Submitted by ziq in Anarchism

Previous correspondence here.

Hi Ziq

I hope this finds you well.

Following discussion with Void Network we would like to ask your permission to publish your article, removing the references to anthropological science, for both the English and the Greek version.

We have decided that using historic / scientific back up for the anti-work argument does not serve it well, it may cause confusion to some readers and in general we do not believe that it will serve the movement at the current time, whereas the rest of the article stands alone very well and can be a very helpful reading piece to support the anti-work cause.

Please let us know if you agree with our approach as we would like to publish both English and Greek versions shortly.

Best wishes [Name Redacted]


No thank you.

I took the time to rewrite the essay to address all your concerns and clarify the points I was making, got no response from you after doing so, and now you've moved the goal posts to justify censoring a big chunk of it; even though the final edit goes to great pains to set straight the false assumptions you were making about it.

If I'm not allowed to contradict or disagree with a dead American academic in my writing because it breaks with whatever ideological dogma you've absorbed, then thank you for your consideration but I'll no longer be submitting to your publication. It's clearly not a good fit.

But on a more uplifting note, I added a link to Void on raddle.me/f/anarchism (in the sidebar) and look forward to reading your future articles.

-ziq

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

probably shouldn't have been so snarky but i've had enough of people building hierarchies to diminish everything i write because of the anticiv elements

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ChaosAnarchy wrote

in general we do not believe that it will serve the movement at the current time,

This sounds like straight leninism "serving the cause"

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

that's what made me stop wanting to be polite

trying to gatekeep anarchy as a top-down 'movement' governed by a council of publishers

same bullshit as AK Press pulls

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ziq OP wrote

I don't understand why they would even want to change something that's already on theanlibrary. It wouldn't be a good look for them if the version on their site is censored.

Now I need to figure out if I should revert back to the original version of the essay or keep the edits they prompted me to make. Theanarchistlibrary has the original version while raddle has the edited one.

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

We have decided that using historic / scientific back up for the anti-work argument does not serve it well, it may cause confusion to some readers

Why are they insulting the intelligence of their readerbase like that?

Vanguardism is for Marxists.

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Hey ziq I'll publish ur essay. All u have to do is first delete ur essay then write a 10000 page essay about how great I am. And if it's not anything other than glowing I will edit it out. I will pay u in exposure. /j

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loukanikos wrote

Maybe I'm being too even handed about this but it feels clear to me there is no "right answer" on this issue so it seems really disingenuous to censure you under the implication that there is.

Kudos for standing your ground. These days a lot of left politics feels opportunistic; in this moment, I think we definitely need the kind of resolve you demonstrated here.

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Alphazero wrote

Sorry for all the trouble. Void Network is an anarchocommunist group, followers of Kropotkin and Malatesta theory. We don't believe anarcho primitivism can be a proposition for the antiwork movement in our era. For us antiwork thesis don't lead back to the jungles, we want free people in the cities living with mutual aid and social care, we promote the emancipatory use of anarchist sciences and social aware technologies, we love overpopulation and we want humanity to be capable to feed us all for free, humanity,... not the "nature". All the recent research about paleontology proves that the anarchoprimitivist narration is imaginary and irrelevant to the real situations of human societies. There are existing egalitarian tribes, there are existing hierarchical tribes but we are not living in tribes, we are living in cities of millions and millions of people. To lead us back to the jungle, to destroy the cities, to destroy agriculture- will cause millions and millions of dead people, starvation and sickness- this can not be our proposition for the future generation as anarchists. Anarcho Primitivism helped us to see nature and our lives in different perspectives when it appeared in the late 80s, we even invited Zerzan to Greece and organized his talks in Athens. It was a movement that rejuvenated ecology and defended wild nature in an organised way in our era. But, for us it can not be an ideal example for the organization of the future societies. Of course an anarchist society must protect nature and the people can decide to live as hunter gatherers if they like- as long as they know how to protect the wild animals and not extinct them to feed themselves. But for sure we don't accept any kind of ideology that wants to force all humanity back to an imaginary 20.000 before christ era. For that reason we believe that the "small societies" anarchoprimitivist paradigms you give to your text are irrelevant to our lives, irrelevant to the antiwork movement, and unfortunately destroy a good and useful article. Thank you for you contact, I hope you understand that this world go round also with the help of mutual criticism and we hope you will feel benefited from our comments and not angry...

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subrosa wrote

we don't accept any kind of ideology that wants to force all humanity back to an imaginary 20.000 before christ era

that's not mutual criticism, that's dogma and reaction based on your unsympathetic reading of anti-civilizational perspectives

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kin wrote

Why framing the author as primitivist?

I understand their critique as coming from an Anarchist position (Black flag anarchism). Using some post-left and Anticiv arguments bit essentially an Anarchist position.

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kin wrote

Your comment was made in bad faith why not admit this plain and simple.

Misrepresenting Anticiv is this fallacious way is just dishonest if you really want to engage in some critique. I am sad bc I struggle with folks of your kind in daily life.

In your paradise we would still be the anarchist outcast

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Alphazero wrote

because in his article he claimed that once upon a time foragers and hunters all they knew about was playing and joy (how can we know what was happening 20000 years ago??), hence.... we must abolish work (!)

this is not political analysis, this is dogma based on irrelevant assumptions about the past

primitivism and anti-civ are not far from each other to my personal opinion

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kin wrote

Ok, but if we are gonna try to debate each other (not us in particular but "your" anarchism and "my anarchism") let's start with hood faith and honesty.

It's not about glorifying neolithic tribes is about a how the entire work ethos is derived on producing a surplus for accumulation and evolved from a series of Empires colonizing different people. It's is a process that come back from at least the modern age.

(how can we know what was happening 20000 years ago??

This is an obvious rhetorical question. But if you are really interested there are great academic sources (you probably value more an academic sources than my personal belief). Check Pierre Clastres for example.

You say that in your opinion primitivism and Anticiv is not far from each other, maybe you are right. But imo you are not far from platformists and they are not far from Tankies, so are you a Tankie disguised as social Anarchist? I hardly think so.. we need to avoid prejudice because of this weird equivalences.

And don't get me wrong I probably have more social Anarchist friends in my real life than anticiv ones, the the anticivs usually don't make a good image for the movement bc they espouse some questionable talking points and beliefs. But this doesn't change that social Anarchists many times don't want to tackle whiteness, decolonization, and other dear themes to anticiv theory.

Not sure my point, but I don't want you starting a fight here just bc ziq posted your convo here, it was another user that said it was you Void network. And we still indicates the Void Network site in our sidebar bc we still have all kinds of anarchists and non-anarchists here

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kin wrote

There's an abyss separating their perception of how things should be to say in a more "blandish" way.

If you expect to bring technology to our side you will be betrayed at some point, that's why solarpunk is failing to get. The average Anarchosyndicalist will say that a mass revolution followed by grassroots direct democracy is the remedy. Anarchism got so political that it's forgot any meaningful philosophical base.

We still are on some Anarchist Dark Age, anarchists don't know many key texts from decades ago that could help us untangle this fabricated debate.

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Alphazero wrote (edited )

since this discussion is about another discussion that i had with Ziq, but still around the topic of anti-work and anti-civ, i will just copy here some points that i made in my discussion with ziq on his essay, hoping to help you understand my viewpoint (i hope ziq will not mind, seeing that he started the thread on this same discussion with the group)

ziq, feel free to come in the discussion with your points, will only copy here my comments from our past discussion

happy reading


We are not sure if we agree to provide any sort of scientific anthropological narrative of the sort that would make a point that 'anarchy and play VS leftist workerist, because that is how it used to be in the decent past'? The point here being, what if in some pre-historical places / times / instances hunter-gatherers were actually and unfortunately living as authoritarian slave-keeping hard working idiots? Would this fact then be removing any 'validity' from your argument, that work must be abolished? We think not, because we want all societies to be free to experiment freely through play and choose their own way of organising and living, regardless if (and not just because) this was the way it used to be in the 'origins' or in the 'true nature' of the human race (we don't know much about prehistory anyway and who cares about our 'true nature'?). Note that if we removed all reference to hunters-gatherers then your essay would still read just fine to our opinion, making a concise and clear political case against work, with references to Bob Black, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Wolfi Landstreicher, Henry Miller etc.

You write the following: 'The point of anti-work, stripped of all the garbage leftist and Marxist ideology that’s been rapidly consuming it (I blame Graeber for kickstarting this process), is to treasure your fleeting existence and spend it doing things you want to do.' Can you please clarify if you blame Graeber for kick starting the process of consuming the anti-work point with garbage leftist and marxist ideology? Again, we are not sure if this point is well supported anywhere else in the essay and, as with the previous comment, we think that if we removed this parenthesis then your essay would still read just fine.


Thank you for the links, personally I find your perspective interesting and I respect it. I have just a couple of disagreements with the way you put your arguments forward as i feel that we, the anarchists, are losing ground sometimes by sticking to what to my opinion are ill informed ideas - here is an example of what i mean from your essay:

'For millennia, play was all humans knew' - this is not a correct statement, how can we know what was all that we knew? recent evidence suggest that we also new work and slavery back then, even money. Work and oppression did not arrive with agriculture and / or civilization, those came much much later actually...

'Gatherer-hunters had no need of work because everything they needed to prosper was free for the taking' - modern people also do not need work but we still do it. We are trying to understand why.

'It wasn’t until we started burning down our ancient food forests to form permanent settlements, cultivate crops and extract non-renewable resources from the land that work displaced play as the driving force in human society.' - Yes but why did we start doing that in the first place? it seems that you are using the fact to justify it by itself, instead of looking for a reason.

'If other cultures embraced the constructive play that gatherer-hunters use, the protestant work ethic would soon lose its death-grip on public consciousness.' - this suggests that all gatherer-hunters have this strategy of play, like this is inherent characteristic of their means of production

Your 'friend' Graeber had recently revealed the wrong conceptions that we have about the egalitarian foragers in his last book, he preempted the main points here:

https://www.eurozine.com/change-course-human-history/


(responding to ziq if there is evidence that money predated the alleged agricultural revolution...)

Evidence is plenty and has been for decades, Graeber merely collected it and presents it in the book with plenty of references, to make the point that, the story of the allegedly agricultural Revolution that kick started civilisation is a lie, it was made up in the enlightenment period in the religious image of a Fall from Grace, to suppress the sensation that was spread in western society, when the native Americans made publically lots of critique to our way of life and the civilisation that we all anarchists want to dismantle, more or less like you want


In any case, we do not need any evidence or Graeber or our ancestors or any enlightened forager of the present or the past, to prove to us what we know already: that anarchy and the revolution is the only way to overthrow this world and to build a new one

However civilisation started and regardless of how and when,

in the present we want to change everything, and we do not need this backed up by any anthropology or history science!

The book is interesting read that will shock you and you do not need it, it’s just really really interesting stuff to read about what was really going on in prehistory (believe me, we don’t have a clue!)

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Alphazero wrote (edited )

It's because void network are not publishers, they are a political group who form collective stance about things. They felt awkward to reduce your article themselves too and they asked (obv.) and then did not publish (obv.) Can't see really what your comment is. They do not care about 'looking bad' neither. Your article is shooting itself to the foot by using the noble savage as argument for anti-work, that's all.

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subrosa wrote (edited )

Might as well ask about the ways they interconnect and resemble.

Critiques of and opposition to civilization go back to figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Fourier. Neither of which we can claim for anarchism, but these are perhaps the main influences for the conversations and social environments in which socialism and anarchism first appear. Long before anti-capitalism and anti-statism got on stage. Imagery and dreams of abandoning civilization (e.g. in the header image of French individualist periodical l'en-dehors, in the transcendentalist movement with Henry David Thoreau's Walden, anarchist naturism, etc.) appear in all corners of the anarchist tradition — if untainted by a Marxist class-struggle influence.

According to Ellul:

As late as 1848, one of the demands of the workers was the suppression of machinery. This is easily understood. The standard of living had not risen, men still suffered from the loss of equilibrium in their lives brought about by a too rapid injection of technique, and they had not yet felt the intoxication of the results. The peasants and the workers bore all the hardships of technical advance without sharing in the triumphs. For this reason, there was a reaction against technique, and society was split. The power of the state, the money of the bourgeoisie were for it; the masses were against.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the situation changed. Karl Marx rehabilitated technique in the eyes of the workers. He preached that technique can be liberating. Those who exploited it enslaved the workers, but that was the fault of the masters and not of technique itself. Marx was perhaps not the first to have said this, but he was the first to convince the masses of it. The working class would not be liberated by a struggle against technique but, on the contrary, by technical progress itself, which would automatically bring about the collapse of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism.

(I'd hope by now we're done waiting for technological progress to bring about a post-capitalist utopia!)

Primitivism — influenced by anthropological studies and reconsiderations (Marshall Sahlins kickstarting a debate with his 1972' Stone Age Economics) and radicals like Fredy Perlman — emerged in the late 1980s, picking up where other anti-civilizational critiques and tendencies left off.

Anti-civ today is again and still a broad critique and opposition to civilization, in which primitivism among many other tendencies offer tools for analysis and study.

It's worth mentioning that figures like Bob Black, Layla AbdelRahim, Hakim Bey, found uses for the study of the "original affluent society" without proposing "going back 20,000 years". Bob Black — arguably the main popularizer of anti-work critiques — draws from Fourier, Morris, Sahlins, and others critical of civilization, while denouncing syndicalists and communists, old and new. Ziq's essay is surprisingly 'traditional' in that regard. Your inquiry is an attempt to clean it up for communist purposes.

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Alphazero wrote

thanks for your guidance - as for my the reason of my inquiry you could not be further from the truth

i can still see no reason to stick to the myth of the noble savage to justify anti-work, the latter is in the core of anarchism (at least of the non-lefty one?) while the myth of the noble savage is... well... a myth! do we need to believe in the myth? are we supernatural religious people after all?

btw the communists are among the firsts to support the spectre of our noble past, amongst others such as... the supporters of capitalism and the state

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

do we need to believe in the myth? are we supernatural religious people after all?

You believe antiwork is somehow compatible with some utopian vision of vastly populated cities with a well-fed population that is completely absent of law (thus policing and social stratification) while somehow also being able to "protect nature" and avert climate disaster.

Unprecedented societal structures that only exist in the minds of optimists are in of themselves mythical.

btw the communists are among the firsts to support the spectre of our noble past, amongst others such as... the supporters of capitalism and the state

Wouldn't be the first time these groups agreed about something; was this supposed to strengthen your argument?

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Alphazero wrote

I do believe all that because I’m an anarchist, my point in this thread being that large egalitarian social structures are far from unprecedented, this being a scientific fact. And, that I do not care if they weren’t. Being an anarchist is truly believing in the principle that we can and we will leave all together in peace with nature. Regardless of what you or the other side believes.

About communists agreeing with the rest is a point against someone claiming that what i say here is clearing the ground for communism, see previous comments.

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lettuceLeafer wrote

Being an anarchist is truly believing in the principle that we can and we will leave all together in peace with nature.

I disagree. I'm an anarchist bc I can't stand people and I like to struggle n fight against people.

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OdiousOutlaw wrote (edited )

large egalitarian social structures are far from unprecedented, this being a scientific fact

And yet...they aren't around anymore; the anti-civ critique of large-scale industrial society is more comparable to present societies than what you believe will come.

And, that I do not care if they weren’t.

That's called "faith", and it's the realm of the "supernatural religious" people that you're attempting to disassociate with and tack on to primitivists.

I do believe all that because I’m an anarchist, my point in this thread being that large egalitarian social structures are far from unprecedented, this being a scientific fact. And, that I do not care if they weren’t.

Being an anarchist is truly believing in the principle that we can and we will leave all together in peace with nature. Regardless of what you or the other side believes.

Blind faith and wishful thinking don't sway me, nor do I define anarchists as having these qualities.

You don't have to prove that " large egalitarian social structures" existed, nor do you have to disprove that civilization and surplus resources lead to hierarchy; but if you're going to try to convince anyone here that civilization can be used for the benefit of anarchism, you should make a better case for it than "facts be damned, this is what I believe in". If you can't do that, then you're wasting everyone's time; if you can, then do it; you made the claim, prove it.

Tell me how industrial civilization can produce unlimited resources for several billion people without impeding on their autonomy while avoiding mass extinction of multiple species and environmental devastation while also making sure no one has to work while also making sure that the means of inventing, manufacturing, using, and distributing technology doesn't rely on the coercion and exploitation of the global south and its people while also uniting several billion individuals to unite under this shared banner.

Don't send me some text someone else wrote either, you were sure enough of yourself to come here and argue, use your own words.

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Alphazero wrote

Dodging your challenges on personal level, let’s go straight to the point.

The fact that they aren’t around today, does it mean that they cannot come again? Really?

Believing as in viewing not as in religiously anticipating (really??)

I cannot see where we are disagreeing, I am merely pointing that we do not need to believe that we once fell from grace, nor we need any facts from science, like the essay in question used,, to promote the idea (anarchism) that favours our selves as individuals and as class subjects.

Why should I spend hours trying to describe something that comrades have so beautifully painted the picture of? I just posted an article from Peter which I really like. I don’t see any shame in using other peoples beautiful images.

Just to remind you what my point is here. The essay is excellent, if only we remove those paragraphs about primitivism. We don’t have to. It’s just my view. You know, as in, discussing stuff

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OdiousOutlaw wrote

Dodging your challenges on personal level, let’s go straight to the point.

"Dodging" is an apt term for what you're doing.

The fact that they aren’t around today, does it mean that they cannot come again? Really?

Burden of proof is on you to prove that it can, with all of the problems of the here and now; I'm not really willing to base my worldview on what "could" happen, especially when there are practical, reality-based factors that you're willfully ignoring, such as "how exactly do we get from the here to anarchotopia?"; you know, the action-based part that we actually care about.

Believing as in viewing not as in religiously anticipating (really??)

I've yet to see you prove your beliefs; which would be exceedingly easy to do if they had basis in reality.

I cannot see where we are disagreeing, I am merely pointing that we do not need to believe that we once fell from grace, nor we need any facts from science, like the essay in question used,, to promote the idea (anarchism) that favours our selves as individuals and as class subjects.

Anarchists don't because they're already anarchist; anarchists also don't make up a majority of any group. If your goal as an anarchocommunist is to bring about anarchocommunism, then you need numbers; which you don't exactly get without convincing arguments. I'm no anarchocommunist, what exactly can you do to sway me, or anyone else on this forum, to a neutral or even positive position on civilization?

Why should I spend hours trying to describe something that comrades have so beautifully painted the picture of?

I don't care if you do or don't. I already knew you couldn't.

The essay is excellent, if only we remove those paragraphs about primitivism. We don’t have to.

That's a blatant lie, considering the fact they wouldn't publish the essay without them.

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Alphazero wrote

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 )

political group who form collective stance about things

you're basically describing a communist party's central committee.

anarchists don't form collective stances on things, we're individuals with different opinions, not a politburo vanguard sitting in presidential palaces issuing decrees to the unwashed masses

the noble savage as argument for anti-work

the so-called 'noble savage fallacy' is an attack against anyone who believes humans are intrinsically good, which would include ancoms:

A noble savage is a literary stock character who symbolizes humanity's innate goodness

everything ancoms hold dear depends on the idea that humans want to do good; co-operate, do mutual aid, aid those unable to aid themselves, take actions that benefit everyone, put the good of the community before the self

capitalists are disgusted by the concept of the noble savage because they believe humans are naturally greedy and act out of self-interest, and that we should all be forced to compete with each other so the strongest individuals can rule supreme

blackflag anarchists (like me) typically hold that we ought to act in the interest of the greater good due to the reality that the greater good benefits the individual. what's good for me is good for you. we don't generally believe we're all innately good, just that our desires are benefited by mutuality

the concept of people being uncorrupted by oppressive structures (capitalism, statism, etc) until those structures are imposed on them is heavily integrated into communist theory. if it's a fallacy, it's not a fallacy created by anticivs.

furthermore, acknowledging that many indigenous people who live off the land structure their cultures around mutual aid and other anarchist principles isn't an attempt to glorify 'savages' (indigenous people) as you suggest, it's merely having respect for indigenous cultures and what they have to impart to us about the human condition, the climate crisis and the way we interact with our ecosystem and by extension, with each other.

it's not a fallacy to point out that gatherer-hunters don't destroy their ecosystems the way civilized people do, simply because it would go against every interest and desire they have to destroy that which they depend on for survival. the same goes for the play point I made. Play is important in gatherer-hunter cultures because it sidelines dominance and other oppressive actions and encourages the people in the group to be non-aggressive towards each other - incredibly important for their continued survival because their survival absolutely depends on mutual co-operation and friendship - something that sadly isn't the case in civilization, where competition is the norm rather than mutual co-operation

being repulsed by the idea that indigenous cultures can have anything to teach you, rejecting any suggestion that indigenous cultures can be enlightening to a city-dweller because their way of life is different from your own, and refusing to consider that information imparted directly by indigenous sources like the Hadza can be beneficial to anarchy and indeed, to our very survival, has some unfortunate implications to say the 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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Alphazero wrote

a communist party is not a group of individuals who move on by discussing things and agreeing using principle of consensus... if you are referring to the fact that they did non want to publish something on their website, well, it's their site, not pretending to represent all of us

the rest that you say about capitalists and various forms of anarchists i generally agree with, cannot see why you making these points... you must be misinterpreting me

my disagreement is with basing an anti-work ethic to an alleged golden past of primitive innocence, either Rousseau's noble savage (lefties) or Hobbes' Leviathan (right wings)

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

my disagreement is with basing an anti-work ethic to an alleged golden past of primitive innocence, either Rousseau's noble savage (lefties) or Hobbes' Leviathan (right wings)

there was no such thing as work before civilization because gatherer-hunters used play instead of work

there is no work in numerous gather-hunter cultures that persist all over the planet today because they utilize play instead of work

there's no false statement in either of these sentences, and it shouldn't be such a controversial take considering the large numbers of anthropologists who lived and continue to live with gatherer-hunters all over the world who have documented it over and over again and written vast troves of text describing it in intricate detail

anti-work is anti-civ and anti-civ is anti-work because in the vast majority of cases, people who live apart from civilization don't utilize work in their cultures.

graeber attempted to dismiss this simple reality by confusing people who subsist on farmed food with gatherer-hunters for some reason: https://raddle.me/f/Anarchism/143440/-/comment/249245

a communist party is not a group of individuals who move on by discussing things and agreeing using principle of consensus..

forcing your insular ideological beliefs on others (e.g. me) isn't "discussing things and agreeing using principles of consensus", friend. you presented me with an ultimatum: to censor myself and agree to adhere to your personal ideological convictions if I want to participate in your project.

It would be like me editing all your comments on raddle every time you praise city culture because it offends me. You wanted to strip out the spine of my argument - the thing that demonstrates why play can be the solution to work. And you wanted to do it because I mentioned how gatherer-hunters utilize play to make my point. that's an incredibly ego-driven response, to be so opposed to me speaking positively about cultures that you see as idk - barbaric?

Just IMO.

btw i edited my previous comment a few times to better get my thoughts across, including once after you replied

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Alphazero wrote (edited )

The fact that you see a demarcation line before and after civilisation, equating before and after work, is the mistake in my opinion. There is no such line. Unfortunately some people were working at occasions since forever, while others were not. All you arguments follow this demarcation line which not based on facts and is merely religious obsession. This is the point in Graeber’s book too. Having spoken with people studying anthropology, the absence of this line (the allegedly agricultural Revolution) is known for decades, it’s just that only a handful among academics on the subject are anarchists to see the implications. For the rest, refer to my previous comments to avoid repetition (about the ultimatum). Lots of ego in the end of a day from your side mate, relax. The Revolution does not depend on our discussion. You wrote a very nice article which in my opinion has a weird mistake, I get it now, you believe in primitivism, that’s fine. Good for you

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

I don't think Graeber demonstrated it at all, in fact he willfully ignored the troves upon troves of evidence to the contrary, including the staggering quantity of new evidence from anthropologists living with today's gatherer-hunters, as several anthropologists and anarchists who have critiqued the book have explained.

And his examples that purported to expose gatherer-hunter cultures as oppressive were incredibly flawed to the point where his prime example was a culture that enslaved people and forced them to grow food for them. That's not a gatherer-hunter culture, it's a royal family that goes fox hunting while their slaves grow their food. His other examples were essentially fish farmers who exclusively controlled the fisheries and stockpiled the fish to build hierarchy and rule over others. Their diets were almost completely made up of dried fish. These aren't gatherer-hunters, these are examples of early civilization. They were land-owning lords.

Dismissing me as a 'primitivist' for recognizing the tradition of play vs work in gatherer hunter culltures is a strong reaction. I don't desire a return to the primitive, I only desire to understand the reasons we've gotten to the desperate position we're in, to pinpoint the decisions we made that led us here, and find ways to approach the unprecedented in natural history ecological disaster that has taken hold of the entire world.

Peace and love.

3

Alphazero wrote

I am really sorry but it seems that you are really bringing it to yourself. Far from me to elevate a single book to the level of a bible, you really seem to have not read the same book.

He did not ignore any evidence, instead he has offered a massive amount of info with references for foragers of both egalitarian and slave-working ones, exactly to make the point that they both existed for millennia.

You are right to question to definition of what forager is, using the info in the book that is presented to make the exact same point with you! that the history that we learned in school about pre-civ foragers is bollocks.

I am not dismissing you i am directly giving you my honest comments as people do in public discussions. I feel secure in doing so that i will not harm you in any way and i see you as comrade in our common struggle to dismantle this society and build a new one.

In the end it's not about understanding or learning anything new at all really, it's about clearing the grounds from all the parasites and preparing the soil to plant the seeds, parabolically. It's a trap to look for revelations in the past, there is nothing there but pain together with hope, the same as today.

keep fighting and stay strong

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Alphazero wrote

if this is a comment or disagreement to any of my points, i fail to see it - i agree that anarchy is beyond politics - I just disagree here that we need to burn all cities and go back to the forest - this will not bring anarchy

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ziq OP wrote

Tell me how industrial civilization can produce unlimited resources for several billion people without impeding on their autonomy while avoiding mass extinction of multiple species and environmental devastation while also making sure no one has to work while also making sure that the means of inventing, manufacturing, using, and distributing technology doesn't rely on the coercion and exploitation of the global south and its people while also uniting several billion individuals to unite under this shared banner.

making this my email signature

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ziq OP wrote (edited )

anticivs don't believe there is any way to turn back the clock or put the genie back in the bottle

anticiv is a critique, not a program

the mistake ancoms make is assuming anticivs, like them, aim to restructure society in their own image

but anticiv isn't an ideology or further adventures in world-building, it's simply people trying to understand the leviathan that rules us

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ziq OP wrote

ideology that wants to force all humanity back to an imaginary 20.000 before christ era

That's really not what anprims believe.

Anarcho-primitivism is a shorthand term for a radical current that critiques the totality of civilization from an anarchist perspective, and seeks to initiate a comprehensive transformation of human life. [...]

Individuals associated with this current do not wish to be adherents of an ideology, merely people who seek to become free individuals in free communities in harmony with one another and with the biosphere, and may therefore refuse to be limited by the term ‘anarcho-primitivist’ or any other ideological tagging. At best, then, anarcho-primitivism is a convenient label used to characterise diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations — e.g., structures of control, coercion, domination, and exploitation — and the creation of a form of community that excludes all such relations. [...]

Politics, ‘the art and science of government,’ is not part of the primitivist project; only a politics of desire, pleasure, mutuality and radical freedom.

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/john-moore-a-primitivist-primer

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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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lettuceLeafer wrote

Which is funny for many reasons bc both somalia and Somaliland have governments. It's just typical people from developed countries acting like an authority on African countries they know nothing about.

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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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ziq OP wrote

And like 'noble savage', it's a shallow and empty attack rooted in colonialist racism and the myth that life without authority is something to be feared and derided.

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