"If you want to destroy his sweater... Beef with Derrick, unraveled." by Kevin Tucker

Why Bother?

I think to a certain extent, we're all finally tired of Derrick Jensen and Deep Green Resistance. The anti-trans stance that DGR has held steadfast to has done most of the work in demolishing any residual legitimacy that Derrick and his crew might have had.
Frankly, I'm relieved to see DGR fade and that's hardly a secret. I think DGR is dangerous. I think the ideas behind it are lacking any and all historical/real world context. As anarchists, we've been gnawing at the roots of organized movements for nearly a century, so this isn't new turf. However, it's the first time we've seen a group try to tap into the anti-civilization milieu to build an organized resistance.
And not just an organized resistance, but an organization. Replete with affidavits, codes of conduct, member purges, authoritarian structures, and all the usual trappings of organization, DGR is dangerous in attempting to fill the perceived void of action in a post-9/11 world by presenting itself as the means to a common end. In doing so, they're doing the paperwork, filing, and organizing that any well balanced security culture sought to eradicate.
That is why is can't be ignored.
For the most part, DGR is a public joke.
You have rigid authoritative figures posing as revolutionaries while they personally call on the cops and FBI for protection, namely against anti-civilization anarchists. The DGR book/approach takes the level of revolutionary romanticism that tends to fade after the first year in college and extrapolates it into a world where we can act as though the Left never picked up arms and used them against the people they claimed to speak for. Occupy imagination, right?
It is posturing in the worst sense. It plans to create an organization that has above and below ground factions and, ideally, will destroy or help destroy civilization. Or industrial civilization. Or Capitalism. Whatever it is that sells books while getting support and funding from key Left groups. There's a slippery slope there and Derrick didn't just take DGR for the ride, he formed it somewhere in the mudslide.

For the record, I find Lierre Keith so utterly useless that it's not worth going into detail about her contributions to DGR. Derrick is using her, just like any other "co-author" that he's worked with; he usurps identity. That is after running it through his Left-approved byline filter of "writer, activist, farmer". Here's a self-published novelist that was thrown into the spotlight by maximizing on the migration from herbivore to omnivore. If you've had the misfortune of reading The Vegetarian Myth, you've seen that it reads as an angry break up letter after a 20 year relationship with a diet. The relationship sounded rough, but the book falls flat on dogma on all ends of the spectrum (articulating why animal liberation oriented folks would be drawn to veganism, health and nutrition points, and overstating pro-farming claims). It fails to make and carry a central point other than the fact that Lierre doesn't like vegans. The feeling appears to be mutual.
I, myself, am far from vegan, yet was let down that what appeared to be a book that had the potential to draw veganism (ideology) into question, turned out to be an attack on vegans instead. A complete an utter waste of time, but seemingly completely in line with all of the insane horse shit that Lierre has let out since.

Digressions aside, the problems with Derrick are complex.
There are plenty of books that I recommend to anyone seeking to expand their understanding of civilization that I don't agree with the authors 100%. That's expected. Most of the people who have helped me form my views would most likely never call themselves an anarcho-primitivist. More so, some would consider anarchists as abhorrent, but not in the way Derrick does.
I trust that people have brains. I trust that my arguments stand on their own feet. I have no interest in being the sales pitch for an ideology, movement, revolution, or anything else. In accordance with that, I don't posit myself as the hitch of my arguments. The problem with Derrick is that he does. That means that when he went off the deep end, his cult building library goes with him.
So let me clarify a point here: Derrick Jensen is a good writer. Not a thinker, but a writer. He is able to write effectively and I know plenty of people personally who were turned onto anarcho-primitivist thought because of his work. I think there are plenty of strengths in Culture of Make Believe, Language Older Than Words, and Welcome to the Machine (Derrick's best book in my opinion, co-authored, of course). His strength lies in articulating points that others have made. As far as I can see, his only really original thought (aside from whatever horrible and ill-advised contributions he made to DGR) comes down to the arguments against pacifism in Endgame which I consider brilliant, even if they become ironic in hindsight.
But I can not, in good conscience, recommend any of Derrick's books.
A good writer is expected to write well. A strong thinker is expected to articulate their ideas and be able to defend them. Defense is a ban-worthy concept in Derrick's world. He's stated openly that he only takes positive criticism from a minor handful of people. He is heavily scripted, as can be witnessed if you've seen his Talk at any point in the last decade. He rarely goes off the cuff during question and answer. When he does, expect unflinching insanity, like comparing himself to Tecumseh or talking about having sex with trees.
When questions are raised about the validity or realities of anything Derrick has said or done, he cuts the party in question off, usually in a rant filled flare. If a lot of points are raised, he'll rant privately and make reference to it, but will absolutely refuse any and all public airing. He's even had "offensive" YouTube videos mocking him taken down, which is no easy feat. It's not because he's trying to take the high road, he's routinely made ridiculous attempts at character assassination in books and interviews as his chosen form of pre-pubescent revenge. It's because the open arena isn't his forte. So he takes a combination of back roads and dead ends to get out of the situation.
But here's the thing: none of this should matter.
In fact, it pains me to even draw it out further. I don't care about Derrick. I don't care about his story, his hopes, his dreams, any of it. I can be fully content ignoring him and his ever-flowing stream of work under one single condition: it didn't attempt to channel the critique of civilization into a pile of names and address in the hands of a narcissistic egomaniac.
Both myself and John Zerzan have continually offered to publicly discuss our differences in approach and the holes in Jensen's narrative with Derrick for years. There are clear points where you see Derrick's cult building up and around his written persona and that resulted in a direct change in language, targets, and approach from what we (being most green anarchists at the time) were helping him push with his earlier books and where Derrick started going in Endgame, but went off the deep end after.
I have to admit that it was Ted Kaczynski that was the most adamant from the start that Derrick's victimization approach would be the source of his decline. When Ted was pointing that out in 2002, I wasn't seeing it that way, but that is clearly what happened. And it just got worse and worse.

Self-Help and the Other

So let's rewind a bit.
What drew John and I towards pushing Derrick's books was that his approach was and remains intrinsically different than ours. There are key points in Derrick's early books that were always problematic; implying that chickens would literally put their heads on the chopping block for his axe, feeling the need to write in detail about jerking off to internet point to drive home points about objectification that folks like Susan Sontag and Susan Griffin made decades prior, things of that nature. But it was close enough that we were willing to share the stage.
Up through the mid-late 2000s, Derrick was willing to call himself an anarcho-primitivist. He was coming at it differently than any of us, but there wasn't question about where he aligned. He clearly didn't come from the anarchist world or understand it, but he didn't claim to. We all knew that the price tag on his Talk was extraordinarily high. When John and I would do gigs with him, he would ensure that we were treated as opening acts (twice John and I were given paltry 15 minute slots when Derrick went on with his whole 90 minute + routine). He always had agents and publishers to do his leg work and we all just accepted it. It was about spreading the word.
But there was more to it.
It became glaringly obvious that Derrick was able to talk in more detail than any other anarchist. Even in the pre-9/11 world, green anarchists had targets on them from the state. So while we were all being followed, surveilled, taped, brought into Grand Juries, courtrooms, trials, chased down by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, ATF, and Secret Service, Derrick is writing about hacking the grid. Seemingly without consequence. And to largely anti-anarchist Leftists groups.
It was baffling, but who was going to complain? I clearly remember defending Derrick to other anarchists who were already calling him a liberal because of his audience. Either they were right or they saw the writing on the wall, but as far as could be told, his audience could only be blamed for not putting the pieces together since he laid it all out.
Or at least that's how it seemed.
In hindsight, maybe the direction Derrick was going in was the direction he always aimed for. Even though Derrick was saying extremely radical things, he was cushioning it. His writing is formulaic and seems to mirror his Neo-Con past and we weren't prepared to see that arc in the mix.
Derrick's writing is about a personal journey. There are cold hard facts, there are soul wrenching moments, there's a call to arms, and then there's a link to normalcy through universal purging. As destroying as Derrick's words can be, they are therapeutic. It happens to be the case that the things he's writing about are driving at the tension in loving the earth and contributing to it's destruction. I was able to take away a call to action, because that's my cross over point. But the cycle is straightforward, pedestrian Derrick stumbles into a horrifying realization, damning facts are laid out, pedestrian Derrick is pulled into it, someone more knowledgable about the matter is brought in to confirm and consult, then in the moment of realization, another "average Joe" pedestrian confirms their agreement on the issue.
Somewhere around 2004-6, I probably asked Derrick a handful of times why he thought his ultra-liberal audience members were throwing support at him while attacking anarchists. He had no answer. He might have not even realized it, but in seeing Derrick's firm move beyond the radical Left and into the professional liberal fold, it's clear that Derrick is the sherpa on the mountain of liberal guilt. He is their motivational speaker; well rehearsed, sitting cross legged on a table, reciting the same effective jokes time after time, walking liberals through their darkest thoughts, and taking them back home.
The reason that Derrick is able to say horribly detailed things about destroying civilization, attempt to organize a revolutionary movement, be pushed by liberals and anarchists alike, call the cops and FBI on anarchists, and get away with all of it is that he's not a threat. He's a professional. An entertainer. A therapist.
And yet DGR carries the allure of a revolutionary movement against civilization. And woe ye who don't know enough to not sign (literally) onto his movement. To date, the only action taken by DGR is selling Derrick's books. Their newswire service simply takes any other action and puts their name on it.
For these reasons alone, it should be fairly obvious why you won't see Derrick's books on Black and Green recommended reading lists.
But it gets worse.

Horticultural Warfare

A longstanding dispute I've had with Derrick is over his portrayal of horticultural warfare. In the decade since I initially brought this up, he's only made flippant mention of it as a minor point in public. But as someone who bases their ideas on facts rather than whims and appeals to personality, I find this sticking point rather irritating.
In Culture of Make Believe, Derrick has a discussion about battlefield warfare amongst horticulturalists in Papua New Guinea. What he says is largely true; battlefield warfare is particularly less lethal than one would imagine. Before the battle, there are large pork feasts, which, if you haven't overloaded yourself with pork before, will tire you out quickly. The weapon of choice is typically large and not horribly accurate or effective arrows, but the tongue is equal as insults are more often shot across than darts. Derrick mentions this to distinguish it from modern warfare for obvious reasons: civilization is unequivocally more violent, faceless, and ruthless.
This sounds nice, but it's not the full truth.
Derrick has no interest in attacking the roots of civilization. This has gotten worse over the years as his focus has shifted in accordance with liberal targets. In my eyes, looking at the consequences of domestication truthfully and honestly is the most telling way to understand how civilization could exist. So horticultural societies, as societies with domestication, but without civilization, are telling. I don't wish to damn them, but it's important to understand them.
Derrick's fairytale version of horticultural warfare would be far more pleasant than the resource wars that our civilization currently undertakes, but it's not true. Most people who have taken a Cultural Anthropology 101 course could tell you this.
Battlefield warfare is a part of horticultural warfare patterns. It is, typically, the least fatal method of warfare. The problem is that warfare is a consequence of resource competition. This applies equally to horticulturalists as it does to us, but it's a matter of scale. In having semi-sedentary lifestyles with gardens, granaries, and surplus, you have property, power, and boundaries that simply don't exist with nomadic gather-hunter societies. The response isn't just battlefield warfare, it's warfare culture.
This is where you get the origins of patriarchy. In warfare culture, you see, for the first time, a preference for males (warriors) over females, hence a higher rate of female infanticide (curbing population). In the warfare cycle, battlefield warfare has little on the more important aspect of raiding. In raids, a lot of people can die. Wives and children are taken, villages are burned. It is, after all, warfare, and it's messy.
I don't say this to judge, but this is what domestication does to us: it's a socio-religious justification for an ecological reality. Sedentary life challenges natural means of birth control associated with nomadism. People settle, numbers go up, surplus is finite, numbers need to go down. It's a cycle.

Printing what Derrick did once isn't lying. It could be a mistake. I talked to Derrick about this at length in person and in email (we were friends at this time) and he was aware that these are the kinds of issues that I was pursuing.
But then it shows up again in Endgame. Same story, same omission.
At this point, it's clearly no accident.
It becomes harder to trust a person as a thinker when their writing is set on a simplistic narrative. It becomes obvious why the material doesn't and can't go deeper. It's a sales pitch. It makes up in simplicity what it lacks in honesty. But who is this helping? No one. It's a weak move for someone with no spine who has no interest in ever having to directly answer questions about it (Jensen has, at times, required that all audience questions be pre-scripted and screened). The arc of the narrative becomes more apparent and the words become secondary to the speaker.
But what does that mean when these books are selling Derrick and he's clearly lying? What else is he lying about? What else is a sales pitch?
As an anarchist, I've come from a tradition where the individual is never as important as the ideas they bring to the table. Sacred cows are sacrificed regularly.
As an anarcho-primitivist, my goal has never been to hand someone a neat and tidy package that they can chose to use or not. I'm not selling myself. I'm not selling anyone. My job, as I see it, is to be honest, to put it out there as openly as possible. I trust that individuals are capable of thinking on their own. I know that the things that I see happening to this world are happening everywhere and we all feel it. My goal isn't to create a struggle, but to put as much out there as possible to help others contextualize their struggles. It's not enough to walk them through scenarios and make them feel renewed and comfortable in their surroundings again. If there is going to be change, it will take individuals making real connections with the real world, not by identifying with another persona.
I refuse to sell myself. I refuse to see myself as an ideal. I refuse to see myself as a leader. These ideas exist outside of ourselves and I feel responsibility to put it out there freely and honestly.
This point can appear minor, but it goes deep. If someone wants to market themselves as a big name in a niche market, I'm not going to let them do it off of my back.

Delusions

As I said at the outset, I think it's clear now where Derrick was headed and that he's firmly lodged in that corner now saying absurd things. I can't support his current or previous work because it's all about him, not the ideas. Even if he hadn't gone this direction it would still be an issue, but it's become intensely clear as time has gone on.
The problem is that Derrick won't address any of these points head on. I'm not sure it matters at this point because I think he is far beyond salvaging. John and I tried early on, but it was a one way door.

So here's the shitty part. Since Derrick won't respond directly to John or myself, but puts out this narrative that we are merely jealous (ha!) of his fame and success, hence the split, let me just briefly give a little background to what actually happened. Derrick's fans will attempt to assert otherwise, but nearly all of them weren't around at the time and all of this is pretty fully documented (mostly in laughable emails from Derrick).
I don't have pride or joy in this. It's ridiculous and I'm leaving out a lot of Derrick's worst side just because it's not necessary to go beyond the public side of this. But Derrick's maniacal egomania is entirely driven by whims, emotions, and knee jerk reactions to unwanted criticisms. Question him and you're out. Good riddance in my opinion.

So a brief look at Derrick's evolving hatred of anarchists;

2007: First Deep Green Resistance weekend retreats. Participants pay north of $1000. At most, Derrick appears via Skype only.

2008: Last issue of Green Anarchy prints an overall positive review of Derrick's Thought to Exist in the Wild. It contains a line questioning the quantity of Derrick's work (including massive reprints from previous books) and wondering if he might lose the effectiveness of his writing by over-saturating.
Derrick loses his shit. Calls it a "hit piece" and refuses to be swayed by reasonable discussion. Before the ink dries, he's doing interviews with liberal magazines and websites about how anarchists are dirty, ineffective, unorganized, and mean.
At the same time, he starts insisting that anarchists have all ripped him off. Despite years of helping scrape together his hefty speaker/travel fees and not being engaged personally plus selling a ton of his books, he goes on undeterred to spread the narrative that we're all out to get him.
Around this time he starts getting quickly accepted and spread by increasingly liberal and progressive outfits. A column in Orion magazine and then doing fundraisers for anti-radical groups. Anarchists are purged from the Derrick Jensen forum.
Drops discussion of civilization in favor of "industrial civilization".

By 2010, Derrick is working with staunch anti-anarchist Chris Hedges about how anarchists are ineffective, mean, and starts talking about the rights of "citizens".
In 2011, he tries to co-opt Occupy Wall Street and bring it in the fold. Drops discussion of "industrial civilization" to target "Capitalism". Does hilarious pay-per-view Skype sessions. Supports Lierre working with the cops after she is pied. Supports Peter "Urban Scout" Bauer in talking to the cops and FBI after he is mailed a rock. Security lock down at talks, scripted questions only.
Deep Green Resistance is published.
In 2012, article with Chris Hedges comes out, attacking anarchists and talking about the complete ineffectiveness of the Black Bloc. Derrick starts calling anarcho-primitivists racist and misogynist while claiming he never took the title on despite plenty of evidence to the contrary online, in books, and in talks. He's only interested in throwing out anarchists so he doesn't have to engage them.
In 2013, Derrick and Lierre anti-trans politics come to the forefront and are indisputable. Huge round of DGR purges, Aric McBay (co-founder) leaves amongst others.

This is an overview, but it should be pretty clear about how Derrick's personal attitudes and paying clientele have directly impacted his approach and impact.

I say good riddance to old trash.

source: Black and Green Press http://www.blackandgreenpress.org/

Anarchy Against Civilization!

Far too many times, we as anarchists can get locked into ideology and blueprint making rather than thinking critically and acting to meet current challenges. The idea of challenging capitalism and the state was one that was relatively new to western civilization when the first people to be called anarchists in a political sense first put forth their ideas. We should not be satisfied to stop there. They didn't face issues such as climate change, neo-liberal globalization, or peak production. That doesn't mean we can afford to ignore those issues. Most early anarchists didn't challenge extraction, economics, technology, domestication, agriculture, mass society, or civilization but that should not bar us from doing so.


What is civilization?


Civilization can be defined as a way of life based around growing urbanization and the social relationships that result. Urban areas, also known as cities, are defined as populations so dense as to require the importation of the means to sustain the city itself and its population.


Upon an initial landbase, a city is built, including houses, businesses, government buildings, infrastructure, etc. This gives people a place to live, but not the means. Because of this, the civilization must seek out external landbases to exploit in order to harvest the resources to keep it going, to build and maintain houses, bridges, roads, sewer lines, water lines, electrical lines, public transportation, food for restaurants, clothing for the stores, luxury items for the civilized, personal transportation, entertainment, and so on ad infinitum.
Eventually, as cities grow and populations increase and the civilization requires more and more external land to provide the civilized with goods, the civilization will run into land with people on it, usually people whose way of life depends on that land. When the civilized encounter such people, they usually have the option (if they aren't killed outright) of working highly exploitative jobs to provide goods or services for the civilized on their traditional lands, moving to the cities to find work, or fighting back.


Because most civilized people do not grow their own food or make their own clothing or build their own houses, access their own water... because the civilized pass these responsibilities on to others, some kind of exchange must take place. As the demands of civilization increase, more and more land is needed to produce goods and services for the civilized. Eventually this means that the civilized will run into traditional communities or other civilizations sitting on top of the land they wish to exploit...
Civilization always views the natural world as “natural resources.”


War


Organized warfare and systemic violence are hallmarks of civilization. Without violence as a form of social control at home and conquest abroad, the hierarchy necessary for the maintenance of mass society could not be maintained. When comparing hunter-gatherers to their agrarian or civilized neighbors, we find that while hunter-gatherers show little or no sexual division of labor, the agrarians and the civilized and those engaged in domestication are more likely to be highly warlike and patriarchal. The tendency seems to be that with increased complexity and increased domestication and planting come increases in the amount of organized violence, hierarchy, and dominance.


The wars and occupations in which the United States are engaged today are not an anomaly. They are the natural extension of a war that began long ago, even before the Christ Bearer Colonizer plagued the Arawaks, even before civilization touched Europe... the war waged against the wild and the primitive by the civilized and the domesticated.


Digging to the Root


As radicals (from the latin radix-root) we seek to examine and challenge root causes. The anarchist tradition has historically identified capitalism as a root cause. Fortunately, we as anarchists are not bound to tradition. Certainly capitalism is odious and something to be abolished, but it is not a root problem. Capitalism is rooted in civilization. Social stratification and hierarchy are necessary for the operation and maintenance of mass society. There is no way to take all of the tasks necessary to maintain civilization and equalize them and divide them up among people equally. Because of its complexity, civilization requires specialization and hierarchy.
Anarchy can't simply pick a set of tenants and require adherence regardless of new information. As we challenge institutions and break them down further and further, we will likely need to challenge some things that our fore bearers might not have. This doesn't imply a break from anarchy, but rather a break from doctrine and ideology.
Long before capitalism, civilization was destroying the natural world, ecosystems, and species and it was dispossessing communities of their landbases. By what standard do we say that capitalism is a root cause? We see that hierarchy and dominance came out of the neolithic revolution and that much of the middle east was deforested by the first civilization. Where was capitalism in all of this? Can capitalism be blamed for the slavery that built the pyramids at Giza? The Roman Empire? Certainly we see authority and civilization wreaked havoc on humanity long before capitalism was in the picture. Capitalism is just another manifestation of civilization. It is not a root cause.


Why is it that we as anarchists are so timid to ask new questions and tread upon new ground? Why are economics, civilization, technology, domestication, mass society, and extraction sacrosanct?


Sustainability


Left anarchists and so called green capitalists and eco-socialists have begun using the words “sustainable” or “sustainability” extremely loosely. Living sustainably means living in symbiosis with the earth and its inhabitants. For something to be sustainable means that it must be able to be continued at the same rate indefinitely. In other words, sustainability means an end to extraction and the use of non-renewable “resources.” To refer to something that is less exploitative as “sustainable” is simply dishonest.
No civilization has ever been sustainable.


Personal Consumer Choices and Alternative Energy


One of the popular myths is that personal consumer choices can move us towards sustainability. Before buying in, we should be asking ourselves who benefits from this. While I wouldn't say there is anything “bad” about trying to make consumer choices that are less exploitative or less cruel (if that is possible) we need to understand that this only mildly alters the details of the existing system without challenging the paradigm itself. Alternative energies are similar in that they attempt to operate only within the context of industrial society and extraction culture. They simply seek to alter details, not to facilitate a paradigm shift.


Who Should Pay for Your Toys? Civilization as Irresponsibility


If someone wants a computer then naturally it should come from their landbase. This person finds some people who want to make computers. It is already irresponsible to take from the earth more than one can return, but we will say that this group or community has decided that they want computers and machine production more than they want a healthy landbase. They begin mining for the metals required for the task. Of course we also need more than metals. We need petroleum and large amounts of water. So the group manufacturing the computers is mining their landbase, drilling for oil, and using water far exceeding the amount available to them in their area and the water used in the production becomes polluted...


Where does the pollution go? Who absorbs the costs? Who is responsible for growing food for the people who use their landbase to produce computers? What landbase will be used for producing the machines that will produce computers? Who will work with the hazardous materials? Who produces the hazardous material gear they will wear while making these computers? Where does all the excess water needed for production come from? On whose landbase/food source do we put the factories? Where do the pollutants from the factories go? What happens when you can't push the costs of your lifestyle onto someone else? What happens when you have to pay for your own toys?


Traditional Communities


Something that I rarely hear discussed in left/progressive circles is the issue of indigenous claim to land. A leftist civilization would be no different than any other civilization in that it would require the same extraction, production, and consumption process, meaning constant growth and expansion. I am highly disinclined to believe that this time the civilized would not dispossess traditional communities of their land to turn it into commodities for consumption by the civilized.


Why should indigenous voices not be the first heard after the fall of civilization? Why do we presume a eurocentric model, based upon the dominant culture rather than developing a way of life more similar to that of the original human inhabitants of the land, those who know it best?


Face to Face Society


Anarchy, statelessness, freedom, a world without authority, has long been the goal of anarchists. Not all anarchists ideas, however, result in anarchy. When following anarchist ideas to their natural conclusion, we find that the structures necessary to coordinate and maintain civilization and mass society are necessarily authoritarian and stratified. Once face to face accountability is lost, personal power and personal responsibility are abdicated.


Civilization is Authority


Civilization and complex society, necessarily result in social stratification or hierarchy. To adequately fulfill all the functions needed to maintain civilization and mass society authority and submission, division of labor, specialization, etc emerge.


Primitive anarchists are not simply positing that “our way is better” but pointing to a mountain of evidence that shows that stateless, egalitarian societies have existed for thousands of years and still exist today in the form or hunter-gatherer tribes and bands, and that to date there has never been a long term, sustained stateless, egalitarian civilization. This is no coincidence.


Can there be a long term, industrial, egalitarian, stateless mass society? If history is any indicator the answer is “no.” The burden of proof is certainly upon the claimant. Mass society is so complex and requires so many moving parts and particular duties that specialization and division of labor arise not out of preference or choice but out of their necessity to mass society.


Primitivist anarchists can point to most of human existence prior to 10,000 years ago and hunter-gatherers today such as the Mbuti, or the San as proof of hunter-gatherers creating sustained, stateless, egalitarian social arrangements. This is, of course, not to idealize or objectify any of these people in any way. No social network or social arrangement is ever perfect or without fault or flaw. However, this does not mean that some methods can't be better than others. As primitivist anarchists, we believe that the social arrangements of hunter-gatherers are overall preferable to those of civilization.


Determinism


It is erroneous to assume that everything that exists now was an inevitability. In fact, it's much more accurate to consider all things that are now to be the result of many improbabilities. The times in which we live are not the result of a predetermined, single narrative. They are a conglomeration of actions, deliberate and non-deliberate. They result from choices, coercion, coincidence.


For example, your existence was not inevitable, but the result of a series of improbable events, that caused your grandparents to meet, and then your parents, that particular egg, that particular sperm... In the same way, all that exists now is the sum of a series of highly improbably events. The present was not inevitable and the future is unwritten.


The Fall of Civilization


We are in an unprecedented era. Neo-liberalism has created a global economy, a global civilization. History tells us that when civilizations fall, the result is usually a return to more decentralized ways of living. There is no reason to believe this is not a likely outcome of the fall of global civilization as well.


Breaking with civilization, economics, and domestication has nothing to do with “going backwards” or “turning back the clock.” Correcting mistakes is not a matter of reversing a preset trajectory. Civilization is constantly and rapidly destroying species, ecosystems, communities, and people. Whether it crashes on its own or whether we take responsibility and bring it down ourselves, the sooner civilization comes down, the less devastation there will be when it does.


If anarchy is to be relevant in today's world it must be green, that is, it must be focused on bringing down civilization and finding a way of living in which we acknowledge ourselves as a part of the natural world, rather than a force at odds with it.
Fighting For Anarchy,
Bobby Whittenberg-James

Anarchy: Breaking Up With Socialism

For well over a century, some anarchists have aligned themselves with socialists of various shades, even fighting on the same side for different periods of time in several failed revolutions. We do not wish to rewrite history or to downplay this alliance, but to learn from it, challenge it, and question its role in the fight for anarchy today while advocating for its immediate and total annulment.
We can define socialism loosely as an economic system in which wealth and property are held either in common or by the state and/or party, in which the means of production and control of distribution are held by the state and/or party, workers, or the whole of society. Socialism can range from leninist totalitarianism to social democracy, to libertarian socialism and social anarchism.
Even under these broad strokes, anarchy escapes. Anarchy is not production and consumption, federations and councils, meetings, and voting and it certainly isn't the state. Such institutions are authoritarian. Anarchy is autonomous individuals associating with others voluntarily to fulfill their needs and desires. This is probably best exemplified among hunter/gatherer bands. Socialism, like capitalism is an economic system, and anarchy seeks to abolish economics altogether.
Leninism-
Leninism is a form of socialism largely characterized by a vanguard party seizing power and imposing the dictatorship of the proletariat upon the masses, allegedly to guide them through socialism into communism.
There are some things that most leninists know that most anarchists don't seem to and should. They know that anarchists are enemies of leninism and that anarchy and leninism are antithetical to one another. They understand that authority is a key issue. They will not budge in their defense of it. We should not budge in our opposition to it. Leninists know too that anarchists have a history of trusting them. They know that they have always been able to fool us with rhetoric for as long as they need us, and lock us up or shoot us when they no longer find us useful.
Many an anarchist has been deceived at one time or another (and this writer is no exception) by rhetoric to the tune of “we want the same things, we just have different ideas about how to get there.” While it may be true that many of the rank and file socialists truly believe that their program will lead to a liberated, classless society, the methods they use are statist and authoritarian and traditionally include the respression, incarceration, and execution of anarchists and other anti-authoritarians.
Libertarian/Anarcho- Socialism and Authoritarian Socialism?
A trotskyist acquaintance once said something about it not being helpful to distinguish between authoritarian and libertarian socialism. At the time I disagreed, but now I think he is right. Socialism is inherently authoritarian. Even with anarcho-prefixes and red and black flags, socialism subjugates the individual, EVERY individual, to the authority of the masses, the headless, unaccountable bureaucracy and separates each individual from the masses, from society as a whole. Each individual must struggle then against the whole of society for freedom, for anarchy. What good is it to free society if each individual is not free from society? From economics? From the commune? From the federation? It is not anarchy if it is not free of bureaucracy, no matter how “directly democratic” it is purported to be.
A highly organized society of councils, unions, and federations just replaces one impersonal, bureaucracy with another and renders people cogs in a new machine. Granted they are cogs in a self organized machine, but cogs in a machine they remain, slaves to a phantom.
Standing on Our Own Ground
The enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. All too often I hear anarchists defending or supporting socialist regimes past or present. Those are the very same regimes that would have us imprisoned or killed. Rather than defending leninist or other left/socialist regimes out of some perceived sense of obligatory allegiance to the left, we should instead be honest and forthcoming with an anarchist critique. We should make it very clear that we oppose both capitalism and socialism. In doing so, we stand on our own ground rather than defending someone else's indefensible ideology and history. We should not back away from anarchy to defend socialism, an ideology that is inconsistent with our wills and desires and one that has consistently systematically oppressed our comrades. It is not our job to be apologists for leninism or socialism. Rest assured the socialists are not spending their time defending anarchy.
Separate Trajectories-
Liberalism, Social Democracy, and Leninism make up a good chunk of what is commonly referred to as “the left.” All of them are characterized by authoritarian rule and bureaucracy. Nowhere along such a trajectory would anarchy fall. Liberalism (at least in rhetoric) and social democracy offer a large, bloated, bureaucratic welfare state and leninism offers a bureacratic totalitarian dictatorship. The pattern along this trajectory shows an increase in the strength, might, and authority of the state. How does one arrive at the conclusion that anarchy, the absence of all government falls somewhere further along this trajectory? How close do we expect to get to anarchy following a trajectory that leads to an all powerful, authoritarian state? How long do we fight alongside the socialists, and the rest of the left advancing their cause at the expense of the fight for anarchy?
We should not view socialists as folks who “just need to take their beliefs a bit farther” because regardless of what lies beyond leninism on that trajectory, of this we can be certain: it is not anarchy. In all likelihood they have already taken their beliefs as far as they intend to.
Because anarchy and socialism are on different trajectories and have such vastly different means of revolutionary practice it is inevitable that we will reach an impasse. The longer we misalign ourselves, the more devastating it will be when we reach that impasse. If you do not understand what happens at this impasse, just ask the ghosts of the anarchists of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions or the Spanish Civil War who were either incarcerated or executed at the hands of “comrades.”
Fight For Anarchy!
Many times allegiance to the left or to socialism manifests itself as anarchists constantly placing themselves in a role where they leave the fight for anarchy to fight for leftism. The socialist doesn't leave the fight for socialism to fight for anarchy out of “solidarity.” They know what they are fighting for, and it is certainly not anarchy.
But do we know what we are fighting for? Are we so enchanted by co-opted language and pseudo-radical rhetoric, so desperate for allies that we continue to repeat past mistakes knowing full well the consequences? Do we really think that anarchy is anything remotely like leninism or social democracy, and that if we tag along with lefties long enough, we'll end up there?
It is true that some early anarchists called themselves socialists or communists. Some still do. It is true that some early anarchists even carried the red flag. We are not frozen in time, however. Since that time, the red flag has been stained with the blood of many an anarchist, autonomist, and other anti-authoritarians. We did not sign a lifetime commitment, for better or worse, to socialism. We are not married to these ideas or these organizations. Perhaps we are historic allies with the socialists, but that brand of nostalgia and unquestioning allegiance has no place in a revolution and has proven to lead us to jails, prison camps, and death at the hand of the socialists.
In the days ahead and the uncertainty they hold, it would behoove us to question our tactics and our allegiances and make sure that we really are aligning ourselves with people who want the same things we do. We set ourselves up to fail again when we align ourselves with and invest trust in authoritarians. They have shown us over and over again what they will do when we ally ourselves with them. To continue to do so in the face of all evidence is sycophancy at best. Anarchy has nothing to concede to authority or statism and we have nothing to concede in the fight for anarchy.
Fighting For Anarchy,
Bobby Whittenberg-James

Down Graded Resistance: A Critique of DGR

Originally published on Veter(A)narchy on May 30, 2011.

There's been a lot of talk in anti-civ/primitive anarchy/deep ecology circles of late about a new organization called Deep Green Resistance and I haven't really weighed in very heavily on it yet and after a few conversations I decided to throw my hat into the ring. If you are unfamiliar with DGR I recommend checking out their website (http://deepgreenresistance.org) before reading this. Don't depend on my explanation of who and what they are. It's better that you form you own opinion before engaging my critique.

In reading through the intro, the (DEW), the Code of Conduct, the Statement of Principles and Why Do You Want Me to Sign the Code of Conduct and Statement of Principles, I found no critique of domestication, sedentaryism, technology, work, symbolic culture, mediating institutions, or agriculture and the only references to dismantling civilization specified industrial civilization. This abbreviated critique of civilization put forth by DGR may very well be a key reason for many of the problems within the organization's framework, theory, and program. If one's critique is sorely lacking, then most likely their resistance will be as well.
Through their calls for democracy, hierarchy, organizing (as opposed to autonomous coordination), and leftist rhetoric they are an explicitly anti-anarchist group, so I'm not really sure why so many anarchists are rushing to their defense. This reminds me a good bit of red anarchists who are sympathetic to liberal or socialist parties or regimes.

One of my initial concerns is the idea of organizationalism in general. It's important to distinguish between organizations and groups or networks and between organizing and cooperating. We don't need rosters and codes of conduct, programs, democratic rule, and recruiting to build a solid resistance. I think many times, as a result of our civilized minds, we tend to equate organization and standardization with expedience and effectiveness, with a quick and easy solution. This have proven not to be true on many occasions (The USA, National Syndicalist Italy, the USSR, North Korea.) We don't need a quick and easy solution, we need an effective solution.
A visit to their website starts out with their explanation of what Deep Green Resistance is. It starts off talking about the rise of civilization, the ineffectiveness of the mainstream activist scene, and building human communities inside of restored landbases. This is all good stuff. My first point of concern comes in the 5th paragraph. “Industrial civilization can be stopped.” This, to me, is concerning because we went from talking about how the problem has been 10,000 years of civilization to stopping industrial civilization. Civilization and industrial civilization cannot just be used interchangeably. Opposition to civilization is opposition to all civilization. Opposition to industrial civilization is opposition to one type of civilization, which carries with it tacit approval of other types of civilization.

My next concern comes in the next paragraph where it talks about the creation of “participatory institutions.” Shouldn't the resistance against civilization be about the abolition of institutions, rather than their creation? Shouldn't de-institutionalization be a part of an anti-civ resistance? A critique of civilization and authority certainly needs to include a critique of social institutions in general.

“... any strategy aiming for a just future must include a call to build direct democracies based on human rights and sustainable material cultures.”

Sustainability is definitely a necessary aim, but I'm curious about the rest of this. Anarchy is a condition of no rule with each individual having autonomy as opposed to democratic rule and a human rights model offered by civilization. Democracy is a form of rule, a form of government. There is an easily observable standardizing and homogenizing affect that comes with democracy. There must be a certain amount of uniformity to maintain social order and production. The process itself tends to discard and eliminate minority ideas and alienate minority groups, as well as challenge personal autonomy and subjugate the individual to the collective, forming a hierarchy.

As far as human rights, prisoners have rights; GI's have rights. Rights, as they are commonly understood, are a concept that rose up out of civilization. Rights can be given or taken. In a democracy they can be voted away. We can't equate a rights framework with liberation, as rights are something granted or recognized by a mediating body. Some people consider marriage to be a human right. California voted away the right for same sex couples to marry. The majority makes the rules. These ideas certainly aren't unique to DGR.
I'm also curious, would trans people be granted “human rights” by these democratically ruled communities? Lierre Keith is openly anti-trans. With her occupying a leadership position in DGR, I really wonder what the plan for trans people is. Would cis people be able to democratically vote these “human rights” away from trans people? Under democratic rule and a rights framework as opposed to liberty and autonomy, the majority can use the democratic institutions to crush the minority. This isn't just true of trans people. This could be any race, people group, gender, or culture that the majority in a democracy wants to dominate.

The end of that section links to their strategy that is referred to as Deep Ecological Warfare or DEW.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any grand strategy designed to be THE strategy. There can't be a “the strategy.” An organic resistance can't be synthesized. There can't be an umbrella organization for dismantling something as complex, nuanced, and layered as civilization. From the language in their program and the structure of the organization, I'm seeing a plan for the structure and program for building of a revolutionary vanguard.

“Industrial systems disruption requires underground networks organized in a hierarchal or paramilitary fashion.” However, if we follow this a bit further we find that “The above ground activists are the frontline fighters against authoritarianism. They are the only ones who can mobilize the popular groundswell needed to prevent fascism.”

I find the specific mention of fascism particularly perplexing. If we are opposed to civilization then we are obviously opposed to fascism. Should we not be fighting capitalism and socialism? Perhaps the answer lies in the next paragraph.

Furthermore, aboveground activists use the disrupted systems as an opportunity to strengthen local communities and parallel institutions. Mainstream people are encouraged to swing their support to participatory local alternatives in the economic, political, and social spheres. When economic turmoil causes unemployment and hyperinflation, people are employed locally for the benefit of their community and the land. In this scenario, as national governments around the world increasingly struggle with crises (like peak oil, food shortages, climate chaos, and so on) and increasingly fail to provide for people, local and directly democratic councils begin to take over administration of basic and emergency services, and people redirect their taxes to those local entities (perhaps as part of a campaign of general noncooperation against those in power). This happens in conjunction with the community emergency response and disaster preparedness measures already undertaken.”

Apparently the reason for specifying a fight against fascism is to facilitate the creation of some sort of democratic socialist idea. Is this suggesting that there is a progressive path to a post-civ world?
I'd also like to key in on this part of their Code of Conduct:

“Liberty: DGR groups have a zero-tolerance policy for abuse of anyone, human or nonhuman. Physical integrity and emotional safety are basic human rights that DGR is sworn to defend. DGR will banish any members who rape, batter, or abuse any living creature. Masculinity, with its militarized psychology and its violation imperative, has to be abandoned personally and dismantled globally.”

While this is a good standard for banishment, there is a loophole. If you want to rape, batter, and abuse living creatures but still want to help out with DGR, you can become a police officer and provide security.

“2. Civilization, especially industrial civilization, is fundamentally destructive to life on earth. Our task is to create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary. Organized political resistance is the only hope for our planet.”

Political resistance is essentially worthless in combatting civilization. Even a full scale political revolution couldn't abolish civilization. At best it could only alter it. Civilization does not just exist in the political sphere. It is a complex and overarching institution and system of oppression that requires a holistic approach to dismantle.

This is something that really makes me think that the change in language might not just be coincidence. We see a distinction drawn between the broader “civilization” and “industrial civilization.” It is understood that civilization is destructive to life on earth, and yet the stated task is to dismantle industrial civilization. Civilization was ravaging the earth and enslaving living beings long before industrialization. If we limit our resistance to the political sphere, or political revolution, we have already defeated ourselves.

I also went to a section called “Why do you want me to sign the Code of Conduct and Statement of Principles?” which includes the passage

“Your signature on that document shows that you made an agreement with DGR and all its members to follow the code and principles. These can serve as proof in court that DGR did not support, condone, or accept the actions of anyone who would do something like blow up a daycare center, or some other horrendous action.”
DGR is an organization. As an organization with identifiable leaders and a member list, they want to be able to drop you like a hot biscuit if you get in legal trouble that might make the organization look bad (to those in power and civilized society.) It's clear that blowing up a daycare is horrific, an act unworthy of our support. But what if we replace the words “daycare center” with “dam” or “police car” or “cell phone tower” or “bulldozer?” If you get caught in a situation where you are doing something that's in your conscience to do, will your comrades have your back, or are they telling you right up front that they'll drop you if you end up in a situation that might be bad PR or legal trouble for the organization? Make no mistake, the organization is more important than you. It's not going to stick its neck out for you. An organization's #1 priority has to be its own existence or else it will cease to exist. To an organization you are totally expendable, particularly in comparison to the organization itself.

“All societies–including the most peaceful; especially the most peaceful–have understood the necessity of codes of conduct, which are nothing more than behavioral norms.”

This is a conflation of two very distinct things. Behavioral norms might be nearly ubiquitous but they are not institutionalized and generally non-authoritarian. It is a behavior norm to not burp loudly or yell in restaurants, but there is no Code of Conduct that people sign before going into a restaurant. Most people just generally don't do those things because it's understood as a behavior norm. Many times there aren't even any consequences aside from some disgusted looks, or someone might ask them to stop. Rarely do people have to be forcibly removed from a restaurant for such things. In people groups that do not have official written law or Code of Conduct there is still personal accountability. When we get together with friends, there is no code of conduct to sign but we can still hold one another accountable and make sure everyone is safe and taken care of.

“All serious organizations have codes of conduct by which people are meant to abide. The Spanish Anarchists did. So did the IRA. The Freedom Riders had a code of conduct, as did Nat Turner’s fighters. Codes of conduct are even more important in militant resistance movements who have a history of behaving badly.”

The IRA was also in favor of the Catholic Church, an institution that routinely rapes children and covers it up and they kill people because of their nationality and/or religion. This is not an organization after which we should pattern our resistance, particularly concerning matters of conduct.

"There is a strain of modern anarchists who believe all codes of conduct interfere with their feral freedoms, or are otherwise inappropriate. These people have done a lot of damage to modern anarchism. And they’re ignorant of anarchist history and the history of social movements. Anarchists throughout history have understood the importance of codes of conduct. Emma Goldman for example. And the Spanish Anarchists. (The men were not allowed to drink, violence against women was unacceptable, men using prostituted women was unacceptable, brawling was unacceptable: they were to comport themselves with dignity and respect).”

It seems that most hunter-gatherers groups, the only to have ever achieved anarchy for any extended period of time, seem to agree with us modern anarchists. The Mbuti and the !Kung don't have Codes of Conduct, but they do have behavior norms and ways of protecting members of the tribes' dignity and autonomy.
Our disagreement is not about whether there are certain behaviors and actions that are unacceptable in a community setting. The discrepancy is whether we want to foster respectful interactions through authoritarian or anarchistic means.

I assume that when they refer to “the” Spanish Anarchists that they are referring to the famous CNT-FAI. These organizations are certainly not ones that should be emulated or idealized as iconic of anarchy. They were organized in a hierarchical fashion, authoritarian in nature, and even took seats within the Spanish government. Their end state was not even anarchy, but socialism. Let us also never forget that their revolution failed to result in the socialist utopia they sought, much less anarchy, something completely different. This argument is similar to saying that since Murray Rothbard called himself an anarchist and advocated a free market capitalism which included a child market, that it's ok for anarchists to sell children and that it is an anarchist practice to do so. Anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-syndicalism are both hierarchical, authoritarian schools of anarchist thought, and therefore we are going to find authoritarian tendencies and ideas within them. This doesn't justify their use in anarchist practice.

“The modern, Western, individualist, capitalist, code of conduct is that there can be no such thing as a code of conduct other than what benefits an individual the most.”

Capitalism is not individualist. The rhetoric may be that of the rugged individual, but in practice it is dependent upon a hierarchical class system, which is a collectivist arrangement. There is a Code of Conduct in capitalist society. It's commonly referred to as “the law,” and it generally prevents individuals from getting what benefits them the most.

What DGR seems to be saying is that in capitalist society, the individual is free to pursue what benefits them most and that there is no law to restrict that. That sounds like anarchy, but that is not the reality of the capitalist society I live in. The society I live in is designed to benefit a very few at the expense of the very many and any individual who dares to try to take more than they are allotted and is caught doing so is met with the full force of the Code of Conduct.

“Most human societies before the rise of civilization, were based on mutual responsibility and cooperation.”

Yes, there was mutual respect and cooperation but NO formal Code of Conduct.

“But freedom in a capitalist society is based on atomized, alienated individuals within a rights framework; as though we are not all interdependent.”

Doesn't DGR advocate a rights framework under democratic rule for its communities?

What I don't see is what vision of the world DGR proposes. I don't mean a blueprint or anything. I just don't understand what the overall goal is. I understand calls for a democratic, participatory socialism and autonomous communities. I understand the goal of bringing down industrial civilization. This makes me curious as to whether we might be talking about an autonomous agricultural or horticultural democratic socialist civilization. I hear a call for a rights framework and disdain for individualism. I hear a plan to dismantle industrial civilization, but what then?

I keep hearing that since we have a common enemy we should unite to fight it, but the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend, something that anarchists generally find out in socialist revolutions once the socialists have gained power and no longer need the anarchists.

DGR says that it exists because there is a dire need for a targeted resistance and I hear many in the current discussion of DGR defend the existence of such an organization on the same grounds. I don't think anyone in the anti-civ/deep ecology/primitivist milieu denies that. That isn't in question.

The questions we face are more like: “What do we want our targeted resistance to look like?” “How will it manifest itself?” “Do we want our resistance to be based upon organization or voluntary cooperation?” “Do we want it to be anarchistic or authoritarian?”

I can't help but note a parallel between the principles of civilization and organizing/organization. DGR and other activist organizations or vanguards, like civilization, take something wild and organic and organize it, codify it, and maintain that order, giving authoritative direction to something that was once fluid and autonomous. We do need greater numbers, but we don't need recruits or activists. We need autonomous warriors and dissidents and who are ready to come together in an organic way and cooperate to bring down that which oppresses us all and destroys our source of life.
Fighting for Anarchy,
Bobby Whittenberg-James

My Battle Cry by Bobby Whittenberg-James

I write today in unprecedented times. As we speak, the fetters that have bound us for the last 10,000-12,000 years are being rattled and shaken. The existing order is crumbling. For so long we have been robbed of our dignity, robbed of our humanity, robbed of our knowledge of how to even be human. The dam is cracking, the prison walls are beginning to shake. We, as humans, have become a domesticated species, but even the most docile domesticated dog will strike back when beaten and cornered long enough.
All over, we see evidence of people and the earth revolting. Between the increase of “natural disasters” (many if not most of which are a result of our Earth Mother seeking to restore balance, countering destructive activities) and political uprisings the evidence is mounting that the existing order, the leviathan, civilization is in its death throes. There is a pervasive darkness that has overcome us all in these days. Many of us are reacting differently, the reactions of a domesticated species striking out in the best ways we see fit. Demonstrations, sabotage, hacking, occupations, these are all results of a people who have had enough, a people seeking nothing more than to be able to live as humans.
When we look around, we see only the false existence we have created for ourselves. “Nature” or “the environment,” names we have given to our home to make it seem like something separate from ourselves has been relegated to city parks, state parks, national parks, and nature preserves. We have created a synthetic environment of concrete, plastic, steel, and social networking. Where there were once forests, deserts, jungles, and prairies, there are now malls, factories, stadiums, cell phone towers, car dealerships, and factory farms.
In our attempt to control everything we come into contact with, to codify, homogenize, and linearize, through domesticating everything around us, we have domesticated ourselves. We have constructed the prison in which we are now prisoners. We have built the plantation upon which we are slaves. We have designed and completed the concentration camps in which we engage in our own genocide.
The Left tells us that if only the prisoners ran the prison, if only the slaves ran the plantation, if only those to be exterminated ran the concentration camp, that this would solve all of our problems. But, they say, we are never to question the existence of or seek to dismantle the prison, the plantation, or the concentration camp themselves, because without them we would surely die. And so we stay in our prisons, on our plantations, in our concentration camps. Since the dawn of civilization, the civilized have been told that life outside the prison, the plantation, the concentration camp is harsh, brutal, dangerous, and scary, that only within the walls can we find security. Where though, is the security in a way of life that is based upon taking more, far more than it ever gives back? Where is the safety in a suicide mission?
We are born into a safe, sterile environment, placed in little rows in a nursery, taken home to a manufactured domicile, surrounded by plastic, processed wood, concrete, and more plastic. Our food is grown in rows, sprayed with chemicals, genetically modified and pumped full of preservatives and other chemicals, pickled, packaged, preserved, and stocked in little rows on shelves in grocery stores. We are sent to school to have our imaginations strangled out of us, robbed of our childhoods, as we spend 8 hours a day for twelve years regurgitating facts, our lives and our experiences homogenized, manufactured, and produced for us. “Raise your hand to talk.” “Do what you’re told.” “Sit down.” “Shut up.” We learn to only ask safe, non-challenging questions, we learn that the things we love, our gifts, our talents, are best put to use for an employer, or for employing others. When we are done with school, it’s off to the workforce, where we are to sit down, shut up and do what we’re told. Some of us go off into the military where we are told to line up in little rows, shut up and kill, occupy, brutalize whomever we are told. Then after that’s all over, we are placed in a box, and one more time, placed in little rows with just a stone to tell the world that another little drone was once here. Is this the world we want to live in? Are these the lives we want to live? Is this really all we are?
Regardless of one’s political stripe, gender, class, race, or nationality, we all have quite a few things in common. Included among these things are the fact that we all need nutritious food to eat, clean water to drink, and uncontaminated air to breathe. We all need to live in healthy communities where we are able to live in a way that benefits us and those around us, human and non-human alike. We can not achieve this through one or the other political ideology, organization, party, program, or platform.
Many of us, particular those of us in the United States have been told that there are easy answers for everything, that we don’t have to put in the blood, sweat, and effort, to achieve what we want or need, but that some external entity will provide that for us. We are taught that if we just pressure our government enough, if we just “vote with our dollars” and buy the right products, if our protests are peaceful enough, if we have enough people at our marches, if we just allow the system to work, if we just do what we’re told and follow the rules, then everything will turn out right. We are told that if we want to change things, we are to build organizations, unions, parties, movements, etc. However, such institutions are merely a shifting of the details of the current order and do nothing to strike at the root of the challenges that we face.
However, a system based on a path of infinite growth on a finite planet, of ever increasing complexity necessarily ends in a collapse of that system. This, we are told, is something we must ignore, that the cornucopia is truly endless. There are endless “resources” to be extracted, manufactured, and produced. Despite this utopian fantasy, every day we are finding out that the ecological destruction is “worse than anyone thought.” We are told that the problems brought about by politics can be solved with more politics, that the problems brought about by economics can be solved with more economics, that the problems brought about by domestication can be solved with more domestication, that the problems brought about by technology can be solved by more technology. We are force fed the disempowering myth that human experience is linear beginning with a primitive existence, and going on to something that looks like Star Trek or the Jetsons, and that we have no control over what is commonly referred to as progress, that we are just along for the ride, and the best we can do is to continue this destruction in the safest way possible.
Search as we may within these constructs, however, there is no savior. We have traded our freedom, our humanity, and our connection to the world around us, we have traded our spirits, our essence for video games, for Starbucks, for McDonald’s, for gasoline, for cell phones, and for Facebook. There is no one but us that can save us from this. Capitalism will not save us. Fascism will not save us. Socialism will not save us. Social democracy will not save us. Another revolution will not save us. Only we can save us. If we are to change the existing paradigm, to bring about new ways of being, new ways of living, there is no shortcut we can take, no ideology that we can map out, no blueprint we can follow, no party we can join, no protest we can orchestrate. We must go about the creation of our own communities, the birthing of our own, new, wild and wonderful ways of living.
I don’t have all the answers. I may have some of the answers. I may just have a few good suggestions or questions, but I know this:
I am not a "consumer" or a "citizen" or a "man." I do not want to press 0 to speak to a customer service representative. I do not want to open a can, a box, a wrapper, or go through a drive through to eat. I do not want to find my "community" behind a screen. I do not want to stay off the grass. I do not want to fill out and return this form. I do not want my ethnicity to be used as a weapon. I do not want my water to come from a bottle or a faucet. I do not want my understanding of the world to come from what someone inside a box or wearing a lab coat tells me. I do not want to do what I'm told. I do not want to live in a way that kills everything around me. I do not want to wipe my ass with the rainforest. I do not want to live among that which is produced and consumed. I want to hug you. I want you and I to be able to love one another without fear, reservation, or pretense. I want to eat food directly from the earth and act directly from my heart. I want to live and laugh and cry and love in a community the way our ancestors did for millions of years. I want you to be there with me. I want us to stop destroying everything. I need you. You need me. We don't need any of the rest of this shit that we manufacture, and produce, and throw away. Beneath the concrete, and alcohol, and uppers, and downers, and anti-depressants, beneath the fashion trends, and social networks, and cell phones, and TV shows, and gender roles, and street lights, and gas stations, deep within this cage we call civilization you are still wild. I am still wild. Inside of me beats the feral heart of the animal that I am. I am flesh and bone, blood and spirit, earth and light. I long to be a part of the earth on which I live, to drink from clean rivers, and breathe clean air. I don't want to be a cog in a machine. I want to dismantle the machine. I am a human being and I want to live as one. As such, civilization is my enemy and this is my battle cry. If it is yours as well, then let us go about creating the world we want to live in.
Until the Earth is Wild Again,
Bobby Whittenberg-James

Civilization is like a Jetliner by David Watson

Civilization is like a jetliner, noisy, burning up enormous amounts of fuel. Every imaginable and unimaginable crime and pollution had to be committed in order to make it go. Whole species were rendered extinct, whole populations dispersed. Its shadow on the waters resembles an oil slick. Birds are sucked into its jets and vaporized. Every part, as Gus Grissom once nervously remarked about space capsules before he was burned up in one, has been made by the lowest bidder.

Civilization is like a 747, the filtered air, the muzak oozing over the earphones, a phony sense of security, the chemical food, the plastic trays, all the passengers sitting passively in the orderly row of padded seats staring at Death on the movie screen. Civilization is like a jetliner, an idiot savant in the cockpit, manipulating computerized controls built by sullen wage workers, and dependent for his directions on sleepy technicians high on amphetamines with their minds wandering to sports and sex.

Civilization is like a 747, filled beyond capacity with coerced volunteers-some in love with the velocity, most wavering at the abyss of terror and nausea, yet still seduced by advertising and propaganda. It is like a DC-10, so incredibly enclosed that you want to break through the tin can walls and escape, make your own way through the clouds, and leave this rattling, screaming fiend approaching its breaking point. The smallest error or technical failure leads to catastrophe, scattering your sad entrails like belated omens all over the runway, knocks you out of your shoes, breaks all your bones like egg shells.

(Of course civilization is like many other things besides jets - always things - a chemical drainage ditch, a woodland knocked down to lengthen an airstrip or to build a slick new shopping mall where people can buy salad bowls made out of exotic tropical trees which will be extinct next week, or perhaps a graveyard for cars, or a suspension bridge which collapses because a single metal pin has shaken loose. Civilization is a hydra. There is a multitude of styles, colors, and sizes of Death to choose from.)

Civilization is like a Boeing jumbo jet because it transports people who have never experienced their humanity where they were. to places where they shouldn't go. In fact it mainly transports businessmen in suits with briefcases filled with charts, contracts, more mischief - businessmen who are identical everywhere and hence have no reason at all to be ferried about. And it goes faster and faster, turning more and more places into airports, the (un)natural habitat of businessmen.

It is an utter mystery how it gets off the ground. It rolls down the runway, the blinking lights along the ground like electronic scar tissue on the flesh of the earth, picks up speed and somehow grunts raping the air, working its way up along the shimmering waves of heat and the trash blowing about like refugees fleeing the bombing of a city. Yes, it is exciting, a mystery, when life has been evacuated and the very stones have been murdered.

But civilization, like the jetliner, this freak phoenix incapable of rising from its ashes, also collapses across the earth like a million bursting wasps, flames spreading across the runway in tentacles of gasoline, samsonite, and charred flesh. And always the absurd rubbish, Death's confetti, the fragments left to mock us lying along the weary trajectory of the dying bird-the doll's head, the shoes eyeglasses, a beltbuckle.

Jetliners fall, civilizations fall, this civilization will fall. The gauges will be read wrong on some snowy day (perhaps they will fail). The wings, supposedly defrosted, will be too frozen to beat against the wind and the bird will sink like a millstone, first gratuitously skimming a bridge (because civilization is also like a bridge, from Paradise to Nowhere), a bridge laden, say, with commuters on their way to or from work, which is to say, to or from an airport, packed in their cars (wingless jetliners) like additional votive offerings to a ravenous Medusa.

Then it will dive into the icy waters of a river, the Potomac perhaps, or the River Jordon, or Lethé. And we will be inside, each one of us at our specially assigned porthole, going down for the last time, like dolls' heads encased in plexiglass.

Class Struggle, Commodification and Modernized Society from Species Traitor #2

“Forget those commies, I don’t want to work in their factories. Why is it that all these intellectuals and rich college kids think work is cool…It’s only people who have never worked at a dead end job with no future that thinks us working class people give a shit who runs the factory. Work is work; no matter if the boss is a capitalist or all of us.” -Craig E. quoted from Essays Towards a New Eco-Anarchism, Chris Kortright

Is class struggle still relevant? The relics of decaying leftist movements would still like us to hold onto this bit of his-story long past its due. As the anti-State publication Black Star North claims, “Suggestions that class struggle is no longer relevant to revolutionary theory and practice should be met with high suspicion. Those who make such claims are either naïve, misguided, or middle/upper class and unwilling to confront their privilege.” (“Towards an Understanding of Class Struggle in the 21st Century”, BSN #3 pg. 27)
Class struggle undoubtedly has its specific origins within the rise of industrial society. The stages of society permeating the social turn in emphasis on production from food rearing to specialization within the varying fields of material goods that accent the idealistic wealth of the times. Agrarian societies certainly had their rich, but most class warriors will focus their attention towards the industrial age that will follow (a detail that will always cause a major problem of historical analysis in the class struggle perspective).

the Rise and Fall of Class Struggle

The rise of class struggle, in the industrial sense that it is most commonly referred to as, comes along during the ages of increasing mechanization and automation. A steady increase from human based power sources to machine based. The technological “advancements” made during this progression made a huge impact on the degrees of severity felt by the working class (the producers). Needless to say, this was accompanied by increasing profits for the upper class (the owners).
It seems extremely important to recognize the differences between the societies of that time and now. The consumer society we live in now is a world apart from the industrial period of yester years (Granted that the same situation still exists, but has just changed on scale considering that the industrial process has not yet been fully automated, but relocated into the extending ‘labor pools’ of second and third world peoples thanks to our globalizing economy.). The vast amounts of labor required by industrial production, and the little amounts of wealth left off to the working class, made such nuances as general stores and vast shopping areas close to nonexistent. The service sector was therefore a mere percentage of the workers, compared to our current society in which this makes up the majority of work being done.
This constant force of dividing labor into more mundane and meaningless positions has completely altered the face of the work force. The worker in our modern stratified society has become even further alienated than the pre-Ford assembly line factory models that Marx spoke of. The effect, in turn, has caused an even greater loss of individual ‘meaning’ in a society flooded with workerist ethics. The entire scenario was hardly even something to be considered in the times of social uprising prior to the Second World War, despite the major steps towards modernization being made throughout the 1800s’ up until this time of ‘material prosperity’, or more commonly misconstrued as the ‘affluent society’ (see Clive Pontings’ Green History of the World). This is the society in which we (the privileged first world, who most likely make up the entire readership of this essay) exist. It seems appallingly apparent that we have moved into post-industrial society (a step which the socialist currents have patently rejected).

Industrial and Post-Industrial Workers

The industrial factory worker slaving away on an hourly wage is a commodity. This is indisputable. The economy turns us all into prostitutes for the capitalists, merely renting our bodies and abilities for the designated economic value (always in light of the capitalist demands or those they have cleverly crafted for the yearning workers [which of course, is all we really are within the religion of economics]). In the period spawned by the times of heavy industrial maturity, we still become further alienated as commodity value. The intrinsic capitalist interests in having producers are of a different nature than the capitalist interests in consumers, a tender breed. While the latter requires more attention and gratification (the effects of synthetic and virtual e-gratification are huge issues in themselves), the industrial worker requires a strict reinforcement of social position as dominated in the physical sense. This is central to an understanding of our current dilemma.
The industrial worker has a clear function within the realm of production. The workerist ethics of our society are born of this situation, and therefore, the industrial worker will be prone to a larger sentiment of solidarity within that context. Doing something so inherent to our way of ‘life’ creates a profound sense of worth for a large portion of the vanishing industrial worker class (that of which is idealized by the roots of class struggle), despite the blows made to this by the increasing roles of specialization and automation.
The Ford model assembly line of production has in itself been one of the more severe forms of modernization within the factories, and serves as an example for the sentiments within the overall post-industrial society (highlighted by an increasingly economically stratified society, with a constantly raising ‘standard of living’ accompanied by further stretches towards ultra-rich and its bastard child, ultra-poor). This has only been aided by the atmosphere of corporate assimilated unions, which carries forth a greater blow towards notions of worker solidarity and nurtures the disillusionments of capitalist fantasies. (see Unions Against Revolution, J. Zerzan and G. Munis)
The industrial worker was well aware of their role in industrial society as their most recognized value was as a producer. This creates a contingency within the working class, which was easily identified, and even more easily aligned with. It is clear to see that such a context will only bring rise to worker solidarity, of a oneness through the community of exploited. The industrial worker of this era was definitely a commodity to the capitalist system, but within that system, there existed a community, which produced its own value system (while we will clearly recognize the notions that were carried over from their other selves). There was a definition and multifaceted existence of a working class; it was clear and apparent to everyone. Such notions as class-consciousness were hardly radical or economic fringe notions, but a daily reality that could be seen everywhere. It should be no surprise that socialist, communist and syndicalist ideologies would find a place within that era. Yet, contemporary class strugglers aren’t willing to let this go. For some the ‘working class’ remains a constant infallible section of society that no matter what happens, they have their working class solidarity. It is likely such never existed, but any radical theory is going to have to be realistic about the situation they are in and just whom they are dealing with.

the Death of Class-Consciousness

The ideals of class struggle (the movement that a conscious, working class could take over the means of production and base a society ‘each to their own needs, from their own abilities’) are of course contextual (not to mention faulty, as we can see from a plentitude of perspectives in hindsight. Including the environmental effects of industrial society as a whole on the planet and individual, the failures in China and Russia, to mention the major ones.).
The general mood of the industrial era was going with the flow of the capitalist vision of constant progression and of worth in the industrial system (with obvious exceptions as the Luddites). The permeating notions of ‘Progress’ and emphasis on the level of production and standard of living were taken as a norm. The working class was usually a bit more optimistic about the distribution of wealth accumulated, but taking into account the areas of immersion with capitalist conceptualizations, it seems that the outcomes of such a society would still hold to be as lethal as our own (an issue to be dealt with in coming sections).
The most conflicting aspect of Class Struggle and our current society lies here. The times have drastically changed and the attitudes of class-consciousness that were once flagrant in industrial society have been lost into the pages of his-story. Where there was at one point a position in society that a mass of people could relate to, there now exists a field of competition and the lines have all been blurred. There is no solid working class that can identify with the mass collectivized movements that characterize class struggle. Even if such a group did exist, there are few means of productions remaining for them to take over.
There is undoubtedly a large portion of the population, just within the belly of the beast, who would definitely constitute a poor ‘class’. The entire notion of work has been completely revamped to fit with the new economy, the almost fully automated workplace, and the ever-expanding realm of the service sector. It is very unlikely to find a solid mass of working class enthusiasts working in supermarkets and super outlet stores. Are there some remnants of organizing labor and class-consciousness? Yes, but the large portion of Marxists and Class Warriors are not out in the mainstream, but in academic pockets of universities or the downsizing remains of factories. There is a reason behind this, that simply is that the exploitation is all still there, but there no longer remains a massive community of consistency that those workers can relate too. The entire face of work has been forever changed.

the Effects of Commodification

The new forms of wage slavery have had profound effects on the contemporary worker. Long gone are working situations in which one can expect to be in the same place in 10, 20, or more years (although who really wants to be?). The centuries of being valued in terms of productivity, output, and all the other economic equations of degradation, have scared the mind to think in no other terms. The bounty of being the ‘affluent society’ has left us with a whole new set of institutions to further alienate and mediate our existence. The backlashes have been unforeseeable.
Just with the solution to eliminating child labor (forced schooling) has been another depravation of childhood; the most important time for personal development and laying out the limitations of ones own future (see Paul Shepards’ Nature and Madness.). Not that work should ever be considered the alternative; the ‘civilized’ solution to the original problem has hardly helped the image of the word ‘humane’. The child is now forced to spend the majority of their days until the age of 16-18 (at least within the United States) within the confines of one of the more efficient socializing devices available, the school system.
It is in this institution that the children are soaked with the glorious, self-gratifying his-stories of “their” own trials and tribulations. From the beginning of the day, when they are subjected to the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’, through mind numbing hours of conditioning to the scientific state of mind. The world is laid out, flat on paper, as the map of Empire, subjected to the simplistic equations of mathematicians, the proper dialect of language, the etiquette of proper domestication, and the Pride of being part of the greatest nation to ever grace the face of the flat planet depicted by graphs. Any way you look at it, you come out the product of the capitalist system. The well-rounded consumer: the tuned, efficient worker to further the cause of progress.
In this we will find that we end up in distinguishable social classes. However, the subjective classes of today are very much different from the set social standings of industrial society.
The citizen of post-industrial society is not the conscious industrial worker by any stretch of the imagination. The end product of the early socializing pattern is eager and ambitious. No longer going to be content with a set social standing, but constantly looking up and forward into a dreamy future of becoming wealthy (more of a disease than ghetto anymore).
To be apart of the economy of today is far from that of the inclusive workers of industrialism, and anyone who has been subjected to this degradation knows it. The current working class is hardly any concrete orientation or job category. If we attempt to draw lines as to who is where, we will find more people belong to the middle class than anything, the truth of the matter is that the structure of our society does actually have loopholes that make it possible for the poorest of poor to become superrich. In fact, such occurrences are highlighted excessively to keep such a loophole as being seen as a possibility for all (the reality being that capitalism will always require its’ ‘shit pool’ to rob at will, generally consisting of the natural environment, but always inclusive of the poor [poverty itself being the creation of such an intrinsic capitalist need]).
In modernized society, there are no setlines, and that is the selling point of the ‘free market’. Essentially anything is possible (most definitely including its’ own destruction), but the reality, as class strugglers have constantly kept in light, is that the whole society is ‘unjust’. The capitalist system is dependent upon its mainframe of exploitation. This should come as little surprise to most readers here, which in itself could be seen as a kind of monument to the past ‘fellow workers’ dedicated to the class revolt (not that this was any great feat, in ever emerging trend there are always the whistleblowers). The notion of set social classes in modernized society has less base in reality as all lines are being blurred in the upsurge of capitalist-utopia delusions flood the ‘common’ vision, better sold as ‘OUR future’.
In almost every aspect within our current condition, commodification has succeeded with the influx of misguided notions that we can all be rich. Whatever forms that notion reappears; the individual in consumer society sees the world in terms of capitalist value. The notion that food grows on trees is not seen as much of a truth, but a pipe dream, and generally a not very preferable one. The new domestication (preferred enslavement to technological industrial society) has taught us that food is not something that exists freely, but can be purchased freely at the many convenient supermarkets that have become a sick satire of the simplicity of finding food in pre-agrarian society.
There are, and always will be, exceptions to this. The many ‘revolutionaries’ that live off the fringes of our urban lifestyles are as much dependent on this way of ‘life’ as those who sell their life away at an hourly wage. While the individual sickness of existing in such a world is surely clearly different, one cannot realistically recommend a large-scale revolutionary current of dumpstering and/or stealing food.
The simple truth of the matter is that our society is not any kind of strict class society, regardless of how academics and social theorists map it out. Such a notion is not merely coming from a refusal to confront ones own ‘privileges’, but from taking in the obvious observation that our society is structured in a completely unique manner, although as with all capitalist systems, the rich are becoming richer, and the poor are becoming poorer. This alone, however, is by no means any indication that class will be, or should be, the determining factor for insurrection or revolution. People know that they’re being fucked, the poor know who is rich, but there is no comfort in being a part of a social class. This is why class struggle has continually lost its large-scale devotion and is only met by more cynicism.
The passive nihilism of consumption has absorbed and resold us as many packages of helplessness as can be imagined. It is always possible to break through that domesticated mentality, but the attempts to do so through a dated movement as class struggle has hardly proven to be much of a solution to the problems intrinsic to this way of ‘life’. One need only spend at least a little time with the working class of our society (the extreme poor being another ‘class’) to realize that there is little interest with re-arising as a massive class determined to take the means of production and distribution into their own hands. The drive to find avenues to venture further into the patently optimistic self-reflection of our society (pounded with the required capitalist reminder that ‘we have never had it so good’) the downtrodden of our society will be more prone to taking this to heart. Ones’ social situation is taken less as a way of life, but as an indication of the effort one has put into ‘bettering’ their own situation. The scenario has succeeded in drawing many further into the beast than making radicals or class-conscious individuals. The stratification of social standing has only furthered alienation from collective efforts in exchange for a bloodthirsty lust for competition.

the Dangers of Industrial Society

There is no sanctuary in an idealized world of industrialism. The mode of thinking at the time (although still ever stronger in our own time) was on a collision course with the disasters that accompany any society that places such excesses on the environment and the peoples in the culture. This way of living, as best exemplified as our current society that has kept on the path laid out well before the industrial era, has an internalized mechanism that will always cause its own downfall. That is the aspect of continual growth that has remained a constant in civilized society. An industrial system is based upon a readily available and determinable system of agriculture to provide for the new centralized mode that has been developing along side the whole.
With industrialism, we have a situation in which the common necessary resources pertaining to food rearing and distribution have moved from being the base of all occurrences within society, to becoming a support network for the newly emerging base, production. Capitalism (a symptom of the civilization which sprouts it) has always been dependent on a centralized system of distribution, thus granting power to those in the center, the government. The power in this sense has no longer been left in those who merely produce the foods (the increasing development of new technologies and methods involving and based upon automation have built upon the now century old systems of rearing and brought about a climate of greater manipulation to enhance production). In a sense, the age-old problem of providing adequate food is being dealt with (the overall ecological impacts still out of sight, to only later reappear to give a good kick in the ass, this however, was not something that would necessarily cause immediate problems for said society).
The problem with overcoming this hurdle is that, as human history has shown, the excesses of food have come hand in hand with expansion in population. The system is faulty in that there is no means to essentially enact bounds upon the population. The span of human life within mass society, especially pertaining to fixed living situations, primarily the vastly growing industrial cities (made possible by increasing abilities to move food), has been marked by the common occurrences of outbreaks of diseases. In any other society, this would in essence be one method of keeping the population in check. The civilized response in turn has been to consistently ignore the warnings, find a quick solution and carry on full speed (the problem of increasing immunity to super antibiotics should come as no surprise, our modern medicine is meant to ‘heal’ in the most superficial immediate sense of the word, we are constantly finding the downfalls of such an approach).
What this means is that industrialized living, without any kind of massively implemented program of limitation, will always be bound to the situation of constant growth (these programs, as even failures in historical senses, will lead towards fascist tendencies, and the likelihood of their success should be considered as ridiculous as past attempts to ‘weed out’.). The costly effects of which have been dealt with in great deals elsewhere. There simply cannot be (and we are seeing increasingly that there should not be) a sustainable or suitable industrial society, which is the only ideal society for the outcomes of class struggle.

the Revolt Against Work

It is becoming increasingly clear that the problem is not whom is the boss (be it an individual, a corporation, or the majority of the ‘working class’), but that we have to work at all. We are always looking for the ‘path of least resistance’. Communal work is still work, especially when it feeds the production/consumer dichotomy.
Every bit of work we do, especially any that would be available should the class struggle wish to attempt to maintain cities, feeds the alienation that accompanies life within a synthetic reality. There is hardly anything that can be done anymore that a person can see a process all the way through. There is very little sowing and reaping of harvests in cities (overlooking the fact that there is little glory in this tediously mechanistic labor, despite what the peasant idealizers would suggest), or any kind of sustaining project. The larger the society, the less ‘meaningful’ work there is to be done, but there will always be those ‘little things’ which become necessary in order to provide for the whole. It will therefore always be someone’s’ job to produce and maintain such things. Any way you look at this, it will always be work. It is not much of a stretch to see the possible joy of communal food gathering or production (most especially by the endless possibilities of doing this on an individual basis), but it really stretches to think that there will be that same feeling of enthusiasm and joy for building tractors and all the mundane shit work that would have to make such an event possible. This is a realistic feat that class strugglers have downplayed. Granted post-capitalist/civilized situation is going to be filled with obstacles, but it seems clear that some are easier to just skip entirely, the industrial system being one of the more obvious of choices.

the Transitory Dilemma

It is not at all uncommon to hear of class struggle as a means to an end. As has been shown in the previous pages, however, that seems very debatable outside of certain industrialist areas. This brings light to the whole notion of possible transitions from a capitalist/civilized order, a constant sore spot in revolutionary theory. It seems that to merely have a vision of what is likely or possible must be accompanied by a play-by-play scenario with how to jump from here to there. That aspect of revolutionary theory seems, at most, to be almost completely useless as any kind of praxis. Revolutions failing have hardly been due to a lack of guidelines, but exceedingly more common is the failure of oversight.
This aspect of theory is where we will most likely find the traces of civilized thought that refuse to let go. For some reason or another, the possibility of revolution occurring spontaneously is always upheld, but moving beyond is hardly given much credit. Transitory theories are laid out from every angle, but why is it that we think that those theories will work? In most cases, it seems that those ‘stages’ are a progression of letting go of certain vices of capitalism. For class struggle, that vice would be the notion of a ruling class, bosses. For others, those vices could be centralized governing structures, some could be schools, some could be work, but what could really be more utopian than the thought that there will be some massive, voluntary downgrading of civilized vices? Why do we think we could get so far, but still ‘need’ this and that, or that something will spark in people and put them in the position to be ‘enlightened’ into groupthink?
I would never claim to posses any special or original knowledge on the subject, but it seems that if we are serious about taking out this way of life, that it would do us much better to work at dismantling all this as many ways as we can. I don’t think making up possible scenarios for what may happen will be as successful as attempting to take this whole thing out of commission. Not that anyone one can do that, but if there is going to be anything, why not that? We live in a very fucked up society, and there is arguably more depression and alienation now than ever, but people aren’t going to always just give up on it. And no matter what anyone thinks, those grips they have on capitalist society aren’t going to stop the inevitable collapse from happening. It seems apparent that any realistic revolutionary praxis would lie in welcoming the inevitable and working to make the crash not so harsh as it would be.
I will be the last to say that many transitory actions are worthless. Certain acts, especially permaculture and other attempts to help ‘rewild’ our lives and our bioregions, are absolutely vital to the permanence of this planet and life on it. Movements that attempt to stop civilization from destroying all wildness play an extremely important role. Actions that seek to help people overcome the alienation and depravation of our mediated life are some of the most important ones. These are all important things, but we should always take them just as what they are, things that lessen the blow and make life more meaningful again.

Colonization and its Discontents

The problem that has commonly been overlooked (or in even worse scenarios, assimilated) by class strugglers is that the new nations that are being brought into the global economy are intrinsically different from our own situation. For class struggle to have any real meaning to those who are in the processes of being colonized (despite the mass media conceptions, this is most definitely non-voluntary for the most part) they would have to further move into the capitalist economy and continue the process of industrialization (which Marx and Engel’s had been known to suggest they ought to do). So the destined path of humans, as pushed by the colonizers, remains that progress and development are the reason for our existence. Even from the supposed ‘resistance’ movements within the ‘first world nations’, the colonized are given no chance to remain autonomous. (This debate has been pursued for some time now, and a bit of it has been well chronicled in Marxism and Native Americans, edited by Ward Churchill.)
Is the above situation a per se aspect of class struggle? Not necessarily, but none-the-less, it is an aspect of the greater indication of the limits that class struggle offers, and highlights the minute contextual basis that it currently holds. This is what globalizing capitalism is working off of, and further evidence of the need for a total revolution. There are no more means of production that exist to be taken over, or at least any that would provide any kind of sustenance for societies, unless they remain within the globalized economy.
It simply is not going to provide any good for the sweatshops to be seized by the workers, the clerks to seize control of the convenience stores, the relocated farm hands to seize the control of the harvest, the rig workers to seize control of an offshore oil rig. The examples could go on, but they all point to one thing, that is the inevitable fatality of this way of life. If we are going to move beyond this, it is going to have to be something intrinsically different from the direction we are heading.

Contemporary Revolt

To conclude, we come back to the initial question of, “is class struggle still relevant?” It seems, that based on a more broad based analysis of our current situation that class struggle is relevant, but that its’ relevance is becoming increasingly less important to the end of our current exploitative framework. The role of class struggle, as a historical and cumulative effort, will forever be apart of revolt against civilization. The State is best maintained by a fluid changing of situation, as a form of progression, but also serves a greater function of severing the movements of revolt from their earlier forms. With this understanding, we must always consider the changing times require new perspectives against the common delusions of things being forever ‘better than before.’ Such is the way that the totality of civilized thought seeks to eradicated and neutralize any radical currents into a state of passive nihilism and further assimilation into the faceless masses of existence.
The present, in its current standings and the resistance to it, has been shaped by the history of class struggle (on top of all those who throughout the past of civilized existence have fought to keep the Megamachine from expanding). I’m personally reminded of these things on a daily basis, as is everyone within our society so prone to building monuments to itself. Here in western Pennsylvania, within range of Pittsburgh, one can everywhere see the his-storical jabs that the capitalists have made. Not far from here is Carnegie-Mellon University, across the city is Carnegie Science Center, throughout the city and surrounding areas you will find the many Henry Clay Frick parks and hospitals. One who is aware of the social past of these industrialists and their deadly social endeavors (the community contributions of Frick and his Pinkertons lay great example), can only feel a greater feeling of solidarity for such class warriors as Alexander Berkman for making their stand and (literally) taking a shot at the capitalist system.
Revolt against this system will always require critical analysis with stress on historical resistance, but we can never dwell upon anyone more than others. We are people with a plentitude of origins that create our subjective reality. It seems apparent that revolt aimed at dismantling the giant beast of civilization will require constant adaptation to the current situation. So perhaps the initial question should not be of the relevance of class struggle, but the role in which class society has played in the creation of our current society and how that may help us dismantle it.

-kevin tucker.