I wrote what I think is the first essay analyzing the origins and ideological development of the Mexican anti-civ group here:
http://ritualmag.com/toward-savagery/
A word on the venue: the magazine itself is eclectic so there are other left communist articles but a lot of it is very critical toward the left so that’s why it’s published here.
I’m definitely stoked on this article and still bummed I couldn’t lure Art aware from his left commie leanings enough to grab it for Black and Green Review.
Is this something people here are interested in discussing?
Discuss Art being a dirty commie? Sure!
Art, as well as BaGR, were invited to participate in the poorly explained blog-forum fusion thingy. Personally, I hope these forums consider—whatever anarchist analyses are considered—with an eye toward putting ideas into practice.
Now… that could be taken very different ways considering the content of this article specifically, so let me say in bold type, I am making a general statement about content, and not this content in particular.
Well, Kevin, this was promised to them since the beginning of the year. I still think I could have edited it more but personal circumstances (job + family) didn’t allow me to get it as polished as I would have liked. The funny thing is that it somehow fell into the hands of RS and they told me (or at least someone associated with them) that they have already translated it into Spanish. They’ll respond to it in their October issue of the magazine, Regresion.
As for the venue, I have to confess that I have never really considered myself an anarchist, nor do I use anarchism as a goal and/or reference for what I write. I am afraid my nexus is still an inverted Marxism, not in the ethical sense but in the sense of analysis and formulating what I oppose. The left-coms in this milieu are for the most part critical of the left, yet they vary in their criticisms. If you go to the same edition of the magazine, there is an article entitled “Shade of Swords” that quotes Camatte and Tiqqun. I know this guy from other places, he is definitely anti-tech and anti-civ. While the article isn’t anti-civ per se, I can’t see it being anything else. I advise people to read it as well.
There’s lots more I could say about the article, as I still think it can sprawl into a million directions. For example, I am largely in agreement with RS concerning its pessimism about building community or coordinated plans of action. I am also pessimistic if one can put it like that that we can somehow take very basic ideas as time, society, governance, etc and turn them against themselves. In essence, I oppose thinking about “ideal” societies, no matter how small. I also share their skepticism (short of outright rejection) of ideas like equality, justice, etc. I just think those ideas are “purchased” by civilized living in one respect, but I would have to draw those ideas out more elsewhere.
One aspect that I would also draw out, for example, is their use of “indigenism” as contrasted with its use in such left-bourgeois and Marxist theoreticians as Jose Vasconcelos, Mariategui, Lopez-Portilla, etc. That is, unlike the United States where Indians were always seen as uncivilized, in parts of Latin America they were acutely aware of the existence of “indigenous” civilizations that rivaled European civilizations, and this was used in bourgeois nationalist formation, left Marxist politics, and so on as an agitation against “outside imperialism”. With RS focusing on the Chichimecas instead of the “civilized” cities of the Valley of Mexico, this was a unique inversion for me as a student of Latin American history. It also indicated the formation of the idea of “wildness” in Mesoamerica itself as I cited in the essay; something always opposed to civilization and seeing itself in a sort of inverted mirror.I think such a perspective is needed.
As for Kevin’s need for writings, fear not, I think I can submit something to B&GR by the deadline in August. It will be on invasive species, I think, and their role in determining what wildness is in the “anthropocene”. It will either be a review of just one book, or a sprawling (though not too sprawling) essay covering several sources, themes in philosophy and literature, etc. If you want to narrow that down, Kevin, shoot me an email or message about what you are looking at in terms of space (how many words) and I’ll think about it some more. I’m pretty flexible and write to order, I’m used to it, and I always am good at absorbing criticism, at least I’d like to think I am.
“I am largely in agreement with RS concerning its pessimism about building community or coordinated plans of action. I am also pessimistic if one can put it like that that we can somehow take very basic ideas as time, society, governance, etc and turn them against themselves. In essence, I oppose thinking about “ideal” societies, no matter how small. I also share their skepticism (short of outright rejection) of ideas like equality, justice, etc. I just think those ideas are “purchased” by civilized living in one respect,”
I oppose the tactic of rhetorically dismissing those using other points of cultural reference – to step outside the cultural nonsense in our heads – as somehow utopian or idealized. This form of strawman argumentation is a classic canard employed to paint those who don’t conform to a particular worldview as mush-brained starry-eyed hippies. Its historical implementation for colonial justification is documented in The Myth of the Noble Savage.
I stand corrected on my accidental misread of where you are at.
I question how much “building community” and “coordinated plans of action” share a similar impulse. Obviously they can cross the Ideological vortex into the world of the Platforms (boo! hiss!), a place a dirty commie like @artc should know all too well. But as a blanket terminology for what could amount for anything from a bullshit hippie commune like The Farm and proposing nomadic hunter-gatherer nodes all the way over to a full on DGR faux-Revolutionary Agenda is pretty clearly far reaching.
I’ve seen reactions to my call for community as something to be confused with communes. That is far from the case. There’s no simple solution here, but there’s two sides of it. One is the rewilding side, which is, in a simplified manner, a matter of moving from observing the wild to integrating with it. Recognizing that we are a part of that wild community and acting as such, to feel empathy with the world that we are actively destroying and to resist it actively. The other side is, you guessed it, about building community. BUT this isn’t as simple as buying land and having a happy garden and utopian zeal. It requires breaking down the bullshit dependencies that domestication fosters and is built upon and to see the world as though the state doesn’t exist. That means to not rely on external policing agents and to learn to settle and respond appropriately. That’s not an easy path and also one that few to no communes are capable of addressing.
I understand to you, @artc, that probably still sounds all the same, but if you recognize that domestication is the root of civilization and is an ongoing process, it’s hard to talk about resistance without building and vice versa. But that said, I don’t feel either one of those terms really sums up the nuances involved in both sides. Both terms can mean entirely different things and in another extreme fit perfectly into the overall failures of communists and socialists past.