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Title: To The Captives
Author: Kevin Tucker
Date: 2019
Language: en
Topics: green anarchy, primal anarchy, anti-civ, Wild Resistance, Black and Green Review
Source: Retrieved on February 3rd, 2019 from https://www.wildresistance.org/news/2019/2/3/wr6-to-the-captives-kevin-tucker
Notes: Kevin Tucker, from Wild Resistance no 6 (winter 2019)

Kevin Tucker

To The Captives

No one, it is said, can go back to the Pleistocene. We will not, in some

magic time warp that denies duration, join those prehistoric dead in

their well-honed ecology. But that is irrelevant. Having never left our

genome and its authority, we have never left the past, which is part of

ourselves, and have only to bring the Pleistocene to us.

-Paul Shepard, Traces of an Omnivore[1]

Semantics can be painful, but sometimes a little goes a long way.

For nearly the past two decades, I have loudly called myself an

anarcho-primitivist. I’ve found both grounding and a place within

anarcho-primitivism. It’s helped define a place to learn and fight from.

But, like all things, it’s important to realize limitations as well. Is

this new ground, or are we still on enemy turf?

As one of anarcho-primitivism’s primary proponents, it’s a fairly

comfortable backdrop for me to offer as shorthand: that there’s more to

what I’m saying then what is in any one essay or talk.

Anarcho-primitivism is my context. But there are a number of drawbacks

that continually come up. So let me say this clearly: I am an

anarcho-primitivist. I have no issue with what we have built up and

continue to build upon. I will always be an anarcho-primitivist.

The problem isn’t the critique. The problem, to the extent there is one,

is in the name and its framing: anarcho-primitivism.

This is a conversation that has been growing for a while. John Zerzan

and I have privately and publicly discussed the relationship of

anarcho-primitivism to anarchism more widely. It’s been a part of

internal discussions among Wild Resistance editors, as well as others.

It’s felt increasingly apparent that the name is a limitation, attaching

itself to two different lineages—anarchism and primitivism—neither of

which is necessarily fitting in its own right. Anarcho-primitivism

becomes the square peg, tethered to sets of rules that are neither

applicable nor useful.

I’ve increasingly used another phrase: primal anarchy. As both anarchism

and primitivism seem to quickly wither and decay on their own, I’m only

finding more reasons to embrace that term entirely.

We are all stuck in a strange predicament.

Until the past 10,000 years or so of our history, little about the world

drastically changed until civilization began to alter it. Since the

technology capable of disrupting the feedback loops of a wild world

arose. Since the organization of labor fostered the domestication of

plants and animals, turning the communal spaces into churches, and the

introduction of draft animals only for them to become replaced by the

combine, there has been a massive disruption to the way that we, as

social animals, have engaged the world. Whatever we throw at it, however

we dam and damn it, this is the very same earth that fostered our

evolution, our development. It allowed us to thrive. And we thrived

within it.

In return, we subjugate and assault it.

We develop technologies to become more efficient at that assault. We

continually become more proficient in our attempts to suffocate the

world that we remain a part of.

All of this comes in stages and steps. In great leaps forward. In wars

and peace. From the vantage point of the supposed victor, the

self-appointed hero records a trajectory. Our rise. Our history.

At every step, we award ourselves the ingenuity of conquest. We document

it. Our achievements. Our first boom, our last burst. It’s all in there,

we wear our colonial past and present in globally sourced and produced

articles of clothing, bought and sold on a world market through machines

and shanty factories. It’s at our table. It’s the beds we seek solace in

at night. Buried in plain sight, the lineage of civilization lies before

us.

If you dig, it falls apart. It becomes increasingly apparent. It becomes

impossible to escape.

It is the predicament of our world, that it is easier to explain that

past, to expand our present back and then into the future, both far and

wide, than it is to understand the answer to the simplest of questions:

why? Why do we go to work? Why do we consume? Why do we defend our

abuser?

Why do we seek to salvage the corpse of a system that brings more misery

than joy?

One that brings more content than grounding? More fiber optic cables

than connections?

Those questions are like plagues: why do we continue to play along and

take part in a system that ultimately could destroy us and our home? Why

are we more comfortable with catastrophic annihilation than the minor

discomforts that a machine-free world might bring?

There is a foundation to this world; infrastructure, economic systems,

systemic distancing and oppression, individual trauma and collective

dispossession are all at its core. When you chart the history of

civilization, all of those things come to the front. But they are

drivers. As social animals, we need more than that. We need a story. We

need a reason or a justification for why we do what we do.

Narratives don’t conquer, but narratives enlist troops, miners, loggers,

and missionaries. In limiting our perception of the world, a solid story

is sales pitch for a life that we didn’t ask for and a sacrifice we

didn’t seek to make. Narratives shape the questions we ask and the

answers we are willing to hear in return.

As the world becomes both more literate and literal, both the stories we

tell and the terms we use continue to gain more and more power. They

become our baseline. They set the parameters.

The words we use, the frameworks we exist within, matter. They flatten

the world and our interactions with it. They keep us looking anywhere

but down to the earth where grounding is possible. Keep on dreaming,

keep on working.

It’s not satisfying to say, but to condense the questions above into

one: why do we actively take part in perpetuating a way of existence

that is unfulfilling and omnicidal? It’s because we’ve stopped seeing it

as an option. Our training pays off and we no longer see it as a choice.

We no longer see that the entire trajectory we are on has more bodies

behind it than futures ahead.

The words matter because this world matters.

If you feel no more satisfied than I do with this, then we better start

finding ways of telling a new story. And it helps to know that older

stories are still here. Buried close to the surface hastily by

conquistadors and developers, they’re tied to the earth we’ve been led

to believe has long since been subjugated. Conquered. Repopulated.

Repurposed.

We are led to believe that we arrived here by choice. That we are free,

acting on free will.

That we are anything but captives.

Everything we interact with seeks to reinforce that perception, but it

is a veneer. A house of cards. A palace of glass and mirrors. Within it,

we have rocks and we have Molotovs at our disposal, but it helps to know

what we’re up against. And to do so, we have to be able to see it more

clearly. Choose our words cautiously, so we can react fiercely. We can

once again become grounded in the world that exists, rather than remain

stuck with the divided, mapped, and claimed reality that we were born

into.

We have the chance to realize that we were never really gone in the

first place.

Anarchism versus Anarchy

The only –ist name I respond to is “cellist.”

-Fredy Perlman[2]

Let’s start with anarchism.

Anarchy is a relatively simple term. From the Greek, An- and –arkhos:

without a chief or ruler. It’s proscriptive and open to interpretation

pretty widely. The various sects of anarchism split over a central

question: what constitutes government? What constitutes social control?

At the very least, anarchists all agree that government is an impediment

to freedom.

Ultimately, that isn’t necessarily saying a lot.

The problem is that anarchism is largely reactive in nature. It’s left

focusing most often on what a particular society might look like without

government, when there is a focus at all. In a sense, that’s not a bad

starting point, but it is limiting.

For anarcho-primitivists, simply being against government has never been

enough. The subjugation implicit in social power presses beyond humans.

The war against the wild started long before the first smokestack ever

went up. Industrial strength domination just sped up the process and

efficiency of draining the earth to fuel itself. This is a realization

shared widely amongst all green anarchists.

Among green or eco-anarchists, it was no longer just about the State,

but state-level societies: civilization itself.[3] Bio-centrism took a

central role, but even anti-civilization anarchism has taken on a life

of its own, having its nihilist and egoist sides being against

“wildness” and “nature,” alongside civilization. It’s not uncommon for

those particular anti-civilization anarchists to call themselves “green

anarchists,” but the “green” aspect is merely incidental.

It is anarcho-primitivism that has driven green anarchism. And this

continues to be the case. Anarcho-primitivism is concerned, first and

foremost, with not just opposing civilization, but in digging up its

roots. While other sects of anarchism have sought to oppose or theorize

about what functional anarchist societies might look like,

anarcho-primitivists dug into history, ecology, anthropology, and our

experiences and actually found them: nomadic hunter-gatherers. Those

that have lived a mobile life, hunting, foraging, and scavenging,

refusing to store foods; here we have it, anarchy in action.

This isn’t the anarchy that most anarchists have dreamt up. Mostly you

hear about modern communes, communal living situations, or cooperative

ventures. Short-lived stuff, but always stuck on being relatively

compatible with a modern, civilized life. Romantic, revolutionary

anarchists can be indiscernible from their socialist affiliates on the

Left and their libertarian affiliates on the Right. “All the movements

of the left and right,” wrote Jacques Camatte in 1973, “are functionally

the same inasmuch as they all participate in a larger, more general

movement towards the destruction of the human species.”[4] In their

view, anarchism is an ideal. One worth fighting for, but mostly one that

will be proven true after the Revolution is won.

And herein lies a central conflict: ideals are meaningless.

Those instances of “anarchy” are unstable, fallible beasts. When they

fail, as they always have and will, it will be said that it was because

they weren’t enacted properly. Or the individuals faltered. Anything

other than being a flawed dream of industrial and post-industrial

philosophers and activists, dead set on tackling only the oppression

most directly in front of them.

What the anarcho-primitivist critique came down to is something that one

of anarchism’s founding voices, Kropotkin, also saw: hunter-gatherers

live in a state of anarchy.[5] He was overly optimistic in pulling that

thread, rightfully seeing that anarchy hadn’t been fully suppressed by

horticultural societies, but then mistaking currents of

anarchy-as-resistance with the potential for anarchism-as-ideal to

continue existing in the fields, factories, and workshops. The path for

anarchy diverged from reality to ideal.

Anarcho-primitivism, however, found it again.

Social control was no longer just the object of States, but made

possible by domestication. Our baseline as a species became more

apparent: 99.999% of our time on Earth was shaped by and for life as

nomadic hunter-gatherer-scavengers. The most egalitarian societies ever

to have existed—where social power in all its forms (patriarchy,

tribe-based, and otherwise) were not only absent, but also

impossible—function not because of planning, but because of practices.

Unlike ideals, there was no need for perfection. There’s nothing

innately better about individuals in a hunter-gatherer society, their

societies work because they remove all the premises of domesticated

life. When you remove production, you remove the need for exclusive

rights and access. When everyone is capable and a participant in

acquiring food (rather than producing it), there’s nothing to wield over

others or coerce with. When tensions rise, you can just walk away.

This is primal anarchy: a holistically functioning, resilient, and

egalitarian society that is innately and ecologically sane. The

anthropologist Peter Gardner has called it “pure anarchy.”[6] It has

often been conflated with “primitive communism,” but when there is no

surplus there is no production. With no production and no articulated

tribal identity, it’s hard to find a means of production for a

non-existent, yet well-defined, society to communally own.

You’d think the anarchists would rejoice, but, again, the ideal won.

Anarchists were already in too deep, having constructed a hypothetical

situation where civilization wasn’t only desirable, but magically

tenable. In the minds of the romantics, unshaken by both history and

ecology, to break the course of Progress is heresy.

All the arguments come out; anarcho-primitivists romanticize

hunter-gatherers. We can’t turn back the clock. Genie is out of the

bottle. Civilization is what everyone wants. It goes on and on.

Anarchism, for anarchists, is seemingly superior to anarchy.

Likewise, one thing was horribly apparent: primal anarchy, where it

exists, is profoundly lacking in anarchists. It doesn’t need idealists

and visionaries to exist. It’s not planned and articulated, but

actualized. As an anarchist, that’s exciting. But it’s also telling: we

are anarchists because of what we oppose. In some cases, because of what

we strive for. Individual flavors of anarchism remain the ideals that

determine goals and targets.

Primal anarchy isn’t content with that. Our bodies, minds, and the ways

we relate with the world were forged within context. It’s not just what

we think, but how we see, how our bodies move, the way our nerves react

to impulses, and the nagging refusals of domestication that have spurred

anarchism and resistance to all forms of control, past, present, and

future.

Primal anarchy isn’t an ideal: it is our context.

This may sound semantic, but it is a significant shift. We aren’t

disempowered agents: we are captives of civilization, of domestication.

We aren’t yearning to find freedom, we yearn to express it and live

within it. It is here, with us, now. It is both within and surrounding

us.

A common critique of anarcho-primitivism is that we have drawn lines

around nomadic hunter-gatherers. That any other society, no matter how

close or far it is to hunter-gatherer life, has simply crossed the line.

To some, it separates the work that anarcho-primitivism has produced

from that of anarchist anthropologists like Pierre Clastres and James

Scott, who have focused on anarchism in horticultural and agrarian

societies as a resistance to power in “societies against the State.”[7]

By taking primal anarchy as our baseline, those lines are gone.

Vanished. To anarchists, we’ve just narrowed the ideal. But this is a

complete recontextualization of our history and present, one that favors

anarchy over anarchism. Primal anarchy closes the gap: anarchy is our

nature. It is our natural state: we don’t just want egalitarianism or,

as State-level societies mirror it, equality, we want wild communities

built on freedom of movement and subsistence.

Every State, every civilization, has had to face that resistance.

Domesticators, politicians, priests, and programmers know this better

than anarchists. Those pulling the reins aren’t smart enough to

completely fabricate wants and needs, it’s far easier and more effective

for them to tear apart the innate needs and wants that we have as social

animals, repackage them and have us work for them piecemeal.

They tell us that we chose to leave our “primitive” life in the hopes of

having more. They know that if they remove our context, we’ll take part

in the unending search for meaning. They know that if we can’t forage,

then we’ll plant. If planting is taken from us, we’ll work for food.

Anarchists accept this. Anarchy refuses it. That is why we fight. That

is why the entirety of civilization is a litany of struggles led by

those who quit working, sat on the front lines, smashed police

barricades, took the lives of capitalists and politicians, and burned

the machinery of Progress.

Primal anarchy isn’t reducing our experience, but understanding it. We

aren’t dead yet, we’ve just been broken to the idea that we can do

something about our condition. Anarchists typically dream of their

ideals as though they will be able to craft some new means of

subsistence. They believe the narrative that egalitarianism may have

never existed, but take the risk anyway. They strive for the improbable

because they fixate on the impossible.

What we have is a living legacy. When we start feeling it and finding

our grounding again, then we can stop seeking our dreams through

civilization’s apparatus and vision. We can stop being bound to repeat

the mistakes of history only to think that next time we’ll do it better:

we won’t. Domestication has always had to work to undermine primal

anarchy and more often than not, it fails. It has only built a mighty

arsenal and it has bred a lot of bodies to throw into trenches.

But we have the upper hand: when we embrace primal anarchy, when we

cease to be anarchists, we no longer have to play on their terms. Power

and control were never meant to be harnessed, not by anyone.

Civilization succeeds in cutting the throats or infecting the minds of

those who seek to steer away from it. Primal anarchy reminds us that the

world the domesticators have built leaches our living, wild world. That

world is not dead, but it is being suffocated and suppressed. We can

wallow through the rest of history, counting our dead as they fail to

take control. Or we can dig deeper and follow the path of domination,

find its bottlenecks and strangle them.

Primal anarchy reminds us that a functioning world isn’t one where power

is fought, but where it is rendered impossible.

Future? Primitive?

The project of annulling time and history will have to be developed as

the only hope of human liberation.

- John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal[8]

Anarchism has its own baggage, but primitivism might have more.

The term “anarchy” may predate the term “primitivism,” but as a movement

or reflection, primitivism has a slightly longer history. Art, music,

literature; primitivism is all of these things on a wider level than it

is a means of social critique. And even there, anarcho-primitivism might

just be the loudest of its advocates.

But what primitivism can be is generally confusing. There’s no consensus

amongst those who have chosen the label and those who have had it

applied. Without the anarcho- preface, it likely wouldn’t have any

teeth.

The indisputable aspect of “primitivism” is the root of the word:

primitive. Taken on its own, that aspect gets a fair amount of negative

attention. It would be wrong to say that as a term ‘primitive’ is free

of judgment or value. It is treated as an insult towards Indigenous

peoples because it is still widely used as one.

At its best, “primitive” was a part of the early anthropologist Lewis

Henry Morgan’s attempts to classify societies. Here you have three

classifications: savage, primitive, and barbarian; or, hunter-gatherer,

horticulturalist, and pastoralist/agrarian, in that order.[9] As imposed

terms, there’s no point in saying that this categorical application by a

social science is neutral. Coming from an imperialist society, the

colonialism is implicit. But, for whatever it’s worth, it would seem

that the usage of this strata was not intended for the horrifically

racist justifications of colonizers.

That said, anarcho-primitivists have never denied that what was more

lasting and impacting than Morgan’s social theories were the realities

of colonization. These terms were used to demean and to justify genocide

and ethnocide, leaving the salvaged lives of Indigenous communities to

be stripped down by missionaries and sold as prostitutes, slaves, and

workers.

The “primitive” in primitivism remained because it accepted that this is

how colonizers worked. And, as a big fuck you to the colonizers. The

term flips the entire measure. In this regard, civilization hasn’t won

by the force and will of inevitability, but has suppressed and decimated

an ecologically and socially stable world to suffocate the rest in an

imposed and ultimately failing civilization.

There’s a bit of street brawler in there that can easily be sanitized

out of context. Philosophers and literary critics, the masters of

thinking about thinking, have drug out the corpse of post-modernism and

its latent uprooting to pull this purposefully aggressive reaction back

into the realm of ideals.

For years, I’ve been dismissive of their attempts: usually saying

primitivism could only be racist by upholding colonial idealism and on

from there. Not that all critiques have no merit, but just that these

ones were latently dismissive, not meant to engage. Likewise, they’ve

rarely been worth engaging.

Personally, nothing about my views on the usage of “primitivism,” as a

term, has changed fully in this regard. But I have to admit, I’m hardly

alone in having pulled back from using “primitive” as a descriptor in

nearly any other case, unless it’s within quotes or used more

sarcastically. Removed from context, it just becomes distracting in

unnecessary ways. I don’t know if that alone is reason to abandon the

term, but it was enough to draw it into question. In doing this, there

are more reasons why the term is as fitting as anarchism, if not less

so.

Outside the issues with the word’s etymological base, there are bigger

issues with its implications.

Primitivism lacks definitive context. “Primitive” is a considerably

older word than primitivism and anarchism. It might have been more

specifically implied as an “uncivilized person” (which is harder for

anarcho-primitivists to take issue with), but it is a reactionary term.

Much like anarchism.

Primitivism remains rooted in concepts of linear time. While many

primitivists, like anarcho-primitivists, have actively attacked notions

of history as a progressing and monolithic force, “primitive” here is

self-referential. “Primitive” isn’t a horticultural society, but

alluding to a “simpler,” less complex state. In many cases, that can be

equally inclusive of the State or state-level societies.

Primitivism becomes diluted to the point of just meaning a preference

for an earlier state of “social evolution.” Paul Shepard tried giving it

power by speaking of a “post-historic primitivism.” No friend of the

calendar or clock, John Zerzan’s “future primitive” is both a challenge

and a threat to our understandings of time. Both have tried to free

primitivism as a source of primal empowerment and a reminder that what

goes up must come down.

Both, in my eyes, succeeded, but the caveats on the terms seem to just

grow. As the critiques expand, the need to distance from so much

impotent primitivism becomes more obvious. If you’ve passed billboards

for “primitive” decor or any other agrarian throw back, you’ve probably

winced as much as I have. Critics of anarcho-primitivism often toss out

the lazy and tired response: “go live with the Amish then.” But we can

only shrug so long before accepting that without heavy connotation,

primitivism has no point of reference at all outside of “previous” or

“earlier” times.

We can keep pressing on and rolling our eyes at it, relying necessarily

on anarcho-primitivism as an all-or-none term, but I’d rather reassess

here. This is another area where primal anarchy makes more sense.

The words primal and primitive share a lot of etymological history, but

where they vary is significant. “Primitive” is used to imply simplicity.

“Primal” is used to invoke primacy. To the point: “primitive” is who and

when. “Primal” is what.

Primal is latent: not over there, but here. The distance of the past and

place are removed because “primal” is what we are before being

domesticated, colonized, and taken captive. Anarcho-primitivists have

always sought to understand the roots of civilization and domestication

to undo them. This isn’t a task for a time machine, but of tracing

patterns through history going back to where our separation from the

world began.

The anarcho-primitivist critique has always been about finding patterns

in history and the reflections of civilization. It seeks to understand

how our own relationship with the world and each other is interpreted

and placed within that lineage. Here, time itself is crucial to the

domestication process: the civilized narrative is that we have changed.

That we made a choice. That we strove to improve our condition and that

a world of machines enhances our experience.

The ideology of civilization, when distilled, is that we don’t only need

civilization, but that we’re better off because of it. Divergent views

of the world stem back to the great questions of philosophers: what is

the social contract and where did it begin?

But that level of articulated control never came overnight. It grew

exceptionally slowly as hunter-gatherers settled around flush fields of

wild grains and seeds or where plants were selectively planted and

animals were ultimately domesticated. However, both of those things

happened in relatively few places.

And, most tellingly, none of the outcomes have improved our lives in any

qualitative way since. Yet this is the story that we are told and then

tell ourselves over and over again. History is born of an agenda and

that is to affirm that we are prisoners to time. If you want to hunt and

gather for a living, that ship has sailed. Or so that’s how the story is

told.

This is such a twisted and small vision of the world. One that is

demonstrably untrue.

Hunter-gatherer societies, embattled though they may be, still exist

today. It is their adaptability and resilience that have helped them

escape the earth-leveling path of civilization. The story we tell of

foragers becoming gardeners, and then taking up herds of domestic

animals in one hand and turning gardens into fields with the other,

until technology permits a new era of industrial growth, is a lie. Our

past has virtually never broken down that way, even when looked at from

the perspective of the civilized.

What is prevalent is our primal anarchy. Every single domesticating

force, every single colonizer, every engineer and prophet, has had to

fight against it. As social animals, that is why we tell mythic stories

to implicate a cosmic meaning and power to be found in the fields,

factories, workshops, and, now, outlet malls.

The struggle of civilization is the constant suppression of the wild.

That includes the wild within us. It is our primary sense of want and

need. It is the part of our mind that must be bargained with by bosses

and administrators. It is the part of our body that sits at desks or

stands in factories only to practice walking on a treadmill or

stationary bike later.

When primitivism flips the table over, saying in defiance that we were

better off before, a part of our grounding is lost. In reacting, we

implicitly accept the timelines and inevitability of accumulated power

in the hands of the State. It becomes easier for philosophers and

literary critics to say that we’ve upheld the Fall-from-Eden myth,

despite our protests and evidence to the contrary, for one simple

reason: primitive, as a term, is always somewhere and someone else.

It accepts “The Fall” narrative because it can easily go from placing

the origins of civilization in historic time to historicizing our

domestication. From the viewpoint of primal anarchy, there was no grand

event. There was a historical point of entry for domestication, but also

an illicit understanding that it is a constant and on-going force.

Primitivism is born of nostalgia. Primal anarchy reminds us that

domestication can and must be resisted at every single impasse. Being

our primary state, when everything else is stripped from us, this is

what remains: a wild animal.

It’s hard to simply be sentimental about something when you realize you

never lost it.

Re-wild, Resist.

I take it for granted that resistance is the natural human response to

dehumanization and, therefore, does not have to be explained or

justified.

-Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan[10]

“Human nature exists.”[11]

Those are the opening words of anthropologist-turned-doctor Melvin

Konner’s 2002 book, Tangled Wing. Konner’s work was with nomadic

hunter-gatherer societies, much like Marjorie Shostak, who was the

co-author of their 1988 book, The Paleolithic Prescription.[12] That

book was the failed launch of what would eventually become the Paleo

diet, along with its lifestyle aspects—from barefoot running to

minimalism to natural movements and so on. It failed because it took

dietary information from nomadic hunter-gatherers anecdotally and

brought in a third author, Dr Boyd Eaton—also a physician—to tether the

anecdotal information against contemporary medical practices and advice.

The book might not have taken off in even a fraction of the way that

subsequent Paleo books and contributors have, but its premise is

telling: we evolved to be nomadic hunter-gatherers. The same message

that Shepard brought to the forefront decades earlier, but now in an

actionable, scientifically approved package.

You have Paleo/Primal authors like Nora Gedgaudas, absolute in her basis

of proscriptive diet and lifestyle advice within nomadic hunter-gatherer

life and respond directly to a world of industrial toxins.[13] Outside

of that small circle, gurus and marketers ready to grab and conquer a

niche market have hijacked the majority of the Paleo world.

Though much of what we see is diluted or often convoluted, the illicit

principle is here: you are a hunter-gatherer in mind and body, so you

should, at the very least, eat like one. Cue a bunch of jarhead

ex-military evoking “caveman” imagery. The point gets drowned out, but

that exposes the bigger picture on a new level: domestication becomes

clearest when you begin to see the patterns of historic time arising. In

this case, it’s pretty straightforward. Those selling Paleo foods (even

packaged ones) are telling us something intrinsic about ourselves but

intervening with sustenance-for-sale over subsistence.

Just as it has always been for domesticators, the closer something is to

our actual human nature, the easier the sales pitch. If our interests

are coddled and catered towards a consumer-based identity, then we’re

less likely to dig deeper. Bait and switch, this time on the genetic

level. Human nature becomes apparent not through distilling blueprints

of nomadic hunter-gatherer societies, but by filtering the institutions

that arise with domestication, understanding their role and purpose.

Here, you find the patterns. Even though their form might be radically

different, their function is always the same: divert the needs of a

nomadic hunter-gatherer through socio-economic and religious identities

and rites.

The ability of marketers to capitalize on hunter-gatherer diets,

lifestyle, and gadgets doesn’t negate them; it just shows the power of

social domestication. The lives of nomadic hunter-gatherers have always

been the targets of domesticated societies and that remains true.

They’re hunted, systematically stripped of their land and their

humanity, displaced and made destitute by missions, corporations, and

governments, and deemed as evil or backwards by religion.

Even the existence of hunter-gatherers, as individuals and as societies,

is such a threat to the fragile ecology of the civilized landscape, that

they must either be rid of or contextualized. That’s why Ishi, the last

of the Yahi of California, died on display in a museum. He became a

living relic of times past. After his death, his body was torn apart to

become a literal relic.

What we are left with is a sanitized variation of reality. Just beneath

the surface of skulls and cultural artifacts in museums is the radical

realization that there’s much more to the life of “cavemen” and that the

egalitarian, primal anarchy they lived in is what our bodies and minds

are comprised of. It’s a pretty shallow grave, but it’s still an

effective one.

So the question remains, if a relatively mainstream wave can come to

accept primal anarchy as our nature, even if left unarticulated, then

why has this been such a contentious issue for anarchists and such a

missed basis for primitivists?

We come back to ideals.

For primitivists, the nostalgia needs little reference point. Having

succumbed to time, primitivists accept defeat to civilization, hoping to

revitalize the past in some form rather than to liberate the present.

For many anarchists, however, human nature is terrifying. That’s

because, like anarchism, it remains an ideal. The more ideological of

anarchists, as romantic as the less-articulate primitivists, don’t have

a problem with human nature in and of itself, they just see it as

something to be actualized in the future, after the Revolution.

For the rest, human nature is dangerous because it can be weaponized. In

all fairness, that’s not the worst reason to avoid the term. Human

nature, as used by nearly every nationalist, revolutionary or

counter-revolutionary movement, has always been about exclusion. It is

about defining who is or is not a human worthy of rights and inclusion

in a society. At best, it becomes the subject of campaigns for civil

equality, but, more often, it has filled gulags and graves.

If you want people to do horrible things, make them feel isolated, then

give them a group and make them feel threatened or attacked. Human

nature, here, is to solidify power: it becomes the idealized group, a

more naturalized—yet more potent—form of xenophobic nationalism.

That’s awful, truly it is, but it is contextual.

What we’re talking about when we say human nature is that there is an

ecological, biological, and psychological imperative to the way that our

bodies move, thirst, and react. The only way that this is threatening is

if those implications could undo the fragile socio-economic order that

has been created. Because fascists on all sides have used the ideal

across the political spectrum doesn’t negate the simple biological

reality that social animals have specific needs. If we neglect to focus

on that, then we are left only with ideals about where power comes from

and where it goes.

When we seek to undermine and bring down the very means that make social

and economic power possible, it’s pretty hard to see how gulags and

trenches can come of it. Our goal isn’t to weaponize the notion of human

nature to prop up ideologies and States, but to expose the ways that

domesticators hide it to turn us into subjects.

It’s hard for me to soft-peddle this concept, because I don’t think this

approach is really that unique. Nearly every group that has a critique

or praxis has some degree of human nature in mind, primal anarchy has

only chosen to articulate it and that’s because it is demonstrable. In a

word, it’s anti-idealist.

For the anarchist, the very minimum of definitions for “anarchy” implies

a refusal of the legitimacy of State power and control. States say that

we need them. What anarchists say is that we don’t. Well, why? It’s

simple to point to primal anarchy as an example. But to say human nature

doesn’t exist, yet that a society without law won’t be overwhelmed by

chaos and violence is harder to ground. It all comes from somewhere.

We all have our wants. We all have our wishes. It’s not liberating to

say that they don’t exist nor that they don’t color our sense of urgency

for action, it’s disingenuous. Primal anarchy puts it up front. It

identifies what it is, how it is suppressed historically, and how it is

continually repressed through rituals of domination in our own lives. It

is demonstrable because it isn’t a historic event or ideal, but an

ongoing process.

Like Konner makes clear above, we aren’t the first to notice either.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold writes:

The advent of domestication, in both senses, had to await the

breakthrough that liberated humanity from the shackles of nature, a

breakthrough that was marked equally by the emergence of institutions of

law and government, serving to shackle human nature to a social

order.[14]

In separating us from a living world, domestication hijacks our nature

and obscures it by intertwining our needs with that of the machine.

Human nature is never gone; it is simply re-purposed by civilization.

That is why we speak of re-wilding. The wild is implicit. Wildness is

what we are removed from. Along the same lines, Ingold distinguishes

enskilling from enculturation. Enskilling can “only take on meaning in

the context of… engagement with the environment.”[15] Our ecology and

biology are tied to the context of a wild world. The same one we evolved

within and amongst.

That is our context. This is a context where anarchy isn’t the ideal,

but the default.

If we’re willing to excuse the imperfect language, we aren’t alone here

either. Anthropologist Stanley Diamond was clear on the matter:

The longing for a primitive mode of existence is no mere fantasy or

sentimental whim; it is consonant with fundamental human needs, the

fulfillment of which (although different form) is a precondition for our

survival.[16]

In finally parting with “primitive,” we recognize what

anarcho-primitivism has always told us: time is a historic creation, one

intent on universalizing our displacement from the wild world, to

justify our decimation of the earth, to see our wild and

less-domesticated relatives as less-than-human, and to leave the relics

of our ancestry to history in our trail-blazing path to our destined

future.

Time gives us a story, a narrative. It gives us a place within the

timeline so that we don’t look around and wonder how domesticated plants

and animals might have changed anything about who we are as individuals,

as societies.

Primal is not an indicator of who we were, but who we are. It animates

the past that history tames in death and conquest. It diminishes our

ability to isolate the present from the future. It sees life as a

continuum. In upholding primal anarchy, we aren’t denying the

anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization, but actualizing it. We are

no longer anarchists wishing to live in anarchy, but the embodiment of a

resistant primal anarchy. One that is capable of biting back.

We are agents, not spectators.

Our lineage doesn’t end with the origins of domestication, but is the

ever-present past of refusals and uprisings that have fought and

continue to fight domesticators in all their forms. Colonizers win more

often because they have the numbers and the technology, cannon fodder to

continue throwing in trenches. Defeat comes with force and subjugation,

not in ceding to the narratives of those with power.

Most resistance movements since have failed because of their inability

to articulate targets. Like revolutionaries, the ideal dictates that you

seize the means of production and the reproduction of power. It feeds

off of a visceral and immediate rage, biting directly at the closest

outpost of control. We have been in the unique position where hindsight

is buried in plain sight. It is expected that we won’t act on our rage,

or at least not in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways.

On that playing field, anarchists lose. We will never defeat the State

or civilization on its own terms or within its own limitations.

Primal anarchy shows us another world. The world domestication preys

upon and prays against. It is here. It is within and around us. Not

another time. Not another place. Like the world that shaped it, it is

dynamic, resilient, and resolute.

It is us.

I see no reason why we should continue to see ourselves any other way.

[1] Paul Shepard, Traces of an Omnivore. Washington DC: Shearwater,

1996. Pg 220.

[2] Cited in Lorraine Perlman, Having Little, Being Much. Detroit: Black

and Red, 1989. Pg 96.

[3] This wasn’t always the case, “green State” social ecologists used to

be under the umbrella of “green anarchism,” but that seemed to have

definitively faded by the time the Green Anarchy editorial collective

added “anti-civilization” to its masthead (no 9, summer 2002).

[4] Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave and Other Essays. New

York: Autonomedia, 1995. Pg 95.

[5] Speaking specifically of Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid. Boston:

Extending Horizons, undated [1902].

[6] Peter Gardner, ‘Studying Pure Anarchists.’ Lecture, CHAGS: Twelfth

Conference on Hunting and Gathering Societies. Penang, Malaysia. 2018.

[7] Most specifically, Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State. New

York: Zone, 1989 [1974]. For Scott, this is a recurring theme through

all of his work, particularly; Weapons of the Weak. New Haven: Yale,

1985, The Art of Not Being Governed. New Haven: Yale, 2009, and Against

the Grain. New Haven: Yale, 2017.

[8] John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal. Columbia, MO: CAL Press, 1999. Pg

29.

[9] Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society. Tucson: University of Arizona

Press, 1995 [1877]. I’ve joked somewhat publicly that “anarcho-savagism”

would have been a more appropriate label over “anarcho-primitivism.”

[10] Fredy Perlman, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan. Detroit: Black

and Red, 1983. Pg 184.

[11] Melvin Konner, The Tangled Wing. New York: Holt, 2002. Pg xiii.

[12] Melvin Konner, Marjorie Shostak, and S. Boyd Eaton, The Paleolithic

Prescription. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

[13] Nora Gedgaudas, Primal Body, Primal Mind. Rochester: Healing Arts

Press, 2011.

[14] Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment. London: Routeledge,

2000. Pg 64.

[15] Ibid. Pg 37.

[16] Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive. Brunswick, NJ:

Transaction, 1987. Pg 207.