“We need to rediscover what it means to be truly human”
Paul Cudenec (1963-) is a contemporary dissident writer who very much fits into the organic radical tradition.
With a background in the UK anarchist movement, he became known more widely in 2020 for his outspoken criticism of the totalitarianism being rolled out worldwide on the back of the Covid crisis.
He declared on his blog as early as March 25 of that year: “It should now be obvious to anyone with even half a brain that we are not in fact facing a deadly global epidemic that threatens to wipe out millions upon millions of our fellow human beings”. (1)
Cudenec went on, in further articles, to condemn other anarchists for “getting angry with me for believing in freedom” (2) and to warn that “there are today some fundamental problems at the very heart of the anarchist movement”. (3)
He also published on his Winter Oak site two widely-circulated articles denouncing the “Fourth Industrial Repression” (4) and analysing, in great detail, “Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset”. (5)
At the end of the year he argued that the events of 2020 had demonstrated the need for “a different civilizational direction”.
He wrote: “We need to rediscover what it means to be truly human, to cherish value over price, communal belonging over personal self-interest, honour above wealth”. (6)
He developed this idea in The Withway (2022): “People who instinctively seek community, cohesion and continuity – a society founded on the natural order of withness – therefore find themselves confronted with the need to become revolutionaries”. (7)
That same year he brought out a closely-referenced 100-page booklet on the history of the Rothschild empire, entitled Enemies of the People, in which he insisted: “By focusing specifically on the Rothschilds, my aim is to distinguish them from the Jewish community into which, when it suits them, they tend to melt away so as to protect themselves from specific scrutiny – a concealment aided and abetted by those who refer loosely to ‘Jewish’ interests when they mean the Rothschilds”. (8)
In 2023 Cudenec identified the existence of what he termed a global “criminocracy” – a single worldwide criminal network which is “behind the scenes, running everything from the WEF to the WHO, the UN to the EU, BlackRock to the World Bank”. (9)
He called for a convergence of all streams of opposing “uncorrupted” thought, which would be “united in their rejection of the global dictatorship and in their demand for a free future”. (10)
Cudenec’s thought has been particularly influenced by Gustav Landauer, Peter Kropotkin and Herbert Read, with René Guénon also being a frequently quoted source.
He said in a 2013 interview that he is inspired by a kind of primal anarchism, an “Ur-anarchism” that underlies the contemporary political philosophy. (11)
Cudenec regards industrialism and its “development” as incompatible with a free and healthy society. (12)
Stressing that human beings are part of nature, he follows Kropotkin in seeing the organic structure of life, including human thought and culture, as being the soil from which a possible future anarchist society would grow.
He takes this idea further by identifying individuals, the social organisms we call communities, humankind and all life as being contained within The Universe, which Cudenec regards as transcending the subjective illusion of time.
In his 2016 collection of essays, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, he explained: “In a metaphorical way, The Universe descends into us in order to act through us and through our being.
“It descends in the sense of passing from an abstract level to a physical one, which is often described as the passing from a ‘higher’ to a ‘lower’ level, but without any sense of inferiority or superiority since we are considering different modes-of-being of one and the same entity.
“The necessary subjectivity with which we lead our lives is also the necessary subjectivity with which The Universe takes on a real form and becomes both present and active in its own self-shaping.
“Thus, in a way, we are doubly present in our own subjective experience. Firstly, we are there as our individual selves leading our own individual lives. Secondly, we are there as manifestations of The Universe, of which we all form a living and active part.
“There is no contradiction between these two forms of presence – they are two aspects of the one reality, two sides of the same coin”. (13)
Cudenec’s spirituality is anything but passive. For him, the individual, as part of a greater whole, bears a heavy responsibility to act on behalf of that whole.
The title of his 2010 essay ‘Antibodies: Life, Death and Resistance in the Psyche of the Superorganism’, referred to the idea that the planetary organism can best defend itself against industrial destruction by means of aware and active human beings.
Cudenec wrote: “The whole point of nature giving us personal freedom and individuality is to give us the choice as to whether we want to go along with the status quo, accept the direction our species or planetary superorganism is taking, or whether we want to try and change it. We, as human beings, can act as the antennae which sense danger, the control mechanisms which prevent disaster for the whole”. (14)
In his 2024 book Our Quest for Freedom he declared: “When you serve spirit, and thus life and humankind, you become a tingling in the World Soul, a pulse of energy sent into billions of other hearts that reminds and awakens and inspires”. (15)
Cudenec sets out to synthesise the various elements of his thinking and present them as a coherent whole. In doing so, he claims not to be inventing some new ideology, but to be rediscovering the age-old Ur-anarchism which originally inspired him.
Academic Anthony T. Fiscella identified him in 2021 as a representative of an anarchist perennialist tradition, alongside Ivan Aguéli and Leo Tolstoy. (16)
W.D. James described him in 2024 as belonging to the radical tradition of Marguerite Porete, Thomas Müntzer and Gerrard Winstanley. (17)
Audio link: “Anarchy” with Paul Cudenec (59 mins).
Video link: Paul Cudenec speaking at the Real Left conference in London, March 2023 (13 minutes).
1. Paul Cudenec, ‘The politics of fear’, March 25, 2020, https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2020/03/25/the-politics-of-fear/
2. Paul Cudenec, ‘Anarchists against freedom’, April 26, 2020, https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2020/04/26/anarchists-against-freedom/
3. Paul Cudenec, ‘The rebels will return’, April 29, 2020, https://network23.org/paulcudenec/2020/04/29/the-rebels-will-return/
4. Paul Cudenec, ‘Resist the Fourth Industrial Repression!’, April 17, 2020, https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/04/17/resist-the-fourth-industrial-repression/
5. Paul Cudenec, ‘Klaus Schwab and his great fascist reset’, October 5, 2020, https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/10/05/klaus-schwab-and-his-great-fascist-reset/
6. Paul Cudenec, ‘Dismantling tyranny’, December 14, 2020, https://winteroak.org.uk/2020/12/14/dismantling-tyranny/
7. Paul Cudenec, The Withway, 2022, p. 149.
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/the-withway-paul-cudenec.pdf
8. Paul Cudenec, Enemies of the People, 2022, p. vi. https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/enemiesofthepeople
9. Paul Cudenec, Converging Against the Criminocrats, 2023, p. 175.
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2023/09/convergingagainstthe-criminocratsweb-1.pdf
10. Cudenec, Converging Against the Criminocrats, p. 202.
11. Paul Cudenec, Antibodies, anarchangels and other essays, 2013, p. 119.
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2021/04/antibodies-and-anarchangelsweb.pdf
12. Paul Cudenec, The Great Racket, 2023, p. 68. https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2023/06/the-great-racket-paul-cudenec.pdf
13. Paul Cudenec, Nature, Essence and Anarchy, 2016, pp. 158-59.
14. Cudenec, Antibodies, anarchangels and other essays, p. 43.
15. Paul Cudenec, Our Quest for Freedom, 2024, p. 28.
https://winteroakpress.files.wordpress.com/2024/01/oqff-olv.pdf
16. Anthony T. Fiscella, ‘Kill the Audience: Ivan Aguéli’s Universal Utopia of Anarchism and Islam’, Anarchist, Artist, Sufi: The Politics, Painting, and Esotericism of Ivan Aguéli, edited by Mark Sedgwick (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 93.
17. W.D. James, ‘Preface’, Our Quest for Freedom, p. x.
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