Eugene Anarchists(TM) Are #1!
author: notafan
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Nice thing about IMC is the ability to post comments.
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Realistic Anarchy
Radicals call for fall of civilization, sometime.
By Alan Pittman
Robin Terranova, the local editor of Green Anarchy magazine, rails against "civilization itself."
Industrialization, domestication and agriculture have created a system of "enslavement" and alienation that is destroying humans and the planet, he says. Too many on the left are "coming from the assumption that mass society is something that's good, that's sustainable, that's healthy, and it's not."
A woman in the audience at the Public Interest Environmental Law Conference (PIELC) last week raises her hand. "Do we need to give up everything?" she asks. What about guitar string and glasses. "I want to see. I don't want to die young."
Local anarchist author John Zerzan smiles from his seat next to Terranova on the panel. He touches his glasses, "I'd certainly be lost without these," he admits. But he says people need to think more deeply about the labor and environmental costs that go into such technological items. "It's certainly not a simple thing."
Anarchists are too often stereotyped as "mad bombers" or "cave people," Terranova says. "I'm not proposing that tomorrow we destroy civilization and live as hunter gatherers," says Terranova. "It's not very realistic." But he says people should examine the costs of the way they live.
Terranova faults most environmentalists for failing to question technology. "We see the left as a failure," he says. "We actually question the left as much as we question the right."
Technology creates "alienation" and "domination," he says. He gives the example of a gun made from minerals destructively mined from the earth and manufactured by workers dominated by their bosses. The gun allows people to easily kill at a long distance without "getting blood on their hands," he says. "The gun analogy can be drawn all the way to nuclear weapons."
Terranova advocates for "economic sabotage" targeting those "profiting off the earth." He praises the Earth Liberation Front for destroying "millions and millions of dollars" worth of SUVs, logging equipment, and luxury homes under construction.
"More extreme action needs to be taken," Terranova says. He calls for "harassment" and "property damage" against individuals responsible for oppression, such as corporate executives of companies involved in animal experiments.
Zerzan faults most environmentalists for "plodding along" and "not ever getting radical and getting down to what this is really about." He notes a recent article in The Nation magazine supportive of globalization. "Globalization is the virulent matastizing form of civilization," Zerzan says. Much of environmental rhetoric is "ridiculous," he says. "Sustainable this and that, there's nothing sustainable about the system." He faults "the whole world system of cancer," noting, "there's no mother's milk that doesn't contain dioxin."
Rigor Sue, of Cascadia Forrest Defenders and Cascadia Rising, says from the panel that there's many people like herself that don't call themselves anarchists but are still "fully in line with these same thoughts."
"As we see more and more environmental laws taken away, we are going to see more people involved in direct action," Sue says.
She says activists need to guard against burn out and despair. "When you're talking about destroying civilization, the list of what you want to do becomes very long," she says. "Unfortunately, there haven't been a lot of victories."
Another danger she says is male domination within the environmental movement itself. "We saved a tree, but we're still being the same authoritarian assholes when it comes down to it."
Another woman raises her hand. She describes herself as a long-time environmentalists sympathetic to many anarchist arguments, but says she can't understand actions like blowing up a power line tower. Such destruction makes enemies, causes environmental damage and is quickly repaired, she notes. The civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements had success with a non-violent approach that didn't alienate potential supporters, she says. "As long as your staying with the nonviolent tradition, you're hope for converting the opposition is so much better."
Sue says the question of property destruction comes up frequently. She says the movement has enough room for people to take different approaches. "We can all work together on multiple levels."
A younger woman with nose rings stands up, "This is a discussion I've heard eight million fucking times," she says. "Blah, blah, blah, blah fucking blah," she says, calling for less debate on the issue and more action. Radicals in social movements play a crucial role, she says. Whites compromised with Martin Luther King Jr. rather than face the alternative of the Black Panthers, she says. "It makes you look so much more reasonable when you're sitting next to something that is smashing everything."
John Zerzan, Robin Terranova and Rigor Sue.
A man in the audience says he works for GI rights and was in Seattle at the big 1999 WTO protests in Seattle in which the mainstream media blamed anarchists for violence. "The most violence I saw was from the police violence," he says. "It's already the state that starts it. That starts beating people's heads in and then it accelerates."
A young man with long hair and beard, asks, "If I'm enslaved and I break the chains that bind me, isn't that property destruction?"
Another audience member asks how the world could move to anarchist primitivism "without a huge loss of human life."
Zerzan says the world is already suffering massive species die-offs under the current system. "Nobody has the answers of how fast that [anarchist move] can happen or exactly how," he says, but society needs to face the need for a big break from the current system.
Terranova says technological civilization's "artificial life support system" is already severely damaging the planet with the current population. How many should the artificial system keep alive, he asks, 10 billion, 20 billion?
"Keeping this artificial life support system going is certain death for all the other species and probably our own," Terranova says. "We're in a tough spot no matter what."
But it's unclear how much of the anarchist rhetoric is reality. After the panel, one of the more radical-sounding people in the audience could be heard trying to take a call on her cell phone. "Hello? Hello?" she said, frustrated at the poor reception. "Damn!"
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add a comment on this article
add a comment on this article
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if you cannot do useful work in the strongest part of your life cycle(we are all babies and most of us old folks at least once) you will not surface
so, the people who will die off- should die off- are the people who require dozens, hundreds of subservient "employees" to cater to their survival needs
when cash isn't worth anything- not evn good toilet paper- who will clean up after you take a shit, who will grow the vegetables, who will build the fire? when you can't give us anything but some useles filthy green papers, why should we take care of your sorry asses.
sorry, iam really not a bitter person. plenty of people can will survive if they take responsibilty for their own health and the health of their ever-interacting environment's on our abundant earth
so we have a lot to learn and build strong bodies and communities
most of the most important jobs are not difficult they just take much time on a regular devoted life-long basis. these meanial jobs will prove to be the most meaningful.
teach the kids!