đž Archived View for library.inu.red âş file âş andrew-flood-civilisation-primitivism-and-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 20:29:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
âŹ ď¸ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
âĄď¸ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Civilisation, Primitivism and Anarchism Author: Andrew Flood Date: June 11, 2004 Language: en Topics: civilization, anarcho-primitivism, critique Source: Retrieved on 12th August 2021 from http://www.anarkismo.net/article/1451
Over the last decade a generalized critique of civilization has been
made by a number of authors, mostly based in the USA. Some of these have
chosen to identify as anarchists although the more general
self-identification is primitivist. There overall argument is that
âcivilisationâ itself is the problem that results in our failure to live
rewarding lives. The struggle for change is thus a struggle against
civilization and for an earth where technology has been eliminated.
This is an interesting argument that has some merits as an intellectual
exercise. But the problem is that some of its adherents have used
primitivism as a base from which to attack all other proposals for
changing society. Facing this challenge anarchists need to first look to
see if primitivism offers any sort of realistic alternative to the world
as it is.
Our starting point is that the expression âlife is hardâ can always
receive the reply that âit is better than the alternativeâ. This
provides a good general test of all critiques of the world âas it isâ,
including anarchism. Which is to ask if a better alternative is
possible?
Even if we canât point to the âbetter alternativeâ, critiques of the
world âas it isâ can have a certain intellectual value. But after the
disaster of the 20^(th) century when so-called alternatives like
Leninism created long lasting dictatorships that killed millions, the
question âis your alternative any better then what exists?â has to be
put to anyone advocating change.
The primitivist critique of anarchism is based around the claim to have
discovered a contradiction between liberty and mass society. In other
words they see it as impossible for any society that involves groups
much larger than a village to be a free society. If this was true it
would make the anarchist proposal of a world of âfree federations of
towns, cities and countrysideâ impossible. Such federations and
population centers are obviously a form of mass society/civilisation.
However the anarchist movement has been answering this very so-called
contradiction since its origins. Back in the 19^(th) century liberal
defenders of the state pointed to such a contradiction in order to
justify the need for one set of men to rule over another. Michael
Bakunin answered this in 1871 in his essay on âThe Paris Commune and the
Idea of the Stateâ[1].
âIt is said that the harmony and universal solidarity of individuals
with society can never be attained in practice because their interests,
being antagonistic, can never be reconciled. To this objection I reply
that if these interest have never as yet come to mutual accord, it was
because the State has sacrificed the interests of the majority for the
benefit of a privileged minority. That is why this famous
incompatibility, this conflict of personal interests with those of
society, is nothing but a fraud, a political lie, born of the
theological lie which invented the doctrine of original sin in order to
dishonor man and destroy his self-respect..... We are convinced that all
the wealth of manâs intellectual, moral, and material development, as
well as his apparent independence, is the product of his life in
society. Outside society, not only would he not be a free man, he would
not even become genuinely human, a being conscious of himself, the only
being who thinks and speaks. Only the combination of intelligence and
collective labor was able to force man out of that savage and brutish
state which constituted his original nature, or rather the starting
point for his further development. We are profoundly convinced that the
entire life of men â their interests, tendencies, needs, illusions, even
stupidities, as well as every bit of violence, injustice, and seemingly
voluntary activity â merely represent the result of inevitable societal
forces. People cannot reject the idea of mutual independence, nor can
they deny the reciprocal influence and uniformity exhibiting the
manifestations of external nature.â
Most primitivists evade the question of what level of technology they
wish to return to by hiding behind the claim that they are not arguing
for a return to anything, on the contrary they want to go forward. With
that in mind a reasonable summary of their position is that certain
technologies are acceptable up to the level of small village society
sustained by hunting and gathering. The problems for primitivists start
with the development of agriculture and mass society.
Of course civilization is a rather general term, as is technology. Few
of these primitivists have taken this argument to its logical
conclusion. One who has is John Zerzan who identifies the root of the
problem in the evolution of language and abstract thought. This is a
logical end point for the primitivist rejection of mass society.
For the purposes of this article Iâm taking as a starting point that the
form of future society that primitivists argue for would be broadly
similar in technological terms to that which existed around 12,000 years
ago on earth, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution. By this I do
not claim that they want to âgo backâ, something that is in any case
impossible. But rather that if you seek to go forward by getting rid of
all the technology of the agricultural revolution and beyond what
results will look quite like pre-agricultural societies of 10,000 BC. As
this is the only example we have of such a society in operation it seems
reasonable to use it to evaluate the primitivist claims.
Hunter-gatherers live off the food they can hunt or gather, hence the
name. Animals can be hunted or trapped while fruits, nuts, greens and
roots are gathered. Before about 12,000 years ago every human on the
planet lived as a hunter-gatherer. Today only a tiny number of people
do, in isolated and marginal regions of the planet including deserts,
artic tundra and jungle. Some of these groups like the Acre have only
had contact with the rest of the planet in recent decades[2], others
like the Inuit[3] have had contact for long periods of time and so have
adopted technologies beyond those developed locally. These latter groups
are very much part of the global civilization and have contributed to
the development of new technologies in this civilization.
In marginal ecosystems hunter-gathering often represents the only
feasible way of producing food. The desert is too dry for sustained
agriculture and the arctic too cold. The only other possibility is
pastoralism, the reliance on semi-domesticated animals as a food source.
For instance in the Scandinavian arctic the Sami[4] control the movement
of huge reindeer herds to provide a regular food source.
Hunter-gatherers survive on the food they hunt and gather. This requires
very low population densities as population growth is limited by the
need to avoid over hunting. Too much gathering of food plants can also
serve to reduce the number of plants that are available in the future.
This is the core problem with the primitivist idea that the whole planet
could live as hunter-gatherers: there is not nearly enough food produced
in natural ecosystems for even a fraction of the current population of
the world to do so.
It should be obvious that the amount of calories available to humans as
food in an acre of oak forest will be a lot lower then the amount of
calories available to humans in an acre of corn. Agriculture provides
far, far more useful calories per acre than hunter gathering in the same
acre would. That is because we have spent 12,000 years selecting plants
and improving agricultural techniques so that per acre we cram in lots
of productive plants that put their energy into producing plant parts
that are food for us rather then plant parts that are not food for us.
Compare any cultivated grain with its wild relative and you will see an
illustration of this, the cultivated form will have much bigger grains
and a much larger proportion of grain to stalk and foliage. We have
chosen plants that produce a high ratio of edible biomass.
In other words a pine tree may be as good or better then a lettuce at
capturing the solar energy that falls on it. But with the lettuce a huge
percentage of the captured energy goes into food (around 75%). With pine
tree none of the energy produces food we can eat. Compare the amount of
food to be found in a nearby woodland with the amount you can grow in a
couple of square meters of garden cultivated in even an organic low
energy fashion and youâll see why agriculture is a must have for the
population of the planet. An acre of organically grown potato can yield
15,000 lbs of food[5]. A a square that is 70 yards wide and 70 yards
long measures just over an acre.
The estimated population of human on the earth before the advent of
agriculture (10,000 BC) varies with some estimates as low as 250,000 [6]
Other estimates for the pre-agricultural hunter gather population are
more generous, in the range of 6 to 10 million.[7]. The earthâs current
population is nearing 6,000 million.
This 6,000 million are almost all supported by agriculture. They could
not be supported by hunter gathering, indeed it is suggested that even
the 10 million hunter gathers who may have existed before agriculture
may have been a non sustainable number. Evidence for this can be seen in
the Pleistocene overkill[8], a period from 12,000 to 10,000 BC in which
200 genera of large mammals went extinct. In the Americas in this period
over 80% of the population of large mammals became extinct.[9] That this
was due to over hunting is one controversial hypothesis. If correct than
the advent of agriculture (and civilisation) may even have then due to
the absence of large game which forced hunter gathers to âsettle downâ
and find other ways of obtaining food.
Certainly in recorded history the same over hunting has been observed
with the arrival of man on isolated Polynesian islands. Over hunting
caused the extinction of the Dodo in Mauretania and the Moa in New
Zealand not to mention many less famous species.
Another way of looking at the fact that primitivism cannot support all
of the people of the planet is more anecdotal and uses Ireland (where I
live) as an example. Left to itself the Irish countryside would consist
mostly of mature oak forest with some hazel scrub and bogs. Go into an
oak forest and see how much food you can gather â if you know your stuff
there is some. Acorns, fruit on brambles in clearings, some wild garlic,
strawberries, edible fungi, wild honey, and the meat from animals like
deer, squirrel, wild goat and pigeon that can be hunted. But this is
many, many, many fewer calories then the same area cultivated as wheat
or potatoes would yield. There is simply not enough land in Ireland to
support 5 million, the current population of the island, as hunter
gatherers.
Typically hunter gathers live at a population density of 1 per 10 square
km. (Irelandâs present population density is around 500 per 10 square km
or 500 times this). By extending this standard calculation from
elsewhere on the planet the number that could be supported in Ireland
would be less then 70,000. Probably a lot less as only 20% of Ireland is
arable land. Blanket bog or Burren karst provide little in the way of
food useful for humans. In winter there would be very little food to be
gathered (perhaps small caches of nuts hidden by squirrels and some wild
honey) and that even 70,000 people living off hunting would eradicate
the large mammals (deer, wild goat) very quickly. The coastal areas and
larger rivers and lakes would be the main source of hunting and some
gathering in the form of shellfish and edible seaweed.
But being generous and assuming that somehow Ireland could sustain
70,000 hunter gatherers we discover we need to âreduceâ the population
by some 4,930,000. Or 98.6%. The actual archaeological estimates for the
population of Ireland before the arrival of agriculture is around 7,000
people.
The idea that a certain amount of land can support a certain amount of
people according to how it is (or in this case is not) cultivated is
referred to as its âcarrying capacityâ. This can be estimated for the
earth as a whole. One modern calculation for hunter gathers actually
give you 100 million as the maximum figure but just how much of a
maximum this is becomes clear when you realize that using similar
methods gives 30 billion as the maximum farming figure.[10] That would
be six times the worldâs current population!
But letâs take this figure of 100 million as the maximum rather then the
historical maximum of 10 million. This is generous estimate, well above
that of those primitivists who have dared to address this issue. For
instance Miss Ann Thropy writing in the US Earth First! magazine
estimated, âEcotopia would be a planet with about 50 million people who
are hunting and gathering for subsistence.â [11]
The earthâs population today is around 6000 million. A return to a
âprimitiveâ earth therefore requires that some 5900 million people
disappear. Something has to happen to 98% of the worldâs population in
order for the 100 million survivors to have even the slightest hope of a
sustainable primitive utopia.
At this point some primitivist writers like John Moore cry foul,
dismissing the suggestion âthat the population levels envisaged by
anarcho-primitivists would have to be achieved by mass die-offs or
nazi-style death camps. These are just smear tactics. The commitment of
anarcho-primitivists to the abolition of all power relations, including
the State with all its administrative and military apparatus, and any
kind of party or organization, means that such orchestrated slaughter
remains an impossibility as well as just plain horrendous.â[12]
The problem for John is that these âsmear tacticsâ are based not only on
the logical requirements of a primitivist world but are also explicitly
acknowledged by other primitivists. Miss Ann Thropyâs 50 million has
already been quoted. Another primitivist FAQ claims âDrastic population
reductions are going to happen whether we do it voluntarily or not. It
would be better, for obvious reasons to do all this gradually and
voluntarily, but if we donât the human population is going to be cut
anyway.â[13]
The Coalition Against Civilization write âWe need to be realistic about
what would happen were we to enter a post-civilized world. One basic
write-off is that a lot of people would die upon civil collapse. While
being a hard thing to argue to a moralistic person, we shouldnât pretend
this wouldnât be the caseâ[14]
More recently Derrick Jensen in an interview from Issue #6 of The âAâ
Word Magazine[15] said civilization âneeds to be actively fought
against, but I donât think that we can bring it down. What we can do is
assist the natural world to bring it down..... I want civilization
brought down and I want it brought down now.â We have seen above what
the consequences of âbringing downâ civilization are.
In short there is no shortage of primitivists who recognize that the
primitive world they desire would require âmass die-offsâ. Iâve not come
across any who advocate ânazi-style death campsâ but perhaps John just
threw this in to muddy the water. Primitivists like John Moore can
therefore refuse to confront this question of die off by upping the
emotional ante and by accusing those who point the need for die-off out
as carrying out âsmear tacticsâ. Itâs up to him to either explain how 6
billion can be fed or to admit that primitivism is no more then an
intellectual mind game.
My expectation is that just about everyone when confronted with this
requirement of mass death will conclude that âprimitivismâ offers
nothing to fight for. A very few, like the survivalists confronted by
the threat of nuclear war in the 1980âs, might conclude that all this is
inevitable and start planning how their loved ones will survive when
others die. But this later group has moved far, far beyond any
understanding of anarchism as I understand it. So the âanarchoâ prefix
such primitivists try to claim has to be rejected.
Most primitivists run away from the requirement for mass death in one of
two ways. The more cuddly ones decide that primitivism is not a program
for a different way of running the world. Rather it exists as a critique
of civilization and not an alternative to it. This is fair enough and
there is a value in re-examining the basic assumptions of civilization .
But in that case primitivism is no substitute for the anarchist struggle
for liberation, which involves adopting technology to our needs rather
then rejecting it. The problem is that primitivists like to attack the
very methods of mass organization that are necessary for overthrowing
capitalism. Reasonable enough if you believe you have an alternative to
anarchism but rather damaging if all you have is an interesting
critique!
Other primitivists however take the Cassandra path, telling us they are
merely prophets of an inevitable doom. They donât desire the death of
5,900 million they just point out it cannot be prevented. This is worth
examing in some detail precisely because it is so disempowering. What
after all is the use of fighting for a fair society today if tomorrow or
the day after 98% of us are going to die and everything we have built
crumble to dust?
Primitivists are not the only ones to use the rhetoric of catastrophe to
panic people into accepting their political proposals. Reformists such
as George Monbiot, use similar âwe are all doomedâ arguments to try and
stampede people into support for reformism and world government. In the
last decades acceptance that the world is somehow doomed has become part
of mainstream culture, first as the cold war and then as looming
environmental disaster. George Bush and Tony Blair created a panic over
Weapons of Mass Destruction to give cover to their invasion of Iraq. The
need to examine and dismantle such panics is clear.
The most convincing form the âend of civilisationâ panic takes is the
idea of a looming resource crisis that will make life as we know it
impossible. And the best resource to focus on for those who wish to make
this argument is oil. Everything we produce, including food, is
dependant on massive energy inputs and 40% of the worlds energy use is
generated from oil.
The primitivist version of this argument goes something like this,
âeveryone knows that in X number of year the oil will run out, this will
mean civilization will grind to a halt, and this will mean lots of
people will die. So we might as well embrace the inevitableâ. The oil
running out argument is the primitivist equivalent of the orthodox
Marxist âfinal economic crisis that results in the overthrow of
capitalismâ. And, just like the orthodox Marxists, primitivists always
argue this final crisis is always just around the corner.
When looked at in any detail this argument evaporates and it becomes
clear that neither capitalism nor civilization face a final crisis
because of the oil running out. This is not because oil supplies are
inexhaustible, indeed we may be reaching the peak of oil production
today in 1994. But far from being the end of capitalism or civilization
this is an opportunity for profit and restructuring. Capitalism, however
reluctantly, is gearing up to make profits out of developing alternative
energy sources on the one hand and on the other of accessing plentiful
but more destructive to extract fossil fuel supplies. The second path of
course makes global warming and other forms of pollution a lot worse but
thatâs not likely to stop the global capitalist class.
It is not just primitivists who have become mesmerized by the oil crisis
so I intend to deal with this in a separate essay. But in summary, while
oil will become more expensive over the decades the process to develop
substitutes for it is already underway. Denmark for instance intends to
produce 50% of its energy needs from wind farms by 2030 and Danish
companies are already making vast amounts of money because they are the
leading producers of wind turbines. The switch over from oil is likely
to provide an opportunity to make profits for capitalism rather then
representing some form of final crisis.
There may well be an energy crisis as oil starts to rise in price and
alternative technologies are not yet capable of filling the 40% of
energy generation filled by oil. This will cause oil and therefore
energy prices to soar but this will be a crisis for the poor of the
world and not for the wealthy some of whom will even profit from it. A
severe energy crisis could trigger a global economic downturn but again
it is the worldâs workers that suffer the most in such times. There is a
good argument that the worldâs elite are already preparing for such a
situation, many of the recent US wars make sense in terms of securing
future oil supplies for US corporations.
Capitalism is quite capable of surviving very destructive crisis. World
War 2 saw many of the major cities of Europe destroyed and most of the
industry of central Europe flattened. (By bombers, by war, by retreating
Germans and then torn up and shipped east by advancing Russians).
Millions of European workers died as a result both in the war years and
in the years that followed. But capitalism not only survived, it
flourished as starvation allowed wages to be driven down and profits
soared.
However it is worth doing a little mental exercise on this idea of the
oil running out. If indeed there was no alternative what might happen?
Would a primitivist utopia emerge even at the bitter price of 5,900
million people dying?
No. The primitivists seem to forget that we live in a class society. The
population of the earth is divided into a few people with vast resources
and power and the rest of us. It is not a case of equal access to
resources, rather of quite incredible unequal access. Those who fell
victim to the mass die off would not include Rubert Murdoch, Bill Gates
or George Bush because these people have the money and power to
monopolise remaining supplies for themselves.
Instead the first to die in huge number would be the population of the
poorer mega cities on the planet. Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt have a
population of around 20 million between them. Egypt is dependent both on
food imports and on the very intensive agriculture of the Nile valley
and the oasis. Except for the tiny wealthy elite those 20 million urban
dwellers would have nowhere to go and there is no more land to be
worked. Current high yields are in part dependent on high inputs of
cheap energy.
The mass deaths of millions of people is not something that destroys
capitalism. Indeed at periods of history it has been seen as quite
natural and even desirable for the modernization of capital. The potato
famine of the 1840âs that reduced the population of Ireland by 30% was
seen as desirable by many advocates of free trade.[16] So was the 1943/4
famine in British ruled Bengal in which four million died[17]. For the
capitalist class such mass deaths, particularly in colonies afford
opportunities to restructure the economy in ways that would otherwise be
resisted.
The real result of an âend of energyâ crisis would see our rulers stock
piling what energy sources remained and using them to power the
helicopter gunships that would be used to control those of us fortunate
enough to be selected to toil for them in the biofuel fields. The
unlucky majority would just be kept where they are and allowed to die
off. More of the âMatrixâ then utopia in other words.
The other point to be made here is that destruction can serve to
regenerate capitalism. Like it or not large scale destruction allows
some capitalist to make a lot of money. Think of the Iraq war. The
destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure may be a disaster for the people
of Iraq buts itâs a profit making bonanza for Halliburton and co[18].
Not coincidentally the Iraq war, is helping the US A, where the largest
corporations are based, gain control of the parts of the planet where
much future and current oil production takes place.
We can extend our intellectual exercise still further. Let us pretend
that some anarchists are magically transported from the Earth to some
Earth like planet elsewhere. And we are dumped there without any
technology at all. The few primitivists amongst us might head off to run
with the deer but a fair percentage would sit down and set about trying
to create an anarchist civilisation. Many of the skills we could bring
might not be that useful (programming without computers is of little
use) but between us weâd have a good basic knowledge of agriculture,
engineering, hydraulics and physics. Next time the primitivists wandered
through the area we settled theyâd find a landscape of farms and dams.
Weâd at least have wheeled carts and possibly draft animals if any of
the large game were suitable for domestication. Weâd send out parties
looking for obvious sources of coal and iron and if we found these weâd
mine and transport them. If not weâd be felling a lot of lumber to turn
into charcoal to extract whatever iron or copper we could from what
could be found. The furnace and the smelter would also be found on that
landscape. We have some medical knowledge, most importantly an
understanding of germs and medical hygiene so weâd have both basic water
purification and sewage removal systems.
Weâd understand the importance of knowledge so weâd have an education
system for our children and at least the beginnings of a long-term store
of knowledge (books). We could probably find the ingredients for
gunpowder, which are quite common, which would give us the blasting
technology need for large-scale mining and construction. If there was
any marble nearby we could make concrete, which is a much better
building material then wood or mud.
Technology did not come from the gods. It was not imposed on man by a
mysterious outside force. Rather it is something we developed and
continue to develop. Even if you could turn the clock back it would just
start ticking again. John Zerzan seems to be the only primitivists
capable of acknowledging this and he retreats to the position of seeing
language and abstract thought as the problem. He is both right and
ludicrous at the same time. His vision of utopia requires not only the
death of the mass of the worlds population but would require the
genetically engineered lobotomy of those who survive and their off
spring! Not of course something he advocates but a logical end point of
his argument.
So why spend so much space demolishing such a fragile ideology as
primitivism. One reason is the embarrassing connection with anarchism
some primitivists seek to claim. More importantly primitivism both by
implication and often in its calls wants its followers to reject
rationalism for mysticism and oneness with nature. The are not the first
irrational ecological movement to do so, a good third of the German Nazi
party came from forest worshipping blood and soil movements that sprang
up in Germany in the aftermath of world war one.
This is not an empty danger. Within primitivism a self-proclaimed
irrational wing has developed that if not yet advocating ânazi-style
death campsâ has openly celebrated the deaths and murder of large
numbers of people as a first step.
In December 1997 the US publication Earth First wrote that âthe AIDS
epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the
inevitable reduction of human population.â[19] Around the same period in
Britain Steve Booth, one of the editors of a magazine called âGreen
Anarchist â, wrote that
âThe Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not
blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and
now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer
capable of oppression.
The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing
the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were
not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the
method of delivery was ineffective. One day the groups will be totally
secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely
effective.â[20]
This is where you end up when you celebrate spirituality over
rationality. When the hope of ârunning with deerâ overcomes the need to
deal with the problem of making a revolution on a planet of 6 billion
people. The ideas above have only reactionary conclusions. Their logic
is elitist and hierarchical , little more than a semi-secular version of
gods chosen people laying waste to the unbelievers. It certainly has
nothing in common with anarchism.
Which brings us back to the start. Civilisation comes with many, many
problems but it is better than the alternative. The challenge for
anarchists is in transforming civilization to a form that is without
hierarchy, or imbalances of power or wealth. This is not a new
challenge, it has always been the challenge of anarchism as shown by the
lengthy Bakunin quote at the start of this essay.
To do this we need modern technology to clean our water, pump away and
process our waste and inoculate or cure people of the diseases of high
population density. With only 10 million people on the earth you can
shit in the woods providing you keep moving on. With 6 billion those who
shit in the woods are shitting in the water they and those around them
will have to drink. According to the UN âeach year, more than 2.2
million people die from water and sanitation related diseases, many of
them childrenâ. Close to one billion urban dwellers have no access to
sustainable sanitation. Data for â43 African cities .... shows that 83
percent of the population do not have toilets connected to sewersâ[21].
The challenge then is not simply the construction of a civilization that
keeps everyoneâs standards of living at the level they are now. The
challenge is raising just about everyoneâs standard of living but doing
so in a manner that is reasonably sustainable. Only the further
development of technology coupled to a revolution that eliminates
inequality across the planet can deliver this.
It is unfortunate that some anarchists who live in the most developed,
most wealthy and most technological nations of the world prefer to play
with primitivism rather than getting down to thinking about how we can
really change the world. The global transformation required will make
all previous revolutions fade into insignificance.
The major problem is not simply that capitalism has been happy to leave
a huge proportion of the worldâs population in poverty. The problem is
also that development has been aimed at creating consumers for future
products rather then providing what people need.
Transport provides the simplest example. A variety of forms of mass
transport exist that can move huge numbers of people from place to place
at great speed. Yet in the last decade capitalism has concentrated on
the form that uses the greatest resources per traveler both in terms of
what goes into making it and what is required to keep it running. This
is the individual car.
Across large areas of the most developed parts of the globe this is
pretty much the only way to get around in an efficient manner. The car
has created the sprawling mega city of which Los Angeles is perhaps the
most infamous example. There a city has been created whose urban layout
makes individual car ownership almost compulsory.
This form of transport is simply not a solution for most of the worldâs
population. And itâs not simply that most people cannot afford a car at
the moment. The resources consumed in the construction of the 3 billion
odd cars needed for every adult inhabitant of the globe are simply not
available. Nor are the resources (petrol) to run these 3 billion cars
available.
So taking hold of existing technologies and developing new ones cannot
simply mean carrying on capitalist production (or production methods)
under a red and black flag. Just as a future anarchist society would
seek to abolish the boring monotonous work of the assembly line so it
would need to radically change the nature of the products that are
produced. At a simple level in terms of transport this would perhaps
begin with greatly reducing the production of cars and greatly
increasing the production of bicycles, motorbikes, trains, buses, trucks
and mini-buses.
Iâm neither a âtransport expertâ nor a worker in the transport industry
so I can do no more then guess at what these changes might be. But we
should be aware that outside of the west the need for transport is often
solved in far less individualistic ways. Only the wealthy can afford a
car but the mass of the population can often move almost as quickly from
one location to another making use not only of bus and rail but also of
systems of long distance collective taxis and mini-buses that run
between towns whenever they are full.
This is the challenge for anarchism. Not simply to overthrow the
existing capitalist world order but also to see the birth of a new
world. A world that is at least capable of delivering the same access to
goods, transport, healthcare and education as is accessible to the
âmiddle classâ in Scandinavian countries today.
It is that new society that will decide what new technologies are needed
and how to adopt existing technologies to the challenge of a new world.
It is quite likely that some technologies, if not discarded, will be
very much downgraded. Itâs hard to believe we would happily decide to
build new nuclear power stations for instance. GMOs would need to prove
something beyond the possibility of GMOâs meaning greater profits and
monopolies for corporations, not least that the benefit was greater than
the dangers.
As long as capitalism exists it will continue to wreak environmental
havoc as it chases profits. It will only effectively respond to the
energy crisis once that becomes profitable and because there will be a
lag of many years before oil can be replaced this might mean worsening
poverty and death for many or the poorer people in the world. But we
cannot fix these problems by dreaming of some lost golden age when the
worldâs population was low enough to support hunter gathering. We can
only sort it out by building the sort of mass movements that can not
only overthrow capitalism but also introduce a libertarian society. And
on the way we need to find ways to halt and even reverse some of the
worst of the environmental threats capitalism is generating.
Primitivism is a pipe dream â it offers no way forwards in the struggle
for a free society. Often its adherents end up undermining that struggle
by attacking the very things, like mass organization, that are a
requirement to win it. Those primitivists who are serious about changing
the world need to re-examine what they are fighting for.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
[9]
[10]
(sorry for the long URL but the page is not directly accessible)
[11] âMiss Ann Thropy,â Earth First! Dec. 22, 1987, cited at
[12]
A Primitivist Primer By John Moore
[13] http///www.eco-action.org/spellbreaker/faq.html
[14] the Practical Anarcho-Primitivist: actualizing the implications of
a critique -Coalition Against Civilization, online at
www.coalitionagainstcivilization.org
[15] Issue #6 of The âAâ Word Magazine, this interview online at
[16]
[17]
[18] For a reasoned critique of collapism from a Green anarchist
perspective see
[19] Earth First!, Dec. 22, 1987, cited at
[20] Green Anarchist, number 51, page 11, a defense of these remarks was
published in Number 52. The author Steve Booth was a GA editor (and the
treasurer) at the time
[21]