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Strategic Premises
This is a list-in-progress of strategic premises that will be of relevance
to communities living during and after the collapse.
"Ecodefense is Community Defense"
All industrial resource extraction infrastructure should be destroyed or made
inoperable. This makes the landbase more likely to persist intact, and also
less appealing to conquest.
If the landbase is protected, we can survive. If it is destroyed, we will die.
Community Interdependence Premise:
Labour minimization premise:
Flexibility premise:
We have to develop a confidence, resilience and adaptability that will allow
us to endure the collapse as intact as possible and to respond openly, flexibly
and intuitively to a variety of possible circumstances and challenges. Thus,
whatever arises, we will be able to do the best that we can. I think that its
likely that many of the choices we make in the coming years will be based on
what is preferable, rather than what specifically is desirable.
Part of developing that intuition is having a good critique of the current
situation and an understanding of how we got here. It also has to do with understanding
certain things about ecology, "primitive" peoples, civilization, community-building
and hierarchy, and the relationships between those things.
Very importantly, it has to do with understanding the history and character
of the landbase you inhabit.
"Skills mean influence"
The premise is that all activists who are concerned about making a better world
-- especially including social activists like queer activists, anti-racism,
anti-poverty activists, and so on -- had better damned well get on about the
business of learning to survive the collapse. If we do that, then we and our
values will form the nuclei for the communities that last. If we don't we will
be wiped out along with everything else that is dependant on this industrial
monstrosity.
So one of the critical things that we can do, as many people _are_ doing,
is to insure that radicals like us have to skills to survive the collapse, and
create new communities. That way we can influence the longterm outcome simply
by surviving and teaching other people to survive. At the same time, we can
share our knowledge on why the collapse happened, and why the remnants of civilization
need to be removed for us to survive.
"Keep the Lights Out"
Even if we don't actively trigger the downfall of industrial civilization,
we should be ready to make sure it doesn't get up again where we are.
We should know how to destroy or disable roads, railways, electrical
grid components, factories and machines, and be ready to to so. As
I write in various ways, "Once the lights go out, it is our job to
make sure that they never come back on again." Basically, when industrial
civilization falters -- and we know it will -- we must strike to cripple
and disable it wherever we can, at our local levels, so that it will
be finished for good.
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