💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › margaret-killjoy-anarchism-versus-civilization.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 12:44:03. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Anarchism Versus Civilization Author: Margaret Killjoy Date: 2010 Language: en Topics: anthropology, anti-civ, post-civ Source: Retrieved on 24 August 2010 from http://www.postcivilized.net/2010/08/anarchism-versus-civilization/
In his 2003 polemic Anarchism versus Primitivism, Brian Oliver Sheppard
makes the case that primitivism is inherently in contradiction with
anarchism.
Much can be inferred from his tone, which is openly mocking. He makes
references to how “[u]nfortunately for anarchists, plunging into the
primitivist miasma has become necessary,” openly condescending to engage
the primitivists at all. But his arguments are mired in absurdities: he
mocks primitivists as hypocrites for engaging in technological practices
while ignoring the fact that nearly every anarchist of any stripe in
capitalist and statist society is not living as she or he preaches.
The core of his argument is that primitivism is authoritarian and
therefore irreconcilable with anarchism. But the anarchism he promotes
is rather clearly a simplistic and “classical” one, a red anarchism that
argues for worker control of a stateless society. He argues that
primitivists are stuck in an illusory past that cannot be supported by
evidence, yet never acknowledges his complicity in the same behavior;
here is a man arguing that anarchism has always been about worker
control and communistic ideas, completely ignoring the heterogeneous
past and present of anarchism. The individualists, the
anarchists-without-adjectives, the mutualists... these people simply
never existed, if one is to infer from Brian’s[1] piece.
Well-reasoned critiques of primitivism exist, but they are rarely
distributed. Instead, self-defeating and remarkably sectarian missives
are the norm. But this basic idea, that anarcho-primitivism is no more
anarchist than the largely dismissed ideas of “anarcho”-capitalists and
“anarcho”-nationalists, is a curious one.
For the sake of argument, I make the opposite case: anarchism is and
always has been anti-civilization, and that civilization and anarchism
are completely irreconcilable. Anyone who claims to be for civilization
and anarchism both is deluding themselves.[2]
An anthropologist named Elman Service[3] suggested a widely-used system
of classification for human cultures that contains four rough
categories. Firstly, there are gatherer-hunter bands, which are
generally egalitarian; secondly there are tribal societies that are
larger, slightly more formal, and have bits of social ranking; third are
chiefdoms, which continue down the path of social stratification; and
finally there are civilizations, which are anthropologically understood
by their complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional
governments.
The rejection of complex social hierarchies and government means,
therefore, the rejection of civilization. If an anarchist society were
to develop, it would be by definition a non-civilized society.
Sure, an argument can be made that “classical” anarchists[4] are in
opposition to the concept of the State rather than the idea of
government per say, but the overwhelming majority of contemporary
anarchist thought and dialogue speaks to the rejection of government as
something that is inherently tied to the stateform.
So an anarchist society would necessitate either a return to the
gatherer-hunter bands or it would — and I consider this option much more
likely and much preferable, personally — mean developing something
entirely new. I would personally like to call it the post-civilization,
but I don’t believe we need to call it that. We simply need to
understand it as anarchism.
Elman understood his four-part typology to be illustrative of a linear
loss of autonomy. In a band, an individual had liberty. In a
civilization, an individual ceded or lost this liberty. Now, Elman was
an integration theorist; he believed that citizens in early
civilizations gave up their autonomy willingly — in essence, that they
signed the social contract, ceding their liberty so as to allow for a
more complex society. The opposing theory is conflict theory: that
states have, from the beginning, sought to consolidate power into the
hands of the few for the benefit of those few.
But no one is arguing that the development from band to civilization
hasn’t resulted in hierarchy and a lack of autonomy. This has,
historically, been quite simple and linear: the further a society
“advances” along these lines towards civilization, the more that liberty
has waned.
Anarchism argues for a classless, egalitarian society devoid of coercive
authority and therefore argues — and always has — against some of the
primary, distinguishing traits that define civilization. To argue in
favor of civilization is as absurd as to argue in favor of the state.
Very few modern anarchists would argue against anarcha-feminism.
Anarcha-feminism is not understood as a separate thing, alien to
anarchism as a whole, but rather as an essential component to the
struggle against domination. It is generally understood that there are
those who identify more strongly with anarcha-feminism than others.
There are those who use it as their personal lens with which to address
the world, who lay down important theory and practical organizing to
address and overcome patriarchy.
And this, I would argue, is the role of the anti-civilized, the
anarcho-primitivists. Anti-civilization thought has greatly deepened our
understandings of oppression, with its critique of the division of labor
and of linear concepts of progress.
It is as much of a mistake to reject all anarcho-primitivists as
genocidal hypocrites as it is to reject all communist anarchists as
technophiles who want the enslavement of nature in service of the
almighty Worker[5].
Patriarchy, government, capitalism, nationalism, racism, civilization...
none of it has a place in the society we envision. And more importantly,
none of it has a place in our struggles, here and now.
Â
[1] It is, of course, the norm to refer to a writer by their last name
rather than their first name. This applies much more often to men than
women; compare Kropotkin and Bakunin with Voltairine DeCleyre and Emma
Goldman.
[2] Or simply use different semantic set and tend to define things
differently than I, or this article, do.
[3] Elman Service, by the way, for some red-anarcho cred, was an
American volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of the Spanish Civil
War, fighting against Franco and the fascists.
[4] The word “classical” is getting the quotes treatment in this article
because I personally disapprove of this oversimplification of “what
anarchists have always wanted” that is presented to us by Brian Sheppard
as much as I disapprove of the oversimplification of what “primitive
people were like” that indeed many primitivists are guilty of.
[5] Of course, it would be easier for me to not make this mistake myself
if I didn’t personally know more than few people who fit these rude
stereotypes...