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Title: Toward an occupy land movement Author: Seaweed Date: 2016 Language: en Topics: Insurrection, Green anarchy, Occupy, Land and liberty, subsistence Source: Blog site
There were many aspects of the Occupy Movement that were praiseworthy:
its decentralization and internationalism, lack of a reformist list of
demands, the explorations of collective decision making and of course
its goal of helping human societies become less hierarchical. But what
were the Occupy protesters occupying? Wasn’t it essentially urban space
as a means of temporarily reclaiming some property to use as a
media-like base to complain about social and economic inequality?
How might someone looking through the lens of insurrectionary
subsistence consider Occupy? I think that it’s worth wondering if Occupy
would have been more powerful and threatening if there had been a more
personal and immediate goal of occupying land. In a city this might mean
occupying a park and a nearby building, for instance, not to use as a
space to become either engaged citizens or drop outs, but to use as
infrastructure in a real attempt at exploring new social relationships.
The park might be used for planting an orchard and a garden, building a
hen coop and setting up ponds to attract wildlife, as simple examples,
and the building used for shelter and defense from hostile forces. Of
course, urban inhabitation offers more opportunity for destroying the
enemy’s infrastructure than it does the creation of liberated space that
could support some sort of sustainable urban permaculture zone. But the
points must be made that we are dispossessed and that access to land is
essential for any group of self-directed people.
Or imagine if the protesters had marched out of their city and brought
their considerable numbers and resources to support the nearest
indigenous land re-occupation effort. What an incredible opportunity to
be allies and co-conspirators with folks who have been on the front line
against capitalism and colonialism for centuries. There are such efforts
all over Canada and the U.S. Or if each encampment had gone out into the
nearest public or corporate lands to set up their own land occupation
camps, as attempts at creating places to self-organize and survive in a
non-urban setting and as a way of opening new fronts against the
nation-state in solidarity with indigenous fighters and communities.
Urban living has to be abandoned in order for any truly anarchic set of
living practices to succeed. With that as a backdrop belief, then
insurrectionary subsistence becomes clearer as a specific revolutionary
perspective. It involves trying to take steps that help further access
to land for communal groups; either indigenous people reclaiming their
traditional territory or non-indigenous people accessing land to create
their own authentic bonds, free of the forces of either the market or
the state.
How does one describe the freedom that anarchists are yearning for? Is
it freedom from-as in oppression, domination, mediation, domestication,
colonization? Is it freedom to-as in to explore, imagine, experiment and
dream? It is both and therefore I wonder how these two might intersect,
and how our means to this intertwining might contain its ends.
Insurrectionary subsistence practice is identifying one’s potential
habitat and making attempts at dismantling existing industrial activity
and doing our best to stop industrial expansion there. Unlike direct
action ecology which advocates attacking industrialism in order to
protect wilderness, insurrectionary subsistence attacks industrialism
generally, wherever one lives, in order to help the local ecosphere
regenerate not for abstract spiritual or ecological reasons, but in
order to protect one’s potential home.
Like primitivism, insurrectionary subsistence encourages attacking
industrialism not only to protect wilderness areas but also as part of a
greater goal of destroying mass authoritarian civilization so that
humanity can ultimately return to lives centered more or less around
hunter-gathering. But insurrectionary subsistence also aims to secure
access to land in order to begin experimenting with different green ways
of living here and now, without any predetermined destination in mind.
We trust that truly free, self-organized, self-directed people will end
up where they need to be to fully realize themselves. Life is full of
spectrums and grey areas, like the undefinable boundaries between the
hard and the soft, so it’s important not to get stuck on specific
expressions and mental constructions, like “bio-regionalism” or “nomadic
hunter-gathering” or “paleo” or “permaculture” or “cultural
materialism”. There are gradations everywhere, disagreements about
definitions, new information and insights that continually ask us to
reconsider our perspectives. This is important for anarchists, who must
be guided by the desire to fight for dignified lives as well as by the
ecological principles of regeneration and renewal. Chaos and paradox
define our surroundings and our histories as much as any rational
template.
I’ve been around long enough to know that eventually all sets of
analyses, like cultural materialism as an example, will seem outdated
and inadequate and will need revisions and rethinking. All over North
America, for instance, the non-civilized experimented with and
integrated many customs and activities that would be considered outside
the limits of nomadic hunter-gatherer lifeways: some had dogs that lived
among them, some planted the odd crop, others maintained specific
conditions to encourage food or medicine sources through fires, many
lived in permanent, if seasonal, villages, etc. Hierarchy did not always
accompany the lives of those who engaged in these practices or
experiments. And what some outsiders, like anthropologists, could
describe as hierarchy in some instances, might from the subjects
themselves not be considered coercive or alienating or having any basis
in domination whatsoever. There are simply so many varieties of
gathering/hunting cultures and of the non-civilized generally, that the
description seems to fall short as sufficient to adequately encapsulate
our destination. Best from my point of view, is to start by getting
access to land with the crystal clear desire to begin experimenting with
free ways of living.
In terms of where I live, fairly close to large areas of land, I do know
how to hunt and have hunted, but civilization has made widespread
gathering-hunting an impossibility for the time being. This doesn’t mean
that occupying land is pointless, it just necessitates conceptualizing
and accepting a practice that has only a few stepping stones in some
places to a green anarchist lifeway while in others the stepping stones
required would be so numerous that one has to accept some transitional
time period of helping re-naturalize a habitat. It does seem true that
the more sedentary the people the more likelihood the existence of rank
and privilege. But there isn’t a causal connection. Other factors also
come into play. And based on my reading of anthropological evidence,
permanently located villages, established within fairly small habitats,
with seasonal subsistence campsites, are also sufficient for
experiencing completely free, undomesticated and healthy existences.
The participant in an organically self-organized subsistence movement
wants to be embedded in a habitat. They don’t aim toward an exclusive
means of providing food or set of living arrangements. They just want to
be free people rooted in a dynamic and healthy environment. I think that
a settled village of ungoverned individuals, (or even cluster of them),
for instance, perhaps divided in smaller groups within it along some
affinity or blood relation, one that also supports seasonal subsistence
camps, is as ideal a setting for humans to experience complete freedom
and direct experience with our surroundings as a nomadic group of
gatherer-hunters. These people would sustain themselves by fishing,
maintaining berry patches and wild starches, perhaps even planting a
simple crop like squash or encouraging oyster production through subtle
interactions. The destination is a place where we are free to experiment
with our social configurations and we have the habitat to support us as
we do so. If that leads to nomadic hunter-gathering, or nomadic
gathering-hunting or village based gathering-hunting or village based
hunting-gathering supported by squash crops and domesticated cannabis
and valerian root medicines, then so be it. Most concepts seem to break
down into ever smaller units or even to completely liquefy into infinite
constituent parts once we try to pin point and confine and set apart
from all other concepts. What precisely is nomadic and what sedentary?
What exactly is domestication? Where does the hierarchy anarchists are
opposed to end to make room for notions of old timer wisdom?
While I am overjoyed when spontaneous and broad proletarian insurgencies
and uprisings occur, like they have recently (2012 to 2015) in Montreal,
Ferguson, Baltimore, Greece, the Bay etc., I believe that each of our
lives counts, each of our undertakings potentially contributes. Some of
our activities quietly chip away at the dominant reality while others
are more dramatic. I don’t care if at times my actions accomplish
nothing. I want to live and try and experiment, and of course there
remains the possibility that in a coalescing of all our small attempts
something greater might occur, that perhaps one day some might actually
help liberate an area. In this sense I support and encourage everything
from the formation of intentional communities to clandestine sabotage of
industrial projects, from the setting up of wilderness camps for a few
friends or helping out at an indigenous land re-occupation camp to
disruptions of normalcy in riotous behavior at anti-police brutality
marches. All of these activities create bonds between comrades,
highlight what and who our enemy is and build experience and wisdom.
Hunting and fishing and gathering wild food is as important as writing
to prisoners.
Insurrectionary subsistence is the attempt, successful or not, to wrest
a little territory from the nation-state and the market. This land base
might be a stepping stone toward eventually reaching a habitat or it
might be taken with the intent of becoming part of a habitat itself, say
through re-naturalizing efforts.
This is not just a call to “green” our revolts, although this is one way
to speak about it, but to make more of our activity aimed toward
accessing land or protecting potential habitat for anarchist living
experiments here and now.
It is a call to consider the implications of realizing that without
access to land, no group can sustain itself.
Free people living in healthy habitats is the destination,
insurrectionary subsistence is one of the means.