Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art, by the late Peter Lamborn Wilson is a book in two parts. First comes reminiscences, rants and raps about anarchist theory and (in)activism. The second half of the volume consists of essays on Symbolism, alchemy and anarchism in the arts. (Your editor is hot to run the pages on Gauguin!) What follows are two chapters from the first swatch of Heresies…
How I Became An Anarchist
When I was 12 or 13, I wanted to be a cartoonist and I worshiped Krazy Kat, greatest of all comic strips: surrealist, mystical, Romantic slapstick about perverse love (across not only gender but species) and criminal anarchy: quantum weirdness and genderfuck written in slang poetry and drawn with slapdash-taoist panache by African-American artist George Herriman. He also illustrated the now-neglected masterpiece Archie and Mehitabel by Don Marquis, about a cockroach poet (based on the anarchistic e.e. cummings) and a passionate alley cat whose motto was “Wot the Hell.” Searching in the library for more Don Marquis I found his (now totally forgotten) book, The Almost Perfect State, in which he (a) defended the Pythagorean ban on eating beans; and (b) propounded a “minarchist” political theory based on Thoreau’s dictum, “that state is best which governs least.” This text in turn sent me to musty disintegrating old books about anarchism and I was hooked. As far as I could tell at the time anarchism was extinct and I was the only anarchist in the world.
Later in high school I discovered that at least one other anarchist existed. In New Brunswick, NJ at that time the old abandoned redbrick factory district down by the sluggish green Raritan Canal intersected a Black ghetto of decrepit early 19th-century sagging-roofed slum houses. There in a tiny dusty disorderly bookshop my friends and I discovered Perry Kaiser, a genuine Jewish anarchist. His business seemed to consist solely of selling used comic books for a nickel each to neighborhood kids. We sat at his feet and soaked up reminiscences of the old glory days when he’d served time in prison for selling Lady Chatterly’s Lover. This was our first taste of real bohemianism, and it struck a deep chord. Mr. Kaiser died, and around 1959 we became beatniks (in our own minds).
In the 1960s I discovered a few more anarchists, but it wasn’t till the 1980s that I finally became an anarchist activist in New York, where I joined the old Libertarian Book Club (then still run by ancient venerable comrades of Emma Goldman), an “Arts Branch” of the IWW (organized by Mel Most, descendent of Johann Most) along with Judith Malina and the Living Theater and Bob Fass of WBAI-FM; and the Philosophical-Individualist Anarchist organization, the John Henry Mackay gesellschaft.
This last grouplet was inspired by the LBC’s venerable Italian Left-Stirnerite “Brand” Arrigoni (whose great autobiography, Freedom My Dream, has recently been republished), another contemporary of Emma’s, then in his 90s. I was and am no narrow ideologue. I like every kind of anarchist, from the Left Nietzscheans to the Sorelian Syndicalists. I like the anarcho-communism of Kropotkin, the anarcho-socialism of Gustav Landauer, and the anarcho-federalism of Mutualism and Proudhon, the cultural anarchism of Mallarme and Jarry, the libertinism of the hippys, Situationism — even the “young” Marx. And I even have a soft spot for large-L Libertarianism [1] l’ve always assumed that “after the Revolution” all flavors of freedom would thrive. In the 80s I took an interest in such syncretistic “systems” as bolo’bolo and “Type 3 Anarchy” which sought to transcend the pointless squabbles of the sectarians and work for a united front. Of course, in the 60s we actually believed in a Revolution. By the 80s a certain irony or Romantic Pessimism (“anarcho-cynicalism”) had somewhat clouded our Flower Power idealism. But we still kept the faith.
Note
1 Robert Anton Wilson was a good friend of mine (and perhaps a cousin), and I also knew and liked Karl Hess, ex-speechwriter for Goldwater and self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist.” The LBC (Libertarian Book Club) had a few capital L-Libertarians along with small-l (anarchist) libertarians as loyal members. We disagree on economics but agree on freedom from the moral oppression of Law.
..
A Theory of Everything
(for the Autonomedia Collective, esp. Jim Fleming)
Sometime in the 1980s — I can’t be more precise — I decided to stop wasting time on things like contemporary fiction, film and other ephemera, and finally get down to figuring out exactly what the fuck it was all about, by which I mean everything. Real reality, both diachronic and synchronic. Physical existence. Human existence. The meaning of history, of science, of spirituality. Where and how it all went wrong.
As I recall, the course in reading I then undertook, with this deliberate motive, began with the complete works of Nietzsche. I read Max Stirner, Proudhon, Guy Debord, Gustav Landauer, and as much Marx as I could stand. I tried to read the Bible but got so outraged by the violence and inhumanity of the Old Testament I had to stop. (I’m reminded of the quip of a queer friend of mine: “Just who IS this Miss Jehovah?!”)
I continued to read in religion and the Histories of Religions. For example I read the entire Rig Veda, not just Doniger’s selection. I consider it (along with the Chuang Tzu) to be the best of all “scriptures.” If I were to accept the idea of “revelation” these would be my choices.
I avoided philosophy per se because it inevitably put me to sleep. (I knew Nietzsche was not a philosopher because I could read him.) Instead I read a great deal of “Theory” including especially Baudrillard, Virilio, Foucault and other French and Italian theorists published by the Semiotext(e)/ Autonomedia Collective, of which I was a working member. (These were the palmy days of our “joke & toke” editorial meetings, every Thursday, at our Brooklyn HDQ)
I had a similar problem with economics. I knew it was the “key to everything” in some sense, but I found it impenetrable and apparently rather stupid. In desperation I turned to my old childhood hobby of numismatics, hoping to approach the question of money as a problem in art and history. It worked. Money itself is a fascinating subject — a Hermetic object par excellence — one of the best proofs that magic sometimes works — bad magic, anyway. After reading probably 20 or 30 books on this subject I found I could approach economics as history if not as “science.” Writers like Michael Hudson and Karl Polanyi (genius of “economic anthropology”) were a pleasure to read, not a chore. I was also influenced by a German theory of money as religious in origin, coins beginning as temple tokens symbolic of shared sacrifices made at certain bull-temples in Asia Minor in the 7th century BC. Simultaneously the alphabet was invented, just as writing itself mirrors money itself in Sumer circa 4004 BC.
Writing was clearly also an Hermetic ar7 (invented by Thoth) and worked magically as “action-at-a-distance.” Writing, as Socrates/Plato observed, was a very mixed blessing indeed: tool of hegemonic oppression, but perhaps to be seized back and redeemed by detournement toward the Insurrection. To this day I’m not sure which of the two trends is stronger. But, like it or not, I’m a writer — I don’t have the choice of becoming somehow “pre-literate” (or “post”). The best book I know on the origin of writing, by Denise Schmant-Besserat, reveals the source of writing as sacred accounting in Mesopotamian temple/banks. There may have been an independent invention of writing in Egypt, even more directly magical, and strangely simultaneous with the Sumerian origin (although my hunch is that Sumer influenced Egypt). Perhaps it’s easier to attribute it to Hermes…
Indulging in a plethora of Science-for-the-masses books, which I read because I’m unfortunately very badly grounded in science and virtually innumerate, I managed to absorb some physics (e.g., from Nick Herbert, who became a comrade) and some math from Rudy Rucker, whom I also met (I co-edited an anthology of SciFi with him and my “cousin” Robert Anton Wilson). I delved into “chaos” and complexity and corresponded with Ralph Abraham (and met Benoit Mandelbrot at a party). The only science I ever really “studied” was alchemy, but I can’t claim to understand it. What I do understand is that it’s still largely missing from the History of Science, generally a very dismal area, devoted to triumphal progressivism and technological determination. Nevertheless, I discovered the Romantic Scientists — Priestly, Davy, Erasmus Darwin (my favorite), Swedenborg, Goethe, Novalis, etc. — and easily recognized their Hermetic background. Two of the few historians to grasp this were Frances Yates and H. Trevor Roper, but neither of them was a historian of science.
I read more anthropology and archaeology, in terms of sheer numbers of books, than any other field. My reasoning was that the former would illuminate the latter although this notion is widely attacked now by many specialists in both areas. Even my friend Mick Taussig “distrusts” this kind of hermeneutics. His work nevertheless was pivotal for me, along with the 1960s gurus Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres (perhaps the greatest, in my opinion); recently I’d add James Scott (the “Yale anarchist”) to that short list. But I consumed many monographs on tribal society, ethnopharmacy, “primitive warfare,” witchcraft and shamanism, and “Stone Age economics.”
In archaeology I specialized in Sumer and the Megalithic Atlantic. Later I spent many happy hours looking at big stones in Ireland, usually in the rain. I studied Sumer because it was the origin-the “Celtic margin” because I’m sentimental about it. But again, I read indiscriminately, looking for shards of light in Egypt, China, Greece and North America…
Of course I consumed a lot of history. I especially liked Carlo Ginzburg’s “microhistory” theory, but also the Braudelian longue duree. I worked on Asian history just because it’s comparatively ignored in our Anglo-American sphere; the Silk Road was a special fascination, as was Chinese history and culture in general (Needham’s Science and Civilization in China was a goldmine, as were the delightful works of Edward Schaefer). I also delved into American “lost histories” of insurrection, “tri-racial” cultures, local Hudson Valley history (especially via the late great Alf Evers, whom I met thanks to Ed Sanders, who was editing Alf’s last book, on Kingston NY), and also local Indian history (through my colleague Evan Pritchard; see his great Native New Yorkers).
I already knew a great deal of Hist. of Relig’s, especially Sufism, Taoism, Tantra, American “Black Islam,” etc., but I continued to browse in that field, discovering the work of George Dumezil (who set me off on a huge course of Indo-European studies) and the brilliant disciple of Eliade, loan Couliano, especially his Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, which inspired me actually to read G. Bruno rather than simply admire him. I’m giving you just the highlights of my bibliography here, lest I get bogged down entirely. At one point I became fatigued with the sheer seriousness of all this work, and decided to take an intellectual break by studying something totally frivolous and insignificant, purely for aesthetic enjoyment — something hopelessly obscure and dusty — elegantly boring — like a vacation on the beach, say, in the 15th century. Sheer self-indulgence.
Somewhere I’d picked up the fact that certain Renaissance magi had been fascinated with ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, but had failed to “crack” them, and wasted seas of ink vainly imagining what they might mean. Of course it was Champollion who received the Rosetta Stone as part of Napoleon’s spoils, eagerly awaited by “Egyptian” Freemasons in France[1] who managed to break through to real translation. Athanasius Kircher, the great Jesuit polymath Hermeticist, devoted whole volumes to this subject, and I was able to look at first editions of these in the NY Public Library (to which, by the way, I owe a huge debt as a non-academic scholar); his works were never re-published or edited or translated from Latin, although my colleague Joscelyn Godwin has written several wonderful studies of him. The Egyptian Hieroglyphs in the Renaissance by Fowden was my modern scholarly vade-me-cum. The great Hermetic romance, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), which I discovered in the Hermetic Library in Amsterdam, was also full of great pseudo-hieroglyphic erudition.
I found the partial Elizabethan translation, and copies of early editions of the Italian and French versions of the Hypnerotomachia (Rabelais adored the latter, and based his last Book of Pantagruel, the Island of Wine, on it). The mania for hieroglyphs had led to the invention of “new” magical hieroglyphs in the form of images, collected in Emblem Books like Michael Maier’s great alchemical book of pictures, poetry and music, Atalanta fugiens. The basic idea was that picture-writing could be “read” and written as direct magical communication. It would perform Image Magic by combining pictures and words — as W. Benjamin pointed out, by ideologizing the emblem — and this would have an actual magical effect on the reader, even without specific knowledge of the “semantic meaning” of the Emblem or rebus itself. De Nerval discusses this idea brilliantly if briefly in Aurelia, so the magical idea of the hieroglyphs survived the revelation that Egyptian writing turned out to be something other than what the magi expected. In short, via a fortuitous mistranslation of the hieroglyphs, the occultists (including Bruno) and poets had discovered a vital principle, a deep truth about art and writing and what Couliano called the eros of magic, as well as deep insight into mass psychology, propaganda, advertising, brainwashing and the False Real of our modern Consensus. In short, the totally “useless” little backwater of history I’d chosen on a whim turned out to be the key to a theory of everything. It actually explained what the devil had been going on for the last million years, or at least for the last 6000 and the “rise” of Civilization. At last I understood the Enuma elish, the Mesopotamian “Genesis” which (I now realized) openly revealed the secret history of History — along with a few vital ancillary texts like How Inanna Stole the 51 Principles of Civilization from Enki in Eridu, and the Sumerian King List [2] and of course Gilgamesh, and the Narmer Palette (so-called proto-writing from the Egyptian First Dynasty).
At the same time I was teaching every year at the Famous Beatnik Summer Camp, a.k.a. the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a.k.a. Naropa in Boulder, Colo., founded by Chogyam Trungpa (I met him while working with Peter Brook in 1975 and didn’t like him, although I think he was a genius) and Allen Ginsberg, whom I came to love and admire tremendously. There I met wonderful people — too many to list here — just look up the Naropa catalogues and the anthologies of Naropa lectures and you’ll get an idea — but I need to mention Harry Smith, a terrible character in some ways, but as a Hermetic anthropologist he was a big influence on me. His surrealist films (especially “Heaven & Earth Magic”) and his incoherent lectures on American anthropology in 1989-91 at Naropa, are major works in my trajectory, and after Harry died I gave a series of talks, one a year, under the rubric “Harry Smith Memorial Lectures in Strange Anthropology” (a few of which were transcribed and published [3], others now being available in audio on-line). There I developed my own theory of everything, and basically talked myself out of attempting a book on the subject. (Actually I wrote two such books, but threw them away as failures.) I did eventually publish a long poem in which I boiled down my idea into a pamphlet called Hieroglyphica Anonymous (which appeared without my name on it, like a Rosicrucian manifesto, and consequently was never read by anyone, as far as I know).
Other writings in which I dealt with aspects of the theory would include the little book I published in Dublin at the short-lived bookshop Garden of Delight (“G.O.D.”) founded by my dear friend the late Gordon Campbell –– Millennium; the essays on Fourier and on the “Shamanic Trace” in Escape; my “crazy” book Ploughing the Clouds: the Search for Irish Soma (City Lights); Green Hermeticism (Lindisfarne) and Ec(o)logues (Station Hill Press). Also a few poems in Black Fez Manifesto, especially the Cro-Magnon texts. More bits of the theory appear in riverpeople, Hoodoo Metaphysics and The Neanderthal Liberation Front.
Can I explain the theory in, say, three pages? Yes, I’ve already done so, in Hieroglyphica Anon. And since that work has sunk out of sight I’ll simply quote myself here:
Public secret-everyone knows but no one speaks. Another kind of public secret: the fact is published but no one pays attention.
A cuneiform tablet called “The Sumerian King List” states that “kingship first descended from heaven in the city of Eridu,” in the south of Sumer. Mesopotamians believed Eridu the oldest city in the world, and modern archaeology confirms the myth. Eridu was founded about 5000 BC and disappeared under the sand around the time of Christ.
Eridu’s god Ea or Enki (a kind of Neptune and Hermes combined) had a ziggurat where fish were sacrificed. He owned the ME, the fifty-one principles of Civilization. The first king, named “Staghorn,” probably ruled as Enki’s high priest. After some centuries came the Flood, and kingship had to descend from heaven again, this time in Uruk and Ur. Gilgamesh now appears on the list. The Flood actually occurred; Sir Leonard Wooley saw the thick layer of silt at Ur between two inhabited strata.
Bishop Ushher once calculated according to the Bible that the world was created on October 19th 4004 BC at 9 o’clock in the morn ing. This makes no Darwinian sense, but provides a good date for the founding of the Sumerian state, which certainly created a new world. Abraham came from Ur of the Chaldees; Genesis owes much to the “Enuma elish” (Mesopotamian Creation Myth). Our only text is late Babylonian but obviously based on a lost Sumerian original. Marduk the wargod of Babylon has apparently been pasted over a series of earlier figures beginning with Enki.
Before the creation of the world as we know it a family of deities held sway. Chief among them at the time, Tiamat (a typical avatar of the universal Neolithic earth or sea goddess) described by the text as a dragon or serpent, rules a brood of monsters and dallies with her “Consort” (high priest) Kingu, an effeminate Tammuz/Adonis prototype. The youngest gods are dissatisfied with her reign; they are “noisy,” and Tiamat (the text claims) wants to destroy them because their noise disturbs her slothful slumber. In truth the young gods are simply fed up with doing all the shitwork themselves because there are no “humans” yet. The gods want Progress. They elect Marduk their king and declare war on Tiamat.
A gruesome battle ensues. Marduk triumphs. He kills Tiamat and slices her body lengthwise in two. He separates the halves with a mighty ripping heave. One half becomes sky above, the other earth below.
Then he kills Kingu and chops his body up into gobs and gobbets. The gods mix the bloody mess with mud and mold little figurines. Thus humans are created as robots of the gods. The poem ends with a triumphalist paean to Marduk, new king of heaven.
Clearly the Neolithic is over. City-god, war-god, metal-god vs. country goddess, lazy goddess, garden goddess. The creation of the world equals the creation of civilization, separation, hierarchy, masters and slaves, above and below. Ziggurat and pyramid symbolize the new shape of life.
Combining “Enuma elish” and “King List” we get an explosive secret document about the origin of civilization not as gradual evolution toward inevitable future, but as violent coup, conspiratorial overthrow of primordial rough-egalitarian Stone Age society by a crew of black magic cult cannibals. (Human sacrifice first appears in the archaeological record at Ur III. Similar grisly phenomena in the first few Egyptian dynasties.)
About 3100 writing was invented at Uruk. Apparently you can witness the moment in the strata: one layer no writing, next layer writing. Of course writing has a pre-history (like the State). From ancient times a system of accounting had grown up based on little clay counters in the shapes of commodities (hides, jars of oil, bars of metal, etc.) Also glyptic seals had been invented with images used heraldically to designate the seals’ owners. Counters and seals were pressed into slabs of wet clay and the records were held in Temple archives — probably records of debts owed to the Temple. (In the Neolithic the temples no doubt served as redistribution centers. In the Bronze Age they began to function as banks.)
As I picture it the invention of real writing took place within a single brilliant family of temple archivists over three or four genera tions, say a century. The counters were discarded and a reed stylus was used to impress signs in clay, based on the shapes of the old counters, and with further pictograms imitated from the seals. Numbering was easily compacted from rows of counters to number-signs. The real breakthrough came with the flash that certain pictographs could be used for their sound divorced from their meaning and recombined to “spell” other words (especially abstractions). Integrating the two systems proved cumbersome, but maybe the sly scribes considered this an advantage. Writing needed to be difficult because it was a mystery revealed by gods and a monopoly of the New Class of scribes. Aristocrats rarely learned to read and write — a matter for mere bureaucrats. But writing provided the key to state expansion by separating sound from meaning, speaker from hearer, and sight from other senses. Writing as separation both mirrors and reinforces separation as “written” as fate. Action-at-a-distance (including a distance of time) constitutes the magic of the state, the nervous system of control. Writing both is and represents the new “Creation” ideology. It wipes out the oral tradition of the Stone Age and erases the collective memory of a time before hierarchy. In the text we have always been slaves.
By combining image and word in single memes or hieroglyphs the scribes of Uruk (and a few years later the pre-dynastic scribes of Egypt) created a magical system. According to a late syncretistic Greco-Egyptian myth, when Hermes-Thoth invents writing he boasts to his father Zeus that humans now never need forget anything ever again. Zeus replies, “On the contrary my son, now they’ll forget everything.” Zeus discerned the occult purpose of the text, the forgetfulness of the oral/aural, the false memory of the text, indeed the lost text. He sensed a void where others saw only a plenum of information. But this void is the telos of writing.
Writing begins as a method of controlling debt owed to the Temple, debt as yet another form of absence. When full-blown economic texts appear a few strata later we find ourselves already immersed in a complex economic world based on debt, interest, compound interest, debt peonage as well as outright slavery, rents, leases, private and public forms of property, long-distance trade, craft monopolies, police, and even a “money-lenders’ bazaar.” Not money as we understand it yet, but commodity currencies (usually barley and silver), often loaned for as much as 33.3% per year. The Jubilee or random periodic forgiveness of debts (as known in the Bible) already existed in Sumer, which would have otherwise collapsed under the load of debt.
Sooner or later the bank (i.e., the temple) would solve this problem by obtaining the monopoly on money. By lending at interest ten or more times its actual assets, the modern bank simultaneously creates debt and money to pay debt. Fiat, “let it be.” But even in Sumer the indebtedness of the king (the state) to the temple (the bank) had already begun.
The problem with commodity currencies is that no one can have a monopoly on cows or wheat. Their materiality limits them. A cow might calve, and barley might grow, but not at rates demanded by usury. Silver doesn’t grow at all.
So the next brilliant move, by King Croesus of Lydia (Asia Minor, 7th century BC), was the invention of the coin, a refinement of money just as the Greek alphabet (also 7th cent.), was a refinement of writing. Originally a temple token or souvenir signifying one’s “due portion” of the communal sacrifice, a lump of metal impressed with a royal or temple seal (often a sacrificial animal such as the bull), the coin begins its career with mana, something super-natural, something more (or less) than the weight of the metal. Stage two: coins showing two faces, one with image, the other with writing. You can never see both at once, suggesting the metaphysical slipperiness of the object, but together they constitute a hieroglyph, a word/image expressed in metal as a single meme of value.
Coins might “really” be worth only their weight in metal but the temple says they’re worth more and the king is ready to enforce the decree. The object and its value are separated; the value floats free, the object circulates. Money works the way it works because of an absence not a presence. In fact money largely consists of absent wealth — debt — your debt to king and temple. Moreover, free of its anchor in the messy materiality of commodity currencies, money can now compound unto eternity, far beyond mere cows and jars of beer, beyond all worldly things, even unto heaven. “Money begets money,” Ben Franklin gloated. But money is dead. Coins are inanimate objects. Then money must be the sexuality of the dead.
The whole of Greco-Egypto-Sumerian economics compacts itself neatly into the hieroglyphic text of the Yankee dollar bill, the most popular publication in the history of History. The owl of Athena, one of the earliest coin images, perches microscopically on the face of the bill in the upper left corner of the upper right shield (you’ll need a magnifying glass), and the Pyramid of Cheops is topped with the all-seeing Eye of Horus or the panoptical eye of ideology. The Washington family coat of arms (stars and stripes) combined with imperial eagle and fasces of arrows, etc.; a portrait of Washington as Masonic Grand Master; and even an admission that the bill is nothing but tender for debt, public or private. Since 1971 the bill is not even “backed” by gold, and thus has become pure textuality.
Hieroglyph as magic focus of desire deflects psyche from object to representation. It “enchains” imagination and defines consciousness. In this sense money constitutes the great triumph of writing, its proof of magic power. Image wields power over desire but no control. Control is added when the image is semanticized (or “alienated”) by logos. The emblem (picture plus caption) gives desire or emotion an ideological frame and thus directs its force. Hieroglyph equals picture plus word, or picture as word (“rebus”), hence hieroglyph’s power and control over both conscious and unconscious — or in other words, its magic.
The rest of the pamphlet is devoted to an Hermetic theory of the Image…and to the principle of Eros. But “Sumerian Economics” expresses the gist of my theory. [4]
After arriving at my conclusions I took a vacation for several years and went back to reading fiction, e.g. Dumas, Scott, Stevenson, Conrad, Proust, Gustav Meyerink, Balzac, Dickens — very enjoyable. I also champion Calvino, Borges, Firbank, Dinesen, Leonora Carrington (as writer as well as painter) and Lord Dunsany. H.P. Lovecraft was a Bad Influence on my youth, along with dear Wm Burroughs. Mallarmé influenced my poetry (he was a life-long anarchist, by the way), as did Ginsberg, and Virgil. And I discovered the Oz books, which I’d never read as a child. Frank Baum was a theosophical anarchist and the Buddha of the Midwest! My theory also involves the necessity for fantasy and the sheer pleasure of reading-pleasure being the best revenge.
Notes
1 Spiritual descendants of Cagliostro, a now-very-much-under-rated but actually very important intellectual “pivot” of his Age, not just a charlatan but also a genius.
2 I experienced a dark epiphany, when I saw the actual clay stele on which the King List is engraved, squatting in the Metropolitan Museum in NYC like something from an H.P. Lovecraft tale.
3 See especially my essay on Money, which was edited by Anne Waldman and published in one of the Naropa essay collections from the Univ. of New Mexico Press and is also available in audio on the Net.
4 The Kurdish PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan, who has embraced anarchist ideas, wrote a similar analysis of Sumerian civilization as slavery and patriarchy; see Volume 1 of his fascinating Prison Writings, and my essay on him and his own excerpts in To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution (New York Autonomedia, 2016)
The version of “A Theory of Everything” above has been edited slightly. Thanks to Autonomedia for allowing First to repost excerpts from Heresies: Anarchist Memoirs, Anarchist Art (which you can buy here).