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Title: Wildness and Freedom - An Argument for Anti-Civ Anarchism
Author: anonymous
Date: 2021
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, rewilding, undomestication

anonymous

Wildness and Freedom - An Argument for Anti-Civ Anarchism

An Introduction

I was born near the turn of the 21st century, and growing up during a

time besieged by political and social turbulence (regarding the incoming

climate disaster, three economic crises in 20 years, ever-growing

polarization in U.S. politics, increasing institutionalized racism and

state sanctioned violence, and a hundred or so more variables) has often

left me and many of my peers in a catastrophic state of distress. We

have witnessed first-hand the increasingly obvious shortcomings of drags

cigarette society.

I find myself outside the present, existing in either the past or the

future. I’m stuck re-living bangs and screams and a blinding haze of

tear gas in a quasi-warzone, the drug-induced fog of a psychiatric

institution, treating my friends for injuries brought about by the

police and other white supremacists, the sight of my local forests

ablaze in an inferno of hellfire, the sludge of half-a-dozen failed

overdoses, and the shit stained walls of a solitary holding cell smaller

than my childhood closet. Or, on the other hand, worrying for future—if

I even live to 20 years old in these political and geological

conditions. I already spend so much of that time planning for the next

catastrophe: making mental lists of my loved ones’ medical information,

memorizing a hundred different passwords and struggling through the

process of setting up a VPN, taking first-aid courses from local street

medics, hiding from cameras, cops, and my own violent parents, drowning

in panic over whichever exercise of authority has most recently been

dreamt up by the powers that be, and over-preparing by putting together

a go-bag of supplies for another of the increasingly frequent “natural”

disasters that—on account of climate change—will devastate millions more

each time. At some point a kid like me stops wondering: “What will I get

to do when I grow up? Who will I settle down with? Where do I want to

live?” and starts to think: “What went wrong? Who do I go to for help?

When the fuck does all this end?”

The conclusion that I’ve come to is that it probably won’t end, not in

my lifetime at least—despite me only being in my teens. But, amazingly,

this realization has never dampened my ability to find joy in life nor

my ability to hope. As an anarchist, I aspire to total liberation

through the abolition of all hierarchies, sometimes including but never

limited to: government, class, authority, race/gender/identity-based

supremacy, ruling gods, private property, money, the nuclear family, and

all enforcers of the state. As an anti-civ anarchist, I believe that

civilization is the root of hierarchy and I therefore seek to dismantle

it. Unfortunately, these very hierarchies form the basis of the United

States, and most other countries in the world. The U.S. violently

enforces hierarchy through a militant police force, an impersonal

capitalist system that attempts to eliminate each individual’s ability

to create their own food/shelter, and systematic/social gatekeeping of

necessary resources such as: healthcare, nutritious food, clean water,

etc. This exercise of power forms the illusion that we are not free to

escape the obligation to contribute (and therefore submit) to this

oppressive society. Nonetheless, I believe that freedom exists, even

while the ruling class declares that they occupy power over everything.

What is freedom?

We hear the word freedom in many contexts, from many sources, and

bearing many meanings. Here in the U.S., we are bombarded by slogans and

propaganda claiming that the United States is ‘The Land Of The Free.’ I

would argue that the idea that the United States perpetuates freedom

could not be further from the truth. The U.S. depends on the working

class’s subjugation to an abusive industrialized economy and on the

majority of its inhabitants’ submission to wealthy officers of the

federal republic/representative democracy whose interchangeable

‘two-party’ system masquerades as choice. Power is dependent upon money,

and capitalism in the U.S. depends on exported atrocities—land and

resources stolen at the expense of people, culture, and nature. (8) The

brainwashing of the system functions in a way that is hauntingly

reminiscent of the famous lie emblazoned upon nazi concentration camps,

“Arbeit macht frei: work sets you free.” This will never cease to be a

devastating falsehood.

If servitude is what freedom is not, let us then discuss what freedom

is. Some say there are two types of freedom: freedom from and freedom

to. I think that the concept of ‘freedom to’ will naturally differ from

person to person, because we all have individual ideas of what we crave

and what we aspire to. But there are common themes within communities

about the notion of ‘freedom from.’ Within anarchism, there exists the

concept of total liberation. The expression ‘total liberation’ contains

infinite meaning. In essence, it describes the destruction of domination

and anthropocentrism, where all human and non-human animals are free

from the influence of powers that be. (10) I asked a friend what it

meant it them and they said “Oh you know, hangin out and eating snacks.”

I doubt total liberation will ever be achieved worldwide; greed and

authority live within people, and not everyone has the commitment to

dismantle these within themselves. You can liberate yourself and those

around you by staying vigilant and annihilating any power you can get

your grimy little hands on.

Occasionally, the lines between freedom to and freedom from are blurred.

In Why Break Windows, Armeanio Lewis claims that “[our] goal is the

destruction of which destroys us. Capitalism, White Supremacy,

Patriarchy
 They are not met by a simple proclamation of againstness but

a swift and decisive action that not only proclaims but shocks those in

power,” (6).

I believe we may view freedom as the absence of oppression. Oppression’

is defined as: ‘unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power.’ If

oppression is inseparable from authority, it is then necessarily

interwoven with hierarchy. Thus, the destruction of hierarchy would

accordingly eliminate oppression.

Lack of oppression often corresponds to a lack of centralized

economy—wherein each individual or communal unit produces no more than

their own requirements at their own leisure. In this situation, the only

thing compelling human labor is one’s natural needs. If you are in

direct contact with the necessities of your existence, the conditions

allowing oppression can be removed. But as the methods of labor give

certain people authority over others, the acquisition of resources and

basic needs takes a back-burner, and all of life is governed by a power

struggle. (11) To many who’ve grown up in the U.S. under capitalism, any

alternative sounds ancient and foreign, but such anarchic elements do

exist in certain places where imperial powers did not permanently

penetrate to form capitalist, white-settler governments. (1)

Therefore, to live without oppression, or to be free, is to live outside

of an authoritarian pressure to separate your labor from the resources

you need. This is the sentiment held by anti-civ anarchists.

Civ is the root of hierarchy & oppression

What is civ? By definition, civilization is an altered relationship to

nature, distorted by human demands. Anthropologist and

anarcho-primitivist Layla AbdelRahim describes the birth of civilization

as “a shift in human consciousness from a state of wildness to a

civilized entity that is separate from other animals and rises above

them, one that domesticates, owns, manages, consumes, and controls the

lives and reproduction of resources,” (9). This is the mindset which

naturalized servitude and allowed the unnatural conditions of racism,

sexism, and classism to arise.

I find it necessary to recall that the term ‘civilized’ has a history of

being used to justify genocide and hate; it is also broad and

subjective. But, there are common ingredients that a ‘civilized’ society

is likely to include, these are: government, economy, agriculture,

industry, technology, and culturally-ingrained ideologies of

supremacism. With awareness of the nature of authority and hierarchy,

each of these aspects should be considered oppressive. Government is by

definition a hierarchy over its citizens, economy is a hierarchy of the

rich over the poor. Agriculture and the domestication of plants/animals

is oppressive and destructive towards the Earth. The original formation

of a modern professional/militarized police force was the state’s

response to workers unionizing against industrialization in England. (2)

So, if we were to pose freedom as the opposite of hierarchy and

oppression, we might call freedom the absence of these things, or the

absence of civilization. In Against His-story, Against Leviathan, Fredy

Perlman says: “Insist that “freedom” and “the state of nature” are

synonyms, and the cadavers will try to bite you. The tame, the

domesticated, try to monopolize the word freedom; they’d like to apply

it to their own condition. They apply the word “wild” to the free. But

it is another public secret that the tame, the domesticated,

occasionally become wild but are never free so long as they remain in

their pens,” (4).

Liberation from civ and hierarchy

The final dilemma is, I think, most gracefully articulated by the

anonymous author of Desert: “The world will not be ‘saved’. Not by

activists, not by mass movements, not by charities and not by an

insurgent global proletariat” (1). But you don’t have to wait for a

revolution to live free from hierarchy and oppression. It is possible to

choose not to participate in global industrial society, and live your

life to the fullest extent possible of the anarchist proposal: No Gods,

No Masters, No Bosses, No Landlords—to refuse to take a wage-slavery

job, or to pay anyone for a place to live. Become ungovernable,

undomesticated, and wild!

The concept of escaping society will always bring up questions about

resources. How would I feed myself without a job? Where will I live?

Won’t I freeze or starve in the streets? This anxiety, in its essence,

is the very glue that holds together capitalism. The separation of an

individual’s work from their needs is not an accident, it has been the

intention of those in power at least since the beginning of

industrialization. In 1755, Archbishop Berkeley even wrote, “wouldn’t

the creation of needs represent the best means of making the nation

industrious?” Without compulsion, the state cannot exert power over your

day to day life. The monopoly over production exists to reinforce

itself. By controlling land and labor, and by surveilling and violently

oppressing those who do not conform, society becomes nothing more than a

prison where our only sufficient option is to break free. (3)

Learning how to meet your own basic needs is a radical act of

resistance. There are plenty of ways to find food and shelter. Food

grows in the wild, and shelter can be built. And, despite being guarded

and policed to assist the arbitrary exchange of money from worker to

owner, resources already exist! Escape the vicious cycle of capital and

embrace illegalism. While some would accuse the anti-civ anarchist for

benefiting from the products of civilization when shoplifting or

dumpstering for food, I rebut that scavenging is so reminiscent of a

pre-agricultural way of living that it is just as undomesticated as

foraging in the woods.

What is often misunderstood from an outside perspective is that anti-civ

is not a romanticization of hunter/gatherer lifestyle, but a critique of

the society we were born into and a desire to demolish civilization and

rebuild something new. Civ is a distorted relationship to nature,

therefore anti-civ seeks to understand nature and aspires to form a

healthy, living relationship to the natural world. Dumpstering is a

perfect example of one way to re-examine the relationship between humans

and nature. Natural forests make use of a perfect cycle to deal with

waste wherein the byproducts of living and the bodies of generations

past are consumed and re-cycled back into the ecosystem. Humans are not

so attentive to nor talented at dealing with waste. By eating an apple

from a grocery store dumpster, I am repossessing what is now essentially

an object, but which was once an organism, and making use of it. Instead

of being added to a vast and ever growing garbage dump, the parts of the

apple my body cannot make use of will end up in a hole in the forest

where my shit will be overrun with living organisms, its nutrients

returned to the Earth. And I will have the energy to walk to the next

dumpster (as well as a stomach ache, because I’m not supposed to eat

apples. My body is one dictator I’m still working to escape).

Liberation goes beyond resistance to the state, it is necessary to tear

down the infrastructure for oppression that has inevitably made its home

in your mind; “kill the cop in your head,” as some say. The whole of

society is a system designed to keep a certain set of individuals in

power, and it is necessary to resist. Illegalist anarchy (shoplifting,

rioting, squatting) is not an appeal to liberals or politicians, it is

not a spectacle. It goes beyond a momentary response to what we have

suffered under oppression. It is a daily practice of not only survival,

but flourishing—in spite of everything. It is the refusal to let ‘law

and order’ masquerade as morality. (7) It has long been clear to me that

the notion of right and wrong cannot be advertised by a set of

oligarchs. We must each decide for ourselves what is right, and defend

our agency to do as our own morals and desires proclaim.

This practice can only be achieved through individualism. While

individual, we are never truly alone. We can always learn from and

provide for each other through mutual aid. Communities need not depend

on an authority if individuals can depend on other individuals. I have

no hope for a global revolution, but I don’t think we need one.

Things I quoted and further reading:

Modern Domination. Warzone Distro. 2017.

Warzone Distro. 2017.

2002.

Unmaking of Civilization. 1990.

Distro. 2017.

Library. 2019.

Foundation. Taylor & Francis. 2014.

Warzone Distro. 2017.