Insurgent Desire - Readers Forum

No to anarchist primitivism

I read with interest Lawrence Jarach's piece on primitivism and its manifestations, but I have to take issue with a number of ideas central to his thesis that the "anarcho-" primitivism he espouses is somehow different than and superior to the alleged "authoritarian" primitivism he attacks.

Jarach's argument is founded on the assertion that if one went backwards in human society, one would find a "hunter-gatherer" society. This is not only an incorrect notion, but a notion founded on the ridiculous 19th-century positivist doctrines that produced both Marxism and the "progressive" neo-liberalism that has, in our time, degenerated into global corporate-capitalism and corporate-socialism. The idea that by going backwards in time man goes backwards in development is simply wrong—it is by going forwards in man that the cultural development of mankind deteriorates.

When one rejects the fundamental doctrine of progress, and realizes that the passage of time and the development of technics occurs simultaneous with the decay of culture and the leveling of mankind, only then can one gain an understanding of what occurs when one moves backwards in time.

As technics and the leveling effects of technology strip away, among most peoples one will see the development of aristocratic individualism, the type of ideology which stands in direct opposition to the egalitarian nihilism—the reduction of all men to the same—that is the basis of both consumerist globalism and Mr Jarach's understanding of "anarcho-" primitivism. One will see as individuals become more distinct, and as individual differences become more important without technology to level them, the development of natural hierarchical social orders that, despite assigning rank and position, will be non-coercive because they are manifestations of each individual's organic nature. Mr Jarach can deride this as "authoritarian" primitivism but it is nothing of the kind—if Mr Jarach implies by that the "authority" will be of the nature of modern corporate authority—an alien entity imposed on an unwilling populace.

I would refer Mr Jarach to the works of Julius Evola—Revolt Against the Modern World in particular, as well as Men Among the Ruins, which my good friend Michael Moynihan has recently translated into English and which will be released next year by Inner Traditions publishers. Though there are those who will object that Evola (or perhaps even Michael!) was a "fascist," in that they display only ignorance, because Evola lived during the time of fascism, and was a renowned and out-spoken anti-fascist. Not only did he oppose the Mussolini regime and the leveling and corporate-capitalist nature of fascism in Italy, where he resided, but he was banned from National Socialist Germany after being deemed a "subversive" by the Hitler government. Michael, too, I know has been slurred by many, but knowing him, I can attest that his views are not those that certain distasteful and dishonest organizations have represented them as being to the corporate media and its consumers.

In short, the type of "anarcho-" primitivism that Mr Jarach proposes is, in actuality, the end product, not the starting point, of the development of capitalism, and is much more authoritarian and technology-driven in nature because both authority and technology are necessary to destroy the natural tendencies of man to find happiness in non-coercive, structured, Traditional societies.

I couldn't have invented a better response; Mr White's perspective epitomizes what I identified as vulgar primitivism in my essay. He pointedly ignores the copious anthropological literature about primitive peoples, and explicitly promotes a eurocentric neo-feudal "aristocratic individualism." Even if it were true that the ethnographic evidence is unimportant to discussions about primitivism, Mr White's pseudo-corrective to the current miserable condition of life—the creation of a hyper-elitist "natural" hierarchy—is beyond any possibility of being attractive or interesting to anarchists.

Evola being a critic of Italian fascism for being too populist hardly makes him "a renowned and out-spoken anti-fascist." I, in turn, would refer Mr White to some of Evola's other works (not translated into English as far as I know); for example "Essays on Magical Idealism," "Theory of the Absolute Individual," "Woman as Thing," "Pagan Imperialism," (all from the 1920s) and finally, "Fascism; Essay Toward a Critical Analysis from the Point of View of the Right" (1970). Stanley Payne, in A History of Fascism 1914-1945 (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1995) has this to say:

"...Evola never joined the Fascist Party...he also criticized Fascism for its demagogic, plebeian, and statist qualities...[he] was largely ignored in Fascist Italy...[but] was much appreciated by German extreme rightists and also by elements of the SS...after the war he became the intellectual leader of the most extreme radical right... What made Evola so attractive both to genuine neofascists and to the radical right after the war was the fact that he developed...an alternative concept of history and culture, based on uncompromising antidemocratism, elitism, mysticism, and the call for a revolutionary elite to create a hierarchic, organic new order...[in order] to achieve a ‘new man’ with a ‘soul of steel’ capable of ‘transcendence against temporality,’ who would live a ‘warrior epic’ imbued with ‘legionary spirit.’ In all this there lay a scarcely veiled encouragement of terrorist action...Evola thus provided inspiration for a wide range of right radical, neofascist, and even neo-Nazi groups in Italy."

More detailed information on Evola's post-WWII antics can be found in Dreamer of the Day (reviewed by me in AJODA #51) by Kevin Coogan (Autonomedia, 1999). A critical examination of the extreme authoritarianism bordering on fascism—if not embracing it altogether—of Evola's translator and Mr White's good friend Michael Moynihan can be found in Hit List #1 and 2, also by Coogan.
Romanticizing primitivists

I would like to comment on the discussion of anthropology, primitivism, etc. First, if there is any romanticizing here I doubt it is by anthropologists. Rather it comes from those primitivists who have donned special romantic glasses to read ethnographies. Having read innumerable ethnographies I have found that they contain plenty of vicious raiding, murder and mayhem, data showing the sexes are not fully equal, that matrilineal societies are still run by males (although they are not fathers but mothers brothers), that hunter gatherers are not such loving conservators of nature, that hunter gatherers have practiced slavery (Northwest Coast) and so on....

Another point which needs to be stressed is that hunter gatherers today—that handful that survive—are in no sense identical to hunter gatherers of a thousand or ten thousand years ago. Anthropologists can only rely on these contemporary examples and on the slim archaeological data (which is like getting a book with 3/4 of the pages randomly torn out). Hunter gatherer societies have, like all societies, changed over time and in the present day It is notable that they only inhabit regions of the world that nobody else wants. They live in remote, not so benign, refuge areas whereas ten thousand years ago they had pretty nearly the whole earth. Modern, hunters have been heavily influenced by the external world. For instance Canadian Indians for 300 years and indigenous Siberian hunters for 400 years have been hunting furs for the international elitist market. All kinds of modern technology have been available to these peoples for some time. The Innuit are quite pleased with their high powered rifles, motor boats and so forth.

In my book, People without Government: An Anthropology of Anarchy, I tried to present more or less anarchic societies warts and all. While I stated something to the effect that 10,000 years ago all humans were anarchists, my meaning had to be taken within the context of what I meant by anarchy for purposes of that investigation, namely, the absence of the state and government. It was not to suggest that such societies were some kind of utopian order. Far from it. I would suppose that nearly all anarchists would not want to live in any of these societies, if only because they would see their freedom as limited despite the absence of government.

In that book I pointed out that no society can exist without some kind of sanctioning device and all of them have shortcomings. Legal sanctions bring the oppression of the state. Diffuse sanctions entail ostracism, gossip, vigilante action. Religious sanctions may involve the oppressive power of shamans (cf. Innuit) or for example the power of bone pointing among Australian Aboriginals.

Most anarchists don't approve of "leaders" even though anarchist history is full of them. All hunter gatherers, horticultural and pastoral societies have their leaders, too. They may be the old men (Australia), the great hunters (Dene, Innuit, etc. etc.), the Big Men (Melanesia, Berbers, etc.), the Seers (Lugbara, Dinka, etc.). They may be leaders but they need not be tyrants. Most do not get their way by force and violence; they are men of influence. Hunter gatherers societies and many horticultural societies have been called egalitarian but this is misleading. While women may have greater equality the balance still favors the males and precedence is given to elders, religious specialists and technicians.

True warfare is not a feature of hunter gatherer societies, but raiding, feuding and murder are. Dene regularly carried on raids of neighboring bands to steal women among other things.

One commentator in Anarchy mentioned pastoral societies as possibly exemplifying stateless and governmentless forms of organization. But such are limited to parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, such as Nuer, or possibly a few reindeer herders in the Euro-Asiatic north. The great majority of pastoral societies have either quasi or full state structures. Turkic, Afghan, Iranian pastoralists have a tribal pattern in which one lineage is the noble lineage from which is drawn the khan who may rule with impunity. After all, all of us have heard of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Berber and Arab pastoralists nave a more ambiguous social structure, but they easily fall into tyrannies. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia arose out of the tribal dynamics of Central Arabia, just as incidentally the Durrani dynasty of the Afghan Kingdom arose out of Pukhtun tribal intercourse in the 18th century.

Ibn Khaldun in the 14th century developed the first systematic theory of sociocultural dynamics in which he argued for a cyclical process of anarchic pastoral and tribal people on the one hand and the urban civilized state on the other. The tribe was guided by ‘asabiyya or social solidarity through kinship. It was fresh and vigourous. The city was dominated by the state, was wealthy and tended to degenerate and become corrupt. The tribalists were attracted to the city gold and saw its weakness and degeneracy. So they invaded and took over the city civilization and reinvigorated it with a new rule. They however were doomed as well to degenerate and be overcome later on by a new wave of healthy tribesmen. The cycles continued and, indeed, this process seems to be a reasonable description of political life in Islamic North Africa at least up to the time of Ibn Khaldun.

Some horticultural societies, like a limited number of pastoral societies have anarchic polities, but as I have tried to suggest here these too raise serious problems regarding equality, violence and other concerns of anarchists. Thus my point is that anarchy as defined simply as no state and no government is widespread in human history, but such a society is by no means utopia or the model primitivists present.

Primitivists are of course correct in identifying the city and agriculture with the state and government. While we may possibly have some viable alternatives for government and state there are no viable alternatives for agriculture in a world inhabited by 6 billion people. Some major reforms in agriculture, however, are viable and necessary. We may question a number of current practices such as the increasing reliance on a very small number of seed varieties and varieties of livestock, monocropping, traditional methods of irrigation, the dependence upon pesticides, herbicides and artificial fertilizers, plowing techniques, methods of rearing calves, pigs, poultry, the feed lot system, pumping cattle full of anti-biotics, the amounts of nonrenewable sources of energy burned in producing crops...in a word turning agriculture into agro-business. It has been demonstrated that the most efficient farmers in the United States are the Old Order Amish cultivating farms of 50 or so acres with horses and mules. Traditional horticultural societies and old peasant societies have much to teach as well.

I have spent several months in the UK and I had the chance to read the last two issues of Anarchy. I have found them amazing: critique of technology, of working, of postmodernism... that's the stuff I was looking for. I'm Italian and I must admit I am fed up with the magazines you can find in the Italian anarchist milieu. Here there are only few mags and I think they often lack new perspectives. I am happy to see that in the USA there are guys that are building up a new critique of civilisation. In Italy the more coherent discourse against civilisation has been provided, as far as I'm concerned, within the insurrectionalist folks. Nevertheless those people carry on using concepts that are either leftist or "volontarista" (I can't find a good English word, I mean a kind of thought in which is stressed the possibilities of the personal will of the rebel of "homme revolte") but following this pattern is something I am not so interested with anymore.

As I have read your debate on primitivism, enjoying sometimes both pro and cons, I have realised it's possible to develop new patterns of radical thought. So far, Italian radical thought is influenced by Situationists, Marx, Stirner, Surrealism and by classical anarchist literature. I am now pleased to see how anthropology and other subjects can offer new opportunities to formulate our dislike of this world. Having read your debate, on the one hand I am eager to get confident with this anthropological literature, which in Italy is nothing but an unpopular academic subject and can be faced with scepticism by many anarchists; on the other hand, I think we should keep in mind some suggestions provided by Wolfi Landstreicher's brief essay in Anarchy n. 52. Despite primitivism's persuasive strength (I guess primitivism can make broader the number of people involved in the libertarian critique), I agree with Landstreicher when he says that primitivism can turn into another ideology (just think of the kind of mysticism connected with a pseudopantheistic cult of nature and you know what I mean). This last opinion is very popular in Italy, where—so far—primitivism is not yet welcomed.

Anyway, I think that primitivism—I better say: anarchoprimitivism—can bring a breath of fresh air to the Italian movement. What we need, it's definitely not a new ideology but a new radical theory or, quoting the famous Zerzan's book—that I have not yet read—new "elements of refusal." But, again, we should avoid turning this theory into an ideology.

Now let's think for a moment what a theory is. Probably a theory is nothing but a set of metaphors we use to describe things around us. Thus I think the goodness of a radical theory has to be found not in any kind of objectivity, but in the way in which this theory will challenge this world we dislike and we find despicable. At last I do think anarchoprimitivism has something to say to every antiauthoritarian. What does really matter is to keep this in mind, that is: we can get the best from primitivism, from anthropology, from whatever, but everything has to be used for our aim, which is to destroy hierarchism and authority, to eliminate power. So, unless we want to became slaves of a theory, I think that with respect to our ideas, our theories, our points of view on things, we should keep a feeling of "futilite" (I can't find a good English word, may be: contingency).

You can say this is bad eclecticism: I don't think so. Neither do I think it's a shame to be eclectic: everybody is. Wasn't Marx eclectic? Or Bakunin? Everyone is. Ideas, concepts, theories do not grow up out of nowhere.

In Italy some people say, against primitivism: anthropology is an academic subject. So is economy—I would respond—which is linked with leftism; so is psychoanalysis, which is linked with surrealism (with this I won't say every radical theory has roots in academics: the contrary is often true. Others say: those primitivist guys at first are against science, then they use archaeology and anthropology and their scientific evidence to fight against civilisation. So? To be sincere I don't trust any scientific proof about anything. I think that every subject, every theory, every culture can provide metaphors that are true only within their own linguistic game, that is within their own theory, inside their own definition of truth.

So primitivism—or better: anarchoprimitivism—should be not an ideology or a definition of "how things really are." It should be a détournement of several anthropological metaphors. I think this is a good way to use a theory without turning ourselves into professional theoreticians: let's use a theory if this theory fulfills our aim. I know that this kind of thinking is not without troubles. For instance: in Anarchy I have found essays against symbolic thought. The criticism of symbolic thought is itself a theory, that is symbolic thought. Of course we can't avoid this contradiction, not yet. To fulfill this theory's goals means paradoxically to abolish every theory (for theory is something that is connected with division of labor, with those dualistic problems, e.g. mind vs. body, theory vs. praxis, art vs life...that we will to abolish, destroying authority). Finally, we develop theories because we don't like this world and the life we lead in it, and the theories we develop are ambiguous and not so coherent because they bring with them marks of our unfulfillment. The most coherent theory is probably a tautology (A equals A) but I'd leave this kind of theory to logicians and other people, so optimistic about a world in which they do not see any contradiction, ruled by natural laws and engineered by technicians. Those people have properly coherent theories. But their coherence is provided only by using a kind of rationality that abolishes every nuance and turn things in strong rational tautologies. But those people are bluffing. Those people are building on the body of our freedom. Never mind if they are geneticists or logicians or architects or revolutionaries. They are building up a cage for the world. Anarchoprimitivism speaks the language of our body, of flesh, of desire: may be it's worth listening to its voice. Is it only a theory that explains the origin of state and civilisation? Or can it help us to fight against the modern technocratic Leviathan? Finally what really matters is whether primitivism will move us closer to a world in which we areneither ruled nor ruling, nor is it only a new illusion, a kind of rebel's opium that will put to sleep every rebellion.