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thousands who died resisting civilization
Feels like this is, itself, highly revisionist. To claim these native communities had no civilization? No professions or languages or shared traditions or sciences?
We know their stories
We don’t know their stories. Far too much was lost. That’s the great tragedy of the Columbian exchange.
Anti-civ and nihilism are absolutely fascist urges. Pretending early civilizations didn’t exist only furthers the fascist narrative that whiteness and modernism are conjoined.
Civilisation from a anti/post-civ has specific meaning within the context of itself and contemporary society.
Anti-civ and nihilism are absolutely fascist urges.
No they are not, and such badjacketing will not be tolerated further.
God damn. Invoking dead indigenous people who lived lives of community and relationship to justify individualism. Wild stuff, OP.
God damn, being a tankie who thinks individualists doesn’t value community and relationships. Cliche understanding, ML.
Go read some anarchist theory, you obviously know nothing about it. Probably think egoism is like right-libertarianism as well.
I’ve read Malatesta, Goldman, Kropotkin, Proudhon… Remember, tankies are obsessed with books and reading?
I just find the anarchist inability to understand the class as the revolutionary subject instead of the individual to be one of its larger failings, particularly in its contemporary Western expression, both on the ground and on the Internet.
Cool, so you’ve read the basic introductory stuff. Now stop doing the tankie thing of only reading ancient theory and treating it as dogmatic, and look into the modern evolutions. Go read some zines and other publications and understand the zeitgeist. You won’t find deep understanding in 1 or 2 large tomes but in millions of competing and evolving short texts from people with different lived experiences, or form your own belief for a better world and argue for it; be another voice shouting in the chaos of growth.
Because you larp about revolution that will never come. Anarchists recognise that rather than sit on our arses pretending that one day we will all rise up in revolt and until than we should sit back and do absolutely nothing to build the new world or fight, that we can actively create mutual-aid and fight today. And guess what, if the fucking heavens part and the mass revolution starts, we can still join in so it’s not like anything has been lost by us being proactive.
The focus on the individual is in relation to individual actions and ethics. A small group or cell is formidable and very real threat to governments, revolutionary book clubs are not.
We likewise don’t want to throw any individual into the grinder of the system because they didn’t ‘fit in’ as we’ve seen places like the USSR, China, and yes even Cuba (up until recently) do to it’s LGBT peoples and other innocent people. Ethics and morals are up to us to judge, not a state or society as a whole.
That’s what individualism is, it does not mean we hate working together or hate community. That’s tankie propaganda.
Because you larp about revolution that will never come.
“Tankies” can look to the actually existing socialist revolutions, both historical and ongoing, and be inspired by revolutions that actually came and the new world they’re actually building. There’s real things happening in the real world right now. Our revolutions have come in different parts of the world, and those revolutions are ongoing as we speak. Hence: actually existing socialism.
China lifted 800 million people out of poverty over the past four decades. Their population’s life expectancy now exceeds the US’s.
What do you even have?
What do you even have?
Not being a genocidal capitalist state engaged in suppressing LGBT and other peoples. Your argument is literally no different to any non-US neolib, “oh but we improved the material conditions and have a higher life expectancy than the US” but at least they can claim to be having some social freedoms.
If your entire argument is “we’re like neolibs but worse” you’re doing a terrible job selling your ideology.
I didn’t ask what you don’t have. What do you have? What has your movement built?
China still has its internal contradictions and flaws, but they also have sovereignty. They have an independent nation that’s only getting better, they’re actually building a future. Whatever criticisms of them we can have, they’re going somewhere. Life in China has only gotten better and will keep getting better, which is more than any imperial subject can say in the declining empire.
You, however, have divorced yourself from this actually existing revolution. So, what do you have? Some zines? Some online discussions? Little co-ops and cults? You’re nothing, and you’ll always be nothing. If you and every single anti-tankie “”“revolutionary”“” like you suddenly vanished, nothing would change. You have had zero impact on history and you never will.
All you can do is attack and criticize other revolutionary projects. You can’t build anything yourself.
China is changing the world. You can’t change anything at all.
What we have is people’s liberation as they fight against oppression. As they defend themselves in Rojava, in Chiapas, as they fight fascism and squat in communities across the world and seek to survive the brutality of the state.
You may be happy to trade freedoms for material gains, all you capitalists are. You sell the people out for a shiny new product, while your factories exploit the poor to line the pockets of your billionaires.
We have class struggle, you have fascism.
Now get the fuck out of here class traitor.
what
How does this mesh with your other meme saying overpopulation isn’t a problem?
Or the one saying that anarchists aren’t for the propagation of violence without a goal?
Or the ones encouraging revolutionary optimism?
Or the one saying that centrists are cringe for not having consistent beliefs?
How does this mesh with your other meme saying overpopulation isn’t a problem?
Because this doesn’t criticise population? It criticises civilisation, which in post-left anarchist anti-civ/post-civ theory refers to “the culture of cities”, "a society defined as a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities … Compared with less complex structures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy.”, or “the modern world’s organizational structures and approaches to culture. We’re talking about the legal and societal codes that dictate “proper” behavior. We’re talking about the centralizing and expanding urges of political and economic empire.” [1].
Or the one saying that anarchists aren’t for the propagation of violence without a goal?
Destruction of a destructive system is the goal.
Or the ones encouraging revolutionary optimism?
Because not everyone follows the same sort of anarchism that I do. Anarchism Without Adjectives [2] means I support all anarchist methodology. And also this community is not simply for the one flavour I value, I want to encourage others views. Likewise nihilism is not without optimism. it’s about realist understanding of the trajectory we’re under. If there was no optimism, there would only be self-defeat.
Or the one saying that centrists are cringe for not having consistent beliefs?
There is nothing contradictory here.
Because this doesn’t criticise population? It criticises civilisation, which in post-left anarchist anti-civ/post-civ theory refers to “the culture of cities”, “a society defined as a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities
Yeah, but the vast majority of the population dies without that complex society with agriculture. Of starvation, if nothing else.
Destruction of a destructive system is the goal.
But that’s exactly the opposite of what that meme said - individual resistance was the goal even with a conscious awareness of hopelessness of destroying the system.
Because not everyone follows the same sort of anarchism that I do. Anarchism Without Adjectives [2] means I support all anarchist methodology. And also this community is not simply for the one flavour I value, I want to encourage others views. Likewise nihilism is not without optimism. it’s about realist understanding of the trajectory we’re under. If there was no optimism, there would only be self-defeat.
Ah, mea culpa, I thought these were ALL your personal opinions.
Yeah, but the vast majority of the population dies without that complex society with agriculture. Of starvation, if nothing else.
Does it? Using Australia as an example, we waste ~312kg of food per person per year. That is half an humans entire yearly food needs, turned into trash because the crops needed to be burned as profits were low, that it was an odd colour and wouldn’t sell as easily at the supermarket, or because people prepared more food than they ate and scrapped the rest into the bin.
We do not need gigantic input machines to survive, populations and people can survive in a dispersed connected manner. Aiding each other rather than aiding one source.
Civilisation is a centralised/decentralised system, that is not the most effective system or the only one that can work, it is simply the easiest to be controlled and managed by a state/authority. Distributed systems of society are adaptive and can support people, especially if we cut back on the waste issue. They are also less resource extractive and harmful to local ecosystems.
And regardless current agriculture is going to kill billions of us as the climate collapses and our inefficient imported crops die off en mass.
Does it? Using Australia as an example, we waste ~312kg of food per person per year. That is half an humans entire yearly food needs, turned into trash because the crops needed to be burned as profits were low, that it was an odd colour and wouldn’t sell as easily at the supermarket, or because people prepared more food than they ate and scrapped the rest into the bin.
That really doesn’t dispute my point - half a person’s food needs per year would increase carrying capacity by ~50% from the current status - so being able to provide, by your numbers for Australia, ~45 million instead of ~30 million.
But the larger issue is that agriculture itself is responsible for a much larger percentage of current carrying capacity. Without agriculture, we would be looking at something more like 3 million, or even less. And certainly that 3 million would not have the same societal capabilities to, say, allow us to not abandon disabled children in the woods to spare the community a mouth it cannot afford to feed.
We do not need gigantic input machines to survive, populations and people can survive in a dispersed connected manner. Aiding each other rather than aiding one source.
That may be so, but however you want to define civilization, agriculture is definitely not what you want to take aim at.
Civilisation is a centralised/decentralised system, that is not the most effective system or the only one that can work, it is simply the easiest to be controlled and managed by a state/authority. Distributed systems of society are adaptive and can support people, especially if we cut back on the waste issue. They are also less resource extractive and harmful to local ecosystems.
I don’t think I agree with that definition of civilization, per se; but I also acknowledge that you’re discussing a different issue than I would be under the label of ‘civilization’, so my objections are limited to the point about abandoning agriculture (which necessarily would destroy what I would regard as civilization).
And regardless current agriculture is going to kill billions of us as the climate collapses and our inefficient imported crops die off en mass.
Not really. Of all the threats to human survival, agricultural collapse is pretty low on the board. At most you could say that the current system of decentralized production of crops which allows year-round access to seasonal foodstuffs would collapse, and cheap fertilizer would go the way of the dinosaur. But agriculture itself is not unsustainable, and, especially, modern agricultural techniques which allow 1 acre to feed 50 people, or more, are largely not predicated on access to expensive materials, but modern knowledge and political stability.
A mixture of crop rotation and composting (only approaching the modern standard for such techniques come the 18th century AD) can provide extremely high returns compared to early agriculture. Combined with the understanding of soil and plant needs, and of (non-chemical) pest control, plant genetics, and the effects of individual traits on crop yields, yields do not have to significantly decrease to be sustainable.
Even assuming that we’re going under the idea that all motorized farming equipment (other than transport infrastructure) is non-kosher, labor requirements are affected much more than yields. Artificial fertilizer in particular is mostly used as a way to create high yields without needing educated farmers, long-term farming plans, or crop rotations (which reduce profits, horror of horrors!) It’s not the death of modern agricultural yields to be stripped of it entirely, assuming one is interested in a system where artificial fertilizers are no longer used at all.
If you can provide stability/safety, there’s no reason why you need to abandon agriculture, and I would go so far as to say that abandoning agriculture (in the sense of intensive land cultivation) is abandoning the vast majority of human beings to a miserable death, and arguably also a miserable life - not just the ones alive now, but all future generations as well.
Well i guess you are genuine and nihilism can be pursued in good faith, but i know of some people that are anti-civ enough to oppose contraceptives, trans medication, technology to help disabled people, etc. So surely some ways of anti-civ can lead to fascism or fascism-like mindset (though clearly leninism did too).
Anti-civ on its own is simply the critique of civilisation. I find the importance lay in ones solution, I prefer post-civ whereas what you’re describing to me sounds more like an anprim approach.
You’re on point it is extreme anprim.
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Whoops! Hexbear linked to this page! But it’s on their front page, I’ve been told they don’t brigade.
Have you tried doing anything, ya know, useful? Seems like peeling potatoes would be better than whatever…this is.
Yes, I do a lot in my local community and aid-groups.
And no, pushing for life saving revolutionary action is pretty damn important.
