On the Anarchist Response to COVID-19

via MTL Counter-info

Anonymous submission to MTL Counter-info

The Covid19 crisis has presented a challenge to anarchists and others who believe in a fully autonomous and liberated life. We write this today because we feel too many people who in better times carry these political and philosophical banners are setting aside their core beliefs – or worse – twisting and contorting those beliefs in wholly disappointing ways, conforming to the mandates of technocrats and politicians, and are convincing themselves that doing so is some grand act of solidarity with the most vulnerable people in our societies.

We say loudly that if the political tenets you promote and encourage in the best of times whither and shrink in times of crisis, then your political tenets are worthless. Any system of organization or any belief about human autonomy that needs to be set aside when history lays a challenge at our feet, is not worth keeping around when the emergency subsides. For truly, it is times of difficulty and challenge that place our ideas on the scale of utility to tell us whether or not they are as robust as we may believe.

As anarchists, autonomy over one’s own mind and body are essential to our values. We believe that human beings are intelligent enough to decide for themselves how to assess their surroundings and to make determinations on how to go forth living in a way that meets their needs and desires. Of course, we recognize that this autonomy comes packaged with genuine responsibility not only to one’s self, but to those with whom they are in community – including the non-human world. We certainly recognize that individuals may be asked for their cooperation in achieving a collective goal. But we also recognize the fundamental importance of consent in such situations, and that force and punishment are antithetical to an anarchist worldview.

That is why we write today. To reach out to our friends, our comrades, our intellectual and philosophical allies to ask that if you haven’t yet, that you please begin to seriously critique and question the state responses to the Covid19 pandemic that we are witnessing around the world. We have watched over the proceeding year, meekly, quietly, as other anarchists have toed the lines drawn by state bureaucrats. We have remained silent when witnessing anarchists act with hostility towards those who have pushed back against state mandated curfews and lockdown orders, only because those doing the most pushing are affiliated with right wing politics, unfortunately ceding this ground to the right wing, instead of forging their own critiques of state policy and thus providing an intellectual home for those who have in isolation grown antagonistic towards those in power who are trifling with our lives.

The impetus for this behavior amongst anarchists seems to be rooted in their desire to do well by those in need, and as this particular crisis is being caused by a virus, that seems to unfold as an enthusiastic willingness to accept state mandates and to shame those who would violate them. It is admirable to want to do well by the elderly and infirm, but that instinct is where the conversation should begin, not where we should resolve to set aside our fundamental principles and to justify this by taking technocrats and politicians at their words, using the pronouncements of sanctioned experts as a gospel by which to claim our lack of resistance to mandate is because the mandate makes such good sense.

Politicians lie. They select the analysis and the technicians who promote their agendas. Corporate executives line up to support them, knowing that the public purse is open to them when they do so. And the media, always wanting to be in the good graces of those with political and financial power, manufacture consent in twenty-four hour news cycles. We know this. We have libraries full of books that we have read and recommended explaining in detail the workings of this reality. Therefore, to be critical of politicians who declare that their emergency violations of basic freedoms are warranted by crisis is always a necessity. To be critical of pharmaceutical executives who tell the public that only they hold the keys to a future of freedom and safety, and of the media who act as propaganda machines in service of official narratives, is always a necessity.

Anarchists seem to know all of this instinctively when the war politicians want us to wage is a war fought with literal weapons, when the victims are more obvious, when the propaganda is more nationalist, xenophobic, and racist. But with the Covid19 crisis, the war being waged by those in power is ostensibly a war to save lives, and this shift in presentation seems to have effectively hacked the hearts and minds of so many anarchists who at the bottom of everything, carry a deep and genuine care for others.

But we must pull back and think critically about our situation. It is forgivable when in the throes of a quickly unfolding emergency, while lacking the information necessary to make confident decisions, to want to go along with the experts that are put before podiums when they ask that we all pull together for the greater good. That is no longer the situation. Much time has passed since SARS-COV-2 was a mysterious new respiratory virus infecting tens of people in Wuhan, to being a virus with global reach that has infected probably 20% of the human population*. Data has been pouring forth from researchers around the world, and there is now no excuse for fear based decision making, for accepting as gospel the perceptions and prescriptions stamped by the state and distributed by their lackeys in the media.

We believe that this crisis is like all the crises that came before it, in that it is a period of time in which those with power and wealth see an opportunity to extend their claws and to steal more of both. It is a moment of collective fear and uncertainty they can exploit to seize more control and to enrich themselves at the expense of the masses of humanity. The only thing that seems to separate the Covid19 crisis from those that came before it, is just how willing so much of the public (sadly including many anarchists) is to willingly and enthusiastically support the loss of their own autonomy.

*In early October The WHO reported an estimate that 10% of the global population had had Covid19. It is therefore reasonable that after a second winter in the Northern Hemisphere, that that number could have doubled.

The Science!!!

Right out of the gate we think it is very important to underscore the dangerous, quasi religious nature of how the media and state are pushing, and how the public is accepting, the notion of a unified scientific consensus on how to politically approach the question of Covid19. First and foremost, science is a method, a tool, and it’s foundational premise is that we must always ask questions, and we must always try to falsify our hypothesis. Science is absolutely NOT about consensus, as the right experiment conducted by one person can absolutely demolish established dogmas with new information, and that is science at its most glorious. Further, SARS-COV-2 is a virus that has been known to humanity at large for now just over one year. To suggest that there is a total and irrefutable understanding of it’s features and dynamics, and that all scientists and researchers and doctors everywhere are all in agreement as to what public policy should be to confront it, is absolutely false.

Also, we enter into very dangerous territory as a society when we allow, nay demand, that experts tucked away in labs using esoteric methods act as the only voices in the room to generate one-size-fits-all policy declarations for entire nations that span massive geographical terrain, for nations populated with vastly diverse groups of human beings who all have different needs. This kind of technocracy is a great cause for concern, as are any pronouncements that those who are skeptical of such schemes of social manipulation are somehow intellectual dullards or that that are anti-scientific.

Science is a tool to illuminate humanity through the elucidation of cause and effect mechanisms. It is a process of discovery. What we do with that illumination, how we go about our lives with the information discovered, is up to us as individuals and as communities.

And finally, it is very easy to fall into a trap of finding competing experts. One side has an expert who says X and the other side finds an expert who says Y, and then we’re at an impasse. This is not our intent, however, we feel we are in a double-bind if we do not at some level demonstrate that the narrative out forth by the state and their lap dog media is not as rooted in scientific fact as they would like us to believe. If we do not present some amount of counter evidence, we risk being dismissed out of hand as ignorant, individualists, whose true motivations are “selfish.” Cracking through a billion dollar narrative that has been crafted by state and private media around the globe for the better part of a year, all in service of generating an atmosphere of fear and thus compliance, is no easy task, and so, we will now point to some research below in an effort to help our readers build a reality-based, data-backed understanding of the current situation, not to position ourselves as possessing some secret alternative knowledge, but merely to demonstrate that there does exist research that makes many state mandates seem preposterous even from a scientific perspective.

Research

The underlying premise behind lockdowns, closures, and curfews is that these efforts can stop the spread of SARS-COV-2. But can they accomplish this? This is a nuanced question. First, we would acknowledge that if you could isolate every human in their own bubble, yes, you could burn out probably many diseases (while causing a variety of new harms). But that isn’t how a mandate functions in reality. Even excluding the shadowy scofflaws who are blamed for the failures of these lockdown efforts from California to London because of their failure to comply with perfection, the fact is that modern civilization requires a massive amount of daily labor in order to prevent it’s immediate collapse, and that labor requires human beings to come into contact with each other, and to travel great distances.

Everything from farm work, to long haul trucking. Power plant operation to plumbers making house calls. Doctors must go to hospital, as must the janitorial and kitchen staff. Fertilizer factories must keep producing for the following season, and so too must the sprawling data centers remain operational for all the white collar professionals to be able to meet via Zoom. Then there are the Amazon warehouses and Wal-Marts! How could we lockdown without our daily deliveries? The list of industries and institutions that cannot close if we expect to have heated homes, drinkable water, functional electric grids, drivable roads, and every other support system of modern life, is very long, and each of them requires human beings to keep them functional. This fact alone means there could never be a 100% lockdown of the population.

Of course, there is the obvious side note that a majority of the labor that must continue, is low wage and/or blue collar. This fact alone makes the very idea of lockdowns a classist enterprise, but this fact has been discussed widely, so we shall move on.

Remember too, these massive lockdowns were never intended (in most places, at the outset) to eliminate Covid19. They were intended to “flatten the curve,” which translates to, “slow the spread” of SARS-COV-2 so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. It should be noted that most hospitals in most locales, never faced this threat, and that even if it is a good idea to prevent hospital overrun, plans to prevent such a scenario would need to be local, not national, or even statewide. As the year progressed, slowly, the perception of the intent of lockdowns has blurred, and politicians and their selected experts have been consistently extending shutdowns, now shifting the rhetoric to focus on the eradication of the virus. This is unacceptable in that it is likely impossible.

As to these lockdown measures and their efficacy, research has found that they do not have much of an effect when it comes to reducing total caseload:

“Conclusions: While small benefits cannot be excluded, we do not find significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs. Similar reductions in case growth may be achievable with less restrictive interventions.”

Another paper concludes:

“Higher Covid death rates are observed in the [25/65°] latitude and in the [−35/−125°] longitude ranges. The national criteria most associated with death rate are life expectancy and its slowdown, public health context (metabolic and non-communicable diseases (NCD) burden vs. infectious diseases prevalence), economy (growth national product, financial support), and environment (temperature, ultra-violet index). Stringency of the measures settled to fight pandemic, including lockdown, did not appear to be linked with death rate.”

We must absolutely understand that no intervention comes without its costs, and when an intervention involves distance, isolation, and the shut down of people’s usual outlets for social interaction and support, those costs are borne by the physical, mental, and emotional health of the public. We cannot destroy public health to save public health. This editorial from the British Medical Journal states:

“Lockdowns can also cause long term health harms, such as from delayed treatment and investigations. Delays in the diagnosis and treatment of various types of cancer, for example, can allow progression of cancer and affect patients’ survival. A three month delay to surgery is estimated to cause more than 4700 deaths a year in the UK. In the US, delays in screening and treatment are estimated to cause 250,000 additional preventable deaths of cancer patients each year.

Furthermore, a sharp decrease in the number of admissions for acute coronary syndromes and emergency coronary procedures has been observed since the start of the pandemic in the US and Europe. In England, the weekly number of hospital admissions for coronary syndromes fell by 40% between mid-February and the end of March 2020. Fear of exposure to the virus stopped many patients from attending hospital, putting them at increased risk of long term complications of myocardial infarction.”

Despite the push by the people in power to present their preferred draconian measures as totally supported by “the science,” there is much disagreement amongst researchers and doctors as to how best to move through this crisis. Scientific American writes:

“In today’s COVID-19 wars, the global scientific divide leans heavily in favor of active, and sometimes even draconian, public health interventions, including widespread locking down of nonessential business, mandating masks, restricting travel and imposing quarantines. On the other side, some doctors, scientists and public health officials are questioning the wisdom of this approach in the face of massive unknowns about their efficacy and in light of the clear and growing evidence that such measures may not be working in some cases, and may also be causing net harm. As people are thrown out of work as a direct result of lockdowns, and as more and more families find themselves unable to cover their rent or food, there have been sharp increases in domestic violence, homelessness and illegal drug use.”

When justifying harsh lockdowns and curfews, many people lean into the danger presented by Covid19, without fully understanding the actual level of threat posed by the illness. Due to the alarmist posture of the media – an industry we know bases their success on capturing attention, and which also goes to great pains to push official political narratives – many people believe that an infection with SARS-COV-2 is far more deadly than it actually is. According to a study authored by Stanford’s John P. Ioannidis, the Infection Fatality Rate globally is quite low:

“Infection fatality rate in different locations can be inferred from seroprevalence studies. While these studies have caveats, they show IFR ranging from 0.00% to 1.54% across 82 study estimates. Median IFR across 51 locations is 0.23% for the overall population and 0.05% for people <70 years old. IFR is larger in locations with higher overall fatalities. Given that these 82 studies are predominantly from hard‐hit epicenters, IFR on a global level may be modestly lower. Average values of 0.15%‐0.20% for the whole global population and 0.03%‐0.04% for people <70 years old as of October 2020 are plausible. These values agree also with the WHO estimate of 10% global infection rate (hence, IFR ~ 0.15%) as of early October 2020.”

We also are aware of a common sentiment that lockdowns could eliminate SARS-COV-2 if only they were stricter, and if only every person participated perfectly. This is the sort of unfalsifiable thinking that politicians and pundits like to push to excuse the failure of previous measures to have the desired outcomes, as well as to target their opposing politicians who they like to insist “dropped the ball,” and who should therefore bear the blame for the pandemic’s toll. Any policy that requires 100% compliance is doomed to fail from the outset. Even ignoring our earlier point about the labor required to maintain society, there will never be 100% compliance from all human beings on anything.

We think it is also necessary to make plain that a new coronavirus is not something that would be detected immediately by doctors or researchers when it makes its first jump from animal to human. Because coronaviruses are common, and because they induce similar symptoms (as well as having a symptom course similar to other forms of respiratory viruses), and as SARS-COV-2 is not symptomatic in a third of people who contract it, it is not surprising that it was circulating the Earth before anyone knew to look for it.

It has now been confirmed that SARS-COV-2 was circulating in Italy in September of 2019:

“SARS-CoV-2 RBD-specific antibodies were detected in 111 of 959 (11.6%) individuals, starting from September 2019 (14%), with a cluster of positive cases (>30%) in the second week of February 2020 and the highest number (53.2%) in Lombardy. This study shows an unexpected very early circulation of SARS-CoV-2 among asymptomatic individuals in Italy several months before the first patient was identified, and clarifies the onset and spread of the coronavirus disease 2019”

It was circulating in the UK in December:

“Professor Tim Spector, epidemiologist at King’s College London, leads the Zoe Covid Symptom Study, tracking symptoms reported by patients during the pandemic.

He said data collected “clearly shows many people had the virus back in December”.

It was also circulating in the US back in late fall of 2019:

“These confirmed reactive sera included 39/1,912 (2.0%) donations collected between December 13-16, 2019, from residents of California (23/1,912) and Oregon or Washington (16/1,912). Sixty seven confirmed reactive (67/5,477, 1.2%) donations were collected between December 30, 2019, and January 17, 2020, from residents of Massachusetts (18/5,477), Wisconsin or Iowa (22/5,477), Michigan (5/5,477), and Connecticut or Rhode Island (33/5,477).”

Other examples exist demonstrating that SARS-COV-2 was circulating in various countries around the world prior to confirmation of its existence coming out of China. As time unfolds, it is likely we will get a fuller picture of what this circulation looked like, but we can safely presume that if there are antibodies within people on various continents in December of 2019, that circulation of the virus would have begun months prior to that. And we point this fact out, again, to emphasize that there was likely no lockdown measure that could have been implemented to snuff out the virus, as it had already gotten such an incredible head start.

On Principle

As anarchists, there are principles we return to as guiding stars in the dark night of the unknown, and these include freedom, autonomy, consent, and a deep belief in the ability of people to self-organize for their maximum benefit as individuals and as communities. No one knows one’s needs better than they do themselves, and truly, most people have self-preservation instincts that cause them to select behaviors that lead to their own safety and survival, as well as that of those they care for.

At the outset of the pandemic, when information was scant, we very much witnessed people making choices to distance themselves from crowds and gatherings they did not believe were essential, while they also began efforts to support and care for those who might be more vulnerable to a circulating respiratory illness that did not have well established treatment courses within the medical field.

While we welcome information and data, even that which is unpleasant, that describes the continually unfolding circumstances, we also believe that people need to be trusted to analyze that information. The current paradigm has the state and their selected technocratic experts filtering the available data and only highlighting that which supports the policy decisions they already decided to implement without any public input. Information and analysis that can be considered “good news” has been largely ignored by the state and their technocrats, while also being blacked out by the media.

“Experts” can always be found to justify horrors. Indeed, we would likely be hard pressed to find a case in recent history in which massive crimes against humanity did not come packaged with a stamp of approval from some consortium of experts whom everyone else was asked to blindly trust. The Covid19 pandemic is no different, and as anarchists we just ask that you remember that debate, critique, and dissent are all essential components of societies that value liberation and autonomy. We ask that whatever you decide about the efficacy of lockdown measures, that you recognize no situation, no matter how dire it may seem, warrants edicts from on high that use the threat of force and violence to accomplish their aims.

Our steadfast commitment to human autonomy, and to our belief that no authority is valid without the consent of those it is exercised over, is what makes anarchism a thing apart from other political philosophies. We will not abandon this commitment, and hope that you will not either.

There are 19 Comments

I like this piece as much as anything I've found in English about covid, and definitely the most diplomatic and compassionate one I've found directed at anarchists who are onboard with state responses (or who think governments aren't being authoritarian enough). I don't have much hope for it to change many minds at this point in the game, but it can't hurt to be eloquently sincere.

That was a U.K.-based collective, this is by a U.S. based long-time Earth First!er. We do appreciate the work of the South Essex Heckler, though. They called it way back in the Spring and I think that they've been proven right.

No, this is a new piece, just published on Montreal Counter Info in advance of Saturday's anti-curfew demonstration.

As if govt. the state etc, can't operate on several levels at once. But let's back up. What is a self? A body? What is autonomy? What is an individual? Does the air I breathe only belong to me? The assumptions in this article are steeped in 19th century binary thinking, that there are individuals that end at the skin, and only include humans (humanity also being a fraught category). Covid is much more than a virus affecting humans. It's the last (or latest) effect of a global system of human white supremacy, of the impoverishment of natural environments, the encroachment of civilization into places we shouldn't be.
The virus is a message, a visit, from the more-than-human.
Can government spin this to its advantage? Of course. And as this article points out, they are. Still, all of us are flying blind, they want to keep the system operational and in the short term that coincides with keeping us alive. But we, anarchist and authoritarian alike, we all are trapped in this horrible machine and it is bleeding to death.
Do governments lie? Yes, this is obvious. But, you, individualist, doing whatever you want whenever you want is a major factor in the ship that sailed us to this shore.

"a global system of human white supremacy"

Fuck off, IDpol!

People all too easily default to claims like, "we failed because too many of the others were not true radicals" or "we failed because the movement was too white and male and middle-class" or "we failed because there's no way we can fight the state with its overwhelming power" or "we failed because we tried to act on things outside our control". These kinds of responses are either melancholic (self-flagellation of ego by superego) or a blame-game corrosive of further cooperation. While we need to question previous assumptions of our strength and any compromises made to ally with non-anarchists, it's much more helpful to think that we *could* have won, but came up against some contingent hurdle which we need to make sense of and find a way around, over, through, etc. For example, high-tech police surveillance was a new threat in the 2000s, and often seemed to make revolt impossible, but it's already being countered with new innovations and there's much more potential to develop new counter-technologies. First off, you have no idea if I'm Indigenous, Black, White, Hispanic, I could be a fucking Martian or a dog with good keyboard skills for all you know. You also don't know if I'm in America, Europe, Russia, South America, or motherfucking Christmas Island. So quit cramming everything into tiny little boxes. Second, the relationship between drop-outs moving to an area and poor people already living there is not necessarily conflictual. It often is, but not always. The Zapatistas were urban Mestizas who moved to a remote Indigenous area and yeah they "brought guns" but I don't think you can call that colonisation. Nor the "tri-racial isolate" communities, nor the Maoist Long March, nor the Beghards migrating eastward en masse. We'd have to be especially careful about colonising and gentrifying if white European or American activists were moving to the global South, though even then, I wouldn't call the Atlantis commune or Jonestown "colonisation". Most often anarchists would have common concerns with existing locals in terms of improving quality of life in a subsistence or petty commodity setting, and fighting commodification and elite land grabs. & there isn't a race question in that case but I understand Tarnac got on pretty well with local farmers. The biggest problem would not so much be locals as not getting massacred by pigs, soldiers, paramilitaries or gangs IMO. Thirdly, in Europe the normal pattern for land projects is that people either squat or buy cheap land in areas which are depopulated. Fourthly, I think the biggest source of colonisation and commodification at the moment is self-colonisation by elite/middle-class members of racialised groups importing "global" capitalist patterns, who become leaders or figureheads of the less-integrated members of the group and come to define what is desirable within the group in dominant Eurocentric terms. A lot of these are "dewesternisers", meaning they explicitly reject colonialism, Eurocentrism, whiteness and so on but still imitate them with a view to outdoing the colonisers at their own game. In India for example, there's far less colonisation involving free-party types who move to beach huts in Goa or wherever, than the type which comes from aggressive "modernisation" by the Hindu-communalist government: demonetisation, population registries, land registries, crackdowns on "encroachers", attacks on social movements, big development projects, "smart city" plans, etc.

Since you think I was speaking to you directly imma just gonna go ahead and assume you are a white bro.

But I stopped reading your screed after "So quit cramming everything into tiny little boxes" as if white supremacy is a tiny box. I'm white and calling what we got white supremacy is hardly controversial and not about idpol. It's about seeing correctly what is directly in front of us. We are all still living in the afterlife of slavery and if you can't see how that shit is bad for all of us white and Black, then dang.

I know you’re going to say that I have a “rugged muhrica” concept of individualism, Nettle. And there may even be a grain of truth to that.

However, I find this pomo-style thought experiment of enlarging the concept of self to encompass an entire group to be... kinda sketchy/culty, tbh. Something that only people with a really low sense of self-esteem would go for as well as a minority of rhetorically-adept manipulators who know a good mark of broken human when they see one. The self-worth of people who believe in this stuff is such that they only feel powerful and valuable if they’re part of a group, and supposedly, these are the true individualists...

Do you get all your exercise jumping to conclusions?

So cute how you go from accusing me of ad hominem but then just jump in with all the ad hominem juice. Sigh.

Not to mention, why do you hide behind the faux-ignorant misspelling of America? Do you think that will insulate you from the consequences of those policies? Do you think rugged American individualism has nothing to do with current property relations, that those relationships of and to property are not part and parcel of the dispossession of and destruction of native lands? Or of ongoing white supremacy?

As to what is a self, ask your gut flora about that.

dear gut flora,

how does it feel to live in my shit?
i mean, excuse me, (y)our shit.

sincerely,

big thunk dividualist

Those are interesting points. I’m a little skeptical but am open to hearing out those arguments in a more elaborated form tho I suspect I would still disagree with you. No doubt the all-american image of the gritty gunslingin lonely cowboy ridin into town representing a life unincorporated by statist machinery appeals to me and certainly influences my individualism on some level tho I’m not sure how it contributes proactively to colonialism or wtv lol. I’m just saying that almost every instance of the “enlightened” sense of the enlarged self put into practice that I’ve come across seems to produce very unhealthy codependent relationships veering on the culty-side.

Where, exactly, was this " all-american (image of the) gritty gunslingin lonely cowboy ridin into town representing a life unincorporated by statist machinery " riding into? Empty land? A land unpopulated by already existing lifeways? I mean, yes, awesome you want to live outside the (western, European ) state mode, good on you. Does that mean the place you encroach upon is without its own logic / rules / modes? The people and flora and fauna, the landscape itself is always already entangled in their / its own mode of living. Does your cowboy see this? Or does your cowboy believe he knows better how to be, how to live on this land, with these already existing people, better than they do?

Colonization is also bringing your sense of what freedom means into a place that already has its own sense of freedom and you thinking yours is superior.

The hypothetical spaghetti western saddletramp individualist who just goes from place to place, meeting ppl, getting into adventures, etc. is a non-entity for colonization esp. if living outside the template of normal society. The real problem is the stateification, institutionalization and capitalization of a place. There’s a difference between the saddletramp and, say, Abraham Lincoln laying down railroad tracks over indian land to build the industrial economy.

The myth of the lone cowboy I agree is mostly that, a myth. On the other hand, it's not as if this mythical/real person was just out on a stroll, just visiting as it were. Nope, this real enough person and the myth he brought with him was a settler. Maybe not entirely intentionally, the way groovy whites move to the city to make art and take advantage of cheap rent, until the gallery owners and landlords get hip and next thing you know, no more blacks and poc in the neighborhood.
Nope, this person-myth brought his culture and disease to the land, where, I guess I need to say again, there were always already people and life-ways. How do you think the establishment was able to build those railroads? The lone escapee or cowboy or saddletramp got there first with his theory of Individualism and his ideas about Property, staked his claim and welcomed the rest of the whites when they got there after him.
There is a difference between having an adventure and then going back to where you came from and venturing out into the world and staying, bringing your worldview with you, overtaking who & what was already there.

You are very confused and missing the point like most Idpol folks.

Technological system, civilization, whatever you name it, does not care if you are white black red green male female or whatever. Those struggles were already incorporated. The goal is to make us all slaves of this megamachine.

This piece is amazing btw. I’m very, very glad to see anarchists coming out with this sort of material and calling the whole narrative into question. It took a minute, but it’s better late than never. Thanks so much to the author. Stay safe, comrade. You’re not alone.

From an Indigenous perspective, it's very disappointing to see the same anthropocentric mantras coming out of anarchists since the beginning of the pandemic. There are consequences to treating the land with disrespect. Modern humans are simply reaping the consequences of their actions and are incapable of viewing them with a critical eye, even in the current context. It's become apparent how the "anti-civ" position which was so prevalent in discourse in the past decades was just a bunch of fashion posturing. Anarchist have no more interest to me.

I'm not sure you understand "anti-civ". Perhaps you're confusing it with academic goofs like DGR and the Dark Mountain Project? Neither of these people are anarchist, jsyk. So I'd like to hear about what are your referents when you talk of "anarchists" and "anti-civ", as you seem to throw a bunch of cheap generalizations around.

Anarchy can only be anti-civ, IMO... in how civilization in itself is an authoritarian construct (and often also totalitarian), and process of domestication and formatting of anything not conforming to whatever its premises are. I can't really think of civlizations that weren't authoritarian in some way.

Regardless of what exactly are your futurist pipedreams, in order to become concrete you'll have to make a lot of people comply with them. I'm too in favor of cool-ass eco-friendly vertical cities, but I recognize what kind of mass politics (and billlions) I'd take to make these become real. So I don't take them very seriously, as this ain't stuff I'll see happening before I die.

Egoistic? Yeah, just like the rest of the mortals. If you want me to think centuries ahead and be more altruistic, gimme gimme immortality.

But no, maybe I ain't too interested after all.

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