Whom I most identify with

Fredy, congenitally, had a bad heart and died relatively young (at 50) on the operating table.

What a loss. He was just starting to fully explicate the insights he was developing as a Green theorist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredy_Perlman

Some of us had taken a certain trajectory: We started out as middle-class kids of the twentieth century imbued with the mystiques of progress, development, and affluence. We noticed some problems and studied Marxism. We noticed some problems and sought better answers.

Fredy found them. His thinking went deeper than others. His ideas were very alternative. Few have carried them forward. What a loss.

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Review of:

Against His-story, Against Leviathan! by Fredy Perlman.

Detroit: Black & Red, 1983, 302 pages.

This is a vital book in one of the most important movements of our time. Yet I’m a little hesitant to recommend it to you. The transitional movement I refer to is the greening of the left. My hesitancy stems from a concern that you’ll miss a lot of allusions if you’re not, yourself, already, in the process of making that transition.

Fredy Perlman, like so many of us who got radicalized during the ferment of “the Sixties,” had at first embraced Marxism as the best theory and praxis for changing society. During the 1970s he started to question. By the time he wrote Against His-story in 1983 he fully understood how misguided the Marxist ideology is owing to Marx’s nineteenth century illusions regarding modernism, industrialism, progress, and historical development.

Fredy set out to debunk and re-conceptualize. But he wrote for those on the same pathway that he was traversing. And he specifically wanted to avoid giving the impression that he was attempting to define a new ideology to replace the old. So, rather than the sociologically “scientific” explications that characterized the Marxist literature, Fredy wrote in an inspiring, but very different (very distinctive), mytho-poetic kind of way. He wasn’t interested in debates about detailed historical this and that.

Against His-story, Against Leviathan! was fully appreciated by a small but influential post-Marxist neo-anarchist milieu about thirty years ago. But Fredy died prematurely in 1985 before becoming more widely read within the broad social change movement. I tried to familiarize colleagues in the Left Green Network with his stuff, but to no avail. His corpus was too “off the spectrum,” and thus somewhat indecipherable, to those adhering to a traditional leftist worldview.

There have tended to be misconceptions about the book. For example, from the Wikipedia entry: “It is a personal critical perspective on contemporary civilization and society.” Well, it’s more a critical review of what got us to this point of crisis. “The work defined anarcho-primitivism for the first time.” Not really. That perspective had been percolating for almost a decade; and Fredy would have been aghast to hear that his ideas “defined” any kind of ideology. “It was a major source of inspiration for anti-civilization perspectives in contemporary anarchism, most notably on the thought of philosopher John Zerzan.” Zerzan had already been explicating his somewhat different ideas prior to 1983. Fredy’s books and articles were more a source of inspiration for the Fifth Estate collective than for Zerzan.

Here’s what Fredy taught us:

“Leviathan” refers to a kind of socio-economic formation that emerged about five thousand years ago in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution. The big issue about it is the fact that our civilization has generally viewed the emergence of such as “advanced” and “progressive” (positive). Fredy promulgated a wholly different perspective, based on a critical re-thinking of the full trajectory of human history.

Prior to that momentous inflection point represented by the cultural passage into what Gary Snyder called the “New Ways,” all people had lived in localist, stateless, communitarian, mostly egalitarian bands, tribes, or villages. The unprecedented Leviathan-type formations were characterized by proto-urbanism and statism; development and employment of technology in service of production, growth, and expansionism; complex division of labor, wealth accumulation, power-elitism, patriarchy, and class division of society. These characteristics and associated values were anti-ecological — and aberrant in relation to all preceding human experience.

In Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Fredy conjectures about why, when, and how these formations arose. But he conveys that the most important thing to understand is this: After they emerged they started to overrun aboriginal communities in place after place and eventually came to dominate the human social landscape; leading, after two or three hundred generations, to our full-blown modern crisis.

He says that our task now is to deconstruct the monster. Our praxis toward that end must be based on a realistic perspective regarding its genesis and development. If we understand how ingrained by now are its lifeways and values, how dependent we’ve all become on its systems, institutions, and technologies, we can appreciate that the process of “the greening of society” (re-greening) will figure to be incremental, tenuous, and of long duration. The hope is that we’ll be able to forge pathways toward our liberation, as we once were: dwellers in the land and good citizens of the planetary biotic community.

* * * *

Fredy Perlman died at 50 in 1985 and didn’t leave us much in the way of specific ideas regarding What To Do. He may or may not have been aware of the then-nascent movements for Green politics and bioregionalism.

The latter, in particular, had already set out to present a vision for “deconstructing the monster.” From our vantage point almost forty years later it shouldn’t surprise us to observe that the movement is growing very slowly. The concept implies a very radical change of lifeways relative to the current state of our society and, indeed, of our civilization.

Bioregionalism has a vision about an alternative direction to go in, but how to carry through such a transformation is clearly quite a challenge. For us it broaches the prospect of eventual secession from the United States, as part of a global-historical movement to transform the entire nation-states system. The scope of this “project” is macro-scale, long-range, and unprecedented. Nonetheless, it heralds the road back to sanity. It obliges us to make the assumption that the human race is capable of negotiating the crucible that we’re now facing, having arrived at a point of crisis characterized by egregious overshoot and hypertrophy in all aspects of life. The more we can effectuate this transition consciously and deliberately the better off we’ll be. Fredy Perlman’s work helped to raise our consciousness and prepare us for the trials ahead.