The publication Green Anarchy was sent by the publisher to our offices, perhaps as a provocation and perhaps because its website gets precious little traffic (Alexa 2 million). On its masthead are these words: “An Anti-Civilization Journal of Theory and Action.” It may sound tongue-in-cheek but it’s not. These people are deadly serious by their desire to turn back anything and everything the rest of us regard as progress.
And yet their core assumptions are not essentially different from what we hear politicians say every day. Thus do we find the opening essay invoking the usual complaints about “globalization” that you would find in any mainstream newspaper. In polite circles these days, the word alone is supposed to provoke furrowed brows and solemn pronouncements concerning the environment and human alienation.
Green Anarchy affects this pose quite well, with page after page of fretting about urbanization, disintegration, rootlessness, withdrawal, and consumerism, all of which are somehow turning the globe into a “McWorld” dominated by multinationals and other scary monsters.
So far the analysis reads like a mainstream US newspapers or standard civics text. It is the approach taken by the dominant part of all US academia, labor union officials, and the leaders of the world’s major religious institutions. Government leaders use the same rhetoric in order to justify their unrelenting push to regulate ever more of the world economy.
But where does the logic of this position take us? It is the virtue of Green Anarchy to show us. We learn from the featured article that that the real root of the modern “problem” began 13,000 years ago with the “introduction of domesticated species (plans prior to animals…).” This, it seems, was the beginning of the end because it led to “complete human domination.” At this point in history, we are told, people entered into “a completely alien relationship with the earth.”
In the sweep of history, according to this view, it was a small step from the potted plant to Nike factories in the third world. Far better, they say, are the days of “hunting and gathering” that defined “99.9% of human existence.” As for the “division of labor,” this publication says it has a “mutilating, deforming, and immiserating nature.”
Why hunting and gathering do not qualify as ill-fated steps toward dominating nature is not explained. But of course without these steps, human life is doomed. Once humans gather and hunt, it follows that they will use their reason to plant and own, and thus begin the process of dividing labor to permit time and energy to be spent on accumulating capital for more and better production. In fact, it was not a small step; rather it took thousands of years to forge the foundations of civilization and prosperity we know today.
Above all else, it took capitalism, so, yes, the “green anarchists” are correct to see that all of this comes with ownership, contract, and exchange. They speak of domination when what is really at work here is nothing short of freedom itself, the economics of which can only mean one thing: the free market economy. It is not “anarchy” that would bring about the destruction of civilization that these people seek but the Leviathan state, which provides the only real means available to stop people from owning, exchanging, and investing to their mutual betterment.
Should the views expressed in Green Anarchy ever prevail, the consequences would be simply unthinkable. The human population the world over would dramatically shrink and eventually die out. Whether that is a result that these people would regret is not entirely clear! Green Anarchy does have the merit of drawing attention to the right issues, even if they come out on the side of evil.
Every step take away from the free market is indeed a step toward a society of hunters and gatherers. It is a step towards barbarism. This is true of the sweeping agenda of the anti-globalization movement, the incremental socialism of the welfare-warfare statists, and it is even true of those who favor only seemingly minor interventions to correct from the supposed failings of the free market.
