Research

Quotes from this zine:

Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are anthropologists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.

I don't want to be that person, but who? Like, I'm genuinely curious to read more about that kind of idea or development, and you're throwing this shit with no sources. (And I'm not about to say anthropologists are bastions of knowledge or perfection, but I'd really like to see evidence about this when such a claim is made.)

This is one of the first things I found, and it only says "to grow carbs." While beer is made out of the same sorts of things, it indicates a shift of diet and not a propensity for alcoholism. Meanwhile, this one outlines drug use in other cultures (though, rather than taking it at its word, it is a jumping off point), but the author does mention that band societies engaged with it on a different level than people settling in towns and cities.

This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.

While I can see the point being made, something about this feels either too generalised or ahistorical. Ancient societies that had alcohol also saw excessive drinking as a problem. Not all societies immediately started getting drunk out of their minds?

Again, I'd really like to see research behind this or additional sources where I can read more, but there is nothing of the sort in this zine (nor is their an online component to visit for more information).

Another perspective that might actually help out here is that people were domesticated by wheat (though I've never really explored that outside the handful of mentions of Yuval Noah Harari's work). It's an interesting concept to explore.

Either way, evidence would be nice.

... but as every historian knows, the spread of civilization was anything but voluntary. Lacking the manners and gentleness of their former companions in the wild, these savages, in their drunken excesses and infringements, must have provoked a series of wars – wars which, sadly, the lushes were able to win, owing to the military efficiency of their autocratic armies and the steady supply of food their subjugated farmlands provided.

This is really falling on the Noble Savage trope in order to highlight problems, which I think is a poor direction to go when you can make the same point without using it.

The first collection of laws, the Code of Hammurabi of Babylon, decreed a daily beer ration in direct proportion to social status: beer consumption went hand-in-hand with hierarchy. For example, workers received two liters while besotted priests and kings got five. [For an interesting thought experiment, ask yourself how much alcohol – and of what grade – you get now, and what that says about your position in society.]

What do you say if a person... doesn't drink? In this manner, either you're going to be moralising them as superior or you're going to imply they're not getting enough.

Either way, this is an interesting structure, though the point feels hit and miss. While it'd be interesting to explore and understand beer's importance in the hierarchy, there is quite a lot of information left unsaid: What was the importance of beer in this time (beyond the mere conjecture of "some historians")? Which historians are you referring to? It'd be nice to have references to look through because it honestly could be interesting to explore, but it's left unsaid.

Only those human beings that still lived in harmony with wilderness, such as the indigenous peoples of North America and some sectors of Africa, remained alcohol-free – for a time.

Is this strictly true, though? And even if they didn't have alcohol, they did have access to mind-altering plants.

But what's being missed in this discussion is the point that should be said bluntly: colonisers used alcohol as a way to interfere in Indigenous cultures. This is too vague for the point they're claiming they're making, and it's dancing around it too much. It's weird.

I'm also interested in why the author doesn't mention: - Sura (from the Indus Valley), which is a beverage brewed of rice meal, wheat, sugar cane, grapes, and other fruits; - Pulque, balché, or xtabentún (from Mesoamerica); - Chicha (from South America)

And then there's this bit of revival from the Palawa people in Tasmania, which the author couldn't have predicted at the time of writing (though it's obvious it could've happened with the frequent Noble Savage tropes being tossed about).

Another thing: Why the focus on beer as opposed to wine? (And when discussing peoples who were most likely predominantly drinking wine, why is that detail omitted? It's intriguing.)

It’s no exaggeration, then, to say that alcohol has played a key role in the epidemic of fascism, racism, statism, imperialism, colonialism, sexism and patriarchy, class oppression, ungoverned technological development, religious superstition, and other bad stuff that has swept the earth over the past few millennia.

... So has the medical profession. Correlation does not equal causation. Alcohol is not the inherent problem, and I'm saying that as a person who rarely (if ever) has any. Has it been used as a tool for colonisation? Of course. Does that mean that it didn't exist in cultures beforehand? That's false and ahistorical; it's also telling when you're willing to redefine "alcohol" to mean beer (while other forms existed).

It's also telling that the author didn't want to consider how it was used in other non-European cultures. Then again, this comment is meant to be strongly worded and to push you into associating it with fascism: "As for other links between alcohol and far-right/fascist activity – perhaps the reader will recall where Hitler initiated his takeover of Germany."

Yet, the fact of the matter is that Hitler didn't drink much. He didn't abstain, but he drank very little. It doesn't matter, though. People would find ways to make nonsensical connections regardless (as they have with painting and vegetarianism), and this is equally as rubbish.

It’s not widely remembered that strict vegetarianism and abstinence from drink have been common in radical circles for many centuries.

It's also been common among non-radicals and conservatives, you absolute weirdo. What a load of garbage moralising. Does eating meat make you a fascist? No. Does eating a lot of it perpetuate industrial-scale farming of animals, which harms the planet? Yes, especially if everyone's doing it.

Can you make a salient point at all?

On the other side of the coin – can you imagine how much more progress we would have made in this struggle already if anti-authoritarians such as Nestor Makhno, Guy Debord, Janis Joplin, and countless anarcho-punks had focused more energy on the creation and destruct ion they loved so dearly, and less on drinking themselves to death?

Can you imagine what a world would be like if people didn't pathologise everything? Can you imagine what it'd be like to literally fight for everything against multiple armies, knowing that the Bolsheviks had executed the people acting as your subordinate commanders? Which was the case for Makhno (who died of tuberculosis).

And what about people who were known to have depression, as is the case of Debourd? And we are aware that Janis Joplin didn't drink herself to death but overdosed on drugs? Yet, we don't know why, though we know people suspect her overdose wasn't accidental.

Interesting that, rather than compassion, it's moralising again and again; there's a demand that they should've stayed alive to serve us (instead of us taking up their mantel). It's obvious and telling that so many people don't want to engage in elements of actual mental health or chronic illness/disability, which are communities that frequently overlap.

These polemics are more harm than good. They're inaccurate and nonsensical.

All the same, we can learn from this past, as from each other, if we apply our imaginations and a keen eye for pattern.

While patterns are important for learning, not all patterns are meaningful. This assumed pattern is littered with holes; the only pattern that can functionally be followed is that of how settler colonialists used alcohol (and other drugs) to subjugate and control people.

But there are also people among the ancestors of those we claim to be subjugated who state that even this mentality removes agency from their people, which I think is important to consider. (It should not, however, be used as a way to deny the actions of our ancestors.)

Even if you do decide that this history of alcoholism is “the” truth, for heaven’s sake don’t waste time looking back into the past for some long-lost state of primitive sobriety that – for all any of us know – may not even have existed.

Then what was the point of your polemic? To infuriate the readers with gaps and inciting language instead of inform them? To then undermine it all by directly contradicting the usage of your beautiful uses of the frequently referenced Noble Savage tropes? What is the purpose in any of this?

Those drunken despots and beer-bellied bigots may destroy their world and smother beneath their history, but we bear a new future in our hearts – and the power to enact it in our healthy livers.

Again with the moralising. It's always easier to insult and deride people and their vices rather than create spaces where reliance upon them decreases. I genuinely am frustrated by people like this.

Side note to the whole piece: Why use the word "civilisation" at all?

Quotes from this zine (which is also part of Gabriel Kuhn's Sober Living for the Revolution):

Drink, like caffeine or sugar in the body, only plays a role in life that life itself can provide for otherwise. The woman who never drinks coffee does not require it in the morning when she awakens: her body produces energy and focus on its own, as thousands of generations of evolution have prepared it to do. If she drinks coffee regularly, soon her body lets the coffee take over that role, and she becomes dependent upon it.

I would love for anyone who thinks like this to spend a minute in the brain of a person with ADHD. I say this because, as a person with unmedicated ADHD (who used to have medicine for it but no longer can because ADHD diagnoses do not cross borders when you move and it is unnecessarily difficult to access medication because adults with ADHD are treated as drug seekers), the best "replacement" (which isn't a replacement) that I have is caffeine.

This is why I will forever say that disability needs to be accounted for when discussing these issues, since they never are. (And by the way, this also includes addiction.)

If some sober people in this society do not seem as reckless and free as their boozer counterparts, that is a mere accident of culture, mere circumstantial evidence.

As a person who doesn't like alcohol, might I say that it's because the culture around drinking is presumed as being "fun" and "lighthearted," while those of us who choose not to drink get hounded for being boring? (Ironically, we also tend to leave people alone for choosing their vices; meanwhile, the amount of times I've been harassed for not drinking because it's seen as "abnormal" should indicate something.)

Alcohol, like Prozac and all the other mind-control medications that are making big bucks for Big Brother these days, substitutes symptomatic treatment for cure. It takes away the pain of a dull, drab existence for a few hours at best, then returns it twofold. It not only replaces positive actions which would address the root causes of our despondency – it prevents them, as more energy becomes focused on achieving and recovering from the drunken state. Like the tourism of the worker, drink is a pressure valve that releases tension while maintaining the system that creates it.

This is appalling. There are ways to discuss the ways that Big Pharma makes money off of these medications and how it manipulates some (certainly not all) people into using them, but it is disgusting to insinuate that someone would not need them. There are a number of people who have said they "finally feel like themselves" while taking anti-depressants, making them realise that elements of depression were part of their brain chemistry. I don't think it's fair to make people endure misery because someone thinks Prozac is a "mind-control" drug. Get the fuck out of here with that shit.

Alcohol, though I don't enjoy it, is not inherently bad. Again, we need to be recognising the way we treat it and how people profit from it.

Also, this is just so fucking ahistorical it hurts. Alcohol has been around for centuries in multiple forms. So let's try talking about how capitalism has co-opted things like alcohol and has thus turned it into something that makes people miserable. Because that does happen.

In this push-button culture, we’ve become used to conceiving of ourselves as simple machines to be operated: add the appropriate chemical to the equation to get the desired result. In our search for health, happiness, meaning in life, we run from one panacea to the next – Viagra, vitamin C, vodka – instead of approaching our lives holistically and addressing our problems at their social and economic roots. This product-oriented mindset is the foundation of our alienated consumer society: without consuming products, we can’t live! We try to buy relaxation, community, self-confidence – now even ecstasy comes in a pill!

Question: If you dealt with erectile dysfunction before medications to help with that existed, what would you do? Should you have existed in Ancient Greece or Rome, you would've worn a talisman with a rooster on it. Had you existed in the 13th century, you would've been told to ingest a wolf's penis.

I hate to break it to you, but we've been medicating such things for a long time. It just so happens that Viagra works (unlike consuming the genitalia of "high libido" animals), and it allows people to... oh, engage with sex. Engage with pleasure.

Y'know, something your first paragraph claims you also support. (It's also far more ethical to consume Viagra than to kill a wolf for its penis.)

Also, what's wrong with Vitamin C? It helps repair body tissues and is useful for bodily functions and immune systems. But I guess have fun dying of scurvy?

“Life sucks – get drunk” is the essence of the argument that enters our ears from our masters’ tongues and then passes out of our own slurring mouths, perpetuating whatever incidental and unnecessary truths it may refer to – but we’re not falling for it any longer!

My issue thus far is that the people writing this particular article have not addressed how alcohol actually makes us miserable or is used in ways to respond to misery. Yes, I have also heard "life sucks, get drunk," but at least I can adequately put forward an example of capitalism pushing people into drinking-to-forget: The Wine Mom.

Why is it that they're handwaving things that are fine but aren't addressing the things that aren't?

Speaking of sex, it’s worth noting the supporting role alcohol has played in patriarchal gender dynamics. For example – in how many nuclear families has alcoholism helped to maintain an unequal distribution of power and pressure? (All the writers of this tract can call to mind more than one such case among their relatives alone.) Th e man’s drunken self-destruction, engendered as it may be by the horrors of surviving under capitalism, imposes even more of a burden on the woman, who must still somehow hold the family together – often in the face of his violence. And on the subject of dynamics …

This is something they could've spent more time on because the interactions between alcohol and sex are worth exploring.

Maybe exploring how disability, queerness, etc interact with alcoholism would've been a good idea. Instead of insulting disabled people or people with mental health needs.

In certain circles, especially the ones in which the word “anarchy” itself is more in fashion than any of its various meanings, freedom is conceived of in negative terms: “don’t tell me what to do!” In practice, this often means nothing more than an assertion of the individual’s right to be lazy, selfish, unaccountable for his actions or lack thereof.

Then perhaps we need to be considering what kind of anarchist circles we're in? And expanding beyond them. If anything, these people sound like the making of right-libertarians and so-called "anarchist"-capitalists. I wouldn't be shocked if that's the direction they went.

Also, because many of the anarchist groups I'm part of do not have a high number of cishet men, they often don't have this issue. Even when people drink, they don't have this problem. Could it possibly be an issue of patriarchy? I think that's likely. (Also, it definitely is an issue of whiteness.)

In such contexts, when a group agrees upon a project it often ends up being a small, responsible minority that has to do all the work to make it happen. These conscientious few often look like the autocratic ones – when, invisibly, it is the apathy and hostility of their comrades that forces them to adopt this role. Being drunk and disorderly all the time is coercive – it compels others to clean up after you, to think clearly when you won’t, to absorb the stress generated by your behavior when you are too fucked up for dialogue. These dynamics go two ways, of course – those who take all responsibility on their shoulders perpetuate a pattern in which everyone else takes none – but everyone is responsible for their own part in such patterns, and for transcending it.

Interestingly, the groups I've been a part of have seen this dynamic from two core demographics: wealthier individuals and white cishet men. That's who is frequently leaving work for everyone else, regardless of amount of alcohol consumed.

But we need to be care about concepts like "to think clearly when you won't," as that can easily lean into ableist structures. It really starts giving way to the ability to deny people autonomy (or to speak over people while claiming they should be autonomous) because of their perceived intelligence. This is a major issue that anarchists struggle with, and it's not helped by how often we still laud a few key figures (who also were eugenicists). Scientism/rationalism is still too rooted in our movement, and that's a problem.

Passing judgment on others for decisions that affect only themselves is absolutely noxious to any anarchist – not to mention it makes them less likely to experiment with the options you offer.

You literally did that through moralising medication while claiming you were talking about it from an "anti-capitalist" perspective. You cannot call something a "mind-control" drug without passing judgement on others for using it. Big Pharma doesn't care if you call it that, but people who need it do.

Especially in the case of those who are struggling to free themselves of unwanted addictions, such solidarity is paramount: Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is just one more instance of a quasi-religious organization filling a social need that should already be provided for by anarchist community self-organizing.

Agreed. This is why I continually say that the core of what we should be doing is building community, building networks, building spaces that help people meet their needs.

Because that is needed to protect people before anything else.

Besides, most of us who are not substance-addicted can thank our privileges and good fortune for this; this gives us all the more responsibility to be good allies to those who have not had such privileges or luck – on whatever terms they set.

You can thank your "privileges and good fortune" for not being substance-addicted (though, I bet some of you are addicted to substances that aren't necessarily seen as a problem), but some of us have avoided addiction to alcohol or drugs through experience. What's wonderful is that you vaguely mention (as pointed out) the impacts of alcoholism on others, but you forget that some of us are victims of abuse by alcoholics.

I don't think my "good fortune" for being in that scenario. It wasn't a "privilege" to be abused by a person who was an alcoholic. This is also why we're going to perpetually come at sobriety in the wrong way; we're not actually thinking about what is happening.

We're moralising instead of understanding.

The social impact of our society’s fixation on alcohol is at least as important as its mental, medical, economic, and emotional effects. Drinking standardizes our social lives, occupying some of the eight waking hours a day that aren’t already colonized by work. It locates us spatially – living rooms, cocktail lounges, railroad tracks – and contextually – in ritualized, predictable behaviors – in ways more explicit systems of control never could. Often when one of us does manage to escape the role of worker/consumer, drinking is there, stubborn holdover from our colonized leisure time, to fill up the promising space that opens. Free from these routines, we could discover other ways to spend time and energy and seek pleasure, ways that could prove dangerous to the system of alienation itself.

Yes but also no. Here are some things: 1. We should deal with how alcohol was used as a tool for colonisation because it definitely was. However, we also need to understand how and when it was not a tool for colonisation and has been part of people's cultures. 2. Social drinking is far older than we realise, and it's not inherently a Bad Thing. I don't have a problem with social spaces such as cocktail lounges and bars/pubs, but I do have a problem that certain activities I love (comedy, writing, music) are always positioned in those spaces (and if not inside them, always has a bar nearby). 3. Union organising has too often been located within bars and pubs, and I suspect this initially started out as a way to exclude people because of who was seen as an "acceptable patron" of those spaces. It's also prohibited a lot of the labour movement because it keeps people, including those in the IWW, from understanding their position in the community and how they need to interact with everyone in order to succeed. (Also, union leadership generally doesn't really care.)

I definitely agree that our social focus on alcohol is a major problem for us, though.

With any luck, you’ve been able to discern – even, perhaps, through that haze of drunken stupor – that this is as much a caricature of polemics in the anarchist tradition as a serious piece. It’s worth pointing out that these polemics have often brought attention to their theses by deliberately taking an extreme position, thereby opening up the ground in between for more “moderate” positions on the subject. Hopefully you can draw useful insights of your own from your interpretations of this text, rather than taking it as gospel or anathema.

Actually, no. If you're trying to satirise a polemic (which is what you're doing when you're making a caricature), it needs to be clear. It's not, and it still isn't.

Why? Because of this moralising statement about people with alcohol addiction.

But you also can't find "moderate" ground when your polemic is maintaining beliefs that harm people (e.g., "mind-controlling" drugs) and advocating for a decrease in health standards (e.g., the point about vitamin C).

Plus, we don't need caricatures that do this because we already have enough conspiracy theorists in the world who harm people through their own medical malpractice, and anarchists should be working to ensure that we don't contribute to that.