Civilization

Civilization is an extraction structure, named by what it takes rather than by what it builds. The network is made of interception points, places at which an interaction between two people has to pass through a third party, and at each of those points two things happen. The interaction is sublated, taken over and absorbed by a will not its own, and the anima moving through it is intercepted. Whoever holds the point can dominate the interaction and parasite off the transfer, which is the whole of the arrangement. Ownership belongs inside the definition rather than beside it, because owning the object, the land or the platform through which people must interact is how a checkpoint gets installed in the first place. Marsh reads the resulting structure as a power structure that runs on energy taken at those points, and the pattern of who is preyed on follows the shape of whichever endogroup is dominant. Industrial endo-idealism preys on the sick, the elderly and children. Wealth endo-idealism preys on the poor. Nothing in the definition concerns cities, writing, agriculture or refinement. What makes something a civilization on this account is the density and reach of its checkpoints.

Civilization ordinarily means a complex society marked by cities, writing, specialized labour and monumental building, and the word has carried a heavy value judgement since the 1700s, when it was set against savagery and used to license conquest. That usage has been under attack for a long time. James C. Scott traced early states to coercion and to grain as a controllable crop, and David Graeber and David Wengrow challenged the sequence in which civilization is supposed to arrive at all. Marsh drops the checklist of achievements entirely. Civilization here is not a level a society reaches but an architecture of interception, identified by where the energy goes.