3 (2019): 221–40.</div>
+When I was little I went to SeaWorld and loved every second of it. I thought the whales were happy and had a genuine best-friendship with their human trainers. You expect a super-friendly place like Florida where they invented orange juice and Mickey Mouse to be really good to their animals. And they are in the biggest pools you had ever seen and they really love what they do – look at the way they leap and smile and splash, all obvious expressions of joy and excitement.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#43|4]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985),'' ''121.</div>
+YAAAAAY, goes the internal monologue of the dolphin. And the whales are far from home but they have each other and they love to be a family. They get the tastiest fish and the best care and fun toys and stimulation from people that they would not get in the wild and they are safe from those nasty Japanese poachers. Shamu has been alive for ever so they must have long, happy lives in captivity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#53|5]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''124.</div>
+You would never guess that the big one they get out at the end to do the big splash is not really called Shamu and would go on to kill lots of people because he is so emotionally traumatised from being masturbated by humans so his sperm could be sold for millions and being stuck in a concrete box with strangers who do not speak his dialect of whale and who rake him with their teeth for being different.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#63|6]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''46. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''64, 148.</div>
+Cetaceans are intensely social. They have coded clicks that they use around each other. We can’t decode what they are communicating, but they seem to be repeating a pattern. These clicks seem to be social affirmations. If they are saying anything it might be HELLO HELLO HELLO in their specific dialect. The sad whales of captivity could just be repeating HELLO HELLO HELLO in mutually unintelligible dialects.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#73|7]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191. Bakunin labels restrictions on freedom as domination on multiple occasions. See ibid., 136, 150, 167, 192, 212, 254.</div>
+Cetaceans are women’s allies in the war against patriarchy because patriarchy holds the cetaceans down with us. Orcas travel in matriarchal pods. The root of the word dolphin, ''delphus'', means womb.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#83|8]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 54.</div>
+==== SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#93|9]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 54, 58–59.</div>
+Either I won Jon over or he invited me to watch the second haul because he was worried I would tell Larus they neglected me on the boat. He was hesitant in everything before I got out there, though, taking ages over giving me a bright orange anorak that drowned me already in case I fell in the water. He pointed out where the whistle was built into the collar and made me blow on it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#103|10]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 50. See also, 61, 62–63. 68.</div>
+It was obvious as soon as I followed him out why he was being so cagey. A couple of the guys swore blatantly, one of them being Logan, who came straight from the other side of the deck and pushed past me back into the cabin, to go into his quarters, take his shoes off, put them back on again and masturbate in frustration over my pillow or something.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#113|11]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''40, 446. See also Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 249, 366; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 38.</div>
+When the netted fish break the surface of the water they seem to be dead already and the gulls appear from nowhere to hover over and peck at them until they realise they can’t lift them from inside the net. All pouched up inside the net, they spiral jaggedly but still quite mesmerisingly into each other because they are slippery and they swirl from the squeeze of the net and the pull of the water. It is the kind of movement that if you concentrate seems self-perpetuating, like a siphon flow, and you can’t imagine how it might have started or when it will stop. A perpetual motion machine. (But this is an illusion. A perpetual motion machine is an epistemic impossibility; energy always dissipates. Second law of thermodynamics.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#123|12]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 41.</div>
+AN ANALOGY: Once upon a time a bunch of people were on a ship too and they went hubris crazy from their own seamanship and they steered their ship into more and more perilous waters in order just to test their ever more brilliant feats of seamanship. Then the people on the ship started to argue amongst themselves, complaining about conditions on the ship. A lady on the ship complained that ladies do not get as many blankets as men. A Mexican on the ship complained he did not get paid as much as his Anglo counterparts. A Native American on the ship complained that he was owed compensation for the theft of his ancestral lands. A gay man on the ship complained at being called names for sucking cock. An animal lover on the ship complained that the dog on the ship was frequently kicked.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#132|13]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''56.</div>
+A lowly cabin boy piped up that everyone should stop arguing because really the issue was that the ship was headed for wreckage in the more perilous waters and that none of their problems would matter if the ship was wrecked, but nobody listened to him because he was just a lowly cabin boy. They called him a fascist and continued to argue amongst themselves about their personal issues, and nobody turned the ship around. Meanwhile the captain distracted them with condolences (an extra blanket for the lady, for example) that were always slight enough to placate but never for long, in order that they would not revolt and the ship could keep steaming ahead.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#142|14]]. Alexander Berkman, “A Decade of Bolshevism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 119.</div>
+The ship went on sailing north until it was crushed between icebergs and sank to the bottom of the sea.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#152|15]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''13.</div>
+This is an analogy of civilisation written by Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Obviously it has some major flaws. Why is the captain suicidal? Is there really one malicious captain steering the helm of civilisation? If we sabotage the ship, like he wants us to, then wouldn’t we drown in freezing waters? But mostly my issue with it is that he does not seem to see that the problems of the people on the ship stem from the same place that built the ship badly (hint: patriarchy!). That to address the root of all their problems is to also steer the ship responsibly. As though the people on the ship were separate from the ship, as though the ship were sturdy and eternal, not contingent and always in the process of being reconstructed. I decided I should demonstrate this to Logan when the guys finally broached the subject of my presence on the ship.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#162|16]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 121.</div>
+‘We thought you might be a spy that Larus sent to try and dig up the dirt on our whale data,’ said Jon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#172|17]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 16.</div>
+‘I just need to get to Canada, and Larus said you’d take me. I can’t say I disagree with how he feels about the whales, though.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#182|18]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 438. See also Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993), 119; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 164; Makhno, ''Struggle'', 62.</div>
+‘That’s exactly the sentimentality a woman would come up with,’ Logan piped up from nowhere.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#192|19]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 72–73.</div>
+Everyone paused for a second with cutlery midway to mouth because it was the first thing he had said directly to me the whole trip.
-[[#202|20]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 27.
+‘I’d kill a whale catch if I had my way. I’d stab it in the jugular and let it bleed out slowly. It’s how we’ve always done it. No amount of squeals from folk like you will stop it, as much as you like to think it does.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#212|21]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 236.</div>
+Thinking I would meet him on his own territory, I said, ‘A curse on you and your boat,’ which I thought was quite funny. I did not think he would take it so seriously. He called me a witch, said something about how the catch had been bad and the boat was headed for doom now and slammed out of the room.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#222|22]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 147.</div>
+There was a big old awkward silence until Ethan, the warmest to me, said, ‘You really shouldn’t have said something like that,’ and a few of the guys exhaled loudly and let out low whistles.
-[[#232|23]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''197.
+Logan is like Ted Kaczynski in that he does not realise it is his own issues with me that was sending his ship to imaginary doom in the first place. It comes from inside him. It is a thing they have both imposed but are thinking is an ''essential thing''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#242|24]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 202–3. This exact same language was used by Mella. See Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 117–18.</div>
+The ‘curse’ will be lifted, so I suppose I did cast a spell on the boat in a way. Because when Logan realises it is ''he'' who is cursing the ship he will have to change his views on women (although there my own analogy falls down; Logan and the Unabomber are not synonymous because Ted Kaczynski would never kill whales).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#252|25]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 40.</div>
+I am partially onside with the Unabomber on the green issues, but like a lot of primitivists he believes in a Darwinian world of individual strength and combat where women have a subservient role because that is just ''essential human nature''. And he really does not like feminists.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#262|26]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 156.</div>
+===== What he says: feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and capable as men. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#272|27]]. Malatesta,'' Towards Anarchy'','' ''149. See also, 141.</div>
+===== What Charles Darwin the sexist Victorian naturalist said: the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#282|28]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''73, 93–94, 130, 133.</div>
+What is ‘strong’? Why is it ‘good’? They are as superstitious as Logan. They believe in the perpetual motion machine, without seeing that something started it, something gives energy to the machine. What the Unabomber needs is a feminist revision.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#292|29]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''78.</div>
+===== What YOU need is a feminist revision. =====
-[[#302|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''153.
+===== Get off my ship you witch-whore. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#312|31]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 76–77.</div>
+=== {{anchor|Topofch03html}} THE RECEDING HORIZON ===
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#322|32]]. Errico Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 57; ''Towards Anarchy'', 56.</div>
+==== GO CAREFULLY BRAVE SPACE PROBE FOR MY DREAMS GO WITH YOU ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#332|33]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 165.</div>
+I had to steer clear of the northernmost mainland of Canada because it is sparsely populated and so logistics would have been difficult. It made more sense to go south to Saint John’s, North America’s oldest city. It’s on the bigger-sized chunk called Newfoundland just off the bottom tip of Labrador, near where they excavated a Viking settlement that could have been Gudrid’s. Means I have to ferry over to the mainland again across the Gulf of St Lawrence.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#342|34]]. The following interpretation of solidarity differs from but is indebted to the discussion of Bakunin’s and Kropotkin’s understanding of solidarity in John Nightingale, “The Concept of Solidarity in Anarchist Thought” (PhD diss., Loughborough University, 2015), 34–108.</div>
+Thank god for the Trans-Canada Highway. I can use it to get all the way across the country to Yukon near the border with Alaska. You can get the whole way using Greyhound buses but they are way too expensive, so I am hoping to be able to do most of it with carpools and just a couple of coaches.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#352|35]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''478.</div>
+If I get completely stuck I suppose I will just have to hitchhike. I keep bringing up pages on the computer about women going missing while walking near the highway. A guy got beheaded and eaten on a Greyhound from Winnipeg, though, so none of my options are perfect.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#362|36]]. Malatesta, ''Café'','' ''57.</div>
+The whole dynamic and landscape of the journey is to change now completely. Physically, it is all so lush and green and so many trees, such big trees! So weird to not be on rolling water. I think for the first few days the sensation will carry through, like how liquid that has been shaken about carries on sloshing even when its vessel has stilled. And it is also strange to think that now for the first time I am really on my own, because all the way so far I have been with Urla or kind of passed between adult guardians. Now it is just me and the whole of Canada, each leg of the journey a level to complete, bonus points carried over to the next level for novelty and amount of budget spared. And something else as well. Perhaps ''velocity''. Because I have a vast space to cover and not much time or budget to do it in.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#372|37]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''68.</div>
+The internet tells me that Voyager 1 has left the solar system after all. It is now 12 billion miles away from Earth. That is 121 astronomical units or 121 times the space between Earth and the Sun. There has not been much fanfare to accompany this, maybe because it does not fit into our dogma of linear time, there not being a point where NASA could sit cheering and giving high-fives. They figured it out by comparing the number of protons around it this year with those around it last year, and from that estimated that it must have crossed the heliopause in around August last year.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#382|38]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 124.</div>
+So before I even left England it was already gone. In retrospect we will slot it into the history of our progressive forward march. Like when Columbus accidentally discovered a world that had already been discovered, several times over. Convinced it was India, he called the people he found there Indians, but more embarrassing is that we still preserve that mistake in our speech today. Europe did not hear about it until he got back afterwards and then the spread of the news would have been slow compared to our instantaneous world. It was an event that set into motion the beginnings of Western world domination, so from our perspective I suppose we are bound to distil it. Is this the drive behind time capsules? Are they a way to feign control over time by chronologising, a way of saying I MARK TIME THEREFORE I AM in order to assert existence?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#392|39]]. Élisée Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 144.</div>
+It is cool that something made in the 1970s is still sending us signals from so far away when you consider what computers looked like in the seventies. On his way back from the New World Columbus threw a bottle overboard, with a message inside addressed to the Queen of Castile detailing what he had found in case he drowned in a storm (I MARKED TIME THEREFORE I WAS). Voyager 1 will carry on sending messages for maybe ten more years until its plutonium runs out, after which it will carry on into interstellar space without us for a billion years before disintegrating.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#402|40]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 415. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''400; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''74; Reclus, “An Anarchist on Anarchy,” 147.</div>
+In Port aux Basques I found a cheap hostel. I was invited out to drink with two obnoxious American boys I met in my dorm but I passed because they were obnoxious and because I was tired and had arranged already to Skype Larus.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#412|41]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''7–8; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007),'' ''58–60, 100–101.</div>
+==== WOMEN’S BLOOD MYSTERIES ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#422|42]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 38–39.</div>
+I had decided to ask for a lift just to Truro so that if I ended up in the car with a weirdo I could get out in plenty of time before it got too late, then if the driver happened to be taking the route on to Moncton I could decide to stay with them or not to. I won’t pretend I was not uncertain as I stood with my thumb out at the side of the road feeling small. When she pulled in for me she did it almost erratically as though on seeing my small uncertain self up close she could not sail past and just leave me there. I am very aware that in this context my youth and gender will be a blessing and could also very easily be a curse. As it happened, Jules was driving back from seeing friends in Sydney to her home in Riverview just outside Moncton.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#432|43]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 63. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 109–10.</div>
+Jules: long brown hair speckled with grey and a denim pinafore with a roll-neck sweater on underneath. A big voice and a way of asking questions that makes you think she genuinely wants your life story, as though she collects them. I told her everything about the documentary, about the journey so far. She told me to go ahead and get the camera out if I wanted to ask her anything, she would love to be a part of it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#442|44]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 7.</div>
+She told me about how when she was a bit older than me she had done the entire Trans-Canada Highway from British Columbia to Newfoundland with her boyfriend. She spent some time after that living in a commune near an Indian reservation learning about Native American spirituality under some white New Age spiritual leader reborn as Raven-Wildheart or something. Then when she was hiking back home to BC alone afterwards she took a ride in a van. The guy was jittery and kept licking his lips, which were cracked; she had a bad feeling from the offset but his was the only vehicle she had seen in hours because she was in backcountry. It got dark fast and she had no idea where they were when he pulled over and took his cock out for her to suck.
-[[#452|45]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 51.
+She got out of the car but it was prairie land and she had nowhere to run or hide. The flat, indifferent plains lay out before her on every side. She started to walk as fast as stoicism allowed but she heard the gears crunch into reverse and he rolled down the passenger-side window to ask her ‘where ya goin’, little lady?’ as he crawled her. She ran back off the road so that he would have to turn the car around to chase her.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#462|46]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 195.</div>
+The moon was behind a cloud. She was out of the beam of the tail-lights, and by the time he had aligned the car to the way she had gone, he could not see her running. And besides, his eyesight was bad, she had seen him squinting at the road signs. She turned and could see the car had stopped from the still of its lights, stiffening to the sight of his figure hunched in the car under the weak glow of the interior light. He took something out of the glove compartment and straightened up, holding it out ahead of him. The torch stammered feebly, he tapped it on his palm and it flickered out completely. She heard faintly the clunk of its loose parts as he kicked it into the dark.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#472|47]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 199.</div>
+Jules did not know which way to head. She had tried to aim herself away from the road in a westerly direction, but in the opposite direction to which they had come so as not to stumble onto a road he might still be following. After walking half the night she curled exhausted into a dip in the ground and let the grasses wash around her. She lay awake all night, whispering to the prairie dogs for comfort and listening for the sound of an engine, until it was light enough to make out a farmhouse not too far away. The people inside were sympathetic to her, giving her breakfast and then a ride all the way home, a three-hour drive.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#482|48]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 4.</div>
+The pervert had a generic van and for years afterwards when she saw a similar van she would go clammy.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#492|49]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 190.</div>
+‘But all the other amazing journeys I had apart from that one stupid one… I never let it stop me. It’s the kind of thing that just happens sometimes. You gotta roll with it. Assert your freedom!’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#502|50]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 125,'' ''181, 211, 218, 229, 7. The exact same class analysis features in Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 19–26, 47–48, 66, 72.</div>
+Yes. Like Sylvia Plath said in her journal, why should women be relegated to the position of custodian of emotions, watcher of infants, feeder of soul, body, and pride of man? A consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar-room regulars – that is what Sylvia Plath had. To be part of this scene, anonymous, listening and recording. We can’t because we are females, always in danger of assault and battery. Oh, to be free to sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#512|51]]. The historian Bernard Moss has argued that the term “artisan” is misleading, due to it conflating “independent artisans, master artisans and skilled wage earners” into one social group. See Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 13. To avoid this misunderstanding, I have added the qualification that the artisans anarchists referred to did not exploit the labor of others.</div>
+Looking out of the window and thinking, in this part of the world there are so many spaces between people that are just for trees. Conifers tower over the highway, making flashing striped shadows, and eagles are in the sky above them. Grass creeps back into the rubble fringing the asphalt. Lakes start to appear as flashes in gaps between the trees, like looking inside a zoetrope. There are spindly top-heavy trees that stand twice the height of the tips of the conifers. We are entering taiga land now, boreal forest.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#522|52]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 493.</div>
+‘You know if you just drive through this you miss it all?’ Jules said. I told her yes but I have to get all the way to Alaska before half of my money runs out, then head back on the rest. She asked, ‘Why’ve you got to do that, sounds like a lot of pressure?’ I told her I have to do it for the project, and that it is constructive pressure.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#532|53]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 11–12; Malatesta, ''Café'', 45.</div>
+‘Why Alaska? What’s Alaska got that New Brunswick doesn’t?’ ‘Gold fever. The mythology of gold rush country. Frontiers land. Jack London land. I don’t know what it has but that’s what I’m going to find out.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#542|54]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 32.</div>
+She laughed. ‘You going to disappear into the wild, then?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#552|55]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 50.</div>
+I told her about the wilderness plan. She smiled and laughed and grimaced and seemed altogether perplexed about her feelings towards it all. Like with the story she had told me, I could not tell if she was being encouraging or cautionary. I asked her why this was.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#562|56]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''25; Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 10.</div>
+‘I don’t mean to patronise you, but you’re so young! And I surprise myself. See, you remind me of a younger me, I was around your age when I did similar things and was sure of them while I did them and when I look back on them now even. But you also remind me of my daughter and that makes me worry for you. Of course I worry for her because she is my daughter. Isn’t that messed up? You’ll understand one day when you are a mother. Where is your mother anyways?’
-[[#572|57]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'','' ''63.
+And from out of nowhere and without hesitation I said,
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#582|58]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 67.</div>
+‘She’s dead.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#592|59]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 50.</div>
+Maybe because I thought she would not press any more after that, but in her uninhibited New World way she said softly,
-[[#602|60]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''49.
+‘And what about your dad?’ ‘He’s dead too.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#612|61]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''49–50, 149, 151–53; Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''25–38; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''79.</div>
+I stared right ahead after that but could see her taking snatched glances at me, searching my emotionless face to find the vulnerability there. When she could not find it we sat in silence a while, between us the sombre reverence of the orphan, so young and so blameless and yet wizened beyond years.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#622|62]]. Anarchists did not all use the same terminology. Malatesta argued in 1891 that anarchists should use the term “government,” instead of “the state.” To avoid confusion, I shall consistently refer to the state. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 111–12.</div>
+After some time had passed she said, ‘Won’t you get lonely out there?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#632|63]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 9, 26. In 1871, two years before the publication of ''Statism and Anarchy'', Bakunin had dated the “foundation of modern States” to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Kropotkin dated the rise of the modern state to the sixteenth century. See Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 137; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 183, 234, 252.</div>
+I asked her did she think Henry D. Thoreau was ever lonely. He was not, he was in a state of solitude. And besides, even that state was not ever pure. I will bring the camera with me, and this presumes an audience. Thoreau meditating on solitude by conversing with a diary is a paradox if you think about it. There is never solitude, only degrees of separation. You have to know something to know it is not there.
-[[#642|64]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 13.
+No man is an island, not even Ted Kaczynski, the man-island of all man-islands. When Ted Kaczynski was a boy genius at Harvard he was used as a subject by Henry Murray as part of the CIA’s secret illegal MK ULTRA mind control programme. The aim of the programme was to find methods and drugs that could be used in interrogations and torture, to weaken the subject and elicit a confession. They chose geniuses because in theory their minds would be more resilient to intrusion. His code name was ‘Lawful’ and he was seventeen years old. Murray used ‘vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks’ against the child Unabomber’s ideas, beliefs and his ego.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#652|65]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 184.</div>
+After such an attack on his idea of his self and his place in the world, is it any wonder he subsumed himself into something bigger (nature) and so different from the institution of Harvard (civilisation)? Ted Kaczynski was no island. He was another product of the Cold War.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#662|66]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 183–84.</div>
+After Jules dropped me in the city centre and I walked away feeling her tear-filled eyes on my back I found a bench right away and rang my parents because I felt so bad that I killed them like that. I have been keeping my promise to email weekly, but that was the first time I have heard their voices in fifty-two days. At the start they texted almost daily, like a check-in to make sure I made it to the end of the day; it would come always around 9 p.m. They must have adjusted based on my time zone so that they would always catch me just before I settled down. But they are becoming less and less persistent with it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#672|67]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'','' ''299, 317–19.</div>
+‘Oh, there she is!’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#682|68]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''118.</div>
+‘I’m sat on a park bench in Moncton in New Brunswick.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#692|69]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147. See also Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'','' ''140; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''11–15.</div>
+‘Where’s that, love?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#702|70]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 45.</div>
+‘Canada.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#712|71]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306. See also, 313–17, 234 and, for anarchist critiques of the police and prisons, 499–508; Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''42–59; Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''332–46; Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''151–72.</div>
+‘She told you before she’s in Canada now.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#721|72]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''210–11; ''Bakunin'' ''on Anarchism'', 317–20; Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''56.</div>
+‘Well, I never heard of New Brunswick! What can you see, lovely?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#731|73]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 234.</div>
+‘Lots of tall buildings, a neat little park, no pigeons.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#741|74]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 226–27. Kropotkin claims that the state is necessarily centralized and hierarchical multiple times in this text and others. See ibid., 199, 275, 310; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''566.</div>
+‘What time is it there?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#751|75]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''113. See also, 136.</div>
+‘It’s about six p.m.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#761|76]]. Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 212–13. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 29, 44.</div>
+‘And are you on your own?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#771|77]]. Quoted in Zurbrugg, “Introduction,” in Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''15.</div>
+‘Yes.’
-[[#781|78]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''24.
+‘Oh, love.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#791|79]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 25, 27; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''115, 118.</div>
+‘What time is it in England?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#801|80]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 63.</div>
+‘It’s one fifteen.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#811|81]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 42, 50, 61; Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 73–79.</div>
+I skirted around the hitchhiking aspect of the journey and told them I had been getting coaches and, yes, my budget was doing all right, it is pretty cheap out here actually. We chatted for a while about things at home, how one of the neighbours had got a new dog that seemed to disagree with our own dog, how the weather had been especially hot for May and how the house was empty without me. And then there was a long pause with lots of little gasps that meant she was crying.
-[[#821|82]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 78.
+‘Don’t go getting all upset, she’s fine. Listen! She sounds so happy! Aren’t you happy, Erin?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#831|83]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 77. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 13, 23.</div>
+‘Yes, very happy.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#841|84]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 50. This idea was later repeated almost word for word by Goldman. See Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 64.</div>
+‘You see, she’s doing just fine.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#851|85]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 197–98.</div>
+I went to wrap it up then because I was about to start crying too and if she heard me cry, well, that would just be it, she would set in with her mantra that I had made a terrible and malady-driven mistake. But then she said in a very small voice, ‘Yes, I know she’s doing just fine, of course she is,’ and that did me in. I waited until we were off the phone and then I sat and wept quietly alone on that park bench in Moncton, New Brunswick, for a full minute until I had exorcised those cumbersome feelings from me and I got up to find a hostel for the night.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#861|86]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''189–90, 203, 207; Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'','' ''70; Rudolf Rocker, ''Nationalism and Culture ''(Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937),'' ''298–339; Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 71–72, 182, 188; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 120–143.</div>
+==== THE POLLINATOR HEALTH TASK FORCE ====
-[[#871|87]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''174; ''Bakunin on Anarchism'','' ''396–7; Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 175–189; Emma Goldman, ''Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation'','' 1896–1926'','' ''ed. Shawn P. Wilbur (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016); Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'','' ''79, 92–93.
+QUEBEC CITY: This whole couch-surfing thing is really novel. All Lucie gets out of it is someone to show her city to, and I suppose a little cultural exchange. Seems to run on a backpacker mentality that sees meeting new people and sharing as the ultimate human rewards. I keep thinking of it like outside your customary social sphere you do not have any prerequisites and can be yourself more than you are yourself at home, become a really exaggerated version of yourself or whatever self you choose to accentuate for a short while.
-[[#881|88]]. Terence Kissack, ''Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States'','' 1895–1917'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008); Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'','' ''169–180.
+It feels so natural that the strangest thing about it is that there will be a point in just a few days when it is all undone and I am a stranger to these people again. That we will stop existing to each other apart from in rare and passing thoughts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#891|89]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 111–135; Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''150–57.</div>
+She and all the friends I met identify as ‘Pure Laine’; of pure French descent. We did not stop at the Citadelle, the massively serene City Hall or any of the other strikingly majestic/oppressive buildings of the British colonial era, but she lingered at anything built before the British took Quebec in the Seven Years’ War: the Notre-Dame de Quebec, the cobbled architecture of the Haute-Ville and the Basse-Ville of the Old Town. The ramparts are the only fortified city walls north of Mexico. It is like the architecture itself is vying for prominence, a physical manifestation of historical egos. But a thought kept bugging me: it forgets that the sparring ground was appropriated and the fighting was imperial on both sides.
-[[#901|90]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 131–49; Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 6–18.
+Lucie told the story as if it began with France and that is how the exhibition at the Musée de la Civilisation told it too, which I suppose it did in terms of written histories we can understand.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#911|91]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 136–7, 156–62, 233; Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography'','' ''160–1; Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', 136. For a discussion of vegetarianism in the Spanish anarchist movement see Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 87–8, 161–2.</div>
+Cultures indigenous to the Americas had no written history before Europeans came and Latinised (or in some nicer cases invented a new syllabic alphabet for) their speech. Writing is the time-capsulation of language, pinning it so it can’t float away on the wind. (An airborne language is the kind of which Ted Kaczynski would approve.) Their history is oral, is ‘prehistory’. So in a way it is as though they did not exist.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#921|92]]. Zoe Baker, “Bakunin was a Racist,” Anarchopac.com, October 31, 2021, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-bakunin-was-a-racist.</div>
+Museums are time capsules. Sometimes they are time capsules of the other but by what taxonomies do they become ‘of the other’? The Golden Records time-capsulised different cultures and species under the umbrella of ‘life on earth’. It could be that the relics of past civilisations that we sanctimoniously preserve and curate were meant for the future anyway. Maybe this is the most basic human impulse. (I mark time therefore I am, I marked time remember me, this is how I marked my time.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#931|93]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 115–8; A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 34–5. See also endnote 10 in the introduction.</div>
+At the time-capsule museum in Oglethorpe University, Atlanta, Georgia, there is an underground chamber sealed in 1940 by the founder of the university, the ‘father of the modern time capsule’, Thornwell Jacobs. It is called the Crypt of Civilisation. It contains all the great literature, voice recordings of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Popeye, objects like a toaster and a typewriter, scientific instruments, the contents of a woman’s purse, a black doll. By ‘our civilisation’ they meant ‘the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century’, according to the inscription on the door. Next to this is a ‘language integrator’ based on the Rosetta Stone, for teaching a subset of English called ‘basic English’ in case it is not spoken any more (a gesture towards solving the Forever Problem).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#941|94]]. Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 2 (New York: Dover Publications, 1970), 555.</div>
+This is taxonomy of sorts; an order to say this culture is different from that culture. They are because I have known them. A discovered animal exists but an undiscovered one does not. Divided they can be ranked. And if not denying the existence of native cultures we are at least able to say, they are behind us, primitive, not-quite-there-yet like animals.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#951|95]]. Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 150, 151.</div>
+It bothered Thornwell Jacobs that there was so little preserved of ancient cultures. He wanted to make future archaeologists’ jobs easy for them. He thought of it in 1936, and figured that date to be the halfway point to the future, 6,177 years after the Egyptian calendar had been established at ‘the beginning of history’ in 4241 BC. So he set the date for the crypt to be opened at AD 8113. And he based the idea of the crypt on the 1920s openings of Egyptian pyramids and tombs. (But still he was the father?)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#961|96]]. Malatesta,'' Method of Freedom'', 299. For other definitions of anarchy, see Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 120–21; Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 144; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 133–34; Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 40; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 26, 58; Lucy Parsons, ''Writings and Speeches'', 38.</div>
+The crypt is an old underground swimming pool built in the bedrock underneath one of the university buildings. Buried in the bedrock underneath Eurajoki in Finland is the world’s only deep geological depository for nuclear waste. It is called Onkalo, which means cave. There are tunnels excavated from the bedrock. The tunnels will be filled with nuclear waste and sealed with concrete. Then the sealed tunnels will be marked with warning signs, or maybe they will not be marked at all; Finland has not decided yet. Because surely to mark them with symbols that will die is only to draw attention to them. And if a future civilisation digs up the Crypt of Civilisation then they might expect Onkalo to contain similar archaeological delights.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#971|97]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 99. See also Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 15–16.</div>
+At the Musée de la Civilisation there was an exhibition on the very first French settlement in Canada, which had been excavated in 2005. The settlement burnt down but they have not figured out whether the scorch marks told of accident or arson. The exhibition does not speculate much about the arsonists. I got so caught up in Lucie’s turbulent history that I forgot that it erased thousands of years of culture, indigenous Canadians killed or cultivated or penned up by Europeans as if they were livestock or an unfortunate feature of the landscape.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#981|98]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 140</div>
+==== AND LIVE ALONE IN THE BEE-LOUD GLADE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#991|99]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 141.</div>
+Sat in a diner eating on my own, waiting for the coach to Ottawa. I am thinking about how the small autonomy of just being alone in public for a woman is also a right that needs to be claimed and kept on being claimed until it is a given. In order to do away with the anxiety that is shaping you from outside, like the deer in the glade that twitches its ears as it grazes, looking up and behind itself always in anticipation of predatory eyes. Women can’t eat alone unless we claim it, can’t go to a bar and sit alone, be in solitude in social places, as though always the female body is a lonely body, an invitation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1001|100]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 142.</div>
+But tonight I sit in a diner on my own and nobody has looked at me. There are not many people in here, granted, but nobody has questioned or tested my being there with their looks. The waitress brought me a complimentary basket of bread and a jug of water without me asking, and smiled, as if to say, you are welcome here, this table is your own.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1011|101]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 128.</div>
+Growing out of the girl and into the woman sitting in cafés alone, libraries alone, anywhere alone, really, without feeling the itch of the out-of-place, displaced, mistaken. With the self-assuredness of the intentionally-put-in-place. I am starting to feel that now. A body that says, before they think to ask, no thank you, I am where I intend to be.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1021|102]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 302. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''304. The same point is made by Mella,'' Anarchist Socialism'', 1–9, 27.</div>
+==== IS THERE WATER ON MARS CUS WE’RE THIRSTY ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1031|103]]. Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015). For other examples, see James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''247–67; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread''<nowiki>; Diego Abad de Santillán, </nowiki>''After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain'', trans. Louis Frank (New York: Greenberg, 1937).</div>
+I have showered and put my least dirty clothes on, and looked at my reflection properly for the first time in weeks. I looked different, perhaps just dirty or tanned, or perhaps I have forgotten myself a little.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1041|104]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 41.</div>
+Now that I am not on the ice sheet or the ocean or moving in a car it is like I am back in real life and that before was unreality. It feels uncomfortable. Like the velocity is gone and now I am at standstill. I feel restless.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1051|105]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49</div>
+I have been on the move now for two months so I need to get to Alaska ASAP but I am about on target. So far I have spent about £470, just under a third of my original budget. I also have an extra £200 I won in a travel-writing competition for a thing I wrote about sledging in Greenland, so I am doing all right, but it still makes sense to stop and work while I am in the more populous part of the country and work is theoretically easier to come by, before I move back up north and west. I found a job in a hostel in Ottawa city on a helpshare website so I will stay put for a few weeks and come up for some air.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1061|106]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 299.</div>
+A girl called Jackie who is hitchhiking to the west coast of America, following in the steps of serial narcissist-road-trip-writer Jack Kerouac, keeps a blog I have been following closely. She has a big following, and some of them are other girls doing similar things, an online-feminist-adventure-blog-vanguard. It is exciting to feel like I am a part of something bigger. I reckon feminism would have worked a lot faster if Annie Peck could have connected with all the other unnamed women who were taking on man-roles, mountaineering and shit, and realised she was not as remarkable as her male counterparts said she was. I think she would have liked that. What Annie Peck was missing was the internet.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1071|107]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 300.</div>
+Benny runs the hostel. He takes on backpackers because they attract other backpackers and also work for a pittance because they mostly don’t have work visas. I cover shifts on the bar, reception, kitchen, wherever there is work, for about £5 per hour. On top of this I get my own single room, food and drink. I have to work eight-hour shifts every day so that is £200 per week with a couple of days off. If I keep it up for two weeks I can make a little bit of money to tide me over.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1081|108]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 302.</div>
+Everyone who works at Benny’s is under thirty and the hostel is full with travellers. You’d almost call it a melting pot if it weren’t so homogeneous. Maybe let us say it is a bunch of at-least-onetime-Europeans but some of them speak differently.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1091|109]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 301, 302.</div>
+An Ottawan guy, a friend of Benny’s called Tom, has stayed at the bar talking to me every night I have been here. Tom is quite attractive, I would say. He has deep-set eyes that bore in a bit in a sexy way when I am talking. So far, though, even though he has had opportunity to try it, he has not suggested coming back to my room. I am glad about this. I have a few weeks and it is more fun to be stretching it out, but also should it be an ill-suited pairing then I have less time left to dwell in the regret of it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1101|110]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 300.</div>
+I did do a few interviews with people around the hostel. I got onto this topic that everyone seems to bring up without really knowing that they are. Lots of the interviews come back to the same elusive thing and this is coming from people from all sorts of nationalities. It makes you think that the world is really a very small place after all, if everyone can be saying the same thing that is not really saying anything, without knowing it. It has something to do with what ''freedom'' feels like, and how it is always just ahead of you, a bright little light like an orb, but if you run hard enough at times and in places like this, you catch it up and you can float it in your hands.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1111|111]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 231.</div>
+Otherwise I suppose everything documentary-wise is on the back burner because I am keeping the laptop in a safe and there is hardly ever time to get it out. It is making me agitated; sometimes instead of sleeping I am thinking of all the things that are waiting to be captured. Like gathering butterflies, and butterflies are really slow and plentiful so I won’t run out or anything, but I might miss a good one while I am not looking. And maybe there is someone else out there butterfly-gathering, gathering them quicker and better.
-[[#1121|112]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 47.
+It makes me empathise with the anxiety that must have been felt on both sides during the space race. The not knowing where the Russians were at, and oh my god, what if they get there first, what if tomorrow even they announce it, we made it here, the moon is ours. This panic drove them, it rushed them into cutting corners they should not have. Russia had many people die in the process. A fire burned up over one hundred spectators in a launch-pad accident. This was kept classified until the nineties. But what else do we not know? Maybe Yuri Gagarin was not the first cosmonaut. Two Italian brothers with a home-made radio claimed they were picking up transmissions from other, abandoned cosmonauts. They thought maybe Yuri Gagarin was just the first to return alive.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1131|113]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49–62; Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 156–68, 215–30.</div>
+But besides what we don’t know, we ''do'' know perhaps the most heart-breaking best-friend-sacrifice story in history. When Yuri Gagarin inspected Soyuz 1 he found 203 structural problems and he urged his superiors to delay the mission but they would not. Scheduled to fly the mission was his best friend, co-pilot Vladimir Komarov, and Vladimir Komarov would not back out of this mission he knew to be a suicide mission because his back-up was Yuri Gagarin. On the day of the launch Yuri Gagarin tried to halt the mission, demanding that he go in Komarov’s place. Of all the design flaws Komarov overcame it was the very last hurdle that got him. After surviving the multiple perils of space he died as he hit the ground in Russia when his parachute did not unfurl.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1141|114]]. This system of decision-making is often referred to as direct democracy without the state by modern anarchists. This language was largely not used by historical anarchists because they used the word “democracy” to refer to systems of government that were incompatible with anarchism, such as bourgeois parliamentary representative democracy or Ancient Athens. For an overview of this topic, see Baker, “Anarchism and Democracy,” Anarchopac.com, April 15, 2022, https://anarchopac.com/2022/04/15/anarchism-and-democracy.</div>
+And then even where they pulled it off, if you look at the minute details they are embarrassingly botched. Like when cosmonaut Alexey Leonov became the first human being to space-walk, he nearly could not get back inside because his spacesuit was badly designed and it inflated. He went up in a spaceship made for only one person, with co-pilot Pavel Belyayev. When they had to calculate re-entry it was so cramped in their shuttle that they could not go through the motions in time and their orbital module did not disconnect from their landing module when it should have and they ended up landing 386 kilometres from where they intended in a forest on a mountain in the taiga, where they had to spend two days fending off bears and wolves frenzied in mating season before help arrived on skis.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1151|115]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 133.</div>
+America had the Apollo 1 fire. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reckoned they had a fifty-fifty chance of coming back alive and President Richard Nixon had two scenario speeches prepared for him. The worst-case scenario speech said very noble and chauvinistic things like THEY BIND MORE TIGHTLY THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN and THEY WILL BE MOURNED BY A MOTHER EARTH THAT DARED SEND TWO OF HER SONS INTO THE UNKNOWN and EVERY HUMAN BEING WHO LOOKS UP AT THE MOON IN THE NIGHTS TO COME WILL KNOW THAT THERE IS SOME CORNER OF ANOTHER WORLD THAT IS FOREVER MANKIIIIIIND.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1161|116]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 148–49; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 614. For a few different proposals on how an anarchist society could respond to people who engaged in acts of violent oppression, see Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 260–61; Malatesta, ''Café'', 130–35; Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''46–48.</div>
+So really they did not have much of a clue and they were just going for it and hoping for the best. How the hell did they even pull off the moon landings? I mean, imagine having almost no deep space technology and then setting the task, guys, you have eight years to put an actual human being on the actual moon, okay, great, thanks, Mr President Kennedy, sir, we’ll get on it. How did they even test the rockets before using them? I suppose they just pointed them at the sky and crossed their fingers. And they had no clue what would happen to people if and when they got up there. Maybe they would spontaneously combust. Maybe their organs would be sucked out. Maybe they would bring flesh-eating alien microbes back to Earth with them. So maybe I should not freak out too much and it is best not to rush the project.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1171|117]]. Anarchist authors used a variety of different terms when referring to assemblies, such as associations of production and consumption, labor councils, popular assemblies, communal assemblies, and communes. To avoid confusion I have chosen to use the language of workplace, community, and general assemblies.</div>
+Considering all this I wonder a bit when Larus teasingly says he thinks they faked the moon landings. You were there, I say, you saw it happen. Yes, but maybe they just flew around the world, maybe they never made it past the Van Allen belt where the radiation gets too much, is it really more far fetched to think that it could be the whole thing was a scam directed by Kubrick so they could have one over the Russians and become Kings of the World than to think that they really risked the lives of men and the whole planet live on television, sending them up there in a little tin can propelled by explosives, all the way to the moon, which is a very, very long way? And that almost all seven of the landing missions went without a hitch of the death-causing kind? And then we never went back there? Why does the flag wave? Why no impact crater? Where are the stars? The rock with the ‘c’ on it? And besides, Watergate?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1181|118]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy ''(Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d.),'' ''30. See also Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''17–19, 390–91; ''Towards Anarchy'', 74; ''Method of Freedom'', 488.</div>
+==== WOMEN INCENSED AT TELEPHONE COMPANY HARASSMENT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1191|119]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''488; Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'','' ''67, 69–70.</div>
+I took it upon myself to make the moves on Tom because sufficient anticipatory time had passed. This being week two. He said, ‘I knew you wanted me, I was just making you work to get it’ or something equally arrogant, but he was drunk and I know he was just saying it to try to be alluring.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1201|120]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 136.</div>
+Today he took me around Ottawa because we both had a spare day. I think we are not compatible but it does not matter under the circumstances. For one he is boring on his own, and also he tried to insist on buying all my drinks and then he just did not get it and we had to agree to disagree so things did not get awkward.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1211|121]]. Malatesta, ''Between Peasants'', 28–29.</div>
+In physics the Zone of Middle Dimensions refers to physicist Isaac Newton’s world of falling apples, where the physical rules Newton laid down still apply to an extent and the progress made in modern physics that undermine all of Newton’s rules is kind of put to one side just to make more of an easy and livable life for everyone in ‘the zone’ of everyday life. Sometimes I think of my everyday life as a zone of middle dimensions where it is best to not always be a precise and righteous feminist even when you know you are right. Sometimes you have to do that for the sake of simplicity; suspend your indignation like, yeah, if you say so, Newton. But I did try asking Tom why he thought he should buy my drinks, which he thought about quietly for a while, then came up with, ‘It’s just what guys do.’ He said, ‘You’re an idiot anyway, if guys were always offering me free drinks I’d just take them.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1221|122]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170.</div>
+I tried to explain to him that accepting a drink is like agreeing to buy something that does not have a price on it and if something does not have a price on it is usually very expensive; that it is like that story about making a deal with the devil when the devil says ‘I get to have whatever is in your garden’ and you think he can only mean the tyre swing but really he meant your ''garden''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1231|123]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''128.</div>
+Tom did say something very suddenly illuminating and not in a good way. We were sat looking over the confluence of the rivers Rideau, Ottawa and another one I don’t remember the name of (that is three rivers all colliding, picture it: one large body of water rushing into another, undulating. At what point does one river become another river?)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1241|124]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 105, 58, 73–75.</div>
+‘I think Benny’s kind of pissed that we are on a date.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1251|125]]. The following account is based on Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170–71, 179, 206; Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 253, 264–66; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60–63; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 105, 188; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''60–65.</div>
+I asked him why he said pissed, rather than something less angry, like sad, or disappointed, but I did not get why Benny would be that either. He asked if I thought everybody got the same special treatment, their own bedroom. And I realised for the first time that, yes, the two other backpacking girls who worked the bar had beds in a dormitory.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#126|126]]. Anarchists throughout Latin America referred to national federations as the regional federations of a country in the world—for example, the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA), rather than the Argentine National Workers’ Federation. See Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 5–6, 63.</div>
+It is so stupidly transparent, so unassumingly obvious and self-assured and so without deviousness, that I failed to notice. But I guess they think I have been playing their game all along.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#127|127]]. Compare Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90 and Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 240–41.</div>
+I didn’t react because, well, I bet Einstein, after he disproved Newton, did not just bumble through life coming to loggerheads all the time having to explain fundamental physical laws to people who were just completely ignorant, I bet most of the time he just got on with things. There is being a good feminist and then there is not having any friends. I had told myself two weeks and had made all my next plans accordingly, so I have to make it work for a few more days. But I did make a point of not inviting Tom back to my room tonight.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#128|128]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 133.</div>
+==== WOMEN STILL APPRECIATE CHIVALRY FROM MEN ACCORDING TO STUDY ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#129|129]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 133. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 475.</div>
+I packed up my stuff and quickly left this morning without anyone seeing me, even as I got my things from the locker in the common room, where Benny was passed out on the sofa asleep. The keys were still in his hand. I took them gently and opened the safe behind the reception desk to get to the moneybox, and took the wages he owed me from last week. Then I took a hundred more. And then I put the hundred back.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#130|130]]. Malatesta, ''Between Peasants'', 30.</div>
+Last night after my shift I had been in bed maybe half an hour without Tom, who I jilted at the bar, and I heard a knock on my door. The first was soft, but when I didn’t answer he knocked louder to try to wake me. I kept quiet, feeling indignant, and then thought, no, I don’t want him to think I am asleep, I want him to know that I am sending him away. So I said, ‘Go away, Tom.’ And a really slurred voice said let me in but it was not Tom’s.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#131|131]]. Kropotkin,'' Direct Struggle'','' ''163.</div>
+Then I heard metal scratching metal where he was trying to fit the key inside the lock. I jumped out of bed to stop the door opening fully and Benny leant into the room leering. He said, ‘Hey, let me in’ and leaned heavily on the door. He is a lot bigger than me and I knew he would be able to force his way in so I stood back and let him fall on his weight and I stood straight and spoke loudly at him so everyone would hear.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#132|132]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 134.</div>
+‘No, you can’t come in my room, Benny, now go away. You’re drunk.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#133|133]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 376.</div>
+Next door’s dorm had opened up at this point from the banging and two of the guys came out to ask if I was okay. Benny turned around pitifully from the floor.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#134|134]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 163. See also Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 46–51.</div>
+‘It’s fine. She’s fine. I’m leaving. I was just… checking on her.’ He dragged himself from the floor and wiped his arm slowly over his mouth to try to be inconspicuous, calling me an ungrateful bitch as he left the room. I mouthed thank you to the others, who nodded and one gave a fingers to eyes signal, to imply he would keep an eye on me. After that I did not sleep too well even with the chair wedged firmly under the door handle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#135|135]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 90; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 9, 46, 96; “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association,” in Appendix to René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 183.</div>
+The guys would not say anything today because Benny shelters and feeds them, and why would they jeopardise their comfortable situation? I wonder what else he gets away with; that makes me angry.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#136|136]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 108. See also, 78.</div>
+One thing that Kerouac Jackie does on her blog that is really interesting, she is deadpan about all the people she has slept with along the way. The thing that makes it interesting is that her blog is pretty big, big enough to have attracted trolls. These trolls sit and write petty things, mostly calling Jackie a slut. I don’t know if the trolls have read Kerouac or not, so I don’t know if they condone male sexuality and lusting over thirteen-year-old girls and wifebeating. I bet Benny likes Kerouac.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#137|137]]. Guillaume quoted in Bakunin,'' Bakunin on Anarchism'', 158–59; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''170–71, 186–87; The Jura Federation, “Minutes of the Jura Federation Congress (1880)” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters'', 283.</div>
+Anyway, I am away and on a coach to Sault Ste. Marie on some of the money I earned because I can afford it and because I wasn’t really feeling like jumping in a vehicle with a stranger right away. It is a ten-hour coach then I have a room booked the other end. I have a lucky last-minute carpool tomorrow all the way to Thunder Bay and from there I will figure out how to get to Winnipeg.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#138|138]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''59.</div>
+Larus has sent me not one but two follow-up emails to an email that I have not had a chance to see let alone reply to. The first one being a catch-up and a how’s things, here, look at some stuff I found for you to read. The second being a follow-on to the first with an enquiry into why I did not reply and some inane stuff about what he has been keeping himself busy with. The third is a little parental, chiding me for ‘going off the radar’. I think he is enjoying living life through me or something, or it is some weird kind of deflected paternalism. Urla would have thought of some great way to enact revenge on Benny. I wish she had been there. I wrote her an email to enlist her in effecting Benny’s karmic retribution, but she hasn’t replied to me in a while now.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#139|139]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 251, 255–57. A similar proposal about labor vouchers was made by Kropotkin in 1873 before he became an anarchist communist. In 1879, he proposed “Anarchist communism” as the long-term goal and “collectivism as a transitory form of property.” By 1880, he had abandoned this view and only advocated anarchist communism. See Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'','' ''29–30, 34–35; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 48–58.</div>
+==== OF THE SHINING BIG-SEA WATER ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#140|140]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''11–12, 46–48, 95–99; Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 49–62. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 215–19; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 74–78; 102–106. For the history of anarchist communism, see Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 36–67; Davide Turcato, “Anarchist Communism,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 237–47.</div>
+Trees clear for a diner and some cabins, then the trees clear altogether and we hit the lakeside. And suddenly a whole new perspective, a landscape with depth and a horizon instead of a belt of evergreens. It is so blue and glittering and vast that for a second I am thrown. How did we end up by the sea? But the water is still and we are so near that I can make out the pebbles in the shallows, like the lake is clear plastic in a miniature replica, and for a second the entire world feels like we have been shrunk to thumb size with this model landscape that is simultaneously tiny and proportionally huge to our new tiny selves. Low concrete bollards separate the highway from the water. My mind is surprised into silence. Lake Superior.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#141|141]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 98–116; Temma Kaplan, ''Anarchists of Andalusia'','' 1868–1903'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 139–142.</div>
+From back behind our green conveyor we arrive at a break in the trees again and the coach slows to elongate our passing it. The driver says ‘over there is America’ and there it is, the stretch of the lake unbroken, America so far away and blue with distance, like Calais from Dover on a good day. I know from the map that if we were looking directly south we would be looking at Hiawatha National Park.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#142|142]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 9–17, 60–62; Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology'', 134–54. Similar views were advocated by Malatesta in 1889. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 95–99.</div>
+We pass some holiday condos. The lake now must feel very different from when Henry Longfellow, the old poet, wrote ''The Song of Hiawatha''. You can write about a lake and a landscape but then when something is worth writing about this usually leads on to something beyond admiration, reduces it to something people want to come and see for themselves. Then everyone wants to get touchy-feely and build their condos right there so that they can own their lake-view property. Now Longfellow could do away with his birch canoe with paddles and circumnavigate the entire lake in his pick-up in just a few hours. It was because fancy new cabins kept creeping into his lovely wilderness that Ted Kaczynski retreated further and started to send the letter bombs.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#143|143]]. Paul Avrich, ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018), 46–47, 58, 107–120, 144–46; de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 9.</div>
+Looking at the glassy surface of the lake I remembered that the micro-beads from your facewash are not biodegradable and they leave the sewage system to collect in constellations on the surface of all of the Great Lakes. I squinted and imagined I could see them glinting.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#144|144]]. Avrich, ''An American Anarchist'','' ''147–49; Voltairine de Cleyre, ''Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist'','' Anarchist'','' Genius'' (State University of New York, 2005), ed. Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell, 105; de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 31–32, 60, 107–8, 173–74; de Cleyre, “A Suggestion and Explanation” in ''Free Society'' 6, no. 29 (June 3, 1900): 1. In 1908, ''Mother Earth'' published a lecture by de Cleyre titled “Why I am an Anarchist.” During the lecture, she advocates a moneyless society based on distribution according to need. It is unclear when this was written. ''Mother Earth'' claimed that the lecture was delivered in Hammond, Indiana but I have been unable to find a date for this talk. De Cleyre had previously given a talk with the exact same title during her 1897 visit to England. She could have given the same talk multiple times or given different talks with the same title. As a result, it is unclear if she advocated a moneyless society based on distribution according to need before or after adopting anarchism without adjectives. See Avrich, ''An American Anarchist'','' ''120; de Cleyre, ''Exquisite Rebel'', 51–65.</div>
+This morning, back to hitchhiking. I settled for a short ride out of Thunder Bay to where the road forks off at Kakabeka Falls to ease myself in with a quiet businessman I could not have spoken more than ten words to. I set up after the turn-off where the highway stretches on to Dryden in an area with thin traffic, in view of a lonely reservoir, and where the aspens bled the landscape yellow and lethargic. Small insects hummed around me as I slumped on my bag and half dozed, sitting up to the sound of any approaching traffic. I was not making good time but the sky was milky with cloud and the air thick with warmth and pollen. If I wanted to do it for free or cheaply, I was going to have to travel the 450 miles to Winnipeg at whatever pace the day or days decreed, and the character of this day was languid. I was thinking this and just laughed out loud.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#145|145]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''201–4.</div>
+It is interesting to watch the faces of people as they pass me in cars. If I am stood with my thumb out then nobody drives by without noticing. The majority avert their eyes, as though to look at me would pull them in out of guilt, I guess because I must look the furthest from threatening, a cute siren on a rock. Those that realise they are going the wrong way to take me seem to take absolution from theatrically signalling they are going the wrong way, with big sorry mouths and shrugging shoulders. Some stare and pass, some shake their heads disapprovingly and some, inexplicably, just honk.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#146|146]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 131–32.</div>
+At around eleven a car pulled over and offered me a ride to Dryden, an old man who seemed concerned for my welfare. I watched time peel away through the window. There was a speck of bird poo on the window and by moving my head up and down I could jump it over the conveyor belt of variable treetops like in a 2D video game. It felt good to watch the world flicker by as though we were still and it was moving around us, and the illusion would be crystallised when a train would appear on the railway where the road and the rail were adjacent and the train would converge with us in speed, making it and us appear static.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#147|147]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 130–31.</div>
+My driver dropped me at a service station. Touchingly, he was projecting vulnerability onto me; the kindly chauvinism of an old man towards a young woman. Irritating, yes, but also he is just old and sweet and well-meaning and of-his-time. He tried to give me money, which I refused, laughing. But the look on his face as he drove away really did make me feel alone and vulnerable for a moment, as though I had transformed into his idea of me. I felt pangs of guilt for this stranger who I would never see again and who would probably worry about me from time to time, wonder if I found my way. God, not even orphans are free of the guilt of people, are they?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#148|148]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 203.</div>
+I found a cardboard box in a bin behind the building and broke it down to make a sign, then positioned myself conspicuously with it on an embankment at the exit, where anyone about to leave could pull over for me or had to sail by my imploring cherubic face. I thought how Urla would probably say I should use my feminine powers to my advantage, so I unzipped my hoody to show a little cleavage. Then I thought, that’s not very feminist, is it? Then I decided that either way it made me feel weird, and I zipped myself back up.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#149|149]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 15–16; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 109.</div>
+Traffic coming through is so thin that I only see someone pass every fifteen minutes or so. There are some lorries parked and drivers mill to and from them. The sparrows have got used to me by now and are pecking around at the crumbs I am throwing to them. I managed to get one so close that I touched it gently with my foot before it flew away to a small sapling, where it sat scolding me.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#150|150]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48. This problem has since been articulated by a number of modern socialist theorists drawing upon Marxism. See Al Campbell and Mehmet Ufuk Tutan, “Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks,” ''Studies in Political Economy'' 82, no. 1 (2008): 153–70; Sam Gindin, “Socialism ‘With Sober Senses’: Developing Workers’ Capacities,” ''The Socialist Register'' 34 (1998): 75–99.</div>
+==== THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#151|151]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''48.</div>
+The lorry cab had two seats in the front and a raised compartment behind with a mattress for sleeping. It was very clean and neat. There were no pornographic photos pinned to the dashboard. There was a little meter up where the rear-view mirror goes in cars and he typed something into it before we started to pull out of the service station. He was very particular that I sit up front next to him, which did not seem too out of the ordinary, just in fitting with his extreme orderliness. The bed compartment behind, where he showed me to put my bag, was out his range of vision, so I put the camera hidden just behind, where he could not see it on, and it could witness everything.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#152|152]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 49.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0100-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#153|153]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''450.</div>
+He offered me little cakes from out of a cool box under his seat in a way that made me nervous about eating them. I declined and patted my stomach to show I was full. I figured I had better stay alert just to be safe rather than sorry. I sat saying things about the landscape at awkward interludes and he nodded and said something or other in another language and stared at my legs a lot.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#154|154]]. De Cleyre, ''Reader'', 37.</div>
+The journey went on so slowly and so uneventfully at lorry speed that now and then I would feel the exhilaration again at my distance to Alaska getting smaller and smaller while I sat still, and that pushed my suspicion and paranoia out of my mind for a while. Even the Stanley knife on the dashboard had become benign by virtue of its sustained uneventful just being there. There was the meter which said how far there was to go and he had checkpoints and a schedule so he could not just take me out into the middle of nowhere and do something bad. A lorry was the most sensible place to be, if I thought about it.
-[[#155|155]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''81–82.
+We pulled in at another service stop at which he managed to communicate to me without English that he was going to go have a cigarette. We were in the lorry-designated area of the services, where regular vehicle paraphernalia like petrol pumps and parking spaces are upped to lorry scale, and men stand around leaning against their wheels smoking and talking. I thought of Plath mingling with truckers. The driver got out and went over to the nearest group for a few minutes; they were talking and looking over to me and smoking their fags and they all laughed together, then he came back to the lorry. He said something to me, half turned round in the driver’s seat and laughed a little spittle out of his mouth, and then he pinched my leg. Between the thumb and forefinger, the part of my leg that indents where the muscle meets the fatter bit of thigh.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#156|156]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 49. This same idea was expressed by Marx. See Karl Marx, ''Selected Writings'', ed. David McLellan, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 172; Marx and Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 5'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976), 214.</div>
+The group of men outside were staring in. They stared as we pulled away. As we passed them he held up his hand in salute to them. We rolled back onto the road. I was too caught up unravelling the situation to realise until we were moving that I probably should have got out of the lorry at that point.
-== {{anchor|Chapter4AnarchistStrategy}} {{anchor|Chapter4AnarchistStrategy1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook7}} Chapter 4: Anarchist Strategy ==
+Later we passed a road sign that showed a turning up ahead for the road to Winnipeg – +207 km – but we passed the slip road and he did not even glance at it.
-Anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries argued that one must not merely critique existing institutions or aspire for a better society. One must also form social movements that engage in class struggle against the ruling classes and thereby bring about fundamental social change. To quote Bakunin, “neither writers, nor philosophers, nor their books, nor socialist journals, would reconstitute a socialism that was alive and vigorous. It is only through enlightened revolutionary instincts, through collective will and through the real organization of the working masses themselves that the latter has a real existence, and when instinct, will and organization are lacking the best books in the world will be nothing more than empty theories and powerless dreams.”[[#1MichaelBakuninSelectedTex|1]] In order to engage in effective action and achieve their goals, working-class social movements had to be guided by an overarching strategy that was both appropriate to their situation and capable of actually bringing about an anarchist society. As Kropotkin succinctly put it, “theory and practice must become one if we are to succeed.”[[#2PeterKropotkinWordsofaR|2]]
+‘That was our turning.’
-A crucial aspect of anarchist theory was, therefore determining what methods of action to engage in. According to Malatesta, “to be able to act, to be able to contribute to the realization of one’s cherished ideas, one has to choose one’s own path. In parties, as more generally in life, the questions of method are predominant. If the idea is the beacon, the method is the helm.”[[#3QuotedinDavideTurcatoMak|3]] It is for this reason that “we are anarchists in our goal… but we are anarchist in our method too.”[[#4QuotedinTurcatoMakingSen|4]] Elsewhere Malatesta defined anarchism as “the method of reaching anarchy, through freedom, without government.”[[#5ErricoMalatestaTheAnarchi|5]]
+He looked at me.
-Anarchists understood that creating appropriate methods of action was not a matter of inventing abstract strategies fit for all times and places, and following them as if there were an instruction manual for producing a revolution. Anarchism, to quote Kropotkin, contains “no ready-made recipes for political-cooking.”[[#6QuotedinRuthKinnaKropotk|6]] Building an anarchist society requires action within a specific context and, since this context varies according to time and place, it follows that, in Goldman’s words, “the methods of Anarchism . . . do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances” but “must grow out of the economic needs of each place and clime, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.”[[#7EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeaks|7]] As Malatesta wrote, “the problem facing us anarchists, who regard anarchy not so much as a beautiful dream to be chased by the light of the moon, but as an individual and social way of life to be brought about for the greatest good of all . . . is to so conduct our activities as to achieve the greatest useful effect in the various circumstances in which history places us. One must not ignore reality, but if reality is noxious, one must fight it, resorting to every means made available to us by reality itself.”[[#8ErricoMalatestaTheMethod|8]]
+‘That was the road to Winnipeg.’
-Despite anarchist methods of action varying depending upon the historically specific context, there were common views on strategy and social change that pervaded the anarchist movement. These were: (a) the advocacy of social revolution, the unity of means and ends, prefiguration, direct action; the spirit of revolt; and (b) the rejection of attempting to achieve social change via the conquest of state power. In this chapter, I shall explain the first group of topics and then, in chapter 5, I shall turn to the anarchist critique of conquering state power. Throughout both chapters, I shall demonstrate that anarchists advocated the strategies they did due to their beliefs about what forms of practice constituted them and how these practices would simultaneously transform people and social relations.
+‘What?’
-'''Social Revolution'''
+‘Why didn’t you turn?’
-Anarchists held that the abolition of class society could “only be achieved by means of a revolutionary movement” instigating a social revolution.[[#9JamesGuillaumeIdeasonSo|9]] It is common for modern academics who study the history of revolutions to define a “revolution” as necessarily involving the transformation of the state from one form into another.[[#10ForexampleCharlesTillyE|10]] Anarchists wanted to abolish the state, rather than seize its power, and so did not define a social revolution in such a state-centric manner. They attempted to create a social revolution that fundamentally transformed “the foundations of society, its political, economic and social character” and so was distinct from a statist revolution in which there is “a mere change of rulers, of government.”[[#11AlexanderBerkmanWhatisA|11]]
+‘Sorry, no understand.’
-This fundamental transformation of society required, according to Kropotkin, “completely reconstructing all relationships” between people, from the relationships within a household, factory, or village to those between urban and rural areas.[[#12PeterKropotkinModernScie|12]] The same idea was expressed by Wilson, who advocated “a revolution in every department of human existence, social, political and economic.”[[#13CharlotteWilsonAnarchist|13]] Anarchists did not limit the scope of revolutionary transformation to the public sphere of the community or workplace. For the revolution to be meaningful, it had to also transform the so-called private sphere of sexual relationships, parent-child relationships, housework, and so on. Goldman, to take one example, argued that the compulsory social relations of marriage should be replaced by free love in which “love can go and come without fear of meeting a watch-dog,” and neither partner acts or views themselves as the owner, controller, and dictator of the other.[[#14GoldmanRedEmma22021|14]] The extent to which some anarchists viewed emancipation within the private sphere as essential can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence that “a revolution, intoxicated with the beautiful words Liberty, Equality, Solidarity would not be a revolution if it maintained slavery at home. Half humanity subjected to the slavery of the hearth would still have to rebel against the other half.”[[#15PeterKropotkinTheConques|15]]
+I stabbed my finger to the right.
-Although anarchists sometimes claimed that the social revolution should be “spontaneous,” the majority of anarchists did not expect it to appear suddenly without any planning and preparation. Nor did anarchists think that the social revolution would occur independently of anarchists influencing other workers through words and deeds. They instead meant that the social revolution should not be imposed on society by a revolutionary elite acting in the name of the people. For a revolution to be “spontaneous” in this sense of the term was for it to be voluntarily launched and self-determined by workers themselves. A worker acted spontaneously when they acted of their own volition, even if their actions were inspired by the actions of those around them.[[#16MichaelBakuninStatismand|16]] Anarchists were, in other words, committed to the famous words of the 1864 preamble to the statutes of the First International: “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”[[#17KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|17]] This line from the preamble was consistently repeated by anarchist authors or rephrased in slightly different language, such as Malatesta’s remark that “we anarchists do not want to ''emancipate'' the people; we want the people to ''emancipate themselves''.”[[#18ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|18]]
+‘That was the road for Winnipeg.’
-The necessity of a social revolution emerged from the fact that a ruling class had never in history given up their power voluntarily. In every instance, it had required violence or at least the threat of it.[[#19BerkmanAnarchism174|19]] Although anarchism aimed at, to quote Malatesta, “the removal of violence from human relations,” the vast majority of anarchist authors advocated revolutionary violence as a means to overcome the violence that defended and maintained class society.[[#20MalatestaLifeandIdeas4|20]] This revolutionary violence took two main forms: the forceful expropriation of the economic ruling classes and the violent destruction of the state. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “an armed, violent revolution” that would “smash the army and police” and achieve the “forcible expropriation of property owners” and “the abolition of all political authority.”[[#21MalatestaMethodofFreedom|21]] This position emerged from an awareness that, as Malatesta explained in 1892, “the means we employ are those that circumstances make possible or necessary . . . we have to make our fight in the world as it is, or else be condemned to be nothing but fruitless dreamers.”[[#22MalatestaMethodofFreedom|22]] Class society is violently enforced by “powerful military and police organizations which meet any serious attempt at a change with prison, hanging, and massacre. . . . Against the physical force that blocks our way there is no appeal except to physical force.”[[#23MalatestaMethodofFreedom|23]]
+He smiled and shrugged.
-The same position was consistently advocated by Kropotkin over several decades. In 1877, he endorsed “the expropriation and suppression of the bourgeoisie.”[[#24QuotedinGeorgeWoodcockan|24]] A few years later in 1881, he wrote that workers must “seize all of the wealth of society, if necessary doing so over the corpse of the bourgeoisie, with the intention of returning all of society’s wealth to those who produced it, the workers.”[[#25KropotkinDirectStruggle|25]] In 1906, he claimed that in order to achieve “the complete destruction of Capitalism and the State, and their replacement by Anarchist Communism” it was necessary to engage in “armed struggle against the dominating order” and expropriate the ruling classes.[[#26KropotkinDirectStruggle|26]] In 1913, he argued that “economic emancipation” required “smashing the old political forms represented by the State.”[[#27KropotkinModernSciencean|27]] A year later, he wrote that “two things are necessary to be successful in a revolution . . . an idea in the head, and a bullet in the rifle! The force of action—guided by the force of Anarchist thought.”[[#28KropotkinDirectStruggle|28]] The extent to which Kropotkin was a proponent of violence against the forces of state repression can be seen in the fact that, in 1877, he attended a demonstration in Switzerland armed with a gun. He was ready, in his own words, to “blow out the brains” of the police if they attacked.[[#29QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|29]] In the wake of the 1905 Russian revolution, when he was in his sixties, Kropotkin practiced shooting with a rifle in case he returned to Russia and needed to participate in street fighting.[[#30WoodcockandAvakumovicFro|30]]
+‘Winnipeg,’ I said slowly, stabbing my finger again.
-Malatesta and Kropotkin were not unique in this respect. Countless other anarchists can be quoted making the exact same points.[[#31ForexampleBakuninStatism|31]] Adolph Fischer claimed in 1887 that “only by the force of arms can the wage slaves make their way out of capitalistic bondage,” “expropriate the privileged,” and achieve “the abolition of political authority, the state.”[[#32QuotedinAlbertParsonsAn|32]] Rocker insisted in 1920 that “we already know that a revolution cannot be made with rose-water. And we know, too, that the owning classes will never yield up their privileges spontaneously. On the day of victorious revolution the workers will have to impose their will on the present owners of the soil, of the subsoil and of the means of production.”[[#33RockerTheSovietSystemo|33]] In order to do so, workers would also have to demolish the state, since it is “the fortress” that violently maintains the power of the ruling classes.[[#34RockerTheSovietSystemo|34]]
+‘Ah! Winnipeg,’ he said, motioning forward.
-The forms of violence that anarchists advocated and engaged in covered a wide spectrum of behavior and varied among different contexts. It included, but was not limited to, riots; fighting the police with fists, sticks, and stones; assassinating class enemies; and engaging in armed conflict with the military. This is not to say that anarchists who advocated revolutionary violence agreed with one another on which forms of violence were ethically acceptable or strategically advisable. Johann Most wrote several articles during the 1880s in which he actively encouraged anarchists to engage in violent acts of vengeance against the ruling classes.[[#35AndrewRCarlsonAnarchism|35]] Malatesta, in comparison, argued in the 1890s that although anarchists should use violence to overthrow systems of oppression, they should not engage in violence to achieve revenge.[[#36MalatestaMethodofFreedom|36]]
+I did not know what to do. I must have looked forlorn and he smiled, said ‘Winnipeg’ cheerfully and motioned forward again. I did not believe him but what could I do, jump out of a moving vehicle? Was I certain enough to tell him to stop and leave me at the side of the road? It was going to start to get dark soon and it might be better to presume we would end up in a floodlit lorry park than to risk the side of the road at night. He had to stop somewhere legit, another service station with other lorries and people. You can’t just go off-road and incognito with a lorry.
-A significant number of anarchists saw potential dangers in revolutionary violence. In 1896, Malatesta argued that “let us have no unnecessary victims, not even in the enemy camp . . . a liberating revolution cannot be born of massacre and terror, these having been—and ever so it shall remain—the midwives to tyranny.”[[#37MalatestaMethodofFreedom|37]] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1892 that “slaughtering the bourgeois so as to ensure that the revolution succeeds is a nonsensical dream” since “organized and legalized Terror . . . serves only to forge chains for the people” and “lays the groundwork for the dictatorship of whoever will grab control of the revolutionary tribunal.”[[#38KropotkinDirectStruggle|38]] Even Most told an audience in Baltimore that “we are revolutionists not from love of gore” but “because there is no other way to free and redeem mankind.”[[#39QuotedinPaulAvrichTheH|39]]
+‘How far?’
-In the popular imagination, revolutions are typically equated with violent acts of destruction, such as fighting the police and army or storming parliament. Anarchists advocated these acts, but they did not reduce the social revolution to them. For them, the social revolution was above all an act of creation. The old world had to be destroyed only because this was a prerequisite to the construction of a new social order. In 1873, Bakunin claimed that although “the real passion for destruction . . . is far from sufficient for achieving the ultimate aims of the revolutionary cause . . . there can be no revolution without widespread and passionate destruction, a destruction salutary and fruitful precisely because out of it, and by means of it alone, new worlds are born and arise.”[[#40BakuninStatismandAnarchy|40]] For anarchists like Berkman, a revolution “''begins'' with a violent upheaval,” but this is only “the rolling up of your sleeves” before “''the actual work''” of revolution occurs, namely “the reorganization of the entire life of society.”[[#41BerkmanAnarchism18384|41]]
+I tried to act out distance with my hands.
-As Kropotkin noted, the “first skirmish” of a social revolution, when the people rise up in insurrection, “is soon ended, and it is only after the overthrow of the old constitution that the real work of revolution can be said to begin.”[[#42KropotkinConquestofBread|42]] This did not mean that violence was not an important aspect of launching and defending the social revolution. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution would most likely result in a civil war, due to the ruling classes launching a counterattack against the working classes.[[#43PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|43]] Anarchists were instead drawing attention to the fact that the core of the social revolution was people internalizing anarchist ideas and reconstructing and reorganizing society according to them. The social revolution, in other words, rested on the simultaneous transformation of social structures and of the people who constituted, produced, and reproduced them. It required a change not only in how society was organized, but also a corresponding change to what drives and capacities people exercised and developed. Above all, for anarchists like Goldman, it required people to develop revolutionary consciousness, such as a “sense of justice and equality, the love of liberty and of human brotherhood.”[[#44GoldmanRedEmma400|44]] This aspect of the social revolution would continue long after the ruling classes had been successfully overthrown.
+‘How long until Winnipeg?’
-Therefore, anarchists did not expect the social revolution to occur quickly. Kropotkin predicted in 1885 that “it is not by a revolution lasting a couple of days that we shall come to transform society in the direction posed by anarchist communism. . . . It is a whole insurrectionary period of three, four, perhaps five years that we must traverse.”[[#45KropotkinRebel72Seeal|45]] During and after this insurrectionary period, society as a whole would be restructured not from the top down by means of government decree but from the bottom up by millions of workers, in both urban and rural areas, reorganizing their workplaces, communities, and households according to anarchist ideas. Fabbri went further and noted in 1922 that “however extensive and radical a revolution may be, before it manages to be victorious completely and worldwide not one but many generations must elapse.”[[#46LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|46]] In other words, anarchists viewed “the social revolution” as a “process” that stretched over an extended period of time.[[#47NabatProceedingsofNabat|47]]
+‘Ah! Winnipeg soon soon. Yes, soon,’ he said.
-Anarchists divided the process of social revolution into moments of destruction and construction.[[#48Thefollowingaccountofsoc|48]] The working classes would destroy the old world by overthrowing and abolishing the state and expropriating land, raw materials, the means of production, and the necessities of life, such as warehouses of food and clothing or apartment blocks, from the ruling classes.[[#49Anarchiststypicallyclaimed|49]] The working classes would build the new society on the ruins of the old by establishing the communal ownership of these things, building organs of self-management—workplace and community assemblies—and, through these, organizing the ongoing reproduction and restructuring of society. As noted in the previous chapter, most anarchists thought that in order to coordinate production, distribution, and revolutionary activity on a large scale, these assemblies should establish formal local federations that would, in turn, federate together to form regional, national, and ultimately, if the social revolution goes as hoped, international federations. A minority of anarchists opposed the establishment of formal federations and argued that large-scale coordination should only be achieved through free agreements between groups that were nodes of informal social networks.
+‘Soon?’
-The defense of the social revolution would be achieved through the formation of worker militias, rather than through the seizure of state power. These worker militias would act as organs of class power. As early as 1868, Bakunin, who had previously joined the barricades during the 1848 revolution in Paris and Prague and an 1849 insurrection in Dresden, argued that revolutionaries must “organize a revolutionary force capable of defeating reaction,” which would include the “federation of the Barricades.”[[#50BakuninSelectedWritings|50]] This view was repeated in 1870, when he wrote that, during an anarchist revolution, workers would be “armed and organized” in order to coordinate “common defense against the enemies of the Revolution.”[[#51BakuninSelectedWritings|51]] Decades later in 1922, Malatesta advocated “the creation of voluntary militia, without powers to interfere as militia in the life of the community, but only to deal with any armed attacks by the forces of reaction to reestablish themselves, or to resist outside intervention by countries as yet not in a state of revolution.”[[#52MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|52]] Berkman similarly argued in 1929 that “the armed workers and peasants are the only effective defense of the revolution.”[[#53BerkmanAnarchism232See|53]]
+‘Soon.’
-Advocating workers’ militias was not limited to the writings of famous anarchist authors. It can also be seen in the resolutions of anarchist organizations. The resolutions passed at the Spanish National Confederation of Labor’s (CNT) May 1936 Zaragoza Congress acknowledged “the necessity to defend the advances made through the revolution” from both “foreign capitalist invasion” and “counterrevolution at home.”[[#54QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|54]] This would be achieved through arming the populace with an array of weapons including not only pistols and rifles but also “planes, tanks, armored vehicles, machine-guns and anti-aircraft cannon,” creating a workers’ militia of “all individuals of both sexes who are fit to fight,” which would coordinate its action via their local “commune” and the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[[#55QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|55]] Anarchists put this theory into practice and formed workers’ militias to defend the revolution during the Russian revolution and civil war of 1917–23, and the early phases of the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39.[[#56Thecomplexhistoryofanarc|56]]
+We drove on; the yolk of the sun spilt on the horizon and the sky got inky. He turned his headlights on and with the dark I began to feel panic really set in. I could see a reservation coming up to our left. An indigenous woman stood at the side of the road in a very short skirt. He pointed at her and laughed like a hyena. The woman winced when the headlights and the sound of his horn hit her face.
-The manner in which anarchists described the social revolution can give the false impression that they thought it would occur all at once and imagined that, to pick a country at random, all or most of France would simultaneously rise up, overthrow the ruling classes and build an anarchist society. This interpretation ignores that Kropotkin routinely pointed out that the social revolution would most likely: (a) occur alongside a parallel statist revolution launched by republicans or state socialists; (b) develop out of a statist revolution or a series of smaller insurrections; and (c) begin with local uprisings in particular regions, such as Paris, or by particular groups of people, such as miners, and spread to the rest of the country (and hopefully the world) as people in other regions and industries heard of these uprisings and were inspired to join the emerging revolutionary process.[[#57KropotkinDirectStruggle|57]]
+A little later, as the headlights breached the trees, you could see the land where the forest had been clear-cut. It stuck in your throat how it was so dense and dark and enclosing then, suddenly, barren, the sky bursting through, the weak light of it pooling out over the feebler trees they left behind, scattered like redundant matchsticks. It must have stretched for miles, naked and vulnerable like a head shaved for neurosurgery. In the far distance a town sat lit up like a cluster of glow-worms. The tick-tick of his indicator started up and we steered onto a gravel path, up towards a closed diner cabin and a portaloo where one other lorry was parked with its lights out. No floodlights.
-As has already been mentioned, anarchists held that these uprisings, and the social revolution at large, should involve the forcible expropriation of the ruling classes. They thought that any social revolution that did not engage in expropriation would be doomed to failure. If a social revolution were to succeed, the population as a whole must be fed, clothed, and housed. If this did not happen, workers would never support the social revolution, because it does not improve their lives directly or causes a decline in living conditions. Without the support of the masses, the social revolution would fail and reactionaries would be able to restore class society with the promise of bringing stability. Anarchists, in other words, understood that “it is not enough to cherish a noble ideal. Man does not live by high thoughts or superb discourses, for he needs bread as well.”[[#58KropotkinRebel218Thef|58]] It is essential that, once a social revolution begins, people immediately expropriate and redistribute food, clothing, and housing among the population. The expropriation of the means of production and land would, in turn, enable the working classes to produce the necessities of life needed to sustain the population over a longer period of time and prevent food shortages from defeating the social revolution.[[#59KropotkinRebel2072182|59]]
+We ground to a halt and he tapped something into the meter, which played a triumphant little jingle. He said something and patted then shook my knee, grinning, and there was the spittle again. I pulled away and asked where we were. And he said something else with his hand back on my knee. I said Winnipeg really resolutely this time. He made the universal sign for sleeping and nodded up to the bed.
-Several anarchists in the late nineteenth century predicted that, even if a country were able to achieve this, the social revolution would likely fail unless it occurred internationally. Guillaume argued in 1874 that “the Revolution cannot be confined to a single country; on pain of death, it is obliged to subsume into its movement, if not the whole world, then at least a considerable portion of the civilized countries.”[[#60GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|60]] No country can be entirely self-sufficient and were the states neighboring a country in revolution to impose a blockade, let alone invade, then “the Revolution, being isolated, would be doomed to perish.”[[#61GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|61]] Kropotkin shared this concern and developed a detailed response to the problem of economic isolation in his famous 1892 book ''The Conquest of Bread''.'' ''He attempted to demonstrate in exhaustive detail how a country could reorganize production and distribution during a revolution with the use of the technology and productive capacities of the time, such as through the extensive use of green houses in urban areas.[[#62KropotkinConquestofBread|62]] Decades later, Berkman witnessed the blockade that was imposed on the 1917 Russian revolution by capitalist states. In 1929, he wrote in response to these experiences that “the revolution is ''compelled'' to become self-supporting and provide for its own wants.”[[#63BerkmanAnarchism228|63]]
+‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’
-The anarchist fear that an isolated revolution would be defeated, alongside their commitment to universal human emancipation, led them to place a great deal of importance on opposing the patriotism and nationalism of the state and fostering internationalism among the working classes. Bakunin understood that “a real and definite solution to the social question can be found only on the basis of an international solidarity of workers of every land,” because “no isolated local or national workers’ association, even one based in the largest of European countries, can ever triumph in the face of a formidable coalition of every privileged class, of every wealthy capitalist, and of every state in the world.”[[#64BakuninSelectedTexts34|64]] To overcome this coalition of reaction, workers had to achieve “the unity of all local and national bodies” through the formation of “one universal association—the great ''International Workers’ Association of every land''.”[[#65BakuninSelectedTexts43|65]] This point was reiterated by Rocker decades later when he argued that “the effective basis . . . for the international liberation of the working class” will only be laid “when the workers in every country . . . come to understand clearly that their interests are everywhere the same, and out of this understanding learn to act together.”[[#66RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi|66]]
+‘No. I’m not sleeping here. I need to get to Winnipeg now.’
-The outcome of this internationalism would, to quote Malatesta, be workers coming to view “the whole world as our homeland, all humanity as our brothers and sisters.”[[#67MalatestaCafe137Seeal|67]] Under capitalism, this internationalism would be grounded in an understanding of the working class’s shared interests, such that any “worker, the oppressed, Chinese or Russian or from any other country, is our brother, just as the property-owner, the oppressor, is our enemy, even if he is born in our home town.”[[#68MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|68]] This belief in working-class internationalism led anarchists in Europe and the United States to form multiethnic and multiracial social movements or organizations. The aptly named International Group of San Francisco brought together Russian, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, French, Italian, and Mexican anarchists in order to organize discussion groups, lectures, picnics, dances, plays, concerts and dinners.[[#69ZimmerImmigrants18288|69]] In 1931, the paper ''L’Emancipazione'', which was collectively produced by members of the group, declared its goal to be “overcoming all race hatred for the solidarity of all peoples, [and] the destruction of all borders: to inaugurate the true and sincere pact of human solidarity.”[[#70QuotedinZimmerImmigrants|70]]
+‘Winnipeg tomorrow.’
-Numerous other examples can be found in the history of anarchism in the United States, which was largely a social movement of immigrants. Anarchists played a key role, alongside other socialists, in the founding of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at a convention in 1905. The constitution of the IWW, in contrast to other trade unions at the time, included an explicit commitment to organizing all workers, regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity, or nationality. This was reflected in the IWW’s subsequent organizing campaigns, which included the formation of interracial unions among Black and white timber workers in the South and Northwest, and Black and white dockworkers on the Philadelphia waterfront. The IWW’s multiethnic and interracial character can also be seen in the fact that French, Spanish, Italian, Mexican, Finnish, Swedish, Romanian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, Japanese, and African American anarchists participated within the trade union as members of local sections, organizers of strikes, and editors of, or writers for, newspapers. On the West Coast, Japanese anarchists, including Takeuchi Tetsugoro, translated IWW literature into Japanese, published a bilingual newspaper to promote the IWW, and organized 2,000 Japanese grape pickers via the Fresno Labor League. In September 1909, the Fresno Labor League held a joint rally with the local branch of the IWW, which was primarily composed of Mexican and Italian workers. After the organization dissolved in 1910, many members joined the local branch of the IWW and went on to organize hundreds of Mexican and Japanese orange pickers in 1918.[[#71PeterColeDavidStruthers|71]]
+‘No, I—’ I started to say through gritted teeth. He said something very firmly, then grabbed my thigh and ran his hand up to my groin.
-For anarchists, this commitment to universal human solidarity entailed an opposition to imperialism and colonialism and the support of anticolonial national liberation movements, such as those in Cuba, India, and Ireland.[[#72KropotkinDirectStruggle|72]] According to Maximoff, “the Anarchists demand the liberation of all colonies and support every struggle for national independence as long as it is an expression of the will of the revolutionary proletariat and the working peasantry of the nation concerned.”[[#73MaximoffProgramofAnarcho|73]] This support included the belief that the main goal of national liberation movements—emancipation—could only be achieved through the methods of anarchism, rather than the establishment of a new state. As will be explained in chapter 5, anarchists predicted that if national liberation movements seized state power then they would end up replacing foreign colonial oppressors with a new minority ruling class who oppressed and exploited the majority of the population.
+I pushed then kicked his arm away from me. We faced each other for a few seconds, each waiting to see what the other would do next. I had to move closer to him to move around the seat so I snaked my body without breaking eye contact so that I could see where his hands were. I grabbed my rucksack and camera strap with one hand, pulled myself back over with the other and, panicky, wrestled with the stiff door handle.
-During World War I, anarchist opposition to imperialism was paradoxically used by a small number of authors, including Kropotkin and Grave, to argue that anarchists should support the French Republic against German militarism on the grounds that Germany had launched a war of aggression and, if victorious, would impose autocracy on the rest of Europe. Most anarchists rejected this argument and refused to side with any state in the conflict since it was a war between rival imperialist powers. As the ''International Anarchist Manifesto Against War'' declared in 1915, “there is but one war of liberation: that which in all countries is waged by the oppressed against the oppressors, by the exploited against the exploiters.”[[#74InternationalAnarchistMan|74]] This opposition to all states in the conflict coincided with multiple attempts to organize resistance to the war, such as launching campaigns against conscription, which resulted in anarchists experiencing a significant amount of state repression.[[#75KinnaKropotkin17783Ma|75]]
+Meanwhile he sat back into his seat, saying things between his jerky hyena cackles. As I prised the door open and threw my bag out he lurched for me. I threw myself down from the tall cab on top of my bag as I felt his hand tighten on my ankle, lose grip, and clutch at my shoe. My foot slipped from it as I fell.
-'''Evolution and Revolution'''
+I scrambled up, swung my bag on my shoulder and put the camera strap around my neck. Then at a safe distance, I glared back at him. He held my shoe in his hand, laughing, and I was filled with so much furious hatred for him I wanted to take a stone and smash his greasy head with it. I wanted to wrestle my shoe back out of his hands and slap it on his face. I thought maybe I would, maybe the danger had passed now, maybe the danger was only ever his violating hands, which were no longer on me. But then he lurched towards me again, making a mocking sort of animal grunt; I started to run.
-Anarchists did not expect the social revolution to appear out of nowhere. They viewed social change as a single process that could be divided into periods of evolution and periods of revolution.[[#76MarieFlemingTheAnarchist|76]] During periods of evolution change is slow, gradual, and partial. Evolutionary change includes such things as certain ideas becoming more popular, small groups of people developing radical capacities and drives, or dominant structures being gradually modified. Over time, this evolutionary change builds up and culminates in a revolutionary period during which change is rapid and large scale, fundamentally altering society. Although periods of evolution are in general much longer than periods of revolution, it does not follow from this that revolutions are short. A revolutionary period could last years if, during this period, it involves ongoing, large-scale change that fundamentally alters society. The French revolutionary period that began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille, for instance, ended ten years later in 1799 with the seizure of state power by Napoleon Bonaparte.
+I ran flat out back down the gravel path towards the dark highway. On the road I headed the way we had come, back in the direction of the reservation, I suppose because taking the road towards the town would have meant running parallel to the park, where he could have scrambled down the slope and intercepted me. The ground where the trees were cut was littered with stumps and amputations. I ran hard, away from the lorry park and the distant lights of the town and towards the blotted darkness of the forest.
-Evolutionary and revolutionary change were not seen as separate distinct entities but rather fed off and flowed into one another. An evolutionary period would, if events unfolded as anarchists hoped, develop into a revolutionary period. According to Bakunin, revolutions “come about of themselves, produced by the force of things, the tide of events and facts. They ferment for a long time in the depths of the instinctive consciousness of the popular masses—then they explode, often triggered by apparently trivial causes.”[[#77BakuninSelectedWritings|77]] In turn, they create or open up new pathways for evolutionary change in the future, while at the same time blocking off other avenues. These new evolutions would lead to new revolutionary change in the future, and so on. As Reclus argued, “evolution and revolution are two successive aspects of the same phenomenon, evolution preceding revolution, and revolution preceding a new evolution, which is in turn the mother of future revolutions.”[[#78EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|78]]
+I was running running running and everything hurt but blind panic kept me moving forward and clouded the jolts in my left heel, the one that had no shoe. I had been running for about ten minutes when the pain of it got too much and I limped to a halt, bent with my hands on my knees, looking behind.
-Émile Pouget expressed this same idea in different language. He conceptualized revolution as a single process of social change that includes both gradual modifications to capitalism and the abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism. For him, revolutionary syndicalism “does not regard the Revolution as a future cataclysm for which we must wait patiently to see emerging from the inevitable working-out of events. . . . The Revolution is an undertaking for all times, for today as well as tomorrow: it is continual action, a daily battling without let-up or respite, against the forces of oppression and exploitation.”[[#79EmilePougetThePartyof|79]] As a result, when the working classes launch an insurrection that forcefully expropriates the capitalist class it will be “the culmination of preceding struggles” in which they had traversed “stages along the road to human emancipation.”[[#80PougetThePartyofLabour|80]]
+===== Can he see me? =====
-Anarchists consistently expressed these ideas about evolution developing into revolution through water-based metaphors. Bakunin wrote in a letter to Reclus that “we are falling back into a time of evolution—that is to say revolutions that are invisible, subterranean and often imperceptible . . . drops of water, though they may be invisible may go on to form an ocean.”[[#81BakuninSelectedTexts251|81]] Guillaume claimed that “it is not in one day that waters rise to the point where they can breach the dam holding them back: the waters rise slowly and by degrees: but once they have reached the desired level, the collapse is sudden, and the dam crumbles in the blinking of an eye.”[[#82GuillaumeIdeasonSocial|82]] For Berkman, evolutionary change leads into revolutionary change in the same way that water in a kettle gradually heats up until it boils.[[#83BerkmanAnarchism179|83]]
+===== No, can’t see the park now. =====
-This did not mean that anarchists viewed evolution and revolution as natural forces that inevitably propel human subjects toward a better society.[[#84Thisideahasbeenfalselya|84]] Reclus understood that “revolutions do not necessarily constitute progress, just as evolutions are not always directed toward justice.”[[#85ReclusAnarchy139|85]] Malatesta similarly held that “there is no natural law that says evolution must inevitably give priority to liberty rather than the permanent division of society into two castes . . . that of the dominators and that of the dominated.”[[#86MalatestaCafe105|86]] These evolutions and revolutions, be they progressive or reactionary, were nothing but the products of humans acting within their historical situation and thereby transforming the world. Mella insisted that “social evolution is constituted by men; these men constitute the means by which it develops.”[[#87MellaEvolutionandRevolu|87]] For Malatesta, “human evolution moves in the direction in which it is driven by the will of humanity.”[[#88MalatestaCafe105|88]]
+===== But he would have seen which way, following the road. =====
-One of the main forms of evolutionary change anarchists engaged in was spreading anarchist ideas through newspapers, pamphlets, books, talks, and demonstrations. Anarchist literature was not exclusively nonfiction and also included poems, songs, short stories, plays, and novels. The majority of anarchist print media was written and edited by workers for free in their spare time after a full day of work. There were a few papers which were run by full-time paid staff, such as Spain’s ''Solidaridad Obrera'' from 1916 onwards, but these were in the minority.[[#89JamesYeomanPrintCulture|89]] Workers who could not read would listen to anarchist texts being read aloud at public meetings, smaller private gatherings, and even at work. Some illiterate workers would deliberately memorize their favorite anarchist articles and then recite them to other workers.[[#90JeromeRMintzTheAnarchi|90]] The medium of transmitting ideas via face-to-face interaction by itself created a social network of anarchist workers in a specific location. This group of workers could then decide to not only absorb and discuss anarchist theory, but also put theory into practice and take direct action, such as by organizing a strike.
+I started to walk forward, trying to keep my heel off the ground and looking behind me. I stopped, remembering my boots tied to my bag. Brushing the bottom of my foot, I squinted at my hands. It was too dark to see much properly, but I felt stickiness between my fingers. My heel was bleeding.
-One of the main sources of content for anarchist papers was the vast number of letters that workers sent to editors and publishing groups. These letters usually contained anarchist theory, stories, poetry, calls for solidarity, news of organizing and meetings, and reports of oppressive or scandalous behavior by capitalists and the police. Through writing letters, these correspondents transmitted information and reflections about a local area to the editors of the paper. The editors would, if they deemed it worthy, print the letter in the paper and then send copies to every correspondent they had across the country. Correspondents would distribute the paper to local workers and collect money for both the publishing costs of the paper and solidarity funds that the paper had set up to support striking workers, anarchist prisoners, or widows of dead comrades. The anarchist press was constituted by a social network in which local correspondents were the nodes through which the anarchist press was channeled out to localities, and the thoughts, experiences, and money from localities were channeled back to publishers. During periods when there were no genuinely national formal anarchist organizations in a country, the informal social networks that connected readers, correspondents, editors, and publishers functioned as the organizational structure of the anarchist movement.[[#91YeomanPrintCulture1619|91]]
+I did not want to stop so I shoved the boots on and kept pressure off the heel, abandoning the other shoe in the scree by the road. Eventually I decided that probably he had not followed but I could not turn back, had to carry on ahead, just keep moving.
-Anarchists also spread their ideas through lectures, public debates, and speaking tours. For example, in 1895, the Italian anarchist Pietro Gori went on a vast speaking tour of the United States during which he delivered somewhere between two and four hundred lectures on anarchism in a single year. He began many by singing songs and playing his guitar in order to gather a crowd, before launching into a talk on anarchism, often successfully persuading a number of workers to form anarchist groups.[[#92PietroDiPaolaTheKnights|92]] The dual goal of consciousness-raising and organizing was typically facilitated through the distribution of posters, pamphlets, and periodicals at talks. This had the effect that speaking tours established a local archive of anarchist literature wherever they traveled. The new collection of print media could then be used by workers to educate themselves further and become more committed to anarchism once the speaking tour had left the area. Since periodicals included an address to send letters to, the distribution of print media also ensured that new local anarchists had a means to communicate with other anarchists and become part of the social networks that constituted the movement.[[#93YeomanPrintCulture1474|93]]
+I felt really suddenly like I wanted to scream and hit myself. How could I have been so stupid? And look at me now, stupid and limping and alone in the dark on a road god knows where at night being what I set out not to be reduced to, fulfilling for everyone who worried and foresaw it, and what now? This is not my world to walk in. I wanted without thinking my phone from my bag. I needed a voice to be with me. I rummaged inside and brought out the torch.
-This emphasis on spreading ideas was motivated by the awareness that, to quote Lucy Parsons, fundamental social change was preceded by “a long period of education” that developed “self-thinking individuals.”[[#94LucyParsonsFreedomEqual|94]] The “first task” of anarchists, according to Malatesta, was “to persuade people. We must make people aware of the misfortunes they suffer and of their chances to destroy them. We must awaken sympathy in everybody for the misfortunes of others and a warm desire for the good of all people . . . arousing the sentiment of rebellion in the minds of men against the avoidable and unjust evils from which we suffer in society today, [and] getting them to understand how they are caused and how it depends on human will to rid ourselves of them.”[[#95MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|95]]
+===== Don’t put the torch on! =====
-In other words, anarchists sought to bring about a variety of different changes to the consciousness of the working classes. They sought to improve their theoretical understanding of existing society and how it oppresses them, persuade them that an anarchist society is both possible and desirable, instill anarchist values in them, and, perhaps most importantly, motivate them to actually engage in direct action and emancipate themselves. It was for this reason that Kropotkin sought to use his paper ''Le Révolté'' to inspire workers with hope by documenting “the growing revolt against antiquated institutions,” rather than, as many socialist papers did, drive workers to despair and inaction by focusing too strongly on suffering within existing society.[[#96KropotkinMemoirs39091|96]]
+Fuck! I scrabbled to turn it off. I hugged the rucksack to me and started to shake and whimper pathetically. Who would I call exactly? What could they do from the other side of the world? I told myself out loud ''this is your mess'', sniffled into my sleeve and started walking quickly onward. The weak moonlight was strobing through the moving canopy, lighting things up in jolts like club lighting.
-Anarchist newspapers, pamphlets, books, and talks were but one aspect of a wider revolutionary working-class counterculture that the anarchist movement constructed. There are numerous examples of anarchist workers in Europe and the United States organizing plays, poetry scenes, musical performances, dinners, dances, picnics, and public celebrations of key dates in the revolutionary calendar, such as May Day and the anniversary of the Paris Commune. These social events, which constituted a significant amount of day-to-day anarchist activity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were not only moments of fun and creativity. They were also instrumental in: (a) drawing workers into a social milieu where they might develop revolutionary consciousness and come to engage in direct action; (b) raising funds for newspapers, strikes, political prisoners, etc.; and (c) forming close social bonds both among anarchist militants and between anarchists and the wider working class in the area. The creation and reproduction of these social networks laid the foundation on which larger acts of revolt and rebellion were organized.[[#97Forexamplesofanarchistco|97]]
+===== Into the forest? =====
-For decades in Spain, workers came into contact with anarchist ideas via cultural and social centers known as ateneos (athenaeums), which were interconnected with the anarchist trade union movement. These ateneos typically featured a café, library, reading rooms, meeting rooms for anarchist and neighborhood groups, and an auditorium for formal debates, public talks, and artistic performances. During periods of state repression when trade unions were forced underground, ateneos were generally able to remain open and thereby ensure the ongoing existence of an anarchist presence within working-class communities. The workers who participated in ateneos organized a wide range of educational and leisure activities in their spare time. This included day schools for working-class children, evening classes for adult workers, theater clubs that would perform radical plays, singing and musical groups, and hiking clubs that allowed poor urban workers to experience the beauty of nature in the countryside and along the coast. Through engaging in these activities, workers developed themselves in multiple directions, such as gaining the confidence to speak before a crowd, learning to read and write, and acquiring an in-depth understanding of why capitalism and the state should be abolished.
+===== I don’t want to get lost in the forest. =====
-A significant number of anarchist militants, especially women, first encountered anarchist ideas and entered into anarchist social networks through their participation in the ateneos when they were children and teenagers. Young people not only received an anarchist education in ateneos, but also gained experiences of anarchist organizing. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth (FIJL). The FIJL, which was an independent organization linked with the CNT, came to be viewed as one of the main pillars of the anarchist movement. On several occasions, the ateneos were the avenue through which workers mobilized to participate in demonstrations and strikes. They were, in short, social spaces that facilitated working-class self-education, recreation, and class struggle.[[#98MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|98]]
+===== But it’s so risky to keep to the road. =====
-'''Unity of Means and Ends'''
+I decided to carry on up the road to the reservation. Sit behind a building where I was not in the open. Find a shed or something. Until the morning. I broke into a little trot again. The indifferent trees spun, they were so high above me; the tough long grass lashed against my legs from the roadside. The road itself was lit up like a silver beacon by the moon, leading up and on and on. The trees were hush-hushing, but the sound of panic beat on my eardrums. I had to keep stopping to get my breath and readjust my rucksack. Then at some point I remembered the camera.
-Anarchists did not think that any form of activity could lead to an anarchist society. They argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating a free, equal, and cooperative society without domination or exploitation. They advocated the unity of means and ends. In 1881, Kropotkin argued that social movements should establish their “final ''objective''” and then “specify a proposed course of action ''in conformity with the ends''.”[[#99KropotkinDirectStruggle|99]] Anarchists like Malatesta often expressed this idea with metaphors of roads and bridges, transit and movement. He wrote,
+===== I need something to complete the sequence. =====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">It is not enough to desire something; if one really wants it adequate means must be used to secure it. And these means are not arbitrary, but instead cannot but be conditioned by the ends we aspire to and by the circumstances in which the struggle takes place, for if we ignore the choice of means we would achieve other ends, possibly diametrically opposed to those we aspire to, and this would be the obvious and inevitable consequence of our choice of means. Whoever sets out on the highroad and takes a wrong turning does not go where he intends to go but where the road leads him.[[#100MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|100]]</div>
+===== You and that fucking documentary! =====
-Goldman made this same point in 1922 when she argued, in response to the Bolshevik seizure of state power during the Russian Revolution, that “means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim” because the “means employed, become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.”[[#101GoldmanRedEmma4012|101]] Given this, “revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be ''initiated'' with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitionary period. The latter can only serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.”[[#102GoldmanRedEmma404|102]]
+I took a bit of footage of the road shaking with my running. Then I noticed the figure on the road up ahead. I stopped running but carried on approaching at limping pace because there was nowhere else to go, and besides, they had already seen me. They raised their hand. They were just ahead of the reservation.
-Anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends was grounded in the theory of practice, which maintained, as we have seen, that as humans engage in activity, they simultaneously transform themselves and the world around them. An anarchist society would be reproduced over time by people engaging in horizontal systems of association and decision-making and, in so doing, continuously creating and re-creating both anarchist social relations and themselves as people with the right kinds of capacities, drives, and consciousness for an anarchist society. These new social relations can only take root if capitalism and the state are abolished through a social revolution and so will have to be created by the people who presently live in, and have been shaped by, class society. It is therefore essential that during the course of the class struggle workers engage in practices that transform them into people who are capable of, and driven to, overthrow class society and establish and reproduce an anarchist society. If social movements make the mistake of using the wrong or inappropriate means then they will produce people who will create a different society than the one they initially intended.
+I put my hand in the air. The figure put theirs down. As I got nearer I could tell it was a woman, which made me feel easier. Nearer still, the woman from the headlights. Then I was stood in front of her, gasping.
-This theory entailed two main commitments. First, a core part of determining what strategies and tactics a social movement should use to achieve their goals is establishing how the forms of practice that constitute them transform individuals and social relations simultaneously. If a social movement’s end goals can only be achieved through a social revolution, then it must choose means during an evolutionary period that build toward this. Kropotkin argued in 1881 that workers should engage in direct struggle against capital, especially via trade unions and strikes, because of the unity of means and ends. He wrote,
+‘Are you all right?’ she asked in a soft voice. I could not answer from panting. ‘I saw you running.’
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">A party which proposes a social revolution as its goal, and which seeks to seize capital from the hands of its current holders must, of necessity, and from this day onward, position itself at the center of the struggle against capital. If it wishes that the next revolution should take place against the regime of property and that the watchword of the next call to arms should necessarily be one calling for the expropriation of society’s wealth from the capitalists, the struggle must, on all fronts, be a struggle against the capitalists.[[#103KropotkinDirectStruggle|103]]</div>
+‘I ran from. The lorry park,’ I managed.
-The second main position entailed by the unity of means and ends is that social movements must structure organizations and make decisions in a manner that causes participants to develop the kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness that are necessary for producing and reproducing the social relations of the future society. A social movement organized in a hierarchical and centralized manner cannot create an anarchist society because it will not produce the right kinds of people for the task. Participants will either act in an authoritarian way or be subject to the authoritarianism of others, such as a small group of leaders monopolizing decision-making power and issuing orders that the membership then implements. This will result in the development of authoritarian tendencies in individuals and the establishment of authoritarian social structures that will, in turn, enable authoritarian modes of practice and constrain antiauthoritarian ones. If a social movement constituted by these self-reproducing authoritarian social structures were to launch or take over a revolution, the result would not be an anarchist society. The authoritarianism of the social movement would instead come to characterize society as a whole. Social movements that aim to create an anarchist society must therefore be constituted by forms of practice that produce self-determining people who associate horizontally with one another. In order to do so, workers must establish social relations in the present that are, as far as possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society.
+‘Why were you running?’
-The unity of means and ends led anarchists to maintain that, although violence was necessary to defend the revolution from counterattack by the ruling classes, it should not be used to force the working classes into an anarchist society. In Bakunin’s words, “liberty can be created only by liberty, by an insurrection of all the people and the voluntary organization of the workers from below upward.”[[#104BakuninStatismandAnarch|104]] As a result, “a revolution that is imposed, either by official decrees, or by force of arms is no longer a revolution but the opposite of a revolution, because it necessarily provokes reaction.”[[#105QuotedinAWZurbrugg|105]] Malatesta noted that “anarchy cannot be made by force and violent imposition by a few” and “is only possible when it is understood and wanted by large popular masses that embrace all the elements necessary to creating a society superior to the present one.”[[#106MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|106]] There is, in other words, an incompatibility between the means of coercing people into a particular kind of society and the ends of creating a free society in which people voluntarily self-manage social life. A genuine social revolution can only occur if the majority of the population choose to participate within it and reorganize society themselves.
+‘There was a man. In the lorry—’
-For anarchists, means and ends are not only interconnected in so far as the means you engage in determine the ends you arrive at. They are also identical in the narrow sense that both the means and the ends of anarchism are freedom. As Fabbri wrote, “the libertarian notion of revolution” holds that “freedom is also a means as well as an end.”[[#107LuigiFabbriRevolutiona|107]] Anarchist actions, in other words, create freedom and are instances of freedom at the same time. This can be seen by connecting the anarchist conceptions of freedom discussed in chapter 3 to revolutionary practice. When the working classes collectively struggle against the ruling classes, they are not only fighting for a distant postcapitalist society in which humanity will finally be free. They are also rejecting domination in the present by choosing to act in accordance with their own wills, rather than obeying the wills of their masters and remaining subservient. When the working classes create organizations and social relations in which they horizontally relate to one another, they are both struggling for a future free society and creating a freer society in the here and now by expanding their real possibilities of experiencing a different kind of life and becoming a different kind of person. When the working classes engage in collective struggles or participate in horizontal social structures, they are developing themselves and becoming more free than they were before.
+But then I do not know because the sky dimmed to black and some sirens started and my knees buckled under a huge pressure that came both from above my head and out of my body at once, and I fell to the floor. The woman went to catch me, I think, because when I came to I was half on the ground and half in her arms, but my leg was twisted under me and she had got on her knees to scoop me into a sitting position. My knees were gashed. It struck me how lost and young I must have seemed right then to this stranger. I feel embarrassed now at this image of me like a broken doll but I did not feel embarrassed right then, because I felt too much relief that the sick pressure was gone from my stomach, that the loss of consciousness had come on me like an anaesthetising sleep that takes pain away and the sweat all over my body was now a cooling balm to the heat. It is a familiar feeling, and by now I am used to the loss of control, and feel less disempowered just letting it happen rather than struggling against it. It makes me feel Victorian and weak.
-Such a view was not inconsistent with the fact that the majority of anarchists thought violence was necessary to overthrow the ruling classes and defend the social revolution. Using violence to abolish the power of violent oppressors is not a negation of freedom but rather an affirmation of it. As Malatesta put it, “in order to fight our enemies, and fight effectively, we do not need to deny the principle of freedom,” since a commitment to freedom entails “the right to resist any violation of freedom, and to use brute force to resist, when violence is based upon brute force and there is no better way to successfully oppose it.”[[#108MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|108]] Anarchists wish to use violence to expropriate the economic ruling classes “not because freedom is a good thing for the future, but because it is always good, today as much as tomorrow, and the owners deprive us of it by depriving us of the means of exercising it.”[[#109MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|109]] Anarchists, likewise, wish to use violence to overthrow the political ruling classes “because governments are the negation of freedom and we cannot be free without having overthrown them.”[[#110MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|110]]
+‘Oh no. All right. All right. Will you be okay here for five minutes? I can go and get my truck. You’re exhausted. I’ll go and get my truck. I’m Rochelle. I’ll be right back.’ Then she got up and ran up the path into the reservation. As she left, I wanted so badly for her not to go and leave me to be enveloped by the darkness. I sat and tore at blades of dry grass and shook, from adrenaline or shock, or something.
-'''Prefiguration'''
+After a few minutes Rochelle came back with her truck and drove me to her caravan, where she picked out the gravel from my foot and put a brown ointment from a jam jar on it then bandaged it up with plasters. She gave me this thing called ‘flybread’ to eat and a savoury tea, telling me the history of the bread. It was made from flour and lard, invented in 1860-something by the Navajo people, who were given the ingredients by the US when they were forced into a 300-mile relocation from Arizona to New Mexico. She told me her mother was Navajo and had died of diabetes from eating too much flybread. She ate it too without a tinge of irony and so I thanked her for it.
-The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends led them to argue that working-class social movements should establish horizontal social relations that are, as far as is possible, the same as those that would constitute an anarchist society. In so doing, workers attempt to construct the world as they wish it to be during their struggle against the world as it is. They also create, through experimentation in the present, the real methods of organization and association that people in the future might use to achieve the states of affairs that characterize an anarchist society. Kropotkin, for example, argued in 1913 that anarchists “have to find, within the practice of life itself and indeed working through their own experiences, new ways in which social formations can be organized . . . and how these might emerge in a liberated society.”[[#111KropotkinDirectStruggle|111]]
+Rochelle gave me blankets and set up her electric heater next to me on her sofa. I woke up when she came into the room with the sun in the morning wearing a full velour tracksuit and wrapping herself in a thick leather coat from the back of the door. She lit a cigarette and started making a pot of coffee without saying anything. I wondered if she had forgotten I was there, if it was even possible to miss me in this tiny space. I had the feeling I should not talk. I shifted my position so I could look out of the window.
-During the second half of the twentieth century, this idea was called ''prefiguration'' or ''prefigurative politics''. It should be kept in mind that this term was not used by anarchists historically.[[#112Forthefirstusesofthese|112]] Nonetheless, anarchist organizations generally prefigured the future anarchist society in two ways. First, by embodying the kinds of organizational structure and methods of deliberation and decision-making that a future society would contain. Second, by performing the kinds of functions that organizations in a future society will carry out. Although a social revolution would mark a dramatic shift in social life, there would be no such dramatic shift in anarchist methods of organization and association. The methods would remain the same. What would change is the context and the conditions under which these methods are applied and so the extent to which they can be fully put into practice.
+Outside I could see the neighbouring trailer, its smashed window blocked up with a bin-liner that tremored in the wind. Next to the trailer was the exoskeleton of a car, its tyres deflated and so sunk into the ground that it looked as though it was melting. It was brown with rust, rainbowed with spray-paint, with no glass in the windows and bullet holes in its side, dark and ringed at the edges like pockmarks of disease.
-Anarchist organizations built within class society thus have a dual function. In the present they bring people together in order to directly satisfy unmet drives and struggle effectively against capitalism and the state. Through participating in anarchist organizations, workers simultaneously attempt to achieve concrete goals and develop their radical capacities, drives, and consciousness. A tenant union might not only organize a rent strike that wins a reduction in rent or prevents an eviction. The participants could also learn how to make collective decisions in general assemblies and act for themselves through their own direct action. At the same time, they might realize that tenants have shared class interests that are opposed to the class interests of landlords. During the course of the struggle, they begin to understand that society could be organized without landlords, and they may come to aspire for an economic system in which everyone has free access to housing. In changing the world, workers at the same time change themselves.
+Rochelle placed the coffee on the coffee table in front of me and sat opposite on a stool that she moved directly into the beam of light from the window, even though it made her squint, and basked like a lizard does. Dust drifted past her face and caught the light like glitter. Her cigarette smoke was dense in the light, an eel curling through the dust motes. She poured the coffee carefully with the cigarette tucked in the corner of her mouth, talking around it.
-During a revolutionary period, anarchist organizations would take on new roles and serve as the inspiration for emerging anarchist social forms and/or transform from organizations that struggle against class society into organizations that run a classless society.[[#113Someanarchistsrejectedth|113]] At such a point, they would not only be the dominant structures through which society was generally organized. They would also continually produce and reproduce individuals who want to and are able to freely associate as equals.
+She said a lot of stuff too that I did not process all of, being hazy and still reeling and replaying things as she talked. ‘I suppose I should say you shouldn’t have put yourself in danger like that but I guess you weren’t to know any better. It happens. Sometimes girls go missing, but not usually white girls.’ I remember that bit because her tone changed. ‘It can happen out here because it’s kind of a forgotten backwater. But anyway it didn’t happen. Nothing happened. You were lucky. Or unlucky or neither, a close call. That’s all.’ Then she looked directly at me and I had to look away.
-The strategy of prefiguration was not original or exclusive to the anarchist movement. From the 1840s onward, a tendency within the French socialist movement had proposed the formation of workers’ cooperatives as organizations that would grow in number under capitalism until they displaced capitalist firms and became the nodes of a socialist society.[[#114BernardHMossTheOrigin|114]] During debates within the First International, this idea was extended to the First International itself, including the trade unions affiliated to it. The Belgian Internationalist César De Paepe, who was a collectivist but not an anarchist, proposed in his February 1869 article “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future”'' ''that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and . . . its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order.”[[#115CesarDePaepeThePresen|115]] For De Paepe, “the International contains within itself the seeds of all the institutions of the future. Let a section of the International be established in each commune; the new society will be formed and the old will collapse with a sigh.”[[#116CesarDePaepeThePresen|116]] The influence these ideas had on the developing anarchist movement can be seen in the fact that the article was republished in April 1869 in ''Le Progrès'', which was edited by Guillaume, and in May 1869 by the official organ of the Romance Federation of the First International, ''L’Égalité'', which Bakunin wrote for and edited at the time.[[#117RobertGrahamWeDoNotFe|117]]
+She was surprisingly forthcoming but in a very detached way, as though thinking aloud to herself. Nothing she said really invited participation. She looked out of the window as she spoke, at two small children who had started poking sticks into the bullet holes. Making a porcupine, she said.
-One of the earliest anarchist endorsements of prefigurative politics occurred when, on November 12, 1871, the Jura Federation issued the “Sonvilier Circular” in response to Marx, Engels, and their supporters converting the General Council of the First International into a governing body that imposed state-socialist decisions and policies on the organization’s previously autonomous sections.[[#118ForthecontextoftheSon|118]] As part of their critique of the actions of the General Council they stated that
+Rochelle has lived on the reservation all her life, apart from four years when she lived on the road with her ex-boyfriend. They met in one of the bars, in the town I saw lit up in the distance the night before. Her ex-boyfriend was a hippy and had always wanted an Indian girlfriend, called her his Pocahontas. They broke up because he wanted to move onto the reservation with her, but it made her more and more uneasy the way he would braid his hair and wear a headband and keep pestering her to arrange a naming ceremony for him, how his favourite film was ''Dances with Wolves''.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the society of the future should be nothing other than the universalization of the organization with which the International will have endowed itself. We must, therefore, have a care to ensure that that organization comes as close as we may to our ideal. How can we expect an egalitarian and free society to emerge from an authoritarian organization? Impossible. The International, as the embryo of the human society of the future, is required in the here and now to faithfully mirror our principles of freedom and federation and shun any principle leaning toward authority and dictatorship.[[#119TheJuraFederationTheS|119]]</div>
+The transcendental open-mindedness of the liberal white man! So free of cultural constraints, free-spirited and open to the other! Many levels progressed from the Enlightenment specimen collectors! What almond skin, what glossy hair, I can’t kill and stuff it, no no, how barbaric. I will parade it around living and glorious! We only view our animals on safari now!
-Anarchists, in short, thought that building prefigurative organizations was essential because of the unity of means and ends. As Bakunin wrote, a few months after the “Sonvilier Circular” was published, “the fashion and form of one’s organization arises from and flows as a consequence from the nature of one’s aims.”[[#120BakuninSelectedTexts18|120]] Kropotkin likewise argued in 1873 that revolutionaries must reject social relations within “the revolutionary organization” that contradict the ideals for which it has been formed, relations such as “a hierarchy of ranks which enslaves many people to one or several persons” or “inequality in the interrelations of the members of one and the same organization.”[[#121PeterKropotkinFugitiveW|121]]
+She started to feel as though he wanted her as a prized possession, or maybe even just a ticket to somewhere else. As though casting off his own civilisation and shrugging on something antithetical, her culture, the uncivilised one.
-This was important because, as Malatesta explained, “the abolition of government and capitalism is feasible only once the people, organizing themselves, are equipped to perform those social functions performed today—and exploited to their own advantage—by rulers and capitalists.”[[#122MalatestaPatientWork20|122]] To this end, anarchists like Goldman proposed that workers in the present should attempt “to prepare and equip themselves for the great task the revolution will put upon them” by acquiring “the knowledge and technical skill necessary for managing and directing the intricate mechanisms of the industrial and social structure of their respective countries.”[[#123GoldmanRedEmma397|123]] Anarchist organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society were the concrete means through which workers would learn to self-manage their lives and thereby become equipped to create a self-managed society. As Mella wrote in 1911,
+It seemed to bug her to talk to me, like it made her squirm, but a silence would be too heavy with my presence inside her small home. We got on to the topic of the documentary and she asked about it. I wasn’t sure if I should tell her explicitly, right after what just happened. But I decided, she will get it, I mean, the white man is her historical enemy. She laughed, not in a condescending way, really just a non-committal laugh that could have meant anything. She said, ‘The freedom to roam free like a white man, hey?’
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The proletariat continues acquiring the capacity for cooperation and management precisely outside of political action. In workers’ associations, ''especially in those where political practices do not govern'', workers are gaining the power of initiative, management practices, habits of freedom and direct intervention in common affairs, ease of expression and mental assurance, all things whose development is void in political entities that have as a base the delegation of powers, and, therefore, the subordination and discipline, and obedience to the elected. In social associations, initiatives come from below and from below come ideas, strength, and action. In this way, free men are made and are released to walk.[[#124MellaAnarchistSocialism|124]]</div>
+Later on she said she wanted to show me something and then she would take me to town. When we left the reservation people were sat and stood about in groups, chatting and smoking. A couple of dark and long-haired guys loped coolly on actual frisky-spirited horses. They all stared at me. I got right into the truck under Rochelle’s instruction. Someone called out ‘Hey, Rochelle’, and she just called back hey, climbing in the driver’s side and starting the engine before she had even shut the door. A twenty-something boy scooted up to her window and tapped on it. She let out a sigh then rolled down the window a couple of inches.
-Decades later in 1932, the Spanish anarchist Isaac Puente argued that just as a child learns to walk or ride a bicycle by trying and failing until they succeed, so too would workers learn to produce and reproduce an anarchist society through experiments in horizontal forms of association. He wrote, “living in libertarian communism will be like learning to live. Its weak points and its failings will be shown up when it is introduced. If we were politicians we would paint a paradise brimful of perfections. Being human and being aware what human nature can be like, we trust that people will learn to walk the only way it is possible for them to learn: by walking.”[[#125IsaacPuenteLibertarianC|125]]
+‘Hey, Walt.’
-Anarchists argued with one another about which prefigurative organizations should be built and how these organizations should be structured. Antiorganizationalists advocated small affinity groups and informal social networks, while organizationalists advocated, in addition to this, large formal federations, such as trade unions. Some anarchists advocated forming intentional communities and workers’ cooperatives, while other anarchists rejected this strategy.[[#126BakuninBasicBakunin153|126]] One area where anarchists generally agreed was on the need to construct emancipatory schools. Anarchists of all varieties founded or participated in schools in Spain, Italy, France, England, the United States, and elsewhere. These schools lasted for varying lengths of time, ranging from one or two years to over four decades, in the case of the Modern School of New York, which opened in 1911, relocated to Stelton, New Jersey in 1915 and finally closed in 1953.[[#127PaulAvrichTheModernSch|127]]
+‘Hey, Rochelle. Hey,’ he said to me, craning around her door to where I sat in the back and grinning. I said hello back and I felt the most British and accented I have done since leaving.
-These schools educated children and adults, but also sought to contribute toward fundamental social change. In 1898, a number of prominent anarchists, including Louise Michel, Reclus, Grave, and Kropotkin, signed an article published in ''Les Temps Nouveaux ''that advocated the creation of anarchist schools on the grounds that “education is a powerful means of disseminating and infiltrating minds with generous ideas” and so could become “the most active motor of progress,” acting as “the lever that will lift up the world and will overthrow error, lies and injustice forever.”[[#128ArdouinetalLibertyTh|128]]
+‘Where you going, hey?’ he asked her.
-One of the most influential anarchist educationalists was Francisco Ferrer, who established a Modern School that taught pupils in Barcelona between 1901 and 1906. He advocated “the establishment of new schools in which, as far as possible, there shall rule this spirit of liberty that we feel will dominate the whole education of the future.”[[#129FranciscoFerrerAnarchist|129]] Ferrer did not think that teachers would be able to establish a fully emancipatory school overnight. He instead argued that teachers should engage in pedagogical experiments that demonstrated, through a process of trial and error, what approaches to education enabled children to develop themselves and become adults who could think independently and horizontally associate with others.[[#130FerrerAnarchistEducation|130]] Ferrer’s experiments in pedagogy were abruptly ended on October 13, 1909, when he was executed by the Spanish government for a crime he had not committed: orchestrating a week-long working-class insurrection against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco. His martyrdom led him to become an internationally known figure and inspired the creation of emancipatory schools around the world.[[#131AvrichModernSchool293|131]]
+‘Just to town.’
-The theory and practice of anarchist prefigurative politics was largely concerned with the formation and structure of organizations and often did not give sufficient attention to interpersonal relations between people in daily life, especially men and women. In the United States, for example, anarchists only shifted to focusing on prefiguration in daily life in the 1940s, after anarchism had ceased to exist as a mass movement in the country.[[#132CornellUnrulyEquality1|132]] This is not to say that anarchists prior to this did not think it was important to act like an anarchist in daily life. In 1886, Wilson claimed that anarchists should, in parallel with the formation of mass, working-class social movements, “endeavor to discard the principle of domination from our own lives.”[[#133WilsonAnarchistEssays4|133]] Malatesta similarly wrote in 1897 that “we need to start by being as socialist as we can immediately, in our everyday life.”[[#134MalatestaPatientWork14|134]] Nor is it to say that anarchists in this period never explicitly advocated some forms of prefiguration in daily life. In 1907, the Italian anarchist Camillo Di Sciullo argued that anarchists should, “build a little anarchist world within your family.”[[#135QuotedinJenniferGuglielm|135]]
+‘What you goin’ to town for?’
-The main form of prefiguration in daily life anarchists advocated was free love in the sense of a voluntary sexual relationship between equals that occurred outside of marriage. These relationships were mostly monogamous, although some anarchists did advocate and practice polyamory. Notable examples of anarchists seriously attempting to engage in free love include the relationship between Rudolf Rocker and Milly Witkop and the one between Guy Aldred and Rose Witkop. In both cases, Rocker and Aldred appear to have treated their partner in a nonpatriarchal manner. However, most evidence indicates that the majority of anarchist men did not build the gender and romantic relations of the future society within their own households. They continued to treat women in a patriarchal manner, such as expecting their partner to become a mother who did the vast majority of housework and childcare. This, in turn, often led to anarchist women lacking the free time to properly participate within the anarchist movement.[[#136AckelsbergFreeWomen46|136]] In 1935, the Spanish anarchist Lola Iturbe complained that anarchist men “however radical they may be in cafés, unions, and even affinity groups, seem to drop their costumes as lovers of female liberation at the doors of their homes. Inside, they behave with their compañeras just like common ‘husbands.’”[[#137QuotedinAckelsbergFree|137]]
+‘Just got to drop some things, is all. Mind it.’ And she pulled the truck away jerkily.
-A similar failure occurred in public organizations. The CNT, for example, was formally committed to the goal of a society in which men and women were free and equal, but this was generally not prefigured within the trade union’s day-to-day social relations. Soledad Estorach recalled in an interview that women would attend a meeting but not return due to experiences of sexism. Even trade union sections whose membership were mostly women were represented at congresses by men and only a few women spoke during a trade union’s local general assembly. Within the FIJL, teenage boys would laugh at girls when they spoke, or were about to speak, at meetings.[[#138AckelsbergFreeWomen77|138]]
+We drove a little way away from the reservation in the truck. She took us into the trees that skirt the far side. We walked uphill a little way until we came to a clearing. There were bottles strewn everywhere, tyres and large black scaffolds and needles, almost chaos but arranged in a rough circle around a nucleus, a fire pit.
-Women in both Europe and the United States responded to patriarchy within the anarchist movement by forming their own groups in order to enable women to more fully participate in the movement, struggling against patriarchal and class oppression simultaneously. The Women’s Emancipation Group—founded in 1897 by the Italian anarchists Maria Roda, Ninfa Baronio, and Ernestina Cravello—had around fifteen members. It was based in Paterson, New Jersey, held regular meetings over seven years, printed and distributed antipatriarchal literature, and inspired other anarchist women to form their own groups, such as the Women’s Propaganda Group in Manhattan.[[#139GuglielmoLivingtheRevol|139]] Anarchist women in Spain similarly formed their own groups in the 1920s. These grew in number until they were formally linked together via the establishment of the national federation Mujeres Libres (Free Women) in 1937 during the Spanish revolution. The organization’s significance can be seen in the fact that it mobilized over 20,000 women.[[#140AckelsbergFreeWomen21|140]]
+‘We tell the kids not to come here so of course they come. We used to put up fences but they just pushed them down. If we stand here too long you’ll get a headache. They like to get dizzy off the fumes.’
-One of Mujeres Libres’ most important contributions was taking anarchist ideas on prefiguration and applying them to the emancipation of women. Since the 1860s, anarchists had argued that workers should build organizations that used the same structure and decision-making procedures as an anarchist society because, through participating in them, workers learned how to self-manage their lives and thereby how to create a self-managed society. Mujeres Libres developed this theory by arguing that liberation for women (and the drives, capacities, and consciousness this entailed) was not simply a matter of creating organizations that coordinated action via federations or made decisions via general assemblies. This is because one of the main barriers to women developing themselves through revolutionary practice was sexist treatment by men and women’s own internalization of patriarchal norms.
+She points out the still pool gathered where the dirt slopes down. There is a filmy rainbow spilt across it. A dead crow floats bloated belly up in it and I notice then that no birds are singing. There is not a sound aside from the trees swaying, and there is a tangy smell that makes your eyes sting a little. Even the sunlight seems anaemic where it reaches the pool’s surface.
-In October 1938, Mujeres Libres explained that one of the main goals of the organization was “to empower women to make of them individuals capable of contributing to the structuring of the future society, individuals who have learned to be self-determining.”[[#141QuotedinAckelsbergFree|141]] To achieve this, Mujeres Libres organized educational programs specifically for women. These taught not only basic skills, such as reading and writing, but also courses on “social formation” that focused on how women were capable of developing themselves and had to learn to take initiative and act independently of the men in their lives. Members of Mujeres Libres spread these ideas to the countryside during educational trips where they gave talks to other women. During these talks they explained that mothers could be anarchist militants, that men oppressed women, and that women should act themselves to stop this from occurring.[[#142AckelsbergFreeWomen151|142]] In so doing, they were attempting to build the gender relations of anarchy during both the struggle against capitalism and the state and the formation of an anarchist society, rather than waiting till after the revolution for their emancipation.
+‘The younger kids have mostly given up on the land, when they just see it dumped on like this. Nobody else wants it in their backyard so the state pays us to dump their shit here. The elders are angry at the young for trading the land for money. The young are angry with the reservation and think there’s better stuff for them on the outside that money can buy. They don’t speak the language much any more. But most of them will never leave. You know, before white men came we had a matriarchy. Figure that into your documentary.’
-'''Direct Action'''
+At this point I realised that she was putting herself through telling me this even though it made her uncomfortable, because she felt it was important. I had the thought that she was telling me because she attached importance to me making a documentary, like she had found a vessel for her message to the outside world. But then I dismissed it, because it did not feel like that at all. It felt like she had a lesson for me.
-The primary means by which the working classes would simultaneously transform themselves and the social world was direct action. Individuals or groups engage in direct action when they act themselves to bring about social change, rather than relying upon intermediaries or representatives to act on their behalf. Direct action, to quote Rocker, encompasses “every method of immediate warfare by the workers against their economic and political oppressors.”[[#143RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|143]] By “immediate warfare,” Rocker meant actions such as strikes, boycotts, industrial sabotage, distributing antimilitarist propaganda and, in certain circumstances, the “armed resistance of the people for the protection of life and liberty.”[[#144RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|144]] Direct action thus includes nonviolent and violent actions that contribute toward both evolutionary and revolutionary change. The social revolution is in a sense the ultimate form of direct action.
+The cesspool sticks with me and the smell will follow me for days. Dump waste on poor people because they are non-people and even if they shout about it no one can hear them. Indians are just layabouts and alcoholics who refuse to get jobs and live off the money they were given for their sacred lands, not so sacred if they chose to sell them anyway, hey? Somebody has to take the collateral damage, to aid progress. In ''On the Road'' Jack Kerouac had the foresight to say that ‘the earth is an Indian thing’, right before he went to a whorehouse to purchase some Mexican Indian women.
-Anarchists initially did not use the term direct action and instead deployed a variety of equivalent phrases.[[#145ForexampleBakuninSelect|145]] It is difficult to trace, using texts that have been translated into English, when the term direct action was first adopted by the anarchist movement. One early example is Wilson’s 1886 advocacy of “direct personal action” in the first issue of ''Freedom''.[[#146WilsonAnarchistEssays5|146]] The term direct action appears to have become commonly used due to the emergence and growth of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement in France between the 1890s and the early 1900s. During this period, revolutionary syndicalists, many of whom were anarchists, consistently advocated and engaged in what they termed direct action. This phrase initially referred to when workers drew on their own strength to personally struggle against capitalism and thereby achieve their own liberation through their own actions.[[#147VadimDamierAnarchoSyndi|147]]
+I asked Rochelle if she knew who Henrietta Lacks was. She did not. Henrietta Lacks is a mascot of bioethics, and systematic medical experimentation on poor and invisible people. Henrietta Lacks was a working-class African-American woman in the 1950s, which made her a non-person too. Scientists sewed a piece of radium inside her and told her it was aggressive treatment for her cervical cancer. She died eight months later at the age of thirty-one. Without asking they sliced two pieces of tissue from her cervix. They called these cells HeLa.
-This perspective can be seen in Émile Pouget’s appropriately titled 1907 pamphlet ''Direct Action''. According to Pouget, who was both an anarchist and a revolutionary syndicalist, direct action meant that “the working class . . . expects nothing from outside people, powers or forces, but rather creates its own conditions of struggle and looks to itself for its methodology. It means that from now on the ''producer'' . . . means to mount a direct attack upon the capitalist mode of production in order to transform it by eliminating the employer and thereby achieving sovereignty in the workshop.”[[#148EmilePougetDirectAction|148]] For Pouget, “direct action is, therefore, merely trade union action . . . without capitalist compromises, without the flirtation with the bosses of which the sycophants of ‘social peace’ dream . . . without friends in the government and with no ‘go-betweens’ horning in on the debate.”[[#149PougetDirectAction3|149]]
+Thousands of metric tonnes of HeLa have been grown and used for research. The cells of her lady-parts were used to find a polio vaccine and a treatment for Parkinson’s and NASA sent some into orbit to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity. Pharmaceutical companies made billions off the back of her but she is barely remembered and her family live in poverty. They did not even know about HeLa until scientists asked them twenty-five years after she died if they could take their cells too. In 2010, fifty-nine years after she died, her grave got an epitaph.
-By the early twentieth century, the term direct action had become a staple of anarchist parlance and was used in a much broader sense than can be found in early revolutionary syndicalist texts. In 1910, Goldman argued that “direct action, having proven effective along economic lines, is equally potent in the environment of the individual. There a hundred forces encroach upon his being, and only persistent resistance to them will finally set him free. Direct action against the authority in the shop, direct action against the authority of the law, direct action against the invasive, meddlesome authority of our moral code, is the logical, consistent method of Anarchism.”[[#150GoldmanRedEmma7677A|150]] Goldman applied this idea to abolishing patriarchy and argued that women should emancipate themselves through their own direct action, rather than trying to win the right to vote and elect representatives who would act on their behalf. She declared that a woman’s “development, her freedom, her independence, must come from and through herself. First, by asserting herself as a personality and not as a sex commodity. Second, by refusing the right of anyone over her body; by refusing to bear children, unless she wants them; by refusing to be a servant to God, the State, society, the husband, the family, etc. . . . by freeing herself from the fear of public opinion and public condemnation. Only that, and not the ballot, will set woman free.”[[#151GoldmanRedEmma202|151]]
+===== Her immortal cells will continue to help mankind forever. =====
-This broader notion of direct action was shared by de Cleyre. During a 1912 lecture in Chicago, she said that “every person who ever had a plan to do anything, and went and did it, or who laid his plan before others, and won their co-operation to do it with him, without going to external authorities to please do the thing for them, was a direct actionist.”[[#152VoltairinedeCleyreTheV|152]] Equipped with this more expansive definition, de Cleyre illustrated the idea by referring not only to the actions of unionized workers. She also pointed to abolitionists, who helped slaves escape their owners through the underground railroad, and to John Brown, who killed supporters of slavery and attempted to free and arm slaves through the seizure of the federal armory at Harpers Ferry.[[#153deCleyreReader5255|153]]
+Her story is a sad one. But it has light to it. Henrietta Lacks is immortal, she is a time capsule, a legacy in the lady-parts of a poor African-American woman.
-Anarchists themselves engaged in a wide variety of different forms of direct action, both small and large scale. These included, but were not limited to, workplace strikes, rent strikes, combative demonstrations, riots, armed uprisings, prison escapes, industrial sabotage, boycotts, civil disobedience, and providing illegal abortions. A few of the more exciting, small-scale examples provide some sense of the range direct action could cover.
+Rochelle said, ‘What good is that to Henrietta Lacks?’
-Anarchists in Paris organized a socialist removal service that would, under the cover of night, move the possessions of poor families from their apartment before they had paid rent. On at least one occasion, anarchists gagged, tied up, and left a landlord or concierge on his bed in order to achieve this.[[#154JohnMerrimanTheDynamite|154]] In 1900, anarchists living in the United States unsuccessfully attempted to free Berkman from prison by digging an underground tunnel through which he could escape.[[#155PaulAvrichandKarenAvric|155]] Five years later, anarchists in the Russian empire defended Jewish people during the 1905 pogroms by organizing mobile defense units armed with pistols and bombs.[[#156MaurizioAntonioliedThe|156]] In 1919, nearly 150 anarchists, mostly women, rioted at the docks in Lower Manhattan, New York. This was in response to their family members and loved ones being arrested by the American government and deported to Russia for being anarchists.[[#157CornellUnrulyEquality7|157]] In September 1923, the Spanish anarchist affinity group Los Solidarios, which included Buenaventura Durruti, stole 650,000 pesetas from the Gijón branch of the Bank of Spain in order to buy weapons for a planned, but never carried out, insurrectionary general strike.[[#158AbelPazDurrutiintheSp|158]]
+After that she hardly spoke but insisted on driving me the rest of the way to Winnipeg. She would not take any petrol money but let me buy her a coffee in a diner in town. We had a stilted conversation about my plans, where I was headed next, but it all felt hopelessly futile and I could see her thinking so as she picked at the rim of her Styrofoam cup. After the coffee I said a clumsy thank-you. She said don’t mention it and swung herself into her truck. Before she drove away she leant out and said, you take care. I watched it kick up gravel as it clutched its way back onto the road, winding out back in the direction of the distant hunching conifers that camouflage the reservation.
-On numerous other occasions, anarchists participated in larger acts of collective direct action carried out by mass movements. In early 1902, Galleani and other anarchists organized a series of meetings among dye workers in Paterson, New Jersey. These culminated in a small strike being launched in mid-April by Italian dye workers. Over the following weeks the strike massively expanded and, on June 17, a general strike was proclaimed that mobilized around 15,000 dye and textile workers in the city and surrounding area. This expansion of the strike was driven forward by the efforts of anarchist militants who distributed local anarchist papers and organized meetings in Italian, German, and English. On June 18, Galleani gave a speech where he called upon the striking workers to “rise up!” and “answer the legal violence of capital with the human violence of revolt!” A group of between 1500 and 2000 striking dyers then marched into Paterson and proceeded to break the windows and doors of several dye works in order to drive out scabs and to close down production. This soon escalated into an extended gun battle with the police during which Galleani, who was armed with a revolver, received a minor gunshot wound to the face. The strike continued over the following week and ended with workers gaining a general wage increase.[[#159ZimmerImmigrants7778|159]]
+When she had gone I felt a relief I could not put my finger on.
-From these examples, it is clear why anarchists advocated direct action. When successful, it either immediately results in a goal being achieved or imposes costs onto the ruling classes, such that they acquire an incentive to give into the demands of workers. A strike stops production and so a capitalist’s ability to earn profit. If a capitalist wants to stay in business, and is unable to break the strike, they have no choice but to increase wages, reduce hours of work, improve safety conditions, and so on.
+===== You take care now, white girl. =====
-Anarchists advocated direct action not only because it was an effective means for achieving social change but also because it positively transformed those who engaged in it. According to the Austrian anarchist Siegfried Nacht, “it is above all through action that the people can educate themselves. Little by little, action will give them a revolutionary mentality.”[[#160AntonioliedInternationa|160]] Pouget held that “direct action has an unmatched educational value: It teaches people to reflect, to make decisions and to act. . . . Direct action thus releases the human being from the strangle-hold of passivity and listlessness. . . . It teaches him will-power, instead of mere obedience, and to embrace his sovereignty instead of conferring his part upon a deputy.”[[#161PougetDirectAction5S|161]]
+I don’t think she meant to seem like she was helping me begrudgingly. She did not take the money and she wrapped my foot up kindly. It seemed like I called something home for her. Like probably she knows somebody that something much, much worse happened to.
-Such a transformation in people was essential for the achievement of anarchist goals. The overthrow of class society and the construction of an anarchist society required the working classes to learn to act for themselves and collectively self-organize and self-determine their lives. This viewpoint was grounded in the theory that there is a connection between means and ends. For Kropotkin, the anarchist vision of a future society “necessarily leads us to develop for the struggle our own tactics, which consist in developing the greatest possible amount of ''individual initiative'' in each group and in each individual—unity in action being obtained by unity of purpose and by the force of persuasion.”[[#162KropotkinModernScience|162]] The social revolution would, after all, only be successful if the working classes had already, to quote Pouget, “acquired the capacity and will” to transform society and overcome “the difficulties that will crop up” through their “own direct efforts, on the capabilities that it possesses within itself.”[[#163PougetDirectAction7|163]] Direct action in the present “lays the groundwork” for the social revolution since “it is the popularization, in the old society of authoritarianism and exploitation, of the creative notions that set the human being free: development of the individual, cultivation of the will and galvanization for action.”[[#164PougetDirectAction20|164]] It was, as Galleani wrote, “the best available means for preparing the masses to manage their own personal and collective interests.”[[#165GalleaniEndofAnarchism|165]]
+===== Well, yeah, duh. She was a prostitute. Probably knows a lot about it. =====
-'''The Spirit of Revolt'''
+For a few minutes I felt intensely sick at myself for such an ugly thought. Was I actually put out that Rochelle had not acted like what had happened was a big enough deal, for not taking me to the police or suggesting I should go?
-Malatesta wrote in 1889 that “the great revolution . . . will come as the result of relentless propaganda and an exceptional number of individual and collective revolts.”[[#166MalatestaMethodofFreedo|166]] He was not simply predicting that revolts would culminate in a social revolution. He was also arguing that revolts are a necessary aspect of the process of social change due to the manner in which they, like all forms of direct action, transform workers who participate in or observe them. He thought that “revolts play a huge part in bringing the revolution about and laying its ground-work.”[[#167MalatestaMethodofFreedo|167]] This was because
+Of course she didn’t suggest it. What the hell would I say to them? Something bad maybe nearly happened to me, not sure what something. Rochelle is just a really nice lady that took me in when I was in trouble, she is an angel. When I was not, even. Because nothing bad has happened.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">it is deeds that trigger ideas, which in turn react with deeds and so on. . . . How ever could those millions of men—brutalized by exhausting toil; rendered anaemic by inadequate and unwholesome food; educated down through the ages in respect for priest, boss, and ruler; forever absorbed in the quest for their daily bread; superstitious; ignorant; fearful—one fine day perform an about face and emerge from their hovels, turn their backs on their entire past of patient submission, tear down the social institutions oppressing them and turn the world into a society made up of equals and brothers—had not a long string of extraordinary events forced their brains to think? If a thousand partial battles had not nurtured the spirit of rebellion in them, plus an appreciation of their own strength, a feeling of solidarity toward their fellow oppressed, hatred for the oppressor, and had not a thousand revolts taught them the art of people’s warfare and had they not found in the yearned for victory a reason to ask themselves: what shall we do tomorrow?[[#168MalatestaMethodofFreedo|168]]</div>
+==== THE LICHENS OF MANITOBA ====
-Anarchists, in other words, believed that, in order for a social revolution to emerge, an increasingly large number of workers have to choose to engage in acts of revolt that transform them and motivate other workers to rise up against their oppressors. During the early 1880s, Kropotkin argued that this process must be driven forward by anarchist workers engaging in acts that spread, what he called, “the spirit of revolt.”[[#169Thisphrasecontinuedtobe|169]] According to Kropotkin, this was because the majority of workers will not become anarchists during periods of evolutionary change. Even a mass movement of one million anarchist workers would be a minority in a country of thirty million. Anarchism will only be embraced by workers throughout all of society during a revolutionary period, when vast numbers of previously indifferent people are caught up in a wave of excitement, become open to fundamentally new ways of thinking, and take an active role in reshaping society. This was demonstrated by the fact that, in the eighteenth century, republicanism and the desire to abolish monarchy only became popular in France during the French Revolution itself.[[#170KropotkinRebel7073|170]]
+Rochelle was right: nothing had happened at all. Although maybe I came close enough for it to mean something. Perhaps my abstract statistic has been accounted for now, so I am pretty much invincible. In a way, I could say that I am a real woman, a real vulnerable woman. An invincible woman.
-The success of anarchism therefore required establishing how evolution develops into revolution. Kropotkin answer was that “it is the ''action'' of the minorities, continuous action endlessly renewed that achieves this transformation” to a “revolutionary situation.”[[#171KropotkinRebel186|171]] He predicted that the actions of radical minorities, as individuals and groups, will spread discontent with the existing social system, hatred of the ruling classes, and “reawaken audacity, the spirit of revolt, through preaching by example.”[[#172KropotkinRebel186|172]] The acts of revolt carried out by courageous minorities will receive sympathy and support from workers not yet engaging in revolutionary action and thereby “find imitators,” such that, as the first radicals are being imprisoned, “others will appear to continue their work” and “the acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of revenge, will continue and multiply.”[[#173KropotkinRebel187|173]]
+I have been thinking probably he was not being malevolent, probably if he had known I did not want to he would have tried to make me stay anyway, that he must have thought I was up for it and been surprised when I was not or else he would not have let his catch go so easily. When he realised his mistake he let me go. I reiterate this in a way that sounds both beat and resolute, a promise no one’s sure they believe in. Does he still have my shoe?
-Kropotkin thought this would occur due to three interdependent processes: (a) revolutionary ideas will spread among previously indifferent workers who are now forced to pick a side in the ongoing class conflict; (b) workers will join the ongoing insurgency because its successes demonstrate the real possibility of overthrowing the ruling classes who previously seemed invincible; and (c) a vicious cycle of state repression will anger the working classes and provoke more and more acts of revolt. Over time, these acts of revolt will spread and grow in size and number until a full-blown social revolution breaks out.[[#174KropotkinRebel18790|174]]
+I stayed in my motel room with comfort food and watched daytime television and started to see about how I get out of here but it gets more complex now as I am leaving the Trans-Canada Highway somewhere just after Winnipeg.
-This social revolution will only adopt an anarchist character if anarchist workers play a key role in the early waves of revolt, because “the party which has done most revolutionary agitation, which has manifested most liveliness and audacity, will get the best hearing on the day when action becomes necessary, when someone must march at the head to accomplish the revolution.”[[#175KropotkinRebel189|175]] A social movement that fails to engage in “revolutionary action in the preparatory period” and make its ideas and aspirations popular among the masses “will have a scanty chance of realizing even the smallest part of its programme. It will be overtaken by the activist parties.”[[#176KropotkinRebel18990|176]]
+==== GREEN IS THE NEW RED ====
-Kropotkin developed this position from his study of how the French Revolution of 1789 arose. He claimed that, in urban areas, a minority of republican revolutionaries spread the spirit of revolt by popularizing their ideas through pamphlets, leaflets, posters, and songs as well as organizing protests where orators spoke, effigies of the ruling classes were burned, and soldiers were attacked if they attempted to break up the demonstration. Over time, this developed the militancy and daring of the masses until demonstrations transformed into riots and riots into a revolution.[[#177KropotkinRebel19296|177]] A similar pattern unfolded in the countryside. According to Kropotkin, “during the whole year of 1788 there were only half-hearted riots among the peasantry. Like the small and hesitant strikes today, they broke out here and there across France, but gradually they spread, became more broad and bitter, more difficult to suppress.”[[#178KropotkinRebel7374|178]] By 1789, the mass of peasantry had risen up to overthrow the ruling classes. They did so because they “saw that the government no longer had the strength to resist a rebellion” after “a few brave men set fire to the first châteaux, while the mass of people, still full of fear, waited until the flames from the conflagration of the great houses rose over the hills toward the clouds.”[[#179KropotkinRebel74|179]] The actions of these revolutionary minorities were the catalyst for a chain reaction of uprisings until
+I took time in the motel to Skype Larus, seeing as he has been feeling so neglected. He had been explaining what has been going on with fracking in the UK while I was away. I got a bit down while he was talking, thinking about how far away from it all I am, and the area where the kids hung out behind the reservation, and how I had been avoiding checking home news in too much detail since I left. My home town has been marked out as one of the possible areas to be fracked. There are not even otters in the river like there should be, and the anglers that actually eat the fish are seen as tramps. I think they are smart. Why pay money for a fish bred in a cesspool and pumped with hormones when you can get one with equivalent danger levels of chemicals from the river, for free?
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">it became impossible to control the revolution. . . . It had broken out almost simultaneously in a thousand places; in each village, in each town, in each city of the insurgent provinces, the revolutionary minorities, strong in their audacity and in the unspoken support they recognized in the aspirations of the people, marched to the conquest of the castles, of the town halls and finally of the Bastille, terrorizing the aristocracy and the upper middle class, abolishing privileges. The minority started the revolution and carried the people with it.[[#180KropotkinRebel74|180]]</div>
+Our rivers are already lifeless and inert, so the threat of chemical contamination is met with a shrug and ''well, there is nothing to destroy anyway, we need the energy!'' There is no mass resistance in the UK because not enough people can see anything worth the bother of saving. The environment was smuggled off a long time ago, as far back as the Enclosure Acts, when the peasants were denied the right to graze or forage so the land could be exploited more efficiently and the peasants had to leave en masse for the cities so that they could lube up the Industrial Revolution with whale oil, and begin the colonisation of the New World. The upheaval can still be seen now where I am from, where the abandoned towering furnaces of industry still cast their shadows. They are immortalised by J. R. R. Tolkien: that exodus from the green and balmy shires of the Midlands to the fiery forges, the slags and the mine pits of the urbanised Black Country (or Mordor; elvish for ‘dark land’).
-Kropotkin thought it would “be just the same with the revolution whose approach we foresee. The idea of anarchist communism, today represented by feeble minorities but increasingly finding popular expression, will make its way among the mass of the people.”[[#181KropotkinRebel75|181]] This would be achieved by groups of anarchist workers spreading throughout the populace in order to help organize acts of resistance and rebellion. Such collective struggles would culminate in revolution spreading widely until capitalism and the state had been overthrown. During this process, “what is now the minority will become the People, the great mass, and that mass rising up against property and the State, will march forward towards anarchist communism.”[[#182KropotkinRebel75|182]]
+The Environmental Protection Agency in America is downplaying the dangers of fracking and of leaking pipelines. The EPA was started because of the legacy of Rachel Carson. I told Larus about my weird dreams about her. This got Larus on to telling me Rachel Carson’s saga.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#14|1]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''77.</div>
+Rachel Carson worked in a very masculine field, but at home on her 65-acre family farm she was surrounded by women. From a young age she liked to write and read stories about animals and the ocean. Her dad died when she was young and she took over as the provider of the family, supporting her ageing mother. She spent all her time working in biology and looking after her ill family, who just kept dying, taking her two nieces in when her older sister died. She still loved to write and did write many beautiful and scientifically important essays and books about the ocean. She started a strong friendship, which may or may not have been romantic, with a woman named Dorothy Freeman. Dorothy was married and their friendship was mainly through letters, which Dorothy had to share with her husband to prove they were not having a lesbian affair.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#24|2]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 204. See also, 219.</div>
+A lot of the Big Dogs did not like Ms Carson because they saw her attack on Big Chemical Corporations as a threat to the paradigm of Scientific Progress in post-war America, and also because she was a woman. A jealous man scientist wrote a letter to President Eisenhower in which he said that because Rachel Carson was physically attractive and not married, she was probably a communist. After working really hard to save the planet she died of cancer at the age of fifty-six, and she never made a deal over the fact that her cancer was probably from the pesticides they sprayed over her home. She kept her cancer secret while she wrote ''Silent Spring''. Rachel Carson knew very well that her body was not her own, its health in the hands of chemical corporations.
-[[#34|3]]. Quoted in Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 55.
+So I was already feeling emotionally fraught when Larus asked me what had happened since we last spoke. There was a big cavernous hole in my narrative so I had to tell him about how I ended up at Rochelle’s. I just told him, really casual, no emphasis, and at first he found the thing almost a little funny. He asked me to send him over some of the videos from the lorry. I sent them while we were talking about other things then he opened one up and started to watch. After a minute or so he rubbed his eyebrows in the fashion of someone tired by the weight of something heavy and spherically shaped and difficult to hold.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#44|4]]. Quoted in Turcato, ''Making Sense'', 55.</div>
+Larus speaks a little Russian from a fleeting obsession in his twenties while trying on communism for size. The man was speaking Russian. He might have been Siberian. He most likely spoke English. How could he be driving through Canada if he didn’t speak basic English, Erin? Either way Larus said he could tell the driver understood me by the way he was talking.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#54|5]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 52.</div>
+Then Larus ran through the clips with me and translated. ''What’s wrong, little sourface, are you a long way from home?'' It was after that that I started to have what I think might have been a panic attack; something sat on my head and stopped me from breathing, the room went bright as though the walls and ceiling had exploded away from me and I felt simultaneously this gravity and this weightlessness, like falling and floating both at the same time and every breath empty of air.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#64|6]]. Quoted in Ruth Kinna, ''Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 132.</div>
+‘Erin?’ Larus’s voice came at me. ‘I think you’re having a panic attack, calm down, breathe slow, sloooooow,’ and my breathing got shallower but had more substance to it. Because he could not hear me gasping any more Larus freaked out, raising his voice, saying Erin, Erin are you still there, are you okay, can you hear me? It was all very embarrassing.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#74|7]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 74.</div>
+Because he could not look at my face he looked directly into the webcam, a serious look that wavered the longer he tried to hold it. It only lasted about five seconds but that is uncomfortably long to hold a look on webcam if you think about it. Slowed down by the lag it went through micro-cycles of intensity, reasserting itself. It said, ''Look into my eyes and see how serious I am. My face is saying it so hard it can’t even keep it up, like it’s a wet bar of soap or something. Like, we are that close now. I can be your rock.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#84|8]]. Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''449–50.</div>
+‘Erin, I’m really concerned about you and I have a suggestion.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#94|9]]. James Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''247.</div>
+‘What?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#104|10]]. For example Charles Tilly, ''European Revolutions'','' 1492–1992'' (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 5.</div>
+‘I have some time now I’ve finished with the whale data. Let me come and meet you.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#114|11]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''180, 176.</div>
+Is he mad? At first I just laugh, but with time for it to sink in I get a little angry. Why is everyone concerned for me? Why is everyone stifling me? Apart from Rochelle, who maybe is trying to liberate me with her cool indifference. TO WALK FREELY AT NIGHT!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#124|12]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''275.</div>
+‘You aren’t infallible, Erin.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#133|13]]. Charlotte Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', ed. Nicolas Walter (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 53.</div>
+I told him that if I were a boy he would not be dwelling on my in/fallibility. He said that’s the point. I think if I blur the driver’s face I can probably still use it in the documentary.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#143|14]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 220–21</div>
+==== INTO A WORMHOLE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#153|15]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''The Conquest of Bread'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007), 156–57. For other examples see Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''197–99; Errico Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 88–96. It should be kept in mind that, despite the ideas and actions of antipatriarchal anarchists within the movement, many anarchist men were sexists.</div>
+I do not think the tight feeling in my chest, the struggle breathing, like my lungs were filled with tar and every breath in and out was sucked and pushed through this viscous liquid, I do not think it had just to do with the lorry driver.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#163|16]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 133, 171; Mark Leier, ''Bakunin: The Creative Passion—A Biography'' (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 345n6. It should be kept in mind that on other occasions anarchists used the term “spontaneous” in a different sense to refer to actions that occurred impulsively, suddenly or without planning. For example, in 1924, Malatesta complained about some anarchists who wrongly believed that “human events,” including revolutions, “happen automatically, ''naturally'', without preparation, without organization, without preconceived plans.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 461.</div>
+It is everything. The lorry driver was just the shake that rattled like passing debris, so that I felt the shuttle’s fragility. The documentary is my shuttle and it keeps me going, it is the only vehicle for carrying on with purpose-propulsion-direction, it stops me from floating aimlessly into the ether, it keeps me on track towards that shining light ahead and the feeling that comes from it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#173|17]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 20'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985), 14.</div>
+The rattling of the debris made me look around and realise the enormity of this task, my journey, its sudden height and distance. A kind of vertigo, a very sudden awareness. But this is just a dizzy spell. Because if I do not have this project as a vessel to move me forward, then what the fuck am I doing and where am I going, what authority do I have being here?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#183|18]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 83. For other examples of anarchists repeating the words of the preamble, see Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''234; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 537.</div>
+Today I want very badly to call Mum and Dad, but if I did I would likely burst into tears, and what for? Imagine how much it would upset her. She would freak the fuck out. There was nothing she could do about it from home, so what was the point in putting her through it?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#193|19]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 174.</div>
+They say in emails that I never call, that they want to speak with me more often, but they do not understand that I can’t do it that way. We can’t carry on in tandem; like the Voyagers dividing from their rocket engines I had to break away completely in order to use the break-off as a kind of propulsion too. I feel bad but it is the way it has got to be.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#203|20]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 45. See also Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 241. There were a few anarchists who were pacifists committed to strict nonviolent resistance, but they were in the minority. See Bart de Ligt, ''The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution'' (London: Pluto Press, 1989).</div>
+I checked out coaches and car shares but there is nothing any time soon. I really need to leave Winnipeg so I can catch the carpool I have arranged out of Saskatoon. Then I am staying on a farm outside Edmonton and they are picking me up from outside the town hall on Monday at 4 p.m. The only thing that seems viable is that I hitch again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#213|21]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 53, 55, 59.</div>
+===== I know this is the kind of thing I wanted to prove should not stop women exerting their right to individual freedom. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#223|22]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 156–57.</div>
+===== That is the spirit. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#233|23]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 157.</div>
+==== MUSHROOM SPORES MAY FLOAT IN OUTER SPACE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#243|24]]. Quoted in George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumović, ''Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990), 160.</div>
+So I stood again in a little layby on Portage Avenue at the city limits extending onto the Trans-Canada Highway, with my thumb out. A lorry breached the road; as it got close enough to see me I dropped my arm. The lorry sailed past; like holding out a titbit of meat for a falcon at the country fair and baulking at the last second of its swoop to your gloved hand. I thought of Jules and her white van. I swore to keep my arm up the next time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#253|25]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 305.</div>
+After half an hour another lorry appeared and as it drew nearer I noticed it was slowing. I said to myself, ''Come on, let’s not be stupid, you just need to get back on the horse, remember.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#263|26]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 470, 477.</div>
+Roy chatted on about his home town Allgood in Alabama, US, how he had a little baby girl and had to be a trucker because it paid well and he wanted his baby to go to a good college. But he did not like being a trucker because he was sad about leaving his baby and his wife. He showed me a picture of his baby and wife. His wife was called Amelia, which he said ‘Melia’, unless that was just what her name was, and his baby was called Jade. I was thinking a guy who comes from a place called Allgood can’t be that bad, and I kept telling myself that. I sat awake daydreaming about how to deal with the recent events when making the narrative of the doc.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#273|27]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', 169. See also, 275, 277.</div>
+There is not much footage of Rochelle; she has been more or less the only person to not be enthusiastic and obliging. And the problem is: how do I show it so that I can make it real like it happened? I have enough that I worry I might inadvertently frame it like she had more significance to what happened than she did, something I do not want to do. I can’t figure out how to use her when I edit, without it seeming like I latched on because she had said something that made her sound like a wise old Mother Willow. It was only because of an accident that she happened to me. Just an act of decency or maybe of obligation to humanity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#283|28]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct ''Struggle, 207. For other examples, see,'' ''145.</div>
+But I need something to tie the story together, from running in the night and onwards, a bit of narrative over the top of some of the story-less shots of her and the reservation. I thought I might as well play my feelings out with Roy, seeing as we would never meet again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#293|29]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''104.</div>
+‘Oh, those natives are touchy folks.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#303|30]]. Woodcock and Avakumović, ''From Prince to Rebel'', 365–66.</div>
+Like he was letting me on his team in a kind of us versus them. I was not sure whose team I was more on, Woman vs White? But it made me think, do I have more of a propensity to feel self-conscious as a kind of voyeur making this film? As a woman, knowing already what it feels like to be an exhibition, to feel eyes on my body? Like the embarrassment I feel when I look in on the glass boxes of taxidermy, towards the possessiveness of ‘collect and display’.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#313|31]]. For example Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'','' ''171; Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 24–25, 36–37, 47; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 86–7; Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 76–77.</div>
+===== I am doing this for you too, Rochelle! =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#323|32]]. Quoted in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 83, 82, 78.</div>
+===== You are doing this for yourself. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#333|33]]. Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 56.</div>
+Before this trip I had a pretty obscure idea of what an Indian reservation would even look like; horses, totem poles and alcoholics, based on what I had seen on a programme on the National Geographic channel once. Mum had come in with the vacuum and stood looking a little perplexed at the TV for a few minutes before saying, ‘You know, I didn’t realise that Indians still existed,’ and I had not even thought that was very strange. I do not want Rochelle to be so much a part of the narrative that it seems like I am yoking my feminist problems with hers, even if we share some.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#343|34]]. Rocker, “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” 56.</div>
+In the late afternoon, where the highway met Regina, I said goodbye to Roy and hopped down from his lorry into a sodden layby a walkable distance from the city. The rain had stopped but the air was damp and clung to the smells and made them sticky; cloying diesel fumes, turf, and the wet on wet of the lakes as I skirted round them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#353|35]]. Andrew R. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Early Movement'' (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 253–55.</div>
+==== TAMING THE SAVAGES ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#363|36]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''201–4.</div>
+I had a dream about Ms Carson again last night. She was underwater conferring with a concerned-looking delegation of fish who held in their wafered fore-fins tiny hermaphrodite fish infants. The Queen of the Fish was distraught, she wanted some answers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#373|37]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 203. See also Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 62–65.</div>
+In all these millions of years the ocean hasn’t changed, now there is a new taste in it, she said. The taste came after your people came so you must have brought it, sour, sharp and fizzing. What is it? Rachel Carson told her that the taste that made the babies hermaphrodites was called synthetic oestrogen and her Womankind had been taking it because they were made to think it would emancipate them but what it also had done was to take their bodies from them, mechanised and controlled, warped to fit the jigsaw.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#383|38]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''563–64.</div>
+The Fish Queen did sympathise. She said, ‘As fish we know of the Man tyranny that your Womankind face because we are also subject to the tyranny of Mankind, have also been subdued and controlled, but we must come to a compromise.’ Rachel Carson promised to be an Ambassador of the Fish to the dry world of above. Like Thoreau casting off the sins of the flesh to attain greater spiritual purity, she swore her chastity to the Fish Queen in order to best fulfil her role as ambassador and prove her devoted kinship.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#393|39]]. Quoted in Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 67.</div>
+It is funny that, how a woman denying her biological breeding function is abhorrent, yet men like Thoreau or the virginal Isaac Newton denying their biological breeding functions are ''chaste'', as though theirs were an admirable ''choice''. What this says is that a woman’s body is not her own to choose to keep from a man.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#403|40]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 28. Bakunin made a similar remark in 1842 prior to becoming an anarchist. See Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 58. For examples of this idea being repeated by later anarchists, see Berkman, ''The Blast ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 10; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 222; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''579.</div>
+She swore she would never take the pill because it a) would cause the decline of the Fish Kingdom, which could have a knock-on effect on the rest of the underwater realm, her favourite realm, and b) ruined the integrity of the Fish Queen, and she liked the Fish Queen. Plus the pill was made by Bayer, who were disappearing the bees with their neonicotinoids. The Fish Queen swore her in as Ambassador of the Fish.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#413|41]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''183–84. See also Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''145–46.</div>
+In Regina I look at a map of Canada and it reads like a pictogram of clusters of neurons. The shape is uniform; where the lines might have been pliant and organic they are neat right angles. The states of Canada are divided in horizontal strips as if Descartes or someone threw down a quadrat and declared it an enlightened territory. Illuminated and user friendly like the satisfying angularity of Enlightenment taxonomies of life; rational flow charts of stable and quantifiable kingdoms that can be pinned to a table and dissected, taken apart and reassembled.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#423|42]]. Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 67–68.</div>
+Canadian prime minister John A. Macdonald was the father of the Canadian Pacific Railway, built from east to west in four years from 1881. The Canadian Pacific Railway Company sold the land around its railway in cheap little acred packages marketed and sold to European homesteaders as a Dream of a similar model to the American one. The Wild West was crazy and big and scary but rapid subdivision into super-manageable chunks made it easy to domesticate. Everything within each quadrat was quantified, named, tamed, land and natives included. From their new stronghold of the south-western cities, the CPRC could frontier-bust again into the north, where they built cities on the Gold Fever of the 1890s.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#433|43]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 270–71.</div>
+The dawn of railways in Britain brought about the invention of Unanimous Time. Some anthropologists think that marking time was the first step in the construction of the symbolic world, before language, before art. Because, like Einstein said, time is not something absolute. He said different observers order an event differently in time if they are moving with different velocities relative to the observed event. A seemingly simultaneous event can occur differently for other observers (also true of history). That means all measurements involving time as a constant lose their absoluteness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#443|44]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 400.</div>
+But the invention of Unanimous Time in Greenwich made the world fall into our order just like the cities are order and the roads and railways are order and the animals are order and genders are order. We invented time and we have sped it up by our own making. The Clock of the Long Now is a clock designed to mark time into the deep, deep future, 10,000 years at a time. It would be built by the Long Now Foundation, in the hope of counterbalancing modern myopia and making us more responsible to the future. But it seems to me just a louder assertion, just a bigger claw reaching. (I REALLY mark time therefore I VERY am.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#453|45]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''72. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 322, 535, 553.</div>
+In the north, where the highway does not reach, the roadveins are less tangled, like a tree spilling out and reaching all its twig-fingers to the sky in whichever way it feels to fill the space around it. In the north, where the landscape is more immutable, the settlers have been made to oblige it. In the northernmost territories the permanent villages are mostly native because the First Nations and the Metis and the Inuit know how to bend to the land rather than make the land bend to them. And like Naaja said, they see the animal/mineral/vegetable worlds as a continuum of which we are a part in the same way that Inuit gender is a continuum.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#463|46]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 28.</div>
+The Trans-Canada Highway was built in the 1950s to link up the cities that Macdonald and the CPR spawned. And all of this came to happen so that the rational concrete highway could unravel underneath me and lead me forward on my journey like my very own yellow brick road. After two hours or so a young couple picked me up and took me to Saskatoon. The journey was treeless and flat, I could see the clouds move all the way to the horizon, where they would lose their shape and amalgamate into one big haze, the blue sky stretching over me like a dome.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#473|47]]. Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters'', 487.</div>
+==== THE BUFFALO AND THE PASSENGER PIGEON ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#483|48]]. The following account of social revolution can be seen in Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''177–236; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 99–103; Malatesta, ''Café'', 122–25.</div>
+''INT. CAR – camera in Erin’s hand taking in the outside of her window – road sign flashes past, ‘You are leaving Saskatoon, please come back soon!’ – flat plains behind a low flickering fence, stretched out as far as one can see, sickie-yellow and bleached by the sun – no glint like there should be – no pastoral quilt trimmed with hedgerows – monotonous sprawling land, dirty and dead and coaxed and quenched with rotating sprinklers, wide and uniform and on giant scales – a humming that should be insects but is diminished and croaky like an echo from giant machines that even look small against the crop desert – now and then a metal structure bent like a crouching pterodactyl butting the ground –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#493|49]]. Anarchists typically claimed that only means of production and land that was used by a capitalist or landowner to profit off the labor of others would be expropriated. See Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 214; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 89. For how the expropriation of food, clothing, and housing was envisioned, see ibid., 70–71, 103–4, 121–22, 127.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0121-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#503|50]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 170–71.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It smells</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#513|51]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 179. For his participation in 1848 and the 1849 insurrection, see E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 149–62, 189–94.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' Yep. Welcome to the hydraulic fracturing capital of Canada. There’s been fracking here for fifty years, but nowadays it’s goin’ haywire. Around abouts third-biggest petroleum reserve in the world</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#523|52]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''157.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin turns the camera to face Steve in the driver’s seat – red cap, dark green North Face gilet – he turns to the camera, smiles haltingly, turns'' ''back to the road, shifts his hands on the wheel to steer from the top –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#533|53]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''232. See also Malatesta,'' Patient Work'', 85; Makhno, ''Struggle'', 57–58, 89; Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 43–46.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' Then there’s your tar sands. And the forests. Half of Alberta is forest. It’s all in the north. And over half of the forest is ripe for harvest. Yep. You could say Alberta runs on selling itself. Alberta is a goddam whore</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#543|54]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 109.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– he laughs, a short honk of a laugh – a shadow passes over his face because a cloud goes under the sun – he points to a harrier out of the window, silhouetted in the sky –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#553|55]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 110.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' That’s a harrier. My pop used to point out all the birds to me. I don’t remember most of the birds. But for some reason I always remember to recognise the harrier</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#563|56]]. The complex history of anarchist military participation in the Russian and Spanish civil wars goes beyond the scope of this book. For overviews, see Peter Arshinov, ''History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''6–23; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014).</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– he carries on glancing back at the bird from the road until he cannot any more without craning his neck –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#573|57]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 542–4, 551–5; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 191–5; Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 101–2, 186–89, 203. Malatesta also pointed out that anarchists would be but one faction within the revolution. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''472.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' I used to think all these environmental types were just out to scaremonger. But then when I worked the tar sands I changed my mind. And you know, I can’t get my head around why I ever doubted them. These guys who just want to see the world green. Over these corporations with big money in their pockets</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#583|58]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 218. The fear that a social revolution could be crippled by food shortages was shared by Malatesta. See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 428–9.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– he talks about it all with an odd kind of affection – custodial attentiveness that makes it seem as though he is talking as part of the Albertan psyche rather than out of a personal fondness or interest –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#593|59]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 207, 218–20; Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread'', 95–97; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 588.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' But hey. Who am I to moan? Driving my car?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#603|60]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– he sits quietly for a few seconds, as though waiting for her to cut the camera – agitatedly, he fidgets his hands, reaches to the glove box –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#613|61]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 266. See also Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 37–38.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''STEVE:''' You want a mint?</div>
-[[#623|62]]. Kropotkin, ''Conquest of Bread''.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– he unwraps a mint between his fingers with his wrists steering the wheel from the top – the camera shudders as Erin reaches for a mint –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#633|63]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 228.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#643|64]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 34, 43.</div>
+==== GOT LAND? THANK AN INDIAN ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#653|65]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 43.</div>
+Steve drove me all way into Edmonton to where I was being picked up even though it was out of his way. He took the petrol money and gave me his email so he could see himself in the finished product when it came about. I thought about all the footage I have, about how Steve was not really talking about what I had told him my documentary was about. But he was talking about how Alberta is a whore and even if he did not quite know it, he was talking indirectly about women too, and the significance that it took a woman with a stolen body to write ''Silent Spring''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#663|66]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 71.</div>
+Sam’s parents left the farm a few days ago for a fortnight, to visit his mum’s family on their reservation over in British Columbia. Sam is a couple of years older than me and Berry is seventeen. They both have similar chin-length raven-black hair, but Berry’s face is much too soft and pretty for them to look too much alike, although they both have the same defiant jawbone. I had to do a bit of introspection and even read back over our emails to try to figure out why I had presumed they were a white family. Maybe it was the all-Canadian-sounding names.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#673|67]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 137. See also Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 111.</div>
+The homestead is just north of Rocky Mountain House, a small town around two hours away from Edmonton. The drive leading up to the homestead from the main road is unpaved and winds through pine trees. Two chickens scuttled out of the way of the car as we pulled up the drive. In the clearing of the forest that surrounds their house, which is a large cabin, there is a totem pole reaching the height of the cabin and half again. I did not want to ask just yet how typical this is. There is a small shed to the right of the cabin and behind the trees fall out onto a meadow where they have a vegetable plot, paddies, a chicken coop and a shed with four yellow plastic kayaks stacked against it. At the far end a wide stream marks the boundary to their land.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#683|68]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''153.</div>
+Around the chicken-roost shed I counted five chickens, and more wandering around. They collect the eggs from the roost every morning and sometimes they eat the chickens. In a pen next to the roost were three speckled pigs, mucking about, two larger and one smaller. They take the bigger ones for breeding every year and raise up the piglets for market, keeping just one back to slaughter themselves for cured meat. The smaller of the three pigs was the keeper and they were fattening her up. The chickens, one pig, fish they catch from the river and the things they shoot hunting are the only meat they eat.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#693|69]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 182–88.</div>
+We grazed the pigs, letting them out from the paddy to forage through the forest for mushrooms and roots and berries and worms and things. We were assigned one pig each. I learned to move them by tap-tapping them on the flank with a stick and manoeuvring them with my legs. I followed my pig close because he kept moving and I was frightened of losing him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#703|70]]. Quoted in Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 182.</div>
+The forest was awake with sound, a medley of territorial and cat calls. Now and again I would zone in on a trill I thought I knew, like picking up on a phrase recognised on a foreign street. Blackbird, wren, wood thrush, starling. And squirrels chattering at us from the trees, him digging up their nuts with his snout.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#713|71]]. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, ed., ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'' (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 4–7, 29–43; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 101–10.</div>
+Sunlight filtered down through the canopy in diagonal beams and motes floated through them. My pig chattered happily and I was thinking to myself, yes, pig, this is what happiness is; when alone, being alone without people or people things, noticing selfacutely, and with a kind of fondness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#722|72]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''138–41; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''221–37; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''120–24; Federico Ferretti, ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK ''(London: Routledge, 2019), 104–15, 120–43.</div>
+I asked if the chickens ever run away. Sam said they don’t because they feed them and the chickens are happy here. I asked if they ever get eaten. He said Grey the dog chases away the weasels and the cats, but sometimes he misses one and they lose chickens. This just happens sometimes, and since the chickens are not exactly theirs they can’t get angry about them being taken away, they just feed them and sometimes the chickens give them eggs and seem to accept that every now and then they kill one to eat. I think this is very philosophical.
-[[#732|73]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 43.
+For dinner we had fish that had been smoked in their smoke house, and vegetables and potatoes from their plot. I am staying put for a few weeks, to decompress before the final push. This is going to be the perfect place to go into the whole helping-out-a-stranger-in-exchange-for-food-and-board thing. Like being a Samaritan in old times, but the idea is that I learn shit about organic living.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#742|74]]. “International Anarchist Manifesto Against War (1915),” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 290. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''379–87.</div>
+In the documentary this will be a few weeks of time-out skimmed over in a few short clips of idyllic pastoral living, like Kerouac, McCandless et al. working on flour mills and the like to pay their way across the States. Rest time and recuperation, a big breath before the deep plunge. Since I got to Sam’s I have this enduring feeling of serenity. I have caught it up for now, the thing, and its glow gives off enough warmth to bask in.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#752|75]]. Kinna, ''Kropotkin'','' ''177–83; Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); A. W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.</div>
+==== BECOMING A RIVER AND SLEEPING LIKE A RIVER ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#762|76]]. Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism:'' Élisée'' Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''77, 157–58; Kropotkin, ''Memoirs'', 412; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 95, 97; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 195–96, 342; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 55.</div>
+Sam and I took kayaks out today. The lake was pellucid and the air barely moved. As we cut into the water with our paddles we startled fish. We could see them a metre underneath us the water was so clear. There was the sound of moving water and the feeling of being pulled away. The feeling of sitting in a little vessel on top of an indifferent intensity, the feeling of being buoyant on the skin of depth. Big swathes of time would pass where neither of us would say anything to the other, just the rhythmical dipping of the paddles and the tinkle of drips from the blades. Behind us the mountains rose, diminished into lethargy by a hazy film of distance. Above the deep green forest, black shapes hovered and dipped.
-[[#772|77]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
+We made it most of the way back upriver but in the end, when I especially was lagging and hardly pushing back against the current, we landed the kayaks and walked the rest. Sam drove to pick them up later and I went with him for company while a friend of his who had come to stay, a guy from the town called Ollie, made dinner with Berry. I can’t help but stare at Sam every time his talking gives me an excuse to. His hands are always dirty. Not gross dirty, but earthy from the farm. I might have been paying a lot of attention to him to notice that his hands are always earthy. Heavy eyelids like crescent moons.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#782|78]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 138.</div>
+In the truck he said, half joking, you’re good in a kayak, I didn’t know you had kayaks in England. I told him we do, and that I was good because I had been in kayaks lots as a Girl Guide. He found the fact that I was a Girl Guide really amusing. He said, ‘I hear you sing Indian songs around the campfire too?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#792|79]]. Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
+I told him there was a song about an Indian in a kayak we used to sing actually.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#802|80]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+He said, ‘That’s funny. We never sing about Girl Scouts.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#812|81]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 251–52. Bakunin used similar imagery in a letter to Nechaev. See Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 183.</div>
+==== A REAL MOUNTAIN ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#822|82]]. Guillaume, “Ideas on Social Organization,” 247. This dam metaphor can also be found in Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolutions'','' ''81.</div>
+Sam said he did not know why I would want to go there, but he took me anyway: the famous Banff Park. The sky was practically cloudless and everything crisp with colour. Ollie rode up front with Sam, so I sat in the truck bed with Grey. To look out over the top of the van’s roof from the back meant positioning my face in the stream of air forced over it, which stung my eyes and wrapped my hair into tight little knots. The only viable way to sit was facing backwards on the bench with Grey wrapped over me, because even though Sam said he always rode in the back I was nervous about him getting excited and bailing over the side.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#832|83]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 179.</div>
+Not being able to see ahead on the journey gave me a novel perspective. The Rockies started to crawl into my view. Grey knew them, his eyes twitching to them frantically. I watched the fixed point where the road disappeared at the horizon as it all rushed past and towards it, the mountains sluggishly because they had further to go.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#842|84]]. This idea has been falsely attributed to Kropotkin. Malatesta, for example, makes this claim in his 1931 article “Peter Kropotkin: Recollections and Criticisms by One of His Old Friends.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 516–20. For a critique of fatalistic readings of Kropotkin, see Matthew S. Adams, ''Kropotkin'','' Read'','' and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism'' (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015) 106–11.</div>
+I am getting towards the real Wild North now, like I had imagined the frontiers-land, the Yukon, to look. Not quite there yet but I can start to feel its tremor. Looking at it, you get why all the Mountain Men do not care to keep any company if they can just keep company with the mountains, so sure and majestic and other-than-you-are.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#852|85]]. Reclus,'' Anarchy'', 139.</div>
+But the road rushing away underneath does something strange. Makes it feel spectral, staged, to be seen but not really felt, like how walking through an underwater tunnel at the Sealife Centre is not anything like swimming in it. Every now and then the sides of the road would rise up and show the flat innards of some great rock or crust, layers of sediment and scars where the road cuts through.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#862|86]]. Malatesta, ''Café'', 105.</div>
+Walking through the forest, Sam chose the least scenic but most secluded route, leading through thick pine forest. Grey rushed around in a frenzy, snuffing up stories, like maybe the coyote that killed its prey dead here, or a three-year-old hare that was caught by its leg already lamed a week ago in another scuffle, that time with a wolverine, and it knew that it could not be so lucky twice. It ran some way then lay down so as not to prolong the inevitable and gave itself to the coyote.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#872|87]]. Mella, “Evolution and Revolution,” Biblioteca Anarquista website, https://es.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ricardo-mella-evolucion-y-revolucion. See also Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 87–92, 227.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0127-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#882|88]]. Malatesta,'' Café'', 105.</div>
+Grey smelled its before and its death smell, then much later in the walk its after, where the coyote had passed it in its scat days after. He smelled the terror of the ground squirrel in its burrow but he catalogued the scent and left it because it was too deep out of the reach of his snout and there was much too much else to read to make time for digging. There was smell around a grand old tree with a thick trunk like the leg of a diplodocus and he ran around it excitedly yapping and cocked his leg to it. Perhaps it was a wolf smell and he was calling out to them and leaving a message in case they came back. Perhaps he was accepting the challenge of the scent of his primordial nemesis: the cat of the wild, the mountain lion.
-[[#892|89]]. James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 40–44, 248–49; George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 127; Chris Ealham, ''Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 72–74.
+Sam walked us through like a heritage tour guide who has been decades in the game so has all the knowledge but waning enthusiasm. He pointed out the ''Polyporaceae'' fungi, of the ''Badius'' genus, jutting from a tree, a pruned brown palm cupping water. He took a skeletal beehive, paper thin, a snakeskin doubled and redoubled, folded and helixed on itself, broke it apart in his hands to show us the chambered innards and crumbled it absently. It fell away like ashes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#902|90]]. Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 80, 120n3; Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 46.</div>
+He said, ‘Don’t you see that that is what it is? Empty? It is a museum to itself, like someone took the whole thing and replaced it with a replica, put it aside for us to experience.’ At first I thought he meant the beehive and I thought, that is very deep to get about a beehive, I am sure the bees have just moved home. But as we went along I began to think he might be talking about the park itself, like it was all a vacant symbol to him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#912|91]]. Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 16–19, 43–50, 146–47.</div>
+We walked for maybe a couple of hours and eventually came onto a lake from inside the trees. It was that opaque and turquoise blue that you can just about accept in photographs but on seeing it there in the real-world landscape I was incredulous. It had a kind of powdered texture, as if a giant had painted the blue of the sky and the white of the clouds and then swilled out their paintbrush in the water of the lake. Peyto Lake is fed by a glacier, Sam said, and in the warmer months the meltwater takes the rock flour it ground up underneath itself and spills it into the lake. When this happens the water of the lake gets called ''glacial milk''.
-[[#922|92]]. Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 1–2; Paul Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background ''(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 47.
+I told them I had seen this before, in the very wildest place I know at home: my old quarry. The quarry was for limestone but it had been abandoned for years so filled up with rainwater. The rainwater mixing with the limestone dust makes a similar rock milk, although it is not as dramatic, but eerie, the hacked cliffs and flats still and blinding white like a moonscape doused with floodlights.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#932|93]]. Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 147–48.</div>
+The quarry was fenced off because it was dangerous and also because it was a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Hunks of orange rust char it, the remains of miscellaneous pieces of machinery, but it is heavy with the presence of the fossils in its 430-million-year-old sediment. There are trilobites from the Silurian period when life was just beginning to crawl out of the sea, and as though to mirror this there are shallow pools writhing with rare newts. There is my nesting pair of peregrine falcons, which Sam says are considered particularly spiritual by Native Americans and Ancient Egyptians. Driven to local extinction in places by DDT in the 1960s, I tell them, but clawing back in this graveyard to humanity. Sometimes when I am there I imagine it is the far future and I am the last human on earth.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#942|94]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 31.</div>
+But the wild of Peyto Lake is the conceptual opposite. It is modelled on life before, but really it is just a simulation. Sam made me see this. He seemed unfazed by the place and sat on the pebbled shore throwing sticks into the water for Grey. On the far shore we could see ants looking down into the lake from an overhang which Ollie told us was designated the most scenic viewpoint in Canada. He asked us if we didn’t think it could be as beautiful seen from the other way round.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#952|95]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 46.</div>
+I was glad that being with the boys gave me a backstage pass into the park and made me different to all the other tourists, even though that was exactly what I was. Sam probably couldn’t help thinking I was not any better than them either.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#962|96]]. Kropotkin, ''Memoirs'', 390–91.</div>
+‘It’s just a spectacle to them,’ Sam said.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#972|97]]. For examples of anarchist counterculture see Avrich, ''Haymarket'','' ''131–49; Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'', 169–83; Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''34–51, 168–82; Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the ''Cronca Sovversiva'' and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 76–125; Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'','' ''124–31; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 155–62, 259–62; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''24–26, 35–37, 62–66.</div>
+Ollie laughed and told him to shut up, the park was beautiful, and if it weren’t for all the tourists they would not have the money to keep it open and conserved.
-[[#982|98]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 84–88; Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''50–55; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 45–47; Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
+‘It’s beautiful, yes, but in a different way to how it should be. Doesn’t it worry you that it will end up with only preserving real mountains, picture-postcard ones? With waterfalls and snow on top and its image reflected in a lake? What about where we live? How long until the river is polluted because people have real mountains put aside to go visit in a park?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#992|99]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''303.</div>
+And Sam is right. At home our quilted landscape is fully exploited and the wild is relegated to special parks. Spaces set aside for preservation are museums, and their segregation makes it okay to debase anything outside of them. Parks are time capsules and that itself seems a futile admission of the falling-apart of nature.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1002|100]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''46.</div>
+I chewed on my sandwich. Ollie took his time formulating a reply. ‘But no one would care about mountains at all if there wasn’t somewhere for them to come and see real ones.’ I could not disagree with him either.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1012|101]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''401–2.</div>
+==== NO PERSON IS AN ISLAND ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1022|102]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 404.</div>
+Mum had sent me frantic messages over Facebook and to my email to say she had had a really bad dream about something happening to me and to ring her. My phone had been dead for a week at the bottom of my bag so I had not seen Mum ring. I phoned her up and she had a fit, first begging me to come home if I was going to keep on pulling stupid stunts like that, disappearing without contact, then when I promised I would not again she burst into tears.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1032|103]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 306–7.</div>
+===== My only child, my daughter. =====
-[[#1042|104]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 179.
+But Mum on the phone is just a little voice, so small and so far away. She is standing on a dot and the balloon gets bigger and worse still Dad on the phone, standing on another dot, sounding tired and saying why do you have to do things like this to your mother, you know what her nerves are like. Tired in a way I have heard many times before. Tired, like you are always so far away, always have been so distant, we have always been stood on these dots getting further and further away from each other.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1052|105]]. Quoted in A. W. Zurbrugg, “Introduction” in Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 14.</div>
+This is only the second time I have heard their voices since I left. I should call home more. But she is crying on the phone and yes it hurts a little, ''I miss you but you know I’d never say'', but also it feels good; she is crying but she can’t bring me home. The power of their summons has nothing on me now. I am becoming my own person apart from them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1062|106]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 420, 426. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 46–47.</div>
+Before me her name was Jennifer and she worked as a secretary and before that she was as young as I am and she had ideas about who Jennifer was and what Jennifer wanted and what she wanted was to go to Italy and learn Italian and be an au pair and before that still she was a child, a little girl called Jennifer who wanted to be a ballerina, like she later wanted me to be. She had a whole self before me and I will never get to that part of her. She is a person with a name: Jennifer. Jennifer and Brian. Not just Mum and Dad. But I have always been Erin first and daughter after. Mum, Dad, Erin. Why is it we do that?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1072|107]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Revolution and Dictatorship: On One Anarchist Who Has Forgotten his Principles,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/8932r8. See also Berkman, ''Anarchism'','' ''136; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''3, 143.</div>
+It is a burden to have a mother that wants so much of you, but it must also be a burden to be an overly attached mother, like why can’t I just shake the daughter from me? You grew out of me but you never really grew away?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1082|108]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147, 148.</div>
+===== I am reminding you that your name is Jennifer. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1092|109]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147.</div>
+===== Daughter; my parasitic twin. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1102|110]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''147.</div>
+==== THERE IS NO WORD FOR ANIMAL IN THE DAKOTA LANGUAGE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1112|111]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''200.</div>
+There is the bigger picture and then there is sex. Having sex grounds you and brings you out of the bigger picture. It makes life more livable and less giant and incomprehensible. It makes sense why people settle down and have babies really. It makes sense to push an idea of love and stability to stop people from feeling so rebellious and righteous and born to save the world. I suppose that was why Thoreau and the Unabomber and all those guys took oaths of abstinence. Plus it was a handy way to illegitimise women.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1122|112]]. For the first uses of these terms, see Carl Boggs, “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control,” ''Radical America'' 11 (1977): 99–122; Wini Breines, “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law,’” ''Social Problems'' 27, no. 4 (1980): 419–29. For a broad overview of this topic, see Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin, ''Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).</div>
+Because when it suited men historically, sexuality was a thing that women had and they were above. In Greek times and in the story of the Fall, we were not allowed a say in decision-making because we were completely and utterly ruled by our sexy, lusty desires. Men could do without sex and did not see the point in dirtying themselves in such a way, and could therefore keep rational heads on their unsexy bodies.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1132|113]]. Some anarchists rejected this idea. Nettlau argued that anarchist organizations built in the present should not be viewed as the embryo of the future society because we should not “permit the present to mortgage or lay its hands upon the future” and we “have no real knowledge of the nature of ''the society of the future, which, like life itself, will have to remain ‘without adjectives.’''” See Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''196, 208, 282.</div>
+What must have happened in recent times is that the male genome mutated like a grasshopper driven into frenzy and meta-morphosing into a locust for lack of food. And now the clitoris is just a relic of that bygone time when women needed pleasure from sex to encourage procreation. Like the appendix is a relic of a time when people ate grass. No one eats grass any more.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1142|114]]. Bernard H. Moss, ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement: The Socialism of Skilled Workers ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 32–41,'' ''69.</div>
+Sam feels heavy to lie with. He feels anchored. He feels like he bends space–time and the groove of it pulls at me. He smells like dirt, in a good way, like his skin is smoothed over with clay. We were tentative and very precious, a bit clumsy also, like children holding tiny mice. He has a freckle on his right eyelid. It is in the crease of his eyelid so that you can only see it when he is sleeping. When I pointed it out to him he said, ‘Yeah, I know, my ex used to like that one,’ and this made me inconceivably sad for just a millisecond.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1152|115]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869.</div>
+We started on the big talks that often come post-sex. The ones you use to excavate the depths of others. I said I did not know why everyone did not take themselves off to new places, that it didn’t even cost much if you did it right.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1162|116]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future.” For an overview of his life and ideas, see William Whitham, “César De Paepe and the Ideas of the First International,” ''Modern Intellectual History ''16, no. 3 (2019):'' ''897–925.</div>
+‘If everyone did it then the world would grind to a halt.’
-[[#1172|117]]. Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 109; Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''9.
+‘Well, would that be so bad a thing?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1182|118]]. For the context of the “Sonvilier Circular,” see Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'', 167–75; Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 85–120.</div>
+‘If everyone did it how would any culture preserve itself?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1192|119]]. The Jura Federation, “The Sonvilier Circular,” in ''Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1, 97–98. For Marx and Engels’s response, in which they reject this position, see Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 64–70.</div>
+I thought of Naaja then, walking herself into the big tundra all alone, waif-small on the grey iced turf, a burden on her tiny shoulders, my own so easily thrown off and abandoned.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1202|120]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''180–81. See also Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.</div>
+===== And why does she not throw hers down? =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1212|121]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Fugitive Writings'', ed. George Woodcock (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993),'' ''41.</div>
+‘What about places you care about? Who would look after places? Most Indians were nomadic once, but now they sit around in poverty fighting oil and mineral prospectors off land they see as sacred.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1222|122]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 20.</div>
+That one stumped me. A pang of guilt for the small cold ring of protesters gathered around the would-be drill site back home.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1232|123]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 397.</div>
+‘I just think if there’s something you don’t like about something you shouldn’t go off in search of something better just for yourself. You should fix it, take what you have and make it better for everyone. Things don’t change just by wanting them too,’ he said.
-[[#1242|124]]. Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''91.
+===== But you don’t understand that is what I am doing. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1252|125]]. Isaac Puente, Libertarian Communism, (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 10.</div>
+We lay awake talking and he started to tell me more and more, peeling away each layer of his skin, and in a way I wish he had not because now I have seen his innards I am going to end up really liking him. And that really will not do when I have to leave soon. He told me the story of the totem pole.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1261|126]]. Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 153; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''358–60; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'','' ''129–30; Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 152–55. For examples of anarchist cooperatives and intentional communities, see Andrew Cornell, ''Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the Twentieth Century ''(Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016),'' ''96–100, 129–33; John Quail, ''The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists'' (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978),'' ''224–31.</div>
+‘On the bottom there is an orca, our family crest. It brings luck and will come to the help of the family when any of them are vulnerable. From my nana’s house you can see an ocean cove and sometimes when they are near, in the shallows herding fish to eat, you can see the orcas arching out of the water, you can go out in a boat to meet them. Underneath it is the salmon carving, the symbol of the reservation of Salmon Water because all of the family crests are water animals in Salmon Water.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1271|127]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 50–51, 261–64; Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013),'' ''90–91; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism'' (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 120–29;'' ''Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 102–20; Yeoman, ''Print Culture'', 151–62.</div>
+‘We also have a guardian animal. This is the carving above that looks a bit like a dog but more like a bird with ears, I think. The wolf is a really charged animal and helps with sickness. Not so much physical sickness, that’s more the orca, this one stands for the sickness of our family’s heart, or sadness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1281|128]]. Ardouin et al., “Liberty Through Education: The Libertarian School,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/liberty-through-education-1898.</div>
+‘And the otter is above the wolf. The otter is thought of as being mischievous and bright, happy and curious. The otter is my ma as a child because she was always sunny and laughing and hiding herself away so that my nana would get scared but my grandpa never did because he knew she would always let herself be found in the end. The otter is from the times they had before she got taken away.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1291|129]]. Francisco Ferrer, ''Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader'','' ''ed. Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth'' ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019), 86. See also, 50–51.</div>
+‘And then the thunderbird stands above them. The thunderbird is a commemoration of bad things that are acknowledged but best not talked about. It brings thunder by beating its wings and lightning when it blinks its eyes, and it is a killer of the orca. We show reverence towards it. It broke apart our family.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1301|130]]. Ferrer,'' Anarchist Education'', 85–93. Anarchists disagreed on whether or not schools run by anarchists should teach anarchist ideas. See ibid., 188–206; Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'','' ''185–201.</div>
+‘My aunt and uncle carved and painted it from a cedar my grandpa had picked out years before he died, because he knew she would let herself be found again one day even though they hadn’t seen her since she was three years old. The first time they met again was when she was twenty-six, they held a potlatch feast and gave her the totem, and my ma cried herself to sleep for days in secret.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1311|131]]. Avrich, ''Modern School'','' ''29–31.</div>
+‘She couldn’t move back to the reservation and neither could dad to his. They didn’t have the identity cards to prove their indigenous heritage, because when they were both children they were taken from their parents by Indian agents and put into adoption with white families. Dad only had his two sisters left when they repatriated. Before he got taken he was being brought up by his grandparents because his dad left and his ma died, and they are dead now too.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1321|132]]. Cornell, ''Unruly Equality'','' ''159–60, 163, 208–9.</div>
+He stopped talking but in a deliberate kind of way, like he was done now and that was all there was to say of the matter. I suppose he has rationalised it so well as to be able to talk it through, seeing as that is what his parents do, he says, with their speaking jobs. For the first time there was not a laughing cadence through every sentence he spoke.
-[[#1331|133]]. Wilson,'' Anarchist Essays'', 43.
+This made me sad for two reasons; because it was sad in itself, and because by telling me he was signifying that he expected never to see me again after my short stay and it was therefore entirely reasonable to open up so soon about something so personal.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1341|134]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''140. See also Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 188.</div>
+He said he did not know how to feel about his white grandparents. That his mum’s adoptive parents were paid to take her in and his dad’s saw themselves as martyrs for saving him from the reservation where his real parents killed themselves with alcohol.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1351|135]]. Quoted in Jennifer Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City'','' 1880–1945 ''(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 165.</div>
+He also at some point said something really specific that I have not ever thought about before. He says they are being disappeared, but no other culture gets worn on so many T-shirts. He was being light-hearted, so for something to say I thought it would be okay to bring up Rochelle and all the things she had said about her white boyfriend’s nicknames for her. I laughed and said it was kind of funny, and surely that is all you could find it now looking over it because it was so stupid.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1361|136]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''46–52, 171–2; Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''155–58, 195–99; J. Mintz, ''Casas Viejas'', 91–99; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'','' ''44–46; Guglielmo,'' Living the Revolution'','' ''154, 156,'' ''171–72; Ginger Frost, “Love is Always Free: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England,” ''Anarchist Studies'' 17, no. 1 (2009): 73–94.</div>
+‘How did you manage to get into a reservation with a camera anyway?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1371|137]]. Quoted in Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 115.</div>
+I had to tell him the whole story because I suppose that was the only credible way I was getting in there uninvited. He listened with a frown on his face. When I had finished he made me want to cry again by telling me a girl on his course at university had been researching murdered indigenous women who disappeared off the highways in Canada for her dissertation, and was murdered by two white men before she finished it. I just mumbled that it could have been a lot worse, then.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1381|138]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''77, 87–88, 103, 115–20, 123.</div>
+He looked redder with the light from the window on him and my own arms looked yellow. I listened to the sound of my voice as if on playback and wondered how I had ever got there, in that unfamiliar room, feeling suddenly blank and inert.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1391|139]]. Guglielmo, ''Living the Revolution'', 156, 159–60, 162–63.</div>
+==== MONOCULTURES OF THE SPIRIT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1401|140]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''21, 115, 120–37.</div>
+Agitations. Larus desperately in contact. Reiterated points: you’ve been stayed put a while, you’re planning on leaving soon, right, you need to keep well ahead of winter, don’t forget what you set out to do.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1411|141]]. Quoted in Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'','' ''148.</div>
+‘I haven’t. I’m still working on it here.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1421|142]]. Ackelsberg, ''Free Women'', 151–54.</div>
+‘Do you not think you might be making excuses to stay put?’
-[[#1431|143]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+‘No, I think—’
-[[#1441|144]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+‘Just have a think about it. I’m surprised at you is all. Didn’t think you of all people would get distracted by a boy.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1451|145]]. For example Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 203.</div>
+Sam could tell I was irritated afterwards. He asked what Larus had said to make me so sour. I did not tell him in case he thought I had taken it to heart. He kept asking questions about Larus, like how much we talk, how old he was, things that irritated me more with their connotations.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1461|146]]. Wilson, ''Anarchist Essays'', 58. See also, 53, 84; Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 105; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 298.</div>
+‘I just wonder why a man old enough to be your dad, who begot five children and who probably thinks we we’re all “children of Earth” and that age sets no boundaries for kindred spirits, is interested in your “feminist project”.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1471|147]]. Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13–15, 23–24.</div>
+‘I really don’t think that it’s any of your business.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1481|148]]. Émile Pouget, ''Direct Action ''(London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 1.</div>
+I wanted to make it sting like I did not care what he thought. For a second he looked like a cat I had splashed with water for no reason other than to see it squirm. I should not have. It was my fault for making Larus sound worse than he is when I described him just for comedic effect, really.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1491|149]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 3.</div>
+Ah, the burden of being a feeling woman! But I am not about to let myself fulfil the very expectations I set out to subvert. I am fully committed to the project and ready to get on with it because winter is catching me up.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1501|150]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 76–77. A few years later in her 1913 pamphlet ''Syndicalism: Its Theory and Practice'', Goldman used the term “direct action” in its original narrow syndicalist sense. See ibid., 94.</div>
+I told Sam I needed to leave because his friend Ollie had mentioned driving to Dawson Creek via Prince George to make some deliveries in his pick-up, and it would be stupid to miss the lift. He said it was an indirect route to Dawson and that I could hitch later on or he would drive me. When I said I hadn’t been doing much on the documentary and I had to get on with things, he said, ‘Oh, of course, for art’s sake’ sarcastically.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1511|151]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''202.</div>
+That was just one of his momentary lapses, he was soon right back to his jovial self, only being at the same time distant with me. In the morning I could not even tell if we was mad or not.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1521|152]]. Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''48.</div>
+‘Well, I’m going, then.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1531|153]]. de Cleyre, ''Reader'', 52–55.</div>
+‘Have a nice trip, thanks for stopping by.’
-[[#1541|154]]. John Merriman, ''The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror ''(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 55.
+‘It’s been really nice to meet you.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1551|155]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 127–32; Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''246–49, 257–8, 275–77.</div>
+‘Yeah, same with you.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1561|156]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907) ''(Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 164.</div>
+‘Aren’t you going to at least pretend to be sad that I’m going?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#157|157]]. Cornell, ''Unruly Equality'', 71–74.</div>
+‘What, try to stop you? That wouldn’t be very feminist of me.’ It was a deliberate game of trying to be the most unaffected. So I shrugged and shouted bye to Berry and turned down the path towards Ollie waiting in his pick-up.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#158|158]]. Abel Paz, ''Durruti in the Spanish Revolution'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 49–54.</div>
+==== TOP TIPS ON HOW TO BE A TRAVEL WRITER ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#159|159]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 77–78; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 98–99, 106–11.</div>
+The highway was empty, and our headlights pooled out ahead. For miles we would see other vehicles in the opposite lane only, and only sporadically. A hump in the road appeared, so that we could not see the behind of it as we rose and trees spilled on either side to its edge. Mounting the rise, we saw a large dark shape up ahead, maybe twenty metres. Ollie slowed the van and as our light poured up and over it we saw it was a small black bear. It stopped in the opposite lane, one paw raised limply, and looked at us. Ollie stopped the van to let it pass.
-[[#160|160]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''92.
+The bear stayed put, lowering its head like a dog in submission. It was small and misplaced against the wide cut of the road. It tapped the ground with its paw, hesitant, testing the cool density of the concrete, warily reading the dead-eyed, no-legged creature that stood still before it. Then it bunched itself up and bounded in front of the van, its four legs gambolling, and we watched as its rump shimmied off into the trees.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#161|161]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 5. See also Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'', 170–71.</div>
+From outside Edmonton we had rejoined the Yellowhead Highway, a branch of the Trans-Canada Highway system which veers north-west, breaking off from the due westerly route and connecting Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta with British Columbia. The Yellowhead is named for Tête Jaune, aka Pierre Bostonais, an Iroquois-Metis fur trader and explorer who in turn got his name from his blond hair, homage to his part-white origin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#162|162]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 189.</div>
+In 1819 Tête Jaune led a brigade of the Hudson Bay Company through a pass in the Rocky Mountains, a piper with a ditty of bounties and a whole band of rats to follow. The pass now bears his name and from this the highway takes its.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#163|163]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 7.</div>
+I was back on the road and it felt good to see the horizon reeling in, all the temporary things staying just where I left them. The feeling that had kept me still the past few weeks was less of a captivation and more like a rabbit trap, wire noose on my leg. It was not aligned with my purpose.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#164|164]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 20.</div>
+===== And what is that exactly? =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#165|165]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 32.</div>
+From Edmonton the highway slides though the Rockies of Jasper National Park fast and sure like a river. The weather was sullen, and low clouds sulked around the grey and shadowed mountains, brooding thunder. Pine smells crept osmotically through the damp air and the open windows. Breaks in the cloud cover would stream down sun in spotlights, directing me further and further on the unfolding road, enchanting, pied-pipering me like Tête Jaune with all his little rodents. Big eagles perched on telephone wires, silhouetted in the low light.
-[[#166|166]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''83.
+We arrived at our halfway point after Ollie had made a stop for his delivery.
-[[#167|167]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''90.
+‘This is Prince George, where we leave the Yellowhead Highway and strike out north to Dawson. Yellowhead continues right the way into the Pacific, then by ferry onto Graham Island.’
-[[#168|168]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''91.
+The Hudson Bay Company drew a straight line right across Canada, not even conceding to the ocean. A branding of ownership. The other side of Prince George is nicknamed the Highway of Tears for all the unsolved murders. Sam said between Prince George and Prince Rupert at the coast, from the sixties until the last one a few months ago, something like forty have happened. Women picked up off the side of the road. Almost exclusively indigenous women.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#169|169]]. This phrase continued to be used by Kropotkin over several decades. See Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''140, 200, 348, 374; Peter Kropotkin, ''The Great French Revolution'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 18–19; Kropotkin,'' Modern Science'','' ''190, 194.</div>
+Ollie said, ‘Bet ya glad you don’t have to hitch that highway.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#170|170]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 70–73.</div>
+Could I ever have hitched that highway? I mean, could it have been the same highway for me as for them?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#171|171]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 186.</div>
+The next day we left the Yellowhead exactly where the designated murder zone started. Yellowhead spilled out, continuing Tête Jaune’s trail through the Rockies, stalking a century and a half behind him. Him stone cold dead and unaware of his namesake (and yes, well, at least he will be remembered for ever) or of the legacy of highways for indigenous women who have no namesake, only anonymous tears.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#172|172]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 186.</div>
+And along such a highway by 1 p.m. we had reached Dawson Creek. Ollie left me at Mile 0 of the Alaskan Highway, where Chris McCandless took a picture with the big road sign, extending 1,523 miles, all the way to Fairbanks, Alaska. Tomorrow just past Fort Nelson I will enter the Yukon, the crazy Wild North and the place that cast a spell on so many Mountain Men, where the ghosts of old miners made Kerouac wonder. The Klondike, where Jack London the wolf-man found himself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#173|173]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 187.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0138-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#174|174]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 187–90</div>
+==== GOLD FEVER IN THE YUKON ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#175|175]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 189.</div>
+From Fort Nelson I got completely stuck. Two full days to get a ride. I was not the only one trying to hitch and I had stayed down-road from the others in a long, sparse queue. There was a woman in first place who looked to be in her late twenties when I passed her in the morning after staying overnight in a hostel near the road. I wanted to interview her but she was not very approachable. She had been waiting for a lift for three whole days. Then I passed a guy who was maybe in his mid-thirties, scruffy with long, lank hair. He said he had been waiting two days but he felt good about today and he wished me luck. I watched him stand and wave and jab out his thumb, jumping up and down, and wondered how he thought he would ever get a lift acting like a crazy person.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#176|176]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 189–90.</div>
+The girl got a lift on my first day. I only counted fifty-four cars that day. There was one woman who gave me a look that was not just judgemental, it had, considering her strangeness to me, a terrible anger to it like I had not seen before. I gave her the finger and the woman gave an even angrier honk.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#177|177]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 192–96.</div>
+I felt bored and restless but of course there would be times when I did not get picked up right away. I imagine the guy has had a much less fluid journey from wherever he came from. The next day, monotonous, feeling quite hopeless, I set myself down again at a distance from the guy, who looked like he might have stayed out all night. Then a really bad thing happened. A lorry pulled in in front of where I was sat on my bag. The window rolled down and the guy inside said, ‘Hey, I can take you to Whitehorse.’ I could see down the road that the thirty-something guy was stood with his arms out above his head imploringly.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#178|178]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 73–74.</div>
+‘Don’t take this the wrong way but I usually only pick up girls. You can’t always trust the guys. Especially if they look like bums.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#179|179]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 74.</div>
+I tried to compute the ethics quickly as I collected my things from the ground as slowly as I could.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#180|180]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 74.</div>
+===== It would be completely hypocritical to take advantage. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#181|181]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 75.</div>
+Well, if I didn’t take the lift he certainly was not going to pick up the guy. I raised my hand to the guy in what I hoped was an apologetic salute, but I do not think he took it that way because he threw his rucksack to the floor and started kicking it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#182|182]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 75.</div>
+‘Don’t worry too much about him, he’s just another bum trying to get to Alaska. They’re usually younger and sometimes they look sweet so someone picks them up. I reckon he’ll wait maybe a week. Maybe his luck will come in and it will rain, then some old dude might take pity on him.’
-== {{anchor|Chapter5AnarchismandStateS}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook8}} {{anchor|Chapter5AnarchismandStateS1}} Chapter 5: Anarchism and State Socialism ==
+The driver’s name was Ron. Ron said sometimes there are ten hitchhikers at any one time trying to get to Fairbanks. He asked me where I was heading and I told him, Fairbanks. This made him laugh. I told him about the documentary.
-Anarchism as a social movement emerged in parallel with, and opposition to, various forms of state socialism. This included not only Marxism but also those influenced by such figures as Louis Auguste Blanqui, Ferdinand Lassalle, César De Paepe, Paul Brousse, and Jean Allemane. During the late nineteenth century, a number of socialist political parties adopted Marxist programs or at least programs influenced by Marxism, such as the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria in 1888 and the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1891. These social democratic parties contained numerous factions, including people who were not Marxists, and coexisted with political parties committed to other kinds of state socialism, such as the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France, who were known as Possibilists. From 1889 onward, the various state socialist parties of the time were linked together through a loosely organized coalition known as the Second International. This coalition disintegrated from 1914 onward, when the majority of socialist parties in Europe supported their respective nation-states in World War I and voted for war credits. This was followed by the Russian revolution of 1917, during which the Marxist Bolshevik party seized state power and established a one-party dictatorship. These two events led to a split in state socialism and the formation of various national Communist parties, which affiliated with the centralized, Bolshevik-led Third International (Comintern) that had been founded in March 1919. These Communist parties, in contrast to a significant chunk of social democracy, were explicit Marxist parties and became the main rivals of anarchism within international socialism.[[#1GaryPSteensonAfterMarx|1]]
+He said, ‘I like that. And why not ladies, hey? I got a little clue for you, though. You might not get a great reception when you tell the folk you meet in Alaska what you’re doing. Alaskans ''hate'' these guys.’
-The anarchist critique of state socialist strategies was largely articulated in response to the programs, newspapers, congress resolutions, and actions of the various socialist, and later communist, political parties that confronted them. Anarchist authors, in other words, generally focused their energy on refuting the theory and practice of really existing social movements, rather than producing an exhaustive examination of Marx and Engels’s various writings on the topic (much of which was not publicly available or easy to obtain at the time). This is not to say that anarchists never argued against Marx and Engels. Anarchist critiques of state socialism frequently mentioned Marx and Engels by name or responded to an idea that Marx and Engels had advocated in their best-known works, such as the ''Manifesto of the Communist Party'' or ''Anti-Dühring''.[[#2Forillustrativeexamplesse|2]]'' ''Yet, even when critiquing the strategy of Marx and Engels, anarchists tended to interpret their ideas through the lens provided to them by socialist political parties at the time, rather than understanding Marx and Engels on their own terms.[[#3ForanoverviewofMarxandE|3]]
+‘Why do they hate them?’
-According to anarchists in this period, state socialists generally argued that, in order to achieve a stateless, classless society (essentially an anarchist society), the working classes must first conquer state power and use it to overthrow the capitalist class, reconstruct the economy along socialist lines, and defend the revolution from counterattack. The conquest of state power would be achieved by forming political parties that either won state power through parliamentary elections or seized state power via force. The government of the bourgeoisie would be transformed into, or replaced with, a democratic workers’ republic that, at least in theory, was based on the genuine self-rule of the working classes. The reconstruction of the economy would take the form of private property being abolished in favor of state ownership of the means of production and land. Production, distribution, and exchange would then be organized through the state. Once the revolution had been successful and a classless society achieved, the state would wither away. Anarchists and state socialists agreed on the ends of a stateless, classless society but proposed different means to achieve it.[[#4PeterKropotkinWordsofaR|4]]
+He said they are hated because they flock from all over North America and some from Europe too. He said they hear the call of the wild and they come running like apostles to it. Usually they get themselves in trouble somewhere and some rescue team has to bail them out.
-Anarchists rejected the strategy of attempting to abolish capitalism via the conquest of state power. This rejection did not stem from abstract arguments about morality, or ignore the harsh facts of real politics. They instead did so for fundamentally strategic reasons that were grounded in the theory of practice. Anarchists argued that, given the unity of means and ends (which was explained in the previous chapter), the conquest of state power was a path that would never lead to a stateless, classless society. This argument applied to both engaging in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state and attempting to overthrow the bourgeois state and transform it into, or replace it with, a workers’ state. In making this argument, anarchists were not, as is commonly claimed by Marxists, rejecting or ignoring political struggle. Given my focus on explaining what anarchists themselves thought, I shall not examine the complex question of whether or not the anarchist critique of state socialism actually applied to their various opponents, such as Marx and Engels.
+Is that not everyone’s problem the whole world over? Shall I call it ''saturation''? Like Larus’s yoga-mat tourists. We live in an overpopulated world now, much to the annoyance of Ted Kaczynski. There is almost not enough space left for the Mountain Men. Back when there were just a couple of hapless truth seekers then maybe they were viewed with a kind of affection. Maybe McCandless of hapless potato fame was viewed with a kind of affection, before his followers followed him.
-'''Parliamentarism'''
+When we crossed into the Yukon after Fort Nelson Ron pointed out the little white sign and said ‘Welcome to Yukon!’ just as I read it. I pointed the camera at everything I was seeing, not much, just a long, long road lined with tall thin trees. I think he found it endearing or something. He started to talk pointedly, like he was giving me something useful for the camera, so I directed it at him. He spoke like an overly trained actor.
-During the late nineteenth century, various socialist parties were formed in Europe and the United States. These parties generally argued that the abolition of capitalism and establishment of socialism could be achieved, or at least built toward, through the strategy of winning local and national elections and participating in bourgeois parliaments as representatives of the working class. Through this political struggle, socialist parties would simultaneously build up their size and organizational strength, win various reforms via the passing of new legislation, and spread socialist ideas to a large audience. In so doing, they would transform parliament from a mere tool of bourgeois rule into a lever of working-class emancipation. This parliamentary struggle would occur alongside, and as a complement to, various forms of extraparliamentary activity, including demonstrations, the organization of trade unions and strikes, the construction of cooperatives, the spreading of ideas via the socialist press, and the establishment of a working-class counterculture within singing societies, bicycle clubs, reading groups, and the like. Socialist parties generally, but not always, viewed the parliamentary struggle as primary and thought that extraparliamentary activity played a secondary and supportive role. Over time, these various forms of struggle would lead to the development of a mass socialist party that was capable of, and driven to, win state power in response to the economic crises of capitalism.[[#5Foranoverviewofthesemove|5]]
+‘You know the ''real'' pull of the north has always been minerals. You know the Klondike Stampede, right? In the 1800s? Well, there’s a brand-new one going on right now.’
-State socialists disagreed with one another about how to achieve this. Moderate state socialists proposed that if a socialist party won a majority in parliament then they would be able to gradually establish socialism through the passing of new legislation and the achievement of various reforms. Radical state socialists rejected this position and argued that the conquest of state power could not be won by legal and peaceful means. State power could only be forcibly seized by such means as an armed insurrection, coup, or general strike. The majority of radical state socialists did not, however, reject parliamentarism and thought that it could still be used as an effective means to win immediate improvements within capitalism, spread socialist ideas to a large audience, and build up the size and organizational strength of the socialist party.[[#6EdwardBernsteinEvolutionar|6]]
+He nodded confidingly.
-Anarchists had four main objections to parliamentarism. First, even if socialist parties managed to win majorities in parliament, the economic ruling classes would never allow their power and property to be voted away and abolished via peaceful and legal means. Capitalists and landowners would, if necessary, overthrow any socialist party that attempted to do so. The abolition of capitalism in favor of socialism cannot be achieved via the ballot. It can only be achieved by working-class social movements breaking the law and launching a social revolution to forcibly overthrow their oppressors. Anarchists were aware that radical state socialists agreed with them about this.[[#7BerkmanAnarchism9193Kr|7]]
+‘Not just gold, mind. Zinc and copper and uranium. It’s all different now, of course. Mostly the work’s done by big Chinese companies, with GPS and bulldozers. Ain’t as many beardy guys with pans. That’s what the north was built on. Guys came seeking their fortune and the hardy ones stuck around. But a bunch came and couldn’t hack it. Like these young guys now, they had this romantic idea of what it’ll be like. But it’ll kill ya. They went running home to the sunny south with scurvy and their toes missing.’
-Second, anarchists rejected the claim that parliamentarism was a necessary or sufficient condition for winning immediate improvements within capitalism. They argued that workers could achieve immediate improvements through direct action alone. This could be seen not only in the numerous strikes that had successfully won higher wages or reductions to the working day, but also in the fact that direct action had played an important role in the achievement of the right to vote itself, as with the 1893 general strike in Belgium. It was clear that a key factor in the achievement of new legislation was the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action. If this is the case, then reforms could be won by imposing pressure on liberal, republican, or conservative politicians. It did not specifically require the election of socialist politicians. Such immediate improvements would also most likely be won faster if time, energy, and money devoted to electoral campaigns was instead exclusively used on direct action and the self-organization of the working classes.[[#8KropotkinDirectStruggle3|8]]
+He paused for a bit to whistle and look out of the window. The trees to our left began to slope down and behind them a whole other sea of them rose up. Then we had a view of the mountains in the distance, the green trees blanketing right the way over them.
-In the absence of the working classes imposing external pressure on parliament via direct action, socialist politicians routinely found themselves unable to pass new laws in parliament. Bourgeois politicians from a variety of different parties would put aside their differences in order to vote against motions proposed by socialists.[[#9MalatestaPatientWork303|9]] Even if socialist politicians did manage to pass laws in parliament that protected or expanded workers’ rights, it did not follow from this that the law would be enforced. As de Cleyre wrote in 1912, “nearly all the laws which were originally framed with the intention of benefiting the workers, have either turned into weapons in their enemies’ hands, or become dead letters unless the workers through their organizations have directly enforced their observance. So that in the end, it is direct action that has to be relied on anyway.”[[#10VoltairinedeCleyreTheVo|10]]
+The first Klondike gold rush was in 1896. Adam Smith, the amoral moral philosopher, wrote ''The Wealth of Nations'' a century before that. Adam Smith saw the wilderness as if it were made of bricks of gold and timber, to be utilised to create wealth, and he saw the creation of wealth as a moral agenda and he reduced complexity to simple constituents as though the illusion of things could be stripped away to reveal their basic and authentic and truthful essences. But what he was doing was taking paper and cutting it to shape, saying ‘Look what shape I found when I trimmed away the excess, a chair!’, when what he really did was to cut the paper to the shape of a chair.
-A state socialist might reply that, in order to achieve maximum effectiveness, working-class social movements should engage in parliamentary politics and direct action simultaneously. In 1897, Malatesta answered this by pointing out that “the two methods of struggle do not go together and whoever embraces them both inevitably winds up sacrificing any other considerations to the electoral prospect.”[[#11MalatestaLongandPatient|11]] Ultimately, “the electoral and parliamentary contest amounts to schooling in parliamentarism and winds up making parliamentarists of all its practitioners.”[[#12MalatestaLongandPatient|12]]
+He broke the world into mechanical pieces and put the natural world outside the world of man so as to justify a particular form of economic and political organisation (capitalism) and philosophical position (individualism) as natural. He was trying to morally justify selfishness. A sperm whale is so called because stabbing one in the head with a harpoon makes it spurt forth oil in a way that reminded whale hunters of ejaculation. And if a sperm whale is just an oil ejaculator and not an emotionally complex being then it is okay to go about slaughtering them.
-The third anarchist objection to parliamentarism was that it is a form of practice that fails to develop in workers the radical traits necessary for a social revolution. Instead of taking direct action within prefigurative organizations, workers would engage in such activities as voting in elections, campaigning for politicians, and listening to them make various promises. Such forms of activity would produce workers who look to politicians to achieve their own emancipation and who respond to injustices by putting their hopes in the next election, rather than taking direct action themselves.[[#13MalatestaLongandPatient|13]] In 1912, De Cleyre claimed that the “main evil” of parliamentary politics was “that it destroys initiative, quenches the individual rebellious spirit, teaches people to rely on someone else to do for them what they should do for themselves, what they alone can do for themselves.”[[#14DeCleyreReader59|14]] Decades later, Rocker was convinced that this is what had occurred. He wrote in 1938 that “participation in parliamentary politics has affected the Socialist labor movement like an insidious poison. It destroyed . . . the impulse to self-help, by inoculating people with the ruinous delusion that salvation always comes from above.”[[#15RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|15]]
+‘It’s beautiful, ain’t it? Don’t it look quiet? The last great wilderness.’
-Anarchists thought that this would be especially harmful during a revolutionary situation. Parliamentarism not only leads to workers becoming accustomed to elevating party leaders into positions of power. It also makes them believe in the possibility of good government and the false notion that emancipation can be achieved by simply changing who is in power. In a revolution, workers would thus most likely establish a new government based on minority rule by a political ruling class. This government would then, for reasons that will be discussed later, turn on and repress working-class social movements. A new system of domination and exploitation would arise, rather than a stateless, classless society based on self-management and free association. Given this, a key reason why anarchists rejected participating in electoral politics was because, to quote Malatesta, “we consider any methods that lead the people to believe that progress consists in a change of governing individuals, and revolution in a change of government form, to be dangerous, and directly counter to our purposes.”[[#16MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|16]]
+He took it all in, sucked it all in through his nostrils. I am so close now and I can feel it. It feels like humming in your mouth, but masked by something loud like engine noise so no one else can really hear it but the vibrations take over your whole face and throat.
-Fourth, anarchists argued that state socialists were wrong to think that they could enter the existing capitalist state, transform it from within, and use it as a tool to build toward socialism. The capitalist state, which is a hierarchical institution that perpetuates the power of the economic and political ruling classes, would transform them. In 1869, before most socialist parties were formed, Bakunin predicted that working-class politicians would be “transplanted into a bourgeois environment, into a political atmosphere of wholly bourgeois political ideas, will cease to be actual workers and will become statesmen, they will become bourgeois, and perhaps more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.”[[#17MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|17]] Later anarchists thought that this prediction had come true. Reclus claimed in 1898 that “socialist leaders who, finding themselves caught up in the electoral machine, end up being gradually transformed into nothing more than bourgeois with liberal ideas. They have placed themselves in determinate conditions that in turn determine them.”[[#18EliseeReclusAnarchyGeog|18]] Kropotkin similarly wrote in 1913 that “as the socialists become a party of government and share power with the bourgeoisie, their socialism will necessarily fade: this is what has already happened.”[[#19KropotkinModernScience1|19]]
+‘But we got things like the Peel Watershed. Places like pristine wilderness. Mines’re leaking arsenic and crap into the water. Some folk think it’ll be a shame if the Peel gets contaminated. But Yukon is mining. It’s kind of its soul. It’s a place the little guy can make something of his lot. Cut down some trees, build himself a cabin, live a simple life. You know, still now in theory anyone can stake a claim to mine someplace out here. It’s a free country. Libertarian. And it won’t stop. Them people are crazed. They’re thinking, “I gotta go get it cus if I don’t then some other asshole will”.’
-Anarchists thought this would consistently occur to any socialist party that engaged in parliamentarism due to a set of interlocking processes. Most obviously, socialist politicians would be corrupted by the exercise of state power, the intrigues of parliament, and the financial offers of wealthy patrons. Reclus argued that the state is “a collection of individuals placed in a specific milieu and subjected to its influence. Those individuals are raised up above their fellow citizens in dignity, power, and preferential treatment, and are consequently compelled to think themselves superior to the common people. Yet in reality the multitude of temptations besetting them almost inevitably leads them to fall below the general level.”[[#20ReclusAnarchy122|20]] As a result of this, socialist politicians with “the best of intentions” may initially “fervently desire” the abolition of capitalism and the state “but new relationships and conditions change them little by little. Their morality changes along with their self-interest, and, thinking themselves eternally loyal to the cause and to their constituents, they inevitably become disloyal.”[[#21ReclusAnarchy122|21]]
+He chuckled to himself. Then a song came on the radio and he stopped talking to half-sing to it. He sang it quietly, and only the words he knew, which were not many, and the rest he kind of mumbled. He whistled the bridge to the chorus.
-Socialist parties that attain power within parliament would, in order to exercise that power, have to become effective managers of the bourgeois state and the national economy. Doing so requires, given the nature of capitalism and the state as social structures, the ongoing reproduction of the domination and exploitation of the working classes. As a result, state socialists in power would inevitably develop interests opposed to the wider working classes and side with capital against labor in order to maintain their own position of rulership and influence. This would especially occur in response to workers engaging in direct action and thereby disrupting the smooth functioning of the economy. In Max Baginski’s words: “The politics of parliaments are tailored to serve the needs of the bourgeois, the capitalist world. They administer this world and provide the violent means necessary to guarantee its continued existence: soldiers, police, and courts of law. Whosoever, as a representative of the workers, enters parliament or the government is faced with two choices; either he is superfluous or else he is an active accomplice in the administration and safeguarding of a political order founded on the exploitation of labor.”[[#22MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|22]]
+While he whistled I looked out of the window. Beautiful, yes, but in a different kind of way, with a creeping melancholy to it. My first felt elation had sapped away and left something hollowed out. I thought about the ghosts of miners that Jack Kerouac wondered about. What would they have said to Kerouac if they could have talked? Would they have told him that the emissions his exhaust was pumping, driving all over America and not giving much of a damn about anything but himself, were poisoning the air like the coal did their black lungs? That their mines had dug up uranium and mercury and cadmium, making bonds in his nostrils each breath he took? ''If we’d have known then what we know now'', maybe they would have said.
-The leadership of socialist parties would, in addition to this, come to view the interests of their nation-state and the interests of the party as increasingly intertwined because the party exercises power within a specific nation and owes its power to the votes of a national electorate. Thus, socialist parties are, to quote Rocker, “compelled by the iron logic of conditions to sacrifice their Socialist convictions bit by bit to the national policies of the state.”[[#23RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|23]] This would result in the labor movement being “gradually incorporated in the equipment of the national state” until it had become a social force that maintained the stability and “equilibrium” of capitalism.[[#24RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|24]]
+And what would I have to say to the ghost of Jack Kerouac? It was all very well and good for you, Jack Kerouac, but things were different then. The not giving a damn thing is harder to get behind now. Not just because I am a woman, but because the yoke is not so easy to throw down when you know the weight just gets transferred to the many other beasts of burden.
-Socialist parties would be transformed not only by the corrupting effects of wielding state power but also by the compromises that parliamentary politics forced them to make. During this period, socialist parties typically had a maximum program and a minimum program. The maximum program were its long-term goals, such as universal human emancipation and the abolition of private property. The minimum program consisted of immediate improvements to be won within capitalism through legislation. These typically included such demands as universal suffrage, banning child labor, the eight-hour day, compulsory secular state education, free health care, and freedom of speech, the press, and assembly.[[#25Fortheprogramsofsocialis|25]] Anarchists thought that socialist parties would begin as revolutionary organizations that focused on the attainment of the minimum program but, gradually over time, become reformist organizations that had abandoned the maximum program and mistakenly viewed the minimum program as the essence of socialism.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0142-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-This would consistently occur because, in order to win elections at both a local and national level, socialist parties must secure as many votes as possible by appealing to as many people as possible, including nonsocialists who would otherwise vote for republican, liberal, or conservative political parties. This would, especially in countries without universal suffrage, include people with class interests that were opposed to those of the working classes, such as small merchants and shopkeepers. Socialist parties, in addition to this, have to ensure that they maintain a legal existence and do not engage in activity that could preclude them from standing in elections or sitting in parliament. The need to appeal to as many voters as possible, alongside the need to operate within the confines of the law, would force socialist parties to: (a) reduce their political program to very minor reforms to capitalist society; and (b) oppose workers within the party, or affiliated trade unions, engaging in militant direct action that might scare voters away.[[#26BerkmanAnarchism92939|26]] This process only accelerates over time as the socialist party grows in size and attracts, to quote Rocker, “bourgeois minds and career-hungry politicians into the Socialist camp.”[[#27RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|27]]
+==== ARE MUTUALISMS A FORM OF LOVE? ====
-In order to achieve these minor social reforms, socialist parties, given the nature of the parliamentary system, would be compelled to form alliances with bourgeois political parties in order to form coalition governments or successfully pass laws in parliament.[[#28MichaelBakuninStatismand|28]] For Bakunin, one of the most notable examples of the dangers of forming alliances with bourgeois political parties occurred when the Geneva section of the First International supported the 1872 electoral campaign of the lawyer Jean-Antoine Amberny, a member of both the First International and the bourgeois Radical Party. During his campaign, he publicly promised fellow members of the bourgeoisie that the First International in Geneva would not engage in strikes that year and, in so doing, acted against the interests of local construction workers, who were at the time, considering taking strike action in response to reduced wages. The leadership of the Geneva section chose to intervene on the side of Amberny and thereby sacrifice the direct struggle of workers themselves in order to protect the electability of a bourgeois candidate. This included unsuccessfully attempting to persuade construction workers to issue a declaration that they were not planning to go on strike.[[#29ReneBerthierSocialDemocr|29]] In response to these events, Bakunin concluded that “whenever workers’ associations ally themselves with the politics of the bourgeoisie, they can only become, willingly or unwillingly, their instrument.”[[#30BakuninSelectedTexts181|30]]
+My first lift took me as far as Haines Junction, where I had to wait only another couple of hours for a lift all the way to Beaver Creek. The roadside trees cloaked pools of water that held their own strange colours. Behind them the mountains grew again, some in the far parts ephemeral and almost-there, the snow on top like cut ice against the sharp sky today but probably gone tomorrow.
-Anarchists predicted that the combined effect of these various processes, which are inherent in parliamentarianism as a social structure, would result in socialist parties abandoning their revolutionary ideas and becoming socialist in name only. State socialists at the time proclaimed that the parliamentary struggle was merely a means to the end of constructing the mass revolutionary socialist movements that would abolish class society. Anarchists replied that, given the forms of practice that constituted parliamentarism, what was once a means to an end would become an end in and of itself. Socialist parties would become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state.[[#31GalleaniEndofAnarchism|31]]
+Then the road ran straight towards a big mountain, washed out by the sun, the huge long lake at its base luminously blue, bluer than the sky blue. Kluane Lake grew wider and wider as we got closer until it was as wide as an ocean and we were right on top of it. The water almost touched the road but just kept away, lapping against the gold sand for miles and miles. The road then curved over the sand towards the mountain, and for a moment there was so much of the sand that you could squint so as not to see the vague plant-life in it and pretend it was a desert and the rest was mirage.
-A state socialist might reply that although anarchists are correct about the dangers of parliamentarism, socialist parties could participate in elections and parliament solely as a means to spread their ideas and critique the ruling classes. Anarchists thought such a strategy was mistaken because it ignored the manner in which participation in elections and parliament transforms people and organizations independently of their intentions. In 1928, Berkman noted that state socialists had initially claimed that they only meant to engage in parliamentarism “for the purpose of propaganda,” but this “proved the undoing of Socialism” because they had failed to realize that “the means you use to attain your object soon themselves become your object.”[[#32BerkmanAnarchism92|32]] He explained,
+Then the road ran brassy under the foot of the mountain and around the lake edge as if to brag about what it had tamed, as though this great feat of engineering should be lauded for its arrogance. But the mountains and the lakes do not care because they can’t. And under the road the rivers flow on and on back to the sky.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Little by little they changed their attitude. Instead of electioneering being merely an educational method, it gradually became their only aim to secure political office, to get elected to legislative bodies and other government positions. The change naturally led the Socialists to tone down their revolutionary ardor; it compelled them to soften their criticism of capitalism and government in order to avoid persecution and secure more votes. Today the main stress of Socialist propaganda is not laid any more on the educational value of politics but on the actual election of Socialists to office.[[#33BerkmanAnarchism9293|33]]</div>
+Online, a little yellow envelope flashed itself at me, from Sam. I did not open it. It is best to leave it for now. Soon I cross into Alaska. There is nothing to do but feel glad that things are back the way they were always supposed to be. And this evening the mountains look rich and blue and fully dimensional.
-Anarchists thought that their critique of parliamentarism was confirmed by the history of state socialism. To focus on France, the socialist Alexandre Millerand joined the bourgeois cabinet of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau in 1899 and became Minister of Commerce and Industry. His colleagues included the Minister of War, Gaston de Galliffet, who had ordered the murder of a large number of workers during the suppression of the Paris Commune. Once in power, Millerand attempted to establish compulsory arbitration in industrial disputes and thereby harm the ability of trade unions to engage in direct action. Pouget responded to this by labeling Millerand a “prisoner of Capital” who “could not break the mold; he is only a cog in the machine of oppression and whether he wishes it or not he must, as minister, participate in the job of crushing the proletariat.”[[#34QuotedinJeremyJenningsS|34]] Several years later, in 1906, socialist René Viviani became Minister of Labor and, under his watch, nineteen workers were killed and an estimated seven hundred were injured due to state repression during strike actions. This state repression included forty thousand soldiers being sent to police a miner’s strike in 1906, launched in response to a mining accident that took the lives of 1,100 miners. In 1910, Aristide Briand, who had once been a socialist and an advocate of the general strike, joined Viviani in government as Minister of the Interior. He proceeded to defeat a French railway strike by arresting the strike committee, declaring a military emergency, and conscripting the railway workers into the army. In so doing, he subjected any worker who refused to work to martial law and the potential punishment of execution for disobeying orders.[[#35JenningsSyndicalisminFra|35]]
+==== ENGLAND, JUST LIKE AMERICA, BUT DIFFERENT ====
-In 1914, World War I broke out and the majority of socialist political parties in Europe responded by siding with their respective governments. A minority of state socialists, which grew in size as the war progressed, remained committed to working-class internationalism, opposed all sides in the war, and organized the antimilitarist Zimmerwald Conference in 1915. The majority of the anarchist movement, in comparison, refused to side with any state in the conflict and suffered a significant amount of state repression due to this.[[#36SFKissinWarandtheMa|36]] Anarchists did not think that socialist political parties abandoned antimilitarism simply due to the treachery or negative personality traits of politicians. Rather, they focused on the manner in which socialist parties had been transformed through the social structures they participated in and the forms of practice that constituted them. Berkman argued in 1928 that “the life we lead, the environment we live in, the thoughts we think, and the deeds we do—all subtly fashion our character and make us what we are. The Socialists’ long political activity and cooperation with bourgeois politics gradually turned their thoughts and mental habits from Socialist ways of thinking.”[[#37BerkmanAnarchism99|37]] This gradual process culminated in socialist parties abandoning their principles and becoming “the handmaiden of the militarists and jingo nationalists” who “sent the toilers to murder each other.”[[#38BerkmanAnarchism9998|38]]
+TO REMEMBER: A deer on the road running from our vehicle, confused and running with the road, not from it. We slow the vehicle to a crawl, honking, trying to throw it off. It half turns, its eyes bulging in fear and confusion at its entrapment. And then its epiphany; it breaks away to the forest.
-From these and other events, anarchists concluded that their predictions had come true. State socialists who entered parliament in order to work toward the conquest of political power and the abolition of classes had not conquered the state. The state had conquered them, and genuine socialist parties had, gradually over time, become fundamentally bourgeois and opposed to the self-emancipation of the working classes.
+From Beaver Creek the highway crosses the border and goes on a long way before it splits to Fairbanks or Anchorage. I took a lift across the border to get out where the road forks so that I could hitch with the traffic that was solely headed for Fairbanks. The geographical border had a ‘Welcome to Alaska’ sign and four flags erected. They were Canada, America, Alaska and I suppose the other must have been the Yukon’s flag. I almost forget that Alaska is a part of America; it seems to me a far nobler place.
-'''Workers’ State'''
+I caught a ride with a young couple who seemed to have had an argument about picking me up. The man at the border inspection station was wearing a blue uniform instead of the nostalgic red one. He said, ‘Welcome to the United States of America,’ just to be pedantic. Ahead the sign read Fairbanks 298.
-Anarchists did not limit themselves to critiquing parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state. They went further and rejected the strategy of overthrowing the bourgeois state and transforming it into, or replacing it with, a workers’ state. They viewed the conquest of state power as a means that would never achieve the ends of a stateless, classless society. To understand why, one must first understand the anarchist theory of the state.
+After a couple of hours the road splits at Tok. I walked a little way out of Tok, where the couple dropped me, up the highway until I got to a layby and set down my bag. Right down the road, where it shrunk to a dot at the centre of perspective, with the line of trees dragged into it on either side, real Alaskan snowcapped mountains stood still behind and waited blue and moody. The sky had dimmed grey and heavy with rain and suspense and I hoped out loud that it wouldn’t fall.
-Anarchists argued that, given their in-depth analysis of the state as a social structure both historically and when they were writing, the state is necessarily a centralized and hierarchical institution wielded by a political ruling class. This class possesses the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force. Kropotkin was convinced that this was “the essence of every State” and that, if an organization ceased to be structured in this manner, then “it ceases to be the State.”[[#39KropotkinModernScience3|39]] Since the state is a centralized and hierarchical institution that rules over an extended territory, it follows that the political power of the so-called workers’ state could not in reality be wielded by the working classes as a whole. State power would at best be exercised by a minority of elected representatives acting in the name of the working classes. Bakunin predicted “it is bound to be impossible for a few thousand, let alone tens or hundreds of thousands of men to wield that power effectively. It will have to be exercised by proxy, which means entrusting it to a group of men elected to represent and govern them.”[[#40MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|40]]
+It felt colder already and different, as if every place becomes itself by virtue of how it is collectively imagined. It felt like Alaska. I tried to explain this with the camera but could not figure how. There is so much important feeling to it that is frustratingly unquantifiable. Words come closer to it because they can dance around it, etch it, bring it out in relief like a lithograph. Vast, empty but full, potent and good, full of understanding and unfathomable fathoms, deep, enigmatic, but everything you want of it absolutely. It is harder with images.
-Anarchists thought that there was an inherent connection between the organizational form and function of any social structure. And the organizational form of the state did not develop by accident. The state is structured in a hierarchical and centralized manner because of the function that it performs and was created to perform: establishing and maintaining the domination and exploitation of the working classes by the ruling classes. This applied not only to monarchies and individual dictatorships but also to republics governed by parliaments of elected representatives. A social structure characterized by a specific organizational form cannot be used to perform just any possible function. Centralization and hierarchy enable and result in the rule of a minority over a majority. Therefore, the state cannot be transformed into an instrument of liberation simply by writing a new constitution or electing good people with the right ideas into positions of authority. The minority of governors who actually exercise state power would, even if they were genuine socialists elected by universal suffrage, become tyrants who dominate and exploit the majority of the population.[[#41RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|41]]
+The very next car gave me a lift. I swung my bag into the open back of the truck, next to some animal skins, and covered it with the tarp. We arrived in Fairbanks at around three. I rang my next host, Stan, to let him know I had arrived and went to grab a sandwich.
-This would occur due to a specific set of processes. Since the state is a social structure like any other, it follows that it is constituted by social relation and forms of practice that produce and reproduce people with particular capacities, drives, and consciousness. According to Malatesta, “the government is the aggregate of the governors . . . those who have the power to make laws, to regulate relations between men, and to force obedience to these laws.”[[#42MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|42]] This force is exercised via various institutionalized mechanisms of coercion, such as the police, army, courts, and prisons. The exercise of state power is therefore necessarily constituted by social relations of command and obedience, of domination and subordination. The minority of socialists who wield this power will use it to implement their own ideas and further their interests. In so doing, they will inevitably come into conflict with different groups of workers who have ideas and interests of their own. This will especially occur with workers who are other kinds of socialist. Given the vast differences in power, the workers will be compelled to follow the commands of their superiors. If they do not do so and choose to ignore, resist, or rebel against the will of the governors they will be met with violent state repression, including censorship, beatings, arrest, imprisonment, and even execution. The result is always the same: workers would not self-determine their lives or the society in which they lived. They would instead be subject to the will of a governing minority. As Malatesta explained, “a government . . . already constitutes a class privileged and separated from the rest of the community. Such a class, like every elected body, will seek instinctively to enlarge its powers; to place itself above the control of the people; to impose its tendencies, and to make its own interests predominate. Placed in a privileged position, the government always finds itself in antagonism to the masses, of whose forces it disposes.”[[#43MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|43]]
+Stan is a guy I have been in touch with on the couch-surfing website. He had offered me a place to stay for a week while I figure out my little adventure. I am consistently surprised at the ease of finding a free place to sleep when I approach young men online. I just had to wait until the French girl he was hosting had moved on. Stan said he would come to pick me up from my spot just south of Fairbanks.
-One might object by arguing that these socialist representatives are workers themselves and so do not form a class distinct from the workers who elected them. Bakunin responded to this argument in 1873. He insisted that the governing minority are “''former'' workers, who, as soon as they become rulers or representatives of the people will cease to be workers and will begin to look upon the whole workers’ world from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people but themselves and their own pretensions to govern the people.”[[#44BakuninStatismandAnarchy|44]] In other words, they have transitioned from being members of the working classes to being members of the political ruling class in control of the state. State socialists fail to realize that class is not only about a person’s relationship to the means of production. It is also determined by a person’s relationship to the means of institutionalized coercion. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat would therefore not be based on the self-rule of the proletariat. It would, to quote Malatesta in 1897, “be the dictatorship of ‘Party’ over people, and of a handful of men over ‘Party.’”[[#45MalatestaPatientWork27|45]]
+==== CHIVALRY ISN’T DEAD, GUYS JUST GET SICK OF UNGRATEFUL BITCHES ====
-Anarchists argued that a fundamentally new function—the self-management of social life by producers themselves—requires the construction of fundamentally new social structures. These new organs need an organizational form that actually enables and leads to the realization of the desired function. For this to occur, the organs of self-management have to be developed by working-class social movements themselves engaging in a process of experimentation during the course of the class struggle. According to anarchists, these new organs are, as we have seen, workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias linked together through formal federations and/or informal social networks.[[#46KropotkinModernScience1|46]]
+Stan works in the Denali Park Centre. Got the job through his uncle, who is a park warden. Told me how he would come to Alaska as a child to live with his uncle in school holidays (he’s originally from Florida). He said even as a child he could not deal with the way of life down there. Said his father and he were nothing alike. He said his father has a Chevy and two jet skis and a speedboat on the lake they live on and that he wished his uncle was his father.
-If state socialists advocated the destruction of the capitalist state and the creation of a new workers’ state that was genuinely nothing but the self-rule of the working classes, then the disagreement with anarchists would largely be a semantic disagreement about how to define a state. In 1897, Malatesta considered the possibility of a social democrat who sincerely wanted to abolish the state:
+In the house there are trophy pictures of Stan or his uncle with big fish and stags. There is one of his uncle with his foot on a dead grizzlie’s head. His uncle the stereotypical Mountain Man, wearing buckskin and a coonskin cap, carrying a rifle and a scalping knife and with a big old bushy beard. Not forgetting the pipe.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">If they meant that, even as they capture it, they want to abolish the State . . . disband any armed governmental force, do away with all legislative powers . . . and promote the organization of society from the bottom up through the free federation of producer and consumer groups, then the entire issue would boil down to this: that they express by certain words the same ideas that we express by other words. Saying ''we want to storm the fortress and destroy it'', and saying ''we want to seize that fortress to demolish it ''means one and the same thing.[[#47MalatestaPatientWork120|47]]</div>
+It turns out that Stan is the douchey kind of Mountain Man, the exclusionary, self-righteous kind. It started when I saw Stan had Jack London on the shelf and I thought I would try to make friends by letting him know I really like London. He had a pretty reductive interpretation of him, so I bated him a little.
-He knew, however, that the vast majority of state socialists did not advocate federations of workplace assemblies, community assemblies, and workers’ militias—the true organs of worker self-rule—and then simply choose to call these systems of organization a state.[[#48Councilcommunistsareanex|48]] In June 1919, Malatesta wrote that the Bolsheviks did not mean by “the dictatorship of the proletariat” merely “the effective power of all the workers intent on breaking down capitalist society” by expropriating the ruling classes and creating social structures in which “there would be no place for a class that exploited and oppressed the producers.”[[#49MalatestaMethodofFreedom|49]] If this is what “the dictatorship of the proletariat” meant then “our dissent would have to do only with words.”[[#50MalatestaMethodofFreedom|50]] In reality, and judging by their actions, the Bolsheviks meant “a dictatorship of a party, or rather of the heads of a party; and it is a true dictatorship, with its decrees, its penal laws, its executive agents and above all with its armed force that serves today also to defend the revolution against its external enemies, but that will serve tomorrow to impose upon the workers the will of the dictators, to arrest the revolution, consolidate the new interests and finally defend a new privileged class against the masses.”[[#51MalatestaMethodofFreedom|51]]
+‘Don’t get offended, but ''Call of the Wild'' is not really a girl’s book.’
-According to state-socialist theory, a workers’ state would only exist during the transition from capitalism to a stateless, classless society. The state is the coercive instrument by which one economic class rules over and represses another economic class. A workers’ state would be the social structure through which the proletariat ruled over and repressed the bourgeoisie. Exercising this political power, the proletariat would reorganize the economy and establish state ownership and control of the means of production and land. In so doing, they would abolish class. Once class had been abolished, the economic basis for the state would cease to exist, since there would no longer be a division between a class who ruled and a class who was ruled over.[[#52KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|52]] The workers’ state would, to quote Engels, wither away such that “the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not ‘abolished.’ ''It dies out''.”[[#53MarxandEngelsCollectedW|53]] Once this had occurred, society would be organized via “a free and equal association of the producers.”[[#54KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|54]]
+‘Well, whose book is it? Is it a dog’s book? It’s a really good imagining of what’s going on in a dog’s head and it works because it is eerie when dogs howl at wolves on TV. And because they do look like they are dreaming about primitive things when they snarl in their sleep.’
-Anarchists living in the nineteenth century were not convinced by this argument. Decades before the Russian revolution and the emergence of the USSR, anarchists predicted that a workers’ state would not die out after the abolition of capitalism. It would instead continuously reproduce itself as a social structure. This is because the forms of practice involved in either exercising or being subject to state power produce people with traits that reproduce the state as a dominant structure, rather than people who will want to and be able to abolish the state. In exercising state power, socialist governors would not only change the world but also change themselves. They would acquire distinct class interests as members of the political ruling class and come to focus on maintaining and expanding their own power over the working classes, rather than allowing it to be abolished in favor of a stateless, classless society.
+‘Yeah, but it’s not just a story about a dog, is it?’
-In 1881, Cafiero declared that any socialist who says “they wish to take over the State in order to destroy it once the struggle is over” is “either seeking to mislead us or are deceiving themselves. . . . No power, no authority in the world has ever destroyed itself. No tyrant has ever dismantled a fortress once he has entered it. On the contrary, every authoritarian organism, every tyranny tends always to spread, to establish itself even more, by its very nature. Power inebriates and even the best can become the worst once they are vested with authority.”[[#55CarloCafieroRevolutionE|55]] In short, to quote Bakunin, the “habit of commanding . . . [and] the exercise of power never fail to produce this demoralization: ''contempt for the masses, and, for the man in power, an exaggerated sense of his own worth''.”[[#56MichaelBakuninBakuninon|56]]
+‘Well, it’s about a dog that wants to be a wolf.’
-Anarchists thought this would occur irrespective of people’s good intentions due to the manner in which they are shaped by the social structures they constitute and participate in. Malatesta wrote, “it is not a question here of the good faith or good will of this man or of that, but of the necessity of situations and the general tendencies that men exhibit when they find themselves in certain circumstances.”[[#57MalatestaPatientWork124|57]] Bakunin similarly claimed that those who exercised state power would be transformed by “the iron logic of their position, the force of circumstances inherent in certain hierarchical and profitable political relationships.” This would occur regardless of their “sentiments, intentions, or good impulses.”[[#58BakuninStatismandAnarchy|58]]
+‘You really think a book would be timeless and never out of print because it just makes people think about what their dog is thinking? This is what I mean, you just don’t get it because you’re a girl.’
-The existence of a state ruled by a minority political ruling class would simultaneously have a dire effect on the working classes in general. Instead of directly self-managing their lives themselves, the working classes would be subject to the rule of a governing minority and so engage in forms of practice that lead them to become accustomed to oppressive social relationships after their supposed liberation. They would learn to obey and defer to their superiors rather than to think and act for themselves. Rather than learning how to associate with others as equals, they would learn to put those in power on a pedestal and venerate them in just the same way that people under capitalism learn to hero worship so-called “captains of industry” or political figureheads like royal families and charismatic presidents. Workers would come to support the ongoing existence of the state and view it as a natural and necessary aspect of human existence that cannot be changed.[[#59MalatestaMethodofFreedom|59]] Authority, to quote Berkman, “debases its victims” and “makes those subject to it acquiesce in wrong, subservient, and servile.”[[#60BerkmanAnarchism43See|60]]
+‘What?’
-Anarchists predicted that the minority political ruling class in control of the so-called workers’ state would, in order to defend and maintain their position of authority, create a new economic ruling class that owed them allegiance and so would protect their class interests. This new economic ruling class would initially appear within the state bureaucracy itself given that the so-called workers’ state would own and manage the whole or majority of the economy. Over time, the new economic ruling class would grow in power due to the extreme importance of production and distribution in social life and gradually transform the state into an institution that primarily serves their distinct economic interests. This would culminate in the reintroduction of private property and market capitalism.[[#61MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|61]] The state was, to quote Fabbri, “more than an outcome of class divisions; it is, at one and the same time, the creator of privilege, thereby bringing about new class divisions.”[[#62LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|62]] According to Malatesta, “anyone in power means to stay there, and no matter what the costs he intends to impose his will—and since wealth is a very effective instrument of power, the ruler, even if he personally does not abuse or steal, he promotes the rise of a class around him that owes to him its privileges and has a vested interest in his remaining in power. . . . Abolish private property without abolishing government, and the former will be resurrected by those who govern.”[[#63MalatestaPatientWork123|63]]
+‘Girls are just naturally social. You could never know what it means to be called on by nature. Society is unnatural for men, it’s damaging for the spirit. The call of the wild is the call of the ancestors.’
-Supporters of workers’ states in this period generally believed that state socialism was a necessary transitional phase between capitalism and communism. Anarchists replied that state socialism would ultimately be the transitional phase between capitalism and capitalism. Given the self-reproducing nature of the state, and its tendency to establish new class divisions, it could not be used to achieve a stateless, classless society. Although, as Bakunin noted, state socialists claimed that “this state yoke, this dictatorship, is a necessary transitional device for achieving the total liberation of the people; anarchy, or freedom, is the goal, and the state, or dictatorship the means,” they failed to realize that “no dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure it.”[[#64BakuninStatismandAnarchy1|64]] The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.[[#65FabbriAnarchyandScient|65]]
+‘There is nothing more primordial than childbirth.’
-'''State Capitalism'''
+He thinks I can’t understand what a dog feels because I am a girl! He thinks dogs and human men have analogous feelings! Stan is talking Darwin like Ted Kaczynski talks Darwin to shut up women, but Darwin was writing to justify capitalism! He wrote ''Origin of the Species'' eighty-three years after Adam Smith wrote ''The Wealth of Nations''. They are all cutting paper into chair shapes. They are talking large organisations, interpreted in terms of self-interest and the maximisation of personal well-being, like in the free market, where firms or individuals succeed or fail based on ‘survival of the fittest’. They think personal maximisation side-handedly benefits the rest of the society or ecosystem. Adam Smith called this the Invisible Hand. Darwin was channelling Smith like a medium; he was a product of his time and primed to think in terms of competitive individuals.
-From an economic perspective, anarchists also rejected the idea that a state socialist society would be socialist at all. They thought it was more appropriate to label such a society ''state capitalism''. The term was used by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in a different sense to refer to the Soviet Republic’s New Economic Policy of 1921, in which capitalist markets and small private businesses existed alongside state ownership and management of large-scale industry but were subject to control by a self-proclaimed workers’ state. The earlier and broader anarchist usage of the term should not be confused with this.[[#66VladimirLeninSelectedWor|66]] It should also be kept in mind that the anarchist claim that state socialist societies would be instances of state capitalism was distinct from their prediction that state socialism would result in the resurrection of private property and market capitalism. From this perspective, it would begin as one form of capitalism and then later transform into another kind of capitalism.
+Russia called their automatically launched assured nuclear destruction machine the Dead Hand. The nuclear Dead Hand will automatically and amorally dish out justice to Russia’s enemy. It now behaves without them. Perhaps they were saying, well, if that is how you want to play it, this is where your Adam Smith’s logic takes you. Could be they were trolling when they called it the Dead Hand. (Dead hand also means an undesirable and persisting influence, which it is also.)
-State socialists aim to establish state ownership of the means of production and land, organize production and distribution through centralized state planning, and have workers become employees of the state. Were this to happen then, a single entity—the state—would own and control the whole or the majority of the economy. Under this system, the economy would, due to the state’s centralized and hierarchical nature, be owned and controlled by the minority of people who in fact wielded state power, rather than the working classes they claimed to represent. These workers would, instead of directly owning and controlling the economy themselves through organs of self-management, labor within state-owned workplaces hierarchically managed by state bureaucrats. These bureaucrats would implement the policies decided by the minority ruling class who, even if elected via universal suffrage, actually exercise decision-making power on a day-to-day basis. Under such a system, workers become wage laborers employed by the state and subject to its domination within the workplace in the same manner that they had previously been employed and dominated by individual capitalists and landowners.
+But there were other theories of the origin of the human species and it took thinkers who were outside the shadow of Adam Smith like ''women'' and ''communists'' to come up with them. Russian botanist Konstantin Mereschkowski came up with ''symbiogenesis'', the evolutionary theory that complex life came about because of a symbiosis of separate single-celled organisms. It takes symbiosis like the symbiosis of ectoparasites and sweetlips one step further and says that a whole new species can come out of the evolutionary dependence of two or more species. Darwin could not think like this because he was thinking too much Adam Smith.
-This perspective can be seen throughout anarchist texts. Bakunin predicted in ''Statism and Anarchy'' that the leaders of socialist parties would, if they seized state power, concentrate “in their own hands all commercial, industrial, agricultural, and even scientific production and will divide the people into two armies, one industrial and one agrarian, under the direct command of state engineers, who will form a new privileged scientific and political class.”[[#67BakuninStatismandAnarchy1|67]] In ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', Kropotkin claimed that anarchists rejected “the new form of wage-labor which would arise if the State took possession of the means of production and exchange, as it has already taken possession of the railways, the post office, education, national security [''l’assurance mutuelle''], and defense of the territory. New powers, industrial powers . . . would create a new, formidable instrument of tyranny.”[[#68KropotkinModernScience1|68]] Kropotkin referred to such a society as “state capitalism” on numerous occasions.[[#69KropotkinDirectStruggle|69]]
+In the 1960s Lynn Margulis, the microbiolo-gist, expanded on Mere-schkowski and revitalised his and the ideas of her predecessors like they were all the collective author (in this way she not only lectured symbiosis but also lived it). She argued with all the neo-Darwinists like omniscient god-denier Richard Dawkins, who gave her the condescending, goddess-invoking nickname ''science’s unruly earth mother''.
-State socialism would therefore lead to a reconfiguration of class society rather than the abolition of classes and the self-management of production and distribution by producers and consumers themselves. The existing economic and political ruling classes—capitalists, landowners, bankers, politicians, judges, generals etc.—would be replaced by or subordinated to a new economic and political ruling class—the socialist party leadership—which exercised power through a single institution: the state. This new economic and political ruling class would, in turn, be aided by a vast array of state bureaucrats who would serve as a managerial class that was subject to the authority of the socialist party leadership but at the same time exercised power over the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, “whoever has dominion over things, has dominion over men; whoever governs production governs the producers; whoever controls consumption lords it over the consumer. The question is this: either things are administered in accordance with agreements freely reached by those concerned, in which case we have anarchy, or they are administered in accordance with law made by the administrators, and we have Government, the State, which inevitably turns tyrannical.”[[#70MalatestaPatientWork123|70]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0147-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-Since state socialists sought to seize existing state power, it followed that the managerial class would be largely composed of the same bureaucrats who had previously managed the market-capitalist state. State socialists would transform certain aspects of the state during their seizure of state power, such as writing a new constitution, but the bulk of the state’s bureaucratic machinery would remain intact since the state could not function without it. This would occur even if state socialists genuinely wanted to smash the old state bureaucracy and immediately construct a new one. During a revolutionary period, the leaders of the socialist party would not be in the position to replace or fundamentally reorganize the state bureaucracy, especially in societies where most people were illiterate. They would instead be forced by circumstances to use, and massively expand, the previously existing state bureaucracy in order to implement their plans as rapidly and as effectively as possible, nationalizing industry and organizing the economy through central planning.
+Eukaryotic life is organisms with larger cells that have a bounded nucleus and organelles. Prokaryotic life is organisms without a bounded nucleus and these are the most abundant life forms on Earth. All eukaryotic life has a symbiotic relationship with prokaryotic life – think bacteria in your stomach.
-For Kropotkin, this was no different from when republicans overthrew monarchies. The form of the state was altered, but the state bureaucracy continued to operate largely as before. He wrote that, in France, “the Third Republic, in spite of its republican form of government, remained monarchist in its essence.” This was because,
+What Lynn Margulis said was that the emergence of eukaryotic cells billions of years ago happened because of ''symbiogenesis''. That a prokaryote + a prokaryote in symbiosis = a eukaryote. That a prokaryote + a eukaryote = a more successful eukaryote. That a more successful eukaryote x 2 = multicellular life (us). That the image of the tree of life should be reimagined to include the ''inosculation'' of its branches.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Those holding power have changed the name; but all this immense ministerial scaffolding, all this centralized organization of bureaucrats, all this imitation of the Rome of the Caesars which has been developed in France, all this formidable organization to ensure and extend the exploitation of the masses in favor of a few privileged groups that is the essence of the State-institution—all that remained. And these cogs [of the bureaucratic machine] continue, as in the past, to exchange their fifty documents when the wind has blown down a tree onto a national highway, and to pour the millions deducted from the nation into the coffers of the privileged. The [official] stamp on the documents has changed; but the State, its spirit, its organs, its territorial centralization, its centralization of functions, its favoritism, its role as creator of monopolies, have remained. Like an octopus, they expand [their grip] on the country day-by-day.[[#71KropotkinModernScience2|71]]</div>
+Lynn Margulis was Carl Sagan’s first wife and they had two sons together. After her second divorce Lynn Margulis said ‘it is not humanly possible to be a good wife, a good mother and a first-class scientist, something has to go’, so it is not hard to imagine the kind of husband that Carl Sagan was. I think I have a girl-crush on Lynn Margulis.
-State socialism would therefore not only be a reconfiguration of class society. It would also be an expansion of existing class society in so far as the bulk of the state machinery would continue to operate largely as before and this state machinery would move from organizing only certain aspects of the economy—the post office, trains etc.—to organizing the whole or most of the economy.
+On the Golden Records there is a sound piece that is like a load of firecrackers going off. It is a famous love story; Ann Druyan was thinking about how in love she was with Carl Sagan and now a token of their love floats for ever into the void with the Voyagers and will outlive us all. Carl Sagan volunteered her when it was suggested they put an electric reading of human brainwaves on the record. Then he called her up the night before the EEG to tell her he wanted to be with her, which was very coordinated of him. What is often missed out from this love story is that Ann Druyan had a boyfriend and Carl Sagan had a second wife, Linda Salzman; a forgotten and left-behind wife of history.
-Within such a society, the state would, for all intents and purposes, act as a single massive capitalist, since it now performed the various functions that were previously performed under market capitalism by multiple individual capitalists owning and directing different aspects of the economy. As a result, anarchists saw in state socialism not the abolition of classes, but the replacement of individual capitalists competing in a market with a single state capitalist that alone owned, directed, and planned the economy.[[#72FabbriAnarchyandScient|72]] Bakunin, for example, claimed that under state socialism the state would “''become the sole proprietor'' . . . the single capitalist, banker, financier, organizer, the director of all national work and the distributor of every product.”[[#73BakuninSelectedTexts88|73]] According to Kropotkin, state socialists aim to “seize the existing power structures and to retain and strengthen their control over them; in place of all of today’s ruling classes (landlords, industrialists, merchants, bankers, etc.) they strive to create one single proprietor—the State—to rule over all land, all works and factories, all accumulated wealth, and to be run by a Parliament.”[[#74KropotkinDirectStruggle|74]] Anarchists rejected this vision and could not “see in the coming revolution a mere . . . replacement of the current capitalists by the State [as sole] capitalist.”[[#75KropotkinModernScience1|75]]
+To rub it in a little bit further the couple were very public about their love token. Ann Druyan said, ‘For me Voyager is a kind of joy so powerful, it robs you of your fear of death.’
-Anarchists were also afraid that state socialists would create something much worse than state capitalism ruled by an elected parliament. In centralizing so much economic and political power into the hands of the state, they were creating an institution that could, in turn, be seized by a dictator and used to establish an even more tyrannical society. Kropotkin wrote in 1913 that “as long as the statist socialists do not abandon their dream of socializing the instruments of labor in the hands of a centralized State, the inevitable result of their attempts at State Capitalism and the Socialist state will be the failure of their dreams and military dictatorship.” The state they created during a period of revolutionary turmoil “would be the stepping-stone for a dictator, representing the reaction.” This would merely be a repeat of what had already happened after the French revolutions of 1793 and 1848. In the “centralized State . . . created by the Jacobins, Napoleon I found the ground already prepared for the Empire. Similarly, fifty years later, Napoleon III found in the dreams of a centralized democratic republic which developed in France after [the revolution of] 1848 the ready-made elements for the Second Empire.”[[#76KropotkinModernScience1|76]]
+Note: fear of death; immortalisation; conceptual colonising of Carl Sagan to usurp any future wife he may decide to have (''our love will live for ever''). They sent their love seed to pioneer into the absolute wilderness of deep, deep outer space, and it unravels this wilderness as it touches it. If Ted Kaczynski was thinking tactically he might have sent a letter bomb to Carl Sagan, who has maybe of all men ejaculated the very furthest.
-It was for these reasons that Kropotkin warned revolutionaries that the state is, “an octopus with a thousand heads and a thousand suckers, like the sea monsters of the old tales, it makes it possible to envelop all society and to channel all individual efforts so as to make them result in the enrichment and governmental monopoly of the privileged classes.”[[#77KropotkinModernScience3|77]] As a result, “if the revolution does not crush the octopus, if it does not destroy its head and cut off its arms and suckers, it will be strangled by the beast. The revolution itself will be placed at the service of monopoly, as was the [French] revolution of 1793.”[[#78KropotkinModernScience3|78]]
+Stan was not interested in any of this. I asked him if he had read ''White Fang''. He said yes, he did not like that one as much. I pointed out that in ''White Fang'', White Fang domesticated himself because he realised that hanging out with people was easier than living in the wild (symbiosis). Dogs live with humans for mutual aid too. There were obvious inconsistencies to Stan’s dog-lore logic.
-For anarchists, these predictions were soon proven true by the one-party Bolshevik state that was established during the 1917 Russian revolution and the subsequent seizure of this state by Stalin and his supporters after Lenin’s death in January 1924.[[#79Forabriefoverviewofthis|79]] As early as June 1919, Malatesta wrote that although “Lenin, Trotsky and their companions are certainly sincere revolutionaries . . . they prepare the governmental cadres that will serve those that will come, who will profit from the revolution and kill it. They will be the first victims of their method, and with them, I fear, will fall the revolution.”[[#80MalatestaMethodofFreedom|80]]
+The original bona fide Mountain Men were self-sufficient trapper/explorer types who lived alone in the North American wilderness. Their numbers were highest in the 1800s during the period of western expansion and homesteading and they were mainly found in the Rockies. They were drawn to the western wild by its virgin lands and the good old challenge to their manliness. They traded with the natives and often took native wives. This was pre-Jack London.
-Anarchists who had witnessed the revolution first hand subsequently wrote a number of critiques of the Bolsheviks. This included Goldman, who was deported from the United States to Russia in 1920. She wrote in December 1922 that the Bolsheviks had succeeded only in creating an “all-powerful, centralized Government with State Capitalism as its economic expression,” which was based on “the masking of autocracy by proletarian slogans.”[[#81GoldmanRedEmma388394|81]] The Bolsheviks violently repressed all rival forms of socialism, including anarchists, left socialist-revolutionaries, and Mensheviks, in order to keep power within the Communist Party. Members of the Party “who were suspected of an independent attitude” and challenged the party leadership were expelled.[[#82GoldmanRedEmma387|82]] In parallel to this, the organs of self-management that had been created by workers themselves during the revolution—soviets, factory committees, trade unions, and cooperatives—were “either subordinated to the needs of the new State or destroyed altogether.”[[#83GoldmanRedEmma389|83]] The consequence of this was that “the triumph of the State meant the defeat of the Revolution.”[[#84GoldmanRedEmma391|84]] This occurred because the “revolutionary methods” of the Bolsheviks were not “in tune with revolutionary aims.”[[#85GoldmanRedEmma404For|85]]
+They are thought of as honourable and chivalrous loners with a high moral code. When the fur trade began to fail, owing to over-trapping and the silk trade, many Mountain Men had to get jobs as army scouts, guides and settlers, bringing the crowds of homesteaders into the wild land they had opened up through the Emigrant Trails they had established. They initiated the corrosion of their precious wilderness. A memory of Mountain Men still lingers in the portrait of the Real Modern American Man: resourceful, masculine, hardy, provider and ''free''.
-The tragedy of the Russian Revolution demonstrated, according to anarchists, that they had been right and state socialists had been wrong. The liberation of the working classes could only be achieved through them crushing state power and building their own organs of self-management and class power. These arguments have, from an anarchist perspective, only proven stronger with time, given that subsequent state socialist revolutions in China, Cuba, and Vietnam have, like their predecessor in Russia, failed to produce a substantially free and equal society in which the working classes themselves own the means of production and self-manage their lives within both the workplace and wider society, let alone a state in the process of withering away. Despite numerous achievements within certain domains, such as increasing literacy rates or improving healthcare, these societies have not laid the foundations from which a stateless, classless, moneyless society based on distribution according to need could possibly emerge.
+My driver Ron told me that the modern Mountain Men living on the frontiers now, in cabins standing on the wilderness, get annoyed at other wilderness stander-on-ers, but they make the money they need to live as Mountain Men by working a few months a year on the pipeline. Really it does not matter if the pipeline fucks the future eventually, as long as the Mountain Men can live their lives alone in a pristine wilderness. They rely on machines like guns and snowploughs. But they pride themselves on their otherwise completely and utterly and totally unadulterated independence.
-'''Anarchism and Political Struggle'''
+Stan is what you might call an environmental chauvinist. Like he thinks it is his job to open the door for nature. And when he becomes the warden he will become the benevolent King of Denali. Stan is a Real Modern American Man. But if running into the wild is so often a wounded retreat from societal constraints and oppressions, then shouldn’t anyone ''but'' straight white men be doing it more?
-The anarchist rejection of seizing state power has led some Marxists to assert that anarchists opposed, and so ignored the need for, political struggle.[[#86ForexampleHalDraperKarl|86]] This argument dates back to Marx and Engels themselves. Marx wrote in an 1870 letter to Paul Lafargue that Bakunin thought that the industrial working class “must not occupy itself with ''politics''” and instead “only organize themselves by trades-unions,” and thus making what Marx saw as the fatal error of allowing “the governments, these great trade-unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like.” Bakunin had, according to Marx, failed to see “that every class movement as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a ''political'' movement.”[[#87KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|87]] After the First International’s Hague Congress of 1872, Marx gave a speech in which he said that “a group has been formed in our midst which advocates that the workers should abstain from political activity” and thereby ignored that “the worker will have to seize political supremacy to establish the new organization of labor.”[[#88KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|88]] Engels likewise claimed in an 1872 letter to Louis Pio that anarchists in the First International advocated the “''complete abstention from all political activity, and especially from all elections''.”[[#89KarlMarxandFriedrichEnge|89]]
+==== BUT HE’S A HIPPY, HOW CAN HE ALSO BE A MISOGYNIST? ====
-Anarchists in Marx’s time and beyond did not, however, reject political struggle in and of itself. They rejected one form of political struggle—attempting to conquer state power via elections or armed insurrection—in favor of a different form of political struggle—engaging in direct action outside of and against the state with the long-term aim of abolishing it. This position was grounded in the idea that working-class social movements should only engage in forms of political struggle that built toward a social revolution that abolished capitalism and the state, rather than leading workers away from it. As Malatesta wrote, anarchists embraced “political struggle” in the sense of “struggle against the government and not co-operation with the government,” because “if you truly want to overthrow the system, then you must clearly place yourself outside and against the system itself.”[[#90MalatestaAttheCafeConv|90]] For many anarchists, this political struggle included engaging in direct action to gain or enforce political liberties that expanded the ability of workers to self-organize, such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.[[#91RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|91]]
+I have had to rein in the indignant feelings I have towards Stan because, as much as I hate to admit it, I need him. Maybe sometimes symbiosis is taken up reluctantly, calculatedly. I keep him sweet by acting dumb and playing up to his idea of himself. There are ways to have covert fun with him, though. For example, I had been thinking about all the parallels between him and Chris McCandless and about what Ron had said about that phenomenon. So I told Stan he reminded me of Chris McCandless.
-The anarchist view on political struggle can be seen in Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois reformist politics and the revolutionary proletarian politics of the anarchist movement. According to Bakunin, “it would be the death of the proletariat, if it were preoccupied exclusively and solely with economic matters” and ignored “political questions.”[[#92BakuninSelectedTexts238|92]] This is because any significant attempt by the working classes to emancipate themselves economically will be met by state violence. In Bakunin’s words, “''the political question is inseparable from the economic question'' . . . politics—the institution and mutual relations of States—has no other object except that of ensuring that the ruling classes can legally exploit the proletariat. So in consequence, the moment the proletariat wishes to free itself, it is forced to consider politics—to fight it and overcome it.”[[#93BakuninSelectedTexts226|93]] The First International would for this same reason, “be compelled to intervene in politics so long as it is forced to struggle against the bourgeoisie.”[[#94BakuninPoliticalPhilosoph|94]] Its task as an organization “is not just some economic or a simply material creative activity, it is at the same time and to the same degree an eminently political process.”[[#95QuotedinBerthierSocialD|95]]
+‘Chris McCandless? Fucking Chris McCandless?’
-The question for Bakunin was not whether we should engage in politics but what form our political interventions should take. He was careful to distinguish between bourgeois politics, which did not aim to achieve the immediate emancipation of workers, and the politics of labor or social revolution, which aimed to abolish the state in order to establish socialism.[[#96BakuninSelectedTexts22|96]] Given this, “It is not true . . . to say that we completely ignore politics. We do not ignore it, for we definitely want to destroy it. And here we have the essential point separating us from political parties and bourgeois radical Socialists. Their politics consists in making use of, reforming, and transforming the politics of the State, whereas our politics, the only kind we admit, is the total ''abolition'' of the State, and of the politics which is its necessary manifestation.”[[#97MichaelBakuninThePolitic|97]]
+‘The guy that died in the bus?’
-Bakunin’s distinction between bourgeois politics and revolutionary proletarian politics was shared by other anarchists. During the First International’s 1872 Hague Congress, which was attended by Marx and Engels, Guillaume claimed that the anarchist idea of politics “was not political indifferentism, but a special kind of politics negating bourgeois politics and which we should call the politics of labor,” which sought “''the destruction of political power''.”[[#98QuotedinWolfgangEckhardt|98]] Andrea Costa wrote, with Bakunin’s assistance, a program for the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International sometime in late 1872. The program distinguished between the “negative politics” of abolishing ruling-class institutions and the “positive politics” of constructing a new society through the “revolutionary power” of the working classes.[[#99QuotedinTRRavindranatha|99]] Over two decades later, in 1897, Malatesta remarked that “who has outdone us in arguing that the battle against capitalism has to be harnessed to the fight against the State, meaning the political struggle? There is a school of thought these days in which political struggle means achieving public office through elections: but . . . logic forces other methods of struggle upon those seeking to do away with government, rather than capture it.”[[#100MalatestaPatientWork20|100]]
+‘I know who fucking Chris McCandless is. You think I could work in Denali and not know who Chris McCandless is? Why do you think I remind you of him?’
-For Malatesta, like Bakunin before him, economic struggles would be transformed into political struggles. He argued that “from the economic struggle one must pass to the political struggle, that is to the struggle against government” because “workers who want to free themselves, or even only to effectively improve their conditions, will be faced with the need to defend themselves from the government” that violently protects private property rights and the interests of the economic ruling classes.[[#101MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|101]] Workers will be forced to “oppose the rifles and guns which defend property with the more effective means that the people will be able to find to defeat force by force.”[[#102MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|102]] The manner in which capitalism and the state support and cocreate one another led Malatesta to conclude that the economic struggle against capitalism and the political struggle against the state are so interconnected that they should be viewed as two aspects of a single struggle against the ruling classes, rather than as two separate struggles.[[#103MalatestaPatientWork16|103]]
+‘Oh, I don’t know. Only slightly. Just, you know, coming to Alaska from the lower forty-eight and being all resourceful and everything?’
-A significant number of anarchists held that politics would be abolished via the social revolution. One Spanish anarchist poem, for example, declared that “politics” would “disappear from the world” via “the establishment of anarchy.”[[#104QuotedinJeromeRMintz|104]] Other anarchists, in comparison, thought that politics was not inherently state-centric and would continue to exist, albeit in a very different form, after the abolition of the state. Kropotkin argued that “new forms of economical life will require also new forms of political life, and these new forms cannot be a reinforcement of the power of the State by giving up in its hands the production and distribution of wealth, and its exchange.”[[#105KropotkinDirectStruggle|105]] These new forms of political life must instead be “created by the workers themselves, in ''their'' unions, ''their'' federations, completely outside the State.”[[#106KropotkinModernScience|106]] Given this, “The free Commune . . . is the ''political ''form that the ''social ''revolution must take.”[[#107KropotkinModernScience|107]]
+‘Chris McCandless was a suicidal idiot. A fucking greenhorn. Any true survivalist would have known to take a map and not go into the bush without knowledge. He died because of his own stupidity. And now his little cult wastes my uncle’s time, they waste Alaskan taxes, and the little piece of “wild” he went into is now a well-trodden mecca. Kids drown trying to cross the river to get there. Broken kids with stupid fantasies about how the wild will complete them.’
-'''Different Kinds of Anarchism'''
+Stan is not even Alaskan. The main difference between Stan and Chris McCandless is that Stan has had the luck to not have died yet. I wonder what the Athabaskans and the Eskimos have to say about guys like Stan.
-Anarchists in this historical period generally shared the basic strategic commitments that have been explained in Chapters 4 and 5. They nonetheless also disagreed with one another about a wide variety of more specific topics. This included such questions as what kind of organizations they should build, what tactics they should engage in, and how anarchists should act to help bring about the social revolution. Broadly speaking the anarchist movement can be divided into two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchism advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that attempted to trigger, or at least build toward, a social revolution by engaging in an escalating series of individual and collective violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions. Mass anarchism, in comparison, advocated the formation of large-scale formal organizations that struggled for immediate reforms in the present via direct action. They viewed such struggles as the most effective means to construct a mass movement capable of launching a social revolution via an armed insurrection.[[#108LucienvanderWaltAnarc|108]]
+Stan is also a lesser Mountain Man; he is a wannabe. He lives in a house! Made from bricks! In a town! There is a post office! And a health centre! The ratio in his fridge of shop-bought convenience over foraged/killed is 9:1! There are degrees, and more evolved Mountain Men get points for living in a house they built themselves in a place where, if their appendix burst, they would die.
-The terms insurrectionist anarchist and mass anarchist were not used by anarchists historically and are anachronistic. In Spain during the 1880s, the debate occurred between anarchist communists (insurrectionist anarchists) and anarchist collectivists (mass anarchists). In Italy during the 1890s and 1900s, it occurred between anarchist communists who were either organizationalists (mass anarchists) or antiorganizationalists (insurrectionist anarchists). Given the wide variety of different terms that were used historically, I decided to make things clearer by using the same terminology consistently. This terminology, which was coined by the historian Lucian van der Walt, is potentially misleading and two points of clarification must be made.
+I have made a list and am sourcing equipment for my trip from the outdoors shops in the town. Stan saw my list and tutted and added some things to it and I let him explain the particular merit of these items to me. I have to nurture his ego because he found me a cabin and he said he will lend me a gun and not tell his uncle that I am out there without a permit. Part of me wonders why he wants to help me when he does not seem to like me. The fact seems to be that he revels so much in his superior authority that he will subject me to the challenge he imagines me so unfit for, sadistically, just to prove himself right. He seems to find me amusing. He wants to see me fail.
-First, mass anarchists advocated and engaged in armed insurrections, while insurrectionist anarchists ultimately aimed to create a mass working-class social movement. Second, although one can distinguish between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism these are ideal types and individuals cannot always be neatly categorized into one or the other due to their combining elements of both or only subscribing to certain aspects of the theory in question. The anarchist movement contained a great deal of intellectual diversity and, although some anarchists were dogmatic, there were no rigid barriers between different kinds of anarchism that might, in principle, prevent one kind of anarchist learning from and being influenced by another kind of anarchist. Most Italian anarchists who lived in North Beach, San Francisco, for example, subscribed to multiple publications espousing different kinds of anarchism and interacted socially with anarchists from other tendencies.[[#109KenyonZimmerImmigrantsA|109]] The distinction between insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism should be viewed as a simplification that is helpful for thinking about the major strategic disagreements within the anarchist movement, rather than being a perfect description of the ideological complexity of the anarchist movement. In the next several chapters, I will examine the various forms that anarchism took during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
+I need to make my pack as light as it can be so I will remove all unnecessary items and leave them at Stan’s, seeing as I have to come back to return the gun anyway. He is taking my things hostage as a kind of deposit on the gun.
-[[#15|1]]. Gary P. Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991); Keven McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, ''The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin ''(Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996), 1–27.
+==== REGRET IN RATS, ALTRUISM IN BONOBOS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#25|2]]. For illustrative examples, see Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''89–136; Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 101–8, 383–420; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 371–82, 432; Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 24–27, 120–24; Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 11–12, 48–49; Rudolf Rocker, “Marx and Anarchism,” Anarchist Library website, April 26, 2009. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-marx-and-anarchism.</div>
+Before casting out I had to begin neatening up all of my frayed edges in order to disengage smoothly. I have told my parents that I am going to volunteer on a community project in an Eskimo village with no phone signal or internet for a few weeks because I do not know how else to put it to them. I sent them a link to a website that organises such excursions to make it more believable.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#35|3]]. For an overview of Marx and Engels’s strategy, see Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 3,'' The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986); Richard N. Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 1,'' Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974); Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 2,'' Classical Marxism, 1850–1895 ''(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984).</div>
+Then I Skyped Larus to tell him bye for now and to vent some of my pent-up frustration at Stan, but he took things in a very different direction and now I wish I had not at all. He was worrying about how we had not spoken in a while again. Then he got all strange about why he thought that was.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#45|4]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 91–92; Peter Kropotkin, ''Modern Science and Anarchy'', ed. Iain McKay'' ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018),'' ''211, 220–21, 233.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0152-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#55|5]]. For an overview of these movements and their ideas, see Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin''. For important primary sources, see Karl Kautsky, ''The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program) ''(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910); Mike Taber, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889–1912 ''(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).</div>
+‘Does Sam not approve of our little chats? My girlfriend doesn’t like me talking to you so much either.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#65|6]]. Edward Bernstein, ''Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation ''(New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1909), x–xvi, 145–46, 163, 196–99, 216–19; Rosa Luxemburg, ''Rosa Luxemburg Speaks'','' ''ed. Mary-Alice Waters'' ''(New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 48–59, 76–83.</div>
+It was the way he said this, like so nail-pickingly nonchalant as to be glaringly pointed. I suppose I realised the conversation was going to go one of two ways from there. I guess part of me had known without wanting to all along that this had been building, like a bird sidling over for crumbs so slowly you don’t even notice until, oh, it is there.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#75|7]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 91–93; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 193; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 30–31.</div>
+‘Your girlfriend?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#85|8]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 378–81; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 64–71; Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''178–82.</div>
+‘Yes, my American girlfriend Jose.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#95|9]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''30–31.</div>
+I involuntarily said that he kept that one quiet.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#105|10]]. Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''59.</div>
+‘I’m just surprised, that’s all. That we’ve been talking for so long and I didn’t know that about you.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#115|11]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 4.</div>
+‘There are lots of things you don’t know about me.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#125|12]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 9.</div>
+This made my legs twitch because I did not know what to do with myself. I turned off the webcam so he could not see me flapping my hands. Neither of us said anything for an uncomfortably long time. I was unsure how to navigate my way back out of it, before anything said became an answer I did not want to hear to a question I had not even asked.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#134|13]]. Malatesta, ''Long and Patient'', 180–81.</div>
+‘She finds it strange that I talk so much to a girl young enough to be my daughter.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#144|14]]. De Cleyre,'' Reader'', 59.</div>
+''Please stop talking.'' I could not think of anything to say. He waited, then carried on.
-[[#154|15]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''54.
+‘I explain to her that you’re a very interesting young lady and that I enjoy helping you with your project.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#164|16]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 178. See also, 77; ''Patient Work'', 10, 44.</div>
+I want to cry. I try to make light. From here, maybe, I could back-paddle. I ask if she knows I am a friend of Urla’s and pointedly call him Uncle Larus.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#174|17]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''54.</div>
+‘Don’t call me that.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#184|18]]. Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 147.</div>
+‘Why?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#194|19]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 193.</div>
+‘Because it’s just weird, don’t you think?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#204|20]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 122.</div>
+I don’t dare ask why some more. I tell him I have to go because Stan is on his way through the door. I tried to make it convincing but do not remember what I said. As he hangs up the camera freezes and lingers on his face for three seconds. His left eye, no, right for him, left for me, is half closed where he got caught off guard.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#214|21]]. Reclus, ''Anarchy'', 122.</div>
+I realised that it had been instinct twinging all along whenever I thought of Urla, and the way she changed so totally when we were the three of us, and how she emailed less and less. I had ignored it because I was stubborn to prove that it did not have to be like that, that two people can span a gender gap and a generational gap and have a level of understanding without any funny business, like a kind of apprenticeship arrangement.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#224|22]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 13.</div>
+And how Sam had put it, giving me a look like ‘yeah, really’ when he asked what Larus had to do with anything. And I got pissed at him for insinuating that I was being stupid and naive and that a person I held to be a friend and mentor was not just that. And Larus doing the same of him, the two of them like male narwhals clashing their horns together, telepathically. And it is like that but grosser still because he is old enough to be my old dad or even almost my very young grandfather. I got annoyed at Sam for denying me platonic camaraderie in such a reductive way, but god, he was right after all.
-[[#234|23]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+And thinking of Sam and how I got angry at him, well, it makes my stomach flip and it also makes me squirm, like if I think of being back there and the last day and our plain shunning of each other I feel shit and I might have done a shit thing by behaving like that but so did he and I do not want to think about it, best really just to forget about it all. It’s not like we will ever see each other again anyway.
-[[#244|24]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+And I am trying hard not to but if I do think about it, I can’t quite get my head around why it got so suddenly weird. It was after he tried to get me to stay and I did not because of course I had to carry on. As though he was hurt that I wanted to leave and carry on without him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#254|25]]. For the programs of socialist parties in Austria, Germany, and Italy, see the appendix to Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin'', 285–307.</div>
+Left behind during the Apollo missions were all of the astronauts’ wives and children. This is perhaps more significant during the Apollo missions than on modern-day missions because they were so rushed what with the race on, all the nationalistic pressure, and so much could go wrong so easily. So the wives left behind had to go to lift-off with all their children in tow and smile for the media cameras and wave and say WE ARE PROUD, THRILLED AND HAPPY and watch their husbands and their children’s fathers and their monetary means of living shoot up into the sky in a hunk of aluminium and disappear into a dimension they might not have even been completely sure existed, maybe thought of in a very abstract way like my mum does.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#264|26]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92–93, 99–102; Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' ''145–7; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 338, 372–74; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 115.</div>
+And if I had been an Apollo wife I would probably have thought ''fuck you'' in a lot of ways. Fuck you, husband, for wanting to risk giving up on our marriage bed and the beautiful faces of our children and my great cooking and our cosy life and our vows to stay together and try to see out this one life to its fullest, for some idea of eternal glory, and yeah, you will be remembered for all of history but the most you will remember of me is how I stopped sleeping at night and started getting craggy and how you eventually left me for a young fan girl and I had to spend the rest of the one life I have on this planet angry at another planet for taking you away. And maybe I would have liked to have gone up there with you too but I was just not allowed and on some level I am just jealous that you get the chance to abandon it all and be seen as a selfless hero and not a selfish egomaniac, and I do not, will not ever, I have to stay here and dress all our children for school.
-[[#274|27]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 55.
+Most of the marriages of the moonwalkers did not last through the strain of fame and affairs and, probably, some feeling of comedown on the part of the astronauts, a feeling of life having peaked and all nuclear-family-life-events paled in comparison; the births and the first words and the graduations and the first grandchildren, all the prototypical life-milestones. You would think they could have sent up bachelors to be fair to all the future absent-fathered children, but of course the astronauts had to be role models, they had to be figureheads of nice productive nuclear families. Even if there were other more suitable candidates (single and childless females included).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#284|28]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 180; Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 30.</div>
+So not to say that Sam is like my sore wife but that maybe in a very small way, on a very micro level, he felt a similar kind of anger-at-abandonment. And I get that. But historically it is women that have to deal with chronic desertion (I see you, Linda Salzman) and this is exactly what I am working against so Sam can just deal with it. I am doing this for all the bitter left-behind wives of history! (Close relatives of the commonly found dragged-around woman.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#294|29]]. René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 48–9; Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 259–60.</div>
+Online a little envelope flashed at me from him. Maybe I miss him and maybe I wish he had made an effort to come with me or something but ha-ha! that would not do. He did not take me seriously. Neither does Stan and even Larus didn’t in the end, all that interest just feigned for an interest in something else. But it is my whole reason for being right now. And if I get disheartened then they all win and I let down all of the left-behind wives of history.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#304|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 181.</div>
+==== ATLAS SHRUGGED ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#314|31]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29–30.</div>
+The more I think about the deal with Larus the more frustrated I get and the less I blame myself. I had come to see us as a kind of master and student, this is a well-established trope, and none of those guys ever had problems with sexual dynamics. Like Plato and Socrates, Harry and Dumbledore, Yoda and Skywalker. I thought Larus was in on this too.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#324|32]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92.</div>
+I can’t tell if I am noticing weirdness in retrospect because I am on to him or if I am seeing things where they were not because he has taken on a new face for me. Sigmund Freud, the phallusobsessed psychoanalyst, said people cannot hear or see things that do not fit with the way they see the world or themselves. Anyway, it is going to make this disappearing into the wilderness thing all the more easy to throw myself into.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#334|33]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 92–93.</div>
+The park centre that Stan works in is Denali National Park, and within it is the Denali Wilderness Area. At the far north-east corner of this is the trail that McCandless took and where the bus he died in still is now, actually on the border of parklands. I will not be anywhere near it but it is strange to think of it existing across the tundra from where I plan to stay. As much as Stan despises him I feel a bit of a kinship with him. Like we are both allied idealists. We differ on a lot of things; for example, I will not be sending out overdramatic maybe-forever-goodbyes by postcard and phone call. I have not even told my parents what I am going to be doing because I know it would worry them sick. I do not intend to be stupid with my life either but I have read my Thoreau too, well, some anyway, and I get what McCandless was trying to find by going out there. It was a claiming of autonomy and a rite of passage that I want to go through too and I bet he died happy doing it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#344|34]]. Quoted in Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''36. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 111–17. In response to Millerand’s actions, the 2nd International passed resolutions at its 1900 and 1904 congresses that opposed the entry of socialist politicians into a bourgeois government’s cabinet. See Taber, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner'','' ''77–78, 83–84.</div>
+The area I will go to is trail-less. I can get a lift to the visitors’ centre with Stan, where I can catch a bus to drop me on the road that leads through the park. Then I can hike out from the road for a long day and hopefully arrive at the cabin that Stan has earmarked on the map for me by late evening.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#354|35]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 36; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),'' ''58–61; Robert G. Neville, “The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906,” ''Journal of Contemporary History'' 13, no. 1 (1978): 33–52.</div>
+===== Part of me says you can’t trust Stan not to tell and another part says you can trust his obsession to see how far you can be pushed, to see you fail and a small part of me says is this a girlfriend test and if I pass I become worthy in his eyes of his tolerance which for him equates to kinship? If so, gross. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#364|36]]. S. F. Kissin, ''War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars'','' ''vol. 1,'' 1848–1918 ''(London: Routledge, 2019). For anarchist responses to the war, see Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War'' (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017)''<nowiki>; </nowiki>''A. W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 157–81.'' ''</div>
+When he dropped me he said, ‘So I’ll see you in around three days’ time, then,’ grinning in a way that was almost flirty. I laughed sweetly and he said, ‘No, really, what’s the limit past which if you haven’t turned up on my doorstep to bring the gun back I send the search parties out after you?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#374|37]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99.</div>
+‘Five weeks, please.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#384|38]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 99, 98.</div>
+‘Okay, so honestly, why are you doing this? Did something bad happen to you?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#394|39]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 310, 199, 227.</div>
+‘What do you mean?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#404|40]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 255. The same point is made in Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 388.</div>
+‘Well, usually that’s why people do things like this, they are running away.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#414|41]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 14–15; Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''130; Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 273–75, 352.</div>
+‘Why do you go camping, Stan? Did something bad happen to you?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#424|42]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''113.</div>
+‘No.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#434|43]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 130. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 253, 265–66.</div>
+‘Exactly.’
-[[#444|44]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 178.
+‘But like, you don’t even come from a place that would prepare you for this. You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#454|45]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 27.</div>
+‘I thought you said you came from Florida?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#464|46]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 164, 352.</div>
+‘You know bears in Denali maul twenty people to death every year, right?’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#474|47]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 120–21.</div>
+Then I smiled at him and passed him my ''Collected Works of Jack London'' with all of the feminist and socialist stories and passages earmarked and annotated for his consideration. I know he is lying about the bear statistic because I already looked it up.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#484|48]]. Council communists are an example of Marxists who advocated a dictatorship of the proletariat that was similar to, but not identical with, what anarchists advocated. For a discussion of the similarities between council communism and anarchism, see Saku Pinta, “Towards a Libertarian Communism: a Conceptual History of the Intersections Between Anarchisms and Marxisms” (PhD Diss., Loughborough University, 2013).</div>
+What happened to me? Nothing. I think that that is the point. I need to experience something visceral to placate the hunger. And I am sick of the men that want to keep it from me. Maybe you could say patriarchy happened to me. So like a dog cast out into the rain maybe I do leave, to go cry myself a big fat fucking two-hearted river. To sleep in an open field! To travel west! To walk freely at night!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#494|49]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+=== {{anchor|Topofch04html}} INTO THE WILDNESS ===
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#504|50]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+==== GOING FERAL ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#514|51]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392. There appears to be a typo in this edition, where Malatesta says that it will “defend the revolution for its external enemies.” I choose to replace “for” with “against” based on the translation available in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''392.</div>
+She stood out vivid and present in the temperature-controlled half-light of her glass coffin, upright and at full human stature, her cloak hung to give the impression of a human figure underneath. She radiated epiphany. She filled the room with a smell like the seal-fur blankets Naaja’s mother gave us and an undertone of perhaps honey. It was strangely familiar and pleasant, not at all sickly. Her staff with the two-pronged antlers, still velvety with fur, sashed to it. On little fronds she had tiny bird skulls and shells. If she weren’t so very still they would click together like a cartoon skeleton falling to pieces. Clack-clack-clack-clack-clack.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#524|52]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 24'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 320–21; ''Collected Works'','' ''vol. 26, 269–72</div>
+In the park centre where I waited for the bus, there were displays on the natural and cultural history of the park. I floated around the room; there was movement from nothing but me. Time had stopped, looking exactly about to happen. There were irides-cent wings clamped open, feigning flight, above italicised names I could not get my tongue around. There were eyes, but we had taken the real ones out to put glass ones in and they stared from inside mounted skins, on placarded walls, from under glass domes, contorted majestically on rocks, on wooden plates, in awkward glory. There were tiny mottled eggs in counterfeit nests that looked as though they were about to burst out into life. And there were Dall sheep horns, a grizzly’s paw pad, skulls which though dry had all once held tiny brains, capillaries and veins.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#534|53]]. Marx and Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 24, 321.</div>
+There were artefacts of the original human inhabitants too: Athabaskan shawls, pipes and pottery. A model of a traditional toboggan and a crusty, worn dog harness. Grainy photographs of vacant-looking Eskimo men and women stood limpidly side by side with priests in robes. The plaque said missionaries won their trust with magical gifts of tobacco and medicine.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#544|54]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 26 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 272. For Marx’s vision of a stateless classless society, see Paul Raekstad, ''Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism'' (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 155–72.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.423cm;">''Prior to the arrival of Christian missionaries to the New World, indigenous religion was animistic, comprised of a worldview where humans are part of an on-going spiritual interchange between all manifestations of organic matter, often including the inanimate matter of the elements. A shaman was a human who was a seer into the spirit world.''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#554|55]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 45.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.423cm;">''Both men and women could be shamans, but many of the shamans were of female form as the idea of creation was sacred and bestowed to the feminine. However men could also have ‘feminine’ attributes. Gender was considered fluid, and there were thought to be at least four genders approximately: masculine men, feminine men, masculine women and feminine women. People who embodied the two opposites were known as Twospirit People.''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#564|56]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 145.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">In the rest of the world Eskimo is a pejorative term and Inuit is preferred instead, but in Alaska the Eskimos prefer to be called Eskimos. There was a poster, a kind of family tree of the Alaskan indigenous peoples. Eskimo and Inuit are both the collective terms for distinct but similar cultures like the Yupik and Inupiat. Other natives of Alaska of separate cultures mostly distinguished by language are the Athabaskans, Aleuts, Eyak, Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#574|57]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 124.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0162-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#584|58]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 52. See also Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 63.</div>
+The distinctions are complicated because there are overlaps between the different cultures, and although they are distinguished by language, some of the languages are maybe not entirely separate languages. And why would the indigenous people care about absolutely distinguishing cultures if souls can transmigrate to rocks, are forever in animal-mineral-plant continuum?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#594|59]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''147.</div>
+On the 9 a.m. bus into the park, before disembarking, I kept my eyes porous out of the window, funnelling it all in. There were just two other people on the bus, a pair of middle-aged day hikers, and I could feel them staring at the gun leant against my seat while I jotted in my notebook.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#604|60]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 43. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 136.</div>
+I was waiting for the mountains to begin on the left and the treeline, which I knew to be mile 52 of the Park Road and the calculated point of my disembarkation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#614|61]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 115–16, 130–31, 289–90; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 11–13.</div>
+The scenery flickered. It was gradual, like well-thought build-up in a feel-good coming-of-age story about a girl like me getting close to something sought. It was layer on layer. Each breaching hill might have been the one to reveal the mountains like a shroud, ghostly, slipping down. Each pre-emptive revealing was excited pressure hoarded.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#624|62]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 20.</div>
+Finally they were there. Mountains as turnstiles, thresholds to becomings. What do these ones mark? The ground crawled meekly to them, green and a blemished kind of red like blood soaked into moss, up and up until it rendered at rusty brown and rocky tips. Behind, another sort of brown, and behind still grey and white-capped. Each row of mountains was coloured a little differently. Layered and assembled like a collage, foreground in green. But no background of sky, instead clouds that hung and panelled forward as an overlay, disturbing the order of the layers. The mountains encroached into the sky, a challenge to its separateness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#634|63]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 123.</div>
+I do not remember stepping off the bus, in a way that slightly alarms. But I do remember the light and colour: dappled impressions of moss and blood. Like Monet. Up close and in cardinal parts, tiny flowers and perfect tiny tear-shaped leaves of purple. Tiny but integral parts of a bigger whole. Micro/macro and indivisible. The timid parts actually prettier, like my own lone small journey to me. At the same time whole and partial, sublime and obscure but sentimental.
-[[#644|64]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 179.
+A couple of hours after disembarking from the bus and I am caught. Until that point I had been plodding along absent but receptive. Then it hits me very suddenly as I stop to drink some water from my bottle and sit on my haunches and look up at the sky, where a huge bloody eagle of some kind is wheeling about. This is it. This is everything. This is my moonwalk.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#654|65]]. Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 20.</div>
+After the Apollo missions lots of the astronauts would talk about a similar sudden awareness of self. After giving all their concentration to lift-off and getting up there without exploding and feeling tense and so overridden by adrenaline that they were not even that aware of where they were and what they were doing, so that when it ''did'' hit them the feeling was potent and alarming. Others never experienced the feeling because they did not ever stop putting all their resources into the functionality of the mission. Many of the Apollo astronauts experienced their time in space not as selves but as detached scientists.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#664|66]]. Vladimir Lenin, ''Selected Works ''(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 635, 682–83, 685–86.</div>
+The tundra is always whistling and it is very empty. I have enough freeze-dried food as base rations to sustain me with hunted stuff for four weeks – the ecologist Aldo Leopold said that three is enough time to get to grips with real solitude and become truly immersed in wilderness. To get into the rhythms of it. Technically past two is classed as ‘settling’ rather than a camping trip and is against park regulations, but I have it from Stan that no one will notice. Stan showed me how to use a radio like the one that would be in the cabin to get in touch if I need him. He has one back in his house for when nobody is in the warden’s office.
-[[#674|67]]. Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 181.
+It took me around nine hours’ marching with only a slight deviation. Stan told me, ‘If you hit the river where it leaves the forest then you are too far north,’ but I couldn’t see the river and had to just hope that this was because I was south of it. I was.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#684|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 170.</div>
+The cabin is everything I dreamed it would be. When I finally saw it from across the tundra I yelped and felt proud of my own tenacity. It is sat just left of some evergreens and looks out onto the tundra. There is an empty smokehouse outside and a tiny toilet shed, a collapsed and moss-covered pile of logs, and a broken pair of skis. Inside there is a mounted fox head, a row of gun mounts, where I have mounted Stan’s gun, some pots, a canvas cot, a fire grate, the radio on a desk with a chair and the supplies I bought. When I move about and unsettle the dust that is uniform and thick I have a sneezing fit. I fitted the radio with the batteries I bought first thing, but I turned it off this evening and intend to keep it so.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#694|69]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 165, 210, 288, 385–86,</div>
+Of course, I also brought loads of books to the woods from a bookshop in town, a pile of the canonical texts on wilderness to help me decipher it. I have some Thoreau, Emerson, Hemingway, the Unabomber and a biographical book about various young male runaways. A heavy but a necessary burden. When Jack London went to the Klondike he read ''Origin of the Species'' (which explains a lot) and ''Paradise Lost''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#704|70]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 123–24.</div>
+Stan didn’t show me how to shoot the gun and I obviously did not ask. I have looked it over and it is pretty similar to a rifle I used to shoot with an ex-boyfriend whose family liked hunting. He used to say he was sad about hurting all the animals, and that was why he would just be the scarer that ran into the grass to get the pheasants up. The real reason was he was a terrible shot; he just didn’t want to say it to me because he was sore that I could shoot better than him. I would not shoot animals, mind, we just used to practise on targets in a field behind his house.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#714|71]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 274.</div>
+I am the only human being for miles around as far as I am aware. At least, that is what I was told by the bus driver, who thinks I am a day hiker too and was concerned enough for my welfare as it was that I did not correct him. He told me to look out for reindeer, caribou, foxes, pine martens, hares, wolves, wildcats and bears. Most are technically edible but I only fancy the smaller things. I have seen Bear Grylls killing and gutting many large animals and it always seems so unnecessary and superfluous. I mean, Bear Grylls obviously eats bears, that is where he gets his name from, right? He eats bears because it is essential to his identity as a ''born survivor''. If he did not eat bears he would not have a job. I am only killing for one and I am only small. I think a hare a week will be more than enough to sustain me with the freeze-dried stuff.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#723|72]]. Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” 29–30.</div>
+Is it cheating to bring the ‘just add water’ survival packs? I had to really think about this before coming out. If I did not have them I would have to hunt for ''all'' my food. But people who do this kind of thing always bring supplies. Ernest Hemingway, writer of manly short sentences, took canned pork and beans. Inuits have supplies in the way of preserved foods. Modern Mountain Men buy sacks of pinto beans from Fairbanks. And if bringing supplies was cheating, maybe I should not really have technology like a gun or a radio. And that would not be survival technique, but a probable death-experiment. This thing, this authenticity, how close can you get to it? How pure can it be?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#733|73]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 88–89.</div>
+I also would not be able to make the video diary, which would undermine the entire point of the trip. The diary might seem a bit false, might add an inverted voyeurism so that it is really like I have company out here, but I don’t really know how to avoid this. When Bear Grylls cut open a camel to demonstrate how to sleep inside it I doubt if he actually stayed in there all night, snug in his authenticity, with his cameraman asleep in a tent pitched next to him.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#743|74]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 130–31.</div>
+How do you really ''front the essential facts of life authentically''? Probably it is not even possible in our time of saturation. I can only try my best. Maybe writing is less inauthentic than the audience of a camera. But even then I am writing to be read, so again the ‘solitude’ is tainted by the inverse voyeurism. Go tell that to Thoreau and Heidegger and the Unabomber.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#753|75]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 198.</div>
+==== THE BEARD AND THE GUNS AND THE ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#763|76]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 191, 193.</div>
+'''LITTLE SHORT SENTENcES'''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#773|77]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306.</div>
+I went for a walk around yesterday to get to grips with the area in order to draw my first rough map. I had taken for granted that it would be easy to find something to eat, but after a few hours it started getting dark so I had to head back without finding anything (I did find a water source, though, a spring that is only a ten-minute walk from the hut but took me hours to find). It is difficult because I spent a lot of time singing to myself so that the bears would hear me coming and keep out of the way but that also scares away the food. When I got back I settled into the hut, arranged all my blankets on the cot, and got a little fire going in the fire grate.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#783|78]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 306.</div>
+I tried for about fifteen minutes, rubbing sticks together, then gave up and used the gas lighter, and cooked some instant noodles. I did feel kind of fraudulent with my lighter and my sachet of flavour, but if it is good enough for Hemingway then it is good enough for me. I sat and watched the noodles bubble, then I sat and watched them cool as I fed Stan’s map to the flames in the grate, watching it curl to cinder. With it gone a pressure released; like McCandless I am alone, it is again a wilderness to me, the places I had not seen yet still to be discovered. Like vaporising Voyager 1 out of the sky with a laser beam, zap!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#793|79]]. For a brief overview of this very complex history from an anti-Leninist perspective, see: Maurice Brinton, “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution,” in ''For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton'', ed. David Goodway (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 293–378; Iain McKay, “The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice,” in ''Bloodstained'', 61–117.</div>
+Today I tried again, but I headed out first thing in the morning to give myself plenty of time, thinking ''immaqa''. I was awake for most of the night anyway. I had not given any thought to how it would feel the first night and alone. There was too much sound to sleep, sound I could not place, the cabin being saggy with age. Mostly I stayed awake because I had a feeling like something was about to happen, or like it had happened and I had not yet put my finger on it. Like everything for a while had been hyperreal sets and stage props but now I was in real real-life, everything with a shining core. It was so bright I could not sleep for it. It was not danger and I would not say I was scared. Just very, very awake.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#803|80]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''392.</div>
+Tips for being not-scared at night:
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#813|81]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 388, 394. For details about Goldman and Berkman’s deportation, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''269–72, 291–302.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– Always sleep in tight corners facing outwards, towards the door</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#823|82]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 387.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– Fill a rubber hot-water bottle with boiling water and curl around it like it is a live, heat-giving companion</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#833|83]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 389.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– Hum songs to trick yourself into feeling calm</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#843|84]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 391.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– Think of the cabin as a living guardian, then its creaks and groans will comfort not unnerve you. It affords you shelter. It is your best friend</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#853|85]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 404. For other anarchist critiques of the Bolsheviks, see Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 103–36; Peter Arshinov, ''History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005); Voline, ''The Unknown Revolution, 1917–1921 ''(Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019).</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– If you hear an alarming noise, imagine it over and over again until it no longer alarms you</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#863|86]]. For example Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 4,'' Critique of Other Socialisms'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 154; Paul Thomas, ''Karl Marx and the Anarchists'' (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), 12, 16, 343–48; Vladimir Lenin, ''Collected Works'', vol. 10,'' ''ed. Andrew Rothstein (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978), 71–73; George Plechanoff, ''Anarchism and Socialism ''(Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912), 94–100.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.847cm;">– If you are still alarmed, try being just as alarming. Go outside and confront everything. Yell at it all. Send any wild animals scurrying into the night. Look at it a while, to convince yourself it is still and unthreatening</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#873|87]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 43'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 490–91.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">I went out as soon as the sun was up enough. I did not do any of the singing this time so that I could go in stealth. First thing I came across apart from the things that ran away before I could see them was a caribou. She was standing behind a tree just ahead of me and had not noticed me, but as soon as I saw her I stopped and must have drawn in breath or something because she looked right at me. She stood there looking at me and kind of puffing cold air out and looking nervous. I thought about shooting her and just living off her for the whole four weeks so that I only had the guilt of one soul on my conscience. But then she stepped forward slowly and her little baby stepped out from behind the tree after her and I was shaking so bad I do not think I would have hit her anyway. They both trotted away and the baby tripped a bit in panic and I had to sit down for a whole minute to stop the shaking.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#883|88]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 23'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988), 254–55.</div>
+After I had been out for a good five hours, although I could not really say because I don’t have a way of telling the time apart from on the laptop, and the sun moves at a pace I am still not accustomed to, I started feeling tired, hungry and irritable and began to carry the gun less half-heartedly so that I could just go ahead and shoot the next thing I saw. I wound myself up being all stealthy and peeking round the trees and jumping out, when I saw something dark move just ahead. I shot it before I even had time to worry.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#893|89]]. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Collected Works'', vol. 44'' ''(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989), 331.</div>
+I had not accounted for how loud the shot would be in the still air, how much the force would shock me backwards, how the jolt would hurt my shoulder. After the shot everything seemed to go really quiet, all the birds shut up as though they thought they might be next, and I ran over to where the thing was and got on my hands and knees by it. I was amazed to have even hit it because I had been knocked off balance by the force, and because I had only been half-truthing when I told Stan and the bus driver that I knew how to use it. It was very dead, which I was glad about, I did not want to see it half dead, twitching or whimpering.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#903|90]]. Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 155. See also Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy'', 171.</div>
+I had never killed a thing before and had made a pact with myself to be stoic about it, not to drop the gun and stare at my hands in horror, all ‘what have I done?’ But as much as I wanted to make it a point of pride ''not'' to cry, because a Mountain Man would not cry, certainly, I cry very easily so of course I burst into tears.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#913|91]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 28; ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'','' ''73–78; Peter Kropotkin, ''Rebel'', 39–43.</div>
+When you are a young child you cry for yourself, you cry for the attention of your parents. Growing up is feeling for the first time for the outside world, it is evolving out of your juvenile solipsism (if you are a girl anyway). I remember the moment it happened to me for the first time clearly. It was when the Columbia rocket blew to pieces over Texas on re-entry.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#923|92]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 238.</div>
+It was a really sunny afternoon in England. I was in the car, sat in the back behind Dad, so it must have been a weekend because I was school age. They announced it on the radio. The radio presenter’s voice was all choked up. I looked up at the bright blue sky, where there was an airplane making candyfloss trails, and I cried. They played David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ on the radio and I felt like I was mourning the Columbia rocket with the whole of the rest of humanity. I remember my dad’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. As I remember it he looked moved, misty-eyed, to see his young daughter cry for the first time at something so outside herself.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#933|93]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 226.</div>
+So girls as a very general demographic cry more. Maybe you can say this is weak. Or maybe you can say that it takes a lot of strength to admit you feel so much all of the bloody time. Like how our pain threshold is higher from tidal womb pain.
-[[#943|94]]. Bakunin, ''Political Philosophy'', 313.
+I recognised it from my fauna and flora book as a large snowshoe hare, its blood all stark on its side and in a little pool beside it. It was pale brown and looked paler in a different way, from its loss of animation. My impulse was to cover it with dirt and leave it be. It affected me greatly to think that the blood had been making its way to its heart moments before and now it was outside it, going sticky.
-[[#953|95]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 59.
+I felt myself shaking, like all my feelings had turned to energy, buzzing around my body instead of turning into something I could understand. It felt like that with no causal link. Before there was a brown hare and now there is this ''corporeal object''. The object is still and cold and looks like a hare, but different.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#963|96]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 22, 53, 225.</div>
+What is a thing? Is it a different thing without the essence that makes it what it is? Is an essence a soul? Before it was a hare and now it is a body and soon to be a piece of meat. This is why I have to do this thing that I am apparently going to find very disturbing. I need to know that I have it in me to live by acknowledging that I am living where living = not dead. And again for that intangible thing this authenticity, for the documentary.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#973|97]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism'', ed. G.P.'' ''Maximoff'' ''(New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964),'' ''313.</div>
+Back at Stan’s I shot a video of him skinning, and I have it to watch back on the laptop. He said something snide about it but I really do not see the problem. I have never known how to do it because I have never lived in a place where I have had to learn, and it annoyed me that he was being smug when I was trying to rectify this.
-[[#983|98]]. Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''341.
+The first thing to do (I will gladly be the oracle because I believe in communal knowledge) is to squeeze the animal’s bladder area, for obvious reasons. Then you make a little V shape at the top of the breast to get the knife under the skin, and you cut right down its belly. When this opens up all the bits are just there like you have unzipped a purse full of guts. I have only gutted fish before and it made me feel unusual. I was expecting lots of blood to spurt out and it all to be chaos and mess but it is not at all. You let a little blood out then it is neat, as if the hare was made just for you to eat it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#993|99]]. Quoted in T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 183.</div>
+When the belly is open you just pull the guts out by running two fingers from top to bottom, which is a very odd sensation, and I don’t think I will be able to get the smell off my fingers for days. Then you take off the legs and head; without a meat cleaver not as easy as Stan made it seem. After that you take off the skin, disconcertingly easy, just like pulling a tight sock off apart from a few places that have to be picked apart with the knife.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1003|100]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 20–21.</div>
+You are left with a naked, headless, pawless ''thing'', which then needs the remaining entrails taken out, including the duct the poo goes through, which made me feel kind of embarrassed for the hare. I did make a bit of a mess of things but still did well for a first time, I think. I cut it into three pieces, two to keep inside the Tupperware box covered in the salt I brought, and the other to boil tonight then take off the bone and eat with some form of vacuum-packed carbohydrate. I made a fire pit for the guts and set them on fire because that is how you make sure the bears do not smell them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1013|101]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''53, 52.</div>
+I had to stop myself from using up too much of the antibacterial hand rub to get rid of the death smell on my hands. I am going out to get some firewood and then I will cook and after some reading I will be very ready for bed, I am exhausted after not sleeping last night. I feel very resourceful. Like a bird must feel when it settles into its nest that it built with its own beak and claws. Birds must be capable of feelings of sorts. When a little bird settles down into its self-built nest and fluffs up its feathers and burrows into its own neck, it is the very image of immense satisfaction.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1023|102]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''53. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 310–11.</div>
+==== MORE SPACE WHERE NOBODY IS THAN WHERE ANYBODY IS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1033|103]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 167–68.</div>
+My plan is to make my map over four days. I already have my rough diagram but need to walk to each place to hone it and add finer details, like where is good for a lookout, or somewhere to maybe practise trapping. I want it to cover the area I am likely to use on a regular day so I will walk for half a day then turn back on myself. On day one I will head north, on day two east, and so on. I think I can walk about twenty miles in a very long day, so the map should cover approximately ten miles in radius from the hut at the centre.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1043|104]]. Quoted in Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 13.</div>
+Stan criticised Chris McCandless for the fact that he did not have an official map. If he had had an official map he would have seen that just downriver from where he could not make his crossing back to civilisation because of floodwater and subsequently ate the potato that killed him, there was a pulley system for transporting things and people across safely. But if Chris McCandless had had an official map, it would not have been his wilderness and he might as well have died anyway.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1053|105]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 535.</div>
+I am not in danger of that because I know exactly how to get back to the road to get the bus back to the visitors’ centre, and I also have radio contact if I want to turn the thing back on. It would not take them long to find the cabin if they needed to, because they know I was headed out without camping gear. I am conceptually isolated and alone, but in trouble I could radio Stan for help. Although I had thought about going further in and leaving the radio behind, finding somewhere else to sleep. With each day I feel a little more certain that Stan will try to rescue me. Actually I am thinking about it a lot.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1063|106]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 164. See also Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''144.</div>
+South of the hut the forest becomes dense and backs all the way to where the mountains start, in the south and arcing west. In the lower foothills the trees stop growing from the altitude, then just behind the mountains rise higher and are sooty black with stripes of white where the meagre snow is. Further behind still somewhere is Denali, the highest point in North America.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1073|107]]. Kropotkin, ''Modern Science'', 159.</div>
+Mount Denali was until very recently named Mount McKinley, and is still called that by some bitter Ohioans. It was called Denali from the Koyukon-Athabaskan ''Deenaalee'', which means ‘the high one’. The Russians, when they owned Alaska, called it ''Bolshaya Gora'', which means ‘big mountain’. Then an American gold prospector came along and called it ''McKinley'', which means ‘President William McKinley’, bequeathed in a curious naming ritual used by colonising white men whereby the conquered entity is named after the conqueror or an adulated public figure.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1083|108]]. Lucien van der Walt, “Anarchism and Marxism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun'' ''(Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017), 515. This distinction was first proposed in Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 123–24. It should be noted that, since its publication, Schmidt was revealed to be a racist.</div>
+The gold prospector called the mountain ''McKinley'' because William McKinley was a proponent of the gold standard and the prospector wanted to get one over on the silver miners, who wanted the president to be William Jennings Bryan, the proponent of the silver standard.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1093|109]]. Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 99.Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism</div>
+Then President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist called Leon Czolgosz because he was the ‘president of the money kings’ willing to exploit the poor to benefit the rich. So the name got officially etched into all of the maps in President William McKinley’s memory by the American government in 1917.
-== {{anchor|Chapter6InsurrectionistAnarc1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook9}} {{anchor|Chapter6InsurrectionistAnarc}} Chapter 6: Insurrectionist Anarchism ==
+Years and years and they will not stop arguing about it because for America Alaska is still very much in the process of construction. Alaskans want the name to be ''Denali'' from ''Deenaalee'', maybe mostly because they do not want to be out-Alaskaned by the Ohioans, who keep blocking the change because McKinley came from Ohio and they want their namesake on the biggest mountain in North America. In real life in Alaska people mostly just call it Denali. The Athabaskans never stopped calling it Deenaalee and maybe do not know what all the fuss is about, because they did not draw maps.
-Insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups that met to learn and discuss ideas, plan direct action, organize talks and countercultural activities—such as dances and picnics—produce or distribute anarchist literature, and engage in violent acts of revolt against the ruling classes and their institutions.[[#1Priortothecreationofthe|1]] The ultimate aim of these different methods of action was the same: to inspire or evoke a revolutionary upsurge by the working classes. In theory, anarchists advocating, praising, and engaging in violent attacks against the ruling classes and their institutions would provoke or inspire significant segments of the working classes to rise up, which would in turn motivate others to join them in insurrection. This would lead to a chain reaction of uprisings spawning an ever-increasing number of revolts until the working classes had formed a mass movement, forcefully expropriated the ruling classes and abolished capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#2MichaelSchmidtandvanderW|2]]
+In 2015 President Barack Obama officially finally changed the name to Denali to show honour, respect and gratitude to the Athabaskan-speaking people (as if naming is owning and he was giving it back). Donald Trump declared this ‘an insult to Ohio’ and vowed to change it back, so let’s see how long that lasts. Does an orca care if it gets shunted from one entire species to a separate species dependent on how it hunts (which is what Larus said may be the case)? Probably the Athabaskans just shrug and say you do what you want, we are going to just carry on calling it Deenaalee under your shouting chins. The orcas say yeah, whatever, we are just going to carry on swimming and flipping seals or not flipping seals.
-This strategy was advocated by Galleani. He held that “the way to revolution, whose initial phase must be the individual act of rebellion, inseparable from propaganda, from the mental preparation which understands it, integrates it, leading to larger and more frequent repetitions through which collective insurrections flow into the social revolution.”[[#3LuigiGalleaniTheEndofAn|3]] Although insurrectionist anarchists favored individual acts of rebellion, they also believed that the social revolution would be brought about by the working classes acting as a mass movement engaging in collective insurrections. Galleani endorsed “the direct and independent action of individuals and masses,” including “rebellion, insurrection, the general strike, the social revolution.”[[#4GalleaniEndofAnarchism3|4]] Cafiero thought that a social revolution would require “the violence of the insurgent masses.”[[#5CarloCafieroRevolutionEd|5]]
+The tundra is always in soliloquy. Mostly it whistles and sings, but now and then the wind will die down suddenly and in the utter silence and still it feels like you are on stage. As though you did not know there were curtains until they just suddenly opened. Then the cacophony of noise again like applause.
-The three main ideas that constituted insurrectionist anarchist strategy in this historical period were an opposition to formal organizations, a rejection of struggling for immediate reforms, and a commitment to propaganda of the deed. This chapter will establish what insurrectionists thought and how they used the theory of practice to justify or reject particular strategies. In particular, it will provide an overview of how the meaning of propaganda of the deed changed over time.
+From where the tundra and taiga meet you see right across to the east, but you do not see the road because it is too far. The sky was very blue and clouds dragged shadows over the tundra, dimming the glare of the lake.
-'''Opposition to Formal Organizations'''
+In the forest I worried about getting lost, but heading due south-west by the compass, towards the steeper foothills, I stayed on track fine. In this area the trees were dense. This route leads to a perfect fishing spot, where the stream is shallow enough to cross and brimming with fish. I headed further on past this in order to get to the foothills because I wanted to climb past the timberline to get a better look. The ground started to slope and the trees thinned so that I had a slight vantage, and I could see what I took to be a radio mast just a mile or so away in the east. I headed there instead for no reason other than that it intrigued me.
-Insurrectionist anarchists argued that anarchism as a movement should not be organized through large, formal organizations characterized by such things as having a constitution, elected delegates, yearly national congresses that passed congress resolutions, and an official membership. Insurrectionist anarchists were initially in favor of federations because anarchism as a movement developed within the federations of the First and Saint-Imier Internationals. Paul Brousse, for example, was one of the main theorists of propaganda of the deed but also participated in a French anarchist federation that was affiliated with the Saint-Imier International.[[#6DavidStaffordFromAnarchis|6]] Similarly, during the 1880s, Most advocated propaganda of the deed, rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and played a key role in the founding of the American national federation of the International Working People’s Association.[[#7TomGoyensBeerandRevoluti|7]]
+The radio mast is really a fire tower. The foliage around it is thick overhead, and after going back into the thicker trees I could not really get a view of it until I was almost directly underneath. There was a little clearing, and when I came into it the sudden view of the tower shocked me. A radio mast was benign in my mind but a watchtower reeked too much of people. It isn’t that I am hermitised already, just that I do not want to lose this game I am playing with myself so soon.
-From the late 1870s onward, a significant segment of insurrectionist anarchists, such as Cafiero, came to reject formal organizations for strategic reasons, while still advocating federations as a key component of the future anarchist society. Eventually what had been a matter of strategy was transformed into a matter of principle and insurrectionist anarchists came to hold that all formal organizations were fundamentally incompatible with anarchist values and goals. It is difficult to establish how many insurrectionist anarchists there were because, unlike trade unions, they did not keep records of their size.[[#8CafieroRevolution4142P|8]]
+I hid back in the trees, where I was sure I could not be seen from above, and hunkered down to watch for movement in the lookout at the top. In real-life terms, I was also concerned that a park warden might ask to see my permit. Stan gave a resident permit from lost property to me, which he advised me to leave in my hut on the days I went out; that way if anyone dropped by they would leave me be thinking I was ‘P. S. Aldridge’. He did not actually explain what I should do if I met a warden while I was out, he just told me that where I was going was so far away and off-trail I would not meet one at all.
-Despite the fact that some insurrectionist anarchists claimed to reject all organization, they were not against organization in the sense of people coming together to act collectively as a group. Insurrectionist anarchists themselves usually distinguished between ''free association'', which they supported, and ''organization'', by which they meant formal organization, which they opposed. The Italian anarchist Giuseppe Ciancabilla wrote in 1899 that “organization (not free agreement, nor free association, we mean) is absolutely anti-anarchist.”[[#9QuotedinKenyonZimmerImmi|9]] In 1925, Galleani advocated a society based on cooperation, mutual agreement between groups, and “''the autonomy of the individual within the freedom of association''.”[[#10GalleaniEndofAnarchism|10]] Yet he also thought that “organizationalists cannot find a form of organization compatible with their anarchist principles.”[[#11GalleaniEndofAnarchism|11]] For this reason he opposed “the political organization of the anarchist party,” by which he meant a specific anarchist organization, and “the organization of the craft and trade unions.”[[#12GalleaniEndofAnarchism|12]]
+I stayed still, hunkered and watching for a good ten minutes. The tower was rusted and wind-battered. As I watched it, it gradually changed its appearance, began to seem hollower as its potential to expose me withered. But then the fire-watcher could just be sat where I could not see them, reading or sleeping or watching for fires. I decided the only way to know was to yell up. I would yell like some kind of animal from inside the trees and see if anything changed.
-Critics of insurrectionist anarchism were likewise aware that they did not literally reject all organization. The Spanish anarchist Juan Serrano y Oteiza, who advocated formal organization and revolutionary trade unionism, wrote in 1885 that his opponents within the movement, “do not accept any organization except that of a group, and therefore they do not have organized trade sections, nor do they have local federations, district federations or federations of trade or trade unions. . . . Their only and exclusive form of organization are the groups or circles of social studies among which there has not been established any pact or constituted any commission which can serve as a center of relations between the respective collective bodies that pursue the same ends.”[[#13QuotedinGeorgeRichardEse|13]] Several years later in 1890, Malatesta noted that antiorganizationalist anarchists “rack their brains to come up with names to take the place of organization, but in actual fact they quite sheepishly engage in organization or attempts at organization.”[[#14MalatestaTheMethodofFre|14]]
+I yelled stupidly. Only crows noticed, lifting off from the tops of the trees and cawing at me because they were annoyed at themselves for startling so easily. Then I felt less stupid. Nobody came to the window.
-Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organizations for two main reasons. First, they held that it made it too easy for the state to infiltrate, persecute, and surveil the anarchist movement. In 1874, a group of influential Italian anarchists argued that the wave of state repression that the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International had experienced was a product of how they had primarily organized within a formal public federation. This had enabled “bourgeois troublemakers and spies” to infiltrate the movement and provide the government with information such that they could track the activities of anarchists and repress them at “the opportune moment.”[[#15QuotedinNunzioPerniconea|15]]
+At the base of the tower, with my foot on the ladder, I shouted up again just to make sure. This time, in a human voice, I asked hello? Nothing. The steps were made of sheet metal, like the steps to a lifeguard’s chair, and were rickety. They wound around the four legs of the tower in an angular spiral.
-From late 1878 onward, the amount of state repression that Italian anarchists faced massively expanded. This occurred due to the Italian ruling classes using an unsuccessful republican assassination attempt against King Umberto I of Italy as an opportunity to destroy the International once and for all.[[#16PerniconeandOttanelliAss|16]] In 1879, Cafiero responded to these events by arguing that anarchists should establish “''secret and firm bonds'' between all of us” because formal organizations “display all our forces to the public, i.e., to the police” and so reveal “how and where to strike us.”[[#17QuotedinNunzioPernicone|17]]
+Towards the top the tower groaned against the slow wind. I came into the lookout through a trapdoor. The floor was coated with a coarse gristly dust, prints left where it came away on my hands. Apart from my marks it was print-less. Nobody had been up there for a very long time. I clambered inside and crawled to sit with my back to a wall.
-One year later, the Italian state issued the killing blow to the International in Italy when the high court ruled that any internationalist organization composed of five or more people was an association of malefactors. This enabled the Italian state to arrest and imprison anarchists simply for being anarchists, even if they had not planned or engaged in any illegal actions. At the same time, numerous anarchists were subject to searches of their home, suppression of newspapers, dissolution of groups, extreme limitations on their freedom of association and movement, and deportation to, and forcible confinement on, desolate islands near Sicily and southern Italy.[[#18PerniconeandOttanelliAss|18]] It was within this context of state repression that the Italian anarchist paper ''La Gazetta Operaia'' wrote in July 1887 that “experience teaches that a vast association of a revolutionary character easily offers its flank to the police, therefore to persecution. . . . United and fighting all together under the impetus of a vast association we run the risk of being crushed with a single blow by adversaries stronger than us.”[[#19QuotedinPerniconeItalian|19]]
+There was nothing inside and the glass in the windows was grimy. I looked around for a sign for when there was last a person in there. The dust was felt-like on the floor. Light came up through the boards, rendering all my movements gold-dusty and ethereal.
-The second reason why insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization was that, from their perspective, formal organizations made people unfree and inhibited their membership’s ability to act and take initiative.[[#20DavideTurcatoMakingSense|20]] This entailed that formal organizations were incompatible with the unity of means and ends, since they failed to produce the self-determining individuals needed for a successful social revolution and the production and reproduction of an anarchist society. This hostile attitude toward formal organization partly stemmed from the negative experiences anarchists had within the First International due to the actions of the General Council.[[#21DavidBerryAHistoryofth|21]]
+I had the thought to maybe check the walls for some kind of graffiti. I imagine they turn up all over the place in spaces like this. There were two; they read:
-Formal organizations were above all thought to mirror the organizational form of the state. In February 1887, the Italian anarchist paper ''Humanitas'' labeled formal organizations “a state in miniature” and argued that they destroyed “the spirit of initiative in individuals, who expect everything from this organization.”[[#22QuotedinPerniconeItalian|22]] In 1925, Galleani similarly claimed that any formal organization “has its programme; i.e., its constitutional charter: in assemblies of group representatives it has its parliament: in its management, its boards and executive committees, it has its government. In short, it is a graduated superstructure of bodies a true hierarchy, no matter how disguised.”[[#23GalleaniEndofAnarchism|23]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">''Johnston Wills, 1952''</div>
-According to Galleani, constitutions forced the formal organization to follow a particular set of procedures, rather than what was appropriate or necessary given ongoing events and the nature of the present struggle. Formal avenues for decision-making and action, such as congresses, filtered out original ideas and reaffirmed the orthodoxy of the organization. When workers wanted to take action themselves and implement their own ideas, they were instead instructed to go through the appropriate committee or were informed that a committee had already been set up to handle this task and would take care of matters. Even federations based on delegates were critiqued for leading to a situation in which representatives and those higher up in the organization made decisions that the wider membership accepted out of discipline, regardless of their own opinions and interests. In each case, the organization would take on a life of its own and control its membership.[[#24GalleaniEndofAnarchism|24]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">''P Harris, 1999''</div>
-Galleani rejected the idea that delegates could represent others, even if they had been elected and mandated. This was because “every delegate . . . could represent only his own ideas and feelings, not those of his constituents, which are infinitely variable on any subject.”[[#25GalleaniEndofAnarchism|25]] He thought it was impossible to “anarchically delegate to another person one’s own thought, one’s own energy, one’s own will.”[[#26QuotedinSentaGalleani1|26]] Galleani also rejected congress resolutions on the grounds that they subordinated the minority to the majority and thereby made people unfree. For Galleani, congresses were only useful and consistent with anarchism if they were just meetings that provided an occasion for individual militants to meet, share ideas, and work together.[[#27SentaGalleani126Formal|27]]
+If I had not found them I could have been the first person to set foot in there since whenever I wanted to imagine. Maybe not objectively, but that would not have mattered. Like how a scientific discovery is a discovery until a new discovery is made that refutes the original one, like how Denali stays Deenaalee to the isolated Athabaskans, who choose not to read maps. Really in this way no one ever discovers anything, they only invent things (we invented nuclear bombs but we say we discovered them because that sounds less evil). I could have invented this place as an unpeopled wilderness for myself. I sat down cross-legged and looked at them and wondered if maybe P Harris had thought the same. Maybe he wrote his name in defiance: ''you can’t have this place all to yourself, Johnston Wills''.
-As an alternative to large formal organizations, insurrectionist anarchists advocated the formation of small, loosely organized groups. These affinity groups, which were also called circles or clubs, were either more or less permanent cells or were formed for a specific task and dissolved once it was complete. They typically had a membership of between four and twenty members and were given a wide variety of different names, such as Germinal (in honor of Émile Zola’s novel), The Termites Libertarian Circle, The Barricade Group, The Right to be Idle Group, and the Revolutionary Propaganda Circle.[[#28AndrewDouglasHoytAndTh|28]] An 1885 article in ''Le Révolté'' claimed that “we do not believe in long-term associations, federations, etc. For us, a group should come together only for a clearly defined objective or short-term action; once the action is accomplished, the group should reform on a new basis, either with the same elements, or with new ones.”[[#29QuotedinBerryFrenchAnar|29]]
+Then I remembered the rock in the Greenlandic tundra that stood to hold me and Urla and Naaja until enough rain, time and rock plants had eroded our names. I wondered what they were both doing right then. If Urla had really thought Larus and I were close in the wrong way, if he let her think that, if she hated me.
-Thus, anarchist affinity groups were viewed as superior to formal organizations because the fact that they were loosely structured and composed of a small group of people, who knew and trusted one another, meant that they simultaneously enabled freedom of initiative while also being more effective at avoiding infiltration, persecution, and state surveillance. If an affinity group was infiltrated or repressed by the state then, given its small size, the damage to the anarchist movement was less severe than when the same occurred to a large federation.[[#30CarloCafieroTheOrganisa|30]] In 1890, Jean Grave argued in ''La Révolte'' that affinity groups accustom “individuals to bestir themselves, to act, without being bogged down in routine and immobility, thereby preparing the groupings of the society to come, by forcing individuals to act for themselves, to seek out one another on the basis of their inclinations, their affinities.”[[#31QuotedinAlexandreSkirda|31]] Affinity groups were, in other words, thought to prefigure the social relations of an anarchist society and so were constituted by forms of practice that developed individuals with the right kinds of radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for achieving anarchist goals.
+If I came back with supplies I could camp out in the tower for a few days. I did not want to cook any food and use the portable propane so soon, so I would have to bring it already cooked and cold. I only have one kind of container for bringing it so I could do maybe two nights if I filled the tub, before I got hungry again. I was brain tired, and my legs ached, and it felt safe to be so high up off the ground, rocking gently, a bird in a tree. I thought of all the canopy creatures; bees in hives, pine martens in tree hollows, porcupine sat in branches, everyone safely elevated from the prowlers, a hovering biome. I felt a comfort like fellowship, and decided to stay put until the morning.
-This is not to say that insurrectionist anarchists thought that only small groups of people should engage in actions. Massive crowds containing numerous small affinity groups could, for example, riot without belonging to a formal organization. Large groups of people who were participating in an uprising could quickly form mass general assemblies in order to make agreements about what to do next. They could do so without establishing a federation, electing an administrative committee, or passing binding congress resolutions. Nor is it the case that affinity groups were completely isolated entities. Insurrectionist anarchists sought to achieve coordination between different groups via informal social networks, which were usually centered around specific periodicals, rather than through the establishment of a formal federation. This can be seen in the history of the paper ''Cronaca Sovversiva'', which was edited by Galleani and based in the United States. It not only spread anarchist ideas and instilled a sense of anarchist identity in its readership, but also connected anarchist groups by publishing their correspondence and announcements in a single place that they all read. This facilitated both the exchange of information and enabled groups to engage in dialogue with one another and make collective decisions.[[#32HoytAndTheyCalledThem|32]]
+==== HEROES FOR A GIRL SCOUT ====
-Some insurrectionist anarchists were so committed to their rejection of formal organizations that they viewed those who advocated them as betraying the core principles of anarchism. This resulted in a great deal of polemical debate that could sometimes even turn violent. In September 1899, the antiorganizationalist anarchist barber Domenico Pazzaglia shot Malatesta in the leg during a meeting at a saloon in West Hoboken, New Jersey, due to Malatesta’s advocacy of formal organizations. He responded in a truly anarchist fashion by refusing to tell the police who had shot him.[[#33ZimmerImmigrants60Pern|33]]
+In my dream I am sat at the bottom of the mighty Mekong river talking to a giant catfish, who tells me he is one hundred years old. His eyes and scales are the same dirt-brown as the river, like over time the dirt that settled on him crawled underneath his skin and became his skin. His voice sounds like bubbling custard. All the dead men that fell in the water in the Vietnam War had sheened themselves with DDT to keep mosquitoes away. Agent Orange collected in the waters and the soil and the bodies of the living things.
-'''Rejection of Struggling for Reforms'''
+The bodies got eaten by the little fish, bigger fish ate the little fish, the catfish ate the bigger fish, all the DDT and Agent Orange from all their livers built up and up in the liver of the catfish. Now the catfish is poison. A hook and line plop and sink into the brown river to where I sit with the catfish. He takes the hook in his crêpe-like fin and pops it through his blubbery lip. Above, a little Vietnamese boy reels in his dinner.
-Insurrectionist anarchism opposed the strategy of struggling for immediate reforms in the present. As the paper ''L’Insurrezione'' argued in 1881, “anything that facilitates and brings the time of the insurrection nearer, is good; all that keeps it away through maintaining the appearance of progress, is bad. This is the principle that guides us.”[[#34QuotedinDiPaolaKnights|34]] This rejection of struggling for immediate reforms included not only parliamentary politics, which all anarchists rejected, but also participating within trade unions in order to struggle for higher wages, shorter working days, and improved working conditions. Those insurrectionists who did advocate participating within trade unions did so only when they thought it was a good opportunity to undermine the trade union bureaucracy, spread anarchist ideas, develop the spirit of revolt, and persuade workers that their involvement in the trade union was futile and would not achieve their emancipation. This included the organization of wildcat strikes that were not approved or supported by the trade union’s leadership.[[#35GalleaniEndofAnarchism|35]]
+I was sleeping deeply and was jerked quite suddenly awake by a strange, long noise. A bell. I shook all over and my teeth clanked from panic. I imagined looking over the spruces like a crow sees them, stretching on and on, an unbroken sea of green and dark shadows. And then the tower.
-Insurrectionist anarchists rejected struggling for immediate reforms for three main reasons. First, they held that reforms did not challenge, but rather rested upon, the ongoing existence of dominant institutions. Social movements that aim to win reforms will therefore end up consenting to and reproducing the existing economic and political system, rather than overthrowing it. They may start out as revolutionary, but the practice of struggling for reforms will, over time, cause radical capacities, drives and, consciousness to decay and be replaced by ones compatible with dominant structures. Reforms that are initially viewed as only a means or stepping stone to revolution will, over time, be transformed into the actual end goals of a movement’s activity. For insurrectionist anarchists, this process of revolutionary movements being weakened by the struggle for reforms could be clearly seen in socialist political parties that became less and less radical over time in order to gain votes and pass reformist laws through political alliances with bourgeois parties.[[#36GalleaniEndofAnarchism|36]]
+A bell needed somebody to ring it. From a vantage of anywhere over the forest, from the ridge or the semicircle of higher ground from the north, you need not be a crow. Had I lit the tower up like a beacon when I used the torch? Somebody had rung a bell.
-Second, they thought that the ruling classes only conceded reforms to the working classes in order to calm popular discontent. Although reforms might improve people’s lives in the short term, they also stabilized class society and thereby perpetuated the suffering and oppression of the working classes. This is because the achievement of reforms can alter the consciousness of workers such that they come to mistakenly believe that the ruling classes are benevolent, view the state as a servant of the people, and put their hopes in politicians and the law. Reforms could, in short, have the dangerous effect of causing workers to desire a better and more humane master, rather than no master at all. According to Galleani, “reforms” are “the ballast the bourgeoisie throws overboard to lighten its old boat in the hope of saving the sad cargo of its privileges from sinking in the revolutionary storm.”[[#37GalleaniEndofAnarchism|37]] Given this, reforms should be seen as the byproducts of threats to ruling class power that are granted when “attacks against the existing social institutions become more forceful and violent,” rather than being the main immediate goal of political and economic struggle.[[#38GalleaniEndofAnarchism|38]]
+I sat up when it came again, peeling away on the wind. It sounded distorted this time. Then right away, it came again. Only this time it sounded nothing like I thought it at all. It was unmistakable: a mournful warble as timeless and familiar as the pentatonic scale.
-Third, insurrectionists tended to subscribe to the iron law of wages, which had been advocated by the political economist David Ricardo and later popularized among socialists by Ferdinand Lassalle, who was one of the main founders of what would become German social democracy. The concept claimed that real wages under capitalism would always tend toward the amount of money required to secure the subsistence of the worker. For Ricardo and Lassalle, this was related to population growth: an expansion of the supply of labor would lead to a decrease in wages, and living costs would increase due to larger families.[[#39GDHColeAHistoryof|39]] The insurrectionist anarchists, in contrast, focused on the idea that any increase in wages that workers won through struggle would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living as capitalists and landlords charged more for basic necessities such as food and rent. If this were true, then fighting to win higher wages was futile, a waste of time and energy, since any wage increase would not last.[[#40GalleaniEndofAnarchism|40]]
+I grabbed the camera and scrambled to open up the window and look down into the dimly visible clearing. It was empty but the wolves were near. The howl had come so clear, and besides I could feel them. The forest was heavy with anticipation, the spires of the evergreens whispering like a crowd as the lights dim.
-In place of struggles for immediate reforms, insurrectionist anarchists advocated immediate violent confrontation with dominant institutions. Galleani argued that “tactics of corrosion and continuous attack should be preferred . . . immediate attempts at partial expropriation, individual rebellion and insurrection” or strikes that adopt “an openly revolutionary character” and seek, “through the inevitable use of force and violence, the unconditional surrender of the ''ruling'' classes.”[[#41GalleaniEndofAnarchism|41]] Insurrectionist anarchists held that, instead of waiting for the revolution to happen, it would be better to “start the revolution inside oneself and realize it according to the best of our abilities in partial experiments, wherever such an opportunity arises, and whenever a bold group of our comrades have the conviction and courage to try.”[[#42GalleaniEndofAnarchism|42]] These tactics were thought to “exert the most spirited influence over the masses” and would therefore inspire the working classes to rise up.[[#43GalleaniEndofAnarchism|43]]
+The howl came again, and it went right through me, could have been in the tower. It made my whole body shudder in a way that made me grin; a tingle of pseudo-fear like looking down from an airplane. My hackles raised of their own accord. Into the clearing came a dark shape, one, two, three, and then a white one, then one more black. They fanned around the base of the tower with their noses to the ground. I could hear an excited kind of whimpering.
-'''Propaganda of the Deed'''
+Wolves are an animal I can trust. Their packs are hierarchical, but they are spearheaded by a male and female breeding pair, who rule together in equality. Wolf Wives are absent from ''The Call of the Wild''. Two she-dogs are friendly so get killed, and the only strong female sled dog – Dolly – goes mad and has her head smashed in. Mercedes, the sole female human character in the book, spends her cameo crying and complaining. This has left a lasting impression on men-who-think-like-dogs like Stan.
-If revolutions were, as an article in ''La Révolte'' stated in 1890, “the product of a spontaneous explosion of the masses’ discontent and anger,” then the role of revolutionaries was to ignite this anger.[[#44QuotedinBerryFrenchAnar|44]] Propaganda of the deed was one of the primary means through which insurrectionist anarchists attempted to spread the spirit of revolt and thereby contribute toward the emergence of a social revolution. Historians of terrorism frequently make the mistake of equating the entire idea of propaganda of the deed with the kinds of high-profile assassination or bombings carried out by anarchists at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.[[#45ForexampleDavidCRapopo|45]] The idea of propaganda of the deed did not, however, always refer to the advocacy and practice of individuals attempting to murder the ruling classes in the name of revolution. It underwent a process of development over three decades of theory and practice.
+For a moment of delicious fear I toyed with the vision of the wolves staying put and waiting for me. Sitting on their haunches and looking up at the tower with hungry eyes.
-What would come to be called “propaganda of the deed” started out as the view that anarchist ideas could and should be spread through actions, rather than only through written or spoken propaganda. Propaganda of the deed proceeded to undergo two main phases of development. During its first phase, between 1870 and 1880, it largely referred to the practice of anarchists collectively attempting to launch armed insurrections in order to spread their ideas and provoke a popular uprising. This went alongside the view that other forms of collective direct action, such as combative demonstrations, were an effective means of popularizing anarchist ideas and gaining support for the anarchist movement. During its second phase, which lasted roughly from the 1880s to the early 1900s, it transformed into the idea that individual acts of violence, such as assassinating heads of state or bombing crowded opera houses frequented by the wealthy, were a legitimate form of working-class vengeance that would weaken the ruling classes and inspire the working classes to rebel.[[#46PaulAvrichAnarchistPortr|46]] Both notions of propaganda of the deed shared the idea that revolutionary action by an anarchist minority could successfully spread anarchist ideas and spark a chain of events that would culminate in a social revolution. Where they differed was the kind of action advocated and performed.[[#47Therearesomeusagesofthe|47]]
+But they did not look up. One of them cocked his leg to the tower then yelped, and they filed away quickly into the trees with such a purpose I knew I would not see them again that night.
-''Propaganda of the Deed: First Phase''
+==== THE TIMESCALES OF HUMMINGBIRDS ====
-The 1870s began with a series of unsuccessful insurrections. In September 1870, Bakunin and his associates launched a quickly defeated insurrection in Lyon. On the September 26, they issued a program, adopted by a crowd of six thousand, declaring the abolition of the state and the establishment of revolutionary committees for each commune, which were subject to the direct supervision of the people. When they attempted to implement this program two days later, they succeeded in storming the city hall and issuing a variety of decrees only to be forced to flee by late afternoon when municipal authorities called in the army. This was soon followed by an equally unsuccessful second insurrection in Lyon on April 30, 1871, the rapid rise and bloody fall of the Marseille Commune between March 23 and April 4, and the Paris Commune between March 18 and May 28.[[#48AvrichAnarchistPortraits|48]] During the violent repression of the Paris Commune, at least seventeen thousand people were, according to the official government report, executed for having risen up against the ruling classes. Anarchists, in comparison, believed that between thirty and thirty-six thousand people had been slaughtered.[[#49JohnMerrimanMassacreThe|49]] The Spanish cantonalist rebellion of July 1873, in which anarchists participated, suffered a similarly violent defeat.[[#50EsenweinAnarchistIdeology|50]]
+When I returned to the cabin I was glad to find everything as I left it. My permit was in the exact same place on the desk, so I am pretty sure nobody came by. I will go back to camp in the tower at some other point but I need some proper food and my mosquito net. Stan was smug when he added it to my list and I had thought it an arbitrary appendage to make him feel like he had had one on me. I have to give him credit now as actually I would have been fucked without it. In the tower so high up they were not so bad, but in the cabin and outside on evenings they come in swarms. I can slap my arm and kill four at one time. I feel a little bad doing this because I know that only female mosquitoes bite and they have to do it to get enough iron and protein to make their eggs. They are only trying to feed their babies, just like everything is trying to feed its babies.
-It was within this context of armed conflict with the ruling classes that the idea of propaganda of the deed arose and gained prominence. In 1870, Bakunin remarked that revolutionaries “must now embark on stormy revolutionary seas and . . . spread our principles, not with words ''but with deeds, for this is the most popular, the most potent, and the most irresistible form of propaganda''.”[[#51BakuninBakuninonAnarchis|51]] The aim of these deeds was to inspire the masses through revolutionary acts.''' '''In advocating this strategy, Bakunin does not appear to have been arguing that assassinations were an effective means of changing society. In 1866, he had responded to Dmitry Karakozov’s attempt to assassinate the Tsar by writing that “no good can come of regicide in Russia for it would arouse a reaction favorable to the Tsar.”[[#52MichaelBakuninSelectedWr|52]] For Bakunin it was a mistake to think that “the Gordian knot can be cut with one stroke.”[[#53BakuninSelectedWritings|53]]
+I decided to try fishing as I figured it would affect me a lot less than shooting a thing dead. I had bought some fishing line and hooks in Fairbanks, and for the rest I found a sturdy stick as my rod and tied the line to the end, where it splayed, so I could attach it around the adjoining part to make it more secure. I made the line long enough so that I could yank it out the water fast, but with no reel I can only use it in relatively shallow water.
-On July 8, 1873, the French anarchist Paul Brousse, who would later become a state socialist, responded to the ongoing cantonalist rebellion by writing an article for the Barcelona paper ''La Solidarité Révolutionnaire''.[[#54StaffordFromAnarchismto|54]] In it, he declared that “revolutionary propaganda is . . . above all made in the open, in the midst of the piled-up paving stones of the barricades, on days when the exasperated people make war on the mercenary forces of reaction.”[[#55QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|55]] This view, as he would later write in the August 1877 edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'', rested on the idea of grabbing “people’s attention, of showing them what they cannot read, of teaching them socialism by means of actions and making them see, feel, touch. . . . Propaganda by the deed is a mighty means of rousing the popular consciousness.”[[#56PaulBroussePropagandaby|56]] An insurrection that established a socialist commune would have to defend itself but even if it was defeated, like the recent insurrections of the early 1870s, this would not matter in the long run since “the idea will have been launched, not on paper, not in a newspaper, not on a chart” but in the real political practices of the working classes; it would thus “march, in flesh and blood, at the head of the people.”[[#57PaulBroussePropagandaby|57]]
+I was stumped for a float until I remembered a redundant tampon at the bottom of my bag that I’d brought just in case I lost my Mooncup. It was still sealed with all the air in so it worked a dream. I attached this to the middle of the line before tying the hook to the end with a little ribbon of foil from a noodle packet just above it to act as the little fish-attracter thing. Then I upturned a log and collected myself some grubs and worms for bait in a rusty tin can.
-Brousse’s insistence on propaganda through insurrection partly developed out of being radicalized by the Paris Commune of 1871. The Paris Commune had, Brousse argued, done more to spread revolutionary ideas in two months of fighting than twenty-three years of traditional written propaganda. This was because, while a person must find, buy, and read a book or newspaper in order to be radicalized by it, an armed insurrection rapidly gains the attention of large numbers of people, including those who cannot read, and puts them in a position where they must take a side in the ongoing struggle.[[#58CahmKropotkin7778|58]] This was not mere speculation on Brousse’s part. In Italy, a large number of revolutionaries were driven to socialism by news of the Paris Commune, including future prominent anarchists such as Malatesta, Cafiero, and Costa.[[#59PerniconeItalianAnarchism|59]]
+I found salmonberries (they look a little like raspberries, more seedy and juicy) and harvested as many as I could carry inside a clean sock. Along the way I managed to find lots of dandelion leaves that I washed in a stream and nibbled. There was also a plant I came across that looked like the plant the pamphlet called ''goosetongue'', but it warned that it also looks like ''arrowgrass'', which is poisonous. I have learned enough from Chris McCandless to know that eating anything I was not sure of would be a no-no, but it felt wholesome to be learning the things by their names just to look at and touch, their tactile truth.
-Brousse was not alone in holding that insurrections that establish communes have a powerful transformative effect on popular consciousness. Bakunin had himself made a similar point in his unsent 1872 letter to the editors of ''La Liberté'', which was not published until 1910. He wrote in response to the Paris Commune that,
+Although to be fair to McCandless it does not seem he confused a lethal plant for another, it was just his own fauna and flora book did not tell him that this certain potato he was always eating actually contained lethal toxins. It was a taxonomical failing and not ignorance that killed him, as I said to Stan.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">What makes that revolution important is not really the weak experiments which it had the power and time to make, it is the ideas it has set in motion, the living light it has cast on the true nature and goal of revolution, the hopes it has raised, and the powerful stir it has produced among the popular masses everywhere, and especially in Italy, where the popular awakening dates from that insurrection, whose main feature was the revolt of the Commune and the workers’ associations against the State.[[#60BakuninSelectedWritings|60]]</div>
+The course of the stream widens out where another joins it. The water runs clear and shallow; underneath it you can see the shadows of the fish holding themselves against the current. They hold then dart away suddenly for reasons kept from you by the mirage-making surface. I watched one fish that seemed to enjoy holding itself against the exact point where the two waters met and did not move from this meditative state for a whole fifteen minutes. Do fish feel meditative? Without awareness, just some primitive state of tranquillity?
-Cafiero shared this evaluation. In an unpublished chapter of his 1881 ''Revolution'','' ''he wrote that ''“''the events of the Commune implanted militant socialism in every civilized land, and the long-awaited distant goal of the propagandist was reached in an instant by the brilliant flash of events.”[[#61CafieroRevolution63The|61]] Two years later, Kropotkin said, during his court speech while on trial in Lyon, that, after the defeat of the Paris Commune, “socialism drew new life from the blood of its followers. Its ideas about property have been given an enormous circulation.”[[#62KropotkinDirectStruggle|62]]
+I set up the rod to dip into the water where shadow from the trees hung over. The forest was awake to me and gave its alarm call. I made sure the rod was wedged into the ground firmly and rested my leg against it so I could feel any movement. It is like all my senses are intensified, sounds are so loud they make me jumpy and my body reacts nervously to the slightest movement. I feel like an acrobat, every body part accountable for something.
-Nor was Brousse alone in holding that anarchists should, given the powerful propaganda effect of the Paris Commune, work toward the social revolution by launching insurrections that establish new communes. In an August 11, 1877, article in ''L’Avant-Garde'', Kropotkin reacted to the recent violently crushed railway strikes in the United States by proposing that the strikes would have gone differently if there had been anarchists present who had sought to transform the strikes into insurrections that established communes and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. Even if these proposed communes had been defeated they would have, like the Paris Commune before them, served as “an immensely resounding act of propaganda for socialism.”[[#63QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|63]] In 1879, Kropotkin argued for this strategy again by insisting that attempts at social revolution must perform “the deed of expropriation” because it is “the most powerful way of propagating the idea” among the general populace and thereby motivating other workers to join the emerging social revolution and expropriate their local economic ruling classes.[[#64KropotkinDirectStruggle|64]]
+After not too much time the birds took up their usual quarrels with each other and ignored me, and the sound came thick from the trees. For some time I lay on my side with my ear to the cool, damp ground. I could feel how far down the layers of earth went below me like vertigo, with soil and crust and mantle, lithosphere and asthenosphere, all the way down to the fiery nut of the earth. I could almost hear it, a mellow, churning grumble.
-Within the historical context of the rise and subsequent violent defeat of the 1848 revolutions, the Paris Commune of 1871, and the Spanish cantonalist rebellion of 1873, anarchists thought that they were riding a revolutionary wave and that the social revolution was imminent. In 1883, while on trial in Lyon, Kropotkin declared to the court that “the social revolution is near. It will break out within ten years.”[[#65KropotkinDirectStruggle|65]] This was not a uniquely anarchist perspective. Engels also predicted that a revolution was imminent numerous times during the 1880s and 1890s.[[#66GaryPSteensonAfterMarx|66]] Reflecting on this period in 1904, Kropotkin wrote that “revolutionaries and moderates agreed then in predicting that the bourgeois regime, shaken by the revolution of 1848 and the Commune of Paris, could not long resist the attack of the European proletariat. Before the end of the century the collapse would come.”[[#67KropotkinDirectStruggle|67]]
+You can’t feel that in a built-up place. In a built-up place the ground is thick with artificiality. In a place that has been built and rebuilt many times over, old towns fallen, redeveloped, retarmacked, returfed, that turf in ready cylinders like grass-and-soil Swiss rolls rolled out, plastered new again and again; it feels too structured to feel dizzying. This is a part of the reason I like my lime quarry so much. All its layers. At the lime quarry the earth is bare and cut open like a quiche and inside the quarry you can feel closer to the heart of the earth, like touching the pit of someone else’s scar.
-If the revolution was near, then, as Costa wrote in January 1874 (with Bakunin’s approval), “the time for peaceful propaganda has passed, it must be replaced by resounding—solemn propaganda of insurrection and barricades.”[[#68QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|68]] These words were written in the journal of the Italian Committee for Social Revolution (CIRS), a secret association whose membership included key Italian anarchists such as Cafiero, Costa, and Malatesta. The group sought to put theory into practice by launching multiple insurrections simultaneously across Italy, which had recently experienced a wave of strikes, demonstrations, and riots in response to high food prices and unemployment. This strategy was opposed by the majority of delegates of the Saint-Imier International at a meeting on March 18, 1874, on the grounds that socialism was not yet popular enough in Italy for armed insurrections to be launched. Despite lacking international support, the Italian federation nonetheless decided to proceed with its plan. The result was total failure.[[#69PerniconeItalianAnarchism|69]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0180-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-None of the insurrections attempted on August 7 and 8, 1874, went as the Italian anarchists had hoped. The people did not rise up in response to CIRS’ calls for revolution, which they had announced in a bulletin that had been posted to the walls of various cities. The thousands of revolutionaries that were expected to form armed bands did not turn up. Instead only several hundred assembled, with a mere five turning up to join Malatesta’s insurrection in Puglia on the night of August 11. In response, the anarchist militants either quickly disbanded or were soon arrested. Other anarchists were arrested before they could even assemble due to police spies sharing the anarchists’ plans with the authorities. Bakunin was forced to shave his beard and escape to Switzerland disguised as a priest.[[#70PerniconeItalianAnarchism|70]]
+The tundra is so big and open that animals are exposed everywhere, so they keep one eye on me warily, but go about doing their thing as I walk on past. How crawling with life the rough grasses are. Hares rush around and stand sentry, ground squirrels run in little bursts, stopping to gather fruits and buds in their cheeks. A weasel slinks through the grass after the voles, so frantic to gather food for the winter that they let their guard down. Summers are so short that everything is fighting against time to prepare, the predation of winter overshadowing that of everything else.
-The insurrections of August 1874 were viewed by Costa, one of the main organizers, as an attempt at propaganda of the deed. In his 1890 memoir, Costa wrote that “the occasion had come if not to provoke the social revolution in Italy, at least to give a practical example that would demonstrate to the people what we wanted and to propagate our ideas with evidence of deeds.”[[#71QuotedinPerniconeItalian|71]] Despite the failure of 1874, the Italian Federation of the Saint-Imier International officially adopted propaganda of the deed as a strategy during its congress of October 1876. This was done because, as Cafiero and Malatesta explained in a letter published in the December edition of the ''Bulletin of the Jura Federation'', “the Italian Federation holds that the ''act of insurrection'', designed to assert socialist principles through deeds, is the most effective method of propaganda and the only one that, without deceiving and corrupting the masses, can delve into the deepest strata of society and draw the cream of humanity into the struggle, backed by the International.”[[#72MalatestaMethodofFreedom|72]]
+In Britain we used to have wolves and bears and lynx and bison and even elephants and rhinos a long time ago, but we are such a tiny island that we quickly killed them all and became kings of our little kingdom. Accounts for some of our colonial hubris?
-In advocating propaganda through the deed of armed insurrection, Italian anarchists were not advocating something new to Italian politics. The strategy had a prior history in the theory and practice of revolutionary Italian republicanism, which much of the Italian anarchist movement had developed out of.[[#73Theunsuccessfulinsurrectio|73]] Giuseppe Mazzini and his associates had sought to create a unified Italian republic through a strategy of armed bands of revolutionaries engaging in guerrilla warfare and attempting to “rouse the nation into insurrection.”[[#74GiuseppeMazziniACosmopol|74]] This can be seen in Mazzini’s hope that a defeated 1853 insurrection in Milan would have been “the kindling of a universal fire throughout Italy” if it had lasted twenty-four hours.[[#75QuotedinDenisMackSmith|75]] Malatesta later claimed, in 1897, that the early anarchist movement in Italy had believed in, “the youthful illusion (which we inherited from Mazzinianism) of imminent revolution achievable through the efforts of the few without due preparation in the masses.”[[#76MalatestaPatientWork336|76]]
+The tundra is specked with water where the frost melts. The permafrost lies underground, starving the drier parts. Lusher grass surrounds waterholes, and elsewhere the grass is hardy and coarse and shrubs are dead-looking. It gives the tundra muted but multifaceted colour. The way the light plays on it from the big sky makes its depth and tone flicker.
-The attempted insurrections launched by Italian republicans were consistently unsuccessful. They often failed, like the future anarchist insurrections, due to the state knowing of the plots before they were launched.[[#77DMSmithMazzini671|77]] The exception was in 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi, a longtime associate of Mazzini, contributed to the unification of Italy by invading Sicily with roughly one thousand poorly armed men and subsequently, after amassing a much larger army of twenty thousand soldiers, capturing Naples.[[#78ClarkItalianRisorgimento|78]] An inkling of the effect that Garibaldi’s actions had on the developing socialist movement can be seen in Kropotkin’s insistence in an 1897 letter to Maria Isidine Goldsmith that between 1859 and 1860 “Garibaldi’s brave campaigns did more to spread the liberal, radical spirit of revolt and socialism right across Europe than anything else.”[[#79KropotkinDirectStruggle|79]]
+As soon as I felt a tug I jumped up and had it over my shoulder before I even knew it and I am glad no one was around to see because the force from flinging it back brought the fish back at me and it hit my front as I turned to it, making me yell. The sound zigzagged away from me into the forest and took several birds with it. It took me a second to remember that there was no one around to hear, but when I realised I was alone, so utterly and completely alone, I laughed and laughed to myself, trying to hold the writhing fish.
-The strategy of forming armed bands that launched insurrections coincided with some republican revolutionaries unsuccessfully attempting to assassinate monarchs. On January 14, 1858, Felice Orsini and two accomplices tried to assassinate Emperor Napoleon III of France with explosives. The three bombs that were thrown killed eight and wounded at least 156 people but barely harmed the Emperor. On December 8, the soldier Agesilao Milano stabbed and wounded King Ferdinand II of Naples with a bayonet. These republican acts of violence, be they collective revolts or individual attacks, had a profound influence on Italian anarchism.[[#80MarcoPinfariExploringth|80]] Malatesta remembered in 1932 that “the idea of violence, even in the sense of the individual ''attentat'', which many today believe characteristic of anarchism, was inherited by us from democracy. . . . Before accepting the teachings of Bakunin, the Italian Anarchists—Fanelli, Friscia, Gambuzzi—had admired and exalted Agesilao Milano, Felice Orsini, and ''coups de main'' typical of Mazzini. When they passed over to the International, they were not taught anything in this camp that they had not already learned from Mazzini and Garibaldi.”[[#81QuotedinPerniconeandOtta|81]]
+And I could feel all of Jack Kerouac’s ghosts of the mountain cursing at me for desecrating the art. But if the art is to demonstrate skill rather than a simple utilitarianism then I don’t want to be a part of it. It is a man’s sport, a battle just to collect its name, possess its specificity, like the Enlightenment exotic specimen collector (one for the collection, a big one for the wall). And to do so ''skilfully'', whatever that means, probably with minimal splashing and squealing. They can keep their art.
-Italian anarchists were particularly influenced by Carlo Pisacane, whose writings they discovered in the mid-1870s. Pisacane was a socialist influenced by Proudhon and was chief of staff of Mazzini’s republican army of 1849.[[#82PerniconeItalianAnarchism|82]] In 1857, shortly before dying in a failed insurrection at Sapri (which he co-organized with Mazzini), he wrote that “ideas spring from deeds and not the other way around . . . conspiracies, plots and attempted uprisings are the succession of deeds whereby Italy proceeds toward her goal of unity. The flash of Milano’s bayonet was a more effective propaganda than a thousand volumes penned by doctrinarians.”[[#83CarloPisacanePoliticalT|83]]
+Once I had it still against the ground I had to stun it to knock it out before I bled it, like Larus showed me on the pilot whale boat. I worried about this part because perhaps it ''did'' have more culpability than pulling a trigger and watching a thing drop. The fish lay still for me, looking up at the sky through the canopy with its empty orb of an eye. I have thought for a long time that anything I am willing to eat I should be willing to kill. And although I back the philosophy all the way, in practice it is as hard as I hoped it wouldn’t be. I am not sure I will ever be able to kill anything without crying at least a little bit.
-Undeterred by their previous failure in 1874, the Italian anarchists soon made a second attempt at insurrection, which would come to be known as the Benevento affair. In theory, an armed band of anarchists would roam the Matese mountain range and its surrounding provinces in southern Italy, spreading revolutionary consciousness. One of the insurrection’s participants, Pietro Ceccarelli (who had previously participated in Garibaldi’s campaigns), explained later in 1881 that they planned “to rove about the countryside for as long as possible, preaching [class] war, inciting social brigandage, occupying small towns and leaving them after having accomplished whatever revolutionary acts we could, and to proceed to that area where our presence would prove more useful.”[[#84QuotedinPerniconeItalian|84]] Believing “that revolution must be provoked, we carried out an act of provocation. . . . We were a band of insurgents destined to provoke an insurrection that cannot and must not count on anything but the echo it may find in the population.”[[#85QuotedinPerniconeItalian|85]]
+After it was bled I laid it out flat and took out the ''Fauna & Flora of the Denali Wilderness'' book to identify it. It was an Arctic grayling, I could tell easy from the fin on its back like a Chinese fan. It was quite little for a grayling, but I can make it last me two meals.
-Guillaume described the ideas behind this strategy in detail. He wrote,
+In the tundra I stumbled onto a spruce grouse sat on a clutch of eggs. It occurred to me that I could take her eggs to eat. She looked at me imploringly through one beady eye. I left her.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Our friends in Italy came to the conclusion that, in their country at least, ''oral and written propaganda were not enough'', and that, to be clearly understood by the popular masses, especially the peasants, it was necessary to ''show'' them what could not be made living and real in any theoretical teaching, they had to be taught socialism through ''deeds'' so that they could see, feel and touch it. A plan was formed for teaching the Italian peasants, by means of a ''practical lesson'', what society would be like if it got rid of government and property owners; for this, it would be enough to organize an armed band, large enough to control the countryside for a brief time and go from one commune to another carrying into effect ''Socialism through action'' before the very eyes of the people.[[#86QuotedinCahmKropotkin7|86]]</div>
+Other birds seen today:
-Again, things did not go according to plan.[[#87Thefollowingaccountofthe|87]] The Italian state was aware of the plot by mid-February 1877, due to reports from police spies who had infiltrated the anarchist movement. The following month, a member of the group, Salvatore Farina, disappeared after revealing the full details of their plans to the Italian state. Rather than flee the country, the anarchists decided to launch the insurrection at the beginning of April, a month earlier than planned. Doing so did not allow them to escape police repression. Several were arrested before they could even reach the agreed rendezvous point. Those who managed to arrive successfully were forced to flee the area with a fraction of their equipment after discovering and shooting at the four policemen who had them under surveillance. During their escape, they were joined by ten fellow insurgents who had, by chance, eluded the police because they missed their scheduled train. Together the group of only twenty-six anarchists headed for the mountains.
+Osprey
-The armed band was low on men, ammunition, weapons, and food. Traveling to nearby large towns to gather supplies was not an option since, as the anarchists soon discovered, the government had already occupied the area with twelve thousand troops. Given these circumstances, the anarchists were only able to enter two small towns, Letino and Gallo. In each case, they did what little they could by burning official documents taken from the town hall, distributing what weapons and money they could find to the local peasants, and giving a speech on the necessity and value of the social revolution. In his speech to the peasants of Letino, Cafiero declared “the rifles and the axes we have given you, the knives you have. If you wish, do something, and if not, go f— yourselves.”[[#88QuotedinPerniconeItalian|88]]
+American kestrel
-According to Brousse, these events had been a practical demonstration that taught the peasants how much contempt they should have for private property and the state.[[#89BroussePropagandabythe|89]] This lesson appears to have had a limited effect, since the peasants of both Letino and Gallo cheered and applauded the anarchists only to return to their daily lives once the band had left. One of the reasons why the peasants did not join the anarchists in insurrection was that they were legitimately afraid of what would happen if they rose up. Malatesta later recalled that a peasant in Gallo had asked him how they could know that the anarchists were not, in fact, undercover police attempting to entrap them. Even if they could be sure that the anarchists were not police, an insurrection was still deeply impractical. As the peasants explained to Malatesta, “the town is in no condition to defend itself, the revolution has not yet erupted on a vast scale, tomorrow the troops will come and massacre us all.”[[#90QuotedinPerniconeItalian|90]]
+Pintail ducks
-After failing to escape the region due to poor weather conditions, the anarchists took refuge for the night in a farmhouse near Letino. They were soon surrounded by soldiers after being informed on by a local peasant seeking a reward. Fighting was not an option—their weapons and ammunition had been rendered useless by rainfall. Knowing that they would be killed if they resisted the anarchists chose to surrender without a fight. With their arrests the insurrection was over.
+Snow geese
-Despite this, the insurrection was not a total failure. News of the insurrection and the subsequent trial, during which the defendants gave speeches on anarchism, garnered the International and its revolutionary socialist politics considerable national attention for several weeks. This was probably a contributing factor in the growth of the Italian section of the Saint-Imier International over the following year and a half.[[#91PerniconeItalianAnarchism|91]] Cafiero, perhaps looking for a positive outcome of the failed insurrection he had participated in, later claimed that the Benevento affair had increased demand for Marx’s ''Capital'' to such an extent that a bookseller in Naples was forced to find more copies after having sold out.[[#92CafieroRevolution6364|92]]
+Tundra swans
-Anarchists in Berne, Switzerland, made less ambitious attempts at propaganda of the deed. They attended a demonstration on March 18, 1877, the anniversary of the Paris Commune, and brought red flags with them. The canton had prohibited the public display of the red flag and the previous year’s demonstration by social democrats had ended in failure when it was attacked, dispersed, and the red flag was torn up. The aim of the anarchists was to march through Berne defending the flag from attacks by the police. This action was inspired by a Russian demonstration on December 6, 1876, when students and workers had gathered outside Our Lady of Kazan Cathedral after a revolutionary had been killed in prison. At the Russian demonstration, a student carrying a red flag had declared the demonstration’s solidarity with all who had suffered in the struggle against Tsarism. The subsequent brutal state repression of the demonstration led to a large increase in public sympathy toward the revolutionaries. The anarchists hoped that their demonstration involving a red flag would have a similar effect and lead to increased sympathy with and support for the Jura Federation, whose membership was in serious decline.
+Ring-necked ducks
-On the day of the protest in Berne, roughly 250 demonstrators, several of whom were armed with sticks and truncheons, assembled themselves into a procession and marched forward with the Swiss anarchist Adhémar Schwitzguébel at their head brandishing a red flag. The demonstration, which was attended by several well-known anarchists including Guillaume, Kropotkin, and the Frenchman Jean-Louis Pindy, was then attacked by police armed with sabers and the anarchists defended themselves. During the struggle six policemen and several protesters were seriously wounded. The anarchists were forced to abandon the original flag but did manage to escape with another red flag and take it to the meeting planned for the end of the demonstration.[[#93CahmKropotkin8082100|93]] Kropotkin claimed in letter written to Paul Robin on March 24, that the protest had nonetheless been a success because two thousand people, instead of the expected seventy, had attended the meeting afterward organized by the anarchists. Their act of revolt had gained them “an attentive and in part sympathetic public” since “''there is nothing like courage to win over the people''.”[[#94QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|94]]
+Grey jay
-In August, Brousse argued that the Berne protest was an act of propaganda of the deed that taught the Swiss working class “that they do not, as they thought they did, enjoy freedom.”[[#95BroussePropagandabythe|95]] This lack of freedom was apparent in how the Swiss state responded to the Berne protest. Thirty of the demonstrators were brought to trial and sentenced to periods of imprisonment ranging from sixty days for the two anarchists who had struck policemen with sticks to forty days for Guillaume, thirty days for Brousse, and ten days for the rest. All the foreign participants were expelled from the Berne Canton for three years and with this the movement in Berne lost its leading militants.[[#96StaffordFromAnarchismto|96]]
+Horned grebes
-''Propaganda of the Deed: Second Phase''
+Plovers
-During its second phase, propaganda of the deed developed into advocating or engaging in assassination and bombings.[[#97Ihavedecidednottocollec|97]] The transformation occurred in response to a vast array of factors that included: a vicious cycle of anarchists responding to state violence with violent individual attacks that led, in turn, to more state violence and so on; anarchists being influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by contemporary social movements such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; and the nefarious influence of police spies and agent provocateurs. It is difficult to chart the path from collective uprisings into individual acts of violence, partly because it is rarely clear if a particular attack was carried out by a genuine anarchist attempting to implement insurrectionist theory and engage in propaganda of the deed. Attacks were frequently attributed to anarchists by the police or the press (including, sometimes, the anarchist press) with little to no evidence.[[#98RichardBachJensenTheBat|98]]
+Mourning doves
-The earliest alleged anarchist assassination attempts occurred in 1878 when Max Hödel on May 11 and Dr. Carl Nobiling on June 2 both tried unsuccessfully to kill the Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany. This was soon followed by Juan Oliva y Moncasi’s failed attempt to assassinate King Alfonso XII of Spain on October 25. It is not clear from the available evidence whether either Hödel or Nobiling were genuine anarchists. At best they were socialists with some loose connections to a few anarchist groups.[[#99AndrewRCarlsonAnarchism|99]] Although Moncasi was a member of the anarchist-led Spanish section of the Saint-Imier International, it is not clear whether he was an anarchist himself.[[#100EsenweinAnarchistIdeolog|100]]
+Cuckoo
-The first definite anarchist assassination plot occurred in 1880. After guns had failed to kill the Kaiser, the German anarchist August Reinsdorf planned to dig a tunnel under the Reichstag, plant explosives around the building’s supports and ignite them while the Reichstag was in session. Reinsdorf made the mistake of explaining his plan in a letter dated September 1, 1880, to his associate Johann Most, a German socialist who, at the time, lived in London, edited the journal ''Freiheit'', and had yet to become an anarchist. Oskar Neumann, a spy living in London, heard of the plan and subsequently informed the Berlin police. Reinsdorf was arrested on November 14 while carrying a dagger near the home of the Berlin chief of police, Guido von Madai, whom he planned to assassinate.[[#101CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|101]]
+In the south the mountains stood resolutely, still and intangible as a painting, until at one point a light aircraft cut across them, a slow and deliberate finger through perfect dust. When this happens there is a noise with it, a loud droning that I noticed for the first time while watching the first plane. It was lucky that I did because I might have spooked from hearing it without knowing what it came from. I threw myself to the ground on impulse but it was too far away to make me out. From here you could not tell the cabin from the treeline.
-This escalation in political practice was mirrored by an escalation in theory. In December 1880, Cafiero wrote an article for ''Le Révolté ''in which he repeated the old insurrectionist idea that actions were an effective means of spreading revolutionary ideas. What had changed was the scope of acceptable action. Rather than merely advocating armed bands inspiring a popular insurrection, he now insisted that anarchists should engage in “permanent rebellion, by word, by writing, by dagger, by gun, by dynamite . . . we shall use every weapon which can be used for rebellion. Everything is right for us which is not legal.”[[#102CarloCafieroAction188|102]] He argued that anarchists should immediately engage in violent attacks because “if we go on waiting until we are strong enough before attacking—we shall never attack, and we shall be like the good man who vowed that he wouldn’t go into the sea until he had learned to swim. It is precisely revolutionary action which develops our strength, just as exercise develops the strength of our muscles.”[[#103CarloCafieroAction188|103]] He predicted that if anarchists fought and died for popular movements then the seeds of socialism they contained would grow and flower into a revolution. Cafiero, in short, held that engaging in revolutionary violence would simultaneously develop the capacities of anarchists and instill radical drives and consciousness within the working classes.
+On the way back to the cabin I found my first bear print. It made my hairs stand on end; a first encounter. Its print a symbol of its self. A warning, a promise, a truth. But really it is just an imprint a big animal left without meaning to. How strange.
-A few months later, Cafiero wrote a letter to the paper ''Il Grido del Popolo ''in which he advocated armed struggle in more detail. Anarchist militants were to form a group in their area composed of between six and ten men or women and engage in violent attacks, including with explosives, against capitalism and the state. He optimistically predicted that their actions “will find echoes all over the world. Hardly will the actions of one group have begun, when the whole country will be covered in groups, and action become generalized. Every group will be its own center of action, with a plan all of its own, and a multiplicity of varied and harmonic initiatives. The concept of the whole war will be one only: the destruction of all oppressors and exploiters.”[[#104CafieroTheOrganization|104]]
+==== LITTLE HOUSE IN THE BIG WOODS ====
-Propaganda of the deed soon came to be enshrined in the resolutions of the International Social Revolutionary Congress, which met in London between July 14 and 20, 1881, and was conceived as an attempt to re-found the International.[[#105Accordingtoapolicerepor|105]] The congress was attended by forty-five delegates claiming to represent sixty federations and fifty-nine individual groups with a total membership of fifty thousand people. One of the most vocal delegates was the French police agent Égide Spilleux, who operated under the pseudonym Serreaux and had successfully infiltrated the movement.[[#106CahmKropotkin15259Pe|106]] After a significant amount of discussion and debate, the delegates agreed to adopt the following resolution,
+It confuses me to have nightmares about a thing I can barely remember now. I had thought it over so many times before that I could no longer tell what was memory and what got added or taken away. Then I stopped remembering it at all, but it came back last night in a bad way.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the International Workingmen’s Association deems it necessary to add “Propaganda by Deed” to oral and written propaganda. . . . It is absolutely necessary to exert every effort toward propagating, by deeds, the revolutionary idea and to arouse the spirit of revolt in those sections of the popular masses who still harbor illusions about the effectiveness of legal methods . . . Whereas the agricultural workers are still outside the revolutionary movement, it is absolutely necessary to make every effort to win them to our cause, and to keep in mind that a deed performed against the existing institutions appeals to the masses much more than thousands of leaflets and torrents of words, and that “Propaganda by Deed” is of greater importance in the countryside than in the cities.[[#107QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|107]]</div>
+In the nightmare I found myself cold and dark. I was in an ice cave. In the Arctic. The walls were blue and jagged. It smelled like damp old fish and dead things. My breath billowed in silvery wisps in front of me. Then it would crystallise and fall to the floor in tinkles. On the back of my neck I felt my hair brushed to the side and hot sticky breath ran across it slowly. A hand came from behind and clasped over my mouth, a stubby, sweaty troll hand.
-Edward Nathan-Ganz, delegate No. 22 and one of the three members of the resolution committee appointed to summarize the proposals that had been put forward during the congress, connected propaganda of the deed to the manufacture of bombs. He wrote within the resolution that “whereas the technical and chemical sciences have rendered services to the revolutionary cause and are bound to render still greater services in the future, the Congress suggests that organizations and individuals affiliated with the International Workingmen’s Association devote themselves to the study of these sciences.”[[#108QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|108]]
+You are not in an ice cave. You are in the meat fridge at work. The hand is clasped tight over your mouth so your whimpering is muffled. The other hand fumbles with your small breasts over the top of the polka-dot starter bra your mum bought you because you are starting to blossom now. You can feel something hard pressing into where your thighs meet the crease in your arse. You know it will make it worse if you squirm but you want to get free. Then you get a chance because someone shouts at him from outside the fridge, his grip loosens and you dig your elbow into his bloated troll belly.
-Reinsdorf soon decided to follow these proposals and undertake a second attempt at blowing up members of Germany’s ruling classes. As he explained in an 1882 letter to an American comrade, only the bomb could “inject the whole bourgeoisie and their slaves with total terror” and achieve “complete and utter revenge” for “all the dirty tricks and atrocities” they committed.[[#109QuotedinUlrichLinseP|109]] This time, Reinsdorf and his associates in the town of Elberfeld planned to use dynamite to kill Wilhelm I, alongside other key members of the German ruling classes, at the inauguration of the Niederwald Monument on September 28, 1883. The assassination failed. Due to a sprained ankle, Reinsdorf was unable to go himself and two of his associates—the saddler Franz Rupsch and the compositor Emil Küchler—went in his place. Küchler made the mistake of ignoring Reinsdorf’s instructions to buy a waterproof fuse. The night before the assassination attempt, it rained heavily and the cheaper fuse failed to ignite at the crucial moment. In 1884, Reinsdorf and his group were arrested and put on trial for the attempted assassination of the Emperor. It turned out that one of Reinsdorf’s associates, the weaver Carl Rudolf Palm—who had donated forty marks toward Rupsch and Küchler’s travel expenses—was in fact a police spy and had been informing on the group from the very beginning. On the morning of February 7, 1885, Reinsdorf and Küchler were executed, with Rupsch having had his death sentence commuted to imprisonment for life.[[#110CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|110]]
+He grunts a troll grunt. He puts his hand around your neck and calls you a little bitch. But then you know it’s over because she is shouting to him from the kitchen. He lumbers to the door and as he closes it he leans his face in and runs his tongue over his fat wet lips. The door bangs shut.
-In parallel to these events, Most, who had known Reinsdorf, moved from London to New York in December 1882 and became an anarchist.[[#111GoyensBeerandRevolution|111]] During the mid-1880s, Most wrote numerous articles for ''Freiheit ''which declared that workers should arm themselves with guns, dynamite, poison, and knives in order to violently attack the ruling classes and achieve revenge. For example, in August 1884 he wrote that “Every prince will find his Brutus. Poison on the table of the gourmet will cancel out his debt. Dynamite will explode in the splendid, rubber tyred, coaches of the aristocracy and bourgeois as they pull up to the opera. Death will await them, both by day and by night, on all roads and footpaths and even in their homes, lurking in a thousand different forms.”[[#112QuotedinCarlsonAnarchis|112]] In 1885, Most even published an assassination manual for his readers based on what he had learned working in an explosives factory. It was titled ''The Science of Revolutionary Warfare: A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc''.[[#113CarlsonAnarchisminGerma|113]]
+You can’t cry you can’t cry you can’t cry because they will shout and send you home, and then what? If you yell Sandra will hear eventually and she will open the door from the outside and let you out and laugh at you for being scared of the dark and getting yourself stuck in the fridge again.
-This shift to the meaning of propaganda of the deed within anarchist circles did not occur in isolation. Anarchists were influenced by assassinations and bombings carried out by other social movements between the 1850s and 1880s, including Italian republicans, Irish nationalists, and Russian nihilists.[[#114OnItalianrepublicanssee|114]] One of the most impactful events was Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) assassinating Tsar Alexander II of Russia with explosives on March 1, 1881. In the aftermath of this attack, an increasing number of anarchists came to argue that anarchists should follow Narodnaya Volya’s example and organize their own assassination campaign against the ruling classes. It is not a coincidence that the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London passed a resolution advocating propaganda of the deed and the study of chemical sciences to build explosives a few months after the assassination of the Tsar with explosives.[[#115SethRussianTerrorists9|115]]
+Was it as bad as the dream felt or was the dream just a collage from things the other girls had told you? No matter what you remember, it is nothing special, of course. Almost every girl you know has a troll to remind her that her body is not her own.
-The impact of the Tsar’s assassination was clear to anarchists at the time. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that “when the Russian revolutionaries had killed the Czar . . . the European anarchists imagined that, from then on, a handful of fervent revolutionaries, armed with a few bombs, would be enough to bring about the social revolution.”[[#116QuotedinJensenAnarchist|116]] This perspective was echoed by Nettlau. He wrote in 1932 that, during this period, anarchists were inspired by “the example of fortitude and sacrifice set by Russian nihilists” and thought that, due to the assassination of the Tsar, alongside other examples of revolt, insurrection, and state repression, there was a “growing accumulation of acts of violence,” which in turn indicated that “a general revolutionary upheaval of a socially destructive type was imminent.”[[#117NettlauShortHistory148|117]]
+It tipped it down today so I stayed cooped up inside. The cabin is cosy with the little fire going, the tapping on the roof and sides adding sound contours that make it feel particularly safe, so I felt better. Because I had the time I made the fire with sticks from my kindling pile. I am very proud of the fire. It took me about ten minutes to get smoke, then another five to get it going properly. I have guarded and fed it all day like a little pet. Kaczynski complained in his diary that he failed to consistently make fire without striking matches and that it annoyed him greatly. I am more authentic than Ted Kaczynski!
-Although the vast majority of anarchist assassinations and bombings were carried out by genuine anarchists acting independently, there are several examples of the police normalizing or encouraging the use of these violent tactics. Louis Andrieux, the prefect of the Paris Police, financed the creation of the anarchist paper ''La Révolution Sociale'' in September 1880, through his agent Serreaux. The paper, which Serreaux helped to edit, published articles advocating violent attacks and provided the reader with instructions on how to manufacture dynamite. In June 1881, a police agent working for Andrieux played a key role in instigating a small group of anarchists to bomb the statue of the former president Adolphe Thiers, who had ordered the massacre of the Paris Commune a decade earlier. The bomb failed to damage the statue, and left only a black stain. As mentioned earlier, Serreaux attended the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London as a delegate and formed around him a group of supporters that Kropotkin referred to as “''la bande Serreaux''.” During the congress, this group advocated propaganda of the deed, a rejection of morality, the study of bomb making, and a repeat of actions like the bombing of the statue of Thiers.[[#118JensenAnarchistTerrorism|118]]
+I did go out just to see how bad it was and got a headache from the hammering of icy raindrops on my crown. It was too heavy to see much and I got soaked through, so I will have to stay put until it slackens off. I have enough food to last and a bit of fish. Hopefully it will have stopped overnight, though.
-It was not until the 1890s that the new understanding of propaganda of the deed was implemented by anarchists on a grand scale. The manner in which this occurred varied between countries. In Italy, explosives were largely used to damage government buildings, rather than people, and generally did little more than break windows.[[#119PerniconeandOttanelliAs|119]] In Spain and France, by contrast, there were a series of bombings that wounded and killed random civilians who just happened to be in the area. In 1892, François Koenigstein, known more commonly as Ravachol, decided to seek vengeance for the wrongful arrest, torture, and imprisonment of anarchist protesters by the French state. To this end, he bombed the apartment buildings where the judge and prosecutor attorney of the court case lived on March 11 and 27. The bombs injured eight innocent people and failed to wound, let alone kill, their targets.[[#120JohnMerrimanTheDynamite|120]]
+I watched back and edited a lot of footage and it is coming together but in a way I am not quite sure about. Mostly when I watch things back they do not feel like I remember them. People seem to be very different to how they really seemed at the time. There is so much responsibility in putting the pieces of what has happened together to follow a story. And there is Rochelle, who will not fit into my story. And then there are the things that can’t and do not say anything at all and lie vacant for my projections.
-Several months later, on November 8, Émile Henry left a bomb outside the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company, which had recently crushed a miners’ strike. The bomb exploded after being moved to a nearby police station, killing five people. On December 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed anarchist who was unable to feed his wife and daughter, threw a small nail bomb into France’s chamber of deputies in order to call attention to the suffering of the poor. Due to its design, the bomb only slightly wounded several deputies and a few spectators. Despite not having killed anyone, Vaillant was sentenced to death. Seven days after Vaillant was executed, Henry sought revenge and threw a bomb into Paris’s Café Terminus on February 12, 1894. His aim was not to target any person in particular but to kill any random member of the bourgeoisie. The explosion killed one and wounded twenty.[[#121MerrimanDynamite99105|121]]
+Am I pulling them out of the water like fish to look at? Like they are specimens and I am writing them into my field book? There is a gap between what they are and what I think they are and I am trying to talk about this gap with authority, declaring I know what I see and it is this.
-Similar events occurred in Spain. On September 24, 1893, Paulino Pallás threw a bomb at Arsenio Martínez de Campos, the Captain General of Catalonia, during a military parade in Barcelona. The bomb, which was thrown in response to the execution of four anarchist militants, killed two people and wounded Campos and twelve soldiers and spectators. Pallás was subsequently executed. Santiago Salvador, who had been converted to anarchism by Pallás, sought revenge for his friend’s execution by throwing two bombs down onto the wealthy audience of the Liceu Opera theater in Barcelona during its November 7 performance of ''William Tell''. Only one bomb exploded, killing fifteen people and seriously injuring fifty others.[[#122EsenweinAnarchistIdeolog|122]]
+I did a lot of reading. Then I did a video diary entry. Then I got bored and decided to search around the hut for hidden things. I had figured it must be at least fifty years old, maybe even one hundred. I had not bothered to check it properly for signatures like I had the tower, aside from a quick sweep. I felt sure I had missed something.
-Other anarchists used blades and guns to engage in targeted assassinations. In 1894, Santo Caserio stabbed to death the President of France Sadi Carnot. This was followed by Michele Angiolillo assassinating the Spanish prime minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo in 1897 and Luigi Lucheni killing the Empress of Austria Elisabeth Eugenie in 1898. Two years later in 1900, Gaetano Bresci killed King Umberto I of Italy with a revolver. In 1901, Leon Czolgosz, who had only recently come into contact with anarchist ideas, shot and fatally wounded the American president William McKinley. On other occasions, anarchist assassins were unsuccessful, such as Berkman’s 1892 attempt to kill the capitalist Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for the violent repression of a strike at the Homestead steel works.[[#123JensenAnarchistTerrorism|123]]
+I checked all the obvious places again first, the walls around the cot, the desk with everything taken off it. Then I found them in a corner of the room. Now I have found them I do not know how I did not notice them before. It was not an obvious place, sure, and most are really faint, but there were enough of them. They are mostly names and dates, the earliest being 1929 and the most recent P Harris again, 1999. I counted seven authors of six signatures and five quotes. Some of the classics:
-Anarchist assassinations and bombings did not end suddenly at the dawn of the new century and continued for several years after. For example, anarchist bomb throwers failed to murder the King of Spain Alfonso XIII during his 1905 visit to Paris and 1906 wedding in Madrid. The explosions from these two assassination attempts injured 124 bystanders and killed twenty-three people. Over a decade later, the anarchist Émile Cottin unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate the French Prime Minister Clemenceau in 1919.[[#124OnAlfonsoseePaulAvrich|124]]
+‘Going to the mountains is going home’ – John Muir
-The majority of these attacks were carried out in response to the much greater violence of the ruling classes. A clear example of this is Bresci’s assassination of King Umberto I of Italy in 1900. A few years previously, in 1897 and 1898, a wave of protests, demonstrations, strikes, and riots had spread across Italy in response to the spiraling cost of bread, which was the primary source of food for the working classes. This direct struggle included women leading raids on granaries and bakeries in order to expropriate food. Bread prices had risen due to an extremely poor grain harvest in Italy and the Italian state’s decision to not lower import duties on foreign grain in order to protect the financial interests of Italian capitalists and landowners. This included the prime minister and finance minister, who both owned vast amounts of land. The Italian state responded to the working classes struggle for adequate food with mass arrests, the mobilization of the army, and the imposition of martial law. On several occasions, protesters armed with little more than sticks and stones were wounded or killed by gunfire from soldiers. In the port of Livorno, two warships even threatened to shell working-class neighborhoods.
+‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived’ – Thoreau
-Such threats were not empty. In May 1898, soldiers in Milan not only responded to thrown rocks with volleys of gunfire. They also fired artillery at striking workers, who had attempted to defend themselves by erecting barricades out of little more than furniture, metal grilles, and trolley cars. Groups of women who attempted to block the street were met with cavalry charges and trampled under horses’ hooves. A crowd of two thousand students, some of whom were armed with revolvers, were shot at with cannons. The names of 264 people were listed as dead victims in local newspapers, though other estimates ranged from four hundred to eight hundred deaths. King Umberto celebrated this violence by rewarding Italy’s highest decoration to the commander of the soldiers in Milan, General Fiorenzo Bava Beccaris.[[#125PerniconeandOttanelliAs|125]] Bresci later claimed that “when in Paterson I read of the events in Milan, where they even used cannons, I wept with rage and prepared myself for vengeance. I thought of the king who awarded a prize to those who carried out the massacres, and I became convinced that he deserved death.”[[#126QuotedinZimmerImmigrant|126]]
+I checked, out of curiosity, behind the fox head (there is also the compulsion to leave a mark that no one will ever notice). It just said Caroline, in very tiny print, with no date. It was the only obviously female name in here. Even where the names were ambiguous, the handwriting on the wall was all very masculine. What I mean by this is that maybe the men who wrote on the wall had learned to express themselves as men, to express their ''man-sized'' ideas in a handwriting that was reflective of how they held and thought of themselves.
-Such individual acts of violence usually provided an anarchist with the opportunity to engage in propaganda of the word during their court speech and thereby spread anarchist ideas to a large audience via the reporting of mainstream newspapers. These speeches varied in quality and the extent to which they successfully transmitted anarchist ideas. To give one example, Berkman refused to be represented by a lawyer and prepared a lengthy court speech on anarchism. During the trial Berkman’s speech was unexpectedly badly translated from German to English by a court interpreter. After an hour, the judge abruptly ended the speech and Berkman was unable to complete it. This occurred despite him offering to cut the part on labor and capital and move onto his discussion of the church and the state.[[#127AvrichandAvrichSashaan|127]] Caserio’s passionate court speech suffered a similar fate when it was translated into French and quickly read aloud by a court clerk in a monotone voice. His speech nonetheless provides an illustrative example of the manner in which anarchist assassins or bombers justified their violent acts. He declared to the court that anarchists had to respond to the “guns, chains, and prisons” of the ruling classes with “dynamite, bombs, and daggers” in order to “defend our lives” and “destroy the bourgeoisie and the governments.”[[#128QuotedinPerniconeandOtt|128]]
+Because they author these ideas like they ''belonged'' to them by virtue of being men. Thoreau and that bunch always talked, of course, in lofty terms of Man and He. In search of some inspirational wilderness quotes from women before I started the documentary most to be found came from low-brow memoirs of the self-help kind and had to do with inner journeys rather than the outer objective Truths of the Mountain Men, and had titles like ''The Single Woman: Life, Love and a Dash of Sass'' or ''Pink Boots and a Machete: My Journey from NFL Cheerleader to National Geographic Explorer''.
-Anarchists responded to the wave of assassinations and bombings that began in the 1890s in a variety of conflicting ways. Prominent anarchist authors routinely claimed that the individuals who carried out such acts of violence were sensitive or desperate people reacting to the much greater violence of capitalism and the state.[[#129ForexampleEmmaGoldmanR|129]] A significant segment of the wider anarchist movement labeled the perpetrators as martyrs who acted heroically in the pursuit of social emancipation. In 1895, the English anarchist Louisa Sarah Bevington wrote that “those who did these acts were the very best, the most human, unselfish, self-sacrificing of our comrades, who threw their lives away, meeting death or imprisonment in the hope that their acts would sow the seeds of revolt, that they might show the way and wake an echo, by their deeds of rebellion, in the victims of the present system.”[[#130LouisaSarahBevingtonAn|130]]
+I wanted Caroline to know, if she ever came back, that I liked that she had hidden herself. I drew a little smiley face next to [[Image:smile.jpg.png|top]]her name.
-These sorts of statements were part of a broader trend in which the memory of anarchist assassins and bombers were incorporated into anarchist counterculture and took their place alongside other key events of remembrance, such as the anniversary of the Paris Commune. An Italian anarchist group in the United States, for example, named themselves “The Twenty-Ninth of July,” after the day Bresci assassinated Umberto.[[#131AvrichSaccoandVanzetti|131]] This trend was not universal or always long-lasting. In Spain, several anarchist papers initially praised anarchist assassins and bombers as martyrs, but from 1898 onward, their names rarely appeared in print media.[[#132JamesYeomanPrintCulture|132]]
+==== MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE ====
-Anarchists, regardless of what they thought about the individuals who carried out assassinations and bombings, disagreed with one another about whether or not such acts were an effective means of contributing toward positive social change. Galleani wrote articles defending Pallás and Vaillant in December 1893, and publicly recommended a bomb-making manual in 1906 that featured an image of Ravachol on the front cover.[[#133SentaGalleani6566139|133]] Several years later, in 1925, Galleani argued that a wave of individual acts of violence was “''a necessarily intermediary phenomenon between the sheer ideal or theoretical affirmation and the insurrectionary movement which follows it and kindles the torch of the victorious revolution''.”[[#134GalleaniEndofAnarchism|134]] Just as Brousse had previously thought that anarchist-led insurrections transmitted lessons to the people, so too did Galleani think that assassinating monarchs was a powerful means of communication. It taught the oppressed classes that a monarch, who is believed to be picked by God and wields a vast amount of power, can be killed and so is just like any other person. Above all, such individual acts of violence taught workers that they could, if they wanted, free themselves and overthrow their oppressors. For Galleani, no act of rebellion was useless or harmful to the cause.[[#135GalleaniEndofAnarchism|135]]
+''INT. CABIN, AFTERNOON – Erin is sat on the cot – daylight bleeds inside, casts light over dust motes – camera is hand-held – in shot are cabin cot, Erin from shoulders up, and window – it is raining heavily –''
-Other anarchists disagreed and argued that such actions were tactically misguided and immoral when they targeted innocent people. Malatesta opposed Henry’s bombing of the Café Terminus as “unjust, vicious, and senseless,”[[#136MalatestaPatientWork58|136]] and described Salvador’s bombing of the Liceu Opera theater as an act which killed and wounded “needless victims” while achieving “no possible benefit to the cause.”[[#137MalatestaPatientWork12|137]] In the case of Michele Angiolillo’s assassination of the Spanish Prime minister, an act that did not harm any innocent people, Malatesta thought that although the act was morally justifiable, “it is doubtful that his deed served the freedom of Spaniards . . . it is for reasons of usefulness that, generally speaking, we are not in favor of individual attacks, which have been very common throughout history but almost always have not helped, and have very often harmed, the cause they were intended to serve.”[[#138MalatestaPatientWork26|138]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' So this morning I found something really interesting.</div>
-According to the historian Richard Bach Jensen, during the 1890s real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings in Europe, the United States, and Australia killed at least sixty people and wounded more than two hundred. Between 1878 and 1914, real or alleged anarchist assassinations and bombings globally (excluding Russia) killed more than 220 people and wounded over 750. Despite such great human costs, which included the needless murder and injury of innocent civilians, the tactic of propaganda of the deed had failed to generate a mass revolutionary movement or inspire large insurrections, let alone ignite the social revolution. It had instead made the social revolution a more remote possibility because it both convinced the political ruling classes, including heads of police, that they were threatened by an international coordinated anarchist conspiracy that had to be destroyed, and it provided them with a political opportunity for directing huge amounts of state repression toward the anarchist movement in particular, and the socialist movement in general. This state repression included the banning of anarchist papers, mass arrests, and laws that criminalized anarchism specifically.[[#139JensenAnarchistTerrorism|139]] Kropotkin neatly summarized the consequences of this state repression in 1907, when he remarked that it had the “effect of thinning our ranks.”[[#140KropotkinDirectStruggle|140]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">After the autograph wall that I found yesterday. And the signature behind the fox head. I was sure there could be other more hidden things but I wasn’t sure where else they could be. I was actually under the desk—</div>
-Ultimately, it is fair to say that insurrectionist anarchism was unsuccessful, in so far as the main forms of propaganda of the deed they advocated and engaged in failed to inspire the working classes to rise up, and in so doing, form a mass movement capable of overthrowing class society. The strategy of propaganda of the deed can appear to be doomed to failure from a twenty-first<sup>-</sup>century vantage point, equipped with the benefit of hindsight and the lessons of over 150 years of attempts to build socialism. As a result, it is essential to understand insurrectionist anarchists on their own terms, and contextualize their ideas within the time they lived in. The strategy of insurrectionist anarchism did not develop out of nowhere. It was instead a product of anarchists being affected by and responding to their contemporary situation. This included the belief that a social revolution was imminent due to a recent wave of insurrections in multiple countries; being deeply influenced by the actions and ideas of contemporary social movements, such as Italian republicans, Russian nihilists, and Irish nationalists; responding to the much greater violence of the political and economic ruling classes toward the working classes in general and anarchism in particular; and the nefarious influences of police spies and agent provocateurs. Insurrectionist anarchism was nonetheless not the only strategy anarchists developed in response to their context.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera view turns towards the desk as Erin gets off the cot and directs the camera to it –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#16|1]]. Prior to the creation of the anarchist movement in the 1870s, the strategy of insurrectionist anarchism was advocated by Déjacque in the 1850s. Since I do not know if his ideas on strategy had any influence on the movement in general or the key insurrectionist theorists, such as Cafiero, Most, or Galleani, I have decided to not discuss his ideas. See Joseph Déjacque, ''Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861'' (Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013), 40–42.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' As you can see, there isn’t anything there</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#26|2]]. Michael Schmidt and van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 123, 128–131.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera sweeps the underside of the desk –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#36|3]]. Luigi Galleani, ''The End of Anarchism?'' (London: Elephant Editions, 2012), 99.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' But. In checking under the desk I found something else. If you look here—</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#46|4]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 32.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera view turns to the floor – Erin is kneeling, her right knee moves against the floorboard, which gives – the opposite end of the board rises, around one inch – Erin prises underneath with her free hand –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#56|5]]. Carlo Cafiero, ''Revolution'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012), 47.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Oh. I can’t do it one-handed</div>
-[[#66|6]]. David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''104–5, 108–9.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera is placed on the floor –''</div>
-[[#76|7]]. Tom Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City'','' 1880–1914'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007),'' ''74, 102–9.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' And underneath. I hadn’t thought to check under the floor because I was sure there was just the foundations underneath there. But here, as you can see—</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#86|8]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'','' ''41–42; Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 61–62; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 57, 91–93. For an example of an insurrectionist group, see Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 150–56.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera is picked up and view is directed towards the floor – the floorboard now removed and placed to the side – camera takes two seconds to focus in low light –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#96|9]]. Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 59.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Someone has dug out the ground underneath the floorboards. And they have left a little parcel</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#106|10]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 61, See also, 58, 105.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera is now in focus – in the hole there is a package wrapped in tarpaulin, about the size of a shoebox – Erin takes the package out of the hole –''</div>
-[[#116|11]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 73.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Isn’t this exciting? So I found this little package. And now I suppose I should open it</div>
-[[#126|12]]. Galleani,'' End of Anarchism'', 75.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera is placed on the desk with a view of the cot – Erin sits cross-legged on the cot with the package on her lap –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#135|13]]. Quoted in George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s like Christmas</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#145|14]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''102. See also'' ''Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''62; Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 95–97.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks down at the package with her hands placed on top – pushes hair behind her ears –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#155|15]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser M. Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order:'' ''Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe ''(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 34.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I’m kind of nervous. I hope it’s not a letter bomb</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#165|16]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''25–29.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks at the camera – pulls one corner of her mouth down in mock-nervousness –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#175|17]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''169.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Okay, then</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#185|18]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''30–33.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she starts to unwrap the parcel – carefully, particularly –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#195|19]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 216.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I wonder how long it’s been down there</div>
-[[#205|20]]. Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 102.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– having undone the parcel string and peeled away each corner of the tarpaulin she takes out a fabric bundle – she carefully unwraps the fabric bundle –''</div>
-[[#215|21]]. David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''19; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 191.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (ABSENTLY): I suppose they wanted to make sure it kept dry</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#225|22]]. Quoted in Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'','' ''216.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– inside the fabric bundle is a parcel wrapped in newspaper –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#235|23]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (ABSENTLY): It’s like a game of pass the bloody parcel</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#245|24]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74–75.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she stops with a piece of the newspaper in her hand – studies it –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#255|25]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 74.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (ABSENTLY): Oh, I’ll check afterwards</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#265|26]]. Quoted in Senta, ''Galleani'', 126.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she lifts the objects from inside the paper one by one and lays them out on the cot very carefully –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#275|27]]. Senta, ''Galleani'', 126. Formal congresses were also rejected by Jean Grave. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''65.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Okay, we have a roll of paper. A book. It’s maybe a diary. A folded piece of paper. Some postcards from Alaska</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#285|28]]. Andrew Douglas Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the ''Cronca Sovversiva'' and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912),” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018), 49–53; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 34–35; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014),'' ''29.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she picks up the book and opens it –''</div>
-[[#295|29]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''19.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s a diary. The first entry is dated the 14th of May 1986. It’s signed Damon. Then inverted underneath. Nomad</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#305|30]]. Carlo Cafiero, “The Organisation of Armed Struggle,” trans. Paul Sharkey, ''The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review'' 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 101.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she brings the book towards the camera and holds up the name, pointing with her forefinger – in spidery handwriting DAMON is written, then backwards underneath its mirror image – DAMON –''</div>
-[[#315|31]]. Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 50.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I don’t know if that’s an alias or just a happy coincidence. Or a self-fulfilling prophecy</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#325|32]]. Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 8–9, 24–27, 33–35, 294–96.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she sits back on the cot and picks up the scroll – unscrolls it –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#335|33]]. Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 60; Pernicone, “Introductory Essay” in Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''xxiii.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Okay. This is a manifesto. I won’t go into it now. We’ll look at it in detail later</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#345|34]]. Quoted in Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'','' ''52–53.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she studies it for a second then turns it to face the camera, holding it closer for inspection – then she turns it around and considers it again –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#355|35]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 76–80; Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''134–48; Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 28–29; Paul Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background ''(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 53, 61. Galleani did not adopt a rigid antisyndicalist perspective until around 1910 or 1911 and prior to this appears to have had a more positive view of trade unions. See Hoyt, “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti,’” 243–44; Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''106–7, 158–59, 172–73, 191–92.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Some kind of Ted Kaczynski manifesto</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#365|36]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''29–30.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she carefully rescrolls it and places it back on the cot – picks up the folded paper –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#375|37]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 30.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' And finally</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#385|38]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 31.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she unfolds it and pauses, brow crumpling – studies it for seven seconds –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#395|39]]. G. D. H. Cole, ''A History of Socialist Thought'','' ''vol. 2,'' Marxism and Anarchism'','' 1850–1890'' (London: Macmillan & Co, 1974), 80–1; Jeremy Wolf, “Iron Law of Wages,” in ''The Encyclopedia of Political Thought'', ed. Michael Gibbons (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0541/abstract.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (ABSENTLY): Damn it. I should have known it. (REMEMBERING THE CAMERA) Erm. It’s a map. Predictably</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#405|40]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''28, 79.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she frowns at it some more –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#415|41]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s better than my map (LAUGHING). Goddammit</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#425|42]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 96–97.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she folds it pedantically and tucks it into the back of the diary – she places the diary back on the cot – she sits with her hands in her lap then distractedly places the newspaper over the top of the diary –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#435|43]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 29.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' That’s exciting. What an exciting find</div>
-[[#445|44]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 21.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks directly at the camera, holds her gaze for four seconds – fidgets –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#455|45]]. For example, David C. Rapoport, “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism,” in ''Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy'', ed. Audrey Cronin and James Ludes (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004), 50–52; Mary S. Barton, “The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904,” ''Diplomatic History'' 39, no. 2 (2015): 306–8.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I’ll have to take a look at it all in more detail. Figure out this guy’s story</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#465|46]]. Paul Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 243.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she touches her face absently –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#475|47]]. There are some usages of the term “propaganda by the deed” by anarchist authors that cannot be neatly fit into these two main versions. Malatesta wrote an article in 1889 called “Propaganda by Deeds,” in which he proposed that anarchists should, either as individuals or affinity groups, beat up tax collectors, push landowners down the stairs when they show up to collect rent, seize and distribute the harvest among peasants rather than allowing it to be taken to the landowner, kill the animals of landowners and distribute the meat to starving peasants, and provide landowners who evict people unable to pay rent “with a terrifying example of the vengeance of the oppressed.” See Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 79–83.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Try and figure out if anyone found the package before</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#485|48]]. Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'', 229–39; Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 255–73; E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 394–96, 400–7; Guillaume, “Michael Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch,” in Michael Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', ed. Sam Dolgoff (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980), 40–42. Bakunin later claimed that the Lyon and Marseille insurrections failed because of a lack of effective organization. See Bakunin, ''Basic Bakunin'', 65.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she twists her hair round a finger –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#495|49]]. John Merriman, ''Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 250–1. For anarchist estimates of the death count, see Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 305; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 354, 406; Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 22.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (ABSENTLY): Yeah</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#505|50]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 45–50; Temma Kaplan, ''Anarchists of Andalusia'','' 1868–1903'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 101–10.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she stops twiddling her hair and stares into space, caught in a thought – five seconds – snaps out of it –''</div>
-[[#515|51]]. Bakunin, ''Bakunin on Anarchism'','' ''195–96.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (SUDDENLY/BRIGHTLY): Anyway. Today is day three of the floods and the rain is still relentless</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#525|52]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 61.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– looks out of the window –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#535|53]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 62. See also Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 123.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Doesn’t seem like it will subside very soon so no meat for Erin for a while. I’ll have to get outside today, though, because I’m almost out of water. I’ll wear my anorak. It will be nice to go outside. Yes</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#545|54]]. Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''35–40. For a short overview of Brousse’s life, see Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'', 240–46.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she sits for a few seconds looking out of the window then snaps to – approaches the camera –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#555|55]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 76–77.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Okay. Over and out. (MUTTERS) That was stupid</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#565|56]]. Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 150.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she fumbles with the camera to cut –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#575|57]]. Paul Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#585|58]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 77–78.</div>
+==== HOW THE MOUNTAIN GOT ITS NAME ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#595|59]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 35–36, 44, 64–70.</div>
+I attempted a video diary entry and retook it about five times. None of them seemed right to me. I am thinking about how far I have come now and whether I am passing Leopold’s test yet. I certainly feel more ‘in tune’ with the ‘rhythms of life’. It is hard to talk about something so personal and unspecific. I was shooting a sequence on the map that was in the parcel. In the first cut I was saying that I had to burn this map too, like I did Stan’s pocket map, had to burn it as quickly as I could before it embossed on my mind and corroded the claim of ''pure invention'' so that this place could still be mine. Then when I had the lighter to it I just could not do it. And the more I held it out with my thumb, scratching at the friction wheel, ready to light it, the more I looked at it. And the more I looked at it the more it embossed on my mind. Then the integrity was gone anyway so I figured I might as well not burn it. My thumb hurt from rubbing and rubbing the lighter without actually striking it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#605|60]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 261. See also, 184–85.</div>
+So then I had to soliloquise about why I was not going to burn the map. But the map glared at me, making itself more and more familiar, and as I got madder at it I thought that I might still get rid of it like I did the other map, because I had seen that one too. Besides I could not just leave it, knowing it was so heavy. I mean like the heaviness you must feel when you find Roman vases in the dirt and you just know that they are not any old broken pottery because you can feel their ''heaviness'' from just looking. I had to acknowledge it, like holding a tiny funeral for a mouse that the cat brought in because it does not feel right to just let it be.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#615|61]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 63. The piece was never published in full during his lifetime because, in September 1881, the newspaper ''La Révolution Sociale'' suspended publication when its editor, the undercover police agent Égide Spilleux, fled with its funds and Cafiero was arrested. See ibid., xi.</div>
+But Damon had made it and it was his time capsule and yet he would never know any better. And then again he left it here in the eighties and he could very well be planning on coming back for it one day. Maybe he really never meant anyone but himself to find it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#625|62]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 111. Kropotkin had himself been radicalized by news of the Paris Commune. See Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 73–75.</div>
+So I could not burn it. I had to put it back in the ground and pretend I never found it. I left out the diary and the manifesto for now because I need to study them. I do not think there is hypocrisy in this. He will never know I read the diary and the manifesto wants to be read and the map I could just try to forget.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#635|63]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 102.</div>
+A thing I did notice is that our maps are different. He marked different features on his to those I drew on mine. He marked some that I have not found, and some of mine were missing. I just have to be careful not to let seeing his infiltrate on my personal wilderness.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#645|64]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 500. Kropotkin thought his idea of the spirit of revolt was distinct from Brousse’s theory of propaganda by the deed. This disagreement appears to be largely semantic given that Kropotkin held, like Brousse, that ideas should be spread through actions and that these actions included insurrections which established communes. See Miller, ''Kropotkin'', 260; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 92, 102–105.</div>
+==== I AM THAT I AM AND THE REST IS WOMEN & WILDERNESS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#655|65]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 111. Kropotkin predicted that a revolution was near several times during this period. For other examples, see Peter Kropotkin, ''Words of a'' ''Rebel ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992), 32, 34–35, 205–6; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 119, 291, 542.</div>
+''INT. CABIN, MORNING – Erin is sat on the cot – camera is on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin sat cross-legged, and the window – it is raining heavily still –''
-[[#665|66]]. Gary P. Steenson, ''After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914'' (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 29–31.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I have been sat inside the cabin for five days now without leaving except to use the toilet. The rain is relentless. I have been thinking lots about what it’s like to be alone for so long. It feels like right now the whole experiment is being intensified because I am not even outside and around nature. The only time I am solitary really is when I am inside alone. This is the biggest test</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#675|67]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 545.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– her voice is low and sleepy – she yawns –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#685|68]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 78.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s just me, myself and I</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#695|69]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 82, 85–86; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 190, 194–95.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she frowns as if she does not know why she said it –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#705|70]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 90–95; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''203–209. For Malatesta’s account of his role in the insurrection see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''12–13.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Oh, that was stupid. Reshoot</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#715|71]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 85.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she stares at the camera long enough so that she can cut out the first part in editing and begin talking as though she were just starting –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#724|72]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 11. Similar ideas had been expressed by Malatesta at the recent October 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. See Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''346.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It has been raining now for five days and I have been isolated inside the whole time. I don’t have much stimulation in here apart from these guys, who are sort of helping</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#734|73]]. The unsuccessful insurrections of 1874 were in part launched in order to out-compete Italian republican revolutionaries. See Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 84–85.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she nods to her pile of books –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#744|74]]. Giuseppe Mazzini, ''A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy'','' Nation Building'','' and International Relations'', ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 111.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I can pretend we are in conversation. In here I don’t have nature to make me feel small. I am surrounded only by all this male intellect. It is the only thing that stops me from disappearing. But it is maddening because their words are not mine. They keep reminding me that. The wilderness is not mine. And at the same time it is all I am. I keep thinking zone of middle dimension. I keep thinking, okay, Newton</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#754|75]]. Quoted in Denis Mack Smith, ''Mazzini'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 100.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– her eyes keep darting to just next to the camera’s eye – she touches her face and hair, as though she is looking in a mirror, checking reflection – the viewfinder of the camera is probably turned towards her –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#764|76]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''336.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I am so wholly excluded from the communion. And without being outside all I have is these abstracted unattainable thoughts on nature. Why the fuck am I even reading this. URGH</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#774|77]]. D. M. Smith, ''Mazzini'', 6–7, 10, 41, 47, 64–73, 98–101, 118–19; Martin Clark, ''The Italian'' ''Risorgimento'','' ''2nd ed. (Harlow: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 41.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she throws Emerson across the room –''</div>
-[[#784|78]]. Clark, ''Italian'' ''Risorgimento'', 80–84.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Am I doing it right? I need to get back outside</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#794|79]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 140. One of the individuals inspired by Mazzini and Garibaldi was Bakunin who, prior to becoming an anarchist, met and attempted to work with them between 1862–64 in order to achieve Slav liberation as part of a wider democratic political revolution. Bakunin would go onto become a major critic of Mazzini and Garibaldi. See Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'', 13–20, 57–60, 84–85, 122–26, 131–33, 147–48, 255n19; Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''214–31.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she pauses then exhales suddenly through nose – puts face into hands – sits still, rubbing her eyelids with her fingers –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#804|80]]. Marco Pinfari, “Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat,” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 21, no. 4 (2009): 582–83; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 7–19.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (TO HERSELF): Maybe I can’t do this. Will the spirit of the mountain disqualify me for wishing I just had someone female to talk to? Is a lone bird on a tree on a lonely mountain singing to itself? Oh, for fuck’s sake. Reshoot</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#814|81]]. Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 7–8.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she rubs her face with both hands – slaps her cheeks – takes a deep breath – looks right into the camera –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#824|82]]. Pernicone,'' Italian Anarchism'','' ''11–13, 118–19, 169. The influence Pisacane had on Italian anarchism can be seen in the fact that Cafiero quotes him at length. See Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 4–5, 10–11, 14, 23, 45, 47, 62, 66–67. Despite being a republican martyr, the political theory of Pisacane does not appear to have been widely known among Italian republicans in the 1860s. See Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''70–73.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' It’s okay to not be content one hundred per cent of the time. Right, mountain spirit? If it were easy then it wouldn’t be hardship. And maybe it’s right to feel lonely. I can do this. I am strong enough to do this. This is the hardest part. The rain will stop soon. The only time I am lonely is when I am inside too long. Besides. I am not lonely. I have the camera and my books</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#834|83]]. Carlo Pisacane, “Political Testament,” Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, September, 22, 2011, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/carlo-pisacane-propaganda-by-the-deed-1857. According to Nettlau, the earliest reprint of this text he was aware of occurred in June 1878 in the Italian anarchist journal L’Avvenire. See Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism, ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996), 92.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– her resolute smile lingers and then fades –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#844|84]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 121.</div>
+'''ERIN'''(MUTTERING): Oh, I can’t use that. This is useless
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#854|85]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 119.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she gets up from the cot and reaches over for the camera –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#864|86]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 78.</div>
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#874|87]]. The following account of the Benevento Affair is a summary of Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 121–26; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''225–29.</div>
+==== EMPTY THE TANKS! ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#884|88]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 125</div>
+I am confused about the postcards in Damon’s parcel. The postcards are written in Damon’s handwriting but are addressed to different people at different addresses all across North America, Canada and Alaska. They are all dated September 1987 and are all of the same kind of sentiment. Damon is thanking people for their hospitality, help and friendship. He is telling them they are beautiful people with room for improvement. Then he is telling them they can improve by living for themselves. He is telling them to cast off their chains and live like he will live, purposefully and free. Then he ends with an ostentatious phrase about casting out into the unknown. He insinuates that they might never meet again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#894|89]]. Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+I suppose this is what he would have liked to say to these people, as though they were parting words, but something stopped him. The strange thing is that the postcards are stamped and bent at the corners and marked like they have travelled. I think maybe he did more than one journey like this, and he brought them to the cabin with him as some kind of token.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#904|90]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''126.</div>
+It is still raining. Last night I had the epiphany to leave out one of the cooking pans to fill up with rainwater so I did not need to venture out to get water from the spring. The rain battered against the hood of my anorak in a way that was exhilarating, an overload of stimulation after endless days inside the muted dry. I ran about in it yelping and laughing for a few minutes before retiring back inside like a fish that comes out from under its rock to dance a little in a flurry of excitement then catch itself and slink off back into the shadows. It was exhausting and after I wanted the stillness of the cabin again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#914|91]]. Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 126–27, 140–45.</div>
+Inside I peeled off my anorak and my sodden leggings and hung them up next to the grate. Then I coaxed a fire and set myself on the cot in view of the pan through the window, with my books. I quickly forgot about the pan, though, and did not remember it until late afternoon, when my mouth was feeling suddenly dry. My clothes had dried and I was loathe to get them wet again, so I took off my trousers to fetch the pan in just my anorak. It was brimming with water, with a couple of drowned insects for good measure. I picked these out and put the pot on top of the fire to boil.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#924|92]]. Cafiero, ''Revolution'', 63–64.</div>
+I filled my canteen with the boiled water and set it to cool. Then I made a broth from the rest of the water with one of the flavour packets from the instant noodles. I curled up on the cot and wrapped myself in the blanket and my sleeping bag with a tin mug of the hot savoury water. I smelled must from the blanket, and savoury, and me. The little excursion earlier in the day had made me overwhelmingly sleepy. I fell into it and slept for the rest of the day and long into the evening.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#934|93]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 80–82, 100–102; Miller, ''Kropotkin'', 136–37; Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''80–83.</div>
+I usually like to rise early and keep myself busy but with the rain I have been dead heavy all the time and dull and lethargic, but I wake in the middle of the night and I have an interlude of energy before falling back to sleep again. I use this time to read and write and draw, and wish the rain would stop so I could go night walking. I am dreaming lots again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#944|94]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 101.</div>
+A thing I have noticed is that they are all in the present tense. As in I am not dreaming about things from before here, no memories or other people or anything. No one I know, at least. Kind of spectral figures. Familiar strangers.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#954|95]]. Brousse, “Propaganda by the Deed,” 151.</div>
+==== THE GOD PARTICLE, THE GOD TRICK ====
-[[#964|96]]. Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism'','' ''113.
+LOCATION: wooden cabin; Denali wilderness; Alaskan tundra; Alaska; Earth; 3rd planet of Sol; inner rim of Orion Arm; the Milky Way; the Local Group; Virgo Supercluster; The Universe; Everywhere Ever and All Over Again.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#974|97]]. I have decided not to collectively label these acts “terrorism.” This is because although some of them were acts of terror against civilians, others were targeted attacks against specific individuals that occurred as part of an ongoing armed conflict between anarchists and the ruling classes. They were thus more akin to special operations carried out during a war. This is, in turn, consistent with how anarchists viewed themselves as militants fighting a class war.</div>
+The tundra is always whistling. wwwwWWWWWhhhHHHHhhh. The tundra is empty. The tundra is partitioned by colour. There is the green-grey flat ground that I am on, the cabin, then the white-blue mountains. The mountains look like a backdrop. I feel like Truman Burbank.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#984|98]]. Richard Bach Jensen, ''The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History'','' 1878–1934'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 7, 23–24.</div>
+If I sit still for long enough the whistling sounds like words. Big snowflake tumbleweed rolls just under my line of focused vision. I blink and it is gone.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#994|99]]. Andrew R. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''vol. 1,'' The Early Movement'' (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972), 115–16, 139–41. For the argument that they were anarchists, see ibid., 117–24, 143–48. For a critique of this view, see Cahm,'' Kropotkin'', 89–90. Kropotkin denied that there was any connection between these assassination attempts and the Jura Federation. See Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 388–89.</div>
+If I sit still for long enough my eyes go blurry like a mirage. Like heat waves but cold, cold. It is hard to focus even when I blink hard.
-[[#1004|100]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 65–66; Benedict Anderson, ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination'' (London: Verso, 2013), 115n90.
+Another sound starts behind the whistling. It sounds like a plane; I look around for one. Negative. It sounds like a person humming; I look around for a person. Negative. It sounds like bees. My hand tickles and there is a bee on it. Affirmative. The bee sits happy. I must be dreaming. The humming is louder.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1014|101]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 284–85.</div>
+In the shimmery mirage there is a dark shape coming closer. There is a figure in a cloak, furs, beads, skulls and with a staff. Her voice is very strange. I can’t see the features of her face because of the bees, which swarm in a flat mask. As if her face has no shape; no pits, no curves, no nose. It is hard to tell where the sound comes out from. There is a vibration on her voice, as if she’s speaking through a laryngophone, as if her voice emanates from all the tiny mouths of the bees in unison. It gives her what you might call an otherworldly aura. Almost techno-human. Like Professor Stephen Hawking. It is authorial.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1024|102]]. Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” in ''Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1, 152.</div>
+Stephen Hawking has a daughter called Lucy and she grew up to be a writer. She wanted to inspire children to get excited about space and physics and all the things she grew up in awe of. She writes adventure books about a little boy called George who likes space. Isn’t that frustrating?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1034|103]]. Carlo Cafiero, “Action (1880),” 152. See also Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 186–88.</div>
+She moves to sit by my side on my log, which does not budge under her, as though she is weightless. I look at her closely and, sure, she has this shimmering quality, buzzing and wavery and nearly not there, like a model of an atom spinning on its axis, just slow enough for you to see the falter, its constituent parts flickering visible. I reach out to touch her and can’t seem to, her contours blurring as my hand gets close, but hovering just above I can feel her. A kind of soft quivering, a pulsating that feels like sound, low sirens in my temples. She draws in the dirt with the end of her staff. The gravelly sound makes me hungry. Like Coco Pops without milk. Her voice has an ungraspable familiarity to it; it is hard to concentrate on what she is saying because of her bee beard.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1044|104]]. Cafiero, “The Organization of Armed Struggle.”</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''The circle is the antithesis of the triangle, because the circle stands for cycles which are even and infinite. In the centre of a circle you are always the same distance from the edge.''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1054|105]]. According to a police report, almost identical resolutions had been passed a year earlier on September 12, 1880, at a meeting of thirty-two anarchist militants in Vevey, Switzerland, which included Kropotkin and Reclus. See Marie Fleming, ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism ''(London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979),'' ''172.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:triangle.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1064|106]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 152–59; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 193–94.</div>
+''The ghost of Adam Smith sits on a triangle that is held upright by the shoulders of his crawling subordinates. He is hoarding all the power, and as it grows exponentially, the growth of others is depleted. But as the others are depleted, they are harmed to the point of abandonment (the bees are the first to leave him). As such, he loses his sense of self, which depended on a sense of the others.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1074|107]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'','' ''252–53.</div>
+So that is where the bees have gone. Around a week and a half has passed since I left Stan’s. I cannot be completely sure because I put a bit of tape over the date and time on the laptop for now and I have spent a lot of time sleeping when I should be awake and waking when I should be asleep. I have been inventing people for company, to talk to and mitigate the loneliness. Are invented people a corruption of solitude?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1084|108]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 253. Nathan-Ganz had, a few months prior, published an article on “Revolutionary War Science,” meaning the use of explosives, in his paper the ''An-Archist: Socialistic Revolutionary Review''. See Avrich, ''Haymarket'','' ''57–58; Timothy Messer-Kruse, ''The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 81, 206n28.</div>
+I have bathed once in the stream in all this time, little splash washes on my smelliest parts now and then. I smell but I only notice this when I take off my pants in the toilet shed. The rest of the time my smell is enveloped into me by my clothes. It worries me when I take off my pants that I may attract bears.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1094|109]]. Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in ''Social Protest'','' Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'','' ''ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 210.</div>
+My face itches a lot because I keep touching it; I keep touching it because I think I am growing a beard; I think I am growing a beard because of the itching. There is not a mirror and the camcorder is just illusive enough to make me think I can see hair.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1103|110]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 288–300.</div>
+From the bee-figure dream I can pinpoint exactly in my subconscious the fodder for it. Back in the visitors’ centre at the entrance to Denali Park there were displays on all of the cultures indigenous to Alaska. I remember a diagram explaining the position of the individual in the Yupik Eskimo belief system in relation to the animals and plants it shared its home with, termed ''Cosmological'' ''Reproductive Cycling''. In the diagram the human was part of a sort of energy transferral web, in the shape of a circle. It made me think at the time of a diagram we had in biology class, a food pyramid used to describe energy transferral in the animal kingdom. On the biggest pyramid and at the top sat the human, the unchallenged dominant omnivore at the top of the food chain.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1113|111]]. Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'', 59–60, 93–95.</div>
+Adam Smith casts himself as the dominant creature of the triangle and food chain and propagates this as the natural order of things. He eats a mass of lesser creatures who have themselves eaten a mass of even lesser creatures who have been grazing on chicken nuggets and apathy because their natural food source is inaccessible to them (these are the crawling subordinates). All of their power accumulates in Adam Smith. He uses this as an economic analogy, substituting for food or energy wealth or money.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1123|112]]. Quoted in Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 254.</div>
+The triangle food pyramid is used to explain hierarchy in nature and justify Adam Smith’s dominance. But it only looks that way because he said it does. The wolf does not sit on top of a pyramid. The wolf is dependent on the grass because when the grass dies the deer dies and when the deer thrives the wolf thrives and when the wolf overreaches the wolf is brought into check by its own hubris because the deer disappear and after a short period of thriving the wolf does too.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1133|113]]. Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 254–55.</div>
+For the Yupik, like Naaja’s Inuit, nothing alive died but was reborn, and this was honoured in hunting ritual so power could never be accumulated but only transferred.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1143|114]]. On Italian republicans, see Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 12–14, 26–29. On Irish nationalists, see K. R. M. Short, ''The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombers in Victorian Britain ''(Dublin: Gill and Macmillan Ltd, 1979); Lindsay Clutterbuck, “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?,” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 16, no. 1 (2004), 154–81. On Russian nihilists, see Claudia Verhoeven, ''The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism'' (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Ronald Seth, ''The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki'' (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966).</div>
+''The orca and the wolf were seen as highly spiritual creatures that aided humans in hunting, and so offerings were made to both to maintain good relationships. The spirit that resided in each was interchangeable, in winter it was embodied in the wolf that brought the deer and in summer the orca that brought the walrus.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1153|115]]. Seth, ''Russian Terrorists'', 96–100; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 35, 37–39.</div>
+''When an animal was killed as prey, it was returned to the wild to become complete again. To aid this, the bones of the carcass remained unbroken, and there was a farewell ritual where the animal would be entertained with drum music. If the animal was pleased with its treatment as a guest, it would return again in the future.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1163|116]]. Quoted in Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 18.</div>
+I am surprised Stan could retain his survival-of-the-fittest worldview when spending so much time in the park centre. I suppose he must not pay too much attention to the plaques.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1173|117]]. Nettlau, ''Short History'', 148, 146.</div>
+==== THE WILD AS A PROJECT OF THE SELF ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1183|118]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 45–46; Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 43–45; Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 154–59, 320–21, notes 11 and 12. For other examples see Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 44–52.</div>
+During the night the rain stopped! I woke up to its lack of noise. It took me a while to realise it had not stopped completely. The gentler rain was white noise. I fell to sleep again feeling looser.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1193|119]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''51–56.</div>
+The rain was slack still when I woke up and I decided to try some fishing. It has been days since I have eaten anything that is not beige and the urge to get outside was so great that I twitched with it.
-[[#1203|120]]. John Merriman, ''The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror ''(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 71–73, 78–81.
+Walking through the forest the rain was less dense still. It fell in fatter drops and at a different tempo to the rain as it hit the canopy above. The noise of rain inside the forest was both dulled and intensified, like a storm from underneath a high church roof. It was much more peaceful in the forest and I felt a stillness come over again for the first time in days.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1213|121]]. Merriman, ''Dynamite'','' ''99–105, 137–38, 145,'' ''149–59, 180–81. For other bombings, see ibid., 172–78.</div>
+I decided to try out on the lake in the tundra. I had been stupid to think I could just fish from the lake with my shoddy short rod. But lucky for me there was a rock that worked a bit like a jetty and let me sit with my short line in the deeper water. In the still water where the rod dripped, the beads skimmed on top for seconds like water beetles skating, before sinking.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1223|122]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 184–88.</div>
+It was luckily an okay spot. It took less than an hour to hook something and I wished I had a way to make the fish keep better so I could stock up and get all the death over in one go for a while. I stunned the fish against the rock jetty, trying to do it without thinking too much. A large ant struggled a tiny caterpillar that was twice its size over my rock and back to its queen. I attached the dead fish to the hook so I could walk it back without having to carry it in my hands. I wiped my hands on some damp grass with lake water to get rid of some of the sticky smell.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1233|123]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 31–36. For details see Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order''.</div>
+When I looked up I went stiff. On the opposite side of the lake there was a bear come out of nowhere while I was busy with the fish. A bloody big grizzly. I forgot my entire body and the rod fell out of my hands and the bear stilled too. It watched me watch it from my plinth on the rock, its fur flittering in the wind. It was close enough to see that but it was still small across the big lake. There was a potent unreality to it. It was still and mysterious in an accidental way and I felt very suddenly that something in me was going to be different from then on.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1243|124]]. On Alfonso, see Paul Avrich, ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006), 26; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 163. On Clemenceau, see Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''167. For other examples, see Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''228–36; Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti'','' ''97–104, 137–59, 205–7; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 200, 221–22, 229.</div>
+I put my hand on my chest to feel my heart beating vigorously but it was not. In fact I did not feel like I thought I would at all. Since I had got out to the cabin The Bear had existed like an aura, since before that even on the ice sheet, the Greenlandic tundra. It had felt conspicuous for not being there; lingering like a promise and quivering with anticipation and fear. And I had thought back then that it would feel like opening up, that I would see that Fire burning in its eyes and recognise myself in it. But instead after all there it was so suddenly. It looked so benign and abstract, an apparition. I wondered if perhaps it was.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1253|125]]. Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'','' ''123–33; Turcato, ''Making Sense'', 170–73. In response to this struggle from below the prime minister suspended import duties on grain and flour until June 30.</div>
+===== I want to see myself in you. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1262|126]]. Quoted in Zimmer, ''Immigrants'', 60.</div>
+===== But we are very different. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1272|127]]. Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'', 91–96.</div>
+I felt like if I turned away it might disappear, and although some flight response was tugging me gently, telling me to get away, I did not want to turn my back on it. It seemed to be thinking the same of me. I started to think maybe we would be trapped like this for ever, perpetually watching each other watching in wary fascination.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1282|128]]. Quoted in Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 75. For more primary sources, see Mitchell Abidor, ed., ''Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed'' (Oakland CA, PM Press, 2015).</div>
+My blood tingled vigorously and I could feel it filling me up all the way to the tips of my fingers and toes, so that the sensation of my feet in my shoes felt like containment, like what it must feel like to be liquid and formless but held in shape, my hands like rubber gloves full of water. Like zero gravity. Like proprioception.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1292|129]]. For example Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 256–79; Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'','' ''84–90;'' ''Voltairine de Cleyre, ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader'' ed. A. J. Brigati (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004),'' ''173–76; Ruth Kinna, ''Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 58–60; Clark, “Introduction,” in Élisée Reclus, ''Anarchy'','' Geography'','' Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus'', ed. John Clark and Camille Martin (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013), 57–59; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 124–27.</div>
+I put one foot behind the other on the rock, using my heel to feel out the stable parts, and climbed down off it without ever breaking contact with its eyes. I put down the rod in case it thought I was brandishing it. Then I started to tiptoe, desperately slow, closer towards it following the lakeside. I was trying to move so slowly that it might not even notice. To get closer to it and really feel its presence. To commune.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1302|130]]. Louisa Sarah Bevington, ''An Anarchist Manifesto'', (London: Metropolitan Printing Works, 1895), 11.</div>
+I have never felt such an acute kind of instinctual consideration of what it is to not be alive. It became clear then that any nostalgia that we feel from ''The Call of the Wild'' is the pang of what we remember but do not have, from where we are before we go in search of it. It is all of the prospects of having life taken and of not being and of things that you can never possess or control or put into words. In that moment I forgot the anxiety of having a body, I forgot the need to possess it.
-[[#1312|131]]. Avrich, ''Sacco and Vanzetti'','' ''52.
+While I was thinking all this I had got a lot closer and I could feel my heart then where I could not before, throbbing in my throat like a pulsar. I was shaking badly from concentrating so hard on my stealth. The grizzly bear stared at me, transfixed. Unmoved and hypnotic stare. We were both fixed on each other in fear and desire or morbid fascination. Or none of that. Just purely under spell.
-[[#1322|132]]. James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 90–98.
+===== But in that way I see me in you, in what I am not. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1332|133]]. Senta, ''Galleani'','' ''65–66, 139–41.</div>
+Then it jerked its head. A sudden lurch snapping the thread that had formed between us. It peeled its black lips back to show its teeth and it jolted me to notice I was so close as to see its teeth clearly. It padded one front paw behind the other, walking its front legs backwards into itself, then using the weight of the rest of its body and jumping a little to bring its forelegs up and stand bipedal, unfolding to its full height and stature. Huge. Fuck.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1342|134]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 84.</div>
+I could see the matting of its fur where its underbelly was wet. It huffed through its nostrils, short, deep grunts.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1352|135]]. Galleani, ''End of Anarchism'', 93–95.</div>
+===== What am I doing what the fuck am I doing. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1362|136]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 58.</div>
+Abruptly out of trance now. I suddenly see myself from right up above, as though looking down. I am small and it is big and the lake is huge blue glass beside us and the grass goes on on on around us and there is nowhere for cover.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1372|137]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 127.</div>
+I keep absolutely still and try to think. What did the pamphlet say what did the pamphlet say. Direct eye contact. Did it not say never to make – very dangerous. I avert my eyes, lower my head, still trying to see it. Keep one hundred feet between you. Was it one hundred? Five hundred? Maybe fifty. How far is fifty feet? Either way it is too late now. What else? Do not go without pepper spray. Well, that one’s out. It said calm, monotone voice. Let it know you are human.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1382|138]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 264–65. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''187–91; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 53–58.</div>
+Hi bear. Nice bear. Gratey-shrill with fear. Be submissive. Shoulders down. Bow head. Respect respect, bowing like a Tibetan prostrating, bow-crawling a pilgrimage. Slowly slowly up the mountain. Back away slowly.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1392|139]]. Jensen, ''Anarchist Terrorism'', 36–38. For an overview of state repression in response to propaganda of the deed see Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013),'' ''132; Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 21–22, 32n22; Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads'', 34–35, 39; Carlson, ''Anarchism in Germany'', 127–29, 154–58, 293–94; Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'','' ''14–17; Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 167, 188–199; Fleming, ''Anarchist Way'', 213–14; Goyens, ''Beer and Revolution'','' ''191; Merriman, ''Dynamite'', 207–10; Pernicone and Ottanelli, ''Assassins against the Old Order'', 77–89.</div>
+===== Where the bloody hell am I? =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1402|140]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''397.Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism</div>
+Rocks under heels making me unsteady. Cannot turn around cannot make it look like fleeing and initiate a chase. It does not come after me. It stands, watching me go. When I have reversed, undone my journey back where I started, let’s not do that again, it lets itself fall limply to its feet. Thud.
-== {{anchor|Chapter7MassAnarchismMas1}} {{anchor|Chapter7MassAnarchismMas}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook10}} Chapter 7: Mass Anarchism ==
+And then it walks away. And I have to say that I did not see the Fire and that its eyes were vague from where I stood. It has nothing to give me apart from its just being and its bear-ness. Probably it will never think of me again and I will remember it always. But that is because the bear does not have sensibilities because it does not need them. It already knows all of this. I did not have the camera for any of this so as far as the documentary is concerned it did not happen. Which makes me think, funny, it was the most ''happened to'' that I have ever felt.
-Mass anarchists advocated forming, or participating in, large-scale, formal organizations that prefigured the future anarchist society and engaged in collective struggles for immediate reforms in the present. It was held that these collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop a revolutionary mass movement that was both capable of, and driven to, overthrow capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. The struggle for immediate reforms was, in other words, viewed as the best means to develop the social force that was necessary for launching a successful armed insurrection. Mass anarchists thought this would occur due to workers being transformed by the practice of participating within prefigurative organizations, taking direct action against the ruling classes, and being influenced by anarchists acting as a militant minority within social movements.[[#1MichaelSchmidtandLucienva|1]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0201-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-'''Support of Formal Organizations'''
+<div style="text-align:center;">''I think a boreal owl?''</div>
-Mass anarchists advocated building, and participating within, large-scale formal federations that prefigured the kinds of organization that would exist in a future anarchist society. These tended to be federations of trade unions or community groups, whose membership included both anarchists and nonanarchists, and federations of anarchist militants, which I shall refer to as ''specific anarchist organizations''. The size of organization mass anarchists hoped to create can be seen in Kropotkin’s argument that the victory of the working classes required “monster unions embracing millions of proletarians” and the establishment of “an ''International Federation of all the Trade Unions all over the World''.”[[#2PeterKropotkinDirectStrug|2]]
+==== SISTER ====
-Large-scale federations were advocated by mass anarchists for two main practical reasons. First, they held that they were necessary to achieve coordination between, and effective action by, large groups of people in different areas. In 1870, Bakunin argued that the self-emancipation of the working classes was impeded by their “lack of organization, the difficulty of coming to agreements and of acting in concert.”[[#3QuotedinReneBerthierSoci|3]] He wrote,
+This morning the strangest thing happened. I was sat around in the cabin doing a video diary entry when my back started to tingle and the hairs on my neck and arms stood up, and I got the sure feeling that I was being watched. At first I put it down to being on the camera but then I felt I could feel its direction, as if it were coming from behind.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Certainly, there is sufficient spontaneous strength among the people, indubitably the strength of the latter is much greater than that of the government and that of ruling classes within it; but lacking organization, spontaneous force is no real force. It is not in a [fit] state to sustain a protracted struggle against forces that are much weaker but much better organized. It is on this undeniable superiority of organized force over elemental popular force that all the power of the state resides. . . . Thus, the [real] question is not one of knowing if the people are capable of an uprising, but rather whether they are ready to form an organization which will assure the success of a revolt, a victory which is not ephemeral, but durable and definitive.[[#4QuotedinBerthierSocialDe|4]]</div>
+I turned very carefully, as though whoever it was would not notice me turning if it was just slow enough. Outside the window, just inside the trees and standing half beneath a shadow, a reindeer was stood still as anything, its legs so straight the wind could knock it over. It just stood there looking and I stared back at it through the window and it just went on like that, looking right at me and not flinching a muscle.
-Given this, Bakunin argued in 1871 that “to make the people’s might strong enough to be able to eradicate the State’s military and civil might, it is necessary to organize the proletariat. . . . That is precisely what the International Working Men’s Association does” by organizing workers into federations of trade unions.[[#5MichaelBakuninTheBasicBa|5]]
+Now I know there are not many reindeer in this part of Alaska at this time of year but here was this reindeer looking at me with an intensity and persistence. I went outside to it to see if it would turn and run away from me because it was creeping me out just standing there. I needed to get closer to see it was real and solid and breathing. I walked slowly towards it and my blood clunked in my ears every step I got nearer because it really was not budging any. Then, as I got within around five metres, it suddenly huffed and took a step backwards. It came to as if from out of a trance and started to back away, baby-step by baby-step. Then it half-circled around me as if at the distance of a force field, and loped slowly out towards the tundra. The whole time it kept looking back at me warily.
-This argument was applied not only to the organization of the working classes in general, but also the organization of workers who were anarchist militants. In 1889, Malatesta complained that some anarchists had “attacked the principle of organization itself. They wanted to prevent betrayals and deception, permit free rein to individual initiative, ensure against spies and attacks from the government—and they brought isolation and impotence to the fore.”[[#6QuotedinNunzioPerniconeI|6]] Amédée Dunois similarly claimed at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam that the anarchist movement in France was disorganized and fragmented into unconnected small groups and isolated individuals. He lamented that,
+But the strangest thing about it was that the reindeer came to me first in a dream. Last night I was outside just kind of staring at the forest moving in the wind, waving like water, at the pinkish tundra evergreens dotted like Christmas cake decorations, at the rust-red mountains glinting back the sun in streaks, the clouds behind their own snowy mountain range, just gently spinning round to get everything in panorama, when the figure appeared in front of me again.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Everyone acts in his own way, whenever he wants; in this way individual efforts are dispersed and often exhausted, simply wasted. Anarchists can be found in more or less every sphere of action: in the workers’ unions, in the anti-militarist movement, among anti-clericalist free thinkers, in the popular universities, and so on, and so forth. What we are missing is a specifically anarchist movement, which can gather to it, on the economic and workers’ ground that is ours, all those forces that have been fighting in isolation up to now. This specifically anarchist movement will voluntarily arise from our groups and from the federation of these groups. The might of joint action, of concerted action, will undoubtedly create it. . . . It would be sufficient for the anarchist organization to group together, around a programme of concrete practical action, all the comrades who accept our principles and who want to work with us, according to our methods.[[#7MaurizioAntonioliedTheI|7]]</div>
+===== Child must have a comrade animal in order to be protected from the bad spirits. =====
-The second reason why mass anarchists advocated large-scale federations was that they were necessary for developing the kinds of people and social relations that were needed to abolish capitalism and the state and create an anarchist society. In 1892, Malatesta argued that since “agreement, association, and organization represent one of the laws governing life and the key to strength—today as well as after the revolution,” it follows that the working classes must be organized prior to the social revolution.[[#8MalatestaTheMethodofFree|8]] This is because “tomorrow can only grow out of today—and if one seeks success tomorrow, the factors of success need to be prepared today.”[[#9MalatestaMethodofFreedom|9]] This was especially important given that, as Malatesta explained in 1897, workers cannot be “expected to provide for pressing needs” during the social revolution “unless they were already used to coming together to deal jointly with their common interests.”[[#10ErricoMalatestaALongand|10]] For example, supplying bread to everyone in a city would have to be organized, and this required that bakers were “already associated and ready to manage without masters.”[[#11MalatestaPatientWork158|11]]
+My head reeled a little from the spinning. I must have looked scared at talk of bad spirits.
-Large-scale, formal organizations were, in short, deemed necessary for both engaging in successful revolts and producing and distributing goods and services during and after the social revolution. Insurrectionist anarchists were not convinced by such arguments because they regarded formal organizations as incompatible with the freedom of the individual, and so with anarchism’s commitment to the unity of means and ends. Mass anarchists replied that formal organizations were both compatible with freedom and a prerequisite for it. They thought that large-scale coordination and collective action based on voluntary agreement expanded a person’s real possibility to act and develop themselves far beyond what an individual could attain by themselves or in a small group. A worker may have the internal ability to help organize a large strike across multiple industries but they lack the capacity to do so when isolated. The external conditions necessary for the development and exercise of such a capacity only emerge when an organization like a national trade union is formed that unites workers together, and thereby enables new forms of action.[[#12MalatestaPatientWork148|12]]
+===== Not all spirits are bad. Most are good and watch over us. Besides, you will have the reindeer. I will find you one. =====
-Mass anarchists also argued that a lack of organizational structures often results in informal hierarchies emerging. Charismatic individuals can, for example, create a newspaper and use it to steer the anarchist movement in a direction of their own choosing, and transform themselves into a prominent leader. In so doing, they acquire a large amount of influence, and use this to further their own positions and interests in manners that are unaccountable to the wider movement and sometimes even harmful. Formal organizational structures can counter this tendency by creating systems of accountability, such as the editors of newspapers being delegates who are elected and mandated by the members of a trade union.[[#13MalatestaPatientWork153|13]]
+===== Who are the bad spirits? =====
-Mass anarchists were, nevertheless, still anarchists and so opposed to any system of top-down organization based on minority rule and centralization.[[#14RicardoMellaAnarchistSoc|14]] The conclusions of the 1906 Russian anarchist-communist conference, which were written by Kropotkin, opposed “every form of hierarchical organization that is characteristic of the parties of the State socialists” in which members are “obedient to a central power” and subject to “party discipline and compulsion.”[[#15KropotkinDirectStruggle|15]] This perspective was shared by Baginski who, three years later, rejected “constraining laws that need a centralistic apparatus for their execution,” while advocating “a federative association that does not demand subjection from its members, but will rather place understanding, initiative, and solidarity in the place of commands and compulsory, soldierly behavior.”[[#16MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|16]]
+===== The bad spirits are spirits without forms. Just spirits that are waiting to be in bodies again. They are not really bad. Just envious. They like to cause mischief to keep themselves occupied. Sometimes that mischief is death but really death only means to be made to change form again. =====
-One hierarchical organization that mass anarchists opposed was the bureaucratic trade union. In 1938, Rocker argued that trade unions, in which decisions flow from a small minority of bureaucrats at the top to workers beneath them, should be rejected on the grounds that they are “always attended by barren official routine; and this crushes individual conviction, kills all personal initiative by lifeless discipline and bureaucratic ossification, and permits no independent action.”[[#17RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndi1|17]] Such top-down systems of decision-making systems were especially harmful because the minority who actually made decisions lacked immediate access to the local information needed to do so. To illustrate this point, Rocker referred to trade unions allied with the Social Democratic Party of Germany, in which strikes had to first be approved by the central committee, which was usually very far away and “not in a position to pass a correct judgement on the local conditions.” This meant that workers in a particular area were unable to engage in sudden direct action, and so effectively respond to their immediate circumstances and concerns on the ground.[[#18RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|18]] For a state, “centralism is the appropriate form of organization, since it aims at the greatest possible uniformity in social life for the maintenance of political and social equilibrium [under capitalism]. But for a movement whose very existence depends on prompt action at any favorable moment and on the independent thought and action of its supporters, centralism could but be a curse.”[[#19RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|19]]
+I was incredulous.
-The form of organization that would, in the opinion of mass anarchists, simultaneously enable effective coordination between large groups of people and the free initiative of its members was the federation. What such federations were supposed to look like can be understood by examining in detail Malatesta’s various descriptions of anarchist organizational structures, especially those he made during a series of debates with antiorganizationalist anarchists in the 1890s.[[#20Thefollowingaccountislar|20]] These organizational principles were later implemented by the specific anarchist organization Malatesta was a member of during the early 1920s, the Italian Anarchist Union.[[#21MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|21]] It should nonetheless be kept in mind that these are Malatesta’s proposals, and, despite being influential, do not reflect what all mass anarchists thought or how all mass anarchist organizations actually operated.
+===== But I quite like my form. =====
-Malatesta advocated the formation of an organization that united individuals under a common program, which specified the goals of the group and the means they proposed to achieve them. The purpose of such an organization was to enable individuals to pursue their shared goals by educating one another, engaging in joint activity, and coordinating action over a large-scale. In so doing, an organization would develop a collective strength to change society that was not only impossible for an individual to develop in isolation, but was also greater than the sum of the individual strengths that composed it.
+===== And this is the tragedy of death. But it is a short-lived one. =====
-Such a formal organization must, given the unity of means and ends, be structured in a manner that prefigures an anarchist society. Whereas authoritarian organizations rest on a division between some who command and others who obey, anarchist organizations are free associations of equals that are formed in order to achieve a common goal. There should be no substantial difference between how anarchists organize before and after the social revolution. They need, “today for the purposes of propaganda and struggle, tomorrow in order to meet all of the needs of social life, organizations built upon the will and in the interest of all their members.”[[#22MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|22]] Anarchist formal organizations, therefore, have to be founded on “the principle of autonomy of individuals within groups, and of groups within federations” such that “nobody has the right to impose their will on anyone else, and nobody is forced to follow decisions that they have not accepted.”[[#23MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|23]] Within such a federalist organization, each group and individual member would be free to federate with whomever they desired, and to leave any federation whenever they wanted. This freedom of association included the freedom of the federation, or groups within the federation, to choose to disassociate from individuals who violated its common program, such as by campaigning for a politician or supporting an imperialist war.[[#24MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|24]]
+She dissolved back into the forest, then promptly reappeared leading a reindeer.
-Decisions within the local groups that compose the federation would be made by a general assembly, in which each member had a vote and an equal say in collective decisions. Although Malatesta held that anarchists should aim for a situation in which everybody agreed on a decision, he understood that this would often not happen, and there would be a division between a majority of people in favor of one position and a minority opposed to it. In such situations, where it was impractical or impossible to pass multiple resolutions reflecting each faction’s distinct viewpoint, it was expected that the minority would voluntarily defer to the majority, so that a decision was made and the organization would continue to function. If the minority disagreed strongly with the majority, and felt that this was an issue of supreme importance, then they were free to voluntarily dissociate and leave the organization.
+===== This will be your reindeer. She is a herd mother so her imprint is very heavy. =====
-Large-scale coordination would be achieved through the organization of congresses, which were attended by delegates that each section’s general assembly had elected. According to Malatesta,
+===== Imprint? =====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">congresses of an anarchist organization . . . do not lay down the law; they do not impose their own resolutions on others. They serve to maintain and increase personal relationships among the most active comrades, to coordinate and encourage programmatic studies on the ways and means of taking action, to acquaint all on the situation in the various regions and the action most urgently needed in each; to formulate the various opinions current among the anarchists and draw up some kind of statistics from them—and their decisions are not obligatory rules but suggestions, recommendations, proposals to be submitted to all involved, and do not become binding and enforceable except on those who accept them, and for as long as they accept them.[[#25MalatestaMethodofFreedom|25]] </div>
+===== All things have an imprint. It is the weight of the energy. Some are heavy and others are lighter. =====
-In order to ensure that the delegates within the federation did not develop into a ruling minority who imposed decisions on the wider membership, Malatesta proposed a number of limits to their power. First, the delegate would be mandated to complete specific tasks by the group who elected them, such as being a treasurer or voting as instructed at a congress, rather than being granted decision-making power, which would remain in the hands of the general assembly who had elected the delegate. Second, the delegate would serve for fixed terms and the position would be rotated regularly, so that as many people as possible could learn to perform these tasks and take initiative. Third, the delegate could be instantly recalled and replaced by those who had elected them, if they did not approve of what the delegate had done.[[#26MalatestaMethodofFreedom|26]]
+===== What does it do? =====
-A more concrete understanding of what federations built on anarchist principles actually looked like can be seen by examining the Spanish anarcho-syndicalist trade union the CNT, which was founded in 1910, and had a membership of over 700,000 workers by 1919. Despite suffering multiple waves of state repression and being illegal for several years of its existence, the CNT was able to survive and maintain itself over time. By May 1936, the CNT was composed of 982 union sections with a total membership of 550,595 workers.[[#27JosePeiratsTheCNTinthe|27]] Its organizational structure is shown below in ''figure 1''. The CNT was initially composed of craft unions that belonged both to a federation of every union in their specific or similar crafts, and a federation composed of all the other unions, irrespective of craft, in their local area. This formally changed at a national level in 1919, when delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form “single unions” that united all workers in a specific industry, regardless of their profession, within the same union. These single unions were, in turn, broken down into individual trade sections that would deal with any issues specific to their craft.[[#28MurrayBookchinTheSpanish|28]]
+===== It defines your potency. A heavier imprint leaves more of an effect. But an imprint can be positive or negative. If you have a heavier imprint you have a responsibility to be positive. But you must also remember that others with a weaker imprint are just as important but in different ways. =====
-Decisions in the single unions were made by a general assembly composed of the entire membership. This general assembly elected a shop steward, who was granted the power to call for work stoppages when the membership instructed them to do so, and an administrative committee. The administrative committee of the single union was, according to the activist manual issued by the CNT during the Spanish revolution of 1936, composed of a general secretary, treasurer, accountant, first secretary, second secretary, third secretary, librarian, propaganda delegate, and federal delegate(s). All the different trade sections within the single union had to be represented within the administrative committee. Who performed what role was decided upon by the elected members of the administrative committee themselves. The exceptions to this were the general secretary, treasurer, and federal delegate who were specifically chosen by the general assembly of the single union.[[#29DannyEvansprivatecommuni|29]]
+The bees droned around her. They bustled over each other, to the very edges of her eyes. I thought I knew those eyes, like a word trapped behind the tonsils. I touched the reindeer. Its fur was soft and downy like a kitten’s tummy and its skin hummed underneath with its charge.
-The single unions in a particular area combined to form a local federation. The local federations then combined to form a regional federation and the regional federations together formed the national federation.[[#30In1931themajorityofdel|30]] The local, regional, and national federations were all self-managed by their own respective administrative committees. In order to prevent the rise of a bureaucracy within the CNT, the only paid delegates within the trade union were the general secretary of the national federation and the secretaries of the regional federations. Every other delegate was expected to earn a living working in a trade.[[#31In1934AngelPestanaclaim|31]] The administrative committees of the local, regional, and national federations lacked the ability to impose decisions on shop stewards, who were only subject to the instructions of their single union. The local, regional, and national administrative committees were, on paper, supposed to focus their activities exclusively on coordinating actions between various single unions, correspondence, collecting statistics, and prisoner support. During periods of state repression, they ended up taking on greater responsibilities because the close links between the single unions and the CNT’s main delegates were broken down.[[#32Thehighercommitteesofthe|32]]
+===== You can find imprint everywhere. =====
-The committees of the regional federations were elected each year at the regional congresses, that were attended by mandated delegates from the local federations. In certain unusual situations, the members of the regional committees were expected to consult local trade unions and federations by means of either a referendum or correspondence. A regional committee could be replaced if the majority of local federations within the regional federation called for an extraordinary congress to take place, at which new delegates would be elected. The committee of the national federation was, in contrast, a role that was delegated to one of the regional committees on a temporary basis by the national federation’s congress, which was attended by mandated delegates from every single union in the country. Between national congresses, decisions in the CNT that involved multiple single unions were made at plenums. A local federation’s plenum was composed of the federal delegates from each single union’s administrative committee, who were mandated on how to vote at the plenum by those who had elected them. These local federal delegates then elected and mandated a delegate to represent the area at a regional plenum of local committees that, in turn, sent mandated delegates to a national plenum of regional committees.[[#33ThisaccountofhowtheCNT|33]]
+Seeing the reindeer today brought it all back. What is going on here? Women are after all irrational and mystical, so maybe I was just being a girl about it? Would an actual real-life visitation feel any different to a hallucination anyway? If a hallucination is a work of your subconscious, it is already a message from another realm in a way. How do you tell the difference? ''For human society I was obliged to conjure up the former occupants of these woods'', said Thoreau of the days real people did not pop into his cabin by the pond at Walden.
-A more detailed description of how the CNT was organized is made by the brickmaker José Peirats, who was a member of the CNT from 1922 onward, and was elected as the organization’s general secretary in 1947. In the CNT,
+The reindeer kept on loping and looking and stopping from time to time to turn and stare back at the hut. I stayed out there shivering in my pyjamas, watching it go.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The unions constitute autonomous units, linked to the ensemble of the Confederation only by the accords of a general nature adopted at national congresses, whether regular or extraordinary. Apart from this commitment, the unions, right up to their technical sections, are free to reach any decision which is not detrimental to the organization as a whole. . . it is the unions which decide and directly regulate the guidelines of the Confederation. At all times, the basis for any local, regional, or national decision is the general assembly of the union, where every member has the right to attend, raise and discuss issues, and vote on proposals. Resolutions are adopted by majority vote attenuated by proportional representation. Extraordinary congresses are held on the suggestion of the assembled unions. Even the agenda is devised by the assemblies where the items on the agenda are debated and delegates appointed as the executors of their collective will. This federalist procedure, operating from the bottom up, constitutes a precaution against any possible authoritarian degeneration in the representative committees.[[#34PeiratsTheCNTintheSpan|34]]</div>
+==== HOW TO KILL AND DIE ====
-<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+After the reindeer incident the bee-figure keeps appearing to me in animal form. I will be walking through the woods and she will appear to me, for example as a brown ermine, springing from behind a tree so very suddenly there and sitting on her hind legs in a way that says ''I am no mortal brown ermine''. I can always tell it is really her, sometimes by ways like this, as though me and the animal are communicating, and sometimes even when she chooses not to acknowledge me in this way, by signs from the physical world. I would call this other kind maybe an increase in ''density'', like Roman-vase heaviness, for example the sudden pick-up of the wind when in the presence of the golden eagle, or a sudden stillness, or anything else that feels like it is hinting at significance.
-[[Image:Zoe_Figure_1.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-The CNT’s system of majority voting was explained in more detail within the organization’s constitution, which was printed on the trade union’s membership card. It declared that “Anarcho-syndicalism and anarchism recognize the validity of majority decisions. The militant has a right to his own point of view and to defend it, but he is obliged to comply with majority decisions, even when they are against his own feelings. . . We recognize the sovereignty of the individual, but we accept and agree to carry out the collective mandate taken by majority decision. Without this there is no organization.”[[#35QuotedinPeiratsWhatist|35]]
+I went far into the tundra today for more food. I saw another golden eagle, or the same golden eagle, and a gyrfalcon. I had been hungry for the taste of meat that was not fish and had to kill by my own hand again if I was ever to build up enough karma points to eat meat back at home. I thought about what she had said and it gave me motivation to take full responsibility for the transferral that maintains my own energy.
-Members of the CNT did, nonetheless, disagree about whether or not this system of majority voting, in which decisions were binding on all members, should be applied to much smaller specific anarchist organizations. The Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) was a specific anarchist organization composed of small affinity groups. The FAI initially made most of their decisions via unanimous agreement and rarely used voting. In 1934, the Z and Nervio affinity groups pushed for the FAI to adopt binding agreements established through majority vote. The Afinidad affinity group, which included Peirats, agreed with the necessity of such a system within the CNT, but opposed it being implemented within small specific anarchist organizations or affinity groups. After a confrontational FAI meeting Afinidad left the organization in protest.[[#36EalhamLivingAnarchism77|36]]
+The clouds were moving fast in the direction I was walking and if I stood still with my head up to face them they would glide over and I would feel my belly go as if I were still moving too. The sun was hanging evening-low and its angle filled the clouds up with colour, so that they were pink in its face and purple in shadow and it was a big ball of orange, opaque enough to look at, leaking its hue onto the grass and making it orange too. The sky felt close and low like a projection inside a planetarium, the tundra wide and empty, and walking north as I was, they went on together uninterrupted until they disappeared behind the curve of the earth, and it made me feel big and small to look at it all.
-The extent to which anarchists within the CNT valued its federalist system of organization can be seen in the actions of the twelve to fifteen thousand former members of the Durruti Column, who had fled to France after the defeat of the Spanish revolution in 1939, and were imprisoned in the Vernet d’Ariège concentration camp. Despite the abysmal conditions of the camp—lack of adequate housing, food shortages, disease, and very cold weather—the anarchists established a mirror image of the CNT. Every anarchist belonged to a general assembly within their hut, which elected a hut committee to represent them. These hut committees then federated together and elected sector committees, which in turn voted for a camp committee. The camp committee then sent demands from the general assemblies to the French authorities running the concentration camp. In so doing, they practiced what little anarchism they could within the direst of circumstances.[[#37EalhamLivingAnarchism12|37]]
+I did it like she says to. This time when I saw the hare I wanted, and I saw more of them because of the flat of the tundra, I considered my shot carefully and struck it in the hind. It had seen me and stood semi-wary, but I suppose it did not bolt because it was too unused to the sight of me to understand. It looked me in the eye before it took my bullet. I ran over to where it dropped to witness the magnitude of what I had done. It was still alive, like she said I should hope it would be. I picked up its warm limp body and held it up to face my face, and looked in at the life fading there. I poured some water from my bottle into its mouth so that it would not be thirsty. I shook from the sobs and tried to share in its suffering. And I am sure that its was much worse than mine, but it felt less like cheating to let it see me cry.
-Mass anarchists advocated and built large-scale federations, but these were not the only kind of organizations they valued. They understood that different forms of organization were appropriate for different tasks and, to this end, also advocated the formation of affinity groups that were either permanent or formed for specific actions, and dissolved once the action was complete.[[#38MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|38]] The CNT itself contained numerous affinity groups that performed a wide variety of tasks, ranging from publishing texts, organizing debates and lectures, engaging in prisoner support, protecting prominent anarchist militants, robbing banks, and assassinating class enemies.[[#39ChrisEalhamAnarchismand|39]]
+I told it I was sorry. I thanked it for giving me its body. And I made a promise to it that when the time came I would offer my body back to the earth for it as nourishment and that I would be happy to do so. And in that moment, I knew it and I meant it and I felt the gravity of what it meant to say it.
-'''Reform not Reformism'''
+==== REMEMBERING THE ANIMA MUNDI ====
-Mass anarchists and insurrectionist anarchists agreed that fundamental social change can only be achieved by mass movements. What separated the two is that mass anarchists believed that, given their immediate social and historical context, the most realistic and effective means to develop mass movements was through the long and patient work of struggling for immediate reforms in the present, rather than isolated individuals or small anarchist groups engaging in propaganda of the deed in order to inspire a series of popular uprisings. Mass anarchists used a variety of different terms to refer to modifications to existing dominant structures and social relations, such as “gains,” “improvements,” or “reforms.”
+''INT. CABIN – VIEW THROUGH WINDOW – camera is in hand-held – position: on cot facing out of the window – outside a reindeer is stood, grazing, very close to the window –''
-This position was originally advocated by anarchists in the First International. In 1869 Bakunin argued that a significant number of workers could develop revolutionary socialist consciousness “through [the] the collective action and practice” of “''the organization and the federation of resistance funds'' [strike funds]” and the “real struggle to reduce hours of work and increase pay.”[[#40MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|40]] An anarchist pamphlet published in 1872 claimed that the International “must gradually change the economic situation of the working class . . . improve working conditions, curtail, diminish and eliminate the privileges of capital, make these every day more dependent and precarious, until capital surrenders and disappears. . . . This can be achieved by ''resistance'', with the legal and open weapon of the ''strike''.”[[#41QuotedinWaltherLBerneck|41]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (EXCITEDLY): Look. Look, there it is again</div>
-This view was repeated four decades later by the CNT’s paper ''Solidaridad Obrera'', which claimed in January 1917 that radical trade union movements, such as the CNT, were simultaneously committed to achieving the “reformism” of “the reduction of the working day, the increase in wages, etc.” and the “revolutionism” of “the emancipation of the proletariat through the abolition of capital and of the wage earner.”[[#42QuotedinRalphDarlington|42]] Fourteen years later, the CNT declared in its 1931 Madrid Congress resolutions that, although they were “openly at war with the state,” and aimed “to educate the people to understand the need to unite with us to secure our complete emancipation by means of the social revolution,” they also had “the ineluctable duty of indicating to the people a schedule of minimum demands that they should press by building up their own revolutionary strength.”[[#43QuotedinPeiratsTheCNTi|43]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the camera jerks with her hands and she moves to get a better view, cot squeaking – camera is steadied – focuses in on reindeer –''</div>
-In order to understand why mass anarchists advocated this strategy, it is important to first outline their critique of insurrectionist anarchism. According to Malatesta, insurrectionists mistakenly viewed “present society as an indivisible block susceptible to no alteration beyond a radical transformation, and thus regarded as useless any attempt at improvements and concerned themselves solely with ''making revolution'' . . . which was then not made and remained a distant promise.”[[#44MalatestaPatientWork281|44]] Propaganda of the deed had been conceived as the means by which anarchists would spark a revolutionary upsurge, but the two main versions of it—small armed bands launching insurrections and individual acts of violence (assassinations or bombings)—had consistently failed to pave the way for mass uprisings, let alone achieve the social revolution. This was despite the fact that insurrectionist anarchists had engaged in numerous revolts, assassinations, and bombings between the 1870s and 1890s.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I’m going to go out to her</div>
-It was argued that these tactics actively encouraged anarchists to isolate themselves from the majority of the working classes in order to avoid state repression, surveillance, and infiltration. Anarchists, thus, were unable to influence or inspire the working classes in the way that they had intended and hoped for. In 1889, twelve years after the Benevento affair, Malatesta wrote that small armed groups of anarchists failed to inspire revolts because inadequate preparation among and contact with the populace led to the group being “scattered and defeated before the people even get to learn what it is that the band wanted!”[[#45MalatestaMethodofFreedom|45]] Under these circumstances, the local populace were unable to join the band, and could merely look on impassively.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– view of camera scrambled, bed, ceiling, floor, as Erin clambers off the cot – floorboards – padding feet – pause – readjust – door –''</div>
-Malatesta expanded upon this argument in 1894, when he concluded that a “great spontaneous insurrection” would most likely not launch the social revolution, because “plots and conspiracies can only embrace a very limited number of individuals and are usually impotent to start a movement among the people of sufficient importance to give a chance of victory. Isolated movements, more or less spontaneous, are almost always stifled in blood before they have had time to acquire importance and become general.”[[#46MalatestaMethodofFreedom|46]] A few years later in 1897, Malatesta insisted that uprisings “''cannot be improvised''” and that “a revolution without resources, without an agreed-upon plan, without weapons, without men” would be doomed to failure.[[#47MalatestaPatientWork182|47]] Anarchists attempting to launch insurrections while they were such a small minority had only resulted in a cycle of “six months of quiet activity, followed by a few microscopic uprisings—or more often, mere threats of uprisings—then arrests, flights abroad, interruption of propaganda, disintegration of the organization. . . . Just to start the whole thing all over again two or three years further down the line.”[[#48MalatestaPatientWork374|48]] Given this, Malatesta concluded in 1899 that, in order for insurrections to be successful, anarchists must, “rather than face periodical and pointless slaughter . . . lay preparations appropriate for the force we are going to have to confront” and federate in order to accumulate “the strength required to steer the next popular uprising to victory.”[[#49MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|49]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (WHISPERING): Got to be really quiet and careful. Don’t want to scare her</div>
-The tactics of assassination and bombings, in contrast, contributed toward the anarchist movement suffering an extreme amount of state repression, without achieving any substantial social change worth that price. Such tactics had been conceived of as acts of propaganda, but were instead a key factor in why a significant number of workers became less likely to listen to anarchists and adopt their ideas. They instead came to stereotype anarchists negatively as dangerous individuals, mindlessly spreading chaos and destruction.[[#50HaiaShpayerMakovAnarchi|50]] The French anarchist Fernand Pelloutier remarked in 1895 that “I know many workers who are disenchanted with parliamentary socialism but who hesitate to support libertarian socialism because, in their view, anarchism simply implies the individualistic use of the bomb.”[[#51QuotedinUlrichLinsePr|51]] After McKinley’s assassination in 1901, the Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky wrote, “the benefits that such an attempt can bring to the propaganda of our ideas are very questionable, the damage however is certain and sure.”[[#52QuotedinKenyonZimmerImm|52]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– door is pushed open and outside light spills in – camera adjusts to light – camera moves around the door – reindeer in view from behind, about five metres distance – it can be heard huffing into the dirt as it tears the grass up – door creaks –''</div>
-Even Most, who had been a fervent advocate of anarchist assassinations and bomb plots during the 1880s, ended up changing his mind.[[#53PaulAvrichandKarenAvrich|53]] He wrote in 1892 that “there is no greater error than to believe that we as anarchists need only to commit any deed, no matter when, where, and against whom. To have a propagandist effect, every deed needs to be popular. . . . If that is not the case, or if it actually meets with disapproval from the very part of the population it is intended to inspire, anarchism makes itself unpopular and hated. Instead of winning new adherents, many will withdraw.”[[#54QuotedinAvrichandAvrich|54]] Shortly afterward, Most responded to Berkman’s unexpected assassination attempt against the American capitalist Frick by publicly opposing the act. He argued that “in a country where we are so weakly represented and so little understood . . . we cannot afford the luxury of assassinations. . . . In countries like America, where we still need solid ground to stand on, we must limit ourselves to literary and verbal agitation.”[[#55QuotedinGoyensJohannMo|55]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (WHISPERING): Shhhhhssh</div>
-Insurrectionist anarchists had above all been wrong to assume that the revolution was imminent, and that the working classes would rise up in reaction to the violent actions of a few. As early as 1885, the Spanish anarchist Serrano had insisted that “individual actions—even if they employ thousands upon thousands of kilos of dynamite—will not succeed in any region, nor will they succeed in destroying the bourgeoisie or in bringing about the Social Revolution.”[[#56QuotedinGeorgeRichardEse|56]] Over a decade later, in an 1897 interview, Malatesta said that “in the early days of the anarchist movement . . . there was the illusion that the revolution was just around the corner; and, as a result, any organizational work that required a long and patient endeavor was neglected.”[[#57MalatestaPatientWork319|57]] He recalled in 1928 that “we put our hopes in general discontent, and because the misery that afflicted the masses was so insufferable, we believed it was enough to give an example, launching with arms in hand the cry of ‘down with the masters,’ in order for the working masses to fling themselves against the bourgeoisie and take possession of the land, the factories, and all that they produced with their toil and that had been stolen from them.”[[#58QuotedinPerniconeItalian|58]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– reindeer suddenly picks up its head – turns to look directly at camera – bolts forward in surprise –''</div>
-In a 1902 letter to Max Nettlau, Kropotkin noted that the wave of propaganda of the deed was motivated by the belief “that all it took to trigger the revolution was a few heroic feats” and, when this failed to happen, several younger anarchists came to realize that “a revolution cannot be ''provoked'' by ten or a hundred” and that it was a delusion to imagine “that a sharp push by a few might successfully spark revolution.”[[#59KropotkinDirectStruggle|59]] A revolution, he said, could only be produced by “the slow work of organization and preparatory propaganda among the working masses.”[[#60KropotkinDirectStruggle|60]] This was, of course, not a new insight for mass anarchists, including Kropotkin. In his 1899 autobiography, he claimed that, in the late 1870s, he and other members of the Jura Federation understood that to abolish class society a period of “tedious propaganda and a long succession of struggles, of individual and collective revolts against the now prevailing forms of property, of individual self-sacrifice, of partial attempts at reconstruction and partial revolutions would have to be lived through.”[[#61PeterKropotkinMemoirsof|61]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Oh no oh no come back don’t go</div>
-The strategy of engaging in individual acts of violence above all rested on a false view of social change. Social change is not just a matter of attacking the existing order until it collapses. The transformation of society requires the transformation of the working classes’ capacities, drives, and consciousness in an anarchist direction such that they learn to self-organize horizontally and undertake a revolution. Killing a monarch or blowing up a building might temporarily scare the ruling classes or inspire a small number of workers, but it will not lead to fundamental social change. A new monarch will be crowned and the building will be repaired. Society will carry on as normal, because the general population will have merely observed the actions of an isolated individual and not have themselves engaged in forms of practice that transform them as people. In the aftermath of any anarchist attack, a typical worker could continue to behave as before, and thereby reproduce the dominant structures of class society.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– camera jolts side to side with her movement – jogging after it as it trots away into tree cover –''</div>
-“An edifice built upon centuries of history,” Kropotkin remarked in 1891, “cannot be destroyed by a few kilos of explosives.”[[#62QuotedinAlexandreSkirda|62]] Malatesta made the same point in 1894: “one thing is certain, namely, that with a number of bombs and a number of blows of the knife, a society like bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being based, as it is, on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices, and sustained, more than it is by the force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission.”[[#63MalatestaMethodofFreedom|63]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Hahahaha</div>
-The mass anarchist alternative to propaganda of the deed, as understood by insurrectionists, was not inaction and relying solely on print media and speaking tours to spread anarchism until the day of revolution. Malatesta’s program of 1899 rejected this explicitly, because anarchists “would soon exhaust our field of action; that is, we would have converted all those who in the existing environment are susceptible to understand and accept our ideas.”[[#64MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|64]] Mass anarchists, in other words, held that, since what people think or are open to thinking is a product of their social environment, it follows that focusing on spreading ideas alone will not lead to fundamental social change. Under present conditions, which reproduce class society, only a small number of people will ever learn about and become anarchists through the written or spoken word.[[#65BakuninSelectedTexts186|65]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she stops running after it, watches it go – reindeer disappears into the black of the dense trees –''</div>
-Anarchists therefore had to cause a “gradual transformation of the environment. Progress must advance contemporaneously and along parallel lines between man and their environment” until an increasingly large number of workers were in a position to learn about and adopt anarchism.[[#66MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|66]] This view was repeated by Malatesta in 1922. He argued that, since “the will of humanity . . . is mostly determined by the social environment,” it follows that anarchists must “work to change social conditions in such a way as to produce a change of will in the desired direction” and thereby cause “a reciprocal interaction between the will and the surrounding conditions,” such that changed people acted and changed social structures that, in turn, changed more people, and so on.[[#67MalatestaAttheCafeConv|67]]
+==== CUT ====
-Mass anarchists held that the most effective means for causing this gradual transformation in social structures, and the people who produced and reproduced them, was by organizing and participating in working-class social movements that struggled for immediate reforms in the present. In 1892, Kropotkin said that anarchists should “permeate the great labor movement which is so rapidly growing in Europe and America” in order to “bring our ideas into that movement, to spread them . . . among those masses which hold in their hands the future issue of the revolution.”[[#68KropotkinDirectStruggle|68]] In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists should win the working classes “over to our ideas by actively taking part in their struggles” and participating in “working-men’s associations, strikes, collective revolt.”[[#69MalatestaMethodofFreedom|69]] Three years later, he insisted that the success of anarchism required “long-term, constant, day-to-day work . . . done in conjunction with resistance societies, cooperatives, and educational circles, of gradually marshaling, organizing, and educating all the fighting forces of the proletariat.”[[#70MalatestaPatientWork101|70]]
+==== WIKI HOW TO FIND YOUR POWER ANIMAL ====
-Malatesta, in addition to this, referred to specific reforms that were worth struggling for. In 1899, he argued that,
+Your power animal may come to you in a dream or meditation or in its actual physical form in waking life. Have you noticed unusual behaviour from a particular animal? Or do you keep encountering the same animal or the same animal species an amount that surprises you? Maybe you are noticing them regularly, as an image or as an object. Does the orca, for example, appear to you in the image form, emblazoned on everyday objects like T-shirts? Did you hear someone talking about going to watch Shamu at SeaWorld? Was ''Free Willy'' on when you turned on your television?
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">we must always push them [workers] to demand greater things; but meanwhile we must encourage and assist them in the battles they want to fight, providing that they are in the right direction, which is to say, that they tend to facilitate future gains and are fought in such a way that workers become used to thinking of their masters and governments as enemies, and to desiring to achieve what they want by themselves. Many workers wish to not work over 8 hours. . . . The reform is among those that tend to actually improve the status of workers and facilitate future gains; and we, when we cannot convince them to demand more, we must support them in such a modest claim.[[#71MalatestaTowardsAnarchy1|71]] </div>
+What animal intrigues and captivates you? What animal do you notice most, not only out in wild nature, but also in your everyday life as an image? If you feel attracted to an animal and it keeps appearing, in the physical world or in a dream, it may be a sign that the animal is seeking to reveal itself to you.
-Organizing to win reforms through direct action was considered valuable for three main reasons. First, and most obviously, achieving reforms improved the lives of workers and put them in a position where they had more time, energy, and motivation to emancipate themselves fully. Malatesta wrote in 1897 that anarchists are “interested in people’s circumstances being improved to the greatest possible extent, starting today,” both because of the “immediate impact of reduced suffering” and “because when one is better nourished, has greater freedom, and is better educated, one has a greater determination and more strength to fully emancipate oneself.”[[#72MalatestaPatientWork25|72]]
+How does the animal make you feel? When you see the animal how does its presence make its impact on you? Do you feel its presence before you see it? What emotion does it evoke? Does it scare you? Does it elate you? Do the feeling and the apparitions/appearances coincide with particular situations in your life? Is there a sense of déjà vu? Do you feel about the animal as you feel about the situation?
-This line of reasoning persuaded Goldman to support the struggle for the eight-hour day and abandon her previous view, which she had learned from Most, that it was a pointless reform that distracted workers from launching a social revolution. She changed her mind after a worker at one of her talks against the eight-hour day explained that it would improve the lives of workers, many of whom would not live long enough to see a revolution, and would give them more time to read and enjoy life.[[#73GoldmanLivingMyLifevol|73]] Rocker, in comparison, came to reject the idea that reforms should be opposed after he visited extremely poor areas of London. During these visits, he realized that “those who have been born into misery and never knew a better state are rarely able to resist and revolt. . . . It is contrary to all the experience of history and of psychology; people who are not prepared to fight for the betterment of their living conditions are not likely to fight for social emancipation.”[[#74RudolfRockerTheLondonYe|74]]
+The power animal could represent your feelings, or a situation that recurs in your mind, or a person or an event from your past, present or future.
-Second, participating in daily struggles for immediate reforms, such as strikes, provided the means to organize and make contact with not only committed socialists, who seek each other out, but also the large number of workers who are yet to become revolutionaries. This was especially important because, regardless of what anarchists did, state socialists would participate in working-class social movements and funnel them toward parliamentary politics. If this happened, given the arguments previously explained in chapter 5, social movements would be transformed from potential threats to ruling class power into maintainers of the status quo. As a result, it was essential that anarchists join struggles for immediate reforms in order to promote direct action and ensure that social movements remained, or became, forces outside of and against the state.[[#75KropotkinDirectStruggle|75]]
+If you answered mostly yes to the above in relation to a particular creature, then you have found your power animal! Learn to honour your power animal.
-Third, collectively struggling for reforms by means of direct action within prefigurative organizations is a form of practice that can positively transform workers. Whether or not a social movement wins great victories, the process of engaging in class struggle is valuable in and of itself. It enables workers to develop new skills, hopes, desires, and ways of thinking, such as learning how to organize a strike, or realizing that the police exist to violently defend the interests of the rich and powerful. As Guillaume wrote in 1914, “you think that the starting point is the revolutionary ideal and that the workers’ struggle against the bosses only comes afterwards, as a consequence of the adoption of the ‘ideal’; I think on the contrary . . . that the starting point is the struggle and the ideal comes after, that it takes form in the workers’ minds as the incidents of the class war give birth to it and cause it to develop.”[[#76QuotedinDavidBerryAHis|76]]
+Another thing Sam said that I had never stopped to think about was that it is actually pretty offensive that suddenly young people on the internet want to know their ‘power animal’, a New Age corruption of a particular native belief, through an online quiz. What I wanted to say back but didn’t was that maybe aside from being appropriative and corruptive in its associations, this signifies a suppressed and lost desire for closer affinity with the animals. That rather than stealing a tradition because we think it sounds enlightened, maybe there could be a more careful way to go about remembering a connection that was always there before?
-This theory was advocated for many decades by mass anarchists involved in the trade union movement. Baginski argued in 1909 that “the proletariat learns from its daily battles that it is always thrown back on itself, on its own strength and solidarity. Whenever it accomplishes small improvements of its situation, it does so as a consequence of direct intervention and struggle. Its condition is a function of the strength of its unity, its revolutionary insights, initiative, and solidarity; for exploiters concede only what is wrested from them through ''the development of proletarian power''.”[[#77BaginskiWhatDoesSyndical|77]] The practice of struggling for reforms through direct action was valued because it transformed workers—who are typically treated as objects acted upon or represented by others—into self-acting agents who fight for their own emancipation, and develop their collective power to transform society.[[#78BaginskiWhatDoesSyndical|78]] Given this, “no one disputes the utility and necessity of wrestling as much as possible for higher pay and shorter hours; but that should be considered in the light of merely preparatory exercises, as training for the final event, the Social Revolution and the overthrow of wage-slavery.”[[#79MaxBaginskiAimandTacti|79]]
+It is hard to feel a connection with ''any'' animal in a spiritual way as a British person when the only animals you are surrounded by are domesticated cats, dogs, cows, sheep, horses and then symbols or images of animals. If symbols are mostly what we have to go on, is this uselessly inauthentic, just too far removed? A symbol of a symbol, not a direct one like a bear track in the mud? Do they lose their potency when you take them from an advert on television?
-These same ideas were expressed by Rocker through the language of pedagogy in 1938. He claimed that “the strike is for the workers not only a means for the defense of immediate economic interests, it is also a continuous schooling for their powers of resistance, showing them every day that every last right has to be won by unceasing struggle against the existing system.”[[#80RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|80]] As a result, “the economic alliance of the producers” is both “a weapon for the enforcement of better living conditions” and “a practical school, a university of experience, from which they draw instruction and enlightenment in richest measure.”[[#81RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|81]] The experience of class struggle transformed how workers thought about themselves and the world in which they lived. By reflecting on these life experiences, workers “developed . . . new needs and the urge for different fields of intellectual life.”[[#82RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|82]] The practice of engaging in class struggle was transformative not only at the individual level; it also altered the social relations between workers. Through their experience of cooperating with one another, such as going on strike in support of other striking workers, they developed a sense of solidarity among themselves, which Rocker defined as a “feeling of mutual helpfulness.”[[#83RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|83]] Developing this sense of solidarity was essential because, without it, they would never learn to act as a united class and thereby transform society in their shared class interests.
+But if we are to feel affinity in order to care, which we must, then symbols are all we have to work with. And if we each held an animal in affinity, a comrade animal, wouldn’t we care more about the continuation of its species? Maybe at birth we should all be given a comrade animal selected at random from a vast database. If you knew that a sea cucumber is an echinoderm from the class ''Holothuroidea'' and you were born into symbolic kinship with it, you would likely care more that it carried on slinking along the sea floor. You would feel the responsibility to help it along.
-Although mass anarchists advocated struggling for immediate reforms, they were not reformists in the sense of people who view reforms as a political endpoint, or who hold that capitalism and the state could eventually be abolished through gradual reform. In September 1897, Malatesta wrote that “the reforms, both economic and political, that can be obtained under certain institutions, are limited by the very nature of those institutions, and sooner or later, depending on the degree of popular consciousness and the more or less blind resistance from the ruling classes, a point of irreconcilability is reached and the very existence of these institutions needs to be called into question.”[[#84MalatestaPatientWork287|84]]
+An animal’s symbolic meaning can be as potent an acknowledgement of our shared invention of that symbol as the animal itself, and maybe more so. Ted Kaczynski made a comrade of the snowshoe rabbit. He called it Grandfather Rabbit. Whenever he shot a snowshoe rabbit he would say ‘thank you, Grandfather Rabbit’. He would get a mystic desire to draw them. He drew and thought about them so much that he actually began to think like a rabbit.
-A month later, in an interview with a state socialist, Malatesta explained that anarchists were not “a reformist party” because “in our view, reforms, if and where they can be won, should be only a first step on the way to revolution; this is why we want the people to win them for themselves and feel that reforms are a result of their vigor, so that their determination to demand ever more may develop.”[[#85MalatestaPatientWork320|85]] This was a restatement of a claim Malatesta had previously made in his 1890 article, “Matters Revolutionary”:
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0208-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">We must immerse ourselves in the life of the people as fully as we can, encourage and egg on all stirrings that carry a seed of material or moral revolt and get the people used to handling their affairs for themselves and relying on only their own resources; but without ever losing sight of the fact that revolution, by means of the expropriation and taking of property into common ownership, plus the demolition of authority, represents the only salvation for the proletariat and for Mankind, in which case a thing is good or bad depending on whether it brings forward or postpones, eases or creates difficulties for that revolution.</div>
+==== THE ATOMIc PRIESTHOOD ====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">As we see it, it is a matter of avoiding two reefs: on the one hand, the indifference toward everyday life and struggles that distance us from the people, making us unfathomable outsiders to them—and, on the other, letting ourselves be consumed by those struggles, affording them greater importance than they possess and eventually forgetting about the revolution.[[#86MalatestaMethodofFreedom|86]]</div>
+I am back on the old estate. As in most of suburbia there are always a lot of cats. Maybe every third house has a cat and almost all the rest have dogs. Only everyone is gathered around a fire pit that has been dug out of the concrete in the centre of our cul-de-sac. The limp little cat bodies are thrown into the pit because they are full of an invisible death.
-Mass anarchists, in other words, saw the struggle for reforms as the means to bring increasingly large numbers of workers together under a common aim, due to their shared interest in improving their lives in the here and now. In struggling for these reforms, workers would not only change social relations, such as reducing the length of the working day, but also change themselves due to the experience of participating in prefigurative organizations and engaging in direct action against the ruling classes. The consequence of this would be that a significant number of workers would, over varying lengths of time, go from only aiming at small improvements within existing society to being revolutionaries, who were organized and united as a class within federations and who had developed the initiative to act for themselves. This process would repeat, until the conflict between the working classes and the ruling classes escalated to the point of an armed insurrection being launched by the social movements that had been developed during previous struggles for reforms. To quote Malatesta’s 1899 anarchist program, “one always comes back to insurrection, for if the government does not give way, the people will end by rebelling; and if the government does give way, then people gain confidence in themselves and make ever-increasing demands, until such time as the incompatibility between freedom and authority becomes clear and the violent struggle is engaged.”[[#87MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|87]]
+There is a potion that has brewed itself from all the chemical run-offs, the Roundup and the Miracle Gro from every impossibly green lawn, trim as porn pubes, then the bleach from the sparkling toilet bowls, the suds of Fairy and Colgate, the nail varnish remover on cotton buds, the Dettol-soaked cloths. Carefully measured so as to be harmless alone but altogether in the cesspits under the roads forming new chemical combinations, transmutations, chance alchemies augmented by years of accumulation. Then pouring over the tarmac when drains fill up in rain, distributed as anomalies in the chain, distilled and distilled up and up, a fusion of the inorganic that leaves its mark as a ''negative imprint'' like she said, malignant and unseen, the tick that sucks the mouse dry.
-Mass anarchists understood, alongside anarchists in general, that evolutionary change does not necessarily lead to progress or an anarchist revolution. They were careful about which reforms they supported, who they worked with, and the means they proposed to achieve these reforms. In 1897, Kropotkin insisted that anarchists “have to cling to our principles while working with others” and therefore must “never allow ourselves to be chosen as or turn into exploiters, bosses, leaders,” “never have any truck with the building of some pyramidal organization, be it economic, governmental or educational-religious (even be it a revolutionary one),” and “never have any hand in conjuring up man’s governance of his fellow man in the realm of production and distribution, political organization, leadership, revolutionary organization, etc.”[[#88KropotkinDirectStruggle|88]]
+But no one knows where the invisible death comes from because they can’t see it so all the dead cats must be burned to save the live ones. Some of the afflicted cats, the ones still alive but coughing, are also thrown onto the fire. Children are kept inside.
-For mass anarchists, it was essential, in the words of Malatesta, to fight ''as'' anarchists, to “remain anarchists and act like anarchists before, during and after the revolution.”[[#89MalatestaMethodofFreedom|89]] To participate within working-class social movements as committed anarchists was primarily for them to persuade other workers to act in an anarchistic manner, such as taking direct action against the ruling classes, making decisions within general assemblies, or coordinating action over a large area via federations. According to Malatesta, anarchists have to “take advantage of all the means, all the possibilities and the opportunities that the present environment allows us to act on our fellow men” and thereby incite the working class “to make demands, and impose itself and take for itself all the improvements and freedoms that it desires as and when it reaches the state of wanting them, and the power to demand them.”[[#90MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|90]]
+The voice comes from beside me, and I recognise it immediately, without the humming mediation. It is the voice that I had in my head the whole time I read ''Silent Spring'', scrapped together from a brief interview Larus showed us; undeviatingly calm and certain, a little drawling, with a trail of whistle to the end of every word. She holds a staff in her right hand; the tiny bird skulls and shells go clack-clack-clack. A few singular bees crawl about the lichen of her skin. ‘Cats, who so meticulously groom their coats and lick their paws, seemed to be most affected.’
-Malatesta explained in his 1897 interview that “as a rule, we always support reforms that, more than the others, highlight the conflict between property-owners and proletarians, rulers and ruled, and therefore are apt to foster a conscious feeling of rebellion that will explode into the definitive, final revolution.”[[#91MalatestaPatientWork320|91]] He rejected “false reforms” that “tend to distract the masses from the struggle against authority and capitalism” and instead “serve to paralyze their actions and make them hope that something can be attained through the kindness of the exploiters and governments.”[[#92MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|92]] One reform that mass anarchists consistently opposed was universal suffrage within existing capitalist states. In 1873, Bakunin argued against struggling to achieve the vote, because it would legitimize the state by giving it the “false appearance of popular government” and thereby provide the economic ruling classes “with a stronger and more reliable guarantee of their peaceful and intensive exploitation of the people’s labor.”[[#93MichaelBakuninStatismand|93]] This opposition to struggling for universal suffrage included women’s suffrage, which Goldman argued against in 1910, on the grounds that it would not further the emancipation of women.[[#94EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|94]]
+‘It’s you, I knew it was you!’ but she says nothing.
-Mass anarchists also rejected methods of winning reforms that consolidated the dominant structures of class society, rather than building the revolutionary strength of the working classes. In Malatesta’s words, anarchists “should never recognize the [existing] institutions. We shall carry out all possible reforms in the spirit in which an army advances ever forward by snatching the enemy-occupied territory in its path.”[[#95MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|95]] This led mass anarchists to argue that reforms should be won by imposing external pressure onto the ruling classes through direct action, rather than by campaigning for new legislation. For example, in 1875, Schwitzguébel wrote that “instead of begging the State for a law compelling employers to make them work only so many hours, the trade associations [''sociétés de métiers''] ''directly impose'' this reform on the employers [''patrons'']; in this way, instead of a legal text which remains a dead letter, a real economic change is effected ''by the direct initiative of the workers''.”[[#96QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|96]] Or, as Malatesta told a court while on trial in April 1898, “there cannot be reforms on the part of a government, unless the people demand and impose them.”[[#97MalatestaPatientWork443|97]]
+We stand and watch as the last of the cats disappear into the flames. Some of the owners are weeping. Other cats watch from behind closed windows. The air smells that horrible smell, the one the adults would not answer for when you asked as a child, when all the pigs and cows had foot and mouth, and the significance makes you retch now. People file away back to their houses.
-The extent to which some mass anarchists were in favor of winning reforms through extremely radical means can be seen in the history of the CNT. In 1931, brick workers used a diversity of tactics to successfully end a system in which they worked for capitalists via exploitative contractors. They not only went on strike but also formed armed groups that would both hunt down scabs escorted by the police, and commit arson attacks against several brickworks. Bakery workers went further and, without even going on strike, forced capitalists to give in to their demands for the abolition of night work and changing the start of the working day to 5 a.m. This was achieved by bombing a number of bakeries. Those capitalists who refused to recognize the deal and punished organizers were subject to an escalation of resistance. This began with boycotts that, after they proved unsuccessful, were followed up with more militant activity, such as more bombings. On one occasion, Peirats and a comrade visited a capitalist armed with pistols in order to make him change his mind.[[#98EalhamLivingAnarchism57|98]]
+‘In central Java so many were killed that the price of a cat more than doubled.’
-It is clear that mass anarchists within the CNT did not reject the use of guns and bombs to achieve reform. They also used them in self-defense against the violence of the ruling classes. From 1914 onward, gunmen hired by capitalists and the state attempted to assassinate a significant number of anarchist trade unionists. In Catalonia, between 1920 and 1923, 104 anarchists were killed—including the former general secretary of the Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí—and thirty-three were wounded. The militant wing of the CNT responded to these violent attacks by organizing armed affinity groups to identify, locate, and kill those responsible.[[#99ChristieWetheAnarchists|99]] This included the assassination of the Spanish Prime Minister Eduardo Dato on March 8, 1921, by members of an action group in the metal industry.[[#100ASmithAnarchismRevolu|100]] These kinds of assassinations had previously been viewed by insurrectionist anarchists in the 1880s and 1890s as one of the means that anarchists could use to develop a mass movement. Mass anarchists who supported assassinations, in contrast, appear to have viewed them as a means to defend already existing mass movements that had been developed through the struggle for immediate reforms.
+I don’t know where Java is but I know it is far away. I wonder if the Javanese burned their cats too, to keep their problems atomised. Treating the maladies, treating the maladies like a very rational physician.
-Armed self-defense by anarchist militants continued over the following years. In July 1931, the CNT’s builders’ union responded to a police raid on their offices with gunfire. This led to a four-hour siege, during which the building was surrounded by hundreds of policemen, assault guards, and soldiers. Six workers were killed and dozens were wounded on both sides.[[#101EalhamAnarchismandtheC|101]] Violence was also used by some mass anarchists to acquire funds for the revolution. From 1933 to 1935, militants within the CNT responded to the trade union’s dire financial problems by launching armed robberies against banks, which on several occasions involved shoot-outs with the police and fleeing the scene of the crime in stolen cars. Despite the financial gains these armed expropriations bought to the union, a significant section of the CNT opposed them, including Peirats.[[#102EalhamAnarchismandtheC|102]]
+Then I woke up. The fact that the light inside was moving might have infiltrated my dream and brought about the fires. It was darker, but still light with the midnight sun, a dusky twilight. Shadows toned up and down and across the floorboards. My first thoughts on waking: ''The world is burning down! The coloured lights of nuclear holocaust!''
-Another disagreement among mass anarchists concerned when social movements should shift from focusing on immediate reforms to attempting to spark the social revolution via armed insurrection. During the 1920s and 1930s, there was a long-lasting dispute within the CNT between moderate and radical syndicalist anarchists. The moderates sought to build up the trade union’s strength gradually through workplace organizing, while the radicals, who belonged to CNT’s defense committees and to armed affinity groups like Nosotros, thought that the social revolution was near and that the time for reform had passed. This led the radical faction to engage in what they termed “revolutionary gymnastics,” which referred to the strategy of dedicated anarchist militants launching insurrections that would be repressed and thereby inspire an increasing number of workers to rise up. In practice, the series of armed uprisings they organized in January 1932, January 1933, and December 1933 were all unsuccessful and defeated quickly, due to a combination of lack of popular support, insufficient weaponry, and the state being prepared to repress them.[[#103JasonGarnerGoalsandMea|103]]
+What she has been saying about negative imprints and energy; we are a very potent species, we have a very heavy imprint. I think about what Larus said about aliens leaving messages in our DNA and, well, we have already left our own messages in the earth at Hiroshima. We made rockets to go to the moon and look at ourselves. But the technology that built the rockets to go to the moon was adapted from the same technology that the atom bomb was made from. Nuclear radiation is the negative imprint left by our glorious inventions. We did it! We made something to give us immortal remembrance!
-'''Militant Minority'''
+What is the message of this, our most enduring time capsule? Its content is senseless, it is a messageless symbol, a dead language. But even where a message fails, the time capsule itself still conveys an intent. It is a pointing finger, you just can’t see at what it points. What is the prerequisite for intent? Just a self-conscious marking? With the Wow! Signal they were looking for a pattern repeated enough for it to seem unlikely to be a coincidental and natural occurrence. In his whale graphs Larus was looking for the frequency with which certain distinct data occurred. Maybe these graphs could not be used to interpret our waste depository sites because we use pictorial symbols rather than language as language is one more degree of symbolism removed. But the pattern and symmetry and frequency of the pictorial symbols should also suggest ''intent''.
-Mass anarchists believed that it was necessary to participate in social movements as a militant minority in order to ensure that struggles for reforms did not collapse into reformism and, instead, developed a revolutionary mass movement that could launch a large-scale armed insurrection. This meant spreading anarchist ideas, acting as key and effective organizers, encouraging or inspiring workers to take direct action, and ensuring that formal organizations or informal groups were horizontally structured and made decisions in a manner that prefigured an anarchist society. In 1931, Malatesta wrote that “anarchy can only come about gradually, as the masses become able to conceive it and desire it; but will never come to pass unless driven forward by a more or less consciously anarchist minority operating in such a way as to create the appropriate climate.”[[#104MalatestaMethodofFreedo|104]]
+So the symbols at the waste depository sites would have to be something that can’t occur naturally like giant sculptures, rock carvings, detailed pictograms. Something with the human stink about it (patterns suggest a maker). But if you don’t know what is the human stink, then maybe you will not smell it (there are patterns and symmetry in nature and these have already been used to argue for a teleological proof of god, which I know to be misleading).
-The notion of a militant minority within working-class social movements was expressed by mass anarchists in a number of different ways. An 1892 article published in ''La Révolte'' claimed that, although the revolution would “be made by the pressure of the masses . . . these masses themselves are looking for people to take the initiative, they are looking for men and women who can better formulate their thoughts, who will be able to win over the hesitant and carry with them the timid.”[[#105QuotedinDavidBerryAHi|105]] This required “active minorities,” who were “avant-gardist” and embodied “individual initiative, put at the service of the collectivity.”[[#106QuotedinBerryFrenchAna|106]] Malatesta referred to anarchists as a “conscious minority” and “vanguard.”[[#107MalatestaCafe107149|107]] Berkman thought that anarchists were “the most advanced and revolutionary element.”[[#108AlexanderBerkmanWhatis|108]] In Spain, the anarchist militants of the CNT were known among other workers as “the ones with ideas.”[[#109EalhamAnarchismandtheC|109]]
+The occurrence of the waste depository sites would be infrequent, making them anomalies, and suggesting unnatural origin, unlike signs that are said to point to intelligent design, which are everywhere, so the intent would be recognised, and would colonise and corrupt the epistemological wilderness of the future. It says without saying SO THAT WE MAY LIVE INTO YOURS. Any attempt to share meaning and a message with the future will probably fail but what probably will not fail is this meaningless scribble. It is a desire that manifests itself a lot in our culture, the desire to leave a mark; graffiti in a bathroom stall, vandalism, a signature: all a defiance of time. We have sown our signature into the soil. We have survived time.
-Such language did not mean that anarchists viewed themselves as separate from the working classes or the workers’ movement. Anarchism was a social movement whose members were overwhelmingly drawn from the working classes. As Fabbri noted, it “is ''de facto'' a teaching whose followers are almost exclusively proletarians: bourgeois, petit bourgeois, so-called intellectuals or professional people, etc. are very few and far between and wield no predominate influence.”[[#110LuigiFabbriAnarchyand|110]] In referring to themselves as a militant minority, anarchists were only expressing the view that they had the most advanced revolutionary ideas within the working classes and, by virtue of this, had a key role to play in the collective struggle for human emancipation.
+===== And what is your message? =====
-The main task of anarchists as a militant segment of the working classes was to bring about a transformation in the consciousness of other workers such that they came to adopt anarchist ideas, overthrow capitalism and the state, and build an anarchist society. For Dunois, “our task as anarchists, the most advanced, the boldest and the most uninhibited sector of the militant proletariat, is to stay constantly by its side, to fight the same battles amongst its ranks . . . to provide this enormous moving mass that is the modern proletariat . . . with a goal and the means of action” and so act as the “educators, stimulators and guides of the working masses.”[[#111AntonioliedInternationa|111]] This point was repeatedly made by Malatesta. In 1897, he wrote that anarchists should “cultivate in the proletariat a consciousness of the class antagonism and the need for collective struggle, and a yearning to . . . [establish] equality, justice, and freedom for everyone.”[[#112MalatestaPatientWork32|112]] During his trial in April 1898, Malatesta told the court that anarchists “want the complete transformation of society, which must spring from the will of the masses, once they become conscious. It is precisely toward the formation of that consciousness that we are working, through the press, the talks and organization.”[[#113MalatestaPatientWork44|113]]
+The light shapes shifted only slightly, it was their vague wave of intensity that had woken me up. As my eyes came to, their change in colour, at the shadows borders, dancing around the edges, rendered the billows of light like a petrol rainbow.
-How anarchists acted as a militant minority varied according to the context. In 1891, it took the form of anarchists in Rome launching a preplanned riot by attacking the police at a May Day demonstration. This attack was triggered by the anarchist Galileo Palla giving his comrades a signal to begin when he ended his speech by declaring, “Long live the revolution!” and then jumped off the speaker’s platform into the crowd. This riot, which the anarchist militant minority initiated, lasted for several hours after it spread quickly to the rest of the crowd and other districts of Rome. So sudden was the riot that both contemporary observers and modern historians have mistaken it for a purely spontaneous affair and failed to realize that it was the outcome of conscious anarchist activity. Six years later in 1897, Italian anarchists in Ancona, including Malatesta, acted as a militant minority in a different manner by actively supporting the unionization of dock workers, bakers, barbers, and shoemakers.[[#114TurcatoMakingSense163|114]]
+The T-shirt I had tucked into the window to keep the light out was clinging on by one sleeve where the stitching bunched the fabric, like it does sometimes when the wind makes the old latches slide down a little.
-The Yiddish-speaking anarchist Yanovsky acted as a militant minority during the early 1890s in London when he opposed a trade unionist called Lewis Lyons, who sought to organize master tailors, who were employers, alongside wage laborers. Yanovsky combated this attempt to unite groups with opposed class interests by denouncing Lyons’s plans in articles he wrote for the ''Arbeter Fraint'' and by speaking at every public meeting that was held on the question, regardless of which side in the dispute organized it. In this way, Yanovsky was able to defeat Lyons and force him to leave the Jewish labor movement.[[#115RockerLondonYears6263|115]] Yanovsky was not unique in this respect. Jewish anarchists living in London, alongside Rocker, played a key role in organizing trade unions and strikes. According to Rocker, “all the Jewish trade unions in the East End, without exception, were started by the initiative of the Jewish anarchists.”[[#116RockerLondonYears90|116]]
+After having only seen the Northern Lights in time-lapse that is how I thought they moved. Licking the sky like a green flame. In real time they hardly move at all. Serves me right for knowing a natural phenomenon only by watching it on the internet. It jarred me, I had to move to check I was not having a sort of stroke and seeing everything in slow motion; a momentary lapse like climbing the last stair that is not there. They moved, but not in big winding ribbons, more rapid little flames within big ribbons that moved more slowly. There were different states of focus; a school of fish that ribbon like a sea serpent.
-In 1912, this activity culminated in Jewish tailors launching a general strike to abolish sweatshops in the East End. The strike, which mobilized 13,000 workers in two days, was launched in solidarity with striking tailors in the West End, whose strike had initially been undermined by strike-breaking work within the East End sweatshops. Rocker acted as a militant minority by attending all the meetings of the strike committee, acting as Chairman of the Finance Committee, editing the daily ''Arbeter Fraint'', and addressing three or four strike meetings a day. After three weeks on strike, the workers employed in men’s tailoring emerged victorious having won shorter hours; an end to piecework; better sanitary conditions; and the employment of union labor only. The strike continued within the women’s garment industry, where Jewish workers were overwhelmingly employed, until the capitalists gave in. In so doing they had, according to Rocker, ended the sweatshop system.[[#117RockerLondonYears1263|117]]
+Eskimos think the lights are the spirits of the animals they hunted. Beluga whales, deer and seals. Native Americans from Wisconsin think that the lights are ''manabai’wok'', giants who are the spirit form of great hunters and fishermen. Other natives see them as the spirits of ancestors, and all interpret them as a benevolent force. And in a way they are all right, given metaphoric licence. The lights are the physical manifestation of a magnetic field that deflects high-energy solar radiation, protecting life on Earth. The lights are particles that have made it through where the magnetic field is weaker at the poles, and collide with gas particles.
-The majority of anarchist militants who played key roles as organizers were not famous authors like Malatesta or Kropotkin, but self-taught workers whose names rarely appear in surviving primary sources. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, a trade union was formed by workers in 1914. One of the main organizers of the local union was a poor charcoal burner named José Olmo García, who provided other workers with anarchist literature, gave fiery speeches on anarchist ideas, and made persuasive points at group meetings.[[#118JMintzCasasViejas14|118]] Anarchist attempts to organize or participate in mass movements as a militant minority were of course not always successful. To focus on England, Italian anarchists living in London failed on several occasions to organize restaurant workers into a long-lasting trade union due, in part, to the temporary and seasonal nature of the work.[[#119DiPaolaKnightsErrant3|119]] In September 1908, English anarchists in Leeds participated in a movement of unemployed people that began positively, from an anarchist perspective, by engaging in direct action but ended up being taken over by politicians, despite anarchist attempts to push it in a radical direction.[[#120JohnQuailTheSlowBurnin|120]]
+Cultures see in the constellation of stars things that feature in their vernacular of images. Carl Sagan said that when the ancient Egyptians saw the Big Dipper they saw a horse carrying a man leaning back followed by a hippo with a crocodile on its back. What will people of the future see in the nuclear trefoil? It looks a little like a peace sign, or an X-marking-the-spot.
-Although mass anarchists viewed themselves as a militant minority who sought to influence the consciousness of other workers, they explicitly rejected authoritarian forms of vanguardism due to their commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. This rejection took four main forms. First, mass anarchists sought only to influence other members of the working classes through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. For Malatesta, while “authoritarians see the mass of the people as raw material to be manipulated into whatever mold they please through the wielding of power by decree, the gun and the handcuff,” anarchists “need the consent of the people and must therefore persuade by propaganda and by example.”[[#121MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|121]] The Russian anarchist Voline similarly wrote that, since revolutionary success can only be achieved by “''the broad popular masses''. . . . Our role in this realization will be limited to that of a ferment, an element providing assistance, advice, and an example.”[[#122VolineSynthesisanarchi|122]] Such influence was entirely consistent with the goal of anarchism since, according to Malatesta, an anarchist society is one in which nobody is “in a position to oblige others to submit to their will or to exercise their influence other than through the power of reason and by example.”[[#123MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|123]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:xmark.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-Second, mass anarchists encouraged other workers to act for themselves and self-organize. In 1894, Malatesta claimed that “it is necessary that the people be conscious of their rights and their strength; it is necessary that they be ready to fight and ready to take the conduct of their affairs into their own hands. It must be the constant preoccupation of the revolutionists, the point toward which all their activity must aim, to bring about this state of mind among the masses.”[[#124MalatestaMethodofFreedo|124]] In a 1929 letter to Makhno, he wrote, “what matters most is that the people, men and women lose the sheeplike instincts and habits that thousands of years of slavery have instilled in them, and learn to think and act freely. And it is to this great work of moral liberation that the anarchists must specially dedicate themselves.”[[#125MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|125]]
+In the narrative of conception the egg is the conquest, but in a photomicrographic image of sperm cells meeting an egg, what really looks like the most ‘powerful’ on a comparison of constructed scales of significance? Why do we talk of sex in terms of penetration, rather than a cave mouth swallowing? What is our own significance against the vastness of space?
-Third, influential mass anarchist authors, rejected the view that they were superior to others and instead sought to treat nonanarchist workers as their equals. In 1890, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists who label others as unintelligent if they do not immediately embrace anarchism “forget that they were not anarchists from birth,” and that it took an extended period of transformation for them to unlearn the prejudices they had been socialized into by class society.[[#126KropotkinDirectStruggle|126]] Five years later, in 1895, he argued that, although anarchist militants had “an obligation to do everything possible to spread the anarchist idea among the working masses,” they should not view themselves as “better than the ‘ignorant masses’ just because we are anarchists and they are not yet.”[[#127KropotkinDirectStruggle|127]] As Malatesta argued in 1894, anarchists should not “refuse to associate with working men who are not already perfect Anarchists” since “it is absolutely necessary to associate with them in order to make them becomes Anarchists.”[[#128MalatestaMethodofFreedo|128]] Anarchists had to, in short, “take the people as they are and . . . move forward with them.”[[#129MalatestaMethodofFreedo|129]] This coincided with the view that anarchists had to not only teach anarchist ideas to other workers, but also themselves learn from the various collective struggles that were organized by workers independently of anarchists.[[#130MalatestaTowardsAnarchy|130]]
+Take something vague like the Lights and make it into something very specific depending on your myths. We are all saying the same thing in different ways. But that is just it; a vernacular. Aliens who find our time capsules would not share any kind of vernacular with we who are under the anthropological umbrella of ‘Life on Earth’, so Larus is wrong to be looking for pi in space. The Human Interference Task Force were wrong to try to find universal symbols.
-Fourth, mass anarchists opposed the seizure of state power in the name of the working classes because, as was explained in chapter 5, it would lead to the death of the revolution, and the establishment of a new system of minority rule in which the majority of workers were oppressed and exploited. The social revolution could only be achieved if workers decided to reorganize society themselves through their own organs of self-management. All mass anarchists could do to facilitate this process was to act as a militant minority in the same manner that they had done prior to the revolution: spreading anarchist ideas and engaging in actions that implemented the anarchist program and thereby served as an example to others. For Kropotkin, anarchists should not “let themselves be hoisted into power” during a revolution, but should instead “remain on the streets, in their own districts, with the people—as propagandists and organizers . . . joining in with the people as they looked to their food and their livelihoods and the city’s defenses; living alongside the poor, getting impassioned about ''their'' everyday issues, their interests, and rebuilding, in the sections, the life of society with them.”[[#131KropotkinDirectStruggle1|131]]
+Ah, Larus. The Northern Lights are super-rare in the Alaskan summer. I thought I must have still been sleeping. But then I remembered like an echo what he had said, that there was going to be a magnetic supercharge this year. He said that the sun’s activity goes in cycles that peak every eleven years, and that this year is the eleventh. I forgot everything for a second and got an urge to talk to him and tell him. He would have liked to know.
-Mass anarchists continued to advocate this position in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian revolution. In 1922, Goldman opposed “the political power of the Party, organized and centralized in the state,” in favor of “the industrial power of the masses, expressed through their libertarian associations.”[[#132GoldmanRedEmma39091|132]] Given this aim, the role of anarchists was “to guide the released energies of the people toward the reorganization of life on a libertarian foundation.”[[#133GoldmanRedEmma393|133]] Two years later, Malatesta explained that “we cannot make the revolution exclusively ‘ours’ because we are a small minority. . . . [W]e must therefore content ourselves with a revolution that is as much ‘ours’ as possible, favoring and taking part, both morally and materially, in every movement directed toward justice and liberty and, when the insurrection has triumphed, ensure that the pace of the revolution is maintained, advancing toward ever greater freedom and justice.”[[#134MalatestaAnarchistRevolu|134]] If anarchists were successful in this, their position as a militant minority would fade away during the course of, or in the aftermath of, the social revolution itself, as more and more workers came to adopt and implement anarchist ideas themselves.[[#135KropotkinRebel75Kropo|135]]
+In a way I am starting to feel a little bit better about the betrayal, because the flaws it gives him free me from his tether. He taught me a lot, but he is still quite blinded by his man-vision. John Lilly did not treat the dolphins with the reverence he preached they deserved, he was a hypocrite and he brought a lot of discredit to the study of cetaceans. But that can’t undermine the few really pertinent things he also said about other-than-human consciousness. Larus and his ulterior motive do not make everything that I ''did'' learn from him null. Because imagine if we took the personal lives of great thinkers as their oeuvre. Sure, we should hate them for it, but if we ''ignored'' all of the wife beaters, all of the wife silencers, all of the wife killers, wouldn’t we have some gaping holes in history?
-According to Kropotkin and Malatesta, one of the main ways that anarchists should act as a militant minority during a revolution was by establishing autonomous regions, which refused to recognize the authority of any revolutionary government that was formed. In 1891, Kropotkin wrote that, during a revolution, anarchists would not “be able to avert . . . attempts at revolutionary government,” but could instead only “conjure up from within the people itself a force that is mighty in its actions and in the constructive revolutionary tasks that it is to carry out, ignoring the authorities, no matter what name they may go under, growing exponentially by virtue of its revolutionary enterprise, its revolutionary vigor and its achievements in terms of tearing down and reorganizing.”[[#136KropotkinDirectStruggle|136]] This self-organized, federated force would undermine any attempts at revolutionary government because
+==== HOW MUSHROOMS CAN SAVE THE WORLD ====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">a people that will itself have organized the consumption of wealth and the reproduction of such assets in the interest of society as a whole will no longer be governable. A people that will itself be the armed strength of the country and which will have afforded armed citizens the requisite cohesion and concerted action, will no longer be susceptible to being ordered around. A people that will itself have organized railways, its navy, its schools is not going to be susceptible to being administered anymore. And finally, a people that will have shown itself capable of organizing arbitration to settle minor disputes will be one where every single individual will deem it his duty to stop the bully misusing the weakling, without waiting for providential intervention by the town sergeant, and will have no use for warders, judges or jailors.[[#137KropotkinDirectStruggle|137]]</div>
+My comrade reindeer came back again. I know for sure it is real now because I have pinched myself when I have seen it and I have filmed it on camera and watched it back several times over just to make sure. I find it very strange that the reindeer is always alone. This is not the usual behaviour of a reindeer, and this fact makes me think it really is my comrade. But then, this is the part that cannot be theoretically tested. The reindeer could just be a lost and lonely reindeer.
-In the 1920 edition of Malatesta’s anarchist program, which was based on the previous 1899 version and adopted by the Italian Anarchist Union, he recommended that anarchists “push the people” to expropriate the ruling classes, establish workplace and community assemblies that collectively own and control the means of production, and refuse “to nominate or recognize any government.”[[#138ErricoMalatestaLifeand|138]] If the wider working classes choose not to do so, then anarchists “must—in the name of the right we have to be free even if others wish to remain slaves and because of the force of example—put into effect as many of our ideas as we can, refuse to recognize the new government and keep alive resistance and seek that those localities where our ideas are received with sympathy should constitute themselves into anarchist communities, rejecting all governmental interference and establishing free agreements with other communities which want to live their own lives.”[[#139MalatestaLifeandIdeas|139]]
+It has not tried to talk to me or tell my future like she said it might. But I do not know if maybe I am looking too hard and thinking too literally. Like looking too hard with my actual physical eyes instead of looking more indirectly with my third eye, which really only means feminine perspective, as in admitting there is not one truth, there are many narratives, there are many names for mountains, and by taking on the perspective of the reindeer I will actually see myself and my future. It is simple and rational, like how Jung said that you can predict the future if you just know how the present has evolved out of the past.
-In 1925, Malatesta clarified that this included, if necessary, engaging in armed self-defense against the violence of the new state:
+==== THE vANITy OF MODERN ExISTENcE ====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">If, despite our efforts, new forms of power were to arise that seek to obstruct the people’s initiative and impose their own will, we must have no part in them, never give them any recognition. We must endeavor to ensure that the people refuse them the means of governing—refuse them, that is, the soldiers and the revenue; see to it that those powers remain weak… until the day comes when we can crush them once and for all. Anyway, we must lay claim to and demand, with force if needs be, our full autonomy, and the right and the means to organize ourselves as we see fit and to put our own methods into practice.[[#140MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|140]]</div>
+''INT. CABIN, SUNLIGHT – Erin on cot, camera on desk opposite – in shot are cabin cot, Erin and the window, legs draped over edge of cot, her hands stiffly under the diary as if at a lectern – she looks up from it and directly at the camera – there is something unsettling in the way her eyes look – wide, imploring/haunted –''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#17|1]]. Michael Schmidt and Lucien van der Walt, ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009), 20, 124, 133–41.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' ‘KACZYNSKI IS GOD’ is scrawled in capitals on the title page of the diary. I have read the first half. Like the title suggests. Damon is pretty much Kaczynski</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#27|2]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 318, 360.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks down at the diary and pauses with a hand hovering over her bookmarks, little scraps of paper – she picks the first and carefully turns to its page – pages are stiff from years sat pressed together –''</div>
-[[#37|3]]. Quoted in René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 31.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' So like here he says</div>
-[[#47|4]]. Quoted in Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 31.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she takes a breath –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#57|5]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 139.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">Once upon a time there was a land covered with pristine virgin wilderness. Where colossal trees soared over lavish mountainsides and rivers ran crazy and free through deserts. Where eagles wheeled and beavers beavered at their dams and people lived in concord with bare nature. Achieving everything they needed to achieve by the day using only rocks. Bones and timber. Padding softly on the Earth and living to full personal potential. In a peaceful state of anarchy</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#67|6]]. Quoted in Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''178.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks back at the camera –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#77|7]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 89–90. See also 83. In the original, Dunois uses the word “spontaneously.” I altered the translation to “voluntarily,” given how the French word “spontanément” was used by anarchists at the time.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Which is lifted right out of Kaczynski. And then this</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#87|8]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''163.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she turns to another page –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#97|9]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''163.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">That summer there were too many people around my old cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I hear there are handlebars and viewing plateaus specifically plateaued for viewing at Yosemite now. They think that wildness can be put in a box and looked at. John Muir was a douchebag</div>
-[[#107|10]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 158.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' Saturation again. Damon must have been in another cabin somewhere a bit less remote before he came to this one. Kaczynski did that too. He got upset when some bulldozers tore down his favourite thinking spot and that’s what sent him further out into the wilderness and into madness and made him send the letter bombs</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#117|11]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 158.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she sits looking at the diary in her hands with slumped shoulders – she looks back at the camera –''</div>
-[[#127|12]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''148–54; Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''98–100.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN''' (QUIETLY): It’s really fucking sad if you think about it</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#136|13]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''153;'' ''Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''64, 73.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– then she smiles weakly, turning to another page –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#146|14]]. Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 58–59.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' And then this. Before the forgetting existence was a mosaic of beauty. It is the iron fist of technology that has smashed that to smithereens. And we are the shards. Each just a remnant of this beautiful mosaic. Discordant from our true nature</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#156|15]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''474–75.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she stares at the page – looks up –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#166|16]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 18.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' And it’s all very hyperbolic but I get it</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#176|17]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 60.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she turns to another page –''</div>
-[[#186|18]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 61.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">Technological society is a leech on the soul. Existentialism is its result. Primitive man had a challenging existence. He had to fight off predators and other men and hunt and kill. He was raw and fully alive. He was not safe from failure but he was not hopeless to all of his threats. He could act on them. Modern man is under constant threat by things he has no power to control. Nuclear weapons. Pollution. Carcinogens. Our environment is already radically altered from its natural state. Soon man will be as radically different as his modern environment</div>
-[[#196|19]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 61.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' He man he. Of course. But he goes into this more. He says that</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#206|20]]. The following account is largely based on Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 63–65, 101–4; ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''61–66, 73–74, 92–95, 130–35, 208–10. For the historical context of this debate, see Pietro Di Paola, ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 59–91; Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 188–95.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she turns to another bookmark –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#216|21]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''439–40.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">Nature is not a feminist. Nature is ruled by chaos and competition. Strength and cunning. Nature made a human creature that must fill the roles of care and duty to offspring. So that the species may flourish. They are weaker and domestically minded. This obviously makes them social beings and so more suited to civilisation. This is why the mountains are not peppered with women. They will be more cumbersome during the revolution and will also fare worse. But of course they will be necessary after the revolution. So we must take care to recruit them</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#226|22]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''63.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she frowns down at the diary – makes a kind of ‘huuumph’ sound – bounces the diary a little in her hands, absently – chews the inside of her lip – she turns to another bookmark – the pages stick together – she peels them apart –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#236|23]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''64,'' ''73.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">The enemy is the machine. We should not make enemies of ourselves</div>
-[[#246|24]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''134; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she looks back to the camera, bouncing the diary in her hands again – the stiff pages hardly move –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#256|25]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''489–90.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' You can see the way his philosophy develops. He starts going then into how the revolution should work and what his idea of utopia after will be like. All the time going back to this idea of freedom freedom freedom, which he always writes in capitals. He wants to destroy everything institutional and symbolic. Factories, of course, but also hospitals. And libraries. And he says there will be many casualties. He says that death and chaos are the sacrifice needed. That freedom and dignity are more valuable than a life free of pain. That to die fighting for survival is more fulfilling than a life void of purpose</div>
-[[#266|26]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''63, 437–39; ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''133–4; ''Patient Work'','' ''42, 153.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– she is absorbed in her trail of thought – she does not notice the book in her hands – her hands play with it absently – apparently she does not notice because she does not treat it with the delicate reverence she did before –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#276|27]]. José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 7–10, 93.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' And then if you follow his logic. And you end up with this post-technological society. Then doesn’t feminism have what it wants anyway? Because if like I believe there is no natural way of being. And patriarchy is just scaffolding. Then does taking down the scaffolding not solve the problem?</div>
-[[#286|28]]. Murray Bookchin, ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years 1868–1936'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998),'' ''154–55,'' ''164–65; Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 195,'' ''237–49.
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– the diary slips from her hands and lands on the floor face down – a page is dislodged and slips across the floor with the gust the book’s landing made – Erin looks reproachfully at the piece of paper – she bends and reaches to pick it up, gathers the diary as she does – she sits back on the cot and looks at the paper, places the diary besides her – then she unfolds the piece of paper – her lips move silently as she begins to read –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#296|29]]. Danny Evans, private communication, June 27, 2020.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– her face caves in on itself – she brings her hand to her mouth and the other begins shaking – she lets out a whine that is broken and animalistic –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#306|30]]. In 1931, the majority of delegates at the CNT’s national congress voted to form national industrial federations, which would unite all the single unions in a given industry together. These were to exist in parallel to the other geographical federations that united workers from different industries together, based on their location. This decision was never implemented and was actively opposed by several anarchist delegates on the grounds that it would decrease the importance and autonomy of the local single unions. See Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''218–19; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''90–92; Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''33–37.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– then her eyes dart suddenly to an area behind the camera and to the left – she brings away her hand as though to talk – her face has a receptivity to it now, like it is in the act of communication, all parts expressive in a way that had not been in evidence to the inanimate camera – as though there is someone in the room with her whom she is addressing –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#316|31]]. In 1934, Ángel Pestaña claimed that some local federations and local unions paid for two or three full-time delegates “off the record” and “under the table.” I have been unable to verify this claim or discover how other members responded to these allegations. Quoted in Frank Mintz, ''Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 54–55.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' He… He killed himself</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#326|32]]. The higher committees of the CNT amassed far more power during the Spanish revolution and civil war of 1936–39. See Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 39–40, 45–49.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– and then, shaking her head desolately –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#336|33]]. This account of how the CNT was organized is based on Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''144–46; Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 11, 13, 73; Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 353n16; Evans, ''Revolution and the State'', 12. For examples of CNT plenums see Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', 52–53, 69–70, 255–56, 259–60.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">'''ERIN:''' I don’t. Don’t know</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#346|34]]. Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''5. For the biographical details about Peirats, see Chris Ealham, ''Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 29–30, 141–42.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– in the background through the window looking out into the trees that get denser and denser until they are forest a dark shape comes forward from the obscurity – it is small because it is in the distance, it would be easy to miss – Erin slowly shakes her head at the point behind the camera with her mouth a big ‘O’ – eyes are drawn to it because it is sudden movement in a previously inert space – in contrast to the space around it it becomes clear – a large animal with long spindly legs –''</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#356|35]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''What is the C.N.T?'' (London: Simian, 1974), 19.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.004cm;">''– Erin’s expression droops and her eyes slip diagonally down to the camera – she blinks at it then slowly rises, slowly, like her body is almost too heavy to lift – she leans across the floor and reaches out –''</div>
-[[#366|36]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''77; Agustín Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014),'' ''28–29.
+==== CUT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#376|37]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''122–23.</div>
+==== WEST, WEST, WEST, DESTINy, DESTINy, DESTINy ====
-[[#386|38]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''83; ''Patient Work'','' ''155.
+After I read it I went a bit dizzy like I had to sit down and get moving acutely at the same time. I got the fear/adrenaline that perhaps a rabbit feels being run into the ground by a fox; a chemical consolation prize for its oncoming doom. And there must be one, a payoff, I think, otherwise the rabbit would just lie down and let the fox take it, not prolong its own suffering. There must be a small part to the death chase that feels good.
-[[#396|39]]. Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 49–50; Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution'','' ''28–30.
+I packed up my bag to move back out to the fire tower. Damon’s quest and the distance he went on it had put my own feeble experiment into perspective; in contrast a glorified camping trip. He too saw the hypocrisy of the Mountain Man but he actually followed through on it with frenzied sincerity. A distance so far and so absolute as to never come back. In fact the ''only'' absolute solitude.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#406|40]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016), 49. See also, 138–41.</div>
+An event horizon is a place in space-time and events beyond this point can’t reach an observer who is outside of them. It is a point of no return and on the other side of this point the gravitational pull turns so intense that escape is impossible. This is a black hole.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#416|41]]. Quoted in Walther L. Bernecker, “The Strategies of ‘Direct Action’ and Violence in Spanish Anarchism,” in ''Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'', ed. Wolfgang J. Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 90.</div>
+Here in the cabin there is always looming the possibility that Stan will come to find me. This is reason enough to leave for somewhere more authentically ''distant''. And I shall not take my map. A map is a corrupting thing, an imposition on the wilderness it tames, translates to the symbolic. And it is a mapping for others to follow, like Thoreau mapped for others to follow him on his ''philosophical'' terrain but by talking about it he took away its agency, its pure wildness. Because pure wildness is the absence of words, is self-willed. Damon found this out and had to give up all of his words.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#426|42]]. Quoted in Ralph Darlington, ''Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism ''(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013), 29.</div>
+I cannot take the camera because it is more than the documentary now. Documenting too throws a quadrant on a thing, pins a thing down like a specimen for dissection. You cannot document a wilderness because that undoes its wildness, its being apart and for itself, and now I understand this. To document is to litter, to litter photographs of the tundra in the tundra behind you. And besides, it diminishes the directness of the experience, which becomes once removed via a superficial lens of viewing. Can you even have a feminist documentary on wilderness? Can you even have a word for wilderness? Do the Eskimos and the Inuits have one?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#436|43]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 39. Some trade unions within the CNT opposed the idea of a minimum program. See Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''218.</div>
+It is like Sam told me; the categorising of indigenous people is a colonial pursuit that controls their identity with words. Like in the Indian Act. It is a way to distinguish in white law who gets status or non-status, who gets what.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#446|44]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''281.</div>
+We map them out, draw out their boundaries, like when I entered Denali Park or you enter any park and there is a visitors’ centre roping off the inside from the outside, nature from non-nature. Gender is another act of division, deciding who gets what admirable qualities. There are no Mountain Women because the Mountain Man will not call her Mountain Woman. The Mercury 13 were ready for space flight, but NASA wasn’t ready to call them astronauts. (Side note: Athabaskans had a matrilineal society before rights were given to their men in white law.)
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#456|45]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 82.</div>
+All along I have been catching butterflies, pinning them in a glass case and putting a name to them: my own name. I had thought it so innocent, the calling of things by their real names. The good truth of speciesism; helping me to see difference. But it is not, it pins the animal to a system that pretends to be truth, static and mechanical, it reduces the luminous and the complex. This makes the thing, the animal, lose its deeper truth. William Blake the poet got upset at Newton and the Enlightenment scientists for ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’. I have been trying so hard to put it into words but I have been struggling because it can never really be worded without making its immediacy dissipate. I have been unweaving rainbows.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#466|46]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 181.</div>
+I set fire to the pile of man books like I did the animal guts, because I do not want The Bear to smell them either. In words they keep the wilderness from me. I am sick of their authority. I am sick of their exclusion, their air of expertise, their colonial intent. I am sick of their wording that which should not be worded. Maybe we need some gaping holes in history! I hate them! And I hate them all the more for being so hypocritical, with Damon so painfully true!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#476|47]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 182.</div>
+I watch the guts crackle but the books do not light because I threw them on whole in anger and the flames lick at them but do not take hold and snuffle and die. Are they fucking immortal? I pick them up one by one and tear the pages from them, reignite the flames, feed them in gently. They curl to black in my fingers, page by page.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#486|48]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''374.</div>
+But I have to do something with this, running away like a little squirrel who takes a strange object to its dray, and what to do with it when I have it there? A voyage that leaves everybody else behind. A voyage to see the moon’s second face.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#496|49]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 19, 23.</div>
+Mike Collins was the astronaut left behind to see to things in the command module while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. He drifted for a day in a hunk of metal that he had little control over, alone in the dizzy void, velvety infinity making him sick with perspective or lack of, no anchor for his soul and a brain telling him that whatever he thinks he can see he is probably still falling. And when he got to the dark side of the moon and he could not see Earth any more, he lost radio contact with Houston for forty-eight minutes.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#506|50]]. Haia Shpayer-Makov, “Anarchism in British Public Opinion 1880–1914,” ''Victorian Studies'' 31, no. 4 (1988): 487–516; Luigi Fabbri, ''Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism'' (Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001).</div>
+''Not since Adam has any human known such solitude'', the loneliest man at the beginning of the world or in the world or out of it. Only, Mike Collins says he did not feel loneliness but awareness, satisfaction and exultation. The most crystalline and private solitude. Oh, Eve, why did you have to show up and tamper with the clarity?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#516|51]]. Quoted in Ulrich Linse, “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence,” in ''Social Protest'','' Violence and Terror'', 215.</div>
+We always had a preoccupation with the moon as this symbol of a philosophical island. A man is an island on the moon. It is so far away it is definitive exile. Is that Cain on the moon? Is he lonely? Is he drunk?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#526|52]]. Quoted in Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 34.</div>
+The moon has not been an island since Apollo, or it is an island like Crusoe’s but after the footprint. Someone already flew up and touched it and saw it from all sides and figured out there are no green men and no cheese. A solitude to be felt by no one since Adam and now Mike Collins.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#536|53]]. Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012),'' ''87–90.</div>
+And yet it could always have been purer still. If Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had died like they easily might have, and Collins had to do a return journey to Earth on his own, first the dark face then the burden and relief of being the survivor, the only one to escape the shipwreck, returned without the heroes empty-handed. But how pure would have been the level of solitude on that return? Does that thought corrupt it? Like it could always go deeper still? Like smashing the atom of solipsism to find out it does smash and it is actually made of weird squiggly things.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#546|54]]. Quoted in Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'', 89.</div>
+In Chinese mythology there is a woman on the moon and she has a whole band of moon rabbits for company. I felt spacey as I left the cabin, but much less heavy than when I walked out here. A flock of geese made a ‘V’ in the sky. This is called a skein.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#556|55]]. Quoted in Goyens, “Johann Most and the German Anarchists,” in ''Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street'', ed. Tom Goyens (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 21–22. In response, Goldman attacked Most with a whip during one of his lectures. See Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''105–6.</div>
+==== NOW COMES GOOD SAILING MOOSE INDIAN ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#566|56]]. Quoted in George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114.</div>
+I stayed up all day and part of the night reading Damon’s journal to its end, only leaving the tower a couple of times to pee and just to stretch my cramping legs. I was sore all over from just sitting still, and so exhausted from crying and reading that I fell into a nightmare sleep that I could not pull myself out of until late this morning. The diary does not elaborate on how he chose to do it. It only suggests that he would not ever be found.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#576|57]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 319.</div>
+Damon is hanging by the neck from a tree, its branch groaning against the pull of his body, but it groans less and less with his diminished mass. The bears and the wolves found him before the ranger, like he planned. His legs are torn away where the lower-standing creatures have managed to reach, from his waist down, a hula skirt made of strands like earthworms, which wriggle as the torso sways. It takes a big bear to stand on its hind legs and wrench the forlorn body to the ground, where the lower-standing creatures wait with yelps and warbles that sound like ecstasy and pain at once. They feast on his body, frenzied but harmonious, creatures great and small.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#586|58]]. Quoted in Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 84. See also Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''526–29.</div>
+''Humankind has been the biggest leech on this planet. No creature has ever dominated so unanimously or pervasively.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#596|59]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 150, 154.</div>
+It had crossed my mind that maybe his suicide was faked so that he could truly cast off all ties and live in his wilderness with no one ever coming after him. To be dead and mourned as the most unconditional form of liberation. But reading the diary, and especially towards its end, he writes so convincingly about how it feels to follow the deduction of his philosophy all the way to its conclusion, and know there is no way back, that I really have to believe he was there.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#606|60]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 150.</div>
+''We are heading for collapse. Eventually the fortress we built will cave in on itself. But not until everything outside of it has been absorbed into it, remodelled in its image. Not until we have corrupted everything that is beautiful and whole and pure.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#616|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist ''(Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989), 373.</div>
+He talks and talks about how there is this innate thing, this selfishness in us, and that no matter our good intentions it always overrides. And it gets me thinking about the parallel on a macro-cosmic scale. That really, if there is no changing the course of our ‘advancement’ and its inevitable conclusion, why even struggle against it? Maybe we should meet it running, we should just run at death and the death of civilisation yelling and flailing like Damon did. The planet could regenerate with new interpretations of life, like after the dinosaurs or all the sea creatures in the Silurian period or everything in the Great Dying in the Permian period when 96 per cent of life forms perished and the 4 per cent that did not went on to become all life as we know it now.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#626|62]]. Quoted in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 55. Kropotkin opposed the tactics of assassination and bombings within the Russian anarchist movement. See Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 206–07; Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 59–60. For an overview of Russian anarchist’s engaging in this kind of violence, see ibid., 44–55, 63–70.</div>
+And if at that end of it, when all the glittery dust motes settle and the black mushrooms start to metabolise the fallout, if there is nothing left that could contemplate our loss, then is nothing really lost? Even those with the capacity to ''feel'', would they even care? Would the dolphins be sad to see us go if any of them survived?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#636|63]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 176.</div>
+The Doomsday Clock is a clock whose time is agreed upon by a group from the ''Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists''. Midnight represents the apocalypse. The clock indicates the planet’s vulnerability to apocalypse from human-made existential risks, their main concerns being nuclear weapons and climate change.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#646|64]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+Nuclear contaminates time and future wildness and will outlive us as a time capsule. Climate change permeates the now, every fibre of being on the surface of the planet touched and corrupted by it, even if only by the colour change of its cast shadow. Human-made change is already written into every little bit of wilderness.
-[[#656|65]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', 14; Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''160; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''470–71.
+No part of the planet will be untouched. Not the deepest ocean trench, not the never-seen portion of Siberian forest, not the unknown and unnamed underwater cave or the blind crabs living in it. All will bear our dirty fingerprints. We have left our negative imprint everywhere. And the first and worst felt of the human species losing their identity and culture will be the Eskimo and Inuit, who did very little to bring it about. The rocks will testify against us to the future, speaking of us as geomorphic agents.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#666|66]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+The Mountain Men are dead now. All purity has been proved untrue. Alaska is owned privately, by natives, or is federal land. Can a wilderness ever be wild if it is owned? Does the wilderness reserved lose its self-will, its wildness? The human stink is everywhere, the smell is enough to almost paralyse me and at the same time frenzy, make me want to limp-run away, run towards, a cliff-lemming suicide tendency.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#676|67]]. Malatesta, ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism'' (London: Freedom Press, 2005), 82–83.</div>
+The clock has recently been set at three minutes to midnight, the closest it has been since the Cold War. In a press release, when they moved the clock hand, the scientists said ''the probability for global catastrophe is very high''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#686|68]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''344. See also 315–33.</div>
+They sat around in a board meeting with other minds representing the frontiers of scientific knowledge, sitting around with dozens of Nobel laureates agreeing on that conclusion and feeling the full weight of its implications. How do the people building the way we know the world manage to stagger on with the weight on their shoulders so heavy?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#696|69]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''179.</div>
+''There are just too many people on this finite planet now. I can only dream that there will be some virus, some superbug, a disaster, an earthquake along the fault lines of civilisation. Something to restore equilibrium.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#706|70]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'', 101.</div>
+''And yet one cannot orchestrate this. One cannot inflict this philosophy onto others and remain sincere. Kaczynski got this wrong. For to be a human being is to be part of humankind. And to be part of humankind is to be in the ranks of the enemy. And so what is to be done? What can an individual do but quit the army that fights for a cause he does not believe in? He cannot hurt his brothers in arms whose only fault is their ignorance.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#716|71]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''67.</div>
+He is right and Kaczynski was wrong and even Thoreau was inauthentic. Thoreau’s writing was a time capsule and with it he colonised his wildness. It is to write intent everywhere, to sow it around like bad seeds. Wilderness is an absence of these seeds, or more than absence – the inexistence of them. A dead Damon is wilderness. Even more absolute wilderness is a Damon never born.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#725|72]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''25.</div>
+In the opinion of Stephen Hawking if we can just cling on for long enough to wait for the technology that will take us to space, we will come out okay. We can bugger off to Mars and live happily ever after. A select group of us on even finiter finite resources. As though moving the problem elsewhere could solve the problem. But we can’t escape the problem when it is inside us, plaited through us, inextricable.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#735|73]]. Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''47–48, 52–53.</div>
+After all I have said and thought about his diary and the parcel I really have to reassess because they were not left there as his intention. And without intent they can’t really said to be his time capsule. More an archaeology of him. There is no ego in an accidental archaeology.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#745|74]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 25–26.</div>
+The postcards were an obvious giveaway. I feel stupid for not having clocked it at all before. Of course he would not have sent them all and then collected them back. Somebody else had collected them for him, and along with his diary, brought them to his holy place as a little shrine.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#755|75]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''309; Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''156,'' ''189.</div>
+''It pains me to be here at the edge but I would fail my beliefs if I were not to do this. Is this not really the meaning of life and everything? Is it not the end of the quest, to have found your own truth and really lived by it? I feel fulfilled.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#765|76]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''26.</div>
+From what is said in the diary I think what must have happened is he left a letter for his family, presumably inside the cabin with a postal address to which it should be sent, for the next person who found it, or for the search party sent out for him.
-[[#775|77]]. Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want'', 11.
+He believed in something so hard that it undid him and he loved it so much he had to give it up. Maybe in part so he could not see it diminish (gouge out eyes, see less suffering). A lover’s suicide before the fervour subsides and a death in innocence before the debasement and a perfectly embalmed and beautiful corpse.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#785|78]]. Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want'', 10–12, 15–16.</div>
+He came to the wilderness in the first place to claim his freedom and then found the only thing he could do to be true was to renounce it. He took his own life to repent for ''our'' sins, like Jesus minus the wide-open arms and the preaching and the son-of-god complex.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#795|79]]. Max Baginski, “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union Movement,” in ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', ed. Peter Glassgold, (New York: Counterpoint, 2000), 305.</div>
+There is a sad kind of beauty in it, like a deep blue bruise that came from nowhere and you want it to go away but then again you don’t because you like how it makes you feel sad to look at it, and more real to touch it and hurt. And in his last days of life he must have felt so free finally of the burden, once he had made up his mind, so cathartically pure. So free of the burden of being because he had decided to do the one and only true thing he could do to live by what he believed in. He had found his truth.
-[[#805|80]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 78.
+I want to try to conjure what he did near the end so that I can try to live it too. If he went wandering, where he went wandering. From the window of the tower the mountains sit pink blue grey behind the trees, always chameleon to the sky. Was he drawn to them, sat impassive and anchored and true, did he climb to the top to see the world he had let go of, the entire world over?
-[[#815|81]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+He will not ever know that there was a girl from a small town in middle England to know and understand the sacrifice he made, because he did not want it to be known. What he wanted was an act of nothingness.
-[[#825|82]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+And I feel a little fear at the danger of my quest now. I am a little scared at the intensity of the ache and camaraderie I feel for this man I never knew. I find myself thinking by proxy about how I would do it, hypothetically, if I wanted to do it in the most sincere and poignant way.
-[[#835|83]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 79.
+What it would need: personal significance and the least amount of suffering and the fewest traces left behind. A desire to be eaten back up by the earth, to dissolve back into the quantum soup that you came from with the smallest smidgen or trace. Rocks on your feet to join Rachel Carson under the water and nourish the fish kingdom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#845|84]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''287.</div>
+But what does personal significance matter if the act’s sole purpose is to deny completely your individuality? The one thing I have to lay down to offer is me, bye-bye, me, bye-bye. But then, if you are going to underwrite your life with that one act, and no one else is ever to know about the circumstances of it anyway, you might as well allow yourself poetic justice, right?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#855|85]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''320.</div>
+Did Rachel Carson choose not to intervene in her cancer to underwrite her whole life’s work for ever? Or did the universe perceive so much ''charge'' in her as a pinnacle figure in her sphere of existence that it attached this significance to her dying?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#865|86]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''106.</div>
+And the burning question: how do I go back from here? When I can see it so painfully wither to touch, and when just by my presence everything is undone? I am not alone here, there is something I bring with me. My bad seeds, and this place so easily inoculated.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#875|87]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''55.</div>
+===== Alfred Worden of Apollo 15 wrote a poem about the moon that went: she is forever moving just out of reach and I sail on/never touching, only watching and wanting to know. =====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#885|88]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''145–46.</div>
+Alfred Worden wanted to stalk, wanted to get his sticky fingers on that coy temptress, wanted to word the moon. I think of my map and my documentary and all of my lists, my collecting. Because the map is not just not the territory, it is also something rather sinister.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#895|89]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 427.</div>
+When we draw a map we are sewing our signature into it. When we map we divide and parcel. When we divide the forms of life in taxonomy and name them in our image, we set ourselves outside, omniscient. We structure our difference; we say, we are the only animals that name and order the other animals, the rest of them just exist. But how do we know the dolphins are not swimming around shouting ‘coral’ at coral in sonar?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#905|90]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''49.</div>
+And naming the animals and knowing the animals, it did not make us look after them better. It is another way for each ‘namer’ to survive time. Our separateness allowed us to bring everything to the brink of mass extinction, to say, oh well, we can do without them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#915|91]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''320.</div>
+I might have learned to don a fraud penis to go to Scott’s Antarctica, but why would I want to now that I know what that entails? What Thilda was saying when she said you don’t need a penis between your legs is that you don’t need one there to make you a good ''coloniser'', but why would I want to be a coloniser at all?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#925|92]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''168. See also Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 80; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''293–94.</div>
+My documentary is a sinister and selfish one, a fraud penis. That is just it. There is a point of footage specifically that I watched back where Rochelle said ‘the freedom to roam free like a white man’.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#935|93]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Statism and Anarchy ''(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,'' ''1990), ed. Marshall Shatz, 114, 25. For another example, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''98–103.</div>
+I am wearing a big heavy robe and walking around and there is a line of faceless people trailing behind me and they are all dressed in white tunics. I am at the head of a glorious procession: roll up, follow me, throw off your imaginary shackles, the world is your oyster! Quit your job, sell your stuff, you can conquer the world, life is too short for regrets! They follow me everywhere in a long winding file like ants, my followers. There are so many of them. When we walk through grass the grass gets trampled to a dirt-dry path. When we walk through snow there are only sludge dirt tracks left after. When we walk through the deserts there are wagon tracks in the red sand.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#945|94]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 190–203.</div>
+The trail has been opened, stomp stomp stomp. Best-guarded travel secrets, too good not to share! Secluded beaches, untouched forests, pristine crystal mountain streams! And despite the lack of authenticity there are those that come to seek it anyway. In trying to find something authentic of their own they leave a well-worn trail behind.
-[[#955|95]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''81.
+My own time capsule, my documentary, my baby, like President Carter’s baby sent into space to colonise the wilderness of the future. The reason Damon’s legacy is different to Chris McCandless’s is that there was no time capsule sent out by or for Damon. This is the tragedy of Chris McCandless, because it was not him who wrote a book and made a film and brought the crowds to his wilderness. If I were to make one with the documentary then Damon too would become a mecca, and that would undermine his entire point. And mine.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#965|96]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''226.</div>
+I guess I knew deep down but I could not admit it to myself because it was my baby and no one thinks their own baby is ugly. And it gave me purpose-propulsion-direction in striking out and living vividly when I had none. And I did not want to kill my baby.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#975|97]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''443. See also Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''67–69.</div>
+For the Eskimos secrecy holds potency and is essential in the continuum of magic. For example, if a hunter were to witness a singing animal, and the animal were an omen of good hunting in that area, the hunter could not tell other people of his or her discovery because this would make the magic lose its power.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#985|98]]. Ealham, ''Living Anarchism'','' ''57–59.</div>
+Inside the forest where the trees are densest and the air is damp with exhumed gases condensing like inside closed windows, Damon had dug himself a hole. He got rid of the spade once the hole was dug, took it away from the grave so as not to leave a marker. Then he buried himself to the shoulders with dirt. His right arm stays outside to bury the other with. It is not perfect but it is the best he could do on his own. He knew enough botany to know which of the plants are poisonous.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#995|99]]. Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'','' ''18–22; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'', 48–51; Guillamón, ''Ready for Revolution'','' ''31–32; Peirats, ''CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1,'' ''11–6; For an in-depth overview of this topic, see A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''210–11, 250–53, 300–301, 312, 316–17, 323–37, 343–49, 351.</div>
+Weeks later a whole ecosystem of microbes has made good work of his meat and tendrils of plants are redirecting his nitrogen to their leaves and ants march off, shards of him on their backs. Wasps have made a nest of his brain, they enter and leave through his nostrils and his eye sockets and the gateway to his soul becomes a wasp flyway. The buzzing and humming and pulsating are the sounds of rage and passion, of nature claiming back her flesh voraciously. It is exactly as he wanted.
-[[#1005|100]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''337.
+==== SEEKING BUT NEVER QUITE FINDING ====
-[[#1015|101]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''98.
+I am too confused and upset to reason over it any more, so I go for a walk. When I jump-turn down from the last rung of the ladder there it is, stock still as always. I have never seen it that far from the tundra, never. And right at that instant I hate the bloody thing, for being so illusive and taunting me so, and how fucking dare it appear with nothing to say when it knows I am struggling.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1025|102]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''144–48, 163; ''Living Anarchism'','' ''66–67. It should be noted that some of the robberies were carried out by self-described individualist anarchist affinity groups.</div>
+I yell at it. I bend for a stone and throw it at it. It is a pathetic throw, it bounces on the ground to the side of it and the reindeer flinches and sidesteps, eyeing me warily.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1035|103]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 139–45; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''87–89, 100–1, 130–40, 161–64; ''Living Anarchism'','' ''60–70; Evans, ''Revolution and the State'', 7–10, 15–23; Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 177–225. It has been argued by Christie that the moderate syndicalist anarchists were not in fact anarchists or only paid lip service to anarchism. I have not been convinced by this claim. See Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', vii, 15, 26–28, 59–65, 68–73, 84–87, 93–94, 100–121.</div>
+I yell at it some more, shouting, go on, then, go. Then sob.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1045|104]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''529.</div>
+But it doesn’t. It does not move. It stands just grazing a little for minutes on end with me just watching and sniffling snot onto my sleeve.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1055|105]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''23.</div>
+And then I think to myself that multiple exposures to coincidence accumulate into destiny. It ''must'' have something to show me, I only have to try my very hardest to follow it this time. Why else would it keep coming back and standing so persistently? It is ready to speak to me.
-[[#1065|106]]. Quoted in Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''23.
+Sometimes it runs so then I run, only I can’t run too far until I get a stitch, but then it slows too, as though waiting for me to catch up.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1075|107]]. Malatesta, ''Café'','' ''107, 149, 155; ''Method of Freedom'','' ''344, 529.</div>
+Hours of this through the forest finds us out on the tundra and by the river, where it cuts deep against the banks before it becomes braided with sandbanks further down. The sun is in the centre of the sky. The insects come up from the grass in little clouds. The reindeer lopes into the river without even stopping for a thought.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1085|108]]. Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''114.</div>
+It only takes it around ten seconds to make it across, being moved at a diagonal by the water only slightly because it is gliding so fast, then it struggles a little out the other side, its bandy legs tremoring slightly, a forlorn old man trying to lift himself off the floor with crutches. When it has heaved itself out, it turns to face me. There it stands, shakes itself down, and looks at me. It lowers its head and snorts.
-[[#1095|109]]. Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''41.
+So I hold my breath and jump in before I can think any better. The water is cold as hell, from running off the mountain after sitting around as ice up there. It is much harder to swim when your ears and mouth are full of ice water that makes your brain freeze and there are sirens in your ears and the water in your mouth makes you gasp and choke. And the sudden and real shock from the water brings me rapidly into the reality of the situation. For all of ten seconds I am flailing in the water in panic, being dragged along and not much able to sort myself out.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1104|110]]. Luigi Fabbri, “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism,” in ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', ed. Friends of Aron Baron (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 16. For an overview of the class composition of anarchist and syndicalist movements around the world, see Schmidt and van der Walt, ''Black Flame'','' ''271–91.</div>
+Flapping my arms down to bring my body up, I try to turn my head to where the reindeer had been but I cannot see it. Obviously it is not going to jump in for me, we are not about to have one of those inter-species rescue moments of empathy and connection. My comrade reindeer has renounced its one job, and I lose all hope.
-[[#1114|111]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''87–88.
+I have thoughts like ''I had better think about my life in retrospect'' like you are supposed to and remember the time I found an injured squirrel and fed it water from a syringe and wrapped it in socks in a cardboard box but it died in the night. I wonder if my mum will feel a psychic maternal twinge, stop stirring her tea and drop the spoon. I see her ears prick up like Beethoven the St Bernard dog from the film franchise, when the little girl falls in the swimming pool ten blocks away. Thinking about things like this I feel so far away and apart as though I am in another life altogether, having a look through the eyes of some girl called Erin.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1124|112]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''325.</div>
+And in an instant I realise it is the first time I have really thought about elsewhere since being here. And in an instant I see everything all at once. ‘It was in this state that I experienced “myself” as melded and intertwined with hundreds of billions of other beings in a thin sheet of consciousness that was distributed around the galaxy. A ''membrain'',’ said John Lilly from his isolation tank.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1134|113]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''443.</div>
+I see a bright light every time I go under the water and screw my eyes shut hard and watch the green shapes like in a lava lamp then emerge and the sun bursts through for my having been starved momentarily and therefore malnourished and more susceptible to its intensity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1144|114]]. Turcato, ''Making Sense'','' ''163–68; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' ''261–67.</div>
+But then the adrenaline kicks in and my body takes over and being the rational one manages to get me right and make me swim with my head up. My rucksack has the dry-bag inside, which is full of air along with all my valuables and is buoyant so keeps me from going too far under. I had the foresight to pack it in case I got caught in the rain. I am heavy with all the water in my boots and it crosses my mind to take them off to stop them dragging me down. But I cannot stay out here without shoes. I honestly think in that moment that I actually would rather die than give up and go home without having found out whatever it is I am trying to find out.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1154|115]]. Rocker, ''London Years'','' ''62–63.</div>
+The crew of Apollo 13 did not get to land on the moon. An oxygen tank exploded and they had to abort their landing, spending almost a week in space trying not to die. They had limited power, only enough to propel themselves around the moon back towards Earth then float on unaided, hoping they would hit the exact angle they needed so as not to skim off the atmosphere like a flat pebble off a placid lake. They essentially had to catapult themselves and hope for the best while steadily running out of oxygen and freezing.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1164|116]]. Rocker, ''London Years'', 90.</div>
+While I am gulping water I wonder if they thought about making a suicide mission to the moon instead. With sudden clarity, as if seeing the moth that had been camouflaged against the tree’s bark, I get it. Looking down on the surface as they circled around, this place that they had seen as their life’s pinnacle, and everything built up to that promise of standing on the moon’s face, basking in majesty and in singularity; it might have seemed worth abandoning living for. To end at the crescendo.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1174|117]]. Rocker, ''London Years'', 126–31.</div>
+But for whatever reason they chose to try to go back, even at the risk of miscalculating and veering off into the void. They said ‘Let’s go home’ and the whole world stopped turning to wait to see them tearing through the roof of the sky. It is strange how it is framed as what could have been the loneliest death in history. Not a death in solitude for the envy of Mike Collins and Adam.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1184|118]]. J. Mintz, ''Casas Viejas'','' ''14–16, 29–31, 79–80, 83–85.</div>
+The difference is the element of choice, of ''intent''. It is not a casting out with purpose but a getting lost. It is the difference between solitude and loneliness. Newton’s ball was lonely because he drew it, the ball did not will itself there. And like Newton’s ball a woman’s body like Rachel Carson’s body is not her own to choose to keep in chastity or solitude.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1194|119]]. Di Paola, ''Knights Errant'', 34–35,'' ''95–96,'' ''111–13, 205.</div>
+Marianne Moore said that solitude is the cure for loneliness, which was very crafty of her, and perhaps my trip’s whole mantra. She was saying take your lonely body and reclaim it as your own, think it solitude!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1204|120]]. John Quail, ''The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists'' (London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978),'' ''250–51. Anarchists were able to more effectively organize unemployed people in the United States. See Avrich and Avrich, ''Sasha and Emma'','' ''217–23.</div>
+But drowning is hardly reclamation. That is why I do not want to let the river take me, or give up my shoes. After clambering onto the grassy bank, I lie panting on my back, trying to get steady, watching the clouds pass overhead in indifference. The mosquitoes are quick to jump on me like carrion. I am too tired to swat them away and get bitten to a pin-cushion through the fabric on my forearms.
-[[#1214|121]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''81.
+It is a long walk back because I was dragged downriver quite fast, and my body is lead-heavy and stiff from cold. I fall over in the mud that goes slick when the rain starts pouring. I have to laugh at the sky opening up minutes after I start walking. I could wade my way back up the river and end up drier than I am. I go despondently back to the cabin and not the tower because in the cabin I can make a fire.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1224|122]]. Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 202–3.</div>
+It takes me into the evening to get myself there and then it is all I can do to make the little fire in the grate to try to get warm by, because once I stop moving my body will not really do what I want it to. I just about peel off all my clothes and shake them out at the door, then place them on various surfaces and protrusions next to the fire. I lay down a makeshift rug and dry myself with my scanty micro-towel, not allowing myself the blanket until the fire has properly dried my skin off. My hair is matted with river bits in.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1234|123]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''56.</div>
+The panic starts when I notice that my feet are blue, like really blue, and it dawns on me that I have not yet stopped shaking. I remember reading a survival manual that went into the stages of hypothermia. The first stage that signals the onset of the severe and death-causing kind of hypothermia is called ''Paradoxical Undressing'', where a person’s brain tells them wrongly that they are really warm, so that they take all their clothes off and seek out snow to roll around in. I try to decide if I feel warm or cold, and if my undressing could be classed as paradoxical. It is hard to tell when you feel so cold and yet your limbs are very definitely burning.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1244|124]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''176.</div>
+The survival handbook also said things about delirium, and the final stage to look out for has a sinister name; it is called ''Terminal Burrowing''. When a dog can feel death coming it takes itself somewhere quiet and solitary to die if it can. The final stage of hypothermia triggers the same response; the afflicted will look for a small and enclosed space to curl up in.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1254|125]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''110–11.</div>
+''I am just going outside and may be some time'' is what Lawrence Oates said, perhaps as a prelude to burrowing. Some German researchers decided that this is an automatic process triggered in the brain which sends us into a primitive mode that thinks up burrowing as a protection behaviour, the same trigger that sends animals into hibernation. So it is possible Lawrence Oates did not have cryogenics in mind. He could have instead been undone to the most basic level of his humanity (benefit of the doubt should be put into practice here, in fairness).
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1263|126]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''332.</div>
+It hits me that Damon’s odyssey to this cabin was an elaborate Terminal Burrowing, was a dog’s death. After the onset of the burrowing mode it is already too late. It would not have been possible for him to change his mind.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1273|127]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''348. See also Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism'', 62–64.</div>
+I figure that as long as I am aware of this final stage and avoid it, I will not end up dead in a hollow. Just have to stay warm, warm. I scramble to put as many layers on as possible. I tell myself, even if you feel hot leave those clothes on. How hard can it be to stay dressed? I consider maybe tying my hands together to stop this, then think better of it. I settle for attaching a little note with a paperclip to the zip on my ski jacket. The note says ‘paradoxical undressing’; I hope that this will suffice to remind me to stay dressed. I put my hands in my pockets because they are making me anxious with how dead-looking they are, skin like tracing paper and all the veins blue crayon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1283|128]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''179.</div>
+I feel so very tired. But sleep is hibernation, hibernation is burrowing, so sleep could not be a good idea. I try to think of ways to stop from sleeping. I so badly want to lie in the cot but instead I sit upright on the chair, so that if I slump I might fall off and wake.
-[[#1293|129]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''87.
+==== MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES ====
-[[#1303|130]]. Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'', 41–42; ''Patient Work'','' ''190.
+''How do I find a way back and do I even want to?''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1313|131]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''554.</div>
+In the visitors’ centre were relics and photographs, each attractive in some visceral way that made a magpie of me. Sometimes an object appears before you and seems to fit itself into your chronology like a fusing cell.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1323|132]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''390–91, 395.</div>
+There were eerie masks with grimaces and rectangular grins, on animal and people faces. The masks were worn for rituals and then destroyed directly after. They were an immediately physical way to don an identity for the expression of something particular and temporary. An uttering of varying identities.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1333|133]]. Goldman, ''Red Emma'','' ''393.</div>
+When the Eskimos gave a name to a matured spirit, after the danger of childhood had passed and the spirit of the young person was thought to be well and truly lodged inside, the name given was always the name of the last departed person, because the spirits were thought to transmigrate through the generations. Young children were brought up in mind of the gender of the last person to have their ancestral name, and then usually reverted to roles based on their biological sex when they reached puberty. They have a very rudimentary taxonomy – animals have names so that they can talk about them but are not separated into families in such detail, are not unwoven. A person could don a mask and become any gender, any life form. Transmigration allows them to do away with taxonomy; a queering of the animals like their queering of gender that is really a way to acknowledge ''symbiotic association''<nowiki>; like Lynn Margulis said, we cannot live apart from each other.</nowiki>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1343|134]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'', 88–89.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0234-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1353|135]]. Kropotkin, ''Rebel'','' ''75; Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 553–55.</div>
+And then along came the white Christian missionaries! They reorganised their society, imposing patrilineal names and social customs. They undermined the Eskimo women’s respected positions. They saw this animism as evidence that the Eskimos worshipped bad and ungodly spirits, that they needed to be saved from the burden of their devil worship and impure customs. In the missionaries’ myth, women were blamed for the mortality of Man, for even daring to eat an apple, which stood metaphorically for their knowledge or heaviness (myths are so easily inverted). Men were ambassadors for the people now; the missionaries’ one male god told them to go forth and fill the world and subdue it. To rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and everything in between. This god said SEW YOUR SIGNATURES INTO THEIR NAMES. Adam named the animals, and in so doing, he thought himself apart.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1363|136]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''578.</div>
+The stewarding approach to the natural world took the Eskimos outside of their circle and tried to make their thinking linear. The missionaries made them speak a language which divides everything into opposites, and pitches each against the other and categorises them good or bad, masculine or feminine. In this language the differences between each opposing pair justify the subjugation of one to the other. Better is determined by what is associated with masculine: rational, civilised, intellectual and strong, so anything that connotes these categories holds value. Worse is the opposites: natural, primitive, spiritual and all their associates. Masculine is better just because masculine is better. This is not a reflection of reality but a structuring of it. A breaking apart and stacking of what could otherwise be fluid and fluctuating, but languidly.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1373|137]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''578.</div>
+Once you divide things into constituent parts you can stack them and you can subdue some parts with others, and this way those doing the building can sit on the top. The missionaries had already trialled this technique in Europe. Casting shamans or strong female figures as demon worshippers and witches scared people into thinking that women who deviated from their new subordinate function were evil and bad. In a theft of body, women were burned at the stake for practising birth control and midwifery. We were enclosed at the same time the commons were enclosed. And women feel connection to what came before even if only because they are made to feel more vividly what has been lost or kept from them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1383|138]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 186.</div>
+Like the animals were atomised by species and set apart from Adam, the physical world was stable and geometric and absolute. But now this myth is being undermined with a new one. Science is our rational way of seeing and knowing. We have been looking very hard, very closely, with new aids to vision. Now a new science is falsifying our apartness. A queer science of approximations and non-objectivity. Things are not absolute Mountain Men either/or. Another book that Larus gave me that I have been reading is ''The Tao of Physics''. It told me that when Niels Bohr the physicist was knighted (Order of the Elephant) in Denmark in 1947 he had to choose a coat of arms and for it he chose the t’ai-chi symbol, the yin-yang, and that his inscription read ‘opposites are complementary’.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1393|139]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''187. To compare these sections to the previous 1899 version, see Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy'','' ''55–56.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:dot.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1403|140]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 472.</div>
+Bohr said that dualisms – is it a particle or a wave? – do not describe exactly the true nature of things, but that the interplay between the two poles brings us closer to their reality, because everything is always both things at once depending on how you are looking. He said that ‘only the totality of the phenomena exhausts the possible information about the objects’. Much like objectivity in naming animals or peoples does not describe exactly, leaves something diminished.
-== {{anchor|Chapter8TheHistoryofSyndic1}} {{anchor|Chapter8TheHistoryofSyndic}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook11}} Chapter 8: The History of Syndicalist Anarchism ==
+I think about Rochelle and all the words I can never find for her. I think instead of finding many, many ''almost'' true words for her. Then it all ties together in my head so suddenly, coming to shape like the image that emerges with just one missing puzzle piece and abruptly you know exactly how it will be. Now science, quantum physics, is our ally in the war against patriarchy because it says you can’t ever touch the atom of another thing, Alfred Worden, not really; there will always be a force between the electrons of you and it which repel each other on an unfathomably small level. Nothing is solid. Can you feel the hollowness of things as you touch them?
-Syndicalist anarchism advocated the formation of federally structured trade unions that united the working classes into a collective force, were independent of political parties, and engaged in direct action against the ruling classes. This was to be achieved either by forming whole new revolutionary trade unions, or by participating within existing reformist trade unions and transforming them from within. Historically, anarchist authors used a variety of different terms to refer to trade unions, such as ''societies of resistance against capital'', ''resistance societies'', ''workers’ associations'', or simply the ''labor movement''.[[#1GeorgeRichardEsenweinAnar|1]] The term ''syndicalism'' is itself derived from the French word for trade union—''syndicat''—and the phrase ''syndicalisme révolutionnaire'', meaning trade unionism that is revolutionary.[[#2WayneThorpeUneasyFamily|2]] For the sake of simplicity, I shall be using the English term trade union, rather than such historical terms.
+Rochelle is a little to me like the moon is to Alfred Worden. She does not want to be spoken of. I did not know if the best way round her was to omit her from the documentary completely. I did not know before why I could not just be a man about it. Just say it like I think it and possess it when the whole reason I set out was to make this documentary just to prove I could.
-Syndicalist anarchism was a form of mass anarchism, and so argued that anarchists should struggle for immediate reforms via direct action, especially strikes, sabotage, and boycotts. These collective struggles for reforms would, over time, develop an organized mass trade union movement with the necessary radical capacities, drives, and consciousness for abolishing capitalism and the state, in favor of an anarchist society. The social revolution would unfold through an insurrectionary general strike, during which the working classes would stop work, occupy their workplaces, expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes, and smash the state. In the course of the social revolution, the federally structured trade unions would evolve, from organizations engaged in economic resistance against the ruling classes into organizations that self-managed the economy, either in part or whole.[[#3MarcelvanderLindenandWay|3]]
+In the quantum realm this is called the Observer Effect. Your measuring of a thing alters the thing itself. The very act of measuring forces the universe to make a decision at random from a bunch of probabilities. When we measure, the probabilities become a single actuality and this is called a ''collapse of the wave function''.
-Although all syndicalist anarchists generally agreed on the above strategy, they disagreed with one another on two main questions. These were:# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Should trade unions be politically neutral, or should they be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means?</div>
+''This'' is the reason I did not know what I wanted my documentary to say. I can’t talk about Rochelle without talking about my own subjective observation of her. I do not want to collapse her wave function and so I just should not talk about her at all. And the same of this place, this whole experience.
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">Are trade unions sufficient in and of themselves to achieve an anarchist society, or do they need to be assisted by a specific anarchist organization?</div>
+Maybe ‘a feminist documentary on wilderness’ is a semantic impossibility. A woman knows the burn of the power and impact of eyes on skin, she knows the observer effect, she feels herself behind the eyes when a man does not because a man does not know the burn, never has his vantage as detached observer brought into question.
+The instant you speak about the thing or you try to pin it down it slips from your hands like soap. The thing can’t be pincered. Matter is a particle and a wave all at once. Both aspects are valid, it just depends on how you look at the matter. And the problem with symbols like words in place of things is that as time passes, like matter in entropy, a symbol will move away from the source at accelerating speed. The markers for nuclear waste sites are never truth, even before the language dies.
-Three main forms of syndicalist anarchism emerged in response to these two questions: revolutionary syndicalism, syndicalism-plus, and anarcho-syndicalism.[[#4Thelanguageofsyndicalism|4]] In this chapter, I will establish what these positions meant, and why anarchists came to advocate them. This will be achieved through a detailed overview of the history of syndicalist anarchism, from its prehistory in the First International, to the formation of anarcho-syndicalism as an international movement in the early twentieth century. With this context in place, I will explain the main strategies that were generally advocated by syndicalist anarchists in chapter 9.
+Now she is again vivid and present, so fully formed I could walk over and actually touch her if only I could muster the willpower to move. We are at the bottom of an ocean or maybe the moon, because the space is dark and heavy, the sand or surface is chalky-looking and grey, and in front of me is what I took at first to be an astronaut. It is Rachel Carson, without her shaman disguise this time, like an astronaut in her old diver’s suit. It is loud with bees, she is humming and nodding along to the bees but I can’t see where the bee noise comes from until I get near to her and realise that I have found the bees: they are inside the fish bowl of her diving suit.
-'''The Prehistory of Syndicalism'''
+Her voice has a new strange quality to it, as though it were song. It was always her voice in many guises, many mouths to help carry it along. Many layers all at once instead of one pulse. How do I explain it? As though the air moves with it, as though when she speaks the trees rustle and a hundred birds sing with her and the air blows leaves across the room, only the windows are shut and everything is still, no pages rustle on the desk, but I feel it in my temples, this vibration. She was a witness for them and they now a witness for her, reanimating her. Like her bees, tiny mouths in unison. And if it comes from inside my head, her thoughts, my thoughts, what does it matter? I am contaminated.
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism, which would come to be known as syndicalism, was first advocated during debates within the First International and Saint-Imier International. At the September 1868 Brussels Congress of the First International, the Belgian delegate and typesetter César De Paepe advocated the formation of ''resistance societies'' that organized strikes to win immediate improvements and revolt against the ruling classes. In order to do so, they had to be “federated with one another—not only at the level of a trade or country, but across different countries and trades.”[[#5CesarDePaepeStrikesUni|5]] In the long term they would aim to achieve “the abolition of the wages system” through “the absorption of capital by labor.”[[#6DePaepeStrikesUnionsa|6]] The Brussels section of the International supported resistance societies “not only from regard to the necessities of the present, but also the future social order . . . we see in these trade unions the embryos of the great workers’ companies which will one day replace the capitalist companies” and “embrace whole industries.”[[#7RaymondWPostgateedDeb|7]] In February 1869, De Paepe expanded upon this point by arguing that “the International already offers the model of the society to come and that its various institutions, with the required modifications, will form the future social order. . . the society of resistance is destined to organize labor in the future. . . . Nothing will be more easy, when the moment comes, than to transform the societies of resistance into cooperative workshops, when the workers have agreed to demand the liquidation of the present society.”[[#8CesarDePaepeThePresent|8]]
+===== Why is my reindeer trying to kill me? =====
-Several months later, the Swiss Courtelary District section of the First International held a general assembly on August 29, 1869, in which a report on strike funds was approved. The report had been written by the engraver Adhémar Schwitzguébel, who would go on to become the corresponding secretary of the anarchist Jura Federation’s Federal Committee.[[#9EckhardtFirstSocialistSch|9]] The report advocated the formation of an international federation of trade unions, with a shared strike fund, on the grounds that they were an effective means to collectively resist the domination of capitalists and win higher wages. At the same time, they were viewed as having “the great advantage of preparing the general organization of the proletariat, of accustoming workers to identify their interests, to practice solidarity and to act in common for the interests of all. In short, they are the basis for the coming organization of society, since workers’ associations will have to do no more than take over the running of industrial and agricultural enterprises.”[[#10AdhemarSchwitzguebelOnR|10]]
+===== Why would you think that? =====
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism continued to be articulated within the First International at its Basel Congress, held between September 5 and 12, 1869, and attended by, among others, Bakunin and Guillaume. During the morning session of September 11, the delegate Jean-Louis Pindy, who would go onto participate in the Paris Commune and become an anarchist, presented a report that was subsequently passed as a resolution of the congress.[[#11JulianPWArcherTheFir|11]] Pindy, a cabinetmaker and the delegate of the Paris Construction Workers’ Trade Union, proposed that all workers should establish strike funds, organize local trade unions, and then link these local trade unions together at national and international levels. In so doing, workers would create an organizational structure that enabled the exchange of information and coordinated strike action both within a country and between countries. The goal of these trade unions would be to engage in strikes until capitalism had been abolished and replaced by the federation of free producers. As capitalism was abolished, the trade unions would take over the organization of production, and be converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. The federation of workers at the level of the town would form “the commune of the future” just as the federation of workers at the national and international level would form “the workers’ representation of the future” under which “politics” would be replaced by “the associated councils of the various trades and a committee of their respective delegates” administrating and regulating “work relations.”[[#12JeanLouisPindyResolutio|12]] The formation of national and international federations of trade unions was, therefore, not only necessary in order to engage in effective class struggle. It was also an essential component of establishing the social structures through which workers could organize a global socialist economy that “no longer recognizing frontiers, establishes a vast allocation of labor from one end of the world to the other.”[[#13JeanLouisPindyResolutio|13]]
+===== Because it led me into the river, and I nearly drowned, and now I don’t know if I am awake or asleep or dead or what. My hands and feet are blue and my head is filled through the ears with ice water. =====
-The same idea was advocated by the French bookbinder, collectivist, and trade union organizer Eugène Varlin, who later played a key role in the Paris Commune and was murdered by the French state in May 1871. He argued that working-class social movements “must actively work to prepare the organizational elements of the future society in order to make the work of social transformation that is imposed on the Revolution easier and more certain.”[[#14EugeneVarlinWorkersSoci|14]] He was convinced that trade unions were one of the main forms of working-class self-organization that could do so: “trade societies (resistance, solidarity, union) deserve our encouragement and sympathy, for they are the natural elements of the social construction of the future; it is they who can easily become producer associations; it is they who will be able to operate social tools and organize production.”[[#15EugeneVarlinWorkersSoci|15]]
+===== It was not trying to kill you. It was trying to show you something. Then why would it go where it knew I could not follow? =====
-One of the main proponents of revolutionary trade unionism in the First International was Bakunin. In August 1869, he argued that, prior to the social revolution, the main task of the First International should be to “give an essentially ''economic character'' to workers’ agitation in every land; setting as its goal the reduction of working hours and higher wages” through “''the organization of the mass of workers'' and ''the creation of resistance'' [strike] funds.”[[#16MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|16]] In so doing, the First International would, Bakunin predicted, grow into a mass movement that unified and organized millions of workers across Europe, if not the entire world, into trade unions with “the capacity to replace the political world of the state, and the departing bourgeois.”[[#17BakuninSelectedTexts56|17]] In a revolutionary situation, the First International would, due to its extensive experience of collective struggle, be “capable of taking things in hand and capable of giving them a sense of direction that will be really salutary for the people.”[[#18BakuninSelectedTexts56|18]] This included trade unions being converted from organs of class struggle into organs of economic self-management. In 1871 Bakunin declared that “the organization of the sections of skilled workers, their federations within the International Association, and their representation through the chambers of labor . . . sow the living seed of a new social order which shall replace the bourgeois world. They create not only the ideas but also the very facts of the future.”[[#19QuotedinMaxNettlauASho|19]]
+===== Precisely. =====
-The strategy of revolutionary trade unionism was also embraced by the sections of the First International that would go onto form the anarchist movement. On April 4, 1870, what would become the Jura Federation passed a resolution at the La Chaux-de-Fonds Congress. It recommended to all sections of the First International that they “direct all their activity toward the federative constitution of labor organizations, the sole means of assuring the success of the social revolution. This federation is the true representation of labor, which absolutely must take place outside of the political governments.”[[#20QuotedinWolfgangEckhardt|20]] An almost identical resolution was passed by the Spanish section of the First International at its founding congress in 1870, attended by ninety delegates representing 40,000 members.[[#21EckhardtFirstSocialistSc|21]]
+I stare at the ceiling some. She goes shimmery, shimmery in the corner of my vision. My head starts to fizz, like it actually starts to fizz as though it is full of fizzy pop. The ceiling spins a vortex. It goes round in a swirl like a galaxy. Like the shape of a galaxy that is also the shape of a hurricane and a shell, it is a recurring shape, a pattern repeated throughout nature, also found in the ratio of your uterus. What does it mean? The Golden Ratio. It is a cosmic constant. It might make up space-time itself. I think I am fainting.
-The first congress of the Saint-Imier International in 1872 declared that trade unions “increase the sense of fraternity and community of interests” among the proletariat, and “give some experience in collective living and prepare for the supreme struggle.”[[#22ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|22]] Given this, “our broad intent is to build solidarity and organization. We regard strikes as a precious means of struggle, but we have no illusions about their economic result. We accept them as a consequence of the antagonism between labor and capital; they have as a necessary consequence that workers should become more and more alive to the abyss that exists between the proletariat and bourgeoisie and that workers’ organizations should be strengthened, and, through ordinary economic struggles, the proletariat should be prepared for the great and final revolutionary struggle.”[[#23ResolutionsoftheSaintIm|23]]
+==== ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR ====
-The resolutions of the 1877 Verviers Congress expanded upon this point: “Congress, while it recognizes the importance of trades’ organizations and recommends their formation on an international basis, declares that trades’ organizations that have as their goal only the improvement of workers’ situations, either through the reduction of working hours, or by the organization of wage levels, will never accomplish the emancipation of the proletariat, and that trade’s organizations should adopt as their principal goal the abolition of the proletariat” through the forceful expropriation of the ruling classes.[[#24ResolutionsoftheCongress|24]]
+Waking up I was cold and confused. For a whole five seconds I took in the sound of the hammering rain, smells of damp wood and glowing ash, with dust in my nostrils and grit on my face, and had no idea where I was. I lifted up my head and figured my position on the floor of the cabin, next to the fire, and registered that I must have been unconscious. I rubbed the dirt from the floorboards off my face. The bites on my forearms itched and my skin and my scalp especially tickled with the hundred tiny bits of plant and animal from the river. Where I scratched grime collected under my nails.
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International, this strategy continued to be endorsed by a number of prominent anarchists. In 1884, Malatesta advocated “organizing the laboring masses into trades associations based on the principle of resistance and of attacking the bosses.”[[#25MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|25]] Three years earlier, Kropotkin wrote that anarchists should organize workers to wage war against capitalist exploitation “relentlessly, day by day, by the strike, by agitation, ''by every revolutionary means''” in order to build “a formidable MACHINE OF STRUGGLE AGAINST CAPITAL,” that united workers from every city, village, and trade into one union.[[#26PeterKropotkinDirectStru|26]] This process of class struggle would, at the same time, lead to an increasingly large number of workers becoming aware of their distinct class interests, developing a hatred of their oppressors, and acquiring the belief that capitalism must be overthrown.
+My head throbbed and was heavy to lift like it had taken in the water. Memories of the river came back to me and I laughed in the sudden appreciation that I was still alive. But then as quickly I felt stupid and vulnerable and vastly under-prepared. Apart from being gluey with cold and maybe some mental scars in the form of future dreams of cold dark rushing water I did not have much to show for my nearly-death. But so easily I could have been another stupid kid Stan’s uncle had to fish out the river with a wooden pole and wire noose. I coaxed the fire up again to heat some coffee.
-For Kropotkin, the primary contemporary example of this strategy in action were Spanish anarchists who “remain within the working class, they struggle with it, for it” and “bring the contribution of their energy to the workers’ organization and work to build up a force that will crush capital, come the day of the revolution: the revolutionary trades associations.”[[#27KropotkinDirectStruggle|27]] In so doing, they were not only furthering the cause of working-class self-emancipation, but were also being “faithful to the anarchist traditions of the International.”[[#28KropotkinDirectStruggle1|28]] The Spanish anarchists to which Kropotkin was referring had founded the Workers’ Federation of the Spanish Region, on September 24, 1881. The organization, which grew out of the Spanish section of the First International (FRE), was a federation of trade unions that by the end of 1882 was composed of 218 federations, 663 sections, and 57,934 members. Its main paper, ''La Revista Social'', had 20,000 subscribers.[[#29EsenweinAnarchistIdeology|29]]
+And now I am back everything is okay again. As in I am a normal colour if a little pale and my fingers are their usual dexterous selves. But I can feel her now like anti-matter. I can feel her lack like an invisible density.
-Spanish anarchists were not the only anarchists to actively participate within the trade union movement during the 1880s. Anarchists in Chicago, including the future Haymarket martyrs Albert Parsons and August Spies, attempted to build revolutionary trade unions and joined the struggle for the eight-hour day as a means to spread anarchist ideas.[[#30PaulAvrichTheHaymarketT|30]] In Turin and Piedmont, Italian anarchists played a key role within trade unions as organizers, delegates or editors of newspapers. This included Galleani, who had yet to adopt his later rejection of trade unions and formal organizations but was already beginning to move in this direction by 1889.[[#31CarlLevyGramsciandtheA|31]] The extent to which anarchists participated in trade union movements during the late nineteenth century only becomes fully apparent when one looks beyond the United States and Europe. Between 1870 and 1900 anarchists were instrumental in the creation of trade unions and the organization of strikes in, at least, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Uruguay.[[#32AngelJCappellettiAnarch|32]]
+I like the way the plaques talk about the beliefs of the Eskimos like they are truth, because they are. They are narratives as science is a narrative and is both belief and truth also. Animist or mystical, i.e. non-linear, non-absolutist, ‘truths’ and knowledge are reduced to the feminine, seen as inferior, irrational, a cloud system knitted into being, induction over deduction. This is pitted against the masculine Mountain Man’s absolute foundational Truths. But a feminine mystic knows it is lying to say ‘I know that Truth’ when you can’t. That it is more accurate and honest to say that opposites are complementary. It does not matter if she is real or not. I am a mystic because owning a vagina is mystical.
-'''The Emergence of Revolutionary Syndicalism'''
+What next? There is one more thing, a small envelope with Damon’s name on. I hesitated over it for a while because I thought I knew what might be in it and it felt just that little bit more intrusive. But then I reasoned I had gone through with it so far I might as well see the whole thing to its end. So I read the letter that his mother left when she built her shrine for him, all the things she wanted to say to him but could not because he was dead.
-Within Europe, the strategy of revolutionary trade unionism came to be endorsed by an increasingly large number of anarchists in response to the London dockland strike of 1889, during which a strike by casual laborers grew over two weeks into a mass mobilization of 130,000 workers that shut down the entire dock and disrupted supply chains such that factories in multiple industries were forced to close. The strike, which ended with workers winning a wage increase, was reported on by Kropotkin, Malatesta, and Pouget in several anarchist papers.[[#33ConstanceBantmanFromTra|33]] In response to these events, Malatesta critiqued anarchists who had opposed participating in the trade union movement, and thereby enabled it to be taken over by moderates and parliamentary socialists. He argued that anarchists should instead “get back among the people . . . let us organize as many strikes as we can; let us see to it that the strike becomes a contagion and that, once one erupts, it spreads to ten or a hundred different trades in ten or a hundred towns.”[[#34MalatestaMethodofFreedom|34]]
+===== My son, my parasitic twin. =====
-In parallel to these developments, revolutionary syndicalism as a self-organized working-class movement began to emerge in France, with the creation of the first ''bourse du travail'' in 1887, three years after trade unions had been legalized in the country. The bourses du travail were initially labor exchanges where workers could find employment, but over the next decade morphed into working-class cultural, educational, and mutual aid centers, and then eventually trade unions that collected strike funds and organized strikes. In 1892, the delegates of ten bourses, including Fernand Pelloutier, met at Saint-Etienne and formed a national federation. A few years later, in 1895, Pelloutier, who had since become an anarchist after moving to Paris in 1893, was appointed general secretary of the Federation of Bourses du Travail.[[#35VadimDamierAnarchoSyndic|35]]
+I stare up at the cobwebbed ceiling and feel hollow at the futility of it all. His mother’s voice reminds me of mine and now I miss her terribly. I feel a whole new size of emptiness, it amazes me I even have the processing space for all these feelings. For the very first time appreciating that I am like a Russian doll she made inside her as every baby girl is to its mother, each a little like the preceding but different, with the potential to birth another if she wishes, and my mum has watched me grow, warily, into her mannerisms and her image and then away from them, until eventually I abandon her and become less her and more myself. And this is a transmigration and I carry many shards of her with me always, as she does me.
-It was within this context that a significant number of French speaking anarchists came to publicly advocate anarchist participation within the trade union movement. This included Kropotkin, who wrote several articles for ''La Révolte ''between 1890 and 1891, that advocated revolutionary trade unionism.[[#36KropotkinDirectStruggle3|36]] A few years later, in October 1894, Pouget argued in ''Le Père Peinard'' that trade unions provided anarchists with an excellent space in which to act and make contact with the wider working class that existed beyond anarchist affinity groups and subcultures.[[#37JenningsSyndicalisminFra|37]] A year later in 1895, Pelloutier wrote an article called “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union” for ''Les Temps Nouveaux''. In it, he called on fellow anarchists to join the trade union movement en masse, and thereby spread their ideas among the working classes and instill in them the idea that they should self-manage their own affairs. Previous and ongoing anarchist participation within the trade union movement had, according to Pelloutier, already been successful in teaching workers “the true meaning of anarchism” and expanding their notion of what a trade union could be and become.[[#38PelloutierAnarchismandt|38]]
+And all her hopes and dreams and expectations for me are something that I am leaving behind, but to her they will always be there. And she had a mother that she came out of and that woman I hardly even knew but I am sure had similar sorts of feelings, because that is what can happen when you give something so many parts of yourself. This is a contamination also, and you can’t be mindful of it and still find an intact apartness. Even in death you are still felt in tremors. Even Damon’s purest act was not entirely pure, because he left his negative imprint with his mother.
-Pouget and Pelloutier’s call for anarchist participation within the trade union movement was even echoed by some anarchist groups who had previously been opposed to revolutionary trade unionism, due to their commitment to the iron law of wages. By 1899, ''Le Libertaire'' had begun to change its attitude and published an article by Luis Grandidier that claimed anarchists should “leave this ivory tower in which we are suffocating” and “enter the trade unions.”[[#39QuotedinDavidBerryAHis|39]] The ideas of French syndicalism also influenced anarchists from other countries. In 1900, Goldman visited France as a delegate for the international anarchist congress in Paris, which ended up being banned by the police and occurring in secret. During her visit, she became an advocate of syndicalism after seeing it in action as a social movement, and hearing so many positive things about Pelloutier. In 1913, she claimed that “on my return to America I immediately began to propagate Syndicalist ideas, especially Direct Action and the General Strike.”[[#40EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|40]]
+I feel a change has come because even a few months ago I would have found these thoughts unacceptably sentimental. I am not sure if I am crying on my cabin bed and missing my mum because I am a girl and I was never going to be able to hack this odyssey of solitude for that reason, if it was always biologically determined, or if I have figured out truths about my life by my own will.
-By the time of Pelloutier’s premature death in 1901 at the age of thirty-three, the National Federation of Bourses du Travail was composed of sixty-five bourses to which 782 dues-paying local unions were affiliated. A year later in 1902, the federation merged with the General Confederation of Labor (CGT) to form a new CGT. This resulted in the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a mass movement.[[#41WayneThorpeTheWorkersT|41]] The CGT had, according to its own congress reports, a membership of 100,000 workers at its refounding in 1902. Over the next decade, it rapidly grew to 300,000 members by 1906, and 600,000 by 1912. Of these 600,000 members, an estimated 400,000 paid their dues. The scale of the CGT can only be understood relative to its historical context. In 1912, an estimated 1,027,000 workers belonged to a trade union in France. The CGT therefore contained, if you limit the figure to dues-paying members, almost half of the unionized workers in France.[[#42RidleyRevolutionarySyndic|42]]
+And they are all laughing, all of the Mountain Men of history laughing and chanting DARWIN WAS RIGHT, WE TOLD YOU SO, WE TOLD YOU SO, their voices echoed by the mountains, giving them a god-like veracity, and for them I have no answer. Did I cast out or did I just get lost and does it matter either way?
-The CGT was not itself a majority anarchist organization and contained several different factions. This included, but was not limited to, reformist syndicalists; anarchists who also identified as revolutionary syndicalists; anarchists who did not identify as revolutionary syndicalists; and revolutionary syndicalists who did not view themselves as anarchists. Nevertheless, anarchists did exert a significant influence on the organization in the early years of its existence.[[#43DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|43]] In 1901, the anarchists Georges Yvetot and Paul Delesalle were elected as the general secretary and vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail. That same year Pouget, who had been the editor of the CGT’s paper ''La Voix du peuple'' since its creation in 1900, was elected as the vice secretary of the CGT. Pouget would remain in this position until late 1908, when he was briefly imprisoned for his involvement in the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and subsequently, after his release on October 31, ceased to be active within the organization. Delesalle, likewise, resigned from his position as vice secretary of the National Federation of Bourses du Travail at the CGT’s 1908 congress of Marseilles, and instead focused his energies on running a second-hand bookshop and publishing radical literature. By 1914, despite anarchist influence within the CGT waning, roughly 100,000 members of the CGT supported anarchist positions at congresses through their elected delegates.[[#44JenningsSyndicalisminFra|44]]
+==== THE THIN VENEER ====
-The ideas of revolutionary syndicalism were formally crystalized by the CGT at its October 1906 congress, where it adopted the Charter of Amiens with 830 votes in favor and only eight opposed. The Charter, which was drafted in a restaurant by Victor Griffuelhes, Louis Niel, André Morizet, Pouget, and Delesalle, emerged out of a compromise between the revolutionary and reformist factions within the CGT.[[#45ThorpeWorkersThemselves|45]] It declared that the CGT sought to unite “all workers conscious of the struggle to be conducted for the disappearance of the system of wage-earning and management” regardless of “their political schooling” in order to win immediate improvements, and eventually overthrow capitalism via expropriation and the general strike.[[#46QuotedinAWZurbruggAna|46]] It affirmed
+I can’t get to sleep tonight although I am exhausted. Not from the wakefulness that has kept me up often here; when I get that I can be content just reading or writing or toying with thoughts, because I know it does not matter too much when I do or do not sleep what with the days being all wrong anyway.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the complete liberty of members to participate, outside the union, in whatsoever forms of struggle conform to their political or philosophical views, and limits itself to requesting, in reciprocity, that they should not introduce into the unions opinions held outside it. As for the organization, Congress resolves, that since economic action must be conducted directly against employers for syndicalism to achieve its maximum effect, the organization of the confederation, insofar as they are unions should not concern themselves with parties and sects, which, outside and alongside, may pursue social transformation in complete freedom.[[#47QuotedinZurbruggAnarchis|47]]</div>
+This time I can’t sleep from a feeling; that the sky is too big and the space between it and me is heavy like deep water; the deeper down you swim the more pressure there is pushing you down and up at the same time, and the more I think about how far there is between me and the sky the more my head feels the same pressure on it. And the space between me and the road, me and Fairbanks, me and every place underneath a big red arrow stretching from here all the way round the world and back again like on some old public service animation where I go black and white and zoom out and out until the tower is just a speck on a cartoon image of the world and the arrow makes a noise as it elongates like ‘vrrrraaaaawm’ going up in pitch with onomatopoeic tautness.
-The charter’s advocacy of political neutrality was worded in such a manner that revolutionaries and reformists could interpret the text in contradictory ways. For revolutionaries, the charter only committed the CGT to independence from political parties and so parliamentarism. Reformists, in comparison, interpreted the charter as entailing a much stricter commitment to independence from all forms of politics, including anarchism. This had the effect that, when the CGT engaged in propaganda campaigns against militarism and patriotism, reformists viewed this as contradicting its commitment to political neutrality.[[#48JenningsSyndicalisminFra|48]] This disagreement over the meaning of political neutrality went alongside multiple attempts by some reformist factions within the CGT to establish a formal alliance or tie between the trade union and socialist parties.[[#49NicholasPapayanisAlphonse|49]]
+For almost all the times I have slept in my life until these weeks, that is around 6,935 sleeps, I have been comforted by the thought that in the room next to me are my parents sleeping, in the houses next to me are my neighbours sleeping, in the town around us people are sleeping, in fact the whole of England is sleeping and the Australians are keeping the world running by doing the day shift.
-Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists advocated political neutrality because they believed that the function of a trade union was to unite workers on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than on the basis of the specific school of political thought they subscribed to. The trade union, to quote Pouget, “groups together those who work against those who live by human exploitation: it brings together interests and not opinions.”[[#50QuotedinJenningsSyndical|50]] He held that the CGT should be open to all workers, whatever their political or religious beliefs, including those amenable to the state. In theory, workers would join the trade union “imbued with the teachings of some (philosophical, political, religious, etc.) school of thought or another” and, through their experiences of engaging in direct action, “have their rough edges knocked off until they are left only with the principles to which they all subscribe: the yearning for improvement and comprehensive emancipation.”[[#51PougetThePartyofLabour|51]]
+Sleeping with someone does things to your trust. As in by sleeping in close proximity to other people you are making yourself your most vulnerable for them, and maybe the proximity of trust could extend to all the people asleep in all the houses around you. It is a thing I am very aware of lacking right now.
-This perspective on trade unions was articulated by the anarchist and revolutionary syndicalist Pierre Monatte on August 28 at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam. According to Monatte,
+But if I concentrate I can invert the deep pressure feeling, can make it feel safe and still and like the space is filled with Styrofoam. Because sometimes when I lie in the centre of suburbia falling asleep I have other thoughts. That lying down en masse to sleep makes you gravely vulnerable, a whole flock of sitting ducks, and it is then that I start to think in particular about nuclear dawn.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">instead of opinion-based syndicalism, which gave rise to anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia and to Christian and social-democratic trade unions in Belgium and Germany, anarchists must provide the option of French-style syndicalism, a neutral—or more precisely, independent—form of syndicalism. Just as there is only one [working] class, so there should be only one single workers’ organization, one single syndicate, for each trade and in each town. Only on this condition can the class struggle—no longer facing the obstacle of arguments between the various schools of schools of thought and rival sects on every point—develop to its fullest extent and have the greatest possible effect.[[#52MaurizioAntonioliedThe|52]]</div>
+Everyone still and asleep and so much trust being channelled around, seeping out of pores and windows as a gaseous thread and into nostrils and mouths connecting them like string on a tin-can phone. And no one is thinking to look at the sky where an object is getting closer and closer silently. And then it happens and at ground zero most people do not even know any better because they are vaporised before the electrical signals even reach their brain to tell them so, but maybe some come to for just an instant of absurdity, to be confronted with a helix of colour and pain while their soul or their energy or whatever it is departs and then that is it, snuffed out, nothing.
-From this, it followed that revolutionary syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. By this, he meant that revolutionary syndicalist trade unions could, by themselves, abolish class society. They could: (a) unite workers as a class; (b) organize direct action that enabled workers to develop radical capacities, drives, and consciousness; (c) launch the social revolution through a general strike; and (d) provide the organizational framework through which workers would take over and self-manage the economy. For Monatte to say that “syndicalism is sufficient unto itself” was merely to say “that the now-mature working class finally intends to be sufficient unto itself and not to entrust its emancipation to anyone other than itself.”[[#53AntonioliedInternational|53]] This position was shared by Pouget who argued in 1908 that “the trade union is . . . sufficient for all purposes” including “the expropriation of capital and the reorganization of society.”[[#54EmilePougetTheBasisof|54]]
+To feel like I am in a box of Styrofoam here is to feel like safety-in-singularity. It is to not be afraid of all the crazy shit that I badly wanted away from, that affects me for being part of a macrocosmic world, that I do not conceive the complexity of because here I am in a world of my own, all on my own.
-Anarchists who advocated revolutionary syndicalism held that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself because trade unions could independently develop a large organized working-class social movement with the necessary radical traits to launch a social revolution and establish an anarchist society. They thought that, in order to achieve this, trade unions had to be politically neutral toward different left-wing factions, including political parties, and therefore not have an explicitly anarchist program. This was because they believed that the goal of a trade union was to unite as many workers as possible on the basis of their shared class interests, rather than because of their shared ideological commitment to, for example, anarchism or Marxism. Anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists did write critiques of political parties and parliamentarism, but they did not think that such positions should be the official position of the trade union. The trade union only had to be independent of political parties, rather than being explicitly opposed to them.
+Really suddenly, like the clunk of a clock’s first chime, this makes me feel deeply sad. A night bird makes a noise outside and a small rodent probably scurries away from it and a shadow passes the gaping windows and the trees are hushing and maybe back home everything could already be blown away. My head throbs and my teeth will not fit together properly. If I try to keep them slightly apart they feel like magnets yearning for each other.
-The CGT was the first self-described revolutionary syndicalist trade union, but it was not the only one. After the CGT’s merger with the National Federation of Bourses du Travail in 1902, numerous trade unions around the world either came to adopt syndicalist programs, or were founded as syndicalist organizations. This occurred due to the combined activity of anarchist syndicalists and syndicalists who did not identify as anarchists, acting as a militant minority during a global wave of working-class revolt against the ruling classes. In Europe and the United States, at least seven syndicalist trade unions emerged between 1905 and 1912: the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS), American IWW, Central Organization of Swedish Workers (SAC), Spanish National Confederation of Labor (CNT), Italian Syndicalist Union (USI), and Free Association of German Trade Unions (FVdG), which would develop into the Free Workers’ Union of Germany (FAUD). In England the Industrial Syndicalist Education League (ISEL) was founded in order to spread syndicalism within existing reformist trade unions.[[#55Forabroadoverviewofthes|55]]
+I could be the last person on Earth, or I could be the last person in my vicinity with any hope of ever finding the other last people in their vicinities, all of us running around frustratingly like little bugs that are lost and you want to yell at them ‘IT’S RIGHT THERE’ until you think about it and actually they are worlds away from the place you plucked them out of, from their perspective, which means the same thing anyway when you have no way of knowing any better.
-Anarchists in Latin America were actively involved in the formation of various syndicalist trade unions, including the Argentine Regional Workers’ Federation (FORA) in 1904, Uruguayan Regional Workers’ Federation (FORU) in 1905, and Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. This was followed by the creation of the Peruvian Regional Workers’ Federation (FORP) and Bolivian International Workers’ Federation in 1912. Anarchists in Cuba organized trade unions and strikes throughout the early 1900s, and this culminated in the founding of the Workers Federation of Havana in 1922, and then the Cuban National Confederation of Labor in 1925. Branches of the IWW were established around the world, including Canada, Mexico, Chile, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. A series of trade unions were also founded by anarchists in Asia, including China’s first modern trade unions in 1917 and the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions (Zenkoku Rôdô Kumiai Jiyû Rengôkai) in 1926.[[#56DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|56]]
+And I realise if it is all gone I want to be gone with it. I want to throw myself onto the sand like a dolphin embracing death on the beach with its family by dehydration and the suffocation of its own chest crushing its lungs under the pressure of gravity. I want to be blown up in the big stupid mess that it is. I do not want to be a Born Survivor.
-The fact that multiple trade unions in Europe, North America, and Latin America embraced syndicalism shortly after the appearance of the CGT can make it appear that they were established simply due to revolutionaries hearing of and deciding to copy the French example. This narrative ignores the fact that they were created after an extended period of anarchists, and other socialists, actively participating within trade union movements. In the United States, for example, Italian anarchists helped organize strikes and founded local trade unions during the 1890s and early 1900s. After the founding of the IWW in 1905, which anarchists participated in, these anarchist-led trade unions decided to affiliate with the IWW and form sections, such as the IWW Silk Workers’ Union Local 152. Italian anarchists within the IWW then continued to act as a militant minority and push the class struggle forward. This included Local 152, which was the main organizing force behind the IWW’s 1913 strike among silkworkers in Paterson, New Jersey. This is not to say that the Italian anarchists were not influenced by French syndicalism at all. Italian anarchist papers, including ''La Questione Sociale'', published translations of French syndicalist texts prior to the founding of the IWW. The actions of Italian anarchists cannot, however, be entirely reduced to this influence.[[#57KenyonZimmerImmigrantsAg|57]]
+I could take my phone from the bottom of my bag, just try to call Mum, just to check the world is still there. We do not even have to talk. I could just get her on the phone just to hear her say ‘Erin?’, then hang up and turn it off again. Just to hear the sound of her alive and speaking.
-This point only becomes more apparent when examining the history of syndicalism in Latin America. In Argentina, anarchists organized trade unions and strikes from 1887 onward. This included Spanish and Italian immigrants who had previous experiences of participating in anarchist-led trade unions, such as Errico Malatesta, Pietro Gori, Antonio Pellicer Paraire, Gregorio Inglán Lafarga, and José Prat. The participation of anarchists and state socialists in the labor movement led to the founding of the Argentine Workers’ Federation (FOA) in 1901. After a series of conflicts between anarchist and state socialist workers within the trade union, the anarchist wing emerged as the majority, and the state socialists left the organization in June 1902. That year, the FOA organized a series of strikes that, in November, escalated into the first general strike in Argentina’s history. In 1904, the FOA was renamed the FORA. The FORA then explicitly committed itself to anarchist communism in 1905. In Latin America it was the FORA, rather than just the French CGT, which served as a key source of inspiration for how to organize a revolutionary trade union.[[#58CappellettiAnarchisminLa|58]]
+It must be around midnight at home. She is probably asleep. Although she is my mother so there must be that thread connecting us, although we might not be so consciously aware of it. Like mother bonds and sister bonds and dolphin bonds. Like we are ''spooky action at a distance''. And it is not New Agey if you are thinking analytically Jungian. Girls are just a little more aware of the secret power of bonds because being connected to them is part of being woman. Jung’s anima was a lady, not because the anima has a vagina but because she is an archetype we all agreed on.
-In addition, French syndicalist theory repeated ideas that had previously been articulated and implemented by anarchists in multiple countries over several decades. In Spain, where anarchists had organized within trade unions since the 1870s, the anarchist journal ''Natura'' responded to the translation of a pamphlet on syndicalism by Pouget in 1904 by claiming it covered topics “well known here” and showed that “the spirit of free syndicalism, common in Spain, is making strides in France.”[[#59QuotedinAngelSmithAnarc|59]] Anselmo Lorenzo, who translated pamphlets by Pouget and Yvetot, held that the French syndicalists had “returned to us, amplified, corrected and perfectly systematized, ideas with which the Spanish anarchists inspired the French.”[[#60QuotedinASmithAnarchis|60]]
+And besides we observe something like it in other animals. A connection to something that is not what you would call ''direct'' experience. Like water buffalo in Thailand that looked out to sea half an hour before the 2004 tsunami hit, and just bellowed like mermaids with conch shells, and ran for higher ground, with villagers scrambling after.
-The Spanish anarchists were not unique in this respect. During this period, many anarchists looked upon the theory and practice of revolutionary syndicalism as a direct continuation of collectivism within the First International. Pouget himself wrote that the CGT emanated from and was the “historical continuation” of “the International Working Men’s Association” and “the federalists or autonomists” within it who opposed the conquest of state power.[[#61PougetThePartyofLabour|61]] In 1907, Malatesta remarked, during his speech at the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, that what some syndicalists considered to be a new path had already been “established and followed within the international” by “the first anarchists.”[[#62AntonioliedInternationa|62]] That same year, Kropotkin wrote in the preface to a pamphlet on syndicalism by the Georgian anarchist Georgi Gogeliia that “the current opinions of the French syndicalists are organically linked with the early ideas formed by the left wing of the International.”[[#63QuotedinNettlauShortHis|63]] The connection between revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism was, in addition to this, understood by at least some Marxists at the time. In 1909, Karl Kautsky, who was one of the most influential Marxists within the Social Democratic Party of Germany, wrote that “syndicalism” was “the latest variety of anarchism” and that “the syndicalism of the Romance countries” was committed to “anti-parliamentarism” due to its “anarchistic origin.”[[#64KarlKautskyRoadtoPower|64]]
+There’s a suggestion we could make an early warning system for natural disasters based on this sense, a hotline people can call if their pets freak out. This data gets logged and if enough pets are freaking out in a particular area then the hotline sends out the warning and everyone runs for the hills. And even if it is only because the animals can ‘hear’ seismic activity in a literal sense, isn’t it the same thing really? Isn’t telepathy just listening to another plane of ‘sound’?
-Despite the connection between the politics of revolutionary syndicalism and the collectivists of the First International, a growing number of syndicalist anarchists came to believe that the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT was not sufficient to achieve a social revolution that would abolish class society and build an anarchist society. These critics came to embrace either syndicalism-plus or anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchists who advocated syndicalism-plus agreed with revolutionary syndicalists that trade unions should be politically neutral but explicitly rejected the idea that syndicalism was sufficient unto itself. They held that anarchists had to both actively participate within the trade union movement and at the same time maintain an independent existence by organizing outside trade unions within specific anarchist organizations. For proponents of syndicalism-plus, these specific anarchist organizations were essential for spreading anarchist values, theory, and practices among the working classes both in and outside of trade unions. They argued, in short, that revolutionaries should create a syndicalist trade union plus a specific anarchist organization. The details of this position will be discussed in chapter 10 as part of my overview of organizational dualism.
+I fish for the phone from the bottom of the bag. I move into the beam of the dusky light from a slither of the window that is uncovered. In my head I say her name over and over and I imagine her face and I imagine her where she might be, her present, maybe awake on her back in bed and listening to the rhythm of Dad’s breathing. I press the button to turn it on.
-Anarcho-syndicalists, unlike proponents of revolutionary syndicalism and syndicalism-plus, believed that trade unions should not be politically neutral, and had to instead be explicitly committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. This typically took the form of trade unions advocating an anarchist society as their end goal, and opposing state socialist strategies and political parties within the union’s constitution, declaration of principles, or congress resolutions. Some anarcho-syndicalists argued that specific anarchist organizations should be formed in parallel with anarcho-syndicalist trade unions, while others opposed it.
+I imagine her face twitch. She sits up in bed then looks at Dad to see if she woke him. She rubs her eyes then goes still, straining to hear. She slowly swings her legs out of the bed and slides herself off and moves towards the cabinet that has her phone on. It is really dark so she goes slowly, feeling with her feet and hands before bringing her body forward.
-'''Anarcho-Syndicalism'''
+I clench my toes to try to squeeze some of the warm blood into them. I stare at the phone really hard. Another animal outside makes a sudden whooping noise and I flinch. It powers on but no signal. I wait ten seconds then twenty, staring at the gap where the bars should be, willing them to come. Of course there is no signal in the Alaskan tundra.
-The phrase “anarcho-syndicalist,” like many left-wing terms, began life as an insult. The earliest known usage of the term occurred in 1907, when some French state socialists used it as a pejorative against revolutionary syndicalists who advocated the independence of trade unions from political parties.[[#65WayneThorpeUneasyFamily|65]] During this same period, anarchists in Argentina and Russia, who do not appear to have been aware of one another’s ideas, came to argue that trade unions should be committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This position was not initially referred to as “anarcho-syndicalism.” On August 26, 1905, the FORA explicitly committed itself to an anarchist program at its fifth congress, which was attended by delegates representing ninety-eight trade unions. It was agreed that “the Fifth Congress of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Argentina consistent with the philosophical principles that have provided the ''raison d’être'' of the organization of workers’ federations declares: We advise and recommend to all our followers the broadest possible study and propaganda with the aim of instilling in workers the economic and philosophical principles of anarchist-communism. This education, not content with achieving the eight-hour day, will bring total emancipation and, consequently, the social evolution we pursue.”[[#66QuotedinCappellettiAnarc|66]]
+I exhale heavily and deflate. Then I turn the phone off, return it to the rucksack and crawl back into my sleeping bag. The bag is still a bit warm from my body before. I spend a few minutes fidgeting, imagining the friction of skin on fabric making heat like lots of little sticks and fires.
-Independently, anarchists in Russia also came to advocate the same approach. A notable example is the South Russian Group of Syndicalist Anarchists, whose membership included factory workers, sailors, dockworkers, bakers, and tailors. Yakob Isaevich Kirillovsky, who was the group’s main theorist and wrote under the pen name Daniil Novomirsky, advocated what would later be called anarcho-syndicalism in his 1907 book ''The Programme of Syndicalist Anarchism''.[[#67AlexandreSkirdaFacingthe|67]] He argued that anarchists should participate in the revolutionary trade union movement in order to “make that movement anarchist,” advocating the formation of “anarchist revolutionary syndicates which are bent on bringing syndicalist anarchism to pass.”[[#68QuotedinSkirdaFacingthe|68]] It is not a coincidence that, in August 1907, the revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist Monatte contrasted the politically “neutral” trade unions he advocated with “anarchist trade-unions in, for example, Russia.”[[#69AntonioliedInternationa|69]]
+On the ceiling there is a spider that always has at least three carcases wrapped in mummy bundles on its silvery web. I have noticed that it rotates them, that its oldest kill is always the one it chooses to eat and then it is usually replaced and the next-oldest is eaten. I admire the spider’s diligent forward planning. The spider is always preparing for the future even though it consistently gets new things to eat. The spider knows that the world can always change in an instant; that the future is not to be counted on. It lives in a very delicate microcosm that can be blown away also, by a gust of wind, but that does not stop it weaving.
-Anarcho-syndicalism continued to be advocated by anarchists a decade later in the Russian revolution. On June 4, 1917, the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda adopted a founding declaration of principles that proclaimed that the social revolution had to be “anti-statist in its method of struggle, Syndicalist in its economic content and federalist in its political tasks,” with “the Anarcho-Communist ideal” as its goal.[[#70GolosTrudaDeclarationof|70]] The meaning of Russian “anarcho-syndicalism” can also be seen in ''The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists'' (1926), which was written by Russian and Ukrainian anarchists who had fled to Germany and then France in order to escape being killed or imprisoned by the Bolshevik government. The'' Platform'' carefully distinguishes between “revolutionary syndicalism,” which exists “solely as a trades movement of the toilers possessed of no specific social and political theory,” and “Anarcho-syndicalism,” which advocates “the creation of anarchist-type unions.”[[#71TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|71]]
+==== THE FALCON CANNOT HEAR THE FALCONER ====
-The term “anarcho-syndicalist” did not immediately catch on and spread outside the Russian anarchist movement. Alexander Schapiro, who had been active within the anarcho-syndicalist movement during the Russian revolution, claimed years later that “when the Russian anarchists nearly a half a century ago pioneered the hoisting of the anarcho-syndicalist colors, the word was rather coldly received by the anarchist movement.”[[#72AlexanderSchapiroIntrodu|72]] Anarchists instead continued to refer to their ideas as revolutionary syndicalism, while advocating what Russian anarchists called anarcho-syndicalism.
+Back at the tower and I am preparing for the final voyage. Like Ishmael in his spiritual malaise casting out into the ocean to escape it all or else end it for good. Because that is the only thing for it, to give yourself up to the waves. And of course I am holding out for a coffin raft yet.
-This can be seen in the resolutions of the 1913 International Syndicalist Congress in London, which was organized in order to establish a revolutionary alternative to the state socialist Second International and the reformist International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centers (ISNTUC). It was attended by delegates representing the major syndicalist trade unions in Europe, including the FVdG, USI, NAS, SAC, ISEL, and the Catalonian Regional Confederation of the CNT. Only a few French trade union sections affiliated with the CGT attended. This was because the CGT supported participating in the much larger ISNTUC in order to radicalize it from within. The congress was not a strictly European affair, and was also attended by delegates representing the COB, the explicitly anarchist FORA, the politically neutral Regional Workers’ Confederation of Argentina, and the Havana Union of Café Employees. According to Schapiro, the thirty-three delegates of the London Congress represented in total roughly sixty local, regional, and national trade unions that had a collective membership of 250,000 members.[[#73ThorpeWorkersThemselves|73]]
+On my way to the tower I came across a sign. It could not have been more imbued with meaning if it had been written for a film, or more climactically timed, or perhaps I am weaving everything into a myth of myself. My reindeer is dead.
-Despite the congress featuring a great deal of personal animosity and conflict between certain delegates, it nonetheless succeeded in passing a declaration of principles and establishing an International Syndicalist Information Bureau based in Amsterdam. The declaration of principles broke with the CGT’s Charter of Amiens and its commitment to political neutrality by endorsing a number of anarchist positions, including the abolition of the state and an opposition to state socialist strategies. It claimed that
+Some of the flesh had been stripped or pecked off but the flies were still in the process of infesting and their maggots had not hatched yet. It could have been brought down by wolves the very day it forsook me in the river. It sat warm in the sun and all around it smelled sickly, the buzz and the smell making the air dense so that I felt it way before I saw it. The antlers sat perfectly on the eyeless head that grinned mockingly, jaw chattering, laughing to itself like it was some macabre joke, leading me on all along when really it had nothing for me.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">this Congress, recognizing that the working class of every country suffers from capitalist slavery and State oppression, declares for the class struggle and international solidarity, and for the organization of the workers into autonomous industrial Unions on a basis of free association. Strives for the immediate uplifting of the material and intellectual interests of the working class, and for the overthrow of the capitalist system and the State. . . . Recognizes that, internationally, Trade Unions will only succeed when they cease to be divided by political and religious differences; declares that their fight is an economic fight, meaning thereby that they do not intend to reach their aim by trusting their cause to governing bodies or their members, but by using Direct Action, by workers themselves relying on the strength of their economic organizations. . . . Congress appeals to the workers of all countries to organize into autonomous industrial unions, and to unite themselves on the basis of international solidarity, in order finally to obtain their emancipation from capitalism and the State.[[#74TheLondonDeclaration191|74]]</div>
+As if to say, ah, how easy it is to die. Just like that, so blunt and final and so very, very dead, a dead end and no clues or directions left behind. Whatever it was I was expecting the reindeer to tell me it very definitely was not going to tell it now. Its silence was corporeal and absolute.
-From 1919 onward, multiple syndicalist trade unions moved in an increasingly anarcho-syndicalist direction. The idea that it was necessary to commit trade unions to an explicitly anarchist program largely gained popularity in reaction to a wider international context. The politically neutral CGT had, in contrast to the majority of the anarchist movement, recently abandoned its commitment to working-class internationalism and collaborated with the French state in World War I. Around the same time, a one-party Bolshevik dictatorship was established during the 1917 Russian revolution, which proceeded to dismantle organs of workers’ control and violently repress other forms of socialism—including anarchism—in order to maintain a system of minority rule. This created a situation in which many anarchists felt compelled to ensure that trade unions were opposed to state socialist strategies, and were not taken over by Bolshevik supporters.[[#75DamierAnarchoSyndicalism|75]]
+No companion, no comrade and no project to give me purpose and nothing to guide me, just my naked self. And with it power in a way; I am real and vulnerable; there is no one watching over me; I am a self-willed woman.
-Although the CNT had been founded in 1910, it was not originally committed to an explicitly anarchist program. This began to change in late 1918, when the National Conference of Anarchist Groups called on anarchists in Spain to actively participate in the CNT and take on positions of responsibility within the trade union, such as delegates within committees.[[#76JuanGomezCasasAnarchists|76]] The CNT passed a resolution at its December 1919 Second Congress, held at the La Comedia Theater in Madrid, that declared that the CNT was “a staunch advocate of the principles of the First International as upheld by Bakunin.”[[#77QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|77]] A number of key delegates, including the organization’s national committee, went further and signed a declaration of principles that was unanimously approved by the congress:
+I have never seen death so up close before. It was different to the hares, and the difference is not just scale. I would say it is familiarity and the fact that I imbued it with significance. Like in nature documentaries when David Attenborough puts a personified spin on things and you end up rooting for the baby tapir and then it goes and gets killed by a jaguar and it is not just the circle of life because David Attenborough went and made it personal. This is more than that still.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Bearing in mind that the tendency most strongly manifested in the bosom of workers’ organizations in every country is the one aiming at the complete and absolute moral, economic and political liberation of mankind, and considering that this goal cannot be attained until such time as the land, means of production and exchange have been socialized and the overweening power of the state has vanished, the undersigned delegates suggest that, in accordance with the essential postulates of the First International, it declares the desired end of the CNT to be anarchist communism.[[#78QuotedinPeiratsTheCNTi|78]]</div>
+I did not even see the body of our first dog when he got put to sleep because I was ushered out of the room to sit on my own in the waiting room, surrounded by sympathetic-looking people with their sympathetic pets all whimpering along with ten-year-old me until my parents came out carrying just the worn brown dog collar. That had been death to me; just a dog collar without the dog in it. And this was it in concrete; the abrupt end to mystery and innocence that I had hitherto in life mostly evaded. And then I knew that the only thing that I had left now was to climb that mountain and see what Damon saw from up there.
-That same month, the FVdG transformed itself into the FAUD at its Twelfth Congress, attended by 109 delegates representing over 110,000 members. As part of this transformation, the FAUD asked Rocker, recently released from the British internment camp where he had been imprisoned for opposing World War I, to write a new declaration of principles for the organization. Rocker’s speech on the principles of syndicalism, which was passed by the congress with minor changes, contained what would become the defining features of anarcho-syndicalism.[[#79ThorpeWorkersThemselves|79]] Although Rocker presented himself as just describing what syndicalists believe, he was in fact articulating a specific understanding of syndicalism that was not shared by everybody who used the label.
+I have been looking at the highest point of the range nearest to me. The ones behind look like they might be bigger and somewhere out there is Denali, the biggest of all, but the one I have been watching is tall and has snow on the very top and the clouds obscure it sometimes so that it looks like Olympus with its feet in the clouds and Olympus is plenty momentous enough for me. It just calls to me. If Damon went from here then I am sure that is the place he went to.
-According to Rocker the aim of syndicalism is the creation of “free, i.e. stateless, communism, which finds its expression in the motto ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!’”[[#80RockerDeclarationofthe|80]] He not only claimed that syndicalists should aim for an anarchist society, but also that they should use anarchist means to get there. He described syndicalists as advocates of revolutionary trade unionism, direct action, and the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This went alongside a rejection of trying to build socialism through parliamentarism, the conquest of state power, and the nationalization of the economy. These anarchist strategies were explicitly grounded by Rocker in the unity of means and ends. He wrote, “syndicalists are firmly grounded in direct action and support all endeavors and struggles of the people that do not conflict with their goals – the abolition of economic monopolies and of the tyranny of the state.”[[#81RockerDeclarationofthe|81]]
+From its snow and the clouds I know it must be around two thousand metres. I remember reading in the park centre that the snowline starts at one and a half thousand metres. Two thousand metres is twice the size of Snowdon but it is still not high enough for altitude sickness. That is how tame the British peaks are. I climbed Snowdon and that took us five hours. So I am hoping I can do it in two, maybe three days. That is one day getting as high as I can, to just under the snowline if possible, then sleeping for the night. Then the next day I can head out with perhaps enough time to summit, and failing that spend one night in the snow and cold. Then the descent should take me no time.
-The final shift toward the theory of anarcho-syndicalism as an idea, but not yet as a label, occurred with the formation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWMA), at an illegal congress held in Berlin between December 25, 1922, and January 2, 1923. The congress was attended by over thirty delegates representing an estimated 1.5 to 2 million workers within various trade unions around the world. This included the FAUD, SAC, FORA-V, USI, and NAS as well as the Mexican General Confederation of Workers (CGT-M), Norwegian Syndicalist Federation (NSF), Dutch National Secretariat of Labor (NAS) and Danish Syndicalist Propaganda Association. The delegates representing the CNT were arrested in Paris while traveling to Berlin, and so were unable to attend. The Portuguese General Confederation of Labor (CGT-P) sent a written endorsement. The delegates representing the Chilean Industrial Workers of the World (IWW-C) and FORU arrived too late to participate in the congress.[[#82Foranoverviewofthecongr|82]]
+I have test-walked to the lower slopes to judge how long it should take. North-west for around five miles the forest stays dense until reaching the slopes of the mountains when it starts to thin. I walked up high enough to see way out over the forest, to where it mottled out on to the tundra, and the braided river which glinted back the blue-silver sky, spread across the sediment like veins of mercury. On the mountainside above, the trees stopped and scree wound like lightning scars through the smoky green and purple skirting. Life waned up the mountainside and the peak was white and dead and here the crows had their kingdom.
-The congress adopted a declaration of ten principles of “revolutionary syndicalism,” which had been agreed upon at a previous conference in June and were written by Rocker. The principles, which Rocker had based on his earlier speech in 1919 at the founding congress of the FAUD, committed the IWMA to an anarcho-syndicalist program in all but name.[[#83GarnerGoalsandMeans126|83]] This occurred as part of syndicalist anarchists formally breaking with the Red International of Labor Unions (RILU), which was affiliated with the Bolshevik-led Communist Third International, after the congresses of the RILU and Comintern declared themselves in favor of core state-socialist tenets that syndicalist anarchists could not subscribe to. Those tenets included parliamentarism, the seizure of state power by a Communist Party, joining reformist unions, centralization, and the subordination of trade unions to Communist parties.[[#84ThorpeWorkersThemselves|84]]
+Lower down where the plants clung still, bleached shapes poised spectral, luminous in the glare from the white sun. There were Dall sheep; they looked happy on the mountain and elegantly strange. I walked west across the ridge below the sheep until the afternoon, watching the colours change as the cloud ran its textures under the sun like a shadow puppet.
-The IWMA’s declaration of principles were, unlike those of the RILU and Comintern, explicitly in favor of the anarchist goal of “free communism” and the establishment of “economic communes and administrative organs run by the workers in the fields and factories, forming a system of free councils without subordination to any authority or political party.”[[#85IWADeclarationofthePri|85]] This goal was to be achieved through anarchist means: the activity of workers themselves, direct action, the general strike, and freely federated, bottom-up organizational structures. The state socialist strategies of parliamentary activity and conquering political power were explicitly rejected because “no form of statism, even the so-called ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat,’ can ever be an instrument for human liberation . . . on the contrary, it will always be the creator of new monopolies and new privileges.”[[#86IWADeclarationofthePri|86]] The “defense of the revolution” would “be the task of the masses themselves and their economic organizations, and not of a particular military body, or any other organization, outside of the economic associations.”[[#87IWADeclarationofthePri|87]]
+So I have rationed everything exactly and I have pared my rucksack down to the barest essentials so that there is not even a spare tampon of extra weight. I have just enough food to summit over the two days or two sleeps before coming back down, depending on hunger, but right now I have no appetite whatsoever so perhaps I will stay longer. I have sticks and a piece of tarp and some cable ties with which to construct some kind of shelter. If the rain comes again it will be miserable but there is nothing to be done about that. ''But please, spirit of the mountain, please don’t let it rain.''
-After its founding congress, a total of thirty trade unions affiliated with the IWMA. Of these, fifteen were from Europe, fourteen were from Latin America, and one was from Asia. Within Europe, this included the FAUD, USI, SAC, NSF, CNT, and CGT-P. They were joined by the Dutch Syndicalist Federation (NSV), which split from the NAS in 1923, and the French Revolutionary Syndicalist General Confederation of Labor (CGTSR), which split from the United General Confederation of Labor in 1926. Other European sections included the Russian Anarcho-Syndicalist Minority; Bulgarian Federation of Autonomous Unions; Polish Trade Union Opposition, Romanian anarcho-syndicalist propaganda organization; and anarcho-syndicalist groups in Austria, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland. In Latin America, the FORA-V, CGT-M, IWW-C, and FORU affiliated in 1923–4. This was followed by the affiliation of the Regional Workers’ Federation of Paraguay (FORP), and various workers’ federations in Brazil, including those based in Rio de Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo.[[#88Thorpemistakenlyclaimstha|88]] Several propaganda groups or local unions in Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala, Cuba, Costa Rica, and El Salvador also affiliated. The American IWW did not affiliate with the IWMA, despite multiple requests to do so, and the support of various sections, including the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union.[[#89ThorpeWorkersThemselves|89]]
+==== THE ABSTRACT WILD ====
-The one trade union in Asia that affiliated with the IWMA was the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labor Unions. It had, according to Rocker, “entered into formal alliance with the IWMA” and “held connections with the Bureau of the IWMA in Berlin.”[[#90RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|90]] The IWMA also maintained contact with anarchist groups in China and India. The founding December 1922 Berlin congress of the IWMA had itself been attended by a group of Indian revolutionaries, including M.P.T. Acharya. Having been persuaded of the truth of anarchism, they set up a committee to send anarcho-syndicalist literature into India. The British empire responded by banning the importation of IWMA literature into the country.[[#91OleBirkLaursenAnarchis|91]]
+We do not use mountains as metaphors for challenges for no good reason. It serves me right for being stupidly under-prepared for this and life and everything. Halfway through the day I left off wading through the snaring purple carpet of alpine tundra vegetation to hit scree and from then on I was stuck in a laborious cycle of climbing tentatively twenty metres or so only to slip back ten. I felt like Sisyphus without a boulder or the lustful in Dante’s inferno, doomed to swirl around in a stormy circle for eternity. Maybe if I kept on I would come across Damon’s soul too, both of us so lustful and hungry for ''something'' that we were doomed to keep after it for ever on this scree-skelter. That he just fell and died on his way to the top; that ironically he did not even get to make his one statement because the universe made it for him. But then that could have been his perfect death; willingly dead but not by his own hand, which means he did not have to feel bad about being selfish and breaking his mother’s heart (although it would still be broken because she would not know any better, I suppose).
-It was only after the founding of the IWMA that anarchists within Europe began to call themselves anarcho-syndicalists on a significant scale. This shift in language can be seen in the fact that, in 1925, Malatesta felt the need to critique what he called “Anarcho-Syndicalists” within the periodical ''Pensiero e Volontà''.[[#92MalatestaMethodofFreedom|92]] In September 1927, Fabbri distinguished between “a labor organization open to all workers, and thereby having no particular ideological program” and “the anarcho-syndicalists in Germany and Russia” who advocate a “labor organization which has an anarchist program, tactics and ideology.”[[#93LuigiFabbriAboutaProje|93]] A year later, the French anarchist Sébastien Faure wrote a text advocating a synthesis of the different forms of anarchism, and included “anarcho-syndicalism” as one of the three main “anarchist currents.”[[#94SebastienFaureTheAnarch|94]] Valeriano Orobón Fernández, who worked within the secretariat of the IWMA from 1926 to 1931, wrote a letter to Ángel Pestaña on August 9, 1930, claiming:
+Each slip on scree I would fall on my knees shaking and weak and too terrified to move in case I slid further. Where I had to sit to get everything back under control I would sit facing upwards, not really looking around me because I was looking at the ground to centre myself and so as not to trip up, and not wanting to look at everything below me until I was at the very top. I wanted this to be a grand revealing, velvet curtains drawn until the finale and for the finale to be one of those moments in life that needs a soundtrack with a loud and euphoric chorus followed by a quiet and melancholic bridge in a new key.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The evolution of politics following the war has spelt the end of the syndical neutrality of the Amiens Charter. In the whole world there is not a syndicalist organization existing today that does not practice politics, either directly or as an appendage of a political party. The CNT brought itself up to date with this international trend, adopting at the congress at La Comedia [Madrid 1919] an ideological platform, and, at the Zaragoza conference, a political platform. The CNT is therefore a complete organization. Whereas pure syndicalism is not “sufficient in itself,” anarcho-syndicalism clearly is.[[#95QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|95]]</div>
+I kept at this for hours, slipping and crying and crawling and just lying where the scree left me on my side, gasping and sweating, sometimes laughing at how stupid and futile a figure I had made myself in each moment and in general, ready to give up only to get a second wind and an angry burst that would propel me upwards like a turbo boost on Mario Kart.
-It is important to note that this shift in language did not occur everywhere at once. In France, the CGTSR was founded in 1926 after a series of splits within the CGT. Its founding declaration of principles, the Lyon Charter, explicitly committed the trade union to opposition to political parties. Despite this, members of the organization referred to themselves as “revolutionary syndicalists” or “federalist anti-statist revolutionary syndicalists,” rather than “anarcho-syndicalist,” until 1937.[[#96BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|96]] That year, Pierre Besnard, who was the secretary of the CGTSR, publicly used the term “anarcho-syndicalist” for the first time to describe the ideology of the trade union he belonged to.[[#97BerryFrenchAnarchistMove|97]] During his speech, he stated that “Anarcho-Syndicalism is an organizational and organized movement. It draws its doctrine from Anarchism and its organizational format from Revolutionary Syndicalism.”[[#98PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|98]]
+And then I got into a rhythm with it, perfecting the amount of pressure to put into each footstep to stop from upsetting the loose rocks. And once I had this it got easier again. I had gashed my knees up terribly and I had cuts all over my hands that smarted when I moved my fingers or when the salt from my own sweat got into them and they were full of grit but they felt good. Like the pain and difficulty made it more worth it. Like wanting to come out of the wreckage with a visible wound, wanting an impact with some tangible effect. Something to show for it all.
-The view that anarcho-syndicalism was the synthesis of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist modes of organization was repeated and popularized by Rocker in his 1938 book ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'', but with one major difference. Unlike Besnard, Rocker did not specify that he was describing what it is for an organization or movement to be anarcho-syndicalist. He instead wrote as if he was describing anarcho-syndicalism as a set of ideas such that an anarcho-syndicalist is anyone who advocates both anarchist theory and syndicalist organizational structures, rather than the position that trade unions should have a syndicalist organizational structure and be committed to an anarchist program.[[#99RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|99]] This had the effect that the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism was blurred, because if anarcho-syndicalism is an ideology based on the combination of anarchist theory with revolutionary syndicalist forms of organization, then anarchists who were revolutionary syndicalists, such as Pouget, could now be viewed as anarcho-syndicalists. Doing so would be a mistake, due to the important debates and differences between revolutionary syndicalist anarchists, who advocated politically neutral trade unions, and anarcho-syndicalists, who advocated explicitly anarchist trade unions.
+I came across some of the mountain sheep and they sprang off away from me barely dislodging a pebble, then turned to look back as if to say you, trunk-legged creature, are not made for here, before loping on. They really are ridiculous animals to look at until you realise that being wrapped in cotton wool makes falling on a mountain like falling over in a spacesuit in zero gravity; inconsequential. That rather than clouds with legs they are ingenious inventions of nature.
-Rocker not only blurred the distinction between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism. He wrote that “Anarcho-Syndicalism had maintained its hold upon organized labor [within Spain] from the days of the First International” and in so doing anachronistically imposed anarcho-syndicalism as a category onto the prehistory of syndicalism before the term and idea had been formed.[[#100RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|100]] Rocker’s 1946 essay, “Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism,” which is an abridged and slightly revised version of ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice'', only made things more unclear for future generations.'' ''He repeated his previous claim that anarcho-syndicalism is a synthesis of anarchist theory and syndicalist modes of organization, but then goes on to equate the two by writing that “Revolutionary Syndicalism . . . was later called, Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[[#101RockerAnarchismandAnarc|101]]
+The wind would come very suddenly and with such force that it could knock me off balance so I found myself bracing for this, flinching for it like a bad puppy to a raised hand. It would scream like a Tolkien wraith when it came and rattle me so that the best I could do was to get close to the ground and stay down. One time doing this I came face to face with a delicate yellow flower struggling to grow isolated and friendless and I cried a little for it all alone on the crag and no way of knowing how by its loneliness it was diminished.
-Rocker’s claim was technically correct in the sense that the organizations he belonged to, the FAUD and the IWMA, did initially call themselves revolutionary syndicalists while advocating anarcho-syndicalism as an idea and then, as language evolved, switched to calling themselves anarcho-syndicalists. This can be seen in the fact that Rocker himself referred to “syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the FAUD in 1919 and “revolutionary syndicalism” in his declaration of principles adopted at the founding of the IWMA in 1922. By 1938, his language had shifted. He now referred to the trade unions that formed the IWMA, including the FAUD, as the representatives of “MODERN Anarcho-Syndicalism.”[[#102RockerDeclarationofthe|102]] Unfortunately, twenty-first-century readers of Rocker have often been unaware of these historical details and have misunderstood both the origins and nature of anarcho-syndicalism, and how it differed from the revolutionary syndicalism of politically neutral trade unions like the CGT. It should also be noted that sections of the IWMA continued to have members who did not identify as anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists.
+I kept on going with the snowline as my carrot until I let myself stop around one hundred metres below on a little forgiving plateau. As soon as I got to the mental place of ‘I will stop here’ my legs gave way and my knees were further damaged but I did not even feel it because the relief of a resting point was so great and it felt so good to be horizontal with the promise of a long interlude.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#18|1]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118; Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 104; Errico Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''170, 172, 338, 463.</div>
+After a little nap I drank deeply from my water, leaving just enough to see me over in the morning, before I got to the snowline and could refill from melting the snow. Then I went about making my tent, forcing the sticks into the ground with difficulty and pegging the tarp on two sides so that it made a humble pentahedron, open at both ends. I tried to angle it so that the wind went over and not through it, but this made the sides whip back and forth.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#28|2]]. Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe From the Charte d’Amiens to World War One,” in ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational'', ed. David Berry and Constance Bantman (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 25–26.</div>
+I must have been walking for over ten hours. The light dimmed after what felt like not much time, just enough time for me to sit about recuperating and to warm up my meagre dinner on the propane. It was bitterly cold once the sun had dipped, even though it did not ever disappear completely. There was still the vague idea of sunshine, the sun hovering somewhere near by, but the wind undermined it ruthlessly.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#38|3]]. Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, “The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'','' ''ed Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe'' ''(Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 1–2; Lucien van der Walt, “Syndicalism” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 249–50.</div>
+I tried to sleep but the wind blew just so and rattled the tarp, which rattled the pebbles in a motion like a Mexican wave all around the perimeter, and this made it sound as though there was someone or something scuttling around outside, making circles around me. I would poke my head out and be reassured, then it would happen again a little later and I would think come on now, Erin, we have been through this numerous times, then, no, there really does sound like there is something, best go check, oh, no, all clear, okay, cool, time to sleep, but what was that? That wailing? Is it Damon, has he come for me? Like this so many times that I gave up and just went outside to sit sentry for myself and put the propane back on even though I needed it for cooking tomorrow because I was just so cold even with the ski jacket and there was not a scrap of wood to be found for a campfire.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#48|4]]. The language of “syndicalism-plus” was coined by Iain McKay, “Communism and Syndicalism,” Anarchist Writers website, May 25, 2012. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/communism-syndicalism. Thanks to McKay for suggesting this phrase to me.</div>
+But there I was alone and enduring and from outside my own head to any observer of course it would seem like I could do this as well as any man. I was ticking all the boxes and besides, Jack London’s men all had dogs and a dog is an invaluable asset in that scenario.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#58|5]]. César De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International” in'' Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', ed. Marcello Musto (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 128.</div>
+A dog like Buck, who gleams with the magnificence that inspired a cult to bask in him. It is the ghost of Buck that remains in Big Mountain gold country – Alaska, the Yukon, the wilds of North America. But anywhere can have its own Big Mountain Country. The philosophy of the cult can be transplanted onto any place and translated into any language. Russians have their own breed of Mountain Men from the days they tried to colonise Alaska. They called them ''promyshlenniki.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#68|6]]. De Paepe, “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International,” 128–29.</div>
+Buck sits by my side exuding pride and vitality and power and kingliness because he knows he is king of the dogs. But he is a dog and a dog is not a person. Jack London never meant to say that men should act like dogs, at least not so literally.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#78|7]]. Raymond W. Postgate, ed. “Debates and Resolutions of the First International on The Control of Industry,” in ''Revolution from 1789 to 1906'' (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921), 393–94.</div>
+''He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#88|8]]. César De Paepe, “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869.</div>
+Okay, this primordial thing is in us all. But the call that came from the wild was specifically addressed to you, a dog. Dogs can regress back into the wild because they are just tame wolves. Big dogs are anyway. Specifically wolfy-looking dogs. You were a dog running round catching and killing and living by tenacity. There is no Neolithic man running round howling in the woods. Jack London only spent one bloody winter in the Klondike! And the call that brought him there was a siren song; it was a promise of gold, and a little house in the big woods on the banks of Plum Creek by the shores of a silver lake on the prairie.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#98|9]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 193; Musto, ed. ''Workers Unite'','' ''138n28.</div>
+''To be a MAN was to write MAN in large capitals on my heart. I played what I conceived to be a MAN’S game, this future was interminable. I could see myself only raging through life without end like one of Nietzsche’s blond beasts, lustfully roving and conquering by sheer superiority and strength.''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#108|10]]. Adhémar Schwitzguébel, “On Resistance Funds,” in'' Workers Unite!'', 138–39.</div>
+Jack London wrote ''Call of the Wild'' when he was young and healthy and full of his own electricity. It is easy to be an individualist when you are a winner and you are too caught up in glory to think about how the losers fare, or how your conquest undoes the very thing that drew you out there.
-[[#118|11]]. Julian P. W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 166–75; Robert Graham, ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy'','' We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015), 117–19.
+There is not enough bounty for everyone to claim a piece, so for Big Mountain to keep on working it had to be understood that Man has no obligation to the happiness of anyone but himself. That to have the ''right'' to pursue happiness was to be free, even if free was only to be forever in ''pursuit''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#128|12]]. Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” in'' Workers Unite!'', 133.</div>
+This is what the Mountain Man was born from. A healthy white man’s ideal. What Ted Kaczynski does not acknowledge or maybe realise is that he is his own worst enemy; it is this rampant freedom to pursue which propagates the Machine. It is as though Ayn Rand wrote both their bibles.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#137|13]]. Jean-Louis Pindy, “Resolution on Resistance Funds,” 133.</div>
+Jack London was remembered only as a writer of macho survival stories for boys. A ''fascist''. It was just that one story! What about the story he wrote about the woman who gets Thoreau? The voice he gave to class struggles? So maybe you were his young ego but you were not his only one.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#147|14]]. Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies,” trans. Iain McKay, Anarchist Writers website, October 6, 2018. https://anarchism.pageabode.com/precursors-of-syndicalism.</div>
+He was in a bad place, you know that. His father had disowned him a second time. He quit Berkeley and ran to the Klondike because he was ''forced'' to be an individualist. But he realised something in the wild. He realised in its contrast how lacking he was. It is different for you, Buck, because you are a dog. They just cling to you, Buck, Stan and all these boys. They want a strict moral code. Something to believe in. Primordial truth. Sad, unhappy, suggestible people reading the works of sad, unhappy writers and taking their words as gospel.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#157|15]]. Eugène Varlin, “Workers Societies.”</div>
+They cannot take his oeuvre for its transgressions, his corrupted values; Wolf House, all those bedrooms. They want a noble truth, purity from their gods, and so they choose to hear you. You outlive him as a negative imprint, a Voyager he later regretted sending.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#167|16]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''56.</div>
+But you are just a dog. An imaginary dog at that. All your ''masculinity'', it is a literary embellishment. Most wolf packs are headed by a male and a female breeding pair, who rule together in equality.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#177|17]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 56.</div>
+The dog is unnervingly blank. As though he feels indifference towards his creator now that he has his own life outside of him. Then the Call sounds from up out of the belly of the forest and Buck pricks up his ears to it. He rises and lopes to the limit of my night vision, turning with a look of contemptuous pity. He pads into the night to answer the Call and he will keep on answering as long as the Call sounds or until the paradigm shifts, because he is not ''quite'' immortal and it is this that will end his reign.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#187|18]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 56.</div>
+And after all, only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf. Aldo Leopold said that. But man says I am civilised, and the rest is woman and wilderness. So what is woman? Is she where the symbols aren’t? Woman is wilderness, if she is man’s unwordable other. Woman is closer to the mountain and the wolf than man even if only because he put her there. Therefore, woman can listen better than man, if not as well as the mountain, to the real howl of the wolf.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#197|19]]. Quoted in Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''122.</div>
+=== {{anchor|Topofch05html}} MY MOUNTAIN MY MOON ===
-[[#207|20]]. Quoted in Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''54.
+==== WHATEVER PARTICLE OF THAT SPIRIT IS IN ME ====
-[[#217|21]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 159–60.
+So I hardly slept and I was exhausted but this felt right, to struggle the last part as a disciple of asceticism after Thoreau’s own heart, like a monk head-butting the ground to nirvana. Like how they say that if something was easy it would not be a challenge and if something is not a challenge then it is not meaningful; so make every day a struggle and lo! you will feel the richer for it, like all those who struggle in poverty are really the richest and most meaningful people in the world, god smiles down on their suffering and they feel the radiance of his smile on their sunburnt backs.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#227|22]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September 1872,” in Appendix to René Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2015), 182.</div>
+I kept on thinking I was about to summit when looking up I would see the ground stop and sky behind it, but each time I got there I would be faced with another slope to climb. I learned not to be tricked in this way so that eventually when I reached the genuine last slope I was dubious, like yeah, right, that old hat, so that when I ''did'' clamber over and see the final point, stood alone and jaunty with an actual landscape beneath it, not just another mosaic of rocks, I felt like I had been hit in the stomach with a football.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#237|23]]. “Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress,” 182–83.</div>
+I said no no don’t look yet not just yet get to the very top first so that you can drink it all in savour every last drop of it. So I took my rucksack off to make things easier and I kept my eyes down until I could not find a higher place to be. I settled down into my crossed legs and let myself look the whole place over and squealed like a proud eagle.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#247|24]]. “Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877,” in Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 190–91.</div>
+It was stupidly windy so that my hair unwrapped itself from my hairband and made little Medusa-snakes of itself, licking me in the eyeballs. I scraped it back, making an Alice band of my hands and using them as a sun visor also. The sun was almost unbearable so high up and with no cloud cover, but it made my vision heavenly bright and ecstatic. The clouds were thin and wispy and some stalked underneath me, motionless but transitory; still, ephemeral jellyfish taken by the current.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#257|25]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''56. Malatesta appears to have previously opposed participating in trade unions at the 1876 Berne Congress of the Saint-Imier International. It is unclear when he changed his mind, because most of the articles he wrote in this period are currently untranslated. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''229.</div>
+I felt giddy from the sheer euphoria of it all and also from vertigo at being so high and the world so tiny. I could see everything, my whole map over for what it really is. I mean, I could not see the cabin per se but I could see its vicinity, the place where the trees wound between me and it. But I could see my tower or I fancied I could just about, a spire amongst the deep green spruce of the taiga, and the tundra to the right of it spilling on, multi-faceted and textured and connoting so many things at once; fat salmons, a clutch of speckled blue eggs, the ripe and gravid feeling of harvest-time and the hazy nostalgia that distance gives to space as time does to memory.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#267|26]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 294.</div>
+There is so much colour, even on the bare mountains so much colour. They are rust and lilac and ochre and pink, all hues of deep contrast, the bright sun bits too bright to look at almost and the shadows so deep they look dimensional like mouths to deep caves. Each piece of contrasting colour is like its own object, can be taken alone like pieces of a paint-by-numbers, but take a step back and they come together and make something breathtakingly complete. If I am right in my bearings then they call these the Polychrome Mountains.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#277|27]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 299.</div>
+My Olympus, my castle in the sky, and down below my queendom all poured out. I feel good and full, brimming, like a fountain all full up and pouring over, like melting. And if Damon did come up here it is hard to imagine how he could climb back down and go through with it, renounce all this beauty. I feel accomplished. It is the feeling that I did it, all of this; they have not succeeded in keeping it from me.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#287|28]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 299.</div>
+But then, directly after, following it through the door like a fast black cat, the feeling of ''did what exactly?''
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#297|29]]. Esenwein, ''Anarchist Ideology'', 80–4. The trade union was forced to suspend its activities in 1884 in response to state repression and was replaced by a new organization in 1888. See ibid., 84–97, 117–22.</div>
+A sudden pang of something when I realise I can see the road, far away but definite, barely visible yet I can feel it like an animal does a scent trail, an invisible ribbon through its terrain. A mixture of things, first like being Simba in ''The Lion King'' when Mufasa tells him ''everything that the light touches'' and beyond is the shadowy place, the road my perimeter of light. But also a vague kind of yearning, a sharp little tug.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#307|30]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Haymarket Tragedy'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 72–73, 89–92, 181–88.</div>
+The light starts to dim and the mountains’ shadow gets longer. He could not very well have stayed up here for ever, not alive anyway. So perhaps for someone in his state of mind it would be perfectly logical for this place to be the end of the story. After going to the moon some of the moonwalkers could not come to terms with the feeling of its climax, all of life after dulled in its light, made ugly under the scrutiny of this spotlight that would not leave them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#317|31]]. Carl Levy, ''Gramsci and the Anarchists ''(Oxford: Berg, 1999), 19–20; Antonio Senta, ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 18–19, 24–29.</div>
+As the sun moves from off the peak the wind picks up, stinging and pulling at the skin of my face and arms, sore with sunburn. My lips are chapped and hard and my nose raw to touch. I take the ski jacket from around my waist and curl into it. I am suddenly and crushingly tired, with sunstroke maybe, and it becomes perfectly sensible to just stay put here, just curl up to sleep on myself, a tired eagle on its lonely scarp, its nose tucked under its own wing.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#327|32]]. Ángel J. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017), 52, 56, 116–18, 120–1, 172–73, 203–5, 273–76; Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World'', ''1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation'','' Internationalism'','' and Social Revolution'' (Leiden: Brill, 2010),'' ''xl–xliii; Frank Fernández, ''Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement'','' ''trans. Charles Bufe'' ''(Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001), 19–29, 40–41; John M. Hart, ''Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class 1860–1931 ''(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978), 46–59, 75–80, 83–84.</div>
+==== A DECLARATION FOR THE RIGHT OF CETACEANS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#337|33]]. Constance Bantman, “From Trade Unionism to Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire to Syndicalism: The British Origins of French Syndicalism” in ''New Perspectives on Anarchism'','' Labour and Syndicalism'', 128–132; Constance Bantman, ''The French Anarchists in London'','' 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation'' (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 40–41; Bantman, “The Militant Go-between: Émile Pouget’s Transnational Propaganda (1880–1914),” ''Labour History Review'' 74, no. 3 (2009): 279–80; Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 36–42; Henry Pelling, ''A History of British Trade Unionism'', 5th ed. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992), 94–96.</div>
+Damon and the Mountain Men, like old scientists, were searching for an absolute and true reality. They went about it by dissection, peeling it back in search of its kernel of truth, a foundation to build up from. The Greeks saw it in the Euclidean geometry they found recurring in nature. From the solid geometry of three dimensions Newton constructed a constant description of the world in his classical mechanics. The fourth dimension was uniform time, which flowed smoothly. Matter was full: indestructible particles moving through space, the void. From these separate unquestioned planes knowledge could be built deductively and a uniform map of matter and life could be built.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#347|34]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 76–77.</div>
+But then along came Einstein and said we must forget the Lapse of Time. He said Newton’s planes do not work on Newton’s planes, you can draw a square but space is really like a balloon not a flat plane, and you can’t draw a perfect square on a balloon.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#357|35]]. Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 13; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),'' ''20–23, 65, 74–75; Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''11; Fernand Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''409.</div>
+It is considered very old and pagan yet new and post-Enlightenment to think of ourselves as not masters or stewards but members of the universe. We forgot this in the first place because Descartes would cut open dogs and when they would scream he would say ''ignore the screams, they are merely the creakings of a machine'', and we ignored them.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#367|36]]. Kropotkin ''Direct Struggle'', 317–39.</div>
+They blasted the atom at the Large Hadron Collider and instead of the kernel of this atom they found a house of mirrors and in the middle a weird shaman sat cross-legged with a gong, who told them ''everything is everything and nothing all at once'' enigmatically, but what did they expect looking for a kernel inside a kernel when by definition a kernel’s kernel is a tautology?
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#377|37]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 24–26; Turcato, ''Making Sense'','' ''134–35; Bantman, “The British Origins of French Syndicalism,” 132–35.</div>
+The Mountain Men went looking in nature, as in outside of human (human Man), but this is a false dichotomy. They did not see that nature was what they threw at it. Somewhere in Texas there is a mountain and at its summit there is built a steel pyramid (I marked time, remember me), glittering back at the sky, and I think this object stands very well for Mountain Men everywhere.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#387|38]]. Pelloutier, “Anarchism and the Workers’ Union,” 409–15. See also Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle.</div>
+You can’t break the world into independent existing units. Particles can’t even be said to exist in definite positions, they only show ''tendencies to exist''. Probability, not certainty, is the fundamental feature of atomic reality, so the Mountain Man was doomed to fail. This is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and it forbids perfect knowledge. The new science says that it is only a web of approximations, it is an idealisation sometimes useful from a practical point of view like demographics of populations, or the construction of an identity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#397|39]]. Quoted in David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''24.</div>
+Once he had figured it out Einstein thought of the implications of this and said ''it was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere, upon which one could have built''. Science had seemingly been undermined if the whole point was to find the very solid absolute foundational true description of everything.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#407|40]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 90. For Goldman’s in-depth description of her visit to Paris in 1900, see Emma Goldman, ''Living My Life'','' ''vol. 1'' ''(New York: Dover Publications, 1970),'' ''264–80, 401. Her views on syndicalism were also influenced by her later visit to Paris in 1907. See ibid., 406–07.</div>
+But Thoreau anticipated Einstein when he said ''if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should'' ''be. Now put the foundations under them'', as though they were talking through time, saying, hey, so there is no such thing as the absolute after all! And absolute wild, absolute solitude; there is an absolutely pure form of neither!
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#417|41]]. Wayne Thorpe, ''“The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour 1913–1923'' (Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989), 25. For details see Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 63–71; Phil H. Goodstein, ''The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland'' (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 53–59; Émile Pouget, “The Party of Labour,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
+And Thoreau said to Einstein that men making speeches (meaning scientists), they are banded together, ''one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise''. He said, I will tell you what is at the centre of the atom without even looking: just shitloads of tortoises! But, he said, it does not matter because the atoms together make the wood I chop to build a fire.
-[[#427|42]]. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 77–79.
+Thoreau was as imperfect as the rest of us, always seeking truth although he knew he could never find it. He still spoilt the magic of the mythically bottomless lake at Walden, by measuring it to its bottom standing on its centre while it froze over, and writing out the measurements so everyone would know it was ''he'' who had solved its mystery.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#437|43]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-''Syndicalism, 15; Wayne Thorpe, ''“The Workers Themselves,”'' 26–27. For an in-depth overview of reformist syndicalism, see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 114–40.</div>
+Subatomic science asks us to take what we can observe and fill in the gaps, intuitive like mysticism because it is just an abstraction of reality and we have to use instruments to pick it apart, we have no direct experience of it. In a similar way a mythical or spiritual belief system that is less restricted by deductive logic can get closer to the truth of the thing by admitting there is not one truth: there are many. Maybe my mum saying she does not think about space is really pretty enlightened.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#447|44]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 24, 138, 145–46; Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 32n37. According to Joll, anarchists only seriously influenced the CGT “for ten or fifteen years” and had little influence within the CGT after 1914. James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 216.</div>
+Future civilisations might excavate the Large Hadron Collider from out of the ground when we are gone and try to interpret it like we do the Tarot, as a divination method that taps into archetypes we created. And in a way this is all it is.
-[[#457|45]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 27; Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 137.
+==== BECAUSE IT IS MY HEART ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#467|46]]. Quoted in A.W. Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918'' (London: Anarres Editions, 2018), 42.</div>
+I slept part of the night out on the peak, but it was too cold without the sun and I woke up. I had to crawl back down to my pack and get out everything warm to wrap up in. I did not get to greet the morning on the peak but now I know what it is like to wake up inside a cloud, and how many people can say that? The light got brighter at around 4 a.m. and I woke up to wonder if I had maybe died and gone to heaven. But the cloud passed, I took food from my bag and chewed it, looking at the landscape coming up all pink and new like a fresh layer of paint, and I decided not to move from off the ridge until I had found a conclusive reason to. All of my bones ached.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#477|47]]. Quoted in Zurbrugg, ''Anarchist Perspectives'','' ''42.</div>
+And as the sun came up I ached more to look at it. Nothing had moved but it looked different again and was permeated with feeling. We do not have a very good or specific word for the feeling of it but I suppose we tentatively call it ''love''. A feeling can’t be mapped to a word without changing the feeling. I could exhaust the possibilities of descriptions, but to get the closest without ever actually touching is all science and words can do. Everything is beyond the touch of language. Why even bother to tell stories if language is so vacant?
-[[#487|48]]. Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 134, 137–140; Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 88–94, 180.
+When you are a very young child you do not understand that there are things outside of yourself, but as you begin to grow you start to feel sad or happy or affected by seemingly irrelevant things like the explosion of rockets or the size of the ocean or the contour of hills.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#497|49]]. Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 39–41, 44–45.</div>
+Everything looks happy and good in pink golden light but the beauty has sadness and sometimes this is difficult to distinguish from sadness itself and I wish I could have told Damon this. There is acute love for the thing then realising that one day one way or another it will leave you or you will leave it or the light will change, but the magnitude of this hurt is itself something that adds to the beauty. You let it enter: permeation, contamination, not-aloneness, shared knowing of this beauty. You grow with it like inosculation, and the sadness comes in knowing that it is so other to you, that it is like tree branches growing first together and then apart. We need this acute sad feeling to make us care about the preservation of otherness. Perhaps then the feeling is more accurately ''the love of sad beauty''. Or nostalgia that has not happened yet.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#507|50]]. Quoted in Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 30–31.</div>
+Then in the distance cutting across the hue between the ground and blue the speed and effortlessness in its wings. I would know it anywhere from the way it writes itself in the sky. Peregrine. I knew that they lived here but in all my looking I had not found one. And there it was, for me and not for me. My knowing of it is not possessive; I know it in reverence. Not looking at it from below as I am used to, but eye-to-eye, I can see the world like it does, and to see with it is a mighty privilege.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#517|51]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+What I see at that moment holds so much significance for me personally even though it means nothing really and nothing at all to the peregrine, but when I remember it all, this is how it will be capsulated; in this single image, pinky golden and perfect but impermanent and sad, but with all the promise of a new day and a new chapter in my time and I will order it as such in retrospect in my own narrative.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#527|52]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 115.</div>
+I want to tell Damon that this is it, this is exactly it or as close as we could come. It is the feeling of space-time in and out of you and connecting you to all of it and none of it. To be able to look down from a mountain and feel sad is the whole point. Damon renounced all of this because it was the one thing that was his to give up but the thing he gave up was the point in itself and the point does not still stand without him. His little death meant nothing to the mountain and it all goes on despite him. There is no wilderness when we are gone. It needs us and our words outside it like proprioception, to define its contours, the same as we need it. And from the realisation onwards, we can adapt and new synapses can be found.
-[[#537|53]]. Antonioli, ed. ''International Anarchist Congress'', 115.
+And when I looked at the road this time I felt something different to the taint and diminishment of before. When I looked at the road I felt very small and I remembered Stan saying his bit about girls being social inherently, innately, by nature, like it is in our geometry. The tug I felt when I looked at it was of a thread in the fabric, a tendril through me and it. But that tug is the reminder that you were attached all along. A tug does not mean I failed to leave properly; I could never really leave. None of us, not even Mountain Men, can ever really leave.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#547|54]]. Émile Pouget, “The Basis of Trade Unionism,” Libcom website, November 19, 2010, https://libcom.org/article/basis-trade-unionism-emile-pouget.</div>
+I stayed put for most of the day, steadily brimming up with purpose. But I was also brimming up with urine from drinking the snow melted with the propane. My appetite was building back up and what little was left of the food was back down on the plateau. I considered briefly weeing up there just to be practical, but it conjured the image of a dog leaving its scent. I thought I would not want all the smelling animals that might come up there to think that of me, even if none ever did, probably just the crows went there and they can’t smell. Besides all of this I did not want to do that to the mountain.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#557|55]]. For a broad overview of these movements see Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe, eds., ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'' (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990).</div>
+I took a last long look, blinking my eyes like they were shutters and I was capturing still photographs of this scene to file away in the far crevices of my mind, the special self-defining crevices that stay secure and well preserved and accessible for life. Then I climbed down, set off to the place below the snowline and got there before dark, in time to make my tent up again and pee in privacy from whatever behind a rock, and heat up the last of the food.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#567|56]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century'', 34–37, 57–63; Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 165, 173-74, 284–85; Hirsch and van der Walt, eds., ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial Worl''d; Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds., ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', (London: Pluto Press, 2017).</div>
+==== ALL MY LIFE NOW APPEARS TO BE ONE HAPPY MOMENT ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#577|57]]. Kenyon Zimmer, ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America'' (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 75–79, 83–87.</div>
+Trudging down the mountain was much easier than up because the scree that was a hindrance before became an ally and I got to the bottom in half the time. When I reached the timberline I turned to look up at my mountain from its most imposing angle before I was under the tree cover and could not see it any more.
-[[#587|58]]. Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 51–65; Juan Suriano, ''Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890–1910'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 14–16.
+Behind it in the pale blue sky the moon was full and almost exactly above the peak but skewed just a little, as if it was being floated there, as if it was a Malteser the mountain was blowing to hover over its mouth. The moon was a very pale white blue disk, only just not the colour of the sky. I had not seen it while I was up there, but I suppose it must have been behind me all along.
-[[#597|59]]. Quoted in Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 142n44.
+The mountain and the moon sat across from each other like telegraph hills, and I imagined I could light up a beacon on the mountain and the lady with the rabbits up on the moon would look down and see a small flare burst out of her image of Earth, an iridescent badge on the black felt of infinity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#607|60]]. Quoted in A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 129. For details about how syndicalism became the dominant position in Spain during the early 1900s, see James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 198–249.</div>
+From a mountain vast cities are pinpricks of light and from the moon they are tinier still. Follow it back further still, this image, of Earth in space getting smaller and smaller the further away you get, speeding much faster than the speed of light away after the Voyagers, but the stars behind Earth do not seem to move at all because they are already so far away, their constellations still look exactly the same as they do on Earth. You have to get about thirty-six light years away past Arcturus, which the Inuits call ‘The First Ones’, and only then do they start to merge into each other, and by this time you can’t see Earth at all.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#617|61]]. Pouget, “The Party of Labour.”</div>
+Earth looks insignificant in the vastness of space, as everything does from far away. But we don’t live far away and can only imagine what this looks like because we made some very clever machinery that can change our viewpoints. New viewpoints give new perspectives. That is what astronauts mean when they get the Overview Effect. From very near by in the grand scheme of things Earth really looks perfect.
-[[#627|62]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 122.
+Larus told me that when NASA were working on ways to detect life on Mars for the Viking programme they called James Lovelock, maverick scientist and inventor from England, to California to come help them. Lovelock told NASA they need not send a spacecraft to Mars because he could tell from the atmosphere that there would be no life there because Mars’ atmosphere was at chemical equilibrium and lacked the dynamism of Earth’s atmosphere. This got Lovelock thinking about life altering its atmosphere and that is how he got on to the Gaia Hypothesis, which he wrote with Lynn Margulis, the symbiosis lady.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#637|63]]. Quoted in Nettlau, ''Short History'', 279. See also Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'','' ''392, 403–11; Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 52–3; Maxim Raevsky, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW ''(Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 1–2.</div>
+They were interested that the sun’s radioactive output had increased over aeons of time but that Earth had not heated up in turn. They postulated that Earth as a whole was self-regulating to maintain this stability, that all of life and non-life were part of one single ‘organism’ of sorts. All parts of the biota worked together to regulate the biosphere, the hydrospheres, the atmosphere, etc., and everything on Earth had evolved reciprocally with the end of keeping the planet stable and optimum for all life. This worked through a cybernetic feedback system that meant that things always fluctuate around the optimum, like a thermostat which changes its output dependent on its reading to maintain a relatively stable, but never perfect, temperature. This was homeostasis.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#647|64]]. Karl Kautsky, ''Road to Power'' (Chicago: Samuel A. Bloch, 1909), 61, 95.</div>
+Lovelock decided that without biodiversity we might not just be lonely, we might actually not have a liveable and breathable climate and atmosphere, that as we upset the balance the planet will get more hostile to us.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#657|65]]. Wayne Thorpe, “Uneasy Family,” 17n2. It has been alleged by Albert Meltzer that the term was first coined by the Welsh anarchist Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907) in order to distinguish between British syndicalists, who did not think of themselves as anarchists, and syndicalists in continental Europe who self-identified as anarchists. He does not provide a source or a date for when this occurred. I have been unable to verify this claim or determine, if true, what Mainwaring meant by anarcho-syndicalism. Meltzer claimed he was told the information by Emma Goldman. See Albert Meltzer, ''The Anarchists in London, 1935–1955 ''(London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976), 10; Kenneth John, “Anti-Parliamentary Passage: South Wales and the Internationalism of Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907)” (PhD diss., University of Greenwich, 2001), 109–10.</div>
+In ''Timaeus'' Plato said our planet was alive and the rivers and lava were its circulatory system. From the eighteenth century onwards there were a few geologists and geochemists who posited that the biosphere could affect the geology and chemistry of its surroundings but they were pretty much ignored. The German Romantic Schelling would talk about Earth like it was alive and the American Transcendentalists Emerson and then Thoreau, they read Schelling.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#667|66]]. Quoted in Cappelletti, ''Anarchism in Latin America'', 64. In 1915, there was a split within the FORA between the FORA-V, which remained committed to the anarchist program of the fifth congress, and the FORA-IX, which endorsed a politically neutral program. See ibid., 66–68, 74.</div>
+This started a tradition that birthed John Muir, father of the American national parks, Jack London, who was in the Bohemian Club with John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, who pioneered environmental ethics. It also inspired the Beats, Jack Kerouac calling himself an ‘urban Thoreau’ and going by ‘Jack’ instead of his given name ‘Jean-Louis’, after London, and then the Beats led on to the counterculture of the sixties and John C. Lilly of dolphin tank fame, who hung out with the Beats. Rudolf Steiner also read Schelling, and it was William Golding who was friends with Lovelock and gave him the name of ''Gaia'' for his idea and put him on to Steiner. So really Lovelock was a product of a long tradition and his and Lynn Margulis’s ideas took off because they were compatible with the post-space race ''zeitgeist''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#677|67]]. Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 76–78; Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 61–62, 77–78; Daniil Novomirsky, ''Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme'', trans. Paul Sharkey, Kate Sharpley Library website, https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3bk4c0. In these translations, the phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” is used. This is an error. In the original Russian only the phrase “syndicalist anarchism” appears. Thanks to Kenyon Zimmer for showing this to me.</div>
+''Metempsychosis.'' That is what the Ancient Greeks called the transmigration of souls, similar to what the Inuit believe in. E=mc<sup>2</sup>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#687|68]]. Quoted in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 77; Novomirsky, ''Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme''. In Skirda, the Russian for “revolutionary trade union” has been translated as “revolutionary syndicalist movement.” To avoid potential confusion with revolutionary syndicalism in the distinct CGT sense, I have decided to alter the translation. See also N. Rogdaev, “On the Anarchist Movement in Russia,” in ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam'', 191.</div>
+is the famous equation by Einstein and what it means is that the amount of energy in a particle is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared, and what this means is that the Inuits are right again. It means that energy and mass or matter are interchangeable. It means that matter can be transformed into other forms of energy. When Lovelock channels Plato, this is metempsychosis of sorts. Rachel Carson has gotten into me by metempsychosis, which is also like the homeostatic process that Lovelock called ''feedback''.
-[[#697|69]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 115.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0265-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#707|70]]. Golos Truda, “Declaration of the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda,” in ''The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution'', ed. Paul Avrich (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 71. For the history of anarcho-syndicalism in the Russian revolution, see Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'','' ''135–51, 185, 190–95; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''98–100,'' ''163–64.</div>
+Homeostasis is also how we maintain a stable identity. We as individuals build from and into a shared image of ourselves. There are tendrils that anchor us to an adaptive and receptive way of knowing and being, building a view from a body, my body.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#717|71]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 204.</div>
+When we die we usually get an epitaph. Inuits in Greenland do not write words on the headstones of their dead, because they know an epitaph traps an identity and undermines its freedom to transmigrate.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#726|72]]. Alexander Schapiro, “Introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism. For an overview of Schapiro’s activity during the Russian revolution, see Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 238–44.</div>
+Ideas and words are metempsychosis, are the weaving of the tapestry, are love for the mountain, are the deep relation between past, present, near and far, are the consciousness between us. Newton’s ball was never alone: it was cocooned by the fabric of space-time. Solitude is an illusion but so is loneliness and it was Emerson himself who said, ‘We see the world piece by piece, as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree; but the whole, of which these are shining parts, is the soul.’
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#736|73]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 53–80. The CNT as a national organization could not attend the congress because it had been made illegal in 1911 and was still in the process of reorganizing itself.</div>
+I think of it, rather than a unanimous whole that underlies everything, more like a collaging of shards all patched up like a quilt, overlapping like a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram on a Venn diagram.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#746|74]]. “The London Declaration (1913),” in Appendix to Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 320.</div>
+Lilly, Kerouac, Sagan, Einstein, Newton, none of them was unblemished by patriarchy but we had to have them all to get us to where we are now. We had to get to the moon with Apollo so that we could look back at ourselves like this. I had to come out here and follow Damon and get lost enough to realise that’s what I was, so that I could find my way again. We had to have Descartes and his dualisms even though they are atomising and not real and identify the self with an isolated ego that exists inside a body like a cage, and this inner fragmentation mirrors the fragmentation of Newton’s world of matter outside as a void within which separate objects and events happen all alone, forever lonely, so that we could have Einstein and the rockets that could take us up there to look at ourselves and see the seams of this, to use the moon like a mirror, like children or parrots recognising their reflection for the very first time.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#756|75]]. Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 43–46, 64–84. For details about the CGT and World War I, including the minority within the CGT who remained internationalists, see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 161–67; Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim'', 85–110.</div>
+These are our new visions, the macro and also the micro, the seeing for the first time and knowing and loving the microscopic creatures in our guts that we could not live without. And it is because we can look so closely and see things inside things and look so far away and see things outside our solar system that we can realise the arbitrariness of our distinctions. Our myopia undone.
-[[#766|76]]. Juan Gómez Casas, ''Anarchists Organization: The History of the F.A.I'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 56; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''7–11.
+The moon is our mountain. The Hubble telescope is finding higher mountains still. We had to get up there to look down with the eyes of Gaia (another useful myth), so that we could see how to mend our fragmentation, see that Earth self-regulates to keep everything in balance, as if we were allowed to get clever enough to get sad looking at mountains for Gaia to be able to see herself and think, bloody hell, isn’t that good. Be good now.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#776|77]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', vol. 1 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), ed. Chris Ealham, 10. For more information on the La Comedia Congress, see Casas, ''The History of the F.A.I'', 57–60; A. Smith, ''Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction'','' ''313–15</div>
+This sudden new knowing of deep connection is a new Copernican Revolution. It’s just that, as with the first Copernican Revolution, we do not quite know it yet, it is still filtering into us, we are in the process of many incremental viewpoint changes, so many and so quickly that we don’t have time to keep up. It will take decades for them to diffuse, but we are in the process of realising our new position and responsibilities as ''members'' rather than ''stewards''.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#786|78]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 8–9. The CNT’s commitment to achieving libertarian communism was reaffirmed at the 1924 Granollers Congress where 236 delegates voted in favor and only one against. See Christie, ''We, the Anarchists'','' ''25.</div>
+And this dawning comes right at our make-or-break moment. In 1870 the novelist Wilkie Collins predicted ‘the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that war shall mean annihilation and men’s fears will force them to keep the peace’; and in 1951, just as he prophesised, the hydrogen bomb was invented, 2,500 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed and is still in the process of destroying Hiroshima.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#796|79]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 120–23; Rudolf Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” trans. Cord-Christian Casper, Academia.edu website, https://www.academia.edu/39134774/Rudolf_Rocker_Syndicalist_Declaration_of_Principles. For an account of his imprisonment, see Rudolf Rocker, ''The London Years ''(Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005), 142–215.</div>
+The rocket technology that got us to the moon was originally created in mind of annihilation, and you can follow the creation of the atom bomb deductively to its logical and predictable conclusion, unravel unravel until you get to here, the singularity.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#806|80]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.</div>
+Millennial anxiety is anxiety about this annihilation aimed back at us in abstract, about things so far out of our control as to be seemingly self-perpetuating, is why we frantically mark time, time-capsulise. It is not an innate impulse but a situational one. What annihilation threatens is this web we have spent so long building and our means of transmigration and our sense of self. And Damon felt this anxiety and he gave up his identity because of it, by self-annihilation.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#816|81]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3.</div>
+The concept of nuclear deterrent is ''your castle cannot go on existing after ours is gone''. Nuclear is the power to wipe out a civilisation (including a future one), to blow up its centre, destroy its institutions, its means of preservation, its universities and its libraries, like Kaczynski wanted rid of. The threat is against our ideologies. In this way the colonisation of space and the veneer of ‘survival of the species’ mask the real agenda, ‘survival of the nation’. It is the threat of inexistence and the retaliation of blowing away the web of everything of the other (but now we know that to do so is to destroy small parts of ourselves too).
-[[#826|82]]. For an overview of the congress see Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 113–27; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''244–56, 313n13.
+I used to think it very strange that the Nepalis did not try to climb all the way to the top of Everest, even though they obviously had the skill to climb because Tenzing Norgay must have been a skilled mountaineer before Edmund Hillary showed up, and so must lots of other Sherpas. But when they looked up at Everest in awe they did not think ‘I am going to conquer that mountain’, they thought, ‘ah, Chomolungma, goddess mother of the world’, and respected it and felt awe for it but no inclination to go about debasing it. Like presuming that there can’t be intelligent life on other planets or they would have made themselves known to us by now. Maybe they are already observing us, but they do not feel any drive to make themselves known to us.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#836|83]]. Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 126, 306n52; Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 120–23, 224–26, 253.</div>
+Edmund Hillary the mountaineer climbed Everest because it was there. Astronaut Gene Cernan of Apollos 10 and 17, when asked why he thought we went to the moon, said ''because it’s there''. When Tenzing Norgay the Sherpa got to the top of Everest he got on his knees, buried some biscuits in offering and prayed to the goddess of the mountain for disturbing her. We should have gone to the moon like Tenzing Norgay.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#846|84]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''chapters 3–7. For overviews of the congresses of the Comintern and RILU, see ibid., 100–106, 132–45, 181–94.</div>
+Maybe this really is the point in the age where everything changes, a rewriting of myths, a sort of coming-of-age in the human narrative. Remember that everyone mocked Copernicus at first when he said that maybe Earth did not sit at the centre of the universe, hey, guys, maybe it does not all revolve around us. Which is what Lovelock and Margulis were saying too.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#856|85]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418, 416. This version of the text refers to “libertarian communism.” I have altered the translation because Rocker in fact used the term “free communism” in the 1922 declaration, the 1920 Berlin declaration, and the 1919 speech at the founding of the FAUD it was based on. This is significant because “libertarian” means anarchist, while “free communism” could potentially be supported by people who identified as syndicalists but not anarchists. See Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 321, 322; Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 2.</div>
+These ideas do not instantaneously propagate. They resonate only once a situation occurs that prompts their germination. They are little seeds we carry with us through life and which remain inert until the perfect conditions arise.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#866|86]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 416–17.</div>
+All these thoughts kept me busy for the hours and hours that I walked back. I had to stop to rest up and take off my shoes and let my blisters fill up so I could pop them. I fell asleep under a tree with my shoes off and slumped against it.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#876|87]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism (1922),” 418.</div>
+==== STRANGE MATTERS DARK MATTERS ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#886|88]]. Thorpe mistakenly claims that the Regional Workers’ Federation of Brazil affiliated. An organization with this name was founded in 1905 but changed its name to the Workers’ Federation of Rio de Janeiro after the founding of the Brazilian Workers’ Confederation (COB) in 1906. The COB ceased to exist in 1915. Some surviving regional federations of the COB went onto affiliate with the IWMA. Thanks to Maurício Knevitz for explaining this to me.</div>
+It is peaceful, with the forest humming from everything busily making the most of the time before the rains come again. The sky is milky with a benevolent cloud, and the eagles are capital-ising on the vantage before they can’t see again. They hang under the cloud like mobiles.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#896|89]]. Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'','' ''256–67; Thorpe, “The IWW and the Dilemmas of Internationalism” in ''Wobblies of the World'', 105–123.</div>
+I have spent an inordinate amount of time just looking. Standing at the open windows of the tower and looking out at all the stuff just gathered beneath me for contemplation. You can’t see a lot from the fire tower and a lot can’t see you, the trees grown tall around through its years of disuse. Before you might have seen it from all over. Only from the mountain could you see everything.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#906|90]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 104, 115. See also Thorpe, ''Workers Themselves'', 267.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0269-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#916|91]]. Ole Birk Laursen, “‘Anarchism, Pure and Simple’: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement,” ''Postcolonial Studies'' 23, no. 2 (2020): 1, 7.</div>
+But what I can see is still a lot. I can see the ocean of trees and I can see on and on to its edge. Boreal forest, the world’s lungs. Sometimes in the morning a mist hangs over like smudged chalk and it strikes you vividly that this is it breathing. Like the vapour you exhale on a cold day but a whole atmosphere respired. I drink it in deeply through my nostrils, all the newest oxygen all for me. I can see the river winding through to meet the tundra, or just about, I see it glinting in slithers. Over the millennia of that river’s course it will have snaked side to side, the trees clambering up or falling with the soil torn from under their feet. And the trees growing, dying, falling, rotting, each to feed another in its place.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#926|92]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 464.</div>
+And inside the forest the light spills green through the leaves as if through coloured film so that the light is green on my arms and on my face. The smell of spruce, and the spruce needles making the floor spongy like a play mat, dry and comfortable so that you can lie down on it to breathe it all in stronger.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#936|93]]. Luigi Fabbri, “About a Project of Anarchist Organization,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/about-a-project-for-anarchist-organization-luigi-fabbri.</div>
+I just listen. Can you hear the sound of the forest breathing? Underneath the ground is the forest’s brain. Can you hear it thinking, ticking away? Tiny threads of mycelium one cell thick branch out like neurons and link up to form a living network underneath the forest, miles long. The mycelium connects to trees’ roots, giving them a larger surface area and a higher absorption of nutrients and minerals, then breaks down with enzymes it excretes and reabsorbs from the soil, and in return the trees give it metabolised carbohydrates, the fruits of photosynthesis.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#946|94]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828.</div>
+The tendrils of the mycelium are synapses and through them information travels. The mycelium is thinking and what it is thinking about is the health of the life around it. It is conscious and responsive to changes in its environment. It is planning for the long-term health of its environment.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#956|95]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 151. For biographical information on Fernández, see ibid., 314n37. The phrase “anarcho-syndicalism” appears to have only become popular in Spain in the late 1920s. See Frank Mintz, ''Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013), 286; Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 64.</div>
+Mycelium has inherited Earth several times over. It always surges after mass extinctions because it can metabolise and recycle the debris. It makes life-sustaining soil out of this debris, and so lays the ground for other life to follow, initiating the ecosystems that will diversify its food chain. Is it self-interested or is it just lonely? You can’t really say. Loneliness is a kind of self-interest anyway.
-[[#966|96]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 150–53.
+Mycelium is a half-being, an in-between shape-shifter. It looks like a plant but it breathes out carbon dioxide. It comes from the kingdom ''Eukarya'', from which we branched hundreds of millions of years ago. Mycelia are more animal than plant really. But they bridge the kingdoms like diplomatic interpreters. They translate between organisms and their environments.
-[[#976|97]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'', 152.
+And mycelium is a shaman, a seer into the spirit world, or into death. It turns the inorganic into organic, can dismantle chains that otherwise tangle, smoothing the mess that might upset its system by processing pollutants and radiation. There are no clear polarities for mycelium, no life or death, no organic or non-organic, but inextricable interconnectedness. It is the dark matter of the organic world.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#986|98]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
+Everything we know and can see is called baryonic matter and this is made up of the atom. Dark matter does not emit or absorb light but we have to assume it exists until the Large Hadron Collider tells us so for sure because there is something that we can’t see exerting gravity on baryonic matter. We can’t ever see it, this strange dark thing, but computer simulations of what it might look like if visible show it as a web that interweaves with baryonic matter like a connective tissue between the infinite everything. Literally everything in this tangled web like sliding spaghetti. I am a strand being pulled through other strands of spaghetti, only the spaghetti is not a strand, it is an infinitely long tangle, a snake swallowing itself. The very fabric of being denies solitude!
-[[#996|99]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 54.
+The web-like pattern of dark matter is an archetype found anywhere information is organised. It is the same shape you see in diagrams of mycelium, neurons, of the internet and the universe. So is mycelium a kind of brain and is the universe conscious? All of the above are governed by the laws of physics, and this pattern recurs simply because it is the optimum way to organise and share information.
-[[#1006|100]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60.
+Mushrooms are the fruits of the network under the forest; the mycelium is the root system to colonies of mushrooms. Mushrooms at Fukushima are growing out of the contaminated forest. They are hyper-accumulating the radioactive waste out of the soil. They can be picked, burned, and the ash can be put into glass. And then the radiation is only as difficult to dispose of as all the other nuclear waste we have bottled up. Perhaps the universe wants to help us to help ourselves. Perhaps it leaves us clues. The particular shape of the cloud from a nuclear blast is a dome on a column. A mushroom.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1016|101]]. Rocker, ''Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism'' (London: Freedom Press, 1988), 5–6, 25, 31.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0271-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1026|102]]. Rocker, “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,” 3–4; IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,''” ''416–18; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 54.Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism</div>
+And so Sylvia Plath was being especially clever when she chose mushrooms as her vehicle for inheriting the earth. Mushrooms offer the chance of renewal. And the wilderness can always be renewed if we only stop sending Voyagers into it. The wilderness can be given back to itself. New Zealand has given the legal status of personhood to Te Urewera National Park and the Whanganui river and its tributaries, which means they now have all of the rights and autonomy that a person does and cannot be exploited and are not owned.
-== {{anchor|Chapter9TheTheoryandPracti}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook12}} {{anchor|Chapter9TheTheoryandPracti1}} Chapter 9: The Theory and Practice of Syndicalist Anarchism ==
+As I lie on the forest floor, an ant or some small fast thing runs across my face and onto my lip and it tickles but I do not want to brush it off in case it gets crushed. I let it carry on making a planet of my face, running all directions, acknowledging its contours and using the information to paint itself a picture of my terrain, like the rover on Mars, like me here in Denali.
-All forms of syndicalist anarchism argued that workers should form federally structured trade unions that engaged in direct action and were independent of political parties. It was believed that, in order to achieve working-class self-emancipation, these syndicalist trade unions had to pursue the ''double aim'' of winning immediate improvements in the present, and overthrowing capitalism and the state via a social revolution in the long term. These unions also had a ''dual function''. Under present conditions, they performed the function of engaging in class struggle against the ruling classes. During the social revolution, they would expropriate the means of production from the ruling classes and take over the organization of the economy in part or whole. In so doing, they would acquire the new function of being the organs through which the self-management of production and distribution occurred. This social revolution could be initiated by workers launching an insurrectionary general strike.
+=== {{anchor|Topofch06html}} HOW TO SAY GOODBYE ===
-'''The Double Aim of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions'''
+==== SOLASTALGIA ====
-Syndicalist anarchists held that trade union activity should have two main goals. These were: (a) defending and advancing the interests of the working classes within existing society and (b) preparing for and ultimately carrying out a social revolution that abolishes capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#1RudolfRockerAnarchoSyndic|1]] For Pouget, “trade union endeavor has a double aim: with tireless persistence, it must pursue betterment of the working class’s current conditions. But, without letting themselves become obsessed with this passing concern, the workers should take care to make possible and imminent the essential act of comprehensive emancipation: the expropriation of capital.”[[#2PougetWhatistheTradeUn|2]]
+So really why am I out here and what am I looking for? I am looking for something that is lost and kept from me but I do not quite know what it is. When I find it I know it will be broken and that I need to fix it but I don’t know how to do that either. What I want right now is to be able to go back in time and talk to a younger lost me and tell her some things that I ''have'' found out.
-Syndicalist anarchism, therefore, like mass anarchism in general, sought to win immediate reforms in the interests of the working classes—such as shorter working hours, better pay, and improved conditions—force the ruling classes to actually implement previously won reforms, and protect these previously won reforms from encroachment by the ruling classes. Crucially, syndicalist anarchists held that reforms had to be achieved, enforced, and protected through the direct action of the working classes. Even reforms that involved changes to the law had to be achieved “through outside pressure brought to bear upon the authorities and not by trying to return specially mandated deputies to Parliament.”[[#3PougetWhatistheTradeUn|3]]
+You are sixteen years old and you are confused and lost and numb. You do not know your body or yourself and you mediate them through a little pill that you think is doing you good, reshaping you to fit in a world that will not otherwise accommodate you. You are told at the same time that it is yours now finally; you are lucky to be a modern woman. But it feels otherwise.
-This strategy generally, but not always, involved a rejection of the iron law of wages, which held that under capitalism real wages would always tend toward the amount required to secure the subsistence of the worker due to either population growth decreasing the value of labor, or higher wages being neutralized by increased costs of living. Pouget labeled it as “illusory” and “false,” because it was empirically untrue, and ignored the fact that increased living costs were themselves a product of class struggle, such as those between landlords and tenants.[[#4EmilePougetDirectAction|4]] Malatesta argued against the iron law of wages on the grounds that between the minimum limit of a worker being paid enough to survive and the maximum limit of a capitalist earning some profit, “wages, hours and other conditions of employment are the result of the struggle between bosses and workers” and so could be changed through collective action.[[#5ErricoMalatestaTowardsAna|5]]
+How do you feel about the place you call home? Crumbled industrial spaces, shiny new mega-stores, rivers yellow at the lips like disease with Coke-can flotsam, no space to be alone so that you can even know what it is to be together. You feel about it like you feel about your body, as though forces from outside are keeping you apart from it. You are helpless to possess it and you don’t understand that others have no right to. What is this homesickness?
-Pouget and Malatesta’s position was not shared by all syndicalist anarchists. Pelloutier, for example, opposed partial strikes; he subscribed to the iron law of wages while still being a syndicalist, because he advocated revolutionary trade unionism as the means to overthrow class society.[[#6JeremyJenningsSyndicalism|6]] Others held that, although any increase in wages would be canceled out by increases in the cost of living, partial strikes were nonetheless important and should be encouraged due to their transformative effect on workers. A 1900 article by Delesalle’s for ''Les Temps Nouveaux'' argued that, while any increase in wages would only be temporary due to the iron law, a strike would still promote “a state of rebellion,” develop class consciousness, and “could be the spark that heralds the revolution.”[[#7PaulDelesalleTheStrike|7]]
+Every time you switch on the news you are overwhelmed by the weight of the bad in the world. You cry because you feel so helpless about it. A whole aboriginal community is put on antidepressants because they are suffering from PTSD. They are suffering from PTSD because there was an oil spill off the coast of British Columbia and the oil washed up and it killed everything that was beautiful in their home. You think this is the saddest thing in the world. How big is home? How atomised? How atomised are you?
-The main forms of direct action that syndicalist anarchists advocated to achieve reforms were strikes, boycotts, and sabotage. By sabotage, syndicalist anarchists meant “workers putting every possible obstacle in the way of the ordinary modes of work.”[[#8RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|8]] This included such tactics as working slowly, strictly following legislation or contracts in order to reduce productivity and, at its most militant, damaging machinery or infrastructure so that strike breakers could not continue production.
+It makes sense that you are a little psychotic and sad. You have got raging hormones and fake ones too and you are living in a shattered world. If your body is not yours to put in the wilderness, then without choice you can only ever feel lonely; unhomely; displaced. And you have been trained, socialised into mega-empathy like a dolphin is. That is not to say you feel it more because you are closer to it by virtue of some innate characteristic. But you feel it a little when a whole forest on the other side of the world is felled, or when another animal becomes extinct, because you see a shard of your lost self in it.
-This strategy of struggling for reforms through militant tactics was put into practice on multiple occasions by syndicalist trade unions. In 1904 the CGT agreed at its congress in Bourges to campaign for the eight-hour day, which workers had unsuccessfully been petitioning for since 1889. Instead of begging the state to grant this reform, the CGT, following Pouget’s suggestion, decided that they should try to force the ruling classes to give in to their demands by engaging in direct action: workers were to either cease work after eight hours, or go on strike until their demands were met. The CGT selected May 1, 1906, as the day of action and proceeded to prepare for the coming struggle over the next two years. This included holding union meetings and distributing posters with revolutionary messages in order to persuade workers to participate in the movement. How much energy was devoted by the CGT to this campaign can be seen in the fact that during December 1905 alone ten famous syndicalist militants organized conferences in eighty cities.
+To know yourself you need to know what you are not the same as, but there are shards of you everywhere. According to Greenlandic Inuits, you have many souls. As many as seven. The souls are tiny people scattered through your body. The tiny people are shards of bigger people that can be found in pieces, in places outside of you.
-The French state unsurprisingly responded to the campaign with repression. On the eve of the strike, key delegates, including Griffuelhes, Pouget, Alphonse Merrheim (secretary of the Federation of Metalworkers), and Gaston Lévy (the CGT treasurer), were arrested and jailed for a few days, after the minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau, claimed to have discovered a nonexistent plot by syndicalists, anarchists, monarchists, and right-wing Catholics to overthrow the Republic. Clemenceau, in addition to this, moved 60,000 soldiers into Paris. Despite this state violence, the strike went ahead and on May 1, 1906, the CGT publicly demanded that the French state reduce the legal working day to eight hours. The next day, the CGT launched a national general strike. The general strike was composed of 295 separate strikes at 12,585 businesses, which demanded a reduction to the workday. A total of roughly 200,000 workers participated in this direct action. Some of the strikes lasted over a hundred days. Only 10,177 workers out of 202,507 succeeded in forcing a capitalist to grant them any reduction to the workday. Despite this, the general strike was not a total defeat. On July 13, 1906, France’s political ruling class responded to the pressure from below by passing a law granting workers a mandatory day off work once per week. Although the CGT continued to campaign for the eight-hour day over the following years, it was not granted to the French working classes until April 1919—as part of the French government’s successful attempt to prevent anything like the ongoing Russian revolution from happening in France.[[#9RidleyRevolutionarySyndica|9]]
+You are made up of webs of relation which are always in the process of reconfiguration, but it is when you tear away too quickly and too much that you uproot, like a plant can be transplanted if you are gentle and slow but if you rip it up and put it in a place that is hostile, it withers. Like the taking away of identity cards or the sticking of a little aboriginal girl into foster care or the extinction of animals; it is then that there is homesickness and there are fewer shards of a lost self to be found.
-The CGT was not unique in attempting to wrestle reforms from the ruling classes through direct action. In February 1919, the CNT’s Catalan Regional Confederation (CRT) organized a strike at the Barcelona offices of the Anglo-American electricity company Ebro Power and Irrigation. This action was launched by the CNT, in response to the company firing workers for attempting to form a union.[[#10Thefollowingaccountofthe|10]] When the company refused to give in to the workers’ demands for higher wages and the reinstatement of all the workers who had been fired, the CNT escalated the struggle and organized a strike at the company’s electricity generating plant. This resulted in Barcelona being plunged into darkness, and trams being stranded in the street unable to move. The strike soon grew to include most of the city’s gas, water, and electricity workers when, on February 26, they voted to strike in retaliation to the Spanish state sending in the military to restore the power supply. They were subsequently joined by solidarity strikes outside of Barcelona, in Sabadell, Vilafranca, and Badalona.
+Likewise as part of the web you can feel its reverberations, and you can feel how everything you do too warps the fabric in some small way. You have to be aware of these reverberations. You have to be aware of the placement of your body, your specific viewpoint, your Observer Effect. To begin healing is to realise this and to make amends and to remember.
-On March 8, the Spanish state responded to the growing strike movement by militarizing the gas, water, and electricity workers who were army reservists subject to military law. The workers were then given the choice between breaking the strike by returning to work or being confined to the barracks as punishment. This state violence did not dampen the strike, which expanded to include tram workers and carters who transported essential supplies such as coal. They, like the gas, water, and electricity workers before them, were soon militarized as well. Almost none of these militarized workers betrayed their class interests by returning to work and, in response, the Spanish state imprisoned 800 of them in the fortress of Montjuïc, in Barcelona. These workers were supported in their struggle by the printers’ union, which refused to publish any of the Spanish state’s proclamations calling up workers for military service or articles in the press opposed to the strike. This even included an announcement by the managers of Ebro Power and Irrigation that declared that workers who did not return to their job by March 6 would be fired. Workers who wanted to learn about the strike could instead read the CNT’s daily ''Solidaridad Obrera'', which published articles informing readers of the latest news.
+Sam said you should not just go off in search of something better for yourself. He said water protectors are living in a camp at Standing Rock where they want to stop an oil pipe being built through sacred land. And they must feel the most hopeless feeling of the panic of loss, but they will not just take themselves off alone somewhere quieter to be in peace and converse with their ego. They will stay and try to resist what is a corruption to the very core of their being, even if their resistance can only end in failure. ''Sam, I am so sorry I did not see it.''
-Throughout the strike, the CNT sought to win its demands by mobilizing large groups of workers in order to impose unbearable pressure on the company and the state via direct action. This included workers implementing syndicalist tactics by sabotaging the transformers and power cables used by the company to try and restore power to the city, and thereby break the strike. By early March, the CNT’s strike committee were, as a result of this working-class militancy, in a position where they could negotiate with the ruling classes. They successfully forced Ebro Power and Irrigation to increase wages, pay workers’ wages for the period they had been on strike, recognize the union, grant an eight-hour day, and reinstate workers who had lost their jobs due to participation in the strike. The CNT not only issued demands to the economic ruling class, but also demanded that the Spanish state release all prisoners who had been arrested for engaging in class struggle. If the state did not do so in seventy-two hours, the CNT threatened to relaunch the strike.
+And how it must have seemed to him, my project of staking a claim to solitude and autonomy, trying to emulate the Mountain Men while at the same time there are other women being violently reminded of their lack of even more. It is all a game to you, he must have thought. I saw his resentment as a man-shackle, a reminder of myself as a dragged-around woman, and thought I was casting this off by ignoring him. I have been emulating and my whole journey has been compliance. I can Buck as well as any man, but now I understand it better, why would I want to be like them, the Mountain Men?
-In response to the general strike, the Spanish prime minster, Álvaro de Figueroa, attempted to soothe the working classes by decreeing the eight-hour day in the construction industry on March 11, which was later expanded to include all industries on April 3. The CNT had previously agreed to struggle for the eight-hour day at its founding 1910 congress. They achieved this goal in nine years through direct action alone.[[#11Itshouldbekeptinmindth|11]] Despite this great victory, the CNT decided to launch another general strike on March 24 (the resolution was passed by one vote) in response to the electricity, gas, and water companies not allowing all the strikers to return to work immediately, and the Spanish state refusing to free a number of workers imprisoned in Montjuïc—including the CNT’s general secretary Manuel Buenacasa. This time, the Spanish state was ready, and retaliated swiftly to the general strike by imposing martial law, closing all CNT union headquarters, arresting key anarchist militants, and censoring the press. Following this wave of state repression, the CNT was forced to call for a return to work on April 7, 1919.
+So this morning I have to say goodbye to the tower and the ghosts of P Harris and Johnston Wills and the wolves, leaving the spider to its flies, taking the little wooden boat from the side of the ship used for getting to the island back to the main ship again.
-Both the CGT’s campaign for the eight-hour day and the CNT’s strike against Ebro Power and Irrigation illustrate the general tendency for syndicalist trade unions to focus on struggling for reforms through organizing workers at the point of production. In response to this tendency, there were multiple attempts in both theory and practice to expand the scope of syndicalist action from the workplace to the wider community. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Joan Peiró argued that the CNT had focused too much on strikes in workplaces, and should establish district committees that organized collective action around any issue facing the working classes, thereby fostering direct action on a mass scale.[[#12NickRiderThePracticeof|12]] This same conclusion was reached in a January 1931 article for the CNT’s ''Solidaridad Obrera''. It claimed that syndicalists had focused too much on mitigating “the exploitation of the producers,” and in so doing had “almost entirely forgotten to combat exploitation in the field of consumption,” such as landlords charging extortionate rent.[[#13QuotedinRiderTheBarcel|13]] Organizing against these other forms of exploitation was not only important in and of itself, but also provided an opportunity to radicalize people who might be indifferent to labor struggles, or even oppose union demands when they suffer the negative consequences of prolonged industrial action.
+And probably I will never come back here. And probably nobody will for a long time. I am pulling myself back from deep space and into orbit, feeling sad and happy like the moonwalkers.
-Such community-based direct action was organized by the CNT itself during the Barcelona rent strike of July 1931.[[#14Thefollowingaccountisbas|14]] The strike grew out of previous rent strikes that had been independently organized by workers in October 1930. This movement then gained the support of the Economic Defense Commission, which had been created by the CNT’s Construction Workers’ Union on April 12, 1931, in order to study the living expenses of workers and examine ways they could be reduced. The Construction Union’s concern with these topics stemmed from the fact that 12,000 of its 30,000 membership were unemployed. On May 1, the commission presented its first demand to a large CNT meeting: a 40 percent reduction in rent. This demand, alongside proposals for combating unemployment and high food prices, was then announced to the wider public through a series of articles in ''Solidaridad Obrera'' that appeared over May 12, 13, and 15. At the end of June and the beginning of July, the commission held a series of meetings in working-class areas of Barcelona and nearby towns, where workers, a significant number of whom were women, were informed of the campaign and heard speeches attacking landlords as thieves.
+I have slept all those nights alone and far away, and I have proved to myself that I can be the kind of person who does those things and there is nothing in my biology stopping me. The documentary as proof never mattered. Maybe that is all but it feels enough, to know that if I wanted to I could be the kind of person who can handle it, that my character is strong enough to endure itself alone as a Mountain Man.
-These meetings were followed by a mass rally on July 5, where the following three demands were agreed upon: (a) that the extra month’s rent demanded by landlords from new tenants as security should be taken as normal rent such that new tenants had to pay no more during the month of July; (b) that rent should be reduced by 40 percent; and (c) that unemployed people should not have to pay any rent. If landlords refused to reduce the rent, workers would respond by announcing that they were going on rent strike as part of a wider movement, and pay nothing.
+Even if at first it was terrifying and I thought maybe I could not do it and my nerves were so wound up that I had to act to myself, act to the part of me that was shit scared and lonely and in a continual feeling of fight or flight.
-The rent strike rapidly grew after its launch and expanded from 45,000 workers in July to over 100,000 in August. The ruling classes responded in late July by banning public meetings of the Economic Defense Commission and evicting workers with the assistance of the police. The tenants organized protests to prevent evictions, reoccupying houses after the eviction had taken place, moving evicted workers to the homes of other CNT members, and marching on the homes of landlords in order to warn them not to reevict tenants. One eviction in early October was prevented by a crowd of pregnant women and children, whom the police officer in charge decided not to attack. Other women protesting evictions were less fortunate, such as those who were charged by eighty police officers on October 21. The rent strike was eventually defeated between November and December, as a result of the state arresting any worker who resisted evictions or returned to their home after eviction. Despite this, it did succeed in bringing many workers into the anarchist movement, and thereby laid the foundation for future mobilizations. The rent strike even continued in some areas, such as in the La Torrassa neighborhood; rent strikers at the end of 1932 attacked the police, seized some of their weapons and attempted to burn down the local office of the chamber of urban property, which was the main landlord association in Barcelona, and had actively encouraged repression of the rent strike.
+But the fight half-fought and in the end it overcame and it won. And this is the hugeness of my small voyage. Something has been stretched in me that makes the general elastic of my life more malleable and I will be able to always feel and notice this new plasticity.
-One of the main driving forces behind attempts to expand the scope of syndicalist action beyond the workplace were women within trade unions struggling simultaneously against both class and gender oppression. This can be seen in the FAUD’s Syndicalist Women’s Union (SFB), which was created by and for women in 1920. One of the cofounders of the group was the Ukrainian Jewish anarchist Milly Witkop-Rocker, whose romantic partner was Rudolf Rocker. In 1922 Witkop-Rocker argued in her pamphlet ''What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?'' that “the organization of women on the basis of anarcho-syndicalism is as necessary as the organization of male workers on the same basis. . . . Wherever there is a syndicalist organization, an attempt must be made to create one of women, so that the sections of the syndicalist women’s federation will cover the whole country like a net.”[[#15MillyWitkopRockerWhatD|15]] The main goal of the syndicalist women’s federation was to persuade women to participate in the union, especially those who were full-time housewives not employed as wage laborers, and to develop their consciousness such that they became anarchists. To this end Witkop-Rocker advocated the formation of women’s-only groups that organized a range of activities. This included mutual aid, artistic pursuits, cooking, and educational clubs equipped with libraries, “where the comrades can meet anytime to read or to speak on important issues, and where they can bring their children, if necessary.”[[#16MillyWitkopRockerWhatD|16]] This would have the consequence that women, who were often isolated from one another within their respective homes, would be brought closer together, establish bonds of solidarity with one another, and, through their participation in the union, develop a spirit of independence and personal initiative that they did not have before due to their patriarchal socialization. It was important to organize housewives not only to further the emancipation of women, but also because they could support strikes by boycotting a particular company.
+Thoreau decided that as important as it was to be alone in his cabin he still did not want or need to do it for ever. No matter how Walden reads he still went back to Concord. Chris McCandless decided this too if his diary is anything to go by; he just died accidentally before he could do anything about it.
-Witkop-Rocker realized that, in order for women to be able to participate effectively in the workers’ movement, they first had to be emancipated from the crushing toil of housework, giving birth to large numbers of children, and looking after said children. One of the main ways the FAUD and the SFB attempted to contribute toward this emancipation was by organizing around what would today be called reproductive justice. They not only demanded the abolition of laws that criminalized advocating contraception and prohibited abortion, but also held meetings on the “childbearing strike,” educated women about birth control, distributed contraceptives, and either performed illegal abortions or put women in contact with physicians who would. Syndicalist anarchists in Germany did this through participating in, and often becoming prominent members of, public organizations that were neither explicitly anarchist nor syndicalist. This included such organizations as the Reich Association of Birth Control and Sexual Hygiene and the Working Committee of the Free Sexual Reformers Association. A few syndicalist anarchists paid heavily for their actions. For example, the FAUD member Albrecht was sentenced to three years of imprisonment in 1930 because she performed more than a hundred abortions for the local chapter of the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Hygiene.[[#17DieterNellesAnarchosyndi|17]]
+==== THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL ====
-Syndicalist anarchists were clearly committed in both theory and practice to achieving, enforcing, and protecting reforms through direct action within both the workplace and the wider community. In line with mass anarchist theory, they did not view the struggle for reforms as an end in and of itself. For Pouget, winning reforms, “far from constituting a goal, can only be considered as a means of stepping up demands and wresting further improvements from capitalism.”[[#18PougetWhatistheTradeU|18]] Goldman similarly believed that, although syndicalist anarchism struggles for “immediate gains” and “wrests from the enemy what it can force him to yield,” it ultimately “aims at, and concentrates its energies upon, the complete overthrow of the wage system.”[[#19EmmaGoldmanRedEmmaSpeak|19]]
+When I got back to the cabin I crawled into the cot and slept for a whole day. I was so tired I felt like I might never be able to move again, but eventually hunger got me up, I made some rice with salt and ate it and then slept for some hours more. When I woke up I decided what was to be done with my time capsule.
-Instead of viewing reform and revolution as inherently opposed to one another, syndicalist anarchists viewed struggling for reforms as an evolutionary moment within a process of social change that would eventually culminate in a revolutionary moment. This was because organizing to win immediate improvements under capitalism was the concrete means to generate a mass social movement that was capable of, and driven to, launch a social revolution. Pouget argued that, in order to create an anarchist society, “preparatory work must have drawn together within existing society those elements whose role it will be to make it happen” through “day to day struggles against the current master of production” that undermined the legitimacy and power of capitalists and gradually escalated and intensified to the point where the working classes had developed sufficient “strength and consciousness” to forcefully expropriate the capitalist class.[[#20PougetDirectAction6|20]] For Pouget, “whenever one analyzes the methods and value of trade union action, the fine distinction between ‘reformist’ and ‘revolutionary’ evaporates,” because, when syndicalist trade unions struggle for either, they use the same method: the direct action of the working classes.[[#21PougetWhatistheTradeU|21]] Reforms like wage increases are “a reduction in capitalist privileges” and a form of “partial expropriation.”[[#22PougetWhatistheTradeU|22]] They are, therefore, a step toward and component of the social transformation that the social revolution will fully bring about.
+I gathered together Damon’s things neatly and reparcelled them in the tarp, then I put them back beneath the floorboards and left them exactly as I found them. And I hope hard that no one else ever finds them and that, if they do, they believe they are the only person to have found them, and that they are a woman (or Eskimo) too, because everyone knows girls are well versed at keeping secrets.
-'''The Dual Function of Syndicalist Anarchist Unions'''
+I laid everything out on the floor and sat cross-legged looking over it: the camera, my diary, the laptop, my notes. The collection felt like a snowshoe hare without a soul inside, an empty vessel. Now that I can’t use it for what it was for, what I wanted it to be, a feminist Golden Record, because there can be no such thing.
-Syndicalist anarchists were, like anarchists in general, committed to the unity of means and ends. The application of this theory led them to conclude that, in order to successfully overthrow capitalism and the state, trade unions had to be structured in a manner that prefigured the kinds of large-scale organizations that would exist after the social revolution. As the Russian anarchist Gregori Maximoff wrote in 1927, trade unions “must be built on principles which will serve in the future, i.e. on liberty—the autonomy of individuals and organizations—and on equality.”[[#23GregoriPMaximoffProgram|23]] In order to instantiate these values, trade unions had to be organized through a system of federalism that practiced, to quote Rocker, “free combination from below upward, putting the right of self-determination of every member above everything else and recognizing only the organic agreement of all on the basis of like interests and common convictions.”[[#24RockerAnarchoSyndicalism1|24]]
+And then one of those last days I walked out onto the tundra in the evening when the sun was unusually orange like an extremely orange egg yolk, the kind of orange yolk that you know is full of goodness, and it spilt across the tundra making everything yolky and big. And on the tundra right behind the cabin, as if I had felt them and the inclination to go outside came to me because of this, there was an entire herd of reindeer just stood about together, munching on tundra grass and being reindeer.
-Syndicalist anarchists thought that, in constructing and expanding trade unions that prefigured the future anarchist society, they were literally, in the famous words of the preamble to the 1908 IWW constitution, “forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.”[[#25IWWThePreambletotheCo|25]] They held that the trade union had, in addition to its double aim, a dual function. Under capitalism, it performed the function of bringing the working classes together in order to resist the power of the ruling classes through their own direct action. During the social revolution, the trade union would take on a new function by forcefully expropriating the means of production from the ruling classes and establishing federations of workers’ assemblies organized by trade and geographic region. This would be achieved by converting the federations and local sections of the trade union from organizations of economic resistance into organizations of economic administration that self-managed the emerging anarchist economy.[[#26Thereareimportantexceptio|26]]
+And in that moment it occurred to me that my reindeer did not die because it was not my reindeer at all. It had always been this herd; it had been one after another crossing my path, the scouts to the herd, the forerunners preceding the main migration.
-The idea that trade unions should perform the dual function of resisting dominant institutions in the present, and taking over and organizing the economy in the future, was not invented by syndicalist anarchists during the 1890s and 1900s. It was, as I showed in chapter 8, first advocated during debates within the First International. It continued to be advocated by anarchists years after the congresses of the First International. In 1887, Lucy Parsons, who would later attend the founding convention of the IWW in 1905, claimed that trade unions built under capitalism were the “embryonic groups of the ideal anarchistic society.”[[#27QuotedinAlbertParsonsAn|27]] In 1927, Maximoff wrote that “the revolutionary trade union, in the view of the Anarchists, are not only organs of the struggle against the contemporary structure; they are also the cells of the future society.”[[#28MaximoffProgramofAnarcho|28]]
+And I thought to myself, ''that'' is the point of reindeer, ''that'' is what she meant by my reindeer telling me my future. My reindeer tells me that I cannot follow it; it is the proprioception I need to know myself. Thoreau again: ‘We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.’
-Although syndicalist anarchists thought that trade unions should be the organization through which workers took control of and reorganized the economy, they were not generally committed to the view that trade unions should be the only organs of self-management during and after the social revolution. In 1909, in their fictional account of a successful syndicalist revolution Pouget and Émile Pataud claimed that, in addition to trade unions, village assemblies in the countryside, and community assemblies in urban areas at the level of street, district, and city would be formed. These community assemblies could be attended by anyone, regardless of their occupation, and so brought people together as “inhabitants, and not as producers.”[[#29EmilePataudandEmilePouge|29]] Meetings “concerned themselves with measures of hygiene and health . . . [and] took part in the administration of the City. They undertook the work of the moral administration of house property, now proclaimed collective property, and, as a matter of course, placed at the free disposition of all.”[[#30PataudandEmilePougetHow|30]] This view was shared by Besnard, who explained in his address to the IWMA in 1937, that “this notion does not at all imply that anarcho-syndicalism—which is, remember, against the State and federalist—means and aims to be ''everything'' and that ''nothing else ''should exist alongside it.”[[#31PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|31]] It instead aims for self-management in every sphere of life, rather than just the workplace, and as a result, advocates a federation of regional, national, and international communes in parallel to the federation of trade unions.[[#32BesnardAnarchoSyndicalism|32]]
+The reindeer tells me that my future is the linear continuity of whatever I build it from because I build and then preserve my own history. It is never complete or completely true but I have to hold on to things that relate to an idea of myself and what I am doing; my cloud castle. It is important to have a story. And this, my history, can be encapsulated in my time capsule. There is pushing a time capsule into the stratosphere and there is the utter negation of symbols, annihilating completely. Somewhere in between I know there is something meaningful. It is what I do with the time capsule, its intent, and not the time capsule itself, that matters.
-The CNT also advocated communes alongside trade unions. The Spanish syndicalist anarchist Isaac Puente argued in his pamphlet ''Libertarian Communism'' in 1932 that “life in the future will be organized” through two currently existing institutions: “the free union,” which unites workers on the basis of their labor, and “the free municipality,” which “is the assembly of the workers in a very small locality, village or hamlet” united on the basis of their location.[[#33IsaacPuenteLibertarianCo|33]] These ideas went onto inspire the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress resolutions. They proposed that during the social revolution workers should establish both federations of producers’ associations, which would self-manage the workplace, and “libertarian communes” in each locality, which would organize such things as housing, education, and the “beautification of the settlement” and federate together to form the “Confederation of Autonomous Libertarian Communes.”[[#34QuotedinJosePeiratsThe|34]]
+===== Do you know the difference between a caribou and a reindeer? =====
-It is also a mistake to view syndicalist trade unions themselves as being purely workplace organizations. The district committees of the CNT were located in union centers within working-class neighborhoods. They were social spaces that established bonds of mutual support between workers from different workplaces, migrants new to the area, and unemployed workers. In so doing, they spread anarchist theory and practice to workers in varied circumstances, on the basis of their shared belonging to a local community. The ability of the CNT to mobilize large groups of workers during waves of direct action was not based exclusively on union sections in specific workplaces or industries. It also stemmed from the influence that anarchist militants had in face-to-face conversations with their neighbors, friends, and family in homes, cafés, and the streets. Nor did workers in the CNT limit themselves to workplace organizing. They also organized tenants unions and, despite patriarchal opposition from within the union, women’s groups such as Mujeres Libres. This went alongside the construction of numerous forms of associational life, including affinity groups, schools, neighborhood educational and cultural centers called ateneos, theater clubs, hiking clubs, and more. In 1932, youth groups that had emerged from ateneos in Granada, Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia formed the Iberian Federation of Libertarian Youth. The CNT’s construction of prefigurative organizations therefore occurred both within the workplace and the community.[[#35MarthaAckelsbergFreeWome|35]]
+===== No, I do not. =====
-Syndicalist anarchists, like anarchists in general, advocated prefigurative organizations because it was only through participating in such organizations that the working classes would develop the radical capacities, drives, and consciousness necessary both for struggling effectively against existing dominant institutions and producing and reproducing the future anarchist society. It was thought that workers would learn how to self-manage the economy through their experience of self-managing a trade union, which, like the economy of the future, was structured in a horizontal and federalist manner, made decisions within general assemblies in which everyone had a vote, and coordinated action on a large scale through a system of delegates. Rocker thought that trade unions should function as both “the fighting organization of the workers against the employers” and “the school for the intellectual training of the workers to make them acquainted with the technical management of production and economic life in general so that when a revolutionary situation arises they will be capable of taking the socio-economic organism into their own hands and remaking it according to Socialist principles.”[[#36RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|36]]
+===== A caribou is larger and more slender and part of a wild herd. A reindeer is semi-wild but it has been domesticated. They are the same species. Reindeer were domesticated in Eurasia over 2000 years ago, then brought to Alaska by colonisers as food, in 1892, as part of the Reindeer Project, created to replace whale meat in the diet of indigenous peoples. The colonisers thought that the geography of the land would prevent the domesticated reindeer leaving to join the caribou herds. In 1997, all of the reindeer joined the Western Artic Caribou Herd and disappeared. =====
-Syndicalist anarchists thought it was very important to provide such technical education to the working classes, because of their commitment to grounding their revolutionary strategy in an understanding of what the world was really like. In Baginski’s words,
+===== How tenacious. =====
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the economic power to rule and lead production does not fall in the workers’ laps (in quiet submission to the fate of economic development) without their active engagement; no, they must gain it themselves by fighting with endurance and strength. Workers dream themselves too easily into the idea that one day the “social revolution” will descend to earth like a supernatural godhead in order to heal all wounds and dry all tears in one swoop. Oh no! The sun, which as it set today looked down on shackled slaves, will not as it rises tomorrow behold free people. Workers must educate themselves through their own strength to become thinking and acting people. They have to educate and prepare themselves for the great profession of administration and leadership in production.[[#37MaxBaginskiWhatDoesSynd|37]]</div>
+===== Some may have already spread via Inuit tribes who share a cultural history with tribes of Eurasia, over in Siberia. =====
-Syndicalist anarchists faced two major problems when trying to implement this theory. First, in order for individual workers to be transformed through their participation within the trade union, they had to be members of the trade union for an extended period of time. A significant number of workers would often join trade unions due to their immediate economic interests, such as a strike, but would leave them once the situation ended. This was especially the case for temporary workers who lacked a permanent employer. As a result of this and other factors, such as workers deciding to join larger reformist trade unions, syndicalist trade unions had a high membership turnover. The SAC, for example, was founded in 1910 and by 1935 had 36,000 members. During this twenty-five year period, a total of 250,000 workers had at one time been registered members of the trade union.[[#38LennartKPerssonRevolut|38]] Even if workers did remain within the trade union over an extended period of time, it did not follow from this that they would actively participate within it and thereby be transformed. In the Spanish village of Casas Viejas, three hundred workers joined the local union of the CNT in 1932, but only a minority of them were committed anarchist militants. A significant number joined the trade union because it was necessary to find a job, and they did not subsequently absorb anarchist ideas.[[#39JeromeRMintzTheAnarchi|39]]
+===== Oh. =====
-Second, syndicalist trade unions, like anarchists in general, experienced a huge amount of state repression. The CNT was founded in 1910, only to be made illegal and have its headquarters shut down in September 1911. This occurred as part of the Spanish state’s violent repression of a wave of strikes and antiwar protests, which anarchist workers had encouraged and participated in. The CNT began to reorganize itself from June 1912 onward, when all the militants who had been arrested the previous September were released. The CNT’s paper, ''Solidaridad Obrera'', reappeared in May 1913, and members of the CNT were able to elect the regional committee of the recently legalized CRT in July. By August, the CRT was once again made illegal after it attempted to organize a general strike in support of textile workers. The CRT re-emerged as a public organization from August 1914 onwards only to be briefly banned again in 1920.[[#40ASmithAnarchismRevolut|40]]
+===== But does all that make them any less potent? =====
-In 1924 the CNT was made illegal for a fourth time due to its resistance to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, which had been established in September 1923. The new regime required that trade unions provide the state with a complete list of their activities and membership, including the positions members held in the trade union and their home addresses. The CNT refused, and different segments of the movement disagreed with one another over whether or not the organization should go underground or try to operate as publicly as possible. On May 28, the Spanish state forced the decision when it responded to the assassination of the executioner of Barcelona, Rogelio Pérez Vicario, by making the trade union illegal, banning ''Solidaridad Obrera'', and arresting leading militants. The CNT was only made legal again in 1930 with the collapse of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, but nonetheless continued to experience significant state repression both under the quasi-dictatorship of Berenguer and the Spanish Republic, which was inaugurated in April 1931.[[#41JasonGarnerGoalsandMean|41]]
+===== I guess we all came from somewhere. =====
-'''The General Strike'''
+I felt the pulse of the whole great herd of caribou, calf mothers and babies and, yes, some males as well, stood out on the tundra making Dali-shadows in the molten bask of the sun. And I knew that it did not have to be a particular reindeer guarding me like an angel and it did not have to talk to me and tell me my future because there is enough magic in seeing a whole herd of anything just being, just being apart and for themselves.
-One of the main tactics that syndicalist anarchists advocated and engaged in were general strikes in which a significant number of workers went on strike at once. Rocker viewed the general strike as “the most powerful weapon which the workers have at their command” because it “brings the whole economic system to a standstill and shakes it to its foundations.”[[#42RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|42]] He proposed that the working classes use the general strike in order to achieve both reforms, such as compelling capitalists to grant workers the eight-hour day, and the revolutionary goal of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society.[[#43RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|43]] This same perspective can be seen in Delesalle’s 1906 distinction between four different kinds of general strike: (a) a general strike by individual unions; (b) a general strike across all industries on a specific day; (c) a general strike across all industries that places the working class in “a state of open war with capitalist society”; and (d) a general strike that is a revolution.[[#44QuotedinJamesJollTheAn|44]]
+This is it, the point of complexity and otherness and the thing that I needed to take away and the thing worth saving and the reason to not bugger off to Mars and the reason Damon should have stayed alive. I think I am ready to talk to Damon now. I think I have decided what I need to say.
-Syndicalist anarchists were neither the first nor the only group to advocate the general strike as a strategy through which the working classes could transform society in a positive direction.[[#45PhilHGoodsteinTheTheor|45]] In October 1833, an assembly of Glasgow workers associated with the Owenite movement passed a resolution that declared that rather than launching an insurrection to achieve social change, workers should simply fold their arms and abstain from work. This mass stoppage of work would, according to their optimistic prediction, have the consequence that “capital is destroyed, the revenue fails, the system of government falls into confusion, and every link in the chain which binds society together is broken in a moment by this inert conspiracy of the poor against the rich.”[[#46QuotedinGoodsteinGeneral|46]]
+Damon, I have been unravelling, unravelling, to try to get to where you were at, and I came undone, I was scared I might go all the way too and end as a tangled mess of unravelling. I followed your philosophy all the way to its genesis, like the deduction that led to the atom bomb. Of this unravelling and of the atom bomb you would say let it happen, let it all unravel and go up in nuclear flames, it’s sad but it’s for the best, the world is better off without us. But I have come so far. I thought there must be a reason to save something of it if I can. To let it all go is to lose too much. And I found a reason. Because it can all be written differently, we can change the direction of the story.
-The idea of the general strike continued to be advocated during the First International. At the Brussels Congress of September 1868, a resolution was passed that stated that, if a war broke out, then workers would stop it through the “legal practical means” of ceasing all work.[[#47QuotedinJulianPWArcher|47]] Several months later Bakunin argued in “Organization and the General Strike,”'' ''which was published in ''Égalité'' on April 3, 1869, that the recent wave of strikes in Europe indicated that “the struggle of labor against capital is growing ever stronger . . . and that we are advancing at a great pace toward Social Revolution. . . . As strikes spread and as neighbors learn about them the general strike comes ever closer. These days, with the idea of liberation so current amongst the proletariat, a general strike can result only in a great cataclysm, giving society a new skin.”[[#48MichaelBakuninSelectedTe|48]]
+===== Nothing is lost with no one there to miss it, you said that. =====
-The Belgian Federation of the Saint-Imier International, which included both anarchists and collectivists who were not anarchists, endorsed the general strike as a revolutionary strategy during their congress of August 1873 held in Antwerp. Guillaume responded to this in May, writing that “the general strike, if it was realizable, would certainly be the most powerful lever of a social revolution. Just imagine the effect of the immense labor machine being stopped on a fixed day in all countries at once. . . . In a word, the whole people descending into the street, and saying to their masters: ‘I will only start work again after having accomplished the transformation of property which must put the instruments of labor into the hands of the workers.’”[[#49QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|49]]
+Stay with me. The complexity of our symbols distinguishes us from all the other creatures (as it stands right now) and you think that from the symbols emanates the bad thing, the thing that propels us towards catastrophe. And perhaps it does right now, but I do not think it is inherent in the symbols. Yes, our language is dichotomising, but for now it is the only one we have to work with. The Enlightenment taxonomers wanted to posses and to control the natural world and they sewed their signatures into the names. Yes, as with the Earthrise photo we can lose the directness of the thing to symbolism, but shared meaning is potent too. We need our symbols so that we can feel the love of sad beauty. If the mountain had no symbolic meaning it would just be a chunk of rock. If I did not know the difference between a kestrel and a buzzard it would be easier to forget them both. Naming can be reverence and not possession.
-He was nonetheless unsure if “the International Federation of trade unions . . . will ever be strong enough, solid enough, universal enough to be able to carry out a general strike.”[[#50QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|50]] The general strike continued to be discussed and debated during the September 1873 Geneva Congress of the Saint-Imier International. The Belgian delegates unsurprisingly argued that the general strike was “a means of bringing a movement onto the street and leading the workers to the barricades.”[[#51QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|51]] Guillaume similarly insisted that the general strike, as understood by the International, was the social revolution and that revolutionaries should focus on bringing it about. Although Guillaume had previously described a general strike as occurring on a fixed day, he now asked: “Should the ideal of the general strike . . . be that it has to break out everywhere at an appointed day and hour? Can the day and hour of the revolution be fixed in this way? No! . . . The revolution has to be contagious.”[[#52QuotedinCahmKropotkin2|52]]
+Narratives are important. Narratives can be dangerous. The trick is to be critical, to always be trying to choose the right and good one. To be critical of your view from what body, to what limit. There would be no love of sad beauty without us. There would not be anything worth dying for without beauty.
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, the idea of the general strike was frequently discussed by French trade unionists during the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a social movement. In 1887, at the Montluçon Congress of the National Federation of Trade Unions (FNS), two anarchist workers, Berger and Combomreil, responded to the French state socialist Jules Guesde’s proposal that capitalism should be abolished through the seizure of state power. They advocated the general strike as an alternative method for achieving social change. A year later, the FNS passed a resolution at its congress from October 28–November 4 in Le Bouscat which stated that “the general strike, i.e., the complete cessation of labor, or the revolution, may be used by the workers for their emancipation.”[[#53GoodsteinGeneralStrike5|53]]
+Well, there might be some love of sad beauty without us but not felt by anything potent and influential enough to do anything about it apart from feel sad and in love. For example, the pack rat collects objects that interest it and it stores them all in its midden. Middens are considered by palaeo-ecologists to be reliable time capsules of natural life of millennia ago. And the bowerbird, when it builds a nest, gives its nest a garden and garden ornaments made from beetles’ wings and orchids and things. It might be to attract a mate but the bowerbird’s beautiful objects have to exist otherwise the world would be too easy to let go of. What do bowerbirds and pack rats mean by their collecting? Are these creatures saying ‘I too am in the appreciation of beauty club’ and at the base of it they are just as scared of being alone as the rest of us?
-During the 1880s and 1890s, many French trade unionists conceived of the general strike in a manner that differed significantly from how syndicalist anarchists would later theorize it in the early twentieth century. Aristide Briand cowrote a text with Pelloutier in 1892, while Pelloutier was still a member of the Marxist led French Workers’ Party and had yet to become an anarchist. It was not published in full, but, in it, they depict the general strike as a “peaceful and legal” affair in which workers saved up enough money and provisions to last fifteen days without work and, on an agreed date, stayed at home. It was imagined that, in the absence of the working classes’ labor, capitalism would quickly cease to function and be abolished “smoothly, without the spilling of blood, solely by the combination of rest.”[[#54QuotedinJenningsSyndical|54]]
+We need to realise that our categories are illusions, but we also need to be able to name the tiny things, the microscopic creatures that live inside us, we have to name them because how could we know them if we did not name them and how could we love them if we did not know them? We need to be able to find a place in the continuum to point at and say ‘me’.
-Syndicalist anarchists, in comparison to many earlier advocates of the general strike, were not naive and understood that a society-wide strike that encompassed all branches of production was extremely unlikely to occur, especially at the beginning of the strike. Nacht, for example, wrote in 1905 (under the pen name Arnold Roller) that a general strike in which the entire international working classes simultaneously laid down their tools and overthrew capitalism was a beautiful idea that will nonetheless “always be a dream.”[[#55ArnoldRollerTheSocialGe|55]] Given this, syndicalist anarchists aimed to achieve the more feasible goal of organizing a general strike that began in key industries the economy could not function without, such as coal, gas, railway, and shipping. From this starting point, the general strike would, in theory, spread to the wider economy as workers in more and more industries either decided to join the strike in solidarity with its aims and as a response to state repression toward the strike, or were forced to cease work entirely due to the strike’s disruption of key infrastructure and raw materials not being transported to factories. This would in turn create a situation in which the large number of workers who were not organized within trade unions, or who were apolitical, were forced by the unfolding wave of events to take sides, participate in the general strike and thereby become radicalized.[[#56RollerSocialGeneralStrik|56]]
+Wilderness as a static boundary keeps humans out of nature, as though we are still two sides of a dichotomy when we are not. But it is also useful to stop from saturation, the unbalance of the system from too many Mountain Men. Thoreau wanted full libertarian ‘freedom’, like Buck the dog, but men are more destructive than dogs, which would leave wildness to fend for itself against many Mountain Men with guns and pickaxes, which it can’t. The ‘self-willed man’ stakes his claim to freedom while taking no care over anybody else’s.
-Unlike the previously mentioned proponents of the general strike, syndicalist anarchists did not view it as a form of passive resistance in which the working classes simply ceased work, folded their arms, and waited for dominant structures to collapse. In the advent of a revolutionary situation, they proposed that workers should use the general strike as a platform from which to launch the forceful expropriation of the means of production, land, and the necessities of life from the ruling classes and establish federations of workplace and community assemblies. During her speech at the 1905 founding convention of the IWW, Lucy Parsons proposed that socialism could be achieved via a “general strike,” in which workers occupied their workplaces in order to “take possession of the necessary property of production.”[[#57LucyParsonsFreedomEqual|57]] That same year, Nacht wrote that a successful general strike “accomplishes expropriation and communalizes the means of production.”[[#58RollerSocialGeneralStrik|58]] Pouget and Pataud imagined in 1909 a fictional revolutionary general strike in which “the Unions in each industry, in each profession, took possession of the factories and workshops” and reorganized production on a communist basis by means of free agreement between federations.[[#59PataudandPougetHowWeSh|59]] Besnard argued in 1930 that a revolutionary general strike was distinguished from normal strikes on the grounds that workers would not only cease work, but also “''occupy'' the place of production, ''get rid'' of the boss, ''expropriate'' him, and ''get ready'' to get production moving again, but in the interests of the revolution.”[[#60QuotedinRichardsMalates|60]]
+This regulation does not take away the wildness. The plants and animals do not even think of it. You can call the mountain Mount McKinley but the Athabaskans will still call it Deenaalee. And wildness allows for renewal. Like the flux of Inuit identity, the wild is not static. The tamed can be feral can be wild again.
-Syndicalist anarchists tried to clearly differentiate their active militant conception of the general strike from previous passive conceptions. For Nacht, writing in 1905, the term “social general strike” should be used to refer to a general strike that involves the expropriation of the ruling classes and the establishment of an anarchist society, in order to clearly differentiate it from general strikes for reforms, such as higher wages or universal suffrage.[[#61RollerSocialGeneralStrik|61]] In 1907, the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam passed a series of resolutions on syndicalism that varyingly referred to “the revolutionary General strike” and “the General Strike with Expropriation.”[[#62MaurizioAntonioliedThe|62]] Decades later, in 1930, Besnard referred to “the expropriatory general strike, with violence,” which would be “''insurrectional''.”[[#63QuotedinRichardsMalates|63]]
+The categorisation of indigenous peoples was a colonial endeavour in the first place, an awarding of status and non-status. They mostly had no written language before white people arrived. But there is empowerment where communities can self-identify. Eskimo language is being written down, in order to preserve it, in order that young Eskimos can relearn the language that underpins their culture. They need a taxonomy of self to know themselves. The plaque in the visitors’ centre has a hopeful message of regeneration. It says that modern ethnically Eskimo and Athabaskan people are reclaiming and reviving their languages and cultures.
-Some syndicalist anarchists equated the general strike with the social revolution, while others were careful to distinguish between the two. Nacht claimed that since a “social general strike” would involve the expropriation of the means of production and the establishment of an anarchist society, it followed that “the General Strike is not only the introduction of the revolution but is the social revolution itself.”[[#64RollerSocialGeneralStrik|64]] Malatesta, in comparison, held in 1907 that “the general strike has always struck me as an excellent means to set off the social revolution.”[[#65AntonioliedInternationa|65]] Malatesta’s conceptualization was shared by at least some syndicalist trade unions. At the founding 1910 congress of the CNT, a report on the general strike was approved and later read aloud again at the CNT’s 1911 congress. The report proposed that “the general strike, the withdrawal of labor by all the workers at any given moment, entails such a great disturbance in the ordinary course of today’s society of exploited and exploiters that it will unavoidably have to cause an explosion, a clash, between the antagonistic forces that are now fighting for survival.”[[#66CNTTheFirstCongressof|66]] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles described “the social general strike . . . as the prelude to the social revolution.”[[#67IWADeclarationofthePri|67]]
+Once you realise the thing that would be missing when all is lost, you have a responsibility to it, to the future. Because trans-migration is a really beautiful concept and if you understand how potent it is you have a responsibility to help it carry on. Like the difference between a dead Damon and a Damon never born. You feel it too. You must have left your diary somewhere your mother could find it.
-Syndicalist anarchists did not think that all it took to initiate a revolutionary general strike was a trade union boldly proclaiming it on a fixed date whenever they fancied.[[#68RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|68]] They believed, instead, that it would develop out of smaller strikes for immediate improvements. In Pouget and Pataud’s 1909 novel ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', they describe a period of escalating class conflict prior to the launching of the general strike: “strikes followed strikes; lockouts were replied to by boycotts; sabotage was employed with ruinous intensity.”[[#69PataudandPougetHowWeSh|69]] Under such conditions the antagonism between workers and capitalists developed to the point that workers came to consider themselves to be in a continuous war against the ruling classes. Through their experience of collective struggle within trade unions, they developed radical capacities, drives, and consciousness such that “the working class became more warlike. They took possession of the streets, and familiarized themselves with the tactics of resistance. They learned how to stand their ground before bodies of police, and how to deal with the troops marched against them.”[[#70PataudandPougetHowWeSh|70]]
+The yearning of lack and the panic of saturation are part of what sent me, but to try to shrug them off is to shake off the shackles of responsibility that are at the same time ribbons of meaning. It is important to have a story for yourself, in order to be in love with the world. And it is the love we feel when we look at the mountain which could save it. Maybe women are made more prone to loneliness, but is this a bad thing? We will be lonely without the plants and the animals and we feel their loss more acutely. There is no purity so there is always the possibility for renewal. Like mother goddess renewal, not like a male god of beginnings and ends.
-In this fictional account, the class conflict then exploded into a revolutionary situation, after a violent skirmish between striking construction workers and the police and army culminated in a massacre, during which the military shot at and launched a cavalry charge against the demonstrators. In response, syndicalist trade unions seized their opportunity and called for a general strike in solidarity with the victims of state violence, a strike they claimed would continue until the state had prosecuted the soldiers.[[#71PataudandPougetHowWeSh|71]] This general strike against a specific act of state violence morphed over time into a revolutionary movement against capitalism and the state due to a combination of: (a) syndicalist trade unions spreading anarchist ideas among participants of the general strike, publicly calling for the social revolution and preparing for the social revolution by seizing weapons and organizing workers’ militias; (b) the working classes being compelled to expropriate and distribute goods in order to meet people’s needs, especially for food; and (c) the working classes responding to increasingly extreme state violence against the general strike by overthrowing the ruling classes.[[#72PataudandPougetHowWeSh|72]]
+===== Stop being so New Agey. =====
-The manner in which syndicalist anarchists described the general strike can sometimes give the false impression that they thought a general strike could overthrow class society without the need for armed conflict and the violent destruction of the state. Such an interpretation ignores what the vast majority of syndicalist anarchists wrote. Pouget and Pataud’s fictional general strike included workers assaulting government buildings, such as police stations and parliament, in order to achieve “the dissolution of the bourgeois State” by “disorganizing . . . dismantling and thoroughly disabling it.”[[#73PataudandPougetHowWeSh|73]] The IWMA’s 1922 declaration of principles claimed that “the decisive struggle between the capitalism of today and free communism of tomorrow will not be without conflict,” and, as a result, they recognized the need for “violence as a means of defense against the violent methods of the ruling classes during the struggle for the possession of the factories and the fields by the revolutionary people.”[[#74IWADeclarationofthePri|74]] At the 1910 founding congress of the CNT, it was agreed that, given the violence of the state, “it would be impossible for a peaceful general strike to last very long”; workers would have to engage in “violent” protests against the forces of state repression and thereby defeat “the tyrants.”[[#75CNTTheFirstCongressof|75]] This position was expanded upon in resolutions of the CNT’s 1936 Zaragoza Congress that proposed that the defense of the revolution should be achieved by “the people armed.”[[#76QuotedinPeiratsCNTinth|76]]
+===== Why don’t you try not being so literal? =====
-Some syndicalist anarchists did argue that a revolutionary general strike would provide a more effective means of defeating the police and military than the previous strategy of launching insurrections that established barricades. Nacht claimed in 1905 that the widening of streets since the French Revolution of 1789 and the uprisings of 1848 meant that “the heroic times of the battle on the barricades have gone by.”[[#77RollerSocialGeneralStrik|77]] In the aftermath of World War I, Berkman wrote in 1929 that workers at a barricade would not be able to defeat a trained military supported by artillery, tanks, bombers, and poison gas. Such an idea of revolution was “obsolete,” and had to be replaced by one that focused on the true power of the working classes: their ability to withdraw labor.[[#78BerkmanAnarchism19697|78]] Rocker similarly wrote that the general strike was a replacement for “the barricades of the political uprising.”[[#79RockerAnarchoSyndicalism|79]]
+==== A LETTER FOR THE UNABOMBER ====
-Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud all hoped that a general strike would occur over such a large area and involve so many workers that the military would be forced, by the sheer scale of the revolt, to scatter their troops into smaller units that could then be more easily defeated in combat or persuaded to join the workers in revolt.[[#80RockerAnarchoSyndicalism1|80]] The idea that a significant number of troops would mutiny and refuse to obey their orders to crush the general strike was not purely wishful thinking and had some basis in experience. In 1871, the Paris Commune was created after army soldiers, who had been sent to seize cannons from the national guard in the district of Montmartre, disobeyed multiple orders to fire on workers and guardsmen defending the cannons and, instead, fraternized with the people, a significant number of whom were women. Several years later, in 1907, a detachment of troops decided to mutiny on their way to suppress a CGT picket line.[[#81JohnMerrimanMassacreThe|81]] During Spain’s tragic week of 1909, a general strike against army reservists being called up to fight in Morocco mutated into an armed insurrection, in which, the working classes attacked the police specifically, while persuading some local soldiers to not fire on them. The insurrection was soon defeated when soldiers from outside Barcelona were called in and the barricades that workers had assembled were destroyed by artillery.[[#82BookchinSpanishAnarchists|82]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Ms Erin Miller</div>
-Even if Rocker, Nacht, Pouget, and Pataud were overly optimistic about the effectiveness of a general strike in diminishing the power of the military and police, they nonetheless did all advocate an armed uprising as part of the general strike, and thought that workers would have to defend themselves from the violence of the police and army. Pouget and Pataud’s account of how this would happen was, by far, the most eccentric. In their novel, they depicted the forces of reaction, including the invading armies of foreign states, being easily defeated by a variety of science-fiction weapons. This included electromagnetic waves that caused far away enemy ammunition to explode and aerial torpedoes dropped from remote-controlled planes.[[#83PataudandPougetHowWeSh|83]] These weapons were so ridiculous for the time that it is unclear if the authors seriously advocated them, or merely intended to entertain the reader. Kropotkin nonetheless asserted in his preface to the 1913 English edition of Pouget and Pataud’s book that the authors had significantly underestimated the violent resistance that the social revolution would face and have to overcome.[[#84KropotkinDirectStruggle|84]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Cabin in the Wilderness</div>
-Although syndicalist anarchists generally attempted to produce a realistic conception of the general strike, they consistently faced two key problems when trying to implement it. First, syndicalist trade unions in Europe and the United States were unable to organize or initiate genuine national general strikes across multiple key industries by themselves, due to them having either small memberships or large memberships concentrated in specific parts of a country or industries. Given this, in order to launch national general strikes they had to rely on support from reformist trade unions, which failed to materialize on a number of occasions. In Spain, the CNT, whose membership was largest in Catalonia, organized a short general strike in December 1916 with the General Union of Workers (UGT), which was affiliated with the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE). This was followed by a general strike in August 1917, for which the leadership of the PSOE-UGT seriously failed to prepare, and which was only launched after they were forced into action by the UGT’s largest union independently calling for a general strike. A few years later, the UGT refused to support a general strike in 1920. When Primo de Rivera established himself as dictator of Spain in September 1923, the CNT responded by calling for a general strike, while the UGT not only did not support the general strike but collaborated with the regime.[[#85BookchinSpanishAnarchists|85]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Denali Wilderness</div>
-Second, general strikes organized by anarchists were militarily crushed on numerous occasions. A long list of examples can be found in the history of Spanish anarchism. To give one, on February 16, 1902, a general strike in Barcelona—which spread to nearby industrial towns—was launched in solidarity with the striking Metalworkers’ Federation, who had been on strike for two months. The general strike only lasted a week and was defeated following the declaration of martial law, the deployment of the military, the closure of union headquarters, and the arrest of several hundred organizers.[[#86ASmithAnarchismRevolut|86]] Spanish syndicalist anarchists were themselves aware of this problem. The CNT’s report on the general strike, which was approved at the founding 1910 congress, claimed that “experience has taught us that” when the general strike is “localized at one point and the workers of the rest of the nation remain completely passive, the forces of public order, at the service of the bourgeoisie, will concentrate on that location, and it will be relatively easy for the government to crush the revolt.”[[#87CNTTheFirstCongressof|87]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Alaska</div>
-This is not to say that general strikes were always unsuccessful. Swiss anarchists participated in a 1907 general strike against local chocolate companies, including Nestlé, after a worker was unfairly fired. The general strike, which lasted from March 25 to 29, spread to Montreux, Lausanne, and Geneva in response to gendarmes firing on and wounding ten workers. It resulted in the rehiring of the worker, recognition of the trade union, and various material improvements.[[#88AntonioliedInternationa|88]] Even when general strikes were militarily crushed or failed to achieve their immediate objectives, they could still bring about social change. This includes the previously mentioned 1906 CGT general strike that won the weekend and the 1919 CNT general strike that won the eight-hour day. On other occasions general strikes were, even if defeated, important acts of working-class resistance against domination and exploitation by the ruling classes. It is, from an anarchist perspective, better to rebel against oppression and lose than to not rebel at all, especially since workers do not know going into a struggle whether or not they will emerge victorious.
+Ted Kaczynski 04475–046
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#19|1]]. Rudolf Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004), 56–57.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">USP FLORENCE ADMAX</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#29|2]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''432–33.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">U.S. PENITENTIARY</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#39|3]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 434.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">PO BOX 8500</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#49|4]]. Émile Pouget, ''Direct Action ''(London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003), 10–13.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">FLORENCE, CO 81226</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#59|5]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''51.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Dear Mr Kaczynski,</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#69|6]]. Jeremy Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas'' (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990),'' ''16–17. During the Saint-Imier International, Guillaume advocated the general strike while being wary of partial strikes for increased wages because he thought they were unlikely to succeed and could instead bring suffering to workers and sap their revolutionary spirit. See Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''222–25.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I am a girl writing to you from a cabin in the wilderness. I have read your manifesto while here from beginning to end because instead of taking for granted that everybody who said you were just a crazy person was right, I wanted to understand why you set off the bombs for myself. I am a big fan of your work; your understanding of the technological system and your predictions for the future of humanity echo worries that I have myself. You are right that this reckless and unsustainable system is causing climate change. But I have come to the conclusion that you take these things so far as to void them, and have actually given more ammunition to the system you despise. I think you need to know this because yours is a dangerous logic and while you spout it others are living and dying by it.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#79|7]]. Paul Delesalle, “The Strike!,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/library/strike-paul-delesalle. For other examples, see Paul Delesalle, “Anarchists and the Trade Unions,” Libcom website, December 9, 2013, https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle; Alexander Berkman, ''What is Anarchism? ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003),'' ''78–79, 197–210.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I know what happened to you at Berkeley and I am sorry that you can’t help that it made you the way you are. You are not wholly to blame for your legacy but I can’t resurrect Thoreau to chide him, or Charles Darwin or Adam Smith, and evidently each has an influence on and on in infinite regress. But you are alive and with living disciples and you have a responsibility for your words while they are still mutable. You could be the last link in a chain that unravels from itself.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#89|8]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 84. For the history of sabotage as a strategy see Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 44–46; F. F. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 120–23; Dominique Pinsolle, “Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage,” in ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', ed. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 44–58.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I am sure you get lots of letters, both fan mail and hate mail alike, but I wanted to ensure that you received the thoughtful perspective of a woman because I feel your philosophy would benefit from this greatly. I know you do not like girls and especially not feminists, or the English, so I am addressing you as a fellow member of the human race, specifically one who is uneasy about the future of humanity under the current technological regime. It worries me also to think that the time may come where there is complete discord between humans and nature. It terrifies me that our civilisation seems to think that we could exist happily as the sole inhabitants of a barren planet. This is not the way I want things to go either. However, I do not think that this outcome is an inevitable progression from where we are now, only a possible one. And I do not think your revolution of individualists who will destroy the system then return to life in the wilderness as loners or in small clans is a fair or just or helpful cause.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#99|9]]. Ridley, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France'', 132–33; Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 20–30, 116–17, 121, 137. Nicholas Papayanis, “Alphones Merrheim and the Strike of Hennebont: The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Day in France,” ''International Review of Social History'' 16, no. 2 (1971): 159–83. Spanish trade unionists, including anarchists, also organized a general strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1906, after being inspired by the CGT’s campaign. See Angel Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labor and the Crisis of the Spanish State'','' 1989–1923'' (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 130–31.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I did some maths. I am not very good at maths like you are but roughly I think I worked something out. So Earth has about 57,500,000 square miles of dry land and not all of it is habitable, but if you take away the 23 per cent of mountains and 33 per cent of desert which totals 32,200,000 square miles you are left with 25,300,000 square miles. Now divide this between the 7,107,663,700 (give or take a few) people on Earth circa 2013, and remember this is also rough, but just for the sake of argument then 25,300,000 ÷ 7,107,663,700 = 0.00355953813 square miles, or 9,219.2 square metres. 9,219.2 square metres per person, which is just a little larger than a football pitch. Enough room for your cabin but not for the woods or much land to grow things and generally be self-sufficient, even with each individual farming their own plot and trading with neighbours, even with some grouping together in order to farm animals. There is still not enough room to avoid the rest of humanity or to be immersed in nature because all the cabins would disrupt the grazing and migration land of animals and also many trees would have to be cut down for all the logs. Also by estimates, the amount of land that would be needed to support a hunter-gatherer lifestyle far outweighs the amount of land available per head currently (only enough land to support around 100 million hunter-gatherers).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#109|10]]. The following account of the strike is based on Murray Bookchin, ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998),'' ''160–63; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''292–99.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I am sure you would argue that population would not be an issue because after the revolution and subsequent fall of technology many drones would starve to death without the system to feed or medicate them. But here I think you underestimate people’s resourcefulness. Surely those with sense would not just curl up and die but loot the cities of their resources, and when these are spent they will drive their SUVs into your wilderness and shoot your wildlife with their machine-made rifles to feed their children, who cannot be fed by the system because of the revolution. Another danger is that the elite would monopolise the remaining resources due to their power and the availability they already have the upper hand on, and would therefore be the ones not to perish, leaving them with a foundation from which to build back up and become monolithic (they already have exclusive billionaire underground bunkers set up for the apocalypse in Germany somewhere). This for me is immoral, and very easy for you to say from your privileged position. Not everyone can have access to the freedom you condemn them for snubbing.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#119|11]]. It should be kept in mind that, even after this legislation was passed, workers went on strike to demand that the eight-hour day was implemented. See A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''302–3.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Maybe I am biased because my tiny female brain is 40 per cent social, but the way I see it, the biggest threat to the freedom of each individual is the patriarchal hierarchical structure of society and the waning of its resources, which puts strain on those at the bottom and is mostly caused by those at the top. I weigh this threat as the one which affects the most people, rather than that which weighs most heavily on certain individuals (i.e. you). A predominant concern for us both is population density, because the denser it gets, the more restricted becomes the individual’s freedom. Therefore your dismissal of the feminist and gay movements is a fatal flaw as their success is key to a social reform that could curb or decrease indiscriminate population growth.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#129|12]]. Nick Rider, “The Practice of Direct Action: The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” in ''For Anarchism: History'','' Theory and Practice'', ed. David Goodway (London: Routledge, 1989), 87.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Generally liberating poor people, liberating women, getting oppressed women into the workplace, or educating them on the options available to them and providing them with the means, could reduce reproduction. Around the world nearly 40 per cent of pregnancies are unintended. Around 350 million women in developing countries did not want their last child or do not want another, but they do not have access to information or services to help them. This means deconstructing patriarchy so that women can take control of their bodies. The deconstruction would also mean that the sole pressure is not on the woman when it comes to child-rearing. Equally shared roles between parents and even communal care would relieve this. The current paradigm does not want communal care because it means the child is not moulded in the image of its parents and is therefore not time-capsulised.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#138|13]]. Quoted in Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I think one of the sentiments that underpins this problem, perhaps the most significant sentiment, is actually the individualism that you advocate. A more collectivist sentiment would encourage alternative ways of fulfilling the desire to nurture, without feeling the need to immortalise the self in genes, and lead to an increase in adoption of children.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#148|14]]. The following account is based on Rider, “The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931,” 88–98; Chris Ealham: ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona'','' 1898–1937 ''(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010), 105–7, 112–18, 120. There had been earlier attempts by Spanish anarchists to organize tenants in 1903–4 and 1917–18. See A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''162, 265–66.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The concept of metempsychosis is a beautiful thing, and I think that once it is embraced the need for biological children will seem outmoded, we will think like the Inuits and name our children in plural. Every person around you gives and takes from the fabric of you. This is spiritual and intellectual more than it is biological. It is how men have been doing it throughout time. You can’t just spay people; you have to remind them that our shards don’t migrate with specificity of genes in mind.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#158|15]]. Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?,” trans. Jesse Cohn, Anarchist Library website, n.d., https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/milly-witkop-rocker-what-does-the-syndicalist-women-s-union-want.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">But anyway, population is not everything; it is the individualist consumer mentality of the developed world that causes more emissions than the ‘overpopulated’ developing world. This can be reformed into a free and equal society based on cooperation and voluntary contribution from all for the good of everyone, which is the fairest way to liberate, spreading freedom as opposed to consolidating it. The technological system can be used to help reform, spreading the message and reminding the people that we are WORLD CITIZENS. Our skill for invention is not the issue, but the way that we are directing our skills. Scientific research and technology are vital in bringing basic rights and freedoms to such a large population. It is scientific research and technology that have given us an understanding of deep time and therefore of our future generations ahead. It is scientific invention that got us far enough to stop and consider ourselves.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#168|16]]. Milly Witkop-Rocker, “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?”</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">This individualism is tied up in your invocation of FREEDOM. Your kind of freedom still requires a dualistic philosophy for it to be maintained. Searching for absolutes in nature builds just another dualistic metanarrative, one of good vs. evil and pure vs. impure. This kind of freedom is the philosophical driving force behind the Machine. You are worried about the subjugation of human nature, but see, essential human nature does not exist.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#178|17]]. Dieter Nelles, “Anarchosyndicalism and the Sexual Reform Movement in the Weimar Republic” (paper presented at the Free Love and Labour Movement workshop at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2000).</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The thing that has been bugging me all this time is the influence of the idea of natural law in the arguments of the Mountain Men. Although I could just argue now that science or natural law is just a bunch of stories, I wanted to meet you on your own territory, so I have come up with some scientific proofs against the argument of the Mountain Men that civilisation is unnatural and women just biologically suck:</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#188|18]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 433.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">There is the evolutionary case of sexual dimorphism. Although I could just invoke Lynn Margulis and her whole argument for origins and cooperation over competition, I want to be specific. In our close relatives of the ape family, males have much more pronounced canines than do females (apart from bonobos, a matriarchal species). In the bones of our long-dead predecessors it has been noted that males had much more pronounced canines, which shrank and shrank until they are as they are now, in no way divergent between the sexes.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#198|19]]. Emma Goldman, ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader'', ed. Alix Kates Shulman, 3rd ed. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 91.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">One theory is that this is because females, when selecting a mate, selected social and sharing males, reducing the evolutionary need for big old canines. The theory is that this is because there was not much or maybe any division of labour between the sexes, we all hunt-gathered, and likely took our meat from scavenging. Sexual specialisation probably came very late in human evolution, as late as the dawn of agriculture, the so-called Neolithic Revolution 12,500 years ago.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#208|20]]. Pouget, ''Direct Action'', 6.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The Palaeolithic came before the Neolithic and had a very vast time span of around 2.5 million years. It has only been 12,500 years since the dawn of agriculture, and the birth of the ‘modern human’. The Palaeolithic world and way of being stayed static for all that time. They obviously had the formula for being human just right then, before things started to change.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#218|21]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The birdman with the boner painting in the caves at Lascaux is dated to the Upper Palaeolithic, the last division before the Neolithic and the birthing of behavioural modernity. Behavioural modernity is characterised by abstract thinking, planning depth and symbolic behaviour like art and ornamentation. So the birdman was painted at a time of upheaval and the caves are a time capsule of this period.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#228|22]]. Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The message fails time, no one can agree on what the birdman means, but that does not matter. We are allowed to interpret it for our purpose like the palaeo-ecologist interprets the pack rat’s midden (narrative licence). So here goes:</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#238|23]]. Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015), 50–51.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I could, for example, say that the birdman is aroused by the dominance that at this point in history he had begun to exert on the natural world. The yak thing represents the natural world. Perhaps that is an enlarged vulva hanging below her abdomen, representing femininity. Lots of art from this time features the female body, so called Venus figures. As though at the time the people revered the female body as a life-giving deity. Perhaps what the painting represents is the rise of patriarchy, at the cusp of two opposing paradigms. But the bull is knocking the birdman down. Perhaps what it says is matriarchy WILL PERSEVERE!!!</div>
-[[#248|24]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 60.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">My point is that I believe there is no proof that competition and dominance are essential and innate features of the human being. The subjugation of women is not necessarily an essential fact of life.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#258|25]]. IWW, “The Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (1908),” in ''Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology'', ed Joyce L. Kornbluh (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 13.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">More facts (or speculations). Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with risk-taking and therefore adventure. It gives us a reward hit when we accomplish a task. The more risk involved in the task, the bigger the hit. A reason not everyone wants to be a Mountain Man could be that some people make less dopamine than others. Dopamine is associated with the left side of the brain while serotonin is associated with the right. As a general trend men are associated more with the left side of the brain and women with the right.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#268|26]]. There are important exceptions to this generalization. The Argentinean FORA opposed the idea that the structure of the future society could be constructed within capitalism. Malatesta also argued in 1922 that trade unions were not establishing the framework of the future society due to the extent to which they were divided according to the capitalist division of labor. See Vadim Damier, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the Twentieth Century'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009), 102–4, 107–8; Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 113–14.</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0289-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#278|27]]. Quoted in Albert Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis'' (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003), 110. The same point was made by Albert himself. See ibid., 173.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Dopamine is associated more with antisocial personality disorders and serotonin with borderline personality disorders. A person with antisocial personality disorder lacks empathy for other people while a borderline personality disorder feels like empathy you can’t control, boundary issues making it difficult to share another’s pain without feeling it too much as your own (the process of osmosis until the saturation point is reached).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#288|28]]. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 50. See also Pouget, “What is the Trade Union?,” 435; Ricardo Mella, ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology'','' ''ed. Stephen Luis Vilaseca (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 73–74.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">These are very general trends. There are more Mountain Men than Mountain Women. But a siphon movement can only start when an outside pressure has been added. A dead hand is an undesirable and persisting influence. And if you pour liquid into a mould to set it will set in the shape of the mould. Learned behaviour has been proved to actually change genetic make-up, so even biological sex is in a process of transformation always.</div>
-[[#298|29]]. Émile Pataud and Émile Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth'' (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 118.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The evolutionary biologists say that maybe the dopamine in the brain was the thing that sent us out of Africa. Maybe it is the chemical of species proliferation. Maybe it made me leave home. Maybe it sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon.</div>
-[[#308|30]]. Pataud and Émile Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 118.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">But could be it is not quite an innate and natural impulse like that and the real reason is that NASA were very selective about who could join Apollo. Some psychologist did a personality assessment of all the Apollo astronauts and concluded that they were all ‘Type A’. A Type A personality is very competitive, rational, ambitious, you could say glory-hungry and selfish. And this could have to do, the psychologist said, with the fact that they were all the eldest sibling or the only son, and had patriarchal military-type fathers (remember the original desert solitude-seeking nature solace Mountain Man with the most famous absent father, our Lord Jesus Christ).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#318|31]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">And women can be Type A too, but maybe it would be better if people stopped being Type A altogether, or if we at least stopped letting Type As do all the important and influential stuff. And if Type A is still the type that provides the most astronauts, then the space colonies are not going to be much fun, are they?</div>
-[[#328|32]]. Besnard, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism''.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The ‘primitive’ necessarily gets meaning from the contrast of civilisation. And besides, you did not ever manage to shrug off civilisation. You worshipped mathematics as absolute.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#338|33]]. Isaac Puente, ''Libertarian Communism'', (Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005), 5, 17.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">But mathematics puts another false map on the world, which pretends to be a territory but is really just another map, same as the others. It is a thing we invented based on spatial allegories coming from our bodies and their interaction with the outside. There are different mathematics and they are inconsistent with each other, but are perfect systems. They are not real or true in your absolutist sense, so they went against your project of wilderness. It is the belief in this reduction that drives your Machine and you do not even see it.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#348|34]]. Quoted in José Peirats, ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, ed. Chris Ealham (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 104–5.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">My main point is we are at a place in time now where we can be reflective. It may have been almost inevitable that our symbols would do this to us, but now we have the reflectiveness to be critical of them. But we need our symbols in order to be able to talk and think about ourselves. And to change the paradigm.</div>
-[[#358|35]]. Martha Ackelsberg, ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''21, 80–88, 120–37; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'', 34–48; Danny Evans, ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020), 23.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Aldo Leopold said, ‘a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.’ And I think this is a philosophy to live by. Our challenge is to remember that we are a part of this biotic community, and once we have remembered, to act accordingly.</div>
-[[#368|36]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 57.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">In a way you are right for wanting to emulate ‘primitive’ cultures. Indigenous cultures generally are more partnership-oriented and feminine. But let us not also forget that they were not perfect; Palaeolithic man may have wiped out the woolly mammoth and some Native Americans used to run whole herds of buffalo off cliff-sides just to watch them disappear. And neither is the natural world a perfect system to emulate; Inuit get annoyed at orcas for killing so many seals just for the fun of it. But you are wrong to say there is a right-just-objective way and it is the old way, the law of the wild. There is no ahistorical way of being. If you burned all the libraries how would you have ‘known’ nature without the naturalists?</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#378|37]]. Max Baginski, ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living'','' Not Dead Unions'' (London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015), 22.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">We can learn from the past but also need to adapt to the future. Women are, in our society, simultaneously social and maternal, crazy and wild. The relationship we need with the natural is one that is feminine. Admitting this and ending the unfair and ungrounded exclusion of women from your philosophy of wilderness is an important step in deconstruction. I am leaving my cabin now, but it is because I have got everything I need. I have got what you were trying to keep from me.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#388|38]]. Lennart K. Persson, “Revolutionary Syndicalism in Sweden Before the Second World War” in ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective'', ed., Marcel van der Linden and Wayne Thorpe (Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990), 87.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The Machine is perpetuated by us and we are inextricable from it. We need to change the collective conscious to change the direction of the Machine. You are not an isolated ego. Even you, the hermit, exist in relation to your polar antithesis, society. We find ourselves in relationship to the other. When we do not, complexity is lost and we are diminished selves.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#398|39]]. Jerome R. Mintz, ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas ''(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 157–65.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I know of a pipe that you made for a friend on which you hand-carved the words ‘Mountain Men are always free’. Mountain Men shun society, yet their solitude relies on the continuation of the system to contain the rest of humanity and leave room for their wilderness. You cannot escape the fact that you are a human being and wherever you go others will want to follow. Scythes cutting through thickets.</div>
-[[#408|40]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 203–5, 211, 316–17, 323; James Yeoman, ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915'' (New York: Routledge, 2020), 223–25.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">On a final note, I know of some people who you might like to get in touch with. They are called the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. With your fame I am sure you could rally to their cause by hunger-striking to death in prison. I have a friend who followed your logic and did exactly this. He was much braver and sincere to himself than you have been with your letter bombs. You could honour his life better by admitting your faults of logic.</div>
-[[#418|41]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 162–69, 234–35, 243; Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'', 190–91. For repression under the Spanish republic, see Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City''.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Reform over revolution.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#428|42]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 81, 82.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Down with patriarchy,</div>
-[[#438|43]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 80–82.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Erin Miller (QUEEN OF THE WILD)</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#448|44]]. Quoted in James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 202.</div>
+==== THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#458|45]]. Phil H. Goodstein, ''The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland ''(Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 15–25; Max Beer, ''A'' ''History of British Socialism'', vol. 2 (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921), 81–90; William Benbow, “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes,” Marxist Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Rachel Carson says it is finally time to lay her to rest. She has taught me what there was to learn. I lay her down in a long wooden canoe. This is so I can set her out, flowing back to the sea to commune with the whales. I set the canoe on fire. I have to set it on fire to fumigate her spirit. This is to try to get rid of some of the imprints the dead leave once the spirit has dissipated. She explains that, more and more, it is impossible to fumigate entirely. Left behind the body is always a fine powder, unnervingly green. It is a lifetime’s accumulation of polychlorinated biphenyl and endocrine disruptors and bisphenol-A from the liver (the chains that cannot be dismantled). These cannot transmigrate into the spiritual realm, but they can’t be reabsorbed back into the natural world either like the ashes can. They remain in the physical realm as a negative imprint.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#468|46]]. Quoted in Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 21.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">(But there is also the positive charge and that stays too because ideas can’t be set on fire. I feel shards of it slide into me, like chakra disks that do not hurt.)</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#478|47]]. Quoted in Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 129.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">As the canoe glides across the ocean it burns up and gets less and less until nothing is left. Then the soul is completely free to transmigrate. Part of the soul slips into the ocean because that is where it wants to be. This soul attaches to a ''Siphonophore'', an odd creature that looks like a jellyfish so that sometimes it is mistakenly identified as one.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#488|48]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''41</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0293-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#498|49]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">But these creatures are really a unity of tiny cellular creatures, simultaneously individual and collective and multicellular. Each member of the colony has a different function towards benefiting the organism as a whole. No member could survive independent of the others that do the things that it can’t. They are genetically the same and they live and die as one. And all are connected to a stem and to a circulatory system, and they develop from the same embryo, like sprouting a Siamese twin from your side again and again and again.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#508|50]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">(But then, what with global warming and the acidification of the oceans, lots of the sea creatures will die and she will have to transmigrate again. Where will all the souls accumulate when there are not the billions of small creatures and no room for more big and potent ones? What havoc will they play, waiting for a body?)</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#518|51]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 223.</div>
+==== WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END? ====
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#528|52]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 224. For more information on this debate, see David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''50–51.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">When the Helios 2 probe launched in 1976 it was the fastest spacecraft ever built, its top speed reaching 157,000 miles per hour. Proxima Centauri is our nearest star and it is 24 trillion miles away. If Helios 2 were to head directly for Proxima Centauri at its top speed it would take 17,000 years to reach it; 17,000 years is a span equivalent to the one that separates modern-day humans from Cro-Magnon cave painters. If Voyager 1 were to travel the same distance it would take it 74,000 years; 74,000 years ago early Palaeolithic people were almost killed off by a supervolcano that erupted in Indonesia and spread ash around the whole planet.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#538|53]]. Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 53–55.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">On and on the little spaceship goes. So far in time it is thirty-seven years away. The year Voyager 1 launched was 1977. That year there were eleven major plane crashes, Harvey Milk became the first openly gay elected official in the US, American man Roy Sullivan got struck by lightning for the seventh time, Spain had its first democratic election since Franco, Queen Elizabeth II opened the parliaments of Australia and New Zealand, the Bucharest earthquake killed 1,500 people, Jimmy Carter became the thirty-ninth president of America, Gary Gilmore from Utah was the first person to be executed after the death penalty was reintroduced in America, Hamida Djandoubi was the last person to be executed by guillotine in France, smallpox was eradicated, Elvis Presley died, optical fibre was first used to carry telephone signals and the Big Ear radio telescope, which would eventually be taken down to make way for a golf course, picked up its famous Wow! signal from deep space. This was on August the fifteenth, twenty-one days before Voyager 1 was launched.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#548|54]]. Quoted in Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'','' ''16. See also, 232n25; Goodstein, ''General Strike'', 57–58.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The year I was born was 1993, the year of the Velvet Divorce, and when guys from the IRA perpetrated the biggest robbery in US history and set off a lot of bombs, the year the Chemical Weapons Convention was signed, Bill Clinton became president, Russians mounted the first art exhibition in space and no one went to see it, Kim Campbell became the first female prime minister of Canada and resigned the same year, a van bomb killed six at the World Trade Center, there was the Great Blizzard of 1993 on the east coast of the US, South Africa abandoned its nuclear weapons programme, the US Air Force let women fly war planes, a Unabomber bomb injured a computer scientist at Yale, a floating chapel sank and killed 266 people, the nineteenth G7 summit was held, the public were allowed into Buckingham Palace for the very first time, China undertook a nuclear test and it ended a worldwide moratorium, the European Union was established, ''A Brief History of Time'' became the longest-lasting bestseller and Freya Stark, Deke Slayton of the Mercury programme and William Golding all died.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#558|55]]. Arnold Roller, ''The Social General Strike'' (Chicago: The Debating Club No.1, 1905), 6.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Written into the Big Bang theory are Cosmological Horizons. These horizons mark the limit of our Observable Universe. The Observable Universe has a spherical distribution with an observer at its centre. Events outside this radius have not had time for their light to reach the observer yet and never will. The Cosmological Horizon is the shady border to the furthest point the observer can retrieve information from. Likewise, light emitted by the observer might not ever catch up to distant and exponentially receding objects in an expanding universe. This is the Future Horizon, and events which are past here the observer can have no influence on. Every single point in the universe can be the centre of a different observable universe and parts of all can overlap.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#568|56]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 7–9; Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 82; Goldman, ''Red Emma'', 95; Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''15, 27–28, 50–51, 91–93.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I will start my journey home a voyager called back like a well-trained falcon. Only there is no calling back the actual Voyagers; they will keep on going if we like it or not. Voyager 1 could go on travelling for ever and ever into the wild yonder on its own velocity. And Voyager 1 is its own central observer, it can leave our observable universe and enter a new one of its own.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#578|57]]. Lucy Parsons, ''Freedom'','' Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches'','' 1878–1937'','' ''ed. Gale Ahrens (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004), 82–83.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Voyager 1 is our time capsule into another universe. It might be that no one who ever finds it will understand what it means. But they would likely understand that it has ''intent'', and even though the intention fails it is the drive behind the ''intent'' that will live on, sinisterly, like the twitch of the almost-dead baddie at the end of the horror film.</div>
-[[#588|58]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'','' ''32.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The Voyagers are relics of a time when people thought missions to space held integrity and wonder. But the next big missions to space will be commercial ones because the public are bored now. The moon is awe-sapped enough that we do not mind mining it. And when the miners have opened the emigrant trails we might colonise our brand-new ''tabula rasa''. Space X wants to launch missions to mine minerals from space and create the world’s first trillionaires. Virgin Galactic will take a bunch of rich and famous people to the moon. On board the inaugural flight will be James Lovelock. Either he had a change of heart in old age or he is going along as a suicide bomber.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#598|59]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''103–38. Quote in ibid.,'' ''121.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">And then if the Curiosity rover were to find a pictogram, or a bipedal vertebrate fossilised on Mars, or the archaeological remains of a complex civilisation, then it would mean that life had appeared elsewhere in another Cambrian Explosion, and that life is probably quite good at forming complex life elsewhere too. But it would also mean that it is not so great at making life whose destiny is to propagate apart from the other life that binds it. It could be a premonition. A great biblical fossil lizard to the Victorians. Or a cautionary symbol.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#608|60]]. Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” in Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''271.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">There is maybe one small redeeming thing, because the thing about horizons is you are never any closer to them. That is just the nature of horizons. Even Voyager 1 can never catch up with the future, and after billions of years I suppose it must disintegrate or something and that will be it, us out in a little plume, a little puff, but whether it does or not there will ''always'' be another horizon and there will ''always'' be epistemological wilderness just beyond it.</div>
-[[#618|61]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 5–6.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Once I had everything packed away in the cabin, the board replaced under the desk and the items exactly as they were when I came, all was ready for a layer of dust to settle again. The dust is made of particles of me now. It is also made of the particles of other things: pollen, spores, space rocks, spiders, wood from the cabin itself. Dust seems a nice legacy to leave behind. I did not even fumigate my litter in the fire. Instead I put it all in a plastic bag and carried it with me out of the wilderness, because to leave the plastic particles in the air from the burning to me seemed too much a desecration.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#628|62]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 134–35.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Could be I was always on it but I began my long journey home. When I left the cabin, my cabin, I pulled the door to quietly as though to not disturb the dust as I left, like I could have come and gone on that very first day and just left silently while the cabin slept and it never even noticed me. I turned around to look at it when I had got a little away, alone and small and heavy and dawny in the 4 a.m. morning light, and took a picture which I shall keep always but show no one.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#638|63]]. Quoted in Richards, “Malatesta’s Relevance for Anarchists Today,” 271.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I really hate goodbyes. I think goodbye when it is a forever goodbye is the saddest and most beautiful word. It is a contraction of god-be-with-you, which is touching because even without a god what you are saying all at once is ‘I hope that the shining light that guides you whatever it is is always with you and you don’t ever lose your way or yourself and we won’t ever meet again now but I want for you to always be safe and happy’.</div>
-[[#648|64]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 7, 8.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">It is saying you will be apart from me now but a shard of you will always remain. Another part of me will go with you, because we are always taking and giving shards from each other and you always lose a part of yourself when you say a forever goodbye. You lose the person they make you. Fear of this loss sometimes drives people to isolation, but this in itself is a tenfold loss. I will always carry Damon with me as a shard, like shrapnel.</div>
-[[#658|65]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''124.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">We are perpetual motion and change, but there is something that endures and it changes, but gradually enough that some of it endures. You would not be able to know yourself, at least only a little and only sometimes, without this enduring thing. It is maybe ‘I do really hope the light is always with you even if the light can’t be said to be unchanging but whatever your new light is I hope there is one and I will always hope it will be with you still’.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#668|66]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor,” Libcom website, January 17, 2017, https://libcom.org/article/first-congress-national-confederation-labor-cnt-barcelona-september-8-10-1911.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Because it is the light that will guide you onwards to the next thing. If there is not this enduring thing, this kind of gravitational force, then we can lose our way completely and forget that carrying on and not losing the way as much as possible is the whole game. The light is a baton and life is the race and goodbye is the passing of the baton but you have to keep on running and keep on passing that baton but each time you pass it you actually swap it, someone gives you a new one.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#678|67]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” in ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas'','' ''vol. 1,'' From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'','' ''ed. Robert Graham (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005), 418.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">That we can feel sad at this motion and this parting and feel a genuine want that although this thing or this person will go on in its own way without you, that it does so with this light even though you can never know it really, this is a beautiful thing. I bawled my eyes out as I walked away as I am in the habit of doing when I feel the pass of the baton occur.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#688|68]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 81; Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 477.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The only astronaut to admit to crying on the moon was Alan Shepard of Mercury and Apollo 14, and this is just proof that they sent the wrong people to the moon because it is good to cry. Crying is the most honest way of saying (and better than with corrupting words), hey, outside world and other beings, I feel you being there.</div>
-[[#698|69]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 5.
+==== A LETTER TO MY FUTURE SELF ====
-[[#708|70]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 8.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Dear Erin of the future,</div>
-[[#718|71]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''1–3, 9, 12.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">This all seems glaringly obvious to you now, but perhaps you will have forgotten some things. I want you to remember how you got there. That is why I decided it was okay to keep some of the project in Eskimo secret because that way the only person I can colonise is you and that is actually a desirable thing (I like to be consistent). It is to shout I EXIST, which is not a conceited thing to do if you only shout it in your own face.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#727|72]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''41–42, 57–58, 64, 67–84, 94.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Almost anything or any method of information transfer when intended for the future can be termed at one time or another a time capsule. So this written thing is a time capsule. Maybe all written words are time capsules. Virginia Woolf said of writing, ''arrange whatever pieces come your way'', which sounds like time-capsule curation to me. Not collection as possession but a collection like that of the reverent bowerbird. So here it is, an affirmation of me, for you.</div>
-[[#737|73]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 80, 82.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The Eskimo and the Inuit, known as Twospirit people, they know that genders are arbitrary because anyone can embody them, but they still use them to describe themselves. Identity and words are important for narrative. Scientific theories are only approximations to the true nature of things but sometimes the error is tiny enough for them to be pretty useful.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#747|74]]. IWA, “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism,” 418.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Like Newton’s world of solid bodies moving through empty space as an analogy for the realm of everyday life called the zone of middle dimensions. In the zone of middle dimensions you feel the effect of the apple that hits you on the head. It is not much use to tell Newton that the apple does not hit one’s head, not really.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#757|75]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I am not a singular organism but an amalgamation of organisms. I am the elected voice of this amalgamation, for the life inside my life and the mites in my eyelashes.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#767|76]]. Quoted in Peirats, ''CNT in the Spanish Revolution'','' ''vol. 1, 110.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">In taxonomy we separate things to make it easier to talk about difference. Taxonomy is a masculine language that dichotomises, like gender is a masculine language, structuring hierarchies. A colonising language; taxonomy is the colonisation of the natural world, but it is pretty useful because it helps you to tell the difference between ''goosetongue'' and ''arrowgrass'' and not die.</div>
-[[#777|77]]. Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 8.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">And if I am a woman I am a historically situated and contextual woman, but I am a woman all the same. And it only matters that in popular opinion I have been more social and permeable and collectivist and can identify more with trees and animals than a man can. But physics now says that everything is permeable. My feminisation was training in the interrelation of earth systems.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#787|78]]. Berkman, ''Anarchism'', 196–97.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Lovelock gave Earth a feminine (historically defined) name because he valued the feminine (historically defined) characteristics of renewal, life-giving/-destroying and cooperation. History dictated that women understand more about empathy, starting with training in the home and ‘mother’ bonds. If women are better trained in empathy, then maybe women are a little more in love with the world.</div>
-[[#797|79]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 83.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">The universe is perpetual motion and change but you can take a step back to where it comes into sharp focus as you look at it. Consciousness is integral to theories of matter because it is consciousness that creates the whole observation that changes the course of the universe, even if only in a very tiny way. It took a long time for things to get this complex and tangled and each of us is woven into this tangle inextricably.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#807|80]]. Rocker, ''Anarcho-Syndicalism'', 83; Roller, ''Social General Strike'', 10–15; Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'', 48–49, 59–61, 67–77, 90–96.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Because it is densely tangled the web does not change very quickly or drastically, and in this way it gives the illusion of stability. When the speed of change is accelerated to an extent that it is a pace too fast for adaption, it gets very suddenly to a place where nothing is recognisable. Examples of this are mass extinctions, nuclear annihilation, or the loss of an indigenous culture. I call this danger ''velocity''.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#817|81]]. John Merriman, ''Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871'' (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 39–44; Jennings, ''Syndicalism in France'', 138.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">When they talk about space they still talk in terms of ‘nature’ or ‘wilderness’ like the Inuit don’t have a word for, because the only way to talk about a thing is to pin it down and quantify it. It has to be outside you in language. Otherwise science can’t work. But Bohr said this is just a trick and that the properties of an atomic object can only be understood in relation to the object’s interaction with the observer and that you can’t talk about nature without talking about yourself. And it works the other way too, in inverse.</div>
-[[#827|82]]. Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''133–37; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'', 173–77.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">This whole time I have been looking so hard through binoculars that I have not even noticed that I am looking through binoculars, which are a pretty nifty thing to have, or that they have been hurting my eye where I have pressed them against it. And I have been looking so hard through binoculars at what looks so far away that I have not seen what was right in front of me. It is all very well and good to build a castle, but you have to make sure not to build it ''on top of people'', and I could have crushed a few people.</div>
-[[#837|83]]. Pataud and Pouget, ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution'','' ''164–65, 194–207.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Another thing Thoreau said about foundations is ''we have not to lay the foundation of our houses in the ashes of a former civilization''<nowiki>; here he meant literal houses and this is why he liked America, Land of the Free, more than Europe, where there were many civilisations under houses. The ambassador of American wilderness conveniently forgets his own impurity; he has still built his on top of a whole lot of native people.</nowiki></div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#847|84]]. Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle'', 561.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Around me the cabin is still, quiet and dusty. Everything sits in its place as it has since the beginning, familiar and inexplicable. I feel how a swallow must feel getting the sudden inclination of the east, one day looking around itself and suddenly, nope, dislocated. It is all void of purpose now. The weather is turning, the berries are dropping, the gnats are dying off. The east, that is the place to be. The swallow can’t pinpoint when its purpose changed but it did and now everything has something different about it and it has to leave for home.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#857|85]]. Bookchin, ''Spanish Anarchists'','' ''150–52, 174–76, 190–91; Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 75–78, 162–63; A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''264–65, 275–83, 335.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">And its place and its nest and the time it spent there do not feel wasted or failed or empty because that is not the way it works for birds. And none of it matters for me either, all that time and all that work, it is not wasted but changed, stretched. It has fulfilled its purpose and the pieces of it do not fit together any more.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#867|86]]. A. Smith, ''Anarchism'','' Revolution and Reaction'','' ''92–94, 122–23. For other examples, see ibid., 281–83; Ealham, ''Anarchism and the City'','' ''117–18.</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Like a reptile trying to shrug on the jacket of its old self to realise that it no longer fits. Only reptiles are not sentimental and do not keep their old skins in the dresser drawer with the other miscellaneous special things, but we do our baby teeth and that is part of what makes us human. Maybe you still have the baby teeth in the little silver box with the fairy on or maybe you lost them.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#877|87]]. CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor” (1911).</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Somewhere in a parallel universe out east where summer is winter and winter is summer, it is winter and the swallows have already flown, and right now a swallow is pecking on a reptile’s discarded skin.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#887|88]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'','' ''47–48.Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Enclosed in all of this are the maps, some pictures and drawings, the raw bits of film, my (our) diary. Because although I know my map is not this place, the map remembers an important place even though it only exists in the realm of my mind. Just because it can’t tell anyone else anything useful does not deny its significance to me (and you). That is the whole point of keeping postcards, right?</div>
-== {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook13}} {{anchor|Chapter10OrganizationalDuali1}} {{anchor|Chapter10OrganizationalDuali}} Chapter 10: Organizational Dualism: From Bakunin to the Platform ==
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">I would like to leave an epitaph because I think you will find it funny still, as I do now. It is a poem by a man called Stephen Crane. It goes:</div>
-A significant number of mass anarchists thought that federations of trade unions or community groups were insufficient to bring about the social revolution. They held that anarchists must, in addition to this, form specific anarchist organizations that would exist alongside mass organizations. These specific anarchist organizations were advocated as the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to others. This theory has come to be known as organizational dualism. In the past, specific anarchist organizations were often called an anarchist union. This language was not confusing to historical anarchists because they mostly spoke languages other than English and so distinguished between syndicates and the anarchist union, rather than trade unions and the anarchist union.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''I saw a man pursuing the horizon;''</div>
-During the course of anarchism’s history, numerous specific anarchist organizations were founded. For example, in January 1891, Italian anarchists formed the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party, at a congress in Capolago, Switzerland. In the following months, anarchist groups from across Italy formed regional federations committed to the Capolago program. This growth in formal organization was cut short by the combination of state repression following May Day demonstrations, and significant push back from antiorganizationalist anarchists. By the end of the year, the Anarchist Socialist Revolutionary Party had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.[[#1DavideTurcatoMakingSense|1]] Later attempts by Italian anarchists to form a national federation committed to a common program culminated in the establishment of the Italian Anarchist-Communist Union in 1919, which changed its name to the Italian Anarchist Union in 1920. The Italian Anarchist Union, which participated as a key force in the USI and the factory occupation movement of the Bienno Rosso, spread its ideas via the paper ''Umanità Nova''.'' ''At its peak in the early 1920s, the paper sold 50,000 copies a day, and was in some areas the most widely read paper among workers.[[#2CarlLevyGramsciandtheAn|2]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''Round and round they sped.''</div>
-Given the enormous scale of the history of organizational dualism, I shall focus on only three main aspects of its theoretical development. These are: (a) Bakunin’s advocacy of organizational dualism between 1868 and 1872; (b) various proposals made between the 1890s and 1930s on what the relationship between anarchism and syndicalism (or trade unions in general) should be; and (c) debates between proponents of platformist and synthesist specific anarchist organizations that occurred from 1926 onward.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''I was disturbed at this;''</div>
-'''Bakunin and the Alliance'''
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''I accosted the man.''</div>
-The strategy of organizational dualism was first advocated by Bakunin. During the late 1860s and early 1870s, he argued that anarchists should simultaneously organize and participate within mass public organizations that had a broad program, such as trade unions, and also form small secret organizations committed to a narrow anarchist program. This theorizing occurred, in parallel, to Bakunin’s actual attempts to form secret revolutionary organizations. The history of these attempts is extremely complex, but a condensed version follows.
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''‘It is futile,’ I said'',</div>
-During his 1864–67 stay in Italy, Bakunin tried to transform the loose network of revolutionaries he knew into an organization that adhered to a specific program.[[#3WolfgangEckhardtTheFirst|3]] In late 1864, Bakunin, who had recently moved from London to Florence, founded his first proper revolutionary organization: the Brotherhood. Although the Brotherhood certainly existed, and had a membership of at least thirty individuals from largely republican circles, it did not last long and soon faded away after Bakunin moved to Sorrento, near Naples, at the end of May 1865. Bakunin, who was becoming increasingly socialist and shifting closer to his mature anarchist politics, then moved to Naples in October, and met a number of republican revolutionaries. Sometime between late 1865 and early 1866, Bakunin persuaded these individuals to join a new secret revolutionary socialist organization called the International Brotherhood, which was the spiritual successor to the previous Brotherhood based in Florence.[[#4EHCarrMichaelBakunin|4]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''‘You can never—’''</div>
-Bakunin subsequently cofounded two distinct but overlapping organizations: the public International Alliance and the secret Alliance in October 1868. The public International Alliance applied to join the First International and, after its application was rejected, converted itself into a Geneva section of the First International in July 1869. The Geneva public Alliance decided to disband in August 1871, in the aftermath of various splits and conflicts within the Romance Federation of the First International, and took this decision without consulting Bakunin. The original secret Alliance disbanded soon after its founding, due to personal conflicts between its members. It continued to exist only as an informal social network composed of a few individuals who were mainly from Spain, Italy, and Switzerland and members of Bakunin’s inner circle. At around the same time, a distinct secret organization called the Alianza de la Democracia Socialista was founded in Spain, to coordinate the activity of key militants and promote the growth of the Spanish section of the First International. The Alianza decided to dissolve itself in April 1872 and continued to adhere to this decision, despite Bakunin writing a letter attempting to persuade them to do otherwise. A few months later, Bakunin cofounded a new secret society, called the Alliance of Social Revolutionaries in September 1872, after Bakunin had been expelled from the First International by the Hague Congress.[[#5EckhardtFirstSocialistSch|5]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''‘You lie,’ he cried'',</div>
-An early example of Bakunin’s strategy of organizational dualism can be found in his 1866 ''Programme of the Brotherhood''. He proposed that “''the dedicated revolutionaries of every land''” should gather “''at once into both public and private association'' with the twofold object of broadening the revolutionary front and at the same time paving the way for simultaneous concerted action in all countries in which action proves initially possible, through secret agreement among the wisest revolutionaries of those countries.”[[#6MichaelBakuninSelectedWri|6]] The central task of these revolutionaries was to fuse, or in other words, organize, “the elements of social revolution” that “are already widespread in practically all countries of Europe” into “an effective force.”[[#7BakuninSelectedWritings9|7]] In the autumn of 1868, Bakunin wrote in the draft program of the secret Alliance that the organization had been founded in order to help “prepare, organize and hasten” the social revolution by pursuing the immediate “dual objective” of (a) spreading revolutionary consciousness through “journals, pamphlets and books” and “founding public associations” and (b) recruiting “intelligent, energetic, discreet men of good will who are sympathetic to our ideas, both in Europe and as far as possible in America, in order to form an invisible network of dedicated revolutionaries, strengthened by the fact of alliance.”[[#8BakuninSelectedWritings1|8]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">''And ran on.''</div>
-The same idea was expressed by Bakunin in the March 27, 1872, letter he wrote to an Italian named Celso Ceretti, who admired the republican revolutionary Garibaldi. In it, Bakunin advocated a “secret alliance” composed of “nuclei intimately bound together with similar nuclei presently being organized, or that will be organized, in other regions of Italy and abroad.”[[#9QuotedinRavindranathanBak|9]] This organization had “a double mission: at first they will form the inspiring and vivifying soul . . . of the International Workingmen’s Association in Italy and elsewhere, and later they will occupy themselves with questions ''that will be impossible to discuss publicly''. They will form the necessary bridge between the propaganda of socialist theories and revolutionary practice.”[[#10QuotedinRavindranathanBa|10]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">From Erin in the cabin in our wilderness,</div>
-Bakunin did not propose the formation of a secret revolutionary organization because he had a hidden authoritarian agenda. He was motivated by the deeply practical view that a secret revolutionary organization was necessary in order to avoid state repression. In a April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza, he argued that the organization could not be public, because, if it were, it would be persecuted and crushed.[[#11MichaelBakuninTotheBro|11]] This concern with secrecy is especially understandable given that Bakunin himself had been imprisoned in 1849 by the state of Saxony for having fought in an insurrection launched by the people of Dresden. He was subsequently handed from one state to another, imprisoned by Saxony, then by Austria, which kept him chained to a cell wall for a year, and then finally Russia from May 1851 onward. Both Saxony and Austria sentenced Bakunin to death, only to alter his sentence at the last minute after a secret agreement was made to transfer him ultimately to Russia. He remained imprisoned in Russia’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where all his teeth fell out due to scurvy, until the Tsar permanently banished him to Siberia in 1857.[[#12CarrBakunin189224240|12]]
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Denali,</div>
-Bakunin thought that the mass public organization—the First International—and the small secret anarchist organization—the Alliance—had distinct but complementary roles in the revolutionary process. The role of the mass public organization was to unite as many workers as possible within an organization that prefigured the future society and to engage in large-scale direct action against the ruling classes. The role of the small, secret, specific anarchist organization was, in comparison, to enable dedicated revolutionaries to coordinate their activity effectively and participate in the collective struggles of the working classes. In so doing, anarchists would spread their ideas and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state in favor of an anarchist society. Bakunin explained his views on this topic in a private letter he wrote to the Alianza member Charles Alerini between May 3 and 6, 1872. According to Bakunin,
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Alaska,</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">The Alliance and the International, although they both seek the same final goals, follow, at one and the same time, different paths. One has a mission to bring together the labor masses—millions of workers—[reaching] across differences of trades or lands, across the frontier of every state into one single compact and immense body. The other, the Alliance, has a mission to give a really revolutionary direction to these masses. The programs of the one and the other, without in any way being opposed, are different, in keeping with the extent of the development of each. That of the International, if it is taken seriously, contains in germ—but only in germ—the whole program of the Alliance. The program of the Alliance is the elaboration of the program of the International.[[#13BakuninSelectedTexts210|13]]</div>
+<div style="margin-left:0.635cm;margin-right:0.635cm;">Earth</div>
-Bakunin thought that the mass public organization and the specific anarchist organization should have distinct programs due to their different roles. The First International’s role was to unite workers from around the world into federations of trade unions that engaged in the struggle for immediate improvements via direct action, and thereby laid the foundation from which the social revolution could arise. Given this, it should have a broad program inclusive to as many workers as possible and be based on their shared class interests to achieve better living conditions, emancipation, and international solidarity in the class struggle.[[#14BakuninSelectedTexts210|14]] Were the First International to adopt a narrow program, it would fail in its mission, and merely create “a very small association, a sect, but not an armed camp for the proletariat of the entire world [set] against the exploiting and dominant classes.”[[#15BakuninSelectedTexts210|15]] The Alliance, in contrast, had to have an explicitly revolutionary program that advocated the simultaneous abolition of capitalism and the state. This included a commitment to atheism, which Bakunin held should not be part of the First International’s program, because that would exclude the millions of workers who believe in God.[[#16BakuninSelectedTexts211|16]]
+==== {{anchor|Topofackhtml}} ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ====
-This view was repeated almost word for word by Bakunin in his April 1872 letter to the members of the Spanish Alianza. This went alongside the clarification that Bakunin rejected the position that all socialist consciousness had to be brought to workers in the mass public organization by the secret organization of revolutionaries. Bakunin instead maintained that workers would develop their own radical ideas, due to both the influence of revolutionaries and their own experiences of class struggle. He thought that in an International with a broad program “it will happen that, more and more educated by the struggle and by the free propaganda of different ideas, directed by their own instinct and increasingly raised to revolutionary consciousness by practice itself and the inevitable consequences of the universal solidarity of the struggle of labor against capital, the masses will elaborate, slowly, it is true, but infallibly, their own thoughts, theories that will emerge from bottom to top.”[[#17BakuninTotheBrothersof|17]]
+I can’t give enough thanks to Jack Underwood for telling me to carry on in the early days, to Harriet Moore for ceaseless support and tender critique, to Nick Sheerin for caring editorial guidance, to all my friends, but especially Claire Liddiard, Hatty Nestor and Zina Sarris, to the Sarris family for allowing me space in their house to write, and to Mum, Dad, Nan and J. J. x
-Although Bakunin thought that a small secret society of dedicated revolutionaries would play an important role in the process of workers becoming organized and adopting socialist ideas, he remained committed to the self-emancipation of the working classes. In his resignation letter to the Jura Federation in 1873, he reminded them that the “organization of the forces of the proletariat . . . should be the work of the proletariat itself.”[[#18BakuninSelectedTexts249|18]] A number of modern authors have argued against such an interpretation of Bakunin on the grounds that these public declarations are contradicted by his private programs and letters in which, they allege, he argued for a fundamentally authoritarian and un-anarchist strategy. According to these critics, Bakunin preached anarchism in public while privately advocating the organization of a hierarchical secret society that would seize power and establish an unaccountable top-down dictatorship that ruled society from the shadows. The two main sources cited to support this interpretation are Bakunin’s April 1, 1870, letter to Albert Richard and his June 2, 1870, letter to Sergei Nechaev.[[#19ForexampleHalDraperKar|19]] These interpretations misrepresent what Bakunin proposed within his letters and take certain quotes out of context.
+I would also like to express gratitude to the following writers who allowed me to draw on their words and work in this novel.
-His letter to Richard did advocate ideas that can sound authoritarian and incompatible with anarchist strategy, such as his endorsement of a “collective, invisible dictatorship.”[[#20BakuninSelectedWritings|20]] In order to refute ominous authoritarian readings of Bakunin, it is necessary to establish in detail exactly what Bakunin meant by an “invisible dictatorship” by placing this phrase within the full context of the letter. First, Bakunin repeated both the standard anarchist critique of state socialism and the standard anarchist conception of a social revolution. He rejected centralization, minority rule, and a revolutionary state modeled on the French Revolution, in which decisions for an entire country are made by a single committee, on the grounds that they were a means that would never lead to a free socialist society. The revolution, he said, should instead be achieved through the formation of a federation of workers’ associations that would expropriate the means of production, liquidate the state, establish workers militias, and coordinate production and distribution through a system of delegates.[[#21BakuninSelectedWritings|21]] Bakunin’s letter is, in this respect, entirely consistent with his statements elsewhere.
+The lines of dialogue attributed to Rachel Carson on pages [[#page44|44]], [[#page53|53]], [[#page209|209]] and [[#page210|210]] and the chapter title ‘THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH’ are taken from ''Silent Spring'' by Rachel Carson (copyright © 1962 by Rachel L. Carson, renewed 1990 by Roger Christie) and are reprinted by permission of Frances Collin, Trustee.
-Second, the reason Bakunin referred to an “invisible dictatorship” is that he is attempting to persuade Richard to abandon state socialist strategies. Richard was a French member of the Alliance who never fully endorsed its anarchist program, and would go on to write a pamphlet arguing for the reinstatement of Napoleon III as Emperor. Bakunin wrote, “you remain more than ever a supporter of centralization and the revolutionary State. Whereas I am more opposed to it than ever, and see no salvation except in revolutionary anarchy, guided on all issues by an invisible collective power—the only dictatorship I accept.”[[#22BakuninSelectedWritings1|22]] As a result the only occasions when Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter is when he is contrasting the “invisible dictatorship” he supports with the “overt dictatorship” that Richard wrongly advocates.[[#23BakuninSelectedWritings1|23]] Bakunin’s use of language for rhetorical purposes is similar to how Marx used the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat,” instead of “rule of the proletariat,” when he was in dialogue with followers of Blanqui due to their support for revolutionary dictatorships.[[#24ForanoverviewofMarxsus|24]]
+The quotation from Sylvia Plath’s journals on page [[#page83|83]] is taken from ''The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950–62'' (copyright © The Estate of Sylvia Plath, 2000) and reproduced by permission of Faber & Faber.
-Third, at no point does Bakunin claim that the “invisible dictatorship” will make decisions and impose them on the working classes. He instead held that it would only act to influence or guide the working classes. He declared that, during a revolution,
+The quotation from Ted Kaczynski on page [[#page76|76]] is taken from ''Technological Slavery: The Collected Writings of Theodore J. Kaczynski'' (Feral House, 2010).
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">supporters of overt dictatorship, advocate the muting of passions, and speak for order, trust and submission to the established revolutionary powers—in this way they reconstitute the state. We, on the other hand, must foment, awaken and unleash all the passions, we must produce anarchy and, like invisible pilots in the thick of the popular tempest, we must steer it not by any open power but by the collective dictatorship of all the allies—a dictatorship without insignia, titles or official rights, and all the stronger for having none of the paraphernalia of power.[[#25BakuninSelectedWritings|25]] </div>
+The chapter title ‘THE EARTH IS AN INDIAN THING’ and the quotation of the same line on page [[#page110|110]] are excerpts from ''On the Road'' by Jack Kerouac, copyright © 1955, 1957, by John Sampas, Literary Representative, the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac; John Lash, Executor of the Estate of Jan Kerouac; Nancy Bump; and Anthony M. Sampas. Used by permission of Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
-This view is repeated later in the letter when Bakunin wrote that only the “invisible collective force . . . can preserve and guide the revolution.”[[#26BakuninSelectedWritings|26]] In advocating an “invisible collective force,” Bakunin was not endorsing a clandestine organization that guides workers by violently forcing them to behave in a particular manner. Bakunin is instead repeating language from Proudhon, who defined ''collective force'' as when the combined and organized action of individuals results in a group that possesses collective capacities to change the world that are greater than the sum of the capacities of each individual member.[[#27PierreJosephProudhonProp|27]]
+The chapter title ‘THE BEARD AND THE GUNS AND THE LITTLE SHORT SENTENCES’ is copyright © 2004 by Ursula K. Le Guin and first appeared in ''The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination'', published by Shambhala in 2004, reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
-Bakunin made similar points in his later letter to Nechaev, who was a Russian acquaintance of Bakunin committed to the formation of an authoritarian top-down secret society that engaged in any means, including assassinating members of the ruling classes and launching coups, to trigger a revolution. As in the previous letter, sections of it can be quoted out of context in order to give the false impression that Bakunin was a hidden authoritarian, such as his advocacy of “''the collective dictatorship'' of a secret organization.”[[#28BakuninSelectedWritings|28]] Such an interpretation should be rejected once again. Bakunin argued, in line with anarchist theory, that any revolution based on the seizure of state power by a ruling minority would result in new forms of oppression and exploitation, rather than emancipation. He thought that any attempt to abolish class society that “is at all artificial, and deals in secret plots, sudden assaults, surprises and blows, is bound to wreck itself against the State, which can only be conquered and broken by a spontaneous popular socialist revolution. And therefore the sole object of a secret society must be not to create an artificial force outside the people, but to arouse, unite and organize spontaneous popular forces; in this way the only possible, the only effective army of the revolution is not outside the people, but consists of the people themselves.”[[#29BakuninSelectedWritings|29]]
+The chapter title ‘I AM THAT I AM AND THE REST IS WOMEN & WILDERNESS’ is an excerpt from ''Dancing at the Edge of the World'', copyright © 1989 Ursula K. Le Guin. Used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Any third party use of this material, outside of this publication, is prohibited.
-During this period, the word “spontaneous” was generally used by anarchists to refer to when workers acted voluntarily of their own volition, rather than being forced to do something. Such spontaneous action was compatible with workers being influenced to act in a particular manner by the words and deeds of those around them. The role of the secret organization of committed revolutionaries was, therefore, to encourage and support a process of working-class self-emancipation. Bakunin wrote that if the working classes are the “revolutionary army,” then the secret organization would be the “general headquarters of this army, and the organizer not of its own, but of the people’s forces, as a link between the people’s instincts and revolutionary thought.”[[#30BakuninSelectedWritings1|30]]
+The chapter title ‘THE WILD AS A PROJECT OF THE SELF’ is a quotation from Jack Turner’s ''The Abstract Wild'' (University of Arizona Press, 1996).
-This would be achieved by forming a series of secret small groups that were dispersed throughout a country and united under a common program. During a revolutionary situation, they would formulate a set of ideas that were “the very essence of popular instincts, desires and demands,” spread them “among a crowd of people who would be struggling without any purpose or plan,” and thereby “create round themselves a circle of people who are more or less devoted to the same idea, and who are naturally subject to their influence.”[[#31BakuninSelectedWritings1|31]] They would then collectively participate within ongoing popular movements in order to “lead the people toward the most complete realization of the social-economic ideal and the organization of the fullest popular freedom. This is what I call ''the collective dictatorship'' of a secret organization.”[[#32BakuninSelectedWritings|32]]
+The quotation attributed to John Lilly on page [[#page230|230]] is taken from ''Tanks for the Memories: Floatation Tank Talks'' by Dr John C. Lilly and E. J. Gold (Gateways Books & Tapes, © 1995).
-Just as in his letter to Richard, Bakunin introduced this phrase in order to contrast the methods by which anarchists will “influence the people” with the “publicly declared dictatorship” that he opposed.[[#33BakuninSelectedWritings|33]] Bakunin’s so-called dictatorship would not give orders to workers who were subject to their authority and forced to obey by the threat of corporal punishment or court-martial. He explicitly wrote that,
+The quotations from Aldo Leopold on pages [[#page252|252]] and [[#page291|291]] are taken from ''A Sand County Almanac'' and are reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press, USA.
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">It does not impose any new resolutions, regulations or ways of living on the people, and only unleashes their will and gives a wider opportunity for their self-determination and their social-economic organizations, which should be created by them alone from the bottom upwards, and not from the top downwards. The organization must be sincerely impregnated with the idea that it is the servant and helper of the people, and by no means their ruler, and also not in any circumstances, not even on the pretext of the people’s welfare, should it ever be their master.[[#34BakuninSelectedWritings|34]]</div>
+The words of Einstein on page [[#page258|258]]–[[#page259|9]] are © The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
-The secret organization instead “influences the people exclusively through the natural, personal influence of its members, who have not the slightest power, are scattered in an unseen web throughout the regions, districts and communes, and, in agreement with each other, try, in whatever place they may be, to direct the spontaneous revolutionary movement of the people toward the plan that has been discussed beforehand and firmly determined.”[[#35BakuninSelectedWritings|35]] Its only methods to direct and influence mass social movements were persuasion and acting as organizers. It would, Bakunin believed, “carry out a broadly based popular propaganda, a propaganda that would ''really'' penetrate to the people, and by the power of this propaganda and also by ''organization among the people themselves'' join together separate popular forces into a mighty strength capable of demolishing the State.”[[#36BakuninSelectedWritings|36]]
+The chapter titles ‘THE KNOWING SELF IS PARTIAL’ and ‘MUCOUS MEMBRANE LINING THE GUT CAVITY OF A MARINE WORM LIVING IN THE VENT GASES ON A FAULT BETWEEN CONTINENTAL PLATES’ are quotations from the work of Donna Haraway and are taken respectively from ''Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective'' (Donna Haraway, Feminist Studies, Vol 14, No 3, Autumn 1988, pp.575–99) and ''Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'' (Donna Haraway, Routledge, 1991).
-Critics of Bakunin have not only misrepresented what Bakunin meant by an invisible or collective dictatorship but also failed to mention that, in several other sources, he makes exactly the same proposals as in his letters to Richard and Nechaev without using any dictatorial language. This is extremely important, because the only two instances in which Bakunin advocates a dictatorship as an anarchist are in two letters he wrote as attempts to persuade authoritarian revolutionaries to adopt anarchist strategy. Outside this context, Bakunin does not use this language, and so it appears most likely that he only adopted the language as a rhetorical device, and not as an expression of his hidden authoritarian agenda.
+The chapter title ‘THE CLITORIS IS A DIRECT LINE TO THE MATRIX’ is taken from a billboard created by artist collective VNS Matrix.
-In the 1868 program of the International Brotherhood, Bakunin wrote that a social revolution must be created by workers themselves through their own organs of self-management. Within such a revolution, “''the unity of revolutionary thought and action must find an agent'' in the thick of the popular anarchy which will constitute the very life and all the energy of the revolution. That agent must be ''the secret universal association of international brothers''” which is “a kind of revolutionary general staff” that spreads ideas and organizes workers in order to act as the “intermediaries between the revolutionary idea and popular instinct.”[[#37BakuninSelectedWritings|37]] This text is almost identical to passages from Bakunin’s letters to Albert and Nechaev but, at no point, does he refer to any invisible dictatorship. Indeed, he explicitly writes that “this organization rules out any idea of dictatorship and custodial control” since “supreme control must always belong to the people.”[[#38BakuninSelectedWritings|38]]
+The chapter title ‘WHAT BOOK IS THIS THAT REFUSES TO END?’ is taken from Anna Tsing’s ''The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins'' (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press, 2015).
-The same opposition to dictatorship appears elsewhere. In September 1869 ''La Liberté ''published Bakunin’s article, “A Few Words to My Young Brothers in Russia.” In the article, he insisted that formally educated young people in Russia should “go among the people” and “learn amid these masses whose hands are hardened by labor how you should serve the people’s cause. And remember well, brothers, that the cultured youth should be neither master nor protector nor benefactor nor dictator to the people, only the midwife of their spontaneous emancipation, the uniter and organizer of their efforts and their strength.”[[#39MichaelBakuninTheBasicB|39]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:f0308-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-Two years later, he wrote in “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State”'' ''that during a social revolution,
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:f0309-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">All that individuals can do is elaborate, clarify and propagate the ideas that correspond to the popular feeling and, beyond this, to contribute by their ceaseless efforts to the revolutionary organization of the natural power of the masses, but nothing beyond that. And everything else should not and could not take place except by the action of the people themselves. Otherwise one would end with political dictatorship, that is to say, the reconstruction of the State . . . and one would arrive by a devious but logical path at the re-establishment of the political, social and economic slavery of the popular masses.[[#40BakuninSelectedWritings|40]]</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:f0310-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-Bakunin described the Alliance in his April 1872 letter to members of the Spanish Alianza as
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:f0311-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Fundamentally a militant organization whose purpose is the organization of the power of the masses for the destruction of all states and all of the religious, political, judicial, social, and economic institutions currently existing, for the absolute emancipation of the subjugated and exploited laborers of the whole world. The purpose of our organization is to push the masses to make a clean sweep, so that agricultural and industrial populations can reorganize and federate themselves according to the principles of justice, equality, freedom and solidarity, from the bottom up, spontaneously, freely, apart from any official tutelage, whether of the reactionary or even the so-called revolutionary kind.[[#41QuotedinEckhardtFirstSo|41]]</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{anchor|Topofbm01html}} '''ALSO FROM SERPENT’S TAIL'''</div>
-The evidence clearly shows that Bakunin was not a hidden authoritarian who preached anarchism in public, and top-down minority rule by a secret society in private. His public and private statements were entirely consistent with one another, and with his anarchist commitment to the self-emancipation of the working classes. Bakunin held, in short, that the success of a social revolution required a specific anarchist organization of dedicated militants who organized secretly to avoid state repression and were united under a common theoretical and strategic program. The main goal of this organization was to participate in popular social movements in order to spread anarchist ideas, and help organize and coordinate the uprisings of the working classes into a force capable of abolishing capitalism and the state and building an anarchist society.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:pub.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-In two letters, Bakunin referred to this as an invisible or collective dictatorship, but in so doing all he actually meant was that a specific anarchist organization would influence the wider working classes through persuasion and acting as key organizers and militants within the ongoing class struggle. In his mind, this would occur in parallel with, and as a complement to, workers transforming themselves through their own experiences of revolutionary practice within mass public organizations that were committed to broad programs. During an evolutionary period, this included such organizations as trade unions. Once a revolution had been launched, increasingly large numbers of workers would continue this process of self-transformation and self-organization within federations of producers’ and consumers’ associations, and federations of workers’ militias. The role of the specific anarchist organization was to prevent the emergence of any new system of minority rule and to promote forms of organization and decision-making that enabled worker self-management.
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0312-01.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-Bakunin attempted to implement this theory by participating in the broad public First International via a secret informal social network known as the Alliance. This secret network was never in a position where it could influence the working classes during a social revolution, and failed to live up to the great role that Bakunin had given it. Despite these limitations, its importance should not be underestimated. It was arguably the first specific anarchist organization in history, and its members played a key role in formulating the theory and practice of the anarchist movement. From the intellectual and practical foundation that Bakunin and the Alliance built, the future history of specific anarchist organizations would emerge.
+<div style="text-align:center;">The Evening Chorus</div>
-'''Syndicalism and Specific Anarchist Organizations'''
+<div style="text-align:center;">Helen Humphreys</div>
-After the collapse of the Saint-Imier International in 1878, mass anarchists continued to advocate the strategy of simultaneously forming mass organizations and small specific anarchist organizations. In the buildup to the 1881 International Social Revolutionary Congress in London, Kropotkin proposed in letters to Malatesta, Cafiero, Schwitzguébel and an unnamed Belgian comrade, that anarchists should form “two organizations; one open, vast, and functioning openly; the other secret intended for action.”[[#42QuotedinCarolineCahmKro|42]] The secret organization was to be composed of dedicated anarchist militants who were experienced and action oriented. The public organization was, in comparison, to be a trade union that grouped workers “under the flag of the Strikers’ International.”[[#43QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|43]] The trade union was advocated both because it was the sole means through which “the forces of labor, the masses, can be successfully grouped together” and because it would “provide forces, money and a place for secret groups” to operate.[[#44QuotedinCahmKropotkin1|44]] This secret organization would be a direct continuation of the Intimité Internationale, a secret association of anarchists within the Saint-Imier International that he had joined in 1877 and that, when he was writing, still existed.[[#45CahmKropotkin1061453|45]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">A story of four lives torn apart by war, falling in and out of love, and the unlikely moments that come to define a life.</div>
-In the years after 1881, Kropotkin remained an advocate of organizational dualism. Nettlau described him as advocating “''the penetration of the masses and their stimulation by libertarian militants, in much the same way as the Alliance acted within the International''.”[[#46MaxNettlauAShortHistory|46]] To support this view, Nettlau cited a 1914 letter where Kropotkin argued that “the syndicate is absolutely necessary. It is the only form of workers’ association which allows the direct struggle against capital to be carried on without a plunge into parliamentarism. But, evidently, it does not achieve this goal automatically, since in Germany, in France and in England, we have the examples of syndicates linked to the parliamentary struggle . . . There is need of the other element which Malatesta speaks of ''and which Bakunin always professed'',” namely a specific anarchist organization.[[#47QuotedinNettlauShortHis|47]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">ISBN 978 1 78125 303 8eISBN 978 1 78283 087 0</div>
-What element Malatesta spoke of can be established by examining the articles he wrote during the 1890s. In 1894, Malatesta argued that anarchists “should organize among ourselves, among folk who are perfectly persuaded and perfectly in agreement; and, around us, in broad, open associations, we should organize as many of the workers as we can, accepting them for what they are and striving to nudge them into whatever progress we can.”[[#48MalatestaTheMethodofFre|48]] This view was repeated in 1897, when he wrote that anarchists should “set up as many groups of convinced and agreeable comrades as possible,” and also “join the labor movement with fervor, helping already existing workers’ organizations and striving to promote new ones.”[[#49ErricoMalatestaALongand|49]] In 1899, he continued to argue for the “organization of us anarchists and the anarchist organization of the masses.”[[#50MalatestaErricoMalatesta|50]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">[[Image:f0313-01.jpg.png|top]]</div>
-Malatesta held, in line with Bakunin, that the mass organization should not have a distinctly anarchist program. In June 1897, he argued that “the workers’ organizations . . . gather the exploited for the economic struggle against the masters” on the basis of “the interests shared by all workers . . . regardless of persuasion” and so must “be separate and distinct from the organizations of the various parties,” including specific anarchist organizations.[[#51MalatestaPatientWork174|51]] Several months later in November, he distinguished between “the workers’ movement—which should be whatever it can be and vary with the varying degree of development attained by the proletarians . . . and the anarchist party, which should be made up of men subscribing to the same ideas and bound by common purposes.”[[#52MalatestaPatientWork364|52]] Malatesta came to adopt this position in response to the lessons of the International in Italy. The Italian section “was never anything other than the anarchist socialist party,” and so “was weak as an organization for economic resistance” because “it was unable to make headway among the masses who were frightened by its overly advanced program . . . and it was weak as an anarchist party because many of its members were workers who had little grasp of anarchy and socialism and, having been drawn by the hope of immediate revolution, melted away every time an insurrectional attempt, or the hope of it, failed.”[[#53MalatestaPatientWork364|53]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">Eat My Heart Out</div>
-After the birth of revolutionary syndicalism as a doctrine between the late 1890s and the early 1900s, Malatesta’s advocacy of organizational dualism was articulated in response to the ideas of the CGT and other revolutionary syndicalist trade unions. Malatesta’s critique of the theory of revolutionary syndicalism is sometimes misrepresented as a rejection of revolutionary trade unionism in and of itself. Such a perspective ignores the fact that during his debate with the revolutionary syndicalist and CGT member Monatte at the 1907 International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam, Malatesta argued that he was a supporter of the labor movement and advocated anarchists entering trade unions to spread anarchist ideas among workers. As a result, he described himself as “a syndicalist, in the sense of being a supporter of the syndicates,” who advocated “syndicates that are open to all workers without distinction of opinions, absolutely neutral syndicates,” rather than “anarchist syndicates.”[[#54MaurizioAntonioliedThe|54]] What Malatesta rejected was revolutionary syndicalism as “a doctrine” in the sense of the position that trade unionism is “''sufficient unto itself''” and “a necessary and sufficient means for social revolution.”[[#55AntonioliedInternationa|55]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">Zoe Pilger</div>
-Over the following decades, Malatesta repeatedly argued that revolutionary syndicalism was wrong, because trade unions are a necessary but insufficient means to revolution. In 1927, he insisted that,
+<div style="text-align:center;">Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, ''Eat My Heart Out'' is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">Today the major force for social transformation is the labor movement (union movement). . . . The anarchists must recognize the usefulness and importance of the union movement; they must support its development and make it one of the levers in their action, doing all they can to ensure that, by cooperation with other forces for progress, it will open the way to a social revolution. . . . But it would be a great and fatal mistake to believe, as many do, that the labor movement can and should, of its own volition, and by its very nature, lead to such a revolution.[[#56MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|56]]</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">ISBN 978 1 84668 963 5eISBN 978 1 84765 971 2</div>
-Malatesta thought that trade unionism was insufficient to achieve a social revolution, because he believed that trade union activity was constituted by forms of practice that, over time, had a tendency to transform them into reformist institutions concerned with reproducing themselves within capitalism, rather than abolishing class society. As he explained in 1907, “Labor movements, which always commence as movements of protest and revolt, and are animated at the beginning by a broad spirit of progress and human fraternity, tend very soon to degenerate; and in proportion as they acquire strength, they become egoistic, conservative, occupied exclusively with interests immediate and restricted, and develop within themselves a bureaucracy which, as in all such cases, has no other object than to strengthen and aggrandize itself.”[[#57MalatestaMethodofFreedom|57]]
+<div style="text-align:center;">{{clear}}
+[[Image:f0313-02.jpg.png|center]]</div>
-Trade unions must, if they are to fulfill their purpose, be open to any worker who wants to win immediate improvements from the economic ruling classes. The consequence of this is that trade unions will be forced by circumstances to “moderate their aspirations, first so that they should not frighten away those they wish to have with them, and next because, in proportion as numbers increase, those with ideas who have initiated the movement remain buried in a majority that is only occupied with the petty interests of the moment.”[[#58MalatestaMethodofFreedom|58]] In addition, given their function of winning immediate improvements for their membership, trade unions will have to operate not too far outside the law, interact with the political and economic ruling classes, and concern themselves primarily with the interests of workers who belong to the trade union, rather than workers who their membership competes with in the labor market. These factors would, in turn, lead trade unions that gain a large membership to “assure, in accord with rather than against the masters, a privileged situation for themselves, and so create difficulties of entrance for new members, and for the admission of apprentices in the factories; a tendency to amass large funds that afterwards they are afraid of compromising; to seek the favor of public powers; to be absorbed, above all, in co-operation and mutual benefit schemes; and to become at last conservative elements in society.”[[#59MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|59]]
-For Malatesta, this tendency of trade unions to develop into reformist institutions that balanced the interests of capital and labor was confirmed by such examples as the American Federation of Labor in the United States. It “does not carry on a struggle against the bosses except in the sense that two businessmen struggle when they are discussing the details of a contract. The real struggle is conducted against the newcomers, the foreigners, or natives who seek to be allowed to work in any industrial job” such that “skilled workers look down on manual workers; whites despise and oppress blacks; the ‘real Americans’ consider Chinese, Italians, and other foreign workers as inferiors. If a revolution were to come in the United States, the strong and wealthy Unions would inevitably be against the Movement, because they would be worried about their investments and the privileged position they have assured for themselves.”[[#60ErricoMalatestaLifeandI|60]] Kropotkin shared Malatesta’s concerns. In 1919, he complained that in England, after the collapse of the First International, “the daily struggle of local unions against the exploiters took the place of more distant ends . . . the majority of the active members of the workers’ unions, occupied day after day with the organization of these unions and their strikes, lost sight of the final end of the workers’ organization—social revolution.”[[#61PeterKropotkinDirectStru|61]]
-The history of the CGT can itself be used to illustrate Malatesta’s argument against revolutionary syndicalism. In 1919, a major and potentially revolutionary strike wave spread across France. It mobilized 1,150,718 workers in 2,026 strikes. One of the major strikes in this wave of revolt began on June 2, when 170,750 metalworkers in Paris and its suburbs, who belonged to thirteen local unions, went on strike for a forty-four-hour workweek and higher wages. This strike was independently organized by the rank and file as a reaction to the secretaries of the CGT’s Federation of Metalworkers signing an agreement with capitalists that granted a forty-eight-hour workweek. In so doing, the Federation had undercut ongoing negotiations between the capitalists and the Parisian local unions concerning a forty-four-hour workweek.
-A significant number of workers who took part in the strike, which expanded to include other regions of France, attempted to transform it into a revolutionary movement against capitalism itself and to achieve political objectives, such as an end to French military intervention against the Russian revolution and amnesty for political and military prisoners. They called for a general strike and the establishment of a new Paris Commune. The strike ended on June 28, before any of this could occur, because the union secretaries decided to achieve a purely economic settlement with the capitalists and government, which won increased wages and reaffirmed the previous agreement of a forty-eight-hour workweek. Despite thinking of themselves as genuine radicals committed to the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism, the secretaries decided to not support political or revolutionary demands or enlist the wider support of the CGT as a whole. Given their social position as trade union bureaucrats, they acted to balance the interests of capital and labor and focused exclusively on reformist rather than revolutionary goals.[[#62NicholasPapayanisAlphonse|62]]
-Anarcho-syndicalists argued that revolutionaries should respond to the problem of trade unions becoming increasingly reformist over time by explicitly committing them to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means. In 1925, Malatesta rejected this position and argued against those who aspired to merge the labor and anarchist movements by giving unions an explicitly anarchist program. He noted that the purpose of a trade union is to unite as many workers as possible in order to win immediate reforms, such as higher wages and improved working conditions, and thereby act as “a means of education and a field for propaganda” until workers “are in a position to make the social revolution.”[[#63MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|63]] Yet, since the majority of workers are not anarchists, any trade union that allowed only committed anarchists to join it would “be the very same thing as an anarchist group and would remain unable either to obtain better conditions or to bring about the revolution.”[[#64MalatestaMethodofFreedom|64]] His claim that anarcho-syndicalist trade unions would end up being specific anarchist organizations that called themselves trade unions was certainly applicable to some groups. The French CGTSR, for example, had only six thousand members in 1936, hardly the size necessary to be an organ of genuinely large-scale class struggle.[[#65DavidBerryAHistoryofth|65]]
-On the other hand, if an anarcho-syndicalist trade union allowed any worker into it and thereby performed its function as an organ of large-scale class struggle then, as it grew in size, it would come to be an organization in which the majority of members were not anarchists and its anarchist program would exist only on paper as “an empty formula to which nobody pays any more attention.”[[#66MalatestaMethodofFreedom|66]] Malatesta concluded that any “fusion” of anarchism and the trade union movement would result “either in rendering the union powerless to attain its specific aim, or in attenuating, falsifying and extinguishing the spirit of Anarchism.”[[#67MalatestaMethodofFreedom|67]]
-Given this, Malatesta rejected the strategy of committing existing trade unions to an anarchist program or splitting off from large, moderate trade unions to form much smaller anarchist ones. He instead argued that anarchists should participate within the largest trade unions as a militant minority in order to be able to influence the largest number of workers and counteract the tendency of trade unions to become reformist. In Malatesta’s specific context during 1920s Italy, this was the syndicalist USI and the General Confederation of Labor, which had close ties with the Italian Socialist Party. His position, though, could apply just as well to less radical trade unions.[[#68MalatestaAnarchistRevolut|68]]
-According to Malatesta, the “revolutionary spirit must be introduced, developed, and maintained by the constant actions of revolutionaries who work from within their ranks as well as from outside, but it cannot be the normal, natural definition of the Trade Unions’ function.”[[#69MalatestaLifeandIdeas1|69]] Anarchists who participate in the trade union movement should, “strive to make them as much as possible instruments of combat in view of the Social Revolution. They should work to develop in the Syndicates all that which can augment its educative influence and its combativeness—the propaganda of ideas, the forcible strike, the spirit of proselytism, the distrust and hatred of the authorities and of the politicians, the practice of solidarity toward individuals and groups in conflict with the masters. They should combat all that which tends to render them egotistic, pacific, conservative,” which included amassing large amounts of money and “the appointment of bureaucratic officials, paid and permanent.”[[#70MalatestaMethodofFreedom|70]]
-Although Malatesta advocated anarchist participation within the trade union movement, he insisted that anarchism should not subsume itself into it, but instead maintain an independent existence within specific anarchist organizations. He argued that anarchists should work within the trade union movement for “anarchistic purposes as individuals, groups and federations of groups” and “always keep in contact with the Anarchists and remember that the labor organizations do not constitute the end but only one of the various means, no matter how important it may be, of preparing the advent of anarchy.”[[#71MalatestaMethodofFreedom|71]] There is, he said, “an impelling need for a specifically anarchist organization which, both from within and outside the unions, struggle for the achievement of anarchism and seek to sterilize all the germs of degeneration and reaction.”[[#72MalatestaMethodofFreedom1|72]] In other words, Malatesta advocated syndicalism (in the broad sense of revolutionary trade unionism) plus a specific anarchist organization.
-He was not alone. In 1888, Spanish anarchists formed the Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region in order to provide the Federation of Resistance Against Capital, a federation of politically neutral trade unions, with a revolutionary orientation.[[#73GeorgeRichardEsenweinAna|73]] Decades later in 1907, an anonymous member of the anarchist movement in Bohemia reported: “We are syndicalists. But syndicalism for us is only a means of action and not an end. We view it as a means of anarchist propaganda. It is thanks to syndicalism that we have been able to put down firm roots among the textile workers and miners in northern Bohemia, whose trade unions are under our direct influence. Most of these unions are flanked by an anarchist group made up of the best educated and most conscious workers. Our revolutionary miners are preparing the struggle for an eight-hour day.”[[#74AntonioliedInternationa|74]]
-Some, but not all, anarcho-syndicalists advocated the formation of both mass syndicalist trade unions committed to an anarchist program, which were open to all workers, and smaller specific anarchist organizations, which were composed exclusively of dedicated militants. Focusing on Spain, the former general secretary of the CNT’s Catalan Regional Federation, Salvador Seguí, gave a speech on anarchism and syndicalism in 1920. He claimed that although anarchists should participate in trade unions in order to “watch over their development and to provide them with direction” such that they “become more libertarian,” this “does not by any means imply that the existing anarchist groups must be dissolved. Not at all. The more influence they exercise, the more Anarchism and anarchists there will be.”[[#75SalvadorSeguiAnarchisma|75]] Ultimately, as Seguí pointed out, it was the influence of anarchist groups that led to the CNT adopting anarchist communism as its goal in 1919.
-Several years later in 1927, the FAI was founded during the CNT’s period of illegality—between 1924 and 1930—under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. Its founding was initiated by the Portuguese Anarchist Union, the Federation of Spanish-Speaking Anarchist Groups in France, and the Federation of Anarchist Groups in Spain.[[#76JuanGomezCasasAnarchist|76]] The strategic motivations for a new specific anarchist organization can be seen in the manifesto issued by the Anarchist Liaison Committee of Catalonia, which had been set up to organize the founding of the FAI. They described themselves as workers who were active CNT militants and supporters of the doctrine of the IWMA. It was asserted that “it is not enough to be active inside the union. . . . Outside of the unions, absolutely independently, we disseminate our theories, form our groups, organize rallies, publish anarchist reading material, and sow the seed of anarchism in every direction.”[[#77QuotedinChristieWethe|77]] This activity in anarchist groups was essential in order to ensure that anarchists both instigated and inspired the coming social revolution such that it was not defeated, as had recently happened in Russia, by the establishment of a new minority political ruling class. Anarchists had to “organize ourselves in anarchist groupings in order to impregnate the anarchist revolution” and “propel it as far forward as we may.”[[#78QuotedinChristieWethe|78]]
-This commitment to an anarcho-syndicalist version of organizational dualism was repeated at the founding meeting of the FAI in July 1927. The minutes claim that the labor organization itself should struggle not only for day-to-day improvements, but also, for universal human emancipation and anarchism. At the same time, an “anarchist organization of groups should be established alongside it, with the two organizations working together for the anarchist movement.”[[#79QuotedinCasasHistoryof|79]] It was proposed that the CNT and the FAI should “hold joint plenums and local, district, and regional meetings” and “form general federations of the full anarchist movement” with “general councils composed of representatives of the unions and the groups. The general councils will name Commissions of Education, Propaganda, Agitation, and other areas of equal concern for both organizations.”[[#80QuotedinCasasHistoryof|80]] By organizing joint councils, the FAI and CNT would establish a ''trabazón'' with one another, which can be translated into English as an “organic link.” This trabazón was subsequently implemented at the CNT’s national conference in January 1928, where delegates from the FAI and CNT agreed to form a National Committee of Revolutionary Action and a National Prisoners’ Aid Committee composed of members of both organizations.[[#81JasonGarnerGoalsandMean|81]]
-The strategy of anarcho-syndicalism plus a specific anarchist organization was also advocated by anarchists outside of Spain. The French anarcho-syndicalist Besnard argued during his speech at the IWMA congress of 1937 that “anarcho-communist groups,” which were distinct from the trade union, should “go ''prospecting'' among the laboring masses,” “seek out recruits and temper militants” and “carry out active propaganda and intensive pioneering work with an eye to winning the greatest possible number of workers hitherto deceived and gulled by all the political parties, without exception, over to their side and thus to the anarcho-syndicalist trade unions.”[[#82PierreBesnardAnarchoSyn|82]]
-The relationship between mass organizations and specific anarchist organizations was not the only topic that anarchists debated. They also argued with one another about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and what role they should play in the class struggle.
-'''Platformism and Synthesism'''
-In 1918, the Confederation of Anarchist Organizations (Nabat) was founded in Ukraine. It was viewed by Voline, who was one of its members, as a specific anarchist organization that would embrace anarchist communists, anarcho-syndicalists, and individualist anarchists and thereby achieve what he termed a “united anarchism.”[[#83PaulAvrichTheRussianAna|83]] The Nabat’s first congress on November 18 described its primary duty as “organizing all of the life forces of anarchism; uniting the various strands of anarchism; bringing together through a common endeavor all anarchists seriously desirous of playing an active part in the social revolution.”[[#84NabatProceedingsofNabat|84]] This aspiration never became a reality due to the anarcho-syndicalists deciding not to join. In response, the Nabat choose not to send a delegate to the third All-Russian Conference of Anarcho-Syndicalists.[[#85AvrichRussianAnarchists|85]]
-In November 1920, the militants of the Nabat, including Voline, were arrested by the Bolshevik secret police and imprisoned in Moscow. After an extensive campaign for the release of anarchist prisoners, which included imprisoned anarchists going on hunger strike, the Bolshevik government released a number of anarchists on the condition that they leave the country immediately. Among them was Voline, who left for Berlin in January 1922. That year, the anarchists who had fled to Berlin in order to escape Bolshevik state repression formed the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad. Between June 1923 and May 1924, this group published the anarchist journal ''Anarkhichesky Vestnik ''(Anarchist Herald) as part of a collaboration with the New York Union of Russian Toilers. The journal, edited by Voline and Peter Arshinov, published articles advocating the formation of specific anarchist organizations that united anarchists from different tendencies in order to combine the best ideas from anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism.[[#86AvrichRussianAnarchists|86]]
-This position came to be known as the ''anarchist synthesis'' and was expounded not only by Voline but also by the French anarchist Sébastien Faure. In his 1928 article ''The Anarchist Synthesis'','' ''Faure utilized an analogy with chemistry to argue that anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism were “three elements” that should be mixed together and synthesized through a process of ongoing experimentation. This would reveal which “dosage” of each element was most appropriate for a given context such that the “formula” would vary “locally, regionally, nationally or internationally.”[[#87SebastienFaureTheAnarch|87]] The organizational basis for this synthesis in France was the recently formed Association of Anarchist Federalists (AFA), which was described by Faure as “an entirely new regrouping of anarchist forces” that would unite all committed anarchists “without distinction of tendency” in order to “give more cohesion, influence and effectiveness to our dear propaganda” and enable anarchists “to work together rather than against one another, to live in peace rather than make war.”[[#88FaureTheAnarchistSynthe|88]]
-In Faure’s ''Anarchist Encyclopedia'', published in 1934,'' ''Voline repeated this view when he defined the anarchist synthesis as “a tendency currently emerging within the libertarian movement seeking to reconcile and then ‘synthesize’ the different currents of thought that divide this movement into several more or less hostile fractions.”[[#89VolineSynthesisanarchis|89]] Voline, in other words, sought not only to unite different anarchists in the same organization but also to combine the different ideas of anarchist tendencies together. This was motivated by two main positions. First, although anarchism’s fragmentation into distinct subtypes had initially led to beneficial developments in anarchist theory and practice, it had in the long run ceased to be useful and resulted in unnecessary conflict between anarchists who each viewed their “parcel” as “the sole truth and bitterly fought against the partisans of the other currents.”[[#90VolineSynthesisAnarchis|90]] In so doing, they ignored the important ideas that other anarchist tendencies had to offer and the fact that anarchism could be improved by fusing each separate element together into an organic whole. Second, any specific anarchist organization composed of different kinds of anarchist that did not establish a synthesis of their different ideas would only be “a ‘mechanical’ assemblage” in which “each holds on to his intransigent position,” resulting in “not a synthesis, but chaos.”[[#91VolineSynthesisAnarchis|91]]
-In parallel with the emergence of Voline and Faure’s anarchist synthesis, a distinct and opposed tendency developed that came to be known as ''platformism''. In June 1926, members of the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, which had relocated to Paris in 1925, issued ''The'' ''Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (Draft)'' through their new journal ''Dielo Truda'' (The Cause of Labor). The ''Platform ''emerged out of discussions within the Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, whose members included Nestor Makhno, Peter Arshinov, and Ida Mett, about how a specific anarchist organization should be structured and operate in order to overcome the perceived disorganization and ineffectiveness that the anarchist movement had fallen into. In so doing, they hoped to ensure that the anarchist movement would not be defeated, as it had been in Russia, during the next revolution.[[#92AlexandreSkirdaFacingthe|92]]
-The Dielo Truda group, in line with organizational dualism in general, advocated the formation of mass organizations that brought the working classes together on the basis of production and consumption, such as trade unions, workers’ councils, or cooperatives, and a specific anarchist organization that united the most revolutionary and militant workers under an anarchist-communist program.[[#93TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|93]] The function of such a specific anarchist organization, which they called ''the general union of anarchists'', was to prepare the working classes for a social revolution, awaken and nurture class consciousness, spread anarchist ideas, coordinate action, and participate effectively in collective struggles. In so doing, it would ensure that anarchism became “the guiding light,” “spearhead,” or “driving force” of the social revolution when it occurred, such that there was an “''anarchist theoretical direction of events''.”[[#94TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|94]]
-By this, the Dielo Truda group did not mean that the general union of anarchists should seize power, establish themselves as a political ruling class, and impose their ideas from the top down in the name of the working classes whom they claimed to represent. Rather, they sought only “to assist the masses to choose the genuine path of social revolution and socialist construction” and establish the “genuine self-governance of the masses,” which would be “the practical first step along the road to the realization of libertarian communism.”[[#95TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|95]] This goal was to be achieved by participating within mass movements, such as trade unions, in order to spread anarchist ideas within them and steer the movement in an anarchist direction.
-The'' Platform'' differed from other forms of organizational dualism in its conception of how the specific anarchist organization should be structured. The Dielo Truda group held that specific anarchist organizations should, in order to effectively influence the working classes, adhere to a narrow ideological and tactical program that would act as a guide for achieving their shared goals via an agreed-upon route. This position emerged from their experiences of the Russian revolution. Arshinov argued in his 1925 article “Our Organizational Problem” that the anarchist movement in Russia had been outmaneuvered by other revolutionary tendencies because it had adopted “positions that were, yes, correct, but too general, acting all at once in a diffuse way, in multiple tiny groups, often at odds on many points of tactics.”[[#96QuotedinSkirdaFacingthe|96]] In order to prevent this from happening again, specific anarchist organizations should be committed to ideological and tactical unity such that every member agrees on a specific route to achieve concrete objectives. Doing so ensures that the organization’s limited resources are deployed in the same direction and prevents different segments of the organization from engaging in tactics that do not complement and support one another, such as one group advocating participation in trade unions while another tried to persuade workers not to join them.[[#97TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|97]]
-The Dielo Truda group therefore rejected Voline and Faure’s theory of the anarchist synthesis. They thought it made little sense to advocate the synthesis of anarchist communism, anarcho-syndicalism, and individualist anarchism. It was already the case that anarcho-syndicalists advocated communism as a goal and most anarchist communists advocated participation in trade unions. Nor was there any need to incorporate the insights of individualist anarchism. Individualists rejected the need for collectively organized class struggle, and anarcho-syndicalism and anarchist communism were already based on a commitment to the freedom of the individual. In addition, it was impractical to attempt to synthesize the different anarchist tendencies into a single organization, because its members would continue to have fundamentally incompatible views on theory and practice. The organization would inevitably disintegrate when these disagreements arose to prominence during collective struggles.[[#98TheGroupofRussianAnarchi|98]]
-The authors of the'' Platform'' believed that the common ideological and tactical program of the specific anarchist organization should be implemented through each individual member engaging in revolutionary self-discipline, and enacting the decisions that had been collectively agreed upon.[[#99MakhnoStruggle6768|99]] They wrote that “the federalist type of anarchist organization, while acknowledging every member of the organization’s right to independence, to freedom of opinion, initiative and individual liberty, charges each member with specific organizational duties, insisting that these be rigorously performed, and that decisions jointly made be put into effect.”[[#100TheGroupofRussianAnarch|100]] This included a commitment to seeing decisions made by majority vote at congresses as binding on every group within the organization. The authors of the'' Platform'', in parallel with this, rejected the “unaccountable individualism” of some anarchist groups in favor of a system of “''collective responsibility''” whereby the general union of anarchists “will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of each of its members” and “each member will be answerable for the revolutionary and political activity of the Union as a whole.”[[#101TheGroupofRussianAnarch|101]]
-Most controversially of all, the Dielo Truda group proposed the formation of an executive committee that would achieve coordination and coherence between different sections of the general union of anarchists. They advocated an “''Executive Committee''” tasked with the “implementation of decisions made by the Union, which the latter have entrusted to it; theoretical and organizational oversight of the activity of isolated organizations, in keeping with the Union’s theoretical options and overall tactical line; scrutiny of the general state of the movement; maintenance of working and organizational ties between all of the organizations of the Union, as well as with outside organizations.”[[#102TheGroupofRussianAnarch|102]] The authors of the Platform were aware that the executive committee could potentially take on a life of its own and subordinate or oppress the membership. In order to prevent this from happening, they proposed that “the rights, responsibilities and practical tasks of the Executive Committee will be prescribed by the Congress of the General Union.”[[#103TheGroupofRussianAnarch|103]]
-The'' Platform'' aroused a great deal of debate within the European anarchist movement. These responses tended to be based on misunderstanding or misrepresenting its ideas due, in part, to a poor French translation produced by Voline, and the ambiguous language within the ''Platform'' itself, such as references to collective responsibility, an executive committee, and anarchists providing theoretical direction.[[#104SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|104]] In 1927, a different group of Russian anarchists, which included Mollie Steimer, Senya Fleshin, and Voline, released a critique of the'' Platform''. They interpreted the'' Platform'' as advocating the formation of a centralized party ruled from the top-down, by an executive committee that was merely a central committee under a different name. This centralized party would, in turn, act as leader and director of both the anarchist movement and working-class movements in general, rather than offering only ideological assistance to other workers as equals in the class struggle. As a result, they concluded that the Dielo Truda group had abandoned anarchist principles in favor of authoritarian Bolshevik ones.[[#105MollieSteimerSimonFlesh|105]] This negative evaluation of the ''Platform'' was shared by Berkman and Goldman.[[#106AvrichRussianAnarchists|106]]
-A more politely written response was issued by Malatesta in October 1927. Malatesta, like Steimer, Fleshin, and Voline, viewed the'' Platform'' as rejecting the anarchist commitment to free initiative and free agreement in favor of a Bolshevik-inspired authoritarian system of organization. The'' Platform’s'' advocacy of collective responsibility, binding congress resolutions made by majority vote, and an executive committee was interpreted by Malatesta as being a proposal for an organization in which decisions are made by elected representatives. If these representatives make binding decisions through simple majority voting then, when there are more than two factions at a meeting, the decision will be made by a numerical minority of representatives elected by a minority of the organization.[[#107MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|107]] He argued that,
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">if the Union is responsible for what each member does, how can it leave to its individual members and to the various groups the freedom to apply the common program in the way they think best? How can one be responsible for an action if one does not have the means to prevent it? Therefore, the Union and in its name the Executive Committee, would need to monitor the action of the individual members and order them what to do and what not to do; and since disapproval after the event cannot put right a previously accepted responsibility, no-one would be able to do anything at all before having obtained the go-ahead, the permission of the committee.[[#108MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|108]]</div>
-As a result, Malatesta concluded that the Dielo Truda group had proposed means that would, “far from helping to bring about the victory of anarchist communism . . . only falsify the anarchist spirit and lead to consequences that go against their intentions.”[[#109MalatestaMethodofFreedo1|109]]
-In response to these critiques the authors of the'' Platform'' issued a number of texts clarifying their position. First, they were not in favor of subordinating the working class to the top-down rule of an anarchist organization. They explicitly wrote that “the action of steering revolutionary elements and the revolutionary movement of the masses in terms of ideas should not be and cannot ever be considered as an aspiration on the part of anarchists that they should take the construction of the new society into their own hands. That construction cannot be carried out except by the whole of laboring society, for that task devolves upon it alone, and any attempt to strip it of that right must be deemed anti-anarchist.”[[#110TheGroupofRussianAnarch|110]]
-Given this, anarchists “will never agree to wield power, even for a single instant, nor impose their decisions on the masses by force. In this connection their methods are: propaganda, force of argument, and spoken and written persuasion.”[[#111TheGroupofRussianAnarch|111]] The'' Platform’s'' references to anarchists providing direction to the working classes only meant that they would influence other workers and persuade them to adopt anarchist ideas in just the same manner that famous anarchist theorists such as Bakunin, Kropotkin, Reclus, and Malatesta had already done. The'' Platform'' merely held that in order for this ideological direction to become a “permanent factor” it was necessary to form “an organization possessed of a common ideology . . . whose membership engage in ideologically coordinated activity, without being side-tracked or dispersed as has been the case hitherto.”[[#112TheGroupofRussianAnarch|112]] This organization would then participate in, for example, the trade union movement “as ''the carriers of a certain theory, a prescribed work plan''” in order to “''disseminate'' within the unions its ideas regarding the revolutionary tactics of the working class and on various events.”[[#113TheGroupofRussianAnarch|113]]
-In summary, although the revolution can only be made by the working classes themselves, it is also the case that “the revolutionary mass is forever nurturing in its bosom a minority of initiators, who precipitate and direct events” and “in a true social revolution the supporters of worker anarchism alone will account for that minority.”[[#114TheGroupofRussianAnarch|114]] Once the working classes “have defeated capitalist society, a new era in their history will be ushered in, an era when all social and political functions are transferred to the hands of workers and peasants who will set about the creation of the new life. At that point the anarchist organizations and, with them, the General Union, will lose all their significance and they should, in our view, gradually melt away into the productive organizations of the workers and peasants,” rather than subjecting workers to their rule.[[#115TheGroupofRussianAnarch|115]]
-Second, in advocating an executive committee within the specific anarchist organization they were not proposing the formation of “a Party Central Committee . . . that issues orders, makes laws and commands.”[[#116TheGroupofRussianAnarch|116]] The authors of the'' Platform'' not only thought that an executive committee was consistent with anarchism, but that “such an organ exists in many anarchist and anarchist-syndicalist organizations.”[[#117TheGroupofRussianAnarch|117]] What the'' Platform'' called an “Executive Committee” had no coercive powers. It was merely “a body ''performing functions of a general nature in the Union''” that would not restrict the activity of groups within the organization and instead only “steer their activity” by providing “ideological or organizational assistance,” such as advising a group on the current “tactical or organizational line adopted by the Union on a variety of matters.”[[#118TheGroupofRussianAnarch|118]]
-If a group within the specific anarchist organization decided to adopt its own tactical approach then one of three outcomes would occur: the minority would agree to follow the majority position within the organization because it is not an issue of supreme importance; the minority and majority position would coexist if feasible; or, the minority would leave the organization to form their own group. Crucially, which of these outcomes transpired “will be resolved, not by the Executive Committee which, let us repeat, is to be merely an executive organ of the Union, but by the entire Union as a body: by a Union Conference or Congress.”[[#119TheGroupofRussianAnarch|119]]
-Third, the idea of collective responsibility did not entail the view that the members of the organization would have to follow the orders of an executive committee. Arshinov explained in his response to Malatesta that the members of the organization would be united under a common program that they all supported and which, in so far as they were members, was binding upon them. Given this,
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">the practical activity of a member of the organization is naturally in complete harmony with the overall activity, and conversely the activity of the organization as a whole could not be at odds with the conscience and activity of each member, assuming he has accepted the program fundamental to this organization. It is this which characterizes the principle of collective responsibility: the Union as a body is answerable for the activity of each member, in the knowledge that he could only carry out his political and revolutionary work in the political spirit of the Union. Likewise, each member is fully answerable for the Union as a whole, since its activity could not be at odds with what has been determined by the whole membership.[[#120ArshinovTheOldandNew|120]]</div>
-From Arshinov’s response, it is clear that Malatesta’s critique was based on a misunderstanding of what the authors of the'' Platform'' meant by collective responsibility. Malatesta himself realized that this was potentially the case. He wrote in a December 1929 letter to Makhno that,
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">I accept and support the view that anyone who associates and cooperates with others for a common purpose must feel the need to coordinate his actions with those of his fellow members and do nothing that harms the work of others and, thus, the common cause; and respect the agreements that have been made—except when wishing sincerely to leave the association. . . . I maintain that those who do not feel and do not practice that duty should be thrown out of the association. Perhaps, speaking of collective responsibility, you mean precisely that accord and solidarity that must exist among the members of an association. And if that is so, your expression amounts, in my view, to an incorrect use of language, but basically it would only be an unimportant question of wording and agreement would soon be reached.[[#121MalatestaAnarchistRevolu1|121]]</div>
-Malatesta further clarified his views on the topic in a July 1930 letter he wrote to a platformist group, based in the Montmartre district of Paris. Although he continued to reject the phrase “collective responsibility” in favor of “moral responsibility,” he wrote “I find myself more or less in agreement with their way of conceiving the anarchist organization (being very far from the authoritarian spirit which the ‘Platform’ seemed to reveal) and I confirm my belief that behind the linguistic differences really lie identical positions.”[[#122ErricoMalatestaOnColle|122]] Malatesta was, nonetheless, not a platformist since he thought that specific anarchist organizations should have a slightly broader program, and rejected the position that congress resolutions passed by majority vote should be binding on every group within a specific anarchist organization, rather than only those groups who voted in favor of them.
-<u>The immediate practical effect of the Platform appears to have been somewhat limited. The </u>Dielo Truda group organized a number of discussion meetings on the'' Platform'' that were attended by militants from around the world, including France, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, and China. This culminated in an attempt to form an Anarchist International at a meeting held in a Parisian cinema on March 20, 1927.[[#123SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|123]] During the meeting, Makhno proposed a five-point program to be discussed: “(1) recognition of the class struggle as the most important factor of the anarchist system; (2) recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement; (3) recognition of syndicalism as one of the principal methods of anarcho-communist struggle; (4) the necessity of a ‘General Union of Anarchists’ based on ideological and tactical unity and collective responsibility; (5) the necessity of a positive program to realize the social revolution.”[[#124QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|124]]
-These five points were then pedantically rephrased by the attending delegates in a manner that changed their language but not their ultimate meaning. The wording agreed upon was: # <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of the struggle of all oppressed and exploited against state and capitalist authority as the most important factor of the anarchist system; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of anarcho-communism as the basis of the movement; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">recognition of the labor and union struggle as one of the most important means of anarchist revolutionary action; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">necessity in each country of as general as possible a Union of Anarchists who have the same goals and tactics, as well as collective responsibility; </div>
-# <div style="margin-left:2.032cm;margin-right:0.355cm;">necessity of a positive program of action for the anarchists in the social revolution.[[#125QuotedinGarnerGoalsand|125]] </div>
-Before the delegates could move on to discuss these points, the French police broke into the meeting and arrested everybody in attendance. The commission elected to form the Anarchist International, whose members were Makhno (Ukrainian), Ranko (Polish), and Chen (Chinese), issued a letter on April 1 that declared the existence of an International Libertarian Communist Federation and, for reasons that are unclear, expressed the original five-point program for discussion that had been formulated by Makhno, rather than the version that delegates had revised. This contributed toward delegates from other anarchist groups, including the Italian anarchists who were members of the Italian Anarchist Union, deciding to disassociate from the project.[[#126SkirdaFacingtheEnemy1|126]] Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli explained in their letter that the members of the Pensiero e Volontà group had decided not to join because,
-<div style="margin-left:0.457cm;margin-right:0.457cm;">there exists among you a spirit which is quite distant from that which underlies our way of conceiving an international anarchist organization, that is one which is open to the greatest number of individuals, groups and federations who agree with the principles of struggle organized in an anarchist way against capitalism and the State, on a permanent national and international basis, but all this without any ideological or tactical exclusivism and without any formalism that could impede the autonomy or freedom of the individuals in the groups or of the groups themselves in the various national and international unions.[[#127LuigiFabbriCamilloBerne|127]]</div>
-The first specific, anarchist organization to express support for platformism was the Federation of Anarcho-Communist Groups of the United States and Canada, which was composed of workers from the Russian empire and financially supported the publication of ''Dielo Truda''.[[#128LipotkinRussianAnarchist|128]] The federation declared in January 1927 that “the Conference agrees with the Organizational Platform” and views its ideas as “timely and desirable.”[[#129QuotedinLipotkinRussian|129]] Other Russian anarchists living in North America rejected the ideas of the Platform, and formed the Federation of Russian Workers’ Organizations of the United States and Canada in 1927. After several years of dialogue and negotiations, the two rival federations united into a single federation in July 1939.[[#130LipotkinRussianAnarchist|130]]
-The second specific anarchist organization to adopt platformism was the French Anarchist Communist Union. At its autumn 1927 congress in Paris, a majority of delegates voted to rename the organization the Revolutionary Anarchist Communist Union. This was accompanied by a number of dramatic changes to how the organization functioned. The results of majority votes were now binding on all individual members; positions adopted at annual congresses could not be subject to criticisms within the pages of the Union’s official paper, ''Le Libertaire'', except during a three-month period immediately prior to the next congress; membership was only possible via a group, meaning isolated individuals could no longer join; and being a member involved paying a subscription fee and receiving a membership card. The 1927 congress resulted in a split within the organization. Proponents of synthesist anarchism left to form the previously mentioned AFA. These changes to the Anarchist Union did not last long. The platformist position was soon defeated at the 1930 Paris Congress where, despite a speech by Makhno, the synthesist delegates won the vote by fourteen to seven, regained control of the organization, and abandoned the above policies. In response, the platformists left and formed the Libertarian Communist Federation in 1934, only to rejoin the Anarchist Union two years later in 1936.[[#131BerryFrenchAnarchistMov|131]]
-Despite the various negative interpretations of the Platform, its commitments were not a break with anarchism. They were instead one of many ways in which anarchists sought to build upon and update the kind of specific anarchist organization that Bakunin had advocated, decades previously. This remains true even though other anarchists thought their proposals were misguided. Although proponents of organizational dualism disagreed about how specific anarchist organizations should be structured and make decisions, they nonetheless agreed on the need to unite committed revolutionaries under a common program in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within broader mass organizations or movements, and to push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engagement in actions that provided an example to others.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#110|1]]. Davide Turcato, ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution'','' 1889–1900 ''(Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 80–81; Nunzio Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'','' 1864–1892'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993),'' ''254–58, 272.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#210|2]]. Carl Levy, ''Gramsci and the Anarchists ''(Oxford: Berg, 1999), 119–25; Fausto Buttà, ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism ''(Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015), 186–87, 196.</div>
-[[#310|3]]. Wolfgang Eckhardt, ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association'' (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016),'' ''2,'' ''156–57.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#410|4]]. E. H. Carr, ''Michael Bakunin'' (London: The Macmillan Press, 1975), 308–18; T.R. Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'' (Kingston and Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988), 29–34, 38–40, 48–56; Pernicone, ''Italian Anarchism'', 16–22; Arthur Lehning, “Bakunin’s Conceptions of Revolutionary Organizations and Their Role: A Study of His ‘Secret Societies,’” in ''Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr'', ed. Chimen Abramsky (London: The Macmillan Press, 1974), 57, 61–63. Bakunin had previously attempted to establish a secret society of revolutionaries in 1848, which was two decades before he became an anarchist, but this attempt was unsuccessful and never went past the planning stages. See Carr, ''Bakunin'','' ''181–86.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#510|5]]. Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''2–12,'' ''47–65, 71–78, 153–58, 243–62, 318–19, 350–51, 354–55; Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''183.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#610|6]]. Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', ed. Arthur Lehning (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 92.</div>
-[[#710|7]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''92.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#810|8]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''173–74. For the evidence that this program was a draft, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''285, 317–19.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#910|9]]. Quoted in Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''160.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1010|10]]. Quoted in Ravindranathan, ''Bakunin and the Italians'','' ''160.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1110|11]]. Michael Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 17, 2014, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain-1872. Bakunin’s ''Œuvres complètes'' incorrectly dates the letter to June. For the correct date of writing, see Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'', 244, 422. For other examples of Bakunin making this argument, see Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''93; Michael Bakunin, ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875'', ed. A. W. Zurbrugg (London: Merlin Books, 2016),'' ''215.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1210|12]]. Carr, ''Bakunin'', 189–224, 240.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#139|13]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''210. This letter to Alerini has been misattributed within Bakunin’s ''Œuvres complètes'' as being part of Bakunin’s May 21, 1872, draft letter to Tomás González Morago. This error is repeated in Zurbrugg’s edition of Bakunin. See Eckhardt, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''259–61,'' ''281, 512–13n55.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#149|14]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 210, 213.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#159|15]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 210.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#169|16]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'','' ''211–15. For the programs of the Alliance, see Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''173–75.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#179|17]]. Bakunin, “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain.”</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#189|18]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Texts'', 249.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#199|19]]. For example, Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 3,'' The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 55–57, 93–96; Hal Draper, ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'','' ''vol. 4,'' Critique of Other Socialisms'' (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990), 130, 144–47; Paul Avrich, ''Anarchist Portraits'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 13, 46, 67; Peter Marshall, ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism'' (London: Harper Perennial, 2008),'' ''263,'' ''271–72, 276–77, 282, 286–87, 306–7; James Joll, ''The Anarchists'' (London: Methuen, 1969), 87</div>
-[[#209|20]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#219|21]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''178–81.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#229|22]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'', 178. For information on Richard, see Julian P.W. Archer, ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact'' (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997), 159–61, 217–8; Carr, ''Bakunin'','' ''343–44, 349, 363, 414–15; Eckart, ''First Socialist Schism'','' ''205.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#239|23]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180. For the two other occasions Bakunin uses the phrase in the letter, see ibid., 178, 181.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#249|24]]. For an overview of Marx’s usage of the term, see Draper, ''The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin ''(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987), 11–35; Richard N. Hunt, ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'','' ''vol. 1,'' Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850 ''(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), 284–336.</div>
-[[#259|25]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''180.
-[[#269|26]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''182.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#279|27]]. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology'', ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011), 554, 654–55.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#289|28]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193. For Nechaev’s views and actions, see Ronald Seth, ''The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki'' (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966), 31–36; Philip Pomper, “Nechaev and Tsaricide: The Conspiracy within the Conspiracy,” ''The Russian Review ''33. no. 2'' ''(1974): 123–38.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#299|29]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''182–83.</div>
-[[#309|30]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''190.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#319|31]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''192–93.</div>
-[[#329|32]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#339|33]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191–92.</div>
-[[#349|34]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''191.
-[[#359|35]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''193.
-[[#369|36]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''194.
-[[#379|37]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
-[[#389|38]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''172.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#399|39]]. Michael Bakunin, ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871'', ed. and trans. Robert M. Cutler (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985), 164. See also, 27.</div>
-[[#409|40]]. Bakunin, ''Selected Writings'','' ''203.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#419|41]]. Quoted in Eckhardt,'' First Socialist Schism'', 244.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#429|42]]. Quoted in Caroline Cahm, ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism'','' 1872–1886'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),'' ''145.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#439|43]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 146.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#449|44]]. Quoted in Cahm, ''Kropotkin'', 146, 147. See also Martin A. Miller, ''Kropotkin'' (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 146–47.</div>
-[[#459|45]]. Cahm, ''Kropotkin'','' ''106, 145, 317–18n77; David Stafford, ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90'' (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971),'' ''54–55.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#469|46]]. Max Nettlau, ''A Short History of Anarchism'', ed. Heiner M. Becker (London: Freedom Press, 1996),'' ''277.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#479|47]]. Quoted in Nettlau, ''Short History'', 280–81.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#489|48]]. Malatesta, ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader'', ed. Davide Turcato (Oakland, CA: AK Press 2014),'' ''173.</div>
-[[#499|49]]. Errico Malatesta, ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 112.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#509|50]]. Malatesta, Errico Malatesta, ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900'', ed. Davide Turcato (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019),'' ''79.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#519|51]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''174–75.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#529|52]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''364.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#539|53]]. Malatesta, ''Patient Work'','' ''364.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#549|54]]. Maurizio Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press 2009), 122.</div>
-[[#559|55]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 121.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#569|56]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''483.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#579|57]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''338.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#589|58]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''341. See also Malatesta, ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931'', ed. Vernon Richards (London: Freedom Press, 1995), 29.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#599|59]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 341.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#609|60]]. Errico Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta'','' ''ed. Vernon Richards (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015), 112–13.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#619|61]]. Peter Kropotkin, ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology'','' ''ed. Iain McKay (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014), 585.</div>
-[[#629|62]]. Nicholas Papayanis, ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925 ''(Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 121–36.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#639|63]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 465. For Malatesta’s later clarifications of this article, see Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''27–34.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#649|64]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 465.</div>
-[[#659|65]]. David Berry, ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009),'' ''151, 255.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#669|66]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''466.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#679|67]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''465.</div>
-[[#689|68]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''32–33; ''Method of Freedom'', 397–98; ''Life and Ideas'','' ''109.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#699|69]]. Malatesta, ''Life and Ideas'','' ''110.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#709|70]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''341–42.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#719|71]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 466–67.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#728|72]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 483.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#738|73]]. George Richard Esenwein,'' Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain'','' 1868–1898 ''(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 118–22.</div>
-[[#748|74]]. Antonioli, ed., ''International Anarchist Congress'', 43.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#758|75]]. Salvador Seguí, “Anarchism and Syndicalism,” trans. Paul Sharkey, Libcom website, https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-syndicalism-salvador-seguí.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#768|76]]. Juan Gómez Casas, ''Anarchist Organization: The History of the F.A.I'' (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986), 76–77, 92–97, 107–16; Stuart Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008),'' ''32–43.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#778|77]]. Quoted in Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 37.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#788|78]]. Quoted in Christie, ''We'','' the Anarchists'', 37, 38.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#798|79]]. Quoted in Casas, ''History of the F.A.I'','' ''110.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#808|80]]. Quoted in Casas, ''History of the F.A.I'','' ''110.</div>
-[[#818|81]]. Jason Garner, ''Goals and Means: Anarchism'','' Syndicalism'','' and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica'' (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016), 214, 222–26.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#828|82]]. Pierre Besnard, “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism,”'' ''trans. Paul Sharkey, Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009, https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism. For another example, see Gregori P. Maximoff, ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism ''(n.p., Guillotine Press, 2015),'' ''50–52.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#838|83]]. Paul Avrich, ''The Russian Anarchists'' (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005), 205.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#848|84]]. Nabat, “Proceedings of Nabat,” in ''No Gods'','' No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'','' ''ed. Daniel Guérin (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005),'' ''487.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#858|85]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 207–8.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#868|86]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 222, 232–33, 238–39, 241; Lazar Lipotkin, ''The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'' (Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019), 119–21, 123. For a text advocating united anarchism, see ibid., 283–86.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#878|87]]. Sébastien Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents,” trans. Shawn P. Wilbur, Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017, https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#888|88]]. Faure, “The Anarchist Synthesis.”</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#897|89]]. Voline, “Synthesis (anarchist),” in ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', ed. Mitchell Abidor (Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019), 197.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#907|90]]. Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 199–200.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#917|91]]. Voline, “Synthesis (Anarchist),” 203.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#927|92]]. Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968 ''(Oakland CA: AK Press, 2002), 121–25; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 192.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#937|93]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 200–201.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#947|94]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201. See also, 213; Nestor Makhno, ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays'','' ''ed. Alexandre Skirda (San Francisco: AK Press, 1996), 64–65.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#957|95]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 201, 207.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#967|96]]. Quoted in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''122.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#977|97]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193, 211. See also Makhno, ''Struggle'','' ''62–63.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#987|98]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “The Problem of Organization and the Notion of Synthesis (March 1926),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 188–91; The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 193.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#997|99]]. Makhno, ''Struggle'', 67–68.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1007|100]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1017|101]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 212. See also Peter Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928),” in Alexandre Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 240–41.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1027|102]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1036|103]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Organizational Platform,” 213.</div>
-[[#1046|104]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''131.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1056|105]]. Mollie Steimer, Simon Fleshin, Voline, Sobol, Schwartz, Lia, Roman, Ervantian, “Concerning the Platform for an Organization of Anarchists,” in ''Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin'', ed. Abe Bluestein'' ''(Minneapolis, MN: Libertarian Publications Group, 1983), 52–53, 58, 61–62.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1066|106]]. Avrich, ''Russian Anarchists'', 242–43.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1076|107]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'','' ''486–91.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1086|108]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 486–87.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1096|109]]. Malatesta, ''Method of Freedom'', 486.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1105|110]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform (November, 1926),” in Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''219.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1115|111]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 222.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1125|112]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists (August 1927),” in Skirda ''Facing the Enemy'', 229–30.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1135|113]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 219–20.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1145|114]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 230.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1155|115]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 235.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1165|116]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1175|117]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists,” 234.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1185|118]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 217.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1195|119]]. The Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, “Supplement to the Organizational Platform,” 218.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1205|120]]. Arshinov, “The Old and New in Anarchism,” 240.</div>
-[[#1215|121]]. Malatesta, ''Anarchist Revolution'','' ''107–8.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1225|122]]. Errico Malatesta, “On Collective Responsibility,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/platform-english/on-collective-responsibility-errico-malatesta.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1235|123]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''124–28, 134–35.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1245|124]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'','' ''205–6.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1255|125]]. Quoted in Garner, ''Goals and Means'', 206.</div>
-[[#1264|126]]. Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''135; Garner, ''Goals and Means'','' ''206.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1274|127]]. Luigi <u>Fabbri, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli, </u>“Reply by the Pensiero e Volontà Group to an Invitation to Join the International Anarchist Communist Federation,” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d., https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/reply-by-the-pensiero-e-volonta-group-to-an-invitation-to-join-the-international-anarchist-communist-federation.</div>
-[[#1284|128]]. Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 127–29, 180, 191.
-[[#1294|129]]. Quoted in Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 138.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#1304|130]]. Lipotkin, ''Russian Anarchist Movement in North America'', 129–31, 145–49, 180, 191–92. It is sometimes claimed that anarchists in Bulgaria were the first to adopt the ''Platform''. I have been unable to verify this due to how little information about the Bulgarian anarchist movement is available in English.</div>
-[[#1314|131]]. Berry, ''French Anarchist Movement'','' ''173–76; Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'','' ''135–36, 143.
-== {{anchor|Chapter11ConclusionBetwee1}} {{anchor|Chapter11ConclusionBetwee}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook14}} Chapter 11: Conclusion ==
-Between 1868 and 1939, anarchists living in Europe and the United States developed a political theory that guided their attempts to bring about fundamental social change. This theory can be summarized as follows. Anarchists were antistate socialists who advocated the achievement of freedom, equality, and solidarity. For anarchists, these values were interdependent, such that the realization of one of them can only occur through the realization of all three at once. Although all anarchists advocated freedom, they disagreed with one another about how to define it. Some anarchists defined freedom as nondomination such that a person is free if and only if they are not subordinate to someone who wields the arbitrary power to impose their will on them. Other anarchists defined freedom as the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things such that a person becomes more free as their opportunities expand. One of the main reasons why anarchists valued freedom is that it is a prerequisite for people fully developing themselves and realizing their human potential. Irrespective of how they defined freedom, anarchists agreed that humans can, given the kind of animals we are, only be free in and through society.
-In order for this to occur, society has to be structured in an egalitarian manner. There must be no hierarchical divisions between rulers who issue commands and make decisions and subordinates who obey and lack decision-making power. Organizations should instead be structured horizontally, such that each member is neither a master nor a subject. They are instead an associate who has an equal say in collective decisions, and so, codetermine the voluntary organization with every other member. Such equality of self-determination must go alongside equality of opportunity. Each individual should have access to the external conditions that are necessary for self-development, and having the real possibility to do and/or be a broad range of things, such as food, health care, and education. The reproduction of such a society requires solidarity, in the sense of individuals and groups cooperating with one another in pursuit of common goals and people, in their personal lives, forming reciprocal caring relationships, such as by being a loving parent, good friend, or supportive teacher.
-Anarchists argued that capitalism and the state, alongside all structures of domination and exploitation,[[#1Thisincludedbutwasnotli|1]] should be abolished in favor of a stateless classless society without authority, in which everyone is free, equal, and bonded together through relations of solidarity. They called this society ''anarchy''. The abolition of capitalism and the state was primarily justified on the grounds that they are violent hierarchical pyramids in which decision-making flows from the top to the bottom. The majority of the population are workers who lack real decision-making power over the nature of their life, workplace, community, or society as a whole. They are instead subject to the power of an economic ruling class—capitalists, landowners, bankers, etc.—and a political ruling class—monarchs, politicians, heads of the police, generals, etc. The economic ruling class derive their power from the private ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production. Workers own personal possessions but not private property and so, in order to survive, must sell their labor to capitalists and landowners in exchange for a wage. The political ruling class sit at the top of the centralized, hierarchical state and possess the authority to make laws and issue commands at a societal level that others must obey, due to the threat or exercise of institutionalized force, such as the police, prisons, and courts. All states, regardless of whether they are a monarchy, dictatorship, or parliamentary democracy, exercise institutionalized violence in order to enforce and maintain the domination and exploitation of workers, and thereby perpetuate the power and privilege of both the economic and political ruling classes.
-The creation of anarchy requires the abolition of capitalism and the state but the ruling classes will never give up their power voluntarily and instead violently defend it. They must be overthrown. The majority of anarchist theory was concerned with how to do this. Anarchists argued that the goal of universal human emancipation could only be achieved through the formation of working-class social movements that engage in class struggle against the political and economic ruling classes and, ultimately, launch a social revolution.
-Anarchists envisioned the social revolution as a lengthy process of simultaneous destruction and construction. Workers would destroy the old world by launching an armed insurrection that violently smashed the state and forcefully expropriated the ruling classes. This victory would be achieved by workers’ militias, who would also defend the social revolution from counterattack. Workers would build the new world by creating an anarchist society, which is the totality of social structures from which anarchy could later emerge. During and immediately after the social revolution, anarchists aimed to establish: (a) the collective ownership of land, raw materials, and the means of production; (b) the self-management of social life, including production and distribution, through workplace and community assemblies in which collective decisions are made via either unanimous agreement, majority vote, or a combination of the two; (c) the abolition of money and markets in favor of a system of decentralized planning; and (d) the reorganization of production, such that people engage in a combination of mental and physical labor, unsatisfying labor is either removed, automated, or shared among producers, and the length of the working day is significantly reduced.
-In order to achieve this goal, anarchists had to overcome the fact that capitalism and the state are self-reproducing. Society is constituted by a process of human beings with particular consciousness engaging in practice: deploying their capacities to satisfy a psychological drive. In so doing, they simultaneously change both the world and themselves. The interplay between practice producing social relations and practice being performed through social relations results in the formation of relatively stable and enduring social structures. These social structures simultaneously enable and constrain practice, such that individuals engage in practices that develop historically specific capacities, drives, and consciousness. The consequence of this is that as people engage in practice, they also create and re-create themselves as the kinds of people who reproduce the social structure itself.
-Abolishing capitalism and the state, creating an anarchist society, and the day-to-day reproduction of an anarchist society requires the bulk of the population to have developed a vast array of different capacities, drives, and consciousness, such as the capacity to make decisions through general assemblies, the drive to not oppress others, and the consciousness that capitalism and the state make people unfree. The dominant structures of class society are constituted by forms of practice that develop people fit mainly for reproducing capitalism and the state, rather than abolishing them. Class society systematically fails to produce the kinds of people that both an anarchist revolution and an anarchist society need. Such individuals, of course, would be produced by a properly functioning anarchist society, but this fact does not help anarchists presently living under class society. Anarchists therefore face a paradox: in order to transform society they need transformed people. In order to have transformed people, they need a new society.
-The anarchist solution to this problem was revolutionary practice. Humans are not solely the product of their circumstances. They can also chose to engage in actions that simultaneously develop new capacities, drives, and consciousness; modify existing social structures; and construct whole new social structures. This is not to say that any form of revolutionary practice could lead to an anarchist society. Anarchists argued that working-class social movements should only use means that were in conformity with the ends of creating anarchy. They, in short, advocated the unity of means and ends: the means that revolutionaries propose for achieving social change have to be constituted by forms of practice that develop people into the kinds of individuals who are capable of, and are driven to: (a) overthrow capitalism and the state, and, (b) construct and reproduce the end goal of an anarchist society. If social movements select means that fail to do this then they would, regardless of people’s good intentions, never achieve the ends of anarchism.
-The anarchist commitment to the unity of means and ends shaped both what strategies they advocated and which ones they rejected. Anarchists thought that the social revolution would emerge out of an extended evolutionary period, during which change was slow, gradual, and partial. In order for this evolutionary period to culminate in a revolution, working-class social movements have to spread their ideas and form social networks through print media, talks, and recreational activities; construct organizations that prefigure the future anarchist society; and engage in class struggle via direct action. Anarchists advocated these means not only because they were effective and won results, but also because of the forms of practice that constituted them. Through engaging in direct action with prefigurative organizations, workers simultaneously change the world and themselves. A group of workers might form a tenant union, organize a rent strike against their landlord, and make collective decisions about the rent strike within a general assembly. In so doing, they change social relations—rent decreases and workers gain more power over their landlord—and change people—workers develop the capacity to organize a rent strike and make decisions within a general assembly, acquire an increased sense of solidarity with one another, and realize that housing should be free.
-During the course of the strike, these workers not only change social relations and themselves, but also construct a new social structure that did not exist before—a tenant union. Long-term participation in this tenant union would, in turn, cause workers to develop their capacities, drives, and consciousness further. This makes the organization of new actions possible, such as a larger rent strike that mobilizes workers in an entire city. These kinds of actions could continue and multiply over time, as increasingly large numbers of workers engage in the process of simultaneously transforming social relations and themselves. This would eventually culminate in a shift from workers only modifying the dominant structures of class society, to workers abolishing them and replacing them with new ones. Through the struggle against capitalism and the state, workers could develop into people ready to emancipate themselves and achieve anarchist goals.
-Anarchism emerged in parallel with, and in opposition to, various forms of state socialism that aimed to achieve a stateless classless society through the conquest of state power. Anarchists replied that the means of conquering state power could never achieve the ends of universal human emancipation. Socialist parties that engaged in parliamentarism within the existing bourgeois state would, over time, abandon their revolutionary program and become mere reform movements that defended the status quo and only aimed at the improvement of conditions within the cage of capitalism and the state. If a socialist party succeeded in conquering state power, whether by elections or force, the result would not be a society in which workers themselves self-managed social life. They would instead create a new form of minority class rule, in which the working classes were dominated and exploited by the party leadership that actually wielded state power. The minority of rulers would be transformed by the exercise of state power and become tyrants who were primarily concerned with expanding and reproducing their power and furthering their specific interests in opposition to, and in conflict with, the interests of the working classes whose name they ruled in. They would never give up their power voluntarily, and would violently repress any working-class social movements who resisted them. The state would never wither away. It had to be intentionally and violently destroyed.
-Although anarchists in general shared these basic strategic commitments, the movement was divided between two main strategic schools of thought: insurrectionist anarchism and mass anarchism. Insurrectionist anarchists opposed formal organization and advocated the formation of small affinity groups, that were linked together via informal social networks and periodicals. They rejected the struggle for immediate reforms, and argued that anarchists should immediately engage in an escalating series of assassinations, bombings, and armed insurrections against the ruling classes and their institutions. The goal of these attacks was to spread anarchist ideas and inspire other workers to rise up. This would result in a chain reaction of revolt, as an increasingly large number of workers launched insurrections, formed a mass movement, and initiated the social revolution.
-Mass anarchists, in contrast, advocated the formation of both affinity groups and large-scale formal federations of autonomous groups, which coordinated large-scale action through regular congresses attended by instantly recallable mandated delegates. They argued that anarchists could generate a mass movement that was driven to, and capable of, launching an armed insurrection that abolished class society through the struggle for immediate reforms in the present. In order for this struggle to build toward revolution, rather than collapse into reformism, it had to be achieved by engaging in direct action within prefigurative organizations. Anarchists would facilitate this process by acting as a militant minority within social movements in order to influence other workers to adopt anarchist ideas and implement anarchist strategy.
-The main form of mass anarchism was syndicalist anarchism, which argued that trade unions were the primary social movement under capitalism that could fulfill anarchist goals. This was because trade unions could pursue the double aim of struggling for immediate reforms and attempting to launch a social revolution via an insurrectionary general strike. In so doing, they would perform a dual function. They could act as organs of resistance that struggle against dominant institutions in the present and then, during the social revolution, take over the organization of the economy (in part or whole) and transform into organs of self-management. Syndicalist anarchists disagreed about whether or not trade unions should be politically neutral, or formally committed to achieving an anarchist society through anarchist means.
-A significant number of mass anarchists thought that trade unions were a necessary but insufficient means to achieve revolution. These proponents of organizational dualism argued that anarchists should simultaneously form mass organizations open to all workers and, in addition, smaller specific anarchist organizations composed exclusively of anarchist militants. These specific anarchist organizations were the means to unite committed revolutionaries in order to develop correct theory and strategy, coordinate their actions both among themselves and within larger and broader mass organizations or movements, and push the revolutionary struggle forward through persuasion and engaging in actions that provided an example to other workers. Proponents of organizational dualism nonetheless disagreed about how to do this, and argued with one another about a variety of topics, including how broad or narrow a specific anarchist organization’s program should be, and whether or not congress resolutions should be binding on every section of an organization, or only those who voted in favor of them. These disagreements led to the formation of distinct tendencies, such as <u>synthesists </u>and platformists.
-Numerous anarchist women, and some men who supported them, realized that the achievement of anarchy required the organization of women-only groups in order to struggle against class and gender oppression simultaneously. These groups aimed to combat sexism and promote women’s liberation within both the anarchist movement, and wider society. In so doing, they would enable women to unlearn their patriarchal socialization and fully participate in the class struggle as equals to male workers. These women-only groups were either mass organizations that were open to all women workers, informal anarchist affinity groups, or formal organizations of dedicated anarchist militants. Some organizations were women’s sections of syndicalist trade unions, while others were independent.
-This book has been concerned with what historical anarchists thought. It was not written as a mere exercise in digging up curious individuals from the past or compiling historical facts for their own sake. I want to help modern workers develop their own ideas about how to change the world, and I thought I could do this by summarizing the theory and actions of the main antiauthoritarian wing of the historical workers’ movement. This project is only partially complete since, for the purposes of this book, I narrowly focused on anarchists living in Europe and the United States. To properly understand the history of anarchism one must also examine the ideas and actions of anarchists who lived in Latin America, Asia, Oceania, and Africa.
-Modern anarchists should read not only Bakunin, Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Goldman but also authors like Ricardo Flores Magón, M. P. T. Acharya, He-Yin Zhen, Liu Shipei, Itō Noe, Kōtoku Shūsui, and Hatta Shūzō. These anarchists should not be treated as tokens, who are only referenced when responding to false accusations that anarchism was historically an exclusively white or European social movement. Their ideas must instead be treated as being of equal importance, such that their views are fully incorporated into our understanding of what anarchism is. Nor should they be viewed as separate from the anarchist movement in Europe and the United States. All these authors read and were influenced by European anarchists. Several of them, such as Magón, Acharya, and Kōtoku, lived in Europe or the United States for parts of their life. The different anarchist movements around the world were so interconnected with one another, through transnational networks and migration flows, that the complete history of anarchism can only be written as a global history.
-Modern anarchists should not merely repeat the ideas of dead anarchists. The fact that a dead anarchist wrote it does not make it true. We must make arguments grounded in evidence for why anarchist positions are correct, rather than merely quoting dead anarchists as if their words were scripture. We must learn not only from their successes, but also from their failures, inadequacies, and inconsistencies. Most importantly of all, we have to develop our own ideas in response to our specific situations and problems, such as climate breakdown and ecological collapse; the resurgence of fascism; modern border systems; the gig economy; and transphobia. This is itself in line with what historical anarchist authors themselves wrote. They consistently reiterated the point that anarchist theory and practice had to develop in response to specific concrete situations and that people in the future would, and should, develop ideas that they were not in a position to even conceive. In order to do so, we need to draw upon not only distinctly anarchist theory, but also the best ideas that have been developed by various social movements of the oppressed and exploited over the past 150 years. This includes, but is not limited to, feminism, queer theory, the disability rights movement, Marxism, the Black radical tradition, Indigenous critiques of settler-colonialism, and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation.
-This work has already begun. During the 1970s, participants in the woman’s liberation and Black power movements came into contact with anarchist ideas and, independently of one another, developed anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism as distinct tendencies. Anarcha-feminists argue that the personal is political and analyze the manner in which women are oppressed by men in daily life, such as women being expected to do the majority of chores, men talking over women at meetings, or women being subject to emotional and physical abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. In response to patriarchy within the anarchist movement, anarcha-feminists have advocated the formation of women’s only groups and insisted that prefiguration requires transforming interpersonal dynamics and interactions, rather than only organizational structures and methods of collective decision-making. This has included arguing that anarchists must develop effective responses to intimate partner violence within social movements.[[#2DarkStaredQuietRumours|2]]
-Proponents of Black anarchism argue that Black people have been excluded from the benefits of citizenship and subject to specific forms of white supremacist state violence. This has resulted in numerous examples of Black people self-organizing independently of the state in order to survive. Emancipation cannot be achieved through the incorporation of Black people into white supremacist states, or the creation of new Black states. They reject authoritarian modes of organization and suggest that the centralization and hierarchy of the Black Panther Party played an important role in its demise and failure to achieve fundamental social change. Black liberation can only be achieved through the formation of horizontal social movements that bring all workers of color together in order to engage in direct action and self-direct their struggle, rather than be subordinate to the leadership of white radicals.[[#3DanaMWilliamsBlackPant|3]]
-Both anarcha-feminism and Black anarchism are part of a more general tendency within modern anarchism that draws upon Black feminism to emphasize the manner in which all structures of oppression form an interlocking web in which each component is defined in terms of its relationship to every other component. Different structures of oppression interact with, shape, and support one another to such an extent that they mutually constitute one another. The relations between structures of oppression are part of what each structure is. A Black working-class lesbian, for example, does not experience patriarchal + racist + homophobic + economic + state oppression, whereby each form of oppression is separate and independent. She instead experiences the product of these five structures interacting with one another to create life experiences that cannot be reduced to a single primary oppressive structure or the sum total of multiple oppressive structures. Society is not a Venn diagram where Black men experience racism, women experience sexism, and Black women experience both. Black women experience not only racism and sexism but also forms of oppression that are unique to them as Black women and are not shared by Black men or white women. This is because the interconnections between structures of oppression, such as racism and patriarchy, create outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.[[#4DericShannonandJRogue|4]]
-The abolition of capitalism and the state will not, by itself, lead to the abolition of patriarchy, racism, queerphobia, ableism, and so on. Even if we accept the premise that these structures of oppression arose, or at least massively expanded, due to the development of class society in general or capitalism in particular, it is still the case that these social structures have become self-reproducing and will not automatically disappear due to the establishment of socialism. They will instead continue to exist, but be mediated through new economic and political relations. The creation of stateless socialism would, for example, end elements of patriarchy that require the existence of capitalism and the state, such as sexist corporate advertising and anti-abortion laws, but other aspects of patriarchy would continue to exist, like people of all genders being socialized into patriarchal gender roles, or men sexually harassing women in public. This would result in the fusion of patriarchal and socialist relations, such as, possibly, collective decisions being made in general assemblies where men treat women as their intellectual inferiors. We cannot focus exclusively on class and wait until after the revolution—which may never come or be defeated—to address other issues. We must instead struggle against all forms of oppression simultaneously. The self-emancipation of the working classes can only be achieved through intersectional class struggle.
-Although historical anarchist theory needs to be updated, it should not be abandoned or discarded. It contains numerous insights that can guide us in the modern world. The oppression we witness on a daily basis is not an inevitable nor an unchangeable aspect of human life. It is instead the product of hierarchical social structures that divide humanity into masters and subjects. These social structures are made by human beings and so can be unmade and replaced with new and better ways of living together. Authoritarians imagine that emancipation can be achieved if good people with the correct ideas take control of the reins of power. Anarchists realize that this has never happened, and will never happen. Regardless of people’s good intentions, or the stories they tell themselves, they will be corrupted by their position at a top of a hierarchy and become primarily concerned with exercising and expanding their power over others in order to serve their own interests. If human beings are not inherently good, then no person is good enough to be a ruler.
-Cold war propaganda taught us that our only choice is between really existing capitalism or really existing state socialism. We are asked to pick between rule by a minority of elected politicians who serve the interests of capital, or rule by a one-party dictatorship led by a supreme leader; the impersonal domination of market forces, or the top-down bureaucracy of state central planning; the prison industrial complex, or the gulag; surveillance and repression by the FBI, or the NKVD. The history of socialism reveals that a large segment of the workers’ movement developed a third way: anarchist socialism and the establishment of federations of workplace and community assemblies that enable people to self-manage their own lives. This is not to say that creating anarchist socialism will be easy. The history of the workers’ movement shows how hard it is to change the world. Any struggle for emancipation will face the overwhelming violence of the ruling classes, and we must prepare ourselves for this. The modern state is better armed and has developed superior forms of surveillance, crowd-control, and counterinsurgency than its historical predecessors.
-When reading about the history of social movements it is easy to focus on large-scale acts of revolt that can appear to have come out of nowhere. This book has itself mentioned numerous strikes, riots, insurrections, and revolutions. Learning about these events is an important part of labor history, but to focus exclusively on them leads to a distorted view of the past and how social change happens. Members of historical socialist movements did not spend the majority of their time participating in huge actions that rapidly transformed society and the future course of history. The bulk of their lives as revolutionaries were spent doing much more mundane activities. They produced, distributed, and read radical literature; organized and attended picnics; performed in a theater club; watched a public debate; discussed politics with friends, family, and colleagues; attended an endless series of meetings for their affinity group or trade union; wrote and received a vast amount of letters; and so on.
-These small, mundane activities can appear to be of little importance when viewed in isolation. Yet when they were repeated day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year by groups of people, they took on greater significance. These small activities produced and reproduced the social relations, capacities, drives, and consciousness that were the foundation of social movements. Without these seemingly insignificant acts, repeated over and over again, the large exciting moments of rebellion and revolution never would have occurred in most instances or would have occurred on a much smaller scale.
-Unfortunately, time is not on our side. Capitalism’s insatiable drive for profit and economic growth is destroying the environment. The climate crisis is not merely coming, it has already begun. Things are only going to get worse. Billionaires and politicians are not going to save us. We have to save ourselves. The actions we take now determine the future we and future generations face. Our only choice is collective struggle. We have to generate a social force that can dismantle the fossil fuels industry and, in so doing, achieve survival pending revolution. In response to these dire circumstances, a large number of people have put their hopes in the election of socialist politicians into parliaments and congresses. Historical anarchist theory informs us why this strategy is mistaken: even if socialists manage to win an election, which frequently does not happen, they will be compelled by the threat of capital flight and their institutionalized role as managers of the capitalist economy to implement policies that serve the interests of the very corporations driving climate change forward. Socialist politicians will not transform the state. The state will transform them. We have to instead develop the power of workers to engage in direct action outside of and against the state, disrupt the smooth functioning of the economy, and, in so doing, impose external pressure onto the ruling classes to give into our demands.
-Even if the specifics of historical insurrectionist anarchism, mass anarchism, syndicalist anarchism, and organizational dualism are deemed to be no longer appropriate strategies within modern society, the core insight of historical anarchist strategy would remain—anarchist ends can only be achieved through anarchist means. Our task remains that of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: to develop forms of practice that can simultaneously resist, and ultimately overthrow, the ruling classes and render us fit to establish a society with neither masters nor subjects. Tomorrow can only grow out of today and the march toward anarchy begins now.
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#111|1]]. This included, but was not limited to, racism, patriarchy, homophobia, hierarchically organized religion, authoritarian modes of education, and the oppression of nonhuman animals. It should nonetheless be kept in mind that a significant number of anarchists failed to put the theoretical opposition to racism, sexism, and homophobia into practice or, on occasion, even support it in theory.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#211|2]]. Dark Star, ed. ''Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader'', 3rd Edition (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012); Ruth Kinna, “Anarchism and Feminism,” in ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy'', ed. Nathan Jun (Brill, 2017), 253–84; Lucy Nicholas, “Gender and Sexuality,” in ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', ed. Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 603–21; Institute for Anarchist Studies, ''Perspectives on Anarchist Theory'', no. 29,'' Anarcha-Feminisms ''(Portland, OR: Eberhardt Press, 2016).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#311|3]]. Dana M. Williams, “Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the Development of Black Anarchism,” ''Journal of Black Studies'' 46, no. 7 (2015): 678–703; Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, ''Anarchism and the Black Revolution ''(London: Pluto Press, 2021); William C. Anderson, ''The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition ''(Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">[[#411|4]]. Deric Shannon and J. Rogue, “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality,” Anarkismo website, https://www.anarkismo.net/article/14923; J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano, “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism,” in ''Quiet Rumours'', 43–46. For an overview of intersectionality from a nonanarchist perspective, see Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, ''Intersectionality'','' ''2nd edition'' ''(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).</div>
-== {{anchor|BibliographyPrimarySources}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook15}} {{anchor|BibliographyPrimarySources1}} Bibliography ==
-<div style="text-align:center;">'''Primary Sources'''</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Abidor, Mitchell, ed. ''Death to Bourgeois Society: The Propagandists of the Deed''.'' ''Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Anderson, William C. ''The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition''.'' ''Chico, CA: AK Press, 2021.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Antonioli, Maurizio, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam (1907)''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Ardouin, J., Degalvès, J., Ferrière, J., Girard, A., Grave, Jean, Janvion, E., Kropotkin, Peter, et al. “Liberty Through Education: The Libertarian School.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, April 9, 2020. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/liberty-through-education-1898.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Arshinov, Peter. “The Old and New in Anarchism: Reply to Comrade Malatesta (May 1928).” In Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 237–42. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Ba Jin. “Anarchism and the Question of Practice.” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 362–66. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Baginski, Max. “Aim and Tactics of the Trade-Union Movement.” In ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', edited by Peter Glassgold, 297–306. New York: Counterpoint, 2000.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Stirner: ‘The Ego and His Own.’” ''Mother Earth'' 2, no. 3 (1907): 142–51.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''What Does Syndicalism Want? Living, Not Dead Unions''. London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bakunin, Michael. ''Bakunin on Anarchism''. Edited by Sam Dolgoff. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Basic Bakunin: Writings, 1869–1871''. Edited and Translated by Robert M. Cutler. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1985.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Political Philosophy of Bakunin: Scientific Anarchism''. Edited by G. P. Maximoff. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1964.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Selected Texts, 1868–1875''. Edited by A. W. Zurbrugg. London: Anarres Editions, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Selected Writings''. Edited by Arthur Lehning. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Statism and Anarchy''. Edited by Marshall Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 17, 2014. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/bakunin-library/bakunin-to-the-brothers-of-the-alliance-in-spain-1872.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bellegarrigue, Anselme. “Anarchy, A Journal of Order.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Anarchist Library website, February 21, 2019. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anselme-bellegarrigue-the-world-s-first-anarchist-manifesto.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Benbow, William. “Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes.” Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/history/england/chartists/benbow-congress.htm.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Berkman, Alexander. “A Decade of Bolshevism.” In ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', edited by Friends of Aron Baron, 119–23. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Blast''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''What Is Anarchism?'' Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2003.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bernstein, Edward. ''Evolutionary Socialism: A Criticism and Affirmation''. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1909.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Besnard, Pierre. “Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bevington, Louisa Sarah. ''An Anarchist Manifesto''. London: Metropolitan Printing Works, 1895. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Brousse, Paul. “Propaganda of the Deed.” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 150–51. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cafiero, Carlo. “Action (1880).” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 152–53. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Compendium of Capital''. Translated by Paul M. Perrone. London: The Anarchist Communist Group, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Organisation of Armed Struggle.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. ''The Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review'' 1, no. 3 (Autumn 1977): 101. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Revolution''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">CNT, “The First Congress of the National Confederation of Labor.” Libcom website, January 17, 2017. https://libcom.org/article/first-congress-national-confederation-labor-cnt-barcelona-september-8-10-1911.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Dark Star, ed. ''Quiet Rumours: An Anarcha-Feminist Reader''. 3rd ed. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">De Cleyre, Voltairine. “A Suggestion and Explanation.” ''Free Society'' 6, no. 29 (1900): 1. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Exquisite Rebel: The Essays of Voltairine de Cleyre—Feminist, Anarchist, Genius''. Edited by Sharon Presley and Crispin Sartwell. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Voltairine de Cleyre Reader''. Edited by A.J. Brigati. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">De Ligt, Bart. ''The Conquest of Violence: An Essay on War and Revolution''. London: Pluto Press, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">De Paepe, César. “The Present Institutions of the International in Relation to the Future.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, March 20, 2018. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/the-present-institutions-of-the-international-from-the-point-of-view-of-the-future-1869.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Strikes, Unions, and the Affiliation of Unions with the International.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 126–29. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Déjacque, Joseph. ''Down with the Bosses and Other Writings, 1859–1861''. Gresham, OR: Corvus Editions, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “On the Human Being, Male and Female.” Translated by Jonathan Mayo Crane. Libertarian Labyrinth website, April 4, 2011. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/from-the-archives/joseph-dejacque-the-human-being-i.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Revolutionary Question.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, May 13, 2012. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/working-translations/joseph-dejacque-the-revolutionary-question.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Delesalle, Paul. “Anarchists and the Trade Unions.” Libcom website, December 9, 2013. https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-and-trade-unions-paul-delesalle.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Strike!” Libcom website, December 9, 2013. <u>https://libcom.org/library/strike-paul-delesalle</u>.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Ervin, Lorenzo Kom’Boa. ''Anarchism and the Black Revolution''.'' ''London: Pluto Press, 2021.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Fabbri, Luigi. “About a Project of Anarchist Organization.” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d. https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/about-a-project-for-anarchist-organization-luigi-fabbri.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Anarchy and ‘Scientific’ Communism.” In ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', edited by Friends of Aron Baron, 13–45. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Bourgeois Influences on Anarchism''. Translated by Chaz Bufe. Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Revolution and Dictatorship: On One Anarchist Who Has Forgotten His Principles.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Kate Sharpley Library, n.d. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/8932r8.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Fabbri, Luigi, Camillo Berneri, and Ugo Fedeli. “Reply by the Pensiero e Volontà Group to an Invitation to Join the International Anarchist Communist Federation.” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d. https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/reply-by-the-pensiero-e-volonta-group-to-an-invitation-to-join-the-international-anarchist-communist-federation.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Faure, Sébastien. “The Anarchist Synthesis: The Three Great Anarchist Currents.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, August 3, 2017. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/sebastien-faure-the-anarchist-synthesis-1828.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Ferrer, Francisco. ''Anarchist Education and the Modern School: A Francisco Ferrer Reader''. Edited by Mark Bray and Robert H. Haworth. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Galleani, Luigi. ''The End of Anarchism?'' London: Elephant Editions, 2012.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Goldman, Emma. ''Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926''. Edited by Shawn P. Wilbur. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Living My Life''. Vol. 1. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Living My Life''. Vol. 2. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Red Emma Speaks: An Emma Goldman Reader''. Edited by Alix Kates Shulman. 3rd ed. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Golos Truda. “Declaration of the Petrograd Union of Anarcho-Syndicalist Propaganda.” In ''The Anarchists in the Russian Revolution'', edited by Paul Avrich, 68–72. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Group of Russian Anarchists Abroad, The. “The Organizational Platform of the General Union of Anarchists (June 1926).” In Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 192–213. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Problem of Organization and the Notion of Synthesis (March 1926).” In Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 188–91. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Reply to Anarchism’s Confusionists (August 1927).” In Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 224–36. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Supplement to the Organizational Platform (November 1926).” In Skirda, ''Facing the Enemy'', 214–23. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Guillaume, James. “Ideas on Social Organization.” In ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'', edited by Daniel Guérin, 247–67. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Michael Bakunin: A Biographical Sketch.” In ''Bakunin on Anarchism'', edited by Sam Dolgoff, 22–52. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1980.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “On the Abolition of the State.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 192–93. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Hins, Eugène. “Resistance Societies as the Organization of the Future.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 135. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“International Anarchist Manifesto Against War.” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 289–91. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">IWA. “Declaration of the Principles of Revolutionary Syndicalism.” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 416–18. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">IWW, “The Preamble to the Constitution of the Industrial Workers of the World (1908).” In ''Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology'', edited by Joyce L. Kornbluh, 12–13. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Jura Federation, The. “Minutes of the Jura Federation Congress (1880).” In ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'', edited by Daniel Guérin, 281–86. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Sonvilier Circular.” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 96–98. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Road to Power''. Chicago: Samuel A. Bloch, 1909. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kautsky, Karl. ''The Class Struggle (Erfurt Program)''. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1910.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kropotkin, Peter. ''Direct Struggle Against Capital: A Peter Kropotkin Anthology''. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Conquest of Bread''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Ethics: Origin and Development''. London: George G. Harrap & Co, 1924.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Fugitive Writings''. Edited by George Woodcock. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1993.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Great French Revolution''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Memoirs of a Revolutionist''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Modern Science and Anarchy''. Edited by Iain McKay. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution''. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Proposed Communist Settlement: A New Colony for Tyneside or Wearside.” ''The Newcastle Daily Chronicle'', February 20, 1895. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-proposed-communist-settlement-a-new-colony-for-tyneside-or-wearside.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Words of A Rebel''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Lenin, Vladimir. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 10. Edited by Andrew Rothstein. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Selected Works''. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Liu, Lydia H., Rebecca E. Karl, and Dorothy Ko, eds. ''The Birth of Chinese Feminism: Essential Texts in Transnational Theory''. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“The London Declaration (1913).” In Appendix to Thorpe,'' “The Workers Themselves'', 320. </div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Lum, Dyer D. “On Anarchy.” In Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, ''149–58.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Philosophy of Trade Unions''. New York: American Federation of Labor, 1892.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Why I Am a Social Revolutionist.” ''Twentieth Century ''5, no. 18 (October 1890): 5–6. </div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Luxemburg, Rosa. ''The Essential Rosa Luxemburg: Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike''. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Mackay, John Henry. ''The Anarchists: A Picture of Civilization at the Close of the Nineteenth Century''. Boston: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1891. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Makhno, Nestor. ''The Struggle Against the State and Other Essays''. Edited by Alexandre Skirda. San Francisco: AK Press, 1996.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Malatesta, Errico. ''A Long and Patient Work: The Anarchist Socialism of L’Agitazione, 1897–1898''. Vol. 3 of ''The Complete Works of Malatesta'', edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Anarchist Revolution: Polemical Articles, 1924–1931''. Edited by Vernon Richards. London: Freedom Press, 1995.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''At the Café: Conversations on Anarchism''. London: Freedom Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Between Peasants: A Dialogue on Anarchy''. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, n.d.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Life and Ideas: The Anarchist Writings of Errico Malatesta''. Edited by Vernon Richards. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Method of Freedom: An Errico Malatesta Reader''. Edited by Davide Turcato. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “On Collective Responsibility.” Institute for Anarchist Theory and History website, n.d. https://ithanarquista.wordpress.com/nestor-makhno-archive/nestor-makhno-archive-english/platform-english/on-collective-responsibility-errico-malatesta.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Towards Anarchy: Malatesta in America, 1899–1900''. Vol. 3 of ''The Complete Works of Malatesta'', edited by Davide Turcato. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Marx, Karl. ''Capital, A Critique of Political Economy'', Vol. 1. London: Penguin Books, 1990.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Selected Writings''. Edited by David McLellan. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 5. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1976.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 20. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 22. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 23. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 24. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 26. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 43. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1988.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Collected Works'', Vol. 44. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In ''Marx, Later Political Writings'', edited by Terrell Carver, 1–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Maximoff, Gregori P. ''Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism''. N.p: Guillotine Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Mazzini, Giuseppe. ''A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations''. Edited by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Mella, Ricardo. ''Anarchist Socialism in Early Twentieth-Century Spain: A Ricardo Mella Anthology''. Edited by Stephen Luis Vilaseca. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Evolution and Revolution.” Biblioteca Anarquista website, April 6, 2013. https://es.theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ricardo-mella-evolucion-y-revolucion</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Meltzer, Albert. ''The Anarchists in London, 1935–1955''. London: Cienfuegos Press, 1976.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nabat. “Proceedings of Nabat.” In ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'', edited by Daniel Guérin, 487–89. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nettlau, Max. “Anarchism: Communist or Individualist? Both.” In ''Anarchy: An Anthology of Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth'', edited by Peter Glassgold, 79–83. New York: Counterpoint, 2000.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nietzsche, Friedrich. ''On the Genealogy of Morality''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Novomirsky, Daniil. ''Anarchism’s Trade Union Programme''. Translated by Paul Sharkey. Kate Sharpley Library website, n.d. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/3bk4c0.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Parsons, Albert. ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis''. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2003.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Parsons, Lucy. ''Freedom, Equality and Solidarity: Writings and Speeches, 1878–1937''. Edited by Gale Ahrens. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2004.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Pataud, Émile, and Émile Pouget. ''How We Shall Bring About the Revolution: Syndicalism and the Cooperative Commonwealth''. London: Pluto Press, 1990.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pindy, Jean-Louis. “Resolution on Resistance Funds.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 132–34. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pisacane, Carlo. “Political Testament.” Translated by Davide Turcato. Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, September 22, 2011. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/carlo-pisacane-propaganda-by-the-deed-1857.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Plechanoff, George. ''Anarchism and Socialism''. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1912.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Postgate, Raymond W., ed. “Debates and Resolutions of the First International on The Control of Industry.” In ''Revolution from 1789 to 1906'', 392–94. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1921.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pouget, Émile. “The Basis of Trade Unionism.” Libcom website, November 19, 2010. https://libcom.org/article/basis-trade-unionism-emile-pouget</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Direct Action''. London: Kate Sharpley Library, 2003.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Party of Labour.” Libcom website, November 19, 2010. https://libcom.org/article/party-labour-emile-pouget.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “What Is the Trade Union?” In ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism'', edited by Daniel Guérin, 427–35. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. ''Property Is Theft: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology''. Edited by Iain McKay. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''What Is Property?'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Puente, Isaac. ''Libertarian Communism''. Johannesburg: Zabalaza Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Raevsky, Maxim. ''Anarcho-Syndicalism and the IWW''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Reclus, Élisée. “An Anarchist on Anarchy.” In Parsons, ''Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, ''136–49. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: Selected Writings of Élisée Reclus''. Edited by John Clark and Camille Martin. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Development of Liberty in the World.” Translated by Shawn P. Wilbur. Libertarian Labyrinth website, September 2, 2016. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/anarchist-beginnings/elisee-reclus-the-development-of-liberty-in-the-world-c-1850.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“Resolutions of the Congresses of Verviers, 5 to 8 September 1877, and Ghent, 9 to 14 September 1877.” In Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 188–91.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">“Resolutions of the Saint-Imier Congress of the International Workers’ Association, 15–16 September 1872.” In Appendix to Berthier, ''Social Democracy and Anarchism'', 179–83. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rocker, Rudolf. ''Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism''. London: Freedom Press, 1988.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Declaration of the Principles of Syndicalism,''” ''1919. Translated by Cord-Christian Casper. Academia.edu website, n.d. https://www.academia.edu/39134774/Rudolf_Rocker_Syndicalist_Declaration_of_Principles.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The London Years''. Nottingham, UK: Five Leaves, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Marx and Anarchism.” Anarchist Library website, April 26, 2009. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rudolf-rocker-marx-and-anarchism.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Nationalism and Culture''. Los Angeles: Rocker Publications Committee, 1937.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Soviet System or the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” In ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', edited by Friends of Aron Baron, 47–56. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rogdaev, N. “On the Anarchist Movement in Russia.” In Antonioli, ed. ''The International Anarchist Congress Amsterdam'', 176–95. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rogue, J., and Abbey Volcano. “Insurrection at the Intersections: Feminism, Intersectionality, and Anarchism.” In Dark Star, ''Quiet Rumours'','' ''43–46.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Roller, Arnold. ''The Social General Strike''. Chicago: The Debating Club No. 1, 1905.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Santillán, Diego Abad de. ''After the Revolution: Economic Reconstruction in Spain''. Translated by Louis Frank. New York: Greenberg, 1937.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Schapiro, Alexander. “Introduction to Anarcho-Syndicalism and Anarchism.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Robert Graham’s Anarchism Weblog, March 15, 2009. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/alexander-schapiro-pierre-besnard-anarcho-syndicalism-and-anarchism.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Schwitzguébel, Adhémar. “On Resistance Funds.” In ''Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later'', edited by Marcello Musto, 138–40. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Seguí, Salvador. “Anarchism and Syndicalism.” Translated by Paul Sharkey. Libcom website, August 2, 2015. https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-syndicalism-salvador-seguí.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Shannon, Deric, and J. Rogue. “Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality.” Anarkismo website, November 11, 2009, https://www.anarkismo.net/article/14923.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Stalin, Joseph. ''Works'','' ''Vol. 1,'' 1901–1907''. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1954.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Steimer, Mollie, Simon Fleshin, Voline, Sobol, Schwartz, Lia, Roman, and Ervantian. “Concerning the Platform for an Organization of Anarchists.” In ''Fighters for Anarchism: Mollie Steimer and Senya Fleshin'', edited by Abe Bluestein, 50–62. Libertarian Publications Group, 1983.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Taber, Mike, ed. ''Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International, 1889–1912''. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Tucker, Benjamin. ''Instead of a Book, by a Man Too Busy to Write One: A Fragmentary Exposition of Philosophical Anarchism''. 2nd ed. New York: Benj. R. Tucker, Publisher, 1897.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Varlin, Eugène. “Workers Societies.” Translated by Iain McKay. Anarchist Writers website, October 6, 2018. https://anarchism.pageabode.com/precursors-of-syndicalism.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Voline. “Synthesis (Anarchist).” In ''The Anarchist Encyclopedia Abridged'', edited by Mitchell Abidor, 197–205. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Unknown Revolution 1917–1921''.'' ''Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Warren, Josiah. ''The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren''. Edited by Crispin Sartwell. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Wilson, Charlotte. ''Anarchist Essays''. Edited by Nicolas Walter. London: Freedom Press, 2000.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Winstanley, Gerrard. “''The Law of Freedom” and Other Writings''. Edited by Christopher Hill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Witkop-Rocker, Milly. “What Does the Syndicalist Women’s Union Want?” Translated by Jesse Cohn. Anarchist Library website, n.d. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/milly-witkop-rocker-what-does-the-syndicalist-women-s-union-want.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Yuzuru, Kubo. “On Class Struggle and the Daily Struggle (1928).” In ''Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Idea''s, Vol. 1, ''From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)'', edited by Robert Graham, 379–81. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005.</div>
-<div style="text-align:center;">'''Secondary Sources'''</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ackelsberg, Martha. ''Free Women of Spain: Anarchism and the Struggle for the Emancipation of Women''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Adams, Matthew S. ''Kropotkin, Read, and the Intellectual History of British Anarchism: Between Reason and Romanticism''. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Adams, Matthew S., and Ruth Kinna, eds. ''Anarchism, 1914–18: Internationalism, Anti-Militarism and War''. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Anderson, Benedict. ''The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anti-Colonial Imagination''. London: Verso, 2013.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Archer, Julian P. W. ''The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact''. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1997.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Arshinov, Peter. ''History of the Makhnovist Movement, 1918–1921''. London: Freedom Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Avrich, Paul. ''An American Anarchist: The Life of Voltairine de Cleyre''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2018.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Anarchist Portraits''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Haymarket Tragedy''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Modern School Movement: Anarchism and Education in the United States''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Sacco and Vanzetti: The Anarchist Background''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Russian Anarchists''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Avrich, Paul, and Karen Avrich. ''Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Baker, Zoe. “Anarchism and Democracy.” Anarchopac.com, April 15, 2022. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-anarchism-and-democracy. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Bakunin was a Racist.” Anarchopac.com, October 31, 2021. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/zoe-baker-bakunin-was-a-racist. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bantman, Constance. “From Trade Unionism to Syndicalisme Révolutionnaire to Syndicalism: The British Origins of French Syndicalism.” In Berry and Bantman, eds., ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism'', 127–40.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation''. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Militant Go-between: Émile Pouget’s Transnational Propaganda (1880–1914).” ''Labour History Review'' 74, no. 3 (2009): 274–87.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Bantman, Constance, and Bert Altena, eds. ''Reassessing the Transnational Turn: Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies''. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Barton, Mary S. “The Global War on Anarchism: The United States and International Anarchist Terrorism, 1898–1904.” ''Diplomatic History'' 39, no. 2 (2015): 303–30.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Beaney, Michael. “Analytic Philosophy and History of Philosophy: The Development of the Idea of Rational Reconstruction.” In ''The Historical Turn in Analytic Philosophy'', edited by Erich H. Reck, 231–60. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Beer, Max. ''A History of British Socialism'', Vol. 2. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1921.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Bernecker, Walther L. “The Strategies of ‘Direct Action’ and Violence in Spanish Anarchism.” In ''Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'', edited by Wolfgang J Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, 88–111. London: The Macmillan Press, 1982.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, Christopher J. ''The Social Theory of the Scottish Enlightenment''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, David. ''A History of the French Anarchist Movement: 1917 to 1945''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berry, David, and Constance Bantman, eds. ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational''. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Berthier, René. ''Social Democracy and Anarchism in the International Workers’ Association, 1864–1877''. London: Anarres Editions, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Boehm, Christopher. ''Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior''. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Boggs, Carl. “Marxism, Prefigurative Communism and the Problem of Workers’ Control.” ''Radical America'' 11 (1977): 99–122.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Bookchin, Murray. ''The Spanish Anarchists: The Heroic Years, 1868–1936''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Breines, Wini. “Community and Organization: The New Left and Michels’ ‘Iron Law.’” ''Social Problems'' 27, no. 4 (1980): 419–29.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Brinton, Maurice. “The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control, 1917–1921: The State and Counter-Revolution.” In ''For Workers’ Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton'', edited by David Goodway, 293–378. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2004.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Buttà, Fausto. ''Living Like Nomads: The Milanese Anarchist Movement Before Fascism''. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cahm, Caroline. ''Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism, 1872–1886''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Campbell, Al, and Mehmet Ufuk Tutan. “Human Development and Socialist Institutional Transformation: Continual Incremental Changes and Radical Breaks.” ''Studies in Political Economy'' 82, no. 1 (2008): 153–70.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cappelletti, Ángel J. ''Anarchism in Latin America''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Carlson, Andrew R. ''Anarchism in Germany'', Vol. 1, ''The Early Movement''. Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1972.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Carr, E. H. ''Michael Bakunin''. London: The Macmillan Press, 1975.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Casas, Juan Gómez. ''Anarchist Organisation: The History of the F.A.I''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1986.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Castleton, Edward. “The Many Revolutions of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.” In ''The 1848 Revolutions and European Political Thought'', edited by Douglas Moggach and Gareth Stedman Jones, 39–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The Origins of ‘Collectivism’: Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s Contested Legacy and the Debate About Property in the International Workingmen’s Association and the League of Peace and Freedom.” ''Global Intellectual History'' 2, no. 2 (2017): 169–95.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Christie, Stuart. ''We, the Anarchists! A Study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI) 1927–1937''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Clark, Martin. ''The Italian Risorgimento''. 2nd ed. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Clastres, Pierre. ''Archeology of Violence''. New York: Semiotext(e), 1994.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology''. New York: Zone Books, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Clutterbuck, Lindsay. “The Progenitors of Terrorism: Russian Revolutionaries or Extreme Irish Republicans?” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 16, no. 1 (2004): 154–81.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Cole, G. D. H. ''A History of Socialist Thought'', Vol. 2, ''Marxism and Anarchism, 1850–1890''. London: Macmillan, 1974.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cole, Peter, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer, eds. ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW''. London: Pluto Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Colins, Patricia, and Sirma Bilge. ''Intersectionality''.'' ''2nd edition.'' ''Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Cornell, Andrew. ''Unruly Equality: US Anarchism in the 20th Century''. Oakland, CA: California University Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Cox, Laurence, and Alf Gunvald Nilsen. ''We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism''. London: Pluto Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Damier, Vadim. ''Anarcho-Syndicalism in the 20th Century''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Darlington, Ralph. ''Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism''. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2013.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Di Paola, Pietro. ''The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora, 1880–1917''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Dobres, Marcia-Anne. “Digging up Gender in the Earliest Human Societies.” In ''A Companion to Gender History'', edited by Teresa A. Meade and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, 211–26. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Draper, Hal. ''The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin''. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'', Vol. 3, ''The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”'' New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution'', Vol. 4, ''Critique of Other Socialisms''. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ealham, Chris. ''Anarchism and the City: Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Barcelona, 1898–1937''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Living Anarchism: José Peirats and the Spanish Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Eckhardt, Wolfgang. ''The First Socialist Schism: Bakunin vs. Marx in the International Working Men’s Association''. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Enckell, Marianne. “Bakunin and the Jura Federation.” In ''Arise Ye Wretched of the Earth: The First International in Global Perspective'', edited by Fabrice Bensimon, Quentin Deluermoz, and Jeanne Moisand, 355–65. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2018.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Esenwein, George Richard. ''Anarchist Ideology and the Working-Class Movement in Spain, 1868–1898''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Evans, Danny. ''Revolution and the State: Anarchism in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Fernández, Frank. ''Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement''. Tucson, AZ: See Sharp Press, 2001.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ferretti, Federico. ''Anarchy and Geography: Reclus and Kropotkin in the UK''. London: Routledge, 2019.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Fleming, Marie. ''The Anarchist Way to Socialism: Élisée Reclus and Nineteenth-Century European Anarchism''. London: Croom Helm Ltd, 1979.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Frost, Ginger. “Love is Always Free: Anarchism, Free Unions and Utopianism in Edwardian England.” ''Anarchist Studies'' 17, no. 1 (2009): 73–94.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Garner, Jason. ''Goals and Means: Anarchism, Syndicalism, and Internationalism in the Origins of the Federación Anarquista Ibérica''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Geuss, Raymond. ''History and Illusion in Politics''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Morality, Culture and History: Essays on German Philosophy''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Gindin, Sam. “Socialism ‘With Sober Senses’: Developing Workers’ Capacities.” ''The Socialist Register'' 34 (1998): 75–99.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Goodstein, Phil H. ''The Theory of the General Strike from the French Revolution to Poland''. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Goyens, Tom. ''Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Johann Most and the German Anarchists.” In ''Radical Gotham: Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street'', edited by Tom Goyens, 12–32. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. ''The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity''. London: Allen Lane, 2021.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Graham, Robert. ''We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Guglielmo, Jennifer. ''Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945''. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2010.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Guillamón, Agustín. ''Ready for Revolution: The CNT Defense Committees in Barcelona, 1933–1938''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Gurney, John. ''Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger’s Life and Legacy''. London: Pluto Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Hart, John M. ''Anarchism and the Mexican Working Class, 1860–1931''. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Hatab, Lawrence J. ''Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’: An Introduction''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Haupt, Georges. ''Aspects of International Socialism, 1871–1914''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Hirsch, Steven, and Lucien van der Walt, eds. ''Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940: The Praxis of National Liberation, Internationalism, and Social Revolution''. Leiden, NL: Brill, 2010.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Hobsbawm, Eric. ''Revolutionaries''. London: Phoenix, 1994.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Hoyt, Andrew Douglas. “And They Called Them ‘Galleanisti’: The Rise of the ''Cronca Sovversiva'' and the Formation of America’s Most Infamous Anarchist Faction (1895–1912).” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 2018.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Hunt, Richard N. ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'', Vol. 1, ''Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850''. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels'', Vol. 2, ''Classical Marxism, 1850–1895''. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1984.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Institute for Anarchist Studies, ''Perspectives on Anarchist Theory,'' no. 29,'' Anarcha-Feminisms'' (2016).</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Jennings, Jeremy. ''Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas''. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1990.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Jensen, Richard Bach. ''The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">John, Kenneth. “Anti-Parliamentary Passage: South Wales and the Internationalism of Sam Mainwaring (1841–1907).” PhD diss., University of Greenwich, 2001.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Joll, James. ''The Anarchists''. London: Methuen & Co, 1969.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kaplan, Temma. ''Anarchists of Andalusia, 1868–1903''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kelly, Robert L. ''The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum''. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Khuri-Makdisi, Ilham. ''The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kinna, Ruth. “Anarchism and Feminism” In ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', edited by Nathan Jun, 253–84. Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Kropotkin: Reviewing the Classical Anarchist Tradition''. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Kinna, Ruth, and Alex Prichard. “Anarchism and Non-Domination.” ''Journal of Political Ideologies'' 24, no. 3 (2019): 221–40.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Kissack, Terence. ''Free Comrades: Anarchism and Homosexuality in the United States, 1895–1917''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2008.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Kissin, S. F. ''War and the Marxists: Socialist Theory and Practice in Capitalist Wars'','' ''Vol. 1,'' 1848–1918''. London: Routledge, 2019.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Kuper, Adam. ''The Reinvention of Primitive Society: Transformations of a Myth''. London: Routledge, 2005.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Laursen, Ole Birk. “‘Anarchism, Pure and Simple’: M. P. T. Acharya, Anti-Colonialism and the International Anarchist Movement.” ''Postcolonial Studies'' 23, no. 2 (2020): 241–55.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Lehning, Arthur. “Bakunin’s Conception of Revolutionary Organisations and Their Role: A Study of His ‘Secret Societies.’” In ''Essays in Honour of E. H. Carr'', edited by Chimen Abramsky, 57–81. London: The Macmillan Press, 1974.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''From Buonarroti to Bakunin: Studies in International Socialism''. Leiden, NL: E. J. Brill, 1970.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Leier, Mark. ''Bakunin: The Creative Passion—A Biography''. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Leopold, David. “A Solitary Life.” In ''Max Stirner'', edited by Saul Newman, 21–41. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Levy, Carl. ''Gramsci and the Anarchists''. Oxford: Berg, 1999.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Linse, Ulrich. “‘Propaganda by Deed’ and ‘Direct Action’: Two Concepts of Anarchist Violence.” In ''Social Protest, Violence and Terror in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe'', edited by Wolfgang J Mommsen and Gerhard Hirschfeld, 201–29. London: The Macmillan Press, 1982.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Lipotkin, Lazar. ''The Russian Anarchist Movement in North America''. Edmonton, AB: Black Cat Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Marshall, Peter. ''Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism''. London: Harper Perennial, 2008.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Martin, James J. ''Men Against the State: The Expositors of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827–1908''. Colorado Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1970.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">McDermott, Kevin, and Jeremy Agnew ''The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to ''Stalin. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 1996.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">McKay, Iain. “Communism and Syndicalism.” Anarchist Writers website, May 25, 2012. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/anarcho/communism-syndicalism.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “The State and Revolution: Theory and Practice.” In ''Bloodstained: One Hundred Years of Leninist Counterrevolution'', edited by Friends of Aron Baron, 61–117. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Meek, Ronald L. ''Smith, Marx, and After: Ten Essays in the Development of Economic Thought''. Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 1977.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Merriman, John. ''The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune of 1871''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Messer-Kruse, Timothy. ''The Haymarket Conspiracy: Transatlantic Anarchist Networks''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Miller, David. ''Anarchism''. London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1984.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Miller, Martin A. ''Kropotkin''. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Mintz, Frank. ''Anarchism and Workers’ Self-Management in Revolutionary Spain''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Mintz, Jerome R. ''The Anarchists of Casas Viejas''. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Moss, Bernard H. ''The Origins of the French Labor Movement, 1930–1914: The Socialism of Skilled Workers''. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nelles, Dieter. “Anarchosyndicalism and the Sexual Reform Movement in the Weimar Republic.” Paper Presented at the Free Love and Labour Movement Workshop at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, 2000. https://www.academia.edu/23692251/Anarchosyndicalism_and_the_Sexual_Reform_Movement_in_the_Weimar_Republic.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nettlau, Max. ''A Short History of Anarchism''. Edited by Heiner M. Becker. London: Freedom Press, 1996.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Neville, Robert G. “The Courrières Colliery Disaster, 1906.” ''Journal of Contemporary History'' 13, no. 1 (1978): 33–52.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nicholas, Lucy. “Gender and Sexuality.” In ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', edited by Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams, 603–2. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Nightingale, John. “The Concept of Solidarity in Anarchist Thought.” PhD diss., Loughborough University, 2015.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Papayanis, Nicholas. “Alphones Merrheim and the Strike of Hennebont: The Struggle for the Eight-Hour Day in France.” International Review of Social History 16, no. 2 (1971): 159–83.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Alphonse Merrheim: The Emergence of Reformism in Revolutionary Syndicalism, 1871–1925''. Dordrecht, NL: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Paz, Abel. ''Durruti in the Spanish Revolution''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2006.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Peirats, José. ''The CNT in the Spanish Revolution'', Vol. 1. Edited by Chris Ealham. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''What Is the C.N.T?'' London: Simian, 1974.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pelling, Henry. ''A History of British Trade Unionism''. 5th ed. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1992.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pernicone, Nunzio. ''Italian Anarchism, 1864–1892''. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pernicone, Nunzio, and Fraser M. Ottanelli. ''Assassins against the Old Order: Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Persson, Lennart K. “Revolutionary Syndicalism in Sweden Before the Second World War.” In van der Linden and Thorpe, ''Revolutionary Syndicalism'', 81–99.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pinfari, Marco. “Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat.” ''Terrorism and Political Violence'' 21, no. 4 (2009): 580–94.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pinsolle, Dominique. “Sabotage, the IWW, and Repression: How the American Reinterpretation of a French Concept Gave Rise to a New International Conception of Sabotage.” In Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer, ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', 44–58.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pinta, Saku. “Towards a Libertarian Communism: A Conceptual History of the Intersections Between Anarchisms and Marxisms.” PhD diss., Loughborough University, 2013.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Pomper, Philip. “Nechaev and Tsaricide: The Conspiracy within the Conspiracy.” ''The Russian Review'' 33, no. 2 (1974): 123–38.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Quail, John. ''The Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of British Anarchists''. London: Granada Publishing Limited, 1978.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Raekstad, Paul. ''Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism''. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Raekstad, Paul, and Sofa Saio Gradin. ''Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today''. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rapoport, David C. “The Four Waves of Modern Terrorism.” In ''Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy'', edited by Audrey Cronin and James Ludes, 46–73. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2004.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Rapp, John A. ''Daoism and Anarchism: Critiques of State Autonomy in Ancient and Modern China''. London: Continuum Books, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Ravindranathan, T.R. ''Bakunin and the Italians''. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1988.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Rider, Nick. “The Practice of Direct Action: The Barcelona Rent Strike of 1931.” In ''For Anarchism: History, Theory and Practice'', edited by David Goodway, 79–105. London: Routledge, 1989.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ridley, F. F. ''Revolutionary Syndicalism in France: The Direct Action of Its Time''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Rocker, Rudolf. ''Pioneers of American Freedom: Origin of Liberal and Radical Thought in America''. Los Angeles: Rocker Publication Committee, 1949.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Ryley, Peter. ''Making Another World Possible: Anarchism, Anti-Capitalism and Ecology in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Britain''. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Schmidt, Michael, and Lucien van der Walt. ''Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Scott, James C. ''The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Senta, Antonio. ''Luigi Galleani: The Most Dangerous Anarchist in America''. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2019.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Seth, Ronald. ''The Russian Terrorists: The Story of the Narodniki''. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1966.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Short, K. R. M. ''The Dynamite War: Irish-American Bombs in Victorian Britain''. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1979.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Shpayer-Makov. Haia. “Anarchism in British Public Opinion, 1880–1914.” ''Victorian Studies'' 31, no. 4 (1988): 487–516.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Skinner, Quentin. ''The Foundations of Modern Political Thought'', Vol. 1, ''The Renaissance''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Interpretation and the Understanding of Speech Acts.” In ''Visions of Politics'', Vol. 1,'' Regarding Method'', 103–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas.” In ''Visions of Politics'', Vol. 1,'' Regarding Method'', 57–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Skirda, Alexandre. ''Facing the Enemy: A History of Anarchist Organization from Proudhon to May 1968''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2002.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Smith, Angel. ''Anarchism, Revolution and Reaction: Catalan Labour and the Crisis of the Spanish State, 1989–1923''. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Smith, Denis Mack. ''Mazzini''. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Spitzer, Alan B. ''The Revolutionary Theories of Louis Auguste Blanqui''. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Stafford, David. ''From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse, 1870–90''. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Steenson, Gary P. ''After Marx, Before Lenin: Marxism and Socialist Working-Class Parties in Europe, 1884–1914''. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Stepelevitch, Laurence S. “The Revival of Max Stirner.” ''Journal of the History of Ideas'' 35, no. 2 (1974): 323–28.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Suriano, Juan. ''Paradoxes of Utopia: Anarchist Culture and Politics in Buenos Aires, 1890–1910''. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2010.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Thomas, Paul. ''Karl Marx and the Anarchists''. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Thorpe, Wayne. “The IWW and the Dilemmas of Internationalism.” In Cole, Struthers, and Zimmer, ''Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW'', 105–23. </div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''“The Workers Themselves”: Revolutionary Syndicalism and International Labour, 1913–1923''. Dordrecht, NL: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Uneasy Family: Revolutionary Syndicalism in Europe From the Charte d’Amiens to World War One.” In Berry and Bantman, eds., ''New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism'', 16–42.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Tilly, Charles. ''European Revolutions, 1492–1992''. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Turcato, Davide. “Anarchist Communism.” In ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', edited by Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams, 237–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments With Revolution, 1889–1900''. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Van der Linden, Marcel, and Wayne Thorpe, eds. ''Revolutionary Syndicalism: An International Perspective''. Aldershot, UK: Scolar Press, 1990.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Van der Walt, Lucien. “Anarchism and Marxism.” In ''Brill’s Companion to Anarchist Philosophy'', edited by Nathan Jun, 505–58. Leiden, NL: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Syndicalism.” In ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', edited by Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams, 249–63. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Verhoeven, Claudia. ''The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism''. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Vincent, Steven K. ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism''. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Whitham, William. “César De Paepe and the Ideas of the First International.” ''Modern Intellectual History'' 16, no. 3 (2019): 897–925.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Wilbur, Shawn P. “Joseph Déjacque and the First Emergence of Anarchism.” In ''Contr’un 5: Our Lost Continent'', 2016.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Mutualism.” In ''The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism'', edited by Carl Levy and Matthew S. Adams, 213–24. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Self-Government and the Citizen-State.” Libertarian Labyrinth website, June 5, 2013. https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/contrun/pierre-joseph-proudhon-self-government-and-the-citizen-state-2.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Williams, Dana M. “Black Panther Radical Factionalization and the Development of Black Anarchism.” ''Journal of Black Studies'' 46, no. 7 (2015): 678–703. </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Wolf, Jeremy. “Iron Law of Wages.” In ''The Encyclopedia of Political Thought'', edited by Michael Gibbons. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0541.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Wood, Ellen Meiksins. ''Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Middle Ages''. London: Verso, 2011.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Woodcock, George. ''Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideals and Movements''. 2nd ed. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1986.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1987.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Woodcock, George, and Ivan Avakumović. ''Peter Kropotkin: From Prince to Rebel''. Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1990.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Yeoman, James. ''Print Culture and the Formation of the Anarchist Movement in Spain, 1890–1915''. New York: Routledge, 2020.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;margin-left:0.355cm;">Zimmer, Kenyon. “Archiving the American Anarchist Press: Reflections on Format, Accessibility and Language.” ''American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism'' 29, no. 1 (2019): 9–11.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">———. ''Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America''. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.</div>
-<div style="margin-left:0.355cm;">Zurbrugg, A.W. ''Anarchist Perspectives in Peace and War, 1900–1918''. London: Anarres Editions, 2018.</div>
-== {{anchor|CopyrightMeansandEndsThe1}} {{anchor|TopofMeansandEndsINTebook16}} {{anchor|CopyrightMeansandEndsThe}} Copyright ==
-''Means and Ends: The Revolutionary Practice of Anarchism in Europe and the United States''
-<div style="color:#000000;">© 2023 Zoe Baker</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">This edition © 2023 AK Press (Chico / Edinburgh)</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">ISBN 978-1-84935-498-1</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">E-ISBN 978-1-84935-499-8</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948753</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">AK Press </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">370 Ryan Avenue #100 </div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Chico, CA 95973</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">USA</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">www.akpress.org</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">akpress@akpress.org</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">AK Press</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">33 Tower Street</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Edinburgh, EH6, 7BN</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Scotland</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">www.akuk.com</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">akuk@akpress.org</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">The addresses above would be delighted to provide you with the latest AK Press catalog, featuring several thousand books, pamphlets, audio and video products, and stylish apparel published and distributed by AK Press. Alternatively, visit our websites for the complete catalog, latest news and updates, events, and secure ordering. </div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">Women & Power: A Manifesto</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Cover design by John Yates | www.stealworks.com</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">Mary Beard</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Cover photographs (top) courtesy of Centro Studi Libertari / Archivio Giuseppe Pinelli, Milan, Italy (bottom) courtesy of Abel Paz Fund, Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation Archive (CNT)</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">The gender agenda revisited by Britain’s best-known classicist, Mary Beard.</div>
-<div style="color:#000000;">Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, recycled paper</div>
+<div style="text-align:center;">ISBN 978 1 78816 060 5eISBN 978 1 78283 453 3</div>

Difference between revisions of "User talk:NonZeroSum"

Revision as of 10:24, 6 December 2024

Contents

X

X

[Front Matter]

Table of Contents

[Title Page]

[About the Author]

Template:Anchor [Copyright]

Template:Anchor dedicated to

Template:Anchor THE WORD FOR WOMAN IS WILDERNESS

PASSING THROUGH THE HELIOPAUSE

HAUNTED BY THOUGHTS OF AN ELSEWHERE

LAND OF THE ICE-QUEENS

WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL TERRORIST CONSPIRACY FROM HELL

CUT

HOW TO BE A GROWN-UP IN A POST-FEMINIST SOCIETY

SYMBIOSIS OF ALGAE AND ANIMALS

GO WEST, YOUNG MAN

Why can’t you just be simple like other girls your age, get a job somewhere in town and work your way up, or at least go away to go to university, make something of yourself?

What did we do to you that made you so determined to leave us?

We won’t sleep until you return.

We won’t sleep ever again.

THE CHEMICAL WAR ON THE GYPSY MOTH

I USE SONAR TO EXPRESS MYSELF

THE CEILING IN THE SKY

MANNED SPACE FLIGHT IS THE TROPHY WIFE OF THE SUPER-PHALLUS

CUT

NOT THE WHITE BULL JUPITER SWIMMING

CUT

THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE

MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

ON BEING OF GREAT ADVANTAGE TO MY SEX

THE RESURRECTION OF RACHEL CARSON

FIRST FOOTPRINTS IN THE FRESH SNOW

THESE ARE SHINING PARTS

THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO ENDURING THE MOST DRAMATIC HARDSHIPS YOU CAN IMAGINE

CUT TO –

CUT TO –

CUT

Template:Anchor HOW TO CONVEY INVISIBLE DEATH

CONTAMINANTS THAT CAUSE ADVERSE CHANGE

WOMEN INTERESTED IN TOPPLING CONSUMER HOLIDAYS

MANKIND’S MOST NOBLE GOAL: THE SEARCH FOR TRUTH AND UNDERSTANDING

THE PILL REFUGEE FORUM

What do you want Naaja?

I want what you want, of course. I want to see the world and make a life for myself. I want to leave Greenland and its small way of life.

But somebody has to stay and be Inuit!

Why should we stay when others do not? Where does it come from, this obligation? Where is yours?

We aren’t so different. You could come with me.

But we are very different. You are so free.

DO PELICANS LOVE TO SOAR?

*DOG VOICE* NOW YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SAY GOODBYE

You will leave me behind.

Please go to university.

I am too headstrong not to.

But also after, go back to the village. Fight for your culture!

We won’t ever speak again.

We will stay in touch.

We don’t even speak the same language.

THE RIGHTS OF NATURE

They aren’t sentient. They are fish. Fish are there to be eaten.

Whales are not fish.

What next? Haddock have feelings too? We can’t eat the haddock? Then what do we eat?

Maybe one day whales might be classed as non-human people and this whole conversation would be considered highly offensive, like how we look at the times before the women’s rights movement.

Ha! You can’t say that as a woman. That is comparing women to animals. Very unfeminist.

Maybe that is what people said about the idea of women’s rights before the suffragettes and in the context of the abolishment of slavery.

That is not a comparison.

THE SUPER-TRENDY SPONGE CLUB

SO LONG AND THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH

What he says: feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong and as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and capable as men.

What Charles Darwin the sexist Victorian naturalist said: the chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman.

What YOU need is a feminist revision.

Get off my ship you witch-whore.

Template:Anchor THE RECEDING HORIZON

GO CAREFULLY BRAVE SPACE PROBE FOR MY DREAMS GO WITH YOU

WOMEN’S BLOOD MYSTERIES

THE POLLINATOR HEALTH TASK FORCE

DOG VOICE NOW YOU MUST LEARN HOW TO SAY GOODBYE