Unsurprisingly, this post led to the biggest drop in subscribers I've seen yet on this platform. However, the number of those who left was still small in comparison to those of you who have remained. I look forward to the dialogue on these topics.
I appreciate and respect your passion and fierce love for the wilderness. I’ll do what I can to help you get the word out to frontline forest, water, mountain and ocean defenders in the year ahead.
This topic you broach here is something I was just reading about in Klee Benally’s book “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”.
As someone that always sought to walk the path of satyagraha in my resistance against the abuses of empire the truths that Klee outlined in his book (many of which you also touch on here) were not easy pills to swallow, but I cannot deny the facts that peaceful resistance that is purely defensive is not doing enough to protect the sacred.
As an animist voluntaryist that sees the planet, trees, water and mountains as living , possessing a spirit and as revered elder kin, I see the act of sabotaging the machines of ecocidal greed driven corporations and their minions as an ethically sound course of action to defend my loved ones against an aggressive attacker.
Within the context of defending an ancient forest against pillaging (like the Walbran or Fairy Creek) what do you think would be the most effective leverage point for eco sabotage ?
Go for the hydrolics on the biggest most expensive machines?
I’ll go get the quote from the book I mentioned and share below as it provides an interesting perspective.
DO WE WISH TO BE CIVILLY OBEDIENT TO A SETTLER COLONIAL system established and maintained on genocidal and ecocidal violence?
The matter of civil obedience might appear to be questioned in the famed assertion that, "What is legal is not synonymous with what is right." But that statement assumes an agreeable morality of and in settler colonialism, its liberal synonymizing reinforces the State. It is a rallying cry of settler inclusion.
The relationships of power that comprise what is "civil," demand obedience. They demand tactics and a politics that confine them to be respectably included (what is called respectability politics in activist speak). Their escalations are a fervor not to undermine and abolish, but to be a part of the club.
If you ve been to any direct action training, the first terms defined are "nonviolent direct action" (NVDA) and "civil dis-obedience" (CD). These terms establish a framework that has been in use since it was created in the 1960s by Christian civil rights activists. They intentionally built an implicit consensus around nonviolence and contrasted their tactics to those of the Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, and other militant formations that sought to abolish the US empire.
In the last fifty plus years, very little has changed in this organizing framework that continues to shape strategies and tactics used by activists throughout the world. At their core they are temporary interventions in social and political power relations that appeal through varying degrees of pressure for justice to be bestowed by the State. This model is not only the status quo in social and environmental justice organizing, it is also embraced by the State and capitalists as it reinforces and reproduces their underlying relationships of power.
The NVDA position speaks through activist managers in a moral binary of violent (bad)/nonviolent (good). It fails (by design) to understand that violence exists on a spectrum (structural, lateral, direct, etc.). This binary fiction of violence/non-violence, which is the preferred fantasy of liberals, normalizes the State's monopoly on violence in declarations of demonstrations and principles as nonviolent. It alienates radical possibilities and the militant legacies of anti-colonial struggle.
The question of nonviolence and violence has never defined Indigenous resistance, it has always been a more practical consideration of, what works?
Outside of the historical movement parentheses, the limitations, failures, and underlying power relationships of these rights aren't discussed and examined enough. This is due, in part, to the overall ways that direct action has been institutionalized by non-profit managers and self-imposed "allies." The criticisms aren't new, as anti-political analyses from the Earth Cells of Fire, and other militant strains of what can be called resistance have long pushed against the narrowly prescribed economy of action in the milieu of what is cynically dubbed “The Struggle” (patent pending).
Outside the parenthetical containers of sanctioned struggle are voices that distance and denounce actions as violent or extreme. After all, the context of their notions of disobedience is confined to the will. Their moralism constricts their lineage to nonviolent martyred icons that the State also embraces such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It dissects the violence of abolitionists sitting the throats of those holding whips and keys to cages. It delicately separates the disfigured entrails of bloody liberation movements and moments that have underscored how power is imposed and disposed of in this world. It declares a monopoly of social transformation that is steeped in its utopic colonial imaginary. The liberal philosophies and ideologies of struggle have colonized and commodified social transformation.
Gord Hill bites at this tendency in his powerful antagonism, Smash Pacifism: A Critical Analysis of Gandhi and King, where he acutely observes that:
Pacifism must be challenged and discredited as an acceptable doctrine for resistance movements. To promote nonviolence is to disarm the people psychologically and to dampen their fighting spirit. This is even more so when the population is already largely pacified, as is the case in North America. Pacified not through state repression, but through apathy and hopelessness, and when these are broken, by the preaching of a pacifist doctrine that claims to be morally, politically, and tactically superior to all other forms of struggle.
Peter Gelderloos' book, How Nonviolence Protects the State offers an extraordinary study. Gelderloos asserts
“Only a people trained to accept being ruled by a violent power structure can really question someone's right and need to forcefully defend herself against oppression."
Indigenous warriors and warrior culture are perversely fetishized by the white historic gaze, yet the intensity and brutality of these complex resistances are sanitized for colonial consumption. But ours is the contradiction of the "noble" and the "savage." And while I'll dig into Indigenous inclusion and "civility" in later chapters (particularly "Voting is Not Harm Reduction," and the whole last section), I want to emphasize that for the duration of the "Indian Wars" and most all history of colonial invasion, Indigenous spiritual and physical resistance was regarded as illicit terrorism against civilization. Most (we had our scouts and collaborators for sure) of our ancestors weren't concerned with legitimacy of their tactics and their moral implications.
Broadly speaking, spirit and the sacred were their frameworks for action and they responded how they could with whatever worked, outside the enclosures, or reservations of dissent sanctioned by their enemies.
The fascinating instability of ongoing Indigenous dissent and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality.
The "criminalization of dissent" becomes an invitation to embrace the anti-settler criminality of our ancestors in order to overwhelm colonial society's abilities to function. There is no need for activism in a world where collective- and self-defense is a way of life. There is no need to stay enclosed on reservations of resistance. Settler civility should always be undermined and contended.”
— Klee Benally
From his book titled “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”
I went to law school (UC Berkeley) in the early '70s after i left the engineering "profession" (just another form of white collar wage slavery) and thought i could translate my tech background and legal training into becoming an environmental law. I soon got politically (and culturally!) radicalized, and came to see that while environmental law projects can prevent outright disasters in some cases, they overall legitimate the entire system, providing the facade of "regulation" and mitigating the worst symptoms.
Meanwhile, the beast rages with little real control. In fact, this helps the monster smooth out its operations and gobble up the planet, making the small "islands" of ecological preserves increasingly unsustainable as the ecosystem collapses around them. Real change will not come due to new laws and regulations, but from social revolution, out of eliminating the global industrial capitalist system.
The best laws and regulations have been able to do is manage the rate of decline, protect certain areas, and stop the worst of the worst in a few cases. Laudable, but not enough.
Are you going to be moving to your own independent website, perhaps out of the Ghost platform, Max? Substack seems like it's just more of the same problem.
Good article, Max. You leave me with a few quandaries.
The first is that I'm already subscribed to you under my real identity. I'm not sure how to create a fictional account and move my subscription, as you suggest, or even whether it would be effective. I imagine the authorities would figure it out.
Next quandary is how to employ some version of violence without becoming exactly what I oppose.
Third, my reading of history, and prehistory since the Holocene, is that dark triad types will always arise and lead followers to conquer neighbors, or even distant peoples, who had been practicing restraint. How does a society practice anarchism and restraint yet maintain the vigilance and military might to maintain its sovereignty?
I might add that even Bronze Age technology was sufficient to wreak havoc on nature and ecosystems.
Without resolving the latter two quandaries, I see no way out of the cycle of destruction, regardless of tactics employed, strategies devised, or battles won.
Perhaps some semblance of peace could be achieved if the human population was knocked down so far that groups rarely ran into each other, except for trade. But getting to such a low population seems likely to be a bloody mess.
Thanks again, Max. As you may know, I came to the same, or similar conclusion back in 2014, after our partial and ultimately futile "success" with those blockades against the tar sands equipment "megaloads." (Described in my article, "Paths Forward..."). My preferred method of sabotage against the Machine became (and still is) the creation of eco-centric, non-monetary communities that can enable us to permanently "boycott" it and assist in the process of shutting it all down. Industrial, technophile, international capitalist civilization will self-destruct completely soon (sadly, taking many living beings and relations down with it, but probably not all), and I will gladly continue to help that process along by helping to create the viable alternatives that people can turn to. Our farm has been somewhat of a local demonstration project-in-progress for a couple of decades now. We are learning earthways and teaching others as we learn.
P.S., I am not too worried about "The Man" watching what we are doing here. I'm pretty sure that they have been watching me since about 1967 when my friends and I were producing funky subversive literature with a mimeograph machine at our high school. They probably forgot about me for awhile during the decades when I did quiet, safe, "resistance" as an academic, until I re-radicalized about four years before I retired. But, since they now see (through their omnipresent surveillance) that hardly anybody reads my writings and my brain is losing function rapidly, they probably say "don't worry about that old man. He's gonna die soon, anyway."
I understand. There’s a need to go on the offensif. The best way to do is create new systems in the cracks and ruins of the current system. History teaches us that you only shift power when 1. You have a better functioning system ( can be scattered experiments that serve the needs of people better preventief dammage or even helping nature) 2. The support grows and you see the new model arise in more and more places. 2. In the mean time you need to slow down the current dominant machine for dammage control and create space and time for the alternatif. . The last thing, we really did well If you take into account the imbalance in power and money. worldwide the dammage would have been far worse without social and environmental activists. Sabotage can help slow down, but it is also defense. We need to speed up creating our parallel social/ ecological experiments that lay the foundations for systems centering health, welbeing and thriving of all communities and ecosystems. I think in a few decades, we can arrive there by shifting the balance bit by bit.
I agree with you, but I would just add that the model societies or communities must provide alternatives to any further participation in and compliance with the present international economic system. We need to create ecosystem-centered non-monetary systems. Also, when we talk about the "welbeing and thriving of all communities and ecosystems," that must be defined and approached in consideration of all living beings (human and non-human) as equal parts of the inter-connected whole of Earth's life system. When starting over, we must strive to not repeat the same mistakes that our species has made through the ages that brought us to this point, and anthropocentrism was one of the biggest errors.
You asked me to introduce myself in an email I received for joining biocentric. I have been a fan for a long time. From before Thacker Pass. I added this article to my doomscroll at the doomsteaddiner.com Please visit.
I agree the volume needs to be turned up. That is why I started my website.
Here is my platform from the 2024 campaign for president in the Green Party where I was on of the three candidates. https://green-liberty.org/ctp/policy/
Unsurprisingly, this post led to the biggest drop in subscribers I've seen yet on this platform. However, the number of those who left was still small in comparison to those of you who have remained. I look forward to the dialogue on these topics.
Hey Max,
I appreciate and respect your passion and fierce love for the wilderness. I’ll do what I can to help you get the word out to frontline forest, water, mountain and ocean defenders in the year ahead.
This topic you broach here is something I was just reading about in Klee Benally’s book “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”.
As someone that always sought to walk the path of satyagraha in my resistance against the abuses of empire the truths that Klee outlined in his book (many of which you also touch on here) were not easy pills to swallow, but I cannot deny the facts that peaceful resistance that is purely defensive is not doing enough to protect the sacred.
As an animist voluntaryist that sees the planet, trees, water and mountains as living , possessing a spirit and as revered elder kin, I see the act of sabotaging the machines of ecocidal greed driven corporations and their minions as an ethically sound course of action to defend my loved ones against an aggressive attacker.
Within the context of defending an ancient forest against pillaging (like the Walbran or Fairy Creek) what do you think would be the most effective leverage point for eco sabotage ?
Go for the hydrolics on the biggest most expensive machines?
I’ll go get the quote from the book I mentioned and share below as it provides an interesting perspective.
“BEYOND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
DO WE WISH TO BE CIVILLY OBEDIENT TO A SETTLER COLONIAL system established and maintained on genocidal and ecocidal violence?
The matter of civil obedience might appear to be questioned in the famed assertion that, "What is legal is not synonymous with what is right." But that statement assumes an agreeable morality of and in settler colonialism, its liberal synonymizing reinforces the State. It is a rallying cry of settler inclusion.
The relationships of power that comprise what is "civil," demand obedience. They demand tactics and a politics that confine them to be respectably included (what is called respectability politics in activist speak). Their escalations are a fervor not to undermine and abolish, but to be a part of the club.
If you ve been to any direct action training, the first terms defined are "nonviolent direct action" (NVDA) and "civil dis-obedience" (CD). These terms establish a framework that has been in use since it was created in the 1960s by Christian civil rights activists. They intentionally built an implicit consensus around nonviolence and contrasted their tactics to those of the Black Panthers, AIM, Weather Underground, Symbionese Liberation Army, and other militant formations that sought to abolish the US empire.
In the last fifty plus years, very little has changed in this organizing framework that continues to shape strategies and tactics used by activists throughout the world. At their core they are temporary interventions in social and political power relations that appeal through varying degrees of pressure for justice to be bestowed by the State. This model is not only the status quo in social and environmental justice organizing, it is also embraced by the State and capitalists as it reinforces and reproduces their underlying relationships of power.
The NVDA position speaks through activist managers in a moral binary of violent (bad)/nonviolent (good). It fails (by design) to understand that violence exists on a spectrum (structural, lateral, direct, etc.). This binary fiction of violence/non-violence, which is the preferred fantasy of liberals, normalizes the State's monopoly on violence in declarations of demonstrations and principles as nonviolent. It alienates radical possibilities and the militant legacies of anti-colonial struggle.
The question of nonviolence and violence has never defined Indigenous resistance, it has always been a more practical consideration of, what works?
Outside of the historical movement parentheses, the limitations, failures, and underlying power relationships of these rights aren't discussed and examined enough. This is due, in part, to the overall ways that direct action has been institutionalized by non-profit managers and self-imposed "allies." The criticisms aren't new, as anti-political analyses from the Earth Cells of Fire, and other militant strains of what can be called resistance have long pushed against the narrowly prescribed economy of action in the milieu of what is cynically dubbed “The Struggle” (patent pending).
Outside the parenthetical containers of sanctioned struggle are voices that distance and denounce actions as violent or extreme. After all, the context of their notions of disobedience is confined to the will. Their moralism constricts their lineage to nonviolent martyred icons that the State also embraces such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. It dissects the violence of abolitionists sitting the throats of those holding whips and keys to cages. It delicately separates the disfigured entrails of bloody liberation movements and moments that have underscored how power is imposed and disposed of in this world. It declares a monopoly of social transformation that is steeped in its utopic colonial imaginary. The liberal philosophies and ideologies of struggle have colonized and commodified social transformation.
Gord Hill bites at this tendency in his powerful antagonism, Smash Pacifism: A Critical Analysis of Gandhi and King, where he acutely observes that:
Pacifism must be challenged and discredited as an acceptable doctrine for resistance movements. To promote nonviolence is to disarm the people psychologically and to dampen their fighting spirit. This is even more so when the population is already largely pacified, as is the case in North America. Pacified not through state repression, but through apathy and hopelessness, and when these are broken, by the preaching of a pacifist doctrine that claims to be morally, politically, and tactically superior to all other forms of struggle.
Peter Gelderloos' book, How Nonviolence Protects the State offers an extraordinary study. Gelderloos asserts
“Only a people trained to accept being ruled by a violent power structure can really question someone's right and need to forcefully defend herself against oppression."
Indigenous warriors and warrior culture are perversely fetishized by the white historic gaze, yet the intensity and brutality of these complex resistances are sanitized for colonial consumption. But ours is the contradiction of the "noble" and the "savage." And while I'll dig into Indigenous inclusion and "civility" in later chapters (particularly "Voting is Not Harm Reduction," and the whole last section), I want to emphasize that for the duration of the "Indian Wars" and most all history of colonial invasion, Indigenous spiritual and physical resistance was regarded as illicit terrorism against civilization. Most (we had our scouts and collaborators for sure) of our ancestors weren't concerned with legitimacy of their tactics and their moral implications.
Broadly speaking, spirit and the sacred were their frameworks for action and they responded how they could with whatever worked, outside the enclosures, or reservations of dissent sanctioned by their enemies.
The fascinating instability of ongoing Indigenous dissent and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality and disobedience is in its contentions of legitimacy and criminality.
The "criminalization of dissent" becomes an invitation to embrace the anti-settler criminality of our ancestors in order to overwhelm colonial society's abilities to function. There is no need for activism in a world where collective- and self-defense is a way of life. There is no need to stay enclosed on reservations of resistance. Settler civility should always be undermined and contended.”
— Klee Benally
From his book titled “No Spiritual Surrender : Indigenous Anarchy In Defense Of The Sacred”
I went to law school (UC Berkeley) in the early '70s after i left the engineering "profession" (just another form of white collar wage slavery) and thought i could translate my tech background and legal training into becoming an environmental law. I soon got politically (and culturally!) radicalized, and came to see that while environmental law projects can prevent outright disasters in some cases, they overall legitimate the entire system, providing the facade of "regulation" and mitigating the worst symptoms.
Meanwhile, the beast rages with little real control. In fact, this helps the monster smooth out its operations and gobble up the planet, making the small "islands" of ecological preserves increasingly unsustainable as the ecosystem collapses around them. Real change will not come due to new laws and regulations, but from social revolution, out of eliminating the global industrial capitalist system.
The best laws and regulations have been able to do is manage the rate of decline, protect certain areas, and stop the worst of the worst in a few cases. Laudable, but not enough.
But how does the destruction of supply in any way curb the demand which drives the construction of energy infrastructure in the first place?
A important topic, and one which I will address in a detailed post.
A powerful article, I am passing it on to friends.
Can you or any readers recommend books for strategy? Are any by Andreas Malm worth reading?
I'll write a post about this, but yes, Malm is worth reading. I disagree with much of the book, but there's some good things in there, too.
Thanks for caring as much as you do, Max. Stay strong.
Thank you, Nina.
Godspeed
Thank you.
Are you going to be moving to your own independent website, perhaps out of the Ghost platform, Max? Substack seems like it's just more of the same problem.
It's something I assume I will have to do at some point, but for now the network effects make it worth sticking around.
Good article, Max. You leave me with a few quandaries.
The first is that I'm already subscribed to you under my real identity. I'm not sure how to create a fictional account and move my subscription, as you suggest, or even whether it would be effective. I imagine the authorities would figure it out.
Next quandary is how to employ some version of violence without becoming exactly what I oppose.
Third, my reading of history, and prehistory since the Holocene, is that dark triad types will always arise and lead followers to conquer neighbors, or even distant peoples, who had been practicing restraint. How does a society practice anarchism and restraint yet maintain the vigilance and military might to maintain its sovereignty?
I might add that even Bronze Age technology was sufficient to wreak havoc on nature and ecosystems.
Without resolving the latter two quandaries, I see no way out of the cycle of destruction, regardless of tactics employed, strategies devised, or battles won.
Perhaps some semblance of peace could be achieved if the human population was knocked down so far that groups rarely ran into each other, except for trade. But getting to such a low population seems likely to be a bloody mess.
Thanks again, Max. As you may know, I came to the same, or similar conclusion back in 2014, after our partial and ultimately futile "success" with those blockades against the tar sands equipment "megaloads." (Described in my article, "Paths Forward..."). My preferred method of sabotage against the Machine became (and still is) the creation of eco-centric, non-monetary communities that can enable us to permanently "boycott" it and assist in the process of shutting it all down. Industrial, technophile, international capitalist civilization will self-destruct completely soon (sadly, taking many living beings and relations down with it, but probably not all), and I will gladly continue to help that process along by helping to create the viable alternatives that people can turn to. Our farm has been somewhat of a local demonstration project-in-progress for a couple of decades now. We are learning earthways and teaching others as we learn.
P.S., I am not too worried about "The Man" watching what we are doing here. I'm pretty sure that they have been watching me since about 1967 when my friends and I were producing funky subversive literature with a mimeograph machine at our high school. They probably forgot about me for awhile during the decades when I did quiet, safe, "resistance" as an academic, until I re-radicalized about four years before I retired. But, since they now see (through their omnipresent surveillance) that hardly anybody reads my writings and my brain is losing function rapidly, they probably say "don't worry about that old man. He's gonna die soon, anyway."
I understand. There’s a need to go on the offensif. The best way to do is create new systems in the cracks and ruins of the current system. History teaches us that you only shift power when 1. You have a better functioning system ( can be scattered experiments that serve the needs of people better preventief dammage or even helping nature) 2. The support grows and you see the new model arise in more and more places. 2. In the mean time you need to slow down the current dominant machine for dammage control and create space and time for the alternatif. . The last thing, we really did well If you take into account the imbalance in power and money. worldwide the dammage would have been far worse without social and environmental activists. Sabotage can help slow down, but it is also defense. We need to speed up creating our parallel social/ ecological experiments that lay the foundations for systems centering health, welbeing and thriving of all communities and ecosystems. I think in a few decades, we can arrive there by shifting the balance bit by bit.
I agree with you, but I would just add that the model societies or communities must provide alternatives to any further participation in and compliance with the present international economic system. We need to create ecosystem-centered non-monetary systems. Also, when we talk about the "welbeing and thriving of all communities and ecosystems," that must be defined and approached in consideration of all living beings (human and non-human) as equal parts of the inter-connected whole of Earth's life system. When starting over, we must strive to not repeat the same mistakes that our species has made through the ages that brought us to this point, and anthropocentrism was one of the biggest errors.
'Our tactics aren’t working. We need to escalate.' - EcoSabotage good, but shutting down these corporatons, better. See this for the 57 Companies causing 80% of the damage: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/just-57-companies-linked-to-80-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-since-2016
You asked me to introduce myself in an email I received for joining biocentric. I have been a fan for a long time. From before Thacker Pass. I added this article to my doomscroll at the doomsteaddiner.com Please visit.
I agree the volume needs to be turned up. That is why I started my website.
Thank you Max for your continued support for the wild places.
I know things are getting worse by the day but your work is a beacon in a disconnected and dangerous culture.
I have just subscribed for the annual subscription of Biocentric and will continue to do so for as long as I possibly can.
Stay strong.
Brendon Crook
www.panthevita.org
https://open.substack.com/pub/emanuelprez/p/a-victim-of-modern-day-political?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=wvp9w
I am happy to support your efforts Max. Will you also publicly support mine, my right to due process? I will do my best to assist you
Hi Emanuel, I'm not sure what you're referring to. I don't know your story. Can you share it?
Here is my platform from the 2024 campaign for president in the Green Party where I was on of the three candidates. https://green-liberty.org/ctp/policy/
Here is my story as described in Covert Action
You will notice the strong position on the environment, agriculture, and security as a comprehensive issue.
Thank you Max. Look forward to working with you. I tried to send you a message just now.