The Freedom of Things: An Ethnology of Control

With remarkable clarity, Peter Harrison reveals how the assumed escape from 'savagery' that the Enlightenment promised was ever only the transformation of humans into commodities freely available in a market: independence and autonomy being replaced by dependence and drudgery. His interpretation of the lifestyles of peoples who lived both before the rise of the State and in societies that still live independently of State administration is both original and non-patronizing.

Within this framework is developed a convincing challenge to the orthodoxy that the feud in pre-State societies was a means of social control, and this leads into a radical re-evaluation of violence in non-State societies. Inspired by the profound critiques of capitalism posed by Indigenous perspectives, it also serves to chronicle the left’s persistent inability to provide a theory that does not ultimately align itself with the paternalist and controlling ethos at the core of Enlightenment, progressivist, and expansionist values.

Pete Harrison was born in Brisbane but grew up in the UK, where he was involved in workplace, anarchist and ultra-left activism through the 1980's and '90's. He is half of the duo who wrote Nihilist Communism ('still one of the most hard-nosed books to call the left to account'). Since becoming a teacher he has also written for Mathematics Teaching. Pete and Willie Brim have had work published in the National Indigenous Times and elsewhere, and are presenters on an Indigenous literacy project called Yarning Strong, produced by Oxford University Press. They operate an embryonic website: www.bulwaicollective.org.