I was recently told by a Kaczynski fanboy that anyone who doesn’t want to destroy all electricity grids is a reformist. So I just wanted to make this graphic as a friendly reminder against travelling down the eco-purist rabbit hole of more and more rigidly dogmatic political theory, where you begin to believe it’s only worth reading the way a few authors view the world.
I have nothing against green anarchism as the promotion of a style of critique not often seen, like black-anarchism and anarcha-feminism, as it can simply help identify you as someone who has been able to have the time to research the ways expertise in building democratic institutions, green architecture and rewilding will help get us to a better world.
And obviously I don’t think the revolution would end at worker control, but I do see anarchists as part of a big tent libertarian socialist movement, where securing workplace democracy would be a massive improvement in society.
The diagram text is not meant to be a perfectly summarized version of each ideology. It’s an analogy for how some people will take a bunch of contradictory twists and turns down a list of more and more fringe ideologies, in pursuit of the most rigidly simplistic way of viewing the world so they can say they have the answers to almost all life’s questions.
I’m simply using an analogy that someone could go from desiring a ‘libertarian socialist revolution’ to a ‘vulgar anarchist insurrection’ because people can buy into anarchist ideology for all the wrong reasons the same way an anorexic person can just be using veganism as a way to restrict their diet on the way to raw veganism, etc.
People move over to the far-right for contradictory reasons, like first being convinced that the civil war was just about less taxes on cotton, to second that black Americans are lucky to be in the US, then third that the civil war was about white people keeping slaves to pick cotton and they had a right to protect their interests.
With green anarchists, it could be first being convinced that giving up various direct action campaigns for thinking solely being against technology is necessary for the most amount of people to get a clear message, reducing the amount of people they’re trying to coalition build with. Then secondly that killing and terrorizing people is a necessary evil to showing the direction society needs to be heading in. To thirdly hope for changing people’s minds is pointless, we need to just take pleasure in embracing our violent hatred for all things ‘unnatural’.
Further reading:
- Say You Want an Insurrection
- A Quick and Dirty Critique of Primitivist & Anti-Civ Thought
- A Conversation with John Zerzan on Direct Action, School Shootings, Authenticity, Veganism & More
- The Unabomber’s Ethics
- Of Indiscriminate Attacks and Wild Reactions: An Anti-Civ Anarchist Engages with ITS and Atassa, their Defenders and Their false Critics
- Eco-Extremism or Extinctionism by John Jacobi
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