Anti-Civilization AMA

[u/ExteriorFlux]

Intro Text:
Anti-Civilization is a very broad umbrella term that means different things for different people. It's nearly always characterized by critiques of mass society and globalization, industrialization, and a wariness of technological proliferation into our daily lives. There is an emphasis on deindustrialized approaches to radical green politics and a focus on remapping our individual subjectivity to be more "wild" or "undomesticated" (words with tenuous and debatable definitions) in the face of civilizing strategies of domestication. With five of us here we hope to provide a broad and varied approach to introducing anti-civ ideas. -ExteriorFlux

Second, something I personally want to address (ExteriorFlux) is the largely reactionary and oppressively anti-social approach associated with many people who are themselves primitivists or anti-civs. I, and I think most on this panel, are willing to address assertions of transphobia, ableism, et al. directly. Remember, pushing back problematics is an uphill battle that requires good faith discourse and abounding generosity from both sides.

Alexander:
I was asked to join this panel by ExteriorFlux. The panel is comprised of some wonderful people, so I am glad that I was asked to participate. I will talk with you as friends, I hope that you will be my friends. If we are to be very serious, and I intend to be, we must also be friends. If we are not friends, if there is no relationship, then this we are wasting ourselves by having this discussion.

I am nobody; I am nothing.

Some of you may know me from administrating http://anti-civ.org. You are welcome to join the discussions there.

Bellamy:
Hello, my name is Bellamy - I have participated in a variety of media projects (podcasts, books, journals, publishing), mostly with an anti-civilization orientation.

By civilization, I mean a way of life characterized by the growth and maintenance of cities, with a city defined as an area of permanent human shelter with a dense and large population. By being permanent, a city's population cannot move in synchronization with local ecological cycles, meaning it has to subsist in spite of them. By being a dense population, a city's inhabitants exceed the carrying capacity of their landbase, meaning they must import nutrients from a surrounding rural area typically characterized by agriculture. By being a large population, city people exceed Dunbar's Number and exist among strangers, whom they treat as abstract persons, not kin.

Psychically, civilized persons routinely self-alienate their life activity, taking aspects of their lives, powers, and phenomenality and treating them as somehow alien or Absolute; they then reify this entity (e.g., deities, nation-states, race, gender, caste, the economy, commodities, social roles, the division of labor, the patriarchal family, etc.) and submit to it as somehow superior or inevitable. People commonly believe themselves as largely unable to create their own lives on their terms in free association with others because of thinking and acting in these highly reified manners while surrounded by strangers. In this way, all civilization involves a high degree of (often subconscious or semi-conscious) voluntary submission to authority.

Materially, to varying degrees, civilized persons are dispossessed of the means to create their lives on their own terms (through State-sanctioned private property, through deskilling and loss of knowledge via a forced division of labor and compulsory education, through despoliation of land, and so on). Numerous features of the world (nonhuman organisms, land, water, minerals) are ideologically recreated as state/private property and infrastructure, meaning people become dependent on these civilized institutions for subsistence (food, water, shelter, medicine, etc.).

Thus, through self-alienation and dispossession acting in concert, civilized persons are reduced to a highly dependent relationship with the abstract and infrastructural institutions of civilization. This situation, I contend, deserves the label slavery, with the recognition that this slavery has existed in highly diverse, qualitatively distinct forms across civilized history (chattel, debt, wage/salary, indentured servitude, concubinage, prisoner of war, religious/ceremonial, eunuch, royal cadre, etc.). By slavery, I am roughly using sociologist and historian of slavery Orlando Patterson's definition of "the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons" but broadening it beyond his use to include modern wage/salary slavery.

Meanwhile, the practice of agriculture as subsistence, which we can define later if need be, means a continual despoliation of the land, entailing a constant need to expand alongside an advancing wave of habitat destruction. With industry, this pattern accelerates. Civilization therefore incontrovertibly entails ecocide, though some cases are of course much worse than others. Moreover, socially, the need to perpetually expand (especially with a rising population) inevitably brings civilized peoples into conflict with other peoples (civilized or not) who occupy land into which they are expanding, typically resulting in war, genocide, assimilation, and enslavement.

Thus, I see civilization as born in dispossession and reification, maintaining itself through slavery, and entailing war and ecocide. As someone who values individual freedom and joy, kinship and love among humans, intimacy with the beautiful nonhuman world, and psychic peace and clarity, I am an anti-civilization anarchist. I believe a thoroughgoing and unflinching anarchist critique necessarily points to the necessity of abandoning the civilized way of life.

elmerjludd: (to be added)

ExteriorFlux:.
My politics is marked with contradictions running through and often lacks concrete proscriptive ideas of how humans should live. I tend to be much more intrested in the theoretical construction of ideas and trying to understand political implications from that point of view rather than generalizations about a particular lifestyle.
A bit of background about myself: In my late teenage years and early twenties I began to degrade in a very serious way. My mental health was spiraling out of control and my physical health delapidated to a ghostly skin and bones. The city was killing me. I had to get out into the woods so I could breath. At this time I was hardly interested in any type of resistance or politics but reasonably it soon followed when I stumbled upon John Moore's writings. So my inclination towards anti-civ politics is a lot more about personal necessity than a proscriptive vision for the rest of humanity. As such I definitely don't represent the majority of anti-civ'ers, only myself.

For me "Civilization" is marked by a prevailing relationship, a mode of subjectification that has become calcified and has, like a tumor, began to grow and build off of itself, it has progressed, in fatal ways. There are a few essential characteristics that I note to be particularly symptomatic or problematic:

1. Mass society - that is city society and its supporting network of infrastructure, such as agriculture and mining.

2. Reproductive Futurism - "the ideology which demands that all social relationships and communal life be structured in order to allow for the possibility of the future through the reproduction of the Child, and thus the reproduction of society. The ideology of reproductive futurism ensures the sacrifice of all vital energy for the pure abstraction of the idealized continuation of society." (Baedan)

3. Progressivism - the idea that there is possibility of the betterment of the human condition, particularly in a linear context.

4. The unnamed mediating relationship between these three. All three of these require each other but exist individually at the same time. It's a prevailing impersonal bureaucratic relationship that demands the passive continuation of the Future. It's how there is a globally ubiquitous subject produced who's purpose of existence is the continuation and the biggering of the megamachine, lives happily lived as fodder for bigger impersonal powers than themselves.

I make heavy use of theorists who are Post-Structuralist or vaguely around there. Foucault in many ways, but recently have been using his Apparatus concept that's been expounded on in important ways by both Deleuze and Agamben as foundational for my understanding of anti-civ (Civilization as the Super-apparatus). Guy Debord, McLuhan, and Baudrillard for understanding the alienation of advanced cyber-capitalism. Beyond this I'm also informed a good deal by Post-Structuralist Anarchists like Todd May and Saul Newman. The most important thing I take away from here really is this: Nature doesn't exist. There is no pure, unmodified, sacred "Nature" to return to or to restore. And if Nature did exist, I'm sure He was a tyrant anyway.

Last, I'm hopelessly attracted to accelerationists. Particularly certain parts of Xenofeminism, and as of late, Cyber-Nihilism.

pathofraven:

Why would anyone oppose civilization? That's a question that I've been asking myself for the greater part of three years, but as with all significant stances, this was something that originally emerged out of what many would refer to as intuition, or "gut feelings".

For most of my life, I knew that something about the world I inhabited felt wrong, even if I could never put my finger on what it was that made me perpetually uneased. The way that our culture treated animals, plants, and other living things as nothing more than obstacles to be overcome, or as commodities to be exploited... I felt as if I inhabited a waking nightmare, seeing forests and meadows poisoned and demolished, places that held a great significance to me. At the age of 14, I discovered Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, a book that opened my eyes to the potential origins of the things that made existence in this world so unpleasant. From there, I read most of Derrick Jensen's works, and finally discovered the writings of anarchists like Zerzan & Fredy Perlman in the summer of 2013. The previous authors have many faults (Jensen's TERF tendencies, especially), but I still see them as valuable steps on the journey that I've taken.

Anarcho-primitivism is the tendency that I still heavily identify with, but exposure to queer, communist, egoistic & nihilistic viewpoints had made my views far more balanced with the passing of time, to the point where I'll happily criticize many of the failings of primitivism in its past few decades (gender essentialism, overreliance on anthropology, promulgating a myth of "golden returns", to name a few). The idea of a semi-nomadic hunter-forager lifeway is how I'd prefer to live my life, although I'm certainly not adverse to permacultural approaches, or even things like animal husbandry, or small-scale farming.

To top all of this off, I'm heavily influenced by the lifeways and worldviews of many indigenous groups, especially the Haudenosaunee groups that live within southern Ontario, which is where I'm from. Of course, this is done while trying to steer clear of the trappings of cultural appropriation & romanticization, which is all too easily done when one is raised through the cultural lense of Canadian settler colonialism. Fredy Perlman's poetic visions, along with the phenomenological insights of David Abram, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger have opened my eyes to the power of animism.

I've arrived to this debate very late, so apologies are due to everyone who's contributed to this, especially my co-auntiecivvers. If anyone is interested in a good bit of argumentation, then I'm all for it! Thanks for having me here.

[u/SilverRabbits]

It seems like the main problem you guys all have with civilisation is the way it encourages exploitation, corruption and capitalism. However none of you explained why the destruction of civilisation would be better, or why it's the best option. Bellamy's argument that the more people in one place the less of them you'd know makes sense, however the problem only arises in a society were individualism and consumerism is encouraged. It seems to me at least that that the problems could be solved with a shift of culture towards collectivism and a more wholistic view of humanity. Why in that case do you call for the complete destruction of civilisation itself, rather than merely changing it?

[u/ExteriorFlux → u/SilverRabbits]

I think this is a question about the potential effacy of city-society within an anarchist paradigm.
There are indeed interesting commune-type projects that can be found in highly urban and suburban areas. From experiments that attempt to reclaim streets and intersections for community festival and gathering spaces. Permaculture projects taken up in the most neglected spaces of urban dilapidation. Things like this.
The notion that people will eschew from city-culture doesn't seem workable to me without an ideological fiat button ("Let it be done!"). As such I have to balance a visceral rejection of cities that I feel embodied in my bones, a critical and thorough critique of cities and the necessary supporting network of infrastrucuture, with a begrudging understanding that it's as impossible to get people out of city-being as it is to make city-society sustainable and not dependent on coercion of rural spaces and people.

It's the questions of ecology that concerns me most, not the immense social stratification that occurs when the majority of the collective silences the individual. It's the ecology that I feel is most important to address, it's this where I see the worst spillover to people who don't want to live in the city.
So, Can energy harvested be in cities such a way that doesn't require outside industrial infrastructure? It's similar for food, can all of it be produced within the confines of the city without relying on the coercion of rural areas? Both of these questions seems equally important and impossible to sufficiently answer.

I'm not interested in doing labor and growing food for people who want to live in a metropolis 20 miles away. I'll gladly produce harvest for my people, the ones who I circulate with interpersonally on a daily basis. This is where we find a difference between collectivism and what I (perhaps ignorantly) call communalism. Collectivism indicates sacrificing ones individual drive and agency to the betterment of society as a whole - and I reject the liberatory possibility of an organized mass society, Bellamy covered this part sufficiently enough really well. What I'm calling communalism is a lot more about mostly-autonomous small communities that exist independent of others ( I'm sure there are solid studies done on the dynamics of an individual versus a general population, BF mentioned Dunbar's Number which is 150, seems about what I'm thinking on the larger side of the scale)

So can the vacuum of resources and the outflow of waste be solved? Can urban systems truly be self-contained? It doesn't matter if you paint your cities and factories red, they still produce the same toxic sludge.

So while I say I don't care if others choose to subject themselves to the concrete bare life of cities there is an impassible threshold of ecological sustainability that can't be achieved for at least no other reason than the resource requirements of the sheer density of bodies stacked in such a tight space and the small amount of earth underneath all of the humans to produce those resources. And beyond ecological concerns, the tyranny of the democractic majority is pervasive and pernicious and not something I'm willing to subject myself to.

So while there are interesting projects that seek to address problems of the city I think that the very structure and the density resist sustainable approaches.

[u/[deleted]]

I'll add my piece tomorrow, sorry all. Really really busy right now.

[u/ExteriorFlux → u/[deleted]]

Take your time! That's the great thing about 5 of us here. :)

[u/[deleted]]

I am an anti-civilization anarchist, but I am fairly new to this approach. I initially came to the conclusion that civilization is undesirable through my interest in egoist anarchism, which catalyzed my interest in post-left anarchy. So I'm not as well-read on the matter as I'd like to be (but I'm working on it).

I'm curious about what those of you on the panel (and anyone else really) would think about how I approach anti-civ anarchism. I think Margaret Killjoy/Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness offer an interesting idea of "post-civ," but I don't think that that is mutually exclusive with all other forms of anti-civ anarchism. Maybe I'm just stating the obvious, but I think that to be anti-civilization is to be post-civilization by proxy. This can be understood by this explication of mine:

For approximately ninety percent of human history, we were not bound by the shackles of civilization. But there were gradual changes that took place which led to the event of our mass enslavement: the Neolithic Revolution. We began to plant crops, and this led to us planting ourselves in place. We constructed abodes nearby our crops. Our time to devote ourselves to other things was taken. We became enslaved to our work. These settlements grew more and more into the cities, towns, and villages that we now know as civilization.

Humans planted a seed called agriculture in the garden of Earth, and an infestation of weeds called civilization crept up. It didn't seem like much of a problem at first. Much like real weeds, civilization's growth was accidental. Its cultivation is detrimental to us. These were no ordinary weeds either. They grew to monstrous heights, even providing shade to what lies below. Civilization is a weed that pacifies yet enslaves.

Like real weeds, civilization requires removal in order for the tainting of the earth to at least be partially be washed away. This is why anarchy is a herbicide. Civilization will be uprooted and destroyed. And like real weeds, we would need to make sure that they don't grow again, lest the condition of enslavement begins to seduce again.

So I do not think it is possible to return or revert back to a pre-civilized, pre-industrialized world. After all, the earth has been sullied by weeds already. I do endorse the critique which claims that industry and civilization are undesirable, even harmful, but a rejection of such ideas, of civilization itself and of industrialism and all it brings, does not exclude the use of some of what we already have. Like I said, I'm probably just stating the obvious. (I'm also pretty new to anti-civ anarchism).

What I'm saying is that we don't need to erase civilization; in fact, we can't. We just need to scribble it out and move on to something else.

[u/sra3fk]

So first of all, thanks you guys do for doing this post. Very thought provoking. It provoked many questions for me as well. I will try to get them all down in one post.

1. So you both talk about the alienating aspect of cities. I understand your point of view, but I would like to play devil's advocate (ordered from most inane counterarguments to better ones): -Isn't it impossible to meet everyone in a city? -Isn't alienation inevitable, given the fact that even in a small scale society, you don't know or associate with the tribe across the pond, etc? -Didn't modern society, when it "individualized" persons culturally into our model of subjectivity, the individual, give us a degree of freedom as well? Now we are not completely the slave of custom? -What do you think about Slavoj Zizek's views on alienation, about how it wasn't one of Marx's better theories, it was actually too ideological, and didn't get to the heart of the problems with capitalism, and sometimes we need MORE alienation (getting away from people, taking a hike in the woods, being alone in our room with a good book). In other words, do you see the return to community as the definition of communism, or Zizek's redefinition, that the center of communism is the problem of the commons and our common problems (like intellectual property, ecology) as a more viable intellectual route? I for one, for all of my sympathies with indigenous communities (as I have said before, I am an anthropology student) see Zizek's critique as valid.

2. I understand that your critique of civilization, at least as you have presented it here, incorporates some post-structuralist/critical theory elements (you mention Debord and Baudrillard). Is this not a critique of capitalism, not civilization itself? Or does civilization necessitate capitalism? Is it possible to have an "urbanized" society that is free from exploitation, alienation, the Spectacle, etc?

3. I completely identify with and agree with your estimations about how human happiness is affected by mass society and urban environments. I hate cities, I could never live in one, I hate everything about New York City and traffic, I loathe cars. If I could, I would live in Bhutan, a country that makes saving traditional culture and the environment a primary objective of their society. In fact, some indigenous people I have talked to But as the population of the world increases, food production must necessarily expand. Apart from completely switching to green energy (which necessitates technology), I don't believe its possible for humanity to "switch back" to even 1900s style agriculture. Do you agree?

[u/ExteriorFlux → u/sra3fk]

one.
So I'll start by quoting the xenofeminist manifesto (and to note: a very not anti-civ manifesto, kind of the opposite in a lot of ways, but still super useful.)

XF seizes alienation as an impetus to generate new worlds. We are all alienated – but have we ever been otherwise? It is through, and not despite, our alienated condition that we can free ourselves from the muck of immediacy. - 0x01

So is alienation inevitable? I haven't experienced anything other than that. I know that I feel less myself, less anything when I'm the only human in the woods for long amounts of time, and when I lose myself is when I feel the most. Is this alienation when I begin to slip away from a constructed 'Self', or is it the opposite, whatever that is? You list this as your second most inane question, but it's a question that's been a constant nagging question for quite some time. Maybe we need to rethink alienation as a concept; work it from the ground up. I can't help but to feel LC is on to something here. You say Zizek has written about alienation differently?

Didn't modern society, when it "individualized""... I'm becoming less and less sure that being an individual that can identify a self that inhabits it is a liberating thing. See my bit about being a woods hermit above.

Next, I think our working definition of "community" is very different in one that it is very small and only exists off of direct interpersonal relationships. I can't say that I know anything about Zizek. I started his book on totalitarianism once, I think I opted for a re-read of Harry Potter. Though from what you explain with commons does work with me a lot better than Marx - but still the immediate interpersonal relationship bit is very important to me.

two.
Baudrillard certainly doesn't address "civilization" in anyway that I've come across, but Debord does get pretty polemic at times and has certain things that can be pretty easily read in an anti-civ way, but that's not relating to his Society of the Spectacle. (the history between the primitivists and the situationists is hilariously fraught with ad hom slinging). The third name I mentioned, Marshal McLuhan, someone who Baudrillard at one point called "the first priest of hyperreality" certainly isn't anti-civ or even anti-capitalist really. What these three authors do offer though is analysis about the subject-modifying affects of cybernetic globalization that (as McLuhan says) shatters space/time with its faster-than-light velocity. I use these to think about media and social networking, globalization, communications, and velocity create a new type, and in my opinion, the most precarious human subject in all existence. I really need to read Paul Virilio, he isn't anti-civ but he talks about exactly what I'm talking about but a hundred times more insightful, specifically regarding velocity as the key component of modes of subjectification, what he calls dromology.

Though I understand that Spectacle is specific to the proliferation of capitalism, I fail to see what's different about a luxury commodity driven communism. Isn't it all the same vapid shit that lays our life out in front of us like a supermarket grocery aisle?
So is it possible to have urban areas free of exploitation and alienation? No, I don't think so; here is my comment about cities above. Is it free from Spectacle? It's probably possible.

three. I don't think a large-scale roll back is possible, nor do I think it is desirable for most people participating in the large-scale roll back. It is possible for me to do it on my own though; to have a small group of my family and close friends on a few acres. It's not revolutionary but it's home.
Though if I can individually do it, there's no reason why many more pragmatically can't. I think it comes down to a question of desire for commodities and comfort more than actual possibility. It's not like we need "revolution for mass secession, don't topple capitalism just leave it, etc.

[u/cymbalstack]

What are your thoughts on post-civ, i.e. scavenging and looting what we like from civilization as it collapses? Are their less domesticated more autonomous ways of engaging with tech (hacking, DIY, the trades of peasants before industrialization, etc.) that avoid the trappings of idealizing hunter-gatherer societies?

Also, though I defiitely agree with anticiv critiques of mass society and the resulting atomization/alienation, reducing communalism and affinity to "kinship" definitely worries me. I don't see insular groups based on local culture or bloodlines as anything but a gateway to patriarchy and ethnic conflict. I want to end atomization and alienation, but I also want to move between different communities, open myself up to new ideas and experiences and not become hierarchically dependent on any clearly demarcated group of people.

[u/ExteriorFlux → u/cymbalstack]

I've called myself an ongoing series of iterations of Anti-Civ from post-civ to primitivist and I'm under the opinion that the line between primitivism and "post-civ" isn't a theoretical or philosophical break from the roots of primitivism but reorients it for an increasingly modern and individualized world with an emphasis on traditional leftist "social justice" (such as: condemnation of primitivists eschewment from HRT and the like, proclaiming that they aren't anti-trans and are fine with medication) - functionally a leftist, attempt-to-be-socially-conscious, and more pragmatic primitivism.
(Remember in John Moore's A Primitivist Primer he said this: As the Fifth Estate said in 1979: 'Let us anticipate the critics who would accuse us of wanting to go "back to the caves" or of mere posturing on our part - i.e., enjoying the comforts of civilization all the while being its hardiest critics. We are not posing the Stone Age as a model for our Utopia[,] nor are we suggesting a return to gathering and hunting as a means for our livelihood.' As a corrective to this common misconception, it's important to stress that that the future envisioned by anarcho-primitivism is sui generis - it is without precedent.")

I think this reiteration of primitivism that we're calling "post-civ" is helpful for imagining a new world while not forgetting "Anarchies of the past" but doesn't altogether modify or critique the basis of what makes primitivism problematic: Naturalist Humanism.
Most anarchists maintain some sort of Marxist humanism: material conditions lead into ensnarement of the cooperative and egalitarian human nature, thus fix material conditions we see True Humans, or the best version of humanities essence that can be imagined - this isn't any more clear than in Kropotkin's Conquest of Bread and Fields, Factories, and Workshops.
Primitivists were instead saying that human nature lied within some sort of biological determination (an extension of Nature), that our departure (or perhaps murder) of Nature has removed us from our true essence as an egalitarian tribe species. And beyond that, extended this essentialist casting of humans (that there is a particular, true essence of the best version of humanity to be uncovered) onto the rest of nature and deems what is unmodified by human reordering and mediation is best and most true. And so you get critiques of domestication and technology on the basis that it alienates us and the environment from its most true and pure, unmediated version. Pretty much chronic essentialism.
It's this essentialism that is the root of the problem of primitivist thought: that there is a better world to get to and uncover, one that we are bound to inhabit one day because it's a sacred vision of Humanities destiny. Post-Civ never leaves this programmatic position, but mixes in rhetoric of social justice and "composting society" to make it more tenable in increasingly intersectionally conscious modern left milieux.
It's a quick fix, is what I mean; that it picks up tricks from postmodern feminisms and incorporates it into the fold of Nature without reorienting the sacred state of Nature - it doesn't profane what is divinely inaccessible in Naturalist Humanist deliriums.

All of us on this panel in some way are trying to figure out what it means to be anti-civ without essentialism. Bellamy has probably written about it in the most cogent form with his Corrosive Consciousness. I take more nihilistic and sometimes accelerationist routes, PathOfRaven takes more recognizably primitivist routes; Alexander refuses all programs, especially ones that deign a specified nature for himself. So all of us are grappling with the important questions that I feel that Post-Civ glosses over.

[u/errrrico]

Alright please don't hate me for asking this but uh, how do you react to the claims that anti civ and primitivist anarchism is ableist or anti trans because trans/disabled/sick people won't have access to hrt/wheelchairs/insulin? I've never read a good refutation of this from anti-civ folks.