Post by wombat on Mar 14, 2015 15:19:51 GMT -5
As some of you know, I've been excited about Sea Weed's book "Land and Freedom" for a little while. As stated elsewhere, my interest in this book was primarily because I've also been experimenting with an examination of an intersection between immediatism (autonomous zone theory) and anarchist primitivism/anti-civilization thought. Some of this approach was also started due to a correspondence I had with Aragorn before Black Seed #2 was released. While his direction was to offer a criticism of anarchist primitivism, my direction was to instead consider other reasons, besides anthropology, one might want to be an anarchist primitivist.
Like Rydra and Bellamy have pointed out on their show, Free Radical Radio, I too feel that there is no hard dichotomy between egoism and anarchist primitivism or nihilism and anarchist primitivism. However, my take on these definitions has been constantly out of line with the growing attraction these identities and theories have taken. I have taken and continue to take an anti-intellectual stance. An anarchist is one who lives in opposition to the dominant order. Nihilism is an aesthetic position for being in favor of the destruction of the totality. Strike everything. What is destroyed is destroyed, what left standing is real. Egoism within this tradition is understanding self interest and intersecting the urge to rebel and the urge to destroy with self interest and finding relation in self interest with others that rebel. None of this deserves the intellectual rigor it is currently being bestowed. Even more repellent are the academics that have latched onto this vein, attracted by the detail and nuance contemporary nihilist and egoist publications are written in, these currents are doomed to recuperation by allowing these parasites of obedience to not just read, but to identify as subjects of nihilist anarchy without criticism!?! They eat anti-authority and excrete structure! If nihilist anarchy is the new academic Marxism and not a call for aggression, it has failed.
What can be destroyed is society. What can't be destroyed is wild. Maybe I'm biased. In my historical positioning as an anarchist, with more than two decades of experimentation under my belt, I've moved away from the anarchist milieu, from the scene of anarchists deliberately. My entrance was alien to the experience of most. A vandal for destruction, I wasn't oppressed or guilty for the oppressed, I was in search of others that agreed vandalism was not just a joy, but a thrill, something to be sought out. I entered the scene looking for accomplices and left with ELF, "Anna", Brandon Darby, the Anarchy Bridge kids and a handful of others that haven't been exposed as dupes or informants trying to get me to hang out with them, before they too were exposed. As a proponent of destruction, I feel no longer capable of full clandestine behavior due to the shady connections to the Green Scare. I left the scene with only the Internet and a handful of friends acquired through the years to build my praxis.
Deciding among them and with myself, I've primarily practiced posters, graffiti, discussion, martial arts and drifting within concepts of immediatism until a few years ago. I've always been a defender of anarchist primitivism and anti-civilization proponents, especially on the Internet. On a loose invite I took up just over a decade ago, I abandoned my family and my possessions. I abandoned the unbearable mediocrity and banality and moved out into what I thought would be the mountains of North Carolina to die in the woods or become wild. Instead, I was taken up by Wild Roots, friends, neighbors and associates. While the experience was not nearly as wild as it could of been...I realized that I was very limited in understanding what it was to be a person in relationship with the world around me. Though I had returned to practice as an anarchist street propagandist, missing my home, my family, I also was practicing my rewilding. My walks were as a barbarian hiding in the ruins of the city where no police walk. Only the homeless, the travelers and the bored.
My walks in the city exposed me greatly to the concept of habitat and how our habitat is devastated by things more normal than evil polluters. Already anti-civ before I even started, my first practices of drifting upon returning to town were to live homeless. Though I did find myself quickly answering the call of sedentary life, I also saw myself as just one of several potentially successful forms of predator that can make due in town. Coyotes, raccoons, opossums, feral cats and dogs...we are all fellow travelers (though also potentially food). The water is poisoned. Roads, buildings and fences are everywhere. Homeless encampments are destroyed by police and land owning authorities. There is a very visible and real monopoly on how life is to be lived. Without a building, getting clean isn't a matter of going to the creek and taking a dip. The creek is questionable to touch the body. So the oasis in the city becomes the fast food restaurant and convenience store for clean water.
Post modern....post structural thought? These academics get it right and wrong so very wrong and so very right. They present abstractions as a criticism of abstractions because they don't directly live...they don't practice what they preach...they don't praxis. There is no direction because they don't put themselves into a position of conflict. Yet on this same point, an anarchist is one who seeks this conflict, to find a conflict, to position themselves against the dominant order on a real rather than theoretic level. A post modern thinker tries to present all possibilities and very often show through this process that there is none. No absolutes. So true, yet so false. Is God real? Ask the Islamic State. Ask the atheists, agnostics and even faithful under their regime. Yes or no? This is not an answer, but a position. A story to be told. Certainly.
Kevin Tucker speaks of objectivity. I feel the groans and I groan. "Objectivity" and all absolutes are bullshit. But he is also correct. I have no word to describe the "real"...as My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult says "'Reality' is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes." Power and reality are related. Only the dominant perception of reality matters. The anarchist project is to make their reality tangible. Though perception may be subjective, the world is real...at least as real as "real" can be. We are a force that presents a contrary perception of reality...and in the same vein and along the same logic, this perception is more than a perception. It is an alternate reality. A narrative of fact, not opinion. A narrative of opposing facts against opposing opinions. Our story is at war with the dominant story and people die. That is objective if the word is to have any real meaning.
Certainly anarchist primitivism would be like any other ideology then, just another story. Opposing views, another story for his story. But this relationship is not that of anarchist primitivists. Their partisanship is not one among many. Once stripped bare, it is a view of the world shaped by those that live immediately or want to live immediately within the world. If we reject society and flee into the woods as individuals with no knowledge of how to live without society, our death or return to society is almost certain. But then we see that even with a knowledge to live without society...something else impedes us. Civilization and the dominant order. Civilization is a real physical creation. It is real if the word has any meaning though its real physical beginnings might be more speculative than known. It is real enough to prevent us from living fully.
Wolfi Landstreicher may speak of living fully and though this too may be a process as is rewilding, rewilding as living fully is impeded. Living fully through rewilding is blocked. It is easy to see why anarchist primitivists level the criticism of vagueness. If egoism is to mean everything and nothing, what it means to becoming feral is far more specific and necessary than to mediate ones relationship with our habitat through agriculture. Agriculture isn't life to a feral being. It is a destroyed landscape which is then destroyed year after year to force it to produce until it is broken, then through technology, we've continued to dump nutrients onto the soil to reinvigorate it, thinking to fix a scab that is perpetually picked by putting anti-biotic ointment on it, though we still pick the scab, digging deep, scarring the landscape and the habitat. Though to the world this wound may heal rather quickly, to us, this wound takes time to heal.
This "time to heal" to society may just mean a waiting period. To people that are wild, to animals that are wild, to plants that are wild, this "time to heal" is a period of extreme instability. A period that humans can't realistically survive off of the land without intervention. Being against civilization means acknowledging this relationship with the land. Being against society means acknowledging this relationship with the land. If an egoist is asked if they are an animal or a human, they are quick to point out the false dichotomy. Not as quick to catch on that such a question has a depth that is 9,000 years or more out of control, where "of course, human" has been the winning answer. Say "fuck society" but then...live without society?
For Aragorn, not to make too many assumptions, he is a great friend and has helped me stay connected and allowed me to participate in many of his projects. He never seems to make clear in his writing that he's coming at things from the perspective of *his bolo*. A fan of Bolo'bolo, his anti-society allows a myriad of possibilities. To some, this could be seen as an endorsement for some sort of petite bourgeois conception of civilization. To me, Bolo'bolo and other theories of autonomous tangible power can be part of anti-civilization discourse. I agree with this uniqueness, this ability for immediate communities of people to shape their lives together without imposing themselves beyond their borders...at least not any more than necessary. This is indeed a nice story and one I could hope for.
But what is missing from the story is the ability to leave and just be an animal. It is one that is neglected time and again. If we remove control over the wild, yet still remain removed from it and not become a part of it. If we still support populations that don't just want but need agricultural production to subsist, we are still presenting a problem that creates the catastrophic issues of humanity on the wild. If anti-civilization isn't being able to choose, but must always remain open, this problem will continue. As anarchist communists are quick to point out the problems of commodity production and how that impacts the ability to live free in a world without states, permanent agriculture dependence is just as problematic. Bolos are a threat, not a choice, in such an environment. I imagine that such permanence is also contrary to Bolos. In either case, maybe we are as initially thought by Kathan in "A Discussion on Green Anarchy" in regards to the connection between "green anarchy", "anti-civilization" and "anarchist primitivism": "pretty much synonymous"?
Maybe where green anarchy, anti-civ and anarchist primitivism meet isn't in a discourse surrounding anarchist primitivism vs. egoism? Maybe egoists have a choice, maybe nihilists have a choice, maybe anarchists have a choice? It isn't whether agriculture vs. hunter gatherer. It is: Can we get by with foraging by itself or should we make the sacrifice and commit to a strategy of agriculture to survive the season? At least, this is where I seem to be going.
*Posted for discussion on the Black and Green Discussion Forum blackandgreen.freeforums.net
