Submitted by anonymous_throwaway in anarcho_primitivism (edited )

Terminal Primitivism : Wiping the smear of Prime Malarkey

It was taking too long, but one shouldn't rush these things. Sitting in the smallest room of my house, I pondered how I may name the piece that was ready to come out, so I made a final push. I laid eyes on the uncut sheets of paper far too refined to be used for printing this subject matter, but being what I had at hand, it would have to do...“Terminal Primitivism (T.P.)...Wiping the smear of Prime Malarkey”...

Kevin Tucker will be the corny content of this piece which has a green hue. I’ll do a brief review of the “conceptual moves” made towards rebranding his claim to irrelevancy, while making sure he receives a pile of ad hominids, like those who get their due, do [0].

To the Captive Market

For decades now Kevin Tucker has made sinking along with the “Ship of Fools”[1] of anarcho-primitivism his career. KT is also one of the editors of Mild Resistance, name that comes from the silky baritone voice of anticiv’s Bob Ross, John Zerzan who, during his weekly apocalypse review of meh, can mumble and stutter a mellow drone that helps his listeners achieve Fecal Consciousness [2].

Kevin Tucker’s writing has been described elsewhere as “unintentionally knee-slappingly funny”[3], and as “supreme buffoonery […] stranded in the Cenozoic, to which they intend to return guided by the voices of their ancestors and by the vengeful hand of the gods (through pandemics and cataclysms); obdurate in the reproduction of a gigantic Jurassic Park, stolid with their primitive future”[4]. Leaving such a poor impression as to cause this last anarchist to wholesale dismiss and discard green anarchism as distortions and misdirection away from anarchy.

In his writing, he flaunts the academic chops of an undergrad T.A., drawn from his hobby of reading cultural anthropology. These traits and trades would lead me to think that banter-blabberer hobby culturalist, rather than hunter-gatherer horticulturalist, would be a more fitting term to describe Kevin.

In his short text “To the Captives” [5] -as he endearingly refers to his customers and his supporters Patrons- he likes. To use. Periods. Instead. Of commas. A preferable alternative to the mumbled ramble of run-on sentences he stutters on his hours long podcasts, in which he speaks in a prissy, smarmy and whiny tone that could only be achieved while making a prim expression [6].

Nowadays, Kevin is better unknown for being a self-styled charlatan engaging in petty scams, in the same vein as the health and lifestyle gurus and shamans that plague instagram. In his version, he’s carved out a niche market doling out digital nuggets of primal wisdom in exchange of charitable cash donations and subscriptions to his Patreon, also known as primal e-begging [7]. Having dubbed himself an expert on a particular anarchist strain of thought, he charges willing dupes for access to his sterile blabber via zoom classes [8]. Even more ridiculous than charging for “intellectual property” is charging for what he claims is merely instinct, human nature and “the human spirit”. Charging for wildness is holding it captive, though not taming it. Information is wild and it yearns to be free in the world wild web, where there’s no reason to pay for it, because you’ll always end up getting it for free.

A fitting trade for someone who is so intimately in touch with his wild side as to be the constant recipient of personal messages from different animals, like an anprim Doctor Dolittle. Except Kevin’s owls are not accountants, but grim omens, warning him of death in the family. Each great horned owl sighting leaves him wondering for whom the owl hoots [9]. He also engages in a necromancy of sorts on his twitter (@gatheredremains), by both entertaining mental phantasms and taking aim at ghosts. Sometimes these ghost are merely a trick of the light, an undigested piece of meat, but other times they’re the memories of the deceased, which he finds opportune to slander with what he wouldn’t dare say to their face when they were alive. He also carries out these seances with his medium [10], his preferred method being automatic writing [11].

Publish or Perish Primitivism

For all the performative disdain for "post-modernist" academia that Kevin ejects, he seems to be convinced that civilization will die by the pen that bides its time. For this strand of publish or perish primitivism anything goes - from hungover tweets, to sophomoric poetry, to paperback fiction - if you can print it, it counts.

At the time of this writing, there’s a strange manifesto of sorts in the landing page for Black and Green Press [12]. For being very short, approximately one page, it mentions the word “We” a whopping 37 times. It’s unclear whether Kevin is using the 1st person singular form of “they”, while keeping the plural for consistency, in that case it could be read as “I”, which would not fare well for him given his obsession with “narcissism”[13], which he considers both a psychopathology [14] and a moral deficiency.

Though it could also be referring to Black and Green press, and therefore speaking for the other authors. A worse scenario would be that he’s saying “we” to speak for all of “humanity”, or if that term is too civilized and not primal enough, “hunter-gatherity”. In the worst case scenario, he’s speaking for all of life on Earth. I will not reproduce the entire headache here, but I will share a few of the funnier parts so you may decide for yourself:

-“We are here to say that either the world burns or the cities do.”

More than half of the world’s population lives in cities, which sprawl into metropolitan conurbations that encroach into a receding rurality. So there’s considerable overlap between the burning of cities and the burning of the world, making this a moot point.

-“We are here to say that abusers convince you that you have no choice.”

So the “we” is now a spokesperson for abusers? I’m beginning to suspect there’s an inconsistent use of “we” in this.

-“We are here to say that marketers convince you that you have their options.”

What? Now “they” speak for marketers.

-“We are here to say that you are wild. That you can be free.”

Ah, so these are my options, marketer.

-“We are here to say that there’s a match in one hand and bolt cutters in the other.”

A single match is a very tiny object, bolt cutters on the other hand, are quite big. You might drop your match once you try to use your bolt cutter with both hands. Why are “they” telling us this?

-“We aren’t here to say the world is waiting. We are here to say that the world is fighting. We are here to say that their story only ends one way. And we are here to tell you that there are others.”

Along these lines, in this epic narrative framing, the entire natural good world is pitted against the unnatural evil domesticators. If we’re all so primal, and the domesticators are so few, how come they are so powerful? If civilization is so fragile and destined for collapse, why does it rise time and again and impose itself having a longer life that let’s say anthills or beehives?

Surely it would be unfair to judge the entire repertoire of publications under the label Black and Green Press based on this piece of shoddy poetry. Since it would lead us to think that they’d sacrifice trees to print and publish uninspired filler just to remain irrelevant.

The Semantics of Irrelevancy

Semantics is very important to Kevin Tucker. His insistence on nomenclature, encapsulating anarchy within a neologism that is meaningless except to the coiner, relegates his project more to the realm of an Urban Dictionary, than to that of an Anarchist Library.

Primal Anarchy: an ideology so simplistic and so digestible that it can be a baby’s first anarchy. After all, we’re all born hunter-gatherers. Just like that, everyone is by default born into a singular life-way, encoded in genes that program the brain, like Chomskyan linguistics [15].

So far, his definition of primal anarchy can be parsed as follows:

Primal: You are a hominid, and what biology says about that.

Anarchy: "Indigenous" society, and what anthropology says about that.

The hunter-gatherer aspect was crucial in crafting this definition, since Kevin had to hunt down articles to bolster his assertions, also known as “cherry-picking”, a practice he shares with folio-frugivores.

Primal Anarchy is the self-assured posture that that you’re always right (because anthropology) and that the fight is already won (because biology).

If something like Primal Anarchy can be said to exist, then so can something like “Primal Archy”, since our instances of domination, domestication and eventually civilization, did not come from an alien infection, but were actually contingent developments that are very in line with our primate pedigree, particularly that of hominids. Even cursory knowledge of the work of primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal would suffice to correct this mistake. In a similar way, reviewing the anthropological literature without "cherry-picking" would provide plenty of examples of hunter-gatherer cultures that had formed sophisticated and complex stratified societies at which you could direct similar criticism like the ones directed to monarchies or contemporary democracies, however tyrannical or benign you might want to characterize them. If there's such a thing as Primal Anarchy, there's such a thing as Primal Archy. Claiming either one, but not the other, is definitively Prime Malarkey.

Anyone who paid attention would accuse this whole framing of Prissy Manicheanism.When Kevin’s writing is called Manichean, this is not meant as a frilly insult, but as an accurate description. People are divided into two groups: the captive vs the domesticators. The socially integrated members of a healthy community vs the anti-social narcissist individualists. The “domesticators” being - “the priests and politicians, marketers and bureaucrats”, and “the captive” being Kevin’s audience, the Patreon supporters, the whole niche market, as we already described.

In the end I ask forgiveness to my correspondents for picking on such low hanging fruit, but I could not help it. I was born this way, it's in my nature as a gatherer. I also apologize for cutting this piece off unceremoniously by pointing you to the text "Corrosive Consciousness" by Bellamy Fitzpatrick [16]. This text gracefully delineates a meticulous critique of Kevin's atavistic lucubrations with both suavity and rigor.

While I self-indulgently relished in ad hominids & pooh-pooh, Bellamy's text makes it a point to avoid fallacies in crafting its arguments, while pointing out all that are present in Kevin's writing. The level of admirable restraint shown in the virtually amicable tone of the text is testament to the diplomatic vocation and gentlemanly disposition of its author, which is further evidenced by his latest media project [17]. The hostile overreaction by the recipients of this critique led Bellamy, and others who have not yet read the text, to the misimpression the text's tone was vitriolic. Bellamy has gone as far as wishing having avoided its nominal caustic quality in the interest of furthering polite conversation and principled philosophical debate among anarchists [18].

Primal Anarchy is the noise Terminal Primitivism makes in its death throes [19]. "Corrosive Consciousness" is not the last nail on its coffin, but the refined etching on its tombstone [20].


[0] Not to insult the intelligence of my correspondents, but I would feel remiss if I did not call attention to this particular choice of words and if then, for some unfortunate reason, you did not notice the phonetic implications of these last two syllables. It's the only worthwhile part of this piece.

[1] Name of text by Ted K. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-ship-of-fools

[2] Which coincidentally is also the title of a book by Julian Langer, which he rates 5/5 stars on goodreads.com. Adam disagrees, giving it 1/5 stars, saying: “Can't find one single idea in this book. It's all just name dropping and buzzwords.”.https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/33957885-feral-consciousness

[3] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/aragorn-review-species-traitor-4

[4] https://anarchistnews.org/retaking-our-black-path

[5] https://www.wildresistance.org/news/2019/2/3/wr6-to-the-captives-kevin-tucker

[6] https://primalanarchy.org/podcast/2020/5/16/primal-anarchy-podcast-25-what-is-primal-anarchy

[7] https://anokchan.org/index.php?q=/post/view/656

[8] Sold out, indeed: https://www.blackandgreenpress.org/classes

[9] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-tucker-to-speak-of-wildness

[10] Kevin’s medium: https://medium.com/@feraledge. At the moment of writing this I can also claim that I said all these things to his face since here it’s prominently featured.

[11]“Automatic writing or psychography is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. The words purportedly arise from a subconscious, spiritual, or supernaturalsource. Scientists and skeptics consider automatic writing to be the result of the ideomotor effect and even proponents of automatic writing admit it has been the source of innumerable cases of self-delusion. Automatic writing is not the same thing as free writing.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_writing)

[12] https://www.blackandgreenpress.org/

[13] A classic case of projection. In fact, rumor has it that his ideology was not inspired by the lifeways of the Cro-Magnon, but by looking in the mirror.

[14] Good old primmie psychology. Primmie DSM is the best DSM.

[15] Noam Chomsky was once a cunning linguist and is now very old, even older than John Zerzan. He was spuriously linked to anarchism at some point, but has since outlived most people who remember why that was. John Zerzan seems to have some recollections https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E64O23NcH9Y&t=46m40s

[16] Even this fragment (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bellamy-fitzpatrick-corrosive-consciousness-part-i)is more than sufficient to dispel any primal phantasms, but I do recommend you read the complete text for the full effect as intended. If you prefer a quick summary, you may read this review that appeared in Black Seed #6 (https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-black-seed-issue-6#toc50)

[17] Liberty and Logos: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCcQjAWEkNivTfVn7Cyn4XMw

[18] https://thebrilliant.org/podcast/episode-91-bellamy-on-corrosive-consciousness/

[19] Not to be confused with Kevin's death-metal band "Peregrine". (https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Peregrine/128097)

[20] I merely shat on its grave.

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polpotisevil2 wrote

A worse scenario would be that he’s saying “we” to speak for all of “humanity”, or if that term is too civilized and not primal enough, “hunter-gatherity”.

One of the few good parts of this text haha

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