by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article
here
An important focus of my work in recent years has been showing how authority, exploitation, empire and industry are all merely aspects of one overall process.
Looking back, I should acknowledge that a significant chunk of that understanding came from the late Richard Hunt (1933-2012).
In the 1990s I read his magazine
Alternative Green
, corresponded with him and even visited him at his home in Oxford on a couple of occasions.
This was not some grandiose mansion on university grounds, by the way, but a tiny flat in a 1960s shopping centre!
Our paths ended up diverging and we lost touch because while, back then, I was moving ever deeper into the vibrant UK eco-anarchist milieu, Hunt was moving
away
from it.
Although he was the original editor of the journal
Green Anarchist
– in whose pages the name “Paul Cudenec” would later make its first
appearance
in 2004 [1] – he had fallen out with his colleagues.
Accused of expressing dangerously nationalistic views, Hunt found himself in the grey zone of beyond-right-and-left dissidence into which I have also now been pushed in recent years.
Alternative Green
, which he started in 1991 and which declared that it combined “the loyalty of the right” with “the compassion of the left”, prided itself on being open to contributions from people from all kinds of political backgrounds.
This did not go down so well in certain “left-wing” circles, of course, and Hunt had to keep defending himself against the smear-mongers.
For instance, there is a letter from him in what turned out to be the
final issue
of the UK Situationist journal
Here and Now
(Winter 1997/98), [2] of which I still have a hard copy, complaining that someone in the
previous issue
[3] had labelled him “fascist” and suggested that he was in some way dishonest.
He responded: “I have bent over backwards to be honest in the mag ‘Alternative Green’. If I have had embarrassing letters, I have printed them. I have made as clear as I possibly can where I stand on each issue and I’ve got into big trouble for it… You can justifiably accuse me of not being left wing. You can accuse me of talking to the decentralist right. What you cannot accuse me of is dishonesty”.
Hunt had indeed by then made his political position very clear, not just in his journal but in his 1997 book,
To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core
, which I have just re-read for the first time in nearly 30 years.
In his “Postscript” he writes: “You will find it difficult to say whether this book is leftwing or rightwing. It is neither. It is moderate, but decentrally extremist…
“The division between left wing and right wing will be replaced by the division between the centralists and decentralists, right wing centralists with left wing centralists against right wing decentralists with left wing decentralists”. [4]
He provides a table with examples of centralists and decentralists, pitting the centralist idea of equality against the decentralist idea of liberty, “economies of scale” against “small is beautiful” and pro-technology versus anti-technology.
On the side of centralism he places capitalists, liberals, fascists, Marxists, internationalists, townspeople and Third World rulers, while on the side of decentralism he includes anarchists, nationalists, greens, regionalists, survivalists, country folk and Third World people.
He asks: “So, dear reader, which side of the barricades will you be on?” [5]