Is there any hope for anarchy to thrive somewhere in the midst of this last collective panic-attack humanity unleashes before disappearing into nothingness?
If we accept that we were a colossally destructive evolutionary dead-end, make peace with it even, do we have one last chance to live our final days in beautiful anarchy before it all shuts down?
Will the parasite class capitalize on the collapse and use global misery to wring every last penny out of our labor and consumption as we all go down in flames? Can we live anarchy even as they do this?
In 45 years we have killed 60% of Earth's wildlife
Insect collapse: We are destroying our life support systems
Salt water fish extinction by 2048
The debate is over: The oceans are in hot, hot water
UN says climate genocide is coming. It's actually worse than that
250,000 deaths a year from climate change is a 'conservative estimate,' research says
Your brain won't allow you to believe the apocalypse could actually happen
The World is Ending And We All Know It
More on f/collapse and f/Climate_Changed
Notice: I might use ideas in this thread as inspiration for a piece I'm writing about the collapse.
An_Old_Big_Tree wrote
Paraphrasing Mbembe speaking to something else, everything depends on the locations in which we find ourselves, the historical contexts in which we live, and the objective conditions we face.
We see this in Seaweed's writing and repeated in quite a few anarchist texts after: “Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it.”
I think that bioregion-based liberation makes sense, and that decentralised desertion-style creation of autarkic communities is a real alternative. "Autarkic" here meaning not dependent on civilisation beyond it for resources.
As much as I desire the death of infrastructure in the spaces that I live, I don't feel I can justify doing the bombings etc myself if it means direct harm to those who will suffer without that infrastructure, as well as further criminalisation and witch-hunts of our people. And, as Bellamy's noted, a large range of what anarchists have considered 'attack' does nothing at this stage.
Being someone who wants as anarchic a world possible, I have a twofold focus. The first is on finding and building affinity with others, and the second is on changing the social imaginary so that it is as open to our ideas as possible. I'm not seeking mass, or to dilute my ideas; I think that as the collapse unfolds people will seek alternatives and that for some of us they will be lucky enough to chose ours. I think also them just having a real sense of our ideas rather than misinformation will bring us some basic safety and support.
That said, models I prefer as an individual almost always fail me, along with ideas for long-term positive projects that aren't conceived with the people involved. Everything we build must be built with others, and at least in my case the people I build with have vastly different backgrounds and ideas and beliefs to me, even as we have some important affinities politically.
So my preference is simply to find those I have affinity with, to scrutinise our resources and our capacities and the context that we live in, and make our best move towards the greatest autonomy/autarky we can find, always in such a way that in passing through space we free others in our wake just by opening up and enabling their sense of what is possible.
Realistically, even the fullest deserter communities will be looking to make connections with other deserter communities, and will to some degree still be connected to the leviathan, even if it is just because we hear the news from there, or our friends are there. Which is to say that not everybody needs to be a deserter. If anarchists are city-lovers they can help the deserters while remaining what they are. Anarchists are useful anywhere.
I'd love to hear comments and critiques on this.