Cooking the Books: Back to the Iron Age? (2007)

The Cooking the Books column from the October 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

“They eat food from skips, wear discarded clothes and want to topple capitalism”, wrote Brian O’Connell in an article headed “Masters of free lunch” in the Irish Times  (4 September). He was describing the activities of a group of people who call themselves “freegans” – “a combination of the words free and vegan, whose aim is to live as non-commercially as possible”. They “don’t believe in working for money”, nor in paying for the things they need to live.

Socialists don’t either, but in the context of a society based on the common ownership of the means of life where there’d be no need for money or buying and selling, not as a lifestyle choice within capitalism. No doubt it is theoretically possible to live within capitalism without using money, but to what end? Not even 5 percent of the population (and that’s probably an exaggeration), let alone a majority, could live like that. Not that skip diving for food and other things needed to survive is ever likely to appeal to more than a tiny handful of people.

So, we are talking about an inevitably very marginal activity, and one that depends on most other people working for wages and producing the wealth of society, including the thrown-away products the freegans gather and consume. As everything produced under capitalism is the result of exploitation, they are carrying to its logical extreme the practice of those who refrain from buying certain products on ethical grounds. They see themselves as the ultimate “ethical consumers”, even if they are doing through voluntary choice what a number of others are obliged to do through economic necessity.

But how is such a lifestyle going to “topple capitalism”? We can’t deny that they are against capitalism or what one of them is quoted as calling “a profit-driven commodities economy”. The trouble is that that’s not all they are against. They also denounce “industrialism” and “globalism”. They want to renounce the real and potential benefits of industrial production and go back to living a simple agricultural life with an Iron Age technology but without using animals.

According to O’Connell:

“Freeganism has its roots in traditional activities such as gleaning, or historical collectives such as the Diggers, a group of agrarian communists who flourished in mid-17th-century England . . . [T]he first official use of the word ‘freegan’ appeared in 2000 and began to gain popularity through a website, Freegan.info, set up in New York by Adam Weissman and Wendy Sher in 2003”.

Hang on a minute! Website? Doesn’t that assume the existence of “industrialism” and in fact a highly developed technology? And is not the internet one of the more prominent aspects of “globalism”?

The freegans are right, however, to want to recreate the social relationships of early human society, which were co-operative and sharing and based on giving and taking rather than buying and selling. Socialists want this too, but we say this can be done without having to renounce the advances in sanitation, medicine and comfort that modern science and technology have brought, including the ability to find ecologically-acceptable techniques of energy generation and industrial production. We want to restore the original common ownership of the Earth’s resources – for the Earth to become, as the Diggers put it, “a common Treasury for All” –  and the social relationships that went with it, while retaining both industrialism and globalism.

Anyone know a lifestyle anarchist? (2011)

From the July 2011 issue of the Socialist Standard

  Keep a look-out for people who are chock-full of undirected, ill-informed revolutionary gusto, but empty of any desire to organise their views into a coherent critique of the world.

Are they easily bored by drab Marxian theory, with its ‘materialist conception of history’ and its ‘labour theory of value’? Do they feel guilty because their parents managed to scrape a bit more out of capitalism than the average wage-slave? Do they feel the need to rebel against daddy’s ‘inbuilt patriarchal mentality’ and mother’s lack of ability to cut the apron strings? Perhaps they like to wear bands around their wrist bearing slogans like ‘make poverty history’ or even better ‘make poverty herstory’. They might feel a sudden urge to grow dreadlocks, wear low crotched shorts, and backpack around the world. They may feel the need to say every damn thing as if it was a question, constantly inserting the word ‘like’ while offering self-righteous homilies about how they ‘just really want to like help the world?’ and how ‘we’ve like got to find like a new way of living?’

They may, in short, be on the verge of becoming a ‘lifestyle anarchist’.

Lifestyle anarchism can best be described as the malformed grandchild of that senile old bat, the sixties hippy movement. It sits in an uncomfortable position somewhere between Che Guevara and Ghandi, Bakunin and the Dalai Lama. Lifestyle anarchists like to engage in what they pretentiously call things like ‘grass roots happenings’ and ‘autonomous eco-resistance.’ To be a lifestyle anarchist you have do things like ‘dumpster diving’ or ‘skipping’ basically taking egotistical pleasure in a society that reduces you to eating out of a bin.

Don’t let a lifestyle anarchist hear you complain about the rent, it’s much cooler to ‘squat’ or even better ‘couch surf’. When university tuition fees get raised again or the trees in the park are chopped down in order to build yet another supermarket, it wouldn’t do to put it down to the shitty social system we live under and then actively encourage fellow workers to help get rid of it, oh no. For the lifestyle anarchist it’s much better to ‘occupy’ a lecture hall or chain themselves to an oak. That is of course until they get dragged away by a policeman, at which point they can really impress all their lifestyle anarchist mates by telling the copper what a ‘brutal like fascist like pig’ he is ‘working for like the man like that’.

Ah yes ‘the man’, is this the start of an understanding of what us socialists mean when we say the capitalist class? Not really, the enemy to the lifestyle anarchist is some sort of white European male, intent on keeping us all in a little box by flying planes into world trade centres then blaming it on really nice guys like the Taliban who only ever wanted to fight oppression. These are just some of the reasons among many why the lifestyle anarchists score very high on the rest of the working class’s bullshit radar.

Many lifestyle anarchists don’t ever seem to work at all, raising the question: when the squats get evicted and the ‘skipping’ is getting harder, where does all the money come from? One lifestyle anarchist I met was very vague about how she actually kept herself financially afloat, for the year or so she had spent hitch-hiking around Europe, preferring to answer the question with a patronising ‘you don’t actually need lots of money you know’. ‘Yes.’ I felt like saying, ‘but then you didn’t find your two iPods and your laptop in a skip now did you?’ I never found out what her parents did for a living, (or didn’t do in the case of the capitalist class). I was forced to leave it, we were ‘couch surfing’ in her house at the time and I suspected that if I really chose to assert my kindly granted ‘right to free speech’ it wouldn’t be long before she asserted her ‘right to private property’. It is for this reason that I am tempted to make my first experience of ‘couch surfing’ also my last.

What other anarchists think

Trotsky once described anarchists as ‘liberals with bombs’, whereas the lifestyle anarchists would be better described as ‘liberals with bins’. Trotsky of course had good reason to dislike anarchists, like Bakunin for example who for all his faults provided some very useful warnings about the dangers of authoritarianism in the working class movement, warnings a lot less applicable to Marx than to the likes of Lenin and Trotsky. While the lifestyle anarchists are keen to point out how ‘free from dogma’ they are, their complete lack of theory means they are prepared to uncritically help in the campaigns of any pseudo-socialist, Leninist party going.

It is of course unfair to equate lifestyle anarchism directly with the anarchist movement as a whole. For all its faults at least most strands of anarchism attempt a class analysis. At least some anarchists see the problems inherent in society as stemming from the fundamental features of that society, i.e., wage labour, production for profit, class rule, and the solution lying in the abolition of these same things. Indeed it is interesting to see the old dog anarchists’ reaction to this silly and incessantly annoying puppy chasing its own tail. On the one hand they like to encourage it for its ‘direct action’ and ‘grass roots defiance’ but even they are compelled to comment on the futility of it all.

Of course we socialists have nothing against people who want to raid through supermarket skips in order to help cut down on food bills. Having done it myself I can honestly say it’s incredible what supermarkets chuck away.  I once found a bin bag full of popcorn that was only a week out of date in a Marks and Spencer skip.

Nor do we have anything against those that choose to squat.  It’s another example of the ridiculous nature of capitalism that perfectly good homes should stay unoccupied while people sleep on the streets, just so a landlord can wait till the property prices rise. Where we have a problem is that for all the talk that lifestyle anarchists and others like them make about their actions being a means to an end, it invariably becomes an end in itself – people preferring to pose with their heads in skips or faces wrapped in kaftans without ever trying to actually understand why the world is the way it is.

Johnny Mercer

Cooking the Books: Living without money (2010)

Cooking the Books column from the March 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

The on-line Guardian (25 January) put up a video “The No Money Man” about Mark Boyle who has chosen to live without money. Last year the (London) Times (24 November) in an article “Living without Money” featured “former teacher Heidemarie Schwermer” who “has lived without money in Germany for 13 years”. Both Boyle and Schwermer are associated with schemes which want people to help each other without using money. Boyle calls his “Freeconomy Community”; Schwermer’s is called Gib und Nimm (“Give and Take”).

Such groups are one way of surviving under capitalism, but they are not the solution to the social problems of poverty and environmental degradation which they are set up to mitigate. Although socialists want a moneyless society, living without money now, under capitalism, is not want we advocate.

Actually, socialists don’t want to “abolish” money. What we want is to see established a system of society where money would become redundant, as it would in a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means for producing wealth. In such a society the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs” could apply. People would cooperate to produce what was needed to live and enjoy life and then have free access to this.

Life without money under capitalism, where most things have to be bought, is pretty austere. Here’s how a sympathiser describes Boyle’s lifestyle:

“He lives in a small camper, makes or scavenges everything he uses on a day-to-day basis . . . He takes solar showers . . . To eat he practices the fine art of Dumpster diving and cooks on a hyper-efficient rocket stove.”

Schwermer “lives – a week at a time – in the spare rooms of members of the Tauschring [the Give and Take scheme], cleaning or working in return for accommodation.”

Very few people (in fact, to tell the truth, only a few, eccentric individuals) would be prepared to live like this. In any event, the whole of society could not. However, this is not the only way to live without money and be part of genuine cooperating community where the links between people would be human not commercial. Socialism offers this possibility without involving giving up such amenities as hot and cold running water in a warm, permanent home. But it’s a society-wide change not an individual lifestyle choice.

With the elimination of the waste of capitalism, not just in arms production, wars and preparations for war but also in the whole superstructure of buying and selling, socialist society will be able, using modern technology and socially cooperative labour on a world scale, to provide these amenities and comforts for everybody everywhere without over-burdening the environment.

We don’t want to be churlish but we must point out that both Boyle and Schwermer, and Boyle in particular, rely on what the cooperative labour of the rest of society is able to provide using modern technology. For instance, Boyle’s camper and solar panels (bought before giving up money) and what he scavenges from skips, and the heated and lit houses which Schwermer uses as temporary accommodation.

Living without money doesn’t have to involve wearing a hair shirt and using old newspapers for toilet paper. And won’t in socialism.