An anarchist search for the primitive actually involves multiple questions. Is civilization itself really the problem? Is its overcoming a realistic possibility? Is it to be overthrown or abandoned?
The radical anthropology that many anarchists have recently taken interest in has the merit of demonstrating that humanity has lived the great bulk of its time on earth in hunter-gatherer bands free of class hierarchy, alienated division of labor, sexual inequality, and devastating technological warfare. In light of all the failed revolutions of modern history it provides us with a glimpse of the only human communities that have ever really been what could be called anarchist or communist in a sustained and successful way. This in itself is a powerful counter to Hobbesian and other ideologues who argue that the nature of the human beast requires authoritarian controls. But drawing a politics out of this anthropology is tricky. Civilization may well have been a mistake from the start, but it could be something that we are more or less stuck with. The idea of primitivism implies, in its most radical form, a return to a golden age of hunter-gatherer society, although few if any of even the most ardent critics of civilization advocate this course. An absolutist primitivism can arrive at the conclusion that the human species itself is the problem, with a resulting misanthropic nihilism. Although I will agree that civilization has deeply alienated humanity from the rest of nature, and that today it seems to take on the aspect of a colossal prolonged train wreck, I don't believe that all of its products (e.g., books, chess, wine, to name a few of my own likes) are evil; some aspects of civilization are probably worth preserving even as its more oppressive and harmful aspects deserve dismantling. We certainly need to free ourselves from a toxic overcivilization and reconcile with nature, but I am skeptical about the feasibility and even desirability of an absolute destruction or abandonment of civilization. Before returning to these questions, I will briefly examine the origins of contemporary primitivism (if that's really what we want to call it) and its quarrel with Marxism and leftism.
Recent years have seen the emergence of a green anarchism, but it should be remembered that contemporary primitivism and its affines (deep ecology excepted) have strong roots in European ultraleft Marxism, or rather, in attempts to transcend it following the great near-revolution of 1968 in France and gathering momentum up to the present time. Jacques Camatte, formerly a member of a Bordiguist party, is one of the key figures and was an important influence on Fredy Perlman and the Fifth Estate. In the 1960s Stalinism was still very much dominant as an ideological opposition to capitalism, even in some Western countries such as France and Italy. The rejection of Marxism involved not just Stalinism and the various nationalistic ideologies (re)emerging from its decay, however, but went on to question even the less authoritarian/ideological and more critical strands of Western Marxism such as left or council communism and the Situationist International and its imitators, which had all seemingly burned out in failure or irrelevance after about 1970. The various theorists today associated with the general idea and milieu of "primitivism" went in varying directions from there, mostly toward a critical engagement with an anarchism that had begun to emerge from a long eclipse. Among them Camatte remains most indebted to Marx.
The Marxist schema of history had a place, albeit a rather small one, for prehistory in the category of "primitive communism," which would, the theory went, return on a "higher" level through the historical dialectic of class struggle. Camatte, and others such as Fredy Perlman and John Zerzan, came to the conclusion that the working class could no longer be considered the revolutionary subject, and questioned the supposed necessity of the long detour through civilization (the "wandering of humanity" or "His-story") with its various stages organized around modes of production. Marx, in contrast to just about any flavor of Marxists you can think of, had some "primitivist" tendencies of his own, which can be seen, for example, in the Ethnological Notebooks and in his early Paris writings on alienation, in which he pointed to communism as the emergence of human community, the natural man and woman whose free creativity, and not the development of economic forces of production, is the goal. At his best, Marx offered the perspective of radical subjectivity rather than faith in an objective process operating by rigid teleology and economic determinism. Unfortunately, it is the latter face of Marxism that the world has come to know all too well, and Engels as well as Marx himself have to share part of the blame for that.
Another radical thinker worth mentioning in this regard is Dwight Macdonald, also a refugee from left Marxism (in his case, Trotskyism), whose principal writings date from the 1940s and 1950s, a time when Stalinism was even more firmly entrenched, indeed at the zenith of its power. Macdonald was not a contemner of civilization as such (he was, in fact, rather fond of the ancient Greeks, who were, he noted approvingly, "technologically as primitive as they were esthetically civilized"), but his well-reasoned critique of Marxism placed it firmly in the context of the Western Enlightenment project of boundless faith in science, progress, and mastery over nature. Macdonald called for a renewal of an anarchism both individualist and communitarian, and free of the fetish of "scientific socialism" that had sprung from classical anarchist and Utopian thinkers as much as from Marx. The reemergence of anarchism since the 1960s has taken a much more critical stance toward science and technology than that of the bearded prophets of the 19th century. Insofar as Macdonald helped lay the groundwork for that reemergence, he can be considered a forerunner of "primitivism," although I get the sense that he may not have entirely approved of it in its present manifestations.
Whatever good there is that people associate with civilization (e.g., cultural, spiritual, or ethical achievements) usually has to do with something other than just making money, which is the alpha and omega of this society. The civilization of Capital-to the extent that it has a civilization of its own, apart from the market- and technology-driven mass culture-is a parasitic patina overlying the culture of previous forms of society, which it continually decomposes, recomposes, and packages as an immense collection of commodities to be sold and consumed. Camatte has described the present society in bleak terms as a "material community of capital" in which the social classes of the classic Marxian polarity, bourgeoisie and proletariat alike, have been suppressed or superseded in a generalized human slavery to wage labor and the commodity, and in which life itself increasingly takes on the cast of "virtual reality." In this society, by analogy with the "Asiatic mode of production," there may be revolts, but there is no exit through a dialectic of history.
But if the proletariat (whether defined, classically, as those without ownership of means of production, or more broadly, by Castoriadis and the Situationists, as those without power or control over their own lives) will not serve as revolutionary subject and force of negation in modern society, then who or what will? The antiwar, green, feminist, gay, and civil-rights "new social movements" (no longer very new at this point) coming out of the 1960s had their own understandable reasons for rejecting Marxism and the old workers' movement, but these movements have tended to become thoroughly integrated into capitalist society through postmodern academe and liberal or social democratic party politics. A deep ecology perspective might see little need for a human subject to effect revolutionary change, but most anarchists, including the "primitivists" among them, do have a vision of social revolution. Although the society of capital seems remarkably resilient, there is (or was, at least, until very recently) at least some cause for optimism. Resistance to all the various ideological, technological, and institutional supports of this society continues and seemed to be increasing dramatically, although what will now happen in the current drive to war is a big question mark.
The theory of the proletariat enunciated in the 19th century has lost its credibility but retains a half-life that continues to resonate. Bob Black, who is not a primitivist per se but shares many elements of a primitivist critique of technological society, put it this way: "The (sur)rational kernel of truth in the mystical Marxist shell is this: the 'working class' is the legendary 'revolutionary agent': but only if, by not working, it abolishes class." Zerowork takes the refusal or withdrawal of labor as the starting point of any effort to change or escape this world, only it rejects leftist efforts to organize such refusal through parties and unions. It is necessarily ambivalent (agnostic?) on the question of civilization and technology. In looking at ways to free humanity from work, there are different directions in which to turn. Paul La Fargue argued for automation under worker control, as did the Situationists. In this scenario technology can be seen as a potential help and not necessarily as an unmitigated force of oppression. The potential downside is that it entails a continued dependency on technology. Then there is the example of the hunter-gatherer peoples, who work hardly at all and don't use or need automation because nature makes available to them everything they need. Given that re-creating such lifeways in their original Paleolithic forms is nigh impossible, however, this example has practical limits as a model for transforming our own lives.
In considering the importance (or not) of the working class it is well to observe that most people in the world are not (post)industrial workers, but peasants. The relationship to the land is most important, and the categories of discourse associated with Marx and other 19th-century radicals are still relevant, especially the emphasis on capitalism's origins as an agricultural revolution. Camatte, who advocates movements based on community rather than class, has written much on this subject. The concept of community is frustratingly vague when applied to contemporary Western societies, but is easier to see in relation to that greater part of the world where capital has still not completely penetrated the traditional societies, and social formations whose roots predate capitalism are still the norm. In his essay on the Russian Revolution, Camatte emphasized the populist, peasant-based dimension rather than the class-struggle dialectic of bourgeoisie vs. proletariat. He made the case that the workers' councils were in a sense extensions of the peasant commune, because many of the insurrectionary workers in the rapidly industrializing Russia of that time were recent migrants from the countryside, where communal social forms prevailed. Today, in non-Western societies, urbanization and industrialization continue to grow and capital makes further inroads through the same means by which it became established in the West: enclosures and the uprooting of people from their means of subsistence on the land. But there is still at least a trace of communitarian dimension in workers' lives. People in many parts of Africa and Asia, for example, who have become workers in cities still have family, food, and other resources in their native villages in the countryside. These regions are poor in relation to North America, Western Europe, and Japan, but in the event of far-reaching industrial collapse it is conceivable they might actually fare better based on this surviving relationship to the land.
If peasant-based socialism were to take hold on a large scale, many areas of the world could be pulled out of the global market. But as long as capital remains securely in power in its metropolitan stongholds, this scenario probably won't work. Indeed, it can be said to have been tried already. Third-World Stalinism was already this attempt in many regions where, in part because of colonialism, a native bourgeoisie never really developed. Peasants have served as the foot soldiers for many revolutions, but these have all been projects of state-run capital overseen by Marxist and nationalist petty-bourgeois bureaucrats. As the 1917 revolution in Russia remained isolated and fought the White Terror with Red Terror, the Bolshevik party-state presided over the imposition of industrial society in that country. This became a pattern repeated several times disastrously throughout the 20th century as many poor nations attempted to follow the totalitarian model of Soviet or Chinese Stalinism. The world is still reeling from this process, although it now seems to have run its course.
A peasant communalism free of statist bureaucatic mediation would be worthy of support for the obstacle it could pose to the spread of capital's real domination to every corner of the world and all facets of life. It would still, of course, be based on agriculture, so it would not really be an alternative to civilization as such. In Zerzan's view agriculture is "the indispensable basis of civilization," and "liberation is impossible without its dissolution." In the most developed capitalist nations, cities are home to the majority of the population, the separation of people from the land is nearly total, and agriculture is carried out as an intensely industrialized process. But practically no one, including Zerzan, imagines that either cities or agriculture could be abandoned overnight. A transition there would certainly have to be, and it would probably be a prolonged process undertaken, if history is any indicator, in the teeth of determined counterrevolutionary efforts aimed at the restoration of the old social order (unless the present ruling elites simply throw in the towel peacefully a seemingly unlikely but not impossible scenario). Would we then be anticipating a withering away of agriculture, to replace the Marxists' "withering away of the state"? The abolition of work is a more flexible idea and is probably more likely to catch on with the plebeian multitudes than calls to abolish civilization and technology. But there is a certain utopian maximalism in this as well. These ideas might serve better as stars to navigate by, while we sail on Fourier's seas of lemonade, seeking our Northwest passage, than as actual destinations. Work can be radically minimized; it is doubtful that it can ever be entirely eliminated. As long as we're not actually living as gatherers and hunters, some production must take place. Surely there has to be a way to accomplish it without domination and coercion of our fellow human beings, or insult to the rest of nature. The "small is beautiful" idea is appealing. "Appropriate" technologies, city gardens (horticulture), and, wherever possible, the revival of artisanal rather than industrial production are possibilities. The sheer size of the earth's human population, however, might make these solutions difficult to implement under all circumstances. Even if industrial society were cut down to size right now, the regeneration of nature could take a considerable time. In the event of another devastating world war-at this moment, alas, not just possible, but likely-resulting in the destruction of much of humansociety, the survivors may indeed be compelled to live as primitivists.
Taken from issue 52 of Anarchy AJDA