The form of the word, civilization, with its -ization suffix, carries entailments that both assume and perpetuate a particularly pernicious set of thought-forms.
Consider the grammatical distinction between -ize and -ization suffixes. The former, as a verb form, entails the action of a subject: a person can rationalize; a group of laborers can unionize; a globalizing state can weaponize and then colonize. There is some person, group, or thing that is doing something. The latter, however, converts the verb into a noun, stripping it of its need for active agency.
Colonization, for example, is a transformational process that embodies its own particular genocidal logic regardless of the nature of the colonizing state. Colonization is something that happens to people, the result of a process, rather than something actively being done to them by specific other people.
Because an acting subject is not a necessary entailment, processes identified with -ization nouns are frequently treated as if they are self-generating and self-sustaining. Corporatization and globalization are thought to proceed according to their own inertial inevitability in the same way as do physical processes like oxidization or crystallization.
Civilization is understood to proceed in just this way, as an unavoidable and unstoppable process. You and I as individuals are just along for the ride, and cannot possibly hope to resist a process that is inevitable and proceeding according to natural law.
Civilization in its noun form may be ultimately beyond us. But in its verb form? Here is where I think there is some promise, and perhaps even some strategic insight. It is not against civilization as an abstract entity, but against the concrete forces that civilize where our efforts need to be directed.
And it is not resistance that is needed, but for you and I to resist.
