Stormy Weather

I don’t know, but I don’t think this is a useful train of thought. Getting caught up in probabilities and potentials for the future can easily lead to either a crippling hopelessness or an apathetic sense of security, when what we need is motivation and urgency. Thankfully the recent UN report has spurred a lot of people to action, and I think we’re going to see more and more people abandoning the ineffective governmental/corporate means of protecting the environment in favor of popular movements

I think one of the best models for reducing the effects of climate change is Transition Towns, a grassroots movement working on a city-by-city basis to create sustainable circular economies. I like this one in particular because it’s community-focused, putting the power in people’s hands while leaving behind the big corporations that are causing the problem. 350.org is similar

The Buy Nothing Project is trying to build that community-controlled circular economy from the ground up. In particular, industrial agriculture is responsible for a good chunk of greenhouse gases, so growing your own food either in a personal or community garden (as well as producing your own eggs, goat milk, honey, etc. if you’re keen on that) is a good place to start. My practical tag has a lot of resources for this kind of thing

It’s also vital that we strike back, by blocking pipelines, occupying forests and other land, picketing coal mines, etc. Rising Tide is a great organization to go to for this kind of direct action

That said, we’re already seeing the effects of climate change, and things are definitely going to get worse before they get better, so focus some of your effort on helping the people affected by it. Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is pretty much what it says on the tin, people offering help after natural disasters - they were partially responsible for getting solar power to Puerto Rico following Maria (and they have a great list of other organizations on their site). We also need to support climate refugees - in the US that can mean stuff like leaving water out for migrants crossing the desert or sabotaging the wall, in Europe it means supporting groups like Sea Watch who are rescuing refugees at sea. And everywhere it means fighting fascism and any attempt to leave these people to die

So in that context ‘ally quietism’ refers to the tendency of tryhard allies to wholesale adopt the identitarian idealogical framework while at the same time refusing to speak to members of a relevant identity if they happen to contradict them. A common example of it in my personal experience is when you see a white person on say facebook say that something is cultural appropriation, is willing to argue with only white people about it (by appealing to “listen to X people!”) but if they get contradicted by someone from the relevant culture they will either disappear or sometimes just ignore what happened and continue to interact with only the white people contradicting them. 

and i don’t deny that it’s beautiful, at least from an ‘objective’ viewpoint, which means that we’re looking solely at the artwork itself. yes, the pyramids are quite something, and so are all the trinkets down at the louvre. i myself like art and i even think that my politics are informed by certain aesthetic aspirations, which i found through art.

walter benjamin once wrote that there is no document of civilization that is not at the same time also a document of barbarism, and i think he got it very well. he meant to say that everything handed down to us by civilization is dripping with blood and shit. this is a critique that you can even find in marxism: there’s that famous poem by brecht where a worker asks: who built the pyramids, or who built thebes? the anti-civ critique starts off from that question but it goes deeper, because (unlike the marxists who think the glories of civilization can be reedeemed if capitalism, its last form, is destroyed) it rejects the idea of ‘socialist civilization’ entirely. ‘communist art’ in this sense, is a mauling of the term ‘.communism’. and it’s not because free human communities don’t make beautiful things, they do. it’s because for us, art, like religion, is a pale reminder of freedom.

when it comes to art, anti-civ anarchists don’t just ask: “well, what where the means of production behind a velázquez painting?” – a question that inevitably leads to “well, even though it was produced for the sake of empire, it’s still beautiful”. they ask: “does that beauty speak of free lives or not? furthermore, is it worth it?” is it possible to find anything beautiful when it speaks the language of leviathan? the mere fact that life is separated into ‘art’ and ‘things that are not art’ already speaks to unbelievable violence and a spiritual misery so great that it’s no wonder that this division is a cornerstone of western thought, and one so praised by one of the founders of marxist aesthetics, theodor adorno. for him, it is capitalism’s little ability to turn everything into commodities that makes art into an autonomous realm, where it is free to finally separate itself entirely from the capricious wishes of rulers, kings, the bourgeois themselves, and most importantly at all, from the decay and tear of life. art is a hobbled ontology of sad human beings. this is probably a reason for why artists suffer so much: they have access to Being, but they are forced to condense into Art. in fact, this is why most of us suffer so much: life has to be reduced to whatever stupid corpse we particularly specialize in, whether it be sex, religion, art or engineering.