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Title: The Anarcho-Primitivist FAQ Author: Stiller Date: 30/07/2020 Language: en Topics: anarcho-primitivism, anti-civ Notes: This work was written by Stiller and edited by Nkosi who made this project possible.
This is an introduction and exploration of the Anarcho-Primitivist
worldview encompassing topics ranging from the beginnings of
civilization, technology, its impacts and how a primitivist future might
look. We felt as if technology and civilization are taken as an assumed
good where more technology is viewed as something positive with very few
if any drawbacks. However, having been exposed to Anarcho-Primitivist
arguments and literature, learning about how power dynamics and social
relationships are imbedded and furthered throughout civilization. We
view it with outmost importance to further anti-civilization thought
through this short introduction which will hopefully awaken the readers
interest to this unique perspective in anarchist thought. Below you will
find a short glossary defining important words and concepts used in the
FAQ.
domestication, control, and domination.
around you or that you are not part of a group:
million years, when primitive stone implements were used.
collecting wild food, rather than by farming
development.
capacity or activity in a country or region.
for reciprocal benefit.
explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards.
While there are many different definitions, the two most common ones
seem to be:
society on a voluntary, cooperative basis without recourse to force or
compulsion; or
involuntary, coercive forms of hierarchy.
Both definitions are appropriate and an Anarcho-Primitivist can settle
for either-or as all uncivilized societies such as the hunter-gatherers
did not have a government or involuntary hierarchies which told them how
and in what way to live. Unlike other forms of anarchism, which have no
problems with civilization and domestication as a concept,
Anarcho-Primitivism serves as the only true anti-systemic current.
Opposing all institutions, machines, abstractions and the artificial,
because they embody power relations.
Primitivism can be used to describe two distinct things. Primitivism can
refer to a mode of aesthetic idealization of a “primitive” past, which
means any landscape or frame which is viewed as being natural or
uncivilized. This type of primitivism relates to the visual arts.
Primitivism or Anarcho-Primitivism is a social movement critiquing the
origins and supposed progress of civilization.
This varies as not all Anarcho-Primitivists are alike, however, they all
agree that civilization as it is now must be abolished. A few are in
favor of returning to a hunter-gatherer past whilst some would like to
take part of its wisdom, such as its radical egalitarianism, gift
economy, peace and well-being, and do away with argued shortcomings such
as the formation of symbolic culture in the upper Paleolithic times as
for instance expressed through art.
A typical day in hunter-gatherer societies would revolve around
gathering and preparing food, sharing it with your fellow tribesmen
ranging anywhere from 5–60 people and spending the rest of your day with
friends and family in a strong community who generally want the best for
each other.
To quote the Primitivist Primer, “The aim is to develop a synthesis of
primal and contemporary anarchy, a synthesis of the
ecologically-focused, non-statist, anti-authoritarian aspects of
primitive lifeways with the most advanced forms of anarchist analysis of
power relations. The aim is not to replicate or return to the primitive,
merely to see the primitive as a source of inspiration, as exemplifying
forms of anarchy.”[1]
There is no unanimously agreed upon strategy or method of abolishing
civilization. Some believe that we should strive towards reform, whilst
others believe that organizing and fighting against civilization is
needless and hence a waste of time.
Still, some believe in locally organizing and trying to do your best
living separate from civilization (which of course won’t be 100%
achievable). There are numerous other methods and strategies, some of
which involve violence against property, which I won’t expand on here.
No, primitive societies are not perfect and problems do exist, such as a
high infant mortality rate. However, without diseases it is estimated
that hunter-gatherers can live to approximately 70 years of age.[2]
Someone living to the age of 90 in a hyper competitive and alienated
where individuals are cogs in a machine, will live a different life than
a hunter-gatherer who is a valued in a close community whose emotional
and physicals needs are typically cared for due mutual aid being
practiced. This I would argue is a fair trade off where quality of life
rather than age matters.
Most likely. Historical and archaeological evidence shows
hunter-gatherers to be lean, fit, and largely free from signs and
symptoms of chronic diseases. When hunter-gatherer societies
transitioned to an agricultural grain based diet, their general health
deteriorated. They also had less famine than agriculturalists,
demonstrating that agriculture is not necessary to have a stable food
supply.[3]
In a modern context, however, this would depend largely on the region
and skills the individuals have. Without large scale rewilding and
deindustrialization, returning to such a life would be very difficult as
there wouldn’t be much to gather, other than the processed and
chemically engineered food from the stores. As anthropologist Mark N.
Cohen said, “agriculture is not easier than hunting and gathering and
does not provide a higher quality, more palatable, or even more secure
food base.”[4]
healthcare?
People will always die of preventable diseases and healthcare will
always lack to some extent. It is partially true that the advancement of
medicine has increased the general life expectancy and created
treatments and cures for preventable diseases.
However, this ignores the fact that domestication has led to a massive
amplification of certain preventable illnesses and disorders, such as
anxiety and depression due to a lack of perceived purpose and
interpersonal relationships people have. A study showed that the number
of people with no friends tripled between 1985 and 2004.[5] Of course
this can’t entirely be blamed on technology, but the replacement of real
life interaction with the artificial ones through social media which
isolates and alienates individuals from nature and their community has
certainly contributed.
Obesity is another large issue which overproduction and overconsumption
leads to. There will most likely be certain diseases which would rise
and become more dangerous than may have been in civilization. Modern
medicine largely aims to treat symptoms through prescribing people
chemical compounds rather than by treating the issues directly.
Primitive society would instead deal with a lot of the causes, through
maintaining an active and fulfilling lifestyle where people have a sense
of belonging and purpose in their community as they strive towards
maximizing their potential in a free environment.[6]
Yes. A distinction must be made between simple tools and technology. To
once again quote the Primitivist Primer, “tools are creations on a
localized, small-scale, the products of either individuals or small
groups on specific occasions. As such, they do not give rise to systems
of control and coercion. Technology, on the other hand, is the product
of large-scale interlocking systems of extraction, production,
distribution and consumption, and such systems gain their own momentum
and dynamic.”
Technology in all its forms carries inevitable alienation and sets up a
system where we need “experts” above us to guide us in some way. A cell
phone, for instance, is something that nearly no one would be able to
make on their own. This alienates us further by relying on an “expert”
to have immense power over the average individual, which has led to many
problems in the past. For instance, the Facebook privacy leaks in 2018
and the dozens of companies selling your information to others which no
repercussions or consent.
Research has shown that hours of screen time is associated with lower
well-being in young people. It is also important to note that
researchers agree that that modern populations are increasingly overfed,
malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, and
socially-isolated.[7] Technology does not solve everything and it often
creates more problems than it solves!
A lot of thinkers have different views on this. Zerzan argues that
indeed it is hypocritical to use technology however it is necessary to
impact and further the discussion in favor of an anti-civilization
perspective. He would deem it a necessary evil to use technology.
However, it could also be argued that it is virtuous and not an
obligation to forgo the use of technology and to not participate in the
system of human domestication. It is unreasonable to expect every
individual who accepts anti-civilization thought to give up their
livelihoods to be perfectly virtuous. This is comparable to how it is
good to give to charity, although unreasonable to expect that everyone
you interact with should donate $50 to charity.
All consumption is unethical, whether it’s buying a t-shirt,which
indirectly funds immoral activities conducted by large corporations, or
food coming from animals which are unnecessarily killed. So, some
Anarcho-Primitivists are probably hypocritical for using technology to
the level that they do, a lot however try to do their best to live in a
way that avoids having to interact with it.
It depends on how “disabled” the person is. If, for example, an
individual has just lost a leg, they could function in a way that allows
them the benefit of receiving the necessary resources without having to
actively gather and hunt themselves. Perhaps taking a more nurturing
role and taking care of children and young people, while others may be
looking for food, could be a way that disabled individuals could
function in a more primitive society. Although some disabilities exist
where individuals are kept alive using devices such as ventilators.
There are two different approaches to those kinds of issues. Some would
cite the overpopulation of humanity and form strict opposition to any
form of technology as a reason why these devices should not exist in a
more primitive society. Depending on the disability, their lifetime may
be shorter than others, though hopefully their life would be more
meaningful and greater in quality than that of the average person today.
The other approach would be to retain some low levels of medical devices
to artificially keep alive or alleviate pain to individuals that are
vulnerable. It is a fact that since 1980, the global economy has grown
by 380%, but the number of people living in poverty on less than $5 a
day has increased by more than 1.1 billion.[8] The person who hates life
wishes to encourage birth rates to grow exponentially making the amount
of people suffer increase.. The person who wants the best for humanity
wishes for the birth rate to decline.
The sufficient knowledge that domestication of nature, humans and other
animals, has been a disaster and hence should never be tried again.
Anarcho-Primitivists don’t strive towards forcing people to be part of a
community that they do not wish to be a part of. If they wish to change
how the community functions, they would be expelled and if they and
others want to create civilization, they are knowingly arguing for the
domination and subordination of nature and its resources to humanity.
It can be argued that this goes against a reasonable ethical standard of
opposing the degradation and exploitation of the environment and other
sentient beings, in which preventative measures as enacted by the
Luddites during the industrial revolution in England are justified to
prevent them from doing so. Or the view can be held that as long as it
does not adversely impact your local community it should be their right
to pursue that path.
As history shows, it is impossible to completely eradicate the existence
of war or group conflict, as some groups might want to have more than
other groups. Incidentally, today’s civilization furthers this urge.
When we have a phone or enough food, social media and advertising
creates these false images which tell us that we should want more
unhealthy food or the newest phone, to further our consumerist urges,
making the average person even more domesticated and a slave to their
desires. So the case must be made that in a primitive society there
would be less conflict.[9]
This is indeed the case as anthropologists and other researchers of the
Paleolithic era demonstrate that there were extremely low levels of
warfare due to the lack of sedentism as hunter-gatherers were on the
move and usually found what they needed. Mutual aid and a gift economy
will prevent unnecessary conflict, as people would work together to
provide for the most amount of people’s needs as shown in
hunter-gatherer societies.[10] They rejected unjust hierarchical rule by
an individual who told the many what to do and consume.
No. There is a lot of research on happiness and human well-being and how
it relates to civilization. Prior to civilization, there generally
existed ample leisure time, considerable gender equality and social
equality, a non-destructive and decontrolling approach to the natural
world, the absence of organized violence, no mediating or formal
institutions, and strong health and robustness. Civilization inaugurated
mass warfare, the subjugation of women, population growth, busy work,
concepts of property, entrenched hierarchies, as well as encouraging the
spread of disease through globalization.
One could go into the detail on how social media increases aggression
and creates a false sense of expectation for people, making them feel
more alienated and disconnected from a perceived happiness that society
actually lacks to an indescribable extent. Or you could point to dozens
of examples demonstrating that our alienated, domesticated,
hierarchically organized, and socially discriminatory society is not
good enough.
To quote Zerzan, “Paleolithic, devices for social cohesion were
unnecessary; division of labor, separate roles, and territoriality seem
to have been largely non-existent. As tensions and anxieties started to
emerge in social life, art and the rest of culture arose with them in
answer to their disturbing presence.”
Civilization began in the agricultural revolution which brought about a
lot of the miseries that we have today. How and why agriculture began is
a hotly debated topic in the anthropological community. Some falsely
argue that civilization came about to prevent food shortages. This
however has been rejected and argued against extensively by leading
researchers, such as geographer Carl Sauer who observed that
“agriculture did not originate from a growing or chronic shortage of
food.”[11] Gebauer and Price go further to state that “rather than the
result of external forces and stress, the adoption of domestication may
well have been an internally motivated process.”[12]
This has led to numerous interesting theories on how agriculture
domestication came about. Another theory is that religion was the
originating factor of civilization as sheep and goats were originally
used for rituals and hence were domesticated so that they can be used as
a sacrifice. Although religion partially plays a role, Zerzan goes
further and argues that agriculture and production arose due to “that
non-rational, cultural force of alienation which spread, in the forms of
time, language, number and art, to ultimately colonize material and
psychic life in agriculture.”[13]
To simplify, symbolic culture is Zerzan’s argued reason why civilization
came about. Symbolic culture is the element of human culture that is
based on semiotic representations of the world in which we live.
Included in “symbolic culture” would necessarily be art, music, numbers,
but also language itself. Symbolic culture inhibits human communication
by blocking and otherwise suppressing channels of sensory awareness. An
increasingly technological existence compels us to tune out most of what
we could experience.
Freud, Marcuse, and other thinkers saw that civilization demands the
sublimation or repression of the pleasures of the proximity senses so
that the individual can be thus converted to an instrument of labor.[14]
Social control, via the network of the symbolic, very deliberately
disempowers the body.[15] This would lead us to believe that
civilization was not made for good reasons but rather the opposite,
culture adapts in ways to make individuals docile further leading to a
sedentary and “lazy” existence where people live in the abstract rather
than in the moment.
Here is an extensive reading list (not composed by me) which will in
detail expand on the Anarcho-Primitivist worldview and its surrounding
components. I owe most of my knowledge to John Zerzan which is why I
highly recommend books and talks online from him.
Indigenous Action
Ryan
uncivilization — John Gowdy
Wilderness — Layla AbdelRahim
Education — Layla AbdelRahim
Meadows, Jørgen Randers
Robert H. Lavenda
Heinberg
Consequences — Edward Tenner
Huesemann and Michael Huesemann
[1]
[2]
McCauley, B. “Life Expectancy in Hunter-Gatherers.” 2018.
[3]
Berbesque, J. et al. “Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists.” 2014.
[4] Cohen, M. The Food Crisis in Prehistory: Overpopulation and the
Origins of Agriculture. 1977. Pg. 15.
[5]
Bryner, J. “Close Friends Less Common Today, Study Finds.” 2011.
[6] Rose, D. Allen, R. Ancient Civilizations of the World. 2018. Pg.
104.
[7]
Hidaka, B. “Depression as a disease of modernity: explanations for increasing prevalence.” 2012.
[8]
Hickel, J. “Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries.” 2015.
[9] Miller, B. Wood, B. Anthropology. 2006. Pg. 223.
[10] Bataille, G. The Tears of Eros. 1989. Pg. 57.
[11] Koyama, S. Thomas, D. Affluent Foragers. 1982. Pg. 177.
[12] Gebrauer, A. Price, T. Transitions to Agriculture in Prehistory.
1992. Pg. 6.
[13] Zerzan, J. Against Civilization. 1999. Pg. 70.
[14] Zerzan, J. Running on Emptiness. 2002. Pg. 8.
[15] Zerzan, J. Running on Emptiness. 2002. Pg. 11.