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Title: Primitivism and History Author: Miguel Amorós Date: March 2003 Language: en Topics: anarcho-primitivism, history, philosophy, indigenous Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/primitivism-history-miguel-amor%C3%B3s Notes: Translated from the Spanish original: http://www.bibliolibertaire.org/catalogue_des_textes_en_espagnol.htm
Back in the middle of the Fourth Century B.C., a vagabond philosopher
lived in Athens and Corinth, a philosopher who employed extravagant
gestures and a provocative attitude to preach the rejection of all
civilized conventions and a return to nature and spontaneity. Diogenes
the Cynic, originally from Sinope, a city on the shores of the Black
Sea, practiced what he preached: he lived in a clay jar, he neither
voted nor participated in any other way in a citizen’s duties, he had no
fixed occupation and attended to both the “matters of Aphrodite” (sex)
and the “matters of Demeter” (eating) in public. He went about with his
staff and his coarse blanket, which served as his clothing by day and
his bedding by night, and a wallet containing the simple items of his
frugal diet that he acquired by begging, which never included cooked
food. Criticizing the false idols that ruled the lives of his
contemporaries, or the democratic institutions that had been perverted
by tyrants and demagogues, or the social hypocrisy concealed behind
allegedly sacred values, he opposed the laws of nature to those of
society and chose the animals as his model, seeking freedom in a life
without encumbrances outside the confines of the polis, far from its
laws and prejudices. He laughed at exile, the worst punishment that
could be inflicted on a Greek, and proclaimed that he was a citizen of
the world; he said, “the only true commonwealth is that of the
universe”. He also rejected property and the family and advocated the
community of goods, women and children: “What I possess is not mine.
Relatives, friends, family, fame, familiar places, lifestyle, all these
things are foreign to me.” [I was unable to locate an English-language
source text for this quotation; it appears to be a
paraphrase—Translator’s note.] Under the law of nature, men, women and
animals were equals, and therefore all varieties of incest are legal (a
minor detail of free love), because they are natural, and even
cannibalism is legal (“because all elements are contained in all things,
and pervade everything”). Violence, however, the source of all evils,
was not legal under the law of nature, nor was the idea of the
fatherland or money. Harmony with the universe would be the necessary
result of the abolition of war and warriors, and of money and
patriotism. Along the same lines, Epicurus, the founder of a later
school of thought, discouraged his disciples from submitting to the
regular Greek educational curriculum and condemned participation in
politics. Like Diogenes, he was addressing the cosmopolitan individual,
that great invention of the Greek world, and proposed that individuals
withdraw from the public realm and live a quiet life surrounded by
friends and lovers, based on a simple diet, the satisfaction of natural
desires and the enjoyment of genuine pleasures, that is, wisdom and the
absence of pain.
The teachings of the philosophical school of the Cynics, which include
the teachings of Diogenes, therefore constituted the first primitivist
critiques of civilization. Their appearance at the end of the classical
period of Greece, in the midst of the full-blown crisis of the polis,
reflected the contrast between the letter of the law and the dreary
reality of everyday life. The civil wars between Sparta and Athens led
to the collapse of the values of Greek civilization. The meanings of
words changed and the civic virtues were transformed into their
opposites due to the greed for power and partisan politics. Corruption
and partisan conflicts had free rein. According to Thucydides: “Thus
religion was in honour with neither party; but the use of fair phrases
to arrive at guilty ends was in high reputation. Meanwhile the moderate
part of the citizens perished between the two, either for not joining in
the quarrel, or because envy would not suffer them to escape” (The
Peloponnesian Wars). Shortly before this era, during the early period of
Hellenism, the Greek cities suffered under the oppression of organized
power and the favored classes. At that time, no one felt that the laws
protected them and therefore no one felt like a member of a civil
community. Hegel said that, “for philosophy to arise among a people, a
rupture must take place in the actual world.” Man takes refuge in
thought when public life no longer satisfies him, when moral life has
dissolved. The Greeks began to think about nature when they lost all
interest in their world and everything around them was turbulent and
unhappy. This phenomenon is not at all surprising. The Greeks did not
conceive of man as emancipated from the universe or separated from
nature, and thus they perceived no opposition between nature and man.
The universe was an ordered world, the source of just relations, a model
in which one could discover the social order “that is in conformance
with nature”. The works of men could not be superior to the works of
nature; at most, they could approach perfection to the extent that they
inserted themselves into nature and reflected its order. With regard to
this question, Epicurus said: “If you do not on every occasion refer
each of your actions to the ultimate end prescribed by nature, but
instead of this in the act of choice or avoidance turn to some other
end, your actions will not be consistent with your theories.” The polis
was a system based on the cosmic laws, a natural system that had been
perverted, and had become something foreign, or “barbarous”. It was
therefore “more Greek” to return to nature. Given the absence of the
historical dimension of time among the Greeks, the end was only the
beginning. The Romans experienced this same state of mind when the
Republic fell. During the subsequent stage, that of the Roman Empire,
the primitivist refusal underwent a resurgence as a myth in literature
and as a reality in the periphery of the empire.
During the Third Century B.C., Zeno the Stoic began his career with a
description of a society in which there were no differences of personal
status, or racial distinctions, or party politics, a kind of egalitarian
world community devoted to sun worship. Ever since the time of Hesiod
there was a primitivist tendency in Greek thought that conceived of life
as it was lived in the distant past as the reign of Pan, a golden age of
abundance, innocence and happiness. The poets sang of the Happy Isles
inhabited by “heliopolitans”, and thanks to the historian Diodorus
Siculus we know that flowers and fruits were plentiful there, and that
nothing was owned by anybody; that everyone took turns using land, food
and tools, and it goes without saying that promiscuity was generalized.
Theocritus situated the pastoral scene in Sicily, but it was a rugged
and inhospitable region of central Greece, Arcadia, that ultimately came
to embody the myth of the original happy condition. Virgil, in his
Eclogues, describes Arcadia as containing lush vegetation, perfect for
meditation, in eternal spring, without suffering, where everything is
leisure and love: “Far from discord and weapons, the land that is so
prodigal for justice provides an easy living…. Man has to do no more
than pick the fruit from the branches and farmland is produced for his
benefit spontaneously. He enjoys a repose without disturbance and an
existence that is rich in various resources.” [This appears to be a
paraphrase rather than a quotation from the Eclogues—Translator’s note.]
Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, provides a similar version of the beginnings
of history, of the times “before Saturn was deposed by Jupiter”: “when
Man yet new,/No rule but uncorrupted reason knew:/And, with a native
bent, did good pursue./Unforc’d by punishment, un-aw’d by fear,/His
words were simple, and his soul sincere;/Needless was written law, where
none opprest…./The teeming Earth, yet guiltless of the plough,/And
unprovok’d, did fruitful stores allow.” Saturn had to take refuge in
Italy with its first inhabitants and according to Pompeius Trogus, “The
first inhabitants of Italy were the Aborigines, whose king, Saturn, is
said to have been a man of such extraordinary justice, that no one was a
slave in his reign, or had any private property, but all things were
common to all, and undivided, as one estate for the use of every one….”
The aspiration for happiness derived not from the impossible idea that a
new society could be built, but from the evocation of a primeval
paradise that would recur at the conclusion of a cycle that was
characterized by decline and ruin. For the Roman Empire, this cycle
began in the Third Century. From then on Gaul and Spain experienced
massive uprisings of outcasts known as the bagaudae that could not be
suppressed by large armies. The bagaudae were fugitive slaves, military
deserters, impoverished dependent farmers, and city dwellers fleeing the
destruction of the cities, who fled to the forests seeking the freedom
that they could not enjoy in civilization. There, they formed gangs that
expropriated landlords and besieged the cities, managing their internal
affairs by means of a “natural” justice that was unrelated to that of
the Empire, without magistrates or governors. In a dialogue that has
been preserved from that era (Querolus), a citizen asks his lares to
guide him to a place where he can be happy. They responded by telling
him to go to the Loire Valley, the territory of the bagaudae, because
“Men live there under natural law. There is no suffering there. Capital
sentences are proclaimed under the oaks and are engraved in bone. There,
even the country people speak and the ordinary people pass judgment. You
can do as you please….” This is an account of the first primitivist
revolt in history.
Neither the disintegration of the Empire nor the Germanic invasions
destroyed the Greco-Roman world. It was the radical transformation with
regard to how the world was viewed that was propagated by Christianity
that was really responsible for the destruction of the Greco-Roman
world. The gods abandoned the universe, which was now the exclusive
creation of God, and cosmic harmony was broken for the benefit of man,
who was made in God’s image. The anthropocentrically interpreted world
was devalued and reality lost its substance in favor of the beyond. This
was a transitional place, an episode in the transcendent drama of
salvation. Spirit and the world, man and nature, were irremediably
separated. This dualism prevailed in the West until the continuing
development of the material and spiritual conditions of medieval society
provoked the emergence of tensions and conflicts that led to the
elaboration of two different approaches to the problem: one, that
originated among the theologians, based on the disenchantment of the
world pursued to its most extreme consequences; the other, inspired by
the intellectuals, based on the exaltation of the culture of antiquity
and the rediscovery of nature through observation and experience. Reform
and Renaissance.
Religious reform rejected the doctrine of salvation by way of the
sacraments, and left man alone to face the consequences of his actions
and forced him to rationalize his conduct. The world—and therefore
civilization—was as a result even more deprecated than was the case
under Catholicism. One more step in this direction led to the appearance
of sects that turned their backs on the “world” and avoided any
relations with non-believers. Attachment to the world was an impediment
to the revelation of faith by the Holy Spirit, and therefore to the
overcoming of irrational subjectivity (of the primitive state of man).
In an attempt to adopt the lifestyle of the primitive Christians, the
sects preached the community of goods and followed the Bible literally,
rejecting any interpretation. Among the adepts of the Free Spirit, a
sectarian movement that, under various names, spread during the 13^(th)
century across a large part of Europe, the spiritual emancipation of man
was pursued by way of the identification of God and the radical
rejection of private property. One of the members of this sect, Johannes
de Brünn, preached to his followers: “Leave, leave, leave your homes,
your horses, your possessions, your land, leave it, remember that
nothing is yours, you possess everything in common….” At first, however,
the call to return to a lost Golden Age, to a natural egalitarian
condition that could be realized in the present, a state that the Church
Fathers had interpreted as the prelapsarian paradise, did not find many
supporters, but when the message was propagated among the poor peasants
and the impoverished people of the cities, as was the case in Flanders,
Picardy and England (the revolt of John Ball), the idea became a
revolutionary myth of the masses. Dissident preachers like John Wycliffe
championed it and spread it throughout Europe, triggering revolutions in
Bohemia, Germany, Holland, etc. (the Hussite revolt, the peasant wars,
the Bundschuh, the Anabaptist movement). With the feudal world in full
disarray, alongside the Protestant reformers an apocalyptic plebeian
party announced the immanent arrival of the Holy Spirit and the return
of 1,000 years of primal paradise, a classless and totally free society,
in which authority would be abolished; the society lost since the Fall
of Man, that is, since the advent of civilization. While the Protestant
reformers prepared the world for capitalism, the plebeian party attacked
“Babylon” (the commercial cities) and burned books. Although only a few
radical factions actually practiced the community of goods—the Adamites,
the extremist Taborites, certain groups of Anabaptists, etc.—all of them
proclaimed the imminence of a kingdom of equality, where all will enjoy
all the goods of nature, of river and forest, of fish and game, in
common, and where all will receive what they need and where there will
be no distinctions of status or estate and everyone will be like
brothers and sisters; a kingdom that will be inaugurated at the end of a
battle of extermination against the Anti-Christ and his hosts, that is,
against the State, the Church and the ruling classes. As the agitator
Thomas Müntzer proclaimed: “On! On! On! Let not your sword grow cold,
let it not be blunted. Smite, cling, clang, on the anvil of Nimrod, and
cast the tower to the ground...”, calling for the most complete social
destruction. Nimrod was the builder of the Tower of Babel and was
considered to be the first creator of cities, the inventor of private
property and of class distinctions, that is, the destroyer of the
primitive State of Nature.
The analysis made by Engels (The Peasant War in Germany) of these
revolutions is erroneous. He judges that they were only capable of
formulating a communist program in a “fantastic” form that could not be
realized given the limited productive forces of that time. Not only does
he succumb to the mistake of blaming them for not knowing things they
could not have known, but he also judges them on the basis of ideas that
had not even been conceived yet. Thus, by scorning the real content of
the revolts he condemned himself to misunderstanding them, and under the
appearance of “historical materialism” he simply asserted the debatable
view that communism only became possible with the total development of
the proletariat, or, which amounts to the same thing, with the full
unfolding of the bourgeois conditions of production. It is true that,
far from being primitive and chimerical elaborations of a
nineteenth-century emancipatory project, those uprisings pursued the
abolition of the feudal world via the extremist realization of the
Christian ideal. The millenarianism of the peasant and urban plebs was
precisely what they wanted it to be. It was not a movement against
history because it remained on the terrain of the myth of the earthly
paradise and was alien to the Protestant bourgeoisie. Its goals—the
destruction of the Church and of the power of the princes, and the
realization of the Millennium—were perfectly possible under those
historical conditions, and they did not require any other language for
their expression.
During the decline of the Middle Ages a sentiment began to be expressed
in literature that reflected a yearning for the simple pastoral life and
the dream of natural happiness, which represented, that is, the bucolic
ideal, which revealed a vital desire for pleasure. The Ancient World was
not so distant. In the particular conditions of the Italian cities, one
of which was the existence of an educated class, a culture linked to
antiquity flourished that awakened an interest in, and a desire to
understand, nature. This attitude restored to nature the reality that
Christianity had taken from it. The world was no longer represented as a
rigid sphere with God—or the Earth—at the center, and was revealed to be
infinite. Religion ceased to be the instrument that made the world
intelligible and yielded this role to the testimony of the senses and
experience. Religion no longer served as a veil for existence and nature
became the field of action for human experience. But it must be recalled
that this change of perspective, which was generalized at the end of the
16^(th) century, affected only the educated class of the cities, that
is, the core population of the bourgeoisie. The uneducated classes that
comprised the majority of the population were unaffected by this
intellectual ferment and expressed their ideas in religious terms. As
late as the time of the English Revolution we can still contemplate the
attempt to use the Gospels to overthrow society. Gerrard Winstanley, the
leading personality among the Diggers, a faction of the Levelers,
replaced the word “God” with “Reason”, because “… I have been held under
darknesse by that word, as I see many people are”. This Reason is a
revealed Reason; a voice told him the news: “work together and eat bread
together, doth advance the law of Reason and Righteousnesse,” but it
also told him that hell does not exist and that heaven is within men. He
referred, like all the rest of his predecessors, to a primal Golden Age.
“In the beginning of Time, the great Creator Reason, made the Earth to
be a Common Treasury, to preserve Beasts, Birds, Fishes, and Man, the
lord that was to govern this Creation; for Man had Domination given to
him, over the Beasts, Birds, and Fishes….”. The egoism of some men,
however, created authority and servitude, and led them to appropriate
the natural wealth that was the common property of all, especially the
land, inventing arbitrary laws to justify their usurpation. The
“Diggers” based freedom on the free enjoyment of the land and proclaimed
that they must “lay the Foundation of making the Earth a Common Treasury
for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the land,
may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth, according to
the Reason that rules in the Creation”. They advocated an economy
without money, organized around public storehouses where everyone would
bring the products of their labor and from which everyone could take
what they need. In practice, they broke down fences and occupied common
lands and the lands of the nobility in order to cultivate them, carrying
on the tradition of previous peasant rebellions by acknowledging the
slogan of an unpartitioned land, without property lines or fences. They
also refused to pay the tithe, they did not respect the rules regarding
Sundays and they demanded the rule of natural justice and Reason without
the mediation of judges and priests. Borrowing the words of Debord that
were less justifiably applied to the peasant wars, we can say that the
struggle of the Diggers was a “revolutionary class struggle speaking the
language of religion for the last time, which is already a modern
revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the consciousness that it is
only historical”. This shortcoming was the result of the separation
between the educated and the uneducated classes, between spiritual and
material necessity, since the popular classes, primarily the peasants
(the English “yeomanry”), were trapped between the bourgeoisie and the
aristocracy. It would be a constant feature of history that obliged the
representatives of the bourgeoisie to clothe themselves in the vestments
of the apocalypse. Even in the middle of the 19^(th) century Georg
Büchner wrote to his friends in the Young Germany group: “Reform society
by ideas? Impossible! Our epoch is altogether materialistic; if you were
to act in a strictly political manner, you would soon reach the point
where reform comes to an end on its own (….) And the majority class
itself? For it, there are only two levers, material poverty and
religious fanaticism. Every party that knows how to manipulate these two
levers will be victorious. Our time needs steel and bread—and only later
a cross or something else….”
In 1493 Columbus sent a letter to the Secretary of the Catholic Kings,
Luis de Santángel, summarizing the results of his voyage to “the
Indias”: “Hispaniola is a marvel. Its hills and mountains, fine plains
and open country, are rich and fertile for planting and for pasturage,
and for building towns and villages. The seaports there are incredibly
fine, as also the magnificent rivers, most of which bear gold. The
trees, fruits and grasses differ widely from those in Juana (….) The
people of this island and all the others I have found or been informed
of go about totally naked, men and women, naked as the day they were
born, although some women cover one place with a leaf or a piece of
cotton cloth they make for that purpose. They have no iron, nor steel,
nor weapons, nor are they fit for them, because although they are
well-made men of commanding stature, they appear extraordinarily timid
(….) It is true that since they have gained more confidence and are
losing this fear, they are so unsuspicious and so generous with what
they possess, that no one who had not seen it would believe it. They
never refuse anything that is asked for. They even offer it themselves,
and show so much love that they would give their very hearts. Whether it
be anything of great or small value, with any trifle of whatever kind,
they are satisfied.” The accounts of the Spanish and French explorers
provide ample material for the reconstruction of the figure of the noble
savage, an image of freedom that had been fragmented by the shattering
of the unity of the Church, the State and earthly life. When Montaigne
wanted to study “the human condition”, a very unusual topic for that
era, he read the travelers’ accounts published in Francia Antarctica:
“what we now see in those nations, does not only surpass all the
pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age, and all their
inventions in feigning a happy state of man, but, moreover, the fancy
and even the wish and desire of philosophy itself; so native and so pure
a simplicity, as we by experience see to be in them, could never enter
into their imagination, nor could they ever believe that human society
could have been maintained with so little artifice and human patchwork.
I should tell Plato, that it is a nation wherein there is no manner of
traffic, no knowledge of letters, no science of numbers, no name of
magistrate or political superiority; no use of service, riches or
poverty, no contracts, no successions, no dividends, no properties, no
employments, but those of leisure, no respect of kindred, but common, no
clothing, no agriculture, no metal, no use of corn or wine; the very
words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy,
detraction, pardon, never heard of. How much would he find his imaginary
republic short of this perfection?” (Essays). Montaigne thought it
fitting to call them barbarians if they were judged by reason, but not
if the standard of judgment would be a comparison with the civilized,
who exceed them in barbarism. He did not even hesitate to claim that
their language, of such an agreeable sound, recalled the accents of the
ancient Greeks. He concluded by referring to the response that one of
the indigenous people, who had been brought to France, gave to King
Charles the Ninth. Asked about how people lived in his country, he
shockingly raised the issue of the leveling of conditions: “… they had
observed, that there were among us men full and crammed with all manner
of commodities, while, in the meantime, their halves were begging at
their doors, lean and half-starved with hunger and poverty; and they
thought it strange that these necessitous halves were able to suffer so
great an inequality and injustice, and that they did not take the others
by the throats, or set fire to their houses.”
The myth of the noble savage would be put to use as a political weapon
of reason. In The Adventures of Telemachus, Fenelon would revisit the
theme of “natural man” and would point to the latter’s antagonism with
civilized man: “We look on the manners of these people as a beautiful
fable, and they must needs look upon ours as a monstrous dream.” In
describing the delights of “Betica” he was actually talking about
certain idealized Canadian aborigines. Its inhabitants live in tents,
all together, without any possessive attitude towards the land, where
there are gold and silver mines, although “the inhabitants, plain and
happy in their plainness, do not even deign to reckon gold and silver
among their riches; they esteem nothing but what really subserves the
wants of man.” Furthermore, “[a]s they had no foreign trade, they had no
occasion for money. They are almost all shepherds or husbandmen. There
are in this country few artificers, for they tolerate no arts but those
which subserve the real necessities of man….”. Superfluous goods are for
wicked men, slaves of the false needs upon which they mistakenly believe
their happiness depends: “They have no need of judges, for every man
submits to the jurisdiction of conscience. They possess all things in
common; for the cattle produce milk, and the fields and the orchards
fruit and grain of every kind in such abundance that a people so frugal
and temperate have no need of property.” And, thanks to the fact that
they flee from vain wealth and deceitful pleasures, they can remain
united, free and equal, peaceful, monogamous and proud of their way of
life: “[t]he Beticans would forsake their country, or choose to die,
rather than submit to servitude. It is therefore as difficult to subdue
them, as they are incapable of desiring to subdue others.” The content
of this work follows a clear purpose: Fenelon contrasted the corrupt
society of Louis XIV with a natural communism, showing, on the one hand,
the incompatibility between the bourgeois world and absolutism, and, on
the other hand, the political weakness of the incipient French
bourgeoisie.
The expansion of the horizons of the world and of the possibilities
inherent in it posed the problem of how man would live; the discovery of
the American tribes contributed to the construction of a theory of the
natural origin of society and the State that could be used to refute the
contrary theory of divine origin. While in France this theory revolved
around utopian constructs, in England, the country where royal power had
been battered by a revolution, bourgeois formulations were much more
carefully tailored. In 1609, Garcilaso de la Vega ordered that his Royal
Commentaries be printed, in which he described the birth and development
of the Inca state of Peru. He maintained that the Inca provided the
proof of the existence of an almost perfect State that ruled, “in
accordance with the teachings of reason and natural law”, every minute
of every day of the lives of its subjects. The Incan Empire had arisen
from the primitive state of nature, free and egalitarian, thanks to the
cities of a mythical founder, Manco Capac. The work was translated into
French and English, and was influential among the enemies of absolute
monarchy, especially John Locke. Thus, from the ranks of the Whig party,
the bourgeois party that disputed power with the English monarchy and
the aristocrats after the revolution, Locke defined the state of nature
as “a state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is
reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more
evident than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously
born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same
faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without
subordination or subjection….” (Of Civil Government: The Second
Treatise). According to Locke, this state was altered by the
transgression of natural law that was brought about by the greed to
possess more than what was necessary and the unwillingness of some
people to work, which obliged the inhabitants to construct a
contract-based society. The people, seeking protection, renounced part
of their individual freedom and submitted to a superior power created by
general agreement. The rationalist philosopher called “natural” what was
in fact only “historical”. Natural law was nothing but the idealist
formulation of the bourgeois social norm.
If the “geometrical” consideration of nature characteristic of
rationalist philosophy (such as that of Descartes or Spinoza) deduced
enormous potentials for man within the confines of nature, expressed in
the idea of the perfectibility and progress of civilization, for other
authors (such as Pascal), the disenchantment of the world by science and
reason revealed an infinite cosmic void, foreign to the human being,
provoking an existential disorder in man, who was now lost in a little
corner of the universe. This latter perspective led to the renunciation
of the world and to religion. As the contradictory side of civilization
began to be revealed, doubts arose regarding the guarantees of freedom
and happiness that the progress of science and the arts was supposed to
bring in its wake. The great debate of the century of the Enlightenment
was that of nature or civilization, progress “of the arts” or moral
progress. For some, one could be happy in ignorance; culture caused
inequality and was the source of error, unhappiness and poverty. For
others, exactly the opposite was true. Modern thought, however, was
irremediably separated from the idea of God and gravitated towards life,
for which contemplative retirement could not be the solution. According
to Abbe Raynal the study of the lives of primitive peoples must have the
purpose of making “the ignorance of the savage shed light in some way on
the civilized peoples.” In the discussions of the savage, therefore,
three positions can be delineated. One followed the path of utopia. In
1753 Morelly’s Wreck of the Floating Isles, or Basiliad of the
Celebrated Pilpaï was published, which was an apology for natural
anarchy and a veritable manual of primitivism. On a blessed isle there
lived an innocent and free people who knew how to reject the temptations
of laziness and wickedness and attended to nature’s harmonious message,
which rather than hindering, actually enhance passions and desires. On
this isle there was neither property, nor marriage, nor religion nor
privilege. Luxury and the accumulation of wealth were forbidden.
Society, formed without an explicit contract, was composed of small
communities that practiced agriculture and the arts and engaged in
mutual aid, obeying no other law than nature. As for culture, they only
needed one book that covered everything. Another position, which is
indebted to Hobbes, paints the life of the savage in the most somber of
colors. According to this view, the primitive man, far from being happy,
suffers from hunger and countless afflictions that make him a ferocious
and cruel being, and that drive him to a perpetual state of war against
all other men. To escape such a risk-filled condition he had to enter
into an agreement not to harm the others and to help them when they
needed help. Holbach maintained that the savages, because they were
deprived of reason, cannot be free, and that freedom in the hands of
beings without either culture or virtue was like a knife in the hands of
a child: “The Savage Life or the state of nature towards which some sad
thinkers have wanted to drag mankind, the golden age that was so highly
praised by the poets, is actually only a state of poverty, of
imbecility, and of irrationality. Inviting us to participate in such a
life means that we are being told that we should return to our infancy,
that we should forget everything we know, that we should renounce the
enlightenment that our minds have been able to acquire: meanwhile,
unfortunately for us, our reason is still quite underdeveloped, even in
the most civilized nations” (Système Social). Freedom therefore depends
on a society ruled by law that is inspired by nature, whose goal must be
human happiness. Abbe Marly, halfway between Holbach and Morelly,
suggested the happy medium was “perfect equality” obtained by means of
the community of goods, since property engendered avarice and ambition,
passions that the legislator had to combat (On Legislation or the
Principle of Law). Marly advocated Spartan equality, the enemy of
science and the arts, since the latter had separated man from the state
of nature, and Athenian freedom, based on the total transfer of
authority to the social body. A third position, that of Rousseau, who
followed in the footsteps of Locke, simultaneously rehabilitated the
egalitarian primitive community and also consecrated the State with the
popular will and the “contract”. This is the content of the Discourse on
Inequality. For Rousseau inequality did not exist in the state of
nature, it only made its appearance when man emerged from that state,
when he formed society: “The moment one man needed the help of another;
as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have provisions for two,
equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and the
fast forests changed into smiling Fields that had to be watered with the
sweat of men, and where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and
grow together with harvests.” This period corresponds with the
introduction of agriculture and metallurgy. From the cultivation of the
land one arrived at the division of the land and from there at property.
The arts brought with them an endless series of needs that seized upon
man. Then, as a corollary, came exploitation and wars, laws and
institutions. As a result, civilized man has lived under the constraints
of superfluous desires and artificial passions. But “When savage man has
eaten, he is at peace with all nature and the friend of all those like
him (…) since savage man desires only things which he knows and knows
only things which he is capable of possessing or which are easy to
acquire, nothing should be as tranquil as his soul and nothing as
limited as his mind.” With regard to the balance sheet of advantages and
disadvantages, the civilized world was in the red, because we never
found a savage who wanted to become civilized but there were many cases
of civilized people who went to live among the savages. The novel
explanation for this fact was that happiness had nothing to do with
reason but with feeling. Finally, by considering freedom as a gift of
nature and property as a social convention, Rousseau provided a decisive
argument for egalitarianism, and exercised more influence than any other
author on the French Revolution, Romanticism and Socialism.
The publication of Bougainville’s Voyage Round the World in 1771 gave
rise to discussions concerning the state of nature and the image of the
savage. Once again, the depiction of a natural and happy world was
transformed into the mirror where civilized society could identify its
malaise and its misfortune. Tahiti, with its voluptuous nature and the
sexual freedom of its inhabitants, became the focal point of the moral
preoccupations of the era. The savage continued to be the cause of the
nostalgic dream of a virtuous and happy life in harmony with nature.
Diderot would express this better than anyone else in his “Supplement to
the Voyage of Bougainville”: “How far we are from nature and happiness!
The empire of nature cannot be destroyed. However much you handicap it
with obstacles it will endure (….) How short the code of nations would
be if it conformed rigidly to the law of nature. How many errors and
vices man would be spared!” Civilized taboos will never be able to
eradicate man’s natural inclinations, at most they can dissimulate them,
to his misfortune: “Would you like an abridged account of almost all our
wretchedness? Here it is. There existed a natural man. There was
introduced into this man an artificial man: and a civil war, enduring
the whole of life, arose in the cavern. Sometimes the natural man is the
stronger, sometimes he is struck down by the moral and artificial man.
In either case the poor monster is pulled about, pinched with tweezers,
tortured, stretched on the wheel.” Diderot resolves the dilemma of
whether one should civilize man or abandon him to his instincts in the
following manner: “If you aspire to be a tyrant, civilize him…. Do you
wish him to be happy and free? Then do not meddle in his affairs.” For
Diderot the history of political, civil and religious institutions was
nothing but the history of tyranny over the human species. In the final
analysis, if you have to choose between civilization and nature, “Really
I cannot say. But this I know. Townsmen have several times been seen to
strip themselves and return to the forest. The woodsman has never put on
clothes and come to the town.” The enlightened man did not renounce
civilization, nor did he seriously consider the advisability of putting
an end to progress. The opposition between nature and reason was
insuperable using only the instruments of reason, but the philosophy of
the 18^(th) century was absolutely unaware of this. What Marx called
“eighteenth century Robinsonades” were in reality an anticipation of the
bourgeois society that had been in gestation since the 16^(th) century.
In this society based on contract, each individual was dispossessed of
all natural bonds, bonds that in the medieval era had made him an
integral and indivisible part of society. The savage was the
idealization of the isolated individual that was a product of the
dissolution of the feudal world. The idea of the savage was an outcome
of history rather than the starting point of history.
During the French Revolution, the specifically bourgeois current as well
as the “sans culottes” constantly invoked nature and its designs,
swearing by Rousseau or Marly. The agitator Anacharsis Cloots, a
self-proclaimed “citizen of humanity”, claimed to have discovered his
political system, “The Republic of the Human Race”, by consulting
nature. Taking an example at random, the oration of the Abbe Fauchet
before the “The Friends of Truth”, we read: “Man was originally a
product of nature in the fullness of his existence and in society; he
was established in the midst of its realm in order to enjoy the good
things of life, to take from it what he needs to survive, to sweeten and
to embellish his existence, and to accumulate by means of his personal
efforts the goods supplied by nature (….) He got enjoyment out of his
existence; he took possession of his domain; he identified the gifts
that were destined for his use; he increased his pleasure by the
exercise of the faculties that enabled him to make constant
improvements: labor was not a punishment for him; it was an agreeable
elaboration of his power and his genius. He was happy as a result of the
serenity of reason and the sweet society which doubled his happiness by
the help of his neighbor; he was happy due to the generosity of the
earth and the simple efforts that multiplied his pleasures; such was the
state of man in the golden age of nature…. Man was born free; this
beautiful faculty was given to him so that he could rise to the
challenge of his destiny and in order to second the intentions of
nature, which was so favorable for him….” By living in society man
separated himself from nature and turned his back on its principles, and
suffered tyranny and injustice. Man can never return to the golden age
but something of that age can be reproduced if society were to be
ordered in such a way that “all have something, and each does not have
too much”, in brief, if it can be ordered in accordance with the ways of
nature: “It is upon natural law that legal institutions must be based
for the first time. The model is neither ancient Greece nor ancient
Italy; it is immutable nature: the social order must adapt to nature, or
else the human race will be eternally miserable (….) Opinion rises to
the level of nature: men want to be happy and just; and they will be
because their will is totally united in favor of happiness and justice.
No power can resist them when nature is on their side, when they march
freely under its commands….” According to Marat, man in nature, in order
to defend himself from the oppression and injustice inflicted on him by
others, has the right to rebel, rob, subjugate and kill if necessary.
The unrestricted exercise of this right would have led to a permanent
state of war and in order to escape this fate man renounced some of the
advantages of nature in favor of the advantages of living in society:
“he renounced his natural rights in order to enjoy his civil rights”; in
short, he signed a social contract. “Thus, the rights of nature
acquired, by means of the social contract, a sacred character. Because
men all received the same rights from nature, they must have equal
rights in the social condition.” But the contract may be broken if there
are privileged persons who enjoy themselves at the expense of the poor:
“justice and wisdom demand that at least part of these goods should be
destined, by way of a judicious allocation, to be shared out among the
citizens who have nothing; for the honest citizen abandoned to poverty
and to hopelessness by society, returns to the state of nature and
therefore has the right to demand with weapons in hand not only the
benefits that he had not renounced but to obtain other greater benefits
as well” (“The Constitution”). This was a unique expression of the right
to insurrection, which Marat called, in accordance with the political
jargon of the era, “the return to nature”. The French revolutionaries
were becoming more and more aware of the danger posed by the inequality
of fortunes, or, which amounts to the same thing, class differences. The
most radical among them suggested compulsory equalization, a leveling of
property that pointed towards the idea of common property, but their
proposals were at first limited to subordinating property rights to the
interests of society, thus undermining its basis. For the deputy from La
Meuse, Harmand, “equality of rights was a gift of nature and not a favor
granted by society”. For the Republican Antonelle, “nature did not
produce property owners, just as it did not produce the nobility; it
only produced beings with nothing, equal in their needs as in their
rights.” The struggle for equality was the crowning moment of the
Revolution and its most enduring demand, but the appeal to communism
took place on the occasion when the bourgeoisie separated itself from
the plebeians and persecuted them ruthlessly. For the conspirator
Babeuf, too, property was not a natural right; to the contrary, “the
condition of community is the only just condition, the only good
condition, the only condition that is in conformance with the pure
sentiments of nature and outside of that condition peaceful and truly
happy societies cannot exist”. In order for the dispossessed to believe
that communism is more than just a dream they will have to recognize
that “the fruits of labor are for all and the land is owned by no one”.
Primitivist communism was the last upwelling of the French Revolution
and the first form that expressed the future emancipatory ideology of
the proletariat, the last class produced by history.
The rational understanding of the world created the foundations for a
new freedom at the same time that it unleashed the forces that would
hinder its realization. The domain of nature, far from achieving freedom
for man, subjugated him more completely than religious despotism.
Science and reason were no better than revelation and the divine will.
The advent of industrial civilization, offspring of applied science and
technical progress, with its long train of destructive consequences,
entailed the worst slavery: wage labor. The instrumental fruits of
Reason gave birth to a monstrous civilization in which both man and
nature were devastated. The opposition between the city and the
countryside grew more pronounced than ever. The people of the
countryside saw how the new laws passed by the bourgeoisie deprived the
majority of them of their means of subsistence, and they were expelled
and concentrated in the most pestilential quarters of the cities. The
cities grew in size and became more and more ugly at the cost of an
enslaved mass of human labor power and prisoners of misfortune. The
individual experienced, in the form of boredom and neurosis, the
disparity between his abstract freedom and the social repression of his
impulses. The confrontation between the ever-narrowing world and the
hypertrophied individual took the form of a unique ideological product:
Romanticism. The Romantics set feeling and passion, or nature, against
reason and progress, or society. Chateaubriand formulated the individual
drama: “Let us listen to the voice of our conscience. What does it tell
us about Nature? ‘It is free.’ And about Society? ‘It rules’.” They
directed their curiosity towards the past, towards the adolescence of
man, to unknown epochs. For Victor Hugo primitive man was not separated
from the divine and that is why his way of thinking was composed of
dreams and his language was poetry: “Before the epoch which modern
society has dubbed ‘ancient,’ there was another epoch which the ancients
called ‘fabulous,’ but which it would be more accurate to call
‘primitive’…. In primitive times, when man awakes in a world that is
newly created, poetry awakes with him. In the face of the marvellous
things that dazzle and intoxicate him, his first speech is a hymn
simply. He is still so close to God that all his meditations are
ecstatic, all his dreams are visions. His bosom swells, he sings as he
breathes. His lyre has but three strings—God, the soul, creation; but
this threefold mystery envelopes everything, this threefold idea
embraces everything. The earth is still almost deserted. There are
families, but no nations; patriarchs, but no kings. Each race exists at
its own pleasure; no property, no laws, no contentions, no wars.
Everything belongs to each and to all. Society is a community. Man is
restrained in nought. He leads that nomadic pastoral life with which all
civilizations begin, and which is so well adapted to solitary
contemplation, to fanciful reverie. He follows every suggestion, he goes
hither and thither, at random. His thought, like his life, resembles a
could that changes its shape and its direction according to the wind
that drives it. Such is the first man, such is the first poet. He is
young, he is cynical. Prayer is his sole religion, the ode is his only
form of poetry. This ode, this poem of primitive times, is Genesis.”
(Preface to Cromwell). This spirit gave rise to an unusual interest in
traditions, legends and popular songs, but also in virgin, mysterious
nature, situated on the edge of the world, in “terra incognita”: “The
memory of a distant country overflowing with an abundance of all the
gifts of nature, the image of a wild and lush vegetation, reanimated and
fortified the spirit; oppressed in the present, we take delight in
getting away from our condition in order to enjoy that simple grandeur
that characterized the infancy of the human race” (Alexander Von
Humboldt, The Legend of El Dorado). Exotic countries, especially “the
Orient”, became the focus of interest (“Spain was still the Orient”). A
feverish passion developed for virgin islands (Robinson Crusoe and Paul
and Virginia were set on islands). Imagination was set above reason,
emotion above logic and intuition above experience. The lost connections
with nature—and with divinity—could not be reconstituted with the help
of reason. Freedom was the most valuable good of man that society could
not guarantee; it was sought outside of society, on its margins, among
the fugitives, the bandits, rebel peoples and savages. Society was
irremediably corrupt. An Indian Chief said: “I began to grasp that this
hateful mixture of ranks and fortunes, of extraordinary opulence and
excessive poverty, of crime without punishment and sacrificed innocence,
forms what in Europe is called society. That is not how it is with us:
among the longhouses of the Iroquois there are no great or small men, no
rich or poor, but hearts at peace and freedom of man everywhere.” Nature
not only appeared as the dream of freedom, rooted in a natural community
held together by feeling, but also as the goal towards which society
itself had to aim: “Can it be otherwise than that the highest degree of
civilization connects with nature?” (Chateaubriand, The Natchez). The
absolute liberty that was proclaimed and the society that existed could
not be more irreconcilable; Shelley said that if men were created by
Jupiter, they could also destroy him. The solution appeared to lie in
revolution, but the Romantics were more tourists than revolutionaries.
In any case, the solution did not lie in civilization; returning to
Chateaubriand: “Civilisation has reached its highest point, but a
materialistic barren civilisation, which can produce nothing, since one
can only create life through morality; one can only forge nations by
Heavenly means: railroads only carry us more swiftly towards the abyss.”
The present was no longer seen as a beginning but as an end; the
Romantic generation had become pessimistic and simply looked back to the
past. The multiple faces of disillusionment transformed the Romantic
ideology into an idealization of the past and a defense of archaic forms
of authority, reflecting the new form of post-revolutionary rule, the
fruit of the alliance between the bourgeoisie and the backward classes
that were in decline. In this spiritual atmosphere naturalist theories
suffered a profound setback at the hands of German idealism. By seeking
to situate man within historical becoming, that is, at the end of a long
series of civilizations, Hegel definitively ruined enlightenment
political thought and its Romantic heirs. Later, the Hegelians Marx and
Bakunin would proclaim to the four winds that freedom and equality were
social rather than natural facts, and that the proletariat, oppressed
humanity, must seek them among the debris of bourgeois civilization and
not in untamed nature.
This change of perspective that Hegel’s works meant for the 19^(th)
century was total and was completely absorbed by socialist thought,
forcing the latter to break not only with the Christian metaphysic and
bourgeois positivism but also with the Rousseauian ideology of the
Revolution. It is often forgotten that Bakunin came of age in the
Hegelian left and that the origins of anarchism are incomprehensible
without taking this into account. Bakunin considered Rousseau to be the
worst of all the bourgeois ideologists on the basis of the assumption
that a social contract legitimized the State, a brutal and primitive
form of social organization. It was assumed that before the advent of
the State man was free but Bakunin thought otherwise about natural
freedom: “It is nothing but the absolute dependence of the ape-man under
the permanent pressure of the external world.” The freedom of primitive
man depended on his solitude: “The freedom of one of them does not
require the freedom of any other; to the contrary, every one of these
individual liberties is based on itself alone, it exists on its own, and
therefore the freedom of each necessarily appears as the negation of the
freedom of all the others, and all of them, should they meet, must limit
and restrict each other mutually, they must contradict each other and
destroy each other….” Up to this point Bakunin is repeating what Holbach
said; but now he parts company with him completely: “Man does not really
become man, he does not conquer the possibility of his internal
emancipation unless he manages to break the chains of the slavery that
external nature imposes upon all living beings.” Humanity was born the
slave of nature and its freedom begins when humanity is emancipated from
nature, that is, when it becomes civilized. From that point on a series
of historical circumstances determine man: “Man does not create society;
he is born within it. He is not born free, but enslaved, the product of
a particular social environment created by a long series of past
influences, of historical developments and events (….) It could be said
that the collective consciousness of any society, embodied in both the
great public institutions as well as in all the details of its private
life upon which all its theories are based, forms a kind of environment,
a kind of intellectual and moral atmosphere, one that is harmful but
absolutely necessary for the existence of all its members.” Freedom and
individuality itself were not natural facts but historical products
created by human society: “Society, far from reducing and limiting, to
the contrary creates the freedom of human individuals”; and further,
“the freedom of individuals is not an individual but a collective fact,
a collective product”, which argument he uses to refute the
individualist workers, whom he defined as “false brothers”. Marx said
the same thing: “Man is, in the most literal sense, a zoon politikon,
not just a social animal, but an animal that can only become an
individual within society” (Grundrisse). The cosmopolitan Bakunin
imagined man living outside of all society, in a desert, and concluded:
“If he does not miserably perish, which is the most probable result, he
will become nothing but a boor, an ape, lacking speech and thought”. He
even criticized the communitarian spirit of pre-bourgeois societies
which he called “natural patriotism”, even though the solidarity of
trades and communities was decisive in the first stages of the workers
movement: “The less civilization prevails in human communities, the less
complicated and the more simple is the very basis of social life and the
more intensely is natural patriotism expressed. Whence we may deduce
that natural patriotism is inversely related to civilization, that is,
to the triumph of humanity….”. However, it was “the barbarians who
represent, today, the faith in the human destiny and the future of
civilization, while the civilized can no longer achieve their salvation
except in barbarism.”
Even so, in socialism the victory over primitivism was not total. In his
Origins of the Family, Engels started from the basis of the primitive
community: “At all earlier stages of society production was essentially
collective, just as consumption proceeded by direct distribution of the
products within larger or smaller communistic communities.” At the
beginning, then, was the state of nature, the golden age that was
perverted according to Engels by the division of labor, which
successively gave rise to livestock raising, agriculture, metalworking
and trade. Then came private property, the accumulation of wealth, and
finally, the formation of classes in conflict, and then the State was
born in order to maintain a balance in the class struggle. This was a
reading of Rousseau and Hobbes in a socialist key, accompanied by a
quantity of data from historical and ethnographic research. Kropotkin,
for his part, would try to prove solidarity as a social principle by
looking in nature, which contains abundant examples of animal solidarity
(Mutual Aid). He would introduce an authentic theoretical breakthrough
by reducing anarchism to a mere Darwinist sociology and by making the
methodology of the natural sciences the guiding procedure of social
analysis. After Kropotkin, the roots of Bakunin’s thought would fall
into oblivion and it was normal to read Rousseauian discussions in
anarchist publications. Working class socialism, meanwhile, had become
reconciled to bourgeios society as a necessary but inevitable evil and,
as a result of this positive evaluation of the historical role of the
bourgeoisie, it was only a short step to the rehabilitation of the idea
of progress and the embrace of science and economic development. The
proletariat, by renouncing its own past, by forgetting that its movement
had made its debut with a bloody struggle against industrialization that
did not hesitate to destroy machines, factories and commodities, and by
ignoring the fact that its own interests demanded the destruction of the
labor market rather than its control, took this step. The bourgeoisie,
on the other hand, became more and more stratified, and became more
reactionary as a result of its position in the hierarchical class order,
and restricted its actions to defending its privileges and forgetting
about the general interest. As the bourgeoisie abandoned all the
reformist whims that previously, when it was revolutionary, had formed
its own patrimony, the proletariat, socialist as well as anarchist, made
those same demands its own. Anarchism, for example, constructed an
entire field of culture out of them: the idea of progress,
individualism, education for all, opposition to war, defense of nature,
family planning, birth control and the other themes of women’s
liberation, sexual freedom, health and nutrition, the dissemination of
scientific knowledge, etc. But despite the fact that the emancipatory
project of the workers had been enriched with new concrete contents that
were previously the property of the bourgeoisie, it nonetheless
experienced a setback. Social democracy became a reformist movement.
Revolutionary Marxism and anarchosyndicalism were the two attempts to
overcome this setback.
The worker of one hundred years ago could be defined by his dependence
on machinery. The machine had split the artisan into technology and
worker. The goal pursued was the rationalization of labor and the
principal consequence, the ejection of the worker from the process of
production. This process having reached its limit with automation, we
obtain a producer expelled from production (with a totally depreciated
wage) and a consumer who is absolutely dependent on machines. The
collective use of machinery changed nothing with regard to the worker’s
condition, and thus changed nothing with regard to the nature of his
exploitation, but only changed the leadership of the process, which was
now in the hands of experts or managers. As a result, the proletariat
that was thus split in two could not overcome itself, that is, free
itself, by way of the development of the machine or its communist use,
but by way of its disappearance. It is true that in some socialist
currents there were complaints about a “working class” civilization
conceived as a copy of the bourgeois civilization, but they were few and
only influenced a minority. It is significant that, as if acknowledging
the unlikelihood of the realization of their proposals, they presented
their theories in the form of utopian narratives. For example, in The
American Anarchist City [1914] by the anarchist Pierre Quirole, we read:
“It is true that everything that exists, the product of labor, must
belong to the workers. But the latter are deceiving themselves if they
want to ‘continue’ rather than ‘innovate’; for we must not imagine any
concept of a new society made in the mold of the current one; if we did,
it would not be worth the effort to move one little finger to help bring
it about. Everything that exists must be replaced by something more
rational and in conformance with real human needs. And Super denied that
coal mines, and the dreadnoughts of the sea, and the fiery dragons of
the rails, and the herculean automatons of the steelworks, are factors
that contribute to human well-being, happiness and freedom; he denied
that the electric trolleys that fill our streets represent progress;
that the tunnels and underground railways are necessary; or that the
great electrical generation plants that give us power and light
represent a benefit for mankind….” All of these creations born of a sick
civilization are condemned to disappear with the victory of the real
revolution because, “to continue exploiting the mines, to keep the
trains and electric trolleys running, to keep the lights on as we did in
capitalist society, to keep the factories and workshops in operation, to
take advantage, in short, of everything that currently exists, all these
sources of profit, regardless of what is done to perfect the machines
and the means of production, for the purpose of alleviating and
relieving the burden of labor, and to act on behalf of the condition of
the producers charged with their management, will always amount to
accepting the existence of an army of slaves eternally chained to the
same amount of demoralizing and unrewarding labor….” Therefore, the idea
of the expropriation of the bourgeoisie, as such, implies consequences
that are opposed to the libertarian goal. The legacy of a social
organization that was complicated, regimented and centralized by
technology was a poisoned legacy.
For his part, the socialist William Morris conceived of the free society
as the result of a process of reversing the ruin and depopulation of the
rural villages brought about by capitalism: “People flocked into the
country villages, and, so to say, flung themselves upon the freed land
like a wild beast upon his prey; and in a very little time the villages
of England were more populous than they had been since the fourteenth
century, and were still growing fast (…) People found out what they were
fit for, and gave up attempting to push themselves into occupations in
which they must needs fail. The town invaded the country; but the
invaders, like the warlike invaders of early days, yielded to the
influence of their surroundings, and became country people; and in their
turn, as they became more numerous than the townsmen, influenced them
also….” (News from Nowhere). In both cases a kind of return to
pre-capitalist conditions is advocated, but this return is to be
accompanied by the experience gained by fighting against capitalism. A
conscious return that does not reject the knowledge acquired in the past
and rather than establishing limits to technology, it oriented its use
to the achievement of a free society of equal producers.
In fin de siècle Paris a certain Henri Zisly lived, an anarchist
railroad worker, a contributor to various magazines such as Temps
Nouveaux, an editor of L’Etat Naturel and the author of a Voyage to the
Beautiful Country of Naturia [Voyage au beau pays de Naturie, 1900]. He
was the first person to champion the cause of a nature that was enslaved
by industrial progress. For the anarchists generally, nature was made
for all free and equal men and the transgression of its laws was the
source of all social evils. Bakunin’s coffin had been sealed with seven
seals. In nature harmony reigned, that is, it lacked contradictions.
Anarchy was its norm. The social revolution meant the abolition of the
divorce between man and nature and the return to the natural life, via
the natural association of producers. The peculiarity of Zisly resided
in his disagreement with the standard view when it came to the means to
be employed. For most anarchists, firm believers in progress, the
separation between man and nature would be overcome thanks to science
and reason. For them, the natural organization of society was the same
thing as the scientific organization of society. Humanity was advancing
towards freedom arm in arm with science and the antagonism between
civilization and nature would be abolished. Zisly, however, did not
believe in the beneficent powers of science or in those of industrial
civilization; “our science is the science of life, the science of
nature”. With great foresight he blamed technological progress for the
disappearance of the forests, the disasters of pollution, climate
change, and the illnesses and degenerative conditions affecting plants,
animals and humans. “Civilization is evil and Nature is good”, he
concluded, and that is why he fought “against the monster of
civilization and for the advent of Integral Nature”. He recognized that
the emancipation of the working class was a prerequisite for a return to
the natural state. For the emancipation of the working class involved
the reconstruction of the natural state of the earth that had been
corrupted by civilization and a return to a primitive state of humanity.
How could this be achieved? By obeying the laws of nature. Avoiding
trade and industry. Abolishing private property and anti-natural needs.
Happiness would come from the satisfaction of basic needs like food,
drink, clothing, shelter, labor, love…. In his list of the things we can
do without, we find artificial lighting, stoves, bicycles, the
gramophone, wine, blouses, and windows and sheet metal. In the “normal
life” amidst the full enjoyment of “freedom in Integral Nature” the
whole world goes on foot and lives in cabins or at the most in houses
made of stone, without dancing, theater, auto races or bullfights.
Zisly was the first advocate of the naturist current in the libertarian
milieu, and far from devoting our attention to the silliness of his
claims or the simplicity of his alternatives, we shall interpret his
role as that of a defender of nature in harmony with man, a precondition
of his emancipation. Zisly and his friends had a better understanding
than anyone else of that time of the fact that the destruction of the
natural environment was the consequence of the technological
colonization (or artificialization) of society, or to put it another
way, of the domestication of man by machines. The exploitation of nature
was the other side of the coin of the exploitation of man. The
bourgeoisie identified progress with economic development. This progress
meant that nature was exclusively the stage for the unfolding of the
productive forces and the backdrop for wage slavery. The degradation of
nature proceeded in tandem with the degradation of the worker.
Anarcho-naturism, an eminently pedagogical tendency, contributed to the
program of social redemption the demand for a balance between nature and
humanity without which equality and freedom would be impossible. While
nature had to be humanized, man had to be naturalized. The influence of
anarcho-naturism is demonstrated by the policy statement on libertarian
communism of the 1936 Zaragoza Congress of the CNT: “… those communes
which reject industrialization, the naturists and nudists, for instance,
may agree upon a different model of coexistence and will be entitled to
an autonomous administration released from the general commitments.
Since such naturist/nudist communes (or communes of some other sort)
will be unable to satisfy their own needs, however limited these needs
may be, their delegates to congresses of the Iberian Confederation of
Autonomous Libertarian Communes will be empowered to enter into economic
contacts with other agricultural and industrial communes.”
The disenchantment of the primitive by ethnography, anthropology and
archaeology must shed light on the crossroads before which the civilized
world stands, rather than confuse it with nebulous ideologies.
Contemporary primitive societies employ little time in labor that is
necessary for survival; thus, they are not the false primitives who are
forced to engage in a constant search for food, for they never work more
than is necessary to meet their needs, that is, they are anti-work
societies. They are not subsistence societies; they are capable of
accumulating a surplus of food above and beyond their needs, but they
only do so in order to consume it or waste it, rather than use it for
trade. The kind of relations that govern their societies are not based
on exchange or barter because scarcity is unknown, but on the “gift”.
They are therefore societies without markets. This detail might be
useful for those who desire to recover the advantages of primitive life
for the free and civilized society. The indigenous peoples of the
northwest coast of North America engaged in contests of sumptuary
gift-giving in order to humble, challenge or compel their rivals, which
they called “potlatch”. This was an explosion of totally unproductive
wastefulness, whose goals were prestige and glory. It was on the basis
of this practice that Georges Battaille offered his suggestion about how
to overcome the conflict between civilization and savagery. From this
perspective the excesses of technology can be rectified. What technology
builds, man destroys. Technology acquires a new role, that of extending
the possibilities of dilapidation. Civilization cannot survive unless it
destroys itself in one gigantic potlatch. The social revolution was the
highest form of potlatch. Civilization’s only historical justification
was its revolutionary overthrow, when its surpluses would have to be
liberated for destruction. This scorn for wealth and rejection of the
fruits of labor was the real luxury, the luxury of the poor and the
refutation of the work ethic preached by domination. The permanent
revolution received a surprising theoretical confirmation. Ultimately,
this competitive destruction was not just a natural form of leveling,
but was also the finally discovered procedure that would permit the
reconciliation of man and the world. It might be objected that the
dynamic of destruction and construction is precisely what characterizes
capitalist civilization, but there is one important difference: the
active subject is different in this case. And the meaning of the process
is logically different, and indeed the opposite.
The primitivist critique of civilization must be of interest to those
who believe that the human ends—freedom and happiness—can only be
achieved with the dismantling the apparatus of production,
de-urbanization and life in community. We cannot, however, overlook the
danger that an erroneous formulation of the problem entails, with the
elevation of nature to a supreme principle (for example, nature equals
anarchy), for this would transform nature into a weapon to be used
against thought and against freedom. The abdication of the human spirit
in favor of nature, or the reduction of man to pure nature, would imply
a degradation of thought into irrational forms. To proclaim the
superiority of primitive man by situating paradise in the Paleolithic
era and original sin in the appearance of symbolic language, as John
Zerzan does in his Future Primitive, does not help clarify the problem
either, since the roots of human unhappiness are not to be found in
language nor can human unhappiness be cured by means of a return to
archaic times. The hunter-gatherer of the primitivists is nothing but an
idealized reflection of the atomized and déclassé individual of mass
society produced by late capitalism.
Nature is not the repository of the truth, only of the wild side. And
civilization is not simply the locus of the lie; it is also the locus of
history. Both have been subjugated by the independent power of the
economy, which is why they are both intertwined and form part of each
other. Dispossessed, separated from his works, submerged in alienation,
man is just as alienated from nature as from civilization, but the
latter is his battlefield. By making civilization his own, he will also
make nature his own. As a result, it is not a matter of man escaping
from civilization, but of creating a situation where civilization cannot
escape from man’s control. Nature will recover its proper status only
when man is free, and he will be free only when he controls his labor,
that is, when the powers he has created which have become independent of
him—the State, the economy, etc.—are destroyed. And then the knowledge
that primitive societies were societies without economies and without
States, because they did not allow the formation of any kind of separate
power, since they could not even conceive of the existence of desires
for wealth, power or domination within them, might prove useful.