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“Wariness of one’s nearest and dearest, as though they were potential witnesses for the prosecution in your existence, evidence of guilt in a trial that is permanently suspended.”

— Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V

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Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999)

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we’re out here suffering again folks

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The liberation of productive forces is confused with the liberation of man: is this a revolutionary formula or that of political economy itself?

Almost no one has doubted such ultimate evidence, especially not Marx, for whom men "begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence... " (Why must man's vocation always be to distinguish himself from animals? Humanism is an idee fixe which also comes from political economy- but we will leave that for now.) But is man's existence an end for which he must find the means?

These innocent little phrases are already theoretical conclusions: the separation of the end from the means is the wildest and most naive postulate about the human race. Man has needs. Does he have needs? Is he pledged to satisfy them? Is he labor power (by which he separates himself as means from himself as his own end)?

These prodigious metaphors of the system that dominates us are a fable of political economy retold to generations of revolutionaries infected even in their political radicalism by the conceptual viruses of this same political economy.

here’s a hot take: any theory that doesn’t criticize the logic of production itself is more closely tied to ableism and eugenics than anti-civ thought

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Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (1999)

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Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, 2001

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how do you get HRT or insulin when civilization, and it's industry, is abolished?

Anon I rewrote this post like three times because it's so important to me that people understand this. I want so much for everyone and am always so frustrated by the constant bad jacketing of nihilists so here it goes.

The first and most important point is that anticiv rejects all vanguardism. There will be no seizure of state power that mandates all power plants be turned off. It is a part of the real communist movement and involves the subaltern population rejecting alienation and finding their power, not destroying things they actively need.

Classical communism imagines that we will simply collectivize our current industrial society and distribute the spoils evenly. In the era of climate change, this is a highly insufficient analysis. If we don't stop clear cutting and strip mining, we'll go extinct, and bring most of the biosphere with us. At the very least, this means serious degrowth, regardless of whether the industry is collectivist or not.

I don't care about the poor little loggers who lost their jobs from tree spiking.

It is the productivist logic that must be challenged if we are to survive the 21st century. That every human being and every scrap of land be put to work. Human, plant, and animal diversity is being crushed by it, and we need that to live. We need to live in a way that's not driven by a "work or starve" mentality, in biodiverse places, where we are not defined by our labour.

This is not possible within an ideology that places the production of things as the cornerstone of everything. It does NOT mean never making things ever again, or even abandoning modern techniques such as insulin production, but it does mean applying serious critique to them:

Does this form of production require the destruction of vital ecosystems, even indirectly such as through power generation, pollution, traffic infrastructure, or use of goods that have such impacts?

Does this form of production require forcing people to do it under threat of death or starvation?

Does this form of production require large swaths of land to be barren, like parking lots or monoculture corn?

Does this form of production require people to subscribe to a specific ideology or way of being to participate in it?

The question of insulin comes up again and again but it is framed wrong. There will be no primmie Vanguard that topples the provisional government and shoots everyone with an insulin pump. It is a tool for the here and now for the powerless, about reclaiming our power outside of totalizing institutions that look at our beautiful earth and just see spoils to be harvested. It's a critique, not a program.

Anticiv praxis could involve black market medical production (including insulin, or HRT which already exists) to combat the increasing failure of the industrial model. In the same way that regenerative agriculture reimagines human relationships with the non-human or FNB reimagines food consumption, the same could be done for pharmacy; the earth is full of medicine that can be produced without destruction. This doesn't require abandoning modern techniques, it requires abandoning the constant liquidation of the non-human to run them.

The real movement is already emerging, in the shared bureaucracy hacks and desperate mutual aid posts, and the truth is right in front of us:

We don't do these things because we are obligated to, but because we need to keep each other alive to live ourselves.

That is the meaning of unalienated labour. It's true of each other and it's true of the earth. There's no primeval reset, but a refusal to view others, human and not, as disposable. To recognize that thinking of human beings as superior is going to get us killed. To recognize that we are within a vast web of life that demands respect, from human diversity to animal and plant diversity.

To keep ALL of our friends alive and flourishing, not meet the demands of tyrants and demagogues.

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We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation.

-The Coming Insurrection

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This quote from Guattari goes hard. It’s from “To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body”

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It should now be clear that, in the biopolitical sense, there is no such thing as a “natural” death.

All deaths are violent. Both existentially and historically speaking. Under the biopolitical democracies of Empire, everything has been socialized, and each death is inserted into a complex network of causalities that make it a social death, a murder. Today, there is only murder, whether it is condemned, pardoned, or, most often, denied.

At this point, there is no longer any question about the fact of murder, only about how it happens.

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hello r u still active here?

I am still alive, yes

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It's kinda funny, I've found that people have really predictable responses to Tiqqun, ultra-communist, nihilist etc. Texts. I keep getting completely apolitical blogs; peoples personal blogs, fandom blogs, roleplaying blogs, photography blogs, you name it, all having really genuine reactions to the writing and wanting to talk about it. It's never anyone I would expect but it's always so earnest and heart warming.

But if someone has pretty much any political ideology at all they react like I just shot their dog in front of them. Liberals, Marxists, anarchists, conservatives, all act like these writings are deranged self-destructive hysteria and they need to like... Intervene before more people are exposed to it. People go off on these utterly bonkers misinterpretations of what's being said, accusations of fascism (the leftist firing squad isn't complete without it!), Misanthropy, psychosis, anything and everything.

This dichotomy is always so interesting to me because it confirms so much of what's being said in these texts; regular people who aren't devoted to being slaves to dead words, people whose main priority is surviving and living well, are always so much more capable of imagining new horizons and living them.

Don't shackle yourself to a dumpster full of words. If it's not poetry it's not worth it.

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“when ONE tells us it’s either this or death, it’s

always

actually

this and death.”

– Tiqqun, Introduction To Civil War

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“People have become so used to living in a state of perennial crisis and emergency that they seem not to realize that their lives have been reduced to a purely biological state. Life is losing not only its social and political dimensions, but also its human and affective ones.”

— Giorgio Agamben, “Where Are We Now?” (2021).

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“The goal of an insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority…hegemony and the desire for hegemony… Destruction has never been enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s done”

— The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, pg. 130-131