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Title: an open invitation Author: seaweed Date: 2012 Language: en Topics: green anarchy, subsistence, survival, insurrection Source: open
This is an encouragement for local, anti-authoritarian secessionist
activity aimed at acquiring land bases. Ecological insights and
awareness, an inspiration from primal ways and a desire for autonomy,
both individual and collective, would characterize this push for
different ways of living.
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 authoritarian civilizations 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
wouldn’t 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 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 planet’s 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 ideologies,
especially the ideology of Progress. 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;
it’s urgent.
Will there always be seeds of the old world in the revolt for the new?
Perhaps, but a genuine rebellion won’t be fertile ground for them to get
established. Liberating humans from alienated and massified 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 isn’t to say that an international anti-authoritarian uprising
can’t or won’t 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 don’t require the permission of parents,
parties, or productive forces. There is no need to wait for history, god
or material conditions to authorize them. I’m exploring willful ruptures
among friends, neighbors, fellow conscripts and comrades, ruptures and
breaks that are valid adventures unto themselves, yet journeys and
breakaways that 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 one’s 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 have tried to have real relationships, the virus can take
hold, the contagion can spread. If they are entrenched only in a milieu,
then the infection will likely be contained by its typically narrow
demographic limits. Occasionally anti-authoritarian elements from these
sub-cultures can intervene in various oppositional struggles in order to
try and push trhem deeper or further, or to question the notions of
directors and representatives, but these opportunities aren’t always
present and nevertheless we shouldn’t be basing the realization of our
dreams and desires on a strategy of joining others in their reformist
and thus limited revolts.
The endless stream of ecological and social catastrophes can be stopped.
When you’re in a battle you don’t have many choices: continue to fight,
surrender or retreat and regroup. It would be wise to look at all the
means at our disposal, to honor all the paths that offer us euphoria,
that can take us to an oasis, to a place and time where self-organized
people can create the lives they choose.
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 making
attempts at creating 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 doesn’t immediately return, preventing 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. Finally we can share our world
views, put alternative perspectives in the public arena for debate.
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. It’s just that 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, of the possibilities they might unleash.
One thing is certain: waiting, either for ecological or economic
collapse, for global rebellion or local insurrection, shouldn’t 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 can’t 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 they 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 isn’t 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. Or,
if you never take the first step, you will never get there.
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 could unlock all 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 of
others 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, sharing food among many, are possible
foundation stones. From every angle, a land base becomes essential.
In a small but significant way it is a proposal to take the initiative,
because we can’t 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 therefore
occupy great amounts of territory. They don’t want new popes or
statesmen, better governments or better representation, new countries or
new republics. They aim for a world of ungoverned individuals, clans,
free wanderers, nomads and villages.
This strategy doesn’t aim for a mass movement, but for a dynamism of
local rebellions that offers to sweep up everyone who isn’t 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 don’t 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.
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 isn’t just for the ultra-exploited or the severely marginalized. It
isn’t 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 doesn’t scapegoat or blame one demographic. It
isn’t led by victim-politicians and morality. We are all in this mess
together, and we should 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 choke it, because it is an organic, site specific impetus.
Each region, each town, neighborhood, affinity-culture or clan 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 aren’t 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
don’t 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 of these? Is there a
place unpolluted enough that you could go to 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, haven’t a garden or access to an unpolluted place from which
they can gather food or medicine. You aren’t alone, at least in your
predicament.
One doesn't always have the option of joining in social disturbances,
most often you have to take responsibility and help create them. This
isn’t 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 obviously can’t 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 don’t 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 of healthy 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 of buds and
blossoms and new growth fill the air, the haze from automobile pollution
is beginning to dissipate and the sky is visible again. It’s 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 don’t get up and head to work in a factory or a mine or
in a store or for someone else’s profit. You pack a lunch and head to
the garden. It’s 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 doesn’t 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 and made
sure that everyone knew 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 shouldn’t be repeated, or
whether they were an imposition of forces opposed to genuine living,
re-forming them can’t 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 isn’t 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 culture’s ways
rest on. It is the foundation of a healthy, independent, autonomous set
of living practices. Subsistence assumes that you are familiar with the
cycles of the place where you live. Sense of place. Sensual wisdom.
This doesn’t mean that primal people don’t make mistakes. But overall,
they rely on directly lived experience complimented by generations old
wisdom to make their decisions.
Life in nature isn’t 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 group’s 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 isn’t about dumpster diving, scams, food banks, stealing and
welfare cheques. It is directly participating in a collectivity’s 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 can’t 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.
In the countryside practicing subsistence ways can immediately be part
of our means, but in the city, challenging urban ways is the necessary
first step.
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.