Chapter 4. This Side of Paradise

Bookchin might have begun his discussion of primitive society as did Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Let us begin by laying the facts aside, as they do not affect the question.”[87] For all his huffing and puffing, the Director Emeritus adds nothing to the inadequate and dishonest “evidentiality” (one of his gratuitous neologisms) which Watson and I have already shown to be wanting in SALA. He continues to ignore the anthropological studies summarized in John Zerzan’s Future Primitive, Watson’s Beyond Bookchin, and my Friendly Fire[88] and Anarchy after Leftism. He continues to pretend that the thesis that stateless hunter-gatherers enjoyed a sort of primitive affluence was a short-lived 60s fad, like smoking banana peels — little more than the rebellious, euphoric romanticizing of non-Western peoples by tripped-out hippies, like the ones who fell for Carlos Casteneda’s “Don Juan” hoax. This anthropological aberration, he again assures us, has been corrected by the sober scholarship of the period of social reaction.

The Director Emeritus persists in his dogged and dogmatic reiteration of the bourgeois Hobbesian myth of the lives of pre-urban anarchist foragers as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, in dramatic contrast to the life of Murray Bookchin: nasty, brutish, and long. Hobbes himself did not believe that the war of each against all described the original condition of all societies.[89] When your Hobbesian argument is refuted by Hobbes, you are off to a bad start.

Again, what are the implications for Bookchin’s own theory of a protracted period of “social reaction” as the explanation why decadent Lifestyle Anarchism has supplanted heroic Social Anarchism over the last 30 years? Apparently periods of — what? social progress? political turbulence? — foster theoretical progress, such as that singlehandledly accomplished by the Director Emeritus. By implication the 60s were not a period of social reaction. It was then that the ex-Director came into his own as an anarchist theorist — proof enough of the fructifying influence of those heady times.[90] Yet this was also when the hippie anthropologists concocted their ludicrous “primitive affluence” thesis based on little more than intensive ethnographic fieldwork and careful historical research. Incredibly, this absurd, empirically-grounded conception prevailed as anthropological orthodoxy, as the Director Emeritus complains, well into the 80s. Undoubtedly it owed much of its undue influence to its qualified endorsement by the Director Emeritus himself in The Ecology of Freedom (1982), an epochal work which — as I demonstrated in AAL by surveying all its academic reviews (both of them)[91] — took the world of social science by storm. If, and insofar as, there has been a professional reaction against the primitive-affluence thesis, it is entirely, like Social Ecology and Social Anarchism, a product of the period of social reaction. How odd (and yet, how dialectical) that from decadence, from decay, the life-force, conscious “second nature” — renewed by rot and reaction — is resurgent in the person and the praxis of the ex-Director of directionality and such lackeys as he finds useful from time to time.

To support his claim that Hobbesianism has been restored to anthropological orthodoxy, the Director Emeritus cited in SALA one highly controversial book (discussed in Chapter 6), one review of that book, and a pop science story,[92] none of which was of very recent vintage when he wrote. In his latest outing, in the face of the challenge of the massed evidence assembled by Watson and myself, Bookchin does not cite a single new source. It is characteristic of Bookchin’s scrupulously scientific method that he affirms as the new consensus — because it suits his political purposes — the most extreme statement of one polar position (Edwin Wilmsen’s) in an ongoing controversy. Make that “controversies”: anthropologists are debating a number of issues involving foragers, issues partly or wholly independent of one another. What most exercises the specialists turns out to be what’s least relevant to anarchists. To say, for example, that “the !Kung [San] model of the foraging lifeway — small, nomadic bands — is no longer taken as typical of preagricultural human societies”[93] invites the question, “In what respects?” As of 1992 there were already at least 582 items published relating to the Kalahari foragers alone[94] — ample evidence of controversy. Eighteen years later, there are many more.

There’s one thing that bothers me. If prehistoric humans weren’t foragers, like all other primates,[95] what were they? Factory workers?

Insofar as any generalization is possible, even a leading revisionist, Thomas N. Headland, approvingly quoted by the ex-Director on the same subject,[96] wrote in 1997 that “while we now doubt that prehistoric hunter-gatherers were as affluent as Sahlins, Lee and others first suggested, we do not want to return to the pre-1966 Hobbesian idea that their lives were nasty, brutish and short ...” Sahlins himself had already written that the Hobbes cliché “becomes now a subject for textbook burlesque,” but the Director Emeritus doesn’t get the joke.[97] He never does. Similar conclusions are common in the literature.[98] The most recent statement I located is by a critic of the Sahlins thesis who nonetheless concedes that Sahlins “appears to have carried the day and has come to represent the new enlightened view of hunting-gathering societies.”[99] In Anarchy after Leftism I already quoted M.A.P. Renouf, writing in 1991, to the effect that “although the more idealized aspects of the Lee and DeVore model are commonly acknowledged, I think it is fair to say that no fundamental revision of it has been made.”[100] Reviewing the scholarship of the nine years subsequent to AAL, I found nothing to refute or dilute this judgment. By the late 1980s, forager (and specifically San) controversies were turning to such questions as whether archaeology and the historical record provide evidence of an Iron Age San culture and to what extent the San are, or were, subordinated by sedentary Bantus. New field studies also make clear the diversity of San adaptations.[101] Thus, the general validity of at least a moderate version of what the Director Emeritus calls “the preposterous theory of an ‘original affluent society’”[102] is still the current orthodoxy. It appears in current college textbooks, such as Anthropology by Ember, Ember and Peregrine (2002), which cites Richard B. Lee’s calculation of !Kung hours of work and remarks that the !Kung San have more leisure than many agriculturists.[103]

For present purposes, as in AAL, I am only addressing aspects of forager society of direct relevance to anarchism. Revisionist corrections, valid or not, mostly relate to other issues. It doesn’t matter to anarchists, for instance, if contemporary foragers are “living fossils” who have always lived as they do now, in “pristine” societies. The media, not the anthropologists, are mainly responsible for that public misperception.[104] It doesn’t matter that foragers have histories (who ever doubted it?), including histories of trade and other interactions with agriculturists and herders. It doesn’t matter if foragers aren’t always and everywhere the benign caretakers of the environment. It doesn’t matter if prehistoric humans were scavengers (not a revisionist thesis, by the way, but rather a quirky Bookchinist thesis[105]). So what does matter to anarchists about these people? In two of my books I specified two crucial points:

“They operate the only known viable stateless societies.”
“And they don’t, except in occasional emergencies, work ...”[106]

To these I would now add (or rather, make explicit) two more. The first — courtesy of the ex-Director — is the egalitarian communism of hunter-gatherers:

“There is very much we can learn from preliterate cultures ... their practices of usufruct and the inequality of equals [?] are of great relevance to an ecological society.”[107]

And finally, a somewhat general, summary contention:

Foragers enjoy a relatively high quality of life, when the blessings of anarchy, leisure, equality and community are considered along with relative good health and longevity.

It is only certain aspects of this last contention (of those of any interest to anarchists) which some revisionist anthropologists would seriously dispute, but even if we had to bid farewell to it, the first three points would still stand.

Foraging as Anarchy

So far as I can determine, none of the research or argument of the revisionists even purports to deny the long-established and unanimous anthropological consensus that nonsedentary hunter-gatherers, at least — and at least most of the sedentary ones — have always been stateless.[108] This was common ground between them and the Lee/DeVore school and all their predecessors, just as it was common ground between Marx and Kropotkin. Not even Bookchin seems to dispute the primitive-anarchy thesis, the thesis most important to anarchists.

Foraging as Zerowork

In “The Original Affluent Society” — which Bookchin has apparently not read,[109] although he formerly praised it as “one of the more readable and well-argued accounts of the huntering-gathering case”[110] — Marshall Sahlins wrote: “A good case can be made that hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intermittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.”[111] Citing the then-unpublished results of Richard B. Lee’s fieldwork among the !Kung San (“Bushmen”), Sahlins estimated that the San worked a four-hour day. In their refined, published version, Lee’s figures were even lower, 2.2 to 2.4 hours a day.[112] Such evidence renders ridiculous what Bookchin is still spouting today, the Marxist dogma about “toil and material uncertainties (as well as natural ones)[113] that have in the past shackled the human spirit to a nearly exclusive concern for subsistence.” The foraging San were not preoccupied with subsistence. They had no reason to be.

The quantitative data, as startling as they are, only begin to disclose the qualitative difference between primitive and modern work, in respects I summarized in Friendly Fire:

In addition to shorter hours, “flextime” and the more reliable “safety net” afforded by general food sharing, foragers’ work is more satisfying than most modern work. We awaken to the alarm clock; they sleep a lot, night and day. We are sedentary in our buildings in our polluted cities; they move about breathing the fresh air of the open country. We have bosses; they have companions. Our work typically implicates one, or at most a few hyper-specialized skills, if any; theirs combines handwork and brainwork in a versatile variety of activities, exactly as the great utopians called for. Our “commute” is dead time, and unpaid to boot; foragers cannot even leave the campsite without “reading” the landscape in a potentially productive way.[114]

To which I might add that hunting, in Europe as elsewhere, has always been the “sport of kings” — play, not work — characterized by what Kierkegaard called “the lovable seriousness which belongs essentially to play.”[115] The synthesis of work (production for its own sake) and play (activity for its own sake) is what I have long called, and long called for, the abolition of work. Someone else might phrase the goal differently, as, for instance, “a joyous artfulness in life and work” — as Murray Bookchin once did.[116]

According to an author highly regarded by Bookchin, “the labor of pastoral peoples is so light and simple that it hardly requires the labor of slaves. Consequently we see that for nomadic and pastoral peoples the number of slaves is very limited, if not zero. Things are otherwise with agricultural and settled peoples. Agriculture requires assiduous, painful, heavy labor. The free man of the forests and plains, the hunter as well as the herdsman, takes to agriculture only with great repugnance.” The Director Emeritus formerly endorsed this point of view.[117] The anarcho-primitivist crazy who wrote these words was Mikhail Bakunin.

It is not just that foragers work much less than the members of agricultural and industrial societies, if by work is meant production. It is not just that they work differently, in more varied and mostly more challenging and satisfying ways.[118] It is not just that they work in cooperation, not in competition. It is not just that they are almost always free of time-discipline, i.e., at any particular time they literally don’t have to do anything.[119] It is not just that they sleep in as late as they like and loaf a lot. In every one of these particulars, forager working life is superior to ours, but more important is what their coincidence implies about the foraging mode of production. At some point, less work plus better work ends up as activity it no longer makes sense to call work at all, although it furnishes the means of life. Foragers are at that point. They don’t work, not if work means forced labor, compulsory production, or the subordination of pleasure to production when these objectives diverge.

Now it is possible to define work in other ways than I do. No one owns the word. I don’t hijack words the way Murray Bookchin does. But an important revolutionary current, by now rooted mainly in anarchism, is explicitly anti-work in approximately the sense I’ve defined work in several essays, one of them well-known,[120] going back twenty five years. [121] By now, many anarchists appreciate that the abolition of the state without the abolition of work is as fatally incomplete — and as fated for failure — as the abolition of the state without the abolition of capitalism. In his early anarchist essays, Bookchin seemed (to many of us) to say so too when he condemned needless and stultifying “toil.”[122] “The distinction of pleasurable work and onerous toil should always be kept in mind,”[123] he said, and he made it hard to forget by repeating it often, though not recently. I of course prefer my own definitions — to which I have devoted some years of careful thought — and which I like to think identify the essentials of work while still corresponding to common usage. But if somebody else prefers a different terminology, that’s fine, as long as he makes its meaning explicit and refrains from spouting eccentric verbiage to muddle the matter. Whatever you call it, foragers usually had it. They were zeroworkers.

With respect to the San, Bookchin fudges the figures for working time in a crude way which is extraordinarily, and blatantly, dishonest even by the relaxed standards of his dotage. He claims that “[Richard B.] Lee has greatly revised the length of the workweek he formerly attributed to the Zhu [sic[124]]”; the average workweek for both sexes, he wrote in 1979, is not eighteen but 42.3 hours.”[125] Now I cannot do better than I did in Friendly Fire to refute, in advance, this clumsy lie. Originally, “Lee studied the San equivalent of what is conventionally accounted work in industrial society — hunting and gathering in their case, wage-labor in ours.”[126] In other words, as I discuss in Friendly Fire, housework — a form of “shadow work”[127] — was originally excluded from the comparisons Sahlins made, not only because Lee had yet to measure housework, but also because housework had always been excluded by our economists from what they measure as work because it is unpaid, and anything not measured in money is invisible to economists. This does not, as I wrote in Friendly Fire, invalidate the comparison, although it invites the more expansive comparison which Lee returned to the field to record, and which I summarized as follows:

Upon returning to the field, Lee broadened his definition of work to encompass all “those activities that contribute to the direct appropriation of food, water or materials from the environment” — adding to subsistence activity tool-making and — fixing and housework (mainly food preparation). These activities didn’t increase the San workload as much as their equivalents in our sort of society increase ours — relatively we fall even f[u]rther behind. Per diem the manufacture and maintenance of tools takes 64 minutes for men, 45 minutes for women.”[128] San women devote 22.4 hours a week to housework, 40.1 hours to all work.[129] American women with full-time jobs devote 40-plus hours a week to them in addition to doing 25–35 hours of housework.[130]

In other words, Bookchin is comparing San direct subsistence work plus shadow work with American direct subsistence work without shadow work.

After the deceptive citation to Lee, the ex-Director adds, as if to clinch the point: “Irven DeVore, the Harvard anthropologist who shared Lee’s conclusions on the Bushmen in the 1960s and 1970s, has observed: ‘We were being a bit romantic... Our assumptions and interpretations were much too simple.’”[131] There is no indication of what exactly DeVore and his colleagues thought they had been romantic or simplistic about. This was just a journalistic sound-bite. Nothing in the article by Roger Lewin (quoting DeVore) suggests that DeVore is referring to the data on working time. The article’s only reference to forager working time is to summarize the original Lee/DeVore finding “that the !Kung were able to satisfy their material needs with just a few hours work each day, their effort being divided between male hunting and female gathering of plant foods.”[132] Lewin reports challenges to several aspects of the Lee/DeVore model, and it must have been to these that DeVore referred, but none to the findings on working time.

Lee studied the foraging !Kung San of the Dobe area of the Kalahari. Susan Kent studied the Kutse group of recently sedentarized San in southeast Botswana. Although some of them kept a few goats and chickens, 90–95% of their meat was obtained by hunting. Per diem the economically active men on average devoted barely two hours to hunting, 22 minutes to tending goats, and less than ten minutes to making traps, for a total of 3.09 hours work.[133] Jiri Tanaka, who was also not in the Lee-DeVore group, studied another group of San in the ≠Kade area of the Kalahari in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His figures on working time, though slightly higher than Lee’s, in general provide independent support for the primitive-zerowork thesis. The daily average of time away from camp, hunting and gathering, is 4 hours and 39 minutes; this includes long breaks, as “the sun’s rays beat down mercilessly on the Kalahari most of the year, [so] the San often stop to rest in the shade during their day’s work ...” In-camp chores add about two hours a day.[134] That makes for a workweek of 46 hours and 33 minutes, a bit higher than Lee’s estimate (44.5 hours for men, 40.1 hours for women), but then Tanaka acquired his data at a time of severe drought.[135] Tanaka is Japanese, from a nation of workaholics. It is unlikely he was subject to the counter-cultural influences which Bookchin improbably blames for the primitive-affluence theory. Tanaka did not come to the Kalahari as a believer in that theory: the figure he arrived at “is less than [he] expected.”[136] Finally, Lorna J. Marshall, who studied the !Kung San in the 50s, a decade before Richard B. Lee and others from the Harvard Kalahari project arrived, reports that the San hunters work less than two hours a day. During the dry season, which is six months of the year, three women she knew spent 43% of their time in camp. And when the !Kung are in camp, “more time is spent in leisure than in tasks.”[137]

So far as I can tell, none of the ex-Director’s cited sources overturns or even qualifies the primitive-zerowork thesis. The Lewin article I have already dealt with. Wilmsen’s polemic Land Filled with Flies is a fierce critique of most aspects of the Lee/DeVore model, but it does not address forager working time. Bookchin relies heavily on Headland’s review of Wilmsen, “Paradise Revised,” as “summarizing current research,” something Headland did not purport to do, and fourteen years later, when I first wrote this passage, such a summary would be obsolete anyway.[138] Rather, he spoke of an awakening in anthropology “that is still taking place.”[139] As so often happens, soon the cutting edge grew dull. By 1997 Headland, as quoted above,[140] stated that the prevailing view is a moderate version of the primitive-affluence thesis.

It is not hard to see why Headland would back off from his 1990 position in just seven years. After mentioning Lee’s contention that “the Dobe !Kung were able to supply their needs easily by working only two or three hours a day,” he went on to make the point that Lee’s original “calculations of the amount of work the !Kung devoted to subsistence ignored the time spent in preparing food, which turned out to be substantial.”[141] He does not explain why he did not use Lee’s later calculations, which did include food preparation, and which had been published eleven years previously. The augmented data only widen the gap between the San and ourselves to our disadvantage. Headland does not say how much time devoted to food preparation he considers substantial, but the time that San foragers devote to food preparation (about two hours a day) is not much different from the time we devote to it, especially if we factor in shopping. Whereas the time they devote to direct food acquisition is, as we have seen, far less. Headland’s initial revisionism is explained, if not excused, by the condition of the foragers he studied, the Agta of the Philippines, who suffer from high mortality, poor nutrition, and low foraging return, “but since this appears to be due primarily to encroachment by agriculturists the relevance to Sahlins’s thesis is limited.”[142]

The San are not the only example of primitive leisure, just the best quantified. Using historical sources and the reports of fieldwork, Marshall Sahlins held up the Australian aborigines, along with the San, as exemplars of primitive affluence.[143] The Hadza in East Africa, who are surrounded by agriculturists and pastoralists, nonetheless persist in foraging — mainly because, as they explain, they do not like hard work. The men spending more time gambling than working. Sahlins quips that they “seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” The hunters spend less than two hours a day obtaining food.[144] Another case: the Guayaki Indians of Paraguay, men and women, work less than two hours a day.[145] In pre-contact conditions the Tiwi of north Australia enjoyed “an abundance of native food available the whole year round” — so much that male initiates aged 14 to 25 desisted from food production for long periods of the year, something “only a very well-off tribe could afford to allow.”[146] But primitive affluence is not confined to foragers. It is generally (not universally) true that underproduction is typical of primitives, notably shifting cultivators. They could produce more, as shown by the fact that, pressed by population increase or conquistador coercion, they did produce more.[147] Without at least potential primitive affluence, civilization could not have arisen.

Without rhyme or reason, the Director Emeritus abruptly fast-forwards (or -backwards) to medieval Europe: “Given the demands of highly labor-intensive farming, what kind of free time, in the twelfth century, did small-scale farmers have? If history is any guide, it was a luxury they rarely enjoyed, even during the agriculturally dormant winters. During the months when farmers were not tilling the land and harvesting its produce, they struggled endlessly to make repairs, tend animals, perform domestic labor, and the like.”[148] This is entirely beside the point — any point — at issue. The appeal to history is unaccompanied by any reference to what historians actually say about work in medieval Europe. These peasants were working to support the cities Bookchin celebrates, as well as a parasitic nobility and church. Even so, how many weeks of work a year did Englishmen devote to subsistence in 1495? Ten![149] Marxist that he is, Bookchin should remember that Paul Lafargue in The Right to Be Lazy wrote that 25% of the pre-industrial French peasant’s calendar consisted of work-free Sundays and holidays.[150] Family celebrations such as betrothals, weddings and funerals subtracted another day from work in a typical month.[151] But, for peasants as for foragers — although to a lesser degree — simply counting days of work and days of leisure understates the superior quality of low-energy modes of production for the direct producers. “The recreational activities of the Middle Ages,” writes historian Keith Thomas, “recall the old primitive confusion as to where work ended and leisure began.”[152]

Foraging as Egalitarian Communism

This is the one aspect of forager society which Bookchin even now accepts and approves of. The revisionists have not gone very far in dispelling this conception, to which both Marx and Kropotkin subscribed: they have just identified a few more exceptions to the general rule of equality and food-sharing. The mode of production in bands, tribes, and some chiefdoms is precisely the “primitive communism” of which Marx and Kropotkin wrote.[153] Usually, as I pointed out in Anarchy after Leftism, it is the sedentary hunter-gatherers who may (but often do not) develop some social stratification, as did the Northwest Coast Indians with permanent villages adjoining salmon runs in which property rights were recognized. Their anarchy is a borderline case.[154]

It’s not impossible, however — just extremely rare — for even nomadic hunter-gatherers to distribute wealth unequally or assert ownership rights to the means of production. A 19^th century example is the Tutchone, a nomadic Athapaskan Indian people in the Yukon. Despite their general poverty, they allocated food resources unequally and even maintained a form of domestic slavery, allegedly without borrowing these practices from other stratified societies. In SALA, Bookchin cited another aberrant, pathological example, the Yuqui — all 43 of them.[155] But that’s just “the ‘not-so-in-Bongobongoland’ style of argument.” Probably all South American foragers, including the miserable Yuqui, are devolved from more complex societies destroyed by European contact.[156] That was not an issue in prehistoric times. If forager egalitarianism is not universal, it almost is, and every other form of society departs from equality to the extent of its greater complexity.

To seriously challenge the thesis of forager egalitarianism, the revisionists would have to find inequality among the many foraging peoples where ethnographers have hitherto found equality. So far as I know, the only revisionist to make such a claim is Edwin Wilmsen in Land Filled with Flies. His provocative example is, improbably, the San. Wilmsen asserts that “meat sharing — the putative sine qua non of San egalitarianism — is thoroughly controlled to meet the political ends of the distributors.”[157] There are several difficulties here. The distributor of meat (the owner of the arrow which killed the animal) has no political ends, for the San are anarchists. What he does have is expectations to satisfy which are determined mainly by kinship. To infer inequality from this is a non sequitur, for few if any San are entirely without family and friends at a campsite: “virtually all members in a band are directly or indirectly related to a core member and thus have free access to the area’s resources.”[158] San principles of food-sharing priorities do not mathematically guarantee absolute distributive equality, but in practice they approximate it. The same has been said of another foraging people, the Paliyans: they do not achieve perfect equality, “but they come closer to doing so than most social philosophers dare dream of.”[159] Generally, hunter-gatherer societies represent “the closest approximation to equality known in any human societies.”[160]

However, even arguments at this modest level of sophistication are unnecessary to dispose of Wilmsen’s example — for that’s all it is: a single “anecdote” (his word) about a San who complained of receiving no meat from a band in which she had no relatives. Even that sounds fishy, or at least nontraditional, because the practice is that everyone in camp gets some meat, and some of it (not the choicest cuts) is shared with non-relatives.[161] Probably she just got less than she wanted. These San are, in fact, nontraditional. They are not foragers, they are pastoralists who hunt, part-time, from horseback, and partly with rifles.[162]

Wilmsen’s claim for class distinctions among foraging San is his “most contentious,” overstated, and least accepted proposition.[163] Several anthropologists, even Wilmsen’s main target Richard B. Lee, credit Wilmsen with placing emphasis on the historical dimension of San studies, but they contest the findings of his fieldwork, which commenced only in 1973, as “so at odds with previous works that it is impossible to reconcile one’s prior knowledge of the Kalahari with what Wilmsen presents.”[164] Even a fellow revisionist like Thomas Headland, in a review which Bookchin cites approvingly, concludes that “one can be generally convinced by Wilmsen’s account of outside influence in the Kalahari desert while being troubled by his complete rejection of earlier portraits of the !Kung.”[165]

Wilmsen’s embrace of history (and archaeology, his specialty[166]) at the expense of ethnography looks like sour grapes. He arrived in the field in 1973,[167] too late to study viable San foragers, as Marshall, Lee, Howell, Tanaka, Shostack and others had done. Instead, he rummaged the archives to prove that there’d never been any such foragers, only the same impoverished underclass he found in the 1970s. But Marjorie Shostack observed rapid change from 1969 onwards.[168] Susan Kent, another anthropologist who has studied the San, surely had Wilmsen in mind when she wrote: “For people not experiencing such rapid change, it sometimes is difficult to conceive that it can occur so quickly. Some researchers are consequently skeptical about descriptions of a people they know today that were written only a decade ago.”[169]

Still another of Wilmsen’s reviewers notes that “page after page denounces Richard Lee and a host of other ethnographers with unnecessary stings, while some other pages rely on the findings of these very scholars.”[170] Murray Bookchin is right to recognize in Wilmsen a kindred spirit, another lawyer trapped in the body of a scholar, except that Bookchin isn’t even a scholar. “Scholarship,” noticed one of Bookchin’s rare scholarly reviewers, “is not his point, or his achievement,” and his “method is to ransack world history — more or less at random” for examples that seem to support his position.[171] Bookchin relies on Wilmsen in exactly the opportunistic way Wilmsen relies on Lee “and a host of other ethnographers,” grabbing whatever sounds like support for an advocacy position, and never mind what it really means or the context or the rest of the story. When lawyers pillage history this way, historians refer to the result contemptuously as “law-office history.”[172] Bookchin writes law-office history, law-office anthropology, and law-office philosophy, which is to say, pseudo-history, pseudo-anthropology, and pseudo-philosophy.

Foraging as the Good Life.

By the catchall phrase “the good life” I refer to various further features of foraging society which are significant for what I can only refer to, vaguely at the outset, as the quality of life. Necessarily, interpretation and value judgments enter into the assessment of this dimension even more openly than in the assessment of the first three, but just as necessarily there is no avoiding them in a full appraisal. Viable anarcho-communist societies naturally interest anarchists, but if hunter-gatherers enjoy little more than the freedom to suffer, and equality in poverty, their example is not very inspiring. If that is all that anarchy offers, anarchism has no appeal except to the fanatic few. Abundance and good health, for instance, may not be supreme values, but values they are. If they are too lacking for too long, the widest liberty, equality and fraternity lose their savor. But for foragers, the price of liberty, equality and fraternity is not nearly so high.

When Marshall Sahlins characterized hunter-gatherers as the original affluent society, he meant to make several points. One I have already dealt with: relatively short working time. The other, which has always attracted more attention, is the contention that foragers typically enjoy a food supply not only abundant but reliable. They do not work very much because they have no need to work any longer or any harder in order to have all that they want to consume. They do not store much food or for long, partly for lack of the requisite technology, but fundamentally because of their confidence that they can always go out and get some more. Instead of the desperate preoccupation with survival which Bookchin attributes to them, the foragers’ attitude toward the quest for subsistence, is, as Sahlins says, one of “nonchalance.”[173]

As everyone acknowledges — Watson and I included[174] — although abundance is the norm among contemporary hunter-gatherers, they may go hungry occasionally. There’s a two-month period of the year, for instance, in which San food intake declines. That does not validate the Hobbesian view, which is exactly the opposite: that for foragers, hunger is the norm. Lee and demographer Nancy Howell measured a 1% to 2% loss in San body weight during the low point, “far short of [the] 4 to 6.5 percent average loss observed among agriculturists.”[175] And although saying so incenses the easily irked Director Emeritus, it is obviously relevant to the primitive-affluence thesis that in prehistoric times, foragers had all the world’s habitats to enjoy, not just the marginal wastes to which contemporary foragers are relegated by civilized techno-violence. It is reasonable to infer that when foragers had the whole world to themselves, they enjoyed even greater ease and affluence, the material base of their successful anarchy.[176] I daresay that more Americans than foragers will go to bed hungry tonight.

The world of the foragers is not, any more than ours is, absolutely secure. Such words as “paradise” and “edenic” are never used by anthropologists and not often used, and then usually metaphorically, by anarcho-primitivists. It is their critics, above all Bookchin, who put these words in their mouths, compounding the deception by putting these nonexistent quotations in quotation marks — a Bookchin abuse I targeted in Anarchy after Leftism but which the Director Emeritus now indulges in more recklessly than ever.[177] Like Bookchin, but unlike a fine wine, it has not improved with age. Inverted commas are a “stylistic tic” with which, as Bookchin does, “‘trendy lefties’ make quotation mark signs in the air at every third word.” As Karl Kraus wrote: “It is a pitiful form of mockery that expends itself in punctuation — employing exclamation marks, question marks, and dashes as if they were whips, snares, and goads.”[178] As John Zerzan says, “you see pretty much everything in quotes when you look at postmodern writing. So it’s a lot of irony, of course.”[179]

For Bookchin, the world of ideas is a fragile and fearful place. If an idea is wrong, it is counter-revolutionary, and vise versa. That is why it never occurs to him that any of the ideas he assails, even if his criticisms are cogent, are just trivial. To be wrong about Goya or Taoism is as calamitous as being wrong about liberatory industrial technology or the polis as human destiny. Every error, no matter how seemingly remote from political practice, is even more catastrophic than every other error, and they all form one vast, malignant pattern. To believe (as all reflective scientists do) that there are no definitive explanations — no one could “have formulated a more disastrous notion”! As usual, the Director Emeritus blames Nietzsche and the Post-Modernists for a point of view with multiple origins, among them Pragmatism, which has prevailed among scientists for a century. At one time he admitted himself that there are no “brute facts” independent of interpretation.[180] What practical difference does it make if one upholds an absolutist or, as scientists do, a probabilistic conception of knowledge? Practicality be damned when the soul is in peril.

And that is also why he calls everything he opposes “bourgeois,” as the term seems to explain and justify a range of rejections which would otherwise look arbitrary and idiosyncratic. In his Stalinist youth, the Director Emeritus learned how to say that whatever the Communist Party opposed that week was “objectively counterrevolutionary.” As that expression has acquired notoriety, Bookchin turns to “bourgeois” as a substitute. He never explains what is bourgeois about this or that hobby-horse because there is never any social basis to refer to. When he says that “primitivism is precisely the privilege of affluent urbanites,” he lies, because he knows that John Zerzan, for instance, is not affluent, and neither are many other primitivists.[181] He never explains how astrology, deep ecology, Temporary Autonomous Zones, situationist theory, Taoism, and the primitive-affluence thesis serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie.

When the ex-Director ventures an explanation, as with Taoism and the situationists, it is that the offending idea promotes passivity and indifference to the “political sphere,” in other words, it deprives him of cadre. But that would not make situationists and Taoists bourgeois, nor alter the reality that the political sphere is overwhelmingly bourgeois. The passivity thesis founders on familiar facts. Over 90% of Americans believe in God[182] — and this is not something new in the period of social reaction — yet the Religious Right surpasses all other interest groups in political activism. Taoism is supposed to induce political quietism, yet John P. Clark is rather too active politically to suit the Director Emeritus.[183] To speak of the situationists as politically quiescent is belied by their activity in Paris in May-June 1968, when Bookchin was in New York waiting out the general strike (see Appendix).[184]

As often as not, it is Bookchin’s ideology which is the more plausible candidate for reinforcing the status quo. “The town meeting ideal,” states a political scientist who does not mean to be critical, “plainly touches something very close to the heart of the dominant ideology.”[185] To be pro-technology is to remove a basis for opposing those who own the technology and what they do with it. Technology may be liberatory potentially, but that does not trouble the capitalists so long as it is profitable actually. “Potentially” may never come and, after all, it never has. To be pro-electoral reproduces the representative system at all levels, not just the one not abstained from, and diverts oppositional forces from direct action. To criticize all other anarchists who differ even somewhat from oneself in goals and methods as delusional or vicious is to split the movement, which is exactly what the Director Emeritus is trying to do, since he cannot hope to place himself at its head. The Greens would not rally behind his leadership and, with uncharacteristic realism, Bookchin has finally figured out that neither would the anarchists. In appearance, the Director Emeritus is an anarchist; in essence, he is a Trotskyist.

It makes no sense to suggest that the myth of the Noble Savage benefits the bourgeoisie. Today, as in the 18^th century, the principal political use of the myth is to criticize civilized society (a function to which it was put by Diderot, Rousseau and others who made explicit that they did not call for a return to primitive ways). Primitive society is actually primitive communism, and, “obviously, the concept is out of step with bourgeois ideology. Bourgeois ideology would have us believe that primitive communism does not exist. In popular consciousness it is lumped with romanticism, exoticism: the noble savage... There is a considerable industry in anthropology, and especially pop anthropology, to show the primitive as a Hobbesian being — with a life that is ‘nasty, brutish and short.’ In the current climate of opinion in the West, no one is going to go broke by appealing to the cynicism and sophistication of the intellectual in late capitalism” (Richard B. Lee).[186]