Why Not Anarcho-Primitivism?

Imagine that we lived, now, ‘as if the day had come’.

(This essay is part of a long thought stream. The last installment, on “Fully Automated Luxury Communism,” lives here.)

Anarcho-primitivists argue that our underlying problem is not capitalism, but civilization itself, or what author Darren Allen calls “The System”. Over the last ten thousand years, a number of civilizations around the world grew to a certain point, reached critical mass, and eventually imploded (as Jared Diamond documents in Collapse). As small-scale, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands become large, settled societies, they start to produce surplus value through agriculture. The shift inexorably leads to class stratification, patriarchy, property rights, laws, accounting systems, literacy, border controls, wars of conquest, slavery, and the like. A civilization continues to expand in this way until it depletes its resource base and disintegrates.

Contemporary post-industrial civilization is the latest, most overwhelming, and perhaps the last iteration in this sequence. Our post-industrial technocracy is no longer a regional phenomenon, like previous civilizations. It has conquered the world as a whole. It has developed sophisticated technologies for resource extraction, transportation, indoctrination, surveillance, warfare, mass incarceration, and so on.

The Luddites were a 19th Century worker’s movement in England. They destroyed factories and machines that threatened their livelihoods.

The goal of the System, according to Allen, is to shore up the insecure ego that fears death and dissolution with a temporary illusion of permanence. As this civilization expanded over the last millennia, humanity got lost in mental abstractions, such as our debt-based economic system requiring endless, exponential growth. The System seeks to construct a mechanized, hyper-mediated, acculturated reality, entirely severing humanity’s connection with nature. This has unleashed the global ecological cataclysm that will soon crush this civilization (because, as doomsaying ecologist Guy McPherson notes, “Nature bats last”).

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In 33 Myths of the System, Allen defines anarcho-primitivism as:

The general rejection of civilized forms of organization, such as centrally controlled cereal cultivation, industrial technology, institutional hegemony and so on. Despite the caricatures which critics invent (‘using a phone! what a hypocrite!’), anarcho-primitivism does not entail the ludicrous refusal of all technology (such as fire, pottery or even agriculture, which, incidentally, predates the horrors of state-run farms) or demand anarcho-primitivists take off all their clothes and go and live in a tree; and it certainly doesn’t entail, as some critics like to believe, a recommendation for the extermination of mankind. It simply recognises that coercion and control run deeper than kings, parliaments and corporations pushing people around; that we are domesticated as much, if not more, by our tools as we are by those who have power over them, and that a functioning society must be based on the non-democratic egalitarianism, sensitivity and wildness of our ancestors. As such anarcho-primitivism is anarchism.

According to Allen’s analysis, there is little difference between Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism, between “open” and “closed” societies, between Parliamentary and even direct democracies. All of these are expressions of the same System that has been growing for thousands of years, extending its nefarious tentacles into all of our lives through increasingly invasive techniques of domination and control. These mechanisms of control have become more invasive recently. The Coronavirus “pseudopandemic”, in Allen's terms (also found here), has been used as a pretext to move us much further toward a technocratic, totalitarian, Orwellian/Huxleyian nightmare with no possibility of escape.

In Democrapathy, an essay for his blog, Allen argues that Democracy is a fundamentally flawed system that can never work. It never makes sense to live under the tyranny of the 51% majority — as recent votes, such as the English choosing Brexit or the US choosing Trump make clear. He writes:

In the real world most people, particularly in the wealthy west, are completely overwhelmed by a cowardly, insensitive and miserable false self laid over their original natures long ago by a system which has spent ten millennia refining its techniques of coercion and domination. In a democracy we are then supposed to respect the decisions that they, as the terrified, unconscious, civilized mass-avatar of an Unhappy Supermind, make together.

What we don’t get to vote on is far more significant than what we do. For instance, we don’t get to vote on the viability of the system as a whole, only on particular laws or which interchangeable functionary will represent us. “No democracy, no matter how fair, can do anything more than tinker with an advanced industrial system or make cosmetic changes to it. It is impossible."

Small-scale indigenous communities, Allen notes, made decisions together without needing to vote:

The assumption that we must organize society democratically is based, amongst other things, on the prior assumption that there is no alternative that has ever worked, which is demonstrably false. Pre-historical societies — which is to say the dominant mode of life for 90% of human pre-history — along with various modes of social life over the past 10,000 years — worked extremely well without recourse to a vote, or to any kind of manifest consensus.

It is hard to envision an informal mode of decision-making scaled up to handle the current scale of mass populations. But perhaps that won’t be necessary. Allen—along with many thinkers—believes our global technocracy is destined to splinter apart and collapse due to the ecological apocalypse we have unleashed. That the entire project of civilization is a failure will be the object lesson that whoever survives the approaching cataclysm will have to accept and integrate.

I find a great deal of logic and truth in the anarcho-primitivist perspective. It seems obvious that we are racing toward ecological collapse which may lead to our extinction as a species (for instance, if the “methane timebomb” erupts and we lose the oxygen-producing capacity of algae and plants). If not extinction, we may experience a drastic contraction of the human population due to famine, drought, wars over resources, and various other natural and unnatural catastrophes. I don’t think that this precipice is far away; perhaps we still have a decade or two. But the signs are clear that it is coming soon.

Assuming we don’t go extinct and humanity survives at some scale, this may involve returning to smaller scale, localized communities producing their own food, mainly using older, pre-industrial technologies. Allen points out that, since we are faced with this catastrophic transformation in any case, we can embrace the situation and organize ourselves to create the anarchist alternative that accords with nature:

What might a free anarchist society look like today? Imagine if we removed the state and all its laws, dismantled our institutions and corporations, made attendance at school voluntary, opened the prisons, abolished educational qualifications and all professional accreditation, allowed everyone access to all professionally-guarded resources, cancelled all debts, abolished the police, the army, modern industrial technology, money, banks and private property. Imagine, in short, that we lived, now, ‘as if the day had come’. It seems to us, considering such a prospect, that the result would be unbelievable chaos and suffering. But, even putting aside the fact that, outside a few comfortable bubbles, the world is already unbelievable chaos and suffering, it is still an irrelevant objection; because very soon there will be a crash that will do all this anyway. We have the choice between that kind of crash and one we organize ourselves.

My perspective accords with much of this: It seems to me that “we" should seek to organize to establish an emancipated human society, ultimately organized on anarchist principles, based on individual and community sovereignty. This requires dismantling much of the current social infrastructure built for domination, indoctrination, and control. However, I prefer the Fully Automated Luxury Communist idea that we can and should apply our technological capabilities to liberate humanity from pointless misery.

Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ (1891) is one of my favorite political essays. He argues for eliminating private property, which distorts the personality of the property owner as much as the renter, through socialism designed to liberate everyone from privation and drudgery. A socialist world—without private property and with a rational application of technology—will give everybody the time and freedom to cultivate themselves and discover their true individuality, which only a handful of wealthy people and artists have enjoyed, historically. Wilde writes:

All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

I find it difficult to argue against Wilde’s perspective (I also appreciate his vision of “cultivated leisure” as our goal). It is the case that, in the pristine natural environment, hunter-gatherers did not really “work” in the way that we understand it (boring jobs consisting of repetitive tasks). The activities necessary to sustain life — hunting, weaving, gathering, cooking, tanning hides, etcetera — were woven into their life world, part of a sacred matrix and ongoing communion. As beautiful as this way of being is, I don’t think we can go back to it.

I still believe there is an evolutionary purpose — a redemptive meaning — in humanity’s trajectory. But I may be wrong.

7.6 billion people now live on the Earth, most in dense cities meshed together by global trade routes, with the planet’s natural resources severely depleted. In such a circumstance, I don’t believe we can revert to pre-industrial technologies, as Allen and other anarcho-primitivists propose. We can—perhaps we must—envision and define, instead, a new way forward, toward a different, yet potentially as satisfying, future condition of being.

Next, I intend to develop my thinking on the hyper-capitalist technological utopianism of the Singularity movement. This movement is the polar opposite—the antithesis—of anarcho-primitivism. I can’t help but wonder, therefore, if we might reach a dialectical synthesis of these seeming opposites. I will explore this possibility in what follows.

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