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https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert
What the war in former Yugoslavia forced us to digest is the fact that people proved willing to make a conscious and active choice to embrace regression, barbarity, a return to the wilderness. Take the Serb fighters who dream of a return to the Serbia of the epic poems 'where there was no electricity, no computers, when the Serbs were happy and had no cities, the breeding grounds of all evil.'
What is the function of primitive war? To assure the permanence of dispersal, of the parcelling out, of the atomization of groups. Primitive war is the work of a centrifugal logic, of a logic of separation which expresses itself from time to time in armed conflict. War serves to maintain each community in its political independence... Now what is the legal power that embraces all differences in order to suppress them, which only supports itself to abolish the logic of the multiple in order to substitute for it the opposite logic of unification? What is the other name of the One that refuses in essence primitive society? It is the State.
Those in relativity stable social environments — politically and climatically — will probably be faced by an increasingly oppressive surveillance state and a 'mass' which increasingly fears 'the barbarism beyond the walls'.
Climate wars to come may wipe out many anarchists but is unlikely to kill off Anarchism, which as a political movement has survived significant culls of its adherents in past local apocalypses. [58]
[58]: Either wiped out during periods of (counter) revolutionary tumult or picked off as the chosen prey of authoritarians during relative social peace — anarchists do have a tendency to get it in the neck. Our ranks have been further thinned by the many who of have felt forced to escape civilisation through suicide and drugs.
We now face the stark choice between a return to a natural life as a small band of hunter gatherers or a much reduced high tech civilisation...
The fundamental 'nature' of all civilisations is an illusory estrangement from wilderness, deepening as we become estranged from each other, from the land, from the product of our labor and even from our own desires. Wild animals (humans included) are tamed — domesticated — by being fenced off, separated, from their natural environments and free members of their own species. Dominance is burnt into brains through violence and rationing of resources. Wilderness is tamed, both without and within. The birth of "domestication involved the initiation of production, vastly increased divisions of labor, and the completed foundations of social stratification. This amounted to an epochal mutation both in the character of human existence and its development, clouding the latter with ever more violence and work." — John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal (C.A.L Press: Columbia, 2006), p. 77. While it is important to try and understand their origins, it would be a mistake to see estrangement and domestication as past events, rather they are a process that can be, and is, resisted. For starters, see also: Ian Hodder, The Domestication of Europe (Basil Blackwells: Oxford, 1990), Leopold Roc, Industrial Domestication: Industry as the Origins of Modern Domination. Anarchist library (www.theanarchistlibrary.org), Derrick Jensen et al., Strangely Like war: The Global Assault on Forests (Green Books: Dartington, 2003), Jacques Camatte, Against Domestication (Leeds: Re-Pressed Distro, 2006), Beasts of Burden: Capitalism, Animals, Communism (Antagonism Press: London, 1999).
book.henry_david_thoreau.walden.gmi
To a greater or lesser extent... [many] traditional African societies manifested an anarchic eloquence which, upon closer examination, leads credence to the historical truism that governments have not always existed.
"This suggests that the resource curse, by exposing those in power to the temptations of great wealth, is the most powerful driver of violence and conflict."
"Such limited links were in the interest of the... [bosses], who purposely created a semi-working class. Thomson states, 'Mine owners and farm managers rely on the fact that peasants [who come to work temporarily] are also producing for themselves back on their smallholdings (farmed in their absence by their families). As workers have this additional source of subsistence, wages can be kept low."
Though obviously not at the expense of looking at the class relations, balances of power, struggles and joys where we live. Too many activists know the intricacies of struggles abroad yet little of the social war all around them.
It should be noted that many commons-based societies within Africa are fall-back positions turned to after complex kingdoms collapsed or were dismantled by invading empires (both Western and African).
(...) in [some parts of] the industrially undeveloped world, the state has withered away, not because of its supercession, but due to the extension of global capitalism.
(...) It restores a patina of legitimacy to a system that can no longer provide either patronage or welfare services to its citizens, and reinvigorates it by dividing clients among the competing parties, so each political grouping has need to siphon fewer funds since it serves a smaller client base...
Another loss of state power is the inability of it to provide minimal welfare to the citizenry, such as education and medical care, which structural adjustment programs eliminate as too costly. While some of these services are taken over by international relief organizations, most that are continued are done so by groups from the distressed society itself. In other words, as Thomson puts it, 'Declining state capacity required civil society to increase its self sufficiency.' The once-repressed women's groups, trade unions, farmers associations, and other grassroots networks are assuming greater responsibility in social and economic life...
[So maybe here we are seeing an African road to Anarchism] 'whereby the money economy and the state, which are in a condition of partial collapse or withdrawal, cede more and more functions to non-monetarized, non-statist village communities that are organized on the basis of mutual aid?'
"Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it."
"Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius." — William Blake, quoted in, Lawrence Millman, Last Places: A Journey in the North
While a surprising number of African dirt roads lead to anarchy much of what we have touched on here relates to many rural areas across the planet to differing degrees. For instance, in his excellent, The Art of Not Being Governed, James C. Scott recounts numerous examples of lived anarchies in upland Southeast Asia. Even outside of anarchies, peasant communities whose self-sufficiency have not been entirely vanquished, still often retain high levels of autonomy — Land is Liberty! [77] Sadly in many places communal traditions have been eradicated, the 'commons' (or 'wilderness') enclosed and farmers forcefully transformed into wage labourers. In others however, they have not, for a diverse set of reasons, not least of which is resistance. States do not always get their own way.
The tide of Western authority will recede from much, though by no means all of the planet. A writhing mess of social flotsam and jetsam will be left in its wake. Some patches of lived anarchy, some horrible conflicts, some empires, some freedoms, and of course, unimaginable weirdness. As states recede and 'fail' — through entropy, stupidity, revolution, internal conflict, climate stress — people will continue to dig, sow, herd and live — most, admittedly, in vastly more challenging climates, and few with the guarantee of a peaceful life. In many places commodified land will be reclaimed as commons and new communities will be formed by refugees from the collapsed economies. Anarchic societies — old and new — will need to defend their liberty and lives, through avoidance, arms, flight and 'outwitting the state'.
[77]: If you doubt this why not try a pleasurable experiment and get a taste of freedom by eating food not bought with sold time but grown with one's own hands. I suspect the experience will convince you that land is liberty and make you desire more of both. For those who like book references as well as soil under their fingernails see: The Ecologist, Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons (London: Earthscan, 1993)
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/anonymous-desert#toc22
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-- Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1817
While some desert areas are lifeless, in most communities of animals, birds, insects, bacteria and plants run, fly, crawl, spread and grow in lives unordered, undomesticated by civilisation. Wildness is in us and all around us. The battle to contain and control it is the constant labour of civilisation. When that battle is lost and the fields are deserted, wildness persists.
No one can live this life and emerge unchanged. They will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad.
Helene Claudot-Hawad says in a discussion of Tuareg conflict with modern states that: "State boundaries have by definition a fixed, immovable and intangible line, and are purposefully made not to be transgressed. They separate what are meant to be mutually opposing entities." That the resistant independence of nomads is often mixed with a practical disbelief in borders makes them threatening to the very ideological basis of governments.
For example the Spinfex people of the Great Victoria Desert have been able to continue their traditional lives despite the advent of 'Australia', as their homelands are so barren that it is not even suitable for pastoralism.[88] The !Kung too, managed to live well and free as gather-hunters in a very harsh environment — the Kalahari.
[88]: Though to the British military this just made it ideal for nuclear weapons testing.
When agriculturalists face extreme food stress or external violence, foraging is an adaptive strategy that has been turned to many times. For some this may be temporary, for others permanent. Thus, with spreading desertification we could see, in some places, a spreading desertion from civilisation to something resembling our original anarchist wild-life. Whole new bands of foragers may evolve following collapses of agricultural viability and the retraction of exuberant, energy rich state powers. Given the present condition of many arid zone pastoralists and foragers it is more likely that in most cases we will see hybridity — an increase in autonomous nomadic populations relying both on animal herding and foraging.
The ancient Creosote bush ring is quite low to the ground and grows on US Bureau of Land Management land "designated for recreational all-terrain vehicle use." The Botswana government has forcefully relocated many Kalahari Bushmen from their homelands into squalid re-settlement camps, seemingly to enable diamond mining. For free peoples and wild-life the harshness of our cultural desert is a most threatening of environments.
https://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/bushmen
Overall, then, as the planet hots up we should remember the nomadic freedoms of the herders and foragers, the refugia of aboriginal peoples and renegade drop-outs, the widening habitats of desert flora and fauna. That arid zones will expand brings positive possibilities as well as sadness for the diminished, often previously vibrant, ecosystems.
Some, not all.