by Jason McQuinn
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.
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