ziq

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 (edited )

i kinda just like pointing out that communists completely embody the noble savage fallacy (and might have even invented it with Marx/Engels' primitive communism and later Kropotkin's studies of ant colonies and the suggestion that mutual aid is in the nature of everyone and everything) so it doesn't make any sense for them to mock their own long-held belief that humans (or workers as they prefer to call us), are inherently good and prone to mutual aid / communism

the whole noble savage thing is an obvious liberal smear to promote capitalistic colonizing exploitation-driven lifestyles over low-impact communal ones, so when ancoms use it, they're really just cutting off their nose to spite their face

It's a massive task, but could be fun to write that thing. Some time.

yeah that would be a fascinating thing to explore

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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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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 wrote

asked for a raise for the first time in 8 years and was listed all the reasons i don't deserve one in as spiteful a manner as possible (literally a hand written list)

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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

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 )

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.

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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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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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