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’s1 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 Service3 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” anarchists4 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 Worker5.

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.

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…
]]> http://www.postcivilized.net/2010/08/anarchism-versus-civilization/feed/ 1 http://www.postcivilized.net/2010/08/social-anarchism-techno-pessimism-and-primitivism/ http://www.postcivilized.net/2010/08/social-anarchism-techno-pessimism-and-primitivism/#comments Sat, 07 Aug 2010 15:36:06 +0000 Margaret http://www.postcivilized.net/?p=71 Blogger Alex Bradshaw has written an excellent article Social Anarchism, Techno-Pessimism, and Primitivism. It explores the usefulness of the anti-civilized (but not necessarily primitivist) critique from the point of view of social anarchism.

Last week I had the privilege to witness (and photograph) the first sailing of The Silakka (silakka is Finnish for “baltic herring”), a boat built almost entirely from scavenged materials. Only the rope and some of the screws and bolts were purchased. The pontoons are made from empty drums, the platform is woven with firehouses. The frame is scrap metal and wood, the mast and sail are secondhand. And of course, it’s powered by the wind. They aim to prove it seaworthy this summer (though I believe their plans are sea-, not ocean-, worthy).

These same people built a river raft entirely out of debris in the past, in Lithuania. They collected empty plastic bottles into wooden crates to provide buoyancy. And that journey was photographed by an intensely capable artist.

Lest you think that they are doing this purely for fun, the Silakka’s mission statement will clear everything up for you in a rather surrealist way:

Unreasonably cheap energy is running out, climate conditions are changing radically, paradoxical economy of constant growth will bankrupt itself, governmental fascism will be declared, racial breeding is practiced to embryos, genetic manipulation will get out of hand, Coup d´état of racistic red necks will happen in the name of revolution, the language loses its meaning, virtual schizophrenia is getting pandemic among the Internet users, obsessed disciples of Tony Robins will get at each other´s throats in the search of lost childhood, fourth world war is waiting at the gates, psychedelic-communistic revolution will fly in the ring like a freshly whiten towel in a heavy weight boxing match while the master is beating the breath out of his competition, heavenly escalator is transporting Jesus down in between the supermarkets while aliens will return to planet earth to complete their work of creation, dystopies and utopies will shake hands, up and down will change the place, emerged birds will withdraw back to the shells. Shit is about to hit the fan, even though a good life needs just bearable conditions and a hand full of material mixed with a drop of good will. We are living strange times – are we? But why?

At the moment we are building a wind powered rescue boat out of waste that our contemporary lifestyle is producing. During the summer 2010 we will sail to Baltic sea and archipelago, far from rectangular conventions and dusty tasting logic of the mainland, to rescue some leftovers of endangered wisdom we are still able to rescue. Maybe we will find some time to think, maybe we will discover something that won´t leave us anything else to think about.

There are people who spend their time figuring out how to build dwellings out of living trees, houses that grow and shift with time, houses that are part of a permacultured solution to sedentary sustainability. I approve.

From what I can tell, the theoretical groundwork biotecture was laid in the 1960s by a man named Rudolf Doernach (who dropped the “civilization” word when he wrote about biotecture for permaculture and who also went off on this wingnut thing about how we can live when the ice-lands cometh, an article I would love to read).

Inhabitat.com has an interesting article from 2006 called grow your own treehouse that goes over a bit of biotecture, and the primary contemporary advocate is Mitchell Joachim, who I’m tempted to call an eco-techno-futurist. Joachim’s critique seems to be entirely ecological, lacking any discussion of the nature of civilization, division of labor, or the like, but his ideas on permacultured tree fab houses are the cutting edge of the field. The basic idea is to build houses with clay or plaster interior walls but incorporate living trees as the outer structure, and to build each house into a fairly self-contained permacultured system.

He did a fairly basic but interesting TED talk about growing houses that fairly quickly goes into satire about building houses out of meat. The above link is particularly funny because it is on a right-wing blog and there are lots and lots of comments that don’t get the satire and also make such useless observations as “never trust a man with waist-length dreadlocks.”

I ran across this today: Route Couture. (site is in Finnish, but there are two galleries of images: fashion photos and art photos. There is also an artist statement in English elsewhere.) Some Finnish radical fashion designers have created “high fashion” clothing out of roadkill. According to google translate, and confirmed by my Finnish friend sitting next to me:

The group seeks to comment on the works for the fashion industry, a market economy and human-animal relationship.

This article was not written specifically to identify with post-civilized theory, and in fact predates that name by a number of years. It appeared in issue #51 of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed in summer, 2001. While not an explicitly post-civilized text, the overlap is enormous and the article is remarkably useful.

The life ways of gatherer-hunter communities have become a central focus of study for many anarchists in recent years, for several good reasons. First of all, and most obviously, if we are to look at actually-existing anarchist societies, the prehistory of the species seems to have been a golden age of anarchy, community, human autonomy and freedom. Various forms of the state, enclosures of the social commons, and accumulations of dead labor (capital) have been the axiomatic organizing principles of civilized societies from the dawn of history. But, from all available evidence, they seem to have been entirely absent in the vast prehistory of the human species. The development of civilization has been the flipside of the steady erosion of both personal and communal autonomy and power within precivilized, anarchic societies and the remnant life ways still surviving from them.

Furthermore, in the last several decades within the fields of anthropology and archeology there has been an explicit and (in its implications) quite radical revaluation of the social life of these noncivilized, gatherer-hunter and horticultural societies, both prehistoric and contemporary. This revaluation has led, as many anarchist writers have pointed out (especially John Zerzan, David Watson [aka George Bradford, etc.] and Bob Black), to a greater understanding and appreciation for several key aspects of life in these societies: their emphasis on personal and community autonomy (entailing their refusal of non-reciprocal power to their head-men or chiefs), their relative lack of deadly warfare, their elegance of technique and tool-kit, their anti-work ethos (refusal to accumulate unnecessary surplus, refusal to be tied down to permanent settlements), and their emphasis on communal sharing, sensuality, celebration and play.

The rise of ecological critiques and the revaluation of nature in the last decades of the twentieth century have entailed for many a search through history for examples of ecologically sustainable societies–societies which didn’t despoil the wilderness, massacre the wildlife and exploit all of the natural resources in sight. Unsurprisingly, any genuine search for ecological communities and cultures predominantly turns up hunter and gatherer societies which have never (outside of situations where they were pressured by encroaching civilizations) developed any compelling needs to build surplus accumulations of food or goods, nor to ignore or despoil their animal kin or natural surroundings. Their long-term stability and the elegance of their adaptations to their natural environments make hunting and gathering societies the sustainable society and sustainable economy par excellence.

Additionally, the cumulative failures of both the revolutionary social movements of the last several centuries and the continuing march of capital and technology in reshaping the world have called into question as never before the illusory ideology of progress that underpins modern civilization (as well as most oppositional movements). A progress that has promised inevitable, incremental improvements in our individual lives and the lives of all humanity (if only we keep the faith and continue supporting capitalist technological development) has been proven increasingly hollow. It has become harder and harder to maintain the lie that life now is qualitatively better than in all previous epochs. Even those who most want to fool themselves (those on the margins of capitalist privilege, power and wealth) must face increasing doubts about their rationality and their ethical values, not to mention their sanity, in a world of global warming, mass extinctions, epidemic oil and toxic chemical spills, global pollution, massive clearing of rain forests, endemic Third World malnutrition and recurrent famine. All amidst an increasing polarization between an international elite of the superrich and vast masses of the powerless, landless and poor. In addition, it has become increasingly questionable whether the multiple pleasures of electric heat, chlorinated water, hydrocarbon-powered transport and electronic entertainment will ever outweigh the insidious costs of industrial enslavement, programmed leisure and our seeming reduction to objects of a scientific experiment to determine at what point we will finally lose all trace of our humanity.

The development of contemporary primitivist theories (and especially anarcho-primitivism) might thus seem to be an easy, logical and inevitable step from these foundations, although this would be to overlook other alternatives equally rooted in resistance culture. At the least, primitivism, as a multifaceted and still-developing response to the epochal crises now facing humanity, deserves our serious evaluation. It is certainly one of the several possible responses which does attempt to make sense of our current predicament in order to suggest a way out. Yet, at the same time there remain many problems with primitivist positions that have been expressed thus far. As well as potentially serious problems with the very concept of primitivism itself as a mode of theory and practice. It may make sense to examine some of the sources of primitivism first in order to identify and develop a few of its most obvious difficulties and suggest some solutions.

Primitivist strands

There are several strands of development which seem to have more or less coalesced to form the current primitivist mélange of theories and practices, at least within North America (I’m not as familiar with British primitivism). But two or three strands stand out as the most influential and important: (1) the strand growing out of Detroit’s anarcho-Marxist Black & Red and the anarchists contributing to the Fifth Estate, including for awhile (2) John Zerzan, although he and the FE eventually parted ways over disagreements about the status and interpretation of agriculture, culture and domestication. Thirdly (3) some activists coming out of the Earth First! milieu, often influenced by deep ecologists, promote a “Back to the Pleistocene” perspective (the Pleistocene, being the geologic period during which the human species emerged).

Fredy Perlman and the Fifth Estate

Although there have been hints of radical primitivism within–and even before the advent of–the modern anarchist movement, contemporary primitivism owes most to Fredy Perlman and the Detroit Black & Red collective through which his work was published, beginning in the 1960s. Most influential of all has been his visionary reconstruction of the origins and development of civilization, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan published in 1983. In this work, Perlman suggested that civilization originated due to the relatively harsh living conditions (in one place and time) which were seen by the tribal elite to require the development of a system of public waterways. The successful building of this system of public waterways required the actions of many individuals in the manner of a social machine under the direction of the tribal elite. And the social machine that was born became the first Leviathan, the first civilization, which grew and reproduced through wars, enslavement and the creation of ever greater social machinery. The situation we now face is a world in which the progeny of that original civilization have now successfully taken over the globe and conquered nearly all human communities. But, as Perlman points out, though almost all humanity is now trapped within civilizations, within Leviathans, there is still resistance. And, in fact, the development of civilizations from their beginnings on has always faced resistance from every non-civilized, free human community. History is the story of early civilizations destroying the relatively freer communities around them, incorporating them or exterminating them, and the succeeding story of civilizations wrestling with each other, civilizations exterminating, incorporating or subjugating other civilizations, up to the present day. Yet resistance is still possible, and we can all trace our ancestral lineages to people who were once stateless, moneyless and in some profound sense more free.

Fredy Perlman’s vision was taken up and elaborated upon by others involved in the Fifth Estate newspaper project, most notably, David Watson, who has written under a number of pseudonyms, including George Bradford. The Fifth Estate was itself an underground newspaper in the ’60s, which evolved into a revolutionary anarchist newspaper in the mid-’70s, and then into an anarcho-primitivist project later in the ’80s. Though the Fifth Estate has recently backed away from some of the more radical implications of its earlier stances, it remains one of the major strands of the contemporary primitivist milieu.

And although Watson’s work is clearly based on Perlman’s, he has also added his own concerns, including the further development of Lewis Mumford’s critique of technology and the “megamachine,” a defense of primitive spirituality and shamanism, and the call for a new, genuine social ecology (which will avoid the errors of Murray Bookchin’s naturalism, rationalism, and post-scarcity, techno-urbanism). Watson’s work can now be evaluated in a new collection of his most significant Fifth Estate writings of the 1980s titled Against the Megamachine (1998). But he’s also the author of two previous books: How Deep is Deep Ecology (1989, written under the name of George Bradford) and Beyond Bookchin: A Preface to Any Future Social Ecology (1996).

John Zerzan

John Zerzan, probably now the most well-known torch-bearer for primitivism in North America, started questioning the origins of social alienation in a series of essays also published in the Fifth Estate throughout the ’80s. These essays eventually found their way into his collection Elements of Refusal (1988, and a second edition in 1999). They included extreme critiques of central aspects of human culture–time, language, number and art–and an influential critique of agriculture, the watershed change in human society which Zerzan calls “the basis of civilization.” (1999, p.73) However, while these “origins” essays, as they are often called, were published in the Fifth Estate, they were not always welcomed. And, in fact, each issue of FE in which they appeared usually included commentaries rejecting his conclusions in no uncertain terms. Eventually, when the Fifth Estate collective tired of publishing his originary essays, and when Zerzan was finding it harder and harder to endure the FE’s obvious distaste for his line of investigation, Zerzan turned to other venues for publication, including this magazine, Anarchy, Michael William’s short-lived Demolition Derby, and ultimately England’s Green Anarchist as well, among others. A second collection of his essays, Future Primitive and Other Essays, was co-published by Anarchy/C.A.L. Press in association with Autonomedia in 1994. And, additionally, he has edited two important primitivist anthologies, Questioning Technology (co-edited by Alice Carnes, 1988, with a second edition published in 1991) and most recently Against Civilization (1999).

John Zerzan may be most notorious for the blunt, no-nonsense conclusions of his originary critiques. In these essays, and in his subsequent writings–which will be familiar to readers of Anarchy magazine, he ultimately rejects all symbolic culture as alienation and a fall from a pre-civilized, pre-domesticated, pre-division-of-labor, primitive state of human nature. He has also become notorious in some circles for his embrace of the Unabomber, to whom he dedicated the second edition of Elements of Refusal, indicating for those who might have been unsure, that he really is serious about his critiques and our need to develop a fundamentally critical, uncompromising practice.

Earth First! and Deep Ecology

The primitivist strand developing from the Earth First! direct-action “in the defense of Mother Earth” milieu is heavily entwined with the formulation of deep ecology by Arne Naess, Bill Devall and George Sessions, among others. In this strand the Earth First! direct action community (largely based in the western US, and largely anarchist) seems to have found itself in search of a philosophical foundation appropriate to its non-urban defense of wilderness and human wildness–and found some irresistible ammunition, if not a coherent theory, in deep ecology.

Earth First! as a substantially, but certainly not completely, informal organization had its own origins in the nativist eco-anarchism of Edward Abbey (whose nature writings–like Desert Solitaire–and novel The Monkey Wrench Gang were hugely influential) and the nativist radical environmentalism of David Foreman and friends. In fact, the original Earth First! often maintained an explicitly anti-immigration, North-American-wilderness-for-U.S.-&-Canadian-citizens-only approach to saving whatever wilderness could still be saved from the increasing human depredation of mining, road-building, clear cutting, agricultural exploitation, grazing and tourism in the service of contemporary mass consumer society–without ever feeling compelled to develop any critical social theory. However, once Earth First! expanded out of the southwest U.S. and became the focus of a widespread direct action movement it became clear that most of the people joining the blockades, marches, banner-hangings and lock-downs were more than a little influenced by the decidedly non-nativist social movements of the 1960s and ’70s (the civil rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist and anarchist movements, etc.). The contradictions between the rank-and-file and the informal leadership in control of the Earth First! journal came to a head with the resignation of Foreman and his subsequent inauguration of the Wild Earth journal with its focus on a conservation biology perspective more to his liking. The new Earth First! leadership (and the new journal collectives since Foreman’s departure) reflect the actual diversity of the activists now involved in the entire Earth First! milieu–an eclectic mix of liberal/reformist environmentalists, eco-leftists (and even eco-syndicalists affiliated with the IWW), some greens, a variety of eco-anarchists and many deep ecologists. But regardless of this diversity, it is clear that deep ecology may well have the most widespread influence within the EF! milieu as a whole, including those who consider themselves to be primitivists. This seems to be mostly because Earth First! is primarily a direct action movement in defense of non-human Nature, and clearly not a socially-oriented movement, despite the often radical social commitments of many of the participants. Deep ecology provides the theoretical justification for the kind of Nature-first, society-later (if at all) attitude often prevalent in EF! It substitutes a specially constructed biocentric or eco-centric vision (“the perspective of a unified natural world” as Lone Wolf Circles puts it) for the supposed anthropocentric perspectives which privilege human values and goals in most other philosophies. And it offers a nature philosophy that merges with nature spirituality, which together help justify an eco-primitivist perspective for many activists who wish to see a huge reduction in human population and a scaling-down or elimination of industrial technology in order to reduce or remove the increasing destruction of the natural world by modern industrial society. Although the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess (no primitivist himself) is usually credited with the creation of deep ecology, the book which originally made it’s name in North America was Bill Devall and George Session’s Deep Ecology (1986). Arne Naess’ book, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy, appeared in 1990, while George Sessions contributed Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century in 1994.

Which Primitivism?

As is obvious from this brief overview (which necessarily leaves out discussion of many details as well as other important participants and influences), the strands of the primitivist milieu are not just diverse, but often in important ways incompatible. To identify with primitivism can mean very different things to those influenced by Fredy Perlman or David Watson, John Zerzan or Arne Naess. Fredy Perlman poetically commemorates the song and dance of primitive communities, their immersion in nature and kinship with other species. For David Watson, primitivism first of all implies a celebration of the sustainable, preindustrial (though not necessarily pre-agricultural) life ways of many peoples, which he believes are most-importantly centered on tribal cultures (especially tribal religions) and convivial tools and techniques. For John Zerzan, primitivism is first and foremost a stance demanding an end to all possible symbolic alienations and all division of labor in order that we experience the world as a reclaimed unity of experience without need for religion, art or other symbolic compensations. While for those influenced by deep ecology, primitivism means a return to a preindustrial world inhabited by a small human population able to live not only in harmony with nature, but above all with a minimal impact on all other animal and plant (and even bacterial) species.

Primitivism as ideology

Although I appreciate and respect the insights of most primitivist currents, there are obvious problems with the formulation of any critical theory primarily focusing around a primitivist identity (or any other positively conceived identity). As Bob Black has contended:

“The communist-anarchist hunter-gatherers (for that is what, to be precise, they are), past and present, are important. Not (necessarily) for their successful habitat-specific adaptations since these are, by definition, not generalizable. But because they demonstrate that life once was, that life can be, radically different. The point is not to recreate that way of life (although there may be some occasions to do that) but to appreciate that, if a life-way so utterly contradictory to ours is feasible, which indeed has a million-year track record, then maybe other life-ways contradictory to ours are feasible” (Bob Black, “Technophilia, An Infantile Disorder,” published in Green Anarchist & on the web at: www.primitivism.com).

If it was obvious that primitivism always implied this type of open-ended, non-ideological stance, a primitivist identity would be much less problematic. Unfortunately, for most primitivists an idealized, hypostatized vision of primal societies tends to irresistibly displace the essential centrality of critical self-theory, whatever their occasional protestations to the contrary. The locus of critique quickly moves from the critical self-understanding of the social and natural world to the adoption of a preconceived ideal against which that world (and one’s own life) is measured, an archetypally ideological stance. This nearly irresistible susceptibility to idealization is primitivism’s greatest weakness.

This becomes especially clear when attempts are made to pin down the exact meaning of the primitive. In a vitally important sense there are no contemporary “primitive” societies and there is not even any single, identifiable, archetypal “primitive” society. Although this is acknowledged even by most primitivists, its importance is not always understood. All societies now (and historically) in existence have their own histories and are contemporary societies in a most important sense, that they exist in the same world–even if far from the centers of power and wealth–as nation-states, multinational corporations and global commodity exchange. And even ancient societies which existed before the advent of agriculture and civilization in all likelihood adapted many unimaginably diverse and innovative life ways over the course of their existence. But, beyond some basic speculations, we can simply never know what these life ways were, much less, which were the most authentically primitive. While this doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from the life ways of contemporary hunters and gatherers–or horitculturalists, nomadic herders, and even subsistence agricultural communities, it does mean that there is no point in picking any one form of life as an ideal to be uncritically emulated, nor of hypostatizing an archetypal primitive ideal based on speculations always about what might have been.

Neither back nor forward, but wherever we choose to go

As all critics of primitivism never tire of pointing out, we can’t simply go back in time. Though this is not because (as most critics believe) that social and technical “progress” is irreversible, nor because modern civilization is unavoidable. There are many historical examples of both resistance to social and technical innovations, and devolutions to what are usually considered (by the believers in Progress) not just simpler, but inferior or backward, life ways. Most importantly, we can’t go back in the sense that wherever we go as a society, we have to make our departure from where we are right now. We are all caught up in an historical social process which constrains our options. As Marxists typically put it, the present material conditions of production and social relations of production largely determine the possibilities for social change. Although anarchists are increasingly (and correctly) critical of the productivist assumptions behind this type of formulation, it remains more generally true that existing conditions of social life (in all their material and cultural dimensions) do have an inertia that makes any thoughts of a “return” to previously existing (or more likely imagined) life ways extremely problematic.

But neither do we necessarily need to go forward into the future that capital and the state are preparing for us. As we are learning from history, their progress has never been our progress–conceived as any substantial diminution of social alienation, domestication or even exploitation. Rather, we might do much better to dispense with the standard timelier of all philosophies of history in order to finally go our own way.

Only without the unnecessary, always ideological, constraints imposed by any directional interpretations of history, are we finally free to become whatever we will, rather than what some conception of progress (or of return) tells us we need to be. This doesn’t mean that we can ever just ignore what we, as a global society, are right now. But it does mean that ultimately no ideology can contain or define the social revolutionary impulse without falsifying it. The vitality of this critical impulse has an existence prior to any theorizing in each and every contradiction between our immediate desires for unitary, non-alienated lives and all of the current social relations, roles and institutions which prevent these desires from being realized.

Critiques of Civilization, Progress, Technology

Much more important for us than the revaluation of what are called primitive societies and life ways is the critical examination of the society within which we live right now and the ways which it systematically alienates our life-activities and denies our desires for a more unitary and satisfying way of life. And this must always be foremost a process of negation, an imminent critique of our lives from within rather than from without. Ideological critiques, while containing a negative component, always remain centered outside of our lives around some sort of positive ideal to which we must eventually conform. The power of their (oversimplified) social criticisms is gained at the expense of denying the necessary centrality of our own lives and our own perspectives to any genuine critique of our social alienation.

The primitivist milieu has developed and popularized critiques of civilization, progress and technology and that is its most important strength. I don’t consider myself a primitivist because of what I see as the inherently ideological thrust of any theory which idealizes a particular form of life (whether or not it has ever actually existed). But this does not mean that I am any less critical of civilization, progress or technology. Rather, I see these critiques as essential to the renewal and further radicalization of any genuine attempts at general contemporary social critique.

Primitivism as an ideology is stuck in an unenviable position ultimately demanding the construction of a complex form of society (however much disputed in particulars) that obviously requires not only massive social transformations, technical changes and population dislocations, but the relatively quick abandonment of at least 10,000 years of civilized development. It is an understatement to say that this poses enormous risks for our survival as individuals, and even, conceivably, as a species (due to the primarily to potential threats of nuclear, chemical and biological warfare that could be unleashed). Yet primitivism can at best offer only indeterminate promises of highly speculative results, even under the most favorably imaginable circumstances: the eventual, worldwide demoralization and capitulation of the most powerful ruling classes, without too many significant civil wars fought by factions attempting to restore the collapsing old order in part or in total. Thus primitivism, at least in this form, is never likely to command the support of more than a relatively small milieu of marginal malcontents, even under conditions of substantial social collapse.

But the critique of civilization doesn’t have to mean the ideological rejection of every historical social development over the course of the last 10 or 20,000 years. The critique of progress doesn’t mean that we need to return to a previous way of life or set about constructing some preconceived, idealized state of non-civilization. The critique of technology doesn’t mean that we can’t successfully work to eliminate only the most egregious forms of technological production, consumption and control first, while leaving the less intensive, less socially- and ecologically-destructive forms of technology for later transformation or elimination (while also, of course, attempting to minimize their alienating effects). What all this does mean is that it can be much more powerful to formulate a revolutionary position that won’t lend itself so readily to degeneration into ideology. And that primitivism, shorn of all its ideological proclivities, is better off with another name.

What should a social revolutionary perspective be called which includes critiques of civilization, progress and technology, all integrated with critiques of alienation, ideology, morality and religion? I can’t say that there is any formulation that won’t also have significant potential for degeneration into ideology. But I doubt that we would do worse than “primitivism.”

I will likely continue to identify most with the simple label of “anarchist,” trusting in part that over time the most valid critiques now identified closely with primitivism will be increasingly incorporated into and identified closely with the anarchist milieu, both within anarchist theory and anarchist practice. Anarcho-leftists won’t like this process. And neither will anarcho-liberals and others. But the critique of civilization is here to stay, along with its corollary critiques of progress and technology. The continued deepening of worldwide social crises resulting from the unceasing developments of capital, technology and state will not allow those anarchists still resistant to the deepening of critique to ignore the implications of these crises forever.

We now stand at the beginning of a new century. Many would say we’re no closer to anarchy now than we were a two centuries ago in the times of Godwin, Courderoy or Proudhon. Many more might say that we are increasingly further away. Or are we? If we can formulate a more powerful critique, more resistant to the temptations of ideology; and if we can develop a more radical and intransigent, yet open-ended practice, perhaps we still have a fighting chance to influence the inevitable revolutions still to come.

This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #3, published in 2010.

“We have no more interest in repairing civilization than a scrapyard does in repairing cars. When you see a roadkill deer, you don’t attempt emergency breathing–you skin and eat it. Well, if you eat meat.”

–Sara Czolgosz

In the previous issue, I laid out the basics of post-civilization theory (affectionately referred to by most people I know as “post-civ”). The really, really short version of it is: we don’t like civilization, but we’re not primitivists either. Oh sure, we learned a lot from our relationship with civilization, but in the end, it was just too abusive. It’s time to break up, it’s time to move on.

In this issue, we’re going to take a close look at post-civilized approaches to production and highlight a possible way to undermine the capitalist economic system.

The Scavenger Versus The Civilian

Let’s say there’s a civilian, and she’s hungry. She chooses a recipe from the cookbook and then goes to the store to purchase the ingredients.

Elsewhere, there’s a scavenger that’s hungry too. She looks to see what food is available and plans her meal accordingly. At all times, she’s passively on the lookout for food, from her garden, from the dumpsters, the discount bins, or gleaned from wild plants.

You might have guessed it: we post-civilized favor the scavenger approach. This applies to most all things, from art to science to education. We favor this approach for so many reasons (admittedly, aesthetic taste is among them).

The civilized idea is that productivity exists for its own sake: automobile manufacturers make cars because it’s what they do. At no point is the question asked, “Have we made enough cars yet?” (The answer to that question, by the way, is obviously yes. Even if we wanted a car culture, we have all the personal automobiles we could possibly need, waiting to be repaired or improved upon.) Forests get cleared and new houses get built while buildings elsewhere sit empty.

This sort of behavior is not reflective of the cunning and resourcefulness of the animal we evolved to be. It’s a cultural imposition forced upon us by civilization.

A civilian will shop for ideologies like she’s buying a new phone, taking a gander at a few before picking one right off the shelf. A scavenger will dissect ideologies, collect the interesting bits, and put them together with other ideas to form her own worldview.

Because, when it comes down to it, a scavenger is a hacker, a hacker is a scavenger.

“That’s fine and good for a tiny minority,” you might be thinking (or, more interestingly, screaming and gesticulating wildly), “but an entire society couldn’t function as scavengers: who would grow the food? Who would build the tables?”

And you’d probably be right, if you were thinking or yelling that. Most of us live in population densities too high to sustain a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. But hunter-gatherer isn’t what we’re going for, exactly. We’ll grow food, we just aren’t going to grow monocultured corn for export. We’ll still build tables, but we’ll build them out of what’s available, and we’ll build them where it’s appropriate.

This isn’t about a purity of approach. In fact, it isn’t about purity at all.

Undermining the Capitalist Economy

We want to use the resources that are available to us already before we go about making more. How, then, do we restructure society to allow for this? Revolution is always a possibility, albeit one without a tremendous track record. Collapse? Civilization, at least the global one, is as likely as not going to do itself in at some point. But who wants to die, and who wants to wait until we’ve left the land and oceans scorched and devoid of life?

Post-civilization theory posits that it’s useful to begin to live post-civilized here and now, whether or not a rev-ocalypse is going to save us in a year or two. So how are we going to do it?

Nothing I’ll talk about in this column, today or ever, is meant as prescriptive. But there are a couple ideas out there.

One of them is to begin to supplant the market capitalist economy, right the hell now. The co-op and syndicalist movements of the 19th and 20th century were on the right track: the co-ops took the middleman out and distributed directly to people, saving everyone money. And the syndicalists took control of industry by firing their bosses and working as equals. But we don’t really want money or industry, certainly not on the scale we have today.

If most of the things–the actual tangible objects we need–have already been made, it can be as simple as getting them to people free of charge. Free stores, we call them in the US (and give-away shops elsewhere, I believe). These are storefronts operated by volunteers that act as secondhand shops in which everything is free.

But by and large, these storefronts are isolated and cannot handle the enormous mass of goods that will otherwise be wasted every day in the civilized world. So then, my proposal, to be enacted on a citywide level:

-Rent or purchase a warehouse. Store donated and acquired resources.

-Rent, purchase, or squat storefronts in multiple neighborhoods throughout the town. Distribute said resources.

As more people’s needs are met outside of market economics, the less they will depend upon that market. With less people shopping, the capitalist economy will suffer, leaving more people dependent upon the new, alternative economy, which will experience growth. Eventually, the old methods will be obsolete. The gift economy will grow beyond secondhand items to include food, artisan crafts, and volunteer labor.

There are two major obstacles to overcome on the local level in order to be effective: rent and the clubhouse effect.

By starting with a network of stores (and a warehouse), rather than a single location, we can hope to minimize the clubhouse effect. People often feel alienated by the cliquish nature of radical circles. Some people who have pointed this out in the past feel like the proper solution then is to water down our politics, or to ascertain that we in no way look or act “weird.” This is the lowest-common-denominator approach that, among other things, explains why large-scale majoritarian democracy always leads to such bland, useless culture and politics.

So instead of a single homogenous radical culture, it’s best to have a large number of diverse cultures acting in solidarity with one another. Allow the central warehouse to be common ground for all of the groups, but let each individual free store be as subcultural as it wants. Just be certain to encourage all subcultures to participate and get in on the act.

The issue of rent can be more complicated. The stores could run on a voluntary subscription model: subscription carries no specific, tangible benefits (like the first pick of the best recycled stuff), but would encourage people to donate some portion of their income every month to pay the rent on the individual stores and the central warehouse. Obviously, methods that minimize costs may be necessary. This can work with no paid staff (after all, a full-time volunteer ought to be able to live entirely off the goods within the gift economy!), bike carts and bakfiets can be used to transport goods whenever possible, and storefronts can be squatted in places where open squats are tolerated.

But these obstacles are, really, quite minor. And now, in what yet might be the death throes of the existing economy, the need of–and opportunity for–a better method of economics has never been greater.

by Margaret Killjoy

This article first appeared in Dodgem Logic #2 in 2010, and is essentially a slightly longer rewrite of post-civ!, a collaboratively written introduction published by Strangers In A Tangled Wilderness, published in 2008.

Well, that civilization thing was interesting, now wasn’t it? I mean, it certainly seemed worth a shot. We got a lot out of it: telescopes, wheelchairs, wikipedia. But we also just about took out the natural world. Science, agriculture, and specialization have done a lot for expanding cultural ideas and communication, but they’ve done even more for genocide and ecocide.

So it’s time we gave up the noble, failed experiment altogether and moved on to something new.

Premise One: We Hate Civilization

This civilization is, from its foundation, unsustainable. It probably cannot be salvaged, and what’s more, it would be undesirable to do so. When we’re discussing civilization, we’re discussing the entirety of the modern world’s organizational structures and approaches to culture. We’re talking about the legal and societal codes that dictate “proper” behavior. We’re talking about the centralizing and expanding urges of political and economic empire.

Civilization is destroying all life on earth. It’s unsustainable: growth-based economies and societies always are. Civilization is nigh unredeemable: there seems to be an infinitesimally slim chance that civilization will drop its resource over-consumption and move rapidly towards a sustainable way of existing. And even if it did, we don’t want it. It would still be an imposition on our freedom.

Civilization has been defined in all sorts of ways, but none of them actually make it sound very good when you think much about it. My dictionary defines civilization as “the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced.” Aside from being a sort of useless definition, this points out the prejudice inherent in civilization. It says: “We are advanced. You are primitive. What’s more, history and development is purely linear in nature, progress only moves forward, and any deviation from the course we are on is regressive.”

Another working definition of civilization can be derived from Wikipedia, which often provides the sort of cultural consensus on a given term. Wikipedia describes civilization as “a society defined as a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities … Compared with less complex structures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labor and an intricate social hierarchy.” This definition, too, points out the flaws in civilization. An intricate social hierarchy? Why have we all chosen a world that puts up with that kind of crap?

Derrick Jensen, an anti-civilization theorist (but not a post-civilized one), has proposed another useful definition of civilization: “a culture–that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts–that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state).” Which of course leads us to ask what, exactly, a city is. Derrick defines a city, for the purpose of his definition of civilization, as: “people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life.”

And that, perhaps, is the point of all of this. If a place requires resources from elsewhere, everything is fine when they can trade for them. But when their farming neighbors experience a drought and can’t provide a surplus for trade? Then you have war. Great.

We hate civilization.

Premise Two: We’re Not Primitivists

It is neither possible, nor desirable, to return to a pre-civilized state of being. Most of the groundwork of anti-civilization thought–important work, mind you–has been laid down by primitivists. Primitivists believe, by and large, that humanity would be better served by returning to a pre-civilized way of life. This is not a view that we share.

Primitivists reject technology. We just reject the inappropriate use of technology. Now, to be fair, that’s almost all of the uses of technology we see in the civilized world. But our issue with most primitivist theory is one of babies and bathwater. Sure, most technologies are being put to rather evil uses–whether warfare or simple ecocide–but that doesn’t make technology (“The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes.”) inherently evil. It just means that we need to completely re-imagine how we interact with machines, with tools, even with science. We need to determine whether something is useful and sustainable, rather than judging things purely on their economic or military value.

Primitivists reject agriculture. We simply reject monoculture, which is abhorrent and centralizing, destroys regional autonomy, forces globalization on the world, and leads to horrific practices like slash-and-burn farming. We also reject other stupid ideas of how to feed humanity, like setting 6 billion people loose in the woods to hunt and gather. By and large, post-civ folks embrace permaculture: agricultural systems designed from the outset to be sustainable in whatever given area they are developed.

Primitivists have done a good job of exploring the problems of civilization, and for this we commend them. But, on the whole, their critique is un-nuanced.

What’s more, the societal structure they envision, tribalism (note that what our society’s view of what tribalism is is mostly based on faulty, euro-centric anthropology), can be socially conservative: what many tribes lacked in codified law they made up for with rigid “customs,” and one generation is born into the near-exact way of life as their predecessors.

We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don’t want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.

We are not primitivists.

Premise Three: We Are Post-Civilized

It is therefore desirable to imagine and enact a post-civilized culture. This is something we can do here and now in the thrashing endgame of civilization.

There are so many false dichotomies in the world. The amateur and the professional musician both have so much to offer, and we post-civilized folks generally cultivate both specialized and generalized skills. Someone has got to get good at lens grinding–and optometry–but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be able to cook a decent meal, or help weed your neighbor’s garden.

One of civilization’s greatest faults is its attempt to homogenize a global culture, to spread one set of ideas of how everything–from governance to architecture to agriculture to music–must be done “properly.” But if you build flat-roofed houses in cold climates, snow is going to build up and your roof is going to collapse. If you fell trees from a hillside the same as you do in the valleys, your soil is going to erode.

So moving towards post-civilization–with or without industrial collapse–is a matter of looking around oneself, one’s community, and one’s landbase, and determining what is appropriate. What this means is that, in the here and now, there are parts of civilized culture we can utilize to our benefit that we might not be able to two generations after a collapse. For those in the first world, our most abundant resource is trash.

Good food can be rescued and eaten. Rotten food can be composted and used to build raised bed gardens atop otherwise poisonous city soil. Paper that is blank on one or both sides can be bound into notebooks. Other paper can be pulped in a blender, spread onto screens, and pressed with a repurposed hydraulic car jack. Roadkill can be skinned and butchered. Electric toys can be scavenged, their circuit boards and motors repurposed. Used vegetable oil can be rescued out of grease traps and used to power our cars or even our generators.

And the critics will say this can’t work forever, and they’ll look confused when we nod our heads in agreement. Because we’ll adapt with the shifting landscape, because what works in one time or place may not work elsewhere or elsewhen.

Civilization thinks that culture naturally trickles down from the civil to the savage, from the urban to the rural. We don’t.

We are post-civilized.

If We Had Our Way

What does a city look like if it’s not a city anymore? The concept of the city, as an entity of its own with specified boundaries, centralized government, and the routine importation of necessities, must be done away with. But we’re not all going to scatter out into the surrounding countryside, oh no.

The post-civilized city (Non-city? Urban area? Terminology is a bit hard.) might look like a city would if you ignored its government. The society would consist of smaller groups that retain their individual identities but are capable of working together for the common good.

We post-civilized aim to prove that decentralization of our culture, economies, and politics is both possible and desirable. Every smaller group (some might use the word tribe, but I personally shy from it) would make its own decisions, maintain its autonomy, and solve problems in the ways that suit its constituency. Some might turn to high technology to meet their needs and desires. Others might live more simply. But the borders between the groups will most likely be blurred, with individuals, groups, and families moving between social spheres. Honestly, it would socially be much like today, if you removed the hierarchy between groups and actively avoided the centralizing influence of civilized culture.

Will these groups ever fight? Probably. No system is perfect, and it is better to admit that forthrightly than pretend it is otherwise. We paint no utopia here. But there have been movements in the past that have developed political structures to allow groups with diverse interests to interact peacefully. One of those movements that we are influenced by is syndicalism.

Syndicalism is an economic system totally outside of the capitalist/state-socialist dichotomy. It suggests that a federation of collectivized trade unions might promote mutual aid between members. For a bit of history of when syndicalism successfully functioned in a developed nation, look into the Spanish Civil War.

Mutual aid, then, is the opposite of competition. Wikipedia describes it as “the economic concept of voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services for mutual benefit.” One of the earliest anarchists–and evolutionary biologists–was Peter Kropotkin, who advocated against Darwin’s suggestion that nature was simply the war of one against all. Instead, he argued, intra-species cooperation is at least as much an evolutionary force as competition. What’s more, modern science has finally come around and has begun to believe him.

Now, we’re not exactly syndicalists, either. Syndicalism is a lovely idea, but we’re not talking about trade unions, and we’re not talking about industrialization. We should cling to the tenants of historical anarchism no more than we should cling to second-wave feminism, or, for that matter, civilization. No, we’re talking about dynamic groups of people coming together organically to make the few decisions that would impact the non-city at large.

We’re talking about the steampunks over here perfecting solar distilleries by use of Fresnel lenses while another group of bike enthusiasts over there spends their time racing, doing courier work for other groups, and forging bicycles out of found pipe. A semi-nomadic clique of teenagers will move out into the wilds of the abandoned suburbs and herd goats, while a hermit whiles her time growing potatoes in stacked tires and recording classical piano onto wax cylinders.

Someone is going to wire up his Super Nintendo to a solar panel array, and folks from all walks of life are going to come over to play Street Fighter, or just to watch. We’re all going to grow most of our own food, and we’re all going to deal with our own trash, wash our own dishes.

The Collapse

And of course, if we had it our way we would move past civilization as peacefully as possible, as non-destructively as possible. We would organize from the bottom up. We’d present solutions that are so reasonable that those in power with ethics will join us and those without ethics will see their economic might dwindle away as more people refuse to participate in civilized exchange.

But this isn’t likely, to be honest. Our society is on a collision course with history. It’s possible that the only question is which will collapse first: industrial civilization or the earth’s ability to sustain human life. If that’s the case, then we’d better hope (or act) for the former.

The collapse of industrial civilization, if it comes, will be horrible. Not one of us, not even those of us who secretly or openly long for the apocalypse, will enjoy it. But contrary to Hollywood lies, the best in people often comes out in crisis. Nothing brings a neighborhood together like a blackout; nothing gets people to sharing like food shortages. (What, you thought we’d all hoard our food and then duke it out with shotguns, kill or be killed, neighbors setting fire to one another’s houses? Humans don’t always do that. What do you think we are, civilized?)

But if our economy doesn’t give way, and we don’t figure out cold fusion (as well as a massive re-stocking of the world’s oceans), we’ll face something much, much worse. Ecological collapse will shatter the world as we know it. If any of us are alive when the dust has cleared, nothing will be the same.

We need to be done with civilization as soon as possible, lest civilization destroy us all.

In The Meantime

We want to not be civilized any longer. It’s time to move on. We want to reject crazy hierarchies and delusional economics, colonialism and nation-states. But it just so happens that we aren’t given much of a chance to opt out. Civilization has never, not once in its history, allowed room for those who aren’t civilized to flourish. It’s to the degree that you might think this a defining characteristic of civilization: civilization is so afraid of being wrong that it simply cannot abide by others who live in other fashions.

And even if we did successfully opt out, that wouldn’t stop civilization from destroying the earth.

But let’s be optimists again for a second. The earth is going to die or the earth is not going to die. Civilization is going to fall, or civilization is not going to fall. What are we going to do, here and now, in our lives?

I don’t want to get into how one might get involved in the epic battle to save the earth, to destroy civilization, to prevent or promote the collapse of this or that. Those are the sorts of ethical choices that one must make for oneself.

But I will encourage that you find or develop a post-civilized lifestyle. In a way, it’s easy. Close your eyes, and imagine who you would be without social constraints. What would you do if you were dependant upon only yourself, your friends, and the resources you can find around yourself. What would you wear? What would you eat? Perhaps the more important questions are subtler: how would you treat your friends? How would you like to be treated?

In the here and now, we learn survival skills: skinning and tanning and wire-stripping, archery and gunpowder-making. Herbalism and acupuncture, yes, but we also study the application (and making) of antibiotics, methods of surgery and dentistry. We permaculture, we rewild, and we scavenge the urban, suburban, and rural landscapes alike, learning what it means to be sustainable in a dying world. We tear up our lawns and leave only gardens. Of course, one day, we’re going to tear up the pavement and leave only bikepaths.

We practice community responses to problems within our subculture, like how to deal with physical and sexual assault without involving the police. We learn about trauma (the hard way, most of the time) and how to deal with it. We keep chickens and ducks, we eat dandelions and cattails.

We live, as much as we can, as though civilization were a blight that is behind us already. And this, more than any writing, will be our propaganda. Because yes, you can live this way. And yes, it is better. A meal means so much more when you grow or gather it yourself, and friends are so much closer when they’re treated as equals. Feral in a tailcoat, that’s us. When we look at the world around us, we take what we need and compost the rest.