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Title: An Invitation to Desertion Author: Bellamy Fitzpatrick Date: Spring 2018 Language: en Topics: Backwoods, anarchy, wortcunning, anti-civ, desertion, autarky, reinhabitation Source: Backwoods: a journal of anarchy and wortcunning, No. 1, Spring 2018. Retrieved on September 22, 2018 from https://viscerapvd.files.wordpress.com/2018/06/bellamyfitzpatrick-aninvitationtodesertion.pdf Notes: Backwoods is Edited by Bellamy Fitzpatrick, Fera Sylvain, and Thuggy Whiskers, PhD. Backwoods is published twice a year by Enemy Combatant, publishers of anarchist books and pamphlets, with and eye to small scale, low-tech, and natural materials, as much as is possible within the bowels of leviathan.
Backwoods is an invitation to those who can hear it, those who already
know that something is deeply false and diseased about our way of life
and who are looking for fellowship in truly confronting our crisis. This
crisis is not one of surface issues, something that can be remedied with
either well-intentioned social reform or rational tinkering with
economic organization — it instead lies at the very core of our way of
life: our values, our relations, and our ways of seeing the world. We
are living through a great derangement, the ecocidal and immiserating
culture of Leviathan, in which the majority are possessed by a slavish
and consumerist ethic, a profound alienation from the non-human world,
and a deep confusion built on cultural lies.
This piece is an introduction to the theory motivating Backwoods. As
theory is thea, “a view,” and horan “to see” (Online Etymology
Dictionary), we are talking here of a whole way of seeing, an
understanding of the world and how to act meaningfully within it. It is
presented as an antidote to the reigning ideology of neoliberal
republicanism, aiming to delve into the roots of our crisis so as to
understand how to live as much as possible outside it and against it.
Our ethos will be explicated further in this piece and developed
continually throughout this journal, but, briefly, it is the following:
predicated on the creation of States to enforce the enslavement of the
many so that the parasitic few may acquire absurd wealth and influence.
Such social relations are poisonous to all involved, being based on
venality and coercion, ridiculous commodity fetishism, and the death of
real human community through domination and atomization.
with its effacement of ecosystems and their replacement with human
domesticates, as a fundamental human error, one generative of mass
extinction, soil exhaustion, war, and overpopulation.
tapestry of the living world as just so much grist for the mill, as an
unliving “resource” to be “developed” — that is, to be endlessly
plundered and paved, extirpated of life, and replaced by parking lots,
factory farms, waste dumps, extraction sites, and our apartment
complexes and offices that fittingly resemble battery cages.
the most humiliated, dislocated, deskilled, distracted, lonely,
unhealthy, and unloved people that have ever lived.
self-ownership and voluntary relations of mutuality with our human and
nonhuman kin in small, autarkic, face-to-face communities based in a
regenerative relationship with the land.
wisdom and modern ecology to the pursuit of modes of subsistence that
are harmonious with the world that sustains us: foraging, hunting,
fishing, and forest gardening.
stupefying technologies, learning well-rounded skill sets for furnishing
a living, and exploring and reviving traditional knowledge, skills, and
forms of healing.
and the sense of place, presence, and fulfillment that comes from
nourishing and being nourished by an enveloping, living world full of
consciousness and agency.
To begin communicating our philosophy to those who can hear it, this
invitation to the desertion of Leviathan’s entrails will consist of: 1.
a brief examination of our crisis, which occurs at the levels of human
social relations, broader ecological relations, and within the mind of
the individual; 2. a frank recognition of the fact that the political
realities of modern nation-states mean they can only perpetuate the
crisis, not rectify it; 3. a short analysis of the alternative political
ideologies of the Left and the Right, revealing that they, too, are
incapable of addressing the heart of the issues afflicting us; 4. a look
at anarchism, the most radical political tendency, and how even most of
its forms fall short of our goals; 5. an introduction to the theory of
anti-civilization anarchy on which Backwoods is based; 6. and, finally,
a first glimpse of the implications for praxis of our perspective:
desertion, autarky, and reinhabitation.
The vast majority of human beings living on Earth today have extremely
little control over their lies and shared world. The ways in which we
eat, gain shelter, and make a living are largely decided for us,
overdetermined by existing social norms that we can influence only
minutely, allowing us only a little room to maneuver in decisions about
how we want to live and what values we want to pursue. Most of us eat
food from grocery stores or restaurants, grown in distant places we will
never see under unknown and uncontrollable conditions. We rent or take
out a mortgage to find a home we did not build with neighbors we did not
choose and must labor immediately and continually to pay for it. After
going from place to place to beg for the opportunity to sell our time,
touting our value with a piece of paper that summarizes how compliant
and productive we are, we are rewarded by surrendering what is produced
with our labor, how our labor is performed, and what is done with the
product afterward.
The cycle of life seems to confront us like a blurred, harried race.
From childhood, most of us are indoctrinated in compulsory government-
or corporate-run schools where we are taught false or misleading
histories, trained to be obedient to closely measured linear time, and
inured to peer competition in the performance of duties issued by
authority. In adolescence, through schooling, socializing, and
propaganda, most of us adopt the religious, secular, and/or political
ideologies with which we are bombarded that make our reality seem
desirable, appropriate, or at least inevitable. Besides the jockeying
for selling one’s labor mentioned above, what is called success in
adulthood for many is vying to exchange the terror of being alone for
the sanctioned isolation of the nuclear family, that reproductive unit
that allows the cycle to begin anew. Elderhood completes this
humiliation, as one’s inability or unwilingness to continue laboring
often means increasing social irrelevance and impotence that commonly
ends in being tended to like an invalid by hired strangers.
What is commonly called our freedom consists of only the most trivial
and useless forms of freedom: the freedom to vote for some of one’s
rulers among predetermined and highly similar political candidates, the
freedom to choose among commodities that shriek at us with their labels
and advertisements, the freedom to escape presence in one’s own life
through a vast menagerie of pornography, television series, films, and —
most recently, at the furthest outposts of moronizing innovation —
virtual reality and sex robots.
As we modern slaves — for we do, as we shall see, truly deserve that
perhaps inflammatory title — struggle to assert some sense of agency in
our own lives, the wider world engulfs us as a vast and variegated,
almost unfathomable crisis. Our crisis is multifarious, a web of
interrelated and mutually reinforcing subcrises — ecological, social,
economic, psychic, philosophical — that not only immiserate our lives
and poison our bodies, but, at this late stage, now threaten the
integrity of the whole biosphere, that complex association of organisms
and their habitats that encompasses the Earth and gives to it the
richness of life in its beautifully simultaneous unity and diversity.
Our ecological crisis is one of accelerating biocide that nearly defies
imagination. Because of our technopathological culture of agriculture,
urbanicity, and industrialism, species are going extinct at a rate one
thousand times faster than the normal, background rate (De Vos et al.).
Forebodingly, only the great mass extinctions in the history of the
Earth compare to this rate of death, and the signs of its severity
surround us. The soils are becoming lifeless (Moss and Scheer) and
washing into the sea (World Economic Forum), when they are not being
entombed beneath pavement (Brown). The oceans are becoming acidic
(NOAA), devoid of coral (Eyre et al.), and emptied of fish (Tanzer, et
al.). The air is becoming increasingly carcinogenic (WHO) and
extinguished of insects (Hallmann et al.). The more pessimistic of
climatologists are currently suggesting that we may be very near or past
the point of setting off positive feedback loops that, once triggered,
will unavoidably bring about dramatic temperature rises within the next
few decades (Hall), and even the minimal goals of the more optimistic
are not being met (Shibli).
As without, so within the human psyche is collapsing as surely as the
biosphere by which it is nourished. Depression, “the number one
psychological disorder in the western world”, abounds, afflicting more
than 17% of Americans. Since the inception of unmitigated consumerism in
the mid20th century, there are an estimated ten times as many people
suffering from depression, with the incidence more than doubling in the
past twenty years (Pietrangelo, Elliott and Tyrrell), leading some
psychologists to bluntly acknowledge depression as the quintessential
“disease of modernity,” as “humans have dragged a body with a long
hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary,
sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and
socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” (Hidaka). Fewer
than one in five sufferers even seek help or acknowledge their condition
— misery, perhaps, is seen as the norm as we expect less and less from
life (Real).
Suicide, depression’s catastrophic end, is the eighth-highest cause of
death and also on the rise — among the middle-aged, it rose thirty
percent from 1999 to 2010 (Elliott and Tyrrell). Undoubtedly, one of the
most appropriate symbols of our time is the presence of nets below
bridges and windows that cannot be opened on tall office buildings and
hotels: the social planners anticipate the broken, hollowed-out worker
or customer who decides one lonely night to finally end their existence,
and they deny them even that freedom.
Meanwhile, empathy, that essentially human capacity to feel what others
feel, has fallen at an accelerating rate in recent decades, while
narcissism, the defensive enclosure of the self by a false persona
(Vaknin), has increased during the same period. This psychic bleaching
is attributed by researchers to widespread social changes: an increased
interest in accruing wealth, decreased frequency of reading, increased
social isolation, fewer friendships, and, of course, a greatly increased
use of technological gadgets (Konrath et al, Kristol, Zaki).
To those who take our shared crisis seriously, the politics of the
status quo can offer no true solution. More than that, the very
existence of politics, as a specialized activity separated from life, is
itself a manifestation of the crisis: it is the willed abdication of the
many from responsibility over their own lives and shared world; it is
the modern secular theology (Schmitt), in which one begs for deliverance
by a vast and invisible being known as the State through the prayer of
voting; and it is, of course, the province of one of the parasitic
classes we call politicians, the professionalized caretakers of the
dysfunctional social order.
The dominant ideology of the modern political class flows from
celebrated political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s laughably millenarian
declaration in 1989 that we had achieved “the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government” (Fukuyama). Fukuyama’s intellectual descendants, the
neoconservatives and neoliberals who now dominate both major political
parties of the United States, congratulate themselves on ruling a
society whose highest virtue is accruing wealth by plundering the living
world and climbing to the top of corporate slave hierarchies in the
ritualized, pacified war of all against all that we euphemize as “the
free market”. This ideology’s elite are, variously, either so convinced
of the greatness of their lifeway or so mendaciously selfserving that
they forcibly spread the gospel of “freedom and democracy” to foreign
lands through wars for “regime change.”
Even among believers in legitimate political authority – that is, those
who believe it is appropriate and desirable to have rulers so long as
those rulers are good and just — rampant political corruption is an open
secret, a fact recognized by the everyperson in quotidian conversation.
The ancient habits of graft, influence peddling, embezzlement, and other
forms of corruption are not only alive, but thriving — they are a
perpetual, inherent feature of a democratic republic, which merely
selects for ambitious, venal demagogues who engage in these practices
rather than, as it is often imagined, preventing their rise. In our
present era, the thinness of political legitimacy has reached the point
that politicians routinely make speeches in which they deride the
political process itself and openly refer to others as
bought-andpaid-for political careerists. In this light, when it is often
lamented by political commentators that only about half of the US
population eligible to vote chooses to do so, we might instead ask why
so many people still believe that we can be saved by getting the right
people into office.
Indeed, the utter emptiness of the political process is lain bare from a
cursory examination of the past few decades of U.S. presidential and
congressional elections, during which the two dominant parties have
repeatedly traded power, but nothing whatsoever has been done to
forestall the implementation of newer forms of naked authoritarianism:
murder by drone via presidential edict, aggressive persecution of
journalists and whistleblowers, the incarceration without trial and
subsequent torture of perceived enemies, the nearly ubiquitous
surveillance of the population, the normalization of “free speech zones”
outside of which protest is not allowed, and the re-legalization of use
of the military to enforce domestic law (Abu El-Haj, Mian, Risen,
Sterne, Wolf). In 1918, historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler
predicted that sometime around the year 2000, the most powerful Western
nation, in an effort to resist its decline and destabilization, would
become a new Caesarism — we are watching his prediction manifest itself
(Spengler).
As the desolation around the human being mirrors the desolation within
the individual amidst the rise of this new techno-authoritarianism, the
political alternatives to the status quo on both the Left and the Right,
correspondingly, become increasingly ghoulish. With incredible foresight
in the mid-19^(th) century, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche predicted
that the nihilism brought on by the long, slow disintegration of
Christianity would cause people of the West to willingly flee into the
prisons of totalitarian political regimes to embrace a new, secular
theology as a salve for their existential malaise — the horrors of
Communism and Fascism in the 20^(th) century bore out his prediction
profoundly (Nietzsche). Now, however, the politically active of the
younger generations, with amnesic zealotry, are intent on repeating
these failed experiments in the perfectibility of the human through the
authority of the State.
Much of the Left, from more reformist to more revolutionary variants,
now embraces what is variously called the ideology of social justice,
antioppression practice, or, usually disparagingly, identity politics,
in which our crisis is understood primarily in terms of
institutionalized oppressor/oppressed dyads: White/Person of Color,
Settler/Indigenous, Male/Female, Straight/LGBTQ, Ablebodied/disabled,
and so forth. Through this understanding of oppression – a fusion of
Maoism and vulgarized postmodernism, often under- or unrecognized as
such by its adherents — members of the oppressor half of the dualisms
are objectively and perhaps unavoidably dominators: not only their
actions but also their ways of thinking are apt to reproduce this
oppression, even if the individual in question consciously rejects and
resists the system of institutionalized hierarchy as a whole.
Conversely, members of the oppressed half of the dualisms are not only
perceived as innocent victims but also objectively revolutionary figures
well-placed to be the leaders of resistance: their status as the
oppressed not only gives them a specialist knowledge of the system as a
whole, but also means virtually any action that they take against their
oppressors is justified and liberatory.
This dualistic analysis, while certainly getting at something genuine,
nonetheless ignores or downplays the fact that the actually-lived
experience of hierarchy is contextual and dialectical, not universal and
straightforwardly top-down: the parasite is not master of the host, but
engaged in a complex and nuanced codependence with it that necessarily
includes both some level of submission and accommodation by the host and
some level of weakness and incentivization by the parasite.[1]
An even worse and more obvious error of social justice ideology is its
obfuscation that in our present reality the vast majority of so-called
oppressors are themselves dispossessed and enslaved subjects. The
European-descended American male, imagined as tremendously “privileged”
in this world that is supposedly made for him, is himself likely the
descendent of people who were serfs, who were dispossessed of land from
which they derived their subsistence, and/or who were enslaved in
factories. He himself is born into a world in which everything he needs
to survive is owned, psychically and materially barred from him. He is
no master, but only a differently privileged slave — and every large
slave society has depended for its integrity on such tiers of privilege
that divide the slaves against one another. The adherents of social
justice ideology have thus internalized their rulers’ gambit by blaming
our crisis primarily on their fellow slaves.
The creeping authoritarianism of this ostensibly liberatory political
tendency increasingly reveals itself in various ways that, while
certainly not universal, are nonetheless common and broadly endorsed or
tolerated by the Left: a vulgar understanding of post-structuralism that
dismisses any pragmatic use of empirical inquiry as necessarily part and
parcel of the oppressive Western apparatus whenever its conclusions
contradict Leftist ideology;[2] a Marcusean willingness to legally or
extralegally suppress the speech of individuals or groups denounced as
objective oppressors by equating speech with violence and the
suppression of such speech as legitimately defensive counter-violence
(Marcuse); and frequent calls for the mass dispossession, subordination,
and punishment of oppressor groups.[3] These authoritarian upwellings
are, fittingly, entirely consistent with the history of authoritarian
communist regimes.
The past few years have seen a sudden rise in a countercultural
Right-wing movement roughly organized around the label Alt-Right, a
hodgepodge of White Nationalists or “Identitarians,” Neo-Reactionaries,
conspiracy theorists, and outright self-identified Neo-Nazis. The
Alt-Right ideologues present, and presumably sincerely view, themselves
as genuinely countercultural or even revolutionary, as they are
resisting the rise of “cultural Marxism,”[4] the suppression of free
speech,[5] and, most importantly, the death of European culture and
“white genocide” via mass immigration to Europe and the United States
coupled with the currently low birth rates of European-descended
peoples. With often messianic, mythic rhetoric, they imagine their
victory as a kind of second European renaissance achieved through the
creation of a European homeland, a “white ethno-state,” in which there
would be a flourishing of artistic culture, science, and moral and
spiritual life.
Some of the social critiques of the Alt-Right — their criticism of
censorship, of endless U.S. war under the military-industrial complex,
and of the death of meaning under consumerism — are wellplaced, though
neither complete nor remotely satisfactorily addressed by their proposed
solution of racial separatism. There is nothing inherently liberatory
about racial nationalism, in spite of its ascendency in European form in
the present politics of the Right and in virtually every nonEuropean
form in the politics of the Left, past and present.[6] Racially
homogeneous societies historically have, currently do, and undoubtedly
will continue to involve all of the horrors of civilization enumerated
thus far, including slavery. Indeed, the sociologist and historian of
slavery Orlando Patterson, in his survey of sixty-six slave societies,
came to the perhaps surprising conclusion that racial similarity or
difference had no effect on either how well-treated slaves were
materially or how much contempt their masters had for them (Patterson).
Nationalism only obscures this reality by creating a false unity, an
imagined automatic solidarity between parasites and hosts — nationalism
is the illusory substitute of the real, intimate community of the small,
face-to-face band societies in which we evolved.
At times, Alt-Right figures embrace an eccentric form of pessimistic
authoritarianism presented as a kind of amoral, brutalist realism, as
when Richard Spencer, in the course of the same conversation, observed
that States are essentially institutions of organized violence, that all
State societies have aristocracies (whether they acknowledge them or
not), and that all States severely infringe on the autonomy of the
individual — yet at the same time he asserted that States are inevitable
and that he wishes to create a new one, even if that necessitates
violence (Warski). This pseudo-radical analysis probes fairly deeply
into the nature of authority, yet at the last moment pulls back to
redeem it as inevitable and desirable.[7] Indeed, Spencer’s vision of
establishing a desirable society through an “ethno-state” is either
deviously mendacious or hopelessly naïve, as — even if one were, due to
an extreme White Nationalism, indifferent to the terror and misery that
would undoubtedly be caused by an ethnic cleansing of all or part of the
United States — the bureaucratic-police apparatus necessary to achieve
it would assuredly develop its own inertia and become an institution of
sustained tyranny over its European-American host population. The
Alt-Right thus ironically parallels the vulgar communists who imagine,
against evidence and intuition, that a dictatorship of the proletariat,
having seized the State and used its authoritarian powers to secure the
transition to communism, would ultimately then allow a withering away of
the State to create a stateless society. The irony of this parallel
dissipates with the clarity that both the political Left and the
political Right have, from an anarchist perspective, always had more in
common than they have had differences: both have the aim of Statecraft —
that is, authority of the few and slavery of the many.
What of anarchism, that most extreme political philosophy of human
freedom? Anarchism deserves great credit and consideration for its
liberatory recognition that the freedoms of the individual and the
freedoms of the community (or positive and negative freedoms) are not
always and inherently mutually opposed; they can, in certain
arrangements, instead be mutually enhancing. For this reason, we place
our project firmly within the anarchist tradition, heterodox though it
may be. Sadly, however, most anarchist tendencies are nonetheless bogged
down in delusory pseudoliberations.
The concept of social revolution has been with anarchism since its
earliest days, being championed by such founding figures as Pyotr
Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. On the
ethical basis that the current order is based on nearly-constant
violence — however mediated, ritualized, and pacified it might be
through law, economic exchange, and social norms — many revolutionary
anarchists have and do advocate for attentat, acts of symbolically
powerful violence, such as the destruction of property or assassination
of individuals perceived as key to the reigning order. Through this
“propaganda of the deed,” anarchists intend to show that the status quo
is not invincible and inevitable, to demonstrate to the everyperson that
their latent rebellious sentiments are justified and shared by others,
and to promote and generalize rebellious behavior.[8]
But a sober look at the history of revolutions does not reveal a great
expansion of freedom, instead only revolutions in the modes of
authority. The American Revolution traded one aristocracy for another,
eventually producing what is arguably the most terroristic empire the
world has ever known. The Haitian Revolution, a literal rising up of
chattel slaves against their masters, led quickly from its success to
the return of the plantation system they had rebelled against in the
first place. The Russian and Chinese Revolutions traded the authority of
ancien régimes for the tyranny of bureaucracy, surveillance, and police
terror.
In an effort to distance themselves from this macabre history, many
modern anarchists favor what they call insurrection, an entirely
decentralized, leaderless mode of revolution based on attentat and
propaganda. By avoiding the formation of formal parties or vanguards of
any kind, the logic goes, there will be no authority to replace what is
destroyed. The collapse of the social order, instead, will open the door
for anarchy: the free life of human beings without authority.
But insurrectionism is afflicted with the most poisonous sort of magical
thinking and optimism about human beings. For the insurrectionary
anarchist’s praxis to be achieved, there must be some sort of tipping
point at which the rebellion of an anarchist minority becomes
generalized, taken up by large numbers of people — it could perhaps be
only a small minority of the population, but this would nonetheless
involve an enormous number of people who are not currently anarchists or
political radicals of any kind, only people in whom, it is imagined,
some latent, undertheorized radical instincts exist, waiting to be
tapped into by the symbolic actions of the active, self-realized
insurrectionary anarchists.
While a great many people are, no doubt, more or less dissatisfied with
any number of aspects of the status quo, it is a tremendous and
unfounded leap to imagine that they therefore are latent anarchists,
only waiting to be tapped by some perfectly performed propaganda of the
deed. Rather, the vast majority are afflicted with what Jason McQuinn
has termed “Slave Syndrome” — an extrapolation from the idea of
Stockholm Syndrome — in that they are deeply conditioned to identify
with and act in their social roles, sculpted to have only a few of the
skills necessary for survival through their occupations, and very likely
to be woefully unprepared for and terrified by the idea of radically
reconstructing every aspect of society (McQuinn).
For most people, their dissatisfaction with the status quo consists of
wanting more commodities, more leisure, more prestigious and less
onerous jobs, better prospects in society for their offspring, and so
forth — these are not people who dream of profound transformations of
the dominant culture. At best, we might say some significant number of
people want a society that feels, in some vague and undertheorized way,
more fair or just, which might translate into a lower disparity of
wealth and an expansion of the welfare state. But how many people
actually crave to give up cars, air conditioning, Netflix, pornography,
and modern medicine? If they are not willing, would the cadre of
insurrectionaries then force such a change — or do they instead believe
that they could recreate a society with high technoogy and luxury
commodities that is, somehow, non-authoritarian and non-ecocidal?
Furthermore, the symbolic culture of society — its religions, myths,
mores, notions of success, life cycle events, and so forth — provides
most people with a much-needed shield of artificial meaning, protecting
them from existential dread and the terror of death — they are thus
attached psychically at a deep, partially unconscious level to their
cultures: to bring an end to the expected functioning of society at
large would entail coming to terms with the reality of one’s life and
choices as if for the first time, a potentially deeply traumatic
experience.[9]
But even were the insurrectionary anarchist to somehow succeed in
overthrowing the existent, they would still likely fail in their goals.
Far from ushering in the freedom of anarchy, the creation of generalized
social chaos that insurrectionary anarchists vie for will likely favor
(and historically has favored) non-anarchist dissident factions,
specifically the most ruthless and demagogical who wield the greatest
ability and willingness to use organized violence. Whoever can quash
their rivals and bring about security and access to resources for the
many can bludgeon the population into going along with their new way of
life whether many of them like it or not. The Leninists and Maoists whom
the anarchists tend to despise — yet who are often in the streets with
them during protests and riots — are quite honest with themselves and
others about this and are willing to be those people. They also, unlike
most anarchists, concertedly theologize their movements with a new
collective mythos — through invocations of the People, the Revolution,
the Communist Utopia, all of which are contortions of Christian
themes[10]-- to provide existential balm in a time of calamity. People
who have been born and bred as slaves are far more likely to feel
comfortable becoming a new kind of slave than to rise to the terrifying
responsibility of freedom.
The revolutionary anarchist is thus selfnegating in their praxis. By
making a revolution their telos, they delimit liberation to an almost
perpetually-receding future moment, confined in the present to
destabilizing their prisons — yet, historically, even in their moments
of apparent victory, they find that their past efforts have only aided
in the creation of their new incarceration.
If we eschew the illusions of reform and revolution, the politics of the
Left and the Right, we arrive at a consistent critique and thus
recognize our crisis for what it really is. Returning to the claim
adumbrated at the outset, our crisis is not merely one of politics,
society, or economics, but one of civilization, and our liberatory
project is therefore not political, reformist, or revolutionary, but
instead anti-civilizational.
To identify oneself and one’s project as being anti-civilizational can
come across as extreme, absurd, or even maudlin — what can it mean to be
“against civilization”? Because of both the mutability of language and
the ideological blinders nearly all of us accrue and so few of us shed,
civilization means to many of us all that is good and decent about human
sociality, typically contrasted with barbarism — thus, civilization is
the rule of law in contrast to barbarism’s arbitrary tyranny, it is
orderly cooperation rather than the chaotic “war of all against
all,”[11] it is high art and culture in favor of brutish struggle for
mere survival, and it is scientific discovery and technological
sophistication against ignorance, superstition, and toil. Used in this
commonplace way, civilization is more an ethical assertion — a claim
about how one ought to live — than it is a descriptive one — a claim
about how people actually do live. Even then, it is only a loose,
obfuscatory sort of ethical claim, a kind of bromidic ideal, since every
so-called civilization will necessarily feature a great deal of
so-called barbarism.
In seeking to describe and understand our crisis, however, we will use
civilization much more specifically and consistently. The term
civilization comes from the Latin civitas, popularized in ancient Rome
by the orator Cicero to describe the supposed implicit social contract
to which all Roman citizens had agreed to as the basis of their
coexistence. For Cicero, the civitas genuinely existed because people
believed it existed: that they acted and thought in certain consistent
ways in dealing with one another is all that civilization really was —
it was, as we said at the outset, a way of life and a way of seeing. The
civitas was thus not merely the city-state as a structure or as a
population of citizens, but also the shared idea of the civic community,
the mutually created and reinforced psychosocial construction of the
city-state.
Following Cicero, by civilization, therefore, we refer to both the
material and the psychic: civilization is sets of thoughts and gestures
reproduced daily as a whole form of life, one that has developed only
very recently and abruptly in the course of human existence. This way of
life is characterized by the growth and maintenance of cities, with a
city defined for our purposes as an area of permanent human shelter with
a dense and large population. By being permanent, a city’s population
cannot move in concordance with local ecological cycles, meaning it has
to subsist in spite of them, against them. By being a dense population,
a city’s inhabitants exceed the carrying capacity of their landbase,
meaning they must import nutrients from a surrounding rural area
typically characterized by agriculture as well as shuttle their wastes
elsewhere lest they choke on them. By being a large population, citizens
exceed the numbers possible for face-to-face and intimate community and
therefore exist among strangers, whom they necessarily treat as abstract
persons, not kin.
Psychically, civilized persons routinely self-alienate their life
activity, taking aspects of their lives, powers, and phenomenality[12]
and treating them as somehow alien or Absolute;[13] they then reify this
imagined entity and submit to it as somehow superior or inevitable. In
other words, an abstract idea dreamed up by an individual and reinforced
through communication with others around them comes to be
half-consciously or unconsciously treated as a concrete force. It is
thus that we create this phantasmagoria of “fixed ideas”[14] that seem
to dominate and dictate our lives: deities, nationstates, social roles,
the economy, the nuclear family, and so forth. The young man who loves
his country — which for him is a haze of ideals, his-tory, and ethnicity
— enlists, fights, and dies for the empire for whom he is a mere
statistic. The mother, hypnotized by the ideal image of the happy
family, slaves for her abusive husband and ungracious children, and then
blames her own inadequacies when her actual life does not align with
this reification.
In this reversal of the existentially-obvious state of affairs, these
frozen concepts — which are merely abstractions, symbols, or models of
actually-lived, sensual life — are delusorily treated as primary, more
real and more powerful than the persons who in fact imagined and created
them. Thus it is that, in civilization, people commonly believe
themselves to be largely unable to create and live their lives on their
own terms in free association with others, instead thinking and acting
in these highly submissive and stiffened manners while surrounded by
strangers with whom they tend to ritualistically and half-consciously
reinforce these shared reifications — just as Cicero imagined in a
positive light with his concept of the civitas. In this way, all
civilizations, past and present, have been and continue to be founded on
a high degree of (often subconscious or semiconscious) voluntary
submission to authority.
A concrete example: the activity of subsistence — the creation of
nourishment, shelter, medicine, and other essentials for survival from
one’s habitat — which could be done through freely-chosen cooperation
with others in a self-directed manner and in an unalienated relationship
with the non-human world that supports us all, is instead highly
mediated through the confining psychosocial infrastructure we call the
economy. Because so many of us so often treat our social roles as
workers and our abstraction of money as more real than our creative
powers and ability to communicate and cooperate, enormous numbers of us
submit to dangerous, toxic, humiliating, or simply tedious and
unnecessary (Graeber) work, surrendering our agency to managers and
investors who gain wealth off of our labor, in order to create
commodities, goods and services that are detached from those who made
them and then more or less passively consumed by others for the
subsistence and recreation whose possibility for direct obtainment was
prohibited by the time and effort spent working in the first place.
Materially, to varying degrees, civilized persons are dispossessed of
the means to create their lives on their own terms. Numerous features of
the world into which we are born — nonhuman organisms, land, water,
minerals — are always already forbidden to us, having been ideologically
recreated as State or private property, meaning people become dependent
not on the living world, but on these mediating civilized institutions
for their subsistence.
The history of civilization, as we will discuss throughout this journal,
can be understood largely in terms of a not-entirely-linear, but
nonetheless present, stepwise process of dispossession. In the very
beginnings of civilization, with the emergence of the first lasting
civilizations of Sumer, Egypt, and the Indus Valley, people were
dispossessed of land and the fruits of their labor through taxation and
theocratic ownership. AS civilizations have deepened and broadened, most
people have come to own and/or have access to less and less land. Common
stewardship of land used for food, natural medicines, and recreation has
nearly disappeared, and the little remaining is often closely managed by
State agents. Many people no longer even own their own homes, while
those that do almost invariably have tiny parcels insufficient for
subsistence. Now, we live in a world where one can step outside their
home — which may be only rented from someone else or be in danger of
being taken from them by a bank or government — to drive on roads that
do not belong to them into cities full of stores with needed foods and
goods taken from those who originally made them and available only for a
price. Nearly the whole world is claimed as property, and it can only be
accessed by the many who need it by performing the submissive behavioral
rituals of civilization.
Thus, through self-alienation and dispossession acting in concert,
civilized persons are reduced to a highly dependent relationship with
the psychic and material institutions of civilization. Their life
activities are no longer felt as their own, but have instead become
ritualized, stiffened, dissociated from them, as though they were all
merely playing a role in a greater body — it is the body of Leviathan,
the State, whose function is to acquire and store material wealth, bring
power and prestige to a few, wage war on competing Leviathans, and wreck
the Earth all the while.
This situation, we contend, deserves the label slavery, with the
recognition that slavery has existed in highly diverse, qualitatively
distinct forms across civilized history: chattel slavery, concubinage,
and indentured servitude, in which a person is more or less directly
owned as property; debt, wage, and salary slavery, in which persons are
parasitized indirectly through the control of money and property; and
temple slavery, eunuchism, and social caste systems, in which persons
are owned and Othered as a result of spiritual or religious belief
systems.
Slavery is, for the purposes of our journal, the sustained, ultimately
violent parasitization of selfalienating and dispossessed persons. This
definition that we employ in this journal is an extension and
modification of that on offer from celebrated historians of chattel
slavery David Brion Davis and Orlando Patterson, who, despite their
brilliance and erudition, cannot quite bring themselves to describe our
present crisis as slavery — even when they come exceedingly close to
doing So, going so far as to cite those who do — instead resorting to
less inflammatory, more academic language like, “exploitation” or
“bondage” (Davis 1966, Davis 1984, Patterson).
Thus, the anti-civilization critique goes far beyond that on offer by
the Left, the Right, or the majority of anarchists. The old Left
recognized class parasitization, but only recapitulated it through the
creation of parties and bureaucracies; the new Left increasingly
obscures even this basic insight under a panoply of particularized
oppressions that are only the symptoms of a common slavery. The Right
similarly obfuscates the issue by attempting to dissolve it into a
common identity of nationalism. The anarchists come closest, but fail to
sufficiently delve into either our crises material origins in
agriculture and industrialism or their psychic origins in
self-alienation, instead positing that a secularized millenarian
deliverance will solve our crisis.
As we will explore in more detail in future issues, the further
corollaries of the anti-civilization critique reveal that agriculture
and industrialism necessarily entail a continual despoliation of the
land and a resultant constant need to expand alongside an advancing wave
of habitat destruction. The need to perpetually expand, due not only to
despoliation but also typically rising populations, inevitably brings
civilized peoples into conflict with other peoples (civilized or not)
who occupy land into which they are expanding, typically resulting in
war, genocide, assimilation, and further enslavement.
Thus, civilization is born in dispossession and reification, maintains
itself through slavery and organized violence, and entails war and
ecocide. To truly value individual freedom and joy, kinship and love
among humans, intimacy with the beautiful nonhuman world, and psychic
peace and clarity entails anti-civilization anarchy, the abandonment of
the civilized way of life.
Here we return to desertion, our invitation at the outset, as the
beginning of the anti-civilization praxis, leading further to autarky
and reinhabitation. This praxis will be developed both theoretically and
practically in the course of this journal, and what follows is intended
only as a primer and a further introduction of the themes of Backwoods.
By desertion, we mean moving toward the abandonment of civilization,
both materially and psychically. Because civilization and the State are
reproduced daily primarily through the submissive, undertheorized
thoughts and gestures of the many — because civilization is first and
foremost the civitas that we psychosocially create — it follows that we
must unmake it through abandoning its lifeway. Material desertion means
decreasing or eliminating dependence on civilized slave economies for
one’s subsistence — food, water, shelter, fuel, and medicine — in favor
of its obtainment through direct interface with one’s habitat
individually or through voluntary cooperation in free association with
others. Psychic desertion means the abandonment of the reified and
submissive civilized slave ideologies on which the daily functioning of
society is based; the alienated and false relationships of social
scripts and roles; and the stupeyfing succor of delusory religions,
pacifying entertainment, and commodity fetishism. Replacing this
civilized worldview, I suggest, would mean in a nutshell the adoption of
a philosophy of conscious self-ownership and personal liberation, the
pursuit of openhearted relations based in mutuality and voluntary
association in common projects, and the embrace of the hard truths of
life with a sense of existentialism and personal honor rather than the
comforting illusions civilization offers us as carrots for our
submission. It would mean further a deep identification of oneself as
part of the flesh of the world, as necessarily tied to the life of all
other earthly beings — depending on one’s ontological or metaphysical
beliefs, this might mean an acknowledgement of the material codependency
of all creatures in the biosphere, or coexistence with them as part of
the anima mundi, or world-soul.
To anticipate the reformist critic of desertion: An immediate corollary
of this view is that efforts at reforming society must be rejected as
ultimately counterproductive. As was touched on above, civilization
cannot be reformed into a benign lifeway for either humans or the wider
living world, as it depends foundationally on slavery and irrevocably
entails ecocide. We will examine in future issues how the promises of
so-called green energy, organic agriculture, and other technical fixes
cannot fundamentally alter this corrupt foundation — they presently
function only to obscure it.
Moreover, civilization depends for its stability on reformers of all
kinds to protect its human constituents and nonhuman victims from its
worst excesses: social welfare protects against crippling destitution
and its resultant social chaos, the expansion of civil rights neuters
potentially dangerous underclasses and outlaws by allowing some of them
to feel they suddenly have a stake in the preservation of the social
order, environmental protection legislation means the poisoning and
denuding of the biosphere to the point of uninhabitability will take a
bit longer. The reformer, who might imagine himself the staunch social
critic, is thus ironically civilization’s most sincere and adroit
guardian. Nearly the same can be said of the revolutionary, who, as was
discussed above, is a kind of aggressive hyperreformer, refusing
incrementality in favor of a dramatic and immediate transformation of
civilization. But the history of civilization is a history of its being
reformed and revolutionized — indeed, progressive social reform was part
of the very earliest States.[15] We are officially told, and it is
popularly believed, that we in the modern West live in the most
reformed, enlightened, liberated civilizations that have ever existed
(and in the United States, our civilization was born in revolution), yet
these civilizations’ ruling classes offer us nearly no influence
whatsoever on policy decisions, surveil evermore of our lives, crush
political dissent outside of narrowly permitted avenues, and have gutted
the living world to nearly its last breath — such are the fruits of
reform and revolution.
To anticipate the anarchist critic: desertion does not necessarily imply
that all forms of attentat are to be rejected outright; but it does mean
a profound reevaluation of what some anarchists have vaguely taken to
calling “attack,” which I feel has been greatly exaggerated in
importance, often very misguidedly conducted, commonly easily
recuperated by the parasitic social classes, and woefully overshadowing
what ought to be the primary goals of desertion, autarky, and
reinhabitation. It is only an empty bluff, or a suicidal and mass
homicidal impulse, to prioritize attacking civilization when oneself and
one’s kin totally depend on its infrastructure and social relations for
their survival.
It may very well be necessary and appropriate to resist more
confrontationally at certain junctures, but much of anarchist activity
these days is a repetitive exercise in self-righteous victimhood, a
perpetual motion machine animated by a ressentiment-fueled martyr
complex: rioting, aggressively confronting police, destroying public and
private property — all of which accomplish next to nothing when civic
and economic activity returns to normalcy one or several days later, but
which often result in arrests, fines, incarceration, and injury for the
activists involved. One attempts to assault directly an enemy who is
best equipped and enormously accustomed to absorb and/or crush direct
assaults, knowing that they will likely only inflict superficial
scratches on their enemy while risking the total destruction of their
lives — only a virulently self-sacrificial morality that places
catharsis over wisdom could motivate such behavior. One loses, but feels
vindicated, justified, and redeemed in their loss, and the oppression
they receive only proves their dedication to righteousness and the
turpitude of their enemies — and so the cycle continues.
At best, rioting may pressure politicians to pass certain reforms, which
means one has fallen perfectly back into the trap of reformism. Again,
there may be a time and place for certain very specific forms of
sabotage and attack, but the greatest destabilization to the dominant
paradigm will likely be caused by civilization’s own selfundermining
productive processes. In any case, desertion does harm the ruling order
by depriving it of the resource on which it totally depends: the daily
submission of slaves.
In almost all cases, desertion will not and cannot be quick or total,
but it can nonetheless meaningfully be incremental and partial, pushing
toward ever-greater withdrawal as deserters come together, share skills
and inspiration, and create informal networks of mutual aid. This
journal is, among other things, intended as an organ for the creation of
such networks.
In reciprocity with desertion is autarky, the knowledge and practice of
providing one’s subsistence — again, food, water, shelter, fuel, and
medicine — for and by oneself in an unalienated relationship with one’s
habitat and in voluntary cooperation with others with whom one freely
associates. Desertion, if it is not to be suicidal, is only possible in
proportion with one’s practice of autarky; and, in turn, a true
engagement with autarky prefigures and implies desertion.
The economy of capitalist modernity, with its imposed division of labor
and its thanatotic evisceration of the living world, pressures us into
lifestyles that are psychically and materially distant from our habitats
and into occupations in which we tend to learn only a small number of
skills related to survival — and perhaps not even that. Pursuing autarky
thus implies a rejection of this hyperspecialization in favor of a
profound reskilling, a regaining of the venerable and valuable skills of
foraging, tending, tracking, hunting, fishing, preserving, woodworking,
herbalism, and others that were, until very recently, so common among
humans.
Recalling McQuinn’s “Slave Syndrome” mentioned above, because the
hyperspecialization of our bondage has meant that most of these skills
have been so foreign to us for all of our lives, the prospect of
learning them and doing all of the activities necessary for living
ourselves may be intimidating, even terrifying, such that we may retreat
into the false, cloying comfort of servitude in which we purchase
blessed ignorance at the price of freedom. Autarky means contesting this
submissiveness with the assertion that regaining these skills is not an
unfortunate burden necessary for freedom, but instead an enriching of
life and an enhancement of personal power — using, and thus
strengthening, both body and mind in a variety of ways is a joyful
fulfillment of our full capacities as organisms.
Throughout this journal, we will examine forest gardening as a
methodology of achieving autarky. Through its practice, one can gain
subsistence from the land without the ecocide and drudgery of
agriculture, enriching the land for not only human, but also nonhuman,
purposes and thus achieving a kind of agricultural counterrevolution. We
at Backwoods are thus not only true radicals — in the sense of looking
to understand and address the radix, or root, of our crisis — but also
the truest form of reactionaries.
Reinhabitation is the outcome of desertion and autarky. Anarchist Emma
Goldman referred to a liberated existence as “simpler, but far deeper
and richer”[16]- I say that this is the essence of reinhabitation. It
is, in the most profound sense, being somewhere. It is shaping and
feeding the landbase as the landbase feeds and shapes you, consciously
being part of the interconnected senses and metabolic processes of one’s
ecosystem, coparticipating with other creatures to tend to the whole
that sustains us all. Against the globalism of modernity, we assert a
return to place.
Autarky is possible as a lone individual, but its solo pursuit is both
more difficult and more joyless than when done cooperatively. Morever,
as primates, we crave companionship and are most vivacious when
nourished by intimate relationships — a sense of place requires a sense
of belonging. The anthropologist Robin Dunbar, through a study of human
behavior and neurobiology, has suggested that humans are cognitively
equipped to function in group sizes of around one hundred and fifty
individuals, a number that we seem to subconsciously gravitate toward in
activities that require a high level of trust, efficiency, and
self-organization to be performed well.[17] Agreeing with but going
beyond Dunbar, I would say that it is only in sustained, regular,
faceto-face contact that deep empathy can be fostered and maintained —
this is how we evolved and how we have spent most of our existence as
humans, in what anthropologists refer to as band societies. Humans are
certainly capable of com-passion and mutuality; but the tragic history
of civilizations incontrovertibly shows us the human capacity for
astonishing cruelty and wantonness when other humans and nonhumans can
be treated not as sentient beings but as abstractions and aliens. Ours
is the era of false communities: we are told, and popularly believe,
that we are members of nations, citizens of cities, followers of
religions — but most of us live among strangers, with shallow or
nonexistent relationships with those near whom we live, with whom we
work, and whom we pass on the street.
To truly flourish as organisms in communion with our habitats, we must
live in a way that nourishes the human psyche: in small, sustained,
face-to-face, autarkic communities of kinship. In such a lifeway, it
would be possible to know everyone’s story, to count on one another, to
live without fear of one another, and to be united in a common purpose
as what one might call a band society, or, less preferably, a family or
tribe.[18] Such a group would not be a suppression of individuality
through stifling and incessant collectivism, but in fact the terrain on
which a true union of individualities could grow, as the ethnographic
record of such band societies suggests (Berezkin, Clastres, Kaczynski,
Turnbull).
Averse to utopic thinking, we recognize as philosophical pessimists that
human conflict and suffering are perennial — but this perspective only
furthers the case for the superiority of this lifeway. Surrounded by
lifelong companions, one can face misfortune with the support and
compassion of loved ones. Facing the ineradicable difficulties of life
and its hard choices, one can be challenged by friends to rise to the
occasion, eschew weakness and excuses, and be encouraged to actualize
their potential. A culture of ethics, honor, and accountability can only
be fostered and maintained through the combination of loving and shaming
that comes from sustained intimacy — our culture of late modernity,
where one can disappear into anonymity and find a new social group at
the first sign of conflict or disappointment, is the grotesque
antithesis of healthful human relations. How much of human misery today
is a result of loneliness, fear of abandonment, sexual poverty and
jealousy, or isolation in times of crisis? Finally, the psychopathic and
socially parasitic tendencies of human beings are best addressed by
face-to-face, small-scale relations in which dominators and exploiters
have no police and armies to manipulate and hide behind, no religious or
political ideologies to rationalize their rapacity, and no mass
anonymity to obscure to themselves their own naked predaceousness — such
parasites could be confronted immediately and directly by a group who
could count on one another, which is indeed what happens in such
cultures. Against the mass anonymity of modernity, we assert that
reinhabitation implies a return to the intimacy of the band society.
Belonging and place cannot be truly realized unless and until human
communities choose as groups of individuals to consciously relinquish
the intoxicated fantasy of human supremacy and relate to the community
of beings around them not as owners, managers, or stewards, but instead
as cocreators. The earliest-known monumental religious architecture
appears to depict humans mastering dangerous animals, and signs of
agriculture and animal husbandry developed around the monument not long
after its creation (Mann). If religion and agriculture began the human
separation from the community of beings by suggesting that the human was
spiritually distinct and materially capable of restructuring whole
ecosystems for its gain, this separation only deepened with the
Abrahamic religions that desacralized and profaned the living world in
favor of the supernatural and otherworldly. The secularization brought
on by Humanism and scientism deepened it further by positing the world
was composed of dead, unfeeling, rationally manipulable matter to be put
in service to human civilization. Thus comes our present era of the
pathological rationalism of techno-industrialism and consumerism, where
toxic lakes are created as byproducts for the production of smartphones
with which bored, lonely people diddle away their lives (Maughan). The
greatest fruits of our separation from our living kin have been mass
extinction, existential anxiety, and a menagerie of stupefying
entertainment commodities — against this hubris and death, we assert the
return to a self-conscious animality.
To put things only a bit simplistically, we must ask ourselves questions
about how we truly want to live in the near future: Will the human being
be nothing but a function, a mere epiphenomenon of vast political and
social forces, a residue of commodity production and consumption? Or
will the human being be an existentialist at the center of her own life,
a creature who coparticipates in the creation and consumption of her
habitat, an animal among a world she senses as kin? These questions
imply profoundly different values, and the outcomes of pursuing them
could not be more different.
Through the way of life called civilization, we have become parasites of
one another and a cancer to the broader biosphere. The modern human is a
tragicomic caricature: a creature who cannot so much as eat or shit
without plugging into one of the apertures of a vast, world-eating
industrial infrastructure; a creature whose capacities are daily
diminished and who is evermore humiliated and moronized by the latest
consumerist excrescence, from automated salt-shakers and “organic water”
to hiring fake friends to appear in “selfies” taken by that apotheosis
of anomie, the smartphone; and a creature for whom the emptiness and
ennui of his life is so obvious and incontrovertible that it can only be
drowned by ceaseless and shallow distraction. The gravity of our error
has been plain for centuries; it is time to turn away.
The present situation is grim: the forces of the parasitic classes are
vast, submission and resignation are widespread, and the biosphere is,
by some estimates, already irrevocably in a mass extinction spiral. But
whether we deserters are so fabulously successful as to initiate a
widespread secessionist movement, or so insignificant as to make merely
“pockets of happiness” that quickly pass away after our deaths, I
believe the choice is clear. It is a modern, utilitarian moral calculus
that measures the value of a course of action in terms of its expected
quantitative consequences, and thus elicits the dismissive scoff at the
possible insignificance of a relatively small number of deserters
scattered around the world. For many of the ancients, as well as modern
iconoclasts, value and meaning are found instead in the individual’s own
sense of virtue, all the more so in the face of tragedy. Exactly what
such a virtue ethic might be in this late period of civilization will be
developed throughout this journal, but the values espoused throughout
this piece are a first glimpse.
Thus, our invitation to all those who can hear it: Refuse the submissive
values and false hopes of the dominant ideologies; follow the
implications of radical critique — say and live what you know to be
true. Refuse the slavery of being a mere appendage of Leviathan — take
back your life. Refuse the cancerousness of
technoindustrial-agricultural life — pursue mutuality with the living
world and rediscover your animality.
[1] For some excellent expositions of this theme, see the famous
master-slave dialectic of Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit and the
concluding chapter of Orlando Patterson’s excellent Slavery and Social
Death, in which he argues the biological concept of the parasite is the
most parsimonious way of understanding relationships of domination and
exploitation.
[2] For example, through a watered-down and distorted version of
philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the épistémè of any era, which
he understood as the usually-unconscious, a priori epistemology of an
era — that is, the hidden assumptions within a society’s discourses of
knowledge that make it possible to make truth claims at all. In social
justice ideology, this often boils down to shallowly denying the
validity of any truth claim deemed as “oppressive.”
[3] Consider, for instance, increasingly bizarre and common cases like
the autumn of 2017 Texas State University school newspaper publishing an
article entitled ‘(white) DNA is an abomination,’ or the April 13, 2017
Huffington Post publication of an article advocating for the global
disenfranchisement of white men (which turned out to be a hoax article
that they fell for and published).
[4] “Cultural Marxism” is a phrase associated with a Right-wing
conspiracy theory that there is an organized Marxist effort to bring
Communism to the United States not through sudden, violent revolution,
but instead through an incremental change in the country’s cultural
values.
[5] Many Alt-Right figures have had their speech suppressed in various
ways, including de-platforming at speaking events and bans and
shadow-bans on social media platforms. To be sure, such suppression is
not at all unique to the Alt-Right — similar suppression has fallen on
the Far-Left.
[6] Black Nationalism, Chicano or Latino/Latina Nationalism, Indigenism,
and so-called Third World Nationalism have all been embraced in various
forms by Leftists, at least since the formation of the New Left in the
1960s.
[7] Spencer’s maneuver is a good example of Roland Barthes’ “Operation
Margarine”, in which one disingenuously and shallowly critiques
something in order to ultimately redeem and defend it. Barthes details
this phenomenon in a very short essay of the same name in his 1957 book
Mythologies.
[8] Exactly how much and what sort of violence is necessary or
appropriate for social change has been debated fiercely by anarchists
for the past century and a half, with positions taken ranging from
pacificsm (e.g., Leo Tolstoy) to deliberate terroristic violence (e.g.,
Luigi Galleani).
[9] This complex point is necessarily touched on only very briefly here.
This phenomenon has been examined at length by numerous figures from
different backgrounds, such as Émile Durkheim in Suicide, Peter Wessel
Zapffe in “The Last Messiah,’ and Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death,
which led to the psychological concept of Terror Management Theory. I
take up this specific issue from another angle in the essay ‘Existential
Cowardice: Submission as Terror Management,’ printed in the forthcoming
collection The Prison Built by Its Inmates: Voluntary Servitude
Revisited, to be published by Enemy Combatant Publications.
[10] The similarities among Left-wing politics, Secular Humanism, and
Christian theology have been examined at length by many, probably most
originally and incisively by Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner. For a
more contemporary and approachable take on the influence of religion on
politics, see John Gray’s Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death
of Utopia.
[11] This is the phrase used by Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 book Leviathan
to describe what he imagined as the brutish state of uncivilized humans
— Hobbes favorably juxtaposed a voluntary surrender of freedom to a
powerful sovereign State, Leviathan. We follow the lead of libertarian
thinkers like Ernst Jünger and Fredy Perlman who use Hobbes’ preferred
term critically.
[12] By phenomenality, I mean what is variously called consciousness or
subjective experience, that is, life as it is actually lived and felt,
one’s own perspective with its sensory experience and inner life of
emotions, thoughts, and imagination.
[13] An Absolute is something imagined as a thing-in-itself, something
that exists, in, of, and for itself irrespective of relations and
perspectives, such as a transcendental deity, a god detached from the
world we inhabit. My own philosophy is that no such Absolutes exist —
they are dangerous philosophical delusions associated with ideologies of
Slavery.
[14] This is the preferred phrasing of Max Stirner, whose 1844 book The
Unique and Its Property is an early and excellent investigation into the
authoritarian nature of reification. For a more contemporary take, see
Jason McQuinn’s ‘Critical Self-Theory: The Non-Ideological Critique of
Ideology’ in the third issue of the journal Modern Slavery from C.A.L.
Press.
[15] Consider the reign of Urukagina, the ensi (ruler) of the city-state
of Lagash in 24^(th)-century B.C. in Mesopotamia, who might be
civilization’s first progressive reformist authoritarian.
[16] To be clear, Emma Goldman’s comment was particular to her vision of
life for liberated women, but it applies just as well generally.
[17] Dunbar initially arrived at the number by noticing a positive
relationship between the neocortex size of primates and the size of
their social groups — he posited that the relationship may be causal and
extrapolated from it that human neocortex size suggested a stable social
group of one hundred and fifty. Subsequently, he bolstered the theory
with empirical data based on numerous human groups that maintained
relationships and/or worked together closely across space and time, from
military units to factory workers to the number of holiday greeting
cards families send. Dunbar’s theory has come under criticism on a
number of fronts that strike me as picking out serious weaknesses, such
as the observation that social insects, with relatively tiny brains,
live in societies with their own sophisticated micro-politics — my
position does not depend on it being literally true, but only on its
being a conceptual guidepost for what is also known phenomenologically.
[18] Band, although colloquially odd, is the preferred term among
anthropologists for small, face-to-face communities, and it is thus the
term we will use in Backwoods. Although terminological distinctions are
not entirely consistent across anthropological literature, tribe is
generally used to pick out groups sufficiently large as to no longer be
bound by faceto-face communication and kinship ties, and instead bound
through small political institutions and roles like councils of elders,
big men, or chiefs — for us, such groups, while still decidedly
anti-authoritarian relative to States, are already past the point of
anarchy and not part of our goal. Going beyond anthropological accuracy,
“tribe” and “family” are to us laden with New Age and cult associations
— band is thus decidedly the best term.