Notes

[1] I have not penned this reference to viruses lightmindedly. The “unimpeachable right” of pathogenic viruses to exist is seriously discussed in David Ehrenfeld’s The Arrogance of Humanism. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 208–210.

[2] See Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology, (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1985) for a comprehensive book-length account of the views expressed by the “deep ecology” movement. Much of the language used by “deep ecologists” — such as “biocentric equality” — will be found in this work.

[3] Ibid., 225.

[4] Robert Briffault, “The Evolution of the Human Species” in The Making of Man, V.F. Calverton, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1931), 765–766.

[5] David Ehremfeld, op.cit.,207

[6] Dorothy Lee, Freedom and Culture (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc, 1959), 42.

[7] Paul Radin, The World of Primitive Man (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 11.

[8] I’ve examined this important, and largely neglected, aspect of magic in my book, The Ecology of Freedom, (Palo Alto: Cheshrire Books, 1982). By no means do I think, however, that this noncoercieve form of magic has any meaning for our time. I cite it merely as an example of how nonhierarchical communities viewed the natural world, not as another technique that should be recovered for use by modern mystics and theists. Early hunters were wrong, of course. Game did not obligingly expose themselves to spears and arrows any more than they were “forced” by more coercive magical practices to become food in a Paleolithic diet. To try to restore these rituals today (and no one quite knows what forms they took) would be naive at best and cynical at worst. To the extent that ritual has any place in a free society, it should be new ones that foster a high regard for life and for human consociation — not descend into an atavism that is absurd and meaningless to the modern mind.

[9] Janet Biehl, “What is Social Ecofeminism?” in Green Perspectives, No. 11.

[10] Paul Radin, op.cit., 212, 215.

[11] To substitute words like “industrial society” for capitalism can thus be highly misleading. “Industrial” capitalism actually preceded the Industrial Revolution. In Venice’s famous arsenal, a large labor force worked with very traditional tools, and in England’s early factories the labor force was structured around simple machines and techniques. What these factories did was to intensify the labor process, not introduce particularly startling technical innovations. The innovations came later. To speak of an “industrial society” without clear reference to the new social relations introduced by capitalism, namely wage and labor and a dispossessed proletariat, often willfully endows technology with mystical powers and a degree of autonomy that it does not really have. It also creates the highly misleading notion that society can live with a market economy that is “green,” “ecological,” or “moral,” even under the conditions of wage labor, exchange, competition, and the like. This misuse of language imputes to technology — much of which may be very useful socially and ecologically — what should really be directed against a very distinct body of social relationships, namely, capitalistic ones. One may gain greater “influence” with an unknowing public by using this expression, but often at the expense of miseducating people.

[12] Ernst Bloch, Man on His Own (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 128.

[13] H. and H.A. Frankfort, “The Emancipation of Thought From Myth,” in Before Philosophy, H. and H.A. Frankfort, et.al. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951), 242–243. The passages from Egyptian chronicles appear in the pages above.

[14] Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989). 195.

[15] Marie Louise Berneri, Journey Through Utopia (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, n.d.), 54.

[16] Ronald Fraser, Blood of Spain (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979). 66.

[17] For a fairly complete discussion of this mixed precapitalist economy, see my book, The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1987).

[18] Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleion,” Collected Works, Vol. 11 (New York: International Publishers, 1979), 103.

[19] Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Random House, 1973), 109–110.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 94.

{1} See my forthcoming book. The Ethics of Evil (Montreal, 1990).

{2} I cannot help but make an observation about the massive ignorance that exists in the American and European ecology movements with respect to the long pedigree of these ideals. Anarchism, which has been pilfered repeatedly and scandalously by “neo-Marxists” of ideas like workers’ control and decentralization, not to speak of the general strike — notions that Marx and Engels explicitly denigrated — are today common fare in self-styled “Marxist” movements. The same is true of Fourier, Owen, and particularly Kropotkin’s ideas, not to mention views advanced by anarchists in the early sixties. Yet barely a word of acknowledgment is made by the ill-informed wags who, particularly in the shelter of the academy, have recycled so many eco-anarchist ideas in the name of “deep ecology” and “eco-feminism.” Apparently, nothing exists in American and European thought until it has first been duly registered in an academic journal as a “paper” and, to be sure, by a professor or an aspiring one.

{3} These views were advanced decades ago, in the author’s essay, “Toward a liberatory Technology” and have since percolated into the ecology movement. Acknowledged or not, they have since become part of our contemporary conventional wisdom in a technocratic rather than an ecological and ethical form.