John Moore: On the Contrary Response to Ron Leighton (This was one of several replies to Ron Leighton's Open Letter on Technology and Mediation.) This is indeed a serious question and deserves serious consideration. In a sense, however, the question of using or not using technology to propagate anti-tech views is a false question. Like everyone else, anarchists are to some degree complicit with the system which oppresses, coerces and exploits them. In part, this is why anarchists want to abolish this system: in order to overcome this enforced complicity. Now, perhaps with the exception of some US libertarians, I would guess that all anarchists are against money and the money economy. And yet all of them are forced to make use of money. Indeed, anarcho-bandits such as the Bonnot gang risked and lost their lives trying to steal it! And while anarchists might bemoan the fact that they, like everyone else, are constrained to make use of money, even to further their ends, they do so. And that remains the case, regardless of whether they work for that money, steal it, or filch it from the State in the form of benefits. Actually, a similar situation appertains with reference to the State. It's true that anarchists do not participate in electoral rituals or rely on assistance from the State, for to do so would be to affirm, and affirm over and against one's self, one of the major institutions which manages social oppression. On the contrary, due to the State's coercive power, anarchists work for its abolition through revolutionary insurgency. But in doing so, they make use of some of its resources and its apparatuses. And, mutatis mutandis, the same can be said for Capital. Let's face it, in the world that we currently inhabit, most resources are owned, controlled and managed by State and Capital. Our lives are organised by these forces, whether we like it or not -- and we don't, which is one reason why we're anarchists! But is that any reason why we shouldn't make use of those resources? We would be in an even worse situation if we didn't. So, for example, if you make use of a library, you're using a resource created, maintained and funded by the State (through local government, maybe) or Capital (through grants and foundations, for example). Does this mean that anarchists shouldn't use libraries? Or that anarchists are hypocrites because they advocate the abolition of State and Capital and yet use the resources of State and Capital to attain that goal? I don't think so. It's just that in the current social situation, they are to some extent forced to make use of institutions of which they disapprove in order to further their projects. And in an integrated system such as post-industrial society, the web of power is cast very wide and deep, and thus all kind of complicities are unavoidable. This brings me on to the question of technology. On the surface, there appears to be a contradiction in the anarchist use of technology to propagate anti-tech views, and therefore an unacknowledged hypocrisy. But is this any more of a contradiction than the anarchist use of money or selective usage of State and Capital institutions? The questions that needs to be asked of those who raise the question of anti-tech perspectives and technological media are: Why are you so obsessed with this particular instance of enforced anarchist complicity with the system anarchists seek to abolish? Why do you fetishisise and prioritise just this one instance of complicity? The answer to such questions might point to the apparent discrepancy between means and ends: anti-tech anarchists propose a world free of technological domination and alienation and thus one that will be based on the immediacy of face-to-face communication, and yet use technological media - the very acme of pseudo-communication - to disseminate their perspectives! My response to such a line of argument would be to say: But isn't that just the point? In a world of separation and non-communication, in the mass society of alienation and division, isn't the use of such technological media to contact others and disseminate information appalling but inevitable -- at least at this stage in the struggle? The fact that anarchists have to resort to these means - "resort" in the sense of having to demean themselves to this level - is in itself a profound indictment of the mass society in which we live. And not, I stress, an indictment of anarchists' failure of imagination. We live in a world of contradictions. That's the nature of a society based on power and power relations. If we're to come to grips with transforming this world in a revolutionary anarchist fashion, then we'd better get used, not to living with those contradictions, but to striving with and against them, and make sure that we make the optimal use of our creative capacities to overcome them. The anarchist condition, in the world of power, is one of living out lives of creative contradiction. And, uncomfortable as it may feel, that creative contradiction - that tension - remains the source for all our insurgency. From Insurgent Desire Back to contents