First of all, let us be clear. Left-wing or anarchist prepping is nothing new. Contrary to what certain authors seem to think, it has existed for some time already. In fact, ever since the 68 student revolts survivalist communes have been cropping up left and right (quite literally). Granted, there were always more on the right, since the predominant majority of preppers seem motivated by right-wing ideologies and conspiracies. But in recent years more people on the left-leaning to anarchistic political spectrum have started to flock towards a survivalist practice. To name just a few here, for some time already Margaret Killjoy has been hosting the anarchist survivalist podcast Live Like the World Is Dying. In more recent times Tadzio Müller, the German environmental activist, has published a book in which he makes the case for what he calls solidarity-based prepping (solidarisches Preppen).
What all preppers seem to ignore, though, is how problematic prepping is, and here i am talking about it as a general, philosophical-political concept. And it does not make a huge difference if prepping is accompanied by the word solidarity or bases itself in anarchist principles.
But allow me to try and make my case, please.
First I have to fess up. In my own past i was one of them. For many years i defined myself as an anarchist prepper. I was getting ready for the time after the collapse of the capitalist system and, to be perfectly honest here, i did not only prepare myself for that collapse, but i even hoped for it.
I might have been an atypical prepper in the sense that i never started to stockpile food or hoard water reserves. Instead my aim was to acquire knowledge and skill sets that would be helpful after the fall of the capitalist system. For many years i studied, most often teaching myself, herbal medicine, foraging, vegetable gardening, permaculture, fermentation, mushroom growing, building, you name it, and even looked into horizontal forms of speaking therapies, chi gong, yoga and meditation, for the mental health.
This process started in 1987, when i was living in San Francisco and it didn’t stop until a few years ago. I was pretty much ready for the time after, but the collapse never came. I always drew the line at arming myself, refusing to learn how to shoot guns or even to buy some, because that would be counter some of my deepest convictions. More on that later.
I found an old blog draft in which i am making the case IN FAVOR of anarchist prepping, LOL. So back then i wrote:
Sadly, as of today, preppers are usually heavily armed right-wingers, their belief systems steeped in conspiracy theories. But does this really need to be the case? When i look at the world i come to a similar conclusion, this system is doomed and i am actually surprised that it has not collapsed already. […] So what about re-framing the coming post-capitalist collapse in a constructive way? Why not imagine a world where we can roam free, to find luscious gardens, funky solar punk constructions, smiling people in pluralistic, horizontal communities, willing to help each other out and share their skills, spread the knowledge. Another world is possible, well yes, and maybe, after the collapse of the cynical way the world has gone under its neoliberal capitalist system, might we actually stand a chance to establish a communal world based on anarchistic principles?!
I am now thankful that i never went ahead to publish it.
Because since then two things happened. First i watched the dystopian TV series The Walking Dead, as you do. I can’t remember in which episode this was, or if it maybe even happened in one of the spin off series. But in one episode a character gets introduced, who tries to use knowledge as his bargaining chip. He only made a brief entrance, blink and you miss it, where he holds up a folder of print-outs with helpful information about solar panels and water pumps and tries to negotiate his free passage. Since then i have forgotten what happened to this guy, but I don’t think he survived it. They probably shot him and took his folder. As they do in that show.
But for me, this was the moment when it started to dawn on me, that i was that guy. How ridiculous i would look when i would try to offer my skills and knowledge while facing a bunch of trigger-happy people with guns.
Side note, here’s why i refuse to get a gun. There are many reasons, really, enough for an entire future article. What it basically comes down to, is that i do not value myself that high. I do not think of myself as worthy of protection and survival. We don’t have any children, and i do realize how having some might change my mind. But as it stands, should i die, i can honestly say, good riddance. One less asshole *playing the smallest violin*. The world will not be a worse place without me. I don’t think this attitude is as unhealthy as it sounds. After all, humility and an honest self-assessment are universal virtues.
So, sure, i had been naive with my knowledge as a bargaining tool approach, quite a usual trait for me. But even if the approach to prepping is more pragmatic, even if people do stockpile water and canned goods and guns and ammo and all that crap, the only thing this manages to do, is that it turns you into a target for greedy, desperate others. Just like Bill & Frank, the odd gay couple in The Last Of Us, who ended up so paranoid and obsessing with their aim to defend themselves, gunned up to their teeth, that their life became pretty dismal.
Quick different question, why are there so many dystopian TV series and hardly any utopian ones? Makes you think, innit?! When can we watch a TV series based on The Dispossessed or The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K Le Guin), hell, i’d even watch the fifteen seasons of The Fifth Sacred Thing (Starhawk)? But I digress.
A few years later a second moment occurred, and this one made me change my mind for good, when i read a series of articles about peppers (here of the right-wing kind) and in one article i found the following quote by Julian Genner, which has since turned into a mantra of mine:
Der Boom des Preppens zeugt von einer zunehmenden Entsolidarisierung in der Gesellschaft. Im Vordergrund steht die Sorge um den eigenen Wohlstand und den eigenen Status. Beides ist wichtiger als das Leben und das Leiden anderer Menschen. Überleben im Preppen bedeutet implizit immer, andere zu überleben. Preppen funktioniert nicht, ohne den Tod der anderen zu denken.
Translation [mine]: The boom of prepping can be seen as evidence for an increasing lack of solidarity in society. Concern for one’s own prosperity and status is at the forefront. Both are more important than the lives and suffering of other people. Survival in prepping implicitly always means surviving others. Prepping does not work without thinking about the death of others.
Julian Genner has done research on survivalists and prepping for many years. Here you can read another article that Genner co-authored with Ulla Schmid, another scientific researcher in the field, as a response to Tadzio Müller’s new book.
At any rate, this was the moment when I realized what the fundamental problem had been with my thinking, stuck in a survivalist approach. In order to dedicate oneself to prepping one always needs to do so in opposition to an imagined or sometimes real other. An constructed in-group is deemed worthy of protection and survival. It stands in opposition to an out-group, an other or enemy. This is the point in the equation, where it does not really matter, if the motivation is right- or left-leaning. Both groups do this whereas the fundamental mechanism remains the same.
Now to be clear, i am not saying that we do not have enemies. The natural, and sadly much too real enemy, or other, for us as anti-fascistic anarchists are the nazis. There is no doubt that nazis exist and have grown into a huge and very threatening problem. There is no denying that.
But the nazis are a problem that we need to address in the here and now, instead of at some point in the future. We need to face the nazis head on instead of wasting energy in our efforts of prepping and arming ourselves. Plus, let’s be realistic, we can never compete with the guns and shooting skills on their side.
The biggest cost of our prepping efforts, and this again is a very fundamental point, is that it deflects energy away from solving problems in the here and now. Instead of us playing make-belief in imagined futures, here and now is where we should be acting.
And this, finally, is why my personal thinking in the prepping question has shifted in a fundamental way. I will forever be glad for the knowledge that i acquired in the process, much of it useful already. But my aim has shifted. I would now go as far as saying, the opposite is true.
If we are NOT capable of solving our nazi problem (insert here: the climate crisis, the conspiracy, disinformation problem, issues with migration, social/wealth inequity) then we have no right to survive – AS A SPECIES. Bamm. There i said it.
No humans deserve to survive on this planet as long as there are nazis in the world. Or maybe, to express it the other way around, no one CAN survive, if there are nazis out there (who will always outgun us).
The nazi (insert all of the above) problem is what we need to solve INSTEAD of focusing on anarchistic or solidarity-based survivalist ploys. In the here and now. Full speed ahead. Let’s go. Vamos. Hasta la.
Not saying it’s going to be easy. But instead of wasting energy and resources on hoarding material, for imagined scenarios after the collapse, let us instead bundle all our efforts on solving the many problems that exist, that won’t magically disappear. And to think that the fucking nazis in Brandenburg and in their bunkers around the world are only one of our problems (imagine what a fucked up world we have created).
Instead of anarcho-survivalists let us be anarcho-bodhisattvas
And so, to end with, may i suggest an idea here. Instead of anarchist (or left-wing) survivalists let us become anarcho-bodhisattvas.
In the buddhist tradition bodhisattvas can have several meanings. What i am thinking about here is their vow to hold back on their personal enlightenment, that is until everyone is ready to get liberated. In other words, even if an individual might be ready to find the enlightened state, whatever that is, they refuse to attain it and instead focus all their effort on helping others to reach the elusive goal.
As anarchists, and it goes without saying, we of course do not seek enlightenment (or at least i don;t think so). But the bodhisattva vow vibes well, with the common anarchist sentiment: no one is free until everyone is free.
So let us focus all our efforts on helping everyone to get free instead of on prepping for our in-groups, which without fail creates an us vs. them situation.
Or you tell me. What would you do if the nazis from Brandenburg knock on the door to ask, if they can barrow some eggs? Probably not give them any, i hope.
On the other hand, in a world free of nazis (insert: climate collapse, wealth inequity etc.) we won’t have to stockpile water and canned beans, nor guns and ammo, because in that world everyone will share their skills and pitch in to find solutions together suited for everyone.
Hopelessly naive again?
Let us maybe think about it in this way, in order to accept it as a challenge. Does the human species really deserve to survive, if we don’t even manage to solve our problems in this current world?!
I don’t think so.
Yes, the system fucks us and needs to be destroyed. But as anarchists we don’t care that much about the system we live under, we prefer to prefigure the world that we want to see.
If we accept this as our challenge, and the collapse should happen anyway, this will mean that we have failed. And in that case i for one will be more than happy to join Tadzio Müller’s in his last gay club in Berlin. But not as a prepper, armed to the teeth and schlepping cans of food with me, but to have some hedonistic fun while the world is getting rid of our species.
Good riddance.
For the time being let us keep fighting like hell that the collapse does not happen.
I know how this feels overwhelming.
But do it we must.
And yes, anarcho-bodhisattvas like Yoda speak we do.
