The Failure of Revolution

I wanted to post this firstly because FC Journal or whatever it goes by now agrees with revolution and KT has expressed strongly against this. Secondly, I quoted the last part primarily because instead of revolution, there is primal war. If I'm getting this right, primal war is connecting with wildness, refusing domestication, unlearning civilized interpretations.

To meditate more on this thought, this connection is not just a personal one, though clearly this must be personal among many other things. It is also one of community, primal war is a process of rewilding community. By connecting with the real and existing wild and living community together through unmediated social interactions in this relationship, we can create a context of primal war. To me, this seems to stress permanent groups aiming to rewild through a process of minimizing the division of labor and interactions with mass society in our lives. Families that break away from patriarchy or perhaps groups of friends that attempt to form a band might be some approaches. Both would have to be multi-generational so the actors, the agents of primal war would be those socially connected with families and bands in a territory all attempting to share their rewilding experiences together. Through the very intention of the group, the legend of the group, the direction of this rewilding, mixed subsistence practices and the intent to shape the surrounding environment away from mass society and towards a myriad of subsistence lifeways, both real community can be seen as well as the permanent conflictuality insurrectionalists are looking for.

The reason I don't think insurrectionists are as successful outside of Greece is because they start from a position of isolated individuals seeking accomplices in a world of mistrust. Though they do try to break down the barriers between people when they interact, most are still following a domesticated lifestyle. They still want to be a insurrectionist and an academic, a business owner, a professional, an activist. They still share the dream of "if this anarchy thing don't work out, at least I'll have a comfortable home and raise my family in a liberal environment." I'm not 100% trying to knock down people that have found compromises that help them out with keeping their personal lives from falling into shit, but I am also pointing out that we ask why insurrections don't last long, why we get a burst of momentum and then disintegrate in a matter of weeks or months and partially it seems we are still investing our permanent, tangible, efforts into maintaining mass society and its values.

It seems that in Greece and perhaps elsewhere, the social spaces play a larger role because people are invested fully into them. Their dreams of the future involve how to interact with the social space and others that share it with them. It involves defending this social space, as well as attempting to expand its influence. Riots are demonstrations of power for these spaces, giving conviction to those that might not of felt it without such spaces.

But here in America, most social spaces I've interacted with lasted only as long as the dream of keeping it going was kept by its founders. The Azone in Chicago was very hot while it existed and when the founders past the infoshop to a new group so they could do Arsenal Magazine and ARA, this was the real death of it. The new group, which briefly included myself, were enthusiastic about it, but most of the time it was a time and money pit, with no regular visitors nor support from the surrounding community. It still lasted a couple of years beyond, but from what I understand, the infoshop movement of the 90s typically was booming much stronger and gave rise to long term anarchist strength and conviction. But then again, maybe I'm wrong? Watching the movie "Hackers" from the 90s, I always thought social spaces would be mixing far more than just books, discussions, presentations, skillshares and other intellectual interests. I thought it would also be a recreation center, a free coffee and stale bagels space. I was so wrong. But still, there was a dream and people believed in the dream and they invested everything about themselves to make it happen and it lasted for quite some time. Once the dream of permanence ends, that something better can be done rather than keep a social space alive, the community clearly no longer invests importance into it.

What I'm talking about is finding ways so this dream doesn't die from lack of interest. Where we are invested in something not just for ourselves, but for the next generation and the generation following. Perhaps making real a dream that is so strong that if it dies, we die with it. This to me seems to speak close to what primal war seems to mean. Primitive skills are a hobby if they don't matter to how we live our lives fully.

The reason we advocate revolution is very practical: very far-reaching changes are *required* for wildness to make it through industry, and historically the only way such far-reaching changes have come about is through revolutions and collapses. There are no other historical precedents.

So we don't just advocate revolution willy-nilly. In fact, believing that revolution is the best outcome out of our options is actually pretty sobering---we all know how revolutions end.

But there are a few things to say about that. The first is that the damage a revolution might do with its potential gallows and morally questionable subcomponents is very small to the damage that might come about if such a revolution does not occur --- the worst of these outcomes being the destruction of all complex life on Earth (and this could perhaps be expanded, but by then we'd be sounding dramatic).

The second thing is that our revolution could potentially be different in two important ways. For one, everyone in the movement avoids putting forward any utopia. There is an ideal, to direct political action, but this is not a utopia to be instituted. Every one of us agrees with Ted when he says that revolutions are good at destroying their target societies but terrible (and for good reason) at instituting their new societies (see wildism.org/lib/item/a3ef9393/, paragraphs ). Second, our revolution is unlike previous revolutions in that we seek to destroy what could give us the power to do great damage, whereas other revolutions simply sought to seize these apparatuses for their own ends. This is actually a huge reason why we reject leftist politics, which subordinate the need for wildness to the need for equality. Such ideological subordination would tempt--and, historically--has successfully tempted all previous left revolutionaries to seize these apparatuses for their ideological ends. But how can our revolutionaries institute a Great Terror over a whole country if we are actively destroying the communication and transportation technologies required for this? And how likely is this if the revolutionaries have successfully avoided those with power-hungry and inferiority-complex-ridden psychologies so common on the left?

Reaccion Salvaje's position is pretty close to my own:

"We do not believe in the possibility of 'anti-industrial revolutions', nor in futurist movements that may bring about (according to those thinkers) the downfall of this artificial system. In wild nature, "possibly" does not exist, nor does "maybe". There are no intermediate points, nor neutral ones. Only the concrete exists: it is or it isn't. Survival has always been thus, and we include ourselves under those natural laws. The present is all there is, the here and now. To try to see the future, or to work to realize something in the future, is a waste of time. That has been the true error of revolutionaries"

KT, the Russian Revolution succeeded at overthrowing its society. The French Revolution too. No one who believes what we do thinks that revolutions have been completely successful. It's just obvious that revolutions have been successful at the important thing: destroying their target. That is all that is required of a revolution against industry.

Art, that quote doesn't speak to me in any meaningful way. Forget their philosophical meandering and nihilistic gobbly-gook for a second and think practically: if thinking about the future really doesn't have any return in value, if these things can't happen no matter what, than why have they happened before? Why has thinking about the future lead to revolutions successfully destroying their target societies before?

The problem with RS is that they make these statements in a kind of a priori fashion, and then justify it with "nature!" Their argument would be much more convincing if they acknowledge previous revolutions have happened, outlined what they believe to be the necessary preconditions, and then explained why these preconditions are impossible for what we who want a revolution against industry want to do. To my knowledge, they have not done this.

The real question is how your primal war proposition stands up to revolutions historically. You compare primal war to "indigenous resistance movements," which "have withstood so much over time." But these movements, because of the form they have taken, have been of low effectiveness. Movements like that have no potential to do the thing that could really make a difference.

That's not to say that they aren't helpful for certain things. But if we can do more than what they are doing, if we can end industry to a significant extent, then how is that not the best option? Given the line up of options, which Ted does very well outlining in Technological Slavery (http://wildism.org/lib/item/a3ef9393/), revolution is best one if you put wildness (around AND in us) first.

Again, technology qua technology as we know if is something that has deeper roots in domestication, abstraction, etc. The first real technologies are religions, ideas, reifications, etc. Place these beside cars and industrial machinery and forklifts and stuff, it's clear what is driving what. "The masses", the very instrument by which revolutions are carried out, are a technology, and they have been manipulated since Giordano Bruno, if not before. You can try to use a machine to break a machine, but the idea of millions of people immolating their will on the altar of a cause, that's almost the definition of unnatural, artificial, technological. Technology is only possible as a concerted efforts of millions of people in supply chains, logistics, production, etc. This life under capital shapes how they think and approach the world. To think that a significant portion of these million (more like billions) of people will work for their own redundancy and even their own perceived suicide, that's completely delusional.

Art, I've read all their communiques (not nearly as much as you, though) and don't find anything they said convincing. Their biggest problem is that they mischaracterize the arguments of our movement. For example, they say things like

"...it is said that the collapse of Civilization will be the work of the 'revolutionaries' themselves"

But the complete opposite has been explicitly stated, even in Ted's own work (see wildism.org/lib/item/a3ef9393/, page 88, paragraphs 162-66) where he explicitly says objective factors have to be present before humans can do anything significant toward the end of industry. This is best explained in Último Reducto's critique of ITS here: voluntadsalvaje.blogspot.com/2014/10/algunos-comentarios-en-referencia-los.html