We tend to think of knowledge in terms of acquisition – we see ourselves as adding new pieces of information to our existing mental stock. But sometimes it is more a process of removal – a pulling away of veils that have been hiding a truth we somehow always knew, deep down, but could not quite seize or articulate.
This is very much the case with a book I recently borrowed from my local anarchist library, written by Georges Lapierre, who was co-author with Yves Delhoysie of the 1987 classic L’Incendie millénariste. This 2015 work published by L’insomniaque, être ouragans: écrits de la dissidence (roughly “Being Hurricanes: Rebel Writings”), runs to 680 pages and consists of three distinct parts – the first one explores our perception of reality, the second looks at the origins of capitalism and the third focuses on current resistance and repression in Mexico, including the indigenous struggles in Oaxaca and Chiapas.
The main insight I personally gained from the book concerns the fundamental character of our modern “Western” society and why I have always found it distasteful, even before I had my youthful head screwed on well enough to understand why.
Lapierre insists that what marks our civilization, and separates it from other cultures past and present, is that it is an entirely mercantile culture. This is not just the way it organises itself, but the way it sees, the way it thinks. The “cosmovision” of our society, to use Lapierre’s term, is based entirely on money, on the exchange of money. As he puts it: “In a mercantile society we are all merchants, our heads are filled with the thoughts of big capitalist merchants, we all think about money.”
The implications of our descent into a money-based cosmovision are enormous. We find ourselves in a hollow and superficial world entirely dominated by Oscar Wilde’s cynics, who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. Lapierre looks at other cultures in which gift-exchange plays a crucial role in communal cohesion and at the way in which the mercantile attitude amounts to a separation of the individual from the collective. This stranded individual becomes nothing more than a helpless slave to the system.
He explains: “From time immemorial, the slave has been the one reduced to being nothing but an individual, someone separated from their community or from their people, someone who is no longer driven by their own thought (in other words, the thought of the collectivity to which they belong) but by that of their master”.
At times, Lapierre seems to shake his head in astonishment at how this ever came about, at how a mentality so alien to every healthy human culture could have come to dominate the species. He writes: “Let’s not forget that in a traditional society the merchant is the stranger, the one who doesn’t respect the rules of the social game, and here we have this being who has set himself apart from society, who doesn’t take part in the interplay of mutual obligations and who only acts in his own interests, and is now poised to conquer the planet”.
He makes it admirably clear that this mercantile domination is not something that has evolved peacefully or somehow emerged naturally through any kind of consensus. The capitalist world-view has always been imposed by force. He cites the example of Australia where “the Aborigines had to submit to the idea of exchange held by the British colonists, or else disappear: massacres, deportations, reserves or concentration camps; the indigenous people and their way of seeing the world do not interest the British colonists, they are wiped out or fenced in”.
Again and again, says Lapierre, “absolute violence” has been used to impose the rule of money: “Violence is at the heart of capitalism… To submit to the capitalist system-world, consciously or not, is always to do violence to yourself”. As well as violence, there is deceit. Part of the totalitarian domination of mercantile thinking involves the hiding of the mercantile nature of our society, the induced forgetting of the notion that there could ever be another way of 