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Title: Revolution and Primitivism Author: Miguel Amorós Date: November 25, 2003 Language: en Topics: revolution, class struggle, anarcho-primitivism Source: Retrieved on 8th May 2021 from https://libcom.org/library/revolution-primitivism-miguel-amoros Notes: Transcript of the author’s contribution to a debate with David Watson and Los Amigos de Ludd that took place at the Espai Obert in Barcelona, November 25, 2003. Translated from the Spanish text available at: http://ruidopoietico.blogspot.com/2010/03/revolucion-y-primitivismo-miguel-amoros.html
“Why is it that, in our eyes/Any past time/Seems better?”
We live in hard times, in which the past is incommunicable. The
survivors from the older generations are incapable of passing on the
experience of their defeats and their victories to young rebels because
the latter are living in such different conditions of existence that the
old truths no longer apply. The older generation has no descendants, and
today’s generation has no ancestors. Capitalism and industrial
civilization have created an artificial environment where people without
memories undergo changes at a dizzying speed. These changes take place
so fast that they leave the very notion of change behind; the idea of
time is therefore also lost. Every fifteen or twenty years one has to
start all over again from scratch. The dead were buried long before the
new generation could succumb to the temptation of venerating their
memory. The revolution does not take its poetry from the past, but it
cannot draw its poetry from the future, either. We are installed in a
perpetual present, in which the old defeated projects of emancipation
and the preposterous ideologies born from their failure walk the same
road.
At the very same moment in history when the industrial city was born, so
also was the desire to flee from it. The modern sentimentality
concerning nature was born along with air pollution and the accumulation
of hazardous wastes. The emotion is legitimate, but by being transformed
into nostalgia it was to become one of the faces of progress. As a
reaction against the harm wrought by industry it sensitizes people; but
this is not enough. What is needed is for sentiment to become
consciousness and consciousness to become a practical force. Recourse
must be had to reflection and historical analysis, that is, one must
turn to theory in order to generalize it as revolt. One has to grow up,
leave childhood behind and accept the fact that we are social and
rational beings. Industrial civilization must be opposed with rigorous
thought and a strong organization that allows that thought to become
practice in the struggle against this civilization. There must be
revolutionary action, as the social revolution will be ecological or, as
they say now, primitivist, or it will not take place at all.
When speaking of primitivism one should distinguish between those who
want to understand archaic societies in order to acquire conceptual
weapons for confronting and transforming the world, and those who seek
innocence and beatitude, lost in the passage of time, in primitive
lifestyles. The former do not intend to recreate these social
formations, however much they may be inspired by them; the latter assert
in all seriousness that the road to freedom for humanity passes through
the return to prehistoric stages. Therefore, in this view, the mere
abolition of the State, capital and industrial production amounts to
nothing unless it results in our return to the forest. In the one case,
an attempt is made to develop social critique and to show that other
ways of life are possible; in the other, it is a matter of a
self-satisfied ideology which masks social conflict and impedes the
developing consciousness of the exploited. There are thus two completely
different forms of primitivism: a subversive one, which wants to clarify
the new problems posed by the social struggle and to drive the
revolution forward; and one which is conformist and reactionary, and
muddles these problems and sows confusion, a form of primitivism that is
based on instinct and rejects method, and that makes itself comfortable
in those spaces that industrial society allows it to occupy. The one is
proof of health, the other, of spiritual sickness. It is the latter
fever of consciousness we shall now address.
An ideology so demented and unreal, one that belongs on the same shelf
with other liberal extravagances, should not be of much importance,
since its practice does not extend beyond mere day tripping and is about
as adventurous as the Marseilles Soap Factory, yet to the degree that it
informs an irrationalist discourse that plunges headlong into
bourgeoisification or delirium, it is of some significance. It turns
nature into a weapon to be used against thought. Vulgar and philistine
primitivism demands the abolition of all culture—of all civilization—and
of all social organization, especially that of the cities, the cradle of
freedom and the site of the most extreme forms of class struggle.
Thought and art, literature and the liberal professions, testimonies to
human creativity and genius, genuine manifestations of man’s freedom,
are in its view utterly dispensable. The role of science or the printing
press in the struggle against religion and monarchy is deprecated, just
like every other historical fact. Vulgar primitivism not only rejects
scientific knowledge or liberating inventions, it rejects every other
form of knowledge and transmission of knowledge that approaches the
historical horizon. There is nothing to learn or to teach from the
history of civilizations beyond the recipe for making falafels. In
short, the primitivist philistine does not demand freedom, but
ignorance, i.e., barbarism.
If we view society through such a lens, all of its historical moments
are reduced to one: all civilizations are territories of domestication
and the lack of freedom. This is a radically anti-historical and
feverishly individualistic ideology. For this ideology, every form of
organization is a source of authority, all mass movements aspire to
construct a center of power and all revolutions murder freedom. One must
not, in that case, organize, or promote mass actions, or pursue
revolutionary goals. Vulgar primitivism is a moralistic ideology which
as such does not get involved in action, and cannot endure a
confrontation with reality. It is immobilist. Under the optics of such a
renunciation of the social struggle, the revolution is just another
error; the vulgar primitivist opposes insurrection to the social
revolution, but not a popular insurrection, an extension of the
revolution, but rather a strictly moral and individual rebellion. For
the vulgar primitivist, freedom is not something that is realized in
society, via institutions. So there is no social question, only a
personal question. There is no battlefront to join, but a cloak in which
one can hide. The society of radical primitivism must not be
contaminated, a wall of primitivist absurdities must be raised and one
must take refuge behind it.
The reactionary character of vulgar primitivism is revealed by its
position on the workers movement. With one stroke it liquidates the role
of the proletariat in history, of revolution and of anarchism itself,
which, let us not forget, is an idea of freedom and emancipation born in
the furnace of class struggle. In its view, the history of the class
struggle is merely the history of the struggle for power. The
proletariat only aspires to the seizure of power, like the bourgeoisie;
there are no differences between the various tendencies in the workers
movement since they all want the same thing. Vulgar primitivism
consequently disdains the workers struggle against exploitation and for
freedom. For the vulgar primitivist this struggle generates new forms of
authority, and class goals and methods are therefore rejected. Direct
action, the general strike and assemblies are condemned along with the
unitary trade unions and the workers councils. The old emancipatory
goal, the free association of the producers—the idea that the
emancipation of the workers must be achieved by the workers
themselves—is an authoritarian and domesticating fallacy from this
perspective. The vulgar primitivist is against work—as is the whole
world—and is, furthermore, against the worker; the fact that billions of
workers live in this world who cannot make their living from pleasurable
activities like hunting and fishing, does not seem to impel him to
reveal his plans for a return to the primitive lifestyle. He does not
bother to explain the real possibilities of his ramblings because, as we
have pointed out above, he does not immerse himself in the river of
action. He limits himself to advocating, as a distant goal, an anomic
social state which could give rise to ephemeral associations based upon
temporary agreements. Once again, barbarism, but this time bourgeois
barbarism. The primitivized ideal of a second home with a garden and
some neighbors.
The vulgar primitivist does not want to destroy the social order, or to
force a radical change in society, or to abruptly dissolve the existing
living conditions, since that would definitely constitute the
revolution. To revolutionary social practice, he opposes an apparent and
fictitious existential project, purged of all social criteria. He
eliminates everything that is socially concrete from practice,
everything historical and social. His homilies on freedom leave him
committed to nothing, but confer upon him a rebellious aura which gives
him comfort and reassurance. All of them feel like Papuans, although
they are 20,000 kilometers from New Guinea. Their paeans to absolute
freedom are exclusively directed against the practices which make it
possible. Once again we recognize the transgressive but simultaneously
immobilist attitude of the decadent bourgeoisie, typical of those times
when the ruling class must subvert its own values in order to preserve
them.
The dehumanization of society has led to the idealization of nature.
Just like the Enlightenment bourgeoisie of the 18^(th) century and the
romantic writers after them, the vulgar primitivists provide nature with
contents, they spiritualize it and convert it into the home of freedom
and harmony. They project representations of the private life of the
middle classes, the heirs of the bourgeois ideal, into nature. They seek
this cozy heaven through the ideologization of the wilderness. They
preach personal salvation at the expense of civilization—of
society—rather than in the struggle against oppression. They renounce
the social experience of freedom, because for them civilization, all of
society, is a form of life that is alien to the natural order. The
opposition of nature and society presupposes the complete ruin of the
civilized world; thus, for the vulgar primitivist, one must rebuild
nature rather than make the revolution; not even the primitivist
revolution. He does not want to leave adolescence and take a leap
forward in history; he wants, as a matter of speculation, of course, to
return to the ice age. Everyone knows: in the darkness of time all cats
were grey.
The vulgar primitivist flees from history as well as from action. He
does not consider the past and the present as guides for living. The
cult of nature or the idealization of archaic communities obeys the
desire to avoid the dangers of history (the dangers of action) because,
above all, the vulgar primitivist does not take risks. Deep down, he
knows that he is committed to nothing because a return to nature is not
possible; there is no longer a virgin nature to which one can return. A
nature which is prior to history does not exist, not even for primitive
peoples; it all revolves around the economy. As Bernard Charbonneau
said, “nature is the public garden of the totality”. Nature has already
been urbanized and suburbanized. Strategic thought and social action are
necessary for the liberation of nature as well as for the liberation of
individuals; in short, revolutions are necessary which will lead us to a
civilization free of the commodity and industry. The revolution is the
only way to impart consciousness to history and history is the
specifically human model of existence, the environment where individuals
can be accommodated and acknowledged, to become themselves. So, how does
one make history? As someone said, at first gradually, then all at once.