Theodore Kaczynski’sAnti-Tech Revolution: Why and How,A Critical Assessment

The following text was first published in the review Atassa. Readings in eco-extremism. Although I don’t agree with all its author’s positions, I’ve chosen to reproduce it here as it contributes to the critical reception of Kaczynski’s thought, and feeds the necessary discussion within anti-tech/anti-industrial circles. [L. Wildman]

“The main difference between Kaczynski and his acolytes propose
and our own position is rather simple: we don‘t wait for a “Great World
Crisis “ to start attacking the physical and moral structures of the techno-industrial system . We attack now because the future is uncertain .”

Wild Reaction
Politically Incorrect:An Interview with Wild Reaction

Introduction
In September of 2016 Ted Kaczynski released his most ambitious treatment of his oft-alluded-to “ revolution against the technological system” in the form of Anti- Tech Revolution: Why and How (AR) , a text of over 200 pages, dedicated solely to various issues surrounding revolutionary action against the technological system. Readers familiar with Kaczynski’s body of work will know that this notion of a revolution against the technological system has long been an important element of Kaczynski’s thought. The notion first appears in a call for the complete destruction of industrial civilization in the first Freedom Club communique to the San Francisco Examiner in 1985 and would continue to be appear throughout Kaczynski’s work. For example, the famous lines here from Industrial Society and its Future (ISAIF) in 1995 :

We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system . This revolution may or may not make use of violence; it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades.

However, despite being such an important element of his thought, a more thorough examination of the issues surrounding such a revolution has been largely absent from his corpus out side of short treatments in ISAIF and scattered essays like “The Coming Revolution” and “ Hit Where it Hurts,” to name some of the most pertinent. It seems that this book is Kaczynski’s attempt to expand on a core, yet somewhat underdeveloped, element of his thought. As a brief overview, the book is divided into twparts corresponding to the two points of interest indicated in the subtitle, both why Kaczynski sees a revolution against the techno-industrial system as the only plausible response to the “principal dangers that hang over us,” as well as ‘“grand-strategic” suggestions for how such a revolution might be prepared for and undertaken. It is worth noting that despite being an expanded treatment of issues around revolutionary action against the technological system, much of the content in AR cannot be considered particularly earth-shattering to anyone who is at all familiar with Kaczynski’s larger body of work; there is not much here that is all that new from a theoretical standpoint. Many of the core elements put forward in this text could be assembled from the scattered essays and letters in Technological Slavery by a careful reader with a bit of synthesizing the comments made across the included pieces. At a fundamental level Kaczynski’s theoretical base remains what it always has been, while the bulk of the text is devoted to offering expanded support for that base through more recourse to the historical record and more rigorously delineated arguments. The exception to this is Kaczynski’s foray into a theory of collapse in the second chapter.

Before engaging in a closer examination of the text I will lay my own ideological cards on the table, so to speak. Let it be noted that much of what I take issue with in AR ties primarily into my affinity for the eco-extremists. From the various critiques of Kaczynski that have been put forward by ITS and Wild Reaction, to their stress on the present moment as the only sound locus of action (and the related skepticism with respect to hypothetical futures) and other points, I very much value the eco-extremists for their contributions to anti-civ/primitivist thought. I would also note that much of the work on these criticisms is available in more detail elsewhere so I will not devote too much space to the nuances of all the points raised by the eco-extremists, except where they are especially pertinent to the content of AR. Having said all this, Kaczynski’s final product is still a single-minded and systematic treatment of an issue that has come to constitute a central element of his thought. As such, AR has an important role in Kaczynski’s corpus as well as for anyone interested in the nuances of Kaczynski’s thoughts on revolutionary action against the technological system, despite what might be my own personal distrust of the kind of revolutionary thinking that characterizes the work.

I. The Development of a Society Can Never be Subject to Rational Human Control
Kaczynski opens the first chapter of the text with an exploration of the thesis that complex societies can never be rationally controlled. This is a doubling down on, and expansion of, the critique of reformist solutions to the problems of the technological system first put forward in ISAIF in the sections titled “ Some Principles of History” and “ Industrial-Technological Society Cannot be Reformed” (paragraphs 99- 1 1 3) . The primary focus of these two sections in ISAIF is to illustrate that, “People do not consciously and rationally choose the form of their society. Societies develop through processes of social evolution that are not under rational human control.” (“Technological Slavery,” p.68) . The main thesis of the first chapter of AR is essentially the same as the thesis offered in the aforementioned sections of ISAIF.

The difference between the two texts is largely the supporting arguments that Kaczynski supplies for the thesis. Whereas the thesis in ISAIF is grounded as a logical deduction from a series of preceding premises, in AR it is largely presupposed, and the bulk of the essay is devoted to historical examples where it is shown to hold in real-world events. Kaczynski pulls from a vast swath of the historical record to illustrate the trend (at this point something of a truism among anyone who finds themselves hailing from almost any anti-civ position) that, plans for the rational control of large scale societies rarely turn out as expected. “ In fact, failure is the norm “ (AR, p. 7) . In addition to this , Kaczynski also offers a series of increasingly implausible counter-factuals against which he looks to test the strength of the thesis. He even continues this in the first appendix, “In Support of Chapter One,” which consists of more of the same counterfactual thought experiments (again, each one more absurd than the last. Just in case you weren’t convinced) . Unsurprisingly, Kaczynski deals with each counterpoint showing that even granting a plethora of ever more implausible scenarios , the rational control of complex societies remains outside the scope of human and even non-human control (for example, the application of something like Godel’s incompleteness theorem to show the impossibility of any totalizing system for the critique of non-human control of a society’s trajectory). The picture of our complex technological society that we end with is analogous to a ship without anyone at the helm. Except it is worse than that; this is a ship that is so massive and complicated that no person, or collective of persons, on board knows enough about the behemoth to be able to consciously direct it, nor realistically ever could. It is an image of a historically unprecedented juggernaut in the face of which we have been rendered helpless.

Again, none of this is anything that Kaczynski hasn’t said in some form or another throughout his body of work. Despite this, this most recent text — which is intended to expand on the impossibility of the rational control and to highlight the truth of the concept through a host of historical examples — is admirable. In many ways there is not nrnch to say about this chapter as I do not have any major disagreements with the thesis and largely agree with the conclusions. At the end of the day one would be hard pressed to find too much to complain about, regarding the analysis here.

II. Why the Technological System will Destroy Itself
As noted in the introduction , this chapter contains some of the only new theoretical explorations in the present work. The chapter is dedicated to an exposition of the need for the self annihilation of the technological system. For some theoretical context: with respect to the prospect of collapse of the technological system, Kaczynski’s treatment of the telos of technological society in the past has admitted that its trajectories are not under the control of human beings (see commentary on chapter I) , but he has been hesitant to make any strong claims about the necessity of collapse. In this chapter, however, he spends a great deal of time attempting to give a rigorously delineated theoretical basis for structural tendencies and processes at the heart of complex societies, and especially technologically advanced societies, that necessarily lead them to collapse. The bulk of the theoretical explorations take place in section II of the chapter. It is there that he lays out in general and abstract terms the formal structure of the theory. In order to flesh out this theory he focuses primarily on what he has termed “self-propagating systems.” This concept is integral to his explorations here and he describes these ‘“self-prop” systems as any “system that tends to promote its own survival and propagation” (AR. p.42) Kaczynski gives examples of self-prop systems that range from individual biological organisms to groups of biological organisms, which would naturally include groups of human beings . Complex human societies, such as modern technological society, are then a subset of this category of self-prop systems. Following this rough definition, Kaczynski spends the remainder of section II outlining a set of seven propositions regarding structural characteristics of self-prop systems, and by extension complex societies, which make up the formal content of his theory of collapse. Kaczynski will also draw on these propositions in section III and IV to illustrate how the events we see playing out in modern society, as well as what he sees as the necessary outcome, all follow the structural dynamics outlined in his theory. Essentially, these seven propositions constitute the core of the theory in abstractum and I repeat them here for the reader:

1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich , self-propagating
   systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems having increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves.
2. In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.
3. Self-propagating sub-systems of a given super-system tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on specific conditions that prevail within the super-system.
4. Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a self -prop system can extend its operations.
5. The most important and the only consistent limit on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating human groups extend their operations is the limit imposed by the available means of transportation and communication. In other words, while not all self-propagating human groups tend to extend their operations over a region of maximum size, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups that operate over regions approaching the maximum size allowed by the available means of transportation and conununication.
6. In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if human beings are someday replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.
7. Whereas today problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating system.

Kaczynski attempts to establish arguments for the truth of each proposition offered in section II , or as he states, to show that we have enough evidence to believe that they are at least reasonably accurate. As abstract statements about some tendency of self-prop systems, and later about complex societies (at least in the light of a number of assumptions) , not many of the propositions seen egregiously problematic. It doesn’t seem worth either the reader’s sanity or time to indulge an overly myopic focus on the minutiae of each proposition. For the aims of this essay it is sufficient to allow the propositions to stand despite what may be some shortcomings in their respective formulations. He also does his best throughout to show that each subsequent proposition can be logically inferred from the prior, as is characteristic of the way that he generally works. He may have given up his work in advanced mathematics a long time ago but his thought is still very
much guided by the formal rigidity of a mathematician. The for mulation in section II is not immune from nitpicking, as thought ful readers may have noticed when looking through the seven propositions listed earlier. Despite his best efforts the connections one sees him attempting to make often seem strained and the section seems to jump from point to point, with ties seeming more like ad hoc attempts to give the theory some sense of logical surety. The presentation lacks the usual systematicity with which Kaczynski often presents his work.

It seems to me that the problems of this section are part of a larger problem with the chapter in general. That problem does not involve this or that proposition or even questionable con nections between them; although as noted they can be criticized. Rather, in my opinion, the problem lies in the over-extensions that Kaczynski makes with regard to the conclusions that he looks to derive from this chapter. The suspected connections between propositions and general lack of fluidity with which the theory is laid out seem to flow from a chapter that posits more than is warranted. Kaczynski is upfront about the fact that in this chapter, and specifically with the work in section II , he is arguing “ that there is such a process” by which technologically advanced societies inevitably self-destruct and that he is going to outline a theory of how this process works. Unfortunately, I just don’t think the chapter lives up to that promise nor does it make a solid case for the impending doom of technological society, as much as Kaczynski would like to protest otherwise.

I noted in the introductory sections of this essay that many of my disagreements with the text stem from my agreements with criticisms and perspectives put forward by the eco-extremists on many of these issues, and this is one such example. I don’t think that the case that Kaczynski is trying to make here can honestly be made without entering into degrees of speculation that render meaning less these kinds of intellectual ventures . Given this, the failure to be able to soundly foretell the future of our or any technologically advanced society in a way that comes across convincingly is not sur prising to me. The idea of the inevitable self-destruction of techno-industrial civilization , and especially the idea that one is going to outline a theory describing it — that applies to all technologically advanced societies in all places and at all times — is one that simply can’t be made without serious flights into the realm of revolutionary delusions.

What is especially interesting is that the impossibility of this is something that realistically should be implied by some of the explorations of chapter I, i . e. the impossibility of the rational control of complex societies. One of the important reasons (certainly not the only one) tha t such control is impossible touches on the limits to human knowledge, specifically the kind of knowledge problems that give rise to bodies of mathematics like dynamical systems theory, what is often colloquially called “ chaos and complexity theory.” The quantity and kind of variables at play in a system such as our modern technological society means that we are dealing with a system that behaves according to the descriptions outlined by dynamical systems theory (think of something like weather systems and the difficulty of making long term weather p redictions) . In such systems, long term forecasts becon1e impossible because of the sheer complexity and behavioral tendencies of the system involved . In this case, this impossibility applies to both progressivist/reformist assumptions about the planned development of societies but also to the kinds of c onclusions that Kaczynski wants to make here in chapter II (and we will see that the logical repercussions of chapter I have consequences for the rest of the book and the armchair revolutionary planning involved later) . The complexity of the system that we are dealing with is such that this kind of theorizing about possible fotures is simply impossible to engage in without venturing into mere speculation . Thus we ultimately find ourselves at an impasse given the impossibility of saying anything regarding the prospects for collapse. But, as it has been put by some, there is such a thing as “primitivism without catastrophe,” and the eco-extremists have shown how.

At the end of the day Kaczynski has simply taken the dynamism, complexity, and power of our modern society and woven himself an interpretation that understands these as the seeds of its own imminent destruction, conveniently fitting into the archi-tectonics of his revolutionary praxis. But his conclusion is by no means a given. It involves a number of theoretical leaps into areas where of we can’t possibly speak in good intellectual conscience. For all this speculation, it could also be theorized that the very dynamism of modern society that Kaczynski sees as its inevitable undoing could equally be seen as its greatest power of self-preservation. This line of thinking characterizes the eco-modernists, for
example. The answer to questions like these, if we’re going to be honest with ourselves, is that we simply do not know. Thus we are left with only this: the future is uncertain, and all that we can truly be sure of is the present. Catastrophe may come, and it may not, but if it does, it is possible that it proves to be simply the whet stone of civilization, not the messiah of anti-civ theorists. But even if this is true, the eco-extremists have shown that it is no cause for quietism. Better a steadfast realism and warrior resolve than the millenarian comforts of revolutionary dreams. I end this section with pertinent words from Wild Reaction:

Personally we don ‘t know howlong the structures that support civilization on its decadent path will last. We can read much concerning various existing theories but still we ‘ II be left waiting for the appointed prophetic year in which maybe it ‘ll all end. But either way, all that the learned can propose are theories. The here and now denotes all that is evil . . . As individualists we have decided to take the rest of our lives into our own hands and not wait for the crisis to happen.
Why? Because we are already living it. We don ‘t want to wait because Nature encourages us to return the blows that it has received right now.

Politically Incorrect:
An Interview with Wild Reaction

III. How to Transform a Society : Errors to Avoid
With the conclusion of chapters I and II Kaczynski switches focus from his explications on why he sees an anti-tech revolution as a necessary response to the technological system to how one might go about such a revolution. The latter considerations are dealt with in this chapter as well as in chapter IV More specifically, and the chapter title here is a little misleading, chapter III is dedicated to outlining a series of general and abstract rules that Kaczynski sees as integral to the success of any revolutionary movement, anti-tech or not. In outlining these rules Kaczynski begins, as he often does, by presenting a set of postulates from which he looks to derive these rules for revolutionary action. The first section of chapter III presents the four postulates, repeated here for the reader:

1 . You can’t change a society by pursuing goals that are vague or abstract. You need to h ave a clear and concrete goal. As an experienced activist put it: “ Vague, over-generalized objectives are seldom met. The trick is to conceive,c of some specific development which will inevitably propel your community in the direction you want to go.”
2 . Preaching alone-the mere advocacy o f ideas-cannot bring about important, long-lasting changes in the behavior of human beings, unless it takes place in a very small minority.
3 . Any radical movement tends t o attract many people who may be sincere, but whose goals are only loosely related to the goals of the movement. The result is that that movement’s original goals may become blurred, if not completely perverted.
4 . Every radical movement that acquires great power becomes corrupt, when its original leaders (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) are all dead or politically inactive. In saying that a movement becomes corrupt, we mean that its members, and especially its leaders, primarily seek personal advantages (such as money, security, social status, p owerful offices , or a career) rather than dedicating themselves sincerely to the ideals of the movement.

From these postulates Kaczynski then derives a set of five
rules:

1 . In order to change a society in a specified way, a movement should select a single, dear, simple, and concrete objective, the achievement of which will produce the desired change.
2 . If a movement aims to transform a society, then the objective selected by the movement must be of such a nature that, once the objective has been achieved, its consequences will be irreversible. This means that, once society has been transformed through the achievement of the objective, society will remain in its transformed condition without any further effort on the part of the movement or anyone else.
3 . Once an objective has been selected, it is necessary to persuade some small minority to commit itself to the achievement of the objective by means more potent than mere preaching or advocacy of ideas . In other words, the minority will have to organize itself for practical action.
4. In order to keep itself faithful to its obj ective, a radical movment should devise means of excluding from its ranks all unsuitable persons who may seek to j oin it.
5 . Once a revolutionary movement has become powerful enough to achieve its obj ective, it must achieve its objective as soon as possible, and in any case before the original revolutionaries (meaning those who joined the movement while it was still relatively weak) die or become politically inactive. Following the presentation of the postulates and the derivation of the rules, Kaczynski devotes the rest of the chapter to examining the truth or falsity of the rules. To do this, much of the support comes again from the historical record, citing a number of instances he uses to show that the truth of any given postulate or rule can be demonstrated in some historical event. To highlight the importance of adherence to these rules, the author cites a number of instances where failures to do so have led to setbacks or catastrophe for the movements involved. However, the theoretical meat
here is ultimately the above list of rules for a revolutionary movement. As stated in the introductory remarks, throughout the text much of Kaczynski’s theoretical base mirrors his older work while expanding the support for that base. This remains true for chapter III and I think readers familiar with Kaczynski’s work will again recognize the themes presented here from older works like ISAIF, “The System’s Neatest Trick,” “The Coming Revolution,” and “ Hit Where it Hurts,” all of which have sections dedicated to more strategic concerns for revolutionary action against technological society.

I will admit that at first pass this chapter is easy to accept if one allows oneself to be uncritically swept along in the current of Kaczynski’s thought. Many of his postulates seem at least intuitively plausible in light of everyday experience or of a general knowledge of history, and his derivations of the rules from these postulates are coherent and read as natural extensions of the postulates. His recourse to the historical record to shore up his postulates and rules is characteristically thorough, matching the detailed treatment of chapter I . The result is a chapter that could convince many, and indeed many have come away from similar reflections convinced by this line of reasoning. One only needs to seek out the work of Ultimo Reducto (UR) or the Indomitistas for examples of groups and individuals who h ave followed much of Kaczynski’s thinking to the letter. It is easy to be swept along in the movements of his armchair revolutionary theorizing and lose sight of the fact that much of this remains completely speculative, dreamt up in the realm of pure theory in a prison cell in Colorado. It is, I ‘ m sure, akin to the way that physicists talk about being caught up in the beauty and elegance of mathematical theories, becoming so enthralled with that elegance that they come to believe that these theories must be an expression of truth . But reality has never had any obligation to conform to what we desire, and this is no less true for Kaczynski’s theorizing than it is for those physicists chasing after the wispy traces of string theory.

I am not simply being flippant. There are legitimate criticisms to be made of what is put forward in this chapter (if we decide to entertain this sort of armchair theorizing) . To expand on but one aspect, there is a fairly obvious contradiction between the revolutionary planning set forth in this chapter and the kinds of conclusions reached in chapter I that essentially forbid such planning. If you recall, we noted that the logical entailments of chapter I apply not only to progressivist/reformist planners looking to steer society along their desired traj ectories, but also to those looking to disrupt it through revolutionary action . This is so because of the impossibility of long term forecasts, the very kinds of forecasts that a revolutionary plan would need to rely on in order to act according to its outline. Certainly, one could attempt to nuke the rules general enough to be applicable across a wide array of situations, but at that point such an abstract rule has little relation to the concrete particulars of actual events. To be fair, Kaczynski does state throughout chapter III that these rules can’t always “ be taken as rigid laws “ (AR, p. 1 1 9) given the difficulty we’ve j ust discussed of foreseeing the real world situations that such a revolutionary movement would face, but we’ve just stated why that doesn’t really make it any better. This contradiction between chapters is not the only criticism one could make of this chapter. For example, Kaczynski’s attempt to derive ahistorical axioms from what are historically contingent events make his recourse to the historical record to ground his postulates and rules dubious at best, at least from the p erspective of a more thorough historicist approach. This same problem occurs in chapter IV.

Perhaps some would claim that this take on what Kaczynski has done here is overly defeatist, or pessi1nistic, etc. Maybe some would say it is hastily dismissive despite our pointing out a number of legitimate concerns. The likes of UR and others have hurled some of these same labels at ITS and Wild Reaction when the latter have expressed a healthy dose of skepticism with regard to this very kind of revolutionary theorizing. These are the same people who only proffer a naive hope in the face of these criticisms, doubling down on the revolutionary naiveté of Kaczynski rather than lifting the veil off their own hopeful delusions and accepting the world as it is. But at the end of the day it remains true, as Wild Reaction have stated in their response to UR and others on these issues, that much of the basis for such a revolution against the technological system remains “ . . . all in the wind:”

So, in conclusion to this point, the strategic basis for the ‘great revolution ‘ is supposition , ‘perhaps,’ ‘hopefully,’ ‘it may be,’ ‘in best of cases,’ ‘it depends, ‘ in other words, nothing concrete, all in the wind. This reminds us of what a popular Mexican comedian said in his shows: ‘Maybe yes, maybe no, but most likely is that who knows.’

Wild Reaction
Some Words about the Present and NOT about the Future

IV. Strategic Guidelines for an Anti-Tech Movement
While chapter III approached the strategic issues surrounding an anti-tech revolution in more abstract terms, attempting to distill the most critical rules for a successful revolutionary movement, the approach of chapter IV takes a broader and marginally more down to earth look at Kaczynski’s revolutionary program. Kaczynski covers a lot of ground in this chapter, treating numerous issues pertaining to the paths that he believes a revolutionary movement ought, and ought not, to take. For those familiar with the history of communist revolutions, much of the program that he offers here is essentially borrowed from the reflections of key figures in the canon of revolutionary Marxist thought. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, and Castro are major influences , for example. However, much has obviously been recast along the lines of Kaczynski’s particular brand of Neo-Luddism. This reliance on the Russian revolution and later communist revolutions is not surprising or new. The French and Russian revolutions have long been an inspiration for Kaczynski’s thoughts on revolutionary action and the scope of communist revolutions following the ascension of the Bolsheviks in 1917 makes the Russian revolution and its related revolutions an obvious source of interest and inspiration for those with revolutionary predilections.

With respect to a critical analysis of this chapter, there are several criticisms one could make that I will offer here. The first and most obvious of these criticisms relates primarily to the kind of revolutionary theorizing that Kaczynski is doing and the degree to which much of this kind of thing takes place in the realm of pure speculation. There are many instances throughout chapter IV which follow the same predilection for revolutionary planning offered in chapter III , sometimes reading as attempts to concretize his formal guidelines. These treatments then obviously mirror those of the previous chapter, and are consequently subject to the same critiques of revolutionary planning offered previously in this essay. It would be redundant to restate those critiques here. On other points, an additional criticism deals with the parallels that Kaczynski often attempts to draw via his constant recourse to various communist revolutions, both at the level of the ideas that he borrows from their respective theorists and his use of these revolutions to justify the feasibility of his particular brand of anti-tech revolution. I am not the first to point out some of these problems.
In various conmmniques both ITS and Wild Reaction have made detailed criticisms of Kaczynski’s recourse to the French and Russian revolutions (the most detailed are contained in the earliest phase of ITS communiques and in various publications from Wild Reaction) . These have well shown the numerous ways that Kaczynski’s talk of global revolution against the technological system occupies the realm of fantasy. Neither the French nor the Russian revolution, nor any revolution save for the industrial one itself, has extended its reach over the entire globe, as they have noted. The historic wars are simply not analogous comparisons.

There is also a related and more methodological critique that I alluded to briefly in the last section; that is, Kaczynski has a consistent tendency to draw on the p ast without considering the historical context of the events that he looks at. For example, in chapter III he continually uses historical events to show that a number of his postulates and rules can be derived from history while completely ignoring any analysis of the historical context within which those events took place, or differences between a
given historical context and our own contemporary context. Our modern technological society is not the Russia of Lenin or Trotsky, the China of Mao, the Cuba of Castro, etc. There are vast differences in the social, ideological, and material fabrics of our contemporary situation and those historical eras, which render correlations tenuous in all but the most general ways. As I noted in the last section, he does have moments of honesty where he admits that recourse to history will not always give lessons that we can easily translate from one historical period to the present. But we also discussed there why this is not exactly helpful. To restate, if the lessons derived are general enough to apply to a sufficiently broad array of situations they are also likely to be next to useless in any concrete situation. The abstractions of a general rule are little help in the face of the complexity of any real world situation.

The aforementioned points are certainly very real problems with the theoretical integrity of Kaczynski’s treatments here in chapter IV, but they are not the main issue that I had with the chapter. What I personally found to be the most obnoxious element of the chapter was Kaczynski ‘s constant recourse to his speculative “future crisis” as a keystone element of his revolutionary praxis. The messianic role of catastrophe for his anti-tech revolution becomes increasingly obvious throughout the chapter, to such a degree that it becomes more and more questionable whether Kaczynski’s revolutionary program is able to handle any thing like “attack without catastrophe,” to offer a spin on Abe Cabrera’s “Primitivism without Catastrophe.” As Wild Reaction put it in an earlier quote, so far as much of the meaningful reaction against the technological system continues to hinge on some speculative crisis, it is for all intents and purposes, “ . . . all in the wind.”

My rejections here once again dovetail with the eco-extremist critiques, in this case an especially central one: the eco-extremist rejection of revolution as a valid form of reaction against the technological system, and the encompassing Leviathan of civilization, and domestication itself for that matter.Since the first communique of ITS in 2011 they haw persisted in a single-minded focus on the present as the only sound locus of attack . In the first communique of ITS following the voluntary dissolution of Wild Reaction, they state the following on this point: “We do not wish, nor do we seek, nor do we find it necessary, nor does it interest us to work for a ‘revolution’. We despise that term and deem it a non-existent goal. We attack in the present because that is all that there is.” Throughout the entirety of this essay we have voiced criticisms of Kaczynski’s revolution ary thinking; many of the foregoing analyses remain relevant here. We have covered the impossibility of speaking in good faith about the prospects of catastrophe, we have talked about the errors of revolutionary planning, etc. Suffice it to say that in the light of the foregoing analyses I see no reason to make concessions here either. Kaczynski and Co. can sit and wait for the messiah of collapse before striking back in the name of Wild Nature, but the march of civilization continues to bend all that is natural and wild to its will and to destroy that which does not abide. What we are confronted with is a present that demands that we act here and now. In closing, I will allow Wild Reaction to express, in their own words, this attack without catastrophe :

The wild can wait no longer. Civilization expands indiscriminately at the cost of all that is natural. We won’t stay twiddling our thumbs, looking on passively as modern man rips the Earth apart in search of minerals, burying her under tons of concrete, or piercing through entire hills to construct tunnels.We are at war with civilization and progress, as well as those who improve or support it withtheir passivity. Whoever!

Individualists Tending Toward the Wild
Seventh Communique

Conclusion
What remains to be said of Kaczynski’s latest work, then? I noted in the introduction that within the context of Kaczynski ‘s corpus this text occupies an important place as a single-minded and systematic treatment of his thoughts surrounding revolutionary action against the technological system. As a purely academic point concerning the oeuvre of a thinker I stand by this claim. I also briefly note the root of my disagreements from an eco-extremist perspective and have, through,sth the foregoing analyses, attempted to more thoroughly delineate their content . And it is out of this personal perspective that I find much of this text simply unacceptable. It is out of this perspective that I affirm the eco-extremist rejection of revolutionary delusions. I affirm the eco-extremis t focus on the present as the only sound locus of attack . I affirm the eco-extremist ‘s steadfast honesty in the face of the terrible present. I affirm the eco-extremist warrior resolve to fight regardless of the knowledge that one ‘s war may well be suicidal, and other points from the eco-extremist perspective. These are positions that are simply irreconcilable with those ef Kaczynski. So be it. Certainly there will be those without the ears to. hear There will be those who denounce these rejections as nihilistic, defeatist, pessimistic, etc. There will be those who trade honesty for the comforts of a revolutionary naiveté. Let this be as well. To the1n I suppose all that can be said is, “ Good luck, I guess .” But for me, and for others with whom this call resonates, what Kaczynski has to offer is simply something that we cannot abide. I end this conclusion and this essay with an expression of the spirit of the eco-extremists from the Editorial of Regresion #4:

“Reality often presents us with a defeatist and very pessimistic scenario. Nevertheless, accepting this reality is crucial for removing the blindfold and accepting things just as they are, even if this is difficult. This blindfold is of course utopia. Many have criticized Individualists Tending Toward the Wild, Wild Reaction and similar groups for rejecting the idea of a “better tomorrow’’. They critique these groups for not expecting a positive result from fighting in this war, or for rejecting hope. But people are always going to hear only what they want, and not Reality. The ecoextremist individualist is a realist and pessimist at the same time. He doesn’t listen to the nagging of the puerile optimist; for him, the world is full of dark realities, and he must confront these with strength,defending himself from them with
tooth and claw.”

S., 2017.