mooncakeSince finishing live-tooting The Conquest Of Bread, I feel like I should do another book that’s on The Anarchist Library. Maybe leap ahead and do “To Our Friends” by the Invisible Committee?
I mean here we go!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/wGxMeEKwof12LMHWnRI
https://anticapitalist.party/media/9E-A831GMYiSrqvaPKo
https://anticapitalist.party/media/wGxMeEKwof12LMHWnRI
https://anticapitalist.party/media/9E-A831GMYiSrqvaPKo
This essay is available as a PDF online but I’m reading a book version (as pictured above) but anyways!
https://anticapitalist.party/media/N9Hdq-MnLTV5M4tjGJw
https://anticapitalist.party/media/N9Hdq-MnLTV5M4tjGJw
"In reality, the end of civilization has been clinically established for a century, and countersigned by events... the catastrophe there in front of us, and that has been there for a long time, from the catastrophe that we are, the catastrophe that the West is. That catastrophe is existential, affective, and metaphysical first of all. It resides in Western man’s incredible estrangement from the world, an estrangement that demands, for example, that he become the master and possessor of nature."
"The falsity of the entire Western apocalyptic consists in projecting onto the world the mourning we’re not able to do in regard to it. It’s not the world that is lost, it’s we who have lost the world and go on losing it. It’s not the world that is going to end soon, it’s we who are finished, amputated, cut-off, we who refuse vital contact with the real in a hallucinatory way. The crisis is not economic, ecological, or political, <i> the crisis is above all that of presence </i>."
"Man has even proclaimed himself a 'geological force' ... For the last time, he assigns himself the main role, even if it’s to accuse himself of having trashed everything—the seas and the skies, the ground and what’s underground... What’s remarkable is that he continues relating in the same disastrous manner to the disaster produced by his own disastrous relationship with the world."
^this bit about the anthropocene is fascinating to me because I know that "capitalocene" is a little more ~acceptable~ in certain circles
Makes me think of Donna Haraway's recent works : http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.7.pdf
"He has the hubris to claim, paternally, to be 'protecting the environment,' which certainly never asked for anything of the sort. All this has the look of a last bold move in a game that can’t be won."
This makes me think about how conservation efforts are almost always framed in terms of biodiversity and survival but ofc whose survival blah blah blah
"If so much satisfaction is derived from surveying the devastation of the environment it’s largely because this veils the shocking destruction of interiorities. Every oil spill, every sterile plain, every species extinction is an image of our souls in shreds, a reflection of our absence from the world, of our personal inability to inhabit it."
"We other revolutionaries, with our atavistic humanism, would do well to inform ourselves about the uninterrupted uprisings by the indigenous peoples of Central and South America over the past twenty years. Their watchword could be “Place the earth at the center.” It’s a declaration of war against Man. Declaring war on him could be the best way to bring him back down to earth, if only he didn’t play deaf, as always."