The history of civilization is the history of beer. In every era and area untouched by civilization, there has been no beer; conversely, virtually everywhere civilization has struck, beer has arrived with it. Civilization – that is to say, hierarchical social structures and consequent relationships of competition, unbridled technological development, and universal alienation – seems to be inextricably linked to alcohol. Our sages, who look back and ahead through time to see beyond the limits of such pernicious culture, tell a parable about our past to explain this link:
Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are anthropologists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.
This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.

—

The Anarcho-Primitivist case for Straight Edge: Against His-Story, Against Alcoholocaust! [via]

anarcho-primitivists!

idk i guess the idea that its basically impossible to have enough excess grain to cook down and use as a base for alcohol (also: a pretty decent way of storing calories so they don’t spoil) without having some sort of organized cultivation of said grain wasn’t an interesting enough topic for a crimethinc. pamphlet! We obv moved out of the idyllic hunter/gatherer lifestyle only because of the raging alcoholic statists amongst us. Its not like human beings/other animals would have developed reward systems that would encourage us to repeatedly engage in pleasurable behaviors (e.g. consuming alcohol) in that beautiful period before we were domesticated.

A tendency has emerged here in Phoenix that I find very exciting. More and more, as we resist the leftist model, so seductive to others, of building bigger and often disingenuous organizations (instead keeping our relations intimate and small scale), I have found that many of us have converged around a familiar and familial politics that is almost entirely unique in the US. With few exceptions (probably Modesto most notably), a particular strain of class war, race traitor, insurrectionist, and primitivist influenced politics has emerged here. Many anarchists in this town defy conventions, reject orthodoxy and instead take our influences based on what makes sense rather than whatever arbitrary groupings of ideas fall under what predetermined label.
Is it the hot summers? Is it the never-industrialized vastness of the ever-growing suburban wasteland? Phoenix seemed for so long to be like the universe — vast but always somehow getting fucking bigger. A constantly growing behemoth, ever eating up more desert. Is it the proximity to the border? Is it the fact that Arizona was a segregated state? Is it the fact that you can see the horizon from anywhere in town? Or that the sun sets so brilliantly every evening? Is it because Phoenix was built on blood, for white people and to the exclusion of the native peoples who continue to make this area their home? Is it the malls that provided the plastic playgrounds of our youths? Is it the fact that almost no one living here was born here? Is it the waves of conquest, migration, dispossession and expulsion that define our history? To be from Arizona and also older than ten is a rare thing here, even in this age of economic collapse and foreclosed homes.

— There’s no immigration law like no law at all: On revolution as the necessary conclusion of the migrant movement

After all, proper intellectual discussions always involve detachment and rationality. What is rationality? Its a way of approaching emotional matters devoid of sentiment, particularly prized by Privileged People as it enables a continuing inequity of power that favours them: after all, if they arent emotionally attached to the topic by way of Lived Experience, it is easier for them to be rational.

— Derailing for Dummies [via]

Still, the obvious point here is that you can’t communize a freeway. You can only destroy it. But so what? There is much we will need to learn to destroy. We will have to learn to do this well, to shut down the flows and pours of capital and labor. Those who oppose this action on the grounds of a theory of property or value miss the fact that property is not a thing; it’s not matter. It’s a social relation, a form of interaction between people that is mediated by objects and signs. By commodities and commands. The freeway is no less a part of this relation than a university building. At the most abstract level, ours is a world in which there are bodies and there are values. The freeway is an instrument for circulating the former according to the self-expanding imperative of the latter. Buildings have no intrinsic value beyond this circulation – beyond the inbox of bodies and the outbox of values. As such, we must learn to attack not only the immediate place of production but its apparatus of circulation as well. We must learn both to destroy and to emancipate. It’s true that we must create new spaces, new relations, but none of this will happen without a negation of the old. When we shut down, if only for a few hours, the forms of compelled circulation that condition our lives, when we circulate against these forms, running along the freeway with banners and medic kits and black flags, with cheers and megaphones, cries of amazement and fear, we are a little part of the future, a future where all the obstacles to flow have been removed and all the flows have been blocked. I felt that. But yes, shutting stuff down is only one part of it.

— Reflections on the I-980/I-880 Takeover [via]