Bow Drill Friction Fire with Yucca

Here is a quick vid I made today. I have no real camera, so if you read this blog, and have an extra digital camera lying around that captures good audio and video, let me know. If you live in the southern Oregon area, and know how to film shit real cool like, and want to make a series of videos this year, also let me know.

Being John Zerzan -My Time with Anarchy Radio

I have not taken the time to write much down in the way of updates, new thoughts, critiques, or rants lately, and I feel fucking GREAT! I am not sure it is related that I feel great and have not been writing, but why change your socks when you're on a winning streak? On top of my reluctance to write lately, my family has decided to move into a completely off grid tipi in in the woods. It is likely that I will not be taking much time to hike into town just to grab a computer and a wifi hotspot to update my fucking blog. So, I have decided to put up some links to a few radio shows I hosted at the request of John Zerzan in his absence. John has been hosting Anarchy Radio for around a hundred years, and it is my favorite thinng to listen to (besides maybe Alex Jones cause that shit is TOO funny). Seriously though, I have a lot of respect for JZ, love the show, and feel honored to have hosted it a few times. Here are links to some shows from this year:

February 7th 2012
Layla Abdel-Rahim joins myself and friend Will Feral on this show. Great stuff from Layla!!!!

February 21st 2012
Rants, calls and beginnings of FBI raids in PDX.

July 31st 2012
Calls, ranting and furtherance of FBI raids in PDX.

John is regulary on Tuesday nights at 7 PM pacific time. Find the archive links and link to live show at www.johnzerzan.net


I will find time occasionally to post new stuff on here. In the meantime, I will be emailing, so if you want to be in touch: primalwarmonger [at] g mail (dot) com

Also, the archives from the two hour weekly green anarchist radio show B.U.R.N. that I hosted for some time are still up at Blogtalkradio.com. You can listen to all of those shows, with guests such as John Zerzan, Jeff "Free" Luers, Ashanti Allston, Layla Abdel Rahim and more at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/burnradio

Calling Out Brian Sheppard

Reading Brian Sheppard's half-cocked analysis of Anarcho-Primitivism, by way of Bakunin ¹, has been beneficial to me for at least one reason; it has reminded me of the garbage that is created by those so content with civilized living. Holding anti-civ ideas has become a bit less marginalized in the past few years, but that bit is not much in the scheme of things. Any credit to the larger understanding of AP critiques is not due so much to it's philosophers such as John Zerzan, Kevin Tucker, or Layla Abdel-Rahim, as to civilization itself, playing out it's destined course fully into the dark chasms it creates. One only need take a half honest look at the world we are creating to see the potable water disappear, the forests fall to more subdivision housing, the mountain tops blasted into tiny bits. The trend of hydraulic fracking has all but re-colonized the western states of Wyoming and Colorado with a new agriculture of refineries sprouting up across the already endangered landscape, as well as the entirety of the eastern “shale” regions. The whole world is held in the grasp of war, or near-war for those places not yet embroiled, which are numbering fewer and fewer by the month. As oil wars take over one nation, water wars erupt in another, land wars nearly everywhere, and the honing of the gunships of technology are even bringing the wars to our very bodies with man made super viruses, just waiting for their time to be unleashed. All sounds pretty bleak, I know, and those primitivist philosophers I mentioned, as well as the many I did not, could all collectively utter a great “i told you so”, if we'd think it'd matter. But, it won't. Not because people wouldn't care, but that they wouldn't hear.

Those in the west who hold primitive critiques of civilization are still viewed as mostly unimportant by the left, while those from as of yet “developed” regions are simply not viewed at all by leftists, liberals and their ilk. This is, of course, not to say that the ideas and those who write them are unimportant, no, no. This is to say that the leading minds in the business of progress are in control of the discussion and seek to benefit from our further domestication, and therefore the funding and exposure to such minds as a Bill Gibbons or a Chris Hedges is more readily available. Even some folks who posture to sit on the fringes of radical thought, such as Derrick Jensen, are tolerable to the dominant culture, if only to offer a ponder at temporary halts to the onslaught of colonization that is technocracy, ever dancing around the roots of civilization and striking at the façade to entice those who may wish to delve deeper, back into the shallow pool of thought. Changing your lightbulbs and voting in local elections is still the most creative solutions that abound, and for good reason. The problem they are solving is how to get better wattage use and how to harness local political power. The problem primitivists are looking at is the very basis for those structures of power themselves. Power dynamic is a much discussed but rarely inspected phenomena of civilization. It is discussed in-so-far-as we abhor the wielding of power of the bosses, teachers, and preachers over our heads, but left without inspection each time we flip on the lights at the vegan cafe to better read dead philosophies of bygone revolutionaries to each other. The real power dynamic there is never discussed; the power of thousands of guns pointed at any one moment to secure the stores of grain, soy and water for such things as vegan cupcakes or the power of enslaved and berated rivers to fuel our electricity dependence. Those powers are seemingly acceptable expenditures and the cost of life of the bio-regions and all of it's inhabitants is a penance to the glory of industrial, fair-trade faux food. While examining domestication and civilization itself won't be as easy as unionizing your starbucks, BS, it may very well be not only the intuitive path, but also the logical and rational path for any radical. Let's pick out some of the BS critiques to better illustrate what we are up against. I want to make this clear though, that while I am going to be addressing, at least in part, the particular BS writing against primitivism, I will not limit my disdain of academic garbage polity to just this one writer(?). This is not an attack on BS alone, but leveled against the slew of ignorant idealizations of primitivist thought, as if there were a specific type of thought that can be deemed “primitivist” definitively. It seems that, as far as I can find, the only half decent critique of AP ideas that is out there in the world of print is one that is brought by an anti-civ prisoner, Theodore Kaczynski². Uncle Ted has his own views about some AP writers and their ideas, but overall, seems unconcerned with any strain of thought in particular, outside of his views that technological civilization, in it's entirety, need be brought down. As of yet, the arguments against anti-civ ideals from the syndicalist perspective consist of cupcakes and piecemeal critiques, dependent upon dishonest evaluations and outright lies. The cupcake argument is the only one that actually holds any water for me. I would whole-heartedly welcome a thought out critique that actually engages the ideas, not simply evades them.

Upton Sinclair quipped that “it is impossible to make a man see something that his paycheck depends upon him not seeing it.” It must then follow that BS would hide from any threat to the institutions of industry, being that he is a proud purveyor of it. Being a member of the I.W.W., a relic left hanging on from the bygone days of worker's unions that passed when the workers gave in to the inevitable takeover of technocrats, it is clear that his paycheck is nestled firmly over his eyes. How else would it be possible for a person who makes radical claims of equality to ally themselves with the machines that segregate and destroy the world? The first point of this drab rehashing of Bakunin's ideologies is to condescendingly scoff at primitivists as today's “romantic, anti-society sect.” Fair enough, coming from today's colonizer whose imagination has given over to the workings of organizing toothless rallies and color coded protests, I would say I am most definitely a romantic by comparison. I romanticize to great lengths. I romantically view the world of full days and fuller nights, without clocking in to a shit job, where-in my mind is ground down and my emotions are spent. Of course, I would not expect an organizer to necessarily understand exactly how taxing manual labor can be, but I can tell you that the world is a much more romantic place once the noose of labor has been severed, so long, of course, as you don't happen to reside in the natural gas fields the workers put in, or the mountains that the workers removed the tops of, or on the bay where the workers spilled massive amounts of toxic chemicals to disperse the massive amounts of toxic chemicals they spilled yesterday. If you don't happen to live in those places, it is a wonderfully romantic world to inhabit. I am happy to spend my time with my family, in the willow withed river valleys of Cascadia, until the workers finish her off too (not without a fight). But to use the term romantic as a derisive thing? Would it be fair play to note that there is nothing more romanticized than to expound the dead words of pro-state “revolutionary” as one's own way of understanding? A romantic view of revolutionaries? In the social anarchist milieu? Perish the thought!

To say that I am anti-society would be a mixing of words that just may apply, but does not have too. If by society, BS calls upon the concrete laden valleys of death and filth that function as the inner workings of a great clock, much like the one that controls it's very movement, then yes, most certainly would I be “anti-society”. It's inhabitants are of the most confused and angry animals in existence, and I speak to this as a product of it, not a mere throwing of words towards a world of which I know little. The rivers are clogged by artifices of depletion, forcing all species who inhabit them to either conform to the maze of confusing channels and make due without vital resources once freely available, or die. The open lands where grazing herds once meandered are fenced and poisoned into obsolescence, contributing more to the destruction of land, and all of it's inhabitants, than we may ever know. If this is the BS society, then who would not be opposed to it? Who would choose to labor away as a cog in the machine of the mundane if there was a way to opt out? Not many do. Alcoholism and escapertainment reign in the cities, giving brief moments of respite to the lonely animals who have been removed from their own nature. Distraction is a linchpin to urban development. If any self realization, or actualization is attained, it is quickly swept under the rug of consumerism and mesmerizing light shows of strip mall psychosis. There are entire industries dedicated to simply manufacturing the desires for this modern life, and without these industries, it is doubtful that modernity would wake with the sun tomorrow. The workers that BS deludes to represent are not full of brotherly and sisterly love, all through the commonality of calluses earned for the cause of the great society. They are more often segmented and dissociated individuals, filled to the lip with anxieties and disorders, all quenched with poisons and pills. The city is their mother and her milk is the refuse of the machines. The dystopic promises of industry are fulfilled here. Daily news reports of homicides fill the pages of every paper. School shootings and sexual violence are rampant, and these in the institutions where the workers ship their children off to learn to become workers. The disconnect is furthered by the technological society's “tools for communication”. Texting has replaced conversation while tweeting removes the responsibility of response. “Friendship” means little more than a superficial connection of avatars in a virtual world of advertisements. If it isn't “updated” it did not happen. Our attention span is rivaled in it's shortcomings only by our grasp of our ancestral story. Our entire societal structure is formed around the central, organizing force of militarism, with every technological advancement, from computers to food additives to fertilizers all having passed through the hands of the military first, most of which were developed specifically for military use! The advent of capitalism found a way to make wars not only profitable, but enjoyable for the masses. Capitalism is not the enemy of this society, only an instrument, a technique if you will, brandished as a weapon both by and on itself. To say one is simply opposed to capitalism is to say very little in the face of the realism of industrial living.

Capitalism did not invent the war on our freedom, it only made it more acceptable to the enslaved and more profitable to the slave-masters. It is, in fact, society itself that is it's own enemy, ever creating the crisis to advance into new colonies of our very psyche. According to the logic of BS, or is it Bakunin, hard to say when one uses solely the words of another to represent themselves who exactly I should address, at any rate, according to the dogma laid out before us, we should be not opposed to the state or to capitalism, rather we should seek to transform the state and use “the technological advances of capitalist society but jettisoned its oppressive social forms otherwise.” We must then be grateful for capitalism, according to this apparently non-radical, by it's own submissions, view. BS goes on to say “Despite what is outwardly claimed, a look at the underpinnings of primitivist ideas reveals that the ideology is predicated upon a set of beliefs inconsistent with any goals of increasing human freedom, happiness or equality.” but fails to ever show us those dark underpinnings, rather glides past this daft statement to comfort us with the happy society promisings of industry revolutionized to fit the mold of social anarchist party plans. He assures us all that in accordance with what he would later call “true and worthy” anarchism that it explicitly is not “ to damn the abstraction of "consumer/ industrial/ modern society" and advocate that "society and its institutions be destroyed" as many passionate young primitivist rebels do. The solution is to work for revolutionary social change so that society may hold true to its promise of helping fully develop humanity's latent potentialities.” But later comes at us with “ in order for revolutionaries was not the destruction of "society" as such, but rather the destruction of the modern form of society, to be replaced with a newer form”. Okay BS, which is it? Do you wish to avoid the “abstractions” of modern society, or maintain it? At one point you say that it is certain unfavorable elements of modern society that make it so oppressive, and without those elements, it would be the highest form of human existence, but then say that it is NOT the abstractions of this society, or modernity, that need be focused on, at least not for the “real” revolutionaries. I am spinning here, anyone else dizzy?

I can only think that BS is attempting to be coy with his clever twisting of the voided, colonialist writings of Bakunin as a sort of metaphor for his own sense of entitlement being threatened here.

Engage, not Escape

In the section referring to primitivists as some imaginary group of individuals hell-bent on solitary living, BS uses this loaded quote of Bakunin's; "Imagine a man endowed with the most inspired powers by nature,cast out from all human society into a desert since infancy. If he does not miserably perish, which is the most probable result, he will become nothing but a boor, an ape, lacking speech and thought ...”

Now, one could speculate that either BS falls for the exceptional-ism of Bakunin's trite, racist belief, or that he is so endowed with a love for this man that he chooses to simply ignore the ramifications of such a quote to fill space in his rather vapid critique. I am sure that the multitudes of people indigenous to desert regions would find much lacking in the understanding of Bakunin's critique, and would be quite appalled to be objectified as “boors” or “apes”. Of course, Bakunin would not be the first to do this to them, as it is a foundation of western expanse, which is not, incidentally, an expanse of capitalism, rather an expanse of industrialism and civilization. The one uses the words to laugh off any serious discussion, the latter uses them to commit genocide. Ah, but it is us, the primitivists, who resemble the aristocracy, right?

BS goes on to comment that solitude is a punishment within society. This is interesting, because if one were to look at the primitivist cannon, I cannot find one that lauds seclusion, or “lone-wolfing” it, as an answer to anything! In TK's critique of Anarchoprimitivism, he mentions often his own experience of living alone in the wilderness, and the hardships that that choice entailed. What is not discussed, when BS mentions TK as this ribald madman who hates all social contact, is that he paid dearly for this choice. TK makes note that the amount of time and energy that he expounded to gather and hunt food was nearly all consuming. What TK, himself, does not focus on is that we, humans, are social creatures, as most every species is. We are dependent upon cooperation to sustain ourselves, and that shared effort is a building point of our contentedness in our environment. It is through shared experiences that we were able to adapt to changing climate, harsh weather, dietary shifts and travel. TK was neither partnered with a band of humans with whom to share the duties of living in the wild, nor was he equipped with the lifetime of skills and knowledge of the environment he chose. He was, in many ways, so cast out by the thought of modern society, that he could not stand the prospect of rebuilding differently while allowing modernity to maintain it's wrath upon the world. He chose to take up an active battle against it, to engage in the fight, and not to merely escape, as BS alludes. If we look at the living bands of gatherer-hunter people today, we see strong ties to community and relationship, but not the binding forces of hierarchy to maintain them. It is only through these relationships have these people survived and held onto the way of life that has been inherent to them since time immemorial.

BS speaks of the punishment of seclusion, but offers nothing to answer the institutionalization of such measures of ostracising that is so entwined with domestication and magnified in industrial society. It is only present in these (civilized) communities, the ability to hold onto such means of survival that entire populations can be imprisoned for any length of time. Even if raids and battles ensue between less complex societies, it would be not only detrimental but nearly impossible to sustain slavery and imprisonment. Prisoners must be fed and slaves must be chained. In a nomadic society, the prospect for this is very much diminished, let alone the incentive of it. What incentive is it for one group to enslave another, if the very population of the group in question is itself fluid and based upon voluntary association? This voluntary community makes little space for dominance or ownership of anything, let alone populations of other beings. It is relationship itself that sustains these populations, coupled with ancestral knowledge and skill-sets that, not only are freely shared amongst the group, but are also unmatched in the civilized world.

When one speaks of avoidance or destruction of society, that does not equate to the destruction of all relationship, and in fact, works towards the opposite. The most lonely animals in the world are in our cities. They are the alienated, the dispossessed, the despised wretches of the very society that BS seeks to uphold as their only hope. If any parallels are to be drawn here, one may find much bolder lines connecting Bakunin to the Bible than primitivists to the aristocracy. Let's look at Bakunin's understanding of man being born somehow failed, and only through the benefit of western civilization can man ever hope to find a path towards unleashing his “latent potentiality”, as BS puts it. We are sinners! All of us, and we must come out form our “savage” places and through our labour will we be redeemed! Never to return to the ignorance of savagery, but forthright into the bosom mass society! Back to work! For Bakunin to have spent a great bit of energy focusing on the destruction of the God ideology, he certainly seeks to maintain the religiosity of the language. This is no surprise though, as he, Bakunin and BS I suppose, long to keep the reigns of civilization firmly grasped so as to simply change it's course to one more favourable to their ideals, no matter what we had to do to get there, or what we will have to do to stay.

When we begin to shed the blinders of civilized control, we begin to see the world opening in a way we haven't seen since childhood. That child's view is now under attack with technology racing to ease us into social existence from the moment we are born. A child whom has had little or no exposure to television, video games, junk foods and compulsory schooling has a vastly different world outlook than those in their peer group that have. I know this because I have two children, and because of that, my community consists of other families and varying styles of living. The children with a more socially acceptable, modern home-life, are diagnosed, doped up, shipped off, shut down, shut up, and shitbagged. It is not that their parents are wicked tyrants with a penchant for torture, at least not in the scope of modern societal norms. No. They are busy workers, with ambitions and deadlines, and progress forbid that a thing like children are going to gum up their works. So, the kids are given the best institutions money can buy. Anxiety disorders are striking as young as three years old, with the cure not being the removal of disastrous elements, but the advancement of them in the form of pharmaceuticals. Obesity is as rampant in 9 year old children as is the counter of anorexia. Our children are starving, and some with very full stomachs. They are starving for the freedom that every animal is born into, and only domesticated ones lack. When the blinders come off, though, it is not so much the living forests, or breathing plains that catch our views, as it is the disgusting outcrop of “society”. We see the poisons passed off as food, the rivers gasping for breath under the assault of agri-chemicals, the roe deer with patchy hair, dying of cancers whose distributor are the natural gas fields. We don't see our true nature so quickly as we see our false surroundings. Of course we would want to escape! No sane creature would stay in these places by choice. It is a matter of force that domestication takes it's hold. Stay, be tortured and dehumanized, but eat. Go, and surely suffer the fate of a boorish ape who lacks thought. I have to ask who is the escape artist? To be so removed from the very functions of yourself that you would choose to remain a slave to it's whims than to face your own nature and do something about it? It is not escape from life that primitivism looks for, but the engagement of it. This way of life is built upon the very function of escape, for without that pressure valve, this society would not stand. When one can live their entire life without ever having gathered their own food for a meal, the level of escapism must be recognized as staggering, but worse than that, we have entire populations that do just that, coupled with the amount of people who live in single person homes and claim to have little or no real life friends outside of the virtual world of their computer life, I think we can see further what we mean by escapism.

The genocide of thought.

The average plate of food, in the U.S. travels over 1,800 miles, some as far as 8,000 miles, just to arrive on the table. The food is sourced from countries with populations of starving humans high enough that starvation is pandemic, yet, it is primitivists who are referred to as genocidal. There is rarely a critique of primitivism that does not, in some fashion, refer to the primitivist critique as anti-human with an urge to depopulate the planet by force. We are often told that, if we were to return to that “ignorant and brutal” state of living of hunter-gatherer bands, that we would not be able to feed the current populaton levels. No shit. You can't feed the world as it is, with all of your wonders of science and communication and agriculture, agrarian societies are starving, war-torn ecological disaster zones. But that doesn't seem to matter so much when the people suffering are “savages” who don't have cell phones. The groups that sociologists find to be the over all most content, healthy peoples, just happen to be the last of the remaining gatherer-hunter populations of the world. They are also the most endangered peoples, as their land is being torn away by industries and governments, in the name of modernity and progress. Funny how that works. Not so much. What is funny, though, is that a person who refers to uncivilized beings as “boors” and “savages” by quoting his historical comrade cannot for a moment stop to consider what genocides have occurred, how they occurred and for what purpose. Of course, according to BS, we would just be idealizing past peoples couching them in “mystic symbolism” to remark to the overall health and well being pre-contact with industrious purveyors of progress.

“It is the liberty of the primitivist rebel who looks backward, to the past of human history, for liberation, rather than forward.” says BS, as he parleys writings over a hundred years old to prove this point. So, at this point, we reach a give in. We must accept, according to BS, that it is a given that the world accept this way of life that it is so clearly revolting against. To question the roots of the problems and to find possible reparations for our lives, is to be a romantic who looks backward. Pardon me for asking, BS, but is not the entire concept of radical thinking to delve deeper into the root of something? If you can, follow me for a moment into the future of industry, and let's figure out where and how freedom comes from within society and not without.

We currently have the highest, per capita, prison population in the world. The prison system was conceived after the northern expanse of banking controlled capital usurped the southern chattel slavery economy. This represented a “revolution” for future leftists to tout as a war for freedom, the civil war, and doubly represented the ingenuity of mass society to maintain it's firm hold on the throats of world. Indigenous peoples here have seen, more than anyone, the promises of freedom through civilizing, but it unfortunately came with a “kill the indian, save the man” program. Alcohol and casinos, cheap processed sugary foods and diabetes are in the deck now. You would put forth that to even question the present by inspecting the past is a useless endeavor. The inability to question is, if not a foundation of civilization, most certainly a major tenement of order required to maintain civilized living. Social organization cannot sustain inspection if it is to be effective. This holds true in groups that seek to profit from the status quo, as well as groups who may very well claim to detest it and seek to undermine it, alter it, or shift it. Anything short of the goal of total dismantlement of mass society imbues the participant with an untenable set of social mores, either spelled out in charters and manifestos or, more often;unspoken. The esoteric sensation of elitism that this secret set of rules formulates is apparent in nearly any revolutionary or subcultural movement. The Marxist movements of recent past to present day show a clear-cut list of principles, with work being the gold and the worker the goose, but what when supposed radical organizations are not so clear? Enter Social Anarchism.

To call social anarchists an organization may have been a stretch at one time, the pantechnicon of the internet has most definitely moved the spectacle into this phase of understanding. I suppose I should describe what I mean by a “social anarchist”. If given to the BS definition of the anarchist, we would be told that anarchism, as a political philosophy, began around a hundred and thirty years ago, with a force of working class peasants and pissed off Princes (kropotkin), rebelling against harsh work conditions and lobbying in favor of a more egalitarian society. I stress the word more, because no worker's movement could ever take themselves seriously if they volleyed for a totally egalitarian society, now could they? What with division of labor and production at the helm, equality just takes a back seat. Social anarchists of today tend to accept this view, and have a narrowed sense of what resistance to oppression is. Sure, most academically understand the history of genocide of indigenous peoples, but that is exactly where the understanding stagnates, as a historical act. Most see gender equality as a right in the workplace, but fail to question either gender as a mandate or work as an institution! The social anarchist of today is angry about a whole lot but not willing to question very much about it. Well, the anger is warranted, and more anger is to come, rightfully so, but the end goal can never be liberation if the end goal includes mass society in any form. The worker's paradise will be the grave of us all. Industry mounts and morphs into technocracy, creating as it's end goal a singularity.Looking towards one world so mechanized and streamlined that questions of equality are no where to be found, but every slave is equal on the plantation, and the plantation is all encompassing. With technology and biology merging, we are seeing entire populations of living beings under strict supervision, not from without, but from within. It sounds like science fiction, but what part of science is not a fiction? What part of science is not merely man made answers to man made questions? You can say we have “advanced” culturally because we no longer say that fire is demons escaping from burning pyres of wood, and now “know” that it is “really” carbon. I say that carbon is a funny name for your demon.

As the spectacle learns from itself, we begin to see the ebb and flow of insurrection and organization, with the two rarely, if ever, allying. In the famed riots of recent history, we see street clashes between not only the cops and rioters, but amongst the factions of rioters themselves. Liberal organizers most often side with, and even work directly with state apparati to control the un-controlables. Organizers of marxist/communist ilks are too busy hocking The Socialist Appeal at a buck a piece to even take part, while would-be red armies are busy shouting down a Starbucks manager instead of smashing the Starbucks to bits. The truly free people are most often the disorganized, decentralized groups in the blocs, and out of, who cannot be held to account, cannot be forced into line, and will not be paraded through the streets led through red ropes of police escorts. That is the only hope for freedom that day, in the smoke of burning police cars and amongst the sea of shattered glass. Then, of course, it is back to the drag, until the next time. Many social anarchists then get to return to the academies to write reports for Mother Jones, where-in they vilify the chaotic actions, those liberated from the confines of scheduling and meetings, and champion the supposed disobedience of those who gleefully allowed themselves to be carted of in handcuffs for the cameras. This is their great insurrection? Submission? No thank you. Then the upsurge of economic crisis hits again and those less content with jobs and schools or demands begin to rise up, only to have a few memorable actions before the hordes of organizers, like vultures to carrion, swoop in to “lead the people”. Lead them right back to where they so urgently fought to escape. All the while, the social anarchist looks with head shaking at the bad press that anarchy receives, and truly hope to redeem the good name by playing pretty for the papers, denouncing insurrectionist actions and distancing themselves from any resistance in their back yards, while proudly touting the fair trade, eco friendly brand name of t-shirt with the EZLN print on the front. The ebb forgives, and swells again, and any small gains made “for the people” only truly strengthen the systems of control. Reform is exactly as it says, a re-form of power. To say these words in many a infoshop may get you nods of approval, until you start to elaborate on exactly what this means. The end of capitalism is a reform. Socialism is reform, at best, and still statist. Communism is control. Veganism is a reform. Unionizing is reform. Process is a reform, and barely one at that, more of a microcosm of social power brandishing. The question of how to reshape modernity to fit their ideals is not such a hard one to address, simply because their ideals already fit within the foundations of this society so well. The adulation of work ethic, the sacrifice of the self for the greater good, the divine right to land use for agriculture and industry, the demonizing of wildness, the glorifying of organization, all typical attributes to the syndicalist and all very much acceptable to the construct of modernity. The rhetoric used to push these ideals is little more than parroting of the same few voices over time, with amazing articulation but little to no depth. It is easy to get cached responses, but nearly impossible to enter into debate or even discourse on these ideals.

Before KT's debacle of a debate with a syndicalist last year, I had approached a certain cafe who proudly displays the red and black jack on their store front, menus, merchandise, print and electronic versions of their meeting notes (yes, extreme boredom.com) along with a circle a on their window, about hosting a series of green and red debates. I thought this would be an engaging, at times explosive, other times hilarious series to attend or participate in. We could hash out disparities between the two group's ideologies, possibly finding overlap in areas that we can agree on and definitely defining certain areas that we will not. Now, this certain “radical” cafe very much makes the apparition of being anarchist in origins, but when approached about hosting these events, it was not even offered up to “the collective” for discussion, rather it was shut down immediately by a “fellow worker”. That is not the shocking part. I am never shocked to see syndicalists cower away from defending their ideas, precisely because most of the ideas are not their ideas.

The party plan of socialist/communist thinking is engrained in the rhetoric and implementation of programs, to the point where many social anarchists see the ideas of anarchy solely the intellectual property of a few philosophers, always ready at arms with quotes and “historical” precedence. Of course, the “history” is short and narrowly focused in a bias that rivals any of their right wing counterparts, looking always to reaffirm the hard line of worker based culture. If you disagree with the processes, well, there is a process to deal with that as well. Basic human communications are wrenched to fit into established paradigms, with no understanding of circumstances, differing of opinions or experiences. If I were to ask to hold a series of discussions surrounding the revolutionary writings of (insert famous dead anarchist philosopher here) , I am sure it would have been accepted or at the very least discussed. One of the many games of both the right and left, that is to say the entire power structure itself, is to lead each other down a road of academic competitions, designed to triumph not with ideas, but with regurgitation and rationale. Rationale, the rationing of thought.

The shocking part was not that it is impossible to defend such ideas as egalitarian industrial complex, nor that one would not want to be forced to confront it. The truly disgusting reason given cam when I was told, in no uncertain terms, “not all of our customers are anarchist, so to host an explicitly anarchist event would possibly turn away business”. Raise that red and black flag high! This is to show the mentality that is required to hold such conflicting views as liberation and work. The anarchist cafe could not afford to host anarchist discussions because their clientele may not be anarchist. Here's a news flash. Neither is your cafe, so don't sweat it. I am not assuming that the people who work at, or congregate at these spaces are not anarchists. I am sure many are. I am saying that the space; the safer space, the “liberated” space, the “cop free” space, the vegan only space, is not inherently anarchist. It is not because of the processes or institutionalized programs that the “collective” has put into place that I say the space is not anarchist, those are the choice of the group to enact as they see fit, so long as anyone can opt out at any time. It is the very nature of civilized spaces that do not allow this space to be yet liberated. The space functions because of it's ability to navigate the domination of the planet and it's inhabitants, not to the detriment of it. The bottom line is the bottom line. This can also be said for any “revolution” that does not seek, in it's inception or it's eventuality, to completely liberate itself from any form of dominance and control, including that which the revolutionary themselves may wield.

Thus begins the failings of DGR, that suspect organization led by the guru status holder Derrick Jensen, with his cohorts Lierre Kieth and Aric McBay. They claim to be the enemy of industrial civilization, yet fail to element the very foundational elements of civilization in their organization. This could account for the distinction between Civilization over all and specifically “industrial civilization”. Hierarchy, domestication, control, policing, censorship and outright silencing are all present in DGR, and all this before the group even “officially” kicked off. They aim to be revolutionaries, following in the path of such statist groups as the I.R.A., a nationalist group known well for their violent controls of it's membership. If you can't even begin your organization from a birthplace of equality and freedom, I fear to see where you will end up. Unfortunately, DGR has grasped the interests of many folks who are discontent with modernity and industrial society, but if left to the programming of DGR, will fail to dig any deeper than this initial battle. I could continue for another thousand pages on this kick, but will leave it for other writings.

BS, IWW, Bakunin, Andrew Flood, and the countless boring defenders of civilization, domestication, industry and technocracy, despite their revolutionary leanings, are not yet entrenched in the battle for liberation, because they continue to uphold the artificial elements of control. They, in fact, are not romantics, but certainly are not grounded in any realistic adventure towards freedom, so long as they pretend that work and freedom are attainable partnerships. Get fucking real, get fucking radical.

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1Bakunin Versus the Primitivists, Brian Oliver Sheppard 10 December, 2004

2The Truth About Primitive Life: A Critique of Anarcho-Primitivism, Kaczynski, Ted 2008

Op Ed Piece for Green Grocer

So, I wrote a quick article pertaining to Colony Collapse Disorder (fucking LOVE that name!) for the Green Grocer's newsletter. I used it as an opportunity to introduce a whole lot of folks who may have never heard a critique of agriculture, domestication or civilization. Not the most in depth article, but it was a fun quick piece. Check it out here: The Silence of the Hives

Also, getting prepped for Wild Roots Feral Futures 2012! Anyone in the NW need a ride, the holy!roller is filling up with folks. We hate to do it, but we need people that can contribute blood money....i mean diesel money, cause we be broke too! contact us at primalwarmonger [at] gmail . com

Re-Wilding the Self, First.

In the most recent issue of "The Backwoodsman", a magazine I indulge in whenever I happen across a new issue, there is a request for articles pertaining to Re-Wilding your land and the plants to begin the process. The magazine content usually revolves around skills and stories of bushcraft, not delving so much into the concepts of anti-civ or post civ thought, so the request for articles surrounding wildness is exciting, even if it is a short-end view of the possibilities. The land we live on certainly could use our assistance in ridding it of the confines of agriculture and domestication, but the real threat to the land is not limited to the crab grass the neighborhood association planted. The real threat is the neighborhood association itself. If anything can be learned from civilization, it is that no matter how "wild"the land is, if encroached upon by those with a directive of ownership and control, the appanages of destruction are readily present. 

 The term "re-wilding" is heard with more frequency as of late, and I attribute this to multiple reasons, but the overarching cause, I believe, is the growing interest in pre-civilized life or the ever growing DIS-interest in civilization, whichever way you choose to view it. Either way you go, it piques my affections along with a few innocent suspicions. It is not that I could ever see "re-wilding" as a bad thing, a deed done to the misfortune of domestication is a good deed, indeed. No, the suspicions I have is of the depth of the roots. If we are concerned only with making superficial changes, i.e. to land, to government, to diet, etc., and do not begin to re-establish our connections, we are doomed to suffer the cycles of HIStory.

A quick side-rant: I participate as often as I can in re-learning "primitive" technologies. This, of course, includes knapping stone tools. There is a small but very dedicated group of people, outside of the hunter/gatherer peoples of today,  who have taken in this obsession and thus there are enumerable articles written by both academics and crafters alike surrounding archeological finds of knapped stone. There are flakes and cores found dating back around 2.5 million years and hunter/gatherer populations still using possibly exact skills today to obtain hunting tools. This shows that for well over 2 million years humans have used this technology, with no obsolescence.  In many of the articles concerning the how-to aspect of knapping, it is followed by a request to mark and date your blades, arrowheads, etc. in order to "protect the archeological record." I understand that our culture is so far removed from our roots that we actually see ourselves as separate from our ancestors. I get that. But I have to ask why. What separates, or impregnates the value of a stone tool that was made 1 million years ago from that of one that fed a tribe yesterday? To continue to place these levels of segregation of ourselves to our ancestors, is to propagate the lie of civilization itself. That you are not wild. Bah, I say, and BAH! again. Protecting the archeological record would be better achieved by closing the gap of our existence today and our birthplace. The thought that we have gone too far, usually worded "come too far", to return to our ancestral way of life is one I hear touted quite often by techno-apologists, and I must point only to their own "science" to see that this is a fallacy.

Studies of feral populations of animals, that is: animals who broke out of the confines of domestication to strike out and become sufficient without the controls of humans, show that it is of no significance the amount of time spent domesticated to become feral. Goats are one of the longest domesticated animals aside from humans, and will go feral readily. In fact, a side effect of feral goats encountering domesticated goats is the creation of more feral goats! I am not sure who wrote the article on wikipedia for "feral", but after reading this line: "Accidental crossbreeding by feral animals may result in harm to breeding programs of pedigreed animals; their presence may also excite domestic animals and push them to escape." I'd like to make them dinner! How exciting, really. Damn the archeological record, up the connections!

Okay, back to the topic. I was tempted to write an article for the Backwoodsman outlining some of these ideas, but I am not sure how helpful I could possibly be. I mean, how can you have a how-to on discovering who you are? I am not fully aware of who I am most times, or to what extent I have completely swallowed the pills of civilization. It is much easier to go into the lawn and pull out ivy than it is to unlearn a lifetime of gender binary and control imperative, of this I am sure. But I suppose there is a starting place. I suppose, much like a suburban lawn, we can be dug up and have seeds planted. What are ideas if not seeds of tomorrow's action? Of course, I can not go into a book and necessarily find what values my ancestral tribes held that gave them fluid commune with one another and land, but I can seek out which ideas are helpful to me and which are not. It is easier spoken at times than done, but often, that is where it starts. Speaking to one another. Opening our communication, verbally, physically, and spiritually is as beneficial or more than all the books on native species we can find. Of course, we have to get wrong answers to find the right questions, but there can be no how-to guide on how we do that. Many of our failures come from following procedures over allowing for processes. The magic of control begins superficially, doing little more than redefining what we already know, so as to masque it's true nature and by proxy, our own nature. We are not meant to control, which is showcased not only by ideals but by the outcomes of control. Anxiety is so much sewn to the fabric of society that many social scientists now put forth that certain levels of anxiety are necessary  for our health, postulating that it is anxiety and fear that have led to our evolution as a species. Such garbage! A base study of biology shows us that defensive instincts help us to escape or evade dangerous interactions but also stifle our ability to grow. The periods when we grow are in rest and relaxation, when we can stretch our proverbial wings and take in the day. An animal in constant fear is an animal that is most easily controlled, this is also true. Fear and love are two base emotions from which most other emotions stem. Both are measurable in the frequencies they emit and can therefore be studied by modern magic to find what ancient magic already knew. That beings who emit love are more centered and relaxed, and over time found to be generally happier (duh) and healthier (tada!). Beings who emit more fear are more likely to lash out in violent fits and suffer from heart problems (remember, the heart is truly our center and life force, giving our body the electromagnetic waves that create and sustain life). Fear also does some other interesting things, such as not allow your body to fire on all points. This means that you have a more honed sense of physical strength but a weakened sense of empathetic capabilities. Now, take all this in and consider the larger picture of mass society and what it's goals are. Of the two base emotions that create and sustain life, love and fear, which emotions create an easier environment for control? You cannot force someone to love you, but you certainly can force fear. Fear is the emotion that can be used against your better will, to maintain and control your responses. Fear is the hallmark of domestication and the battery of civilization. To "re-wild", is to abandon fear. Do not fear the wildness that you are from, but embrace it.

In biblical terms, which I am not prone to citing, but find it to be just as good a source as any other fucking book, the mono-theistic god of the Israelite people warned them of fear. In Exodus we see a period of great significance to the battle of wildness and civilization. The people of Israel are led away from captivity in Egypt (foundation of civilization as we know it) and out in to the the wilderness where they knew freedom existed. There they feared for having no food, as they were no longer in civilized life and their god showed them the benefits of hunting and gathering. Quail to hunt the night and "manna" in the mornings. This "manna" could have very well been acorns, as they were in the great forests of the fertile crescent that are now barren deserts thanks to civilized life and bread was made from what they gathered on the ground. This hunter gatherer life sustained them and helped them to create a culture of their own, with music, dance, and stories that were uniquely theirs. The moment they re-entered settled, civilized life, the "manna" was no more. This is a great tale of a re-wilding of a people, only to return to civilization and lose all that wildness had brought them.  The bible does not go into much detail of the quality of life of the people of Israel in this time, but we can see how "progress" and kingship, chiefdom and civilized life affected them in later chapters. We see the wars without end, the class divisions, the patriarchy and the /master/slave mentality sprouting up without pause. It is a shame that most Christians do not take these stories with much meaning. Our friends who work on In The Land Of the Living certainly delve into this and many other interesting aspects of spirituality as resistance to civilization, and their work deserves much consideration.

The point of most of this is to ask the question of limits. What limits do we place on ourselves? What limits are placed on us by civilized thought? And finally, how far are we willing to go to understand our true nature? I, for one, am on a constant search for the roots of our being, and in that search have learned much about who I am, and who I want to become. Who do you want to become?

Occupy Your Bookshelf

So, it appears an article from this blog was published in a new book Edited by Aragorn! and published by Little Black Cart. Occupy Everything is a compendium of anarchist writings, spanning a few years, relating to the idea of occupying space. It is relevant right now considering the hype surrounding the current Occupy movement that took to the mainstream last year, and provides readers with a varied response from anarchist perspectives. I encourage the free use of anything written, recorded, created, blah blah blah, and am glad Aragorn! found something of use in my writing for this project. I did not submit to this book, and think that I probably would not have considering my aversion to most things in the public light of anarchism these days, thanks to my experiences with the social anarchists of Portland and beyond, but I am glad that this book is out and that I am peripherally involved. Thanks to Aragorn! for all the hard work that he does, and fuck off to all the shit hackers on AnarchistNews that are on his shit for getting it done.


I was a little shocked to find that amidst the leftist dribble that is sure to surround such discussions, this book actually puts forth some decent critiques and offers some solid ideas as well. It is too bad the book wasn't released after Chris Hedges and Derrick Jensen collaborated on an epic piece of shit writing called The Cancer In Occupy that stirred up enough turds to make a plumber blush! I suppose we will see more books of this kind in the near future, and I applaud Aragorn! and LBC for getting it out in time to beat out the standard liberal faux-radical shit that is sure to follow from other publishers.

The Art of Group Reliance.

Primitive skills are not merely niche hobbyist and macho survivalist concerns, rather are the birthright of every human today, much as knowing how to navigate thousands of miles each season is the birthright of the Monarch Butterfly. It is precisely these skills that kept our asses alive for the millions of years of human existence, but they did much more than just allow us to survive. These most basic of skills created and sustained communities of people, built ties, strengthened relationships and allowed us to be more fluid without the constraints of an anxiety racked, alienated work force of producers and mind-numbed consumers.  Today, these skills are written off by many in the left as the toils of reactionary, right-wing militia types, hell-bent on individualist living.  How short is the memory of those dependent upon forgetting?

The basics of our survival: food, water, shelter, containers and cordage, are now available in finished, plastic wrapped, mass produced form to any first world person with the money to buy them. The concept of need is tormented in it's false projections and the joys of wants are as manufactured as the cheap filth products that abound to fulfill them. This process requires the enslavement of a production society, the enslavement of a service society and the enslavement of a consumer society, married to the absolute destruction of the land bases of us all through industrial extraction, waste, and the civilization borne illness of a disposable society. We have ourselves a recipe for insanity. The division of labor is not only a division of who does what work, but a division of self to the land in which we were born to thrive in. The passing of primitive skills helps to break the barrier of the frightened co-dependence of civilized life, and welcome in a wildness that is not only all around us, but inside of us. 

The battle we are in constant struggle with is the innate hierarchies in civilized living. There is much argument to when these began. Some say with the advent of agriculture and some with the concept of marriage, others with gender roles and religiosity. No matter where it began, we cannot argue that hierarchy is a cornerstone of civilization. Without it we cannot domesticate, subjagate, persecute, or enslave. One of the greatest benefits to primitive technologies is their decentralizing force. Who controls your ability to survive, controls you totally. If the elements of survival are shared with all, or at least grasped by all, then there is an automatic liberation in it's beginning. If we take even a cursory glance at the functions of our societies today, one will see an intentional hording of information. Whether this is for profit or control, or both, varies by situation. Power dynamics are  prevalent in most civilized relationships, necessitating the constant struggle towards liberation.

  Children are kept segregated from society, in small boxes where they are taught anything BUT the methods of survival. Advertising uber alles ensures that an entire nation will be under the firm choke-hold of consumerism. We are taught to want, and what to want, but not how to create. Elders, many of whom do not even have the skills to survive themselves, are also pushed away into packing houses of the sick and dying.  We are taught to navigate THEIR systems of life, to ignore the natural systems from which we are being ever torn. By the age of 5 we are all too familiar with the Logos of fast food poisons, while simultaneously taught that the forest is the place where the big bad wolf lives. This elemental disconnect begins our journey away from the community of life, and into the assylum of alienation. Food comes from those lighted signs and danger comes from the dark places. Most people I know that are between the ages of 17 and 28 do not know how to prepare their own food, let alone how to grow, forage, or hunt for it. This is a primitive skill that has been taken away, refined and left to the experts, this case being the corporate giants, to handle. We were once these children too, and we were taken away from this world at birth. We are taught to see our history in the rear view, always receeding, and not allowed to understand that the story of our lives is alive, albeit in much danger of extinction. Everyone from the age of 18 to 65 is stuck in the middle ground of not knowing where to put their ass or their face, and end up covered in shit.

As our family has taken steps to break from societal confines over the years, none of our choices have been so beneficial as seeking out primitive skills.  You cannot begin to know what it feels like to sit with a group of your family and friends and rediscover hand to mouth skills from the land that surrounds us until you do it. Political discussions are a great form of intellectual masturbation, but little brings more joy to resistance than holding life in your hands and feeling at home. In the vast sea of Green Anarchist critique, most of which I very much enjoy and take part in discussing often, I have seen a disconnect from the skill aspect of primitive living. Without this element we are flinging shit in the wind of academia, hoping to not get hit on it's return. There is no philosophizing needed when my 7 year old daughter teaches me how she knapped a flint scraper with elk antler. Maybe for some of you, there is too much philosophizing to grasp it. As for me, I am content with it being what it is. A child who is not only grasping an ancient skill, but having a hell of a good time doing it. It is a few hours she is not being slammed with billboards and adverts. An hour she is not being made to feel less than another because her clothes are dirty, or she is not quite as strong as another kid. It is a time that negates time, and begets confidence, skill, tools, and re-creates memories that are older than us all.

One myth of primitive skills is that  the classes are costly, and the instructors are all macho hetero males. While there is a lot of truth to part of this, being that organized classes with specific "tracker" groups are quite overpriced, and many of the "leaders" of these classes are capitalist macho pricks, this, of course, does not need to be the case. Many of the skills I learn are from books or friends, for free. Being that I don't have any macho prick friends, I skirt the latter and since most of my friends have no money, and are quite content, I dodge the prior. It is not that I am opposed to paying for certain classes, or gatherings, as I understand that the filthy lucre of the king has taken over most of our daily exchanges, it's just that we don't have any money, so it is not an issue. If you do have the money to take a course or a few courses from a good tracker school, by all means do! Take every thing you learned and share share share! Your friends will love it and if you are savvy enough to make a zine, youtube videos or a blog, you can guarantee I will be reading it at some point. In the meantime, there is no end to the amount of free information that exists on these subjects. My dear friend Rowan Walkingwolf, Phd. has made more than a few zines and is in the works on many more. You can find them all at their blog, for free, here: Yggdrasil Distro

Another myth of primitive skills is that they are for reclusive, "back-to-the-land" hippies who live in the woods and make sweet love to trees. While I may have just described the dream life of myself and most of my friends, it is simply not the case. We were ALL born into civilization, and most of us still do occupy cities and towns, with grocery stores, hospitals and cute little cafes like the one I am writing this blog in. As much as we might hate this reality, we are not equipped to change that, unless we learn these most vital of skills. When Tre Arrow fled from the feds, he attributes his, rather limited, knowledge of outdoor skills to his being able to successfully evade for the length of time that he did, nearly two years. The hero of Hayduke Lives!, George Washington Hayduke, lives for years in a cave in Utah, using the skills he had gained in primitive living to evade and enact the fantastical schemes against the earth rapists in Ed Abbey's novels. Sure, Hayduke is a fictional character, but if you think all that Abbey sourced was fiction, you need to reread his works. The point is, these skills are the skills that will not only help to build communities, keep us alive, and help us thrive, they will help the take-down of the civilized as well. No matter where you live, if that is not your goal, why the fuck are you reading this blog?

Fire
"I am convinced that fires lit this way (primitively) burn hotter than those lit by matches...because these fires burn inside of us." Ray Mears

Fire making is possibly the first uniquely human animal characterisitic. It has allowed a hairless animal to survive harsh winters, a hungry animal to eat food that otherwise would be impossible and to create an array of tools. John and Geri McPherson, of Naked Into The Wilderness lore, teach that while all skills of living wild are closely related, the first we should learn to create is fire. From this element we receive more bounty than nearly all others. Nothing rings our primordial bells like fire. There is a reason people congregate into your kitchen, and it certainly is not to do the dishes. (Though, that is a skill most anarchists could really benefit from acquiring.) The kitchen is the fire of the home. The hearth and heart. The fire has been used to cook our food, to warm us and possibly most human, to tell our stories. From strictly a survival aspect, it is a no brainer, but from a communal aspect, it is well worth inspection. Learning to make fire is learning to be human, together.

Cordage

Cordage, or rope, string, lashing, etc. is another basic tool that we use for literally thousands of things a day, but rarely have we learned the simple yet magical ways it is made. This was one of the first "primtive" skills I obtained, and was able to share with-in a week to others. Depending on where you live, there are hundreds of plants that have the ability to make good cordage. I have made it from New Zealand Flax, Yucca, Stinging Nettle, Red Cedar Bark and leather lace, but a simple search on a few choice sites such as Primtive Ways will bring forth links to many other. This site: Cordage Discovery lists a few with good explanation of the plants used.

These are two skills that are a good start to grasp, but hell, start wherever you want! If you want to update me on some skills you know or are working on, you can leave them in a comment or email me at primalwarmonger [@] gmail (dot) com.

May the Forest Bewitch you!