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Title: Demodernizing Anarchism
Author: Jesse Cohn
Date: May 5, 2022
Language: en
Topics: modernity, modernism, land back, indigenous, Magic
Source: Retrieved on 2022-05-16 from https://anarchiststudies.org/demodernizing-anarchism-jesse-cohn/

Jesse Cohn

Demodernizing Anarchism

I should begin by acknowledging my positioning: I am writing as a white

settler anarchist on land stolen from the Neshnabé (Potawatomi) in

so-called Northwest Indiana, and I intend here to address mainly other

settler anarchists of North America/Turtle Island. I feel that we are

laboring under some unhelpful and indeed harmful habits of thought when

it comes to imagining how we might relate our traditions to the

far-older ones of Indigenous peoples everywhere and of Native Americans

in particular.

In my book about the history of global anarchist resistance culture,

Underground Passages, I found an astonishing degree of coherence between

the newspapers, songs, poems, visual art, and novels produced by

anarchists in Chile and China, Argentina and Australia. From one

perspective, this similitude is a remarkable cultural achievement; from

another, the cultural expressions of these non-European militants did

not significantly deviate from those of their European counterparts for

over a hundred years, and innovations flowed largely from center to

periphery. And in Anarquistas de Ultramar: Anarquismo, Indigenismo,

Descolonización (Overseas Anarchists: Anarchism, Indigenism,

Decolonization), Carlos Taibo attempts to come to grips with the fact

that while anarchy—mutual aid, direct democracy, communism, and so on—is

to be found in the practices and concepts of nearly every culture

(provided one looks far enough back), anarchism as a doctrine appears to

arrive “overseas” as a modern European import.

“Import” is, of course, a euphemism: if the migration of working-class

European anarchists into the Americas was pushed along by waves of

capital, we have to admit that this emigration was also a form of

colonization. Moreover, these arrivals—settlers, invaders—most often

carried with them the sense that science was superior to traditions,

that emancipation was linked to modern progress, and that these things

meant not only the advance of technology but the dethronement of gods

and the subsequent placement of humanity at the center of the universe.

In short, the colonizer culture was Eurocentric, anthropocentric, and

resolutely modern—opposed in every way to the native cultures being

displaced.

It might be fairly objected that contemporary Indigenous peoples are

modern. Certainly, the myth of the “vanishing Indian” must be vehemently

opposed; Native Americans have adapted to modernity and survive and

sometimes even thrive within it. The Ojibwe/Dakota scholar Scott Lyons

argues for “embracing modernity and resisting essentialism” (xiii),

suggesting that even the “consent” of Native Americans to modern

“concepts, policies, technologies, [and] ideas,” even when “contaminated

and coerced,” has sometimes led to positive change (2–3): for instance,

as Michael P. Taylor observes, even the genocidal institution of the

Indian boarding schools had the perverse result of “revitaliz[ing] ... a

transindigenous network of Indigenous solidarity.” The suppression of

traditional Native American dances likewise led to the invention of

transindigenous powwow culture, now a key institution of Native

resistance culture. It was at one such powwow that the transindigenous

term “Two-Spirit” made its debut. None of what follows is intended to

argue for a return to “pure” Indigenous identities, or to suggest that

all that is traditional is simply good in contrast to an all-bad

modernity. I would rather affirm, with Eduardo Galeano, that it is not a

matter of “believ[ing] in traditions simply because they are

traditions.” Instead, as he expresses it,

I believe in the legacies that multiply human freedom, and not in those

that cage it .... I am not proposing a return to the sacrificial rites

that offered up human hearts to the gods, nor am I praising the

despotism of the Inca or Aztec monarchs. (177)

However, it must be recognized that crucial institutions of Indigenous

cultures, notably traditions of land tenure and property relations, are

absolutely excluded by the modern state, which still sends military

forces in response to any effort to assert them, as we have seen in the

current cycle of protests against petrochemical pipelines running

through tribal lands and waters. Modernity cannot allow any exception to

the laws of the state and the laws of the market to stand alongside it,

much less outside of it. Modernity’s statism and capitalism, consumerist

individualism and ideology of progress, stand as obstacles to

decolonization and re-Indigenization.

If “decolonization” is now a watchword, calls to “decolonize anarchism”

must run up against the insistence of Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang that

“decolonization is not a metaphor,” nor is it exclusively or even

primarily a matter of changing mindsets. Instead, they argue,

non-Indigenous anarchists help to decolonize when they fight to restore

land and autonomy to Indigenous peoples. However, as they point out,

some conceptual updates might make it easier to join in those struggles.

The lingering attachment of non-Indigenous anarchists to modernity is an

obstacle to the construction of bonds of solidarity and to shared

struggle with Indigenous counterparts for whom modernity has been an

almost completely unmitigated disaster. It is necessarily difficult to

join hands with people whose spirituality one has labeled as naive and

foolish at best, whose culture one regards as merely particular and

parochial, and whose identification with the land one sees as a quaint

but misconceived projection of human qualities onto an indifferent

nonhuman world.

Accordingly, we might want to explore ways to demodernize anarchism.

How Not to Demodernize Anarchism

First, however, we should identify some possible false starts and

cul-de-sacs. To begin with, we must not be mystified by discourses of

the “traditionalist” Far Right that identify “modernity” with such

supposedly debauched notions as feminism or queerness (Burley). On the

contrary, such fascist ideologies, which we must absolutely refuse, wish

to immortalize what Taibo argues is “one of the first marks of

modernity,” in spite of modernity’s egalitarian self-image: namely, “the

consolidation of a world of hierarchies and separations” (107). Thus,

women, queer and trans folks, and nonwhite people find themselves in the

crosshairs of fascist entrepreneurs such as the so-called Traditionalist

Worker Party or the National Anarchist Tribal Alliance. Nothing can be

more disgusting than the spectacle of white people such as Jacob

Chansley, known as the “QAnon Shaman,” cosplaying as Indigenous, whether

to appropriate Native American identities or—all the worse—to make

parallel identitarian claims for “Western peoples” “reclaiming” European

“ancestral roots.” Key to these arguments, as journalist and author

Shane Burley notes, is “a caricature of leftist ‘identity politics’”

that imagines identity in terms of ancestral “blood” or an authentic

racial “essence,” rather than in terms of one’s position within

structures of power or one’s experience of oppression. Wherever we

encounter anti-modernists like these, we encounter not allies but

enemies: self-mythologizing white supremacists and would-be patriarchs.

So-called primitivist and anti-civilizational anarchists have indeed

militated against modernity, but theirs is a “modernity” defined

primarily by its technological base. They have imagined a “natural”

human being who emerges only when stripped of technological

externalities (which Fredy Perlman memorably imagined as “masks and

armors”). This seems to me a misidentification of the problem. I would

rather begin with the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s

recognition that everything is simultaneously “nature” and “machines.”

The question is how these nature-machines are to relate to one another:

Must they be organized hierarchically, with some of them harming and

destroying others and cutting them off from their possibilities? An

anarchist wants to answer in the negative. We must question the very

distinction between the natural and the human worlds, which sociologist

and anthropologist Bruno Latour (a problematic thinker, but I’ll follow

him this far) claims is the founding distinction of modernity. It is the

“premoderns,” he argues, who insist on treating “natural” beings as part

of the “human” social world, thanking animals after taking their lives

and listening to speaking stones. We moderns, on the contrary, can only

encounter “nature” as a silent, essentially alien other that makes no

social demands of us and listens to no entreaties.

Some anarchist theory is so modern as to regard listening to “nature” as

the very sign of human self-enslavement. The late political philosopher

Eduardo Colombo, extending a line of thinking derived from Cornelius

Castoriadis, regarded human freedom as a project of “autonomy” imagined

as the refusal to allow anything other than human decision making to

determine the outcome of decisions—not God (as in Western theology), not

the economy (as under capitalism), and not nature (as among

“premoderns”):

Since the vanished obscurity of ancient times, human thought, in order

to constitute itself as such, had to separate, to distinguish, to

oppose, to unify. It had to organize the flux of perception and

construct discrete and determinate representations; it had to make a

cosmos out of chaos. Human beings instituted the earth and the heavens,

created the gods and all things. Humanity – the human collective –

created itself, and in the same movement subjected itself to the

heteronomy of its own creation. Everything came to us from beyond, from

on high, from the center. We, as creatures, are seen as dispossessed and

dependent. (2008, 14)

Here Colombo relies on the structural anthropology of Claude

Lévi-Strauss, for which human beings are indeed those who impose

structure on the world through language, the world in itself being

without meaningful form or clear demarcations. The classic example of

this transformation of “chaos” into “cosmos” is the color spectrum, a

continuum that different languages “carve up” in sometimes wildly

different ways (Lévi-Strauss 92–94). Structuralist theory predicted that

the speakers of those different languages would in fact see different

colors. However, it seems that while language “influences” visual

perception (particularly in the right field of vision), the hypothesis

that language determines perception is at best only “half right” (Regier

and Kay).

Deleuze, following the philosopher Gilbert Simondon, would point to the

dependence of this kind of language-centered theory on “the hylomorphic

schema,” a model of reality as divided into shapeless matter (in Greek,

hyle) and intelligible form (morphe). At least since Bakunin, anarchist

theory has found this model to be incipiently hierarchical and

dominatory, since it asks us to imagine a world of masters bestowing

form on lump-like slaves. In God and the State, Bakunin writes that “the

vile matter of the idealists,” having been “stripped by them of ...

intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or

forces, motion itself,” was “indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile

thing,” unlike “the matter of which materialists speak, matter

spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive” (12–13). Such a

conception of matter, as anthropologist Tim Ingold notes, takes as its

basis a different theory of reality: “This is the ontology of animism”

(214).

Thinking Anarchism with Animism

Can anarchists be animists? Murray Bookchin seems to briefly entertain

the idea in the first edition of The Ecology of Freedom (1983), where he

writes with admiration of the “outlook” of Indigenous societies:

I am eager to determine what can be recovered from that outlook and

integrated into our own ... perhaps we can achieve a way of thinking and

experiencing that involves a quasi-animistic respiritization of

phenomena—inanimate as well as animate—without abandoning the insights

provided by science and analytical reasoning. (14)

By 1991, however, Bookchin felt compelled to add:

Without a sense of contrast between the human and nonhuman, people are

limited to the bedrock existence of seeking mere survival, to a way of

life so undifferentiated from that of other living things that they know

little more than the unmediated confines of their limited ecological

community. This way of life is bereft of purpose, meaning, or

orientation, apart from what people create in their imagination. And it

is a way of life that no human being could endure except by ceasing to

think. (xlv)

The lives of animists thus go from being represented as full and rich, a

source of renewal and inspiration, to impoverished and empty even of

thought itself. In subsequent years, Bookchin would double down on

“civilization, progress, and science” with Re-enchanting Humanity

(1995), wherein he insists that “it was primarily in Europe that a

remarkable constellation of historical and ideological factors converged

to produce a common emphasis on reason, the importance of the

individual, and a healthy naturalism” (4, 249).

If commitments to humanism can lead someone as smart and imbued with

libertarian ethos as Bookchin or Colombo into the crassest endorsements

of colonial ideology, maybe we ought to listen once again to the

postanarchist critique of humanism’s presence in the anarchist

genealogy. Colonialism may go unmentioned in the classic texts of the

postanarchists, but perhaps we dismissed their concerns about humanism

too quickly—or perhaps they located this humanism in the wrong place.

Bakunin, for example, is indeed too canny to embrace the simple-minded

notions of a “good human nature” that the Anglo-American postanarchists

attributed to him; his conception of “the human” surely includes the

potential for domination as well as for freedom. However, he never pays

anything like sufficient attention to the realities of colonial genocide

and enslavement, and he repeatedly assumes, like Bookchin, that Europe

has been the privileged locus for humanity’s development—a development

that must take us away from “fetichism” and “the primitive religion of

savages” (1974, 110). Once you’ve accepted that the Enlightenment

spelled out, for once and for all, the future of humanity, you’ve

accepted a Eurocentric ideology of progress.

Glen Coulthard, a scholar of Indigenous studies, helpfully names this

ideology “normative developmentalism” (9); it is a fault Bakunin shares

especially with Marx, for whom “primitive communism” must necessarily

give way to all the other historical stages leading to a second and

final communism. This Eurocentrism, this ideology of progress, this

imagination that takes just one of the “genres of being human” as the

universal (Wynter 26), could not fail to taint European anarchists’

anticolonial commitments, and historically, as Taibo reminds us, the

anarchist anticolonialists tended to tacitly accept “the superiority of

Western civilization and, with it, of a significant part of the colonial

discourse” (117). In the end, he finds, “although anarchists sharply

criticized the many excesses that characterized colonization, it seems

as if they accept that the latter constituted a natural process

justifiable under the scientific and technical superiority of Western

civilization, hand in hand with an argument that could not but remind

many of Marx and Engels’ assertions on the subject” (117–18).

What might anarchism look like if it really gave up on the notion that,

as our fascist enemies have it, “the West is the best”? Perhaps it might

follow Bakunin’s suggestion and (in spite of him) become animist.

Proudhon had already hinted at something like this when he wrote that

“intellect sleeps in the stone, dreams in the animal, reasons in the

man” (3:267). In the early twentieth century, anarchist journals devoted

substantial print to the scientific theories of the “plasmogenists,”

which suggested something strikingly similar: if, under the right

circumstances, even inorganic chemicals could be observed behaving in a

quasi-animate fashion, why draw a distinction between dead or inert

matter and the biochemistry of life (Quintana-Navarrete 88–89)? Why not

attribute an incipient motion, liveliness, intelligence, even

consciousness to all kinds of material beings?

The late anthropologist David Graeber was moving in just such a

direction when he published the essay “What’s the Point If We Can’t Have

Fun?” in The Baffler in 2014. Drawing on the vast ethological literature

about the prevalence of play in species other than ours—even ants, he

points out, “not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but

also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange

mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it” (52)—he goes on to

speculate about matter itself, including, for instance, the seemingly

capricious behavior of electrons under certain circumstances:

If one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that

is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity

imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex

organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of

material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little

like intentionality, something at least a little like experience,

something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every

level of physical reality as well. (57)

This hypothesis, sometimes called “panpsychism,” has been increasingly

widely entertained by philosophers of science in recent years, who find

in it an alternative to “emergentism,” the doctrine that mental

phenomena are not visible in but somehow arise from micro-scale material

like electrochemical exchanges between neurons. While satisfying in some

ways, emergentist explanations of mind seem to mystify rather than

resolve what cognitive scientist David Chalmers calls “the puzzle of

conscious experience” (80). How far are such speculations, really, from

the theories—labeled, in the colonizers’ language, “spirituality” or

“religion”—of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), or Diné

(Navajo) peoples? In fact, what is “religion,” and if we oppose it, why?

“Blasphemy,” writes Colombo, “is perhaps the first point of rebellion

against the established order,” insofar as a society that locates the

source of its own norms in the sacred—that is, in the mythical deeds and

words of gods, heroes, or ancestors—is by definition heteronomous rather

than autonomous, since those norms then are “dictated once and for

always,” and the “symbolic-instituting power” that established them is

sealed off in a transcendent beyond (2006 15–16). Surely this seems like

a good description of the way that the sacred has served the interests

of power in Western history, at least. Yet the best examples we know of

self-managing communist societies with long duration were Indigenous.

Sociologist Ronald Creagh suggests a possible solution to this seeming

paradox in a study of seventeenth-century Jesuits’ perplexed accounts of

the Wendat (Huron) and Innu (Montagnais) people. Agreeing with Colombo,

in essence, that the problem with religion has to do with this “theft

... of humanity’s symbolic-instituting power,” that is, the “power to

organize society for ourselves” (Colombo 2006, 16; Creagh 75–76), Creagh

warns against a too-hasty understanding of Native American religion in

terms of Western concepts of the sacred:

The struggle between the missionary and the sorcerer is nothing other

than the manifestation of a conflict between two different approaches to

the sacred. Because if, in the Catholic Church, this phenomenon is

characterized by a recourse to transcendence, is it the same for “the

Indian”? ...

[W]hile for Catholics the sacred and the profane refer to two different

worlds, the terrestrial here-and-now and the hereafter, which

communicate only through certain more or less sacramental acts and

places, the religious type described by Mr. Eliade sees only one

universe. The Montagnais, the Hurons and several of these tribes that

the Jesuits meet are on the same level as the forces of nature; these

“spiritual” intensities do not possess any ontological distinction from

those which animate men. (84–85)

In short, Western religions “founded on transcendence” do not have the

same social functions as “an Indian ‘religion’ for which everything can

become hierophanic because the sacred is immanent in the world” (88).

Note that this immanent sacred runs directly contrary to the root

concept of sacredness in the Western tradition—“Dedicated, set apart,

exclusively appropriated to some person or some special purpose” (OED);

in Hebrew, kadosh, translated as “sacred” or “holy,” signifies

“otherness,” which can be read as indicating an apartness from the

ordinary world (Armstrong 41). Amplified by combination with Platonist

idealism, it was erected into the most thoroughly transcendent version

of the sacred in Christianity. Yet the immanence of Native religious

concepts and practices, in which “any object can become hierophanic, a

sign of the ‘divine,’” denies any “disembodied beyond” (Creagh 85–86).

Does this other, animist form of the sacred even belong, in the terms

set out by anarchists from Bakunin to Bookchin, in the category of

“religion”?

This approach to understanding animisms would entail a radical

reassessment of our commitment to a strict atheism (or, as Bakunin

dubbed it, “anti-theologism”). Religion scholar Paul-François Tremlett

notes that while the majority discourse on religion among anarchists is

“modernist,” “broadly constitut[ing] religion and the past as conditions

to be overcome,” there is a countervailing discourse critical of

secular, scientistic modernity, in which “religion emerges as a means of

imagining the free, creative and autonomous individual,” of

“re-enchant[ing] the present” (367, 377). Anarchist animism might then

follow in the footsteps of thinkers such as Gustav Landauer, for whom it

is the Marxist “science of history” that represents superstition (“Old

wives prophesy from coffee dregs. Karl Marx prophesied from steam”),

while the “glimmer ... of beauty” belonging to tradition is needed to

break the spell of capitalist modernity: “Therefore let us be the type

of innovators in whose anticipatory imagination, that which they want to

create already lives as something ... anchored in the past, in primeval

and sacred life” (65, 93). Such thinkers provide useful precedents for

critiques of religion that are more sophisticated than blanket

endorsement or reflexive condemnation.

Rather than presenting a contradiction in terms, an animist anarchism

would be more consistent in its critique of instrumental rationality—the

worldview for which all of nature consists of mere “raw materials” (or,

at best, “natural resources”) set aside (as if by a transcendent God)

for human beings to own and use. It might or might not adhere to

veganism or vegetarianism—animism could provide a basis for this, but it

most often does not—but it would be a more consistently ecological

anarchism, as we shall see. And it would be better theoretically

positioned to struggle alongside Indigenous peoples, no longer

encumbered by a crude materialism for which it is self-evidently absurd

to listen to nonhuman beings.

Can nonhumans speak? Iwona Janicka, author of Theorizing Contemporary

Anarchism, suggests that the question is not so much one of “who can

speak?” as it is of “how best to listen.” Even human beings are enabled

to speak (rather than simply emit meaningless noise) by the efforts of

listeners to “translate” them. Accordingly, listening to nonhumans is a

matter of constructing “human-nonhuman assemblages” (5–6) capable of

translating between, for instance, Algae and English or Ant Swarm and

Swahili:

Humans do not “give meaning” to nonhuman entities as such or “interpret

brute matter,” but rather they create favorable conditions in which

nonhuman entities become visible. In order to do that, however,

nonhumans and humans alike require a set of devices, gestures, settings,

procedures, instruments, trials and sites. (7–8)

Such devices might include the apparatus given to Koko the gorilla to

communicate with her human counterparts and the instruments currently

being used to understand the quarrels of bats, but also the methods used

to measure glacial formation and movement, the Bolivian Ley de Derechos

de Madre Tierra that accords legal standing and representation to

“Mother Earth”—and the customs and rituals that Native Americans have

used for thousands of years (which, in spite of some episodes of

overhunting, have worked quite well in most cases, at least insofar as

“working” means functionally establishing balanced ecological

relationships).

Anarchism and #LandBack

One of the most concrete obstacles to mutual understanding between our

movements arises when white anarchists balk at Indigenous demands for

the return of ancestral lands. Here, too, anarchism is ill served by its

fidelity to modernity. In the modern imaginary, land is an ownable

object, a commodity; the radical modern demand has typically been a

demand for redistribution of the commodity. We moderns have by and large

not imagined land as an agent, a process that acts on us and interacts

with us. We imagine that persons have rights, but that land only has

value—exchange value under modern capitalism, or use value under modern

communism. Many Indigenous languages have the advantage of being verb

based (unlike European languages like English, which require nouns to

fill the role of subject in a sentence), so that this agency of land is

more self-evident (Kimmerer). In Peskotomuhkati-latuwewakon (the

Passamaquoddy language), for instance, the English noun “field” is

rendered instead as a verb, pomskute, “a field goes along”; instead of

saying that the berries (a substantive) are growing in the field (a

location), one attaches a kind of quasi-adverbial expression, pemskutek,

as if the berries were growing fieldishly (Francis et al.).

It is not only whiteness but a white supremacist modernity that makes it

difficult for white anarchists to understand the Indigenous slogan “No

socialism on stolen land.” “Stolen” seems to presuppose a regime of

private property rights, and aren’t we against private property? But

this is a misunderstanding (even if, to some extent, a willful

misunderstanding). The point of the demand for the return of sovereignty

over Indigenous lands and waters has never been to simply change one set

of proprietors for another; it is, rather, a reassertion of a very

different kind of land tenure, one that falls outside the bounds of

capitalist property relations, in part because the “property” in

question is a living agent, not an individual but a web of relations in

which Indigenous humans are already enmeshed.

As many have pointed out, the demands of Indigenous peoples do not

necessarily include the expulsion of the non-Indigenous or our return to

our supposed “homes” in Europe, Africa, and so on. Other models of life

after coloniality proliferate; among them, many look back to the Two-Row

Wampum (Teioháte Kaswenta) that was created early in the seventeenth

century to solemnize a covenant between the Ögwë’ö:weh (“original

people”) and the Skaghneghtadaronni(Dutch settlers) (Hill 1). Figured in

the wampum beads are two canoes in the same river, side by side; neither

tries to interfere with the other. Here is an Indigenous vision of

peaceful coexistence, a direction not taken by history but which yet

might be.

What might be harder for settler anarchists to understand, given our

universalistic biases, is the way that land is tied to experience,

memory, understanding, and hence knowledge. In trying to explain “the

Indigenous experience with a layered sense of place that is at one and

the same time ordinary and holy,” Arapaho scholar Michael Marker

proposes that “the methodology for learning about powerful forms of

consciousness and visions cannot be extracted from the ‘being in places’

where the powers exist” (462–63, 456). Indigenous place-based

epistemologies yield not an abstract Truth, to be applied everywhere

regardless of context, but localized, particular, context-sensitive

truths. When Bookchin reads of an Ojibwe elder listening to the

anthropologist’s question, “Are all the stones we see about us here

alive?” and answering “No! But some are” (Hallowell 24), he is

constrained to hear this as “a very shrewd response,” a cynical hedging

of bets: “Aboriginal peoples are not so absurd as to view stones and

horses ... as equally alive. However, ‘animistically’ they regard the

natural world in theory, in practice they apply their animistic views

with considerable discretion” (1995, 135–36). In pragmatist terms, a

difference in discourse without a corresponding difference in behavior

is empty verbiage. But clearly, animistic discourse among Indigenous

peoples does make a difference in how they interact with the landscape,

just as one might expect. For Indigenous people, some truths only obtain

partially, locally, within a particular place, precisely because that

place is another “sentient being,” not only a “known” but simultaneously

a “knower” and a condition for knowing (Marker 457, 461).

Socialismo Mágico

It is still more difficult for modern anarchists to trust those who

believe, as is commonplace among Indigenous peoples, in various forms of

what we call “magic”: spirits, sorcery, and the like. As materialists,

we reason that spirits, immaterial beings, cannot exist; as disenchanted

descendants of the Enlightenment, we fear that according any reality or

truth to enchantment will drag us back to the Dark Ages. And yet, as we

have seen, the spirits of Wendat cosmology, for example, are never

allowed to drift away from the living materiality of the natural world,

to become transcendent authorities reigning over life. Spirit does not

have to supply that which the body supposedly lacks, to represent an

eternal reality outside of the world; as the Sioux scholar Vine Deloria

points out, “the afterlife was not of overwhelming concern to people of

the tribal religions.... No highly articulated or developed theories of

the afterlife were ever necessary, and certainly none projected a life

radically different than that experienced on Earth” (179). Before

dismissing Indigenous cosmologies because of their magical content, we

ought at least to ask: What is the social content of this magic?

The answer is bound to vary widely among the more than five thousand

Indigenous peoples. However, we might find many conceptions of spirit

not drastically different from the atheist Landauer’s. For Landauer,

spirit (Geist) is simply that which unifies people (33); it does not

need to be regarded as a being as much as a doing, an action. In social

scientist Howard Richards’s words,

Spirits comfort, bring joy, inspire, keep families together, win

football games, carry patients through illnesses, move the hardhearted

to forgiveness, unite friends, put charity fundraising campaigns over

the top, give courage to the weak, bring life to parties, energy to

concerts, success to business enterprises, and do a million and one

other things, even though a spirit is not a thing, and if one were

obliged to answer the question, “What exactly is it?” one would have to

answer, in all honesty, “Nothing.” But having to answer, “Nothing,

no-thing,” no longer bothers me. I am past the point where I expect

every word to refer to a thing.

This social account of the reality of spirits, Richards notes, yields “a

greater access to the wisdom of traditional peoples, who almost

invariably are found by anthropologists to enjoy communing with spirits”

(142).

Deloria cautions against an overly literalistic interpretation of

Indigenous magic, such as those promulgated by skeptics and

“representatives of other religions seeking to discredit tribal

religions” who deliberately violate their sacred places in order to

demonstrate the non-reality of spirits—reflecting “a strange non-Indian

belief in a form of mechanical magic that is touchingly adolescent”

(280). Indeed, they are treating Indigenous Geist as if it were

something rigid, like a dogma. As the Colombian comrades of the Alas de

Xue collective point out, modern theories of magic, from Francis Bacon

to Paul Radin, tend to represent it as a primitive phase of human

development, something to be transcended in favor of rational cognition,

or at best, as a means of coping with “economic insecurity” (116).

“Unity in diversity,” they argue,

means respecting individuals and peoples who dream their utopias based

on their own traditions and myths; this respect must arise from a study

of ethnic and cultural diversity, incorporating their contributions and

expectations, accepting difference as a driving force towards the

construction of Magical Socialism. (121)

Despite the poetic flourish of the phrase socialismo mágico (a play on

the literary phrase “magical realism,” perhaps), the direction suggested

by the collective is essentially practical, aimed at making do with what

we have together. From a pragmatist perspective, magic, like spirit, is

what it does. We might understand magic in a very broad sense as the

efficacy of words—the phenomenon in which saying something makes it so.

“Within Indigenous science,” writes theoretical physicist F. David Peat,

“to say something is to create an objective event and release a process

of energetic vibrations that enter into relationships with the other

powers and energies of nature” (226). As much as this might sound like

New Age nonsense, it need not be understood in a supernatural sense, for

in fact, we are always making things happen with words. Linguists refer

to these events as “speech acts,” one of the most common species of

which is the making of promises. Here, rather than describing some real

state of affairs in the world, a description that could be verified or

falsified by inspection, the words uttered actually perform the act of

promising, thus creating, when successful, a new state of affairs—a

social relationship. The classic example is the wedding, in which “I do”

creates spouses. Promises, when successful, create new states of

affairs; they bring together partners, alliances, federations. It seems,

then, that mere words can create (social) worlds.

Granted, this redescription of magic as a kind of speech act may not

please everyone equally. Surely it does a little rationalization as

well, although I hope that it does not disrespect Indigenous

self-understandings. But pragmatist accounts of such things as spirits

and magic may be one effective way of translating between cosmologies,

allowing us to unsettle some of our own assumptions long enough to

listen and learn—perhaps even long enough to jointly construct a

socialismo mágico that defies what British theorist Mark Fisher calls

“capitalist realism.” (2)

What about Science and Technology?

One of modernity’s ideological articles of faith is that there is but

one path to futurity, and that it runs through modernity. Modern images

of the future, of course, sometimes include mournful, apocalyptic dreams

in which the world reverts to some previous historical condition, to the

Middle Ages or to some imaginary Wild West; its utopian dreams, when

they do not similarly cast backward for their images, often represent

the shiny new future—as Bookchin once observed—as just more of the same:

taller skyscrapers, faster cars, and so on (1980, 277). This is cruel,

because it forecloses the imagination of other futures, and impossible,

because it offers more of the same, continuing the project of extraction

indefinitely on a finite earth. Anarchist visionaries have had to

struggle to imagine different futures, often reproducing these modern

tropes.

Nonmodernity, as we might develop it, does not offer to return us to an

imaginarily perfect past, though it does entail surrendering the land

back to Indigenous peoples; it is not a simple inversion or negation of

modernity, much less a simple extension of modernity into the future. It

would seek something else—a retrieval of past possibilities that is also

a “new emergence,” in the words of Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer Leanne

Betasamosake Simpson. As such, it would explore previously foreclosed

possibilities for the development of sciences and technologies (always

to be understood in the plural). After all, Indigenous peoples have not

been incurious about the universe or lacking in inventiveness. Indeed,

for as much as settler archaeologists like Elizabeth Weiss and projects

like the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on sacred Mauna Kea

portray Indigenous people as obstacles to scientific knowledge, we can

and do speak of Indigenous sciences and technologies.

A demodernized anarchism would not have to abandon the sciences, but it

would abandon scientism. Scientism—the insistence that scientific method

is the only legitimate means of access to truth, and that therefore it

can be applied everywhere and always without regard for social or

cultural context—has promised to liberate us from all the traditional

forms of oppression associated with what the Jineolojî Committee Europe

identifies as a five-thousand-year-old patriarchal “state civilization”;

where that civilization disrupted relations between humanity and nature

(97), modern scientism proposed to bridge the supposed gap between human

and natural realms by studying both with the same tools. Historian Arif

Dirlik writes of some of the early Chinese anarchists that they “valued

science to the point of scientism,” in part precisely because it offered

to dissolve the respect for traditions that held the social hierarchies

inherited from Chinese “state civilization” in place—a major source of

oppression for them (108). In practice, however, scientism also degrades

the spirit of scientific inquiry into “an ideology for viewing the world

as an ethically neutral, essentially mechanical body to be manipulated”

(Bookchin 1991, 268)—as well as for so viewing the human body and mind.

Most shamefully, anarchists’ embrace of scientism led us, for a long

time, to endorse eugenics (47). Freed from scientism, the sciences

become one highly valuable mode of knowing among others. Better still,

Western sciences are freed to encounter other sciences on egalitarian

terms.

The possibilities for combining Indigenous and modern technologies are

similarly wide open. Neither refusing technology completely as bad nor

embracing it in toto as good, we could blend horticultural techniques,

architectures, and practices of medical and psychological healing, for

instance. No longer committed to modern technology as a whole, we might

instead practice many convivial technics, both old and new. Again, this

would necessitate a rejection of the normative developmentalism that

indiscriminately discards traditional ways of knowing and doing as

obsolete on the assumption that there is only one culture that is “new”

and that only the new can be better.

Toward a Nonmodern Anarchism

We settler anarchists must acknowledge our complicity with colonialism,

and we must not turn living, breathing Indigenous people into our

fantasy objects. As the Guaraní activist Bettina Escauriza writes, it is

impossible for settlers to become Indigenous, and beside the point: “The

issue is not for an individual to become something they are not, but

rather for a centering of other ways of being in the world that may make

our final years on this planet—however many or few there may be—ones

worth living” (102).

We may dimly recognize these “other ways” as the source of our own best

ideas. Bakunin and Proudhon came of age politically in an intellectual

environment stimulated by accounts of the New World and of its peoples,

who seemed not to recognize the kinds of distinctions drawn by the

colonists, soldiers, and missionaries who encountered them, testifying

to the possibility of radically different worlds. Modern anarchism, as

developed in Europe, was a codification of practices already found in

nonmodern cultural repertoires, practices which anarchism imperfectly

but usefully translated into the conceptual idiom of modernity: mutual

aid, communism, affinity groups, direct democracy, consensus, direct

action.

This is not to say, of course, that all Native American societies were

anarchist in the modern sense of the concept. Clearly, some adhered and

still do adhere to hierarchies of their own. We should not regard these

as a permanent feature of these societies, either (indeed, to say

“society” is to call any “permanent features” into question); some were

acquired as a direct result of colonization, and others have been and

may yet be called into question by a process of immanent critique. Such

processes of self-reconstruction emphatically do not require

colonization. If it is anyone’s turn to listen respectfully, to give

thanks, and to show solidarity, it is white settler anarchists vis-à-vis

our Indigenous counterparts.

One thing that Indigenous knowledge can impart to a nonmodern anarchism

is a long experience of linking disparate societies with different

traditions in democratic confederations. Probably the best known of

these is the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), a confederation that linked first

five and later six nations, an assemblage of considerable power and

influence. The Neshnabé, who were forcibly expelled from Indiana a

little less than a hundred years ago, participated in the Council of

Three Fires with the Odawa (Ottawa) and Ojibwe (Chippewa) peoples, as

well as in the larger culture of the Anishinaabe, which linked them with

the Algonquin, Mississauga, and Nipissing. In the years before their

Removal, they joined in Tecumseh’s much vaster Confederacy to fight the

settlers. Their experience has much to say about the lived experience of

democratic confederation—how to establish effective unity between

disparate social worlds, how to achieve the coordination of action and

the coexistence of plural truths without the imposition of uniformity

from above.

None of this is really possible if we cling to the project of modernity,

with all that it entails. Let’s demodernize anarchism!

Author

Jesse Cohn is part of the Institute for Anarchist Studies. He teaches in

the Department of English at Purdue University Northwest, in Indiana. He

is the author of Underground Passages: Anarchist Resistance Culture,

1848–2011 (AK Press, 2015), translated, A Little Philosophical Lexicon

of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (Minor Compositions, 2019), and

has published other books and essays, including in Anarchist Studies,

Fifth Estate, and Radical Philosophy.

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