Dear Fifth Estate:
I sent a copy of Green Apocalypse to you before, but for some reason it was returned. I thought something might be up with you, so I was especially pleased to see issue #347.
As you can see from GA, we’ve been having some problems with Green Anarchist. Their letter in your Spring 1996 issue is pretty much par for the course. Like the Unabomber, they offer a rightwing version of anarchism, and are now latching on to primitivism. Anyone who criticises them is accused of “siding with state assets” when they’re not accused of actually being state assets.
I don’t understand why anyone except right-wing bozos would give the Unabomber the time of day. We’ve been active in the alternative publishing scene for a couple of decades publishing revolutionary news and views. We have been part of a world-wide network which has been generating debate and reflection on All sorts of struggles across the world.
Rather than taking part in this unglamorous work, the Unabomber is so infatuated with his own ideas that he threatened to murder people unless his second rate ideas were published in the mainstream media. What a shit! Rather than participate in the slow and sometimes painful process of collectively developing a discussion with people across the world, the Unabomber adopts the pose of a Lex Luther, an asocial genius whose ideas will “change the world.”
When we get to read these “wonderful” ideas, what do we get?--a heap of reactionary bullshit. His tirade against “over-socialised leftists” smacks of warmed up leftovers from Frederick Nietzsche. O.K., he’s against technology, but this comes from an anti-modernist, right-wing perspective. For those who can’t figure it out themselves, the Unabomber spells it out when he suggests that:
“The people whose behaviour is fairly well under the control of the system are those of the type that might be called ‘bourgeois.’ But there are growing numbers of people who in one way or another are rebels against the system: welfare leaches, youth gangs, cultists, Satanists, Nazis, radical environmentalists, militiamen, etc..” (Thesis 161)
This is just reactionary elitism, and shows the Unabomber up for the scum s/he is. It comes as no surprise that Green Anarchist reproduced the Manifesto and offers accolades to the Unabomber, as this fits in with their own right-wing agenda. But I am surprised that others haven’t condemned the Unabomber not simply as an embarrassment, but as a reactionary.
In the twenties and thirties, reactionary left-wing parties like the Social Democrats and the Communist Parties tried to offer alliances with revolutionaries on the basis of a shared discourse around class. Those who entered such alliances soon found out at their peril the consequences of such pacts, e.g. the 1937 May Days in Barcelona.
From this experience it is clear that those who are ready to push technological progress aside in favour of the world human community have nothing to gain from aligning themselves with people who make a fetish of the struggle against technology. It doesn’t matter whether these creeps remain in the right-wing sewers of the Militia movement, or pose as anarchists.
Anyway, I should have some more bits an pieces to send you soon--a Hakim Bey scandal in Italy and a discussion of primitivism in Detroit which is to appear in Transgressions #2.
In Solidarity,
Fabian Tompsett
Unpopular Books, Box 15, 136 Kingland High Road, London E8 2NS, England
FE Note: Write to the above address for a catalog of interesting anti-authoritarian titles.