From Décivilize

Welcome back!

This marks the reboot of the eco-anarcho blog Antidev! Now under the improved, catchier name DÉCIVILIZE. You may use the old or the new name as you wish! For those who don’t know what the fuck was that blog… what is a blog… or what’s was this blog’s purpose… well it is still accessible at https://antidev.wordpress.com, or have fun reading the wall of text below.

As for this blog, we promise it to be a little different, yet continuing upon the same effort of bringing to light (even if that’s relative) the critiques, thoughts, projects, actions and sensibilities of the anarchistic eco-rebellion, especially the one that rises against the Leviathan of techno-industrial, consumerist social mess, in a diversity of forms and from a multitude of contexts, in both French and English, and perhaps more! This time around we’ll be looking for contributors willing to translate -to and fro- some texts/articles/reports to Chinese, Korean as well as native/indigenous languages, in an effort to “disown” green anarchy as a Euro/settler paradigm, and make it known to more than just “White” Westerners… try to make it better spread globally, outside of the toxic NGO politics.

Proepilogue

This past effort, the Antidev blog was launched out of a will to communicate something, but more deeply out of a few underlying hypotheses that eventually were somewhat proven true…

Over these three years I confronted myself to the world «outside», turning myself inside out, shelving that internet «presence», far away from that bunker of self-seclusion, back to the world closer to those few reading and following this blog, and also and especially to the rest who had near-zero chances of having ever read from it. Sometimes making a fool of myself… going through a few hardships and personal drama… «feeling society» at its worst… even doing institutional entryism…

So, what I have found out there (…or in there?)… was of course a vast web of self-deception, or delusion, and a lot people being distracted by wasteful shit on a thousand plateaus of rather bad social theater, other vaudevillian comedy or even more often some depressing waste of time and energy. In other words, society. Set on a quest to understand their incredible carelessness, their unassumed absurdity, their mindless sociality, I had a taste of their politics, only to realize that it was just, capitalist politics… no worse, no better; just not as good as their external pretenses spectacularize. For sure, I am most likely not a better person than they are, if there is any value, save a meaning, to each other’s goodness. Their world, and my world, is driven by the virtual facades and their politics. How can it be escaped?

The world we produce can only be attacked, subverted, and/or destroyed. But, how to sling at the Leviathan? This may be the most important question of our age. Also a very tough one.

A blog can still be used for a few things, including firing pot shots at society in its thousands of reified shapes and forms, and situations. A blog surely does little more than entertaining you for a moment, as you pause in the midst of your daily barrage of alienation. A blog is not a living thing. «I» am not even a living being, even if the one writing this could potentially be alive (but then again, could I consider this as life?). The blogosphere isn’t as important as it used to be, but like other older structures of the internet, it will remain useful especially for those seeking to escape the big data traps of corporate social media, but not significantly more so than a street post, wall or panel to vandalize.

A big issue with the past blog was how it attempted to be «connect with the world» (or was reflecting its author(s) attempt at doing so) by being a kind of social media, or at best an estuary -or a beach head- to the wider social media. This has been solved by the vast invasion of corporate social media of the past few years, that made such efforts irrelevant anyways. So, good evils. Also some positionning… some fronting that emerged from this blog was pretentious, and sometimes misguided, lacking careful background considerations of who/what it was backing, siding with agendas or interests that only followed their own short-sighted views. Taking sides with the wrong political agencies can easily be an outcome in the smoke and mirrors of the internet, so it may be more cautious to post more intelligently, even if this could mean posting less often, or avoid the social media reaction trap in regards to «world events», more local politics, identity politics, and else.

It may be a benefit of the near-defeat of the «blogosphere» by corporate social media, that it is no longer relevant of attempting to be an interlocutor in the virtual agora of the «masses», engaging in prefab debates or the depersonalized «big issues» of State politics, now that this tribune is pretty much enclosed within the walls of big business. If only for sanity’s sake. Did it matter anyway? Aren’t these masses, aggregates, products of big business, and their State, groomed and programmed by it, after all? How to be autonomous while at the same time getting attention, in a preset discourse with a spectacular mass made of likely forged personas and positions?

The world is a slightly different place since April 2011. The newer generation, like every generation, sold themselves to the social machine until the new normal became existent back again, after this brief and inarticulate moment of social rupture in 2012, and «history», once again, negated its own existence, enforced its immuability, as the world of before reasserted itself to the present, and keeps planting its seeds for future global domination.

But then why keep publishing, when everyone’s getting their daily fill of crap through social media? Do people, in their daily social trance, still «deserve» it?

A few do! Since a few are interested on this radical otherness, that may not have been translated, expressed properly, to do it proper justice after this first attempt, during this past five years period. As a few are showing, in words but more importantly in practice, this refusal, this rejection this big «No» directed at the world, the Existent, even if the latter keeps being enforced, being reproduced, no matter what, even by those «friends» around us, or this less identifiable sanctified «people» we’re all supposed to be part of. People want a «life»! How can we blame them for it? It’s not their fault… they just ain’t asking significant enough questions.

Also because, for its creator(s), it is fun and creative! As a kind of art project. But unlike the contemporary productive/lucrative activity we call Art, it can be one that also serves a collective purpose of agitation, subversion, solidarity, counter-info, education, maybe even liberation.

How to turn your life into a bomb, against the world that destroys you anyways

Let’s be clear that it is always a small decided minority that changes «things»; those interested in experimenting, pandering with devices and mechanisms around, to practice the dangerous magic of «changing reality», and yes, my interest is still into this. It may even start with a few explosive individuals.

But a few fundamental questions equally deserve being asked, about the who and the why these changes have to be set in motion, and at what cost – questions I think are unavoidable to any autonomous insurgent. Most often, the struggle is so self-evident that it doesn’t bear such philosophical questioning at the inception; yet equally, things tend to not be exactly what they seem, and some aspects always evade our limited, one-sided perspectives.

Anarchist insurgents are not supposed to be a bunch of mindless jihadists or mass-shooters driven by some over-simplified, all-encompassing cause -or spooks- especially given how society makes it so easy -even prescribed- to be self-sacrificing over bullshit purposes. Well that’s what work is about, anyways, right? If a few decide to stand up for the lives that get destroyed in the natural world, that’s because there is no other choice. Because these lives do not have the means to defend themselves, even comprehend what’s happening to them. This is why we choose to stand for them. These lives are unlike the compromised lives of humans. They are inherently innocents; it is beyond question. Activists serving agendas… politicians acting upon agendas negotiated with bigger groups, organizations; they of course are serving their own, beneath the spectacular antagonists. They are responsible for their own madness, and gain their own capital as they progress, when they do.

Anarchist praxis emerges from and towards the realization of anarchy, not of made-up ideals recycled from others. It is facing the unknown, answering by asking questions.

«Realization» is in both senses of the word; not just as an idea coming to reality, but as a reality coming to mind, to awareness. Awareness that, inherently, anarchy is already there, and omnipresent; that society, translated in the physical world, means nothing short than a continuous onslaught to break it, transform it, in the goal of ordering it, according to its own dominant institutions, make-beliefs, ideals. Of course there could be a «better society», but it’s not there. It is another projected ideal, that eco-socialism. You likely won’t be living into it in your lifetime, if it ever comes to reality. More importantly, like any other projected ideal, it isn’t to be fulfilled in the first place, but to be enforced as abstraction upon the real world.

There is little left to create, but plenty of relationships to destroy, horizons to liberate.

I understand that the natural world is a world of anarchy, of freedom. An endless multiplicity of life forms, and their ways of dealing with problems, sustaining, enjoying and coping. There’s violence and there’s peace, love/hate, pleasure/pain… an apparent happiness and sometimes misery… mutual aid just like rivalry… sharing and robbing, there is even some level of oppression and alienation, and all the things between these binaries, but none of these are instituted values like property, or the family, as far as we know.

The mistake in all naturalist thinking is not to be taking example from nature, but rather to be, self-servingly, projecting aspects of our own culture upon what we perceive as the natural world (the idea that killing or domination is natural, because «look at them lions»), and use it back to justify human behavior. In a way, it is an «injection attack». Or an entire blackmailing, of both the natural and the human world. But «nature» is not nature. It is a stained mirror.

What matters -in our own view- is the tension of our (repressed) savagery; the one society fights so hard to erase by disciplining and organizing us. But what this savagery IS… that’s more complicated than what stereotypes might tell us. Is this really irrationality, mindless impulses, or unrestrained sexual onslaught, or chaotic violence? The question of «living like savages» as humans is pretty coarse, and delving in archaic imperial chauvinism, that’s next to racism.

Yet there is the more certain, subversive reality of a life that doesn’t need those fabrications to be and even sustain. That we can live upon the land and feed from its resources, individually, without needing, inherently, to purchase land… as this is fabricated «need» was always nothing else than enforced through a web of interlocking relations, that started with colonialism at their foundation, and are still perpetuating it, through nationalism, the clan, private property, and agriculture. Thought forms and cultural shapes that are the forces of this self-fulfilling prophecy of civilization. They are civilization due to their civilizing; this is what civilization inherently is, a process of transforming and imposing imperiously, which results at the bottom line with… more crap, more waste and more delusions.

Fuck maoists, as the rest of the authoritarian Left, like forever…

Domination is no longer embodied on a global scale solely by the Western Christian-Capitalist civilization. The gods have changed faces, their devices are new currencies. Another thing we’ve seen over the past few years is the sudden rise of China as a counterweight to the Western world. If we ever succeed at curbing capitalist development on Turtle Island, how will that relate to the insane techno-industrial, the economic development in China, and its wider technocratic onslaught? The Communist Party, successful where the Soviet bloc has failed, will keep asserting itself as a civilizing force, for as long as Western capitalists seek to dominate the world, and not only within its national boundaries, but as a global hegemony as well, driven by a kind of late-stage socio-capitalism. It is noteworthy to consider that Chinese interests are also intertwined with the extractive industry, its related tech industry, and obviously, as we all know, the mass commodity markets. Canada, like Europe, has served as an economic buffer zone for these markets, and the investments in infrastructure, real-estate, as well as the deeper energy and mining industries.

The proposed goal here would not to be fighting «them Chinese influence in our cuntry» as xenophobes would, but instead to be (re)building linguistic bridges with those, among the Chinese world (and by extension through the wider East-Asian world), who seek to oppose the techno-totalitarian world that expands upon their lives, upon natural life, and/or assert a life that exists outside of it. Opposition to authority, or the will to be free from its spooks, isn’t only a recent invention of the industrial Western world. Even if «anarchism» may not be a globally well-spread paradigm, the underlying sentiment, intent and rationale from which it emerged in the West is what really matters, and we believe these may exist all over the globe.

This is not yet as much another depersonalized attempt at “changing the world”, as it is an effort of bringing to awareness the realities of personal rebellion, up against the oppression and devastation that are redundant all over the planet, from your specific local context to that of someone in Guangzhou, or in the Amazon forest, as well as our more important converging will to refuse it, and assert life up against civilization’s death machine.

The continuous push to civilize is all over the place, and intimately connected to the authoritarian nature of States, and their managing organs. To be sabotaging the first is to be undermining the latter. This used to be, and still is, the fundamental thesis behind this mediation effort.

撤文明!
撤权力!

More coming, soon…