💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › elany-tools-of-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:49:30. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Tools of Anarchism
Author: Elany
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: black, black anarchism, egoism, affinity groups, interpersonal relationships, decivilizing, decolonization, indigenous anarchism, postcolonialism, anti-civ, post-civ, disability, anti-technology, anti-colonialism, translation, german, switzerland
Source: https://1312press.noblogs.org/post/2022/02/10/submitted-zine-wildpunk-black-against-civilization
Notes: Originally published in three parts in the 2021 Schwarze Saat, a compilation of 85 Black and Indigenous essays mostly translated into German. The translator also included these and other essays by her and her father. Original titles were Werkzeuge des Anarchismus Teil 1: Über zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen (und gelebter Anarchie); Teil 2 Über Entkolonialisierung (und die technologische Komponente des Kolonialismus); and Teil 3: Über Dezivilisierung (und eine Neubewertung der Welt). Original german texts available at https://feralfire.noblogs.org/post/2022/01/25/gesammelte-schriften-von-elany-samuel-aus-schwarze-saat/ English translations are available at 1312.noblogs.org Elany was kidnapped by the Swiss government during the translation of these texts and remains locked up as of publication. Fire to the ALL prisons.

Elany

Tools of Anarchism

Part 1: On Interpersonal Relationships (and Lived Anarchy)

A significant portion of anarchist theory deals with interpersonal

relationships. What do these look like when the state falls? What does

an anarchist society look like? Should there even be a society? What

about community, affinity, free association?

While many anarchists put society on an imaginary pedestal, other

anarchists argue that the construct of society itself stands in the way

of anarchy and that it possesses an inherent authority. In their essay

“Against Community Building, For Friendship,” the Indigenous anarchist

ziq argues that “the ‘anarchist community’ ideal [is] inherently

unattainable and isolating” and that instead, interpersonal

relationships in an anarchy should be based on friendship rather than

forced community.

As early as 1844, Max Stirner attacked the concept of society in his

work The Ego and its Own, and as an alternative to society proposed the

“union of egoists.” According to Stirner, this association is something

mundane, but also an unbelievably mighty tool for the individual. The

union is something that we experience and build over the course of our

lives. In contrast to society, the union of egoists cannot be regarded

as a static relationship between individuals, but rather as shared

activities of life by self-interested individuals. These are felt,

experienced, and lived in the moment.

We come together in this union for shared activity – not out of duty,

morality, or other reasons, rather because we find mutual benefit in

such a connection. Examples of everyday relationships based on

reciprocity include, for instance, romantic relationships, playing

games, sex, or robbing a bank. Such a union can also be formed by larger

groups. A union can consist of thousands of people who join together

into a labor union to fight for better working conditions. What counts

is that all participants have the freedom to leave the union. If we no

longer find it beneficial, no longer feel good about it, or wish to take

on new activities, the union is ended.

In short: the association is transient, it lives in the moment. It is a

tool of the individual. This stands in contrast to society. The

individual is a tool of society. The claim of society over the

individual is absolute and the individual cannot end this claim. While

the union is a conscious act of your own power, society is imposed upon

you. It is not based on reciprocity, and in it you are compelled to take

up activities and relationships in which you find no satisfaction. Needs

and longings are suppressed for empty ideas.

Another form of interpersonal relationship in Anarchist spaces is the

“affinity group.” An affinity group is a group of comrades who

understand themselves as an autonomous political force. The idea behind

it is that people who already know and trust each other work together,

enabling them to react quickly and flexibly to new situations. Although

affinity groups are designed to be small groups, they can have a

powerful impact. In contrast to top-down structures they are free enough

to adapt to any situation. All members of such affinity groups can react

without needing to wait for orders, all while maintaining a clear idea

of the expectations and ideas of the others.

As a counterpart to the classic formal organizational forms with

Programs, Declarations of Principals and Congresses there exist informal

organizations in which the representatives argue that giant federations

are a relic of the past, as proven by the fact that they have failed.

Small, autonomous and agile groups are preferred instead. Without giving

up the ever-important spreading of anarchist ideas, it is not a matter

these days of collecting as many people as possible around anarchism at

any price. It could be argued that no strong anarchist organization is

necessary to give the signal for the revolution or the insurrection when

the time is ripe. When it is no longer about how one can organize people

for the struggle, the new question becomes how one can organize the

struggle. Informal affinity groups, independent from each other but with

a shared perspective on the struggle, are the best way to go directly on

the offensive. This offers the most autonomy and the widest spectrum of

possible action.

To return once more to “societal forms” in an anarchy, I think it makes

sense to finally give an example of interpersonal relationships in a

lived anarchy: the tribal or band model of hunter-gatherers, which was

replaced some 10,000 years ago by authoritarian interpersonal

relationships in the course of the spread of civilizations. In some

parts of the world there still live small groups of hunter gathers who

hold to their anti-authoritarian model of interpersonal relationships,

such as the Hadza in Tanzania, East Africa. Many Anthropologists and

Sociologists have and continue to characterize hunter-gatherers as

“egalitarian cultures” or “acephalous societies,” but only a few use the

word “Anarchy” – a remarkable attempt at ideological sabotage, if you

ask me. (Acephalous, by the way, means “free of domination”).

Many hunter-gatherers stand (or stood) out through an exceptional degree

of equality, of individual autonomy, of mutual aid, and of

anti-authoritarian educational methods. They always live in small groups

of 20 to 50 people, very rarely up to 100. We thus find here a

similarity to today’s concept of affinity groups, which are commonly

made up of 5 to 25 people. It would not be absurd to characterize a band

as the first Affinity Group in the world. The small size of a band

effectively hinders – along with its other characteristics – the

formation of hierarchies. A comparison to Stirner’s model of the union

of egoists can also be made. Sometimes different bands come (or came)

together on a voluntary, mutual basis to, for instance, help with

constructing temporary homes or to repel intruders. Afterwards the union

was ended and the bands separated themselves.

In bands there exists an “egalitarian ethos.” If a member of a band

violates this, they will be shunned by the other members. Either the

shunned person changes their behavior or they leave the band and join

another (free association).

One practice stands out in particular. Something which is paid far too

little attention in Anarchist discourses: the anti-authoritarian methods

of child rearing, which ensure that feelings of trust, egalitarian

principals, and the rejection of authority are passed on to every

generation.

The parenting style of hunter-gatherers would be characterized in the

civilized world as “permissive.” Children could decide freely when they

wanted to be fed or not, and they educated themselves through their own

self-determined play and inquiry. Corporal punishments were

non-existent. As described for instance by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,

who studied the Ju/'hoansi in Africa’s Kalahari Desert: “Ju/wa children

very rarely cried, probably because they had little to cry about. No

child was ever yelled at or slapped or physically punished, and few were

even scolded. Most never heard a discouraging word until they were

approaching adolescence, and even then the reprimand, if it really was a

reprimand, was delivered in a soft voice… We are sometimes told that

children who are treated so kindly become spoiled, but this is because

those who hold that opinion have no idea how successful such measures

can be. Free from frustration or anxiety, sunny and cooperative, and

usually without close siblings as competitors, the Ju/wa children were

every parent’s dream. No culture can ever have raised better, more

intelligent, more likable, more confident children.”

It is easy to understand that children who are trusted and well-treated

from the start grow up to trust in others and treat them well, feeling

little or no need to dominate and oppress others to fulfill their own

needs. (On the theme of parenting I recommend reading the essay

“Childhood & the Psychological Dimension of Revolution” by Ashanti

Alston – more than once.)

Today, the Hadza are one of the last still-existing examples of lived

anarchy and anti-authoritarian interpersonal relationships. And they

have been doing so for at least 100,000 years. But the ever-expanding

agricultural industry embodies the destruction of this last bit of

anarchy.

The Hadza lived the great majority of their lives untroubled by the

civilized world. As the Mesopotamian Empire experimented with

agriculture (which led to desertification and flooding, which are still

the consequences today), as slaves in Egypt were building the pyramids,

as the roman empire rose and fell, as Europeans colonized the world, as

Indigenous peoples on the American continent were slaughtered, as

African people were kidnapped from their homelands to build the “New

World,” the Hadza lived in complete ignorance of colonialism and

agro-imperialism. Until the First World War that is, when the British

colonial government tried to settle the Hadza and make them practice

agriculture. If at first the Hadza profited from the new foods, they

quickly saw no sense in doing heavy work in the fields when adequate

food was freely available in the bush. Another reason why they left the

settlements was the outbreak of infectious diseases which thrive in

sedentary communities, such as measles.

Illnesses are rare among the Hadza. There exists equality between the

sexes and youths can freely explore their sexuality. Women enjoy a high

level of sexual autonomy, in complete contrast to the civilized world.

The Hadza are also completely free from the suffocation of time. Their

sense of time depends entirely on the migrating animals and the changing

appearances of the flowering plants.

But in the last 100 years they have lost more than 90% of their lands

due to the growth of agriculture and civilization threatening their

regions. Cattle displace the usual hunting prey and eat the nuts and

berries up. Due to the overgrazing of the region they have started to

eat the grass roofs of Hadza homes. The trip to a water spring is today

laborious because local agriculture has enormous needs, triggering a

prolonged drought in East Africa and lowering the water tables. Many

Hadza are forced to trade their valuable honey for less valuable

cornmeal with settled communities because food procurement continues to

deteriorate. Due to tourism, for which the Hadza are a popular

attraction, some tribes have come into contact with alcohol for the

first time. Alcoholism and its connected mortality has become a dire

problem. If the Hadza are soon successfully robbed of their territory

and their way of life, and in the course of this forcibly civilized,

another set of living anarchistic interpersonal relationships will die.

Soon there will be nothing left.

Part 2: On Decolonization (and the Technological Components of

Colonialism)

The anarchist struggle is intimately tied to anti-colonial resistance.

State and capitalism occupy the central terrain in both struggles. But

many anarchists (as well as many anti-colonial warriors) often fail to

take into account the various levels of power and oppression that are at

play not just historically but at present. The technological components

of colonialism usually get little attention and anarchism frequently has

a notable eurocentrism.

To speak about decolonization, it must first be made clear: from what do

we want to decolonize, anyway? Colonialism means that a dominant group

exploits, assimilates, and forces its own values and ideals on a land

and its respective population in order to annihilate the lifeways of the

colonized people. Colonialism has occurred all over the world and shown

itself through varied forms of oppression: land theft, enslavement,

rape, the breaking of bodies through work, imprisonment and genocide,

the kidnapping of children, replacement of religions and the

annihilation of spiritual lifeways, the imposition of ones own values

and imaginaries (for instance the gender binary and heteronormativity),

or the plundering of life-giving habitats. All these things have left

deep fissures within colonized peoples (physical as well as spiritual

and psychological) as a system has been forced upon us which we have

neither created nor shaped. These are the things we must heal ourselves

from. Here decolonization comes into play.

Decolonization is about reclaiming what was taken from us and honoring

what we still have. That demands conscious effort. It is valuable to

seek actively what was lost and to remember what was forgotten. We still

live with the trauma colonization inflicted on us, and many of us have

so internalized the imposed values of colonial domination that they are

sometimes more visible in our communities than in today's so-called

“progressive” states. To name one example: before Colonialism there

existed no clear concept of gender. Settler-sexuality enforced the

concepts of the gender binary and heteronormativity in the name of

Science. Values which were so strongly internalized that misogyny and

queerphobia as well as patriarchal structures are widespread among

colonized peoples today.

To decolonize the world, we must therefore first decolonize ourselves.

We must heal from the deep wounds that colonialism left behind. That

demands killing the colonizer in your own head. Decolonization is a way

of life. It is a path that binds us with our past, present and future.

It’s not just political but also personal and spiritual.

The Anarchist Dimension of Decolonization

Anarchism has yielded many different tendencies, but there are

nevertheless three essential cornerstones of anarchistic thought: mutual

aid, direct action, and free association. Mutual aid is the mutual

exchange of resources and support for mutual benefit. Direct action

emphasizes unmediated actions through an attack on the structures of

domination, which I would personally call permanent insurrection. Free

association is the means by which individuals determine how and with

whom they will agitate together.

Anarchist decolonization supports anti-colonial struggles without

placing its own ideals in the foreground. It means considering the

wishes and needs of colonized peoples, even when these don’t correspond

with one’s own wish for anarchy. Thus anarchist decolonization supports

the struggle of the Zapatistas, even when they have voiced that they are

not interested in anarchism (though according to their own statements

there are anarchist Zapatistas among them). Other anti-colonial

movements likewise do not have anarchy as the goal, but rather forms of

Indigenous democracy and communalism, political systems which were

widespread in the precolonial era. The anarchist anti-colonial struggle

requires a respectful exchange of ideas with Indigenous movements in

which distinctiveness and autonomy are respected and ones own ideas are

not assigned to these movements. This is indispensable in order to

hinder recolonizing tendencies in anarchist movements.

While its own ideas should not be assigned to movements, anarchist

decolonization nevertheless places “anarchist values” into a focus that

questions the foundations of civilization. Those marginalized and

racialized are not absolutely free from the dangers of coloniality.

Techno-industrial progress is the art of stealing the wishes of the

conquered. Supporting the sovereignty of colonized people does not mean

that you must support every person, every project, and every movement.

There are many Indigenous, Black, and racialized people who have

internalized the values of colonization, and you do yourself no favors

when you help them come to power. Fight for liberating ideas, not for

nations or bloodlines.

In an anarchist anti-colonial struggle, anarchist decolonization can

show its full spirit and fight for the total liberation of humans and

non-humans. In doing so anarchist decolonization draws on different

anarchist tendencies. Borrowing from the insurrectionary tendency, the

(neo-)colonial state is identified as an occupying power carrying on a

permanent war of greater or lesser intensity to control natural

resources and domesticate people. The feminist and queer tendency offers

an important position from which to identify and destroy the constructs

of patriarchy, the gender binary, and heteronormativity. Of particular

relevance to the anti-colonial struggle is finally the green tendency,

where ecological themes, land defense, and the liberation of human and

animal are put into focus.

The anti-civilization tendency is the most radical among the green

tendencies, recognizing the mechanisms of domination and oppression

inherent to the construct of civilization that first led to colonialism.

It battles the world-devouring Leviathan that exploits all human and

non-human resources and seeks to redirect them into the flow of capital.

The recognition and rejection of overlapping processes of domination,

manifesting in different forms, offers a valuable perspective for the

anti-colonial struggle to make colonialism and recolonization

impossible.

Anarchist decolonization is above all fluid as well as wild and

spontaneous like anarchy itself. It cannot be captured in a single

concept and must always adapt to ongoing colonization.

The Technological Components of Colonialism

Many comrades cannot grasp the technological components of colonialism

(or rather they ignore them deliberately), remaining perplexed at a

perspective based on the urgency of utterly annihilating

techno-domination and the tech industry. If you talk to them about the

connection of technologies to power, they respond with the supposed

neutrality of these technologies and that they can be decoupled from the

very logic of power which developed and produced them.

Such a perspective ignores that the entire framework of fundamental

technologies which have today entered into all fields of social life

stem from military research, and that colonialism, historically and

presently, has a strong technological component. It is in fact a

cornerstone. The process of colonization developed over centuries,

always adding new technologies as soon as they developed. These

technologies are based not only on the exploitation of people in the

Global South and their lands, but were and have always been unleashed

against the “enemy” or tested in the colonies, until they finally make

their way into the empire itself.

With the aid of the British colonies, undersea cables enabled

telegraphic communication in service of the British Empire. New

developments in record-keeping, archiving, and organization of

information were first utilized by the US military intelligence service

during the conquest of the Philippines. Governments today work together

with tech-giants to enable widespread surveillance and control of their

own people. This is first tested in the global south. Microsoft offers a

solution for police vehicles with facial-recognition cameras that was

launched in Cape Town and Durban, South Africa. The “Command-and-Control

Surveillance Platform” named “Microsoft Aware” is utilized in Brazil and

Singapore. Microsoft is also heavily engaged in the prison industry.

They offer a variety of software solutions for the penal system,

covering the whole process. In Africa they have gotten together with a

firm named Netopia offering a “Prison Management Software Platform,”

including “escape management” and prisoner analysis. Countries in the

global south also offer an abundance of cheap laborers for technological

processes and tech giants. These includes data annotators for artificial

intelligence, call center workers, and content moderators for social

media giants like Facebook. They clean disruptive content from social

media feeds and are often left psychologically damaged.

Over centuries, imperial powers have tested technologies for the

surveillance and control of their own populations on foreign

populations; from Sir Francis Galtons pioneering work on fingerprinting,

which occurred in India and South Africa, all the way to America’s

combination of biometrics and innovations in the management of

statistics and data, which constructed the first modern surveillance

apparatus to pacify the Philippines. The wide collection of surveillance

technologies used in the Philippines offered a testing site for a model

that was finally brought back to the United States to set against the

dissidents in its own country. High tech surveillance projects by

Microsoft and their partners suggest that Africa will continue to be

serve as a lab for carceral experiments.

The technological component of colonialism also reveals itself in the

ways and means by which people in the Global South are exploited for

menial and dangerous work as their lands are destroyed, just to provide

supposedly necessary technology. Thus Congo supplies more than 70% of

worldwide Cobalt, a vital raw material for the batteries used in cars,

computers, and smartphones. As for Lithium, the biggest reserves are

found in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, and Australia. Out of these,

Australia is less attractive because the workers there earn dramatically

higher wages. The actual process of mining the raw materials often has

negative consequences to the health of the workers and their

surroundings.

To eradicate colonialism, its causes, main actors, and processes must be

clearly and plainly illustrated and linked. There must be no illusions:

an anti-colonial struggle must inevitably align itself against the tech

industry if decolonization is to live up to its name.

A Postcolonial future?

The shortcomings of imagining a post-colonial future are illuminated in

the utterly bizarre thought experiments of so many people who call

themselves Anarchists but nevertheless represent deeply colonial

worldviews. The most repulsive of these concepts is “Luxury Space

Communism,” whose more fitting name would be Space Colonialism.

Fantasies like these reveal an excess of naivete in liberation

movements. When it is found that everything won’t just fall from the

sky, the Global South will be further exploited until the resources have

disappeared and the earth is burned. But that shouldn’t concern us,

because afterwards we will have the materials we need to colonize space.

“Radicals” will cling to exploitation and oppression when they discover

that their ideal society doesn’t foresee any colonial luxury nor a

system supported by exploitative labor practices. In the end, life as

usual in the warmth of four homely walls is the mightiest and securest

of all prisons.

Anarchists must ask themselves what they are ready to “give up” if their

goal is a truly anti-colonial anarchy, free of every hierarchy, every

exploitation, every oppression. If you are not ready to do without the

many advantages which the Tech Industry has produced, ask yourself the

question of whether anarchy is really right for you. Your beloved gaming

PC with 16GB RAM and the newest NVIDIA GEFORCE is probably one such

product that could no longer exist in a post-colonial future, unless

through some magical means you find a path to non-exploitative

manufacture and production. Until then you must either exploit other

people to acquire the necessary raw materials or you will endanger your

own health to get them. This is even assuming that the necessary

machinery for extraction, production, and manufacture suddenly ceases to

bring about the destruction of the environment and the habitats of the

humans and non-humans within it.

Part 3: On Decivilizing (and a Revaluation of the World)

Since the beginnings of anarchism as a movement and philosophy,

anarchists have continually widened their anti-authoritarian analysis.

Anti-statism and Anti-capitalism were initially not just in focus but

were the sole cornerstones of Anarchism. Frustrated by the male

Anarchists whose conviction was that the liberation of women could wait

until “after the Revolution,” women expanded the anarchist critique of

authority to include patriarchy. Some decades later, queers widened the

feminist analysis yet again.

In recent decades the anarchist analysis has expanded to include a

critique of technology and civilization. After all, anarchism aims at

the destruction of all authority. But anti-civilization analysis,

setting a goal of decivilization, has not been well received by most

anarchist circles. Instead there exists deep misunderstanding and

misjudgment all the way to intentionally malicious defamation. In order

to (hopefully) clear up these misunderstandings, I address the most

common critiques, clarify what is meant by the term civilization

(something which most also misunderstand), and illustrate why

decivilization is perhaps the mightiest tool for Black and Indigenous

Liberation – and for all people, all animals, and the world.

From a Free and Wild Life to Civilized Society

We are taught to believe that our modern lifestyle, characterized by

competition, inequality, and oppression, is an improvement over the

past. But when one considers the facts of human history, this

misconception could not be more false. On the contrary, we have things

to learn from our egalitarian past which reveal how we can revive the

anarchy in our world.

An old African fable teaches us the following:

A group of nomads come upon a tree full of ripe fruit and hold a feast.

In the morning, as they want to depart, a young man fills a pack with

fruit to take with them on the journey so that they will will have more

to eat. An older person in the group stops him: “We don’t have many

rules, but the most important is: We thank, we enjoy, but we don’t take

with.” The young man asked: “But why not?” The elder answered: “Because

the world is rich and will take care of us. But when we take more than

what we need, it is the beginning of the end of our carefree lives and

brings the entire world to catastrophe.”

Pre-civilized lifeways in Africa had such a precise and deep

understanding of the exact nature of their relationships and their

impacts on individual quality of life as well as our collective fate, as

did similar nomadic lifeways throughout the whole world. These groups

managed to lead a peaceful, egalitarian life free from all authority and

oppression, before pastoralism and settlement and finally civilization

was established. For at least 500,000 years – it was probably more like

two million years – our ancestors found a way to live in lasting harmony

with nature. This changed with the arrival of agriculture and

civilization around 10,000 years ago.

In nomadic lifeways there is no place for the accumulation of property

and therefore there is also no great difference in material possessions.

As a rule nomads only own what they can carry. The anthropologist

Marshall Sahlins coined the term “Original Affluence” to describe the

lifestyle of hunter gatherers. This concept of affluence means: “having

enough of everything necessary to satisfy ones needs and a lot of free

time to enjoy life.” Hunter-gatherers reach affluence in the sense that

they want little and don’t produce much, that is they are free of greed.

Nomads live in groups in which there is as good as no material wealth,

but in exchange true wealth: lots of free time to truly enjoy life. The

generally high level of satisfaction, happiness, and love of art, music,

dance, and social games is well documented among many original peoples

like the forest peoples in Central Africa, Aboriginal Australians, and

the various Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.

This original way of life, enjoyed by our ancestors throughout the great

majority of humanity’s time on this earth, has survived even to this

day, though it has retreated sharply and almost died out. In Indonesia

and other parts of Southeast Asia, in the Amazon regions of South

America, and scattered over all of Africa there remain fully functioning

nomadic micro-cultures, which are similar or completely identical to the

life of “Original Affluence.” Although there are differences between

these surviving groups, they have many commonalities. The best

documented present hunter-gatherers are the Hadza in Tanzania, East

Africa, and the Dobe Ju/'hoansi of Southern Africa who live in and

around the Kalahari desert.

A short summary of the most important characteristics of

hunter-gatherers:

-Work (mostly the procurement of food) requires less than half the time

that civilized people spend in factories, offices, and other workplaces.

The absolute majority of food is gathered, while the hunt composes only

a small portion. Work and play are identical.

-Everyone has enough to eat and there is no hunger – by comparison, over

30% of the population in industrial societies go hungry.

-There is no concept of private property.

-Children are raised “permissively.” They educate themselves through

their own self-determined play and exploration. Corporal punishment is

non-existent.

-Outstanding health. Sickness is very rare. When one person is sick or

disabled, they are lovingly cared for by the rest of the group.

-There is no hierarchy, no authority

-Everyone has the same access to resources.

-If one person shows shitty behavior, this person will be shunned until

they cease their bad behavior. Otherwise this person decides for

themselves to join another group, because no one lives (or survives)

long on their own.

The few still-living nomadic groups were crowded out towards the least

productive regions, the edge of their earlier living spaces, over the

last 10,000 years in countless waves of marginalization by civilized

peoples.

There is a multitude of studies on the original transition from nomadic

to settled tribes. For instance, the San People in southern Africa (to

which the Dobe Ju/'hoansi belong) lived peacefully and sustainably for

hundreds of thousands of years before the Bantu peoples came from the

north. The Bantus brought along agricultural methods and technologies,

creating food surpluses and a rapid rise in population, following which

massive and bloody wars between the tribes began.

There are many examples showing that inequality and the proportion of

violence continued to rise after the arrival of agriculture. The

isolated Enga tribe in Papua New Guinea traditionally lived on taro,

yams, half-domesticated pigs, and a little wild game. But the

introduction of the sweet potato, a quick and easy growing plant from

South America, led to a significant rise in the food surplus. This

surplus was fed to the pigs, whose population multiplied. Pigs became

the means of exchange in trade. There thus arose a new political class

which did no real work, instead controlling and manipulating the trade

to their own advantage. In comparison to the poor farmers they became

very rich. Every trace of equality disappeared from there and wars

became ever bigger and more frequent.

Thus humanity traded quality for quantity and gave up freedom and

autonomy for hard work and security. Life has deteriorated from many

different perspectives, for instance through the reduction of our

nourishment from thousands of different plants to just a few cultivated

varieties, leading to the emergence of many new, modern diseases. With

continuous growth and consumption have finally arisen the “Diseases of

Civilization” familiar to us today: cancer, diabetes, heart attacks,

broken digestive health, and much more.

Agriculture brought so many downsides to human life that the scientist

Jared Diamond described it as the worst mistake in the history of

humanity when he wrote: “Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic

diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class

divisions… Thus with the advent of agriculture and elite became better

off, but most people became worse off. Farming could support many more

people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life… Some bands

chose [agriculture]… outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that

chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers

can still outfight one healthy hunter…. It's not that hunter-gatherers

abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to

abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn't

want.”

With the new lifestyle there also came a new division of labor. Farmers

worked much more than before to feed everyone, while others concentrated

on such things as the production of weapons and technologies. The

accumulation of more property brought the rich more negotiating power

and led to an exponential rise in wealth, meaning that the higher class

increasingly exploited the work of the lower class for their own profit.

The transition also brought with it the arrival of centralized power.

Social inequality rose ever higher while societies became ever larger

and more complex. Technological progress enabled an even more

dramatically unequal distribution of wealth.

If the history of humanity started at midnight, then we would almost be

at the end of our first day. We have lived almost the entire day as

hunter-gatherers, from midnight through dawn, midday, and dusk. Finally,

at 11:54 PM, we started raising crops. Hunter-gatherers practiced the

most successful and long-lasting lifestyle in human history. By

contrast, we have been fighting for some 10,000 years against the chaos

that agriculture and civilization has landed us in. It is unclear if we

can find a solution.

It’s high-time we protect the ancient history of anarchism from

systematic extinction. It could be the key to our common future.

The Construct Called Civilization

There is a great deal of uncertainty over the word civilization (that

even a little research on Wikipedia could start to clear up). People who

live together in groups/communities/societies are not necessarily a

civilization. People who live, for instance, as herders and not as

hunter-gatherers are likewise also not necessarily a civilization. A

civilization has unique characteristics.

Civilization is characterized as a complex society in which social and

material living conditions are enabled through scientific and technical

progress and created by politics and economy. With civilization it

always ultimately always comes down to the formation of governments,

states, and borders. Through the newly established hierarchy arises

social classes, division of labor, and inequality. A civilization

universally possesses an ideology containing a belief in progress as

well as the conviction that particular groups are superior to others.

With civilization the worst evils broke out among us: empires,

expansionism, colonialism, capital accumulation, police and military,

prisons, the gender binary, and with it heteronormativity and

patriarchy, wars for resources and land, the rise of classes, fascism,

technocracy…

In short: a civilization centralizes power among a few people to expand

long-term control over other people as well as nature. It is the

absolute opposite of anarchy. Stop defending the civilization construct

by defining it falsely. Civilization stands in the way of a good life

for all. It is nothing other than the biggest prison in the world.

When we support the current liberation movements throughout the whole

world, we should remind ourselves that truly egalitarian and just

anti-authoritarian lifeways are not just possible but have existed far

longer on the African and other continents than the young phenomenon of

tyranny and oppression.

Towards a Decivilization of the World

I do not plead for us to return to the leftover remains of the forests

and go back to hunting and gathering, even if so much speaks in favor.

If we want to solve the many urgent problems confronting us today, we

will need a revaluation of the world. Precivilized and uncivilized

people deliver us valuable lessons that are not only useful but could

protect us from a catastrophe where humanity could cease to exist.

To reclaim the freedom that was stolen from us, the world (or rather

what is left of it) must be decivilized. We must tear to pieces what

civilization has brought forth, and in the ruins of this broken old

world build a new one that is once again habitable for all humans and

non-humans. This envisioned future would not be “primitive” (though it

can be), but it would definitely include much of what primitive people

teach us. In the process of decivilization, which will necessarily last

numerous generations, we must inevitably raise the question of if and

what we can rescue from the wreck of civilization. And when something is

rescued from this wreck, how do we prevent a new revival of tyranny? How

do we maintain Anarchy?

A decivilized world is one thing above all: an unknown future without an

exact timetable. It would be wild and spontaneous like anarchy itself.

But if we as humanity want to survive, decivilization is the only way.

One thing is certain at least: it would be a truly radical

transformation. A radicalness which would deserve its name. A new

beginning in which every foundational pillar of authority is torn and

burned to the ground so something entirely new and liberating can be

created – completely contrary to the desperate aspirations of other

anarchists to reform civilization while leaving 90% of life untouched by

the transformation. Wherever authority is not entirely smashed,

domination and exploitation will always find a new manifestation.

Prejudices Against Anti-Civilization Thought

It seems to me sensible in closing to quickly go over the most prevalent

critiques and prejudices to which anti-civilization thought is

frequently exposed so as to clear out of the way any misunderstandings,

misjudgments, and defamations.

“Anti-Civilization Thought is Primitivism”

No. Primal anarchists are against civilization but not all

anti-civilization anarchists are primal anarchists – taken strictly they

are probably a small minority. And even among primal anarchists there is

no dominant consensus over what a decivilized world should look like. As

Firth Estate once wrote: “The aim is to develop a synthesis of primal

and contemporary anarchy, a synthesis of the ecologically-focused,

non-statist, anti-authoritarian aspects of primitive lifeways with the

most advanced forms of anarchist analysis of power relations. The aim is

not to replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive

as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying forms of anarchy.”

“To be Against Civilization is Queerphobic and Ableist”

This is a particularly “interesting” critique which above all highlights

the nauseating and malicious defamations. Probably the greatest share of

queer and disabled anarchists are anti-civ anarchists, while in fact

“traditional” anti-authoritarian spaces have a problem with queerphobia

and ableism. Thus the question arises of how exactly all of this fits?

Are they really just self-hating queer and disabled people who are

working for their own extinction?

Decivilization would have the consequence of gendering disappearing once

again. By this it is meant that the concept of gender and with it Gender

Dysphoria would cease to exist (it may look different for Body

Dysmorphia). It is civilization which is queer- and transphobic because

it laid out the concept of gender, and in it the gender binary upon

which heteronormativity and patriarchy rest.

Regarding disability, it is held here that it is civilization that is

ableist. Not only are people in civilization reduced to their bodies and

transformed into goods, meaning that only able-bodied people are valued

because they perform the necessary work, but civilization is also

directly responsible for most disabilities. For example: victims of

transportation and work accidents, Thalidomide babies, wartime invalids,

disabilities caused by other illnesses, and, not to forget, the epidemic

of mental illness.

The situation is no different for common illnesses: Diabetes, allergies,

cancer, acne, heart disease, thyroid sickness, and so much more. Why do

you think these are sometimes called “western diseases” or “Diseases of

Civilization?” They are illnesses brought about through our way of life

and do not occur in many primitive peoples, not just hunter-gatherers.

There have been voluminous studies and research on that topic for many

decades. These also show how fast primitive people can “catch” these

when they come in contact with civilization. Lifeways change and people

come in contact with the poisonous environment in industrial societies.

The original diet is replaced with grain, dairy products, industrial

byproducts, and yet more grain – the result: the previously unknown

diseases of civilization break out.

Uncivilized people universally have exceptional health. Diseases are

rare. What few sick and disabled people there are are lovingly cared

for, not left behind. Even the Neanderthals cared for their disabled.

Thus in a decivilized world diseases and disabilities would recede over

the course of time. Not because these will have killed so many people

but because their direct causes will be confronted.

To quote an anarchist comrade with disabilities: “When disabled and sick

people concern themselves with the true causes of their suffering, the

implications are inevitably anti-civilizing. Civilization is the

greatest open air prison – in which the air is extremely poisoned – in

the world. It mutilates us first in body and soul and finally implants

the belief that only civilization can ease our pain.”

“Anti-Civ Anarchists Want to Reduce the Population”

Here we must deal with an allegation which also arises in discussions

about a so-called “over-population.” One thing must be made clear from

the outset: anyone who seeks active control of population numbers

(“Population Control”, leaving sick people behind) is no Anarchist. It

is also irrelevant whether the Earth is “overpopulated,”

“underpopulated,” or “populated just right.” What counts is the here and

now, how we will enable a good life for all people. Besides,

decivilization would be a slow process taking place over many

generations. 10,000 years of oppression will not let itself be undone

tomorrow morning. Population numbers would automatically stabilize over

such a process without any horrible notion of actively grabbing at

control.

Feminists have moreover long argued that humans, free from the

differentiated gender roles and the family structure, would not be

defined by their reproductive capabilities as in a patriarchal society.

This would lead to a lower population. The population would thus

probably sink, in fact automatically.

“Without Civilization People Would Starve, Epidemic Diseases Would

Break Out and there Would be no Medicine to Heal”

Then ask yourself why the Hadza, for example, survive until today.

Hunger didn’t exist in such lifeways, but to a rather high degree in the

civilized world. Naturally you can reply that eight billion people can’t

be fed by hunting and gathering and you would probably be right, even if

food forests appeared overnight where there were once shopping centers,

commercial districts, insutrial complexes, and streets. Precisely for

that reason, even I don’t advocate for a return to pure gathering and

hunting. Perhaps a means of agriculture will be found that is

sustainable enough to provide for all people without continuing the

colossal ecocide. Monocultures are definitely out. Here also, Indigenous

cultures deliver us teachable lessons.

Regarding diseases, it is once again the opposite. Civilization first

made possible the serious outbreak of epidemics. We are currently

treading into an Era of Pandemics. I certainly don’t have a crystal

ball, but I can’t imagine any scenario in a decivilized world where

something like the current Corona Pandemic could kill millions of

people, let alone that such a pandemic could even exist when you have

destroyed its very basis for existence. The past should prove me right:

epidemics first broke out regularly with the arrival of civilization.

There were of course earlier infectious diseases, I certainly don’t want

to lie. But never to the extent reached in the civilized world.

With that we finally arrive at the topic of healing and medicine and

start off with a Fun Fact: an essential part of modern western medicine

is based on the botanical knowledge of Indigenous peoples, which people

appropriated in the course of colonialism and later synthesized.

Indigenous cultures often utilized methods which modern science only

barely understands, if at all. In fact, Indigenous groups as well as

uncivilized/precivilized people have at their disposal not only a deep

knowledge of nature, but also discoveries which have been lost to

city-dwellers.

The majority of modern medicine doesn’t even heal but only relieves the

symptoms. Take for instance medicines for the Diseases of Civilization

like thyroid disease or diabetes, which as a rule must be taken for a

lifetime in order to “manage” the illness. In decivilization, the cure

itself stands in focus. Healing of the fissures which have grown inside

the individual, between people, and between humans and nature. The

fissures made by civilization, by power. Our modern medical progress is

also anything but innocent – stop romanticizing it. Colonialism,

imperialism, and horrific medical experiments largely on the African

continent (as well as in the animal world) were always a part of this

so-called progress. They remain to this day. My ancestors were tortured

and killed so that today a pill can manage your illness brought about by

the modern way of life.

Ask yourself: do I want to stand for the continued existence of this

world, in which my children will be plagued by the same (and new) ills

as me? Or do I want to take this destructive world and destroy it and

renew it so that future generations can be spared from these ills? In

the end, the best medicine is not fighting symptoms. In so doing, new

symptoms often emerge and you end up taking Pill B against Pill A.

Instead, you fight the underlying causes wherever possible. Here, at

least, civilization is honest when it admits that it has created the

worst illnesses and itself speaks of “Diseases of Civilization.”

We have and will all be mutilated in one way or another. Our psyche is

damaged and we are destroyed physically by illness and disease. As

Diseases of Civilization and other infectious diseases withdraw from

life, the need for complex medicine will steadily decrease. A world

which places healing at the center would energetically strive to heal

ills. For the few modern medicines which could possibly be brought into

a decivilized world, people will find non-civilized and anti-colonial

ways to produce them. Today’s science also won’t suddenly disappear into

thin air. (This also shouldn’t be taken to mean that you should suddenly

throw out all your pills just because they have a colonial history

behind them. We must recognize that the ills and destruction of our

bodies brought on by civilization will not be undone overnight. It means

to fight so that future generations will be spared these ills and

destruction by tackling the root causes. Some will be corrected quicker

than others – a change in lifestyle and diet, the abolition of work,

letting wild the surviving specks of the Earth, all can have a quick and

not insignificant impact. On the other hand, some threats will continue

to harm us for a long time. The poisons which have accumulated into the

soils, for instance, will remain with us for decades and centuries.)

With this piece I hope to have offered a glance at a perspective on

restoring our lost anarchy, and to have shown that it is modern society

which is backwards-looking, not primitive lifeways. Alongside

eurocentrism, modern-centrism is revealed to be a grave problem. Our

society endlessly describes the possibilities offered by modern

technology and entirely ignores what it simultaneously takes from us. It

is of critical importance that we examine with sober and objective eyes

what we have won with the coming of civilization, but most of all what

we have lost.