We need it all. We need people to take out dams and we need people to knock out electrical infrastructures. We need people to protest and to chain themselves to trees. We also need people working to ensure that as many people as possible are equipped to deal with the fallout when the collapse comes. We need people working to teach others what wild plants to eat, what plants are natural antibiotics. We need people teaching others how to purify water, how to build shelters. All of this can look like supporting traditional, local knowledge, it can look like starting rooftop gardens, it can look like planting local varieties of medicinal herbs, and it can look like teaching people how to sing.
The truth is that although I do not believe that designing groovy eco-villages will help bring down civilization, when the crash comes, I’m sure to be first in line knocking on their doors asking for food.
People taking out dams do not have a responsibility to ensure that people in homes previously powered by hydro know how to cook over a fire. They do however have a responsibility to support the people doing that work.
Similarly, those people growing medicinal plants (in preparation for the end of civilization) do not have a responsibility to take out dams. They do however have a responsibility at the very least to not condemn those people who have chosen that work. In fact they have a responsibility to support them. They especially have a responsibility to not report them to the cops.
It’s the same old story: the good thing about everything being so fucked up is that no matter where you look, there is great work to be done. Do what you love. Do what you can. Do what best serves your landbase. We need it all.
This doesn’t mean that everyone taking out dams and everyone working to cultivate medicinal plants are working toward the same goals. It does mean that if they are, each should see the importance of the other’s work.
Further, resistance needs to be global. Acts of resistance are more effective when they’re large-scale and coordinated. The infrastructure is monolithic and centralized, so common tools and techniques can be used to dismantle it in many different places, simultaneously if possible.
By contrast, the work of renewal must be local. To be truly effective (and to avoid reproducing the industrial infrastructure) acts of survival and livelihood need to grow from particular landbases where they will thrive. People need to enter into conversation with each piece of earth and all its human and nonhuman inhabitants. This doesn’t mean of course that we can’t share ideas, or that one water purification technique won’t be useful in many different locations. It does mean that people in those places need to decide for themselves what will work. Most important of all, the water in each place needs to be asked and allowed to decide for itself.
I’ve been thinking a lot again about the cell phone tower behind Safeway, and I see now how these different approaches manifest themselves in this one small place. The cell phone tower needs to come down. It is contiguous on two sides with abandoned parking lots. Those lots need to come up. Gardens can bloom in their place. We can even do our work side by side.296
When at talks I’ve mentioned the three premises above—that civilization will crash, that the crash will be messy, and that the crash will be messier the longer we wait—nearly everyone who has thought about these issues at all agrees with the premises immediately. But at a talk I gave yesterday, one man was looking at me dubiously and shaking his head. I asked him what was up.
“I don’t think we’re going to crash,” he said.
Oh Lord, I thought, a cornucopian.
But he surprised me. “It’s not future tense,” he said. “We’re already in it.”
I told him I agreed.
The next of Dear Abby’s warnings about abusive relationships was that you should be very wary if the abuser uses threats of violence to control you. A batterer may attempt to convince you that all men threaten partners, but this isn’t true. He may also attempt to convince you that you’re responsible for his threats: he wouldn’t threaten you if you didn’t make him do it.
These are actually three related warnings. As far as relating the first—the use of violence to control—to the larger social level, after my most recent show a man said, “You talk a lot about the violence of this culture. I don’t feel I’m particularly violent. Where is the violence in my life?”
I asked him where his shirt was made. He said Bangladesh. I told him that wages in clothing factories in Bangladesh start at seven to eight cents per hour, and max out at about eighteen cents per hour. Now, I know we hear all the time from politicians, capitalist journalists, and other apologists for sweatshops that these wages are good because otherwise these people would simply starve to death. But that’s only true if you accept the framing conditions that lead to those wages: Once people have been forced off their land—the source of their food, clothing, and shelter—and the land given to transnational corporations, once people have been made dependent on the corporations that are killing them, sure, it might be better not to starve immediately but to slave for seven cents per hour, starving a tad more slowly.
The question becomes, how much violence did it take to force these people off their land? It is violence or the threat of violence that keeps them working for these low wages.
Cheap consumer goods are not the only place the threat of violence controls our lives. I asked the man if he pays rent.
“Yes.”
“Why do you do that?”
“Because I don’t own my home.”
“What would happen if you didn’t pay rent?”
“I would be evicted.”
“By whom?”
“The sheriff.”
“And what if you refused to leave? What if you invited the sheriff in for dinner? And then after dinner you said, ‘I’ve enjoyed your company, but I haven’t enjoyed it all that much, and this is my home, so I would like you to leave now.’ What would happen then?”
“If I refused to leave, the sheriff would evict me.”
“How?”
“By force, if necessary.”
I nodded. So did he.
Then I said, “And what if you were really hungry, and so you went to the grocery store. They’ve got a lot of food there, you know. And if you just started eating food there, and you didn’t pay anything, what would happen?”
“They’d call the sheriff.”
“It would probably be the same guy. He’s a real asshole, isn’t he? He’d come with a gun and take you away. Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don’t, people with guns come and force us to pay. That’s violent.”
The reason (part two of Abby’s warning) that batterers may attempt to convince victims that all men threaten partners of course is that if you can get victims to disbelieve in the possibility of alternatives—if you can make your violence seem natural and inevitable—there will be no real reason for them to resist. You will, like the owners of sweatshops, have them exactly where you want them: under your control, with no need to even bother beating them anymore. The larger social equivalent is our culture’s frantic insistence that all cultures are based on violence, that all cultures destroy their landbase, that men of all cultures rape women, that children of all cultures are beaten, that the poor of all cultures are forced to pay rent to the rich (or even that all cultures have rich and poor!). Perhaps the best example of this culture trying to naturalize its violence is the belief that natural selection is based on competition, that all survival is a violent struggle where only the meanest, most exploitative survive. The fact that this belief is nearly ubiquitous in this culture despite it being demonstrably untrue, logically untenable (recall the one-sentence disproof from early in this book: those creatures who have survived in the long run have survived in the long run, and if you hyperexploit your surroundings you will deplete them and die; the only way to survive in the long run is to give back more than you take), and a complete distortion of Darw
in’s elegant ideas, to which it is wrongly attributed, reveals the degree to which we have internalized the perspective of the abusers, and done so against the combined weight of history and common sense.
The third part of Abby’s warning was that abusers attempt to convince their victims that the victims are responsible for the abusers’ threats: the abuser wouldn’t threaten you if you didn’t make him do it. This has huge implications for activists. I cannot tell you how many activists have insisted to me that we must never use sabotage, violent rhetoric, and certainly never violence, because to do so will call up a strong backlash by those in power.
This insistence reveals an absolute lack of understanding of how repression works. Abusers will use any excuse to ratchet up repression, and if no excuses are forthcoming, excuses will be fabricated. Recall my discussion of the planned “outbursts” of CIA agents. Recall the Japanese knot-tying art of hojojutsu, where every movement tightens the ropes around your throat. Those in power will repress us no matter what we do or don’t do. And if we do anything they will ratchet it up.
What is our solution? Probably the most commonly chosen solution, which is no solution at all, is to never upset those in power, that is, to use only tactics deemed acceptable to those in power. The main advantage of pursuing this non-option is that you get to feel good about yourself for “fighting the good fight” against the system of exploitation while not actually putting at risk the benefits you gain from this same system. (Have you ever wondered, by the way, why so many more people in the United States support third world rebel groups than participate in similarly open revolt here?)
Well, let’s try this on for a solution. What if we prepare ourselves so that each time they ratchet up their repression towards us, we ratchet up our response? If they make us afraid of acting decisively to stop them from exploiting and destroying us and those we love—to stop them from killing (what remains of) the oceans, (what remains of) the forests, (what remains of) the soil—what would it take for us to make them fear to continue this exploitation, this destruction?
Everyone who has ever in any way been associated with perpetrators of abuse will probably agree with this analysis by psychologist and writer Arno Gruen of why abusers must continue to ratchet up their exploitation: “[C]atharsis does not work for those people whose anger and rage are fueled by self-hatred, for if it is projected onto an external object, self-hatred is only intensified and is aggravated by actions that are unconsciously perceived deep within as further forms of self-betrayal. Thus, with every additional act of destruction, destructive rage raises its stakes.”297
The Oglala man Red Cloud spoke of this insatiability of abusers another way: “They made us many promises, more than I can remember. But they only kept but one. They promised to take our land and they took it.”298
And George Orwell described it again: “It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.”299
Abusers, and abusive cultures, are insatiable. They can ultimately brook no impediment to their control, to their destructiveness. Harry Merlo, former CEO of the Louisiana-Pacific timber corporation, articulated this mania as well as possible. After logging, he said, “There shouldn’t be anything left on the ground. We need everything that’s out there. We don’t log to a ten-inch top or an eight-inch top or even a six-inch top. We log to infinity. Because it’s out there and we need it all, now.”
The question becomes, do we have the guts—and the heart—to stop them? Do we care enough about our landbases and the lives of those we love? Do we dare to act?
I need to be clear: to blame members of the resistance for the backlash by those in power when resistors do not follow the agreed-upon rules is yet more acceptance of the abusers’ logic: If I hit you, it is only because you made me do it.
When Nazis killed a hundred Jews for every Jew who escaped from a death camp, it was not the Jews’ fault the Nazis chose to do this. When Nazis chose to kill a hundred innocent bystanders for every Nazi killed by partisans, it was not the partisans’ fault. The choice to kill was the Nazis’. The responsibility was their own. Remember, from the perspective of the exploiters it is always best if you can get your victims to “choose” to participate. Proper limiting of their options will save you from having to use quite so much force. If you can get them to internalize responsibility for the violence you do use, so much the better.
If those in power choose to build a dam, that is their choice. I am not responsible for their decision. If I choose to take out this dam, that is my choice. Those in power are not responsible for my decision. If after that dam is gone, those in power decide to arrest everyone with brown hair, that is their choice. I would not be responsible for their decision.
We all have choices. I have choices. Those in power have choices. You have choices. Even if we choose to not act, we are still making choices.
The next to last characteristic on Abby’s list was that the abuser may break or strike objects. There are two variants of this behavior: one is the destruction of beloved objects as punishment. The other is for him to violently strike or throw things to scare you.
To translate the first variant to the larger cultural level we need only consider the logic routinely used by mainstream environmental activists to keep more radical activists in line: “We must be reasonable, or the feds and corporations will cut all the forests.” The punishment for not being “reasonable” is the destruction of ever more of what we love. Even more to the point, we know what happens as punishment to traditional indigenous people who do not give up their landbase: they will be killed, their landbase destroyed. And extirpation of species can be seen as a form of punishment, too: if the plant or animal (or culture) cannot adapt (conform) to the requirements of civilization, it will—it must—be destroyed.
Who among us has not witnessed the destruction of wild places or creatures we have loved? That this destruction is not always explicitly labeled as punishment seems secondary—exploiters lie as well as exploit—especially when the threat of further damage hangs always over our heads.
To translate the second variant into larger social terms, all we need to do is invoke a phrase used often these days by the U.S. military and politicians: Shock and Awe. This phrase is a euphemism for bombing the hell out of a people in order to terrorize them into doing what you want. Shock and Awe is merely the most recent name for this. George Washington earned the nickname Town Destroyer among the Indians by doing what the name suggests. He did this to punish those who resisted. A bit further back we find Catholic priests and missionaries cutting down the sacred groves of pagans as punishment for their recalcitrance and to preempt any return to the worship of their nonhuman neighbors. Before that, the Israelites clearcut the groves of all who did not bow before their god. They also clearcut the people.
Dear Abby’s last characteristic of abusive relationships is the use of any force during an argument: holding you down, physically restraining you from leaving the room, pushing you, shoving you, forcing you to listen. Should we talk about Christianity or death? Should we talk about prisons? How about compulsory attendance at schools? Maybe we should talk about the fact that at protests cops are armed while protesters are not (I wonder who will win arguments between those two groups?). Why don’t we cut to the chase and simply remark on the “social contract” imposed upon us by those in power, that those in power grant themselves a monopoly on force (then force us to attend schools where we are taught that the state—a primary instrument of those in power—has, you guessed it, a monopoly on force).
Within this culture there really is one central rule: Might makes right. I can think of no more abusive way to live.
A truism of political science seems to be that part of the deal we sign as civilized human beings is that we allow the state to have a monopoly on violence. About a hundred years ago the German sociologist Max Weber defined the mode
rn state as maintaining the monopoly on violence, with the exercise of force being authorized or permitted by the state, which means by law. The monopoly on violence is what a state is. Maintaining the monopoly on violence is what a state does. Weber states that “the use of force is regarded as legitimate only so far as it is either permitted by the state or prescribed by it. Thus the right of a father to discipline his children is recognized—a survival of the former independent authority of the head of a household, which in the right to use force has sometimes extended to a power of life and death over children and slaves. The claim of the modern state to monopolize the use of force is as essential to it as its character of compulsory jurisdiction and of continuous organization.”300
Chibli Mallat made the implications clear: “Judicial power wields, through the rule of law, the most sophisticated manifestation of state coercion. There is no rule of law without the state’s monopoly of violence.”301
My friend George Draffan brings it all home: “The modern state rests on the monopoly of legitimate violence and, consequently, on the monopoly of taxation. Moreover, the group that effectively controls means of organized violence also acquires the monopoly over the enforcement of rules of economic and civic life. A weak state, then, is one which has lost the ability to effectively maintain these key monopolies. In late- and post-communist Russia, a constellation of factors led, after 1987, to a progressive privatization of the state. The privatization of the state is understood here as the process whereby the function of protecting juridical and economic subjects was taken over by criminal groups, private protection companies, or units of the state police force acting as private entrepreneurs. The consequence of that can also be defined as the covert fragmentation of the state: the emergence, on the territory under the formal jurisdiction of the state, of competing and uncontrolled sources of organized violence and alternative taxation networks.”
Endgame Vol.1 Page 36
