(this is adapted from an article that appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Green Horizon Magazine)
Steve Welzer review of:
Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
By Fredy Perlman.
Detroit: Black & Red, 1983.
Mohandas Gandhi wrote: “I myself am an anarchist, but of a different type . . .” The Fifth Estate Magazine has been a proponent of an anarchism of a different type. During the 1980s and 1990s it influenced the anarchist movement to embrace an eco-communitarian orientation to social change. Fredy Perlman (1934-1985) was a primary inspiration.
Fredy was born in Czechoslovakia. His family fled to Bolivia in 1938 to escape the Holocaust and later immigrated to the United States. Settling in New York City as a young man, he and his wife, Lorraine, were active in pacifist activities with the Living Theater. Fredy was arrested following a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. From 1963-1966 he studied at the Belgrade (Yugoslavia) University. After receiving a Ph.D. in Economics he became a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo and Metohija.
In May 1968 Fredy went to Paris on the last train before rail traffic was shut down by strikes. He participated in the May Day uprising in Paris and worked at the Censier center with the Citroen factory committee. Upon returning to the U.S. he wound up in Michigan where he produced the Black and Red zine, which was printed at the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor. He then became a principal with the Fifth Estate in Detroit.
Fredy’s translations include I.I. Rubin’s Essay on Marx’s Theory of Value, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Peter Arshinov’s History of the Makhnovist Movement, parts of Voline’s The Unknown Revolution, and Jacques Camatte’s The Wandering of Humanity. But he is best remembered for writing
Against His-story, Against Leviathan! in 1983.
Fredy Perlman is credited with coining the phrase “all isms are wasms.” Always averse to any manifestation of ideological sclerosis, the evolution of his ideas brought him to a point where he applied that to old-style leftism in general. For his magnum opus, rather than the sociologically “scientific” explications that tended to characterize leftist literature of the time, Fredy chose to write in a very different (very distinctive) mytho-poetic kind of way. It makes for a special reading experience, but it can be initially disconcerting for those used to high theory and historical detail.
Against His-story, Against Leviathan! was fully appreciated by a small but influential post-Marxist neo-anarchist milieu about forty years ago. Fredy’s readership was dismayed when he died prematurely in 1985 before becoming more widely read within the broad social change movement. We had been looking forward to follow-up works where Fredy could provide background for and self-interpretation of his material. In the absence of that there have tended to be misconceptions about Against His-story, Against Leviathan! For example, from the Wikipedia entry: “It is a personal critical perspective on contemporary civilization and society.” Well, it’s more a critical review of what got us to this point of crisis. “The work defined anarcho-primitivism for the first time.” Not really. That perspective had been percolating for almost a decade; and Fredy would have been aghast to hear that his ideas “defined” any kind of ideology. So let me offer my own encapsulation of what Fredy taught us:
“Leviathan” refers to a kind of socio-economic formation that started to emerge about five thousand years ago in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution. The big issue about it is the fact that our civilization has generally viewed the emergence of such as “advanced” and “progressive.” Fredy promulgated a perspective based on a critical re-thinking of the full trajectory of human history.
Prior to the momentous inflection point represented by the cultural passage into what Gary Snyder called the “New Ways,” all people had lived in localist, stateless, communitarian, mostly egalitarian bands, tribes, or villages. The unprecedented Leviathan-type formations were characterized by proto-urbanism and statism; development and employment of technology in service of production, growth, and expansionism; complex division of labor, wealth accumulation, power-elitism, patriarchy, and class division of society. These characteristics and associated values were anti-ecological—and aberrant in relation to all preceding human experience.
In Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Fredy Perlman conjectures about why, when, and how these formations arose. But he conveys that the key thing to understand is this: After they emerged they started to overrun aboriginal communities in place after place and eventually came to dominate the human social landscape—leading, after several hundred generations, to our full-blown modern crisis. He says that our task now is to deconstruct the monster. Our praxis toward that end must be based on a realistic perspective regarding its genesis and development. If we understand how ingrained by now are its lifeways and values, how dependent we’ve become on its systems, institutions, and technologies, we can appreciate that the process of “the greening of society” (re-greening) will figure to be incremental, tenuous, and of long duration. The hope is that we’ll be able to forge pathways toward our liberation: as “dwellers in the land” and good citizens of the planetary biotic community.
* * * *
When Fredy died in 1985 he may or may not have been aware of the then-nascent movements for Green politics and bioregionalism. The latter, in particular, had just started to present a vision for “deconstructing the monster.” Fredy wrote about turning around the ship of state, but how to carry through such a transformation is clearly a challenge. The scope of such a “project” is macro-scale, long-range, and unprecedented. Nonetheless, it heralds the road back to sanity. It obliges us to make the assumption that the human race is capable of negotiating the crucible that we’re now facing
The more we can effectuate this transition consciously and deliberately the better off we’ll be. Fredy Perlman’s work helped to raise our consciousness and prepare us for the trials ahead.
