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Title: Beyond Extraction, Towards Liberation
Author: Athko
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: post-civ, accumulation, anti-civ, anarcho-primitivism
Source: distributed privately

Athko

Beyond Extraction, Towards Liberation

“Listen, even as I write this, the bells begin to ring for tomorrow,

jingling in the celebration of the thousand years of existence of our

dear Germany. Ring out, ring out its funeral dirge!”

- Max Stirner, 1844

The reigning social formation dominating almost all humans and the vast

majority of the biosphere is civilization. Accreting from tribal

communities into the first cities between ten and twelve thousand years

ago, civilization has since conquered 7.8 billion humans, led to the

development of thousands of cities, and fenced off half of the world’s

habitable land as farmland (Our World in Data). When confronted with and

inculcated within such a massive superorganism as a civilization, we

must critically determine whether it should exist at all. Civilization

is, as Derrick Jensen, a researcher of the development and conduct of

civilizations, describes, “a complex of stories, institutions, and

artifacts that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities

(civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin

civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined … as people

living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to

require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life”

(15, Derrick Jensen). Or, more simply, a civilization is a cultural form

based on continuous resource extraction and concentration into cities.

All civilizations require certain physical and social infrastructure to

maintain this extraction and concentration, which leads to the

generation of common traits among them. Regarding this infrastructure,

Margaret Killjoy, a prominent anti-civilization activist, explains that

civilizations “are anthropologically understood by their complex social

hierarchies and organized, institutional governments” (Margaret

Killjoy). One may already notice several flaws with civilization, most

notably that all civilizations depend on continuous resource extraction,

which will by definition reach an upper limit when you run out of land

to farm, mountains to mine, oceans to fish, or rivers to drink. However,

this is only one of many problems confronting us if we wish to live

within civilizations. We must move beyond civilization as it is based

upon continuous domination of the individual and ecologically

catastrophic resource extraction; however, we cannot simply revert to a

pre-technological society, as this would reproduce the environmental

destruction and domination characteristic to civilization.

Civilization’s existence as a social organism necessitates domination of

the individual, rendering each member a docile body upon which desire is

inscribed rather than liberated, and action is determined rather than

left wild. One of the primary arguments against civilization can be

found within Killjoy’s above quote, that civilization requires social

hierarchy and organized government to exist. Negative freedom is defined

as “the absence of obstacles, barriers or constraints,” and so it is

clear that civilization depends on its civilian constituents having

limited negative freedom, as governments and social hierarchies

necessarily place constraints upon the individual - whether by custom,

law, command, or manipulation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). How

do these constraints manifest? Max Stirner, a German social philosopher

and member of the Left Hegelians, explains, “the independent existence

of the state establishes my lack of independence; its “naturalness,” its

organism, demands that my nature doesn’t grow freely, but is cut to fit

it… it gives me an education and culture suitable to it, not me” (145,

Max Stirner). The domination of the state which is so necessary to

civilization rests on its ability to ‘cut’ the nature of the individual

to fit its patterns of organization. In a system based on resource

extraction, civilians must be continuously involved in the extraction of

such resources, along with their refinement, precipitating the

production and consumption of finalized commodities. Therefore, states,

along with a variety of other organs within any given civilization, have

developed to control and channel production, ensure continuous and

useful extraction, and produce territorialized and predictable desire.

To do all this, such states and other organs must exert influence over

individuals. Techniques to attain such influence have changed radically

over time, including such forms as sovereignty, discipline, and control,

the latter two of which I will explain as they are most contemporarily

relevant. Michel Foucault, a philosopher of epistemology and social

change, discussed disciplinary societies in his landmark work Discipline

and Punish, wherein he writes, “in the great eighteenth-century states,

the army guaranteed civil peace no doubt because it was a real force, an

ever-threatening sword, but also because it was a technique and a body

of knowledge that could project their schema over the social body” (168,

Michel Foucault). Societies of discipline are defined by how they impart

rules upon the individual in a system modeled after those of the army

and prison, rendering domination internal, with the ‘docile bodies’

regulating their own actions. Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher of

metaphysics and ethics, explains in his exploration of Foucault’s ideas

Postscript on the Societies of Control, that in a society of discipline,

“the individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to

another, each having its own laws: first, the family; then the school

(“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no

longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital;

possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed

environment” (Gilles Deleuze). Disciplinary civilizations are based upon

such enclosed spaces, wherein the individual must choose to act

according to particular laws, codes, and social practices, lest they

face punishment. Deleuze goes on to explain how such disciplinary forms

spread; he contends that in addition to developing from prison and army

models, implemented from the top down, that social organs have also

developed into disciplinary enclosures in the market space. He explains,

“[capitalism] erects the factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist

being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the

owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial

house, the school)” (Gilles Deleuze). The factory, as much as the prison

and army barrack, comes to be the model other spaces are adapted to fit.

Market dynamics, rather than punishment from above, determine how

non-factory enclosures function, pressuring their constituents to

internalize their laws. The reason docility and discipline evolve into

societies is not because they are more just or free than hitherto extant

forms of society, such as sovereignty, but rather because disciplinary

societies outcompete, outproduce, and destroy lesser forms of

domination. Discipline is a better technique to maintain consistent and

continual production than sovereignty (or, obviously, any uncivilized

system), and so it outcompetes sovereignty. Europe did not colonize

Africa because the ‘proper minds’ in Europe decided invading other

countries was a good idea, but rather because Europe was already

developing discipline internally, and so it could quite easily conquer

the sovereign African kingdoms and tribes. African kingdoms knew that

they could not colonize Europe as they lacked such disciplined armies

and other social organs necessary to war-waging, and so none have tried

since 1491. Max Stirner writes of state control, “the state has never

aimed to bring about the free activity of individuals, but always that

bound to the state purpose… everything is done by the state machine;

because it moves the cogs of the individual minds, none of which follow

their own impulses” (146, Max Stirner). It is precisely these ‘docile

bodies,’ cogs in the state machine, which all of us are processed to

become, as if we did not internalize these laws, we would not maintain

the continuous production necessary for our complex civilizations. It is

clear then, that the punishment which is necessary to enforce the laws

docile bodies act within is not orchestrated by some higher cabal which

chooses to maintain a disciplinary society, but rather, such systems of

enforcement and entailed docility evolutionarily outcompete other

systems of society, and so the ones doing the punishing are by

definition themselves docile bodies. Disciplinary societies and spaces

are dominant within much of our modern civilization; however,

civilization is currently within a transition from societies of

discipline to those of control. Deleuze explains a society of control as

one which controls individuals rather than enclosing them; he writes,

“Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation,

like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment

to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to

point” (Gilles Deleuze). Rather than rely on the individual’s panoptic

self-domination, a society of control preforms and continuously

modulates the individual’s set of possible actions such that, rather

than participating in the resource extraction and commodity production

and consumption necessary for civilization in a set of discrete

enclosures governed by discrete rulesets at discrete times, they

extract, produce, and consume continuously throughout such spaces,

without any hard break in action. The civilian is made to always

participate in civilization’s maintenance, never resetting their actions

upon entering a new enclosure. We now study at home, plan our family

time at school over text, and, most visibly due to COVID-19, work at all

places and at all times, always ‘on-call.’ The prison has atomized - a

million are easier to control when they are wearing tracking bracelets,

constantly surveilled, than when they are locked in jails, constantly

regimented. Civilization is moving towards a breakdown in the

time-separation so inherent to disciplinary society, towards a continual

shift in an individual’s actions, always extracting, producing,

consuming regardless of location or time. Domination is moving from a

system which impresses laws upon citizens to one which constantly

determines the set of actions a particular citizen can perform at any

given time - digitally remanufactured task-structuring. Civilians are

made to lack the option to ignore the law, they are ‘more free’ insofar

as they are now truly ‘allowed’ to perform all actions they are capable

of. This is simply masking the deeper lack of freedom - the individual’s

capabilities are restricted, not their allowances. As such, the ‘more

free’ society of the present, wherein you are “allowed” to work from

home, to be under house arrest, to take a plea-bargain, is not more

free, but more insidiously dominant. Control society is outcompeting

disciplinary society as police realize riot police honeypots are more

effective than brute force use of tanks and as corporations work their

employees off the clock more productively than factories can - all in

support of, whether by consequence or by prefiguration, the extraction

and concentration which defines civilization. Beyond extraction and

production, however, civilization and the various state machines and

social machines also regiment and determine consumption. Deleuze and

psychoanalyst Félix Guattari write in their landmark book Anti-Oedipus,

“the social machine is identical with the desiring-machine. The social

machine's limit is not attrition, but rather its misfirings; it can

operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in

spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential element of

its very ability to function, which is not the least important aspect of

the system of cruelty.” (151, Deleuze and Guattari). The continual

‘grinding and breaking down’ inherent to the operation of the social

machine, the deterritorialization of previous regimes of consumption,

however, works in tandem with reterritorialization: “Civilized modern

societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization.

But what they deterritorialize with one hand, they reterritorialize with

the other” (257, Deleuze and Guattari). In other words, the social

machine continually adapts the desires of the civilian cogs to fit what

is produced, it territorializes their desire, restricting it to the

marketable subset of commodity it is able to create. However, it also

continually adapts the desires of the civilization at large to create

different commodities, to deterritorialize the unprofitable and replace

it with the new. This ever-new creation entails ever-new extraction such

that the environment is exponentially consumed. The perfection of the

social machine’s operation will necessarily be the perfection of

extraction, and therefore the immediate prelude to the collapse of the

environment such extraction occurs within as it runs out of the

necessary resources to maintain its own homeostasis.

Civilization relies upon the continuous extraction and centralization of

resources, which degrades the environment and pushes the system towards

collapse. Climate change, pollution, and desertification are not

symptoms of civilization, able to be prevented by new market means such

as wind power or carbon taxes, but rather are structural effects of

civilization. Environmental destruction is always the result of resource

extraction, as the resources, whether mineral, biological, or spatial,

are the environment. An anonymous author writes in Desert, “The 2007

IPCC report predicted a rise of between 2 and 6.4°C this century … What

could this new hot state look like? Some highlights: Hot deserts

spreading over much of the global south and into southern and even some

of central Europe. Cold deserts predominantly in the global north

retracting to leave new frontier land in Siberia, Scandinavia, Canada,

Greenland, Alaska and even to a certain extent in the Antarctic. Mass

attempts at migration from arid zones to the still habitable areas. Mass

human die-off coupled with accelerating species extinctions” (14,

Anonymous). Further, Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino explain in their

report Deforestation and world population sustainability: a quantitative

analysis, “our model shows that a catastrophic collapse in human

population, due to resource consumption, is the most likely scenario of

the dynamical evolution based on current parameters” (Bologna and

Aquino). The perfection of the social machine, the perfection which

evolves unstoppably into civilization as more responsive social machines

outcompete less responsive ones, will lead to the utter annihilation of

the human-habitable environment. Anything we could not inhabit would not

be assimilated into civilization, and as such may survive the coming

collapse of civilization, but the effects of the breakdown will be

catastrophic, as detailed above. During this and the next century, the

foremost climate scientists predict an exponential collapse in tropical

survivability, a total collapse of many ecosystems, mass starvation and

extinction of groups of both animals and humans, increased ethnic and

resource conflict precipitating further wars and induced starvation,

and, most likely, a ‘mass human die-off,’ a ‘catastrophic collapse in

human population.’ You and those you know may survive, but many, many

more will die in the civilization-induced climatic cataclysm. This is

not something which can be stopped by further technological

developments, as we have already passed the ‘point of no return’

according to the report An earth system model shows self-sustained

melting of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions stop in 2020 by

Jorgen Randers and Ulrich Goluke. Some studies show we have until 2025

or 2027, but whatever the time scale, it is far too short to throw a

monkey-wrench, whether in the form of a new energy source or a new

crisis, in civilization’s grind towards annihilation. As Desert

explains, “Industrial civilisation has managed to push up food supply by

both colonising ever more wild land for agriculture and developing

fossil fuel reliant ‘green revolution’ agro-technologies and

transportation … industrial agriculture relies on the harvesting of

ghost acreage (the fossilised photosynthetic production of ecosystems

millions of years ago) to produce food at the present rate. This can be

only temporary, for unless one is a believer in the cornucopian myth

that resources are limitless, someday the fossil-fuel hunting will draw

a blank” (16, Anonymous). The natural limit of resources within the

Earth-system - and by extension, the universe, in case escape via Musk’s

ships crossed your mind - will always force civilization’s collapse.

Civilization cannot escape its demise, as the motor which drives

ecosystem meltdown is the civilization itself. Without continuous

extraction, you do not have a civilization, with it, you imply your own

collapse. As Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale explain in Topsoil and

Civilization, “Civilised man has marched across the face of the earth

and left a desert in his footprints” (Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale).

The Dark Mountain Project explains in their Manifesto, “The very fact

that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard

ourselves as part of it. Indeed, our separation from it is a myth

integral to the triumph of our civilisation” (The Dark Mountain

Project). Without this humanist separation from nature, this

anthropocentric myth, civilization is left unjustifiable, a system of

mass exploitation and destruction with a basis only in its domination

rather than in some greater purpose. ‘Man’s triumph over nature’ is,

when one realizes man is a part of nature, nothing other than the

triumph of the man machine, the social machine, over man, over nature,

over the climate, the environment, our habitats, our ecosystems. The

social machine’s perfection, its (final) peak of triumph, can otherwise

be rendered simply as omnicide. The Dark Mountain Project continue,

stating “a quarter of the world’s mammals are threatened with imminent

extinction [humans are a mammal]; an acre and a half of rainforest is

felled every second; 75% of the world’s fish stocks are on the verge of

collapse; humanity consumes 25% more of the world’s natural ‘products’

than the Earth can replace – a figure predicted to rise to 80% by

mid-century” (The Dark Mountain Project). Civilization was always headed

for its own obliteration; just as Sumer, Greece, Rome, Egypt, the Mongol

Empire, the Zhou, the Mayan Empire, the Cahokian nation, and so many

others have fallen, so too our civilization will fall - but our

civilization will not, as those did, fall to another, but rather it will

fall, and so will the conditions necessary to build it and any other

civilization. This civilization will fall as it fells the environment

around it, the environment which produced it. The Dark Mountain Project

continues, “We are the first generations born into a new and

unprecedented age – the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to

presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway.

The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence –

all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a

bottomless pit, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of

our extraction, production, consumption” (The Dark Mountain Project).

Nothing other than total omnicide can stop civilization’s rise to

perfection, and nothing other than total omnicide will force it to

reckon with its legacy of ecocide which has been the prime tool it has

employed since its birth ten to twelve thousand years ago. Civilization

has traced out the path to its own collapse, and the trees it felled

along the way cannot be burned forever. In fact, it seems they cannot be

burned any longer at all, seeing we have already strode past the point

of no return, burning the overhanging (fossilized) trees despite it all.

Definitionally, we cannot create a ‘sustainable’ or ‘permanent’

civilization any more than we can create a ‘green’ coal or ‘eternal’

mine. Civilization will fall, and we must be ready when it does, lest we

number among the omnicide casualties.

The way out is not backwards - primitivism and neotribalism cannot move

us beyond domination of the individual and environmental destruction. It

may seem as though, in arguing against civilization, I wish to instead

argue we live in a ‘primitive’ cave-man society. However, such a society

is not desirable either. I have defined negative freedoms, and

civilization clearly restricts those more so than any primitive or

hunter-gatherer society would. But positive freedoms, “the possibility

of acting — or the fact of acting — in such a way as to take control of

one's life and realize one's fundamental purposes” are in fact bolstered

by civilization, to the extent that most would initially find the idea

of living an uncivilized existence laughable on its face, because, if

for no other reason, they would lose access to their phone and running

water (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). If we wish to pursue any

liberatory future, it cannot be one which necessitates the destruction

of all technology which would positively free us from the domination of

our surroundings and internal limits. Primitivists, such as Fredy

Perlman, John Zerzan, Ned Ludd, and most famously, though least

effectively, Ted Kaczynski, argue that technology itself, along with

agriculture, tools, symbolic thought, art, science (in their view itself

a religion), and many other cultural forms most commonly associated with

civilization are inherently destructive or dangerous. They argue that if

civilization is destructive, it is because of its constituent parts,

that the emergent construct destroys because its cogs destroy. However,

this is a distortion of the role of such technologies at best and an

outright fabrication at worst. Technology, along with the other

aforementioned objects and systems, existed prior to civilization, and

so to argue that they destroy the environment within civilization, and

therefore must be left behind once civilization collapses, ignores their

origin in tribal and primitive societies. Killjoy writes in Take What

You Need And Compost The Rest: an introduction to post-civilized theory,

“It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized

state of being” (Margaret Killjoy) as such a state of being would be

less positively free, i.e. would have less access to liberatory

technologies, than any other form of being which embraces such

developments. Technology is often used to destroy, extract, produce, and

consume within civilization, and to be sure, many technologies are

solely useful within civilization (e.g. nuclear weaponry, tanks,

financial trading AI, the Bagger 288 mobile strip mining machine,

etc.) - but many more are useful, or were even developed, outside of a

civilized context. When leaving civilization, we needn’t leave our

toothbrushes behind any more than we need to leave our teeth behind or

bring our chemical weaponry with us. Primitivists argue agriculture

itself is destructive and extractive. Even ignoring the development of

many forms of agriculture prior to the development of civilization, the

argument that agriculture itself is extractive is baseless. The reason

for this is actually an entire branch of agriculture - permaculture,

that is, agriculture which is scientifically or temporally proven to be

sustainable and non-extractive within the environment. Permaculture is

agriculture made to fit the conditions of the land rather than fitting

the land to a profitable cash crop, cereal, or grazing monoculture. No

long-term extraction can occur within permacultural systems, and so

permaculture can exist beyond civilization. Examples of permaculture

include the ‘three sisters’ farming method of the Native American

tribes, which developed over 5,000 years ago, along with hügelkultur,

agroforestry, rainwater harvesting, and many others. Technology and

agriculture must be separated from civilization, not left behind with it

as primitivists would have us choose. Additionally, as outlined in

Desert, a tribal society is unfeasible given current population

dynamics. We are, as Desert explains, ‘eating oil,’ that is, we are

eating food the production of which relies on non-renewable energy

sources. As such, when these sources either (de facto) run out or, as

primitivists demand, are voluntarily not used, a population collapse

will occur. Permaculture cannot produce as much food as industrial

monoculture, but it can absolutely produce more than hunting and

gathering alone can, and, as such, primitivism is, in absolute terms,

more deadly to humans than a permacultural system. Civilization and its

nearing collapse is, as detailed above, also more deadly to humans than

a transition to permaculture would be. As such, if we intend to maximize

negative freedoms, we must escape civilization. If we intend to maximize

positive freedoms, we must escape primitivism. If we intend to minimize

life-loss, we must escape both. The only way out of our history of

ecocide and future of suicide is not back to the caves or forward to

perfection, but beyond.

We must not continue civilization, nor revert to primitivism, but rather

proceed beyond all systems of domination and extraction.

Post-civilization is the only model of society which neither entails

continuous extraction and the domination of the individual needed to

maintain itself nor places needless restrictions on positive freedom.

The future is not behind us, nor within our already-explored habits of

our ‘great and powerful’ civilization, but beyond these visibly

collapsing and despotic regimes. Uncivilize yourself, rewild your life,

or face its imminent destruction at the hands of the system you help

form. Post-civilization is the only sustainable, liberatory, adaptive,

and survivable model of a future society to which we can escape.

Bibliography:

Our World in Data, “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for

agriculture,” 2019,

https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture

Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, 2006

Margaret Killjoy, Anarchism Versus Civilization, 2010

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Positive and Negative Liberty”,

2016, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/

Max Stirner, The Unique and Its Property, 1844, Wolfi Landstreicher

translation, 2017

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 1975

Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control, 1991

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1972

Anonymous, Desert, 2011

Mauro Bologna and Gerardo Aquino, Deforestation and world population

sustainability: a quantitative analysis, 2020,

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6

Jorgen Randers and Ulrich Goluke, An earth system model shows

self-sustained melting of permafrost even if all man-made GHG emissions

stop in 2020, 2020,

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-02https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63657-6#Sec80-75481-z

Vernon G. Carter and Tom Dale, Topsoil and Civilization, 1974

The Dark Mountain Project, The Manifesto, 2009

Margaret Killjoy, Take What You Need And Compost The Rest: an

introduction to post-civilized theory, 2010