Desert by Anonymous & Anonymous

Author:Anonymous & Anonymous
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: critique, green, nihilist
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Lives of liberty/slavery on the new frontiers

Possibilities will emerge as the cold deserts retreat for those who wish to settle/invade/resist/work. Who will populate these new lands? Physical landscapes and the social terrains of struggle frame what we think is possible and thus what we do. In Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century North America, Individualist Anarchism (especially that influenced by Henry David Thoreau) was framed directly by the idea and existence of frontiers and thus the real ability to build some level of autonomy and self-sufficiency — admittedly on stolen land! In crowded Europe at the same time there was less ‘outside’ available, and so despite strong currents with an ecological and anti-civilisation perspective, many individualist anarchists turned to bank robbing, insurrection, assassination and art. We can expect the opening up of new lands within Europe and North America to have a significant impact on both those who wish to desert civilisation as well as those who wish to expand it. There will be many possibilities for lives of liberty on the expanding frontiers, though drop-outs and renegades may themselves lay the foundations for a wider ‘gentrification’ of the wilderness.

It would be lovely to think that a thousand anarchist log huts will bloom but more prevalent are likely to be workcamps and farmlands resembling something between Dubai’s modern gulags and the new Chinese farming and logging colonies of Siberia. In the UAE desert migrant workers live in horrific conditions and are bussed in and out of Dubai daily to build the new super city. They have no rights of citizenship, no rights to stay beyond a fixed term contract, almost no spouses (or right to marry or co-habit), families rarely exist, no official unionisation. Frightened by an ‘Indian Demographic Time-Bomb’ Dubai’s rulers have initiated a complex immigration quota system where migrants are brought in from diverse countries to keep workers socially divided. In Siberia 600,000 Chinese workers cross the border in seasonal migration every summer to work the new fields. [112]

So there will be lives of slavery as well as liberty on the new frontiers and with worsening prospects in much of the warming world and the promise of hard currency many will choose them. Readers with anarcho-syndicalist leanings may notice the striking similarity of such situations with that of the logging and mining camps that were the battlegrounds of the Wobblies. The IWW was the only workers organisation that had any successes in uniting ‘lumpen’ migrant workers of diverse nationalities in early 20th century America. Culturally divided and without recourse to legal unions and other organs of social democracy, militant informal syndicalism could arise in the New North, possibly even informed by Anarchism.

Parallels between old and new frontiers are laid out well by climatologist Lawrence C. Smith.

[An] envisioning of the New North today might be something like America in 1803, just after the Louisiana Purchase from France. It, too, possessed major cities fuelled by foreign immigration, with a vast, inhospitable frontier distant from the major urban cores. Its deserts, like Arctic tundra, were harsh, dangerous, and ecologically fragile.

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