#anti-civ

[forbidden-sorcery]

[tastethebloodofmeatthawsmoth]

"I don’t think one can separate a critique of the state and capital from a critique of civilization. Civilization gave birth to the state and capital, which brought all kinds of oppressions and tools to manage that oppression such as surveillance, greed, domination, and all the other shitty things people find logic in doing to each other and the environment. Civilization is explained away by capital as being advancements in efficiency and quality of life, but remember the life expectancy of a Black male in the U.S. is about 25 years. He is expected to be dead or in prison by 25 years of age. Civilization has caused a disconnect between people and the earth. Civilization has given birth to all kinds of diseases; drugs that don’t cure anything but have you buying them to “manage” the disease, feed their greed; pollution; patriarchy; racism; prisons; etc. Civilization is the root cause of the misery which we term oppression and must be dismantled, ruthlessly and utterly destroyed." - anarchist prisoner Michael Kimble

[autogyne-redacted]

what’s wrong with building codes?

Ok fair, this isn't a line of critique ppl talk about much and probably isn't intuitive from lots of positions.

But they're a fundamental piece of how capitalism (tries to) force us to play its game and of how it destroys alternative lifeways!

Also worth noting that nearly all traditional indigenous dwellings are gonna be illegal by most building codes. That alone should make you real skeptical of them.

//

For most of human history, in most places, people could build dwellings at the individual or small group level out of readily available, natural materials. (Eg from what I've read 1-2 people can build a wigwam in 3 days that'll last well over a year).

This kind of set up gives individuals way more power over their housing and isn't conducive to landlording or housing debt. Readily available housing means way less pressure to stay with shitty family/housemates/partners/jobs. It removes one of the primary forms of leverage.

Building codes make it difficult or fully illegal to live in anything other than a modern, conventional home.*

///

Modern homes are convenient in tons of ways. But:

Older tech gets portrayed as way worse than it was, and:

A lot of that convenience primarily matters if you're spending most of your time/energy working because you're living thoroughly inside the market and if you're separated from the skills and knowledge to take care of your shit without modern conveniences.

Civ has a gravity to it. You (theoretically/legally) have to pay a certain amount in taxes, at the point at which you're working a little, probably you find at least some things you want to buy. As you work more you handle less shit yourself and pay more so other people handle it for you. As more people are doing this community becomes harder and harder to find if you're holding out. And the skills, knowledge and lifeways for living outside of civ are harder to access.

While mass violence is needed at times, that's not needed or sustainable long term.

With the commons enclosed, the genocide and forced relocation of indigenous people enacted, industrialization and urbanization complete, more mundane and bureaucratic forms of coercion tend to do the trick for the few hold outs and breakaways.

Shit like telling you you have to install a septic system you can't begin to afford, or condemning your house.

//

*while the details of what's allowed and what's prohibited vary massively from place to place, it is a practical tension I and friends come up against with the state, and even if it wasn't I think it makes sense to object on principle/with an eye towards the future.

Child custody standards (what's grounds for the state taking your kid/what's gonna count against you in a custody battle) often go above and beyond building codes in requiring normative dwellings.

I'm thinking of details like: septic/sewer standards, requiring electric/water hookups, requiring buildings made to last decades vs easy to build structures that are rebuilt every few years or require more active maintenance, making it difficult or impossible to use natural materials, etc.

//

Qualifier: I think building codes serve a purpose in landlord-tennant relationships but without them it'd be way easier to escape renting

[111seedhillroad]

i think a vast majority of engagement with anti-civ thoughts from pro-civs comes down to various ways to avoid actually talking about the points being made and constructing a facade around it to protect people from dangerous ideas. in good faith discussions people try to come to common terminology or at least try to understand the terms that the other is arguing on. instead you got someone trying to distort the meaning of everything you are saying by putting it within their own framework. this is an issue particularly with leftists who are used to vigilantly defending against less obtuse and overtly oppressive ideologies. the conclusions of anti-civ are processed through the core assumptions of pro-civ leftists, and the foundations and principles that lead to anti-civ conclusions are not even considered. instead those foundations are assumed to be reactionary, oppressive in such and such way, and incoherent.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Legitimacy in the terror age: counter-insurgency

Legitimation, winning the consent of the population for rule, has always been the basic task of governance. But the techniques and methods vary greatly. This essay’s contribution is to give us some sharp analysis of contemporary legitimation techniques in the age of terrors.

First of all, as we shift from a state of peace (i.e, war is “elsewhere”) to a state of continual terror-war, the whole of society becomes militarised, transformed into an “armed camp”. In fact, with direct combat now increasingly carried out by mercenaries or drones, this doesn’t mean mass conscription but rather “a matter of inducing the population to identify with a certain kind of order, the imposition of which takes place within the national borders as much as outside them” (quoting CrimethInc). This is an order in which, as a population at war, we spy, police, grass on ourselves, accepting every demand of the war-spectacle and war-economy: “militarised thinking spreading through life” (quoting some German anti-militarists).

To understand how this works, a useful lead comes from studying the field of “counter-insurgency”: specifically, ideas and techniques developed in the US (and elsewhere) by military and political strategists, and their academic collaborators, in response to insurgencies both at home (e.g., the black power and other domestic rebel movements of the 1960s) and on the colonial battlefields.

In essence, counter-insurgency means identifying “(nascent) social tensions” within a population that could give rise to rebellion, and then heading them off by: (a) targeting “(suspected) dissidents”, making predictable and undermining their actions, or removing and destroying them altogether; while (b) co-opting the majority, where this means “convincing people that there are avenues to address their grievances; if they were only to put their energy into trusting or adjusting the system as it exists, that would be the entity which can best care for their needs.” The basic principle, then, is “to restructure the environment to displace the enemy from it”, and so to “COIN a passive population”.

The role of intelligence is clearly paramount. There is a very interesting discussion on the US “Human Terrain Systems” (HTS) programme, in which the US military employed ethnographic researchers in Iraq and and other warzones, applying social network analysis to map the “human terrain” of the subject population, its connections, allegiances and potentials for submission or rebellion. In fact the basic ideas developed in the 1960s in response to domestic unrest. Once mapped, state agencies can intervene in the terrain in various ways, from funding NGOs to provide welfare services (e.g., replacing the social programmes “that combative entities such as the Black Panthers briefly pioneered before they were smashed by the State”), through feeding in drugs and weapons to exploit internal tensions, to radioing in the “airborne armed response team”.

[noneedtofearorhope]

Many [insurrectionary anarchists] refuse to offer a specific, singular model of the future at all, believing that people will choose a variety of social forms to organise themselves when given the chance. They are critical of groups or tendencies that believe they are ‘carriers of the truth’ and try to impose their ideological and formal solution to the problem of social organisation. Instead, many insurrectionary anarchists believe that it is through self-organisation in struggle that people will learn to live without institutions of domination.

“Insurrectionary Anarchism: Organize for Attack!” from Do or Die Issue 10

[cl0ck-killer]

Now, amid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. More and more people know or sense this, as they silently experience its damaging consequences. The digital tools and services used by people everywhere are subordinated to the power of transnational corporations, intelligence agencies, criminal cartels and a sociopathic billionaire elite. For the majority of the earth's population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory and social disintegration. All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts.

Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World

[notasocialismjoke]

civilization? don't you mean encitification?

[lakecitylifeline]

Misconceptions About FTHPNW

Since posting our Grievance Zine on Twitter, people have said some completely incorrect things about Lindsay's behavior being due to the communist nature/structure of the organization. It's clear that people have zero idea how From the Heart actually operated.

To clarify: From the Heart PNW proper was never a communist organization, and Lindsay is not and has never been a communist. When the walkout finally happened, a majority of the people who participated were communists, and many communist spearheaded the attempt to democratize the organization and make it more internally and externally accountable.

I'm sure this confuses people, based on their impressions from social media, but words are cheap. From the Heart was never Red's org. It was always Lindsay's org, and Red just supported the effort. Red saw the political potential of the effort, and cared about it succeeding, but he knew better than to try and run it. The CDC was his project, and when he got sick that effectively disappeared. For the years he was too weak to do political work on the ground, he just posted and fundraised and recruited. Any impression people got from Red's twitter was purely his own politics, and had nothing to do with the org--he wasn't even there on the ground to see things himself most of the time.

Lindsay's politics are based primarily on whatever passes her personal vibe check. There was no formal structure in the org, only the informal ones of seniority and personal dominance, and the capitalist ones of private control of funds and media. When we tried to democratize the organization based on our expectations as communists, that new structure was a potential threat to her control and income, and so she quickly acted to crush it.

Lindsay butted heads with anarchists and constantly talked shit about them, but if you were around long enough you learned she had smoke for everyone. She would often say that "communism never works," and other vague anti-communist statements. When we talked about carrying political literature, or when we put up political graffiti, she would explode at us. She would get annoyed when we talked about communism, even with each other. If you went along with her, she liked you, and if you disagreed with her or pushed back, she would frequently use your political ideology--anarchist, communist, or liberal--to explain why you were so annoying.

Because of Red's social media presence, online recruits were mostly communists. With anarchists distancing themselves from Lindsay or leaving when they got fed up, it eventually left the organization majority communist. This created a weird situation where both the media presence and the volunteer base of From the Heart were mostly communist, but the actual operation, organization, and politics of the org on the ground were not.

She believes large, collectively-driven political change is impossible in the US, so any thoughts we had about trying to make the program more political were squashed. She thinks our only hope is to build and support a socialist micro-society among the unhoused, and then wait out the climate apocalypse--or that we'll all die in nuclear Armageddon, so we should just help a few people and dick around while we have the chance. She talked about how we were building a "new culture," and that she was opposed to a socialist revolution if we hadn't established the new culture yet (according to her own standards). If we didn't do things exactly how she wanted, that was a personal failure to build the new culture™️.

Lots of prefiguration, lots of apocalypticism, lots of inherent sin and personal martyrdom, constant demands for a protestant work ethic (i.e. if there's a problem achieving a goal, it's because people aren't working hard enough), and not much systematic material analysis--basically Christianity, but without the parts about being nice.

All that mattered was maintaining the flow of goods and services to the unhoused of Lake City, and maintaining her income. Anything else she viewed as a waste of time. Red's misdeed was creating a false face for this, and enabling and covering for Lindsay's behavior. Once he was gone, the parasocial fog lifted. The non-socialist nature of the org became a problem once we were asked to step up and replace Red's labor.

Don't think that your politics can't be used to justify abuse--as though there are no toxic anarchist spaces. Lindsay used anarchist prefiguration, communist revolutionary discipline, and liberal identity essentialism as rhetorical devices to control us, while holding onto the economic and social capital needed to run the org. There's a lesson in that.

[forbidden-sorcery]

[dreamsbeyondsleep]

Anti-civ is interesting to me because I definitely think we should tone some shit down! After the great communist revolution that will put an end to companies destroying tonnes of unsold product and dumping it in landfills, we could probably use less electricity at night, compost some more, do some environmental restoration etc. In my version a transhumanist future, the Earth is rendered even more ecologically stable by our decoupling from the environment (you don’t need to produce as many crops if humans don’t need to eat etc).

And that’s where my contention is with anti-civ rhetoric lies; in the idea that the only stable equilibrium humanity can have with the environment is one of low technological sophistication and low-level social organization. Civilization is a problem to be solved and anti-civ types are choosing the trivial solution. There’s this, and the fact that a lot of the rhetoric also leans into “everyone will just-” thinking and assumes that we can put genies back in bottles wrt most of the technology we have today. Really reveals a lack of technical background that irritates me.

Anyway, here’s hoping that a reasonable social movement takes all the good ideas from anti-civ and leaves all the bs.

[spacedkitty]

the definitions amongst the disparate leftist groups seem intentionally setup to cause semantic debates masquerading as ideological debates

the issue is that anti-civ wants to talk about and critique very specific things and one of the main words used to talk about those things is a specific usage of the word civilization.

many leftists just want to prevent anyone from ever thinking about these things or taking anti-civ seriously in the first place which is why they'll often describe anti-civ as primitivist or eco-fash or use some other thought terminating accusation.

this is also why its very common for leftists who do end up talking about anti-civ use entirely different and often useless definitions of civilization. one of the common claims is that civilization means anything humans have ever done... but what exactly is the purpose of that definition? how does it help you talk about or communicate something? its not helpful with talking about anything because its only purpose is to make it harder for people to understand what an anti-civ critique is trying to say. its actually very similar to capitalists saying that capitalism is anytime humans exchange anything so capitalism has always and will always exist.

unfortunately semantic debates are more memeable on the internet so why bother with a difficult ideological debate that might require introspection, questioning of assumptions, and making difficult decisions about where your priorities are.

I worry that this is a sentiment I've seen expressed by almost every group of leftists I've encountered on the internet, each with their own set of terminology/definitions that they state the other groups dismiss out of hand as some form of conspiracy to suppress their particular brand of leftist views.

I don't think any of these groups are wrong exactly, I just worry that perhaps the problem becomes one of insularity. I see why the definition being used is used in this case, because it helps to conceptualize of civilization in this manner when dealing with the particular critiques specific to anti-civ. However, without that context, it's extremely hard to parse and looks far closer to "well, like, society is evil and we should live in mud-huts" than makes sense, and in a world full of fascists, well, I've encountered a few people that truly seem to think that's the right approach..

Without context it is easy to see idiocy in the arguments of others if you are primed to do so (which our present society does an excellent job of).

Often I see people get absorbed into a particular brand of leftism and begin denouncing the others after having furious debates using words that seem to mean different things to the different parties. Sometimes when they encounter something to change their perspective they will jump to another brand with a similar fervor and go on to denounce the former brand with the same fervor they defended it with, now using different definitions.

I still have a great deal to learn, but it always feels difficult to do so when often genuine questions are treated with hostility and a dogmatic approach to a group's views. Which I guess I understand, given the frequency of trolls (from all sides of the political spectrum, let's be honest) attempting to waste people's time with frivolous bullshit.

I find myself looking into anti-civ and finding it compatible in many ways with my understandings of socialism and anarchism, and wondering why it felt so hostile and absurd when first I encountered it. Similar to the feelings I had when first learning of communism, socialism and anarchism.

Many leftists just want to prevent anyone from ever thinking about these things or taking anti-civ seriously

I honestly don't agree with you here. I know there are some who do, but I think the vast majority have gotten into confusing debates that mimicked impassible ideological differences and wrote it off, particularly when discussing with others in their movement.

A common problem I've encountered (particularly in online leftist circles) is one of defending ivory tower knowledge over conversational understanding, which makes understanding other groups significantly harder. If your go-to response to criticism or misunderstanding of your movement is "go read this tome" you open no doors to communication, only offering a silo of separate knowledge and perspective.

In summary, I don't think most leftists are opposed to understanding anti-civ, I think we are just primed by society and other leftist movements to see anti-civ perspectives, without the proper context, as reactionary and regressive. A view I think most leftist groups see in one another.

I hope things could possibly be shifted with better grassroots communication and like, maybe something as silly seeming as leftist dictionaries, but that remains to be seen (by me at least).

[111seedhillroad]

Self-determination should be read as the desire for people who are self-organized (whether by tradition, individual choice, or inclination) to decide how they want to live with each other. This may seem like common sense, and it is, but it is also consistently violated by people who believe that their value system supersedes that of those around them. The question that anarchists of all stripes have to answer for themselves is whether they are capable of dealing with the consequences of other people living in ways they find reprehensible.

Aragorn! Locating an Indigenous Anarchism

[dailyanarchistposts]

Martial vs. Military

Another point where we agree with RF is in not fetishising destruction — not making attack into an affair of professionalised militants, and so effectively another removed political sphere. “We have no interests in being specialists in fighting. Rather, we dream of moments which call on each of us to become everything at once; situations which demand that each of us become fighters and healers, caretakers and firebringers.” (Quoting from ‘We Welcome the Fire, We Welcome the Rain‘).

For, as many anarchists have always maintained, destruction and creativity go hand in hand. “A building can be destroyed without constructing a new one, but a relationship of alienation cannot be ended without the creation of another type of relationship. … Without speaking of the creation of new social relations, we cannot speak honestly about the destruction of the State.” Giving full respect to committed nihilist comrades, as RF point out this means stepping away from the “nihilist proposal” that speaks only of destroying the State (or the whole existing system of domination).

While, at the same time, we cannot create in this world without also attacking. RF put this well by distinguishing “the martial” from “the military”. Militarisation means life impoverished, regimented, made anxious, reduced to service of the war machine. “The martial” means fighting for and as a part of our struggle for life, “not as the science of war, but the art of rebellion”, challenging our passivity and the state’s legitimacy as we break its claimed monopoly of violence. “This is something which has been steadily stripped away from us over the generations; the ability to fight on our own terms, as much as the awareness of the war we inhabit.” We regain it in practice: training, learning new skills, going out alone or forming gangs, and taking action. “This isn’t a call to “armed struggle” but for inclusion of a neglected aspect of a holistic approach to rebellion” (quoting Sea Weed).

In the end, for sure, this essay does not offer a programme for how to advance. Not that we’re looking for one. We know a lot of the paths we need to take — grow our skills and strength as individuals and groups, find comrades, be open to new encounters … these can even start to sound like platitudes, but they’re right. “Avenues for sharing, discussing and sharpening perspectives and methods is one accomplishment of anarchists and other radicals, in our own limited way so far. Our enemies are well aware of this …” “Experience tells us that even a little empowerment and picking-up of skills can have a huge impact in one’s character or desires, and with our unconstrained lives at stake, let’s not be stopped by fear of failure.”

And then there are lots of questions, things we don’t know or are just starting to explore. One we’re especially interested in at the moment, that this essay highlighted, is one that we’ve tried to explore as we’ve worked on this site, and still only have glimpses of. How to understand ourselves not as isolated atoms but as accomplices and instigators acting in “social” worlds, without falling into the old political trap of “a campaign to win ’society’ over to ’us’ as a unified opposition”. How to think as proto-insurgents whose thoughts and actions can touch many others, including many other rebels and potential rebels, even if we cannot anticipate, far less control, what their effects may be.

[1] The Veil Drops can be downloaded as a pdf here: http://rabble.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/05-23-The-Veil-Drops-HI-RES.pdf It can also be read on The Anarchist Library. The full Return Fire 3 magazine and previous issues, including the articles referenced in [square brackets] in the text below, can be read, downloaded and printed via 325.nostate.net/?tag=return-fire

[noneedtofearorhope]

‘socialism or barbarism’ is a phrase that i think we ought to phase out, at least in that specific form.

like, i get the meaning, that the logical conclusion of our current society is outright fascism, and the only alternative is revolt and the creation of socialism. i get that. but when you look at the history of the word ‘barbarism’, it’s a word calling for purity of culture, a word which delineates between the cultured, civilized, and therefore superior in group, and a primitive, uncivilized, and therefore inferior other. it’s far more a word to be used by fascists than it is to describe them.

as i see it, socialism is about solidarity with the underclasses, and often there is no greater underclass than those seen as being completely outside of society, those cast as ‘barbarians’, those who are targeted by fascists for elimination. if anything it should be ‘socialism and barbarism’, ‘socialism as barbarism’. we should seek to sack rome, to see the fall of empire.

[cl0ck-killer]