Press interview with Paul Cudenec

Writer Paul Cudenec has given an interview to a newspaper in England about his latest book, The Stifled Soul of Humankind.

Paul told the West Sussex County Times, which covers the area where he used to live, why he had chosen to go to France to write.

 “I could feel a real negative pressure building up around me in West Sussex,” he recalled. “Not only the threat from fracking, but also from massive house-building schemes, the possible expansion of Gatwick and so on.

“I really needed to go away somewhere to try and make sense of it all and place it all in some kind of historical context.”

Paul insisted that despite the downbeat title of the book, and the rather scary cover art depicting damned souls, it contains an essentially positive message.

He explained: “On the one hand I try to describe all the factors that have blocked the freedom and the potential of humankind – from the megalomania of the Roman Catholic Church through the theft of common land and the suppression of folk culture, to the lie of ‘progress’ that is still being imposed on us today and which threatens our very existence.

“On the other hand, I also show that there is an underground stream of opposition to all of this. It takes different forms at different moments in history, but it is obviously the same stream.”

Paul said it was important to realise that this idea of resistance was spiritual in origin – an aspect which he said had been neglected by many contemporary radicals who were still attached to a “scientific” or economic analysis of society.

“One of my favouriter thinkers, the German-Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer, was warning of this 100 years ago – he saw dogmatic Marxist thinking as the biggest enemy of any authentic human renaissance because it denied the very idea of a human spirit.

“Now that state communism is fading into history, I think dissidents today have to go back to the original rebellions against the machineries of power and profit to seek inspiration in ideas that have been mostly neglected since orthodox Marxism became so dominant.”

 

In his book, Paul traces a thread of ideas back to the 13th century and the Brethren of the Free Spirit – rebel Christians viciously persecuted by the Inquisition. Their anti-authoritarian heresy spread across Europe, helping to fuel centuries of peasant uprisings, and later inspired the radical Ranters and Diggers of the 17th century English Revolution.

Also woven into the story are the likes of William Blake, William Morris, Richard Jefferies, Franz Kafka, René Guénon, Herbert Read, Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley.

Paul said: “Some of the writers speaking out against industrial civilization in the 19th century have been described as ‘anti-capitalist Romantics’. For me, that is what we have got to reclaim, that sense of spirit, of life, against the dead hand of money which seems to rule everything these days. And while there is life there is always hope, no matter how bad things are looking.”

To arrange an interview with Paul Cudenec, or to invite him to speak, he can be contacted directly via cudenec@riseup.net

Spirals of hope

We have just brought out a series of free mini-booklets called Winter Oak Branches of Knowledge. The fourth of these is adapted from the final chapter of Paul Cudenec’s new book The Stifled Soul of Humankind and is called Spirals of Hope. Here is the text:

Deep anxiety is a common personal reaction to the world stripped of meaning and authenticity in which we find ourselves today. One solution proposed for this crisis of the spirit is to “live in the Now” and thus put into some kind of distant perspective the nagging confusions of our contemporary society, to root oneself in the physical reality of each moment, finding a firm foundation in the sensations of looking, listening, breathing, walking, eating.

But, while an obsessive nostalgia for the past is clearly unhealthy for any individual, so is the addiction to the present moment that results from living excessively in the Now. It encourages a drifting and passive kind of experience. Despite the intention of shedding the ambitious and anxious ego, the Now personality can become selfish, glorying in the irresponsible spontaneity of its own eternally present tense. It may manage to avoid anxiety in this way, but only by ignoring the fact that anxiety is a symptom. The root causes of the problem are simply ignored and any real remedial action indefinitely postponed.

What applies to the individual also applies to the macrocosm of society. Collectively we are also tempted to retreat into living purely in the Now, in the face of the disorientating storm of anxieties swirling around us. Living perpetually in the present tense of the News, we simply respond intuitively to the stimuli it offers, find ourselves carried along from one issue to the next. Attempts to reach a deeper long-term understanding of our collective predicament are made virtually impossible by the constant white noise generated by accounts of history serving the interests of the status quo. Sometimes it’s merely the sheer amount of irrelevant detail that makes it difficult to make out any real shape to what’s been happening to humankind, but often these accounts are deliberately misleading. 

Los Amigos de Ludd write that capitalism imposes its own reality by “reducing History to a succession of stages in the fulfilment of its own dogma, and the past to a skeleton of concepts and abstractions”. Michael Löwy argues that reality has been obscured by a modern mindset which “sees the movement of history as a continuum of constant improvements, of irreversible evolution, of growing accumulation, of beneficial modernisation for which scientific and technological progress provides the motor”.

In contrast to this official story of Progress are visions such as Walter Benjamin’s famous imagining of the angel of history, as inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus. “His face is turned towards the past,” explains Benjamin. “Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”.

Like Benjamin, we need to be able to step back from the frantic ever-changing detail of the Now and see that it is part of a much broader and more significant scenario. What we will see is a humanity dispossessed, a society in which freedom, autonomy, creativity, culture, and the spirit of collective solidarity have been deliberately suffocated by a ruthlessly violent and exploitative elite hiding behind the masks of Authority, Property, Law, Progress and God.

Such enslavement of humankind should be enough to incite the desire for change, but there is, in addition to all this, another factor: this capitalist industrial civilization is also killing the planet. The situation could hardly be more urgent and yet our culture barely responds, shows no sign of changing. The core problem is perhaps that our society is no longer alive and you can’t expect much in the way of response from a corpse! Our so-called democracy is a sham, the people disempowered and cowed into submission by Authority and there is therefore no obvious way that the majority can influence the direction society takes, even on detailed points, let alone issues of fundamental importance.

However, it is important to remember that this sensation of powerlessness is all part of the psychological trickery used by the authorities to ensure our compliance with the continuing status quo. Living collectively in the Now, we are blinded not only to the past, but to the future. More specifically, we have become convinced that just as Progress has inevitably brought us to where we are today, so it must continue to take us to wherever it must lead. We are taught that the future is essentially pre-determined, according to the historical laws which we are told have shaped our world, and there is nothing we can do about it. This lie has even come to be accepted by radical opponents of industrial capitalism, who insist that the best we can do is to adapt to the grim future that will inevitably be delivered to us by the system.

In truth, there was nothing inevitable about the way our society has turned out. It has taken centuries of repression to impose the will of a sociopathic elite on the population. That repression continues today, along with the possibility that it will fail to hold us down. Seen from our enemies’ point of view, there is nothing inevitable about the continuation of their system at all. They live in constant fear of losing control, of being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of the lawless mob. That is why they devote so much time and energy to feeding us lies, locking us up, acting out the theatre of Authority, sending in riot cops and armies to put down any signs of resistance to their global slave-labour system.

“Now is the moment for us to explode the ultimate lie with which we have been brainwashed - that we are powerless”

We are living in an age when many of the illusions of Authority are falling away and many millions of people across the world are seeing the truth behind the false constructs which prop it up. Cynicism is rife but we seem to have stopped there, balanced on the point of no longer believing in the system but unwilling to go any further, to take the final step into outright resistance. Now is the moment for us to explode the ultimate lie with which we have been brainwashed – that we are powerless.

The first step is to understand how it is that we have been duped, how we have been reduced to a state of psychological submission. Then we have to rediscover within ourselves the vital spirit that makes us strong, the sense of collective belonging and empowerment that so frightens those who would keep us and our descendants as their slaves. It barely matters what we term this power within, so long as we do not allow it to be overshadowed by the myth of a power outside or above us – there can be no authority, no god, but ourselves.

From this perspective, the situation of the human race looks quite different. It seems impossible that it could ever bow its head in slavery or stand idly by while its mother, the Earth, is destroyed in the name of short-term greed. It seems unthinkable that people could ever have forgotten that the desire for freedom lies at the heart of their very being. Reconnected with the long-forbidden knowledge of its own power, a people will naturally be propelled towards its innate and eternal needs. Like the green shoots of a plant seeking out the sunlight, humanity will always have a natural tendency to fulfil its inner organic potential.

Peter Kropotkin could be describing our own times when he argues that “there are periods in the life of human society when revolution becomes an imperative necessity, when it proclaims itself as inevitable”. But, of course, revolution is only inevitable, or indeed possible, if we take whatever action is necessary to bring it about.

It is here that we must again confront the comfortable habit of perpetually living in the Now and with it the whole concept of time as something that sweeps us along like small twigs in a surging river. This is Time regarded as Authority, as an obstacle to our power to shape our own reality, to become the people we want to be. 

We are not bound to travel to any particular future, there is nothing inevitable about any outcome, no matter how likely it may look from our present vantage point. While we recognise the existence of circumstances that stand in the way of the future we would like to see, there is no reason why we must therefore accept that their influence will be decisive. It is, as Ernst Bloch says, always possible to replace the fatalism of a “because” with the determination of a “despite everything”.

“We have to reintroduce ourselves to history, not as observers but as participants. The power that we can rediscover in ourselves is, among other things, the power to create the future”

 

We have to reintroduce ourselves to history, not as observers but as participants. The power that we can rediscover in ourselves is, among other things, the power to create the future. We have to create our own narrative – the narrative of revolution. Like the prophesies of rebels past, our narrative can become self-fulfilling. There is a self-feeding circular momentum that we need to get started. The understanding of the need for revolution, the dream of revolution, the hope of revolution, the belief in the possibility of revolution – all of these must be fostered in turn before revolution can ever take place.

For this task we need a powerful collective vision and determination that can inspire, that can transform, that can regenerate, that can sweep aside seemingly immovable obstacles and turn remote possibilities into hard realities. Humankind needs new generations of idealistic young revolutionaries, heretics, inspirés with a burning sense of purpose and destiny, with the unquenchable energy to will into existence the new world of which they dream. We need, as Kropotkin insists, “intrepid souls who know that is necessary to dare in order to succeed”.

We won’t get them by sticking to dry dispassionate analysis of history, by being bogged down in detail, by being waylaid into dead ends of pointless abstraction or pedantry. We won’t get them by shying away from the truth, by compromising with the system, by regarding passionate polemic as an embarrassment. We won’t get them by trying to regulate and repress the spirit of our own revolt, by pouring cold water on others’ attempts to bring about change, by sneering at hope itself.

There are those who reject hope as unrealistic and those who reject it as being passive, as being reliant on factors outside our own control. But both positions fail to see that hope is in fact a vital factor in our ability to change reality and that, far from playing a passive role, it is the key to inspiring active participation. “Let us remember that if exasperation often drives men to revolt, it is always hope, the hope of victory, which makes revolutions”, says Kropotkin and he argues that the action it inspires will itself feed back into the positive energies of the revolutionary spirit: “Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic”. 

Prophecy brings hope, hope brings courage, courage brings action, action brings inspiration, inspiration brings more determination, renewed hope, deepened courage. Once this magical spiral of revolt has started spinning, it takes on a life of its own and becomes, in Kropotkin’s phrase, “a revolutionary whirlwind”.

The authentic urge to revolution can be destructive, but never negative, and behind it there be must always be a vision born from the heart of humanity. There is something therefore much deeper behind the will to genuine revolution, to anarchy, than mere opinion. It rises from the depths of our collective soul and thus, by extension, from the natural world of which we are part. It is the vehicle of an intangible organic need for things to be made right, for humankind and the planet it dominates to once again exist in harmony with the Tao. 

This restoration of the state of nature, of the Golden Age, is demanded by natural laws next to which our artificial human laws look feeble and ephemeral. Once unleashed, the mighty strength of a global uprising summoned by the life-force itself will have no difficulty in sweeping away for ever the violent machineries of a tyranny which has stifled humankind for far too long.

 “Prophecy brings hope, hope brings courage, courage brings action, action brings inspiration, inspiration brings more determination, renewed hope, deepened courage. Once this magical spiral of revolt has started spinning, it takes on a life of its own”

Paul Cudenec books in London

 

All three titles by Paul Cudenec are now available from two radical bookshops in London.

The Stifled Soul of Humankind, The Anarchist Revelation and Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays can all be found at both Housmans and Freedom - they all retail at £7.99.

Housmans, at 5 Caledonian Road, King's Cross, London N1 9DX, is a not-for-profit bookshop, specialising in books, zines, and periodicals of radical interest and progressive politics.

It stocks the largest range of radical newsletters, newspapers and magazines of any shop in Britain. It opens Monday to Friday, 10am to 6.30pm, Saturday, 10am to 6pm, and Sunday, noon to 6pm.

Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley, 84b Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX,  is Britain’s largest anarchist bookshop, stocking thousands of books, newspapers and pamphlets on history to sex, philosophy to workers’ struggles, fiction to anti-fascism, as well as the latest magazines, periodicals and newsletters from all the major anarchist and radical groups.

 It opens Monday to Saturday 12 noon to 6pm and Sunday 12 noon to 4pm.

New title by Paul Cudenec: The Stifled Soul of Humankind

Winter Oak Press is delighted to announce the publication of a new book by anarchist philosopher Paul Cudenec.

In The Stifled Soul of Humankind, Cudenec depicts a humanity dispossessed, a society in which freedom, autonomy, creativity, culture, and the spirit of collective solidarity have been deliberately suffocated by a ruthlessly violent and exploitative elite hiding behind the masks of Authority, Property, Law, Progress and God.

But he also identifies an underground current of heresy and resistance which resurfaces at key moments in history and which, he argues, has the primal strength to sweep away the prison walls of our diseased civilization and carry us forward to a future of vitality and renewal.

Cudenec writes: “We have to reintroduce ourselves to history, not as observers but as participants. The power that we can rediscover in ourselves is, among other things, the power to create the future. Prophecy brings hope, hope brings courage, courage brings action, action brings inspiration, inspiration brings more determination, renewed hope, deepened courage. Once this magical spiral of revolt has started spinning, it takes on a life of its own”.

In The Stifled Soul of Humankind, Paul Cudenec delves into disparate corners of history to provide the ammunition for his deeply radical analysis, throwing up some intriguing questions about the way our society has become what it is today.

What is the connection between Sufi mystics of the Middle East and the peasant revolts that shook Europe in the Middle Ages? At what point did Protestantism turn from being a revolutionary force into a reactionary one? What links the colonization of North America with the Highland Clearances in Scotland? What is the basis of authority? Can art retain its authenticity in an industrial civilization? What on earth did Franz Kafka have in common with the völkisch predecessors of the Nazi movement? Is Marxism fundamentally opposed to capitalism? Why was Aldous Huxley targeted for ideological attack by a leading figure in MI6? And, most crucially of all, what is it that ties all these questions together and reveals a seam through the rock of history that can help us understand how so much has gone wrong and how we might yet put it right?

Cudenec’s book The Anarchist Revelation, published by Winter Oak in 2013, has earned some influential praise in anarchist circles. US eco-philosopher John Zerzan, author of Future Primitive and Running on Emptiness, described it as “the least pessimistic book I can recall reading. It brings anarchist resistance and the spirit together in a very wide-ranging and powerful contribution”.

Gabriel Kuhn, translator of Gustav Landauer’s writing into English and author of Life Under the Jolly Roger and Soccer vs the State, wrote: “The book attempts no less than equipping contemporary anarchism with a footing that is often neglected: the transfor-mation not only of society’s structures but also of people’s souls... an inspiring read”.

Cudenec’s essay Antibodies, republished as part of a book of his collected writing in 2013, was welcomed as “very readable and profoundly thoughtful” by Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism and Nature’s Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking. Marshall said Antibodies provided “many new insights on the destructive relationship between the greater part of humanity and the planet which tries to sustain them”.

The Stifled Soul of Humankind by Paul Cudenec (160 pages) will go on sale at £7.99 and will be available from all major booksellers.

For more information, to request review copies or to arrange an interview with the author, please email winteroak@greenmail.net.

Mind-expanding message

This very positive review of Paul Cudenec's The Anarchist Revelation can be found on the Permaculture magazine website. 


Helen Moore reviews Paul Cudenec's book that explores why knowing ourselves more deeply requires that we move beyond society's conditioning and connect with the power of the transpersonal. 

Could the twin urges in my life - to know myself deeper and, in the face of ecocidal capitalism, an increasingly radical sensibility - actually have their roots in the same impulse? Paul Cudenec’s passionately argued book, The Anarchist Revelation, Being What We’re Meant to Be, persuades me that they do.


Drawing on an impressive range of sources, Cudenec begins by showing how much the status quo relies on our not knowing ourselves. Our educational system, the media, TV, scientific materialism and established religion all play their part, so that: “Being just what we are… is the greatest challenge any of us face in a civilisation where our compliance, our obedience, depends on us not knowing who we are.”

Of course, individual development originally unfolded in interconnection with the natural world, and was embedded within the anarchist ‘organic society’, based on natural laws, co-operation and the self-organising capacity of ecosystems. But having lost our ancient rites of passage and with little awareness of the natural world, in which clues to the meaning of life can be found, our modern alienation from Nature contributes to our collective dysfunction and madness, moving us yet further from our own authenticity.

Fortunately, because we have in fact been shaped through evolution and don’t actually come into the world as “helplessly amoral blank sheets of paper”, on which the state puts its stamp, but as “an integral part of the collective existence”, we can still access our natural sense of ‘love and rage’ as we witness injustice and oppression on a global scale. Cudenec believes this “builds up in our spirits - individually and en masse, consciously and unconsciously - and becomes the force behind the need for revolution”; but it also sustains us by offering a “spiritual pool”, from which we can draw.
In proclaiming ‘No Gods, No Masters’, many anarchists have, of course, notoriously rejected religion, in particular the authoritarianism of the church. Emma Goldman nevertheless saw anarchist revolution as “the mental and spiritual regenerator”, while Cudenec skilfully demonstrates how the roots of anarchism and the universal spirituality posited by Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung, amongst others, are deeply intertwined.

Ultimately, the author’s heartening message is not only that the spirituality inherent in anarchism can sustain us against the deadening effects of capitalism, but also that by transforming ourselves – surrendering to the alchemical processes that dissolve the ‘base metals’ of our superficial ego-selves – we can serve the greater whole, becoming “a conscious manifestation of [the] greater unity, as a temporary representative-on-earth of the life force.” Mind-expanding and well-written, The Anarchist Revelation will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Helen Moore is an award winning ecopoet based in Somerset. Her debut collection, Hedge Fund, And Other Living Margins, was published in 2012 by Shearsman Books and is highly recommended.

Zerzan: "The least pessimistic book I can recall reading"

"The least pessimistic book I can recall reading. It brings anarchist resistance and the spirit together in a very wide-ranging and powerful contribution”.

This is the comment, in a recent article, from US anarchist writer John Zerzan on Paul Cudenec's The Anarchist Revelation, published by Winter Oak Press.

Zerzan is the influential author of  Elements of Refusal, Future Primitive and Other Essays, Running on Emptiness, Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections and Twilight of the Machines.

This positive international feedback to Cudenec's work follows on from anarchist author Gabriel Kuhn's review on the Alpine Anarchist site, in which he refers to it as "a daring journey through the history of ideas".

Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger and Soccer vs the State, adds: "The book attempts no less than equipping contemporary anarchism with a footing that is often neglected: the transformation not only of society's structures but also of people's souls.

"Cudenec's text is well-structured, consistent in its arguments, and manages to address poetry, mysticism, and spirituality without regressing into lofty gibberish."

Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, has described Cudenec's essay Antibodies as "very readable and profoundly thoughtful" and offering "many new insights on the destructive relationship between the greater part of humanity and the planet which tries to sustain them".

Paul Cudenec will be talking on The Anarchist Revelation at the London Anarchist Bookfair on Saturday October 19, at 5pm in room 3.20.

Paul Cudenec: talks in Brighton and London

 

Paul Cudenec will be giving two talks in the UK in the next few weeks, based around the themes of his book The Anarchist Revelation, published by Winter Oak Press.

The first is at The Cowley Club at 12 London Road, Brighton, East Sussex, on the evening of Wednesday September 25.

The event, oganised by Cowley Books, is open to all and free of charge and begins at 7pm. The Cowley Club is a libertarian social centre, which hosts a range of cultural and political activities and has its own bookshop, library and bar.

The second talk will be on Saturday October 19 at the 2013 Anarchist Bookfair at Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS.

Paul's talk will be on the third floor, room 3.20, from 5pm to 6pm. The programme says he will explain "how only anarchy can save humankind and the planet - and why today’s anarchists must urgently reconnect with the primal force of our root ideology, a free and profound way of thinking that stands in direct opposition to the blinkered and soul-stifling materialism of contemporary society". It will be followed by a general discussion.

The bookfair itself, a must for anyone in the UK interested in anarchism, runs from 10am to 7pm with the usual packed programme of diverse meetings and rooms full of stalls.

Daring journey through the history of ideas

Gabriel Kuhn

"The book attempts no less than equipping contemporary anarchism with a footing that is often neglected: the transformation not only of society's structures but also of people's souls.

"In order to achieve his goal, Cudenec embarks on a daring journey through the history of ideas.
Make no mistake, though: this is no hodgepodge of random notations, and no new age hocus-pocus disguised in anarchist colors.

"Cudenec's text is well-structured, consistent in its arguments, and manages to address poetry, mysticism, and spirituality without regressing into lofty gibberish.

"It is never in doubt that the book is a serious attempt at helping us answer the ever relevant question of whether life can change with a rearrangement of social institutions alone, if we don't change as human beings...

"Paul Cudenec's work will mostly appeal to those who – in increasing numbers – explore the relations between anarchism and philosophy, psychology, and religion.

"People looking for in-depth analyses of governmental bodies, labor conditions, or gender and race relations might have to turn somewhere else. No single book has it all.  

"The Anarchist Revelation has a clear purpose, however, that is, reflecting on the transformation of the self for the benefit of the community. Everyone interested in this mighty challenge will find the text to be an inspiring read."

Above are a few key paragraphs from a review of Paul Cudenec's The Anarchist Revelation, published by Winter Oak Press, by author Gabriel Kuhn. The original can be seen on the Alpine Anarchist Productions website.

Gabriel Kuhn is well known to English-speaking anarchists for the likes of Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy (2010), Soccer vs. the State: Tackling Football and Radical Politics (2011), and for editing and translating Gustav Landauer's Revolution and Other Writings (2010) and Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings (2011) by Erich Mühsam.

His German-language works include Tier-Werden, Schwarz-Werden, Frau-Werden. Eine Einführung in die politische Philosophie des Poststrukturalismus (2005) and Neuer Anarchismus in den USA. Seattle und die Folgen (2008).

Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays

 

A new collection of writing by Paul Cudenec has been published by Winter Oak Press.

Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays brings together a selection of work by the author of The Anarchist Revelation, published earlier this summer.

Cudenec calls for a new deeper level of resistance to global capitalism - one which is rooted in the collective soul not just of humankind but of the living planet. 

He leads us along the intertwining environmental and philosophical strands of Antibodies, through the passion of Anarchangels and The Task and on to a cutting analysis of Gladio, a state-terrorist branch of what he calls the "plutofascist" system. 

Also included, alongside short pieces on Taoism and Jungian psychology, is an interview with the author, in which he explains key aspects of his approach. 

Peter Marshall, author of Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism and Nature's Web: An Exploration of Ecological Thinking, has described Antibodies as “very readable and profoundly thoughtful... Many new insights on the destructive relationship between the greater part of humanity and the planet which tries to sustain them".

Antibodies, Anarchangels and Other Essays is 154 pages long and is available at £7.99 in the UK, $11.99 in the USA and  Euros 9.62.

The Kindle version can be had for a special price of just 77p in the UK, $1.18 in the USA and 0.89 Euros.

Excerpt from Anarchist Revelation now online

Paul Cudenec has posted a passage from his book The Anarchist Revelation on his blog, under the heading The Natural Laws of Freedom.

For details of how to get hold of a copy, see previous entries on this site.

Anarchist Revelation at The Cowley Club

 

We are pleased to announce that Paul Cudenec's The Anarchist Revelation is now available from the Cowley Club bookshop at 12 London Road, Brighton, East Sussex. Copies are on sale there for £7 each.

The cub is a social centre  which  houses a cafe and bookshop during the day and a members' bar during the evenings. It also has a library and is a base for a variety of other projects.

It is collectively owned and run as a base for those involved in grassroots social change and those sympathetic to such activities. It is run entirely by volunteers.

The Anarchist Revelation - more outlets

The Anarchist Revelation by Paul Cudenec is now available from Waterstones bookshops, at £7.99, with free delivery in the UK.

Other commercial outlets include The Book Depository and play.com.

For potential readers in India, there's Bookadda, in Australia there's Bookworld and in New Zealand Mighty Ape.

In Norway you can buy The Anarchist Revelation from Bokklubben or Studia and in Sweden from Adlibris or  Bokus.

In Croatia it is available from Superbookshop and in the USA it is now stocked by Tower Books and should be found on the shelves of Left Bank Books in Seattle.

Online interview with Paul Cudenec

An interview with Paul Cudenec, author of The Anarchist Revelation, has been published on  the internet.

It was originally published on the Vast Minority blog site but has since also appeared at on UK Indymedia and Indybay.org.

Here's the text:

Q: Your book The Anarchist Revelation is very much focused around presenting an anarchist spirituality. Why?

That’s the question I hopefully go some way to answering over the course of some 150 pages! In short, there are two separate, and yet interwoven, strands. Firstly there is the individual question – how can an alienated individual such as an anarchist, who is sane enough to find the contemporary capitalist world insane, carry on living in that world? Involvement in the anarchist struggle is part of the answer, but you also need something more than that, some greater perspective to fall back on in times of doubt or isolation.

I think anarchism, historically, has always offered a depth of vision that can sustain and propel an individual through adversity but, if we start to regard anarchism not as a life-philosophy but as a narrowly defined social movement, we will lose contact with that vital force.

Secondly, there’s the spiritual depth of the anarchist movement as a whole. To me, it stands opposed to the modern materialist mindset at a fundamental level. It’s not just that we reject all those assumptions about the legitimacy of authority, property or privilege, but we also reject the blinkered and one-dimensional thinking of the current age.

Anarchy is lateral thinking, creative thinking, poetic thinking in many ways, and in that it has a lot in common with something like Sufism, the esoteric strand of Islam. It’s not stuck on the one level - like Marxism is, for example. And I think we need to reconnect to that imaginative and fluid side of anarchist thought.

Q: But there’s a difference between the vitality or fluidity of a philosophy and this idea of “spirituality”. Why does that come in? Why does it have to come in?

Spirituality for me is all about using the parts of our mind that are left to wither away in a purely materialist society, where nothing it considered valid unless it can be “empirically” proven to be so. These are the powers we need to reignite, on both an individual and collective level.

Q: But what about the religious aspect to “spirituality” that you do evoke in your book? Are you suggesting that these unused parts of our mind are something to do with a supernatural element?

Not supernatural, no. But my definition of what is natural, and real, would go a lot further than what’s generally understood by that. As far as religion goes, the only religion I’m promoting is anarchism. OK, maybe it’s not quite a religion at the moment, but I think it has the potential to be, if it doesn’t cut itself off from the less materialist aspects of its philosophy that take it up in that direction.

Q: So what kind of religion would anarchism be? A religion with no god?

There doesn’t have to be a “god”, in the sense in which it’s normally meant in the West. It’s all about an holistic vision, understanding that on every level of existence everything is interconnected and ultimately part of the one entity. On a human level, this is already the anarchist position – mutual aid, co-operation, solidarity and so on. On a planetary level this is the environmentalist position – the Gaia idea of a living Earth. On a cosmic level, this becomes a Buddhist or Taoist idea of the ultimate unity.

I think that anarchism naturally embraces the holistic approach on the other levels, as well, thus expanding itself into a complete vision of life, rather than remaining merely a social or economic programme spiced up with a confrontational attitude.

Q: Is this a bad thing, then, a “confrontational attitude”? Should anarchists be adopting the quietism of Eastern mystics?

Not at all. A confrontational attitude is essential for anarchism. I think we need to be more confrontational, in fact, in contexts other than street battles with the police or fascists. We need to be more confrontational in our refusal of the moral claims of the state, by stating clearly that we don’t accept that they have the right to rule us, to jail us, to control us in any way. Of course, we recognise the reality that they can do so, in the same way that a large man with a knife has the physical ability to rob me in the street, but we should make it clear that we don’t buy into their lie that there is any moral legitimacy behind this.

We also need to be more confrontational in attacking the limits that are placed around possible futures. Although it’s often a tactically good idea to work with reformist campaigns, if only to help stem the tide of increasing capitalist domination, we should never stop talking about the completely different society that is our vision and inspiration. It doesn’t matter if people can’t grasp that this could ever happen, that they are conditioned by society to think that such a future is not only undesirable but also impossible.

We have to keep our black flag flying so that the vision stays alive, at least on an abstract level, and it’s there for people to turn to one day when they finally realise that the only alternative is going to be a future of slavery and misery for the vast majority of humanity. What we need to reclaim is the total opposition to the current system that was historically offered by anarchism. There’s such a strength in that.

Also, by the way, there’s nothing necessarily quietist or pacifist about faiths like Buddhism – take the Tibetan monks in their struggle against Chinese occupation, for a start. Many religions are used by authorities to promote obedience and submission, and Buddhism is no exception, but that doesn’t reflect on its innate qualities or its potential as an aid to human liberation.

Q: Total opposition? That sounds quite full-on!

In the context in which I just used it, I meant total opposition in a philosophical sense – attacking the current death-system at its roots, rather than focusing on trimming it back here and there. But I do think that’s what we need, at every level. Otherwise nothing will change, all possibilities of improvement will remain blocked and the future will be like this, only a thousand times worse.

Q: There’s a strong environmental current running through your work. Would you describe yourself as an eco-anarchist?

I have done, yes, though I’m tending now to focus on just being an anarchist, which I think is enough. For a start, I can’t see that anything other than anarchism – and the total opposition that it involves – is going to save the planet. The system is not going to reform itself or voluntarily concede any power or control. I also don’t feel there’s a need for any of us to qualify our anarchism with adjectives.

I’ve been playing around with the notion of an Anarchy Threshold, this being the “finishing tape” that all anarchists are aiming at, the point at which humankind can said to be liberated. The idea is that we don’t really have to argue about what happens after that, because, as anarchists, we’re saying that the people around at the time (whenever it actually happens!) will decide that, by their actions and views, among themselves.

So it doesn’t matter if my vision of a better future is one without factories, while my comrade sees the need for a continuation of some form of industrialism. Neither of us will be in a position to decide that. As anarchists we’re not about imposing our views on others anyway, even if we could do so. So it’s purely theoretical – our only input is in putting forward our own visions of how life could be. If we have faith in a free humanity, we will have faith in the future it will create for itself in an anarchist society. Personally, I can’t see that a post-capitalist world would be industrial in any way, because industrialism is capitalism.

The capitalists are right when they say that without the profit incentive, we wouldn’t have what they call “progress” – it’s the forces of money and power, feeding off each other, that have spawned the industrial hell in which we are all forced to live today and the moment that there is no more capitalism there will be no raison d’être for factories, oil refineries, nuclear power stations, shopping malls and so on.

I don’t have to argue too much with other anarchists about what a future anarchist society would look like, though. Firstly, because it’s not my call – or theirs. Secondly, because I know, in my own heart, that an anarchist society would not be an industrial one. It will all unfold in due course. And in the meantime, before the Anarchy Threshold has been reached, our only aim should be to work towards that point with a diversity of tactics and a respect for each others’ personal visions.

Q: Isn’t that a bit naïve, to think that anarchists could all work together happily ever after?

It’s not naïve to think we should all work together – or at least not snipe at each other. If we can’t, then perhaps that’s something to do with the egos of individuals concerned (not just inflated egos, but fragile ones as well) – and that is something that can be addressed by an individual spiritual approach that is a microcosm of our social struggle, as I describe in the book. It’s about rediscovering our strength and clarity, both individually and collectively.

Q: The language in your book can be quite academic at times – do you feel that this can create a barrier to people understanding what you’re saying and limit the numbers who are going to read your message?

Firstly, I’m not a professional academic and I try to make my meaning clear to readers. It’s difficult, though, to express complex ideas without using the short cut of a certain vocabulary – otherwise the end result would be both long-winded and a little patronising.

Secondly, when you’re quoting writers like Herbert Marcuse or Karl Jaspers it would be strange if the surrounding text was in a completely different register – the flow wouldn’t be there. Thirdly, part of theme of The Anarchist Revelation is the lowering of the intellectual level and the denial by the narrow positivist mindset of people’s ability to think clearly and profoundly. Dumbing-down the language in which that sort of argument is expressed seems to me like something of an own goal!

It’s not just a question of vocabulary, but also the way ideas are expressed. Everything doesn’t always have to be compressed into soundbites. I do take on board the criticism to a certain extent, though, and I would like to work on ways of communicating these ideas in a way that they can be more readily absorbed.

Q: Finally, your book draws on the work of a whole range of writers, many of whom are not anarchists. How would you respond to criticism that you risk diluting the anarchist message and confusing it with unrelated strands of thought. Is this some kind of “post-anarchism” that you’re serving up?

No, it’s not “post-anarchism”. If anything, I’m trying to unearth an “Ur-anarchism”, a primal force behind the philosophy, hence my foray into the worlds of hermeticism, alchemy, Sufism and Taoism.

I think it’s a mistake to imagine that anarchism is, or should be, some kind of self-contained bubble of consciously-limited political analysis. It’s not airtight, but porous. Anarchism influences the world around it and it is, in turn, influenced by that world. The fact that an idea is expressed by a particular individual does not make it “their” idea anyway; it’s all drawn from the common cultural resource of humanity.

So if a writer expresses something that seems valid and interesting to me, I don’t have to agree with everything else they ever wrote or did in order for me to make use of it in my work and acknowledge where I read it. To me, it’s actually exciting to find anarchist ideas bubbling up in unexpected places, as it makes it clear that our vision is not as peripheral as the thought-authorities would like to make out.

Anarchism is the political label we give to a massive underground river of suppressed thinking that is flowing under the streets of our materialist capitalist civilization, waiting to rise up and sweep away its factories, prisons and city halls. Ultimately, it’s the life-force itself and as such it’s unstoppable. 

The Anarchist Revelation is now also available from The Book Depository.