A Surrounding for Us to Live Within: notes on industrial society and it’s ecology – By a Friend of Ludd – MP3 – Read – Print – Archive – Torrent – YouTube

A Surrounding for Us to Live Within came out of the Italian anarchist scene in 2003, is signed by “a friend of Ludd,” and sets out to “bring to light some relationships between the progressive loss of individual and social autonomy, environmental devastation and the sharpening of repression.” This very brief and unexpectedly gorgeous, succinct, and intelligent text starts off from one child’s definition of the environment and touches on everything from the mass hermitude of contemporary city-dwellers to the artful mixing of the pleasures of solitude with the pleasures of meeting, from meditations on the interplay between forest and village to a critique of representation, from the domination of technology to the war in Iraq, nuclear waste, the COP9 summit, the solidarity with Marco Camenisch, globalization, the state’s ecology, the wildcat strike of Milanese streetcar drivers, the struggle against prisons, the Luddite uprising, utopianism, the oil economy.

“In the notes that follow, we will try to bring to light some relationships between the progressive loss of individual and social autonomy, environmental devastation and the sharpening of repression. Not in order to update the endless catalogue of horrors and complaints, but rather in order to reflect on some possibilities. Just this once, we will start from a “for” and not an “against”. What is a “surrounding for us to live within”? I would say a place in which the pleasure of solitude and the pleasure of meeting are artfully intertwined, whereas we know from experience that industrial society destroys both.”

Musical Interludes – This Other Place by Saltland