Many Liberals but also productivist socialists, especially Marxist-Leninists will praise & fawn over “development” & praise countries like China for development & mass urban projects, they view mass production & development as the highest stage of human cooperation.
“Development” isn’t just a neutral idea, it’s a human supremacist ideology that frames non-urban, ecological/green spaces as something evil to be fought & destroyed & conquered by human civilization. Urban civ is not the result of stateless moneyless voluntary cooperation, aka the society communism supposedly wants to build, but of centralization, war, colonialism, capitalism, mass coercion, so why would a “communist” be in love with development?
Well there are a few reasons, we are fed the idea that development = progress, & a lot of communists want to “progress” as in move away from traditional social structures like capitalism, nationalism & patriarchy, there is absolutely nothing wrong with hating capitalism, nationalism & patriarchy, but these people are confused with the idea that progress/utopia is when the world is covered in skyscrapers & high speed rails, so in addition to wanting to progress beyond reactionary structures they, because of what they’ve been told progress is, want to build more factories, more skyscrapers & more mines, they fail to analyze how extraction, production & development reflect an inherently capitalistic relationship to our earth.
Development isn’t a “progressive” ideology, if anything it’s reactionary, having historically & still being used to justify supremacist attitudes, colonialism/neo-colonialism & racism. If “the left” has a reactionary problem it’s productivists and/or Leninists, not eco-anarchists.
“Without Civilization People Would Starve, Epidemic Diseases Would Break Out and there Would be no Medicine to Heal”
Then ask yourself why the Hadza, for example, survive until today. Hunger didn’t exist in such lifeways, but to a rather high degree in the civilized world. Naturally you can reply that eight billion people can’t be fed by hunting and gathering and you would probably be right, even if food forests appeared overnight where there were once shopping centers, commercial districts, insutrial complexes, and streets. Precisely for that reason, even I don’t advocate for a return to pure gathering and hunting. Perhaps a means of agriculture will be found that is sustainable enough to provide for all people without continuing the colossal ecocide. Monocultures are definitely out. Here also, Indigenous cultures deliver us teachable lessons.
Regarding diseases, it is once again the opposite. Civilization first made possible the serious outbreak of epidemics. We are currently treading into an Era of Pandemics. I certainly don’t have a crystal ball, but I can’t imagine any scenario in a decivilized world where something like the current Corona Pandemic could kill millions of people, let alone that such a pandemic could even exist when you have destroyed its very basis for existence. The past should prove me right: epidemics first broke out regularly with the arrival of civilization. There were of course earlier infectious diseases, I certainly don’t want to lie. But never to the extent reached in the civilized world.
With that we finally arrive at the topic of healing and medicine and start off with a Fun Fact: an essential part of modern western medicine is based on the botanical knowledge of Indigenous peoples, which people appropriated in the course of colonialism and later synthesized. Indigenous cultures often utilized methods which modern science only barely understands, if at all. In fact, Indigenous groups as well as uncivilized/precivilized people have at their disposal not only a deep knowledge of nature, but also discoveries which have been lost to city-dwellers.
The majority of modern medicine doesn’t even heal but only relieves the symptoms. Take for instance medicines for the Diseases of Civilization like thyroid disease or diabetes, which as a rule must be taken for a lifetime in order to “manage” the illness. In decivilization, the cure itself stands in focus. Healing of the fissures which have grown inside the individual, between people, and between humans and nature. The fissures made by civilization, by power. Our modern medical progress is also anything but innocent – stop romanticizing it. Colonialism, imperialism, and horrific medical experiments largely on the African continent (as well as in the animal world) were always a part of this so-called progress. They remain to this day. My ancestors were tortured and killed so that today a pill can manage your illness brought about by the modern way of life.
Ask yourself: do I want to stand for the continued existence of this world, in which my children will be plagued by the same (and new) ills as me? Or do I want to take this destructive world and destroy it and renew it so that future generations can be spared from these ills? In the end, the best medicine is not fighting symptoms. In so doing, new symptoms often emerge and you end up taking Pill B against Pill A. Instead, you fight the underlying causes wherever possible. Here, at least, civilization is honest when it admits that it has created the worst illnesses and itself speaks of “Diseases of Civilization.”
We have and will all be mutilated in one way or another. Our psyche is damaged and we are destroyed physically by illness and disease. As Diseases of Civilization and other infectious diseases withdraw from life, the need for complex medicine will steadily decrease. A world which places healing at the center would energetically strive to heal ills. For the few modern medicines which could possibly be brought into a decivilized world, people will find non-civilized and anti-colonial ways to produce them. Today’s science also won’t suddenly disappear into thin air. (This also shouldn’t be taken to mean that you should suddenly throw out all your pills just because they have a colonial history behind them. We must recognize that the ills and destruction of our bodies brought on by civilization will not be undone overnight. It means to fight so that future generations will be spared these ills and destruction by tackling the root causes. Some will be corrected quicker than others – a change in lifestyle and diet, the abolition of work, letting wild the surviving specks of the Earth, all can have a quick and not insignificant impact. On the other hand, some threats will continue to harm us for a long time. The poisons which have accumulated into the soils, for instance, will remain with us for decades and centuries.)
With this piece I hope to have offered a glance at a perspective on restoring our lost anarchy, and to have shown that it is modern society which is backwards-looking, not primitive lifeways. Alongside eurocentrism, modern-centrism is revealed to be a grave problem. Our society endlessly describes the possibilities offered by modern technology and entirely ignores what it simultaneously takes from us. It is of critical importance that we examine with sober and objective eyes what we have won with the coming of civilization, but most of all what we have lost.
Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
"Post-civilization is about scavenging the ruins, physical and cultural. Post-civilization is about taking what is appropriate from all of history and pre-history. It’s about an organic method of growth, where we can apply philosophies and structures and technologies and cultures as best suits any given situation. It’s about the anarchist urban hunter-gatherer squatting the ruins of the city living side-by-side with the micro-hydro engineer who has rigged the water running through the sewers to power her gristmill. It’s about the permaculturalist who collects camera lenses to build solar cookers. It’s about the living food-forests that we’ll turn our towns into."
-http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/strangers-in-a-tangled-wilderness-post-civ-a-brief-philosophical-and-political-introduction-to
Margaret Killjoy Take What You Need And Compost The Rest: an introduction to post-civilized theory 2010 This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #2 in...
THE BUCK STOPS HERE Check out http://driveonwood.com for more information.
Oil Companies Hate Him! Local Redneck Uses THIS WEIRD TRICK to Run His Trucks On WOOD!
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Meme aside wood gas is cool as shit and if I could ever make a woodmobile half as professional-looking as Wayne Keith's I would never drive anything else. If you've got your own woodlot you can basically drive for free; if you live near a sawmill they'll fill a trailer with fuel-worthy scraps for pennies; and even if you buy wood by the cord, at wholesale prices you're still driving for less than a quarter the cost of gasoline.
Mr. Keith gets about 5200 miles per cord in his trucks. At wholesale firewood prices (i.e. not for the advertised, pre-cut and dried wood) of about $100 per cord, that gets you a price per mile of around two cents--comparable to getting about 150 miles per gallon at current gas prices of $2.75 a gallon.
I do not plead for us to return to the leftover remains of the forests and go back to hunting and gathering, even if so much speaks in favor. If we want to solve the many urgent problems confronting us today, we will need a revaluation of the world. Precivilized and uncivilized people deliver us valuable lessons that are not only useful but could protect us from a catastrophe where humanity could cease to exist.
To reclaim the freedom that was stolen from us, the world (or rather what is left of it) must be decivilized. We must tear to pieces what civilization has brought forth, and in the ruins of this broken old world build a new one that is once again habitable for all humans and non-humans. This envisioned future would not be “primitive” (though it can be), but it would definitely include much of what primitive people teach us. In the process of decivilization, which will necessarily last numerous generations, we must inevitably raise the question of if and what we can rescue from the wreck of civilization. And when something is rescued from this wreck, how do we prevent a new revival of tyranny? How do we maintain Anarchy?
A decivilized world is one thing above all: an unknown future without an exact timetable. It would be wild and spontaneous like anarchy itself. But if we as humanity want to survive, decivilization is the only way. One thing is certain at least: it would be a truly radical transformation. A radicalness which would deserve its name. A new beginning in which every foundational pillar of authority is torn and burned to the ground so something entirely new and liberating can be created – completely contrary to the desperate aspirations of other anarchists to reform civilization while leaving 90% of life untouched by the transformation. Wherever authority is not entirely smashed, domination and exploitation will always find a new manifestation.
