DarkFi Philosophy

State Civilization and the Democratic Nation

State civilization has a 5000 year history. The origin of civilizations in mesopotamia experienced a cambrian explosion of various forms. The legacy of state civilization can be traced back to ancient assyria which was essentially a military dictatorship that mobilized all of society's resources to wage war and defeat other civilizations, enslaving them and seizing their wealth.

Wikipedia defines civilization:

Civilizations are organized densely-populated settlements divided into hierarchical social classes with a ruling elite and subordinate urban and rural populations.

Civilization concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings.

However this destiny of civilization was not inherent as history teaches us. This definition is one particular mode of civilization that became prevalent. During human history there has been a plethora of forms of civilizations. Our role as revolutionaries is to reconstruct the civilizational paradigm.

The democratic nation is synonymous with society, and produces all value including that which the state extracts. Creative enterprise and wealth production originates in society from small scale business, artisans and inventors, and anybody driven by intent or ambition to create works.

Within society, there are multiple coexisting nations which are communities of people sharing language, history, ethnicity or culture. For example there could be a nation based on spiritual belief, a nation of women, or a distinct cultural nation.

The nation state is an extreme variant of the state civilization tendency. Like early state civilizations, the development of the French nation-state was more effective at seizing the wealth of society to mobilize in war against the existing empires of the time.

Soon after, the remaining systems were forced to adopt the nation state system, including its ideology of nationalism. It is no mistake that the nation state tends towards nationalism and fascism including the worst genocides in human history. Nationalism is a blind religion supplanting religious ideologies weakened by secularism. However nationalism is separate from patriotism.

Loving one's country for which you have struggled and fought over for centuries or even millenia as an ethnic community or nation, which you have made your homeland in this long struggle, represents a sacred value.

~ Ocalan's "PKK and Kurdish Question in the 21st century"

Defining the State

The state is a centralized organization that imposes and enforces rules over a population through the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. In discussing the rise of militarism, Ocalan says:

Essentially, he attempted to establish his authority over two key groups: the hunters at his side and the women he was trying to confine to the home. Along the way, as shamans (proto-priests) and gerontocratic elements (groups of elders) joined the crafty strongman, the first hierarchical authority was formed in many societies in various forms.

Section called "Society’s Militarism Problem" from "The Sociology of Freedom"

The state is defined as:

1. Ideological hegemony represented by a system of priests and shamans in pre-state formations. Today this is the media industry, schools, and big tech (for example "fake news" and surveillance systems).
2. Monopolization on the use of violence through military and police. Powerful commanders like Gilgamesh conquered neighbouring tribes, creating nascent state polities whose main business model was to hunt and enslave barbarian tribes. This enabled state to expand agricultural output which they seized through taxation.
3. State bureaucracy and administration represented in tribal societies and proto-states through a council of elders. This arm of the state also includes scientific research institutes, state psychology groups and various forms of manipulation including modern AI and data harvesting. This tendency is a misappropriation of scientific methods to serve power, thus retarding scientific and technological development and impoverishing society by depriving it of its great benefits.

The state is a parasite on society, extracting value created. There are many historical stateless societies such as the Medean Confederation, the Iroquiois Confederation, the ninja republics of Iga and Kōga, the Swiss pre-Sonderbund Confederation Helvetica, and Cossack society.

Government is a system or people administrating a society. Although most governments are nation-states, we can create stateless societies with autonomous governments. Within a free society government is local, broadly democratic, and autonomous. Society is widely engaged at every level in decision making through local people's councils, as well as possessing the use of violence through a system of gun ownership and local militias. Government also answers to a network of various interest groups from various nations such as women or youth.

Modernity and the Subject of Ideology

Modernity was born in the "age of reason" and represents the overturning of prevailing religious ideas and rejection of tradition in favour of secularization. Modernity has a mixed legacy which includes alienation, commodity fetishism, scientific positivism, and rationalism.

During this period of modernity 4 major ideologies developed, each with their own specific subject as its focus.

• Liberalism and its subject of the individual. Individuals are atomic units existing under the state system which guarantees them certain bargains in the form of laws and rights.
• Communism which focused on the concept of class warfare and economic justice through state power.
• Fascism which put the volk or state at the center of society, whereby all resources would be mobilized to serve the state.
• Anarchism with its critiques of power and favouring social freedom.

The particular form of modernity that is predominant can be characterized as capitalist modernity. Capitalism, otherwise referred to by others as corporatism can be likened to a religion, whereby a particular elite class having no ideology except self profit uses the means of the state to protect its own interests and extract the wealth of society through nefarious means. In some ways, it is a parasite on the state.

Agorist free markets is the democratic tendency of economy. The word 'economy' derives from the Ancient Greek 'oikonomos' which means household management. Economy was, during ancient periods, connected with nature, the role of motherhood, life, and freedom. It was believed that wealth was derived from the quality of our lived environments. The Kurds use the feminine word 'mal' to refer to the house, while the masculine variant refers to actual property. Later during the Roman period, economy came to be understood as the accumulation of property in the form of number of slaves owned, amount of land seized, or the quantity of money.

The subject of our ideology is the moral and political society. Society exists within a framework of morality and politics. Here we use politics to refer not to red team vs blue team, but instead all social activity concerned with our security, necessity, and life. A society can only be free when it has its own morality and politics. The state seeks to keep society weak by depriving it of morality and replacing society's politics with statecraft.

The Extinction of Humanity

During the 20th century, liberals, communists, and fascists vyed for state power each promising a new form of society. State power existed with these external ideological justifications.

With the end of the Soviet Union, and the end of history (according to liberalism), state power morphed into pure domination and profit. The system simply became a managerial form of raw power over society without purpose or aim. Wars such as the Iraq War were invented by neoliberals to breathe a new purpose into society. Indeed, there is no more effective means to support despotism than war.

Today the military industrial complex has grown into a gigantic leviathan that threatens the world driving economies into an ever greater spiral of desperation. The push for the development of automated weapons, aerial drones, and ninja missiles that eliminate all space for human resistance against tyranny.

Meanwhile social credit scoring is being introduced as CBDCs with incentivization schemes such as UBI. Such systems will give more effective means for the seizure of wealth by the state from society, centralizing economic power within an already deeply corrupt elite class.

Liberal ideologies have made people indifferent to their own situation, turning society inward and focused on social media, unable to organize together to oppose rising authoritarianism. Liberalism is essentially a tendency towards extinction or death.

Nature, Life, Freedom

Nature is the center of spiritual belief. Humanity is an aspect of nature. Nature is more than the number of trees. It is the going up, the ascending of life. Through struggle, we overcome obstacles, becoming harder and stronger along the way. This growth makes us more human and closer with nature.

People naturally feel an empathy with nature such as when an animal is injured or generous feelings towards the young of any species. This feeling was put in us by evolution. We feel an attachment and empathy towards our lived environment and want to see it improve. This feeling is mother nature speaking through us. The more in touch we are with this deeper feeling, the more free we are since we are able to develop as higher human beings.

Freedom does not mean the ability to be without constraint or enact any wild fantasy at a moment's notice. Freedom means direct conscious action with power that drives us to ascend. Nature is full of interwoven threads of organisms vying for influence or power, with time doing an ordered dance punctuated by inflection points of change. It is during these moments that our ability of foresight and prescience allows us to deeply affect events along alternative trajectories.

Re-Evaluating Anarchism

Anarchists had the correct critique & analysis of power. In particular seeing that the nation state would grow into a monster that would consume society. However they were the least equipped of all the other ideologies during modernity to enact their vision and put their ideas into practice.

• They fell victim to the same positivist forces that they claimed to be fighting against.
• They lacked a coherent vision and had little strategy or roadmap for how the revolution would happen.
• Their utopian demand that the state must be eliminated immediately and at all costs meant they were not able to plan how that would happen.
• Their opposition to all forms of authority, even legitimate leadership, meant they were ineffective at organizing revolutionary forces.

Revolutionary Objectives

• Our movement is primarily a spiritual one. One cannot understand Christianity by studying its system of churches, since primarily it is a body of teachings. Likewise, the core of our movement is in our philosophy, ideas, and concepts, which then inform our ideas on governance and economics.
• We must build a strong intellectual fabric that inoculates us and fosters resilience, as well as equipping us with the means to be effective in our work.
• There are two legacies in technology, one informed by state civilization and the other by society. The technology we create is to solve problems that society and aligned communities have.