I just received a copy of Green Anarchy (issue 23) today — an American “anti-civ” journal.
Now, I must admit before going any further that I used to call myself something of an anarcho-primitivist. The images of going back to a simpler, more peaceful, “wild”, undomesticated existence really did something for me, and in many ways they still do. But I think anti-civ anarchists have really lost the plot, and I’m really not surprised that this is a current largely confined to the US (and a little to Britain).
Anti-civ anarchists are strongly influenced by insurrectionalism, though they probably don’t know it as they religiously claim to be “anti-ideology”. This critique of insurrectionalism applies very well the anti-civ crew. It seems the anti-civ fetish with small-scale militant direct action, their perceived social isolation and their perceived backwardness and brainwashing of the majority of people are very much a reflection of their desire for radical change in the face of ecological destruction but the lack of mass struggle. I can understand their rejection of mass organisation, but not their rejection of mass movements. They seem to be very much trapped in the American individualist tradition and quite out of touch with popular struggles in North America (excepting their fetishising of indigenous struggle… they’re wild peoples, you see). In fact, they remind me a bit of the desperation of militant groups in 1970s US, like Weather Underground, who became more militant the more apathetic the general population became.
The other major point of critique has to be questioning exactly what the fuck “civilisation” is. Having read a lot of this, I know that the definitions of this are all over the place. It seems bizarre to reify such a vacuous concept and create a whole political ideology seeking its abolition. They claim they seek the end of domestication, while “leftist” anarchists merely seek the destruction of the State and capitalism. What do they mean by domestication? Well, at times it refers to human domestication, at other times it refers to animal domestication and at other times to all forms of domestication of life, including plants. Surely the first is the aim of any anarchist project, and the second the aim of any anarchist project with the slightest of an animal-lib tinge. The third is more bizarre, and obviously aims for a hunter-gatherer lifestyle simply not possible in a lot of countries (NZ included) and not possible with current population levels. Their reasoning for it is based in Marxism and some recent, rather weak, anthropological studies that point to the domestication of plants and the resulting surplus as the seed of domination. This fails to take into account all the anthropological evidence, from the likes of David Graeber, that show that hunter-gatherer societies come in both authoritarian and non-authoritarian varieties, as do horticulturalist societies. See Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology for more on this (he takes a particularly vicious swipe at John Zerzan).
John Zerzan, while we’re on the topic, also seeks as part of his abolition of civilisation the abolition of time, language and symbolic thinking. Go figure. Thankfully most of the anti-civ peeps haven’t taken this on board.
Anti-civ anarchists go to great lengths to characterise other anarchists as latent authoritarians, going so far as to claim that after our revolution 99% of social life will be the same. Well I certainly hope not. I would imagine the destruction of the State, capitalist relations, patriarchy, ecological domination, etc. would mean a quite major shift in daily life for most people.
anarchafairy 
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January 8, 2007 at 7:06 pm
mollymew
Liked your essay very much. Visited your site because you visited mine (Molly’s Blog up here in Canada- on the “upside of the Earth” if you will- at the “ends of the Earth from another viewpoint). I am thinking about republishing this essay on my own blog, with propoer attribution, of course.
In Solidarity,
Mollymew
January 10, 2007 at 1:35 am
George
yes, but what about those flax whips?
January 10, 2007 at 1:35 am
John
Hi i know this might sound rather pathetic but their is a difference between primitivists and anti civilisation streams of thought. While i agree primitivism is mad as are many of the people such as John Zerzan who espouse its ideas.
Anti civilisation writers such as Ran Prieur and Derrick Jenson however tend to argue that civilisation (marked by the rise of citys) cannot be sustainable and that collapse due to a lack of resources is part of the rise of citys over the long term. They also tend to talk about the hierachys implicit in large scale society such as citys.
Anyway what im trying to say is that being anti civilisation is different to being a promitivist.
January 10, 2007 at 1:54 am
anarchafairy
Hey John,
When I was into this stuff I found it quite hard to differentiate between anti-civ anarchists and primitivists — I think I used the words interchangably though more often called myself a primitivist. Some primmies only want to go back to pre-industrial societies, whereas anti-civ types much more universally want to go back further… but I’m not sure they can be separated so easily.
I reckon your comment about cities is a really good one. It’s interesting reading the classic anarchist writers – Kropotkin especially – as most of them also call for the desturction of the city, to be replaced with the semi-urban semi-rural free commune. They point to the centralisation of the city being a perculiarly capitalist development, efficient only according to capitalist logic, and that anarchist organisation would invariably turn toward decentralisation of production and thus the city. They also talked about the need for largely self-sufficient communes, which therefore needed to cater for their own food production and general production, and only look outside the commune for specialised production.
I guess my point is that being anti-city isn’t a departure from classical anarchism really much at all, and its funny anti-civs try to make such a big thing out of it.
I haven’t read Jensen so I don’t know the arguments about the city by its nature being unsustainable. Is there anything you know of I could read online that would give me a good quick intro?
January 11, 2007 at 2:59 pm
John
Yea i agree with you point that a lot of socialist and anarchist theory does call for the city to play a smaller role in how humans live and i think thats a positive thing. However i think that often those involved in left wing struggles fail to realise that almost everythign we take for granted today is unsustainable and that the way we live has to change really fast if we are to stop ourselves from going extinct.
You can call these ideas whatever you want and most anti civ thought is borrowed from other left wing fields but I think its as good a label as any.
here are a few links that are kinda interesting.
http://anthropik.com/2005/03/what-is-civilization/
http://anthropik.com/2006/09/reviewing-the-basics/
http://www.altpr.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=336&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0
January 13, 2007 at 12:17 am
maps
Agree with you about primitivism. Interesting that Zerzan used to be an ultra-left (using that as a descriptive rather then derogatory term) Marxist, opposed to unions and United Fronts, before he became a primitivist.
March 22, 2009 at 7:42 am
Clay
I’m definitely against civilization, but i don’t consider my self an anarcho-primitivist or anything of the sort, i just hope we can abolish civilization and capitalism along with it and move forward, beyond civilization. Not go back to anything necessarily.
There are some obvious changes that can be made to halt our dominion and destruction of the world that don’t requires us becoming hunters and gatherers again.
May 10, 2009 at 6:55 am
vera
“They seem to be very much trapped in the American individualist tradition and quite out of touch with popular struggles in North America”
Oh, yeah. I am in Colorado, and the most popular North American struggle is all around me. It’s called denial!
Forget about labels. Civ sucks.
June 7, 2009 at 2:28 am
R.
I just wanted to point out that anti-civ as a classifying term is defined as a critique of civilization as a system. In general, the anti-civ critique finds most forms of oppression rising with the city-state. Primitivism, on the other hand, is a theory or method based on the anti-civ critique, for living outside of civilization. There are other groups that function under the premises of anti-civ critiques.
The Anti-Civ critique argues that the following things exist with civilizations
the collection of unsustainable populations into cities
the forced domestication of classes of people and animals
the inevitable importation of goods from outside its own sources
the inevitable increase in demand for goods and depletion of sources for goods
the standardization of life, from biodiversity to monoculture
the necessity of hierarchical authority,
the inevitable collapse of civilization, capitalism, communist, socialist, anarchist? (but would an anarchist society be a civilization or does civilization come from coercion and hierarchy?)
The key argument is that it is a system that can not be sustained, a system that is founded on violence to begin with. This is what people debate. Is Civilization as a System Sustainable? Can it survive? This is drawn from history. The Mayan collapse. The collapse of the Roman Empire.
City-states and their populations can not supply themselves with their own food. The food must be gotten from exploiting the land beyond the city-state. No amount of theory will change that necessary oppression. An unsustainable system can not be changed or rearranged. It will collapse!
10 billion left wing anarchist inhabiting the cities of the planet will need to exploit the planet beyond its capacity for survival and the system will collapse.
July 8, 2010 at 1:09 am
Kalevi
With me it was the other way round, that I started with mass society anarchism (I bought the definition of anarchism as the “extreme left of socialism”) and ended up with anti-civilization anarchism. I realised there is a glaring hole in conventional anarchist theory as regards technology and mass society, and in time came to understand that anarchism, if it is to have any kind of practical meaning at all, must be a comprehensive theory and practise of living in the world without complex society.
In other words, anarcho-primitivism, as far as I understand, is a kind of societal (but not social) nihilism. The fundamental argument of the anarchist critique of civilisation, as far as I can see, is that people can live together in the world without having to rely on complex social organisation or engineered social cohesion (both hallmarks of leftism and conservatism) for their sustenance and community.
May 23, 2012 at 8:04 am
Kyler
“I can understand their rejection of mass organisation, but not their rejection of mass movements. They seem to be very much trapped in the American individualist tradition and quite out of touch with popular struggles in North America (excepting their fetishising of indigenous struggle… they’re wild peoples, you see). ”
Anti-civ movement in general goes by many different organizations and movements, like Deep Green Resistance and Occupy the Machine. I don’t know any who oppose mass-movements. And I certainly don’t reject mass movement.
Bad generalization, that we are out of touch with popular struggles, our radical thinking just makes us focus more on the causes of these struggles, capitalism and civilization.
I don’t see how they fetishiize Indigenous struggles, indigenous struggles are highly undervalued and unreported. So I know it might seem like fetishizing because they actually care and are taking actions. I know Deep Green Resistance is trying to help out the White Clay community, but considering the overall goal, being in solidarity with indigenous people is necessary.
“Wild peoples”, eh, see that’s the problem with the “primitivist” perspective. You see anything pertaining to having any relationship to the land or the “natural world” as “wild” or “in a state of nature”. You view hunter-gatherer societies as “early”, or “undeveloped.” You view non-civilized cultures through the same reductionist, subordinating dogma of the hierarchical state you want to abolish.
There is definitely a difference between anti-civ and primitivism. Primitivism is an insult a progressive standpoint, and assumes that non-civilized cultures are not complex, are not intelligent, are not evolved, are not advanced from evolution and are just far less than civilization. As if history is completely linear, and civilization is the peak of our existence, or the entire 99% existence has been waiting for this 1%. That the 99% was meaningless.
Unless “anti-civ” is an action word, than most “anti-civ” don’t call themselves that or identify with it.
“Anti-civ anarchists are strongly influenced by insurrectionalism, though they probably don’t know it as they religiously claim to be “anti-ideology”. This critique of insurrectionalism applies very well the anti-civ crew. It seems the anti-civ fetish with small-scale militant direct action, their perceived social isolation and their perceived backwardness and brainwashing of the majority of people are very much a reflection of their desire for radical change in the face of ecological destruction but the lack of mass struggle. ”
Never really heard of “insurrectionalism”. I know what an insurrectionist is. Someone who goes against the civil authority or government through revolting. But the entire ideological belief, I’ve never heard. It’s fucking awesome. Insurrection. Insurrection as an ideology doesn’t necessarily guide to “anti-civ” because of the obvious examples of people trying to legally protect forests and another example White Clay.
Domestication is also a form of domination. Which means we don’t want domination like humans controlling everything. Like mono-cropping. I’ll explain later.
Domestication in agriculture has profoundly changed because in subssistence agriculture today, humans works for the animals and plants.
Also, give me one example of an authoritatarian hunter gatherer society that wasn’t in contact with civilization?
March 14, 2014 at 9:43 am
ryan
Primitivism is an explanation about how this all came about, an abductive hypothesis grounded in well done anthropology. Given that it is abductive, it is consistent with counterexamples like Graeber’s, which is why Graeber’s critique doesn’t matter. That is to say, it is more importantly a narrative about possibility. It is possible for there to be humyns living in proximity and real biocentric community because domestication/civliization/etc., only arose over the last 10,000 years, with a cluster of oppressions that we now see. Is there a necessary connection (strong claim, difficult to prove)? Is it merely contingent? Graeber misses this point. Since it is possible to live wild because once actual, it is not impossible. In other words, relying on the MegaMachine is only psychological. Rewilding is a task, to be chosen by individuals as they see fit. As an deliberative argument for others to decide for themselves, it is proffered as better than dead-end leftist utopias that are obviously unlikely.
As a positive name, primitivism undermines the progress mantra, and shows leftists as essentially colonizing racist state creators (No surprise there!). What’s wrong with primitive life? Should the indigenous persyns living this way be colonized for the sake of their humynity? To fail to see this in a context indifferent to masculine name-calling because affirming it as positive, is to miss the irony. Is it offensive? It only offends those that want privilege passed around. We do not care.
It is also a mistake to assume that green anarchists glorify the primitive. This might end up in allyship, but it doesn’t have to. I desire accomplices; we have each other; no one has me. Allyship is authoritarian. Besides, 10,000 years ago, primitive life was normal. Those are the origins of everyone. It is also ridiculous to suppose that there are persyns to worship in an anarchist practice. Now, while the old boys are worshipped too much by the red anarchists, this blatant misunderstanding of being against hierarchy is not lost on green anarchists. After all, we want total destruction, the shell and everything resembling the shell, not new shit in the shell of the old.
Mass movements are reformist and never anti-state. Anarcho-Syndicalists and all the other anarchies that seem to matter to some, for this reason, seem to keep in their pockets pamphlets by Bonnano. Insurrectionary theory tends to suggest moving alongside mass movements (game face!) in order to rupture and push the agenda for play right now. Fine and well–after all it is fun!–but this is also individualist in that it is a taking. Wolfi Landstreicher, aka Feral Faun, was instrumental in producing this theory in the various tendencies. Their work highlights the affinity that GA has with Insurrectionary Theory, a similarity that @’s ought to recognize.
To be together with nature, inside her care, relying on her biocentricity, doesn’t provide a programme. It is an opening without assurances. It is the limit case of ideology. One must make way for nature, however it might come as individual manifestation, without any desire to force others into containers of rules, and rules and rules. If rules guide action in every case, the point of this article is trivial. But there is a difference between the first rule: be open to whatever, and a whole litany of rules that suggest being closed to all sorts of possibilities. Now, does the G@ take issue with your building a house? Perhaps! But perhaps not! One that does might burn it to the ground. That’s called possibility, and its not a vangaurd position if it stems from an individual choice.
April 1, 2014 at 2:48 am
le
personally i am very disappointed in the fact that many anarchists seem to have no awareness of post civ arguments, without post civ theory, as i see it, anarchism is delusional and will lead to mass starvation, death and chaos especially in high tech densely populated areas such as every western city and suburb… in an abstract way, what post civ theory teaches anarchism is that people will not bite the hand that feeds them… so feed yourself first, and then we will talk about your revolution… or in a more concrete way, if you no longer wish to put a gun to their head and destroy their means of living, all of your african, asian, hispanic…slaves are going on strike…forever! You, anarchist, are either misinformed or willfully hypocrite if you do not realise that you eat, drink, shit and live in a most civilised manner thanks to the very system of exploitation you are supposed to be destroying.
April 1, 2014 at 3:08 am
le
the road to freedom looks like someone bringing their bucket full of humanure to the compost heap… please people… instead trying to convince people of super abstract anarchist theory, teach them how to apply basic thermodynamics when building a shelter, how to germinate seeds, build solar ovens, collect rainwater, make medicine… self sufficient communities will naturally disrupt the capitalist system by not buying both their stuff and their bs, it is third world and western peoples uniting and empowering eachother. They can teach us primitive skills and wisdom, we can teach them low tech solutions and practical science. Anarchism has to be anti civ because this civ is anti- anarchism by design.
January 19, 2015 at 2:25 pm
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