The paradox of man's condition in the modem world is that the more fully he recognizes his right and duty to be his own master, the more completely he becomes the passive object of a technology and bureaucracy whose complexities he cannot hope to understand.

-Robert Paul Wolff In Defense of Anarchism

Readers of Black Rose may have noticed that the editorial collective has rarely organized the offerings in the magazine around a single issue or theme. With this edition of the magazine, however, it seems that our contributors have focussed on a special set of questions without any guidance or suggestion from the Black Rose collective. Whether or not it is the effect of the Zeitgeist created by the likes of Ronald Reagan, Alexander Haig, James Watt and the engineers of Route 128 and the Silicon Valley, it seems that there is a special interest among anarchists writing today on the relationship of persons to nature (in the broadest sense) and the uses of reason and knowledge to order the environment. Related to these general ecological concerns is the question of how instrumental reason and knowledge can have power in our lives.

The notion that knowledge and power are somehow related is, of course, not at all a new idea. We find thinkers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, such as Francis Bacon, who clearly saw the relationship between these two forces. The difference, in the case of our own time, is the unbelievable rise in the magnitude of technological knowledge from the time of the seventeenth century, and the corresponding rise of the power to oppress and annihilate. The scope and seriousness of the problem is especially frightening if Michel Foucault is correct when he writes

No body of knowledge can be formed without a system of communica tions, records, accumulation and displacement which is in itself a form of power and which is linked, in its existence and functioning, to other forms or power. Conversely, no power can be exercised without the extraction, appropriation, distribution or retention of knowledge. On this level, there is not knowledge on one side and society on the other, or science and the state, but only the fundamental forms of knowledge/power.

Thus we witness a rise in chemical technology; at the same time a power is created which can poison the environment or create food for the world's populace. We see the development of a technology which can make an atomic bomb which can destroy millions of people, yet we also observe the deployment of an information system which can limit the use of these weapons and provide scientific background for better educated persons.

It is clear, then, that although there is a symbiotic relationship between knowledge and power, that the combination of these two forces can both serve to liberate and dominate us. As anarchists we must be continuaiiy alert to both of these manifestations of knowledge, and we must constantly question, if we are to survive, its authoritarian and destructive uses.

? Julian Knox