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Title: The Failure of Revolution
Author: Kevin Tucker
Date: 2010
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, history, insurrection, primitivist, revolution
Source: Retreived May 1, 2011 from https://www.facebook.com/notes/primal-war/the-failure-of-revolution/201173956588138
Notes: From Species Traitor 5

Kevin Tucker

The Failure of Revolution

Sorry comrade, the revolution has failed you.

This is the conclusion I’ve reached over the last decade. It hasn’t been

easy to come to terms with the realization that revolution, that innate

core of anarchist thought, was the final piece of Leftism that I carried

on as I came to understand that my ‘enemy’ was civilization and not

merely the State.

Ironically, I resisted the thought. I begged and pleaded with myself to

make room for a revolution against civilization, but over the years I’ve

come to terms with the undeniable reality; revolutions have always been

and will always be strictly political in nature.

As I’ve withered off my once deeply held beliefs in anarcho-syndicalism

from its anachronistic cynicism of human nature, it’s become

increasingly clear that no resistance to civilization can come through

this mythic, fabled ideal: tied as it is to a looming techno-industrial,

political nightmare of a reality. My doubts have come to the surface and

the sacred cow was laid before me: a rotted corpse animated by

half-truths and ideals of what liberation may look like. Not only could

revolution never bring about a future primitive, it’s become

increasingly harder to imagine it bringing any society like what its

dystopian forbearers had envisioned.

So before I bash revolution for my own sake, let me attack it for its

own.

Revolution and Modernization

The problem with revolutions is that any failure can so easily be

justified away. It doesn’t matter what the principle; democracy,

anarchy, fascism, communism, socialism, etc., there’s always something

in the way. Never mind that humanity was never meant to be organized and

certainly not on any mass, political level; there’s always something to

blame. Lack of will, internal and/or external stresses and so on. No

matter how many times people have tried, it’s simply impossible to find

one single revolution that lived up to its own propaganda. And that

includes the agrarian, industrial and technological revolutions.

Communism gets stuck in socialism. Anarchism gets stuck in communism.

Workerists get stuck in industrialism. Industrialists get stuck in

agrarianism. Over and over again, the same sales pitch comes out in

fancy, modernized clothes. And every time, it can never live up to its

guise.

Time and time again, the carrot succumbs to the stick and the dead hand

of Progress washes the blood from the streets. When the theorized

revolution fails, the ideology becomes force.

There’s something about human nature that makes us not want to work. Our

brains aren’t hardwired for the world of delayed return. The Church

preaches the virtue of business. The State preaches the gospel of

contribution and unity within nationalist agendas. And it’s as simple as

this; the people exploited in the dawning of a new era get caught in the

treadmill of Progress. Giving up our lives for the building of nothing

is simply too much to bear. The reality is too depressing to even

comprehend the implications of saying no to the hype. We fear the truth:

that our lives were wasted for the triumph of emptiness.

The gears of Progress simply produce used and spent fuel. Yet the

architects of a forced and contrived attempt to modernize domestication

can’t just stop by the wayside and give into their failed ideals.

And the utopias crafted from such waste only show the tired, knee jerk

refusal to lose faith. Revolutions carry the bland desire to pull our

own leash, to believe our subjugation can be better. Progress

encapsulated in the death of desire. We celebrate mediocrity at the

altar of Modernity.

Yet the dogma remains. No matter how many failed and half-baked

revolutions rise and fall through that dogma, that ideology of

entitlement to the fruits of civilization, the bounty of a strangled

earth stands strong.

All revolutions are bound to their time and place. They speak to the

totalizing nature of domestication: the failure to see beyond your own

cage or, more appropriately, your own field, factory, or workshop... or

just shop.

Reduced to a part of the machinery of the time, the only way up is to

turn your misery into your passion: to demand your worth. Farmers and

trade workers form guilds. Workers formed unions. And in that moment of

self-proclaimed worth, they found a moment of ecstasy. They got a taste

of our primal need for community. And in its absence they cast their

substitute and sought a way to stretch it out for eternity.

There’s something to the madness of crowds. There’s an acceptance and

elation where you can do no wrong. You see it in riots, in festivals, in

a drunken stupor, or any mutual release from stress. You can see it in

the churches, stadiums or rallies: the semblance of community born of in

a spirit of ecstasy. The elevated senses brought about by the

“incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy and

exaltation”, as noted by the sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich in her study

of communal ecstasy.[1] It’s that feeling that breeds vigor for a

revolutionary spirit. And in that madness, the dreams make sense: the

fruit of our burdens could be our own.

Repulsive Utopias

The nightmare turns to addiction.

Caught in the populist tide, the idealist mistakes their desperate stand

as a universal truth. The ideologues seek to control and direct the

madness into their own vision. But there are always competing views and

hopes. And under the universalized utopias comes the impending failure

of Revolution.

Like the lie of Progress, the ideologue places their view into their own

dialectic of history. It looks so simple and easy when they lay it out

in their own well-trodden path. For the Marxist, industrialism and

capitalism create breeding grounds for communism by way of socialism.

For the anarchist, communism is the natural step to a worker-run, co-op

stateless society. The dualistic, linear drive of history underlies

their action.

But life is never this simple. The linear path of ideals constantly hits

the cyclical nature of wildness. The soils in Russia dried against the

Soviet genocide of those who worked them. The Cultural Revolution of

China gave a new speed and ferocity to civilization’s ecocidal impulse.

Cuba, despite outside shoves, could never be self-sufficient. Peru,

Nicaragua, Chile, Guatemala; none could convince their indigenous

occupants of the nationalistic urgency to feed the urbanites. And the

ideologues sought utopia by force.

And the anarchists remained complacent for far too long in almost every

case. Among the communist and socialist revolutions you can easily find

the anarchists trying to shape or guide the revolutionary uprisings.

They carried the buried dream that ultimately their dialectic would rise

at the right moment. In those moments of ecstasy they stood alongside

the Revolution for the sake of Revolution. And each time they failed.

During Russia’s November Revolution of 1917, Emma Goldman took to the

defense of Lenin and Trotsky “who hold the world in awe by their

personality, their prophetic vision, and their intense revolutionary

spirit.”[2] Taken by the ambiguous mix of revolutionary dogma, some of

which played greatly with the insurrectionalist ideas of the anarchists

and nihilists, Goldman and a great number of anarchists at the time

overlooked that the Bolsheviks took the reigns because they were more

understanding of the force a successful revolution must take. Thrusting

itself against the grain of human intuition, they were at least more

honest about taking arms and securing their ideological stronghold.

Even among their own ranks, by 1920 Lenin had taken the revolutionary

dogma to its fully open conclusion stating: “If we are not ready to

shoot a saboteur and White Guardist, what sort of revolution is

that?”[3]

In shock and awe, the anarchists were exiled and persecuted by the

Soviets. Voline barely escaped the firing squads of the Bolsheviks while

believing their comradery in the struggle against capitalism unified

them. Realizing the obvious within the grasp of a revolutionary

cleansing, Voline recounted speaking with Trotsky before the guns were

turned:

“It is inevitable that you and we should come into conflict. You will

begin to persecute us just as soon as your power has been consolidated.

And you will end by having us shot down like partridges...”

“— Come, come, comrade,” Trotsky replied. “You people are pig-headed and

incorrigible fanatasists. Look, as things now stand, what is the

difference between us? A little question of methodology, quite

secondary. You, like us, are revolutionaries. Like you, we are

anarchists, in the final analysis. The only thing is that you want to

introduce your anarchism straight away, without transition or

preparation. Whereas we marxists believe that one cannot “leap” into the

libertarian realm in a single bound. We anticipate a transitional stage

during which the ground can be cleared and smoothed for the anarchist

society with the aid of an anti-bourgeois political power. In short, it

is only a difference of “degree”, nothing more. Essentially, we are very

close to one another. Brother in arms. Think of it: we will have a

common foe to fight. Will it even occur to us to fight one another? And

anyway, I have no doubt but that you will quickly be persuaded of the

necessity for a provisional socialist proletarian dictatorship. So I

really cannot see any reason for warfare between you and us. We will

assuredly march hand in hand. And then, even if we do not see eye to

eye, you are overstating things a bit to suggest that we socialists will

use brute force against anarchists! Come, come, what do you take us for?

Anyways, we are socialists, comrade Voline! So we are not your

enemies...”

“In December 1919, gravely wounded, I was arrested by the Bolshevik

military authorities in the Makhnovist region. Deeming me a militant “of

some standing,” the authorities notified Trotsky of my arrest by means

of a special telegram asking his view of how I should be handled. His

answer arrived snappily and tersely and plainly — also by telegram:

“Shoot out of hand. — Trotsky.” I was not shot, thanks solely to a set

of particularly felicitous and quite fortuitous circumstances.”[4]

And you have the same pattern repeating throughout history. The

anarchist support and factions of the Spanish Civil War mirror the

situation in Russia horribly. Even after ranting on the situation in

Russia, Goldman continued to be surprised by the “communist sabotage of

the revolution”[5] to no avail. In Cuba, the anarchists still live on

the run. And from the sidelines they cried out against the injustice and

the betrayal of Revolution: treason to the proletariat.

The problems are systemic. Not just for communist, capitalist or

fascistic systems, but any mass level of synthetic social organization.

Whether anarchists oppose the State or not, they merely pay lip service

to the necessary bureaucracy and needs of a state-level society.

Compared the rest, anarchists differ merely in their lack of imagination

in understanding this point.

But they could continue to peddle this line for so long solely because

they never got this far. What Yves Fremian over zealously called the

“Orgasms of History”[6] were merely premature wet dreams. The outcome of

their dialectic was simply the delusion of linguistics. The red

anarchists spoke of the need for increased production the same as the

socialists: a throw back to the euphoric celebrations of councils drunk

as they were on the outcomes of Progress.

In Alexander Berkman’s criticisms of the Russian Revolution he claimed

his initial excitement was based on the premise that the Revolution was

“the only one which actually abolished the capitalist system on a

country-wide scale, and fundamentally altered all social relationships

existing till then.”[7] That historically laughable after-the-fact

realization shows that his own premises about the nature of the

Proletariat, their struggles and aims were no closer to reality than

Lenin or Trotsky’s understandings. Outside of being exiled from Russia,

it’s impossible to think Berkman would have done much differently had

the roles been exchanged.

Like the Proletarian towing propagandists of the time, Berkman played

the same lines:

“It should be clearly understood that the social revolution necessitates

more intensive production than under capitalism in order to supply the

needs of the larger masses who till then had lived in penury. This

greater production can be achieved only by the workers having previously

prepared themselves for the new situation. Familiarity with the process

of industry, knowledge of the sources of supply, and determination to

succeed will accomplish the task. ... Revolution always wakens a high

degree of responsibility.”[8]

Berkman’s presumptions have failed field test after field test. Whether

it’s the inability of South American socialists to foster support among

the ‘peasants’ or even the infamous Russian example set in 1921 during

the Kronstadt revolt when protest among the unwilling and unenthused

workers went on strike only to have the arms of the Revolution turned on

them. Goldman didn’t seem to sense the irony in attributing the strikes

to a winter that was an “exceptionally hard one, and the people of the

capital suffered intensely from cold, hunger, and exhaustion. They asked

an increase of their food rations, some fuel and clothing.”[9]

Among the many failures of revolution, awakening “a high degree of

responsibility” seems to rank fairly high. Revolution oriented and

driven anarchists will beg and plead that this is due to the course of

the revolution, not the nature of the society, but where is an example

to the contrary? Would one be possible? Even more important, would it be

worth waiting on? Had the anarchists of past or present attributed some

foresight and even hindsight in recognizing why revolutions fail on

anarchist goals alone, I’d be willing to entertain the notion. But when

the ecstatic rage of the masses collects, it’s like hitting a reset

button on the propaganda machine and the inevitable (and righteous)

feelings of anger are left in a bloody aftermath when the guns get

turned around.

Likewise Errico Malatesta, in his yearnings for Revolution called for

land workers to “no longer recognize the landowners’ property rights,

but continue and intensify production on their own account” while

industrial workers “should take possession of the factories and continue

and intensify production for their own benefit and that of the whole

community.”[10] And again, there’s a reason you don’t see this

happening. In fairness, the Kronstadt strikers weren’t getting the

benefits of increased production all around, but the equally stressed

and reluctant “land workers” met an equal fate albeit with a less

organized curtain call. Malatesta was only a step ahead of his

contemporaries in addressing the farmers dead on. They most likely

shared the delusions of Progress their former Russian allies held: “The

Bolsheviks’ need to live off the land probably surprised themselves more

than it surprised the peasants.”[11]

Outside of power, outside of politics, their utopias gleamed in

delusion. Given the chance, would they not take the path of the

socialists? Would the utilitarian ‘will of the people’ be cast any

differently?

We have yet to see, but the red anarchists will never get their chance

to be proven wrong.

In the euphoric delusion, the anarchists misunderstood the rage and

discontent, just as the socialists and fascists had. Their vision failed

to understand the problem wasn’t the spread of wealth, but the

production of it: an unquestioned need to work. The Proletarian will

that the socialists poured their faith into rang hollow as the eve of

the Revolution was followed by business as usual. The

counter-intuitiveness of the machine still bred lethargy. The

orchestration of the machine called back the capitalists who drew the

blueprints once more.

‘Transition’ became justification.

It comes back to the madness, the euphoria, the group therapy of

councils, unions, and a shared plight or identity. In those moments, the

elation gave a face and a name. It gave a name to the stick that dangled

the golden carrot. And in these moments, the mass could almost smell it.

But the scent fades. The stench of manure, the heat of smelted iron, the

cough of the miner, the torn body of the logger, the hunger of the

baker, the emptying seas, the scarred face of the earth; all these

feelings won out. The hollow promises of a better tomorrow taste too

much like the stale after taste of yesterday.

And this is where revolutions die.

The death march of Progress, the peak of civilized existence is always

out of reach. The rage of the dispossessed cannot be fooled forever. In

the end, a part of our soul always knows the only thing singing in the

coalmine is the canary.

The Anti-Nature of the State

I’d be dishonest to claim that my lack of enthusiasm for revolutionary

anarchists and revolutions past was solely do to a crude underestimation

of the will of the people. There is no exception to the genocide and

ecocide inducing prerogatives of Progress among the revolutionaries.

If there’s one place that my disdain for revolutionary blindness comes

about the most, it’s in the highly held successes when and where they

briefly occurred. It never ceases to amaze me when anarchists cite the

few minute examples of forced and temporary ‘autonomous zones’ as a

glimpse of anarchy in action. For all the revolutions, for all the

occupied and reclaimed spaces, you have a shattered, intentional attempt

to pull the pieces together and rarely have anything to show for it.

Coming back to Fremion’s frightening wet dream of history, he salivates

over the list of modernization and technological prowess put into place

during the Spanish Revolution. Be it the dam built to bring water to “a

million almond trees” which he further called an “out-and-out economic

miracle” due to the speed of its construction. Or be it the new poultry

feed, the “900 new shoe styles”, or that the workers had, in his words,

“no hesitation in diverting streams, clearing the land, erecting mills,

setting up farms, and refectories” while in shops they “even assumed

responsibility for the debts incurred by the previous capitalist

owners.”[12] I fail to see where the underlying lies and destruction of

Progress are being swayed.

You’ll have to pardon my lack of enthusiasm for what, in hindsight of

the failures of revolution seems like pure revisionist history. In the

eyes of the civilizers, Fremion’s unbeknownst Blake-ian nightmare is

typically part and parcel of the fast tracked modernizing any revolution

undertakes. The Russian Revolution succeeded in massive overhauls on a

nearly destroyed ecosystem, using fertilizers and technologically driven

farming methods to wretch perhaps another century from complete

ecological collapse in the region. The same can be said for the rapid

building of dams in China after the revolution.

When revolutionaries embed their desires with that of the state and its

needs, they become the flag bearers for the destruction of the earth.

States or state-level societies are inherently unsustainable and the

greater the reliance upon technology and need to develop it, the more

rampant the ecological devastation. We are innately nomadic beings. What

has allowed us to live for so long, so far beyond our means and need for

community and wildness is ironically our adaptability. What once kept us

from being over dependent upon any certain food source or eco niche has

kept our bodies’ fighting against the carcinogen cocktail that is the

air and water we breathe, drink and foul up.

Not one thing has happened over the past ten thousand years or so since

societies settled, or were conquered, that has changed our essential

being: our minds, bodies and senses. The underlying drive of Progress,

once we stop looking towards our liberated future of techno-addiction,

is to separate those needs and reassemble them around the socially

constructed demands of a society tinkering on the edge of destruction.

Whether we embody the spirit of domestication and leap into the brink of

peak everything as an anarchist collective or a disembodied, cutthroat

opportunist doesn’t change anything about the grounded needs of all

peoples and societies.

No matter how hard anyone fights against the State, or for it for that

matter, we still need to eat, drink and breathe. The revolutionary

spirit, no matter how liberated its propagandists may believe it to be,

can’t feed itself. Even beyond meeting our needs for community and

wildness, we simply can’t survive on ideology and philosophy and social

contracts. Revolutions fail because they perpetuate a society or social

level that cannot, has not and never will be capable of sustaining

itself for any prolonged period of time.

And that’s certainly something I have no interest in fighting for or

siding with.

In fixating on the State or a State as an enemy, the mantra of

Revolution is to unite against one enemy and every interested party is

hoping it’s their dialectic or their unspoken desire that erupts. As

we’ve already seen here and anywhere in the world where a revolutionary

dogma creeps out, it demands uncomfortable partnerships that rarely turn

out in any positive light.

And few are more likely to play on that ambiguity than

insurrectionalists.

The Insurrectionalist Delusion

Of all types of anarchism, no one dances with the euphoric more than the

insurrectionalist. I should specify that not all insurrectionary

anarchists are insurrectionalists. The distinction that I make is when

insurrection is the sole end goal, the idea being that sheer upheaval

brings about positive change. Insurrectionary anarchists may append

their hope for insurrection with a larger, grounded critique. What I’m

referring to specifically here are the nihilistic anarchists who trump

critique with the much-taunted hope for transformation through

destruction without aim. Born of a nihilistic urge and revolutionary

fervor, the insurrectionalist demands elation. In a selfish act of

indulgence, the insurrectionalist anarchist basks in the glory of the

Individual.

They feel the poetry of rioting like a dance. The smashing of anything

tangibly relating to the ‘old order’ is like a chorus. Bakunin typified

the rage when he stated that the “urge to destroy is also a creative

urge.” The unattainable sense of urgency and damning of ideologues cries

from that same rage that the revolutionaries tried to tap into. Every

act of self-expression and anger touches closer to the sacred self. The

Ego bows to its reflection and becomes addicted to euphoria until it can

no longer imagine a purer vision of liberation.

But, as we have seen, that euphoria can’t last forever.

The disembodied Egoist has isolated themselves, mistaken joy for purity,

and only bred the revolutionary delusion. In an embrace of the unknown,

they grasp the trajectory of Progress, reaching for an unknown future

and demanding its boundless potential.

And the unknown extends to all aspects of life. Max Stirner, founding

egoist anarchist who remains the underlying source for insurrectionalist

dogma famously declared “all things are nothing to me”[13] in a

statement of defiance to a society where he sees inter-reliance as

weakness. In his vision, only once individuals recognized their

uniqueness in and of their own right could they connect on any

anarchistic level. Seeing the tattered community of the State, he made

the common mistake of blaming human nature rather than merely the social

circumstances of civilization. And mirroring the mistakes of

domestication the individual is the only basis for understanding and

relating to the world. The interconnected community of wildness

disregarded and set aside removed from the earth, from community,

Stirner’s “Union of Egoists” can only remain a dream. And the nihilistic

Egoist can only search for their own liberation in nothingness, some

pure isolation from context. And like any philosophical quest, it can

never be complete.

Had the power of Stirner’s precious self extended beyond his body, he

might have recognized the irony in having died of a bug bite.[14]

Unfortunately the poetic egoists and nihilists to follow didn’t take

note either. The rhetoric of the insurrectionalists stems from this

tainted notion of the self as defined by civilization and, even worse,

by modernity and seeks the source of change as a realization that our

damaged psyches are capable of realizing in a moment of uprising within

the concrete and steel cages of the modernized environment.

I believe it is within our own nature that we can find and recognize

what is wrong with our lives, but for completely different reasons than

the insurrectionalists. While they believe there is no human nature and

that the future is unwritten, I see the opposite and in a liberatory

sense. It is our connections that give us context, our community, our

place within wildness. Civilization is perpetuated by the questions over

the meaning of life, not wild communities. True to form, the nihilist

and the egoist reject the question by refuting the possibility of

knowing. It’s taking the longest path to the simplest conclusion: that

we know be feeling and experiencing what life is, not by externalizing.

The path of the insurrectionalist if taken by their propaganda rather

than their unspoken hopes can find no end and no community. Life becomes

a constant quest, born of strife and revolt against a truly imposing

situation initially, but it lives out through trial-and-error sorting

the mess of domestication without grounding. The dogma produced,

inspiring though it may be, bites hard on social relationships such as

the family and community without recognizing that the need for community

is what spurs civilizers of all levels to tear apart and reassemble

social networks as if the sum of all parts was equal to the whole. The

relationships that we have as civilized beings are no doubt twisted

versions of our wild cousins, but the complete rejection and search for

a new starting point ignores who we are and what we need. That further

pushes the real issue of why the civilizing process works for the most

part in making innately wild humans tame consumers and civilians.

The insurrectionalist Feral Faun echoes Stirner:

“All social relationships have their basis in the incompleteness

produced by the repression of our passions and desires. Their basis is

our need for each other. We are using each other.”[15]

He then continues to default on the passions and desires of individuals

as the point of eruption and potential insurrection. And this sentiment

is echoed through all insurrectionalist propaganda through time.

The dogma becomes as infantile as the disorders that perpetuate

civilization. A recent example is an insurrectionalist magazine that

boldly declared on its cover “For Nothing, Against Everything.”[16] The

standard lines are poetic ramblings that have been used effectively by

any lofty ideologue from Trotsky to Hitler with anarchists sharing the

vagueness in between.

What’s even worse than taking the insurrectionalists at their word is

believing that they’re not towing an ideological line in their calls for

hopes and desires. In all past revolutions you have insurrectionary

leaflets taking a central role in recruitment and continued

perseverance, but when the smoke clears the hope of the revolution

washes over the aspirations of the loudest harshly. In their lack of

vision, the dogma falls short. That is why the nihilist inspired

Situationists reeked of beautiful insurrectionary dogma amidst a poetic

critique of modernity where Guy Debord could state that the success of

production and its abundance “is experienced by its producers only as an

abundance of possession”[17] and Raoul Vaneigem could proclaim that we

“have a world of pleasures to win, and nothing to lose but boredom”,[18]

while ultimately defaulting to the power of the Worker’s Councils.

We are beings of context. We have needs. Tainted by the whims of the

domesticators, we are lost, but our damage is never complete nor

irreversible.

Domestication is the process of taming wildness; a process, but not an

act. It works so long as the environment is controlled, maintained as a

reflection of the civilizers’ linear drive. The rage that

revolutionaries target, that insurrectionalists gleam, that fascists,

priests and politicians damn, that is our stubborn refusal to die

inside. Drowned, refused, and contorted, our rage seeps in contempt for

our condition.

In a sense, the insurrectionalist knows this. They put their blind faith

into it. They call for a subjection to desire unbound by circumstance

even when those impulses stem from a civilized will to power and lust.

Another misguided reaction to a disempowered life. As elating as the

moments of insurrection may be, as much as they may open the door, they

never lead very far in and of themselves.

We are beings of context. We have needs. The nihilistic denial of this

is the delusion of the insurrectionalist: the dishonest acknowledgement

that something makes us human. That some universal condition, some

communal urge lurks within. Without embracing the full revolutionary

utopia, the insurrectionalist merely hopes the rioter or the

insurrectionary urge leads towards their same realization. They see the

Union of Egoists freed from all seen and unseen restraints.

But this poetry of self-indulgence is merely another guise for the

populist revolution. It remains just another implicit celebration of the

ghost of Progress into the oblivious pursuit of modernity.

And in that linguistic dance, the insurrectionary poet can never be

wrong. Instead they live out a purist pursuit and a fear of failure

hidden beneath the half-frightened hopes for revolution.

In the revolutions, the insurrectionalists hide on all sides under a

banner of anarchistic urges to destroy and the elated rage of the

present: a mix of fear and hope and a refusal to accept responsibility

for action. Soaking in the righteous, undefined glory: Progress stands

triumphant.

The Trouble with Politics

The looming question when it comes to revolutions and insurrections is

why they fail. The revolutionary sees a failure of technique, any number

of tactical issues that weren’t dealt with properly or an inability of

the people being “liberated” to do what they must for the success of the

Revolution. The insurrectionalist can simply default on their poetic

discourse and claim the complete disruption of everything was not

achieved. Both can fall back on the State, but by their very nature

neither of them can question the power that a State or state-level

society makes possible.

As beings infused with the sensibility and rootedness of

gatherer-hunters, we were never meant to think on the size and scale of

any civilization, much less one with a technological-industrial system

at its disposal.

The failure of revolutionary dogma and action is in the inability to see

beyond power.

Political, economic and social power, created by sedentary and surplus

dependent societies underlies civilization. Technological innovations

are a necessary response to the adapting needs of increasing populations

with their increased dependence upon centralized, stagnant circumstance.

That is what creates the stratified, hierarchical, bureaucratic

institutions that we all know so intimately in our society as our

ancestors knew or had to face down in their own lives.

All systems, whether they are theocracies, democracies, communist,

fascist, capitalist, feudal, or what have you, must address the most

basic question of the continuation of power. In our modernized reality,

that comes in the form of electricity and then sheer force, but our

belief in the necessity of stored resources is the focus of the

domestication process. It always has been and always will be.

The strength of any system is the totalizing conviction with which that

message can be conveyed. Politics are intangible. The effects of

politics never are. Piles of bodies, prisons, televisions, buildings,

concrete, steel, and plastic are all the physical creations of power and

its assertion, but you can’t touch a social network. As tempting as it

might be, you can’t assassinate an ideology. Yet this is the singular

battlefield on which revolutionaries and insurrectionaries must play. If

you wish to alter society, if you want to grab it by its reigns and

innately change it, you must succumb to its delusion of power and the

methods by which it is maintained.

So long as the State is the enemy, revolutions fail because they must

play into the ideology of power. No matter what they hope to achieve or

how they hope to spread it, they must wrangle the intangible and, in the

case of anarchists and communists, collectivize it on some level while

maintaining its unwavering path.

That is why the classical anarchists talked about the need to increase

production. It’s hardly a major talking point because it’s a source of

contempt and deception. But even the most convinced revolutionary knows

that people need to eat. The more modernized the society, the less

leeway for downtime in the food distribution networks.

Their premise must remain unquestioned: that in a more ideal society,

the daily sacrifice of labor to the Megamachine won’t feed an

unapproachable system. That reflects a lack of understanding about why

it is that humans don’t want to work. By work, I’m referring

specifically to production of a surplus by a fragmented system, a

contribution to an unseen whole rather than the daily, immediate efforts

of our grounded ancestors and cousins living closer to or within the

cycles of our earth. There is no where in the relatively brief history

of civilization where you see that sacrifice being taken easily and the

reason is simple: it’s not in our nature to work towards building some

great distant future. We are beings of the present, we are wild animals:

the only way we have been convinced otherwise is through a constant

barrage of mental and physical reconstructions of our needs.

The issue of power is and always will be tied to the issue of

production. No revolution will change that. No technology will change

that. As much as visionaries have tried to open our eyes to unseen

possibilities, we need to eat, sleep, drink and breathe. Revolutionaries

come to power seeking to give a new face to that sacrifice at the altar

of Progress and they soon find that they keep it by forcing production.

That grasp of power is what unites revolutionaries and the systems they

oppose. Politics and Revolution are tied, and so long as

insurrectionalists play in the realm of established social relationships

they are caught in the same track.

And despite the lofty, poetic dreams of liberation, the outcome is

always the same.

When the Grid is the Enemy

This estimation of the failures of revolution and insurrection is far

from a surrendering to the power of domestication and the politics it

perpetuates. Quite the contrary, I’m interested in understanding what it

takes to bring about the end of the civilized era. And the question

comes back to power.

The revolutionaries focus on power in a strategic sense. Rather than

questioning why politics continue to rule our lives, they seek to

possess and redirect them. The problem is the existence of politics and

the ability of a political system to self perpetuate.

That lies in the heart of production.

The roots of civilization spread back to the settling of nomadic

gatherer-hunters around a surplus of storable foods; be it grains,

tubers, or fish. Here you are more prone to see the areas of social and

spiritual stratification surrounding the distribution of a steady

stockpile of foods. The need to distribute becomes necessary as the

society becomes increasingly dependent upon it. Breaking directly and

starkly with the adaptivity that accompanies nomadic life. But this is a

slow and far from inevitable pattern. Yet where it emerges you have a

larger, stratified society, capable and in need of state level

organization.

The dawn of civilization is built around permanent settlements with

political and religious centers and food producing peripheries: cities.

As that society grows through conquest and growth, the necessities of

life include sources of fuel for the social centers and those living in

and around them. Natural and created resources become a part of the

power infrastructure.

In the age of peak oil, we should all be innately aware of the

importance limited resources play in the life of a society pushing the

boundaries of the ecosystem in which it is based. As oil wars rage, as

water scarcity feeds civil war, as critics of food producers are

brandished terrorists, it is horribly apparent how weak the network that

creates and supports political power is in relation to its armed face:

the military, police, and concrete infrastructure.

Engaged in the same sphere, the revolutionary is left to face that

opponent on their terrain. They must plan to fight the State where all

political systems must excel the most, suppression through force. The

ideal of Revolution is to avoid this when possible, but there has rarely

been a case where that outcome is even expected. Instead you have a

deliberate conflict of forces and bloodshed.

When you look beyond civilization, the possibilities begin to open up.

On the one hand you see the weaknesses instilled in a system sustaining

the mirage of power and on the other you have the consequences of that

same civilization pushing against the boundaries of ecological capacity.

It always has and always will be a losing battle and at the same time

opens up further cracks in the armor of Leviathan.

Innate in understanding civilization is the target rather than its

political face is the reality of a self-consuming, narcissistic

cannibal. In accepting our wild human nature and a deepening

relationship with remaining and struggling ecosystems, the opportunities

make themselves available in ways that the revolutionaries and

insurrectionalists will never have or see.

Where revolutions fail is where the potential for the complete collapse

of the technologically dependent, resource starved modernity flourish.

When we stop identifying with the faulty premise of sacrifice to

Progress, we can open ourselves to learn from the mistakes of our

well-intentioned anarchist forbearers.

Primal War

The flipside of asking why revolutions fail is asking why indigenous

resistance movements have withstood so much over time. Faced with brutal

colonizing forces, whether it is nomadic gatherer-hunters fighting

expanding agrarian neighbors or imperial armies, there is a long

standing tradition of unrelenting existence and typically with greater

results than most revolutions.

The reason is the one thing that revolutionaries and insurrectionaries

consistently overlook: our innate need for community, for wildness and

the primal anarchy that runs through our spirit and connects us. It’s

something you can’t fault revolutionaries for, this oversight is the

linchpin of domestication: the reorganization of our spiritual

connectivity.

Revolutions fail because revolutionaries and insurrectionaries must tow

the line of Progress, the dream that the sacrifice of individuals has

some greater meaning in the realm of human history and destiny. That is

a path that has led to ecological instability and rampant decimation of

wildness. The outcomes of revolution have only ever affected the speed

and scale of that destruction. The revolutionary is selling ideology

while the insurrectionalist is selling a blind hope of an improbable and

seemingly unpredictable future.

Revolutions fail because when the blood inevitably begins to flow and

the face of Revolution so closely begins to resemble or take the place

of the gallows of the State, leaving the revolutionary to rightfully

question the sacrifice. And it’s hard to imagine why this wouldn’t be

the case. At the end of the day ideas are simply ideas. The hopes and

dreams envisioned by the propagandists ring hollow alongside every other

lie of Progress.

The connections that we so desperately need remain denied and buried in

a sea of convoluted sales pitches. And revolutions die.

Politics are intangible. Wildness is not. Community is not. These are

things that we feel, live, experience and connect to personally. There

are no sales pitches or revolutionary cries that can take the place of

our primal anarchy, the spirit of wildness embedded in our genes.

Gatherer-hunter and horticultural societies have continued their

resistance because this is something they know, something they are tied

to. Community is not a political ideal. The food they have foraged and

harvested is not an ideology written about in newspapers. The primal

anarchy of their society is lived out rather than spoken. They fight

because of what they feel rather than what they think they know.

But there is nothing unique about any of these societies past or present

that is alien to us. Despite the lies of the civilizers, domestication

has not changed who we are. It has wrought destruction upon our earth,

but it is a constant and fragile process. Wildness continues to flourish

in spite of the domesticating hand of the State. It creeps up through

concrete, grows through foundations, overcomes structures, and it

resists our sedentary lifestyles whether we like it or not. And it is

freeing.

Unlike the promises and hopes of Revolution, the vague possibilities

offered by insurrectionalists, wildness is tangible and available. It is

something we can connect with here and now. The refusal of

domestication, the giving over to wildness, the unlearning of civilized

interpretation through a simple humility in the face of the simplicity

of ecological sanity, what I call the primal war, counters the failures

of Revolution.

In giving up on the Left, in riding the shackles of politics, the world

awaits. And within that recognition, through our own attempts to rewild

and reform community lie the key to understanding that the revolutions

fail because politics have failed us; domestication and civilization

have failed us.

In recognizing the lies of Progress, the twilight of power makes itself

apparent. We merely need to join with the earth in overcoming this

plague. And if we look close enough, we will see that we merely need to

follow its lead.

[1] Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets: a History of Collective

Joy. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007, pg .16.

[2] Goldman cited in Paul Avarich, Anarchist Portraits. Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1988, pg. 194.

[3] Lenin cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution. New York:

Oxford University Press, 1994, pg. 76.

[4] Voline, The Unknown Revolution cited in Daniel Guerin, No Gods, No

Masters: Book Two. Oakland: AK Press, 1998, pgs. 107–108.

[5] Emma Goldman, Visions of Fire: Emma Goldman on the Spanish

Revolution (David Porter, ed). New Paltz, NY: Commonground Press, 1985,

pgs. 132–171.

[6] Yves Fremion, Orgasms of History. Oakland: AK Press, 2002.

[7] Alexander Berkman, The Russian Tragedy. London: Phoenix Press, 1986,

pg. 14.

[8] Alexander Berkman, What is Anarchism? Oakland: AK Press, 2004.

[9] Emma Goldman, My Disillusionment in Russia. New York: Apollo

Editions, 1970, pg. 193.

[10] Vernon Richards, Malatesta: Life and Ideas. London: Aldgate Press,

1993, pg. 175.

[11] Fitzpatrick, 1994, pg. 81.

[12] Fremion, 2002, pg. 158.

[13] Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1995, pg. 324.

[14] Ibid, pg xxxv.

[15] Feral Faun, Feral Revolution. London: Elephant Editions, 2000, pg.

46.

[16] Fire to the Prisons, issue 7.

[17] Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995,

pg 23. Italics in original.

[18] Raoul Vaneigem, Revolution of Everyday Life. London: Rebel Press,

2001, pg. 279