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Title: Land and Freedom Author: Seaweed Date: 2013 Language: en Topics: green anarchy Source: OCR of book PDF Notes: Black Powder Press, 2013. Essays by Seaweed
If ecology is being in a mutually beneficial relationship with the land
that we live on, rather than forcing the land into subservience to us,
it would mean challenging our entire notion of what society is.
What would our planet look like if industrialism were not in place?
Could experiments in living be the solution to the social crises facing
humans and to the ecological crises engulfing practically all
life-forms? Isnât access to land a necessary condition for any
self-organized, self-directed group of people? Will anarchist rebellion
naturally lead to a society of free people living in conjunction with
healthy habitats? If not, what sorts of natural and human relationships
might arise from, and sustain, an ecologically-informed anarchist
rebellion? These were the types of questions I was considering when I
began writing the articles found in this book.
Digressions make conversations interesting, the adage goes, and so it
was with my investigation and research. Along the way I learned that
theories are most often just opinions and ideologues are imprisoned by
ideas. I learned that assertions are generally less interesting than
questions explored among friends. I learned that jargon is a sign of
weakness, and that a manifesto yells while a romance whispers.
I have been inspired by the specific martial skills used by countless
generations of people and communities resisting conquest and how those
people kept martial approaches from dominating their social fabric. The
essay Of Martial Traditions grew out of this interest. We need as many
skills as possible to be successful and we neednât fear that studying
martial abilities leads inevitably to leftism. Martial skills can be
used by individuals or by groups, as part of a push toward the
acquisition of land or to attack an institution or individual. I was
originally inspired by their potential for emerging communities of
resistance, but discovered that these are skills that are useful
generally.
I also discovered the historical existence of a band of escaped
indentured servants in 18th century Newfoundland, Canada who
successfully evaded authority by living in the wilderness for nearly
four decades. You can read about this in The Society of Masterless Men.
Complete transformation, of our relationships with each other and with
our natural environments, is both possible and urgent. The more
widespread the participation in the thrust toward transformation, the
quicker and more likely it will happen. Ultimately, it means overturning
and dismantling the global grid of authoritarian and capitalist
institutions that dominate us. If having a reciprocal relationship with
a natural environment is inherently healthy because this creates
habitats, which in turn sustain their living inhabitants, then a focus
on occupying a land base would seem always positive. Local or regional
undertakings in acquiring these bases seem the most sensible. Actions
around re-appropriating land, because they undermine the state and the
marketâs control over our shared environment, help destroy the global
institutions which prevent us from having land in the first place.
Isnât it likely that the planetary network of authority and economics
can only be defeated through multitudes of local and regional uprisings,
ruptures and occupations, coalescing in an organic way? A single,
overarching, world-wide movement would require complex international
organizations to coordinate and manage, and this would open up the
possibility and even likelihood, for new global institutions to form and
dominate our lives in different ways. At the very least, the less
diverse a movement, in terms of means and participants, the less diverse
will be the resulting outcome, in terms of possible social
relationships, should it succeed.
If we envision global revolution as the merging of countless numbers of
local ruptures and rebellions, we can help prefigure this diversity by
making our practice conform to our vision. â The essay Land and Liberty
fleshes out some possible answers and approaches to questions of habitat
and resistance, of the dynamic between local and global.
I looked into one of the main solutions environmentalists have been
pursuing, i.e. the creation of parks and conservation areas. One of the
many things I learned from this research is that the healthiest natural
environments, often called wilderness areas, were not necessarily
without human occupation. I share some of this research in the article
On Parks. The first parks were indigenous peoples land bases. Many
conservation areas are chosen because they appear pristine and
untouched, but their very health, diversity and even sometimes beauty
are often the result of generations of occupation by people who tended
and protected and interacted with them, and this trend continues today.
Hopefully this fact will help counter some of the misanthropy prevalent
in certain environmentalist circles.
A while ago, many anti-authoritarians were reading and excitedly sharing
a book called Temporary Autonomous Zones by Hakim Bey. This book spoke
to investigations into what kinds of activities are not only worth
initiating, but, given our lives within capitalist civilization, are
possible to accomplish. My piece Permanent Subsistence Zones addresses
those questions with a different answer, positing permanence and
subsistence as the groundwork for the possibility of lives based around
freedom and pleasure. While the specific actions in that article didnât
endure, it is the type of experimenting we need to engage in as part of
our attempt to create ecological relationships with the places where we
live.
Ponds and Oceans, a collection of simple phrases and proverbs, offers a
different way of expressing some of my ideas. They are also a nod to the
game of Go, an ancient board game or mental martial art widely played in
most eastern countries and which uses proverbs as a teaching tool. In
that collection, I use the noun federation and the verb tofederate. I do
not intend these in the leftist sense of a formal organization with
members, policies, a programme, etc., that seeks to take on a political
or representative role. Tofederate, in my usage, means to not be afraid
of collective power or will. Dismantling the institutions that prevent
us from re-appropriating our lives means exploring ways in which to band
together. We do this in order to more successfully protect each other
from, and to take offensive actions against, those institutions, but as
well to practice mutual aid and to cooperate on a larger scale than say
within a group of friends or a single occupation site.
I also include a series of phrases in that piece based around the
concept of withdrawal. While I question civilization, as I understand
it, generally, the civilization which dominates us today is capitalist
civilization. This specific civilization relies on statist and economic
institutions which in turn rely heavily on technological means to
maintain and advance its control. I refer often to secession and
withdrawal, but I do not encourage these activities as a form of
dropping out, but as a strategy for healing, for regrouping, for
training, etc. Furthermore, I recognize that to simply withdraw and try
to defend a place might lead to a series of losing battles, but I donât
think that this is the obvious or predictable outcome. I see withdrawal
as a form of rebellion, as a way of weakening the existing order by
withholding participation in it and ultimately as a way to better
prepare ourselves for attacking its institutions from a place of
communal strength.
Of course, not everyone can do this. I speak from my particular
geographical and cultural place. Iâm not trying to advance a universally
applicable approach to rebellion. Where ever one finds oneself, whether
it is in a prison or a city or a religious cult or a factory or
whatever, one does oneâs best to fight against the immediate experience
of living under the civilized order. We need to attack and not just
withdraw, but we also need to withdraw and not just attack. A dynamic
between the two seems most promising.
As it stands now, some prioritize attack (black bloc, demos, strikes,
sabotage, etc.) then disperse and disappear, which is ineffectual, while
others withdraw (form communes, co-ops, community gardens, avoid wage
labor, etc.) and never attack, which is equally so.
With the wisdom of hindsight, we can see that certain permutations of
human organization are inherently destructive, both to our individual
existences and to the environments that sustain us. These are the urban
and authoritarian arrangements. The controlled existence of mass society
is simply harmful and unnecessary.
There are infinite variations on how humans can organically
self-organize in much healthier ways, so there is no need for blueprints
or proposals to present that might detail such anarchic arrangements.
However, I do allow myself to take a brief speculative stroll into the
immediate future of a city following the destruction or collapse of
urban society in my opening essay, An Open Offer. This might give the
impression that I am arguing for transitional time periods. But this is
not the case. Clearly cityscapes can be re-naturalized to some extent,
but urban living itself is antithetical to anarchic ways.
Therefore, I would argue for the abandonment of cities and against the
herculean efforts which would be necessary to redesign, reform and
rehabilitate them. But there might be places where rehabilitation is
necessary, for many reasons, and I am using this essay to point out that
in these areas a transition from city to autonomous clan or village,
from atomized urban dweller to free, wild being is possible.
The means of production did not have to develop from empire and
conquest, through primitive accumulation to feudalism and on through to
industrialism on a long painful path to utopia, a belief touted by both
the lords of capitalism and the Marxist prophets of socialism. All that
blood and exploitation and sacrifice have causes located in domination,
not in any inevitable or desirable direction toward the positive
achievements of something called âprogress.â Partly because of this, you
will find within my meta-narrative a great admiration for many of the
cultures of land- based peoples, which I find consistently superior to
urban/civilized ones. I believe that many primitive people consciously
refused to allow institutions of domination to take root in their
societies. This is an important difference from others who believe that
because the non-civilized never had authoritarian institutions which
they destroyed and dismantled, we canât consider them examples of
authentic anarchic cultures.
Urban societies are founded on constraints, on maintaining their regimes
by suppressing the individual not only through laws but through the
generalized fear of ungoverned individuals. But political authority and
institutional bullying are inherently weak or non-existent in
small-scale cultures. Therefore, free individuals have a far greater
chance of surviving and thriving outside of urban (massified) existence.
Or to put it another way, within small scale sets of social
relationships constraints on the individual are much more difficult to
establish.
Society, in the sense of that which is hostile and oppressive to the
individual, has as a precondition: urban life.
Small bands of friends or even the human relationships which exist in
small villages are not societies. Of course, I am talking about
voluntary associations between people on a small scale. Iâm aware that
authoritarian cults, for instance, exist regardless of their size. I
look at de-massifying our lives as important not only as a way of
healing the environment through the eradication of industrialism, but
because the more massified our settlements, the more human freedom is
reduced.
Individual freedom thrives within a group of other free individuals, but
the larger the group, the greater the depth and width of the constraints
and the more impersonal the control mechanisms. Small groups of free
individuals do not seem to legitimately constitute societies. One can be
embedded in a group (which in turn is embedded in a place) and not
experience any inherent antagonisms with the relationships that together
constitute the collective. A group of people sharing agreements and
practicing subsistence together does not establish a society. It is in
this sense that the ungoverned, nature-loving individual is at the heart
of my conception of an ecologically minded anarchism.
A group of friends who have been exploring many of the same proposals in
this collection have recently begun using the expression
âinsurrectionary subsistenceâas a way to summarize their ideas. Keep an
eye out for pamphlets, magazines and essays with this headline in it if
you are interested in broadening your understanding or participating in
associated activities. I have been using âorganically self-organized
subsistence movementsâ, which also grew out of our discussions and
actions, as an encapsulating phrase. Both of these give an idea of the
direction some of us believe rebels should be going in.
It is my hope that these articles contribute some original thought, but
I would be most pleased if they helped foster a new spirit.
This is an encouragement for local, anti-authoritarian secessionist
activity aimed at acquiring land bases. This push for different ways of
living would be characterized by new ecological insights and awareness,
an inspiration from primal ways, and a desire for autonomy, both
individual and collective.
Secessionist action is not aimed at establishing new, smaller
nation-states, but toward the creation of stateless zones. The actions
aim for a decisive break from a world that damages and stunts us.
Secessionists secede not only from nation states but ideology as well.
This type of rupture is based in a desire for new relationships, between
each other, within ourselves and with the world that surrounds us.
This is about notions of regeneration and renewal, a call to look to the
time after the death and darkness of civilization as one when life will
return and growth will begin anew. It is an appeal for a persistent,
global May Day, to ideas and actions inspired by the midpoint between
the spring equinox and the summer solstice, the time when the sun is set
free to bring the pleasurable warmth of summer back to earth once again.
Numerous ancient cultures were suffused with anarchic qualities.
Sexuality and fertility were viewed as joyous expressions of wild
nature, of creation. Ecstatic community dances rejoicing in the many
cherished wonders of life were common. Let our rebellions aim for
planetary rejuvenation, let them signal a time to celebrate abundance
and fecundity, let them be yearnings for new life and blissful days in
the pleasing heat of our new season.
Humans are at a juncture. We can continue to be conned, obedient
citizens who venerate the market and respect the institutions of
capitalist civilization or we can try to put into practice new ways of
living, ways that implicitly acknowledge the rich potential that comes
with freely-chosen communalism, that honor earth wisdom and continued
renewal. The techno-utopian argument remains wholly unconvincing. Who
wouldnât rather have clean rivers flowing with abundance, intact
mountains and healthy forests, teeming with wildlife and purifying our
air, than polluted rivers supporting only a few contaminated fish,
mountains cleaved in half for coal and minerals and forests reduced to
monoculture or scraped into clearcuts?
These attempts would be highlighted by the widespread sharing of skills,
resources, and burdens now carried by individuals and families locked
into their private lives. They would also involve the creation of common
lands, gardens and gathering spaces, collective child rearing and
collective responsibility for shelters. Subsistence activities would be
explored and practiced. Secessionists would consciously aim at
permanently freeing their territory, their habitat, from political
power.
In the beginning, openness for intimacy with others, with strangers will
be essential, because we have all become strangers to each other.
Ultimately, these local movements aim for true kinship, authentic
community, genuine inter-relationships that allow each individual to be
all that she can be yet part of a whole. These expressions of collective
will would involve measures of offense and defense, for there are those
who cannot accept community autonomy, who fear individual freedom or who
have an interest in maintaining control from the top.
Many people now assume that a pitiless chaos is on the horizon. A chaos
birthed and driven by a social system based on hierarchy and
exploitation. Our fragile biosphere is sick. Its health is deteriorating
fast. Desertification of vast areas, global warming, diminishing
sunlight, widespread cancer, and daily extinctions are but a few of the
symptoms. Our planetâs diversity of life forms is in peril.
This crisis has been caused by the institutions of the state and the
urban ways of industrial capitalism. It is maintained by our belief in
ideologies. Our way out is to collectively de-urbanize and
de-industrialize. It is to relearn how to feed and shelter ourselves
without governments or markets. It is to create our habitats as we are
simultaneously created by them, thus re-establishing a healthy
relationship with our environment.
Unfortunately, every crisis is compounded by the existence of yet other
crises on our horizon: nuclear waste waiting to sit up like a corpse and
spread its death, the ongoing possibility of nuclear war, the
disappearance of the protective ozone layer, scarcity of potable water,
and even complete ecological meltdown. The warning lights are blinking
wildly, the alarms are getting louder and the elders are warning us:
itâs urgent.
Our future is shrinking.
Will there always be seeds of the old world in the revolt for the new?
Perhaps, but a genuine rebellion wonât be fertile ground for them to get
established. Liberating humans from urban life is possible. We are all
potential agents of change. By emphasizing local resistance, our
strengths become more obvious and defeatism wanes. We need not prolong
the time it takes to travel from the possible to the impossible.
This isnât to say that an international anti-authoritarian uprising
canât or wonât happen. It is to ask how might this come about if we
recognize that institutions of domination are complex and global, and
that there are too many variables for any particular minority group to
grasp and control in order to strategically and intentionally instigate
such a global process. Many Marxists hold that planned, coordinated
revolutions are possible by putting our power into the hands of a
specialized intelligentsia and often the political party they work for,
but history has shown us the misery and repression waiting for us when
we do allow them to hijack our insurgencies.
The breaks I am encouraging donât require the permission of parents,
parties, or productive forces. There is no need to wait for history,
god, or material conditions to authorize them. Iâm exploring willful
ruptures among friends, neighbors, fellow conscripts and comrades,
ruptures and breaks that are valid adventures unto themselves, yet might
coalesce into something larger, something planetary even.
Where do authentic rebellions originate? Most often they originate where
people spend a lot of time together and therefore know each other enough
to have shared their misery and their desires, to have built some trust:
ghettos, neighborhoods, factories, universities, prisons, reservations.
Frequently rebellions happen along tribal, ethnic or kinship lines.
Of course, any individual who wants to make a break, who wants to live
an intense life, can. This is making oneâs life a cause sufficient unto
itself. These folks can inspire others, can implicitly give others
permission to stand up and shine and flourish. But, when such
individuals are embedded somewhere, are surrounded by friends and
neighbors with whom they try to have real relationships, the virus can
take hold, the contagion can spread. If they are entenched only in a
milieu, a scene or subculture based exclusively around shared outlooks
or interests, then the contagion will likely be contained by its
typically narrow demographic limits. Occasionally, anti-authoritarian
radicals from these sub-cultures can join in various oppositional
struggles to try and push them further or in order to question notions
of directors and representatives, but these opportunities arenât always
present and nevertheless we shouldnât be basing the realization of our
dreams and desires on a strategy of intervening in reformist revolts.
The endless stream of ecological and social catastrophes can be stopped.
When youâre in a battle you donât have many choices: continue to fight,
surrender, or retreat and regroup. It would be wise to look at all of
the means at our disposal, to consider all of the paths that might lead
us to a place and time where self-organized people can create the lives
they choose.
If we exclude surrendering, whatâs left?
Fighting includes riots, sabotage, insurrections, and other forms of
self-organized mutiny. Some may be spontaneous, like waves that seem to
swell up suddenly wherever you live that you can participate in. Others
might involve instigation and intent, like blockades and occupations.
We can withdraw, drop out, encourage absenteeism, stop participating and
refuse various forms of conscription. We can regroup, build trust, come
to some agreements, and then perhaps lay some plans.
We can also plant seeds for the future. This sometimes involves
attempting to create a different world here and now. Other times, it
means acquiring skills and tools that may be useful for sustenance
should a cataclysm turn the world upside down. This would help ensure
that the Old World doesnât immediately return to prevent genuine New
Ones from taking hold. It often prioritizes withdrawal over direct
attacks. Sharing skills, growing food, hunting and fishing, prioritizing
conviviality, pirate radios, gatherings, and communal child rearing are
just some examples of this approach.
There is no approach that guarantees that we can realize a more
unprejudiced and authentic world, a world without commodities or money,
without states or wage labor, without prisons and politicians. In fact,
the most we can likely hope to intentionally accomplish is to free,
temporarily or permanently, our home, the place where we live, of these
institutions and ways and values.
Of course, we want our rebellions to be global because our adversary is
global, yet we must avoid being paralyzed by an attitude that views all
local attempts and activity as marginal and ineffective. We have to
counter all of the doctrines that promote a view of humans as helpless,
powerless objects of history. History can be a story that we all have a
voice in authoring. It is our activities, taken collectively, that
create history.
But right now our powers are under the control of malevolent, impersonal
institutions which we ironically reinforce by continuing to not only
obey, but believe in, as though they were gods. There are gods, but they
are you and me. We are just afraid of our powers, ofthe possibilities
they might unleash.
One thing is certain: waiting, either for ecological or economic
collapse, for global rebellion or local insurrection, can not be the
main choice. We can change the world because we can change our world,
the place where each of us lives.
A NEW WORLD canât BE CREATED BY THE ACTIVITIES OF A small group of
radicals. However, there is no megalomania in considering critically the
possibility of initiating and participating in a local, organically
self-organized thrust aimed at freeing the place where we live from the
selfish, myopic bullies that enforce injustice, ecological plunder and
exploitation. And this process could be healing, because it would likely
create the space and the possibility for better relations between us and
these new relations would in turn create the possibility for a complete
rupture with the current reality of sickness and domination.
Yet, it isnât just an economic class and their henchmen and police that
need to be confronted, but the values that permeate authoritarian
societies generally. In other words, each of us must also wage an
internal struggle and in the process free ourselves and help create an
atmosphere that supports others doing the same.
The organic world consists of paradoxes, chaos, spectrums, and
gradations, not engineered grids, predictable patterns, and axioms. No
person or world view or ideology has all the answers. By trusting our
instincts and our desires, new possibilities will open. We can make
public what Power wants to keep private: our dreams, our visions, our
unhappiness and our anger.
The thousand-mile journey begins with the first step; an old truth.
Authoritarian civilization is founded on our systematic self-enslavement
and self-exploitation. Humans are at the helm, our fathers, brothers,
sisters, and mothers are at the helm. Almost every one of us contributes
to reproducing this authoritarian, destructive, unjust, oppressive and
unimaginative planetary realm. It is hegemonic and, therefore, difficult
to live outside of.
Yet one persistent mutiny on this global slave ship called civilization
could unlockall the doors, could let loose the animals, could let us all
find our wings and our immortality once again. Any generation can change
the world. But one generation must soon, because there may not be a
future one healthy enough to do it.
This transformation would create the possibility of authentic, intense
lives lived in genuine, autonomous communities embedded in healthy
habitats.
And having a healthy habitat in which to live offers the possibility of
having a sense of place. A sense of place in turn offers the opportunity
for rediscovering feelings and experiences of awe, reverence and wonder,
not for science and technology, but for nature and its marvels.
The simple proposal is this: a widespread insurgency, based on a
multitude of local rebellions, each one demanding enough land to sustain
its inhabitants. More specifically, occupying or re-occupying territory
with the explicit view that it becomes our habitat. And these
withdrawals, while ends in themselves, as far as flourishing under
adversarial conditions goes, are also only a means to a much greater
vision. We withdraw to build strength, to succeed for ourselves but also
in order to offer assistance to other revolutionary projects and
attempts, to intertwine our liberated spaces with the struggles ofothers
who want to make a final break with global institutions of domination.
Yes, we have much anger and rage toward the class of rulers; yes, we are
inspired by expressions of hatred and destruction aimed at the bullies
who organize society. But here I suggest that we emphasize, among
ourselves, fraternity and cooperation. This proposal is about intent,
about not waiting for the right conditions, about consciously taking
advantage of the cracks and fissures in the dominant reality wherever
you live, prying them open, creating space for ourselves. It is from
many of these free camps that capitalism might potentially be attacked,
as rebels and dreamers join with others for whom life under the
civilized order is unbearable.
In the long term, acquiring a home, a habitat, is essential. This means
freeing up colonized land, rehabilitating plundered land, or seizing
land. In the short term, it might mean rent strikes or squatting. It
could involve wilderness camps, fishing shacks, shared berry patches,
collective harvesting of wild foods and group gardening and
permaculture, etc. Learning from and being in solidarity with people of
the land, elders and traditionalists among indigenous people for
instance, who may live nearby, might be a priority. It seems obvious
that acquiring food in groups, and sharing food among many, are possible
foundation stones. From every angle, a land base becomes essential.
In a small but significant way, this is a proposal to take the
initiative, because we canât win if we are always on the defensive.
These organically self-organized subsistence movements are autonomous
but linked, small but many, local but together spread out, and occupy
great amounts of territory. They donât want new popes or statesmen,
better governments or better representation, new countries or new
republics. They aim for a world of clans, tribes and villages, of
freedom and community.
This strategy doesnât aim for a mass movement, but for a dynamism
oflocal rebellions that offers to sweep up everyone who isnât afraid of
being energized and carried by it.
There are no books necessary to read, no leaders to follow, no
traditions or jargon or vocabulary to adopt. You donât have to live in
the countryside or in the city. It is homegrown, like a euphoric weed
that grows everywhere and spreads easily. It is against the laws of the
unjust, the arrogant and the elite, the powerful, the intolerant, and
the unimaginative. It is strengthened by critical observation. It has no
room for bullies. It is intuition and rationality, hand in hand. This
effort would be courageous and celebratory. It would succeed through
persistent self-directed activity by people without labels.
It promises to be an incredible voyage, and you are invited!
Any authentic anti-authoritarian resistance should be an offer: an open
offer to all who cherish freedom, sharing, giving, healthy habitats,
mutual aid, cooperation and voluntary association.
It isnât just for the ultra-exploited or the severely marginalized. It
isnât open only to the excluded or the imprisoned or the hungry and
poor. But it listens carefully to all these voices because they know
firsthand of the most brutal hardships authoritarian systems impose on
their inhabitants. It doesnât scapegoat anyone because of their genital
morphology. It doesnât point self-righteous fingers at skin tones or
linguistic groups. It doesnât exclude some because of their place of
birth on the social ladder. It has a low tolerance for judgment, guilt
and shame as weapons and tools. We are all in this mess together, and we
need to make room for all of us to contribute meaningfully to a way out.
Our solidarity is an invitation to all.
But History has created identities marked by privilege for some,
victimization and powerlessness for others, and the rebellions are
determined to free everyone from these chains. In the meantime, there
can be no place for those who want power, who want to control others.
An anarchic rebellion aimed at healthy habitats and free, unique
individuals embedded in authentic communities, makes room for the old
and the frail, for the young and the strong, for the impatient and the
patient, for those who are repulsed by violence and those who view its
use as another weapon in our arsenal. Morality and dichotomous world
views cannot choose it, because it is an organic, site-specific impetus.
Each region, each town, neighborhood, affinity-culture, or tribe can
base its secession from the nation-state on their own desires, tenets,
and dreams.
Starting from a circle of friends--or a neighborhood, an eco-village, an
island, a commune, an ethnic group, part of a city, a city, a region, a
clan, a reserve, a cult--its ultimate aim is always access to territory
from which the group can sustain itself. This means that it always seeks
access to land. Naturally, there is room for wandering lone wolves,
nomadic families, and hobo tribes, as long as free villages and
liberated zones arenât viewed as mini welfare states for them to depend
on.
Do you know how to grow or gather food? Do any of your neighbors? I
donât mean a weekend garden, but enough to sustain you and your extended
family over a winter. Should the capitalist market collapse, and the
stores all get looted, what would you eat? Do you have seeds, a fishing
rod or a hunting weapon? Do you know how to use any ofthese? Is there a
place unpolluted enough that you could goto for food? Are you part of a
tribe, a community or a clan? Are you woven tightly enough into any
social group that would be willing to help each other out in a time of
crisis, or are you an atomized individual whose social group consists
mostly of your immediate family, with a few friends you see occasionally
at work or at play?
The vast majority of Europeans and North Americans, and of urban
dwellers everywhere, are just like you. They have no seeds, no survival
skills and no fishing rod or hunting weapon, belong to no genuine
community, havenât a garden or access to an unpolluted place from which
they can gather food or medicine. You arenât alone, at least in your
predicament.
One doesnât always have the option of joining in social disturbances,
most often you have to take responsibility and help create them. This
isnât as difficult as you might think at first. It involves taking time
away from work. It means saying hello to a stranger. It asks you to turn
off your TV and other weapons of social control. Where possible, it
involves exploring the wilderness and countryside closest to you.
Revolt requires being optimistic in the face of the nearly
insurmountable. It means viewing privacy not as something to preserve
and protect, but to unburden oneself from. It demands that you spend
more time with children, not only yours, but children in general. It
requires you to envision humans as a collection of individual life-forms
each an integral part of a natural home.
Cities are not habitats. City folk can, indeed must, participate in a
push against urban living, because city ways are one of the roots of our
predicament and it is city inhabitants who will suffer the most in the
coming years.
Obviously, hundreds of millions of people canât move out of cities
overnight. So perhaps bringing some wilderness to the city might be part
of the route back home. Cities must be de-citified. It will take
insurgent imagination and imaginative insurgencies. Cities can become
partly abandoned, partly re-created into a collection of autonomous
villages and zones separated by vast tracts of orchards, gardens,
re-emerging forests and re-establishing wild nature, the whole region
healed by becoming a sort of vast permaculture zone.
And cities donât end where the suburbs dissipate into farmland. Rural
living presently is but the flip side of the same coin of capitalist
civilization. Rural people also work and shop and pay rent or mortgages
and live out atomized lives. The air is cleaner and at least one might
spot a deer and watch the stars at night, but private property, work and
cops also control the countryside. There too, habitats are invaded,
plundered, polluted. Country folk are also incarcerated, carcinogized,
monitored, and punished.
Our destruction of urban life entails the destruction of rural life. The
goal is a geography where villages and clans and groups of friends
dominate the social landscape, not vast tracts of farmland that feed
cities or country estates that the privileged and lucky retreat to. The
goal is healthy natural homes, the creation ofhealthy environments and
the healing of sick ones that can sustain all the life forms that live
within them.
Imagine your city neighborhood without cars. The sounds are returning:
birds, leaves rustling, children laughing and squealing. The smells are
returning too. In springtime and summer, the perfumes ofbuds and
blossoms and new growth fill the air; the haze from automobile pollution
is beginning to dissipate and the sky is visible again. Itâs so much
safer to be outside without two-ton machines whizzing by at 60
kilometres an hour. Most of the roads are breaking up from the new
shoots pushing through the pavement and concrete. There are footpaths
everywhere. Even bicycles seem strangely out of place.
Parks have become community gardens and orchards. Creeks and small
rivers are beginning to form and re-form here and there. Someone claims
that a salmon was spotted moving up a regenerating creek during spawning
season. Life is returning!
Sharing and giving have become the preferred way of circulating
everything. You donât get up and head to work in a factory or a mine or
in a store or for someone elseâs profit. You pack a lunch and head to
the garden. Itâs a long day, but an enjoyable one.
There are over a hundred people in your vast community garden. Today you
are all weeding and watering and mulching and repairing fences and water
catchment systems. There is a playground inside it where the children
play. But in every place some food is also wild crafted, gathered and
fished and hunted, depending on where the city was located and on the
level of knowledge of its inhabitants. Gardens need fences and constant
attention. As subsistence skills spread and grow, gardens and orchards
contract, making room for the expansion of dream and play time, for the
nurturing and blossoming of carnal and ludic adventures.
Tomorrow is music day in the field just outside the garden. There will
be a bonfire with wild meat and fish and herbs shared. What used to be a
dead zone, a polluted, homogenized, top down city, a habitation without
wildness, an insane density of atomized people is turning into a
fascinating collection of autonomous neighborhoods and villages.
If you walk an hour south, you enter what used to be just another aspect
of the same standardised urban life of producers and consumers that
existed everywhere before the rupture succeeded. Now it is like going to
another realm. A different etiquette, different ways of food gathering
and preservation, different approaches to sexuality, perhaps even a
different dialect have all been slowly emerging. Everything there is
different because individuality was allowed to blossom and communal
identities only take hold organically and voluntarily. One doesnât have
to travel to a faraway place for adventure, in search of diversity or
difference anymore. Walk to any other village, only a couple of hours or
so away and you enter a unique zone.
In the countryside, subsistence might immediately be the primary way of
living. In the healing zones of formerly urban centers, permaculture
might take center spot. Permaculture is a set of practices that
emphasize efficiency in our food production activity. Composting human
waste into manure, for instance would be such a practice. Within
permaculture philosophy and practice, various food preservation
techniques need to become a widespread set of cultural skills. In this
sense, permaculture might be a stepping stone while crossing the
turbulent waters of post-urban living.
And there are places inside the city walls where no one enters anymore.
These are the dead zones. They are so polluted and ugly and unsafe to be
in that long ago we piled up a mountain of rubble around them to make
sure that everyone knows to stay away: a chemical factory, a prison,
places of psychological ugliness and ecological sickness. This is why
specific physical areas of cities will need to be abandoned, not just
the urban ways that sustained them.
Whether cities were just a bad experiment and shouldnât be repeated, or
whether they were an imposition of forces opposed to genuine living,
re-forming them canât be part of the solution. Transformation will be
the healing medicine this time. Our land bases will be places where
experiments in living are a constant opportunity.
What is subsistence? Subsistence means committing to a place and the
people who live there. It means generally getting food from your region
because that is the geographical area that you understand and are
familiar with and therefore you know when and how much of each item or
animal is acceptable to gather or hunt.
Subsistence means fishing with friends. It means preserving food with
others in your group or village or clan or whatever. Subsistence is
getting together, voluntarily, with folks that you have an affinity
with, to provide yourself with food and shelter and musical instruments
and friendship.
Subsistence means abundance and balance, it means wildness and harmony
at once. Subsistence is not an impoverished, depleted existence.
Time spent repairing the fishing nets or pickling vegetables or building
a communal smokehouse isnât alienated time. It is meaningful and joyous.
In some places likely characterized by songs and mead, in others by
quiet satisfaction. It means providing for yourself where you live.
Subsistence is participatory. It involves understanding your habitat and
finding a healthy place within it.
Subsistence could be the bedrock upon which an anarchic cultureâs ways
rest on. It is the foundation of a healthy, independent, autonomous set
ofliving practices, based on the cycles of the place where you live.
Sense of place. Sensual wisdom.
This doesnât mean that primal people donât make mistakes. But overall,
they rely on directly lived experience complimented by generations old
wisdom to make their decisions.
Life in nature isnât nasty brutish and short. This is a lie of the
fearful and the fear mongers, of ruling classes set on the conquest of
land-based people.
Subsistence means no or very little material waste: no dumpsites, no
burning piles of garbage, no necessity of a recycling industry, and no
mountains of appliances, gadgets and plastic. It is based in the natural
cycles of your groupâs land base. It means respecting nature where you
live and all of the life forms that you share your habitat with, even
the ones that are threatening to you, because we are all interconnected.
Subsistence isnât about dumpster diving, scams, food banks, stealing and
welfare cheques. Subsistence is directly participating in a
collectivityâs future and thus ensuring your own.
For now, a group of five or ten folks acquiring food and shelter
together is a form of surviving or pioneering. Fifteen or twenty people
providing food and shelter for themselves, communally rearing their
children, and generally taking care of each other is perhaps the ember
of a clan, but true kinship probably takes a few generations.
When fifty or more people spend their lives, within the context of a
successful break from the current world of hierarchy and private
property and ideology, making sure that everyone within their group is
fed and sheltered and nurtured and have built an infrastructure of ways
and tools to assist them, anarchy begins to take hold.
This speculative glimpse is just my notion of how an urban area might
de-urbanize should the present social order get cast overboard. Today,
inhabitants of rural communes and eco-villages can practice some
subsistence skills, but these are generally projects of the fortunate,
out of reach of the majority, and canât be viewed as the primary tactic
of a thrust toward autonomous, genuine communities embedded in nature. A
rural intentional community based around principles of mutual aid,
cooperation and ecology might be a qualitatively superior place to live
than most others, but truly self-directed people embedded in a habitat
requires secession from private property and a refusal to obey the laws
of both the market and the nation-state.
Power abhors subsistence. Capitalism depends on obedient producers and
consumers spending our lives shopping and at work, not friends and
neighbors practicing communal self reliance within a shared habitat. But
together we can say no, we can disobey, and in this negativity there
will birth a positive and creative force.
Even those of us in what appear to be peaceful countries are deeply
involved in a war. It is a social and a political war. It is a war of
ideology versus freedom of thought. It is a war of industrialism against
healthy environments. It is a war between the included and the excluded,
between the individual and the constraints imposed by impersonal
institutions.
The vast majority of the worldâs population consists of defeated peoples
in this war. In fact, we are more than just defeated. We are kept: kept
in fear, kept in awe, kept out of touch with each other and the earth
that gives us life. It has been said that our chains are long and our
cages big, yet we are still prisoners. Coercion is everywhere, including
the necessity to sell our labor for a wage, forced obedience to laws,
conscription in imperial armies, and compulsory moralities and
schooling.
The occupying physical forces are essentially the police and the army.
Over the centuries, weâve internalized much of the values and ideas of
the conquerors and have thus been assimilated into the ways of the
obedient and the domesticated. But Iâd like to explore our physical
occupation, not the various skins that we must shed and the fears we
must lose.
If people want to claim space, then they have to be prepared to fight
and defend it. This space could be permanent (a liberated region or
village) or temporary (squats, wilderness camps, legally and illegally
built shelters or autonomous neighborhoods). It could be based in
village or regional secessionist movements, access to land by popular
movements or indigenous assertion over traditional territories.
Those of you familiar with the events in Kahnesatake, a Mohawk reserve
outside of Montreal from which the cops were physically chased out of
town a while ago, are aware of how successful an organized martial
action can be. Canadian anarchists and other insubordinates have an
incredible amount of insight and inspiration to glean from that event.
People can claim space if they get organized and arenât afraid to lose a
few teeth.
With this in mind, perhaps a look at history generally will help us
discover how others in our predicament have successfully organized
themselves martially. There are countless examples of rebels organizing
themselves and winning a few battles.
Official history is written by the conquerors. Their self-congratulatory
folklore is that we (rebels) have always lost because the conquerors
were superior (and thus had superior weapons). Most of us assume that
this is true, so we might as well not even try a martial approach
because weâre sure to lose. But this isnât the case. In North American
history for instance, the dishonest image of the technologically
advanced Europeans overrunning primitive savages needs to be
re-examined. All over this continent, the indigenous peoples rose up and
used martial skills to repel the invasions. In most instances, at least
initially, they had some success.
Letâs look at an example from one of the very first invasions. In 1521,
in what is now called Florida, the Calusa and Timucua defeated
experienced conquistadors under Ponce de Leon and Hernandez de Cordoba.
In fact, both of these conquerors died of wounds inflicted by the
Calusa! For half a century the indigenous tribes repelled the Spanish in
that region. The invasion by de Leon and de Cordoba was the fourth
invasion by Spaniards repelled successfully by local tribes-people.
Throughout the invasions, there were numerous examples of success. In
many instances, the indigenous successfully defended their territory for
decades, some even succeeded for generations. Europeans would not have
ultimately won without adopting some native technology and skills, even
as the indigenous peoples also adapted European technology and tactics.
In his excellent book, Warpaths, author Ian Steele explains that:
âSpanish crossbows had failed to compete with Amerindian longbows that
were six tc. seven feet long, thick as a manâs arm, and very accurate at
two hundred yards. Although Spanish armor had been effective against
most arrows encountered on three continents, these . . . arrows
penetrated six inches of wood and even Spanish breast- and back plates.â
Attack needs to be organically self-organized in a broad, horizontal,
diverse way, and if it is based within entire communities, I think that
it has a better chance of succeeding. Regional and village-like
secessionist movements might be expressions of this, but so too would
occupy sites. Centralized authority cannot control a multitude of
rebellious fronts: regions, villages, reserves, and neighborhoods, each
with its own focus, its specific expression of anti-authoritarian
self-organization. For all the criticism anarchists have heaped on the
Zapatistas in Chiapas, I think we have more to learn from them than the
other way around. Also, by collaborating with or at least acknowledging
indigenous actions for autonomy and territory, we can be part of
something much larger, something quite close to what many insurgent
communitarians, radical ecologists, anarchists, and other rebels are
aiming for.
Part of breaking out involves shedding all those ideological skins
grafted onto us through schooling, the mass media, living in nuclear
families, etc. But my involvement with rebels over the past 25 years
tells me that most of us already know that this is important. What we
donât seem to inventory is the means available to us to counter our
physical occupation. After all, it is only by ridding ourselves of
organized coercive authority that we will truly begin to have real
opportunities to profoundly transform ourselves and to take back our
lives. Can a local area succeed against this coercion and against the
imperialism of the market? If so, what are some of the first steps?
Part of being an insurgent today could involve acquiring martial skills.
Martial traditions include everything from fighting techniques, fighting
theory, group cohesion and earth knowledge, to skill with a weapon. This
isnât a call to âarmed struggleâ but for inclusion of a neglected aspect
of a more all-inclusive approach to rebellion. Most simple weapons are
also useful tools and we should make use of them in that context, for
instance by learning hunting skills, then bringing home some wild meat
to share with friends so we can stop relying on dumpsters and food banks
and jobs, as well as using them for self-defence or to chase away
adversaries. The bonus is that our possession and familiarity with them
could be extremely useful in a crisis situation or during a popular
revolt.
The prisons are full. The factories and mines are full. A small class of
people calls all the shots. A wave of extinction is denuding the planet,
a tsunami caused by a system that is imposed from above. Entire
populations are on anti-depressant and anti-anxiety pills.
We need to regroup and heal and make plans for re-appropriating our
lives. Encouraging individuals and groups of rebellious people to get
some training in survival and martial skills seems like common sense.
These various individuals and groups would help create a new
anti-authoritarian culture that includes a widespread acceptance of a
martial component. Rhetoric and politeness have ruled us for too long. A
more martial approach should be given an opportunity to contribute to
attempts at creating new relationships grounded in imaginative, healthy
cultures.
The support for martial skills could translate into anti-authoritarian
militias and other semi-formal groupings that exist over time, or more
fluid entities like the black bloc that manifest themselves
spontaneously and informally when the need arises. Either way, the
intention is that there are groups of individuals able and perhaps
willing to help their neighbors, comrades, and friends claim space to
express anger, resist the plundering of their habitat, and help various
grassroots initiatives to fight back through the practice of martial
approaches. When a squat is about to be evicted or a wilderness camp
burned by authorities, for instance, they might show up to give moral
and physical support with their training and ability to act strongly as
a group. Whether groups form or not, by being inclusive and encouraging
as many friends, neighbors, and comrades as possible to explore martial
ways, a stronger, more resilient and threatening anti-authoritarian
culture will be given the opportunity to emerge.
Canadian rebels can take advantage of the relative freedom and openness
of our society and get these skills and tools before the chains shorten
and the cages shrink. The reaction to the September 11th events in the
US proved just how quickly an open society will bring in draconian laws
to protect the elite, the system they depend on and the values that
allow such a system to exist in the first place.
We are all occupied peoples. The occupation is partly maintained
militarily and our response should therefore be, in part at least, a
fighting one. But I donât want a warrior-like ethic to be the central
aspect of my community. I want the wisdom of the elders, the
spontaneity, playfulness and brutal honesty of the children, and the
careful chiding and questioning of the pacifists to also be essential
aspects of my resistance, otherwise weâll end up with martial societies
rather than societies with martial skills. Iâm not suggesting the
acceptance of a fighting elite, but an anti-authoritarian culture that
values martial skills and tactics generally. Training in self-defence,
widespread use and knowledge of weaponry, popular study of conflict and
confrontation, general encouragement of fighting back and standing up,
etc. might all be central.
The trained fighters I want to encourage are motivated by a concern and
caring for others in their community. They arenât based in small
sanctimonious cliques. However, they care about others because they care
about themselves, about their immediate experience as individual,
unwilling conscripts of authoritarian civilization. I want to encourage
the rising up of a combative spirit, in the best sense of the fighting
spirit of North Americaâs indigenous warriors. Our fighter exists to
claim space for herself and others. In this newly freed up space we can
have the opportunity for genuine experiments in living.
Part of preparing ourselves for revolt should include the study of
military history, the principles and ways of warfare, mostly because our
adversaries are well schooled in it, but also because these offer
insights and principles valuable to anti-authoritarian rebels as well.
Many of us are familiar with some of the classics: Sun Tzuâs The Art of
War, Musashiâs Book of Five Rings, Che Gueverraâs writings, Maoâs
musings, and analysis and the works of Clausewitz for instance. But
these are only some of the works, many from an authoritarian or
vanguardist perspective, and clearly inadequate for an emerging martial
culture wanting to resist or to claim and defend space.
We could also look at the history of anarchists, like the Makhnovchina
or the Durruti Column, for instance: how they got started, how they were
organized, as well as at some of their specific battles and how these
were won or lost. We can learn from the mistakes of countless past
attempts.
Anti-authoritarian rebels donât have an elitist leadership and arenât
centrally organized. Federations of independent camps could be
encouraged, but these alliances should be fragile agreements.
Ultimately, it is in not becoming too formally linked that we will
succeed in permanently breaking the existence of political monopolies
and large-scale infrastructures that tend toward congealing into
authoritarian organizations. The notion here is to be a small part in
helping create a world of free individuals, of healthy ecological
environments where self-organized groups of free humans can live.
This new focus of rebellious people on the history of the military
response to social conflict would obviously be well complimented by also
including the struggles of indigenous and other insurgent groups. In
this respect, we could also look at the Metis rebellion around the Red
River Valley and the Society of the Masterless Men in Newfoundland, for
instance. Weâd benefit as well from a study of the battles of war
leaders like Crazy Horse, Tecumseh, Chief Joseph, Pontiac, and Geronimo,
as well as events like John Brownâs attempted seizure of the armory at
Harperâs Ferry, and countless other examples.
A study of the military attempts of anti-authoritarian and indigenous
rebels that focuses on specific battles and the strategies that either
won or lost the fight, can lead to many useful insights into the art of
revolt. A look at the Potawatomi, for instance, who lived according to
open and free principles, and who struggled to survive while caught up
in the conflicts between the French and English colonial powers, reveals
secrets of successful warfare. Here is just one example: in the spring
of 1755, British Major General Braddock led a large army of colonial
militia and regular troops from Virginia to destroy French forts on the
Ohio River. His guide and adviser was a young colonel, George
Washington.
Hereâs a description of what transpired from James Cliftonâs book The
Potawatomi:
On June 8 the British were approaching Fort Duquesne in western
Pennsylvania, site of present day Pittsburgh. Seeing that the British
were camped and on the alert, the Potawatomi war leaders persuaded the
French not to attack. Instead, they planned to attack the British troops
the next day while they were on the move, stretched out in mile-long
files along a narrow, forest-shrouded trail. Their surprise attack was a
complete success. Colonel Washington tried to ... counterattack in
Indian style ... but was defeated. They suffered nearly 1000 dead and
wounded out of 1500 on the trail that morning. They abandoned most of
their equipment and supplies .... Braddock was mortally wounded.
Washington barely escaped with his life. He learned a life-saving
military lesson from this disaster, one that he would regularly give as
advice to his own generals when sending them against British and Indian
forces: âBeware of surprise!â
In military theory, surprise is one of the most potent weapons
available. We should keep in mind that a study of historical combat
shows that surprise increases the combat power of fighting forces.
Surprise, combat effectiveness, defensive postures, these are all
multipliers that can help. Shouldnât this knowledge be generally
available and understood among anti-authoritarians?
Like all strategies involving territory and occupation, the defeated
have myriad choices in terms of how they live out their lives. But the
choices are more limited if we can agree on what our aims are, on what
success is and on what constitutes an acceptable quality of life. Were
the Warsaw Ghetto inhabitants who rose up against their Nazi tormentors
ethically reprehensible for killing? Should they have continued to
accept daily humiliation, suffering, violence and death? Yet at the
time, there were those among them who argued against the uprising on
various grounds, including moral ones.
Oftentimes, it isnât a question of who was more successful, but agreeing
on what success is. In the case of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, those who
participated felt that victory was standing up to their oppressors and
risking death rather than continuing to live in Nazi hell. For others,
success was measured simply by staying alive at all costs, even if that
meant being a traitor or accepting defeat. For others still, victory was
measured by being morally superior, by never adopting the means and ways
of the enemy, even if that meant suffering or death.
All rebels who want to overthrow the present social order in favor of a
more just and imaginative one need to ask themselves not only what is
acceptable radical behavior, but what are acceptable conditions of
living. Standing up to the bullies who run things and asserting some
territoriality within which we can learn to live in harmony with each
other and the world around us seem reasonable to me, while waiting for
objective conditions to be right or other such Marxian concepts seem
unacceptable. To confront the institutions that maintain our servitude
and misery we need to listen to the hot-headed, impatient, and
courageous fighters as much as we do to the cautious, negotiating, and
compromising peacemakers. Itâs about context, not morality, the forces
of history, or universally applicable strategies.
We are all damaged people who need to heal and not just fight. We partly
do this with others with whom we share affinities and openness for
intimacy. We also need to analyze civilization (or domination generally)
and share our insights through debates, pamphlets, publications and
discussion. And we need to help create communities and/or cultures of
resistance by contributing to the various projects that fellow rebels
are involved in. Yet personal healing, propaganda, and putting our
energy into community projects, no matter how worthy, still donât
confront the military occupation we are presently living under. Even
attempts at re-wilding are vain if we donât push for a generalized,
effective, long-term push against militarily-protected centralized
authority. History is not only the story of imperial civilizations
targeting and conquering others, it is also a chronicle of the
resistance to that conquest. I have allies and kin that extend back
millennia. They have won countless battles. There has been successful
resistance in every area and every era. In order to honor these
ancestors we need to give them thanks and keep up the fight.
In military theory, it is said that for the conqueror to really succeed,
the losing population must accept defeat. Otherwise, the conquerors only
win after every single person has been killed, which isnât normally in
the conquerors interest because they need slaves and soldiers, etc. A
very large part of our population unfortunately has accepted defeat. So,
I want to repeat that sharing our unique world-views and critiques and
creating community are as essential as acquiring martial skills. A
martial component is simply one part. But we also must remember that a
small band of rebels can accomplish a lot, even succeeding in leading
relatively free lives away from capitalist civilization.
In Ireland, in the early nineteen hundreds, small local militias, with
not even enough rifles to go around, succeeded in thwarting the designs
of one of the most powerful empires on the planet for decades. Theywere
successful partly because they used many martial skills, from spying to
engagement in actual battles but also because they had widespread
support. The fighters could melt back into the population. Disadvantaged
fighters need widespread support to win. With this in mind, itâs helpful
when rebels stay put in one region and make strong bonds with the land
and the inhabitants there. Perhaps, over time, the embers of authentic
communities with martial skills will begin to glow and maybe these
seemingly isolated embers will one day gather themselves into small
local fires. And hopefully, youâll be a rebel around one of those fires.
I HOPE THAT I CAN STIMULATE SOME INTEREST NOT IN THE outrage and tragedy
that is conventional war, but in the art of revolt. The principles of
the art of rebellion might apply in regional secession, guerilla warfare
or insurgency. They might apply among a group of friends doing their
best to confront the imperialism of the market within their potential
territory or their neighborhood. They might allow a stunted, humiliated
individual to find dignity and achieve small successes along her life
path, rather than resignation.
While conflict, even armed conflict, is as natural as a rainy day in the
Pacific Northwest, war or large-scale invasions in the interest of an
elite or ideology, violent brutality as a continuation of politics,
seems to only begin with urban civilization. I have read about the
exploits of Hannibal, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon and so on.
There is much to learn from them, but little to be inspired by. Theirs
is the story of wretched masses impoverished by the scale and insanity
of the conflicts in their lands, of obedient soldiers dutifully
following the orders of their superiors. It is the story of plunder and
rape and pillage, of senseless slaughter and bloodshed.
War generally has little to do with real courage and more to do with a
superficial heroism based primarily in self-preservation, although one
does find examples of extraordinary bravery and solidarity, a humanity
that asserts itself in the midst of the inhumane. Calls to class war,
from one point of view, represent an ignorance of the realities of war
or an example of a general lack of vocabulary among radicals who want to
overthrow the present order. These calls are often a shallow
romanticism, frequently the privilege of those who live in peace.
I am interested in the re-awakening and celebration of the fighting
spirit. The call is not for war, but an end to war through revolution.
Tecumseh, Pontiac, Zapata, Makhno, Gabriel Dumont, Crazy Horse, Durruti,
the uncontrollables everywhere, these are my âheroes.â Iâm sure you have
friends, neighbors or acquaintances who have the fighting spirit, who
stand up to the bullies around them, who arenât afraid to speak their
mind, who give support to rebellious practices, be it through attitudes
or actions. This is the spirit that should be acknowledged and
encouraged, especially when it coincides with anarchic desires.
Martial skills are useful for everyone, including those who simply want
to irritate, to vandalize, to commit small low level attacks designed to
make public their hatred of the institutions and managers of this
culture. And a clandestine group of friends that creates beauty by
destructive means or that spreads subversion using playful methods, can
also benefit from and help inform the martial approaches I am
advocating.
Many rebels are anxious to explore the possibilities that successful
resistance might offer. And outside of these milieus, there are others
whose communities or friends are threatened and havenât the skills to
act on their desires. Can we challenge the institutions that rule our
lives without losing? Ongoing ecological catastrophes cascading into a
potential collapse make the situation urgent. Institutions of domination
are global, but this doesnât mean that to overcome this planetary regime
local confrontations and occupations are futile. Perhaps the
mega-monster can be torn apart limb by local limb. Low intensity
insurgency based primarily on unconventional warfare techniques is one
possible avenue to pursue.
I am not promoting a resistance dominated by a sea of humorless
ârevolutionariesâ. Rather these insurgencies would be primarily based
among groups of friends, in geographical or genuine communities. This
usually implies some degree of a mutually beneficial and trusting
relationship between the actual fighters and the folks around them.
Presently there seems to be widespread interest among anarchists in
exploring a variety of martial arts. There is also interest in
destructive actions, occupations of shelters and of food producing land
bases, in survival and wilderness skills, etc. The urgency brought on by
the shredding of the green world has helped create a rebel milieu
anxious to fight for a future.
And this era has also helped rebels back into our bodies. There will
always be philosophers; incisive people who can easily juggle ideas, but
hopefully we will now begin to honor those with sensual wisdom among us
as well: more women, the indigenous traditionalists, those with survival
skills and earth knowledge, even so called rednecks, rural outlaws with
whom we could be building bridges. A more rounded approach seems
necessary if we are going to succeed in our desires for healthy
communities and individuals. So perhaps once our philosophizing is
complimented by an equal degree of pursuit of sensual knowledge,
including martial skills, a more significant threat will begin to
emerge. And the more that we integrate these abilities into our ideas
the more confident and healthy we will be and the more likely will we
begin to see opportunities that we were previously blind to.
Integrating the arts of rebellion into our self organizing doesnât imply
an iota of hierarchical structure of arrogant superiors and obedient
ranks. Obviously we donât want to militarize rebellion. The hope is that
potential insurgents will develop a richer vocabulary and experience
around conflict. There is for instance an enormous difference between
attacking, invading and fighting or between claiming and occupying. We
can explore these and many other differences and concepts. Training
camps, places where radical theory, survival skills and martial arts are
learned and shared, could be useful. Having these types of abilities
could be helpful, even lifesaving. Luckily, it isnât necessary to
reinvent combative skills, because there are timeless truths and
principles that apply to all combat.
Sun Tzu IS ACTUALLY AN HONORIFIC TITLE GIVEN TO Su-N Wu (c. 544 BC-496
BC), the author of The Art of War. There is some debate about the
original title of this famous text, which some of you may be interested
in because it seems that the author intended to suggest martial arts,
rather than war. In any case, Sun Tzu looked at both the philosophy of
conflict as well as the conduct of military operations, especially
maneuvers and combat, making his writings as they stand useful to
anarchist rebels. The Art of War is an important text and should be
widely read by potential insurgents. This isnât to say that Sun Tzu was
an anarchist, rather that his writings are poetic and open ended enough
to be used by just about anybody interested in being victorious in
âcombatâ or âconflictâ. This means that many, many people have read
them, including your adversaries. Therefore, to succeed, study this text
among others, and aim to be on equal footing with your opponents, at
least in theoretical knowledge.
The Art of War is widely available, but I thought Iâd share some of my
favorite quotes from one of the translations:
Those skilled in warfare establish positions that make them invincible
and do not miss opportunities to attack the enemy.
Generally, in battle, use the common to engage the enemy and the
uncommon to gain victory. Those skilled at uncommon maneuvers are as
endless as the heavens and earth, and as inexhaustible as the rivers and
seas.
To be certain to take what you attack, attack where the enemy cannot
defend. To be certain of safety when defending, defend where the enemy
cannot attack.
Subtle! Subtle! They become formless. Mysterious! Mysterious! They
become soundless.
In armed struggle, the difficulty is turning the circuitous into the
direct, and turning adversity into advantage. Therefore, if you make the
enemyâs route circuitous and bait him with advantages, though you start
out behind him, you will arrive before him.
One of the ways that I understand Sun Tzu is through the use of the
genre in which he expressed himself. While there is no reason to
reinvent useful philosophies of combat and conflict, we can pass on new
parables, ones that grow out of our own experience and insights. For
instance, based on some of the discussions that friends and I have been
having, new ideas have begun to emerge which might be helpful to others.
The notion here is that we can all contribute to philosophical
meditations on revolt, based on our own study and experience. This
sharing might help our projects and attempts and make each of us more
worthy opponents of the megamachine.
I think that it is safe to say that anarchist insurgents are a small
minority within almost every given population; itis certainly true where
I live. For many reasons, mobility, lack of kinship ties, etc., we are a
dispersed group of people. Yet, it is important, from the perspective of
the art of rebellion, to at times concentrate oneâs forces, especially
on a vital point of an opponent. Naturally those in control of the
repressive apparatus are aware of such things and have planned and
trained accordingly. Riot control techniques, for instance, are an
example of this. So rather than remaining inactive out of fear of losing
a direct confrontation as a group and thus remaining defeated, we can
find ways to act as a group without appearing to be a group. Remember
Sun Tzu: âsubtle, subtle, they become formless.â We can concentrate our
forces, we just canât let our enemy know that we are doing so until it
is too late. Black blocs often come close to achieving this.
Every potential rebel exists in different circumstances, regardless of
the fact that we all live within various prisons of capitalist
civilization. Therefore it is up to you to decide if it is best for an
in-the- street, prolonged, collective confrontation at a counter summit
all dressed in black, for instance, or whether it is wiser to avoid
uniforms, appear to be unconnected individuals, and coordinate an action
that occurs quickly, following which the participants melt away. The
latter would be an example of acting as a group without appearing to be
a group.
Since Sun Tzu there have been innumerable treatises and theoretical
works on war. For instance, in the 1st century AD Sextus Julius
Frontanus wrote a book called On Military Affairs. Byzantium produced
both Strategikon by Mauricius and the Tactica by Leo the Wise. There are
many such books, but I believe that overall they have little benefit for
our purposes although a historian or a scholar could find much value
there.
Much later, in Europe during Napoleonâs reign, and in fact inspired by
his successful campaigns, Carl Von Clausewitz (17801831) wrote On War.
This is the only text that compares in importance and originality to Sun
Tzuâs. As pointed out, many treatises on various aspects of war and
military approaches had been written after Sun Tzu, but Clausewitz was
the first to introduce a philosophical perspective on it and he did so
thoroughly. His contributions are enormous. I wonât attempt to summarize
his ideas, but will mention some of the areas that he explored and some
of the terms that he used.
Clausewitz wrote about the essential unpredictability of war, explored
the asymmetrical relationship between attack and defense, came up with
the useful concepts of âfogâ and âfrictionâ in war and emphasized that
there must be a culminating point of an offensive. Commentators also
remind us that he used a dialectical method to present his ideas, making
them sometimes difficult to understand. If you are truly interested in
military theory, then Clausewitz is a must-read. It would be difficult
for any writer on these topics to claim to not have been influenced by
him.
Clausewitz had a contemporary, Antoine Henri Jomini, who was also
largely stimulated by Napoleonâs campaigns to search for a theory or a
collection of laws on war. He is worth investigation for a fuller
understanding of the development of the theory of combat.
Finally there is JFC Fuller, one of the greatest military thinkers of
the 20th century. He is nearly as important as Clausewitz, if only
because his influence is also widespread, but his ambition was not as
great. The Principles of War, as they have been known for nearly a
century, were first codified by him. The US Armyâs list of the
Principles of War, found in one of their basic field manuals, is almost
identical to the list first compiled by Fuller. Letâs have a brief look
at these:
The Principles of War:
Mass Objective-Offensive Surprise Security Economy of force Movement
Unity of command Simplicity
Mass--Bring decisive force to bear at critical times and places.
Objective-- Define a decisive and attainable objective for every
military operation.
Offensive--Seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.
Surprise--Strike the enemy at a time and/or place and in a manner for
which he is unprepared.
Security--Never permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage.
Economy of Force--Allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary
efforts.
Movement/maneuver--Place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through
the flexible application of combat power.
Unity of Command--For every objective, there must be a unified effort.
Simplicity--Prepare clear, uncomplicated plans. Complex plans are more
likely to be misunderstood or to fall-apart as soon as something goes
wrong.
All apply to organized anti-authoritarian rebellion. We should also keep
in mind that these are the guiding principles of literally every
military organization in the world.
The timeless truths of combat, while having been derived from a careful
study of centuries, even millennia, of human history, can (with a little
imagination) be applied to social struggles as well. These truths seem
to apply in all combative situations, regardless of changes in the
technology of conflicts. Keep in mind that these principles and truths
are not necessarily intended to be used in direct military battles
against state forces, although they could be used in this way. They can
also be used in fighting against gentrification, protecting your
autonomous space from being destroyed or its valuables taken, to stop
developments, to occupy or reoccupy land, etc. And you will notice that
the truths of combat often coincide with the basic principles of war
elaborated on earlier.
The first and most important truth is that âdefense is the stronger form
of combatâ. This is a quote from Clausewitz, but he was not the first to
make this realization. All things being equal, it would seem that the
side with the defensive posture will likely succeed. And a defender with
well placed and well protected forces, even with less weaponry or less
experience or fewer people, can still have an enormous advantage. The
practice here would be to dig in, make fortifications, donât yield for
as long as possible, and your opponent will surely take heavy losses,
and may even retreat.
An example: a group of friends has spent the last several years building
a wilderness camp as a place to hunt and fish from, to go and gather
medicines and food, to escape from capitalist civilization, in short, to
practice green ways. Somehow a group of âopponentsâ (forestry officials
or whatever) has not only discovered the camp, but has decided to
âremove the squatters.â These officials are intent on evicting the camp
dwellers.
Luckily, one of the camp occupants was doing a regular peripheral sweep
and spotted the officials on their way up. She returns to camp and warns
everyone. Because the camp dwellers have studied and practiced martial
skills, they donât just panic and abandon their camp and its valuables.
Rather they are confident from the knowledge that because they have the
defensive posture they enjoy many advantages and will put these
advantages to maximum use by combining them with other skills they have
acquired through collective study and practice. In all likelihood, the
officials will soon give up and return home or retreat to seek
reinforcements, giving the rebels a chance to hold onto their position
long enough to gather their stuff, avoid arrest or injury and hopefully
escape to another camp.
The defensive posture is the strongest, so it makes absolute sense to
focus on where one can have an impact, namely where you live, here and
now, with the confidence that comes with knowing that should you manage
to wrest even a small area from authority and the market, you have a
good chance of holding onto it for a long time, perhaps long enough for
other areas to accomplish the same, join you or open new fronts.
In fairness, however, the second truth must also be remembered: âan
attacker willing to pay the price can always penetrate the strongest
defenses.â
Some military theorists have noticed that superior combat power always
wins. This is the third truth of war. All other things being equal, fate
smiles on the side with the greatest combat power. For this reason, it
makes absolutely no sense for a minority of revolutionaries in North
America to contemplate attempting an outright military contest against
the police and army. The stateâs combat power is simply overwhelming, so
it might be better to focus on making friends within the military and
hoping for mutinies or at least treasonous acts (like providing gear or
information . to outsiders). In any event, destroying the imperialism of
the market is not a military exercise. Martial skills are primarily
helpful when occupying (or reoccupying, for Indigenous people) and/or
defending territory, for building the confidence to initiate small
battles and to act as a grounding influence for dreamers. There will be
times, however, when the insurgents will have the superior combat power
and this would be the time not to be afraid, but to push and succeed.
The fourth truth of combat is what Clausewitz referred to as âfriction
in warâ. During any combat operation, most activities are hindered by
mistakes, the dispersal effects of firepower, disruptions caused by
confusion and fear in a potentially lethal environment, etc. Practicing
in the safety of your local wilderness or in a camp or dojo, is just not
the same as the real thing. The pace especially suffers and therefore
allowances must be made during the planning stages for this friction.
Keep this truth in mind when planning to disrupt a gathering of
economists or politicians, for instance, and you will less likely be
thrown off by the âfrictionâ and its effects.
Achieving surprise in a combative situation is extremely important. This
is the fifth truth. Analysis of historical military confrontations has
shown that surprise actually significantly increases the combat power of
the side that achieves it. In fact, as mentioned in part one, surprise
is the greatest of combat multipliers. As noted above, it is included in
the US Armyâs list of the Principles of War.
T.S. Dupuy writes that offensive action is essential to positive combat
results as his first truth. Defense and strength and surprise are
important, but ultimate combat success involves offensive action. Even
should a strategy of overall defensive posture be the plan, (for example
successful local upheavals which are surrounded by hostile adversaries),
offensive tactics and operations must be selectively employed for final
victory.
While the purpose of this chapter is to encourage the study and practice
of martial skills, the focus is on strategy and tactics generally and,
when specifically âmilitaryââ, on ground combat. I have completely
ignored air and naval theorists. Such thinkers do exist and any
insurgency would have to deal with aspects of each.
Many, if not most, of state forces today use a combination of land and
air combat. For instance high tech, high performance helicopters will
often do reconnaissance that directs far away tanks, with extremely
specific GPS coordinates, to their targets. Land Combat today is rarely
unsupported by fixed wing aircraft, drones or helicopters. Thus we
should more accurately speak of Air Land Battle in many instances.
As for Naval combat, these ideas can be applied effectively to deter and
harass navies or to initiate very small scale naval combat, although we
mustnât forget about the power and potential of a sailors mutiny.
I think that what you can learn from these introductions and ideas,
especially if followed up by your own study and practice, can be applied
to all areas of conflict.
One important and useful exploration is the distinction between tactics
and strategy.
Clausewitz believed that strategy belonged primarily to the realm of
art, while tactics belonged primarily to the realm of science. From a
military point of view strategy is the planning and managing of the
resources available in warfare. The military and political elite, i.e.
those with national power to influence these matters, do this.
Just below strategy, the military uses the term operations when the
direction of armies or large forces in military (usually combat)
activities within a clearly defined theater is involved. Conceptually,
operations lie between strategy and tactics when engaged in combat.
Tactics are the specific techniques used to achieve your strategic ends.
They are influenced by local conditions, or you can say that context
determines your choice. Tactics are the detailed maneuvers and
offensives used to achieve the objectives of your strategy. They are
often plans and moves that gain advantages in the short term, while
strategy is the larger-scale framework of direction and control. You can
practice your tactics, but you must use intuition for your strategy.
One might think that studying the techniques of sieges would only be of
interest to hobbyists or scholars of medieval warfare, but this is not
the case. Only quite recently, from 1992 to 1996, the city of Sarajevo
was under siege during the Bosnian war. In fact, Iâve noticed that many
of the most significant conflicts that occur tend to have siege
qualities to them. If we look at Oka, Gustafsen Lake, MOVE, Caledonia,
squat evictions, etc., we find sieges and siege techniques used by both
sides.
A siege is a military blockade of a city or fortress with the intent of
conquering by force or attrition, often accompanied by an assault. A
siege occurs when an attacker encounters a city or fortress that refuses
to surrender and cannot be easily taken by a frontal assault. Sieges
involve surrounding the target and blocking the reinforcement or escape
of troops or provision of supplies (a tactic known as âinvestmentâ),
typically coupled with attempts to reduce the fortifications by means of
siege engines, artillery bombardment, mining (also known as sapping), or
the use of deception or treachery to bypass defenses. Failing a military
outcome, sieges can often be decided by starvation, thirst or disease,
which can afflict both the attacker or defender.
Generally speaking, siege warfare is a form of low-inten- sity warfare
(until an assault takes place) characterized in that at least one party
holds a strong defense position, it is a highly static situation, the
element of attrition is typically strong and there are plenty of
opportunities for negotiations.[1]
Whenever considering an action, it is important to reflect on what
Clauswewitz called âthe variables representing the circumstances of
combat.â Letâs look at an example:
A group of friends decides to destroy a couple of bridges in a nearby
wilderness to prevent logging and other industrial activity. The first
step is to look at the many basic security considerations to follow:
donât tell anyone outside the group anything ever, have alibis, donât
use or carry any techno-devices to communicate, document or brainstorm,
etc.
The group uses their knowledge of strategy, operations and tactics in
making plans. They are conscious of some of the principles and truths of
conflict: surprise, movement, economy of force, etc. But what we havenât
looked at yet are the variables that typically come into play, (the
concept of friction does take into account these influences to some
extent).
Trevor Dupuy breaks down the variables into a few simple categories,
although Iâve tweaked these somewhat. There are many that are sure to
influence the outcome and smoothness of your action, so please make sure
that variables are considered before pursuing your objective.
The variables are Environmental, Behavioral, and Operational. Under
Environmental, we find primarily the weather and terrain, although I
would include season, time of day and even lunar cycle as important.
Secondly, we find Behavioral variables. These relate to the psychology
and nature of the human participants. Morale, training, emotional well
being, stability, drug and alcohol use, experience, etc. Finally,
Operational includes vulnerability, mobility, fatigue and posture. It
should be noted that we have easy ir. luence over these and should take
advantage of this fact.
The Environmental: Itâs cold and rainy. Will this affect the terrain
enough to make any changes? Does the group need to make a fire, perhaps
to burn the bridge? If so, can they make a fire in the rain? They were
counting on the full moon to help, but the clouds will inhibit this, do
they have a flashlight? Heavier clothing can slow down oneâs escape. The
area is primarily a deciduous forest, so in spring there will be plenty
of coverage from the leaves, but itâs autumn, can they hide behind bare
branches?
The Behavioral: ifit is going to be a rainy and cold night and one of
the group is inexperienced or weak, one might want to make sure that his
backpack is checked for proper clothing, that he is rested enough to do
the action, perhaps consider pairing him up with a stronger or more
experienced participant, etc. If you expect to be confronted, who has
the most training to stand firm, who is likely to flee?
The Operational: will the rain make it muddy and slow down the vehicles?
Does everyone have the proper clothing? If the group will have to sit
still and hide for a long period of time in uncomfortable circumstances,
has everyone trained for this long enough? Variables and the reality of
friction are essential last considerations to ponder before setting out
to âbattleâ.
When I began thinking about outlaws and outlaw history I realized that
if outlaw just means one who breaks the law, then I could write about
the lives of nearly every citizen. So I define outlaw as one who not
only breaks the law, but who survives by breaking the law or essentially
lives outside of it. And the more I delve into Canadas past, the more
outlaws I discover, and many of them are worthy of our attention. As an
introduction to Canadian outlaw history, here is the story of a group of
Newfoundland rebels who survived without masters for half a century.
The story of the Society of Masterless Men, which included women and
children, begins in the 18th-century settlement of Ferryland, in
Newfoundland. In order to colonize Newfoundland, The British Empire
created plantations. These were settlements of primarily Irish
indentured servants, many of them very young, (thus their name: the
Irish Youngsters), abducted from Ireland either by force or guile and
brought to the South Shore of Newfoundland where they were literally
sold to fishing masters. Their price: $50 a head.
These village plantations were primarily set up by consortiums and
cabals of wealthy merchants in England. The fishing masters were
essentially the Lords and Ladies of the villages, living in luxury and
security while surrounded by dozens, even hundreds, of indentured
servants who fished and labored in the camps processing the fishing
catch. British frigates were stationed in the harbors and marines
patrolled the town. Because there wasnât a local police force, the Navy
helped reinforce the authority of the local fishing masters.
The workers in these fishing villages were barely a step up from slaves.
Corporal punishment was routinely used and everyday life was harsh and
brutal. In the small settlement of Ferryland, for instance, there were a
gallows and three whipping posts, in separate regions of the town. When
a man was sentenced to be flogged for stealing a jug of rum or refusing
to work for one of the fishing masters, he was taken to all three posts
and whipped so the whole town would have an opportunity to witness the
punishment as a warning.
The settlement of Ferryland was founded by Sir George Calvert around
1620, and was partly intended as a ârefuge for ...Catholics.â Itâs not
clear ifthere were any âfreeâ Catholics, or only Catholic servants. This
was a time of penal law and repression of Catholicism in Britain and at
least some Irish Catholics voluntarily came to the New World to escape
persecution. Unfortunately, the laws in Newfoundland were the same as in
the Old World. The orders given to the governor from 1729 to 1776 were:
âYou are to permit a liberty of conscience to all, except Papists, so
they be contented with a quiet and peaceable enjoyment of the same, not
giving offense or scandal to the government.â
This order wasnât always strictly followed and around the mid 1700âs
there was a crackdown on Catholicism. In 1743, the governor of the time,
Smith, wrote to the magistrate in Ferryland, John Benger, instructing
him to be mindful of the âIrish papistsâ in the area. William Keen, the
chief magistrate of the city of St. Johnâs was killed by a group of
Irishmen in 1752. Following this assassination, penal laws were strictly
enforced for the next thirty or forty years.
Life wasnât much better for those in the British Navy patrolling the
area. The Navy wielded its authority over its seamen with zero
compassion and nothing but discipline enforced by abuse and violence.
Food rations were slim and flogging was common. For instance
keelhauling - dragging a seaman on ropes under the keel of a ship,
thereby shredding his flesh on the sharp edged barnacles- was still a
legal punishment even though it frequently resulted in death.
Some refer to the Society of Masterless Men as lore or a traditionally
told story, one for which there is little documentary evidence. But
there is a fair amount of facts that are known about the Masterless Men.
And, as a matter of context, we know a lot about the injustice of the
British Empire and of the cruelty of many of its managers and henchmen.
We know that indentured servants were brought to Newfoundland and
treated with brutality, as were the seamen in the Royal Navy. We also
know that one Irish-born Peter Kerrivan was among those young indentured
servants and abused seamen. It is largely believed that he was a
reluctant seaman, having been pressed into service.
Some time in 1750, while Kerrivanâs ship was docked in Ferryland, he
escaped (historians usually choose to say âdesertedâ). Together with two
or three escaped indentured fishermen, he helped establish a lookout and
base in the Butter Pot Barrens, a wild area of the Avalon Peninsula, for
outlaws. This was the beginning of the Masterless Men.
Hunted by the authorities, the Masterless Men soon learned a way of life
based on subsistence and sharing. They came into contact with
Newfoundlandâs aboriginal peoples, the Miâqmaq and the Beothuk, who
taught the rebels survival skills. They learned how to hunt for food
based on the caribou herd on the Peninsula.
At the time, one could be hanged for running away. Nevertheless many
young men escaped from the plantations and tookuplives as outlaws. In
1774, for instance, a petition written by Bonavista merchants, justices
of the peace, and others, was sent to Governor Shuldham to complain of a
number of âmasterlessâ Irishmen who had gone to live in a secluded cove
and âwere there building fishing rooms.â But Kerrivanâs band of young
companions were among the luckiest and best organized.
Word of the well organized free men spread and fresh runaways from
coastal settlements came to join them. Eventually their numbers swelled
to between 20 and 50 men. There were also women, but their numbers are
unknown. The literature I found mention the women simply as âwives,â
although I imagine them as strong, rebellious women sickened by the
misery and cruelty that surrounded them who also yearned for a freer and
better way oflife and whojoined their outlaw husbands voluntarily.
After a while, the group of comrades began trading caribou meat and
hides with allies in the remote villages, receiving supplies such as
flour, tea, and bullets. They also organized stealth raids against the
fishery plantations.
By this time the British authorities, without a police or militia of
their own, were beginning to fear that this group of anarchic rebels
would inspire too many others to desertion and ordered the Navy to track
the freedom-loving band down and make examples of them. Some years
passed before the first expedition against the Masterless Men was
organized and, by then, the rebels had become skilled wilderness
inhabitants. Anticipating the attack or somehow being forewarned,
Kerrivan and his comrades cut a series of blind trails which confounded
their pursuers. The party of marines sent to capture them often found
themselves lost and dumbly led into bogs and impenetrable thick bush.
Eventually the Navy did manage to close in on the rebelsâ camp near
their lookout, but they found the log cabins deserted, âwith every rag
and chattel removedâ. Taking advantage of their pursuersâ confusion,
Kerrivan and his friends had moved off towards the north and west. The
navy set fire to their little village but had to return to their base
without any prisoners. The Masterless group rebuilt their cabins and the
Navy burned them down again. Over time the Navy burned down their cabins
three times and each time they were rebuilt.
Two of the rebels were captured and hanged, but the state never did
succeed in destroying the Society. In fact, the captured young runaways
had joined the band only a few weeks earlier and had been taken by
surprise away from the main body of the rebels. They were hanged with
great dispatch from the yard-arm of the English frigate in Ferryland. No
other Masterless Men were ever captured after this incident, presumably
because this only made the outlaws more cautious. Some of the tracks
that had been carved partly to support their wilderness ways and partly
as subterfuge became Newfoundlandâs first inland roads. In fact, their
road system eventually connected most of the small settlements of the
Avalon Peninsula.
For more than a generation the Masterless Men roamed free over the
barrens! Over time, perhaps as military rule began to relax or for
reasons unknown to this author, their ranks began to dwindle. In 1789,
39 years after escaping, four men gave themselves up on condition that
their only punishment would be deportation to Ireland, which was agreed
upon. Many of the other rebels settled in remote parts of Newfoundlandâs
coast and survived as independent fishermen. Kerrivan, who was never
captured, is said to have had a partner, four sons and several daughters
and is believed to have remained on the barrens well into old age, never
returning to civilization.
The children of the Masterless Men gradually drifted out to the coast
and settled down in small coves never visited by the navy. They married
the children of other outlaws who had settled there generations earlier
and together they raised families.
The story of The Society of the Masterless Men is inspiring because they
succeeded. A group of people voluntarily joined together in common cause
and broke free from their masters, most never to be captured or to
return to their work prisons.
Alexina Reid from The Newfoundland and Labrador Archives Newfoundland by
Harold Horwood
SecretMasses at Midnight: The Legend of the Grotto in Renews,
Newfoundland by Tammy Lawlor
The Canadian Encyclopedia Hurtig Publishers
âThe Unshackled Societyâ by Paul Butler, originally published in
Saltscapes Magazine
For freedom and nature lovers.
Simple proverbs and phrases intended as
broadhints and insights for the rebellious.
Habitats
The dispossessed will occupy land for habitats.
Cities are not habitats.
Adapt to nature.
The people of the land are our elders.
Nature has no political boundaries.
Industrialism kills habitats.
Industrial production must be permanently dismantled.
The village can learn from the traveler.
Our minds are not separate from our bodies. Mind is matter. Habitats
create us as we create them.
Defend your habitat.
Withdrawal
Withdraw to organize.
Withdraw to attack.
Withdraw to experience communal subsistence. Insurgency and withdrawal
coexist.
Withdraw to train.
Withdraw to heal.
Withdraw to occupy.
Withdraw now to attack later.
Refusing to participate is an act of sabotage.
The state will use violence to enforce reintegration and assimilation of
group withdrawal. Pursue collective experiments in living.
Anarchy
Free individuals cluster together organically.
Secessionist regions and enclaves can experiment with anarchy. Kinship
ties facilitate anarchy.
Anarchy will bury anarchism.
The ungoverned individual is the basis of anarchy. Decentralisation
prevents new states from emerging.
Desire for the inherent benefits of harmony and successful subsistence
activity encourages efforts to create pleasurable coexistence.
Federations can break away from the nation state.
Anarchy is a fight for experimentation in living.
Freedom is a set of social relationships.
Peace is achieved through the revolutionary abolition of nation states.
The group is stronger within an alliance.
The anarchist alliance is an organic body.
The organic decays and disappears to make room for renewal. The artist
experiments. The anarchist destroys.
The animal embodies sensual knowledge.
The alliance can be a weapon of insurgency.
Revolution
Global revolution cannot be planned but local secession can.
Organic self-organization can precede secession from the nation-state.
Seceding from the nation-state makes room for organic self-organization.
Authentic revolution creates authentic human bonds.
All politicians are obstacles to revolution.
Revolution is organically self-organized.
Revolution is complete renewal.
Complete renewal requires an organic dimension. Federations of communes
can break away from the nation state. Occupation sites federate.
Allies federate. Ponds become an ocean.
Revolutionary foresight creates revolutionary futures.
Urban ways
Abandon cities in groups.
Atomization is the chain that binds us.
Uprisings must destroy the relationships called city. Without destroying
the city, complete renewal will fail. The city is an authoritarian
institution.
Numeracy and literacy are urban technologies.
Temporary gatherings of thousands of people are not cities. Technology
canât solve social problems.
Using technology is not a consensual activity.
A collection of villages is not a city.
Urban civilization is a necessary condition for capitalist civilization.
Coercive hierarchy is a necessary condition for urban civilization.
Agriculture makes urban civilization possible.
The destruction of capitalism will include the destruction of urban
ways.
The rural will be buried alongside the urban.
Resist atomization.
Martial traditions
Communes defend themselves.
Animals donât have hospitals.
Even fragile, peaceful snowflakes acting together can sometimes quietly
suffocate the dominant reality.
Some will die.
No one can see the whole mountain.
Beneath the surface, the roots live in darkness.
The state prevents the emergence of federations with violence. Martial
skills can defeat military ones.
During unrest the state will use police or rebels as
human sacrifices, the first to justify law and order, the second to
reassure the bourgeoisie.
Act as a group without appearing to be a group. Insurrectional events
should threaten the bosses of the dominant reality.
Without risk we fail.
A community of resistance has an arsenal.
Makhno, Durruti, Pontiac, Geronimo,
Gabriel Dumont, Zapata, Crazy Horse.
Collective fury is the invisible weapon of the disarmed. Youâre only
disarmed if you think you are.
A mutual shaping of ideas and action begins before genuine revolt and
continues during it.
Capitalism
Capitalism is a violent crisis.
No roles or identities created for capitalist civilization are worth
preserving. Capitalism is a river of blood.
Capitalist civilization stunts its populace. The market is the worldâs
imperial master.
If you read through this collection, youâll get the distinct impression
that I am trying to guide rebels in a specific direction. But what is
the destination of these paths I am urging us on?
There is general consensus that the first people to colonize the North
American continent did so about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. There are
dissenting archaeologists who believe that humans have been here for
closer to 20,000 years or even more. Radio carbon dating indicates that
humans were on the eastern half of the continent, in what is currently
called the United States, at least 10,400 years ago. Their remains are
found over the entire area. Meat seems to have been the primary food
source and the peoples of the area used fluted projectile points as
their basic hunting tool. These free wanderers, as some archaeologists
have described them, were essentially single families or small bands of
related kin.
What interests me is that there is no physical evidence, to my
knowledge, of human-made shelters in this area for the first several
thousand years of people living there. No seasonal campsites have been
found, let alone permanent village sites, until around 8,000 years ago.
That means that humans on this continent wandered freely without
permanent sites, and perhaps without even human-made shelters, for at
least 4,000 years.
From 8,000 until 3,500 years ago, there is a gradual shift from this
open wandering-based lifeway to a more sedentary one. First, there
emerges a number of temporary campsites, with some evidence of longer
occupation. Toward the middle of this period, we find increasing numbers
of seasonal campsites, places where the wanderers would regularly return
to for certain foods. By the end of this period we find the midden
deposits, designated village or family places where the waste products
of meals and other debris from human activity were placed, many of them
10 meters deep.
Human groups became slightly larger, they wandered less, and had camps
that occupied an acre or two. This is when we find circular pole-framed
structures, ornaments, woven mats, storage pits, nets and traps. Humans
slowly moved from their free wandering days to a more subsistence based
life. They became embedded in specific areas, developed a set of skills
and tools based on their environmental context. Essentially, they became
part of a place, both formed by and forming it.
The subsistence I imagine and believe we should strive toward is one
that once found its expression somewhere between and within these two
time periods. I donât view one time period as superior to the other
against a measure of extent of domination or domestication. I donât
agree with the model of history that draws a map of rectilinear roads
going through time with village life located in a purgatory downhill
from the heaven of free wandering and somewhere before the hell of urban
life.
Were the free-wanderers the most free? Were their people the happiest,
the least alienated (or without alienation)? Were they even the wildest?
In some green anarchist and primitivist writing, re-wilding is the
destination. And because any degree of sedentary living, even seasonal,
is viewed as a degree of domestication, then only the free wandering
lifeways seem to offer the ultimate fruit ofwildness. For them, unless
we are aiming toward small, self-organized bands of related kin roaming
forests and seashores, then we wonât ever be truly capable of
rediscovering our wild existences, and thus our potential to realize
ourselves as truly undomesticated beings in an unconstrained, direct
relationship with every raw moment.
But I have come to the conclusion that a mutually shared set of life
skills, combined with the extensive sensual knowledge that comes with
being embedded in a place, also allows for the same unfettered existence
that the free wanderers had.
To view human history on this continent as a simple linear devolution
from the completely free, unmediated lives of the original inhabitants
to the first degrees of separation in the campsites, then deeper still
with the seasonal camps, then into the abyss of domestication in the
semi-permanent and permanent villages to, the complete colonization and
integration into urban life under the empire of the market and
hierarchy, is just too one-dimensional. I am not aiming for
relationships that always exclude any degree of sedentariness any more
than I am aiming for an obligatory sedentariness.
I think that the villages that gave us the midden deposits, and the
traps, and the nets, and the masks, and the songs, etc, are as ideal an
ultimate destination as the roaming days of the free wanderers.
Subsistence for me includes the lifeways of free-wandering people as
well as village/seasonal camp-based people. Both can offer the richness
of meaningful, ungoverned lives. Both can encourage our possible
variations as free beings.
The village isnât a stage on a downhill momentum toward urban life. The
net and song and mask arenât first steps on a path toward rank and
privilege, environmental degradation or ever increasing degrees of
mediated lives. They are merely the outcome of sensual wisdom, of
embeddedness, of organic life ways. In this sense, my destination is
primarily toward small villages and seasonal camps.
Here, where I live, in the Comox Valley in the Pacific Northwest,
herring season has come and gone once again. Many of us take special
notice of this natural cycle, it seems truly wondrous: the water
whitening from fish spawn, the seagulls excitedly squealing with
anticipation and satisfaction, the deep bark of sea lions filling the
air, keen-eyed bald eagles swooping down from their tree top perches to
gorge themselves. But there is a sinister player in this seasonal cycle.
It is the commercial fishing industry.
In the middle part of the eighteenth century, the western expansion of
the European invaders involved the use of market hunting as opposed to a
subsistence tactic. Combined with the development of breech loading
firearms, this approach led to the extermination and near extinction of
several species, including the pronghorn, elk, deer and some waterfowl.
On the Great Plains, frozen pronghorn carcases were stacked like
cordwood along railway lines to be shipped east to urban centers. The
elimination of the bison was part of a covert policy of the United
States government to deprive the indigenous people of their subsistence
base, and thereby their base of operation, against the army and
settlers.
The same forces today are used to prevent any possibility of the
dispossessed from regrouping and claiming territory within which to live
according to principles of mutual aid and organically self-organized
subsistence ways. Of course, as the earthâs natural abundance is
plundered for the market, indigenous traditionalists also have less
chance ofliving according to the old embedded ways. Take note that it
was military policy to deprive the resisters of their food sources so
that they would lose their base of operations. Doesnât that indicate
that in order for rebels to begin having some success in terms of the
social war that they too need to secure bases as they regroup and
strategize on how to win a few battles?
Unless humans begin to live in accordance with ecological principles,
that is, in harmony with our biosphere and with each other, ecological
and social collapses appear inevitable. The signs are everywhere:
climate change on a global scale, empires aggressively pursuing imperial
conquests, the populations of entire nations muted by fear of punishment
and numbed by mood-altering drugs, planetary domestication and plunder
of wild nature, overflowing prisons, astronomical suicide rates, cancer,
extinction, hunger, and private atomized existences. Name a civilization
that wasnât fundamentally characterized by centralization, coercive
authority, ecological plunder, imperialism and a general arrogance
toward others.
Itâs not just the state and capitalism that are to blame, because every
civilization included classes and a state. We have to look at what it is
about the cultural values and philosophical outlooks of the civilized
(urban peoples) that lead them to disrespect life forms outside of their
view and to tolerate oppressive, impersonal institutions as an
inevitable part of everyday living.
But there are many examples of individuals, groups of friends and
communities resisting the current and pursuing different paths. Those
that inspire me the most are committed to firmly establishing themselves
in a specific region. They want to (or continue to) hunt, fish, collect
herbs and grow gardens together, share tools and child-minding
responsibilities, and help clothe and shelter one another using
everything from permaculture techniques to re-appropriation.
The focus must be on access to land that can potentially support these
clans and groups which are based on voluntary association and mutual aid
and self-sustenance. And as these these subsistence zones are nurtured,
a general and natural willingness to defend them naturally emerge. From
South America to South Africa, from Chiapas to India, we read and hear
about communities that are not only trying to survive, but to create new
societies based on anarchic insights. Using diverse tactics, these
communities are determined to secede from the nation states that confine
and dispossess them. This is where herring season comes back into our
focus.
All along the west coast, indigenous peoples TRAditionally collected
herring roe as a food source. Today, many different people come annually
to the Gulf Islands of what is called British Columbia, in the Coast
Salish and Kwakiutl territories, to participate in the herring run.
Incidentally, while the group of islands are collectively known as the
âGulf Islandsâ, they are located in a strait not a gulf. This is because
a European explorer named them without traveling the full length of the
waters in which they are located.
In any case, some who attend the annual herring run are newcomers while
others have been doing so for generations. They harvest the roe and net
the fish along the shoreline or from boats. Traditionally, the roe, or
eggs from the females, is collected on hemlock or other evergreen boughs
or kelp that is floated in the water until they are saturated. On many
islands, families and friends also collect the roe, which washes onto
the shore mixed in with the seaweed, for their families, and for their
gardens, providing a rich source of minerals for their compost.
All this is collected on a small scale, harvested without machines or
wage slaves. Oftentimes, the fish itself is harvested, not just the roe.
Using different preservation techniques, like pickling, this bounty is
stored for future use. Some use the herring as bait for other fish. All
of this activity is and has been pursued on a scale commensurate with
sustainability for generations.
But, according to Dave Wiwchar in a report published in the
Nuu-chah-nulth Southern Region Reporter, â...over the last few years,
First Nations (indigenous) fishers who drop hemlock trees or kelp
bundles in order to harvest the traditional dietary staple of siihmuu
(herring roe) have come up empty handed. Boughs that would normally be
laden with numerous layers of roe, two inches thick, are being hauled up
with barely a single egg. Traditionally, herring spawning areas were
heavily protected by Chiefs, and Nu- chah-nulth spawn-on-kelp/bough
fishers used special âsilent paddlesâ whenever they ventured into
herring spawning areas. The report continues:
âSiihmuu/Kwaqmis is traditionally very important to us as it is the
first resource to return to our territories after the winter,â said
elder Nelson Keitlah. âIn the days of my grandpa, no one was allowed to
go into the spawning areas where the herring were looking for a place to
spawn. Not even a noise from a canoe was allowed. People had a very high
respect for the herring as they are a very important part of the food
chain, and our diet,â he said. Keitlah fears the noise from the vessels,
machinery and sonar are driving the herring down to depths where their
eggs will not survive. âWeâve been saying for years that the sonar and
machines are a total disrespect to the herring, and as a result the
herring are now spawning in deep water, and not coming near shore where
we can feed on them,â he said. âWe havenât had siihmuu/kwaqmis in recent
years as it has been very scarce. We need to be able to harvest them in
a natural, normal way, which is a much better way to do it than to
harvest the roe by seiners.â
And in an article in the Globe and Mail, Reg Moody of the Heltsiuk
people in Bella Bella said in a statement:
âWho knows, maybe this province and country will soon see scenes on
national TV of what took place with our brothers from Burnt Church on
the east Coast. These stocks mean that much to us. Our way of life is at
stake here . . . To protect the future of the central coast region, the
Heltsiuk and Kitasoo Xaixas have been instructed by their people not to
allow a sein or gillnet sac-roe fishery in their traditional territories
for the next season âŠâ
The traditional method of stringing fronds of seaweed in spawning areas
allowed the herring to lay their sticky eggs on the seaweed and then
swim away. But the commercial method is harmful and unsustainable. The
seiners are noisy, scaring the spawning herring away into deep waters,
and the fish are killed to extract the egg sacs rather than allowing
them to swim away. Combine this with industrial activity on or near
their spawning grounds and the herring are increasingly threatened.
This year a group of us living on Sla Dai Ich, an island in the strait
that separates Vancouver Island from the mainland, decided that we
should learn more about the natural cycle of the herring. The island
that we live on is a regular stop for the annual pacific herring run. At
roughly 250,000 tons, the herring that pass through our waters is one of
the largest biomasses that moves on our planet, comparable say to the
bison herds of two hundred years ago.
Because the fishery is essentially based strictly on the collection of
roe, what actually occurs in the water is this: a convoy of fishing
boats gather in the strait as the herring arrive in our waters to spawn.
The schools of fish are surrounded by the boats and the smaller punts.
Once the fishery is opened by government officials, the herring are
brought onto the boats by nets, which are then slapped by large rotating
paddles beating the herring out of the nets. From the shoreline one sees
fish seemingly flying through the air onto boats. The females are gutted
and the roe extracted to feed the hungry sushi and delicacy markets,
while the males and the fem ale carcasses are collected for animal food
and fertilizer. About thirty to fifty boats gather on the waters off our
shores. And, while in reality they are a veritable platoon of parasites
eagerly plundering this incredible abundance of life, the boats appear
rather innocuous, even picturesque, especially at night when they are
lit up and together resemble a small floating village.
There exists no local cottage food industry that harvests the fish for
human consumption. Pickled herring and roll mops (delicious tasting
strips of herring rolled around capers, pickles or olives and bathed in
vinegar and spices) are sold locally but are imported from Europe.
There are 252 seine and 1,254 gillnet licenses in the roe herring
fishery alone. Fisheries and Oceans Canada set the quota and catch limit
based on an âexploitation rate of 20% or less.â This means they
ostensibly leave 80% of the stock in the ecosystem. But this is
misleading, because the Canadian commercial fishery takes only 20% of
what moves through our waters. What about the American fishery, the sea
lions, the salmon and cod, etc., who are also all feeding on this run?
This year, 2005, the coast wide commercial roe herring allowable catch
is 25,574 tons! The spawn on kelp fronds fishery is 3,000 tons for 37
non-Heltsiuk licenses and 525 tons for the nine Heltsiuk licenses. Itâs
worth noting that the once abundant Haida Gwai herring run is at a
record low. In terms of statist laws and regulations, there is a whole
herring daily limit of 20 kilograms and a possession limit of 40
kilograms for the so-called recreational fisher.
If the stocks continue to be affected by the contamination of spawning
grounds and attacks on other aspects of the intertwined marine
ecosystem, then it doesnât matter what percent is taken. The herring
will eventually disappear unless the commercial fishery is terminated
and the spawning grounds are protected from industrial activity.
A FEW FRIENDS AND COMRADES WENT DOWN TO THE shoreline and set up a small
camp. A fire pit was set up, some fresh water brought down, a few posts
and beams erected to define the area and as something for us to secure
windbreaks to. Meanwhile, several of us gathered rock salt, pickling
vinegar, capers, pickles, and food grade buckets. I phoned my mother on
the East Coast of Canada to ask for a recipe and any tips she might
have.
Believe it or not, even though Iâm only 46 years old, my mom grew up
making her own soap from animal fat, churning her own butter, collecting
nuts, weaving wool, harvesting firewood with horses and sleighs, etc.
Her family lived with hardly any money. They 1 id just enough from
selling hazelnuts along the highway, firewood from their land, and other
small initiatives to pay their property taxes, buy oil and flour and a
few other basics. In one generation all these skills have been lost in
our family. While my mother mourns her childhood, she does so with much
reservation. It was all too much work, she complains. I think this is
because the effort was done in the context of her family, without the
deep roots of true village ways. Pioneer ways are different than a
context of communal activity among others with whom we have strong
kinship ties.
It so happened that a comrade from Mauvaise Herbe, a green anarchist
group in Montreal, was visiting. He came to the little camp and we had a
talk about their activity and ours, shared some perspectives and
gathered some fresh oysters to roast and eat. One of the things we
talked about was the âindividual selfâ and its development. He related
how some tribes people from the Vietnam area traditionally didnât use
the word I, but rather usually spoke about themselves from the
perspective of the relationship that they were engaged in at the moment
of talking. For instance a person speaking to an uncle would say: âniece
wants to walk with uncle.â An individual without a community to rely on,
to share the demands and desires for shelter and food and intimacy, for
example, becomes groundless and atomized. Clearly, we need to be
embedded within a group of people. And a group of people has the best
chance of enduring and thriving if embedded in a place.
A couple of friends got hold of a zodiac and ventured into the water
armed with a video camera to document the commercial fishery. It was
risky. Bobbing around in extremely choppy waters in a rubber dinghy
trying to videotape a bunch of fishers who likely werenât too sure
whether or not they wanted to allow it. After all, if anyone gets a lot
of finger pointing from self-righteous urban environmentalists and
activists, itâs the rural wage slaves who do all the primary extraction
and plundering of resources for urban civilization: loggers, fishers,
miners, etc. Thanks to our three brave friends, we have a few hours of
documentation to use in our arsenal for future use. But at that point we
still hadnât gathered any herring.
Each day for about a week, a dedicated bunch us went down to the camp
and waited to determine whether the herring had begun to fill the waters
enough so that we could stand along the shoreline and net them, which is
how it normally happens. The fish become so plentiful, that simply by
dipping a net into the water, one can gather as many as a half dozen
herring at a time! While they waited, they collected oysters and roasted
them over the fire, and explained to others from our island community
what they were up to. During that time many local friends, neighbors and
comrades from urban centers came and went. Some were just curious, but
most were hoping to learn something and to participate in this
subsistence approach to living.
One reason why this attempt to learn and feed ourselves and understand
one of the natural cycles of our region that was so appealing to our
neighbors was that it wasnât about politics. Some called it our protest
camp, others the herring camp, just tl. . camp or even Valiâs camp,
after one of the core people who initiated the energy around it. But the
days werenât intended on being spent arguing with politicians, trying to
recruit members or handing our petitions. Here was a chance to feed
ourselves, to build a culture not based on wage work, to learn new
skills, and sadly, to witness and document another plunder. The small
camp also reminded me of how little autonomous space we actually have.
Apart from our local pirate radio station ( yeah, weâre on air!),
situated in a small trailer, and a small autonomous zone on a separate
beach created by other locals, all we have are each otherâs homes to
visit or commercial ventures to hang out in. But this was/is different.
I think some of us would like to see a campsite or two permanently on
our shoreline, regardless of the outcome of the herring fishery.
Eventually some fish were gathered and brought back to one of our homes.
They were killed, their heads removed, then gutted and scales shed. Then
after splitting them in two, the fillets were spread with mustard,
wrapped around capers and pickles and placed in a bucket of pickling
vinegar and onions, to be eaten at a later time. We didnât succeed in
filling our hampers for the next several months, in fact we barely
harvested any, but we took a first step. Thatâs how all great dreams are
realized. Hopefully next year weâll be a little luckier and a little
more experienced. Maybe eventually local kids will stay out of school,
comrades will come visit from urban centers and weâll all spend a few
weeks just gutting and pickling herring as an extended group of friends,
neighbors and rebels. Over time we will feel compelled to defend the
ecological integrity of these waters and to protect the herring that
dwell in them and which help sustain us.
The pacific herring play a huge role in the marine ecosystem of our
territory. Herring are an important part of the northern pacific marine
food web. They are a food source for gulls, ducks, pilchards and jelly
fish. Pacific cod, halibut, Chinook salmon and harbor seals all have
diets largely comprised of herring. Three quarters of the lingcodâs diet
consists of herring. The near shore and intertidal environment is
critical to the continued abundance of the herring. This is where they
deposit their eggs, and only at very specific locations. It is important
for us to protect the spawning grounds closest to us. In some areas, for
instance Cherry Point in Puget Sound, herring stocks have declined
rapidly over the past decades. The decline is attributed to a high level
of commercial fishing and to contamination of the spawning grounds by
industrial activity.
Commercialized, market driven, mass levels of fishing are not
sustainable. We need to re-learn how to integrate our lives into this
fishery as we do with all of the natural cycles in each of our regions.
We need to take care of the places where we live. It isnât hysteria to
suggest that the herring might eventually disappear from over-fishing
and bureaucratic mismanagement. The herring should be here for our
great-great-great grandchildren. As the herring dwindle, so too will the
other fish that feed on them, while the life forms that the herring feed
on will become overpopulated. All this will create imbalance and ill
health and contribute to the eventual collapse of the complex marine
ecosystem of our potential territories.
Our struggle for ungoverned lives can sometimes appear as an exclusively
destructive project. Clearly we need to be on the offensive against the
forces and institutions that uphold the social order, but we can also
take time to sketch out potential territories and habitats that might
sustain us both here and now and in the future. Identifying such
environments and exploring possible ways of adapting to them is a unique
offensive tactic in that it naturally encourages a wider demographic in
our resistance. Fighting for a place or defending a habitat help counter
the oftentimes pointlessness of urban activism, are inherently
meaningful and help foster notions of entire communities in opposition.
In response to this piece, Wolfi Landstreicher raised some important
questions about this stance. Wolfi states that while he âthinks that it
is a wonderful thing for a small group of people to get to know an area
and learn to live on and with it,â he âthinks it is a mistake to
conceive of this in terms of any sort of bounded region. Rather it is
important to understand that relationships within the natural world
perpetually flow and intertwine into each other making any real
placement of boundaries impossible, except through the use of
institutional force.â
Wolfi also offered an articulate criticism of bio-regionalism. He wrote:
. . . bioregionalism takes a conception, a human mental construction,
developed to try to understand certain types of environmental
relationships, and treats it as a thing-an actual bounded area of land.
This is an unfortunate tendency that human beings seem to have with all
the conceptions we have developed for understanding complex
relationships (society, culture, gender, race, ethnicity, nation, etc.).
When this tendency toward reification institutionalizes, the boundaries
we imagined are made real by force and agreement-cops, armies, walls,
treaties, pacts, etc. If I understand bio-regionalism, it is a name
given to the reality that the relationship between all living and
natural factors in a given area tend to create a specific environment
amenable to specific living beings. Thus far there is no problem. But
there are no real boundaries between these areas, but rather, gradations
from one into the other. This is true even of rivers, mountains and
oceans.
Thus in healthy natural environments there are constant interchanges
between these areas which keeps them in a state of constant, but usually
gradual, change. Therefore, bio-regions as such, do not actually exist,
they are simply constructs we use for developing certain understandings.
Talking of basing how one lives on assuming that a specific mental
construct is a concrete reality is dangerous. Particularly when it
assumes that the earth is something that is naturally divided into
clearly definable sections, it can be the source of a great deal of
ugliness including territorialism, quasi-patriotism and property (even
if it is conceived as property of the âcommunityâ).
In response, I would argue that a home is a bounded area, be it a
physical shelter or a valley. Furthermore, a group of people can claim a
natural area as their home without it implying political boundaries or
property. Just as you wouldnât walk into someoneâs pantry and help
yourself without asking, the same would apply to an occupied habitat. To
remain free and autonomous, people must defend and protect their home,
not let themselves be bullied into leaving it (or giving up their food
storehouse).
The boundaries of any habitat are partially determined by the life forms
that create it, including human ones. Habitats are the result of
activity on the part of their inhabitants, not ready-made areas that a
group of people simply move onto and occupy. People become attached to
their territories and want to protect them because they help create
them; they are the result of their collective imaginations, desires and
labor, of spending generations in one place and becoming embedded there.
Sure the boundaries in some places might be ambiguous, but traditions
like having first access to the salmon or berries can solve these
questions and strains between close neighbors in a shared region.
Wolfiâs assessment of bio-regionalism is essentially correct, I believe.
For the reasons he shared, bio-regionalism does not reflect my
destination, rather the expressions âhabitatâ is closer to what i am
proposing. These are places created by us and which create us, not
specific boundaries one would recognize on an environmental map.
Anyone who enjoys mountaineering, hiking, camping or exploring valleys,
caves and canyons, is grateful that parks exist. They are a welcome
respite from the hustle and bustle of urban living, an opportunity to
delight in the slower rhythms, fresher air and greater diversity ofplant
and animal life. Parks are refuges, oases of green in the otherwise
dreary grey of concrete and pavement. The local and federal land areas
put aside to a large degree for conservation and public enjoyment exist
not only to provide a cherished escape from civilization, but a
sanctuary for wildlife, whose habitats are fast disappearing under the
guns of housing developments and industrialism. Parks, it would seem,
leave little to complain about.
Recently, however, it came to my attention that some folk, particularly
indigenous peoples, did have some complaints. And, as I did a little
research, it didnât take long for me to discover that these complaints
werenât frivolous. In fact, there are many real concerns around these
seemingly benign oases. There is even a largely unknown history behind
them, one whose basis continues to this day.
Most federal parks, not only in the US, but in Canada and indeed
throughout the world, were once part of traditional indigenous
territory. Following their introduction, millions of indigenous peoples
around the world were forced out of their habitats.
Why has the public accepted this? First and foremost because parks have
been viewed as necessary, benevolent tools for the conservation of
nature. Secondly, many people have a personal stake in their existence,
providing their only possible escape from urban living. And finally,
most people simply arenât aware of the displacement of those millions
that was necessary for their establishment. And so activists, radicals,
reformers, and green minded people have accepted them without much
critical thought.
Parks seem to be bulwarks against continuing encroachment into
wilderness, and thus storehouses of flora and fauna for a future
regenerating nature. However, perhaps its time to reconsider whether
parks and conservation areas, as we know them, are a significant,
long-term solution to the destructive madness of industrialism and to
look more closely at what wilderness is and the impact parks have had
and continue to have, on indigenous peoples everywhere.
In 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed a Land Grant bill giving nearly 40,000
acres of federal land âencompassing Yosemite Valley to the state of
California for public enjoyment and preservation.â The grant deeded both
Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove of Giant Sequoias. This was the
basis for the creation of state parks as we know them today: setting
aside âscenicâ lands simply to protect them and to allow for their
enjoyment by the public.
On October 1, 1890, the U.S. Congress set aside more than 1,500 square
miles of âreserved forest landsâ soon to be known as Yosemite National
Park. But where did this land come from? Twelve years earlier, it was
taken from a people known as the Miwok. The Mariposa Indian War, a
territorial grab and an effort to subdue Indian autonomy, was the
necessary precedent that led to the possibility of that first park being
created.
Indigenous people have lived in the Yosemite region for about 8,000
years. By the mid-nineteenth century they were primarily of Southern
Miwok ancestry. However, trade with the Mono Paiutes from the East side
of the Sierra for pinyon pine nuts, obsidian, and other materials
resulted in many alliances between the two tribes. There were plenty of
acorns there and deer were abundant, making this a desirable place to
settle. In fact, it had one of the highest densities of aboriginal
peoples on the West Coast.
After the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills in 1848,
thousands of miners came to the Yosemite area to seek their fortune.
Naturally, the local First Nations fought to protect their homelands. In
December 1850, a trading post was destroyed at Fresno Crossing, and
three settler men were killed. Later, a force under Sheriff Burney
clashed with the Indians on January 11, 1851. As a result of this
opposition to the invaders, the Mariposa Battalion was organized as a
punitive expedition under the authority of the state to bring an end to
the resistance.
The Battalion entered Yosemite Valley on March 27, 1851. Dr. Lafayette
Bunnell, the company physician, who later wrote about his awestruck
impressions of the valley in The Discovery of the Yosemite, wanted to
âsweep the territory of any scattered bands that might infest it.â He is
also known to have had a take-no-pris- oners approach to the conflict.
Three companies were formed and launched several campaigns. Indian food
stores and even some villages were destroyed and tribal peoples pursued
into the mountains through snow and slush. âExpulsion from the Park
deprived the Miwok of their traditional hunting grounds, grazing areas,
fish runs and nut collecting groves. When they tried to take anything
back from the whites, they were resisted with guns and then hounded out
of the area again by the Mariposa Battalion.
Ironically the veryword âYosemiteâ is, according to Simon Schama, a term
of abuse used by the Miwok to describe the Americans who were assaulting
them and actually means âsome among them are killers[2].â Eventually all
of the associated tribes were defeated and were forced to accept
reservation life. Military units administered the park while the state
continued to govern the area covered by the original 1864 grant.
Civilian park rangers didnât take over from the military until 1914.
The extraordinary landscapes that made Yosemite desirable from a scenic
point of view were actually the result of the Miwokâs land use
practices, primarily a direct outcome of the intentional burning of
underbrush. After their expulsion, the activities of early
entrepreneurs, tourists and settlers, (the construction of hotels and
residences, livestock grazed in meadows, orchards were planted, etc,)
wreaked great damage on the eco-systems, painstakingly and properly
tended for so long by the Miwok and their ancestors.
We find this pattern of outlook and events recurring over and over again
in the creation of parks in many places: a) the notion of wilderness as
a place that doesnât include people living there b) the recognition that
an area has exceptional scenic, wilderness or industrial resource value
c) the area is protected by being turned into a park d) the expulsion
and dispossession of its inhabitants who were often largely responsible
for creating and/or protecting its beauty/resources in the first place.
The Miwok petitioned the U.S. government in 1890. They called for
compensation for their losses and denounced the managers of the park.
âThe valley is cut up completely with dusty, sandy roads leading from
the hotels of the white in every direction... All seem to come only to
hunt money... The valley has been taken away from us ...or ... a
pleasure ground...â Their pleas were ignored and further evictions of
remnant Miwok settlements were made in 1906, 1929 and as late as
1969.[3]
In 1871, AS A CONDITION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA JOINING Canada, the Canadian
Government had to agree to build a transcontinental railroad linking BC
to the rest of the country. Of course, the construction of a
transcontinental railroad also established a claim to the remaining
parts of British North America not yet integrated into either the
Canadian or America nation-states. It comes as no surprise that Banff
National Park was created in 1885, the year of the defeat of the Metis
Rebellion, which cleared and opened the west for settlement, tourists
and capital investment.
The official story goes that in 1882, Tom Wilson, a surveyor for the
Canadian Pacific Railway, âdiscoveredâ Lake Louise, the most accessible
centerpiece of the park, on the way through the Rockies. A year later
the Cave and Basin Hot springs were discovered by three railway
construction workers. People began to flock to the site, hotels went up
and the town of Banff was born.
The truth, however, is that it was people from the Nakodah First Nation
that guided Wilson to the Lake. In fact, they already had a name for it,
they called it âThe Lake of the Little Fish.â The Nakodah (also known as
Stoney) are descendants of the Dakota and Lakota nations of the Great
Plains and the Rocky Mountains, part of the large Sioux Nation.
The name âStoneyâ was given them by white explorers because of their
technique of using fire-heated rocks to boil broth in rawhide bowls. The
Nakodah were familiar with the area, having lived throughout it for at
least several hundred years. They knew the trails and passes as part of
their hunting grounds. There is archaeological evidence pointing to
human occupation going back at least ten thousand years, but apparently
the Nakodah came from somewhere around the Mississippi after an outbreak
of smallpox in the 1600âs.
In any case, by the time the Railroad was being built, the mountains
were part of their home. Iâm not aware of any uprisings to protect their
homelands, however the âStoneyâ were signatories to Treaty 7. (In order
for the transcontinental railroad to make its way across Canada, it had
to go through what were recognized as the traditional lands of different
aboriginal peoples. So it was important for the Canadian State to
negotiate Treaties with the distinct tribes living along the route to
allow the railroad to be built.) Regardless, the whole territory was
evidence of long term harmonious human occupation, much like
Yellowstone.
Sadly, during the first decades, park managers would do regular predator
hunts, believing that mountain lions, coyotes and wolves, for instance,
should be killed to save deer and elk. And now, only a hundred and
thirty years later, many of the Parkâs eco-systems are threatened, as
are several of the animals who live within it, and the Nakodah live on a
reservation.
In its 2007 annual report the Parks Canada web site states: âParks
Canada continued to work with the Siksika Nation and Indian and Northern
Affairs Canada to resolve the outstanding specific claim in the park.â
The claim is by the Siksika First Nation. Furthermore, in May 2000 the
Siksika threatened â to occupy Castle Mountain in Banff National Park to
pressure the federal government into handing it over. The Siksika, who
live east of Calgary near Gleichen, say theyâve been trying since 1960
to gain control of a 68-square-kilometre parcel that was used by their
ancestors for rituals.[4]â
The Siksika are part of the Blackfoot Confederacy, which consists of
four different tribes, the Pikuni/Peigan, North Peigan Pikuni,
Blood/Kainai, and Blackfoot/Siksika. Banff is the most heavily developed
national park in North America, entertaining more than five million
visitors a year and has been the site of fights between
environmentalists and developers. Environmentalists claim that added
development âwill put added stress on a fragile lake region where
grizzly bears, lynx and wolverines are already threatened by the
presence of as many as 20,000 tourists a day.[5]â
In 1989, I WENT TO THE SAVE THE STEIN VALLEY GATHERING. I joined with
many others and climbed to alpine elevations in the Valley, near Lytton
in southwestern British Columbia. I spent a couple of days listening to
First Nations elders and activists and scientists from near and far. The
non-native activists spoke primarily of helping to preserve an intact
and unlogged watershed, a âpristine wilderness.â The First Nation elders
spoke of protecting their traditional territory and of a hope of
regenerating traditional ways.
The U.S. Wilderness Act states that parks are places âwhere man himself
is a visitor who doesnât remain.â But isnât it industrial modes of
living that threaten the organic world? Isnât it how we live, and not
simply our presence, which really makes the difference? From an essay by
Marcus Colchester:
Many indigenous peoples remain perplexed by western views of what
conservation means. âMy Dad used to say: âthatâs our pantry.â We knew
about all the plants and animals, when to pick, when to hunt,â remarked
Ruby Dunstan of the Nlâakaâ -pamux people, who have been trying to
prevent the logging of their ancestral lands around Stein Valley in
Western Canada. âBut some of the white environmentalists seemed to think
if something was declared a wilderness, no-one was allowed inside
because it was so fragile. So they have put a fence around it, or maybe
around themselves.[6]â
The fact is that humans, like every living species, need a habitat. Call
it a territory if you will, but we need a place that we know intimately,
that creates us as we create it. And because indigenous peoples in North
America had this intimacy, it was incumbent on them to protect their
land bases from incursion and invasions, especially destructive ones.
After all, as Ruby Dunstan pointed out, these were their âpantryâ, land
bases that were part of their sustenance and their lives in myriad ways.
The lands werenât untouched by humans. In fact, humans lived within most
of the âwilderness areasâ that became parks. To an outsider they
appeared âpristineâ, âuntouchedâ, âwildâ, but, in fact, they were closer
to a type of permaculture on a grand scale. Humans had inhabited many of
these âwilderness areasâ for lit rally thousands of years. That they
were so rich in their abundance as well as appealing in their natural
beauty is really a testimony to the organic ways of their human
inhabitants who were determined not to spoil their pantries but to
respect and understand them.
The Stein Valley, like Yosemite and Banff, was a living example of
harmonious human occupation. The valley had been significant to the
Nlakaâpamux people for thousands of years. It provided for them. There
are a large number of pictographs still visible today throughout the
valley, from small single symbols to one of the largest pictograph sites
in Canada. At Asking Rock near Stryen Creek, the Nlakaâpamux can stop to
pray and ask permission to travel the valley safely.
According to the organization BC Spaces for Nature
Evidence of the Nlakaâpamuxâs inhabitancy is found throughout the
valley. Where the Indians once wintered in gigantic pithouses at the
confluence of the Fraser shallow depressions of their winter storehouses
can still be found. Numerous culturally modified trees, cedar trees with
large, rectangular strips of bark missing, can be found near Teaspoon
Creek. This small grove of cedars provided an important source of fibre
for cord, clothing, roofing, basketry, and insulating materials.[7]
In 1993-1994, protests in Clayoquot Sound, also in British Columbia,
reached a climax with nearly 800 environmental protestors arrested. This
was the largest act of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Needing
to heal the fracture between itself and many environmentalists, the
government at the time doubled the provincial park land-base in BC. As a
result the Stein Valley Provincial Park was created as an area to be
co-managed by the Lytton First Nation and BC government. There is
allowance for the Stein Valley Nlakaâpamux Heritage Park to be used for
âspiritualâ activities, but I donât know at this time whether the Stein
is also being used for subsistence activities or not.
While we have been focusing on North America, the park model was
actually exported throughout the world, forcing millions of tribal
peoples out of their habitats/territories. The practice continues to
this day in Asia, Africa and India, for example, where non-profit
foundations and United Nations sponsored organizations are eagerly
trying to protect what little land is left that hasnât been destroyed by
industrial modes of living.
Unfortunately, be it the Twa peoples expulsion from Congoâs Kahuzi-Biega
National Park, the Maasai from the Amboseli National Park in Kenya or
tribal people in southern India forced out of the Indira Gandhi National
Park as part of an âeco-developmentâ scheme funded by the Global
Environment Facility, parks and conservation lands remain one more force
which dispossesses tribal peoples. In Africa alone, one million square
kilometers of land has been expropriated for conservation over the past
one hundred years. Estimates in India range around three-quarters of a
million people pushed off their traditional lands for conservation, in
Africa the number is likely in the millions. Unfortunately, and
ironically, land that has long been occupied and protected by indigenous
peoples continues to be deemed âwildâ and therefore suitable for
âconservationâ primarily by having them declared parks, thus making them
out of bounds for the indigenous peoples who maintained them in the
first place.
What happens to the people who once lived rich, meaningful lives within
these habitats? They become like you and I. Dispossession leads to
rootlessness, discouragement, depression, inability to be self-reliant,
bad nutrition, broken communities, severed kinship ties, and anger, too
often turned inward or directed to the nearest person.
I think we need to realize that dedication to creating parkland and
conservation areas does not necessarily coincide with helping regenerate
ways of living harmoniously with a habitat. More often than not it
promotes a misanthropic outlook that posits intact, healthy land areas
being by definition âhuman-freeââ, rather than capitalism-free. We tend
to ignore the fact that indigenous peoples seeking to maintain or renew
their traditional life ways need to have access tothese areas,
especially if the parkland in question was actually part of their
traditional territory.
Even liberal organizations like UNESCO have begun to realize that there
has been a negative social impact associated with many protected areas.
In some places in Asia, Africa and Latin America, provisions have been
made for local control so that traditional lifestyles might continue.
But these tend to be limited âbuffer zonesâ, where the original
inhabitants can control âdevelopment projectsâ. These attempts have not
succeeded.
Apparently coalitions of indigenous peoples have had some success in
forcing international bodies to recognize their inherent right to manage
their traditional territories. âIn the 1990s, the World Wildlife Fund
for Nature (WWF), the World Conservation Congress and the World
Commission on Protected Areas all adopted new policies and resolutions
which strongly endorse indigenous peoplesâ rights and promote the
co-management of protected areas, based on negotiated agreements.[8]â
However, these organizations arenât arguing for free access to oneâs
habitat, but to ânegotiated agreementsâ with outsiders and centralized
authority, and land bases integrated into the scheme of state
regulations and subject to the pressures of politics and the market.
Regardless of some recognition, many parks and conservation areas,
especially in impoverished countries, remain part of the greater theft
of traditional homelands by arrogant, powerful outsiders who impose
their views of what constitutes healthy habitats. It isnât parks and
conservation areas that will help stem the tide of destruction and
plunder, but recognition that new ways of living are required. And these
new ways can be informed by the old ways ofland based people.
In several parts of the world and in some parts of Canada many of the
old ways have been lost, or nearly so. In the Pacific Northwest,
however, this isnât the case. It seems sensible to promote a return to
the traditional ways of the people of the land, because, as we have
seen, the empirical proof is there for long-term harmonious occupation.
Naturally, in some countries, there could be real challenges for some
peoples regaining control of these parks in order to live according to
ecologically harmonious principles because it would mean reawakening and
re-learning buried systems of subsistence and self-organization. There
are also new environmental limits that might conflict with traditional
life ways. But the simple fact remains; if it is their land, it must be
returned.
Backhome, in Canada, in the Pacific Northwest, radicals can focus on
protecting areas from industrialism and capitalism, while also arguing
for the free access to those lands by the people whose territories they
have always been, rather than for the creation of parks. And, if the
lands arenât under claim by an indigenous nation, why not consider
making them your own home, regardless of what the authorities and
misanthropes have to say?
A HABITAT IS A TERRITORY THAT PROVIDES SOURCES OF water and food, as
well as reliable sources of materials for shelter and heat. Typically,
it is where you first made love, learned to swim, caught your first
fish, and perhaps even fought a battle against a belligerent neighboring
group.
Practically everybody in your community knows the names of the flora and
fauna of your habitat, where the berries are, when the birds leave and
return. Most inhabitants feel a kinship with the totality of your
habitat, not only its flora and fauna, but its weather patterns, rocks,
streams and mountains, its unique smells and sounds and the various
combinations of them that make the singular music of your home.
Urban civilization wonât fail because of the actions of a minority of
eco-activists and indigenous traditionalists. However, it is possible
that a majority of those repulsed by the destructive basis of
civilization will become anti-authoritarian fighters dedicated to
creating a world of ecological communities, each success along the way a
revitalising inspiration. If enough of the population participates, a
critical point will be reached where the drive of our collective push
toward kinship with our surroundings will become unstoppable.
Revolution is not everywhere or nowhere. Any region can be liberated
through a succession of actions, events and strategies based on the
conditions unique to it, as the grip of civilization in that area
weakens through its own volition or through the efforts of its
inhabitants. It would benefit these liberated regions to form alliances
or meld in some way, or they might choose not to.
It is up to each of us to look for the weak points and the vital points
of our opponentâs armor within our geographical area and to strike them.
It is not true that until all humans are free, none are free. But it is
true that none are free until all are free within the same place. And it
is enraging and sad that some might enjoy freedom and authentic
community while others donât. It is this sense of solidarity with
others, our refusal to be atomized, that compels us to spread our
freedom.
Civilization didnât succeed everywhere at once, so its undoing might
only occur to varying degrees in different places at different times. In
any case, the process of domestication is an ongoing one. Just because
it succeeds in colonizing any given area, doesnât mean civilization is
inherently permanent. Its continuance relies on our belief in its
superiority, our submission to its authority, and our failure to have
successful insurgencies.
Civilization is a march toward death. Just to ensure that some diversity
of life will endure, the brakes must soon be put on the mega machines:
seemingly unstoppable, out-of-control locomotives of catastrophes.
The captivity of the civilized must be maintained on a daily basis,
otherwise there would be constant organizing and revolting. Coercive
authority relies on entertainment (tourism, drugs, television, etc.),
ideologies (Marxism, religion, science, etc.), propaganda (schools, mass
media, etc.) and repression to keep us dumb and scared. Many of us who
recognize that something is deeply wrong donât fight back primarily, I
believe, because of feelings of isolation and poverty, as well as fear
of retribution from the repressive apparatus of political power (police,
military, courts, jails, etc.).
While the rule of capital and centralized power might seem omniscient,
they actually are not. There is a totality of domination, but the
totality is not yet dominated. There are many psychic and geographical
blind spots, openings, frontiers, where the sentinels and soldiers are
few or at least fewer. We can take advantage of these. Our struggle for
individual and collective freedom isnât pointless or hopeless or so
overwhelming as to make total surrender appear reasonable and
inevitable.
For instance, because so much of our captivity relies on internalized
cops, on the daily reproduction of social misery by our own compliance
with the various roles expected of us (worker, soldier, consumer, man,
woman, etc.), the weakest point in our opponents armor is probably our
own ability to refuse these expectations of predictable behavior. It is
through withdrawal from scripted roles and cultural constructs that we
will get to know our neighbors and comrades, indeed ourselves, in a more
honest light, revealing our true complexity as individuals, and thereby
be better able to create the communities of resistance that could form
the bases of our offensives. It also means attempting to collectively
withdraw from our participation in the institutions and behaviours of
capitalist civilization: entertainment, schooling, dependence on welfare
states, wage work rather than subsistence skills and self-reliance,
electoralism and other forms of representation, etc.
In order to become free individuals embedded in genuine communities, we
need habitats. Cities are not habitats; they are concentrations of labor
and commodities and an opportunity for power to synchronize the
activities of masses of workers and consumers, of large populations.
They are also one form of the many sacrifice zones that civilizations
rely on. Their original wild state has been erased. Nearly every
original expression of life and diversity and the organic has been paved
over, or re-formed from above by officialdom and its planners.
An ecologically healthy, self-reliant culture would find such zones
incapable of providing adequate food for a fraction of their existing
populations. Free individuals would likely recognize them as hopeless
wastelands of environmental desolation, rather than potential
playgrounds to be newly explored and filled with expressions ofthe
marvelous. Urban ways are inherently un-sustainable, they are
destructive to the environment and to the human spirit. Their
territories are organized entirely to accommodate political power and
the market.
Sustainable, self-reliant, autonomous groups of people need a land base,
a territory. This means that we need to make the acquisition of such
bases a focus of libertarian struggle. This doesnât mean a simple return
to a movement of rural communes, although these could be an important
part of a diverse movement toward achieving this objective. Rather
having land, or at least access to land, must be acknowledged as the
necessary condition it is for any group of people to live freely, to
support themselves within.
For some radicals the focus might then drift away from activities aimed
at reforming urban living with co-ops and community gardens and free
schools, for instance, and toward the re-appropriation of their lives
through the re-appropriation of sustainable land. For others, it could
mean a shift from urban activism, no matter how militant, to identifying
a potential habitat and making efforts to occupy it. Both of these
approaches entail abandoning cities, either literally as the places
where they currently live, or as the central stage where they assume
that the revolutionary struggle must occur.
Assuming that all important struggles must occur within urban settings
only reinforces the belief that urban societies are here to stay.
Struggles and resistance against capitalism and authority are valid
everywhere. In fact, the more an anti-urban element exists within the
struggle, the more threatening it is. Radicals should be able to focus
energy on solutions wherever they live: small towns, villages, cities,
ghettos, ethnic neighborhoods or islands.
In order to create self-directed groups based on ecological principles,
we need a habitat to experiment within and with, to learn from, to grow
and gather food on, and to help provide us with shelter.
If we can push the project for social freedom and harmony with the
biosphere toward one dedicated to the liberation of geographical areas
within which we live, we canre-create/re-discover viable habitats. Then
several things become possible. For one, a movement of genuine and
stable communities might begin to establish itself. Should this arise,
with its tastes of deep bonds, personal freedom, collective
self-reliance (not on a state), organic self-direction, etc., our
ability and motivation to resist will be much stronger.
Most non-native radicals are admirably fighting against specific forms
of oppression and injustice or even trying to find ways to oppose the
totality of our domination, but few are fighting for a communal place
and the territory it depends on. This is because so many non-indigenous
people ofNorth America are still visitors or settlers; they havenât made
this place home yet. Few have either a deep connection with our
surroundings or with those who live within them.
Our insurgencies could be focused on the liberation of territory as
potential habitats. These emerging communities of withdrawal and
resistance might then form roots and become communities implanted in
specific places, thereby gaining some of the strength needed to be
genuinely effective forces for authoritarians to reckon with. Non-native
rebels should be aiming for a time when they too will be defending their
kin and their habitats or territories.
I take great inspiration from our comrades in Chiapas, Mexico, who, in
defense of their territories and relations, took the first shot and, to
a large degree, have won. With the realization that we have nothing to
lose but our false freedom, false wealth, and false community, we too
could be preparing ourselves for secession from the nation-states and
ideologies that hold us captive, wherever we live.
Large areas of North America are still claimed by the descendants of
earlier peoples, and radicals need to acknowledge this when occupying
land wherever we live. Itâs important for us to educate ourselves about
the indigenous people who lived in our area before contact with empire
and its civilized soldiers and citizens, and to reach out to the
traditionalists, our natural allies, among them. Without a land base we
canât be free, self-sustaining people. But in many places the land
already belongs to an indigenous group, so our occupations must go hand
in hand with relationships with them, or at least general knowledge of
their history and territorial claims. Colonization and colonialism can
take many forms, including revolutionary attempts at occupying land.
Some believe that an anarchist uprising always includes the liberation
of geographical areas from the rule of the state and capital and
therefore always include a renewed relationship with the natural world.
But this isnât the case. Many radicals and rebels still seek anarchy
through the creation of large political organizations, by winning
converts and taking over the levers of production and distribution. They
want us to manage civilization for ourselves rather than abolishing it
and creating a total transformation of our life- ways. Their vision
still includes cities, factories, an ethic of production rather than a
subsistence ethic, overarching infrastructures (transportation,
industry, research, large political organizations) and large-scale
agriculture.
That set of ideas has as a condition a situation in which the natural
environment is subservient to humans rather than predicated on a more
harmonious, reciprocal relationship. If the primary relationship we have
with the natural world is based on its domination and colonization, then
it would seem that everything built on that approach has a predictable
outcome: the degradation and eventual depletion of the land that it
relies on, just as under capitalist civilization.
Unfortunately we canât have our industrial cake and eat it too.
Anarchist industrialism, like its sibling, capitalist industrialism, is
untenable in the long term.
Anarchy implies not only voluntary association and organic
self-organization, but self-reliance, which occurs most naturally and
easily within groups embedded in a specific region. We arenât aliens.
Our feelings of indifference to our habitats grows out of an imposed
separation from them by institutions of political and economic power,
which are threatened by land-based people.
The present authoritarian order seems to have originated around the end
of the so-called Paleolithic era. This is where we find the beginning of
our systematic self-enslavement and self-alienation. All of the
developments usually associated with the Neolithic revolution (urban
living, agriculture, etc.) seem to ultimately lead to todayâs mega
technological civilization.
Over the centuries, myths have permeated civilized societies in order to
make the ideologies that civilization is predicated on seem natural.
These myths include the necessity of political hierarchy, a belief in
progress, the notion of nature as hostile, and the belief that economics
(exchange rather than gift-giving) are inherent in all human social
arrangements.
Preceding urban civilization, many changes must have occurred within
these culturesâ collective psychological experience, for instance the
emergence of symbolic mediation (language, art, time, etc.), that made
domestication more likely to occur. These changes led to sedentary lives
and the domestication of formerly wild plants and animals, breaking
age-old, organic life-ways and creating a permanent cycle of increasing
separation from our natural surroundings.
No matter the chronology, or whether there actually is an original
source of domination, our contemporary predicament is most characterized
by lack of access to land within which to freely live.
Weâve all become either prisoners, livestock, inmates, refugees,
dependents, slaves, servants, settlers, or their various overseers and
managers.
Restoring/reclaiming genuine habitats means the liberation of
geographical areas from the rule of the state and capital, as well as
renewing our kinship with nature. Free people living in free groups in
harmony with the biosphere need to locate themselves within natural, not
political, regions.
It isnât possible to lay out a universally-applicable practical
strategy. Revolt takes myriad forms. Ultimately a combination/
confluence of defensive and offensive strategies seems obviously most
promising. Occupy land and defend it, or at least look in that direction
for ideas.
Creating anarchy, or the undoing of capitalism and the dismantling of
authority, is primarily an unknown adventure, but living in anarchic
villages is in our blood. Since the first dawn we have been free except
for the long nightmare of this urban civilization. Rediscovering
voluntary association, creating collectively a new era of social
experimentation will involve many events and upheavals and in many cases
bloodshed, not because rebels are fixated on violence, but because
authority relies on it. All over the planet, political authority is
making it safe for the market to devour the wild and punishing and
imprisoning its opponents.
In many areas where civilization is most ingrained and the population
most bribed by the âgoodsâ of capitalism, we will likely free ourselves
in bits and pieces, slowly removing our armor, questioning authority,
re-discovering self-reliant ways, learning new strategies and tactics
with which to oppose capitalism, unlearning the internalized forms of
our domination like homophobia and racism, isolating leftist vanguards
and politicians, learning about the natural world, etc.
Demanding/creating large commonly-held land bases fits very well within
this overall strategy for self-emancipation. Cities need to be
abandoned, but this might take a long time in some places. Succeeding in
renewing and regenerating large urban or rural areas by freeing them
from the market will at least give many of us a chance to get some
breathing room.
This is about probing power for weaknesses while at the same time making
attempts at self-emancipation. Expanding oneâs territory, while
shrinking the enemyâs, is the ideal move in a territorial contest
between opponents.
As authority is repulsed and its institutions dismantled, new
opportunities will open up. As it stands now, based on experiences
around the Occupy movement and events in Montreal around the student
protests (2012), indeed looking at many recent uprisings around the
world, neighborhood councils and general assemblies, at least in cities,
would likely become core institutions guiding radical aspirations. But
rather than opening new doors, rather than making experiments in living
possible, these assemblies risk becoming the new directors and
representatives of revolt, reproducing large scale urban ways of
organizing based on democratic values, rather than smaller scale,
organic approaches.
As long as we are on a path, taking a specific direction, toward an end
to all the prevailing truths, toward the creation of genuinely new
relationships, then general assemblies can be a stepping stone, so to
speak, on that trail. But if they are seen as ends in themselves, as the
embodiment of what an anarchic society would look like, one where we are
still entrenched in cities and politics, then they will become
obstacles. The direction, after the carnival of expropriation, ofthe
liberation of our yearnings, of the erasure of all rank and privilege,
of feasts and dances and experimentation, must be toward building new
relationships with, and re-situating ourselves within, the natural
world.
Literacy, and it's role in society, is a huge topic, one deserving of
much debate and conversation. But itâs important to me that the reader
is aware of my discomfort with literate-cen- tricity. It seems implied
by the writing and publishing of my thinking that I view literacy as a
neutral, if not important, tool in the spreading of ideas. But this
isnât the case. Literacy has many aspects that make its neutrality
questionable. In fact, I believe that a better world would have
difficulty making a place for it.
Literacy presupposes many relationships between humans and between
humans and their environment. Are we going to be sitting in schools
learning how to write and spell and read or will we be at the river
learning how to fish, or in the field learning medicinal herbs and
edible plants? Will we be laboring at a printing press, with its
machinery and ink, or honing our oratorical skills at gatherings? Will
we be in a machine shop making parts for the press or reciting poetry
from memory to our lover in a meadow? Books are like cars or computers
or electric guitars. We make use of them today, within the context of
this particular social order, but will we really be interested in or
able to maintain the cultural values and relationships necessary for
their survival?
I have greatly benefitted from books, from poetry and radical theory to
how-to and fiction books, Iâve been enriched by their possession. And
there is a lot of knowledge that elite classes While the rule of capital
and centralized power might seem omniscient, they actually are not.
There is a totality of domination, but the totality is not yet
dominated. There are many psychic and geographical blind spots,
openings, frontiers, where the sentinels and soldiers are few or at
least fewer. We can take advantage of these. Our struggle for individual
and collective freedom isnât pointless or hopeless or so overwhelming as
to make total surrender appear reasonable and inevitable.
For instance, because so much of our captivity relies on internalized
cops, on the daily reproduction of social misery by our own compliance
with the various roles expected of us (worker, soldier, consumer, man,
woman, etc.), the weakest point in our opponents armor is probably our
own ability to refuse these expectations of predictable behavior. It is
through withdrawal from scripted roles and cultural constructs that we
will get to know our neighbors and comrades, indeed ourselves, in a more
honest light, revealing our true complexity as individuals, and thereby
be better able to create the communities of resistance that could form
the bases of our offensives. It also means attempting to collectively
withdraw from our participation in the institutions and behaviours of
capitalist civilization: entertainment, schooling, dependence on welfare
states, wage work rather than subsistence skills and self-reliance,
electoralism and other forms of representation, etc.
In order to become free individuals embedded in genuine communities, we
need habitats. Cities are not habitats; they are concentrations of labor
and commodities and an opportunity for power to synchronize the
activities of masses of workers and consumers, of large populations.
They are also one form of the many sacrifice zones that civilizations
rely on. Their original It just seems plainly ridiculous to assume that
literacy will endure everywhere. I doubt the interest, ability and
energy will exist to ensure its universal continuance. A few sacred or
important texts in some places will be copied and reproduced in some
manner, but we shouldnât project a literate world into a decentralized,
non-authoritarian, ecological existence. It seems much more likely that
the average inhabitant of a given area will be expected and encouraged
to nurture highly developed memory and oratorical skills rather than
literate abilities.
In the meantime, I want to encourage face to face conversations and
debates, reading to each other, public speaking, and other forms of
direct communication specifically among radicals and rebels, but among
all people generally. Memorization, public speaking talents and the
ability to take the stories and ideas of others and make them our own
can be powerful tools and skills in our struggle to dismantle the
psychological institutions that dominate our lives.
For over 30 years I have acted, debated and conversed with other
anarchists. Throughout my life I have read the words and listened to the
voices of numerous philosophers, poets, fighters, friends, and
neighbors. I canât see any use in trying to sort out exactly who said
what or in trying to locate the passages in books where some of my
ideas, influences and even expressions might originate from. I believe I
have taken each idea and phrase and made it my own.
But there are specific people I would like to acknowledge as having
contributed a great deal to the formation of my outlook, either through
their writing or in conversations and friendship. So, in gratitude,
thank you to Corinne Bjorge, Karl for his exceptional lucidity, John
Zerzan, Wolfi Lanstreicher, Fredy Perlman, Jane Venter, Matsuki
Masutani, Zig Zag, Michael William, Jason McQuinn, and David Watson.
An extra thanks is in order to Aragorn! for his many inspiring projects
and the extraordinary support and recommendations he made when this
collection was originally imagined. Special appreciation to JennVicious
at Black Powder Press for her invaluable editing suggestions, without
which this collection would have been much less. And thank you to the
rest of the folks at Black Powder Press.
[1] The paragraphs on sieges came primarily from Wikipedia, as did parts
of the description of the Principles ofWar.
[2] World Rainforest Movement Bulletin No. 73 August 200
[3] âThis Park is No Longer Your Land: National Parks on Former Native
Landsâ UNESCO Courier, July, 2001, by Marcus Colchester. Special
acknowledgment to Marcus Colchester this exceptional essay. It formed
the basis for mine.
[4] Calgary Herald, August 20, 2000
[5] New York Times, August 14 200
[6] Colchester, 2001
[7] Great Wild Spaces: Stein Valley Nlakaâpamux Provincial Park,
http://www.spacesfornature.org/greatspaces/stein.html
[8] Colchester, 2001