Whilst, philosophically, I am opposed to ideas of Wholeness or those structures - be they narratives, cathedrals, or classic rock albums - which would enframe us within the Absolute, as a political thinker I have never believed in the ruins with the same degree of fervour as the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti who famously declared in an interview:
"We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth and we carry a new world here, in our hearts." [1]
Such idealism - based on the Christian-moral conviction that one day the powerless shall triumph [2] and the utopian dream of a better future - always seems to end in a good deal of misery and suffering for those it promised to liberate, precisely because it's always easier to smash the old world and remain living among the ruins than it is to build up new habitats.
Thus, whether it's the Khmer Rouge calling for Year Zero in Cambodia in the 1970s, or Keir Starmer's mission-driven Labour government presently promoting Net Zero here in the UK, I do not trust the zealotry that lies behind such thinking and suspect that A believer in the ruins is happy to pull the house down providing he can rule over the rubble ... [3]
Notes
[1] It now seems certain that the interview with the Dutch-Canadian journalist Pierre van Paassen in which Durruti is reported as having said this - published in the Toronoto Star on 18 August 1936 - never took place and that Van Paassen either imagined it entirely, or drew upon remarks made to other reporters and published in other articles.
Thus, amusingly, the most famous utterance of Spain's most famous anarchist is a
romantic fiction. Nevertheless, as one commentator says, "it has resonated across the decades as a
summation of revolutionary anarchist politics, a poetic and highly
quotable paraphrasing of Bakunin, which was presumably Van Paassen's
source material when formulating his most celebrated passage".
See Danny Evans, 'A Pile of Ruins? Pierre van Paassen and the Mythical Durruti' (12 Oct 2022) on theanarchistlibrary.org - click here.
[2] See Matthew 5:5. I am aware that the Greek term πραεῖς [praus] which appears in the New Testament is usually translated as 'meek' in English, but I'm happy to go along with scholars, such as John Nolland, who argue that powerless is a more accurate interpretation.
[3] According to the fact checking site truthorfiction.com, the line that I paraphrase here - 'An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes' - is misattributed to the Chinese philosopher and military strategist Sun Tzu. Nevertheless, that hasn't prevented it from being widely shared on social media during the last four years.
