Anarcarkism

Anarcarkism is an anarchist and libertarian movement. Inspired by technological determinism and Teodhore Kaczynski's story “Ship of Fools”, anarcarkism acknowledges the more or less imminent sinking of the industrial society most humans, animals and environments on earth are subjected to. Differently from Kaczynski, the Anarcarkist does not intend to undermine the techno-system governing society. He rather sets forward to the building of a lifeboat, the tinkering of an ark in which to rescue whatever he can rescue of human and natural life in peril.

The anarchy black and brown flag of anarcarkism with the anarchy A truncated so as to symbolize an ark. The color brown represents the wood or rusted iron of a possible ark.

History

Origins

As early as 1964 Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan pointed out how those individuals making a creative use of technology at the margins of society come to create Noah's like arks which if disclosed on time can alleviate the catastrophes that each new technological paradigm brings about. In his seminal text “The Technological Society” French Italian philosopher Jacques Ellul also makes a distinction between industrial technology of big organizations and the technique used by individuals in the same fashion as primitive shamans adhering to a formula.

Disclosing his own self-tracking and constraints-based practice as part of his doctorate thesis, in 2016 Italian anarchist Alberto Frigo analyzed how his ark stowed with life-data provided the audience with a form of syncretism healing it from the polarization brought forward by for example social media. Experiencing the hater that politicians and academics and people complying to the techo-system generally displayed for his life-stowing project, after much reading into anarchist philosophy, Frigo conceived the term Anarcarkism.

The 25 by 25 by 25 feet iron cube Frigo built to disclose his 36 years life project. A cubic ark resembling that of the Epic of Gilgamesh

Wording

In an attempt to expand on French Jewish philosopher Jacques Derrida's negative notion on archiving practices, Frigo showed that if on one side archiving is the safeguarding of law as in the Ark of the Covenant it has also the more precarious and poetic connotation of rescuing life. To proof this Frigo showed how in ancient bibles the Ark of the Covenant was called aron while both Noah's ark and the basket in which small baby Moses was let in the river were called tebah. Originally then Frigo named the movement Tebahism, a term which was later discarded sounding too religious.

Cyclicity

Departing from this narrow Jewish wording Frigo was able investigate the many small and big arks of the many deluge myths from around the world but also generally how each new imperialistic build up brought about counter movements such as Taoism, Cynicism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Transcendentalism and Tolstoyanism. Along with these movements however Frigo noticed the proliferation of activities of more or less marginal Noah-like individuals preparing to stow life before an imminent disaster. These individuals may have gotten famous such as German photographer August Sander also photographing German cities before their complete annihilation in World War 2 or American nanny Vivian Maier. Other may have not emerged from their surface other than for their compulsive and hoarding behaviour such as Polish housewife Janina Turek.

Main concepts

Relation to technology

Anarcarkism wants to stand as a conscious yet non-violent mutiny of the techno-system. It is however not a passive movement in that it invites anarcarkists to build their unique life-boats and eventually join effort to do so applying solidarity among its members. An example is The Larnax Foundation the mountain property Frigo has bought to host such kind of ark making activities, larnax being the box with which Deucalion and his wife escaped the deluge ending up on Mount Parnassus which name probably derives from larnax itself (originally Larnassus).

Similarly to anarcho-primitivists and other proto-anarchic movements such as Taoism and Transcendentalism, Anarcarkism also advocates for a return to nature, yet this return is rather a need to find a vital space where to experiment with the building of lifeboats, a building that cannot really be pursued in highly gentrified and middle-class environments. The life of the anarcarkist can still take place in urban enviroments where elements of life can be collected and the preparation for the lifeboat can be made yet the wild represents the jumping back in the ocean, the rewilding and the rewinding and the ultimate cut with the techno-system ship.

Differing from anarcho-primitivism, anarcarkism advocates for the scavenging and the tinkering of technology for anarchists to create lifeboats in which life-content is stowed and ultimately brought to a different spatial and temporal dimension, a dimension that has survived the imminent collapse of the techno-system. In this respect, coming back to Kaczynsci's metaphor of society as a sheep, rather than trying to mediate with its captains or rather than trying to replace them with new captains, anarcarkists attempt to quietly set up their lifeboats and desert.

The general concept of mutiny applied by anarcarkists is that of non-compliance with the system and/or outsource of the system in view of creating a subsystem, in this respect a lifeboat which does not scorn the system itself but can even learn from it and reuse some of its technique where possible. With the advance of automated and ever more sophisticated technologies, the anarcarkists is that who rescue the effortful human skills endangered by effortless technologies which are more and more brought forward thus us also making the crew in the ship ever more depressed and dissatisfied about their power-process.

Relation to anarchism

While maintaining Kaczynski's view that any of the leftist discussions are unimportant especially in view of the sinking of the social and capitalist driven system, Anarcarkism strongly relates to traditional anarchism and in particularly to the thinking of Mikhail Bakunin. In the first place the anarcarkist, in his precarious assemblage of improvised lifeboats becomes a manual worker. Now with the advanced of automated technology, human craftmanship is relegated to a sort of hobby and surrogate activity.

Under this line of thinking, anarcarkists making as their primary scope in life the creation of lifeboats, become the remaining proletarian class, a class that because of its effortful labour is more capable to govern and it is far from all the psycho-pathological issues characterizing the bourgeois class of brain workers loyal to the system and shaped by it. In this respect the anarcarkist is bound to operate at the periphery of where hegemony lies. By means of example, under a Bakunian perspective, if the hegemony in Europe is among the Germanic people most loyal to the system, anarcarkists are more likely to be able to operate in the Latin and Slavic peripheries.

In this sense anarcarkism is a movement hopping off the Germanic dominated Western world, scorning the latest unimportant issues that Germanized thinkers bring forward in Germanized environments and creating a precarious school of thinking in other correlated and system exploited dimensions such as the Latin and Slavic world. In fact anarcarkism perceives the obsession with unimportant issues as an enforcing of more oppressing forms of governance and dogmas turning humanity ever more dependent to a sinking ship.

Also another important aspect of anarcarkism is that while the builders of lifeboats have generally attempted to work in marginalized and most precarious conditions, the creation of a movement to represent them become a form of syndicalism, a union in which solidarity among the lifeboat wrights can be established. Their human power however is never to come to terms with a social system which might as well use their lifeboats as mere decorations and proof that if anything happens, the mother ship have got life-boats.

Relation to politics

Generally speaking, the anarcarkist, having to comply as little as possible with the system and only in view of keeping up the building and stowing of his ark, ought to live a very frugal life. He is in this respect somewhat of an ancient Cynic, like a Diogenes contenting himself of the barrel, his ark. He is above all a Stoic, libertarian in his attitude like Zeno of Citium yet most concerned with the growing power of a republic turning gradually into an epicurean empire with its own official Christianity-like religion, Leftism.

In this respect the anarcarkist is not only most skeptical about this new religion, but cannot simply operate along its lines. While Leftism advocates for a form of environmentalism that is dictated by science, an environmentalism in which the human agents are replaced by more efficient machines, anarcarkism advocates for the necessity of letting the human agent use his machines for the sake of building his ark. In this respect anarcarkism maintains Bakunin's view that a governance lead by scientists is but a for of tyranny.

The question is how free and for how long can anarcarkists operate under a governance putting more and more constraints in the use of manual technologies such as fuel operated machineries which are so in need for the anarcarkist to reuse and scavenge for example old industrial material? How can he plasma cut an abandoned ship container to fabricate his ark if no fumes are anymore allowed especially in a most gentrified middle-class residential settings that does not tolerate any fumes but meantime have entire industries at their disposal in the eastern part of the world with millions o workers enslaved by Communist regimes?

In this respect the anarcarkist is bound to the periphery, a periphery that is still reluctant to implement the political hypocrisies of in this case the Westerner world. This periphery is traditionally rebellious to its hegemonic center and the anarcarkist can here operate without worrying about the leftists issues yet right in this periphery the anarcarkist ought to face the rightists, people responding to the hegemony of the leftist center with absurd nationalistic and sovereignty based ideas.

Interestingly the very creation of an "anarcark" is most disturbing of a factor for both leftists and rightists, the latter being most disturbed about the lack of a nationalistic narrative within the operation of the anarcarkist.

External links

• [1] Anarcarkism official website