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shanc wrote

anticiv is anarchism. civilization is antianarchism.

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[deleted] wrote

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genderbender wrote

Anarchism isn't just about not having a state, it's about opposing all hierarchies. Civilization is as much a hierarchy as statism.

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OdiousOutlaw wrote (edited )

For me, a civilization is a collection of societies that are connected and require the creation and maintenance of hierarchies in order to sustain itself and the societies within it. Civilization requires a caste system, government, and a common culture in order to prevent itself from collapsing: the caste system is required to delegate the tasks of resource creation, allocation, and distribution; with the higher castes managing these systems, the government, and the culture. The government is created in order to keep civil order, ensure that the lower castes don't revolt, and manage growth. The common culture is also required: it ensures that social mores (which it also creates) are followed in a more subtle and acceptable manner than booted thugs with nightsticks would; it is passed on to children, so that the ideas created by the culture are seen as unquestionable or natural (western societies often preach the ideals of democracy, for example), further stamping out any ideas of rebellion. Anti-civilization is the opposition and critique of this structure; I think it's a prerequisite to Anarchism, since Anarchism is the abolition of all hierarchies and civilization requires hierarchy in order to function. There's a reason why world wide Anarchism won't work under civilization: someone has to produce the resources necessary to actually keep a globe-spanning social structure running, the materials required to do so have to come from somewhere, there would have to be an incentive in order to get a group (some would say class) of people to mine ore and grow food, AND you'd have to find a way to restrict consumption in order to stretch these resources out. All which would require a government, laws, and law enforcement in order to do so, which defeats the point of being a fucking anarchist.

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shanc wrote

All which would require a government, laws, and law enforcement in order to do so, which defeats the point of being a fucking anarchist.

But what if it is The People's Government, comrade?!?!1

Great writeup. Thanks

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LostYonder wrote

Civilization has two overlapping meanings, one cultural one technological. Ultimately though, it is nothing more than an hegemonic ideology produced, circulated, and bought into that masks colonial conquest, social hierarchies, and brutal violence against a perceived "uncivilized" other.

Culturally, civilization is an imagined expression of assumed common histories - "Europe", "Chinese", "Indian", "Islamic", etc. The construction of boundaries between civilizations is a complete historical fallacy that allows for people to imagine a sense of uniqueness - to differentiate themselves from others. It is an erasure of histories of connections, exchanges, borrowings, dialogues, debates, etc. It is anachronistic as it projects back in time contemporary political borders and imagines them as historically real, allowing "Europe"/"the west", for example, to imagine Greece as western and not Mediterranean/Arab/African. In so doing, not only does it erase connections, it also feeds ideas of difference predicated on superiority, which one sees in every self-proclaimed civilizational world, most violently institutionalized in the west!

Technologically, civilization implies, as others have mentioned, a belief in technological advancement, ideas of progress, of continued rationalization of human thought and behavior. This mode of civilization also fosters hierarchies of difference between those more advanced (e.g., 1st World, colonizer) and those perceived as less advanced (e.g., 3rd World, colonized). It also feeds into imagining others as a threat, particularly Muslims and the "hordes" on the US's southern border, as they are irrational, driven by religion and not science, are undeveloped, etc. As such, they can be exterminated, bombed, caged as they are already deemed less than fully human.

Both ideas of civilization require a massive state project to produce and circulate their ideas and thus are inherent expressions of the modern state. Being anticiv is as much critiquing the idea of civilization as it is undoing the destructive forces that are enacted in the name of civilization. Unlearning civilization is a monumental task...

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

Wikipedia knows all apparently:

A civilization or civilisation (see English spelling differences) is any complex society characterized by urban development, social stratification imposed by a cultural elite, symbolic systems of communication (for example, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.

Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labour, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming and expansionism. Historically, civilization has often been understood as a larger and "more advanced" culture, in contrast to smaller, supposedly primitive cultures.[1][3][4][9] Similarly, some scholars have described civilization as being necessarily multicultural.[10] In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, Neolithic societies or hunter-gatherers, but it also contrasts with the cultures found within civilizations themselves. As an uncountable noun, "civilization" also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure. Civilizations are organized in densely populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade. Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.

Civilization, as its etymology (below) suggests, is a concept originally linked to towns and cities. The earliest emergence of civilizations is generally associated with the final stages of the Neolithic Revolution, culminating in the relatively rapid process of urban revolution and state formation, a political development associated with the appearance of a governing elite.

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

Anti-civ is just an extension of anti-authority / anti-state thinking. Civilisations are state-forms with an in-built growth tendency rooted in alienation (from our resources and our waste). As something growth-tending it's also inherently colonial. Anti-civ thinking is mostly just the critique of authority in this context, towards bringing about actually sustainable (i.e. not growth-tending) modes of existence, outside of authority. Also it seems reified binary gender and civilisation go hand in hand, so there's another reason to get rid of it.

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shanc wrote

Imagine reading that and thinking that anarchism and civilisation are perfectly compatible

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ziq wrote (edited )

It's easy when your conception of anarchism is uploading your mind into a giant robot to "free" yourself from "the hierarchy of biology".

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shanc wrote

Oof

My great aunt is a missionary who can't wait to upload her mind into a heavenly cloud to free herself from the sorrows of biology.

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rot wrote (edited )

civilization is the belief in endless growth and technology as a mindset. It is capitalist hierarchy applied to the natural world.

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ziq wrote

Civilization is "progress" at the expense of life. The goal of civilization is to gradually replace all life with death.

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