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Alphazero wrote

Reply to comment by OdiousOutlaw in Update on the anarchist publication I was trying to submit my anti-work essay to by ziq

The essay can be published, it is ready, in both English and Greek. We just cockfighting over the distant past of humanity. It’s all about the writer’s ego, well respected ofcourse.

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

I'm a little confused, the changes I made to the essay remove the reference to human cultures of the past, so what exactly is the problem? Just publish the new version I wrote for you rather than stripping away paragraphs that provide vital narrative continuity -

https://raddle.me/wiki/anti-work

Anthropologists who study some of the few remaining gatherer-hunter bands of people in various parts of the world today have frequently noted how, unlike authority-based tribes in neighboring lands, the anarchistic, non-hierarchical bands of people such as the Hadza in Eastern Africa emphasize acts of play rather than work. (Read my "Eradicate Left Unity: Make Bands, Not Communities. Anarchy, Not Leftism" essay for more about this.)

is this in any way advocacy for what you consider primitivism? am I saying we should return to the stone age? I'm simply making reference to specific indigenous people in a region of Eastern Africa

if you've replied to my email since my last response, I haven't seen it because that whole conversation was giving me anxiety (so i stopped checking my email). last I heard, you wouldn't publish it unless I removed all reference to gatherer hunters, including modern ones

edit: and like i said, you can remove the parenthesis referencing graeber that you objected to, it's not important to the essay

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

I stand corrected on that point, at least.

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Alphazero wrote

i am not trying to convince you to change how you feel about civilisation, i am just saying that in order to pursue anarchy we do not need to believe that in the past we were great and that civilisation just came and screwed things up, this belief does not offer much, if it doesn't cause confusion

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

The argument isn't that we were great, it's that we had no ability to rule or destroy the world because everything we did was isolated and thus had a minimal impact. Furthermore, we actively preserved the ecosystem and helped spread beneficial-plant food forests because we weren't insulated from the effects of the natural world's destruction as we are currently (due to the work system), and depended on its continued balance for survival. Instead of working to exchange our labor for food as we do now, we just took food directly from the land without needing to work. There's an immediate cause and effect - so when your survival depends on the health of a forest vs the success of the paper mill you work at, you're going to preserve the forest at all costs otherwise you'll starve, while the paper mill worker will sacrifice the forest for a short term meal ticket, not caring that the next generation will starve when the paper mill runs out of trees to process (due to their alienation from the ecosystem and perceiving themselves as seperate from it; civilized).

Civilization gives us the authority to casually impact the world in ways that will be felt by every lifeform on the planet for millennia. Every bottle of water coming off the assembly line is contributing to global ecocide, mass extinction, desertification, and forcing mass migration. Civilization is able to cause all this disaster because it's completely pervasive and alienating. There's no way to get away from it or its effects.

The anti-civ argument is that replacing capitalism with communism won't do enough to change this. The root of all authority is civilization, not simply who controls the means of production.

Without civilization, the harm any individual or group can do, the authority they can wield, is limited to their immediate surroundings. With civilization, the harm is amplified across the entire planet, and nearly everyone becomes guilty of doing harm because there's simply no way for them to opt out of civilization. Every meal a city or farm dweller eats is participating in destroying the ecosystem rather than renewing it.

So arguments that posit "there were some bad people around before civilization so anticiv = bad" completely misunderstand the nature of civilizational hierarchy. It isn't isolated, it's expansive and forces everything everywhere to wither up and die.

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