💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › john-moore-a-primitivist-primer.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 11:25:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: A Primitivist Primer Author: John Moore Language: en Topics: anti-civ, green, anarcho-primitivism Source: Retrieved on February 12th, 2009 from http://www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/primprimer.htm
This is not a definitive statement, merely a personal account, and seeks
in general terms to explain what is meant by anarcho-primitivism. It
does not wish to limit or exclude, but provide a general introduction to
the topic. Apologies for inaccuracies, misinterpretations, or
(inevitable) overgeneralizations.
Anarcho-primitivism (a.k.a. radical primitivism, anti-authoritarian
primitivism, the anti-civilization movement, or just, primitivism) is a
shorthand term for a radical current that critiques the totality of
civilization from an anarchist perspective, and seeks to initiate a
comprehensive transformation of human life. Strictly speaking, there is
no such thing as anarcho-primitivism or anarcho-primitivists. Fredy
Perlman, a major voice in this current, once said, “The only -ist name I
respond to is ‘cellist’.” Individuals associated with this current do
not wish to be adherents of an ideology, merely people who seek to
become free individuals in free communities in harmony with one another
and with the biosphere, and may therefore refuse to be limited by the
term ‘anarcho-primitivist’ or any other ideological tagging. At best,
then, anarcho-primitivism is a convenient label used to characterise
diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power
relations — e.g., structures of control, coercion, domination, and
exploitation — and the creation of a form of community that excludes all
such relations. So why is the term anarcho-primitivist used to
characterise this current? In 1986, the circle around the Detroit paper
Fifth Estate indicated that they were engaged in developing a ‘critical
analysis of the technological structure of western civilization[,]
combined with a reappraisal of the indigenous world and the character of
primitive and original communities. In this sense we are
primitivists...’ The Fifth Estate group sought to complement a critique
of civilization as a project of control with a reappraisal of the
primitive, which they regarded as a source of renewal and
anti-authoritarian inspiration. This reappraisal of the primitive takes
place from an anarchist perspective, a perspective concerned with
eliminating power relations. Pointing to ‘an emerging synthesis of
post-modern anarchy and the primitive (in the sense of original),
Earth-based ecstatic vision,’ the Fifth Estate circle indicated: We are
not anarchists per se, but pro-anarchy, which is for us a living,
integral experience, incommensurate with Power and refusing all
ideology... Our work on the FE as a project explores possibilities for
our own participation in this movement, but also works to rediscover the
primitive roots of anarchy as well as to document its present
expression. Simultaneously, we examine the evolution of Power in our
midst in order to suggest new terrains for contestations and critique in
order to undermine the present tyranny of the modern totalitarian
discourse — that hyper-reality that destroys human meaning, and hence
solidarity, by simulating it with technology. Underlying all struggles
for freedom is this central necessity: to regain a truly human discourse
grounded in autonomous, intersubjective mutuality and closely associated
with the natural world. The aim is to develop a synthesis of primal and
contemporary anarchy, a synthesis of the ecologically-focussed,
non-statist, anti-authoritarian aspects of primitive lifeways with the
most advanced forms of anarchist analysis of power relations. The aim is
not to replicate or return to the primitive, merely to see the primitive
as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying forms of anarchy. For
anarcho-primitivists, civilization is the overarching context within
which the multiplicity of power relations develop. Some basic power
relations are present in primitive societies — and this is one reason
why anarcho-primitivists do not seek to replicate these societies — but
it is in civilization that power relations become pervasive and
entrenched in practically all aspects of human life and human relations
with the biosphere. Civilization — also referred to as the megamachine
or Leviathan — becomes a huge machine which gains its own momentum and
becomes beyond the control of even its supposed rulers. Powered by the
routines of daily life which are defined and managed by internalized
patterns of obedience, people become slaves to the machine, the system
of civilization itself. Only widespread refusal of this system and its
various forms of control, revolt against power itself, can abolish
civilization, and pose a radical alternative. Ideologies such as
Marxism, classical anarchism and feminism oppose aspects of
civilization; only anarcho-primitivism opposes civilization, the context
within which the various forms of oppression proliferate and become
pervasive — and, indeed, possible. Anarcho-primitivism incorporates
elements from various oppositional currents — ecological consciousness,
anarchist anti-authoritarianism, feminist critiques, Situationist ideas,
zero-work theories, technological criticism — but goes beyond opposition
to single forms of power to refuse them all and pose a radical
alternative.
ideologies?
From the perspective of anarcho-primitivism, all other forms of
radicalism appear as reformist, whether or not they regard themselves as
revolutionary. Marxism and classical anarchism, for example, want to
take over civilization, rework its structures to some degree, and remove
its worst abuses and oppressions. However, 99% of life in civilization
remains unchanged in their future scenarios, precisely because the
aspects of civilization they question are minimal. Although both want to
abolish capitalism, and classical anarchism would abolish the State too,
overall life patterns wouldn’t change too much. Although there might be
some changes in socioeconomic relations, such as worker control of
industry and neighbourhood councils in place of the State, and even an
ecological focus, basic patterns would remain unchanged. The Western
model of progress would merely be amended and would still act as an
ideal. Mass society would essentially continue, with most people
working, living in artificial, technologised environments, and subject
to forms of coercion and control. Radical ideologies on the Left seek to
capture power, not abolish it. Hence, they develop various kinds of
exclusive groups — cadres, political parties, consciousness-raising
groups — in order to win converts and plan strategies for gaining
control. Organizations, for anarcho-primitivists, are just rackets,
gangs for putting a particular ideology in power. Politics, ‘the art and
science of government,’ is not part of the primitivist project; only a
politics of desire, pleasure, mutuality and radical freedom.
Again, a source of some debate among anarcho-primitivists. Perlman sees
the creation of impersonal institutions or abstract power relations as
the defining moment at which primitive anarchy begins to be dismantled
by civilized social relations. In contrast, John Zerzan locates the
development of symbolic mediation — in its various forms of number,
language, time, art and later, agriculture — as the means of transition
from human freedom to a state of domestication. The focus on origin is
important in anarcho-primitivism because primitivism seeks, in
exponential fashion, to expose, challenge and abolish all the multiple
forms of power that structure the individual, social relations, and
interrelations with the natural world. Locating origins is a way of
identifying what can be safely salvaged from the wreck of civilization,
and what it is essential to eradicate if power relations are not to
recommence after civilization’s collapse. What kind of future is
envisaged by anarcho-primitivists? Anarcho-primitivist journal “Anarchy;
A Journal of Desire Armed” envisions a future that is ‘radically
cooperative & communitarian, ecological and feminist, spontaneous and
wild,’ and this might be the closest you’ll get to a description!
There’s no blueprint, no proscriptive pattern, although it’s important
to stress that the envisioned future is not ‘primitive’ in any
stereotypical sense. As the Fifth Estate said in 1979: ‘Let us
anticipate the critics who would accuse us of wanting to go “back to the
caves” or of mere posturing on our part — i.e., enjoying the comforts of
civilization all the while being its hardiest critics. We are not posing
the Stone Age as a model for our Utopia[,] nor are we suggesting a
return to gathering and hunting as a means for our livelihood.’ As a
corrective to this common misconception, it’s important to stress that
that the future envisioned by anarcho-primitivism is sui generis — it is
without precedent. Although primitive cultures provide intimations of
the future, and that future may well incorporate elements derived from
those cultures, an anarcho-primitivist world would likely be quite
different from previous forms of anarchy.
John Zerzan defines technology as ‘the ensemble of division of labor/
production/ industrialism and its impact on us and on nature. Technology
is the sum of mediations between us and the natural world and the sum of
those separations mediating us from each other. It is all the drudgery
and toxicity required to produce and reproduce the stage of
hyper-alienation we languish in. It is the texture and the form of
domination at any given stage of hierarchy and domination.’ Opposition
to technology thus plays an important role in anarcho-primitivist
practice. However, Fredy Perlman says that ‘technology is nothing but
the Leviathan’s armory,’ its ‘claws and fangs.’ Anarcho-primitivists are
thus opposed to technology, but there is some debate over how central
technology is to domination in civilization. A distinction should be
drawn between tools (or implements) and technology. Perlman shows that
primitive peoples develop all kinds of tools and implements, but not
technologies: ‘The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging
sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they
were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a
single occasion .... Most of the implements are ancient, and the
[material] surpluses [these implements supposedly made possible] have
been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal
institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both.’ Tools are
creations on a localised, small-scale, the products of either
individuals or small groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not
give rise to systems of control and coercion. Technology, on the other
hand, is the product of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction,
production, distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their
own momentum and dynamic. As such, they demand structures of control and
obedience on a mass scale — what Perlman calls impersonal institutions.
As the Fifth Estate pointed out in 1981: ‘Technology is not a simple
tool which can be used in any way we like. It is a form of social
organization, a set of social relations. It has its own laws. If we are
to engage in its use, we must accept its authority. The enormous size,
complex interconnections and stratification of tasks which make up
modern technological systems make authoritarian command necessary and
independent, individual decision-making impossible.’ Anarcho-primitivism
is an anti-systemic current: it opposes all systems, institutions,
abstractions, the artificial, the synthetic, and the machine, because
they embody power relations. Anarcho-primitivists thus oppose technology
or the technological system, but not the use of tools and implements in
the senses indicated here. As to whether any technological forms will be
appropriate in an anarcho-primitivist world, there is debate over this
issue. The Fifth Estate remarked in 1979 that: ‘Reduced to its most
basic elements, discussions about the future sensibly should be
predicated on what we desire socially and from that determine what
technology is possible. All of us desire central heating, flush toilets,
and electric lighting, but not at the expense of our humanity. Maybe
they are all possible together, but maybe not.’ What about medicine?
Ultimately, anarcho-primitivism is all about healing — healing the rifts
that have opened up within individuals, between people, and between
people and nature, the rifts that have opened up through civilization,
through power, including the State, Capital, and technology. The German
philosopher Nietzsche said that pain, and the way it is dealt with,
should be at the heart of any free society, and in this respect, he is
right. Individuals, communities and the Earth itself have been maimed to
one degree or another by the power relations characteristic of
civilization. People have been psychologically maimed but also
physically assaulted by illness and disease. This isn’t to suggest that
anarcho-primitivism can abolish pain, illness and disease! However,
research has revealed that many diseases are the results of civilized
living conditions, and if these conditions were abolished, then certain
types of pain, illness and disease could disappear. As for the
remainder, a world which places pain at its centre would be vigorous in
its pursuit of assuaging it by finding ways of curing illness and
disease. In this sense, anarcho-primitivism is very concerned with
medicine. However, the alienating high-tech, pharmaceutical-centred form
of medicine practised in the West is not the only form of medicine
possible. The question of what medicine might consist of in an
anarcho-primitivist future depends, as in the Fifth Estate comment on
technology above, on what is possible and what people desire, without
compromising the lifeways of free individuals in ecologically-centred
free communities. As on all other questions, there is no dogmatic answer
to this issue.
A controversial issue, largely because there isn’t a consensus among
anarcho-primitivists on this topic. Some people argue that population
reduction wouldn’t be necessary; others argue that it would on
ecological grounds and/or to sustain the kind of lifeways envisaged by
anarcho-primitivists. George Bradford, in How Deep is Deep Ecology?,
argues that women’s control over reproduction would lead to a fall in
population rate. The personal view of the present writer is that
population would need to be reduced, but this would occur through
natural wastage — i.e., when people died, not all of them would be
replaced, and thus the overall population rate would fall and eventually
stabilise. Anarchists have long argued that in a free world, social,
economic and psychological pressures toward excessive reproduction would
be removed. There would just be too many other interesting things going
on to engage people’s time! Feminists have argued that women, freed of
gender constraints and the family structure, would not be defined by
their reproductive capacities as in patriarchal societies, and this
would result in lower population levels too. So population would be
likely to fall, willy-nilly. After all, as Perlman makes plain,
population growth is purely a product of civilization: ‘a steady
increase in human numbers [is] as persistent as the Leviathan itself.
This phenomenon seems to exist only among Leviathanized human beings.
Animals as well as human communities in the state of nature do not
proliferate their own kind to the point of pushing all others off the
field.’ So there’s really no reason to suppose that human population
shouldn’t stabilise once Leviathanic social relations are abolished and
communitarian harmony is restored. Ignore the weird fantasies spread by
some commentators hostile to anarcho-primitivism who suggest that the
population levels envisaged by anarcho-primitivists would have to be
achieved by mass die-offs or nazi-style death camps. These are just
smear tactics. The commitment of anarcho-primitivists to the abolition
of all power relations, including the State with all its administrative
and military apparatus, and any kind of party or organization, means
that such orchestrated slaughter remains an impossibility as well as
just plain horrendous.
The sixty-four thousand dollar question! (to use a thoroughly suspect
metaphor!) There are no hard-and-fast rules here, no blueprint. The glib
answer — seen by some as a cop-out — is that forms of struggle emerge in
the course of insurgency. This is true, but not necessarily very
helpful! The fact is that anarcho-primitivism is not a power-seeking
ideology. It doesn’t seek to capture the State, take over factories, win
converts, create political organizations, or order people about.
Instead, it wants people to become free individuals living in free
communities which are interdependent with one another and with the
biosphere they inhabit. It wants, then, a total transformation, a
transformation of identity, ways of life, ways of being, and ways of
communicating. This means that the tried and tested means of
power-seeking ideologies just aren’t relevant to the anarcho-primitivist
project, which seeks to abolish all forms of power. So new forms of
action and being, forms appropriate to and commensurate with the
anarcho-primitivist project, need to be developed. This is an ongoing
process and so there’s no easy answer to the question: What is to be
done? At present, many agree that communities of resistance are an
important element in the anarcho-primitivist project. The word
‘community’ is bandied about these days in all kinds of absurd ways
(e.g., the business community), precisely because most genuine
communities have been destroyed by Capital and the State. Some think
that if traditional communities, frequently sources of resistance to
power, have been destroyed, then the creation of communities of
resistance — communities formed by individuals with resistance as their
common focus — are a way to recreate bases for action. An old anarchist
idea is that the new world must be created within the shell of the old.
This means that when civilization collapses — through its own volition,
through our efforts, or a combination of the two — there will be an
alternative waiting to take its place. This is really necessary as, in
the absence of positive alternatives, the social disruption caused by
collapse could easily create the psychological insecurity and social
vacuum in which fascism and other totalitarian dictatorships could
flourish. For the present writer, this means that anarcho-primitivists
need to develop communities of resistance — microcosms (as much as they
can be) of the future to come — both in cities and outside. These need
to act as bases for action (particularly direct action), but also as
sites for the creation of new ways of thinking, behaving, communicating,
being, and so on, as well as new sets of ethics — in short, a whole new
liberatory culture. They need to become places where people can discover
their true desires and pleasures, and through the good old anarchist
idea of the exemplary deed, show others by example that alternative ways
of life are possible. However, there are many other possibilities that
need exploring. The kind of world envisaged by anarcho-primitivism is
one unprecedented in human experience in terms of the degree and types
of freedom anticipated ... so there can’t be any limits on the forms of
resistance and insurgency that might develop. The kind of vast
transformations envisaged will need all kinds of innovative thought and
activity.
The Primitivist Network (PO Box 252, Ampthill, Beds MK45 2QZ) can
provide you with a reading list. Check out copies of the British paper
Green Anarchist and the US zines Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed and
Fifth Estate. Read Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
(Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), the most important anarcho-primitivist
text, and John Zerzan’s Elements of Refusal (Seattle: Left Bank, 1988)
and Future Primitive (New York: Autonomedia, 1994). How do I get
involved in anarcho-primitivism? One way is to contact the Primitivist
Network. If you send two 1^(st) class postage stamps, you will receive a
copy of the PN contact list and be entered on it yourself. This will put
you in contact with other anarcho-primitivists. Some people involved in
Earth First! also see themselves as anarcho-primitivists, and they are
worth seeking out too.