What we Leave Behind

A GREAT MANY BOOKS ON ENVIRONMENTALISM written in the last few decades conclude with a listing of things that you, as a citizen, or more likely as a consumer, can do to address the problems. In your capacity as a consumer, you can reduce your consumption or buy products that are allegedly more eco-friendly in order to convince corporations to enact change. As a citizen, you can write to “your” congresspeople or other governmental “representatives,” and ask them to enact change. If you want to do one better, you can donate to a nonprofit organization that will lobby governments and corporations on your behalf. Authors may offer a plethora of different vicarious solutions involving various ways to try to persuade large, entrenched institutions to act against their underlying drives.

If you’ve gotten to this point and are yearning for a way to reduce your personal use of disposable packaging or compost more of your household waste, there are already hundreds of books with tips on exactly those subjects. It’s been done. And we’re not saying you shouldn’t try to reduce your production of household waste. Minimizing waste is certainly a good thing to do, and we don’t want to insult that group of people (which includes ourselves) who have taken steps to reduce their waste. And obviously we aren’t saying you shouldn’t donate to nonprofit organizations, especially local ones. We will say that in general you shouldn’t give a dime to big corporate “green” organizations. One example why: Jay Hair, former head of the National Wildlife Federation, immediately went from there to becoming a spokesperson for Plum Creek Timber Company, a timber company so nasty even a Republican called it the Darth Vader of the timber industry. Such is business as usual among the big corporate “green” organizations.)

What we are saying is this: we aren’t going to insult your intelligence by asserting that such solutions are even remotely sufficient to address the problem. Removing an extra few dump-truck loads from those seventy-three Grand Canyons is good, but it’s a drop in the plastic-suffocated ocean in terms of real change. We don’t have the time or patience to immerse ourselves in a fantasy world where corporations and governments act in ways that contradict their own fundamental imperatives and immediate self-interest because we send them politely worded and well-researched letters. And we aren’t going to blindly swallow the premise that you, the reader, are a mere consumer, taxpayer, or even citizen. Your identity, your being, is not limited to your economic function in relation to some vast bureaucracy. You are a human being, an animal: whether you recognize it or not, you are a living creature embedded in a network of trillions and trillions of other living creatures, all interdependent.

In a way, that’s really what this entire book is about. Is your identity that of a consumer, or a person? When you say “the real world” are you talking about wage slave capitalism, or are you talking about a living breathing world of trees and rivers and lakes and deserts and forests and mountains and seas? And if you identify as a living member of that much larger community, a community that is being systematically destroyed by a toxic mimic of the real world, what are you going to do about it? How are you going to defend your community?

There are those who disagree that the world needs defending. I’m not talking about the people who think everything is fine, or those who wouldn’t understand or care if every fish in the ocean were killed. I’m talking about people who recognize the scope and seriousness of our predicament, who recognize that the problems we face are deeply rooted and systemic, but who don’t think that they in particular need to do anything other than “walk away.” Of course, as was already discussed, this is not nearly enough, and we should not pretend it is. Those who would truly walk away, who aim to abandon the dominant culture completely, clearly recognize that this culture is fundamentally irredeemable. And they presumably recognize that civilization’s voracious industrial appetite is eating up the planet at an ever increasing rate. So why do they view walking away as an adequate strategy? If this culture is not going to change, where do they expect to be safe? What do they expect will happen as industrial society exhausts its last remaining resources? If this monstrosity is not stopped, the carefully tended permaculture gardens and groves of lifeboat ecovillages will be nothing more than after-dinner snacks for civilization.

I think the problem is partly a lack of historical perspective. It’s not as though living outside of civilization is new, after all. A little more than five centuries ago, North and South America (and Africa, Oceania, and Asia; if we go back 2000 years we can add Europe, and if we go back 6000 years we can add the Near and Middle East) were filled with tens of thousands of uncivilized communities. Any five-year-old child among them would have been better at finding wild edible foods than I will ever be. The Confederacy of the Haudenosaunee was a proven and effective participatory democracy that I can only dream of emulating in my community. These continents abounded with warriors who were skilled and courageous beyond my conception. And yet they were all but wiped out by the insane civilized (whom they significantly outnumbered, at least at the beginning) using technologies that are hopelessly crude by modern standards of conquest and genocide. Do civilized people who walk away, many of whom are essentially novices both to living in a healthy community and living with the land, believe they can survive so much better than entire indigenous nations with countless millennia of uninterrupted experience?

I don’t mean to sound overly pessimistic. I don’t think we’re completely doomed. We do have some advantages that those living centuries ago did not. We recognize how deeply pathological this culture is, we recognize the need for it to be dismantled entirely, and we can understand that in a way for which indigenous Americans of the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries (and others of the indigenous) simply didn’t have the context. They were taken off-guard by an enemy more hideous, insatiable, and cruel than they had ever encountered, could reasonably anticipate, or even imagine. We no longer have to imagine. We need merely pay attention. We also have the benefit that modern society is more monolithic, more dependent on a small number of centralized industrial and economic systems, more brittle, and more vulnerable to collapse. And we can use those systems to our own (and the world’s) advantage, both by employing and disrupting them.

Like most decisions people make, especially life decisions based on complex or unpredictable situations, the decision to just walk away is not one based on reasoned analysis. And because of this, I think the motivation has much to do not just with identity, but with what Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote: that action comes from a readiness for responsibility. To succeed in stopping the destruction of the planet, you have to be ready to take responsibility. Not to belittle responsibility by pretending that solely personal actions aimed primarily at protecting you and yours can solve vast problems. Not to surrender responsibility to governments and businesses which claim to act on your behalf or in your best interest. Not to renounce responsibility by pretending that walking away from the destruction will somehow cause it to stop.

Fighting back, in the broadest sense, means a great deal. It means giving up on the fairy tale that those in power act in the best interest of us or the planet, or that they are systematically capable of thinking in the long term. It means no longer pretending that industrial progress will bring us to some bright new beautiful tomorrow. It means stepping outside of the carefully circumscribed limits that keep us ineffective. It means deliberate and strategic opposition to those in power, instead of attempts to lobby or convince them to please stop exploiting people and destroying the world.

Fighting back means doing what is appropriate. It means seeking solutions appropriate to the scale of a problem. It means not ruling out actions just because those in power (or Gandhian activists, or the Bible, or those who think buying recycled toilet paper is sufficient, or liberal members of the “loyal opposition”) say they shouldn’t be used. And fighting back may or may not look like fighting: it doesn’t have to look like violence (although it may). It means not using violence when it’s appropriate to not use violence. It means using violence when it is appropriate to use violence. It means using industrial technology when it’s appropriate, and not using it when it’s not appropriate. It means being strategic, and being smart, and remembering our allegiances and our end goals.

I’ve learned many things from the brilliant writer and activist Lierre Keith, and one of them is this: effective organized political resistance, whether it’s devoutly nonviolent or espouses a diversity of tactics, is based on force. Those in power understand this, which is why they want a monopoly not just on violence but on force, and why they have gone to such lengths (through the use of COINTELPRO and the like) to sabotage movements that understand force. Radical movements that disavow the use of directed political violence can, in certain circumstances, succeed, so long as they have very large numbers of dedicated people who understand that their goal is not to ask for the intolerable to stop, but to force it to stop.

Another person who understood this was abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who said as much in a speech in 1857: “Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men [sic] who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.³¹⁴

“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”³¹⁵

When I interviewed Lierre several years ago, she discussed the basis of political effectiveness in force, and strongly recommended Gene Sharp’s book The Politics of Nonviolent Action: “His books are profoundly important. His ideas have been used in liberation struggles all over the world, from South Africa to Eastern Europe. He points out that power depends on obedience, and we don’t have to obey. The moment the oppressed withdraw our consent, the powerful are left with nothing. Sharp identifies a range of tactical approaches, but they break down into two categories: acts of omission and acts of commission.

“There’s a tremendous misconception, particularly in the US, that nonviolent action is about somehow trying to educate or convert those in power. It’s not. That’s pacifism, not nonviolent action. I mean, does anybody really think the owners of the bus company in Montgomery, Alabama had a sudden epiphany? ‘We’ve been so terrible to Black people, oh my god, segregation must end!’ Of course not. The boycott brought them to their knees. There may or may not have been individuals whose consciences were awakened, but that wasn’t the point. People withheld their economic power until the institution—in this case, the bus company—caved in.

“I think this is so important because the main divide isn’t between violence and nonviolence. It’s between action and inaction. Properly understood, both militancy and nonviolence are direct confrontations with power, confrontations backed by the threat of force. Both strategies require planning, discipline, and sacrifice. Both kinds of activism will bring the full weight of the wrath of the powerful down upon the actionists. The moment you’re successful, the moment power is threatened, you will pay, sometimes with your lives.”³¹⁶

There’s no doubt, we’re in a serious situation that requires a serious response. And though we shouldn’t unnecessarily provoke those in power, we must recognize that effective political strategy will meet with reprisals from those in power regardless of the specific tactics used. It can be frightening to think of those reprisals targeting you—that’s the whole point after all: it’s a form of government-sponsored terrorism (and one could easily argue that civilized governments are a form of terrorism)—but in the long term (and by now the short term), those in power are destroying the world. What do we have to lose? If we make them really mad, what are they going to do, destroy the earth twice?

Some people will not resist. Some will actively collaborate. Perhaps they benefit, at least temporarily, from civilization’s hierarchy. Or perhaps those in power have determined the precise measure of empty promises that most people will tolerate, calculated the “exact measure of injustice and wrong” that they can get away with. But for the rest of us, our job is to devise and enact a plan—many plans, actually—that will make those in power afraid, not just for themselves, but for the entire wretched system that keeps them in power.

So what do we need in order to do that? First, to again quote Lierre Keith: “What any movement needs is an effective strategy. That means identifying two things: where is power weak and where are you strong? The overlap is where you strike. One problem with nonviolence is that it depends on huge numbers of people to be effective. Rosa Parks on her own ended up in jail. Rosa Parks plus the whole Black community of Montgomery ended segregation on the public transportation system. Without a mass movement, the technique doesn’t work.”

So that’s actually two things we need so far: an effective strategy, and an effective strategy that’s actually congruent with the numbers of people we have, the resources we have, and the time we have. That helps to narrow things down. Though a wholly nonviolent mass movement bent on systematically uprooting the fundamental causes of human exploitation and ecocide would be wonderful, it falls short in our case as a valid strategy. Currently, there simply aren’t enough people willing to address the issue. And worse, there isn’t enough time to build that movement—each day that passes means hundreds of species wiped out forever, means more land-based cultures destroyed by the industrial onslaught, means global fossil energy consumption brings us closer and closer to a runaway greenhouse effect, means more plastic and fewer fish in the oceans, means fewer amphibians, and so on, ad omnicidium.

A third asset we need is a collective recognition of the real systemic roots of the problem. As discussed earlier, the garbage problem will not go away because you or I stop producing garbage. And global warming will not go away because you or I stop using gasoline. Those problems will not go away as long as there is a global industrial system that produces waste and burns gasoline. In fact, it’s conceivable that in the coming decades a focus on reducing personal consumption could even make things worse. I’m not talking about worsening caused by a focus on more symbolic action at the expense of more effective action, although that’s certainly a valid argument. Rather, I’m talking about the fact that we’re entering a post-peak period for oil, and for many other commodities. If demand for oil far outstrips supply, and we all decide to get together to reduce our consumption of gas for altruistic reasons, we will reduce demand for the finite supply of oil. The net effect of this “green” action will simply be to make the remaining oil cheaper and more readily available for militaries, corporations, and other institutions which lack our scruples. Which, again, isn’t to say we shouldn’t reduce our consumption, but we should do it because it’s the right thing and not because we expect it to topple those in power.

A fourth prerequisite for effectiveness is a culture of resistance. This should not be confused with an “alternative culture.” Instead, a culture of resistance is an explicitly oppositional culture. An effective culture of resistance does not seek a “cultural revolution”: cultural change is not the objective, but material change, accomplished though the organized work of a large and diverse group. A culture of resistance is, collectively, that group of people with an understanding of the root causes of their predicament, and a willingness to work together in opposition to authority to address those causes.

There is a story about a member of an Irish resistance group in the early twentieth century. One night, while carrying out resistance activities, he was discovered by the British and shot as he escaped. The man was wounded, but managed to hide in an alley and avoid discovery by the British. Later that night, a group of men on their way home passed through the alley and found the injured man. Though not active members of the resistance, they immediately recognized what had happened and brought the man to a doctor and safehouse. They didn’t need to be told to do this—they knew, because their culture was a culture of resistance.

Such a culture benefits from shared goals and group norms that allow the culture to propagate and persist, and gives rise to effective tactics and strategies. Solidarity and mutual aid, such as in the above example, are one important characteristic. Further, those in the culture acknowledge and support a broad diversity of tactics and involvement, with the understanding that they’re all working toward the same goals with the same general strategy. This permits individuals and small groups to focus on the projects and tasks they’re best suited for, as well as limiting risk to the entire group while supporting those in the most high risk positions.

Here’s what I mean by that. In any given army, only a tiny percentage of the army is actually involved in fighting. (For example, in 1918, just before the Irish War of Independence, the IRA had about 100,000 enlisted members, but only about 3000 of them were actually fighters at any given time.) The rest of those involved participate in logistical and support roles, doing recruitment and training; communication; logistics like obtaining, manufacturing, and moving materiel; medical support; and even things as basic as feeding the troops and maintaining equipment. And many of those who fight aren’t professional soldiers. An army commonly consists of a core or skeleton of professional officers and noncommissioned officers. When war is declared, that skeleton is fleshed out by conscripts, reservists, or civilian militia.

Guerilla or resistance movements are likely have a similar disproportion between the number of people who actively carry out operations, and the people who support them. Relatively few members of an armed resistance movement actually take up arms as active guerillas. But in order for them to succeed they require a much larger support network of sympathizers, fundraisers, above-ground political agitators, reconnaissance workers, and those who offer direct material support such as food and shelter. Even nonviolent movements are likely to have a parallel structure. Those people who put themselves in harm’s way through civil disobedience or direct action—be they forest defenders in tree sits, Project Ploughshares activists smashing military hardware, or indigenous people blockading loggers or miners in their homeland—ultimately rely on those who can offer support for prisoners and their families, medical aid, awareness raising and material support. (For example, when people think of treesitters, how many of them think about the people who bring them food and water, and carry away their shit buckets, people without whom the treesitters would not be able to last more than a few days.)

Governments of occupation realize that cultures of resistance are very dangerous things. They constantly try to undermine group solidarity and a diversity of tactics to split movements and quash actions that might prove effective. The FBI’s Counter Intelligence Program, COINTELPRO, is an example of a highly effective program designed to destroy cultures of resistance. In his book War at Home: Covert Action Against US Activists and What We Can Do About It, attorney Brian Glick identified four main methods used to target and disrupt everyone from the Black Panther Party to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Those four categories were: “Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents. Psychological Warfare from the Outside: The FBI and police used myriad other ‘dirty tricks’ to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials, and others to cause trouble for activists. Harassment Through the Legal System: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, ‘investigative’ interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters. Extralegal Force and Violence: The FBI and police threatened, instigated, and themselves conducted break-ins, vandalism, assaults, and beatings. The object was to frighten dissidents and disrupt their movements. In the case of radical Black and Puerto Rican activists (and later Native Americans), these attacks—including political assassinations—were so extensive, vicious, and calculated that they can accurately be termed a form of official ‘terrorism.’”³¹⁷

Though COINTELPRO operations were only officially active between 1956 and 1971, of course COINTELPRO-like operations have continued.³¹⁸ And furthermore, the success of COINTELPRO means that their strategy has served as a template mimicked by many of those in power attempting to quash resistance without unleashing the public sympathy that comes with more overt fascism. We hear echoes of that same strategy when protestors are described as “good protestors” and “bad protesters” (usually based on who is willing to follow police orders), and when protesters internalize these messages from above and use them to label other protesters as “good” or “bad” based on this same criteria. Any successful culture of resistance must learn from COINTELPRO and programs like it in order to become more robust, and any serious culture of resistance must come up with its own measures of “good” and “bad,” “successful” and “unsuccessful.”

When the issue of fighting back comes up, I sometimes hear people argue that we mustn’t fight back, because those in power will only rebuild, or because they’ll only increase their repression and violence. That this concern is considered by some to be a valid reason for inaction tells me many things. One of the most important things it tells me is that the people asking that question do not live in a culture of resistance. The question of how those in power will respond to different actions is certainly strategically valid. But in a culture of resistance, it’s not a reason to not resist by whatever means are most appropriate and effective. Of course those in power will inflict reprisals on those who resist them. Of course they will try to frighten and terrorize dissidents into accepting their authority. Of course they will try to harm even those who do not directly participate in actions against power. This is not a reason to hold back—this is why we fight them. In a culture of resistance, reprisals and state terrorism are certainly not trivial, and they are not ignored. Instead, they underscore the importance of resistance, and strengthen the resolve of those who fight back.

No government or party gains power by offering a cogent analysis of the underlying flaws of a civilization. A cunning fascist would not claim that the capitalist economy collapsed because it was intrinsically unstable and based on the imaginary inflation of capital. No clever authoritarian would say that energy shortages are caused by the exhaustion of finite supplies of fossil fuels. No, those sociopathologically sly would-be dictators always find a scapegoat and a reason to gather more power, more authority. The economy is weakened because foreign powers are conspiring against us, because there are bloodsuckers parasitizing our society. Energy is short because environmentalists are standing in the way of progress, because terrorists overseas are attacking us and hate our freedoms. Give me your vote. Let me be your voice. Give me the power, and I will do what it takes. I will crush these enemies of our glorious nation, our homeland, our fatherland.

The Nazis, in particular, were experts at this kind of manipulation (although one could argue that they were neophytes compared to the US). Hitler and other Nazi propagandists blamed Germany’s economic woes on the Treaty of Versailles and countries which signed it, whipping good Germans into a nationalistic frenzy against those external enemies. This propaganda had at least a partial basis in fact—the Treaty of Versailles required Germany to pay exacting reparations for losses suffered by the Allies. On the other hand, finding internal scapegoats required what Hitler called the Big Lie, the use of repeated falsehoods so colossal that listeners would not believe that the liar would have the gall make such preposterous statements if they were not true.

When Nazis targeted and demonized internal enemies, such as Jews and Roma, they started by capitalizing on existing ethnocentrism, racism and anti-Semitism. Germans were suffering, they said, because Jews were bloodsuckers who leeched money from hardworking German people while doing no work themselves. Propaganda posters showed Jews depicted as worms with dollar signs and the hammer-and-sickle for pupils. From there the Nazis moved onto even more audacious lies: Jews were part of a conspiracy to control the world and wipe out the Aryan race; at Passover, Jews would try to kidnap and kill Christian infants to mix the blood with their matzoh.

As absurd and clearly irrational as much of their propaganda was, the Nazis were motivated by a sociopathic internal logic, social Darwinism, and a perverse understanding of carrying capacity. German expansionism in the Nazi doctrine was internally rationalized by the German need for more Lebensraum, the German word for “living space” or “habitat,” a concept which included both land and raw resources. In the Nazi doctrine, other “inferior races” took up Lebensraum that rightfully belonged to the superior Germans. It was therefore not just acceptable, but a moral imperative for Germany to enslave, deport, or kill those “inferior races” and colonize their Lebensraum with Germans.

Let’s bring this back to the modern day and the concept of collapse. Currently human carrying capacity is vastly overshot through the use of unsustainable practices like the extensive use of fossil energy for agriculture, the erosion of soils with intensive cultivation, and the drawing down of aquifers around the world. When peak oil really hits home, when global trade starts to unravel in earnest, that ghost carrying capacity will evaporate, and food and basic resources will be in globally short supply. People who do not have jobs, people who cannot afford to fuel their cars, people who are hungry, do not want to hear that they’re experiencing that privation because generations of industrial humans lived unsustainably and stripped away much of the planet’s surface in an orgy of pointless consumerism. They do not want to hear that they will never again experience the levels of material opulence to which they’ve grown to feel entitled. They certainly do not want to hear that they were the ones who used up all of those resources. They would be much more receptive to hearing that some particular scapegoat—Arabs, Mexicans, illegal immigrants, those strange people living across the river—is to blame, and if they’ll just give the government a little more power, sacrifice a little more of their freedom, the government will be sure to solve that problem. And heck, if all else fails they can always displace the different people across the river and grow more food on their land. Or they can enslave them and force them to work in labor camps, because those fossil-fueled factories aren’t quite so productive since the oil dried up. And if those scapegoats don’t cooperate—or even if they do—the government can always kill them. They aren’t fully human after all.

The Nazis did all of these things. When Jews, Roma, Slavs, and others were targeted by the Nazis, the German government could claim their land, homes, money, and even personal effects and bodies (including hair, eyeglasses, fat for soap, and gold from their teeth), which could be given to Germans or used in the war effort. And of course, the concentration camps weren’t solely extermination camps. Almost all of them were also work camps, commonly with adjacent corporate factories getting slave labor from the inmates.

Although carrying capacity pressures and economic or social collapses are never the sole causes of genocide, many historians and analysts believe they play a major contributing role. According to some observers, even the relatively recent and tragic genocide in Rwanda may have been worsened or partly caused by carrying capacity pressures.³²⁰ But that by itself is never enough to spawn a full-scale genocide. Such atrocities require some pre-existing racism or other prejudice accompanied by an authoritarian leadership willing to manipulate the situation for power gain.

Regardless of the exact politics of those fascists, authoritarians, or totalitarians, resistance and dissent represents a threat. A culture of resistance represents a particular threat. In fascism, the identity of the people is subsumed to that of the nation, which is personified by the authoritarian leader, be it the führer or some variant. That leader cannot tolerate dissent, or, as Erich Fromm put it in his essential book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, self-assertion: “For all irrational and exploitative forms of authority, self assertion—the pursuit by another of his real goals—is the arch sin because it is a threat to the power of the authority; the person subject to it is indoctrinated to believe that the aims of authority are also his, and that obedience offers the optimal chance for fulfilling oneself.”³²¹

Even modern states officially running under democracy—or, depending on your perspective, a form of Friendly Fascism—work under much the same principal. Those who are not able to break this indoctrination, those who are not part of the culture of resistance, often fail to question authority even when it is utterly clear that they should. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, survivor of both Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps, had a keen understanding of how this played out in the camps: “Non-political middle class prisoners (a minority group in the concentration camps) were those least able to withstand the initial shock. They were utterly unable to understand what had happened to them and why. More than ever they clung to what had given them self respect up to that moment. Even while being abused, they would assure the SS they had never opposed Nazism. They could not understand why they, who had always obeyed the law without question, were being persecuted. Even now, though unjustly imprisoned, they dared not oppose their oppressors even in thought, though it would have given them a self-respect they were badly in need of. All they could do was plead and many groveled. Since law and police had to remain beyond reproach, they accepted as just whatever the Gestapo did. Their only objection was that they had become objects of a persecution which in itself must be just, since the authorities imposed it. They rationalized their difficulty by insisting it was all a ‘mistake.’ The SS made fun of them, mistreated them badly, while at the same time enjoying scenes that emphasized their position of superiority. The [middle class prisoner] group as a whole was especially anxious that their middle class status should be respected in some way. What upset them most was being treated ‘like ordinary criminals.’

“Their behaviour showed how little the apolitical German middle class was able to hold its own against National Socialism. No consistent philosophy, either moral, political, or social, protected their integrity or gave them strength for an inner stand against Nazism. They had little or no resources to fall back on when subject to the shock of imprisonment. Their self esteem had rested on a status and respect that came with their positions, depended on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors. . . .”³²²

Bettelheim goes on to discuss how the apolitical middle-class prisoners almost universally failed to adopt the more dignified and effective behaviour patterns of political prisoners, which embodied solidarity and mutual aid. Instead they exhibited “pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self-pity” and took to stealing from the other prisoners. Many of the apolitical prisoners actively collaborated with the guards and informed on other prisoners. This hurt other prisoners, but did not help the collaborators. As Bettelheim observed, “the Gestapo liked the betrayal but despised the traitor.”

Clearly, those apolitical middle-class prisoners failed to break their identification with those in power, even when those in power were not merely in error but actually evil, even when those prisoners were directly confronted with this fact, even when those prisoners would clearly have benefitted from breaking that identification. This fact cries for a question: if apolitical middle-class people do not break their identification even when they personally bear the brunt of state violence, how will they come around when the state’s violence is primarily directed at others, when the effects of corporate ecocide are displaced years or decades into the future?

The answer is, by and large, they won’t. And we should not fool ourselves into thinking that they will. But that does not lessen the importance of building a culture of resistance, only underscores it. Some of the apolitical middle-class prisoners did join with the political prisoners. And even in a place as dismal as the concentration camps, the culture of resistance helped to improve conditions and sometimes permitted organized escapes. Whatever trials we face, a healthy culture of resistance can only help us to keep going.

All this is why building a culture of resistance should never be confused with building a mass movement, or making our politics mainstream. Again, it would be lovely if those things were to happen. But when the situation is as urgent as it is, we do not have time to wait for a majority consensus. You would not, after all, expect WWII resistance members in Germany to wait for the majority of Germans to oppose the Nazi government before they started to take action. You would not expect Tecumseh to wait until all Indians agreed to fight before he confronted colonizing soldiers. You would not expect antebellum slaves to refrain from attempting to escape or revolt until they could gather endorsement from society at large.

Some observers critique those who take action without a mass movement, or outside of the context of a mass movement. Such action, they argue, constitutes a form of vanguardism, a strategy (most notably used by Lenin) in which dedicated revolutionaries attempt to put themselves at the center of a movement in order to trigger a revolution and steer its direction. In a way, this criticism is paradoxical—how can you try to seize control of a mass movement if you aren’t actually participating in one? The difference between vanguardism and what we’re talking about is that of self-defense, of community defense. A mass movement would be wonderful, but you can’t reasonably expect people to stand by and watch the destruction of the planet while waiting for a “mass enlightenment,” which, as Bettelheim’s example shows, is counter to the (socially created) nature of many people.

Here’s another reason why people who don’t want to fight back themselves should support a culture of resistance. Simply by being more radical, or by taking action, members of serious resistance movements can shift the entire political spectrum. For example, let’s say that a group of reformists are attempting to draw attention to a certain issue, perhaps attempting to convince a municipal government to limit suburban sprawl. They issue letters of protest, they sign petitions, and eventually, out of desperation, they blockade a highway in a subdivision under construction. Maybe someone even spraypaints a bulldozer. The police come to clear them out, and they are criticized by newspapers and letters to the editor. The next week, some anonymous party burns down three unfinished houses in that same subdivision. All of a sudden, the newspapers don’t seem to care so much about the occasional blockade; they have their hands full criticizing bigger events. Whether or not you agree with burning down unfinished subdivisions, more radical actions can shift the political spectrum, and make more room for actions that aren’t as radical.