From In These Times: http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/14292/catastrophiliacs
For some, the end of the world can’t come too soon.
BY Sasha Lilley
December 20, 2012
When the financial crisis unfolded in the early years of the new millennium, many radicals hoped the end was nigh. The capitalist system had finally arrived at its terminus—the last stop on the line. Where the Left had failed, the inexorable limits to capitalism would deliver. Needless to say, it has not turned out so well. Expecting predestined forces to transform society for the better forms one half of the couplet of Left catastrophism. The other consists of the idea that the worse things get, the more auspicious they become for radical prospects—that if conditions become dire, the scales with fall from the eyes of the misled masses.
The outer edges of Left catastrophism are inhabited by those who see the collapse of society—not simply capitalism, but civilization—as a route to a better world. Both poles of catastrophism can be found here. For some, the collapse is preordained, the result of “peak oil,” the scarcity of other natural resources, or the implosion of industrial society. For others, it needs hastening.
The most prominent proponents of this broad outlook label themselves “anti-civilization” and often, but not exclusively, identify as anarchists. Adversaries of civilization believe that the original catastrophe, begetting the catastrophe of the present, was the emergence of settled agriculture in the Neolithic period circa 8,000 B.C., when humans purportedly stopped living in harmony with the land and started organizing complex economies. A return to a hunter-gatherer society, they argue, is the only conceivable future that is sustainable. Such a transformation would necessarily require the dramatic reduction of the majority of the human population, since foraging would not provide a fraction of the food that the world’s inhabitants need. However—and auspiciously, as they see it—the collapse may deliver such a reduction. As the now-defunct publication Green Anarchy put it:
Some time when you’re on a busy street, in line at the post office, on the bus, look around. Get used to the idea that most of these people will not live a lot longer. Who among them would survive if the food stopped coming into the city for a month? … We will be throwing the stinking dead bodies of our families into pits and kneeling in garbage coughing up blood. … Within that range of imagined futures, even the bad extreme is not so bad, and at the good extreme we see the Earth quickly healing to its former fecundity, and people living peacefully with other life, and never sliding out of balance again.
Opponents of civilization tend to take a dim view of other humans. They eschew mass collective revolutionary action in favor of subversion by the chosen few who have little interest in whether others perish. Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Aric McBay’s tome Deep Green Resistance lays out a series of scenarios for taking down industrial civilization, including through the strategy of “decisive ecological warfare.” (One critic described the book as an encounter between evangelical Protestant Noah Webster and the Red Army Faction.) It predicts that the depletion of accessible oil reserves, or peak oil, will cause the global capitalist economy to fall apart around 2015. Radicals will have a choice either to sit back and watch, or to hasten the collapse, while organizing mutual aid through small autonomous communities. Decisive ecological warfare, the most militant of possible strategies, would aim to reduce fossil fuel consumption immediately by 90 percent through an escalating above and below ground strategy targeting industrial, and especially energy, infrastructure.
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