[From Killing King Abacus magazine, URL below. John] 

http://www.geocities.com/kk_abacus


The Continuing Appeal of Anarchism among Anarchists

                         A review of Hakim Bey's Millenium

According to Hakim Bey, he wrote Millennium to answer to the question of
whether he still holds the position he staked out in TAZ. By reading
Millennium we can both understand Bey's current theoretical position and
how he placed TAZ in the first place. First off, Bey notes that between
the two books the world changed: the Soviet Union fell apart. This has
radical implications for anarchists. Before the fall, anarchists were the
"third way" (not to be confused with Tony Blair's Third Way) and the real
opposition to Capital was the Soviet Union. With the Soviet dissolution,
anarchism has become the other of Capital. Where as when anarchism was
the third way, anarchists could hang out in the cracks creating Temporary
Autonomous Zones and not really confronting Capital or the State, we no
longer have that luxury. Bey admits that it took him some time to realize
the difference that this made; in fact, in the early nineties he still
counseled anarchists that the present was like the Dark Ages and, as with
the mystics and monks Bey so loves, we should hang out and meditate in
the monasteries until they are over. It seems that it took the Zapatistas
to wake Bey to the implications of anarchism becoming the primary
opposition to Capital. In Millennium, Bey concludes that TAZ is no longer
an option, now we must leave the monasteries and begin the Jihad (the
revolution). 

But what is this Jihad Bey has declared? With a jumble of badly digested
academic, post-colonial theory, the writings of Deleuze and Guattari,
Islam and the sound-bytes of Subcommander Marcos, Bey paints a colonial
picture of our 'newly' globalized world. In Bey's world, capitalism and
the state are no longer the central enemies (in fact, they begin to drop
out of Bey's analysis, as capital no longer exploits or alienates, it
only produces 'sameness'); instead, colonialism in the form of
globalization that produces 'sameness' (homogenization) is what we must
confront with a revolution of 'difference.' With this logic, the form
revolution must take to protect difference, to fight colonialism, is
national liberation. Thus, Bey's acritical support for the EZLN revolt (a
revolt Bey joyfully calls the first postmodern revolution).

For Bey, difference is constituted by ethnic nationalism. Accordingly, we
need to understand the "revolutionary implication of culture." (43) Or,
more directly, Bey states, "...true organic integral difference is
revolutionary, now. It has to be, because it's opposed to the single
world, the mono-world, the mono-culture of capital." (25) We have to ask,
however, what is "true" or "organic" about ethnic nationalities? One of
the central problems with Bey's anti-colonial outlook is that it tends to
naturalize nationalities and thus nationalism. It makes them seem natural
and eternal instead of historically specific and socially constructed.
Contra Bey's reading, nationalities are produced at certain times and by
certain forces. And, instead of just assuming they are eternal and fixed,
as Bey simplistically does, we need to pay attention to how such ethnic
differences come to be created and articulated by political and social
actors for particular reasons.

Bey does allow for "positive" and "negative" difference or
particularities (nationalities). Positive or "true" nationalities are
those that aren't imperialistic (those that stay in their borders and
don't dominate their minorities). Bey offers the examples of the
Zapatistas, Bosnia, Slovenia, Macedonia, the Ukraine, the Kurds and the
Chechens as positive nationalities and nationalisms; and, he cites the
Serbs and Russia as negative or hegemonic particularities. Yet in fine
New York Times style, these nationalities in and of themselves remain
unquestioned. This is the weakness of Bey's sameness/difference
dichotomy, in which, he tells us, we have to choose one or the other.
Thus instead of acting in revolutionary solidarity with the struggle
against the state and capital, we should choose difference or nationalism
(versus globalization), and try to influence it to take the
non-imperialist, nice form of nationalism.

The Poverty of Choice

Bey's either/or choice is an expression of the poverty of imagination
inherent in much anti-globalization
rhetoric: sameness or difference, globalization or nationalism. Thus Bey
says, "...one cannot help but
supporting Chechnya and the Kurds." (100) We can't help it, or as he also
says, "we have to choose...." In
Chechnya nationalists have begun to institute Shariat law and the death
penalty (of course, for Bey, law and
the Shariat have been redefined as no less than "the open road of the
aimless wanderer." (41)). Kurdish
nationalists have been crushing all internal dissent for years; perhaps Bey
should speak with Kurdish
anarchists before jumping on the nationalist bandwagon. One wonders where
Bey would stand in relation to
the war in Kosovo. He has already stated that Serbian nationalism is bad and
Bosnian is good, so I suppose he
would stand with the KLA nationalist government in waiting (for Bey, there
is the added benefit that the
Kosovo Albanians are for the most part Muslims). Unfortunately for Bey, the
KLA are now aligned with
NATO, a force for 'sameness' if there ever was one. The contradictions of
nationalism begin to mount.

The State versus Globalization

Bey's anti-globalization ideology goes as far as to set up a facile
opposition between globalization
('sameness') and the nation-state ('difference'???). Bey states: "Like
religion, the State has simply failed to
'go away'-in fact, in a bizarre extension of the thesis of 'Society against
the State,' we can even reimagine
the State as an institutional type of 'custom and right' which Society can
wield (paradoxically) against an even
more 'final' shape of power-that of 'pure Capitalism.'" (96) While in TAZ
Bey, unlike many other anarchists,
was simply waiting for the state to 'go away' on its own, in Millennium he
has decided that, since it didn't
disappear, we could use it to fight Capitalism. Of course, in order to do
so, we need to take over the state, to
control it: Hakim Bey for President! Once our trusted comrades are firmly in
power they will dismantle
Capitalism and shore up the nationalist venture. Yet, while Clastres'
'Society Against the State" shows that
society developed customs to oppose the concentration and
institutionalization of power, the nation-state grew
up working with capital from its birth. Unlike the customs of
gatherer/hunter societies that work to defuse
power, the nation-states laws and institutions are organized to facilitate
and protect the accumulation of
capital.

One of the central myths that much of the current talk about 'globalization'
propagates is that the state is
opposed to the global accumulation and expansion of capital. Somehow there
exists a "pure Capitalism" which
needs no state to protect its property system, guarantee its currency,
mediate its disputes and contain social
conflict. But to realign ourselves with the state and nationalism is to
align ourselves with the reproduction of
capitalism as a system and against a certain set of capitalists. There is no
"pure Capitalism" that wishes the
state would disappear. The logic of capitalist accumulation continually
works to refashion the state as it
develops and changes its needs. Bey seems to think that globalization is
about to do away with borders and the
state. Yet the reality is quite the opposite. While borders are becoming
more porous to the movement of goods
and capital, they are becoming more controlled in terms of the movement of
people. This works to capital's
advantage as capital needs to control and divide labor in order to increase
exploitation. Without borders the
poor could move from the third world where the rate of capitalist
exploitation is highest and to areas where the
living standards of the working class are much higher. Thus Bey's
nationalism actually works hand-in-hand
with capitalism to insure the maintenance of borders and the control and
division of labor. It is no surprise,
therefore, that ethnic-nationalism has become one of the organizing
narratives of the '90's. It is the flipside of
the narrative of globalization. These hegemonic narratives limit the
imagination's capacity to think of a
different world. Thus they contain and recuperate oppositional forces. It is
for this reason that we must always
be careful of setting up such simple dichotomous choices such as Bey's
'sameness' versus 'difference' or
globalization versus nationalism. We must demand what has been made to seem
as impossible instead off
falling into ready-made categories of thought.

Poetic History

Bey's theories are grounded in history; unfortunately, his post-modern
"poetic history" has more akin to myth
than to a radical, critical history. The pirates of North Africa become
"pirate utopias" without mention of the
fact that their ships were, for the most part, powered by slaves at the oar
(sounds like Bookchin's utopic slave
society of the Ancient Greek city states). Col. Qaddafi's "Green Path" is
part neo-Sufism, part
anarcho-syndicalism.(44) The hierarchically organized, ethnic-nationalist
Tong in China becomes an
inspiration. And religion becomes revolutionary. Bey goes so far to state
that "...it seems clear that without
religion there will be no radical revolution." (84) The history of the Tong
is rewritten or badly read by Bey to
make them Taoists who supposedly collaborated with anarchists in the 1911
revolution in China. (84) The
weak connection between the Tong and Taoism is about as weak as the
connection between the Tong and the
anarchists. We also shouldn't forget that the 1911 revolution was a
nationalist revolution, something that
doesn't bother Bey at all. And from this argument we are supposed to realize
that religion is necessary to
revolution. It is by such poetic rewriting of history that Bey claims to be
able to save the concept of 'volk' or
'nationality.' "This concept was looted by base reaction and distorted into
hegemonism of the worst sort, but it
too can be rescued (an 'adventure' in itself). [We need to re-read Proudhon,
Marx, Nietzsche, Landauer,
Fourier, Benjamin, Bakhtin, the IWW, etc.--the way the EZLN re-reads
Zapata!]" (45)

Bey's poetic history romanticizes cultural difference. Bey has called for a
romantic Orientalism (are there
other types?) that stresses the difference of the 'Orient' from the West.
They were spiritual and we are
secular and rational. This is the same argument that European Orientalism
made over 100 years ago to justify
its conquests. Bey's favorites are romantic Islam and Taoism. In this poetic
history of firm cultural difference,
the individual tends to disappear, as do some of those annoying facts.

Such romanticization, however, has little to offer a truly revolutionary
movement. Instead, we need a critical
history that exposes such romanticizations that help nationalist history
maintain its dominance. Poetic history
works with nationalist, mythic history in making ethnic-difference seem
natural, fixed, and eternal. Critical
history denaturalizes hegemonic history and allows us to imagine a truly
different world as opposed to setting
up the simplistic choice between globalization and nationalism. We must
think outside of the dominant
narratives that capitalism puts forth to us, and blinds us with.

Unfortunately, just as TAZ, with its implicit suggestion that anarchists
wait in the cracks for the state to
crumble, was an expression of the weakness of the anarchist movement in the
late '80's, Millennium, with its
more explicit demands that anarchists align themselves with nationalism,
religion, and the state, is a measure
of its weakness in the early '90's. Hopefully, with the recent upswing in
direct action by anarchists such
expressions of weakness may be left behind as historical relics of a
movement that had temporarily lost its
ability to imagine and demand the impossible.


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