On the State of Things — An Anarchist-Pacifist Statement for a Leaderless World

John Kinsella

As each of us, no matter where we are in the world or what circumstances we live under, tries to come to grips with a collapsing biosphere and human injustice towards fellow humans and towards ‘nature’, we are confronted with the issues of people making decisions for themselves or on ‘our behalf’ that frequently offend or distress us, that go against all we believe in. Many people are suffering obvious and horrendous abuse and deprivation, are in conflict zones, suffering state-driven, social or domestic violence, suffering from criminal (for self-gain) exploitation, experiencing marginalisation or bigotry from people or institutions in the majority or far more empowered than themselves, or live in poverty or reduced circumstances. 

The obviousness of all this is not an excuse to dismiss as ‘realpolitik’ or with ‘it was always thus’ stock sayings. The wrongs are not addressed by a fatalism of ‘the human condition’. Each of us might also have our ideas or theories about how to address wrongs on micro and macro levels, and many of us are trying or will try to live lives that reduce our corrosive impact of presence on others and on the biosphere. It goes without saying that some people will try to exploit for self-gain, or even for their own politics of personal, familial, national, and bespoke ‘community-mindedness’ above and beyond others. Into this will be woven the bandwidths of selfishness through to ‘loyalty’ (at the exclusion of other loyalties), but in the end such exclusionism of the outside one’s own belonging or orientation will lead to exploitation or bigotry on some level or other. 

My personal concerns are to find a way around such exclusions, and to work on a respectful collective-communal decision-making that doesn’t diminish other communities and their connections to the biosphere, to specific places, to specific associations with others, to spiritual belief systems (or spiritual de-systeming). This is an anarchist positionality, of course, but at the core of this is a belief on my part that ‘leaders’ are inevitably part of any problem of diminished rights and unfair distribution of ‘wealth’. 

As someone who also advocates for animals and eco-systems’ rights in both empathy and totemic interaction through/by/with humans, but also an independence of ‘being’ (a respect for the ‘animalness’ of an animal, for example), I include ecological and ‘personal’ animal quiddity and rights in these discussions. ‘Leaders’ in communities might function in a quasi-representative way in which they are spokespeople for a group, but hold no real power and cannot make decisions that control and/or oppress others. I am not talking about that dynamic here. I am referring to leaders who make unilateral decisions that are not uniquely and completely discussed with their community of representation. 

It would seem that no political model outside anarchism achieves this. Every decision being one of mutual understanding and mutual aid, every choice one of collective affirmation. Once a leader is separated from that process, they are in essence a form of dictator. Sure, a leader operating with more checks and balances than one operating with few or none is only nominally acting as a dictator as opposed to the out-and-out dictator whose command system is entirely centred on their whim and response to any stimuli. But, essentially, with a leader who is not nominal, a leader who has the power to make decisions as even representative of their constituents without being in constant communication with all those constituents who could in an instant say ‘that person is not speaking for us’, then we are dealing with degrees of dictatorship. 

Involved in this capacity for taking on the mantle of speaking for others who are distant from oneself is a belief that one can do so with principle and affirmation of having been chosen in the first place. There are degrees of choosing, from the small group selecting a spokesperson to the nation-state electing a government who selects a leader from their ranks, or direct election of a president, say, who the electors know has dictatorial tendencies. Leadership is something enforced through fiscal control, martial backing, and access to exclusive knowledge (‘security’). 

As I hear leaders say that a nation (or any national ‘sovereignty’), for example, ‘has a right to defend itself’, I have to ask myself what defence is, as I have done since my late teens. ‘Defence’ is a quality of violence. ‘Defence’ is entwined with ‘attack’ and not really its opposite (maybe more a theoretical ‘counterpoint’). ‘Defence’ is the right to strike first as the ‘best form of defence’. ‘Defence’ is the quality of a colonial beachhead expanding into ‘hostile territory’, and living by constant pre-emptive action. Or when ‘defence’ is more literal (as in a nation-state being attacked by another), it can so quickly become ‘flexible’ to incorporate acts of aggression that extend far outside its earlier response/defend definition.

All nation-states have at some point or another formed out of military presence and maintain themselves through the same. Nation-states are built on values of control and oppression. Australia-as-nation is an example of that predictable claim of fair ‘treatment’ of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands peoples via the state’s elected and appointed leaders and the institutions they are extensions of and embedded in. A faux ‘fairness’ to the very people who were dispossessed by colonialism... and many of whom experience an ongoing state of psychological and material siege. 

As someone who strongly advocates for a ‘no-state’ approach to habitation of the world (communities rather than nations), and for the rights to co-inhabit land with respect for difference and with mutual support/aid, and for the valorisation of and full respect for any traditional relationship to country (and for complete intactness of those Indigenous relationships to country) while allowing for the peaceful co-existence of those with different connectivities with place (including newcomers — ‘migrants’... a word that is manipulated depending on where one sits in the equation of movement and ‘settling’), I see the core offence in the unthinkable hatred between communities around ‘Israel’ and ‘Palestine’ as arising from ‘leaders’ and ‘nation states’. The powerful nation-state of Israel is using its military power to control, oppress and destroy its constructed ‘enemy’.

Once organised into financial-military blocks of difference, with religious leadership and control over peoples’ lives being attended covertly or directly with the state/s, these ideas of nation establish conflict, apartheid and exclusion from their very inceptions, be that more recently or hundreds or thousands of years ago. Identity built out of exclusion risks conflict and the exploitation of an eternalised ‘other’. This should not be happening on any level.

This generalisation can extend to Ukraine and Russia, or anywhere else, allowing for the highly specific inflections of history and disintegration between larger community demographics over time. Each ‘case’ of hate is different, but behind them is the ‘leader’ or ‘leaders’ (from government to military, from ‘church to state’, and so on) making unilateral decisions for collective situations. 

As fascism consolidates itself in Israel, the United States, Russia, China, Italy, Hungary, Iran, North Korea (with strong tendencies in the South as well), Ukraine (try being a pacifist in Ukraine under the present military regime... Ukraine is experiencing a colonial invasion, but it is also embracing the values of ‘leadered’ militarism and a cessation of tolerance for contrary views on achieving peace).... it hovers around the edges of the militarism of the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany and so many other countries where it is participatory and exploiting through internal oppressions and bigotries, control over adversarial voices (especially in the arts and ‘humanities’), the manufacturing and sale of armaments, and the compliance of leadership with the power and ‘bonuses’ (or withholdings) of superpower leadership. 

If a ‘business leader’ such as Elon Musk can wield as much power as the Robber Barons or, say, Alfred Krupp and his company, and use a spuriously ‘free’ social media platform as an extension of power to gather ‘like minds’ to form ‘posses’ of social bullying and control, then that leadership speaks for itself (and, perversely, proudly). Or The Dictator with his military parades, penchant for gift acceptance from corrupt and exploitive regimes akin to his own positionality, simply creating his own social media bullying platform. Leaders empower themselves beyond their initial ‘support’ and vectors into public office with guns (the bottom line), and guns rule the world. 

Those who deny genocide is happening in Gaza (and other parts of the world — in those places off the Western media radar), those who deny the massive number of weapons-related deaths throughout the world, those who deny that the destruction of habitat is a participatory mass-extinction event, and those who see themselves as being morally, culturally or ethnically superior to others, are emboldened by leaders who either embrace similar ideologies or who essentially cover for them, allowing them to feel ‘represented’ in their hate. Leaders exist because we allow them to be leaders and we have established systems and platforms to ensure such leadership. 

If we fail to:

— completely disarm

— to respect country and Indigenous claims whilst allowing for the free (borderless) movements of peoples (with respect to bio-protections to prevent the destruction of habitat — and this to be conducted on a voluntary/shared basis without punitive actions)

— to de-martialise policing so that small community groups manage their own ‘policing’ in non-violent and non-punitive ways

— to create universal healthcare on all levels, to deny anyone leadership roles beyond being spokespeople

— to reduce mining to the bare essentials for life and to de-industrialise (a slow process... but let’s start with de-nuclearising and de-fossil fuelling)

— to redistribute wealth fairly

— to start nurturing all that remains of old-growth forests and committing to an ideation of vast replanting and habitat restoration

— to end the abuses and destructiveness of industrial agriculture and animal exploitation

— to detoxify ecologies 

— to work through a sharing/barter communalism

— respect diversity of belief and respect diversity in all our communities

— end/renounce capitalism (which accords with all of the above)

then injustice will grow rather than reduce, and some will have much and others will be lost to the world. 

Every person has a right to be their own leader, and to enjoy their own communities without abuse.

Ecological Benefits Propositions

1. People are ecologically minded to serve their own ends

2. People believe that they have an intrinsic right over an ecology whether or not they have a totemic relationship with that ecology

3. People will damage an ecology to improve their own ecology or the ecology of their perceived community

4. People will address a social injustice that does not directly concern themselves through aligning it with protection of ecology but not if that ecology serves their own powerbase, even indirectly

5. People separate social injustice from justice to ecologies

6. Oppressive power structures will ‘trickle down’ benefits from the exploitation of ecologies while receiving minimum side-effects for themselves while maximising proximity-damage to those who are oppressed

7. Ecological activism will benefit the activist directly or indirectly, even when it benefits us all: this paradox is the empathetically just position designed to be incontestable

8. Ecologies rarely get to speak for ecologies and only do where their direct Indigenous or traditional interlocutors are given a voice over their protection and well-being

9. All being of ecologies give us all equal part and concern in their fate and yet the benefits from damage are lopsided and based on a series of oppressions worked through ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘gender’, and control

10. Ecology is aligned with dwelling and habitation and yet the houses of non-human species are undone or transposed to transfer power from ecology to certain humans or groups of humans

11. Human social structures make control of ecology more effective in order to control subordinate or peripheral parts of those social structures themselves

12. To claim authority and construct laws that have a central alignment with power will undo any ‘rights’ they legislate through controlling the nature of those rights (and the provenance of their being ‘granted’) — and this applies to the ‘protection’ of ecologies that then become reliant on the power demographics in the systems ‘offering’ that protection. Rights are inherent and beyond legislation which consumes those rights in underlying agendas

13. The elevating of human over animals in a conceptual sense will always mean animals will suffer not because humans should be respected less but because animals aren’t respected more — in the same way, ecologies being respected more can’t mean humans are respected less

14. The exploitation of individuals and groups of humans by other individuals and groups of humans (especially through institutions, state apparatuses, and larger social mechanism) relies on control and manipulation of ecologies — removing control over ecologies and allowing them to regain aspects of their autonomy lessens the ability of humans to create structures to systematically control, oppress and impose their ‘law’ on other humans.

John Kinsella

Temporariness (2): Photography

            by John Kinsella

I drag and drop my terms from a previous investigation of presence into this ‘new’ one, or into this present one. The multiplicities of polysituatedness, the echoes, murmurs and stains of temporariness. Here for a relatively short time, but not briefly, as I have been before, I am present ‘in company’. My company is more than my own, and as I age, I age with someone else. Tracy and I share much of origins in common. Ancestry, locality, the same television programmes as children, and decades together. We etch-o-sketch each other’s spatial and temporal presences. We overlap. And here, in Tübingen, we overlap in our temporariness. Both of us record our presence and observations of the town and environs in our own way — directly, indirectly — but we are also observed by others alone and together. We do not know what these observations, maybe recordings, mean, but they are there. We are background to the State’s (attempted, at least) observations of all who pass through, and we are in dozens of photographs taken by visitors and residents. The old town is a town that is photographed. The machine is used to capture, but each face or back-of-the-head caught by the machine escapes the function of the machine. Mostly, photographers won’t notice the detail till later. And even then, they might well look around the ‘distractions’, the incidentals in the photos, to see what they want to see. One might be photoshopped out of existence, out of the time marked at the bottom of the image. I have Walter Benjamin’s The Arcade Project on my lap, opened to the section on photography. I am recollecting and tracing because I want to show a poem is not a photograph. Not for me. Is it really for any poet? It might be referred to as such by a critic, as an insult, or maybe as an act of détournement by the poet, or as a commentary on how a photo sees and is seen as opposed to a poem. A sequence of poems: Photographs on... or Snapshots of... Already the title ironises or at least ‘sets up’ the way we frame the poems that follow. All that is seen in the moment. But then, the still photograph in the next frame. Or run together through a slideshow, a different kind of movement, a disrupting film. Benjamin: ‘Symptom, it would seem, of a profound displacement: painting must submit to being measured by the standard of photography: ‘We will be in agreement with public in admiring... the fine artist who... has appeared this year with a painting capable of holding its own, in point of delicacy, with daguerrian prints.’ This assessment of Meissonnier from Auguste Galimard's Examen du Salon de 1849 (Paris, 1850, p. 95, cited in Benjamin, p. 685). This is followed by ‘Photography in verse’ — synonym for description in verse. Edouard Fournier, Chroniques et légendes des rues de Paris (Paris, 1864, pp. 14-15, in Benjamin, p. 685). And, of course, one must reference the referencing of this by saying The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin (trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann; Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1999, p. 685). Whose reference system is this? I track my journey and you can follow, too. Scrutiny, gate-keeping, appropriate behaviour. See me as others might see me. See us as others would see us. But let’s go back a few pages, altering the sequence (dipping in?), and read: ‘One of the — often unspoken — objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine. This the sentiment of Delacroix in particular’ (op. cit. p. 678). Why do I go here? Well, the strands of belonging and unbelonging take me to the photo Tracy is taking — I am there again, NOW — of me on the Neckar Island outside, across the river from the Hölderlin tower. Not outside, really, but almost opposite. At a slight angle, to avoid getting others in the shot — dogs and their walkers, people discussing their problems. We are in the alleyway of plane trees, 

JK photographed by Tracy Ryan; Hölderlin tower behind

the same trees Hölderlin  would have looked onto out across the river, in their youth. The island. I feel most connected to both my aloneness and my sharing of life-space on islands. It was absence of family on Cocos; with family on La Réunion; with family again here, on this small river-island. The ancient trees have been tagged with graffiti. Between the old town keeping an eye on, and the new town eyeing off? Both, really. Crocuses are out. There are no four seasons anymore, not even here, and the prompts to emergence are conflicted.

Tracy takes all the photos of our presences beyond Jam Tree Gully. She carries the camera. She embraced digital photography very early on not in praise of technology — she shares my doubts, objections and often refusals — but because this way she could get around the issue of animal products in the manufacture of film and developing of photographs. I think of this as she snaps my photo. As a child, I did all I could to avoid being photographed. There are quite a few childhood photographs of me, but fewer than there would have been. Seeing myself disturbed me as much as hearing myself on cassettes. Early cassette-players. All these devices to show we’ve been, to carry our timbres to others, to say we have trodden here as well, maybe (slightly) before. The markers of presence. The painting marks the presence of the painter more than the subject. Does the photo mark the presence of the photographer in the same way? Our temporariness here has stretched to breaking-point; we risk becoming familiar. That familiarity of the outsider who stays and stays and sees what is uncomfortable even when not looking. It’s easy to see the overt badness: the hatred of refugees by some, the violent moments on a back street, the racist graffiti, the brutal presence of the past under the utopias of early modern architecture. It’s also easy to see the good (I don’t use scare quotes): people living as people, welcoming refugees, the anti-racism, and a strong environmental consciousness. As I would arrange good and bad. As I would picture the qualities of each. But the liminal comes into focus over time, and one realises the Green emphasis is also mixed with capitalism, that the head of the Greens in the state is proud of his Mercedes and wants the state to be used as a dumping-ground for radioactive waste. The blurring. The state party system adapts to the emphasis of place, and beneath all the good and bad is a commercial drive, a desire for goods. Telephones, cameras, computers. They might be used to undermine the capitalist enterprise, but they reinforce it more than they undermine. The violent ones, those from the circles of Dante’s Inferno, worship goods to remake the world in the image they ascribe to some other force but which is really a reflection of self-desire and often self-hatred. I think this while being photographed opposite (almost) ‘Hölderlin’s tower’ (it wasn’t his tower, it was the carpenter Zimmer’s and his family’s) and thinking of the industry that has grown around his supposed madness, his fall, his ‘lesser’ late poems which I think burst out of their formulaics to be masterpieces of subterfuge, mocking the very fame he had obsessed over when young. He was not insane. His tower glows. An edifice. Graffiti approaches along the walkway. It will be tagged.  

This end to Benjamin’s Photography section does something for me and maybe this text as well: ‘Cocteau’s Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel can perhaps be considered a “critique of the snapshot”, insofar as in this piece the two aspects of shock — its technological function in the mechanism and its sterilizing function in the experience — both come into play.’ (Benjamin, p. 692) This notation to brutality (the consequences of a Sunday stroll?), to Cocteau’s critique of the bourgeoisie reinvented in the gallery of the book, or the accumulation of notes towards the book, does not accord with the moment of being photographed in front of Hölderlin’s tower. (There was no violence; however, behind the façade of any pleasant moment within the State is the knowledge that the pleasantness comes at a cost to the world somewhere else.) But it does accord with the ecology of presence around it, and of which we make ourselves part.  There is no beauty in ‘history’. The dialectic rejects it. I do not ‘watch the birdie’ when Tracy ‘snaps’ me. I am there, and she is in front of me, and I look at her obscured by the machine. But I see past the machine to Tracy. I know she is there, and that she will look at the picture later. I know it is part of a narrative she is making where a narrative is, but is also diffused and lost. That narrative isn’t fixed, and its purpose will change over time. I am happy to be part of it: a recording, of course, but also an act of temporariness against the hauntings of temporariness. Not to say we have been, but to say we are. Not to own presence, but acknowledge it. Tracy’s brother Sean, who died when he was eighteen, was a photographer and was going to study to be a ‘professional photographer’. I am told that as a child he liked the tricks of the camera, all it could do in terms of changing our perceptions of what actually was and is. The person standing on the palm of a hand, the warping of perspective. But there is no change to reality, just a play on the way we see. He was interested in temporariness, he died young, but marked his places in so many ways. Not damaging, but imprinting over so many other previous imprints, and in the imprint of presence continuous. In Tracy’s ‘snaps’ are her brother’s imprints. In a world where negatives are a fading memory, his negative develops the island without damaging the trees, a negative made positive in a place so far from where he lived and died. The ‘other side of the world’ (a place he never left), but here all the awareness of the indelible nature of ‘history’ and its images would have pressed on him also.

Statements

by John Kinsella (posted by Tracy)


I think some clarification regarding my views on a few matters might be useful for those who read this blog. A list might be the way to go — I apologise if it seems officious, as it’s not intended to be.

1. I still maintain that technology fetishism is destructive to the planet. These occasional forays into the electronic world, (kindly posted by Tracy), are not intended as some kind of personal approval of the medium. The internet and computers are, to my mind, part of the disturbing portrait of ecological destruction that is being painted across this planet. However, I do think that on occasion one must speak out through all means available, and that includes the internet. For the last two-and-a-half years I have lived in virtual isolation on a bush block, and I am proud of this, and believe that one should constantly aim to minimise impact on the ecologies of the planet. But one must also be wary of a quietism by default. Having said this, I maintain my (non-violent, pacifist) neo-luddite position that gratuitous technology is destructive in so many ways.

2. What has convinced me to go ‘out into the world’ in as low-impact a way as can be managed is the distress imposed on the place where we live by Targa West Rallying’s insistence on conducting one of their dangerous and environmentally insensitive events where we live. This is not just a case of one’s own backyard, but a microcosm of a much wider problem. I have always believed in acting locally. Use of the net to bring attention to this problem (as well as writing to local papers etc), is a judgement call: a case of two evils.

3. In going forth into the world again, I do so in the belief that one can minimise impact in so many ways. Still needing to make a living and demonstrate alternative ways of approaching one’s art and practice, I might contribute to a broader awareness. The experiences of the last few years are worth publicly articulating.

4. I recently dedicated a poem about human-induced climate change (which I believe is a fact) to Cate Blanchett. I did so because I am very sick of seeing contempt and ridicule of women who are willing to challenge the industrial and mining power complex. As someone who believes that centralised power of any sort is a denial of liberty, the controls and impositions of government in any context are anathema. However, I am also pragmatic in that I am interested in seeing ecologies protected and respected, and if taxing these industries, which I don’t think should exist at all, will in any way reduce their abusive hold on the lives of all living things, then that’s a step on the way. I place this under the rubric ‘umbrella anarchism’. In terms of the abuse I have copped for dedicating a poem to Cate Blanchett, well, so be it. I make no apologies; I stand by the poem and the dedication. At least she had the guts to stick her neck out. I have no interest in her status or her iconicity, only in her humanity and willingness to take a risk on a vital subject. The bullies have been merciless.

I have dedicated many poems in my life, to people including Yehudi Menuhin, Noam Chomsky, my partner and my own children. Every dedication has a political and ethical purpose that is also about respect of the ‘person’. Persons should be respected. The dedication is never arbitrary. The people to whom I dedicate poems don’t have to have my views; neither is my dedication necessarily a confirmation of their views. Dedications are subtle as well as loud. They do many things, and I think readers would benefit from considering the nature of their own varied interactions with others. It’s a strange imposition on what a poem is, to read a dedication as a rigid and ‘loud’ fact.

5. I have spent many years writing and campaigning around refugee rights. I believe emphatically that all people have a right to sanctuary, no matter where they come from or how they get anywhere. Australia is a racist country, and racism should be resisted in all pacifist ways possible. There should be no mandatory detention, and the so-called Malaysia solution (or that of any other place outside the ‘target’ place of the refugees) is outrageous.

6. The World Health Organisation have confirmed the high likelihood that mobile phones cause brain cancer. I don’t use a mobile phone, have never owned one, and am not about to start. They are the ‘asbestos’ of our time. It saddens me to see young people using them because of social expectation. So many people see themselves as liberated by technology when they are performing exactly as the industrial (and military) power complexes want them to.

7. Activism isn’t just fronting up at a demo. It especially isn’t damaging things or being violent. Activism is a record of how we live our lives. Twenty-five years of veganism have taught me that identifying cruelty in an abattoir (what do you expect, seriously?) is always going to be no more than ‘identification’ if one turns around and eats an animal. Don’t eat them and they won’t be slaughtered. Don’t eat them and the window for cruelty closes considerably.

8. I believe poetry can literally change things. Though it might trigger hatred, ridicule, abuse, it will inevitably create discussion. You can ask for no more, but that’s worth asking for. Often your poem won’t ‘be got’, but you have to accept that language has its own ways in different contexts. Once you take a poem outside the safety of the discourse (and that’s not really very safe), you have to expect to cop it. But it’s worth it. Allowing or offering a poem to be posted on the web, printed in a newspaper, read on the radio, etc, may contradict beliefs about the corruptions of media, etc, but pragmatically (‘umbrella anarchism’), maybe you help undo the structure itself by doing so. It’s that old pacifist Trojan Horse again. The net, for example, will consume itself in the end, if the power holds out that long.

9. I am about to write an essay on ‘greed’. I believe that greed’s many faces need identifying and I will attempt to do so. Anarchism for me is about sharing: not only of wealth, but of knowledge and experience. It’s also about being willing to receive where appropriate.

10. The small acts accumulate quickly. There is no radicalism in violence, just compliance. Violence is the illustration that future violence is based on. In perpetuity. Break the cycle. Each of us has it in us — the violence, and the ability to deny its pollution.

Vegan "Pirate" Party, Part One

By Tracy

Tim's pre-primary class has got their end-of-term party tomorrow, and the theme (which has been their theme all term) is "Pirates".

I've made some vegan sausage rolls, courtesy of this vegetarian blog which carries some vegan recipes, and am in the process of decorating a vegan pirate cake and gingerbread pirates -- more photos to follow...



We've been very lucky with open-minded and sympathetic teachers for both our kids, in terms of respecting the choice not to eat meat or animal products, visit zoos, etc. Nonetheless, mainstream schooling has its challenges for the anarchist pacifist vegan -- I think ours might turn out to be the only pirate ship cake with no guns, cutlasses or cannons...

Likewise for the superhero thing that seems to grab the imagination of pre-primary kids, certainly the boys if not the girls. Too many of these toys and related items promote aggression -- not only in theme but sometimes in actuality, e.g. superhero toys that shoot real little projectiles (I wonder how these pass safety standards, anyway?).

Tim likes Superman and Spiderman because "they don't have weapons" (at least in the versions he knows of them -- he is too young to watch the movies!).

In any case, at the moment, they are taking a back seat to his real current obsession: ACDC.

On Anarchism: Part One

Tracy Ryan interviews John Kinsella on Anarchism

Transcript of talk given in 2004 at the State Library of WA, originally with introductions by Professor Bill Louden (formerly ECU), and anarchist activist Mar Bucknell.

Tracy
There are many different historical aspects of anarchism, some of which you would probably define yourself against. And I’m thinking particularly of the aspect of violence. So I’m going to start with a quote that I will run by John, that I read recently in a post-graduate French course studying Sartre’s play Les Mains sales, in which a lecturer gave the following definition for the benefit of students.

“An anarchist is a person (this is a very dated definition) who seeks to overturn by violent means all constituted forms and institutions of government and society, with no aim of establishing any other system of order in place of that destroyed.”

So, what I’m going to ask John is, Would you comment on that definition and perhaps contrast it with your own understanding of what an anarchist or anarchism might be?

John
Today I don’t want to get into an historical discussion of anarchism. I don’t want to regurgitate nineteenth-century anarchists, but Malatesta made a great point about anarchism being the abolition of government and not the abolition of society, and I kind of concur with that. The replacement of governing institutions and hierarchical bodies of control with co-operative, with mutual aid organisations, people interacting to support each other. It’s a very viable and practical alternative to me, if not the only alternative. So from the start what I’m talking about is a world without government, and not a world without social institutions or interactions. Institutions is the wrong word – social interactions. I think that’s extremely important.

Obviously I would say (agree with others) that such a definition was absurd. A dictionary definition that’s very convenient, immediately isolates, and removes any debate about anarchist issues. Anarchism isn’t, and from the most aggressive anarchists I’ve never heard it put as, simply a violent overthrow of the state with nothing in its place; that’s nihilism and not anarchism. I’m a pacifist above and beyond everything else, and veganism, the kind of non-use and non-abuse of animals, is the basis of my anarchist thought. I start from there and move out. So an anarchist’s world is one in which animals are equal, if you like, as much as humans.

The very starting point of a violent overthrow is not possible from my point of view. I don’t believe in “revolution as such”; I believe in change by example. And I’m going to be referring, as I know Tracy will as well, to a guy named Colin Ward. This is a book of his just come out called Talking Anarchy. Colin Ward is an interesting British anarchist, who is very much involved in architectural solutions to housing for people. And his anarchism is a very pragmatic and a very practical anarchism that works within the context of the existing state. He believes that the state can be best changed by good example. So if you behave in a way that’s better than the government is behaving, then people will gradually see that as a viable alternative to living, living communally. There is a lot I disagree with in Ward, but that basic principle I really do agree with. So, just as a starting point for this, I totally reject any kind of violent overthrow of anything – it seems a contradiction in terms to me.

We are working towards a better world of egalitarianism and equality especially in terms of what people have or don’t have. Then the moment you introduce violence, you are introducing a hierarchy already. Violence is the ultimate form of hierarchy. It’s the most controlling form of hierarchy. I would argue that many actual actions, ethically, cancell out any positive results. And I think that is a very personal view, as I said, that comes out of pacifism and veganism. That’s where I start.

Tracy
Thinking about that better world you mentioned and looking at the quote that we have there which is from God and the State, where Bakunin says “the liberty of man consists solely in this, that he (and he says ‘he’ because he is using the word ‘man’) obeys natural laws because he has himself recognised them as such, not because they have been externally imposed upon him by any extrinsic world whatever, divine or human, collective or individual”.

Now what I’m going to ask you about that is the following: Many people find it hard to believe that a human being can or would follow what Bakunin calls “natural laws” without the existence of the whole paraphernalia that polices, punishes, regulates them and so on.

So this is linked to the popular beliefs that anarchism means “chaos”, that if we didn’t have those things we wouldn’t do the right thing.

There are a few questions coming up here that are kind of related. What do you make of the common complaint that anarchism as an idea is too optimistic or utopian? Does it rely too much on the concept of human goodwill and altruism? Is it naive, vis-à-vis the selfishness and the violence we see enacted around us daily, I mean in the world that is, rather than the better world? A similar accusation is often made regarding pacifism, you know, people say: if we try it, will all the pacifists be wiped out straight away? So I’m kind of playing devil’s advocate here, and asking John – is it too optimistic to think this way?

John
Well, no, you see, I don’t see anarchism as utopia. I see it as something incredibly realisable. Speaking of Malatesta again, he also made the point – you can’t expect us all to know what will happen after changes come. He said after revolution – as I’ve already indicated, it’s a term I have a lot of problems with for all sorts of reasons, which might become evident as we go on. But certainly the point is that people and things find their own level of interaction. The basic principle of mutual aid, which is fundamental for understanding anarchist thought, is that people naturally help each other because it is in their best interest to help each other, and when Kropotkin wrote about mutual aid, he looked at the false nature of the Darwinian model in which people compete to beat each other, which is the system capitalism is based on, and basically, eventually, some of the strongest will survive and conquer. The other way of looking at it, he makes the point, is that animals have always had to work together to survive in their communities, and he gives interesting examples of that.

This kind of mutual aid is fundamental not only to the existence of animals, but to the existence of humans. We don’t have a policeman sitting watching over us – we might have in the audience! – we don’t have someone policing in this room, and we are sitting here listening to an argument we may not agree with. However, basic mutual aid is there in the sense of co-operating together to actually hear something, and maybe express ourselves at the end... People can interact, people can respond in a responsible way towards each other without being told to do so, and the idea is that without governing bodies, without the judiciary, without the different constabulary, without the kind of legislature and these kind of things, we can actually do this anyway. So there is a very practical side, certainly, to the anarchist thought that I’m interested in.

The other thing is that, apart from these “what will happen” scenarios, the idea that we are fundamentally good and not bad drives my thought. Many people say that a lot of the stuff I write about seems very negative. Well, negative in the sense that I criticise things I see as wrong. I see the treatment, the locking-up of refugees as wrong, I see the war in Iraq as wrong – I can list the whole series of wrongs I feel. My subjective take on it is one thing, but fundamentally what is being talked about here is an ethical way of living. Now, you may have very different ethical views, but at the same time you have some form of ethical system where you denote good and bad, and I think intrinsically people have that ability, and I don’t think it’s a class ability, and I don’t think it’s something you are taught. I think it’s very inherent. I think that in the same way that an animal is neither good nor bad, they are – I think that humans are neither good nor bad, they are inherently good because of that – if you know what I mean. You can have both because both exist in you; goodness exists in you as well.

So my kind of take on it comes from an ethical standpoint, and Bakunin is a problem for me in a variety of ways. I strongly believe that many ills of the world have come about because of the abuses of science. I have no problem with the accumulation of knowledge and the use of knowledge; I do have a problem with the systematising of knowledge, when knowledge is used to create a hierarchy, and science more than anything else has created hierarchy. You know the addiction of discovery isn’t always to benefit human kind; it’s to benefit the ‘discoverer’ or the ‘culture’ of discovery – the actual pleasuring of discovery – to ‘enlighten’ becomes to fetishise... in a marketed sense to add value to science. Now Bakunin recognised the irony of science but he still, like many anarchists in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, and indeed some people I would consider having very similar views who were involved with Freedom Press in Britain, strongly support/ed the kind of scientific approach to an anarchist solution.

So they say that when the government is gone, what we will have is a kind of knowledge, science will continue and the hospitals will be hospitals, and so on. And I have a more agrarian view of the world, and I think that society would naturally break down into smaller component parts. They are talking about a decentralised world, obviously, but I’m talking more literally about a very small component part, a very agrarian kind of anarchism.

I believe in direct contact and preservation of the land, and I think the only way you can do that is by actually understanding what the land physically is. Bakunin makes this very interesting point, and I strongly disagree with it. He says “What I preach then is, to a certain extent, the revolt of life against science, or rather against the government of science, not to destroy science – that would be high treason to humanity – but to remand it to its place so that it can never leave it again.” On one level he is talking about the fact that governance isn’t just literally the bodies that govern us; it’s the way systems operate, and science becoming a system, the kind of move towards cloning a human being isn’t about the survival of the human species, it’s about a kind of value-adding to humanity, which is a very big problem for me. Bakunin is challenging that, as he would if he was standing here, I imagine, challenge the art of cloning and these sort of things. But he is still reserving a place for science as rational. Science for him is rationality; it’s an Enlightenment thing, and he believes very much in a kind of logic. Anarchism for Bakunin was a very logical thing. His logic extended to violent revolution – mine doesn’t, and that’s where we strongly part; but it’s an interesting point.

Tracy
Science, rational science, as we see it practised, has a lot of problems of course for the vegan, in ways that are perhaps obvious; and also, thinking of mutual aid, there is a kind of implicit recognition there, even if it’s not followed all the way through, of the relation between animals and humans, because he’s arguing that it’s not only in the competitive sense that we draw on our animal origin, but also in a sense of mutual aid.

Thinking about veganism: in my experience, many people, if they have heard of veganism and know what it is, believe it to be a dogmatic and authoritarian type of outlook. This may be partly a fear of difference, because it is potentially threatening to meet someone whose lifestyle implicitly rejects your own, and especially when it comes to food, because eating together is such a communal activity, some feel very rejected by someone who doesn’t eat the same.

But it’s also true that some vegans are very loudly critical of non-vegans and may appear to be rigid and fanatical. Could you comment on this image – how it squares with your own personal outlook, and also with your anarchist beliefs, because that kind of rigid authoritarian stance would be directly in opposition to anarchism.

John
One of the things that has always disturbed me in talking to fellow anarchists is that as soon as you mention that you are a vegan, most anarchists I’ve known haven’t been vegans or vegetarians – some have, but most haven’t – the objection has been that you’re imposing just another authority, another kind of hierarchy. But if you see an equality between animals and humans as a starting point, it’s not possible to have a hierarchy of imposition or declaration in that ‘equation’, and that’s the way I see it.

One of the scariest moments of my life when I was at Cambridge, where I lived part of the year, was when I met my first vegan straight-edge. He was a young guy and he had engraved in his arm a statement – it wasn’t “meat is murder” but it was something very similar – he did have some line from the Smiths on his arm, and I got talking to him. He went through his list of absolute ‘don’ts’, including no sexual activity – basically it was no pleasure on any level, and intellectually I can appreciate where he was coming from, I could see there was a kind of abstaining that was almost the ultimate control, and I can respect that even if I don’t subscribe to it.

But where I don’t agree is that he said basically: those of my friends who have betrayed us have been branded, physically with a branding iron, and I said to him, “That’s not a vegan activity. Vegan activity is not to damage or utilise or abuse any animals, humans included, for your benefit or for any other purpose.” And he said, “No, we don’t see it that way. We see the only way of creating a revolution against the damaging and hurting of animals is to be really strict and rigid in our thinking.” I could see where he was coming from, but it immediately defeated the ethics of his veganism, for me.

Near Cambridge there is something called Huntingdon Life Sciences, which is the main place for animal vivisection and animal research, and straight-edgers have been very prominent in direct action against this, literally breaking into it and damaging it and so on. Now I can understand, and in my younger years I was involved in direct action against property, but I learned that this can develop its own hierarchies of behaviour and overwhelm itself with contradictions. I have felt over the years that violent direct action – even against property – delays but doesn’t solve... I was prepared to try anything to resist and challenge what I considered to be state-imposed oppressions. I thought, well, maybe it’s worth trying. Mostly it was yelling and screaming at the tools of state and corporate capitalism, which I was very inclined to doing, certainly around the time I met my anarchist friend, Mar Bucknell. When I met with Mar and ‘his’ group in Fremantle, it was a really amazing experience. I had all this intellectual stuff, I had read all this stuff and I thought – this is where I’m at, this is what I think. But what struck me with these people and what deeply interested me in them – even though my behaviour was reprehensible and I apologise to them for my nihilism at the time – was their dedication to idea and action operating in tandem. Everything had to be discussed and worked through as a group of individuals. A consensus operated, as opposed to my individualised martyrdom for what I believed to be right.

Tracy
This is going back how many years?

John
This is twenty or twenty-one years ago, it would be 1983/84; and as Mar told me at the time I was a nihilist, not an anarchist. I just wanted to basically remove everything that was a problem very rapidly. What interested me about this group was that they actually had practical solutions. They had this wonderful newsletter (and this is how I discovered them, when someone gave me a newsletter, New from Nowhere) where I saw this thing about someone who was in academic life, who was an anarchist, who’d drawn up this plan for a possible agrarian commune – with practical outcomes like ‘that’s where the water-tank should be’ – the kind of background information needed, and it made sense and it was very practical and I loved that practical side to it. These guys were very practical – direct action to them was something that was mediated by a kind of a longer view of things and that impressed me. Although I didn’t fit in, because I wasn’t capable of fitting in with anyone, pretty well, at that stage, I have thought about it over the last ten years and tried to put a lot of those things into effect.

Go to Part Two

On Anarchism: Part Two

Continuing John Kinsella interviewed by Tracy Ryan (State Library WA, 2004)

Tracy
I want to pick up on that idea you just mentioned – at that phase of your wanting everything to be sort of gone, destroyed, whatever. The anarchist writer, Colin Ward, whose book you have already mentioned, suggests that the people who most readily attack the ideology of non-violence are those with little experience of the ugliness, squalor, and arbitrary nature of violence, so he’s saying those who say that non-violence doesn’t work are the ones who really haven’t had much to do with violence. Could you comment on how your witnessing or experiencing of violence may have influenced your vegan, anarchist, pacifist beliefs? I’m thinking of poems of yours like “Shootings”, in which you write about early experiences with animal death on farms, but also of any other experiences that you felt were crucial.

John
I was pretty aggressive. I had a major substance and alcohol problem for a long time and I was an aggressive person, and I tried to deal with things very directly, and very ineffectually, in the long run – I certainly learnt that. I suppose having a sense of aggression about you makes you think about it generally, but more than that, I grew up shooting everything. I had guns, and on the farm – when I sent and spent time there – it was considered to be what you did; you literally went out and collected trophies, and that kind of trophyism was a very big part of my life up to age sixteen. I shot everything that walked, crawled and flew – that’s what I was. I shot the things I liked the most, I loved “twenty-eight” parrots, they were beautiful; I shot them because they were there, and what was disturbing about this was that I actually understood what I was doing. I wasn’t some kid who was conditioned to this; I pursued it as an art form because it struck me that it was a kind of masculine thing that someone who was very directly non-masculine as a kid could do.

It struck me as a way of kind of identifying with that part of the culture I was invited into, so it was that kind of violence, and I stopped this because of two incidents – one when I saw an animal chew off its forepaw because it was entrapped and it chewed off its entire limb trying to escape; and the second was when I hit a ram driving past a ute on this gravel road near the farm. I was actually eighteen when that happened – I was farm-minding at the time. I shouldn’t have been driving, but that’s another issue – I hit a ram that ran out and fell over a fence and ran just in front of the vehicle, and it had a broken neck, and I was terribly distraught, as I didn’t know what to do with this animal, and I shot it in the head and killed it, and pretty well everything changed for me from that period on. It took a while before I became a vegan, but that kind of event really stood out.

Also as someone involved in that kind of lifestyle of drugs and alcohol, I saw a lot of violence, a lot of serious violence, and it used to repulse me. So my activity against violence, my pacifism has come from experience rather than from just a concept. I have experienced a lot of violence as an addict, but also since cleaning up my act — as a pacifist being physically challenged for being a pacifist. Being tested. People are so affronted by non-violence, it’s even a far more effective device than violence anyway, and if you want to bring change, you can bring it most effectively by not biting back. So my non-violence is something that’s come through a kind of fire if you like, and there are many other things I’ve seen over the years that confirm that, especially in other countries – that I won’t go into, but I’ve been involved in the middle of things on a number of occasions where people have been literally fighting with guns and stuff. I found myself in the middle of battle in the mid-‘80s and saw people shot. It changes you.

Tracy
Your veganism connects you in other ways to the environment. We heard Mar [Bucknell] say earlier (in an introduction to this interview) how anarchists recently have been involved with the tuarts at Ludlow (actions to protest against the sand-mining of an area of rare and endangered tuart forest near Busselton in south-west Australia); we also heard, in a previous lecture in this series, about your concerns for the environment, in the forest lecture. Is an anarchist necessarily an environmentalist, and what forms of action then, or attitude, might that take?

John
I’ve not met any anarchist who is not an environmentalist, but as Colin Ward points out, they are most often environmentalists of the urban. Certainly in the London anarchist groups, as you would expect, in the British anarchist groups, they are very urban-centred, big populations in urban places, and Colin Ward talks about the urban environment as someone who is concerned about how people are housed; it’s a very important thing to him. I have an interest in that, but I am very much what you would call a ecological environmentalist. After I gave the forest lecture I went down to the tuart forest, and it’s the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen; this is a set-up, it’s not even owned incidentally by Cable Sands, it’s owned by a different mob altogether, manipulation of legalities, the crossing of boundaries and the violation of measurement; it makes it actually illegal within Australian government terms as well.

We’ve got the anarchist activists in the forest, and we need them, and that’s good, but my argument to them, when I was talking to them, people I feel deeply akin to who are pacifists as well, but they were doing a lot of locking-on to machinery and I said that’s a very pacifist resistance, but it’s a very finite effectiveness once you’re locked up. You’ve been locked up a few times, you are disempowered, the state will get you, believe you me, it does. And then the defence is gone, then the trees get knocked over, and as I was talking a tree was going down. I think the solution to a lot of these problems is one in which we use our mutual aid and work together. We live in a world that is not anarchist, unfortunately, and we must work with people who aren’t anarchists and may have very different views, and I don’t have a problem with that. I’m very pragmatic in that way: I’m quite happy to work with people for a cause and work together and have a number of different approaches to a situation, because I think if we get very monolithic in the way we view a problem, then we are really serving our own interests, and our own emotions, rather than the actual cause of say, saving the forest. I’m not suggesting these people are serving anything but the cause of the forest, I’m saying there has to be a more interactive approach to preservation of environment because you can save something for six months, but then six months later…

We went up to the Avon Valley National Park, not far from Perth, a beautiful park where the Avon River runs through. You only get to see it basically when the Avon Descent is on and people go and watch them going down the rapids, but Boral, the large mining conglomerate that mines stone, their mining operations are based on the edge of the park, possibly going into the park, that’s an issue, as well, I’d like to find out about. The government doesn’t survey its own wrong; it surveys your wrong according to itself, and that’s a truism. It strikes me that one of the most effective pacifist ways of dealing with governments is to kind of legally dismantle them from within, as with defending the tuart forest, get a few really good lawyers down there and get those boundary lines checked out where they have violated the lease and get them, and gradually the process of decomposition takes place. So I’m into very practical solutions.

Tracy
You more or less absorbed my next question there, which is good, but I’ll just add one aspect of it. It was to do with Maletesta having said that “we have to find ways of living among non-anarchists as anarchistically as possible, because history is always a result of all the forces acting in society”. So is it really feasible? You’ve just been talking about ways in which we might live as anarchistically as possible under that umbrella, even when we differ from it. Is it really feasible; are we inevitably going to get drawn into complicity with the State?

John
I actually have such a negative view of the State, that it’s so oppressive I don’t think we could ever be complicit with it, because it’s always going to get us in some way or another. The welfare state is obviously set up in a paternalistic way to protect people, theoretically, but the further you move away from who is actually doing the governing, the process of representation, the less you are going to be represented. Democracy for me is not a free society; it’s the opposite because you’re abdicating your responsibility and your right to have a say in how you live. My local government member for York for the region – he doesn’t know me and I don’t know him – we might meet socially, but the point is I’ve abdicated the responsibility to him.

Democracy is not about giving you your rights and freedom. It’s about working through a totally delayed and distracted and deferred system of response to needs, where responsibility is in essence entirely removed. The more welfare-state it is, the more paternalistic it becomes, of course. On the other hand, thinking about Ward... Thatcherite individualism, for example, yields right-wing selfishness. Ward notes certain things that were in some senses more anarchistic than the Labour government that followed, and that’s not to say he supported Thatcher – he loathed Thatcher and his whole life was campaigning against Thatcher, but the idea for example, the example he gives is when council houses were sold at very cheap rates to the occupants because basically the Thatcher government did not want to spend any money on the upgrade and the upkeep of these houses, so the houses were sold for £30,000 – half their price – to the occupants. So suddenly a group of relatively underprivileged people had property, and unwittingly what the government did was empower “working class people” through property ownership which they normally wouldn’t achieve under the rigours of wealth-marginalisation, for want of a better expression. Ward picks up on the point that governments actually don’t understand what they are doing when they are working in other directions and the Thatcher point is a very good one, there, in every way.

As regards individualism in America, of course, historically, there is a whole thread of right-wing anarchism, individualist and liberal anarchism that is very much packed into the “what’s good for me is best, and bugger everyone else” school of thought. But it’s a lot more complex than this. The American dream of doing pretty well what you want without government strictures, at least from the “Feds”, or without interference, is so much tied up with property – a kind of liberty through the rights of property accumulation.

Umbrella anarchism is a co-existence but not an approval of the state. Anarchism on a “micro-level” can bring change in quite dramatic ways. “Umbrella” both protects and deflects (literally, from rain). The anarchist is protected from the physical abuses of the state’s legal and military apparatus by “co-existence” on the least directly compromising levels (purchasing food, use of water and hospitals, and so on), but is also deflecting its intrusions by making use of facilities and means outside the state’s control (and corporate-state capitalist control) as much as possible (not banking, exchanging and bartering where possible, growing one’s own food, capturing one’s own water, refusing to vote, being involved in public and private protest, deschooling – I am thinking of Ivan Illich here – and so on).

Tracy
I’ve got a couple of things which relate to what you are saying. Malatesta again: “The real being is man, the individual... in the age-long struggle between liberty and authority, or in other words between socialism and a class state, the question is not really one of changing the relationships between society and the individual; nor is it a question of increasing the independence of the individual at the expense of social interference or vice versa. But rather is it a question of preventing some individuals from oppressing others; of giving all individuals the same rights and the same means of action; and of replacing the initiative of the few, which inevitably results in the oppression of everybody else.”

I think a lot of people who aren’t anarchists have problems with the individual and how it’s balanced against society. Do you want to comment a little more on that, on your notion of what individualism is, for you?

John
...You have two functional notions of the individual, we have the individual that we know, where what we think and what we feel are very much connected to this physical body we have, and that’s a very observable state. It is also the individualism that comes in how we interact with other people, within a social situation – say five or six of us might get together and watch a television, and we have very individual views regarding what we should watch – regarding the matter of ‘choice’... all arguing what is good for us is good for others because... and so on. Struggling towards consensus, creating a comparatively egalitarian and acceptable pattern of watching. So there are two issues there – one of consensus where we have agreed to actually do something together, and one of actually having an individual view within that consensus (and a desire to have our own way).

In a non-centralised world, it seems essential that property is held in common, and pretty well most anarchists would agree on that – there is not individual ownership to the point where people can have actually more than someone else, because we are sharing in a distribution of wealth. But it is a kind of wrong thinking for me, an illogical thinking, in that property as such, as a definition, shouldn’t exist at all, as far as I’m concerned. The problem is in the emotion of ownership. The desire to fetishise the object and exclude others having a right to it. To invest it with a personal spirit that makes it exclusive. The existence of property would be contingent on rights of access: to have access to the things that are required/needed at a particular time; so I might have this book, but you have access to it if you need it, only if it becomes “relevant” on a basis of need. I might have made this book, I might have sat down and made my own paper, written it up and have it in my own possession, but it is something anyone can have. Same applies to a shovel or bedding or any other “possession”. Some “property” would need to be used constantly, and this is factored in: clothing, eating utensils, health items...

It’s a kind of public moment, you are not hiding it away and keeping it for your personal edification alone; there are different levels of possession and materiality depending on need. I think that there are very literal and very obvious and pragmatic solutions to these issues of ownership or not. Things are not only in common – obviously they are in common – but I think we have access. So if someone’s got a rake, then I will use it and then so on. It is a very feasible thing. For me it’s not a matter of what you own; it’s a matter of what you share.

Tracy
I’m thinking in terms of how that’s organised in a wider context, with your ideas about international regionalism, which you’ve talked about in relation to poetry and landscape – you’ve written about it as well. This is the sort of wide picture rather than person to person, because the world, so we say, is very global now... Would you just like to talk about the idea of international regionalism, how it relates to anarchism for you and to your views of environment and pacifism as well?

John
International regionalism, in a nutshell, is basically interacting with communities outside one’s own, respecting others’ regional integrity, and confirming your own identity. So it might be applied to a social group, it might be a geographical region. Obviously the integrity of tribal or nomadic social groups that have a differing “definition” of region, that cross lines of other community identities, is respected. Respecting that, and at the same time opening communication between those groups where communication might be desirable, or allowing communications. Or silences.

So in this regional philosophy the possibility of lines of communication (visual, verbal, exchange – a variety of modes of interaction) is key. I developed this idea in dealing with poetry, in writing a very physical, a very regional poetry – I write a very specific area – and being very involved in international discussion on how things might change or what we might do. So this kind of theory evolved out of a necessity.

Tracy
Within this philosophy, people sometimes ask, what about identity groups, indigenous identity groups or migrant identity groups, and so on?

John
Well, this isn’t an issue of identity-as-hierarchy, but identity-as-choice against state hegemony. “Identity” is completely respected and surely it is logical that ethnicity and social groupings or beliefs connected to land are enough to generate a kind of social structure, rather than having a government tell you what to do? And that is a very interesting differentiation. Bakunin thought that everything problematical began with the concept of God, that we immediately start with the hierarchy. The point is being made that there is a hierarchy for relationship in the way we worship. Now, I am not suggesting that people should suddenly not worship, but what it means is that the power structure dictates how one worships or how one believes or how one has faith. I’m not serving anyone, they are serving themselves – it’s a matter of allowing people to recognize that the “church”, for example, whatever religion we are talking about, is dictating to you how you will believe. You are quite capable of discovering how to believe yourself. Through your experience socially and otherwise, there are a lot of other directions available to you. I think it’s a good point.

Go to Part Three

On Anarchism: Part Three

Continuing: John Kinsella interviewed by Tracy Ryan (State Library WA, 2004)

Tracy
...Colin Ward, when asked about religion, said that rather than being the opiate of the people, in that famous saying, he said, it’s rather the stimulant of the people. Exactly like nationalism, it stimulates hostility and aggression towards others. Many have observed that people who are kind and considerate in their personal life can become mass-murderers under the banner of God and the State, and we are seeing a lot of religious strife, daily, or things that are connected to it. Would you agree that it is a stimulant of aggression and hostility, and why? Can veganism, just as a matter of interest, be a form of religion or equivalent to religion, and does it thereby risk similar problems?

John
I think straight-edge is a religion; I think there is a kind of hierarchy within the group that commands people to do something. Veganism is a personal choice to me. I don’t tell you that you should be a vegan. I became a vegan for the reasons I’ve described very clearly. I realised I was certainly not better than the things I was killing and it came about in a very literal kind of process. I believe very much in people finding their own way – and that’s what an anarchist world is, people finding their own kind of place in their own way in a social context. But the idea of being called or forced into any activity, for our own benefit especially – that deeply bothers me. So yes, I do see organised religion as being part of – as much of the state part of a controlling liberty. Free will is a slogan as much as freedom of the vote! Propaganda of souls.

Responses to a question (unrecorded) from the audience:

John
The media is the construct of the state anyway, the media exists because the government exists. The media applies and works through government boards, what’s shown on television even if it sometimes pushes the boundaries I mean, all the ills of the media can be traced to the ills of the State which can be traced to the ills, in my argument, of any controlling system (religion etc). Authority and power are the things that bring abuse on every level. I mean the embedded forces in the Iraq war, what fun and games we have in terms of televisual entertainment. Remember John Forbes’s brilliant “Love Poem” — its all “being staged for me”. The absurdity!

Media as a concept is actually a problem. We are talking about communications; there are other ways of communicating, the “media” is a self-serving entity. You’ve got the judiciary and you’ve got the legislature, and the constabulary being parts of the state, and then there’s the media. Clergy, nobles, commoners, and ‘the press’. Media is an extension of the state. It uses the power, the facilities, the permission of the state. Pirate radio plugged into the grid, or pirate radio using the mechanisms of corporate capitalism or relying on those who receive its signal having access to the grid: it’s hard to get away from media being media. Whichever state it might be, this state or a state elsewhere, it’s still an extensive arm of the state.

Tracy
So can I narrow that down then to kind of come full-circle, to some kind of closure, to what Bill [Louden] was saying about the connection with poetry and poetry as a medium – what’s poetry got to do with all this?

John
Poetry for me is the most direct form of communication – the one that goes in deepest. There was an Australian anarchist – Harry Hooton – who wrote his poetry mainly during the late 30s to the late 50s. He said something like “Language is not eternal. It will be replaced. We are not going to talk forever” and he said, there will be some kind of action in the end, and he said the words, once they left your mouth, were dead.

For me, poetry is, in the structural sense, neither speech nor writing but something between, and it’s a way of keeping words alive. Not killing them. Poetry is an act of non-violence, even if the content is violent, or invokes violence. Poetry is a very impacted and compacted way of expressing things. I don’t believe in writing didactic, polemical poetry to tell you what to think, but I believe in writing a poetry that evokes the mood, and it might bring an alternative to a response. Poetry is not dialectical by default. Maybe what I’ll do to wrap up my contribution is read the poem “Shootings” from my book The Silo: A Pastoral Symphony (1995). In this poem I wrote literally a crisis of killing, of hunting, and the fetishisation of this on the familial and private level... set against the backdrop of gun-making and social and gender expectation. The public and the private melding and conspiring in conflict. I wrote this poem as a way of moving on from what I was. Poetry became a way of considering something, of prompting action within the subjective self, and from there, hopefully, community.


SHOOTINGS

1

I collected makers’ names
like stamps – Winchester, Browning, Sportco,
the more exotic Finnish and German brands.

Death was a fantasy
made real
in the bush enclaves
of my uncle’s farm.

Vermin!
was the password
before touching
a gun.


2

My oldest cousin’s heart
is not in it – shooting
parrots that is.

He’s taking me
because I’m up
for the holidays
and hungry
for trophies.

We march out
past the dams,
past Sand Springs
and Hathaways,
and close in
on a stand
of York gums.
I take aim
at a pair
of 28s
and drop one.
Its partner sits
twisting its head,
picking at a branch
and glancing
towards the ground.
I reload and take aim.
My cousin grips my arm
and points to the corpse
splayed on the ground,
tail cocked heavenward.
Something twists
in my stomach.
I am too young
to put a name to it.
I lower the gun
and turn for home.


3

When I was twelve
I walked all day
mid-summer
without water –
rifle slung
over my shoulder,
sun obscuring
those wicked crows
my targets
(too smart
to be shot
by a kid
who measures death
by the number
of bullets
left in a packet)
and nearly died
of sunstroke.


4

I’ve seen photographs
in a biscuit tin
that show young men
sitting on mounds
of rabbit carcasses.
Mounds as tall
as the young men
they support.


5

The last thing I shot
was a ram with a broken
neck. It had been hit
by a car. Through
the open sight
I measured its breath
and for once
looked death
straight in the eye.


6

Rabbits frustrate
large men
with high-powered
rifles.

The lack of more
exotic game
leads them to vent
their frustrations.

Rabbits aren’t just shot.
And full moons
do induce madness.


7

Harvest time, and
between shifts
workers corner
a pair
of screaming
foxes
in a forty-four
gallon drum

a shotgun wedding
in a forty-four

the sun skylarking
as the bouquet of lead
rips the steel
with a fizz

the gossip columnists
decked out
in army fatigues.


8

My uncle once killed
sheep with a knife.
Then he turned to the gun.
Regardless, city children
waited for the bladder
to be sprung.
The dogs frantic
below the carcass.


9

I placed the barrel
of a gun with a hair-trigger
against my tongue
as an experiment.
Tea-tree scraped at the windows
and all hell broke loose
in the chicken run.
The fox I sought
dropped from the roof of the coop
and sat at my feet –
too close to shoot
it ran
straight through me.


10

Did it a favour –
it was a mangy specimen
anyway!


11

Stalking.
Wending your way through.
Like dropping a parrot
mid-flight.
Downwind you approach
your upwind life.
Smell yourself.
Fear stinks.


12

I empty the breech and drain the powder.
I break the sights and seal the barrel.
I renounce the hunt, the flesh, the kill.
I embrace the sting of a cold morning,
the flight of the parrot, the bark
of the fox, the utility of the rabbit.

John Kinsella


Responses to a series of unrecorded questions from audience

John
It’s interesting we raise children, obviously, in that environment. I’ve argued for an anarchism that exists within a state as well as a grand vision of some world in which is not governed in that way. People say “you let your kids do what they want”; we don’t let our kids do what they want. We let them do what they want unless they are going to hurt themselves or others, and pretty well that’s the law we live by. If it’s not going to bring harm or distress to others or to the person themselves, then they find their own way.

The process of deciding what is good for others and good for yourself is obviously a subjective one and there is a form of authority in that. But what I’m arguing for is that social interactions bring their own authority without someone telling you how those social interactions should take place. Natural law as Bakunin says. I lived in two ‘communes’ in my life apart from the family commune. I consider the family unit a commune when it works fairly. And we’ve lived with extended families as well at times, and so on. But I’ve lived in two communes with groups of people who were very dissimilar, yet held one view, and that was that you could live mutually, supportively, without time being in control or someone being higher up than others. And one of them was incredibly interesting and successful in the sense that we pretty well functioned and got things done, and another one was incredibly ineffective.

The ineffective one was because there was a single relationship involved in it between a man and a woman – it didn’t have to be heterosexual relationship but it happened to be in this particular case – and single people around us, and there was a friction between the relationship and people being single, especially people so deeply connected to each other, and that brought its own hierarchy as you’d expect, but that didn’t last long enough to get any fair judgment on how these thing might evolve. But my experience has been that people, even people who deeply disagree, in time either learn to live with each other, or there is a disaster of some sort. I think the disasters are less rather than more.

And Ward talks about many solutions, for example, he says, what happens is you’ve got a group where someone turns around and says about killing people, and the answer is that someone will obviously stop that person if they can, even the pacifist will react. I get this question: If a lion was going to eat your daughter, what would you do? I would stop the bloody lion eating my daughter. It’s a silly question. That’s putting the logic of pacifism to the point of absurdity. On the other hand, if someone was attacking me, I would choose not to respond. I wouldn’t choose it if it was my own daughter, or a child on any level. Because the responsibility is a social responsibility.

I’m not saying there shouldn’t be social responsibility. I’m saying an anarchist society is all social responsibility, and in a sense, those kinds of paternalistic relationships we are talking about are going to exist with interaction with people, that’s human nature. You are going to work it out with yourself because no one is going to say, Okay, this person has the authority, and then is going to back them up. They are in it on their own. I’m anti-technological, I’m not anti-knowledge, I’m not anti-people knowing things and doing things.

Now I’m the most plugged-in person when it comes to the net, as you can imagine, but I deeply deplore it, and wish I weren’t. And in many ways, seriously, what I work against is what I’m actually doing myself in utilising that technology. I think it is an effective technology in disseminating ideas, and getting knowledge – and often false knowledge at that, mind you, which is a different argument.

(Another audience question)

John
I’m actually saying that there should be no adversarial system. I’m saying that natural, adversarial dialogue takes place between humans anyway. We don’t need people backing up those natural adversarial dialogues with court systems. For example, if I deeply disagree with the fact that you are putting pesticides on your lawn and I go and dispose of your pesticide drums when you are not looking, by law I can actually be fined or jailed if it goes through court. That backing up of your right, as it seems to do, wouldn’t exist, because the common right is that pesticide is bad for all of us. And it’s a kind of commonsense approach to all of this that I deeply value.

(Another audience question)

John
... I’m arguing – this is the umbrella argument for anarchism – that justice is the primary issue, that we are saying what is beneficial to individuals and the social group at the same time. As I said, I don’t believe in violent revolution. I believe in gradual change, and that is why I do a lot of the kind of things I do. For example, I have worked with people who function in schools, courts, universities, you name it – they are all part of the governing system. That doesn’t invalidate their efforts. I am talking about a co-existence with the state, but a co-existence in which gradually change will come, and I want to see an anarchist society, with natural law and natural justice.

End of interview