Dale Pendell
Dale Pendell, in this pellucid dialogue for the 2006 Palenque Norte theme-camp series of Burning Man lectures, discourses, and public dialectic, discusses the invention of Horizon Anarchism; and that, in a sum:
If it took a thousand years to gradually dismantle the armed forces watching over us, and mechanisms of the State, that would be a bargain. That’s fine. That’s no problem.
And that’s Horizon Anarchism.
Raiazome suggests you reconnoiter the original recording of this event prior to reading the transcription for this event. This is freely downloadable at:
One of the problems with political action, I think, that developed in the last 30 years or so is that it hasn’t been much fun. And Barbara Ehrenreich, in a wonderful essay called Transcendence, Madness, and the Festival, talks about how festivals in medieval Europe happened all year long. In some cases, with all the Saints’ days, a third of the days of the year were holidays, were festivals.
Festivals were often centers of political rebellion, which is why they were often repressed. What finally closed them down was the rising power of the State, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment. Reason! Whereas a festival, coming out to such a godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, with great difficulty to this paradise of dust and exuberant wasteful expenditure, is surely madness. This is not reason.
And the Marxists didn’t like festivals either. Bénin even wrote that he was grateful to the capitalists for having disciplined the working class.
One of the philosophers that I turn to in Inspired Madness is the late Norman O. Brown. In 1990 (the year that Burning Man moved out here to the playa), Brown, in a prophetic tone, wrote:
That strengthening of the forces of Eros, for which Freud prayed, might create new institutions of individual generosity and public joy such as the world has not seen since Mont Saint-Michelle and Charte. Gift giving, a primary manifestation of Dionysian exuberance, might be able to revel in its own intrinsic, self-sacrificial nature instead of being inhibited and distorted, in bondage to primary social institutions of self-assertion, and public joy might manifest itself in carnivalesque extravaganzas uninhibited by the resentment of the exploited, the excluded, the deprived.
We have some ways to go yet to reach that, but it’s a great pointer. And just the fact that this many people come together, not under the corporate logos, [but] helping each other, doing what we do, and kind of having Backward Fools’ Days of breaking the rules, breaking the taboos, standing out, walking backwards, mocking all that is holy and sacred, speaking the unspeakable — saying “Fuck!”, “Fuck him!”, “Fuck you!”, “Fuck you, hippie!”, “Hey! Fuck you, redneck!”, “Hey, have a beer!”, “O.K.”
It gives me hope.
So, what is anarchism? Anarchism is often brought up in the Burning Man context as the theoretical foundation, often through their situationists. And mostly it’s misunderstood. And here’s a story.
A few years ago, I was at my poling place [for] the primary election. And a tall guy walked in, looked like a working man, and said in a loud voice, “Can I vote in the democratic primary? I’m a registered Republican and proud of it.” And where I lived, from all around the room, there were God bless you’s. And what I thought was, “Fuck.” And I’m a registered Democrat and ashamed of it.
What was that about? It’s about, because I’m really an anarchist.
Most people when they hear [[anarchism?]], they either think of the Hay Market Bombers. (You know, it’s that round bomb that’s black with a little fuse, that’s hissing.) And certain journals — Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed — like that part. Or, they think that anarchy means “No rules,” which has never really been a part of anarchist theory as a political practice. Anarchism really means “No ruler,” which means “No State,” which means a way to live without an armed police force and standing armies in our midst.
We’re kind of an occupied country.
Harma Arns (sp?) said that “the one prequisite for all police states are concentration camps.” Now, she wrote that in the 40’s; so, the image of Hitler and Stalin were foremost. These things morph into different forms. The United States now has more people in prison than any other country in the world. We have the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. What am I missing?
[The crowd responds, “Infant mortality.”]
Police state.
So we must resist how we can, and come up with a theory of where we want to go. And so I’m calling that Horizon Anarchism.
Anarchism has to do with cooperation, cooperative living: that, through most of our existence (40,000 years), we have lived as anarchists cooperatively.
[[Peter_Kropotkin?|Kropotkin]]‘s insight was that that was kind of the mark of our species. That’s our particular “thing,” is that we help each other.
Ancient paleolithic burials show arthritic skeletons. These people had to be cared for, carried even, fed for years and years. That takes brains. That’s why we evolved large brains. Because we’re the people who take care of each other. No other…
Emotion is a mammalian invention. We’re the huddling class, you know. We stack in mush piles under the great, freezing cosmos. And all mammals do that to some extent, but our species has really perfected this aspect of compassion and care: care for the unfit. We want to bring everybody along with us. That’s what takes brains. There’s lots of solutions to “survival of the fittest.” You can be fast, you can be strong, you can be invisible.
But, anarchists are kind of all over the map on alot of particulars about how to implement things. Historically, alot of anarchists have worked through unions. In Spain, the unions — the anarchist unions — took control through an election. And they made the trains run on time, and [taught] enlisted men to question the orders of their officers. And that’s not why they lost.
We see that the State, on balance, has created much more damage, much more pain, much more suffering, and a general tendency to infantalize the population. You don’t have to look very far back in history to see that the greatest crimes have all been committed by the State. That’s not to say, left to our own devices without a police force, that we wouldn’t have trouble. But it’s one thing to have a bully in the camp or maybe a bully with a gun, which might require a bunch of us to get together to figure out what to do about it — there’s a big difference between that and a hundred thousand or five hundred thousand such armed bullies marching in step.
So the greatest weapon of mass destruction is the State: with its armies, its prisons, its spy networks. That’s the great danger. If, as I often think, we sort of live in an insane asylum, it is not wise to leave weapons of mass destruction lying around. We can say, “Yes, but we need the State! What about, what about the wackos?” It is because wackos always come along, and particularly because they are attracted to power, that the State is such a dangerous organization. Inevitably, one of them will end up controlling it. And then we have big problems.
Some anarchists don’t want to take part in any governmental forms at all, but what I’m trying to look at in what I call Horizon Anarchism is a long-term view, which means that reformist measures are O.K. That good anarchist, Noam Chomsky, believes that we need the State right now to hold down the corporations, that it’s our only form against them. Actually, none of the corporations could exist without the State backing them up.
The State primarily is about protecting private property. By “private property,” we do not mean your personal possessions; we don’t mean your house, your car, or even your store. We mean global capital, that can claim to own “all of it,” whose very existence is created to try to own all of it.
In Buddhism, there’s an entity called the Hungry Ghost: the preta. And at every meal, Buddhists make a little offering to the Hungry Ghost, the hungry spirits. The hungry spirits have huge stomaches, swollen bellies, and these gigantic appetites, but necks no wider than a strand of thread. So they can never be satisfied. They’re always hungry; they’re locked into craving.
What is the Corporation but the embodiment of disembodied craving? It’s whole creation is to make more. And we have chosen to build our society around them. We’ve given them the rights of citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment (I think that’s the one) meant to guarantee freedom to the ex-slaves — 90% of the time it has come to the Supreme Court it’s been used to defend corporations like they were people, like they were citizens, like they had families, like they worked, like they had neighbors. They don’t. They’re ghosts.
Details of implementations of what to do about these things have to be decided at the time, by the people involved. We can’t come up with any general theory about this.
But note: when people get together for direct action! Maybe a corporation that owns houses — apartment houses in Oakland someplace — has decided that [if] they throw everybody out, they can make a little more on their bottom line by selling them to people who can’t afford to move to Marin. And the people finally get so fed up, are so oppressed, are hurt so much being pushed out onto the street with everything that they own, that they band together; they manage to organize and stand up to do something about it. It is the State police that come out to protect property.
None of that, none of the corporate wealth, could exist without the State backing it up.
Chomsky is afraid they will soon have their own armies, and we seem to be working in that direction. But I don’t think mercenary armies would have the popular support. They just, I don’t know… I think we’d win!
What to do about it? The first thing that I see is that we want a vision of where we want to go.
I would like to go… I would like to live in a society where people help each other and take care of themselves, where there’s no standing army, there’s no prisons, there’s not a police force. And [there] are always going to be problems, and we’ll (I don’t know) deal with them, right? Deal with them.
Many people will say, “That’s against human nature!”
The intellectual foundations of the State go back, well, (1) to Plato, who in the The Republic, which is what all the aristocratic youth used to have to read in school, said that “People should be ruled by the wise. And people can’t really take care of themselves; they’re too dumb to make the right decisions. So, in order to keep them happy, to keep them pacified, we, the wise, must lie to them. But this is a holy lie because it is done for the good of the State. Which means our estate, basically.”
Historically, the excesses of oligarchies have been far beyond anything that happens at a local level. I.F. Stone thinks the reason that Socrates was condemned to death was because he supported the oligarchs, or at least his pupils did, who allied themselves with Sparta and overthrew the democracy in Athens, and instituted the Rule of the (I don’t know) 27 Families (or something), and executed thousands in Athens to secure their position. It took a generation to kick them out. Great suffering.
Another intellectual foundation for those who would rule with coercion is the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes, supporting the monarchy, said that “Human beings, by nature, if just left to their own devices, are cannabilistic murdurers. And if we didn’t have a police force watching over us, we would attack each other, eat each other.”
Gary Snyder, in 1967, 1968, in his book Earth Households, wrote “To those who say it’s against human nature, we must patiently explain that you have to know you own essential nature before you can say that and that those who have gone into this deeply, for some thousands of years now — their reports have come back that we have nothing to fear, that with some training, develop some inner discipline, the way is clear. We can live together.”
Brown, working off of Finnegan’s Wake, said “In the Era of Here Comes Everybody [HCE], that is the fall of high art…” — which is something that you will hear from intellectuals on the Right, sometimes: “But we must defend high culture!” And, I don’t know, I mean, looking at the wasteland of television (it’s hard not to), it’s hard to be a Democrat. Sometimes it’s hard to believe in the people. It’s just that the alternatives are so clearly nasty that if you’ve got to throw your hat someplace, let’s all throw it in together and try to find another way to do things.
Brown said, “The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses” — that is, passive entertainment — “will satisfy the masses. The Dionysian bets that the Inquisitor is wrong.”
And that is the great hope of something like this, like Burning Man. Just the fact of people getting together in great numbers is a huge threat to the State. That is why, every year, the Feds try and add more strictures. They try to squeeze it out economically. They said, “We want more police there. You have to pay for ‘em even though, yes, it’s true: there are very few arrests and we don’t find any crime.” But they would like to stamp it out.
Corporate interests will attempt to come and offer compromises, as forced compromises. And that could happen.
But as that good philosopher Hakim Bey says, “Some of these things have a temporary nature at one place. And when they are discovered and squashed out someplace, they appear someplace else.”
But the importance of getting together to avoid this isolation. The isolation! Isolation is one of the keys of State power. So, it’s very important for us to get together and have fun. It is a political act. It is an act of what anarchy is based upon. If this can be true, given time, we have an alternative.
I want to see the president, when it comes time to sign a bill, even if [the bill] may be necessary, to recognize — instead of being proud of every piece of legislation that’s passed — to recognize that it represents a failure of our collective social nature. And, instead of giving away all these pens with fanfare, he should light a stick of incense and say, “My fellow Americans, it is with deep regret that I must announce to you [that], because we could not solve this problem on our own, we have had to enact another piece of legislation. Let us pray we can recover our senses and repeal it as soon as possible.”
Perhaps in Horizon Anarchism — which just means, we want it on the horizon. Knowing where we want to go is half of it. If we can stop things from getting worse, that’s really enough.
Because there are those who acquired great wealth, owning (basically) countries — just because they acquired their wealth essentially through theft, that does not necessarily give us the right to steal it back. In anarchism, the basic principle is that the ends do not support the means. It is our practice, that is what we do, [that] should be embodying the ends where we want to go.
Let ‘em keep it! They won’t live that long. I mean, [we] might have an estate tax or something: that, they should give back their fair share to what that supported them and made possible this great accumulation of wealth. (Sick as that is, in the first place.)
Corporations are supported not only by the bail outs, which we read about, which exceed everything spent on social welfare by more than an order of magnitude. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Their whole operation is subsidized by us. Everybody pays taxes. It’s all supported by the people. The research is supported. The armies are supported. (Maybe there’s a problem in some part of the world: the workers, having had too fucking much, band together. So we send in an army to protect private property. Maybe we setup an assassination. We keep the lines open.) It’s all subsidized by us. There’s no reason they shouldn’t pay their share.
At Burning Man, alot of what’s called anarchism or anarchist discussion, is actually [what] is called libertarianism. Libertarianism is, along with the whole neoconservative movement, the neocons — they like to say this: “We’re against the State. Down with government! Get government off our backs!” What they’re really talking about, they’re not talking about dismantling the forces protecting their property or their “rights.” They want to dismantle the watchdog agencies. They [the watchdog agencies] are trying to give some protection to consumers, and to workers, and to the Earth. They [the libertarians] don’t want anybody telling them they can’t strip mine, pollute, do anything they want with what they so-called “own.” They’re actually for a stronger form of government.
Now this business of “Do we still need government at this time?” is a sticky point for anybody thinking about eventually getting to a condition without a State. Some say (and they may be right), “You can’t work through the State to get beyond the State.” They may be right. Chomsky thinks that’s not so. And, as I mentioned, in Spain the anarchists came in through a popular elective movement. There’s no reason we can’t do that. All we have to do is stop supporting the forces, in every way we can. And it can’t sustain.
A hundred-year wait would be a miracle.
At a thousand years — if it took a thousand years to gradually dismantle the armed forces watching over us, and mechanisms of the State, that would be a bargain. That’s fine. That’s no problem.
And that’s Horizon Anarchism.
I’ve got a little time. I’ll take a question.
[A crowd members asks a largely unintelligible question, beginning with “Focusing on issues with the State…”]
I completely agree. He said, if I can paraphrase and restate that, the gentleman spoke of the liberation of the imagination.
I completely agree. That’s where it has to start; that’s absolutely the place. It’s the easiest. It’s kind of the lightest thing around, you know. I mean, some of this stuff kind of heavy to lift. But the lightest and the easiest thing to move is the imagination. And I completely agree with you: breaking out of — experimenting with new forms. That’s where the violence should be. Blake said, “I will not cease from mental fight.”
The alternative is corporeal war. That’s what Blake saw.
And here we have an invocation of the young god, Dionysus, who was very important to my teacher, N.O. Brown. And trouble follows Dionysus. It’s not like this all going to be peace and love. Trouble always follows him; his appearance was often dreaded. But the alternative — the repression of Dionysus, according to the ancients — is much worse. That leads to the sacrifice of children.
And I mention in my book that some have occasionally, here, mistaken themselves for the god, and walked naked into the fire. That has happened. I say, “That stamps the ceremony as genuine.” And Euripides would have left that part in.
[Another crowd members asks another largely unintelligible question.]
As the greater system comes under stress, do I see that as energizing social transformation? You know, I…
Things can get very brutish, in stress. So I think those who want to, in the old Marxist terminology, “raise the dialectic” — that is, let’s let things get worse so the revolution will come sooner —
No. No, things are plenty bad enough.
And poverty, great inequality in wealth, repression: it separates people, it fragments the society, and it can take generations for familial relationships, for relationships between parents and children, [and] violence within families [to heal]. All of these things result from these great social stresses.
Our society is so schizophrenic, now, that to be well-adjusted at this point is really a mark of ill health.
O.K., we’ve got about two minutes.
[The mediator interjects, “Two questions.”]
Two questions. Yo.
[Another crowd members; another unintelligible question.]
That’s a deep question. He asked about the Federal Reserve system. I…
There’s an interesting book by Jerry Martien called Shell Game, about the history of money. And, [it] goes into it at kind of a deeper level. You know, the Federal Reserve; or Jackson getting rid of the Bank; or the Hamiltonian Bank. It’s a very complicated thing. I’ve seen a big book on that and I’m, you know… I’m not qualified to speak on it.
But it’s part of a larger problem. The issue of money is — that’s a tough nut to crack.
And one of the fantastic things here on the playa is just what a difference it can make — just the lack of currency going around. I mean, except we have to pay for our “real drug” down at Center Camp. But…
[Another crowd members; another unintelligible question.]
He asked about [coffee] — I have written about the connection between stimulant drugs and industrial capitalism through the Enlightenment and mercantilism. And what does it mean that that’s the one thing that they sell here?
It just shows, you know, that’s how, that is our true, that is the ally of our culture. That’s our true plant ally. And, you know, the real plant ally is the one that’s so close and so all around you, all the time, that you don’t even see it. You just take it for granted. But…
There are lots of contradictions in Burning Man, and I try and address some of those in Inspired Madness. The idea…
So. I just want to close with one idea, which is this idea of wasteful consumption. And if you look at the Belgium — take the Belgium Waffle [a Burning Man art installation].
What can this mean, all of that lumber? All those sweet Canadian 2x3s, which we will burn? That wasteful consumption, which is anathema to conservationalists of the old school, to (I don’t know) Protestants, generally, to Catholics — well, to everybody. It’s madness. “That our greatest blessings,” Socrates said, “come to us through madness, if it is divine madness inspired by the gods.”
So we grace this wasteful consumption with the name of a god. We will call him the God of the Potlatch. And that, in burning this surplus, we can look on it as a magical sacrifice.
The alternative worship is war.