Actually, nowadays some anarchist communities in the United States do very little drinking. Anarchism used to be really associated with drinking in some places here, but many of those scenes have collapsed; that lifestyle can be hard to sustain. Many younger anarchists seem to have learned from this—not that they are totally sober, necessarily, but drinking and drug use are not central to their social lives.
The anarchist community in my home town, for example, is almost entirely sober. Drinking is not a part of any of our regular social activities, so we find ourselves exploring other ways to relax and create intimacy together. I think this is becoming more common in other parts of the country as well.
The most ironic reactions to “Wasted Indeed” have been snide dismissals from people who drink, to the effect that people in our circles must have a real problem with drinking or else we wouldn’t take that stance. This strikes me as projection.
I’ve been invited to participate in a few panel discussions about sobriety and radical politics, yes—but I think most of those panels have been missed opportunities, because they were composed entirely of sober people. People who have chosen lifelong sobriety are not the best positioned to speak on the subject to a mixed audience; it would be better to hear from a variety of perspectives. The people most qualified to speak about drug use and sobriety are those who have just quit using or are trying to quit, not those who haven’t ever used or who quit long ago. It’s the same with talking about quitting one’s job and changing one’s lifestyle—people who are currently trying to do that have much more useful perspectives on it than full-time anarchists who dropped out ten years ago.
There’s a fair bit of diversity around this issue in CrimethInc. circles, but habitual reliance on intoxicants is uncommon—it’s just so boring and typical, so consumerist! Perhaps the best test case to examine is the CrimethInc. convergences, which are explicitly sober spaces. This policy has been developed for a variety of reasons. For one, it makes it easier to deal with security issues: it denies the authorities a pretext to raid the site, and makes sure no one’s drinking leads to loose lips and subsequent entrapment by informants. It also seems to make non-consensual social or sexual interactions somewhat less likely. Finally, as the convergences are intended to be an experimental laboratory for non-standard interactions and relationships, the sobriety policy ensures that people don’t simply do what they do the rest of the year in other spaces. In this regard, the CrimethInc. convergences are distinct from practically every other anarchist gathering around the US, most of which are marked by a fair bit of drinking and predictable behavior.
People with a wide range of relationships to intoxicants come to the convergences—straight edge kids, people who only drink occasionally, and people who are struggling with addiction. The one thing everyone has in common is that they all choose to be in a substance-free space for the duration of the convergence, and thus to experiment with other forms of pleasure, intoxication, and interaction. This has been surprisingly successful—many participants who otherwise choose to drink, even to drink a lot, are supportive of the convergence being a sober space and argue strongly for this approach. Some of the people who snuck off into the woods to drink at the 2006 convergence were among the most vocal proponents of the sobriety policy in 2007, arguing that they regretted all they missed and felt there was a lot to be gained from everyone experimenting with sobriety together at least once a year.
Straight edge is a useful reference point in a specific subcultural context, but CrimethInc. texts circulate far outside that context. Also, in the spaces in which people are most familiar with it, it is also the most freighted with associations, not all of which are good. Some of the culture associated with the straight edge scene has not been particularly anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, or liberating.
I think the 1990s vegan straight edge scene has the most influence on the younger kids who were not around to experience it. For them, Earth Crisis is just a hardcore band they listened to in high school, with the good associations everyone has with high school rebellion. For older participants who were active in the 1990s, Earth Crisis and the vegan straight edge scene in general are much more problematic; they were characterized by a single-issue focus that often obstructed the discussion of broader-based liberation struggles, and at worst directed energy towards reactionary phenomena such as so-called “pro-life” politics and self-righteous middle class consumerism.
I wouldn’t rule out that some straight edge scenes may have resembled this description, but I can’t say it resonates with my experience from the days I traveled in those circles. I remember there being a handful of us positioned between the heavy-drinking anarcho-punk scene and the consumerist straight edge scene who wished to combine the best aspects of both, but I don’t know that that ever came to fruition on a large scale. I’d say my current community is the best example I’ve experienced of a radical sober space. It’s exciting to be connected to a lot of people for whom sobriety is a starting point for a passionate exploration of life.
I don’t think that was mentioned a single time in the course of discussing whether to publish that book. On the other hand, it probably influenced the decision on an unconscious level—if the stories in Evasion had been about stealing liquor, drinking by the railroad tracks, and waking up with a hangover, it would have been a very different story, and less promising as a vehicle for spreading a counter-consumerist message.
Again, I think the message did come across on a subconscious level. One indication of this is the defensiveness the book created—if it had included a lot of generic stories about getting drunk, it would have fit much more neatly into the stereotypical punk traveling zine format, and people would have reacted less strongly to it. The implication that one need not drink to enjoy life—or, for that matter, to rebel—often provokes defensiveness, even if that defensiveness ends up being framed around entirely different issues.
Honestly, I fear I wasn’t paying close attention, so perhaps I’m not qualified to speak on this. If I had to hypothesize about the controversy, I would guess that someone brought up the issue of privilege, arguing that it was self-centered and oppressive for white males in the US to endorse sobriety as a universally applicable stance. To some extent, I agree with that critique, though I don’t think it’s necessarily oppressive for a white male to suggest to a community predominantly composed of other white males that they should consider sobriety as an aspect of their radical practice.
If memory serves, “Wasted Indeed” was originally written for the “Food and Drink” issue of Fifth Estate, North America’s longest-running anarchist periodical. Fifth Estate has a sort of hippy reputation, so it was a deliberately provocative submission; the editors were actually quite hesitant about putting it in, shortened it, and included a disclaimer saying that they loved to get drunk themselves. It appeared after that in the reunion issue of Inside Front, an anarchist magazine that had developed in the straight edge hardcore scene, which was a context in which it was somewhat less controversial. I think it’s written to speak to people who are already somewhat familiar with radical ideas, in order to draw the connections between liberation and sobriety for that particular readership.
I think the further away one gets from one’s own cultural context, the less likely it is that one’s opinions will be applicable to others. So I certainly can’t say whether anything in “Wasted Indeed” would be relevant to women in Zapatista communities or underclass bankrobbers a century ago in France. At the same time, women in Zapatista communities are well known for pushing for sobriety in their communities as part of their struggle, and in France a century ago the anarchist bankrobbers who invented the getaway car (nowadays known as the Bonnot Gang) were sober and strictly vegetarian ... so who knows, maybe it’s an idea with wide relevance! The point is, that’s up to others to decide, in their own contexts, not for us to decide from ours.