Towards Autonomy

Our culture suffers from an extreme personality disorder. It seems that it is wearing so much armor, that it forgets it’s even connected to its’ body. The face is so preoccupied with make up that it forgets to look down.

We’re built ourselves up so high that we forget that we need our foundations to stay afloat. We just say, “Here we are, now let’s deal with it.” Nowhere else can this be clearer than in our ‘race for the cure’ approach to life.

It surrounds us. It is BP selling stuffed ‘endangered animals’ toys with fill ups. IT is Phillip Morris out to find the cure for cancer. It is Weyerhauser protecting the wilderness, and Police protecting urban youth from violence. It is Monsanto feeding the staring ‘third world’ children, and Channel One teaching ‘first world’ children.

This is it, the dichotomy of good and evil (life and survival, damnation and salvation, dictator and leader, take your pick), which underlies the conquests of ‘progress’, comes down to public relations.

Sink or swim, has been changed to float with us and you’ll worry no more. We plunge into “It”, the undying, righteous, creator/sustainer. You can live forever, but the fine print is getting harder to read as we drag on and lose our vision to the luminescent glow of TVs, in-store track lighting, computers, and streetlights.

We want more than anything to never die. This constant search for limbo permeates our lust for life, since pure freedom doesn’t have the catchy jingles that its’ zombie replacements willingly offer.

The dying desperately grasp to the life they’ve never had.

Obsessions with the progression into a future of such technological magnitude that we need never even breathe for ourselves, compressed with an over-reluctant ness to push the ‘past’ further behind (onto ‘e-history bookshelves’), has placed us into a ‘might is right’ corner where ‘the Ends’ (progress and growth) have presumptuously justified any ‘means’ which may arise (bio-devastation or avoidable diseases, perhaps).

And where does a cure fit it?

The search for cures is a part of the unquestioning ideology of civilization. To search for a cure is to ‘level the playing field’, so to speak. A cure presumes one is needed, that the problem is naturally occurring. This turns cancer, retardation, and stupidity into a natural genetic ‘mishap’, rather than what they are, results of the ‘means’ to a non-existent ‘end’. The search for such is digging our own graves. The cure for one problem is the cause for the next, and as long as we isolate each problem, the cycle is self-perpetuating.

What we need is solutions. We can’t turn a blind eye to the foundations of civilization, and we must ask ourselves if this is really what should be occurring. The reasoning for the entire social order must be brought into question.

Only when this is done can we stop sacrificing for the future, and start living now.

Case Studies on the Dualistic Nature of the Totality: Technology. The Allegory of the Accident.

At 2:15 A.M., a miracle occurs in the emergency room of Kennedy Memorial Hospital.

It played out like this:

11:23 P.M.- Dan and friends are finishing off their weekly ritual of getting plastered in celebration of another week of work down the drain. Working for the past 13 years in a fast-paced assembly line, Dan and friends now require excessive alcohol consumption at least 2 nights a week to help pass away the time till retirement. 11:31 P.M.- Amy, who is 7 and a half months pregnant and a soon-to-be single mother, departs from her parents house. She is constantly bothered by fears of not being able to provide for her child and is plagued by worries over how to care for her child.

11:52 P.M.- Both within ten miles of their respective dwellings, Amy and Dan become soothed at the thought of being almost home and fade into thoughts of relaxation. This thought, combined with excessive amounts of alcohol, make it harder for Dan to focus on the red light at the quickly nearing intersection. Amy, in her downtrodden state, is also less aware of Dan’s vehicle rapidly approaching.

11:52:41 P.M.- Amy’s Ford Escort traveling at 42 MPH is now plowed in the driver’s side by Dan’s Dodge Ram. Which mildly slowed by a last minute slam on the breaks is still charging at 32 MPH.

11:53:24 P.M.- A nearby driver, Charles, sees the collision and immediately alerts Emergency Operator Suzanne by means of his Nokia cellular phone. Suzanne has 2 ambulances dispatched immediately to the intersection, where Charles is “afraid he can’t tell exactly what is going on.”

11:55 P.M.- The emergency crew, consisting of 2 ambulances, 1 fire truck, and 3 police squad cars, arrives at the scene. Charles rushes to Officer Daniels to give his mildly coherent account of the ‘real life emergency’. Officer Daniels follows procedure by calming Charles and attempting to get an accurate account of the ‘event’. Still in awe of the unfolding adventure, Charles mutters, “thank god I had my Nokia handy.”

11:52:26 P.M.- Amy’s door is completely crushed, leaving her arm now intertwined with the ‘Shatter Resistant Glass’ of her window. Fire/Rescue Engine No. 8 member Jeff is able to pry open the passenger side door and extract Amy. Upon noticing her critical condition, Jeff brings her to the ‘safety’ of the ambulance. He constantly reassures the comatose Amy, “you’ll be fine, just hang in there.”

Dan’s Dodge Ram is luckily equipped with Dual Side Airbags. He is extracted by Fire/Rescue Engine No. 8 member Frank, who brings the dazed Dan to an ambulance.

The fire truck now hoses down both vehicles to assure the surrounding residents that the situation is “under control”. The dramatic effects are accentuated to reaffirm the heroism of the emergency crew. One hundred and three onlookers will now disperse to flood the news of their encounters with the scene of a near death encounter.

11:58 P.M.- Jeff’s ambulance arrives at Kennedy Memorial Hospital. He proceeds to cart Amy into the Emergency Room and alerts the critical condition to Doctor Robertson, who immediately shouts orders to his lackeys. His qualifications to do so lie in the prefix of Doctor, the nurses must act upon his decisions. He, however, is calm as can be, he has “seen this sort of thing a million times.”

11:59 P.M.- Dan arrives at Kennedy Memorial Hospital Emergency Room. He is taken in, but it is quickly noted that he is n20.7ot in critical condition. He will sit in the hall awaiting care for 18 minutes until a certified doctor stops by and prescribes his ailments.

A large contingency of ‘populists’ and ‘progressives’ will find this aspect to be particularly disturbing. They feel there is a dire need to extend the entire medicinal institution to better deal with this painstakingly bureaucratic detail. The blindness to the social contexts surrounding this institution is another symptom of the success of the totality to separate problems with the Problem (the totality itself: the existence of civilization). The functionalism of leftism within that framework can be seen as it’s strong point of overall failure.

12:05 A.M.- As the textbook procedures are coming and going, so is Amy’s desperate grasp onto life. One is forced to wonder if her pre-accident dilemmas may weigh heavily upon the strength of that grasp.

Chemicals are now flowing through her blood stream via the IV injected into her veins. That very blood is pumping because of the ‘Life Saving’ machines that are mechanically replicating the functions of her vital organs in order to preserve her hollowing shell of a body.

The forced vital activities are not able to provide the same service for her brain. As the consciousness fades into oblivion, hopeful Nurse Becky wishes there was a way to ‘save’ the mind in a manner such as that being implored upon Amy’s ironing lungs. The brain reduced to a purely mechanistic component; the soul has lost its’ place in light of Modern Times.

A decision is passed o20.n from the Expert to now focus attention on the unborn child inside Amy. The decision is upheld by an instantaneous change of pace by the flock of lackeys surrounding Amy’s dying body.

It will later be explained by Dr. Robertson that it is a miracle and trophy to Progress that a premature baby can now be ‘extracted’ and placed in a replica womb where it can go onto live a ‘normal’ life.

This brief analysis is to be picked up by every bit of alert media who will later fight for the most dramatic reenactment of the situation for their sponsors to pat them on the wallet for. The best rendition will be rewarded with a ‘based on a true story’ made-for-TV movie, whereas the runner ups will be rewarded with a spot of a ‘real life’ drama show exalting the miracles of modern medicine and technology of the glory of life in the gory ER. This is the spectacle of our society in work.

The viewers wait at the edge of their couches and clench for closure as they await success though intervals of cleverly placed, 30 second, lifestyle enhancement, product pitches (In groups of 3 to 5 depending on the ability of the show to unknowingly lure consumers .). They all know the way the story ends, but the happy ending needs constant reimbursement for those partaking in the ‘most exciting age in history.’

Necessary detail: 12:11:32 A.M.- Amy has let go. A brief moment of inner contemplation at the gaping void of emotion on the part of the lackeys. Recovery begins, the show must go on.

12:14 A.M.- An emergency Caesarian Section is done on Amy’s corpse, the blood pours out of her deceased body and the fetus is removed from the womb. The Surgery Room is now in a state of panic as they race the clock to assure the baby is ‘alive’. The next couple hours will be the most strenuous the child will ever have. It goes back and forth on the level of criticalness. A swarm of nurses surrounds the mechanical womb, a machine is there to perform every function the baby needs to ‘live’. It is a battle of testing the child’s reactions to the technicalities of the mechanical womb. Only time will determine the fate of the baby.

12:15 A.M.- The evidence of disaster is now towed away; traffic patterns resume to regularity.

12:17 A.M.- Dan is finally visited by Doctor Smith. Upon quick examination the professional verdict is handed down. The verdict: the impact of the airbag with the inertia of the collision has resulted in a broken nose and jaw, on top of this, the seatbelt Dan wore broke his left collar bone. He had some serious bruises and scrapes, but nothing really bad, only appearing worse since the alcohol thinned the blood out and gave the impression of more serious bleeding.20.

The doctor hands down his decree and the lackeys pick up the mess. The word of manslaughter charges floats through ER walls and the doctor wishes for a second that the technology to so easily help Dan wasn’t available so he could suffer more for his folly. The thought quickly passes away as the good Doctor recalls that it is incidents such as this that “keep the medical establishment running”.

It seems that the new technologies nor only cure more effectively, but too quickly. Now it is the Business of Curing, and it needs more clients. This incident is business as usual to the medicinal establishment.

2:15 A.M.- After the long process of trying to replace the womb for the child, it is declared that the child will live. Excitement fills the ER staff for a moment before they move onto the next set of patients and unfolding dramatic moments.

The baby will be left electronically supervised until it can exist on it’s own. From there legal battles will ensue over ‘rights’ to the motherless child. As it is raised in a synthetic environment (more than likely with numerous new diseases) on synthetic ‘life sources’, it will rejoice in the knowledge that it was because of technology that it survived the disaster it’s mother didn’t.

The viewer rejoices in a daily affirmation of the privilege of being a sacrifice to the coming techno-utopia.

God bless Progress.

Refusal to Become History

The situation just explained was a made up story. That is a ‘based on a true story’ story, while specifics may differentiate, the situation is hardly a rare one in our society. More important than the story, however, is the tone.

Throughout the many Progress affirming stories our society loves to tell itself, is a constant theme, that of shortsightedness.

The totality exists by stagnating our daily life into a series of events. For each event there is development, climax and conclusion. All conflicts unfold and are dealt with and put away into storybooks for further lessons next time around. For a culture as obsessed with history and past experience as ours, the past is doomed to repeat itself. This becomes our ideology.

It is through our ideological looking glass that we can feel thankful for something that ‘gives back’ a little from what it takes.

In the situation laid out in the previous pages, the emphasis lies not on technology for creating the position in the first place, but for prevailing in the end (and for those who feel I have set up a straw person, you would need to look only at a newspaper or watch a few hours of ‘real life TV’ to find quite a few stories mirroring this one). We would sooner praise the artificial ‘life giving’ machines than question the role of the life taking ones. The situation builds to the throne of Progress instead of hacking at its roots.

There is also a clearly intentional overshoot of the amount of lives taken in the production of the ‘life saving’ machines. The majority of the high tech products are made in sweatshops which put known carcinogens into the air, water and soil. The unspoken cost can20. be seen in the development of such ‘plagues’ as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which has taken a much higher toll upon those forced to live and work in these areas. SIDS, however, is never given a name until it begins to enter the lives of those in the ‘first world’ populations. At this point millions of dollars are turned into research for a more synthetic approach to ‘deterring’ the problem. More medicines and technologies are seen as the solution to all problems. This is the dualistic reality inherent in the civilized mindset.

In the case of Dan and Amy, the totality allows for criticism only as far as to extend the limitations elsewhere. One group could see the situation as evidence for stricter legislations on drinking and driving laws (which could result in more clients for the Corrections and Enforcement Establishments). Another group could see it as grounds for more safety in vehicles (perhaps side mount airbags, added security equals added comfort equals added sales). The cell phone companies would be quick to point out their role in assistance (it’s worth the money if it saves lives [even if it gives you tumors]). It goes on and on, but it goes on in circles.

To isolate the situation is to enforce the power of the totality. The lesson learned should never accept the situation as it is, it should be grounds to reevaluate the entire circumstance. Why were the cars even there? Why was Dan drunk? Why was Amy so preoccupied? Anything short of a complete reworking of the society which allows such incidents will only find more problems in the end.

An example a little closer to home is the attitude that the success of recent confrontations, such as Seattle, Nov. 99, was based primarily on the organization that took place over the internet. True or not, granting to success to the technology is completely overlooking the factor that that very technology had in the success for the globalizing state powers. This case especially brings out this duality since those who profit from the sale and manufacturing of technologies had such a heavy hand in the first place. If a doctor says your intestines are bleeding you wouldn’t thank him for aspirin. This is exactly how the system was built to work.

It is because of this that we should never accept these situations as another lesson to be packed away in story books. Every time this happens, more validity is granted to the totality. It is a system of give and take, as long as it serves the same goal. The extra links on your chain come from the closing in of the fence that surrounds you.

Any action which seeks to reform the system will merely end up as the basis for more exploitation and constraint in another area/time. We must refuse to separate the past and future of our society, for it is all the same. We are the product of one ideology with many faces, and until the whole is taken on, we will find ourselves at arms with a new face.

Against Cities

City n., pl -ies. 1. A large or important town. 2. An incorporated municipality, usually governed by a Mayor or Council. 3. A physical manifestation of humankinds? war on nature.

Every year, states pour more and more money into “fixing things up.” There are always people fixing cracks in sidewalks, streets, highways, etc. But it’s all still there. Pouring more and more money and resources into cracks, and yet they never go away.

Every year, building owners pour more and more money into “fixing things up.” Foundations shift and crack, windows need replaced, walls tear apart, roofs leak, it goes on and on. More money goes into the hole that magically appears again years later.

Every year, more and more money goes into therapy to try to “fix things up.” There are new mental diseases being found all the time. Billions of dollars of pharmaceuticals sold, suicide goes up, escapism is at an all time high, and people just aren’t happy. Year after year money goes in and the people loose out.

Every year, more and more money goes into waste disposal to “fix things up.” Population rises, people eat, people defecate, and people throw things away. It begins to add up. Sewage drains flood, pipes bust, landfills stink, and our trash covers the earth. More and more money goes in, as do chemicals go into our body, back out, then in the air, water and soil again.

Every year, more and more money goes into the crime industry. Prisons are built, no one talks to strangers, more cops, more laws, more security systems, more people willing to kill for and to protect possessions. More and more money goes in, less people go out, and more and more people are incarcerated.

And cities get bigger, people get scarred and move further away, and take the roads out with them. More roads, more houses, more pollution, more domination, more domestication, and less and less nature.

It all goes back to one thing, a tumor that appeared about 10,000 years ago. Big tumor, little name: stability. Not the kind of stability that “goes with the flow of things,” but the literal stability. It extends more to the dependence on stability. It works like this: some people thought, “why have only a few foods we really like when we can grow as much as we want.” This kind of thinking had intertwined with hunter-gatherer lifestyles, until some one decided to do it full time.

The greatest change this brought about was that this lifestyle required patterns and cycles that must be followed in order to survive. This is in contrast to previous societies, which could up and go if needed.

Obviously, earlier tribes who took this up could easily fall back into previous lifestyles (as many surely did), but as generations grew up in this way, they lost their abilities to leave. On top of this, agriculture based societies needed more land (Increase in food supply mixed with settlements equal increase in population.) and workers (The more complex the cycles, the greater the divisions of labor, the more workers needed.). So the agriculture lifestyles were generally not peaceful and easy to live by. They took what they needed, reduced options of lifestyles, created slavery, classism, sexism, casteism, and so on. This is all further explained elsewhere and is not the main idea of this essay.

The smaller, closer to nature tribes were more able to adapt to the landscapes. But the larger the society gets, the more space required. The more space meant planning. The population needed a constant and definite food supply this requires manipulation. Nature is chaos. There is no order in the way things are, which is entirely spontaneous. It is never constant, and depends on unpredictability to keep things working. To step out of this order is to step out of the natural world. For 3 million years, humans were a part of this natural order (and some still are). Because it was perfect? No, perfection doesn’t even exist. It lasted because it works. Anything that has felt otherwise has become extinct (Save the 200 species that are pushed into extinction in the process of humankinds’ own journey there.).

So what does this mean? Essentially stepping into mass agriculture was the first step in the path to extinction.

And what does this have to do with cities?

Cities and agriculture are products of the short-sightedness thought of “why have a little when you can have it all?” Cities are further down the path to extinction. Their foundations for existing are going against the way of the natural world. Cities are built upon stability. This is why millions and billions of dollars are spent yearly, to try to keep things “up and going.” It defies the life source of Mother Earth and its permanence is quite frankly, impossible.

When highways and strip malls are built, it goes without saying that the intent is to be there forever. Nature’s spontaneity is only taken into account in high-risk areas of earthquakes. This defies the root of nature, which says that things must go through cycles to maintain life. Cities and the roads, farms, etc., that allow their existence say, “we are taking this as it is now and not giving cycles a chance as long as it goes against our interests!” This is what cuts down the forests, dam rivers, make irrigation canals, paves, and so on. The civilizations that build cities are saying that they determine what Mother Nature needs in order to allow us life.

To put it softly, we aren’t smart enough to figure in all the factors. We aren’t supposed to be and we never will be. Mother Nature is a great mystery that cannot be revealed. If it were, there would be no reason left to live. (Humankind’s defiance can be seen in their overwhelming search for the answer to this puzzle. In fact, searching too hard may be responsible for all devastation, since it looks right past all the answers we need, and takes a bulldozer down the wrong path.). This is the simple fact of life that we’ve denied, that denial has come back and hit us in the face every time, yet we still don’t learn our lessons.

For years DDT was used since the factors of mass-produced food included increased populations of weeds and insects. Without knowing the full role these things played in nature’s life cycles, the farmers saw them as enemies of productivity. Enter the world of pesticides. People from the war industry largely produced these chemicals. (If they can kill countries, why not pests?) And so they sought out to destroy every last one of them. DDT was just one of these. It did what it was designed to do and did it well. There was one little problem though it was giving people cancer. The problem was and is getting bigger though. Now it’s not just DDT and lead paint, it’s almost all the pesticides and microwaves and more. Is there a lesson being learned? Of course not! They can’t “turn back on progress!” So instead more corporations have to spend more and more money to keep us in the dark. But they raised the stakes (Of course, that’s how technological innovation works, right? “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet.”) Now instead of pouring on pesticides, they’re splicing its DNA with animals, our food and us. This is how dependency works. “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again!” “GO FOR THE GOLD!”

So chemicals are poured into our foods and us, inside and out. It goes from there to our toilets, through a series of pipes (still getting rid of the lead ones), till it ends up in sewage pipes, in ditches, in purification tanks (to get out all of the bad stuff, that we know of.), and back into human made and supervised water holding systems. During this it mixes with other chemicals and gets “processed” through other animals, evaporates and gets rained back down on us. (Have we forgotten about acid rain?) All of this so a group of humans can perform the basic necessities of eating (And this is without even mentioning the horrendous acts involved in domesticating and “processing” animals. On top of all the other brutish acts involved in getting and maintaining transportation for all of this), and processing the both.

In nature-based societies, these actions required little thought and action. They could be easily achieved, and if not, the people would pick up and go to a place where it could be done. But out society is the opposite. If its needs can’t be met in one aspect, the others are all sure to feel the blow. So when nature acts in a natural cycle, it may throw this all off. A tornado, hurricane or earthquake would have massive implications, but these things just happen. Our society cannot deal with this basic fact. And incorporating it is not possible. Cities cannot be rebuilt when the foundations were made all wrong. A mountain flattened off for a Wal-Mart, will still be susceptible to erosion, like all other concrete structures built hoping the earth will freeze its cycles, will be left in ruins.

Where are the humans in all of this? Humans are animals as much as any other species. Our only difference is that we think we deserve better than the rest of the world. Why? That I don’t really know. But it’s not all humans that think this way. Only a small portion did, and they felt sickened that we would still live as other creatures. So they started making up stories. Stories that involved every aspect that could be seen in daily life that they could contort so that it fit their interests: to prove that they’d be given the short end of the stick. They created a higher power that granted them not just with creation, but superiority. They had to be the best, so they “fixed things up” to meet their demands. Animals weren’t animals anymore; they were cats, dogs, birds, and all kinds of different species, genetically different. Then came the most important part: humans. We weren’t animals anymore; we were made by gods to be gods. We deserved to be the rulers of everything and that is just what we did. Language was created and put into use so that it reaffirmed this superiority. We set up all kinds of new ideals of good and bad, strong and weak. What humans were best at became the new standard ideal of greatness. If another animal could do it, we had to too. Birds can fly, so we built planes, fish can swim, so we built boats and submarines, and if we couldn’t do it, it’s cause we didn’t want to. Those other animals became filthy, and humans that still lived like that were below us. Missionaries tried to make them civilized, and if they didn’t work, it’s because they’re inferior and we had the right to push them under our dominion as well. This went on and on, and now we are in the center of the ever-higher reaching climax. We went a far way up and we’re finding more and more problems with being this far up. Some more possibilities went overlooked, and now some of us are starting to realize maybe there was something down there that we needed. But “you can’t turn back,” and this has been the way things go. So we just keep digging further and further down into isolation and depression.

Our cities are run on technology and electricity. These things require complex set ups to go. You can’t just plug a stereo into a socket; you need electricity to that socket, which is powered by a series of wires and pipes that come from generators, which make lots of noise to turn a “natural resource” into energy. And taking that energy around requires more transportation. Which means more gas and more gas stations, or trains, planes, etc. All plentiful, all very noisy, and all taking whatever they need from the earth and leaving things the earth doesn’t need behind.

Cities are built on property, which is central to the ideas of civilization. Nature provides life sources, we can control the amount that we get though by partaking in a hierarchal society that gives us more of the things we want and less of what we don’t. We, of course, have to make some sacrifices, but we get more of the stuff we want, and the stuff we don’t want is spread out more. So through the long process, we loose our long term interests and needs, but get some of our manufactured needs gratified immediately (or at least, after working to save up the money need to buy them, on top of the money needed to pay for living the life style which accommodates working for that money, on top of all the time it takes to fulfill these activities, etc.). So what to do with all this stuff? What if some people don’t want to put in all the time and effort that you did? Well, you need to protect it. You need to put it in a place that’s for you. You can’t really do that out in the forest, at least not for this many people. You need housing, you need security systems for your housing, you need housing that keeps other non-human “thieves” away, and you need something that is comfortable enough to contain you with all your stuff. Our current cities are the highest technology on the line in keeping people’s stuff, and more and more, keeping the people who own the stuff tied up with it. So in order to have more of the things we like the best, we’re all tied up in our little sections of the world that we work too long to borrow for high prices off someone who claimed it as theirs. It gets pretty lonely up here. We’ve got more crap than we ever needed, computers and TVs to keep us company, faceless and emotionless music to give us an outlet, hollow relationships, videos of the relationships we wish we had that are filled with drama, hot sex, and a happy ending. Everyone is saying that “we’ve never had it better!” The rate of suicide, mental illness, overwork, debt, depression, and just outright disgust seem to say different.

The field of eco-psychology has done wonders to open up the obvious thing missing here: nature. If you go into the woods: you feel it, when you spend time in the desert: you feel it, when animals surround you: you feel it. There is something there in nature that we’re not getting here. We’re loosing contact with the earth and with each other. We’re pouring out to people that we’ve never seen or met, over the “information superhighway,” built by the US military in order to never have to actually send real people into combat to blow away an enemy nation (who are after our stuff, of course). We’ve never had more stuff, but we’ve never been so emotionally dead. We stare at screens flashing ads, dead people and images to over-sex our sexual repression, stimulating our brains so much that we don’t even notice anymore. The machinery that runs our lives for us constantly makes so much noise that we don’t even notice that we’re going deaf and loosing our sanity to the constant ringing. We notice once we’re born that we are taken into existence for someone else’s reasons, and for this we almost never become whole. Our lives are so full of crap that we have no meaning anymore. All this to try to fulfill the impossible idea that we need to attain perfection, all this so we can live in the filth holes of the world, and kill what remains of the wild so we never have to do anything for ourselves. We march off to school to be detained, to work so we can push ourselves over the limit to get more stuff in the end, into retirement, if we don’t die first, so we can dwindle off our last years and dollars. We’re setting up an impossible goal for ourselves. There’s a high point that we will never achieve, but are willing to die, and in some cases, kill for, and what for? The rest of the planet, ourselves included, was happy and working for more time than we could imagine. We weren’t perfect, but we got what we wanted and didn’t destroy it all for others in trying to do so. So why keep the towers that push us into spending eternity trying to hold them up? There was something there that worked, and it kept things going because it was right.

So where to now? Do we keep going on as we’ve done before and hope the next technology, the next “fix it all” pill, will work and undo everything else, without any negative side effects? Why don’t we look back and say, “this was a mistake from the start and we can’t go on like this.” It’s not some big loss on our part, everything we need is still in nature, less accessible obviously, but nature will heal itself. We give up our crap to live lives without the great void lingering over our pathetic existence. We have to take back our lives from those who profit from us being in this hollowed state and not let them get the chance to take it back. We have to abandon our empire as those in the past had. It is flawed and unsalvageable, so we need to find a way back into step one and stay there. The only thing between here and there is the thought that what we are doing is right, and that we can’t turn back. So we’re at a crucial point now, do we keep going and let extinction tell us the right answer, or do we step out of our hole and into life. The boat is sinking, are you going to drown with it?

Pacifism as a Deterrent to Peace

Nowadays, the banner of ‘Peace’ covers the sheer cowardice of the ‘movement’. The pacifistic mindsets which confuse ought with is could serve to be the greatest detriment to the actual achievement of peace.

It seems the ‘progressive communities’ (and even some self proclaimed ‘radicals’), have confused peace, as a time in which no war is occurring, with the system’s official definitions of peace, as a period in which no war is officially declared (which tends to be more narrowed in even more by pertaining to only that systems’ involvement). The result ends in a complete exemption from conflict as opposed to fighting for the end goal of peace. This isn’t to say the entire ‘peace movement’ disregards unofficial warring acts (strategic military offenses) as a state of peace, but to critique the ‘movements’ armor of pacifism.

The long held catchphrase that violence begets more violence has become a clearer indication at the level of self removal that the ‘peace movement’ currently holds. The fact that those involved can refrain from health or life threatening confrontation does not question the warring ideology of civilization, it merely mirrors the very stratification which makes allowances for such ideologies.

As long as there is civilization, there is always war. There will always be a continuous effort on the part of the civilization to control every aspect of life and to wipe out all alternate ways of being. This is inherently a thorough assault on nature and it’s communities since civilization spreads from anthropocentrism. This separation put into practice is a declaration of war, it is saying this is how we will exist at all costs. The abolition of this ideology and practice will be the only true peace.

The ‘peace movement’ also suffers mass delusion in confusing violence with war. ‘Violence’ has been redefined as any action which inflicts pain on others. This is something that will always be inherent in life. The community of life requires this kind of ‘violence’ in order to sustain and enrich itself. It is perfectly natural for these things to happen. The violence that is problematic is the systematic violence that is required by civilization. The violence that flows from the ideologies of the totality are the physical acts that constitute war. Individual acts of pain and death for the community of life should never be confused with this.

It is with this that the ‘peace movement’ should stay out of the hollow shell of pacifism nad be willing to defend the community of life which is peace. It is personal and it is universal.

We can no longer separate from the war of civilization and its systematic violence and seep into the comforts that it provided. We should embrace the rage and passions that connects to the community of life. It is from this that we can reemerge to fight for what it is in our hearts to do.

We must break the ideological taboos placed before us by civilization and fight by whatever means necessary for the sake of our lives, our future, and our community of life.

The Witch and the Wildness

The mainstay of our global civilization is the energy that flows through outlets into our walls. The fact that our global civilization exists is primarily because we keep plugging in. So why do it? When we turn on a light switch do we think about leaks in nuclear power plants, mountains stripped of their peaks with nothing but steel tracks and dead canaries left inside, do we think about 6 million birds who die yearly in the U.S. alone because they flew into microwave towers high above the tree lines, do we think about the wildness that constantly tries to seep through cracks in the concrete? Do we think about the wildness within us that turns into boiling rage because we compromise life for survival? Of course not, because if we did, we would be out there bashing everything that stands in the way of autonomy. Spiritually speaking, we are dead.

Domestication is the destruction of the soul. It takes a wild being and turns it into a piece of the global machinery: we become a part of the machine, mentally and physically. It is no easy process, but it is one we are all familiar with. A process we all feel with deep agony when we say ‘thanks’ for being handed a paycheck. But in the eyes of the civilizers, it is a necessary process. It’s necessary because we aren’t born thinking that power is necessary or justified anymore now than we did ten thousand or a million years ago. We have to be tricked into believing in it.

The key to holding power is a good justification. A good justification doesn’t need to be true; it just needs to be believable. This is as true for chiefs on the Trobriand Islands as it is for Bush Jr. The best reason for having standing armies then seems to be the age old fear of ‘barbarians at the gate’: the fear of the chaos and wildness that lurks just beyond the walls, borders, fences, or clearing. Bush Juniors’ ‘terrorists’ are really just filling the slot of the ‘Other’. For McCarthy and Reagan it was ‘communists’, Nazis had ‘Jews’, Colonialists had ‘Savages’, and as Clyde Kluckhohn writes, the Navaho, like so many other (stateless and statist) societies had ‘witches’ (1944, 89–90).

The antagonistic split between the self and the ‘Other’ then lies at the heart of domestication. To defend ‘territory’ or to turn a wild plant or animal into your ‘property’ requires that you not only see it as different, but inferior (Duerr 1985, Tucker 2002). This isn’t to say that ‘true primitives’ don’t recognize that they aren’t plants or animals, but the relationship with the ‘Other’ isn’t antagonistic or necessarily important: that comes with domestication.

James Woodburn made the important observation that societies can be split into two primary groups: based either on immediate or delayed return/gratification (Woodburn 1982). Put simply, there are egalitarian (meaning all people have equal access to necessities) and non-egalitarian societies (where there is a ranked system of access) respectively. In immediate return societies, there are no barriers to getting what you need when you need it. There is no mediating system and all people have the skills necessary to meet their ‘needs’.

This is more than economics; it is about a way of living that is a constant reminder of the community of life. The separation with the other is contextual: humans are a part of life, not aside from it. There are neither barbarians nor gates; wildness is not feared, but relished. That these societies lack a belief in witchcraft should hardly be surprising, but is widely noted (Brain 2001: 211–2, Lee and DeVore 1968: 91–2, 341). As Colin Turnbull noticed among the BaMbuti: “[they] roam the forest at will, in small isolated bands or hunting groups. They have no fear, because for them there is no danger. For them there is little hardship, so they have no need for belief in evil spirits.” (Turnbull 1962: 14) But the absence of witches is not only lack of imagination. It is not uncommon for IR gatherer-hunters to acknowledge witchcraft among sedentary neighbors, but they take no interest in it for their own uses (Woodburn 1988: 40).

Delayed return societies are a different story. The loss of egalitarianism is directly linked to three primary factors; surplus, sedentism, and domestication. Some societies have one of these, while others may have all three. These can be gatherer-hunters, but in the case of all three are typically horticultural societies. However insignificant any of these things may seem to be, they are all very important. When a society becomes dependent on surplus, it is no longer an option for people to just take freely, because for the first time something is produced. The ‘fruits of labor’ are pooled together and positions emerge for people to distribute food. This is where positions of power emerge: in small steps, access to life is removed from our hands (something so engrained in our own lives that the thought of being truly self-sufficient can be shocking).

Sedentism, or settled societies, not only counter the anti-power tendencies of mobility and flexibility (Barnard and Woodburn 1988: 28, Brain 2001: 211–2), but also challenge the ecological relationship formed over millions of years. The ‘contraceptive on the hip’ has been a powerful way of keeping populations within the ‘carrying capacity’. But when people settle down, it becomes easier to raise multiple children at one time. This settling further allows for more elaborate domestic situations. Domestication in its literal sense (accustom to the household), becomes an issue. The erosion of egalitarian relations begins to be seen in village life and architecture (Wilson 1988). Furthermore, domestication of plants and animals solidifies the superiority of the self/Other split, not only between humans and non-humans, but between ‘tribes’ and kin.

The picture here is the emergence of power and the degradation of egalitarianism. This is the context where witches, werewolves, sorcerers, and ‘things that go bump in the night’ emerge. Just as misery loves company, power mongers need a common enemy. The role of a chief is more fragile than the role of a king or president. While strict taboos can arise in their benefit, they are still accessible. When a king or president loses their credibility, they still have access to power (also, in our case, ludicrously high paid public relations experts). When a chief loses their credibility, they are often killed or exiled. So a scapegoat is needed. We have terrorists, many others have witches.

Domestication is dependency. A bad growing season, drought or plight means starvation to agriculturalists whereas gatherer-hunter mobility means they have to carry on and look for food elsewhere. For many agricultural states, droughts and floods have meant collapse (Fagan 1999), in others; it’s meant that witches and sorcerers are to blame. Not only are bad harvests and hunts at stake, but personal failures, ill health, and most often, death, are all caused by witches.

For agricultural societies, witchcraft is a common plight. Among the Azande, it’s recognized that the witches are always active, but they only become a problem when a person falls victim to witching. That doesn’t mean people aren’t always cautious, especially because a witch may not know they have bewitched you. As we stock up on canned foods and seal our windows with plastic and tape, we bear many similarities to witch fearers burying and securing possessions, excrement, nail clippings, hair, and so on, so they don’t become tools of the witches trade.

Witch accusations are a regular occurrence. Most often, a guilty witch can repay the damage of their malign substances without being killed, but this isn’t always the case. Needless to say, members of the princely class are very rarely accused of being witches, at least publicly (Evans-Pritchard 1976: 9). So are witches a catch all category for disorder? In many ways, apparently so, but it’s easy to see why. When things start to fall apart, it’s always more beneficial for those with power to keep people looking everywhere but the social system. Of all people, we should be rather familiar with this.

The witch, then, is the threat of decay and opposition to the social order. Among the Lele, sorcerers “turn their back on their own kind and run with the hunted, fight against the hunters, work against diviners to achieve death instead of healing.” (Douglas 2002: 207) Again this should sound familiar. Werewolves, vampires, and ‘wild men’ have long haunted civilized societies, lurking in the forests outside of the empire and creeping in at night (Duerr 1985, Anonymous 2003, Kennedy 2004). They steal or eat our children and souls, they threaten to carry us beyond the barriers between civilization and savagery and destroy us (turn us loose or kill us, the former seemingly being the more frightening to most).

Despite this, witches are not always used only to justify or strengthen power. The role of witchcraft is typically relative to the amount of egalitarianism that remains within a society. However, increased stress can always make it more dominant. European influence meant a surge in witchcraft accusations for the Yanomami (Ferguson 1995: 58) and the Navaho (Kluckhohn 1944), as it likely has for others. But among stateless societies, witchcraft accusations are used against further centralization of power.

Most often, the witch in stateless, non-chiefdom societies takes the role of the Trickster. It passes on justification for taboo and lays out ‘etiquette’ by exemplifying what is socially destructive behavior. Witches break taboo and take on the character of a ‘poor neighbor’ embodying such qualities as; “unsociability, isolation, stinginess, unfriendliness, and moroseness”. (Lehmann and Myers 2001: 205) Among the Navaho witches primarily take part in “all secret and malevolent activities against the health, property and lives of fellow tribesmen” (Kluckhohn: 110). While at the same time offering a means of expressing these thoughts/behaviors (ibid: 85).

The witch or trickster character then is an important aspect of social cohesion (something to keep in mind when thinking about anti-authoritarian social organization as well). As a society becomes more dependent upon a division of labor and predictable circumstances, it is vital that the health of the state is seen as the health of the individual. Even in microform, nationalism is the lifeblood of forced societies. Keeping social stratification to a minimum is an important task, one where witch accusations can come in handy.

In these societies, witch accusations can be a means of social leveling. When people become more and more powerful at the expense of others, social unrest shoots up. As Kluckhohn noticed among the Navaho: “the threat of an accusation of witchcraft acts as a brake upon the power and influence of ceremonial practitioners” to keep “their capacity for influencing the course of events supernatural techniques must be used only to accomplish socially desirable ends” (111). In keeping with the “anarchistic tendencies of Navaho society” (ibid: 113), the rise to power is extinguished early.

This usage can be further seen among Shawnee nativists, who, during their revolt against Christianity and colonization in the 1750-70s, would accuse the rich and powerful of being witches (Dowd 1992: 136).

Although we can clearly draw similarities between witches among the Navaho and the Azande and terrorists in the age of globalization, it is important to look at witches in our own ‘his-story’. It has often been easy for social Darwinist and apologists for Progress to point towards fear of witches as reasons why primitives were less evolved or childish and in need of civilizing (in the form of a rain of bullets or reign of colonization). But a look into our own closet shows the European Witchcraze taking place within the birth of our beloved scientific rationality from the early 14th century to the late 17th century.

In America, the Salem witch trials stand strong in historical memory, but the 25 lives burned at the stake are little compared to other cases; in the Diocese of Como, 1,000 witches were burnt in 1523, 1585 left two villages reduced to one female inhabitant each, 1581–1591 saw 900 witches burnt in Lorraine (Griffin 1978: 15). The list goes on and on. Burnt remains are the legacy of fear. The witch as disorder and wildness was never so feared. Only now the disorder became a more obvious target.

As patriarchy became even more enmeshed in civilization, enemies became more obvious. For the first time, the witch became gendered and classed. The social deviants were the dispossessed, those whose very existence served as a constant reminder of the frailty of power. During this period, those being burnt were most likely women, the poor, homosexuals and radicals (Evans 1978, Griffin 1978, Merchant 1990). As women were further subjugated and increasingly seen as relics of nature, they would rise to 82% of supposed witches between 1562 and 1684 (Harris 1989: 238).

This period was a time of increasing unrest. As social stratification soared to new levels, the totalistic disempowerment was hardly an abstract concept. The established order was being threatened by the very backs it was built upon. Marvin Harris writes: “The principle result of the witch-hunt system (aside from charred bodies) was that the poor came to believe that they were being victimized by witches and devils instead of princes and popes.” (237) Burnt bodies gave validity to the state. Social ills had a source and, most importantly, the state was doing something about it.

Today whites fear non-whites because they are a tangible threat. Our chances of being killed in a car wreck make the chances of being killed by terrorists (Bush’s ‘evil people’ not governments of course) look ridiculous. Someone is more likely to die by having a vending machine fall on them than be attacked by sharks. But what are we afraid of? Anything but the entire system; the whole of civilization that stands before us daily, the anxiety of a machine paced world, the nagging urges to resist domestication, the microwaves that pierce our bodies in the lurking wildness. The wealth of production is our health: that is the message domestication puts into our minds. That is our burden, our crutch. Wildness, disorder, chaos, anarchy, these are the witches of civilization.

But the message here is not only a problem, but an option. By drawing on the Navaho heritage we can turn towards the persecuted witches during the Christian ritual purifications and take the cue that is being offered. Among the Navaho, Azande, Lele, Europe, and so on, when times got hard, where does one turn? If all your life, you hear of this power that lurks and exceeds the human body, why wouldn’t you try to use it? We know that this is what many did during the European Witchcraze (Duerr, Evans) and there seems little reason to doubt things were much different among ‘primitives’.

When the patriarchs of Puritanism began to preach of the evils of the lurking wildness of witches and beings that stride the fence between civilization and savagery, the dispossessed sought this out. In searching for a way out, they identified with the antithesis of state power. This is what we have to learn. In seeking to eliminate the threats of the state, those in power show their weaknesses. They unwittingly show what has always lied before us: underneath the veneer of absolute power lies a frail and fragile corpse maintained by the sweat and blood of those who are trained to see through its eyes, the vision of domestication.

Civilization becomes us; chains on the mind, scars on the body, piles of charred corpses, the yearning of an enslaved animal to smash the barrier between it and true freedom. The witches, shamans, and sorcerers brought themselves to the brink of death to remind themselves of the frailty of life and the joys of being. Drug induced trances were temporary breaks from the pain of survival sickness. They sought bewilderment, having “surrendered their individuality, renounced personal volition to the will-of-the-land, and merged individuated desire within the expansive needs of the wild.” (Moore 1988: 21)

This isn’t to say that delving into new age programs, drug induced escapes or forced rewilding will break our domestication; this is actually far from my point. Rewilding is a process and active resistance is a necessary part of that. What I am saying is that the key to the destruction of civilization lies in understanding its witches, its fears. Not only looking at the external system, but domestication itself, the internalized system: the cop, missionary, politician, economist, and worker in our heads. When we look within and outside, the target before us becomes most apparent. It becomes possible to see that the plug can be pulled on this technological civilization and it will all come crashing down before us. If only we would listen.

The witch is wildness. The witch is very much alive for the witch is life itself. It smashes machines at work. It burns construction equipment under the cover of night. It stirs within us and it seeks to overtake us if only we would let it.

The civilizers fear this wildness. They lock it up. They paint it as a brutish beast that would go on a violent rampage if released. They push it in our heads. They stand strong with an iron fist, but they are weak. They know they are weak. They know, in time, the wildness will eat their monuments and swallow their pride. The witch runs rampant. And when the lights go out, beyond the reach of the state, beyond the dependency, beyond the imposed system, we will be free to let the witching substance, the wildness, become us.

Bibliography:

Anonymous. 2003. ‘The Perennial Wild Men’. Green Anarchist. 70: 10–11.

Barnard, Alan and Woodburn, James. 1988. ‘Property, power, and ideology in hunter-gathering societies’ in Hunters and Gatherers: Volume 2, Property, Power and Ideology. Ingold, Riches, and Woodburn (eds). Oxford: Berg, 4–31.

Brain, James. 2001. ‘An Anthropological Perspective on the Witchcraze’ in Magic, Witchcraft, and Religion. In Lehmann and Myers (eds). Mountain View: Mayfield, 208–214.

Douglas, Mary. 2002 [1966]. Purity and Danger. London: Routledge.

Dowd, Gregory Evans. 1992. A Spirited Resistance. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.

Duerr, Hans Peter. 1985. Dreamtime. New York: Basil Blackwell.

Evans, Arthur. 1978. Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. Boston: Fag Rag.

Evans-Pritchard, E.E. 1976. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande: Abridged. London: Oxford UP.

Fagan, Brian. 1999. Floods, Famines and Emperors: el Nino and the Fate of Civilizations. New York: Basic.

Ferguson, R. Brian. 1995. Yanomami Warfare. Santa Fe: SAR.

Griffin, Susan. 1978. Woman and Nature. New York: Harper and Row.

Harris, Marvin. 1989. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches. New York: Vintage.

Kennedy, Joseph. 2004. ‘The Wild Man of Samoa’. Natural History. 2/04: 22–25, 66.

Kluckhohn, Clyde. 1944. Navaho Witchcraft. Boston: Beacon.

Lee, Richard B. and DeVore, Irven (eds). 1968. Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Lehmann, Arthur and Myers, James (eds). 2001. Magic, Witchcraft and Religion. Mountain View: Mayfield.

Merchant, Carolyn. 1990. The Death of Nature. New York: Harper Collins.

Moore, John. 1988. Anarchy and Ecstasy. London: Aporia.

Tucker, Kevin. 2002. ‘Spectacle of the Symbolic’, Species Traitor 3: 15–21.

Turnbull, Colin. 1962. The Forest People. New York: Touchstone.

Wilson, Peter. 1988. The Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale UP.

Woodburn, James. 1982. ‘Egalitarian Societies’, Man 17 (3): 431–451.

Woodburn, James. 1988. ‘African hunter-gatherer social organization’ in Hunters and Gatherers: Volume 1, History, Evolution and Social Change. Ingold, Riches and Woodburn (eds). Oxford: Berg, 31–64.

Taken from Green Anarchy #16

Discontents in the State of Inequality: Noble Dependents

O wo/man, whatever country you may come from, whatever your opinions may be, listen: Here is your story as I have seen it. For there exists a type of person who seeks life beyond his/her social context! Those who know the dirty lies of the great stories of oppressors, yet while feeling urges to flee the physical manifestations of such stories are compelled to remain within its bounds. Those who see the beauty of life in the hands of nature, and seek to fight the might grip of civilization from within. Oh let me tell you, it is a life of great compromise and many aren’t surprised to see it end with little satisfaction, but within it holds the noble lust for the life free of fear, pressure and destruction. They hold a view so complex and important it demands immediate description.

This group of people stem from a tradition of variants, such as anthropology, radical anarchism, feminism, environmentalism, psychology, and more. They recognize that the past movements against oppression held loopholes and weak points, which would prove to be fatal to the revolutionary potential. Further examination of such issues and there historical developments brought about discoveries of utter importance: it isn’t just capitalism or feudalism that brought about lives of drudgery and discontent, but the whole of civilized/reason existence! Quite an astonishing finding indeed! This led to a complete overhauling to the ideologies of inequality. It found that the origins of reason lie in the development and force of mass agricultural existence! It dug through a history of lies and deceit to uncover the realities of life previous to full time farming and stewardship of nature and all its inhabitants. It found the existence of Homo Sapiens was set up as tribes living in harmony with each other, animals and nature. They ranged from hunter-gatherers to part-time farmers. It was by no means perfect (The concept of perfection itself refuted by this group!), but it worked! Further studies have proven that this worked for around three million years! These people lived free of the burdens of civilization. They knew nothing of the world of work. The closest they came to anything similar was gathering and hunting, something that was joyous and ritualistic and occupied maybe three to fours hours of a day. These people knew nothing of property (or poverty, being the product of property), so while they didn’t posses all the ‘stuff’ modern life has provided, they don’t posses its burdens either! The ills of modern society are almost completely unknown. The plagues of our world (AIDS, cancer, suicide, war, insanity, alcoholism, drug abuse, and so on) don’t show themselves in this world. Brutishness is not non-existent, but there are no forms of violence, as our society knows of it. There are fights, but no wars. There are little of grudges, and it is hardly uncommon for competitors to live as friends. Its inhabitants live life as a whole, seeking joy in each moment versus a life of seeking only ends. An overall happier life indeed!

These peoples see that the occurrence of moving from this life to our modern world was by no means of natural evolution or free choice, but of coercion and deceit. The human conquering of nature required thoroughness and the totality of thought and life. It wasn’t enough to set up a society of complex hierarchies and divisions of labor. It required stability and a constant surplus of labor. Its greatest task at hand was to control the necessities of life for its inhabitants (and those it seeks to push under its thumb). It’s hard to restrain and involve a large quantity of peoples when the option of leaving is on hand. So this meant the domesticators needed more land and less competition. This requires extermination or assimilation for all societies within reach of that society which is imposing itself. Quite the horrendous situation!

They recognize the staples of modern society to be imperative to the power of the state apparatus. They see the overwhelming replacement of the natural world with synthetic society as the prime means of dependency on the state. This dependency would become the totality of state power. The people involved in it would learn to love their master, because they feared life without it! This is the ultimate success of the state. For the most part people really think that food isn’t free, you can’t live without money, and possessions are a symbol of ones success. They feel that technology will help them as it guides them further into the world that is built around it. The common sentiment is that the strong points of their oppression (work, money and technology) are neutral and can be used to free them as much as it causes misery. History has shown this to be incorrect, and that giving the impression that these things are neutral is the key to pushing the totality further and further into the human psyche, turning it’s followers into self imposed slaves.

From birth we are set through a series of deprivations, which wedge us into the totality further and further. We are born from parents who are themselves part of this system which denies us the ability to develop fully and freely. They seek children in hopes that this will fill their own voids, and see the children not as a part of themselves and the entire world, but another possession, which can further assert their own power and worth (and this is the case primarily with the constantly shrinking amount of people who even really want the children they have birthed). This scenario is not unknown to the child, and the continuing of this cycle of deprivation and obligatory care stars making more voids in its life than it fills.

The entire culture is separated in emotional and physical senses. It does take a tribe to raise a child, but that doesn’t exist here. Instead there remains the wholesale method of child raising. Rules are set as to what is right and wrong: what foods, diapers, toys, animals, people, etc. should be around the child. There are institutions that have the capability of removing children into the state’s ‘care’ if these rules aren’t followed. Quite a barbaric matter of dealing with the situation! Other institutions take on the painstaking task of watching the children for the parents and socializing them into firmly set standards, via the department of education. Here children learn everything that their parents might not have quite so high in their curriculum. A major problem here is, when you leave it up to a few trained professionals, how do they deal with all the kids? How do they take into matters, the fact that the parents are always cautious of what they do, and are willing to follow anything they deem unfit with lawsuits? There’s only one way that can be done: make a strict and solid criteria that does the tasks at hand while causing the least amount of interaction outside those realms (medicines are available for those who can’t seem to quite fit into it all with the others). As the noble dependents will commonly point out, this is far from the way that nature-based societies function. The children in those societies come out fully capable of taking on all responsibilities and functions needed to survive. In fact, it’s not uncommon for the teens to go off and test their skills by isolating themselves for however long is needed. This occurrence goes without question or doubt, and the child is surely never bickered about why they would want to do it. The parent understands that this is something the child needs to help place themselves in the context of the entirety of nature. Such an act in our society isn’t just looked down upon: it’s illegal. A child found wandering to the dependents of civilization is a fright. Either their parents obviously don’t care about them and they may be in a gang or the like, or the child is lost and needs an adult to help it finds its way. As the children get older, it’s more important to discipline them to these rules. That is why it is illegal for anyone under 16 to drop out of high school in most states. If they do not complete a preset minimum years of schooling, they will not have received the whole process of socialization from the school. Aside from this, they would flood the job market, creating numerous other problems for the society to deal with. So in the mean time they are rendered useless by being forced into mandatory socialization. Wandering is by no means a possibility either; it’s a sign of possible deviants. A curfew is set to insure that any such deviants will be put away for such an anti-social act. To further keep them under the eye of the big brother, they are forced in most states to remain under their parents care until 18 years of age (despite the situation the child faces at home).

The entire system puts a lot of power in the child’s parents. They are legally responsible for their ‘property,’ so they have the rights to ensure that their rule is effective. This has been known to fill quite a few heads. A child becomes the burden of the parent and is treated with likely contempt. The process of becoming an adult is extended to 21 years (when the child gains full legal rights, however, this has been expanding to 23 to 25 years of age.), whereas it is almost complete at the point of puberty in nature-based societies. A child who is obviously an adult in thinking and capabilities is still seen as ‘just a child.’ Their autonomy is fully taken in by this and they are helpless to the situation. The parents have full legal rights to inflict whatever it is they see should be done on their child. This power shows its face most commonly in the form of constant belittling and in some cases (more and more not uncommon either) physical abuse. These years of helplessness develop a full sense of spite, distrust, and hardening to the world that should be supportive to the child’s need. The realization that the world is actually against them by this point is almost totally developed. Meanwhile, in nature-based societies, the child has fully developed its love for the world and found that its place lies within it. Mother Earth provides and the now adult respectfully participates in it. The civilized child finds contempt and more likely than ever is willing to cry for help with a machine gun on fellow students. A sickening result of 10,000 years of deprivation and groundlessness!

The world created isn’t a small portion of nature, but it is the entire view and knowledge of how the civilized person sees nature and all its inhabitants. The people involved are by no means able to get up and leave upon the realization that the mass of culture is a leech on every bit of life that exists. Aside from the physical forces that keep them from being able to fulfill such a given right, they are completely buried in thought that denies them abilities to exist as they had for millions of years. The basic necessities of life, food, water and air, are no longer things that exist in plenty and freely, but are products of the culture that allows them to be. Food doesn’t grow on trees, it exists in cans that come from factories that can be received in exchange for paper representations of a natural substance that has been given value for unknown reasons, that one receives through fulfilling the amount of hours of work according to the cash value that is placed on their time. Water comes from pipes, which come from plants, which come from a source that weren’t not sure of, but we know must of it is cleaned up. It is free in some places through dispensing units that are occasionally filled with things that may be hazardous to our health and attached to walls in some institutions. Otherwise it can be purchased in small amounts in plastic bottles from grocery stores or vending machines. Commonly it comes from large pipes that go to places that you’re not supposed to drink from, and to get them to function in your shelter, you must pay a monthly fee. Air isn’t a life source; it is a complex series of letters and numbers interchanging in scientific formulas. It’s real components can be located on a chart of things that can not be seen to the naked eye, called a periodic table of elements (Here you will also find that water is not your life source, but 2 parts hydrogen to one part oxygen.). Whether or not it is pure is of mild importance really, since the facts can be manipulated on either ends, but it is there and you can use it.

This is just a small fracture of civilizations ability to splice things up into little bits of information that cloud existence. Things aren’t just because they aren’t; they aren’t for a series of scientific explanations. This mode of thought is the primary bit of information that is worked into you from day one. It changes the way you think of everything and makes everything a product. Nothing is sacred except power. Certain things posses natural power, because they are responsible for creating and maintaining you, i.e., your parents, god, governments, science, etc. This slice and dice mentality is saying one thing loud and clear, “the world is too complex for you, live in our hands and we will make sure you get what you need as long as you go with the flow.” This creates dependence, which can be otherwise referred to as the totality of civilized thought. It solidifies everything that you know into one mass that watches itself whenever its credentials are put into question. It never makes mistakes, but accidents happen, and rest assured, it will make sure that those same ones don’t happen again. But sometimes sacrifice is also necessary. The state of dependence is almost completely thorough throughout civilized nations. It has taken from us from birth, and it places objects in our way to ensure that we don’t find out what they are and how to get around them. To rid ourselves of this entirety is extremely possible, but it’s not easy to do alone. The setup of this totality is well planned so that people will try as much as possible to refrain from having to put effort into doing things. Some people see problems with the way it works, but are so lost that they are not willing to make any effort to do so.

However, there are some people who realize the entire system is what is killing the planet and all its inhabitants. They also realize that the totality has and will do everything in its power to keep these people from being heard, but this is seen as an obstacle that must be overrun. Most feel that they are capable of living free of the totality, but realize that this would still leave the whole order in place and it would continue to destroy as it does from day to day. So they feel an obligation and desire to stay within its bounds (against their own desires to be free of it) and try to tear apart the foundations of the totality. These are who we see as ‘noble dependents,’ for they are aware of the bounds placed on them as dependents, but will not free themselves until all others are free. This requires the sacrifice to the mega-machine of themselves and their integrity in the hopes that they will be able to bring about civil-collapse. Most feel grim in the possibilities of this happening, but realize that maybe in the next generations it will be more viable, if for any reason, that the system has come too close to the edge and is pulling itself apart. None the less, these ‘noble dependents’ feel that their goal is to tear at the social order, and try and wake up the mass of dependents of the oppression that exists beyond their socialized realm of thought. The reality of the situation is frighteningly grim on their side, but the groups are constantly growing as the contempt for mass society becomes undeniably apparent. They will speak regardless of their own dependence on the system (which is in a constant state of being weaned off of), and in the hopes that their efforts will deter the destruction of the planet and it’s inhabitants at the hands of civilization and it’s progress.

Sticks, Stones and Nursery Homes

“I wonder what it would feel like to kill mommy.”

This came from the mouth of a four year old child. Not something I pulled from the newspaper, but the child of a friend’s friend. Your completely average four year old American child. Smiling pictures, piles of toys, and loves fast food. A child I’ve seen off and on since he was born.

And he’s hardly alone.

The same day I heard about that line (which I later found out wasn’t a single thought or bad mood but an everyday topic), I heard about another friend of a friend’s child. This one is nine years old and duct taped a butcher knife to his hand and ran around trying to slash everyone. His parents hide food and drinks because he shits and pisses in them. Another otherwise average American kid.

True enough thoughts alone don’t kill. But the line between thought and action is becoming easier to cross. It’s becoming easier to kill. But the issue isn’t about being more psychologically prepared to kill. It’s about being psychologically separated from life and reality.

If these four and nine year olds aren’t convincing, you probably don’t have to look very far for much more of the same. Two years ago, in this area, a sixteen year old boy killed his brother with a hammer and went to a school dance. Now he’s a child in an adult prison who is considered hopeless.

If those stories make the local news anymore it can be surprising.

Let’s face it this sort of thing is hardly shocking anymore. Everyone wonders what’s wrong with kids these days. Most people have their theories: lack of strong morals, weak education system, or hell bent right wing parents, bleeding heart liberal parents, not enough good ol’ fashioned ass whippin’, not enough therapy, lack of attention, too much T.V., too spoiled, and so on.

It’s become an all too familiar topic and rarely do people have enough time or attention to actually try to change things (short of violence or anger). Opinions, of course, don’t always have a lot of meaning. Unfortunately sedatives do, and they’re much easier to come by. But no matter how the problem is or is not dealt with, we all know that there’s a problem. But it’s always ‘their kids’ or ‘those kids’. We all know how to look the other way.

We all know how miserable modern life can be. Knowing this is a full time job, literally. We can talk about the problems of civilized, highly technological living and safely fall back into the passive nihilism that things aren’t going to get better so we just have to make the best of it. We could always improve things for ourselves if we really tried. Or we could win the lottery.

But when we look at ourselves, it can be really easy to just stop thinking about it all. Life’s just too short and it’s easier to go with the flow. Young adult to middle age, we just deal with what we’re given. Let’s step outside of that for a moment and think about the other parts of life where we’re not just out to get ‘what’s ours’: being young and being old.

All of us have been young. Most of us will probably be old. As Future obsessed as our rationally defined reality is, its just as much about eternally living in that mid-range of twenties and thirties. Or at least looking like it. Not many of us look forward to going ‘over the hill’. We spend billions of dollars and thousands of hours to keep ourselves looking ‘young and sexy’. We become very high maintenance.

But part of the dream of a better tomorrow is that we’ll be there to live it. Happy, healthy, synthetically balanced us. We’ll be slaves to the technological Future so long as it’s to our benefit. We can ignore the consequences of Progress and the wonders of chemistry when it gives us stuff. We don’t want to die, but we certainly don’t want to grow older.

Either way, we’re happy to report that modern technology allows us to live longer than ever before. This much may very well be true. More often than not though, a long life is really just a very slow death. Alzheimer’s may be less of a physical condition than a psychological escape from the reality that things didn’t get better.

In the First World, one of the fastest growing areas of population is the percentage of elderly people: a major selling point for Progress. But in a society that changes as quickly as ours, the elderly are quickly outdated. We keep them around for sentimental value and they’re stored in tall, cheaply built filing cabinets called nursing homes where they receive the best babying and prolonged misery that money and social security can buy. Or is that tender loving care?

Once upon a time, people lived in egalitarian societies. There wasn’t equality in the sense that we know it, but in the sense that there was no system of rank or worth. People were just people, young, old or in between. That can be hard to imagine. Damn hard really.

But for those of us basking in the wonders of modernity, it’s hard because Progress and evolution make it unthinkable. We’ve naturalized hierarchy so much that we can’t think of anything without it. An infant is without strength and knowledge and has no leverage or economic viability. An elderly person has knowledge but less strength. Might makes right and the strong and knowledgeable take control and determine all the rest. Any reality based off of this kind of thinking can’t help but apply it everywhere. Our bosses make us feel inferior, our parents establish authority and we learn to trust experts rather than ourselves.

Somewhere something went horribly wrong.

The complete depravity of modernity is only the most obvious proof of that.

Economies breed economic thinking. We learn what is utilitarian or useful to carrying civilization forward. It’s all about efficiency. When our lives are run like machines it should be no wonder that they must start and end that way, from sonograms to oxygen tanks.

All animals are born with a will to survive. Humans are no exception. Most infants will not crawl off a cliff unless everyone is convinced (and has convinced them) that they don’t know better. Likewise, a baby isn’t likely to cry unless it needs something. That something is not ‘tough love’; it is a cry for attention. This is something most people know, but civilization teaches us differently.

This is something Jean Liedloff learned when she lived among the Yequana and Sanema, indigenous societies in the Amazon. Children were always touched and always treated with complete confidence, but were never pampered. They got what they needed without ever being told what to do and parents never expressed anger towards them. Every step children took was of their own will and motivation. She refers to this as instinctual parenting. That is something primal. Her realizations are rather universal. Should it be any surprise that few children raised this way ever thought about killing their mothers?

But civilized living is anti-primal. Children must be broken and must learn to obey orders from the start or they may never be of use. To become a part of the machine, we must start from birth. We must learn very early the need for efficiency. And what’s more efficient than complete standardization?

Liedloff saw that a baby is taken immediately from the womb into the arms of its mother. She’s the first thing the child will see. It hears the familiar heart beat and feels the heat of bodies. She saw births in the hospital where children are taken in sterile hands, measured, weighed, and set alone to learn the most central message of civilization: infinite need. What it eventually gets is a pathetic substitute for being held: bottles of formula, mechanical love, noise, and the loneliness and boredom of the crib. It cries for distant parents who are eager to ensure their independence and gets more attention from soft fabric than warm skin. It learns the importance of compromise.

Confident and fulfilled children are not efficient machines. Everything must be done to undermine them.

But the psychological pain goes deeper than this. It begins at conception. It takes in the anger, hate, love and fear of its mother in a world of compromise and the misery of not being efficient enough. We are assured that children are not thinking even if the religious say that they are full beings crafted by god. They’re just lower on the social ladder.

We are told not to listen to the senses. Words are more important. Science can prove it.

With this divine knowledge, we can continue to inflict the original trauma without consequence. And even better, we can take no fault for children with homicidal and suicidal tendencies.

Chemical imbalances, chemical solutions. We breed the killers and they are increasingly efficient.

We stock pile the elderly because it is our badge of success. We hide them because then we don’t have to see how miserable life is when you can no longer control your body. We don’t have to think about what it would be like to feel physically numb (we’re actually experts at numbing our minds), to have someone help you to the bathroom, to be completely frail and not be able to do anything about it.

We visit. We bring sedatives. We do our good deed.

We think that will never be us.

Senility becomes a retreat for the elderly left with nothing. The Future that they spent their lives building leaves them in a cookie-cutter room and with a TV they often can’t see or hear: another pathetic substitute. The original trauma comes full circle.

A life lived for the machine is not a life lived at all. Threats of going to hell for not working or threats of poverty were enough to make someone sell their days rather than live them. When that realization starts to set in and you’re left alone to think about it, you can become bitter, sentimental, or your mind can shut down. There’s not too much you can do about it at that point and when we can shove that reality away, it’s something we don’t have to think about either.

The problem with confident children is that they won’t allow themselves to be sold. They can live in horribly inefficient ways and they can be happy. They don’t need stuff. The purpose of life is something known and enacted rather than an interesting philosophical question. Or a basis for dissecting, measuring and weighing the world.

Someone raised to be confident and happy doesn’t wait for the Future. They won’t make that compromise. When they feel their life can no longer be lived to its fullest, they don’t fear death. They know that living in fear of death is not living at all. They know that they have lived well. They are ready to move on.

In our wonderful modernity, suicide is a crime. It cuts a wonderful, mechanically reproduced life short of the bounty of Progress. It’s called a pathetic and desperate act. Morality tells us that life is sacred because our bodies are the property of god. Dependent, domesticated people aren’t even allowed control over themselves.

But elderly suicide is an act of confidence. It is faced with glory and seals a live well lived.

By civilized values, this is unthinkable. Death cannot be accepted any more than life can be lived. We can never give up our faith and our blind hope that technology will make us young and vibrant again. We can never give up on the Future. When our last days are drawn out by the iron lung, we have nothing but incomplete lives to think about and we aren’t able to give up.

As we listen to our heartbeats mechanical reproduced and amplified, all we can do is hope for a miracle. A cybernetic fountain of youth and another day to fight off the reality that we are animals and like all living beings we will die.

But this is not the suicide of our modernity. Everyday suicides are tragic. They are tragic because the passive nihilism of our reality allows only for confidence to mean an end to a life not lived, rather than the confidence to refuse compromise and fight. It is the last and boldest act of defeat. And sadly, it is often seen as the only possibility.

Our efficiency is destroying the earth just as it turns beings into dependents. Our hope for the Future relies on ghost resources, of finding more fuel for the machine. We will kill to maintain this civilization rather than ask if its end wouldn’t be the best thing for us and for the earth.

Carrying capacity, human impact analysis, and human ecological footprint, all names for studies that show us this reality is running on finite sources: that maintaining the great escape from death is running the planet dry. We’ve been warned that the search is running out of fuel and its end is a matter of time. As William Catton pointed out, the inevitable ‘tomorrow’ was yesterday. We’ve peaked and the bright Future of hope is fading, and quickly. If we have anything to learn about collapse from past civilizations it is that no crash landing is a good one. And most of us won’t even notice till it all comes crashing down.

And all of this is for a way of existing that cannot be fulfilling. A way of being that always looks to the Future and never just is. A way of life that we create, maintain and reproduce daily.

We have to play dumb when kids talk about killing.

We say they are desensitized.

What they are is efficient.

Most often we look towards technology. That’s a search in the right direction, but rarely does it go all the way. TV and video games are efficient ways of keeping kids from thinking. It makes them passive while causing sensory overload and fills in for sensory deprivation. It’s a cheap and constant thrill, a fast paced adventure without any involvement.

System overload, system crash.

Children have almost always known how to kill. In gatherer/hunter societies, this is something they start at early. But they learn how about the connectivity of life: about the link between us all and the importance of not abusing it.

Zygmunt Bauman writes: “It has been perhaps the unique achievement of modern civilization to enable ordinary folks, “just good workers,” to contribute to the killing — and to make that killing cleaner, morally antiseptic and efficient as never before.” It is true that video games have been a virtual target practice and glamorized killing has numbed children. But these efficient killers are not full of blood lust. In fact, they have no lust, no passion, no being. They are becoming more mechanical daily.

This is not science and technology gone wrong. This is where Progress must go. This is how the Future must be. The end product of domestication is efficient dependents. As our technology becomes more advanced and creeps into every bit of life, this is how it looks.

This is the Future.

We hide animality and nature from the children. We hide everything that makes us human. We deny touch from birth. We deny confidence.

For millions of years people lived closely and without secrets. People would have sex by the fire at night and children knew and accepted it. Sexuality and curiosity were never sins nor outlawed. Children could play and experiment. They could be confident about their bodies and desires.

There was respect: the kind that exists between beings, the kind that comes together for mutual desire and not violent rage. The kind that is cooperative and not competitive.

No might, no right. No rape, murdering rampages, and death came with dignity. Life was lived and there was no compromise.

This is how things were and can be.

What separates this reality and ours is the willingness to compromise. A compromise that means our complicity to efficiency and blind faith in the Future that is killing our home and our being. A complicity that makes us do onto our children what has been done to us.

Chellis Glendinning wrote that the original trauma is domestication. It creates rage within us, but is given no safe outlet in society. It ends in battered children, relationships based on domination, dead classmates, and children born knowing that they are not wanted.

The reality that we reproduce daily is inflicted upon the planet. And each child that is born is given this burden. Part of ending this cycle of domination and submission means not inflicting that original trauma: it means refusing domestication for ourselves and refusing complacency. Most of all, it means breaking a blind faith in the Future. Breaking the morality that denies what our bodies tell us and what the earth tells us.

It means being confident. It means no compromise. It means passionate love and hate instead of an emotionless, efficient void.

The hallmarks of modernity and Progress are the nursery where babies learn the harsh lessons of civilized life: that nothing comes easily and infinite want. It ends in the nursing home where lives of devotion to blind faith drag out our last days and ensure that we never stand on our own. When we are finally ready to do so, we are no longer physically or mentally capable.

We are told that this must be better than where we were: a savage place with only sticks and stones. Where we didn’t have a greater purpose in life and children and elderly were killed madly.

We think this as the empire of Progress takes over the planet, predators feeding off life so that they may one day live forever. Our fear of death is pathological. It breeds an efficient world without love. It creates morality that says we have no right to end a life that we can not give the most absolute care for in the world. A choice that carries the promise that no child will exist unless it can be given everything it needs to be confident and live fully. Or that we can end our life when we are satisfied and know that things cannot go on forever. That we can leave this world with dignity and pride.

The only thing 6 billion predatory people can do is die slowly and take the planet with them. It was announced recently that the world population will be 9 billion by 2050. The inevitability of the Future goes unquestioned. We have faith in our illusion. But our illusion has no reality.

A child recently asked me if I would kill someone if it would save the planet. He is eleven years old.

I thought, “if only it was that easy”, but you can never know how an answer might be taken anymore.

I’ve thought about that a lot though. I found myself asking if I really care enough that I might kill an infant that I could not offer everything they needed to be full. If I could break the morality, the little god in my head that said all life is gods’ property and only she/he/they could make that choice.

I was reminded of the supposed glory of Progress. Of the long life we’ve been given.

I had to wonder if I loved an elderly person enough to help them die with dignity or if I could leave them behind when they asked for it.

I think of the love these ‘savage acts’ must take. The love of the world and the love of life.

And, most of all, the confidence and passion behind them.

The Future of Progress need not be inevitable.

The original trauma, once confronted, can be challenged. We need not be victims. We can be survivors. We can be active. We can live on our own terms.

But it requires a lot from us. It requires us to stop compromising.

It requires us to stop being efficient.

We’ve seen a glimpse of where this is heading and what the consequences are beyond the daily reality that we can chose to confront or to ignore.

The question I’m left wondering is whether I would destroy the machine (the engine and lifeblood of civilization) that is killing, dominating and subjugating life.

What I’ve discovered is that I still have a whole lot of very inefficient passion and an unspeakable will to live without compromise.

The Reproduction of Production: Class, Modernity and Identity

Class is a social relationship. Stripped to its base, it is about economics. It’s about being a producer, distributor or an owner of the means and fruits of production. No matter what category any person is, it’s about identity.

Who do you identify with? Or better yet, what do you identify with? Every one of us can be put into any number of socio-economic categories. But that isn’t the question. Is your job your identity? Is your economical niche?

Let’s take a step back. What are economics? My dictionary defines it as: “the science of production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services.” Fair enough. Economies do exist. In any society where there is unequal access to the necessities of life, where people are dependent upon one another (and more importantly, institutions) there is economy.

The goal of revolutionaries and reformists has almost always been about reorganizing the economy. Wealth must be redistributed. Capitalist, communist, socialist, syndicalist, what have you, it’s all about economics. Why? Because production has been naturalized, science can always distinguish economy, and work is just a necessary evil.

It’s back to the fall from Eden where Adam was punished to till the soil for disobeying god. It’s the Protestant work ethic and warnings of the sin of ‘idle hands’. Work becomes the basis for humanity. That’s the inherent message of economics.

Labor “is the prime basic condition for all human existence, and this to such an extent that, in a sense, we have to say that labor created man himself.” That’s not Adam Smith or God talking (at least this time), that’s Frederick Engels.

But something’s very wrong here. What about the Others beyond the walls of Eden? What about the savages who farmers and conquistadors (for all they can be separated) could only see as lazy for not working?

Are economics universal?

Let’s look back at our definition.

The crux of economy is production. So if production is not universal, then economy cannot be. We’re in luck, it’s not. The savage Others beyond the walls of Eden, the walls of Babylon, and the gardens: nomadic gatherer/hunters, produced nothing. A hunter does not produce wild animals. A gatherer does not produce wild plants. They simply hunt and gather. Their existence is give and take, but this is ecology, not economy.

Every one in a nomadic gatherer/hunter society is capable of getting what they need on their own. That they don’t is a matter of mutual aid and social cohesiveness, not force. If they don’t like their situation, they change it. They are capable of this and encouraged to do so. Their form of exchange is anti-economy: generalized reciprocity. This means simply that people give anything to anyone whenever. There are no records, no tabs, no tax and no running system of measurement or worth. Share with others and they share in return.

These societies are intrinsically anti-production, anti-wealth, anti-power, anti-economics. They are simply egalitarian to the core: organic, primal anarchy.

But that doesn’t tell how we became economic people. How work became identity.

Looking at the origins of civilization does.

Civilization is based off production. The first instance of production is surplus production. Nomadic gatherer/hunters got what they needed when they needed it. They ate animals, insects, and plants. When a number of gatherer/hunters settled, they still hunted animals and gathered plants, but not to eat.

At least not immediately.

In Mesopotamia, the cradle of our now global civilization, vast fields of wild grains could be harvested. Grain, unlike meat and most wild plants, can be stored without any intensive technology. It was put in huge granaries. But grain is harvested seasonally. As populations expand, they become dependent upon granaries rather than what is freely available.

Enter distribution. The granaries were owned by elites or family elders who were in charge of rationing and distributing to the people who filled their lot. Dependency means compromise: that’s the central element of domestication. Grain must be stored. Granary owners store and ration the grain in exchange for increased social status. Social status means coercive power. This is how the State arose.

In other areas, such as what is now the northwest coast of the United States into Canada, store houses were filled with dried fish rather than grain. Kingdoms and intense chiefdoms were established. The subjects of the arising power were those who filled the storehouses. This should sound familiar. Expansive trade networks were formed and the domestication of plants and then animals followed the expansion of populations. The need for more grain turned gatherers into farmers. The farmers would need more land and wars were waged. Soldiers were conscripted. Slaves were captured. Nomadic gatherer/hunters and horticulturalists were pushed away and killed.

The people did all of this not because the chiefs and kings said so, but because their created gods did. The priest is as important to the emergence of states as chiefs and kings. At some points they were the same position, sometimes not. But they fed off each other. Economics, politics and religion have always been one system. Nowadays science takes the place of religion. That’s why Engels could say that labor is what made humans from apes. Scientifically this is could easily be true. God punished the descendants of Adam and Eve to work the land. Both are just a matter of faith.

But faith comes easily when it comes from the hand that feeds. So long as we are dependent on the economy, we’ll compromise what the plants and animals tells us, what our bodies tell us. No one wants to work, but that’s just the way it is.

So we see in the tunnel vision of civilization. The economy needs reformed or revolutionized. The fruit of production needs redistributed.

Enter class struggle.

Class is one of many relationships offered by civilization. It has often been asserted that the history of civilization is the history of class struggle. But I would argue differently. The relationship between the peasant and the king and between chief and commoner cannot be reduced to one set of categories. When we do this, we ignore the differences that accompany various aspects of civilization. Simplification is nice and easy, but if we’re trying to understand how civilization arose so that we can destroy it, we must be willing to understand subtle and significant differences.

What could be more significant than how power is created, maintained and asserted? This isn’t done to cheapen the very real resistance that the ‘underclass’ had against elites, far from it. But to say that class or class consciousness are universal ignores important particulars.

Class is about capitalism. It’s about a globalizing system based on absolute mediation and specialization. It emerged from feudal relationships through mercantile capitalism into industrial capitalism and now modernity.

Proletarian, bourgeoisie, peasant, petite bourgeoisie, these are all social classes about our relationship to production and distribution. Particularly in capitalist society, this is everything. All of this couldn’t have been more apparent than during the major periods of industrialization. You worked in a factory, owned it or sold what came out of it. This was the heyday of class consciousness because there was no question about it. Proletarians were in the same conditions and for the most part they knew that is where they would always be. They spent their days