Nature, Essence and Anarchy

185 Pages·2016·0.48 MB·English

by  Paul Cudenec

Nature, Essence
and Anarchy

Paul Cudenec
Winter Oak Press, Sussex, England, 2016
winteroak.org.uk

Copyright © 2016 Paul Cudenec. The author formally
retains copyright over this work but permits non-
commercial reproduction or distribution

ISBN: 978-0-9576566-8-0
“To the future or to the past, to a time when
thought is free, when men are different from one
another and do not live alone – to a time when
truth exists and what is done cannot be undone.
From the age of uniformity, from the age of
solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age
of double-think – greetings!”

George Orwell, 1984

CONTENTS

Preface ix
1 Natural anarchy 1
2 Denying reality: from nominalism to 20
newthink
3 When negative is positive 41
4 Essence and empowerment 58
5 Naturaphobia and the industrial-capitalist 77
death cult
6 The eye of the heart 99
7 Necessary subjectivity 121

PREFACE

At a time when the very future of our species and
of planetary life is at threat from the unchecked
growth of the industrial capitalist cancer, the
need for a powerful and coherent resistance can
hardly be disputed. One of the effects of this
disease, however, has been a thought-paralysis
which renders any authentic and holistic anti-
capitalist philosophy difficult to conceive and
communicate. This is not by chance, of course – it
is by disabling our intellectual immune system
that the illness has been able to take and
maintain control over us.
As well as fighting capitalism in a physical
and day-to-day sense, we need to fight it in our
heads and in our hearts by rooting our thinking
in a healthy intellectual soil beyond the mental
toxicity of its philosophically polluted
wastelands. However, to expound a world-view
that stands outside the received wisdom of
contemporary industrial rigidities is far from
simple when you have to communicate using a
language which has been remodelled to reflect
the requirements of capitalist modernity and
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PAUL CUDENEC
when you are addressing a public whose deepest
assumptions are those ingrained by the very
system you seek to challenge.
In previous books, namely The Anarchist
Revelation, The Stifled Soul of Humankind and
Forms of Freedom, I have attempted to set out
one overall argument that runs throughout the
length of the book, developing sequentially from
one chapter to the next. This is not the case here.
Instead, you will find a series of separate essays,
addressing similar issues from different angles.
Each essay is like a cross-section of the
overarching critique I am trying to present,
through which a particular seam of analysis is
revealed. One practical advantage of this format
is that the reader can safely feel free to read the
chapters in any order that happens to appeal. I
also hope that the intersections and parallels
between the various essays, as well as the spaces
between them, will help stimulate the reader’s
thinking in ways that are not possible within a
single linear thread.
The first essay, Natural anarchy, begins
with an echoing of Guy Debord’s condemnation of
the world of artifice in which we live. I describe
how, in order to hide its own falsity, capitalism
denies that humanity belongs to a holistic
natural world and also denies the very possibility
of authenticity. I discuss the way that, despite
Peter Kropotkin’s work in describing the
x