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

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]

I take anarchism seriously and Occupations historically have been an important and useful tool in the struggle against state power. When these folks appropriate that term and attach it to whatever the hell they find themselves doing right now, which apparently is having weird parties in boring venues for no reason, i find it irritating.

— bun bun commenting on Updates from The Evergreen State College, Occupied Coast Salish Territories

My co workers and i stopped working at 12 noon today to sit and eat food, smoke cigarettes, drink coffee and bullshit with one another in a temporarily liberated loading dock. liberals, reactionaries, and non-autonomous individuals might call this a lunch break, we prefer to call it a General Strike. Look for our communique shortly!

— bun bun commenting on Updates from The Evergreen State College, Occupied Coast Salish Territories

you had me at being over civilization

— anon commenting on D-FUNK Says, ‘It’s on! to Arizona State University’

this violent direct action is ultimately just a glorified symbolic demonstration that doesn’t actually accomplish anything liberatory (how the fuck is eating your trainer gonna get you or other orcas physically out of your pools and into the ocean?) and is doomed to set the shamu-vement back ten years. The attentat is so turn of last century, whales need to resist and rewild within the confines of the civilized cement pond so that they may leave it one day and return to a state of nonmediated voluptuous wholeness in the sea

— anon commenting on Bash Back!ers in Support of Autonomous Animal Action Call For Trans-Species Solidarity With Tillikum

In fact, the willingness of unarmed activists to battle with heavily armed riot cops, in order to de-arrest people they may have never met before and may never be able to identify, is one of the strongest forms of solidarity I have ever witnessed. We have to be willing to physically protect our own communities, no matter the cost, by any means necessary. This is the type of message that the Black Bloc sends. The point is that we don’t need or want your cops or your capitalist colonial system. The point of such actions is not to convince bystanders or any particular audience to join us in the streets. The point is to put people on notice that there exists active insurrectionary resistance, right here in the belly of the beast.
For Judy Rebick to suggest that Black Bloc tactics “put other people and the issues we are fighting for in jeopardy,” is just preposterous. The mass audiences that dismissed the “Heart Attack” march are consistently the same mass audiences who generally dismiss every form of direct action and every radical cause. Judy may be too used to her celebrity status to notice, but most people aren’t paying attention to start with. So-called “nonviolent direct action”, with rare exceptions, is also summarily dismissed by most people, most of the time. They want us to go through so-called proper channels, not understanding that the system exists to perpetuate itself, not to accommodate change or the empowerment of communities under attack. Begging the government for change merely legitimizes their claim to be the rightful authority over land and people. Too many, enamoured with the cult of nonviolence, have too easily parroted the conservative media narratives that so predictably hamper our movements.
Further, it is not unity under a commitment to a “diversity of tactics” that stifles debate within our movement — that is what we call solidarity. It is a zealous adherence to dogmatic “non-violence” that shuts down any meaningful dialogue. Making Canadians stop and think

— Vancouver: In defence of the diversity of tactics

What is a bad attitude? I’d say it’s a general unwillingness to submit to the conditions of wage-slavery. It’s demonstrated most dramatically in a surly, uncooperative manner on the job, but must usually be more subtle. The worker with a bad attitude is always looking for ways to work less (procrastination, losing things), to surrender less time to the job (coming in late, leaving early, long breaks and lunches, lots of sick days), to further private pleasures and human interaction on the job (talking a lot, smoking dope), and by doing one’s own creative work on the job.
A bad attitude is a fundamentally normal, human response to the utter absurdity of most modern work. It’s a mystery to me why more people don’t demonstrate a bad attitude—i suppose it’s because they fear unemployment and/or lost income and have learned to smile and hide their true feelings. Of course I’ve done that too, and all too often. You can’t get a job in the first place without smiling and lying through your teeth!

— The Making of a Bad Attitude: An Abridged History of my Wage Slavery

But, above all else, in the US every movement must consider carefully how its politics fit into the overall context of white supremacy. But there’s hope: when the system of white supremacy is in crisis — which means that enough crazy motherfucking white people reject their whiteness in solidarity with people of color that the reactionary system can no longer be counted on to undermine class solidarity — amazing things happen. The very explosions insurrectionists desire manifest! The women’s movement emerges. Gender and sexual relations shift. And on and on. Capital becomes weak and stumbles. The Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina sent revolutionary salutations to the Paris Commune. Think about that. The capitalist machine counts on the alliance of whiteness to create within struggles an emergency escape hatch for white people of all classes. This must be refused.
White supremacy may seem quaint and “olde timey” in the age of a Black president, but it’s grip is still on us. It is the cross class alliance that time and time again turns the white working class against what would otherwise be its comrades. It is the knife’s edge of Capital. If the student movement can generalize itself, whatever else it does, it must attack white supremacy head on. This is what will throw the system into crisis. This contradiction is what will build that unstoppable constituency that will overturn Capital.
Think insurrection. Think John Brown. Think Bleeding Kansas. Think solidarity. Death to Capital.

— Some thoughts on the ongoing student struggle from someone who is not a student

What troubles me is the decision of what constitutes one as middleclass. There seems to be a general contempt for anyone who has a mortgage, yet a fetishization of anyone who sweats while they work. Defining those who have a 401k, a mortgage and a family as the petit-bourgeoisie becomes precarious when people realize that unionized autoworkers, welders, coal miners, refinery workers and the like make damn good money. Their fingers are on the pulse and levers of production and their hands are what keeps capitalism churning. Is this the mythical working class of the Marxist stripe? The workers, who once conscious, will seize those very levers and bring the state to a screeching halt? (this is not to reflect my opinion of the hollow concept of consciousness raising, but merely pointing to the mystical image of your average community college certified 22 year old welder)
And how about the poor? Do they fit into this revitalized analysis?
They work service jobs and various other forms of unsteady employment. Even if they went on a classic general strike, occupying their workplaces, all that would be achieved is temporarily halting the service and hospitality industry. They have no bargaining chips like organized essential labor. The levers they hold in their hands are simply to, what is the equivalent of, the electric rear view mirrors of your car. Even if the motor stopped you could just roll down the window and move it with your hands, it just might click a little bit.
So the question remains. If your definition of working class is based on the relationship to production then it must be said that what many people have been calling middle class is, in fact, the working class. If your definition has a salary cap then it must be said that those who work the lower eschalon service jobs do not have the capacity to halt production, which would mean that your perception of revolution must either A) Not come from the working class seizing the means of production, lets face it, 12 baristas taking over Starbucks is useless. B) Come from middleclass as well as working class essential proletarians seizing the means of production.

— Middle Class Is Anyone With An Ipod