The Anti-Civ critique argues that the following things exist with civilizations

the collection of unsustainable populations into cities

the forced domestication of classes of people and animals

the inevitable importation of goods from outside its own sources

the inevitable increase in demand for goods and depletion of sources for goods

the standardization of life, from biodiversity to monoculture

the necessity of hierarchical authority,

the inevitable collapse of civilization, capitalism, communist, socialist, anarchist? (but would an anarchist society be a civilization or does civilization come from coercion and hierarchy?)

The key argument is that it is a system that can not be sustained, a system that is founded on violence to begin with. This is what people debate. Is Civilization as a System Sustainable? Can it survive? This is drawn from history. The Mayan collapse. The collapse of the Roman Empire.

City-states and their populations can not supply themselves with their own food. The food must be gotten from exploiting the land beyond the city-state. No amount of theory will change that necessary oppression. An unsustainable system can not be changed or rearranged. It will collapse!
10 billion left wing anarchist inhabiting the cities of the planet will need to exploit the planet beyond its capacity for survival and the system will collapse.

Oh, yeah. I am in Colorado, and the most popular North American struggle is all around me. It’s called denial!

Forget about labels. Civ sucks.

You can call these ideas whatever you want and most anti civ thought is borrowed from other left wing fields but I think its as good a label as any.

here are a few links that are kinda interesting.

http://anthropik.com/2005/03/what-is-civilization/

http://anthropik.com/2006/09/reviewing-the-basics/

http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=336&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

When I was into this stuff I found it quite hard to differentiate between anti-civ anarchists and primitivists — I think I used the words interchangably though more often called myself a primitivist. Some primmies only want to go back to pre-industrial societies, whereas anti-civ types much more universally want to go back further… but I’m not sure they can be separated so easily.

I reckon your comment about cities is a really good one. It’s interesting reading the classic anarchist writers – Kropotkin especially – as most of them also call for the desturction of the city, to be replaced with the semi-urban semi-rural free commune. They point to the centralisation of the city being a perculiarly capitalist development, efficient only according to capitalist logic, and that anarchist organisation would invariably turn toward decentralisation of production and thus the city. They also talked about the need for largely self-sufficient communes, which therefore needed to cater for their own food production and general production, and only look outside the commune for specialised production.

I guess my point is that being anti-city isn’t a departure from classical anarchism really much at all, and its funny anti-civs try to make such a big thing out of it.

I haven’t read Jensen so I don’t know the arguments about the city by its nature being unsustainable. Is there anything you know of I could read online that would give me a good quick intro?

Anti civilisation writers such as Ran Prieur and Derrick Jenson however tend to argue that civilisation (marked by the rise of citys) cannot be sustainable and that collapse due to a lack of resources is part of the rise of citys over the long term. They also tend to talk about the hierachys implicit in large scale society such as citys.

Anyway what im trying to say is that being anti civilisation is different to being a promitivist.