Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

Nuktuk wrote (edited )

Don't tell me what to do.

As I understand it, anarcho primitivism isn't something you go. It is a critique of civilisation focused on its origins, usually the point agriculture was developed.

You can check out f/anarcho_primitivism for some resources other raddle users have found useful, or search the anarchist library using an anprim tag.

On the off chance you are being sincere, I would recommend you avoid demanding strangers explain something to you, and I would also recommend avoiding the word primmie as it tends to be used not in cases where people are looking for an actual discussion.

6

newtor OP wrote

Be a primmie.

−3

ziq wrote

Don't give people bad advice, they might hurt themselves without civilization's warm embrace.

1

celebratedrecluse wrote

civilization, especially industrial civilization, has had a historically visible effect on health. You can see that with the massive plastic pollution, radioactive leakage, chemical contaminants, and other externalized results of industrial activity. Even in the transition to agriculture, human populations lost about a foot in height (from 6 ft to a little over 5 foot) during the neolithic revolution-- at least, those populations who adopted agriculture did. Right now, industrial civilization has seen improvements in health largely due to antibiotics, which are losing effectiveness, vaccines, which are being inexplicably discarded by an increasingly antiscientific populace, and petroleum-derived fertilizers, which are running out & becoming more expensive over time, and the extraction of which are additionally contributing to runaway climate change. Not exactly long-term, this situation of "civilization"-- at least, the kind of industrial post-modern civilization we are familiar with.

So we are approaching a social point of no return with the ecological system, where a bubble of industrial growth will collapse, current levels of consumption will be impossible to sustain, and the entire mode of production is about to change. This provides a lot of opportunities for revolutionaries, but also sets the stage for huge social turmoil & mass death. Already, we are seeing the beginnings of a literally unprecedented era of migration, of ecological instability, and the political consequences of all that. Concentration camps and ghettos are being created for immigrant communities across Europe & North America, racial segregation is at higher levels in the US than in 1955, gentrification is resulting from "internal migration" within national borders, and all of this is ultimately caused by the unsustainability of capitalism. However, one is not able to appreciate the depth of the problem without a critique of domesticated civilization, and the way in which it has produced the logics, psychologies, and fundamentals of hierarchy. Anarchist analysis of hierarchy are strengthened greatly by the critiques of civilization which critical anthropology of the paleolithic-neolithic transition, just as those same analyses are reinforced by a solid grasp of the industrial revolutions, colonialism, roman and greek democratic empires & republican plutocracies, and many other historical phenomena.

critiques of civilization do not necessarily entail the embracing of a puritanical stance against technology, although they certainly don't exclude that approach either. It can be an informative lens from which to become aware of the ways in which humans may be conditioned by things we are unaware of. It can provide a framework to start exploring alternatives to these conditioned behaviors, processes, and attitudes-- this framework may be applied by anyone, even those living in the hearts of urban environments, or in the middle of toxic waste spills, and it doesn't have to look like Ted K. at all. But, you know, it can. It's a very diverse, intriguing, and sometimes frustrating political tendency.

however, i am not a primitivist

4

newtor OP wrote

If you believe all that, why aren't you a primmie?

−2

celebratedrecluse wrote

I think that technology can be used to assist the creation of egalitarian, anti-industrial communities which have a fundamentally different relationship to the earth. He is hated on a lot here, and I take him with a grain of salt, but Bookchin explored some of this territory in his writings on communalism. However, I think a lot of this theoretical ground has not really been treated well, so I'd say we're still very early in the exploratory phase of what this is all going to look like.

In turn, such a change in the mode of production can change the nature of being human, which a cybernetic queer feminist positionality would find potentially desirable. Rather than romanticizing a partially fictive past, I would prefer to imagine an anti-industrial tendency which attacks the roots of domestication while developing technology which can democratize a scaled-down, decentralized, and ecologically calibrated new mode of production. This is only possible to define or pursue in an anticapitalist and anarchist lens, because markets and centrally organized authorities are anathema to this type of goal, and will reconstruct the capitalist mode of production, patriarchy, and reactionary tendencies in general.

For one example of what I am interested in, I think the multiplication of CRISPR home kits, lowering costs of biotech lab equipment, 3D printers, VR, FOSS software, photoelectric bacteria, meshnets, and a number of other relatively new technologies-- as well as older ones, such as the internet, widely available computing devices, radio, herbal medicines, etc-- are all intriguing toolkits to approach the project of social change, and come with both advantages and drawbacks, as well as contextual cofactors.

Technology can be extremely useful in confronting other technology. Eliminating reliance on technologies can also be extremely useful in confronting other technologies. I don't see a reason to give up any means available to us.

Primitivists would no doubt see this is as a laughable endeavor, rife with contradictions, but I feel that contradictions are in fact the driving engine of history, and are not necessarily destructive, reactionary, or useless per se. You do have to be careful when you're playing with dangerous toys, though.

3

ziq wrote

no

3

newtor OP wrote

You admit you're a primmie then.

−3