Richard Hunt: from green anarchism to primitivist fascism

 The following is an article on Wikipedia that has existed there as a stub until recently when I substantially expanded it. However, the Wikipedia community has decided that Hunt in himself is insufficiently notable for a Wikipedia article and will fold the material into related articles and delete it. I'm copying its current form here as I think it's an interesting case study in political syncretism and the dangers of the fascist creep. In the 1990s, I read and was convinced by some articles in Green Anarchist, the magazine he had edited, and even had one of Hunt's graphics on my wall; following the group's turn against Hunt I learnt a lot about how fascist ideas enter radical spaces. 

Keywords: eco-fascism, anarcho-primitivism, national-anarchism

Richard Hunt was a green anarchist activist, and editor of various magazines, most notably Green Anarchist and Alternative Green.

Hunt advocated measures to reduce population and to deconstruct the state to a village level.^[1] He was widely criticised in the anarchist community for his sympathies for nationalism, after he wrote an editorial for Green Anarchist expressing patriotic support for British soldiers serving in the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq. Richard Hunt continued to have political disputes with the other editors of Green Anarchist, and shortly afterwards left the editorial collective to form his own magazine, entitled Alternative Green, of which he edited the first thirty-one issues and to which he contributed articles.

Biography

According to an account of Green Anarchist's history by John Connor, published in its pages in 2004, "Hunt had been variously a SIGINT operative during his national service in Hong Kong and a torture victim of the psychiatric establishment (‘aversion therapy’), but most relevantly here had quit both the Green Party and John Carpenter’s dissident splinter, Green Line, for failure to adopt what he portentiously [sic] described as 'my economic analysis'."^[2] According to Connor, Hunt was able to focus on writing in the late 1990s due to receiving an inheritance on the death of his mother.^[2] According to Connor, he suffered a mentally debilitating stroke in 2002.^[2]

From Green Anarchist to Green Alternative

Connor says that in the 1970s Hunt was influenced by the original affluent society thesis developed by anthropologists Richard Lee and Marshall Sahlins about "primitive" hunter-gatherer societies: "that whilst band-societies are typically commodity-poor, they are time-rich and use their leisure to live full, harmonious, egalitarian lives." This view was described in Hunt’s mid-1970s pamphlet The Natural Society, which Connor calls "typical of that decade’s utopianism" in arguing for the decentralisation of society to the level of small, self-sufficient village communities.^[2] The pamphlet argues that "xenophobia" was the key to the village communities' resilience, as it cemented communal bonds.^[3]

Green Anarchist was founded in 1984 after the Stop the City protests in London, with an editorial collective consisting of Hunt, Alan Albon, and Marcus Christo. Hunt had become frustrated with the more mainstream green magazine Green Line for which he had been writing.^[2]

During the 1984–1985 United Kingdom miners' strike, Hunt advocated the Thatcherite policy of "cutting taxes", on the grounds that it "redistributes wealth from the rich to the poor" and allows small business to prosper.^[4]

Within the GA editorial collective, there was a divergence between the essentially pacifist approach of Albon and Christo, and the advocacy of violent confrontation with the state favoured by Hunt. Albon and Christo left Green Anarchist, and the magazine saw a succession of editorial collectives, although Hunt remained in overall control. During this period he published articles which were increasingly alienating much of the magazine's readership.^{[citation needed]} Matters came to a head after Hunt wrote an editorial which expressed support for British troops in the Gulf War and extolled the virtues of patriotism.^[3][2] Hunt has stated that the rest of the editorial collective wished to bring to Green Anarchist a more left-wing political approach, while Hunt wanted it to remain non-aligned.^{[5][unreliable source?]} Shortly afterwards he left to start another magazine Alternative Green, which continued to promote his own particular view of green anarchism, and eventually became closely linked to the far right National-Anarchist movement from the mid-90s onwards.^[3]

In the late 1990s, he published a book-length expansion of his earlier pamphlet The Natural Society, entitled To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core.^[2][3] According to scholar of fascism, Graham Macklin, To End Poverty argues

that poverty in the ‘periphery’ is caused by western trade demands on a developing world that is starved to feed the ‘core’. This ‘progress’ represents an extension of the taxation and wage slavery that encourages the growth of an increasingly urbanized and ‘biologically unhealthy’ population, creating poverty and crime as society hurtles towards ‘total social breakdown’. Hunt's panacea is to return to ‘the original affluent society’ of the self-sufficient hunter-gatherer living in rural communes, protected by armed militias (evoking the murderous post-apocalyptic tribalism of the Mad Max trilogy) and regimented by a ‘peck order’ of ‘respect and influence’, bound by ‘kinship’, that would re-establish family values and foster a primitive communalism immune to capitalism.^[3]

Alternative Green would later merge with Perspectives, the journal of the Transeuropa Collective, which was formed in 1989 to discuss "European identities, autonomies and initiatives" and which emerged from the fascist National Front's "cultural" association IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic), and had been publishing Hunt's material. Troy Southgate, an ideologue of national-anarchism, encountered Hunt's writings in Perspectives, leading to a re-orientation of his ideas and the shaping of his idea of "Traditional Anarchy" based on decentralised communities.^[3] Southgate later noted that “to say that we have been hugely influenced by Richard Hunt’s ideas is an understatement”.^[6] According to Macklin, writing in 2006:

This exposure to anarcho-primitivism has helped Southgate conceive of ‘folk autonomy’ rather than nationalism as the only true bulwark against the further encroachment of globalization... Alternative Green and its ‘overriding aversion to the Capitalist system’ was therefore an ‘ideal platform for formulating practical strategy’ to oppose capitalism. Alternative Green was soon being used by Southgate as a bridgehead to the ecological and anarchist movement in an effort to forge a ‘sincere’ alliance of ‘anti-system’ protesters from both ends of the political spectrum. To do so Southgate and others participated in the Anarchist Heretics Fair in Brighton in May 2000, which drew together several minute splinter groups from the political and cultural fringe... The furore led to Hunt's further marginalization within green anarchist circles and, despite Southgate's frequent contributions to Alternative Green, his views have not permeated further within the far right. Denounced as a ‘fascist’ Hunt found his speaking engagements cancelled, and several independent bookshops refused to stock Alternative Green.^[3]

Hunt fell ill and relinquished the editorial control of Alternative Green to Southgate. After one issue under his editorship it was suspended and replaced with a new publication entitled Terra Firma.^[3][6]

References

1. ^ Jones, Daniel (21 April 2020). "Greenshirts – The (Mis)use of Environmentalism by the Extreme Right". History Workshop. Retrieved 15 May 2025.
2. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g} Connor, John (March 2004). "Two Decades of Disobedience: A retrospective on Green Anarchist's first twenty years". Green Anarchist. No. 71–72. Retrieved 15 May 2025 – via The Anarchist Library.
3. ^ Jump up to:^{a b c d e f g h} Macklin, Graham D. (2005). "Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction". Patterns of Prejudice. 39 (3): 301–326. doi:10.1080/00313220500198292. ISSN 0031-322X. Retrieved 15 May 2025.
4. ^ Franks, Benjamin (2005). "British anarchisms and the miners' strike". Capital & Class. 29 (3): 227–254. doi:10.1177/030981680508700113. ISSN 0309-8168. Retrieved 12 May 2025.
5. ^ "An Interview with Richard Hunt". Terra Firma: National Anarchism online. 1996. Archived from the original on 12 March 2005. Retrieved 14 May 2015.
6. ^ Jump up to:^a b Sunshine, Spencer (2008). "Rebranding fascism: national anarchists" (PDF). The Public Eye. Vol. Winter 2008.

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Further reading

Some further resources if you're interested:

• Against Green Reactionaries: Writings on eco-fascists and exterminationists [PDF]
• Stewart Home's list of Green Anarchist documents
• Libcom resources on Green Anarchist