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Title: Anarchy & Alcohol Author: CrimethInc. Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: alcoholism, sobriety, Inside Front, anti-civ, anarcho-primitivism Source: Retrieved on 9th November 2020 from https://crimethinc.com/zines/anarchy-and-alcohol Notes: Essays originally appeared as sympathetic but firm cultural analysis and comic relief in the reunion issue of Inside Front, an international journal of hardcore punk and anarchist action, published by CrimethInc. ex-Workers Collective in 2003.
Peering through the fog behind his eyes, he saw an alcohologram: a world
of anguish, in which intoxication was the only escape. Hating himself
even more than he hated the corporate killers who had created it, he
stumbled to his feet and headed back to the liquor store.
Ensconced in their penthouses, they counted the dollars pouring in from
millions like him, and chuckled to themselves at the ease with which all
opposition was crushed. But they, too,often had to drink themselves to
sleep at night – if ever those vanquished masses stop coming back for
more, the tycoons sometimes fretted to themselves, there’s gonna be hell
to pay.
anarchaholism?
Sloshed, smashed, trashed, loaded, wrecked, wasted, blasted, plastered,
tanked, fucked up, bombed. Everyone’s heard of the arctic people with
one hundred words for snow; we have one hundred words for drunk.
We perpetuate our own culture of defeat.
Hold it right there – I can see the sneer on your face: Are these
anarchists so uptight that they would even denounce the only fun aspect
of anarchism – the beer after the riots, the liquor in the pub where all
that pie-in-the-sky theory is bandied about? What do they do for fun,
anyway – cast aspersions on the little fun we do have? Don’t we get to
relax and have a good time in any part of our lives?
Do not misunderstand us: we are not arguing against indulgence, but for
it. Ambrose Bierce defined an ascetic as “a weak person who succumbs to
the tempta-tion of denying himself pleasure,” and we concur. As Chuck
Baudelaire wrote, you must always be high – everything depends on this.
So we are not against drunkenness, but rather against drink! For those
who embrace drink as a route to drunkenness thus cheat themselves of a
total life of enchantment.
Drink, like caffeine or sugar in the body, only plays a role in life
that life itself can provide for otherwise. The woman who never drinks
coffee does not require it in the morning when she awakens: her body
produces energy and focus on its own, as thousands of generations of
evolution have prepared it to do. If she drinks coffee regularly, soon
her body lets the coffee take over that role, and she becomes dependent
upon it. Thus does alcohol artificially provide for temporary moments of
relaxation and release while impoverishing life of all that is genuinely
restful and liberating.
If some sober people in this society do not seem as reckless and free as
their boozer counterparts, that is a mere accident of culture, mere
circumstantial evi-dence. Those puritans exist all the same in the world
drained of all magic and ge-nius by the alcoholism of their fellows (and
the capitalism, hierarchy, misery it helps maintain) – the only
difference is that they are so self-abnegating as to refuse even the
false magic, the genie of the bottle. But other “sober” folk, whose
orientation to living might better be described as enchanted or
ecstatic, are plentiful, if you look hard enough. For these individuals
– for us – life is a constant celebration, one which needs no
augmentation and from which we need no respite.
Alcohol, like Prozac and all the other mind-control medications that are
making big bucks for Big Brother these days, substitutes symptomatic
treatment for cure. It takes away the pain of a dull, drab existence for
a few hours at best, then returns it twofold. It not only replaces
positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency
– it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and
recovering from the drunken state. Like the tourism of the worker, drink
is a pressure valve that releases tension while maintaining the system
that creates it.
In this push-button culture, we’ve become used to conceiving of
ourselves as simple machines to be operated: add the appropriate
chemical to the equation to get the desired result. In our search for
health, happiness, meaning in life, we run from one panacea to the next
– Viagra, vitamin C, vodka – instead of approaching our lives
holistically and addressing our problems at their social and economic
roots. This product-oriented mindset is the foundation of our alienated
consumer society: without consuming products, we can’t live! We try to
buy relaxation, community, self-confidence – now even ecstasy comes in a
pill!
We want ecstasy as a way of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from
it. “Life sucks – get drunk” is the essence of the argument that enters
our ears from our masters’ tongues and then passes out of our own
slurring mouths, perpetuating whatever incidental and unnecessary truths
it may refer to – but we’re not falling for it any longer! Against
inebriation – and for drunkenness! Burn down the liquor stores, and
replace them with playgrounds!
Practically every child in mainstream Western society grows up with
alcohol as the forbidden fruit their parents or peers indulge in but
deny to them. This prohibi-tion only makes drinking that much more
fascinating to young people, and when they get the opportunity, most
immediately assert their independence by doing exactly as they’ve been
told not to: ironically, they rebel by following the example set for
them. This hypocritical pattern is standard for child-rearing in this
society, and works to replicate a number of destructive behaviors that
otherwise would be aggressively refused by new generations. The fact
that the bogus morality of many drinking parents is mirrored in the
sanctimonious practice of religious groups helps to create a false
dichotomy between puritanical self-denial and life-loving, free-wheeling
drinkers – with “friends” like Baptist ministers, we teetotalers wonder,
who needs enemies?
These partisans of Rebellious Drunkenness and advocates of Responsible
Abstinence are loyal adversaries. The former need the latter to make
their dismal rituals look like fun; the latter need the former to make
their rigid austerity seem like common sense. An “ecstatic sobriety”
which combats the dreariness of one and the bleariness of the other –
false pleasure and false discretion alike – is analogous to the
anarchism that confronts both the false freedom offered by capitalism
and the false community offered by communism.
Let’s lay it on the table: almost all of us are coming from a place
where our sexuality is or was occupied territory. We’ve been raped,
abused, assaulted, shamed, silenced, confused, constructed, programmed.
We’re badasses, and we’re taking it all back, reclaiming ourselves; but
for most of us, that’s a slow, complex, not yet concluded process.
This doesn’t mean we can’t have good, safe, supportive sex right now, in
the middle of that healing – but it does make having that sex a little
more complicated. To be certain we’re not perpetuating or helping to
perpetuate negative patterns in a lover’s life, we have to be able to
communicate clearly and honestly before things get hot and heavy – and
while they are, and after. Few forces interfere with this communication
like alcohol does. In this culture of denial, we are encouraged to use
it as a social lubricant to help us slip past our inhibitions; all too
often, this simply means ignoring our own fears and scars, and not
asking about others’. If it is dangerous, as well as beautiful, for us
to share sex with each other sober, how much more dangerous must it be
to do so drunk, reckless, and incoherent?
¶ Speaking of sex, it’s worth noting the supporting role alcohol has
played in patriarchal gender dynamics. For example – in how many nuclear
families has alcoholism helped to maintain an unequal distribution of
power and pressure? (All the writers of this tract can call to mind more
than one such case among their relatives alone.) The man’s drunken
self-destruction, engendered as it may be by the horrors of surviving
under capitalism, imposes even more of a burden on the woman, who must
still somehow hold the family together – often in the face of his
violence. And on the subject of dynamics ...
“Every fucking anarchist project I engage in is ruined or nearly ruined
by alcohol. You set up a collective living situation and everyone is too
drunk or stoned to do the basic chores, let alone maintain an attitude
of respect. You want to create community, but after the show everyone
just goes back to their rooms and drinks themselves to death. If it’s
not one substance to abuse it’s a motherfucking other. I understand
trying to obliterate your consciousness is a natural reaction to being
born in alienating capitalist hell, but I want people to see what we
anarchists are doing and say “Yeah, this is better than
capitalism!”...which is hard to say if you can’t walk around without
step-ping on broken forty-ounce bottles. I’ve never considered myself
straight-edge, but fuck it, I’m not taking it anymore!”
It’s said that when the renowned anarchist Oscar Wilde first heard the
old slogan if it is humiliating to be ruled, how much more humiliating
it is to choose one’s rulers, he responded: “If it’s humiliating to
choose one’s masters, how much more humiliating to be one’s own master!”
He intended this as a critique of hierarchies within the self as well as
the democratic state, of course – but, sadly, his quip could be applied
literally to the way some of our attempts at creating anarchist
environments pan out in practice. This is especially true when they’re
carried out by drunk people.
In certain circles, especially the ones in which the word “anarchy”
itself is more in fashion than any of its various meanings, freedom is
conceived of in negative terms: “don’t tell me what to do!” In practice,
this often means nothing more than an assertion of the individual’s
right to be lazy, selfish, unaccountable for his actions or lack
thereof. In such contexts, when a group agrees upon a project it often
ends up being a small, responsible minority that has to do all the work
to make it hap-pen. These conscientious few often look like the
autocratic ones – when, invisibly, it is the apathy and hostility of
their comrades that forces them to adopt this role. Being drunk and
disorderly all the time is coercive – it compels others to clean up
after you, to think clearly when you won’t, to absorb the stress
generated by your behavior when you are too fucked up for dialogue.
These dynamics go two ways, of course – those who take all
responsibility on their shoulders perpetuate a pattern in which everyone
else takes none – but everyone is responsible for their own part in such
patterns, and for transcending it.
Think of the power we could have if all the energy and effort in the
world – or maybe even just your energy and effort? – that goes into
drinking were put into resisting, building, creating. Try adding up all
the money anarchists in your community have spent on corporate
libations, and picture how much musical equipment or bail money or food
(-not-bombs ... or, fuck it, bombs!) it could have paid for – instead of
funding their war against all of us. Better: imagine living in a world
where cokehead presidents die of overdoses while radical musicians and
rebels live the chaos into ripe old age!
Like any lifestyle choice, be it vagabondage or union membership,
abstention from alcohol can sometimes be mistaken as an end rather than
a means.
Above all, it is critical that our own choices not be a pretext for us
to deem our-selves superior to those who make different decisions. The
only strategy for sharing good ideas that succeeds unfailingly (and that
goes for hotheaded, alienating tracts like this one as well!) is the
power of example – if you put “ecstatic sobriety” into action in your
life and it works, those who sincerely want similar things will join in.
Passing judgment on others for decisions that affect only themselves is
absolutely noxious to any anarchist – not to mention it makes them less
likely to experiment with the options you offer.
And so – the question of solidarity and community with anarchists and
others who do use alcohol and drugs. We propose that these are of utmost
importance. Especially in the case of those who are struggling to free
themselves of unwanted ad-dictions, such solidarity is paramount:
Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is just one more instance of a
quasi-religious organization filling a social need that should already
be provided for by anarchist community self-organizing. As in every
case, we anarchists must ask ourselves: do we take our positions simply
to feel superior to the unwashed (er, washed) masses – or because we
sincerely want to propagate accessible alternatives? Besides, most of us
who are not substance-addicted can thank our privileges and good fortune
for this; this gives us all the more responsibility to be good allies to
those who have not had such privileges or luck – on whatever terms they
set. Let tolerance, humility, accessibility, and sensitivity be the
qualities we nurture in ourselves, not self-righteousness or pride. No
separatist sobriety!
So anyway – what are we going to do if we don’t go to bars, hang out at
parties, sit on the steps or in front of the television with our
forty-ounce bottles? Anything else!
The social impact of our society’s fixation on alcohol is at least as
important as its mental, medical, economic, and emotional effects.
Drinking standardizes our social lives, occupying some of the eight
waking hours a day that aren’t already colonized by work. It locates us
spatially – living rooms, cocktail lounges, railroad tracks – and
contextually – in ritualized, predictable behaviors – in ways more
explicit systems of control never could. Often when one of us does
manage to escape the role of worker/consumer, drinking is there,
stubborn holdover from our colonized leisure time, to fill up the
promising space that opens. Free from these routines, we could discover
other ways to spend time and energy and seek pleasure, ways that could
prove dangerous to the system of alienation itself.
Drink can incidentally be part of positive and challenging social
interactions, of course – the problem is that its central role in
current socializing and socialization misrepresents it as the
prerequisite for such intercourse. This obscures the fact that we can
create such interactions at will with nothing more than our own
creativity, honesty, and daring. Indeed, without these, nothing of value
is possible – have you ever been to a bad party? – and with them, no
alcohol is necessary.
When one or two persons cease to drink, it just seems senseless, like
they are ejecting themselves from the company (or at least customs) of
their fellow human beings for nothing. But a community of such people
can develop a radical culture of sober adventure and engagement, one
that could eventually offer exciting opportunities for drink-free
activity and merriment for all. Yesterday’s geeks and loners could be
the pioneers of tomorrow’s new world: “lucid bacchanalism” is a new
horizon, a new possibility for transgression and transformation that
could provide fertile soil for revolts yet unimaginable. Like any
revolutionary lifestyle option, this one offers an immediate taste of
another world while helping create a context for actions that hasten its
universal realization.
us brew nothing but trouble!
With any luck, you’ve been able to discern – even, perhaps, through that
haze of drunken stupor – that this is as much a caricature of polemics
in the anarchist tradition as a serious piece. It’s worth pointing out
that these polemics have often brought attention to their theses by
deliberately taking an extreme position, thereby opening up the ground
in between for more “moderate” positions on the subject. Hopefully you
can draw useful insights of your own from your interpretations of this
text, rather than taking it as gospel or anathema.
And all this is not to say there are no fools who refuse intoxication –
but can you imagine how much more insufferable they would be if they did
not? The boring would still be boring, only louder about it; the
self-righteous ones would continue to lambaste and harangue, while
spitting and drooling on their victims! It is an almost universal
characteristic of drinkers that they encourage everyone around them to
drink, that – barring those hypocritical power-plays between lovers or
parents and children, at least – they prefer their own choices to be
reflected in the choices of all. This strikes us as indicating a
monumental insecurity, not unrelated to the insecurity revealed by
ideologues and recruiters of every stripe from Christian to Marxist to
anarchist who feel they cannot rest until everyone in the world sees
that world exactly as they do. As you read, try to fight off that
insecurity – and try not to read this as an expression of our own,
either, but rather, in the tradition of the best anarchist works, as a
reminder for all who choose to concern themselves that another world is
possible.
As in the case of every CrimethInc. text, this one only represents the
perspectives of whoever agrees with it at the time, not the “entire
CrimethInc. ex-Workers’ Collective” or any other abstract mass. Somebody
who does important work under the CrimethInc. moniker is probably
getting sloshed at the moment I’m typing this – and that’s ok!
civilized
Against Alcoholocaust!
The history of civilization is the history of beer. In every era and
area untouched by civilization, there has been no beer; conversely,
virtually everywhere civilization has struck, beer has arrived with it.
Civilization – that is to say, hierarchical social structures and
consequent relationships of competition, unbridled technological
development, and universal alienation – seems to be inextricably linked
to alcohol. Our sages, who look back and ahead through time to see
beyond the limits of such pernicious culture, tell a parable about our
past to explain this link:
Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the
inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the
land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from
nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to
the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why
would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all
the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic
foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for
something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are
anthropolo-gists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate
themselves did so in order to brew beer.
This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have
shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these
“primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive
relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them
both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal
of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around
them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of
drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this
situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters,
overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were
carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople.
Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted,
it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus,
under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was
conceived.
Such a pathetic way of life could not have been appealing to the peoples
who neighbored the aboriginal alcoholic agriculturists; but as every
historian knows, the spread of civilization was anything but voluntary.
Lacking the manners and gentleness of their former companions in the
wild, these savages, in their drunken excesses and infringements, must
have provoked a series of wars – wars which, sadly, the lushes were able
to win, owing to the military efficiency of their autocratic armies and
the steady supply of food their subjugated farmlands provided. Even
these advantages would not have been enough, if the brutes hadn’t had a
secret weapon in their possession: alcohol itself. Adversaries who would
otherwise have held their own on the field of battle indefinitely fell
before the cultural onslaught of drunken debauchery and addiction, when
trade – one of the inventions of the agriculturists, who also became the
first misers, the first merchants – brought this poison into their
midst. A pattern of conflict, addiction, defeat, and assimilation was
set in motion, one which can be traced throughout history from the
cradle of civilization through the Roman wars for Empire to the
holocaust perpetrated upon the natives of the New World by the murderous
European colonists.
But this is just a story, speculation. Let’s consult the history books
(reading be-tween the lines where we must, as these books come down to
us from yesteryear’s conquering killers and their obedient slaves ...
that is, historians!) to see if it lines up with the evidence. We’ll
start in the early years of agriculture, when the first tribes settled
down – in the fertile lands around rivers, where wheat and barley were
easy to grow and ferment in mass quantities.
Enkidu, a shaggy, unkempt, almost bestial primitive man, who ate grass
and could milk wild animals, wanted to test his strength against
Gilgamesh, the god-king. Gilgamesh sent a prostitute to Enkidu to learn
of his strengths and weaknesses. Enkidu enjoyed a week with her during
which she taught him of civilization. Enkidu knew not what bread was,
nor had he learned to drink beer. She spoke unto Enkidu: “Eat the bread
now, it belongs to life. Drink also beer, as it is the custom of the
land.” Enkidu drank seven cups of beer and his heart soared. In this
condition he washed himself and became a civilized being.
– The first written narrative of civilization, the Epic of Gilgamesh
written in 3000 bc, describes the domestication of Enkidu the Primitive
by means of beer.
The oldest authenticated records of brewing were fashioned over 6000
years ago in Sumer, the oldest of human civilizations. Sumer also had
the first known state-organized religion, and the official “divine
drink” of this religion was beer brewed by priestesses of Ninkasi, the
Sumerian goddess of alcohol. The hymns of Ninkasi were brewing
instructions! The first collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi of
Babylon, decreed a daily beer ration in direct proportion to social
status: beer consumption went hand-in-hand with hierarchy. For example,
workers received two liters while besotted priests and kings got five.
[For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself how much alcohol –
and of what grade – you get now, and what that says about your position
in society.] Historians pondering the primacy of alcohol in these
ancient lawbooks have even conjectured that the original function of
hierarchy was to permit some men to hoard mass amounts of alcohol while
ensuring that a sufficient labor force – pacified by their meager
alcohol rations to discourage revolt or escape – was always at hand to
keep farming and brewing. Kings used golden drinking straws to sip from
giant containers of beer, a tradition that has been preserved in plastic
throughout the Western world. The pivotal role of alcohol in this first
hierarchy is easy to recognize, even from a cursory reading of these
records: as in every authoritarian regime, “justice” was a cardinal
concern, and the punishment decreed for all who violated any of the laws
governing beer was death by drowning.
Though it was yet newly-invented, beer influenced every single facet of
emerging human civilization. Before the invention of money, beer was
used as the standard item of barter – a money before money! In Ancient
Egypt, a keg of beer was the only proper gift to offer to the Pharaoh
when proposing marriage to his daughter, and kegs of beer were
sacrificed to the gods when the Nile overflowed. As civiliza-tion
spread, so did beer. Even in regions as remote as Finland, beer played a
crucial role from the moment civilization struck: the Kalevala, the
ancient Finnish epic poem, had twice as many verses devoted to beer than
to the creation of the earth. Brewing could be found wherever
civilization was, from the rudimentary villages of German barbarians to
the god-emperors of ancient China. Only those human beings that still
lived in harmony with wilderness, such as the indigenous peoples of
North America and some sectors of Africa, remained alcohol-free – for a
time.
The “classical civilizations” of Greece and Rome were as soaked in
alcohol as they were in blood – the entire ancient world was lost in a
collective hangover. This must have helped the nobles and philosophers
to gloss over the fact that their “enlightened democracy” was based on
the subjection of women and masses of slaves. The greatest work of
“classical” literature, the Symposium, details a drinking party starring
Socrates, whose claim-to-fame as a philosopher was augmented by his
inhumanly high tolerance for alcohol. Studying his glorifications of the
abstract over the real – provided these weren’t falsely attributed to
him by his mendacious pupil, Plato – one can still catch a whiff of the
sour breath of a drunk.
In life be I called Gambrinus, King of Flanders and Brabant, who first
have made malt from barley and so conceived of the brewing of beer.
Hence, the brewers can say they have a king as the first master brewer.
– The patron saint of beer was a monarch, of course.
The Roman Empire finally collapsed, as all empires eventually do
(including this one, damn it!), after a generations-long drunken orgy of
decadence and degeneration. The two most influential survivors were beer
and Christianity. Brewing had once been the domain of women – but with
the rise of the Catholic Church the monastic orders seized that domain
for themselves, destroying one of the last bastions of primal
matriarchy. Monks, wasting away in prayer, relied upon the drink to ease
their miserable religious fasting – and so, not surprisingly, the
consumption of beer was not considered a violation of their vows of
non-consumption. Beer consumption in monasteries reached unheard-of
levels, as monks were allowed to consume up to five liters of beer a
day. Both the popes and early emperors such as Charlemagne would
personally supervise the brewing process, hoping to create the perfect
drink to obliterate both their consciousness and the consciousness of
their subjects.
The birth of capitalism and the nation-state began with the
commercializa-tion of beer. The monasteries, overflowing with more beer
than they themselves could consume, began to sell it to the surrounding
villages. Monasteries doubled by night as pubs, and these men of God
created some of the first well-managed profit-making enterprises. With
the weakening of the power of the Church and the rise of the modern
nation-state, kings and dukes moved in to close the tax-exempt
monasteries. They began licensing out brewing to the rising merchant
class, imposing a heavy tax that hastened the centralization of power
and wealth in these nations. Beer became the focus of every night and
the mainstay of every celebration. Christmas “Yuletide,” for example,
derives from “Ale tide.” To pacify women on their wedding night, an
extra-potent “Bride Ale” was made, and so our word bridal. Everywhere
the triumph of drunkenness, everywhere the triumph of God and State.
Herewith shall brewers and others not use anything other than malt,
hops, and water. These same brewers also shall not add anything when
serving or otherwise handling beer, upon penalty of death.
– Beer Purity & Eugenics Laws of Bayers-Landshut
While the monasteries were commercializing beer and the nation-state
thriving off it, a secret sisterhood of brewers remained in the peasant
villages, fermenting strange and miraculous drinks for the poor and
excluded of medieval society. These “witches” would ferment juniper
berries, sweet gale, blackthorn, anise, yarrow, rose-mary, wormwood,
pine roots, henbane – each with effects unique and potent. For example,
while drinks based off the “vile weed” hops were sedatives, many other
fermented drinks would heal the sick, calm the angry, and give hope to
the hopeless. Peasants would gather in their villages and drink sacred
drinks brewed with yeast their grandmothers had passed down through
generations. As they consorted and consumed these wild and varied
drinks, all the degradations the priests and kings had heaped upon them
would rise to their consciousness, and they would rise in revolt against
their rulers. As these revolts were especially frequent and ferocious in
the Holy Roman Empire, the various German nobles conspired to destroy
the cultures that nourished them. The Duke of Bavaria, Wilhelm iv,
passed the Beer Purity Act to quash all subversive diversity of
fermentation. From 1516 onwards, beer was to be brewed only with the
sedative hops: henceforth all alcohol was homogenized, and whatever
medicinal or restorative fermentation technology had existed was lost.
Hops-based brew causes a lack of coordination, an inability to think
clearly, and eventually a slow death – all qualities needed to make both
German peasants and modern temp workers incapable of revolt.
The women who had formerly been the respected brewers of the peasant
villages were hunted down and burned at stake as “brew witches.” To this
day, witches are rarely imagined without their brewing cauldrons.
Burnings of witches on the grounds of heretical brewing processes
continued until 1519. With this slaughter, the last independent and
creative brewing centers were destroyed, and women prostrated before the
drunken God of the repressed monks and greedy brewmas-ters. Through
alcohol the common folk were subdued, and what passed for life in the
Middle Ages became nasty, short, brutish, and – above all – drunk.
Indeed, if it be the design of Providence to excavate these savages in
order to make room for the cultivators of the earth, it seems not
improbable that rum may be the appointed means. It has already
annihilated all the tribes that formerly inhabited the sea coast.
– Benjamin Franklin who was, primitivists take note, the “discoverer” of
electricity, among other things – though folk scientists will protest
that he discovered electricity no more than Columbus discovered America.
Perhaps “domesticator” is more accurate a term? Anyway, back to our
story.
As imperialist European civilization began its cancerous spread across
the world, beer loyally led the charge. The first merchants, the Hansa,
exported beer as far as India. The colonization of the United States
began when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, instead of further
south as planned, because they ran out of supplies: “especially our
beere.” The founding fathers, including Washington and Jefferson, as
well as being slave-owning aristocrats, were all brewers of beer.
Coincidence?
The foundations of colonial genocide bear the stench of a long and
protract-ed alcohol-induced nightmare – nearly every indigenous culture
the Europeans encountered was destroyed by European alcohol and disease.
The spreading of firewater among indigenous populations of North America
went hand-in-hand with the distribution of lethal smallpox-infested
blankets. Many of these cultures, without the experience of thousands of
years of civilized alcoholism to draw upon, were even more subject than
the Europeans to the ravages of “the civilized brew.” Between alcohol,
disease, commerce, and guns, most of them were quickly and utterly
destroyed. This process was not unique to North America – it was
repeated throughout the world in every European colonial endeavor. While
the drug of choice varied (sometimes it was opium, for example, as in
the “Opium Wars” Great Britain waged to control China), alcohol was
judged in many countries to be the most socially-acceptable tool of
pacification.
The Industrial Revolution was hastened by the prospect of brewing beer
year-long, since the temperatures needed for brewing occur naturally
only in winter. The steam engine invented by James Watt was immediately
applied by Carl von Linde to enable artificial cooling, allowing those
with the infrastructure of civilization to brew anytime, anywhere.
Contrary to popular belief, Louis Pasteur invented pasteurization for
beer-making, and only later was it adopted by the dairy industry. Yeast,
which is found naturally in the air, is no longer even used in that
state by modern brewing, as scientists have isolated a single yeast cell
and induced its artificial reproduction for brewing. Following the
invention of the as-sembly line, beer has come to be mass-produced on an
ever larger scale. Over the two centuries since, the alcohol industry –
like all capitalist industries – has been consolidated by a few major
companies controlled feudally by families like the infamous
Anheuser-Busch beer syndicate (infamous for its connections to
right-wing groups and religious fundamentalists). As for other links
between alcohol and far-right/fascist activity – perhaps the reader will
recall where Hitler initiated his takeover of Germany.
It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that alcohol has played a key role in
the epidemic of fascism, racism, statism, imperialism, colonialism,
sexism and patriarchy, class oppression, ungoverned technological
development, religious superstition, and other bad stuff that has swept
the earth over the past few millennia. It continues to play that role
today, as the peoples of the whole world, finally universally
do-mesticated and enslaved by global capitalism, are kept pacified and
helpless by a steady supply of spirits. These evil spirits squander the
time, money, health, focus, creativity, awareness, and fellowship of all
who inhabit this universally occupied territory – “work is the curse of
the drinking classes,” as Oscar Wilde said. It’s not surprising, for
example, that the primary targets of advertising for malt liquor (a
toxic by-product of the brewing process) are the inhabitants of ghettos
in the United States: people who constitute a class that, if not
tranquilized by addiction and incapacitated by self-destruction, would
be on the front lines of the war to destroy capitalism.
Civilization – and everything noxious and baleful it engenders – will
crumble when a resistance movement appears that can dam the flood of
alcohol immobiliz-ing the masses. The world now waits for a temperance
that can defend itself, for a radical vision unclouded by drink, for a
revolutionary sobriety that will return us to the ecstatic state of
wild.
Totalitarianism
It’s not widely remembered that strict vegetarianism and abstinence from
drink have been common in radical circles for many centuries. One need
only thumb through the history books to amass a long list of heretics,
utopians, reformers, revolutionaries, communitarians, and individualists
who adopted these lifestyle choices as essential elements of their
platforms. We’ll leave that list-making to the enthusiastic reader or
obsessive critic – let it suffice to say that examples range from old
white guys like Friedrich Nietzsche, who eschewed even caffeine while
extolling the kind of ecstatic bacchanalism described herein, N. Vachel
Lindsay, the visionary hobo of Springfield, Illinois who traversed the
early United States to share his poetic appeals for temperance and
willful unemployment, and Jules Bonnot and his fellow anarchist
bankrobbers, who invented the getaway car together, to Malcolm X (of
course), and the EZLN – who prohibit alcohol as per the counsel of
Zapatista women fed up with mens’ bullshit. (The capitalist government
of Mexico has tried to undermine revolutionary activity by importing
beer into villages like Ocosingo; in that city and others; Zapatistas
have responded by setting up bar-ricades and fighting the soldiers who
would enforce this “free trade” upon them.) One of Public Enemy’s best
songs attacked the role of alcohol in the exploitation and oppression of
the African-American community. You can bet anarchist Leon Czolgosz was
stone cold sober when he shot us President William McKinley to death.
Oh, and – could we forget? – there’s always Ian McKaye.
On the other side of the coin – can you imagine how much more progress
we would have made in this struggle already if anti-authoritarians such
as Nestor Makhno, Guy Debord, Janis Joplin, and countless anarcho-punks
had focused more energy on the creation and destruction they loved so
dearly, and less on drinking themselves to death?
Perhaps so much talk about faraway times and peoples leaves you cold.
Sure, history can be dead – and the history of triumphant armies and
mass-murderer Presidents is indeed a history of death. All the same, we
can learn from this past, as from each other, if we apply our
imaginations and a keen eye for pattern. Professional histo-rians and
their fellow slaves of slaves might call this account subjective or
biased, but then – which of their histories isn’t? We’re not the ones
whose salaries depend on corporate sponsorships and patronage, anyway!
Even if you do decide that this history of alcoholism is “the” truth,
for heaven’s sake don’t waste time looking back into the past for some
long-lost state of primi-tive sobriety that – for all any of us know –
may not even have existed. What matters is what we do in the present
tense, what histories our actions create today. History is the residue –
no, better, the excrement – of such activity; let us not drown in it
like yeast, but learn what we must and then leave it behind. Let nothing
stop us, not even alcohol, as ingrained in our culture as it is! Those
drunken despots and beer-bellied bigots may destroy their world and
smother beneath their history, but we bear a new future in our hearts –
and the power to enact it in our healthy livers.