Anarchy Against Civilization!

Far too many times, we as anarchists can get locked into ideology and blueprint making rather than thinking critically and acting to meet current challenges. The idea of challenging capitalism and the state was one that was relatively new to western civilization when the first people to be called anarchists in a political sense first put forth their ideas. We should not be satisfied to stop there. They didn’t face issues such as climate change, neo-liberal globalization, or peak production. That doesn’t mean we can afford to ignore those issues. Most early anarchists didn’t challenge extraction, economics, technology, domestication, agriculture, mass society, or civilization but that should not bar us from doing so.

What is civilization?

Civilization can be defined as a way of life based around growing urbanization and the social relationships that result. Urban areas, also known as cities, are defined as populations so dense as to require the importation of the means to sustain the city itself and its population.

Upon an initial landbase, a city is built, including houses, businesses, government buildings, infrastructure, etc. This gives people a place to live, but not the means. Because of this, the civilization must seek out external landbases to exploit in order to harvest the resources to keep it going, to build and maintain houses, bridges, roads, sewer lines, water lines, electrical lines, public transportation, food for restaurants, clothing for the stores, luxury items for the civilized, personal transportation, entertainment, and so on ad infinitum.

Eventually, as cities grow and populations increase and the civilization requires more and more external land to provide the civilized with goods, the civilization will run into land with people on it, usually people whose way of life depends on that land. When the civilized encounter such people, they usually have the option (if they aren’t killed outright) of working highly exploitative jobs to provide goods or services for the civilized on their traditional lands, moving to the cities to find work, or fighting back.

Because most civilized people do not grow their own food or make their own clothing or build their own houses, access their own water… because the civilized pass these responsibilities on to others, some kind of exchange must take place. As the demands of civilization increase, more and more land is needed to produce goods and services for the civilized. Eventually this means that the civilized will run into traditional communities or other civilizations sitting on top of the land they wish to exploit…

Civilization always views the natural world as “natural resources.”

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Economic Nihilism

An Anarchist Case Against Economics

By Bobby Whittenberg-James

Economics can be defined as a field of social science mostly focused on analysis of the production, consumption, and distribution of goods and services. The economy can be defined as the system developed to control and manage the production, consumption, and distribution of those goods and services. Note that the focus is not on meeting needs, maintaining symbiosis with the local bio-region, ecosystem, or the planet. There’s nothing about keeping land bases healthy, or species survival. Nothing is mentioned about replenishing, just production, distribution, and consumption.

The cycle of production, distribution, and consumption is not to be conflating with people coming together to find ways to best meet their needs and fulfill their lives. Like an organization, the first priority of an economy is to continue to exist and generally to grow. In most cases an economy has to continue to grow to exist. Like an organization, as a result of self perpetuation being a priority, the existence of that economy takes priority over the individuals in the economy, the land base upon which the economy is imposed, and the planet. In the same way that an organization is not an accurate representation of the wills and desires of its individual members, an economy is not an accurate representation of the needs and desires of the individuals in that society and the ways in which they want to fulfill those needs and desires.

As anarchists we seek to abolish the economy and economics and all that they entail, be it markets, remuneration, central planning, industry, or work. As such we are economic nihilists, declaring that there to no value in any system of production, consumption, and distribution of goods regardless of whether that system is feudalist, mercantilist, capitalist, socialist, or communist. Not only do such systems have no value but they are a means of social control, harmful and deadly to people, non-human animals, eco-systems, and the planet and ergo must be destroyed completely and absolutely. Whether the economy is run by a capitalist, fascist, or socialist regime, or even if it is a participatory economy, it is still a system of authority that is imposed upon people, non-humans, and land bases.