Critiquing Primitivism, Anarcho-Primitivism and General Anti-Civilisationism

This piece was originally written by me after I had been discussing the pitfalls of so-called “primitivist” ideology with some local left-wingers. I feel it is very important to confront psuedo-leftist (or in the case of primitivism, “post-leftist”) reactionary political philosophies like the current primitivist, anarcho-primitivist and general anti-civilizationist movement. Most of the left, both Marxist and anarchist, seem to steer clear of things like primitivism and the works of its primary spokesmen, such as John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen as they find it to be absurd, and I am not without sympathy for this position, but in not confronting it we are creating a situation where many young, and energetic people, especially from the eco/green movement, who are looking for radical, if not revolutionary, solutions to current global issues are being enthralled and mislead by life-stylist philosophers preaching reactionary and psuedo-mystic doctrines.

I have gone back-n-forth for a while now on writing a piece critical of the primitivist thought. As a person trained in anthropology and sociology I have found this political movement to be both fascinating and completely ridiculous. Again, coming from a position of socio-cultural anthropology, I find the concept of wishing to “return” to a more “primitive” state to be more than a tad absurd. In fact I would go so far as to say that, along with myself, the vast majority of the organized and non-organized political left generally find that the core ideas and ideals of the so-called “primitivist” movement are so insane and out of touch with reality as to be not even worth arguing against.  However despite this, I have chosen now to write on the topic. I have decided to do so now given the rise of the movement’s popularity and profile within certain segments of the radical, especially anarchist, community and I feel that now that it has gained a certain prominence it does now need refutation and exposure, both for its theoretical and practical quackness, as well the frankly dark moral questions that its theories cause us to contemplate.  I should also note that while the so-called anarcho-primitivists are part of the wider green anarchist, or eco-anarchist movement, this is not meant to an attack on that movement as a whole. I will direct my readers to the work of the late Murray Bookchin, who was both an eco-anarchist and a very strong critic of anti-civilizationist movement.

So where to begin? Well, the core ideological belief that unifies all the diverse strains of the primitivist and anti-civilizationist movement, including anarcho-primitivism, is the concept that the source of all that is ill with world society can be traced back to the shift from the hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern to the agricultural subsistence pattern (known to anthropologists and other scholars as the “Agricultural Revolution” or less commonly, the “Broad Spectrum Revolution”). This shift in the subsistence pattern of mankind is thought by the movement to have given rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation. Thus, the goal of the movement is not just a “simple” social revolution, as is sought by socialists as well as the mainstream anarchist movement, but rather the abolishment of the use of all technology. The process through which this is to be brought about is known as “rewilding” within the movement.

This first point alone should make it clear that arguing against this philosophy is completely unnecessary. I hope it is obvious to all that, even if one were to take the most cursory of glances at it, the abolishment of technology would have many numerous and terrible consequences for our species, and for the planet as a whole that we inhabit. If we look at the possible health consequences of this we can immediately see that many people, from those who need visual assistance, to those with HIV/AIDS would just be thrown to the proverbial wolves. What would happen should we abandon the monitoring of nuclear waste sites? Even if buried deep below the surface, climate changes and tectonic plate movements would eventually cause it to leak and ecological devastation would ensue.

However, there are are also some other, decidedly more morbid and ethically questionable (from a revolutionary socialist perspective), effects of “rewilding” that I wish to explore in some more depth in the rest of this post.

While the concept of primitivism is not new, it has come to prominence over the last decade or so. In this period of time a generalised critique of “civilization” has been put forward by a number of authors. At this point I should also point out that not all primitivists are anarcho-primitivists. When I speak of primitivism I am talking of the whole movement, of which anarcho-primitivism is but a subset. However, of those proposing an anti-civilizationist mode of thought, more than enough have chosen to identify as anarchists and anarcho-primitivists. They also often have chosen to eschew the traditional ideoligical designations and rather choose to call themselves “post-left.”

As when dissecting any movement, to begin with we need to first look to see if primitivism and the primitivist movement is even able to offer any sort of preferable, or realistic, alternative to the world as we currently find it.

From the primitivist perspective, the critique of society, and existing leftisms, is based around a claim by some to have discovered a contradiction between true liberty and mass society/technology. To put it another way, the primitivist feels that it is impossible for a society that is made of any sort of group much larger than a small village to be a free society.

But what about technology? Are we talking about bows and spears, ground stone tools, or chipped stone tools? Maybe no tools? Many primitivists find the level of technology present in the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas to be too high a level, while other find it to be acceptable. The simple fact is that most primitivists try to evade this question of what level of technology they wish to return to. They do so by attempting to hide behind the claim that they are not arguing for a return to anything, quite the contrary, they actually wish to move forward. With that in hand it is possible to summarize that their position is that certain technologies are acceptable up to the level of small village society sustained by hunting and gathering. For them the problem begins when people begin to make the transition to agriculture and mass society.

Another source of problems for the primitivists is term civilization, which is also rarely defined by them. Indeed, in general, even in the fields such Anthropology which seek to study human history and culture, it is not a well defined term. Also, only a few of the primitivist thinkers have taken the argument against civilization to its logical conclusion, however one who has, John Zerzan, actually figures the root of the problem can be found in the evolution of language and abstract thought. This is a logical end point for the primitivist rejection of mass society, with some segments of primitivists wishing to see the abolition of symbolic communication, which includes spoken language, along with technology and civilization.

However, while many primitivists do like to argue that they do not wish to go backwards, but forwards, for the sake of simplicity in this article I will just say that the future society envisioned by the primitivists would look allot like what existed around 12,000 years ago, the time immediately before the Agricultural Revolution. The simple fact is that if one seeks to “go forward” by removing all post-revolutionary technology, then the society that will result will look quite like pre-agricultural society of 10,000 BCE. As this type of society is only real analogue we have to the society put forward by the primitivists it will serve as the base from which we can evaluate their claims.

The first question we can begin to answer is the one about food and population. Again for simplicities sake I will only deal with those claims that seek a return to a society made up of both gatherers and hunters, and ignore the fact that many primitivists, especially anarcho-primitivists, are also advocates of veganism/vegetarianism and hence would advocate for a “feral” society that would technically only involve gathering.

As the name should be make plainly obvious, hunters and gatherers subsist off of the food they can gather (fruits, nuts, edible leaves and grasses, roots etc) and can trap or hunt. As we are dealing with a pre-agriculture society in 10,000 BCE, our primitivist analogue, every man, woman and child on the earth subsisted by some mix of the two. It is also the truth that in many marginal systems a hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern is the only feasible way of obtaining food, with examples being the extreme dryness of deserts and the extreme cold of the circum-polar regions, both of which are incompatible with any sort of large scale agriculture.

The only possible statistical outcome for a hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern is a very low population density, as population growth is determined by the amount of calories that can be hunted, trapped or gathered from any given acre of land. This leads us to the core problem with the primitivist world-view. It is simply impossible for all six billion plus people who live on the Earth currently to survive in hunter-gatherer bands.

It should be obvious to all that an acre of steppe, forest, savannah or any other type of wild landscape will yield a lot less edible calories than an acre of a food plant that has been selectively bred for centuries to have a high calorie content. Just compare any modern domesticated plant with its wild cousin, say for example modern maize with its ancestor teosente. The simple fact is that agriculture yields far more useful calories per unit of measurement than wild countryside.

Also, the population estimates for Earth at the dawn of agriculture vary wildly, from as little as 250,000 to as much as 6 to 10 million. This presents us, and the primitivists, with a bit of a problem to say the least when compared to the current world population.

As the human population, all 6 billion of us, are now almost entirely sustained by agriculture it would be completely impossible for us to make a transition to a primitivist society without having to go through a mass die off of the human population. This is an absolutely inescapable problem for the primitivists. But how is this mass die off to happen? If we take the historic maximum population of 10 million and generously multiply it by 10 giving us 100 million people, given the world’s 6 billion plus population, we see that the die off would involve the extinction of almost 98% of the world’s current population. This is a moral dilemma to say the least. It is at this point, when the mass die off of humanity is brought up, that many primitivists declare that we are playing dirty tricks and slinging mud. While no primitivist seems to actively suggest the use of Nazi-like death camps where masses of people are put to death in order to reduce the global population, the problem however is that the idea of the need for a mass die off is not just backed up by a realistic, logical look at such a scenario, it is backed up in the words various individual primitivists and primitivist groups, with some claiming that drastic population reductions are going to happen whether we do it voluntarily or not. One group, the Coalition Against Civilisation writes “We need to be realistic about what would happen were we to enter a post-civilised world. One basic write-off is that a lot of people would die upon civil collapse. While being a hard thing to argue to a moralistic person, we shouldn’t pretend this wouldn’t be the case.” Another major primitivist, Derrick Jensen says “civilisation needs to be actively fought against, but I don’t think that we can bring it down. What we can do is assist the natural world to bring it down….. I want civilisation brought down and I want it brought down now.”

I have already demonstrated what the immediate collapse of “civilization” would portend for the human race. So despite the protestations of a few, the fact of the matter is that there is no shortage of primitivists who actually do recognise the need for mass die offs in order to achieve their desired world. Some primitivists like John Moore still however refuse to confront this question of the die off by playing the emotion card, accusing critics of using smear tactics. However, it’s up to him to explain either how 6 billion can be fed or to admit that primitivism is no more then an intellectual thought experiment.

I expect that more than a few people, when confronted with this requirement of mass death, will not hesitate to conclude that so-called primitivism offers absolutely nothing worth fighting for, much less worth dying for.

So if primitivism is such a completely absurd idea, why waste your time arguing against it and its adherents? It is after all an extremely fragile ideology once it is put to the microscope. My primary point of contention with the primitivist school of thought is how, both by implication and often in its calls, seeks to have its followers reject rationalism for pseudo-mysticism and “oneness” with nature. If we look back on history we see that they are far from the first irrational ecological movement to do so. A good third of the German Nazi party came from forest-worshipping cults and soil movements that sprung up in Germany in the aftermath of World War I.

And I do not mention this as some sort of alarmist empty danger, the truth is that within primitivism a self-proclaimed irrational wing has developed, that while not yet advocating Nazi-style death camps, has publicly celebrated the deaths and murder of large numbers of people as a first step towards their ecotopia. If we take a quick survey of the primitivist literature we can see a number of examples of his type of disgusting death worship. For example, in the December, 1997 issue of the US publication Earth First! wrote, “the AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population.” If that was not enough, around the same time in the United Kingdom, Steve Booth, one of the editors of the magazine Green Anarchist, wrote that:

“The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer capable of oppression. The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the method of delivery was ineffective. One day the groups will be totally secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely effective.”

This is where one ends up when one raises pseudo-mystic visions over rationalism. The ideas primitivists, anarcho-primitivists and anti-civilizationists have only reactionary conclusions.

With that we come back to the beginning of this discussion. I will agree that the rise of civilisation came with many, many problems, class society etc, but it also came with many blessings. The challenge for as radicals and revolutionaries is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to transform civilisation into something worth fighting, and dying, for, a society without capitalism, without classes, without patriarchy, without racial/national oppression, without war and without ecological destruction.

The answer is not to abandon all technology in some sort of suicidal knee-jerk reaction, but to create new technology, and to improve on already existing technology. It is undeniable that we need technology, we need it to clean our water, pump away and process our waste and inoculate or cure people of disease.

The challenge I present to you then is not just the creation of a new civilisation that keeps everyone’s standards of living at the level they are now. The challenge is raising that standard, but while all the while keeping sure to do so in a manner that is sustainable. It is only with the further development of technology, combined with a revolution against inequality across the planet that we can deliver on this challenge.

It is unfortunate development that living in the most developed, most wealthy and most technological nations there are people who prefer to play around with reactionary visions like primitivism more than getting down to thinking about how we can really change the world. The problem we face is not that capitalism has been complicit in sending a huge proportion of the world’s population in utter poverty, the problem is that development of the profit driven system has been aimed so completely at creating consumers for future products rather then providing what people need. The truth is that as long as the system of capitalism exists it will continue to send our ecological system down the proverbial shitter. It will only effectively respond to the environmental crisis once that becomes profitable. But we must realize that it is not by glorifying some sort of mystical past that we will fix these problems. We can only sort it out by building the sort of mass movements that are able to not just overthrow capitalism, but replace with a truly democratic socialist society.

To conclude, let me restate that primitivism, anarcho-primitivism and anti-civilizationism are nothing more than reactionary pipe-dreams. They offer absolutely no way forwards in the struggle for a free society, and often its adherents end up undermining that struggle by attacking the very things, like mass organisation, that are a requirement to win it. It must be said that those primitivists who are actually serious about changing the world need to deeply re-examine what they are fighting for.

This piece was originally written by me after I had been discussing the pitfalls of so-called “primitivist” ideology with some local left-wingers. I feel it is very important to confront psuedo-leftist (or in the case of primitivism, “post-leftist”) reactionary political philosophies like the current primitivist, anarcho-primitivist and general anti-civilizationist movement. Most of the left, both Marxist and anarchist, seem to steer clear of things like primitivism and the works of its primary spokesmen, such as John Zerzan and Derrick Jensen as they find it to be absurd, and I am not without sympathy for this position, but in not confronting it we are creating a situation where many young, and energetic people, especially from the eco/green movement, who are looking for radical, if not revolutionary, solutions to current global issues are being enthralled and mislead by life-stylist philosophers preaching reactionary and psuedo-mystic doctrines.

I have gone back-n-forth for a while now on writing a piece critical of the primitivist thought. As a person trained in anthropology I have found this political movement to be both fascinating and complete ridiculous. Again, coming from a position of socio-cultural anthropology, I find the concept of wishing to “return” to a more “primitive” state to be more than a tad absurd. In fact I would go so far as to say that, along with myself, the vast majority of the organized and non-organized political left generally find that the core ideas and ideals of the so-called “primitivist” movement are so insane and out of touch with reality as to be not even worth arguing against.  However despite this, I have chosen now to write on the topic. I have decided to do so now given the rise of the movement’s popularity and profile within certain segments of the anarchist community and I feel that now that it has gained a certain prominence that it does now need refutation and exposure, both for its theoretical and practical quackness, as well the frankly dark moral questions that its theories cause us to contemplate.  I should also that while the so-called anarcho-primitivists are part of the wider green anarchy, or eco-anarchy movement, this is not meant to an attack on the entire movement. I will direct my readers to the work of late Murray Bookchin, who was both an eco-anarchist and a very strong critic of anti-civilizationist movement.

So where to begin? Well, the core ideological belief that unifies all the diverse strains of the primitivist and anti-civilizationist movement, including anarcho-primitivism, is the concept source of all that is ill with world society can be traced back to the shift from the hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern to the agricultural subsistence pattern (known to anthropologists and other scholars as the “Agricultural Revolution”). This shift in the subsistence pattern of mankind is thought by the movement to have given rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation. Thus, the goal of the movement is not just a simple social revolution as is sought by socialists and anarchists, but rather the abolishment of all use of technology. The process through which this is to be brought about is known as “rewilding.”

This alone should make it clear that arguing against this philosophy is completely unnecessary. I hope it is obvious to all that even if one were to take the most cursory of glances at it, that the abolishment of technology would have many numerous and terrible consequences for our species, and for the planet as a whole that we inhabit. If we look at the possible health consequences of this we can immediately see that many people, from those who need visual assistance, to those with HIV/AIDS would just be thrown to the proverbial wolves. What would happen should we abandon the monitoring of nuclear waste sites? Even if buried deep below the surface, climate changes and tectonic plate movements would eventually cause it to leak and ecological devastation would ensue.

However, there are are also some other, decidedly more morbid and ethically questionable (from a revolutionary socialist perspective), effects of “rewilding” that I wish to explore in some more depth in the rest of this post.

While the concept of primitivism is not new, it has come to prominence over the last decade or so. In this period of time a generalised critique of “civilization” has been put forward by a number of authors. At this point I should also point out that not all primitivists are anarcho-primitivists. When I speak of primitivism I am talking of the whole movement, of which anarcho-primitivism is a subset. However, of those proposing an anti-civilizationist mode of thought, more than enough have chosen to identify as anarchists and anarcho-primitivists. They also often have chosen to call themselves “post-left.”

To begin in dissecting this movement we need to first look to see if primitivism is even able to offer any sort of preferable, or realistic alternative to the world as we currently find it.

From the primitivist perspective, the critique of society, and existing leftisms, is based around a claim by some to have discovered a contradiction between true liberty and mass society/technology. To put it another way, the primitivist feels that it is impossible for a society that is made of any sort of group much larger than a small village to be a free society.

But what about technology? Are we talking about bows and spears, ground stone tools, or chipped stone tools? Maybe no tools? Many primitivists find the level of technology present in the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas to be too high a level, while other find it to be acceptable. The simple fact is that most primitivists try to evade this question of what level of technology they wish to return to. They do so by attempting to hide behind the claim that they are not arguing for a return to anything, quite the contrary, they actually wish to move forward. With that in hand it is possible to summarize that their position is that certain technologies are acceptable up to the level of small village society sustained by hunting and gathering. For them the problem begins when people begin to make the transition to agriculture and mass society.

Another source of problems for the primitivists is term civilization, which is also rarely defined by them. Indeed, in general, even in the fields such Anthropology which seek to study human history and culture, it is not a well defined term. Also, only a few of the primitivist thinkers have taken the argument against civilization to its logical conclusion, however one who has, John Zerzan, actually figures the root of the problem can be found in the evolution of language and abstract thought. This is a logical end point for the primitivist rejection of mass society, with some segments of primitivists wishing to see the abolition of symbolic communication, which includes spoken language, along with technology and civilization.

However, while many primitivists do like to argue that they do not wish to go backwards, but forwards, for the sake of simplicity in this article I will just say that the future society envisioned by the primitivists would look allot like what existed around 12,000 years ago, the time immediately before the Agricultural Revolution. The simple fact is that if one seeks to “go forward” by removing all post-revolutionary technology, then the society that will result will look quite like pre-agricultural society of 10,000 BCE. As this type of society is only real analogue we have to the society put forward by the primitivists it will serve as the base from which we can evaluate their claims.

The first question we can begin to answer is the one about food and population. Again for simplicities sake I will only deal with those claims that seek a return to a society made up of both gatherers and hunters, and ignore the fact that many primitivists, especially anarcho-primitivists, are also advocates of veganism/vegetarianism and hence would advocate for a “feral” society that would technically only involve gathering.

As the name should be make plainly obvious, hunters and gatherers subsist off of the food they can gather (fruits, nuts, edible leaves and grasses, roots etc) and can trap or hunt. As we are dealing with a pre-agriculture society in 10,000 BCE, our primitivist analogue, every man, woman and child on the earth subsisted by some mix of the two. It is also the truth that in many marginal systems a hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern is the only feasible way of obtaining food, with examples being the extreme dryness of deserts and the extreme cold of the circum-polar regions, both of which are incompatible with any sort of large scale agriculture.

The only possible statistical outcome for a hunter-gatherer subsistence pattern is a very low population density, as population growth is determined by the amount of calories that can be hunted, trapped or gathered from any given acre of land. This leads us to the core problem with the primitivist world-view. It is simply impossible for all six billion plus people who live on the Earth currently to survive in hunter-gatherer bands.

It should be obvious to all that an acre of steppe, forest, savannah or any other type of wild landscape will yield a lot less edible calories than an acre of a food plant that has been selectively bred for centuries to have a high calorie content. Just compare any modern domesticated plant with its wild cousin, say for example modern maize with its ancestor teosente. The simple fact is that agriculture yields far more useful calories per unit of measurement than wild countryside.

Also, the population estimates for Earth at the dawn of agriculture vary wildly, from as little as 250,000 to as much as 6 to 10 million. This presents us, and the primitivists, with a bit of a problem to say the least when compared to the current world population.

As the human population, all 6 billion of us, are now almost entirely sustained by agriculture it would be completely impossible for us to make a transition to a primitivist society without having to go through a mass die off of the human population. This is an absolutely inescapable problem for the primitivists. But how is this mass die off to happen? If we take the historic maximum population of 10 million and generously multiply it by 10 giving us 100 million people, given the world’s 6 billion plus population, we see that the die off would involve the extinction of almost 98% of the world’s current population. This is a moral dilemma to say the least. It is at this point, when the mass die off of humanity is brought up, that many primitivists declare that we are playing dirty tricks and slinging mud. While no primitivist seems to actively suggest the use of Nazi-like death camps where masses of people are put to death in order to reduce the global population, the problem however is that the idea of the need for a mass die off is not just backed up by a realistic, logical look at such a scenario, it is backed up in the words various individual primitivists and primitivist groups, with some claiming that drastic population reductions are going to happen whether we do it voluntarily or not. One group, the Coalition Against Civilisation writes “We need to be realistic about what would happen were we to enter a post-civilised world. One basic write-off is that a lot of people would die upon civil collapse. While being a hard thing to argue to a moralistic person, we shouldn’t pretend this wouldn’t be the case.” Another major primitivist, Derrick Jensen says “civilisation needs to be actively fought against, but I don’t think that we can bring it down. What we can do is assist the natural world to bring it down….. I want civilisation brought down and I want it brought down now.”

I have already demonstrated what the immediate collapse of “civilization” would portend for the human race. So despite the protestations of a few, the fact of the matter is that there is no shortage of primitivists who actually do recognise the need for mass die offs in order to achieve their desired world. Some primitivists like John Moore still however refuse to confront this question of the die off by playing the emotion card, accusing critics of using smear tactics. However, it’s up to him to explain either how 6 billion can be fed or to admit that primitivism is no more then an intellectual thought experiment.

I expect that more than a few people, when confronted with this requirement of mass death, will not hesitate to conclude that so-called primitivism offers absolutely nothing worth fighting for, much less worth dying for.

So if primitivism is such a completely absurd idea, why waste your time arguing against it and its adherents? It is after all an extremely fragile ideology once it is put to the microscope. My primary point of contention with the primitivist school of thought is how, both by implication and often in its calls, seeks to have its followers reject rationalism for pseudo-mysticism and “oneness” with nature. If we look back on history we see that they are far from the first irrational ecological movement to do so. A good third of the German Nazi party came from forest-worshipping cults and soil movements that sprung up in Germany in the aftermath of World War I.

And I do not mention this as some sort of alarmist empty danger, the truth is that within primitivism a self-proclaimed irrational wing has developed, that while not yet advocating Nazi-style death camps, has publicly celebrated the deaths and murder of large numbers of people as a first step towards their ecotopia. If we take a quick survey of the primitivist literature we can see a number of examples of his type of disgusting death worship. For example, in the December, 1997 issue of the US publication Earth First! wrote, “the AIDS epidemic, rather than being a scourge, is a welcome development in the inevitable reduction of human population.” If that was not enough, around the same time in the United Kingdom, Steve Booth, one of the editors of the magazine Green Anarchist, wrote that:

“The Oklahoma bombers had the right idea. The pity was that they did not blast any more government offices. Even so, they did all they could and now there are at least 200 government automatons that are no longer capable of oppression. The Tokyo sarin cult had the right idea. The pity was that in testing the gas a year prior to the attack, they gave themselves away. They were not secretive enough. They had the technology to produce the gas but the method of delivery was ineffective. One day the groups will be totally secretive and their methods of fumigation will be completely effective.”

This is where one ends up when one raises pseudo-mystic visions over rationalism. The ideas primitivists, anarcho-primitivists and anti-civilizationists have only reactionary conclusions.

With that we come back to the beginning of this discussion. I will agree that the rise of civilisation came with many, many problems, class society etc, but it also came with many blessings. The challenge for as radicals and revolutionaries is not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to transform civilisation into something worth fighting, and dying, for, a society without capitalism, without classes, without patriarchy, without racial/national oppression, without war and without ecological destruction.

The answer is not to abandon all technology in some sort of suicidal knee-jerk reaction, but to create new technology, and to improve on already existing technology. It is undeniable that we need technology, we need it to clean our water, pump away and process our waste and inoculate or cure people of disease.

The challenge I present to you then is not just the creation of a new civilisation that keeps everyone’s standards of living at the level they are now. The challenge is raising that standard, but while all the while keeping sure to do so in a manner that is sustainable. It is only with the further development of technology, combined with a revolution against inequality across the planet that we can deliver on this challenge.

It is unfortunate development that living in the most developed, most wealthy and most technological nations there are people who prefer to play around with reactionary visions like primitivism more than getting down to thinking about how we can really change the world. The problem we face is not that capitalism has been complicit in sending a huge proportion of the world’s population in utter poverty, the problem is that development of the profit driven system has been aimed so completely at creating consumers for future products rather then providing what people need. The truth is that as long as the system of capitalism exists it will continue to send our ecological system down the proverbial shitter. It will only effectively respond to the environmental crisis once that becomes profitable. But we must realize that it is not by glorifying some sort of mystical past that we will fix these problems. We can only sort it out by building the sort of mass movements that are able to not just overthrow capitalism, but replace with a truly democratic socialist society.

To conclude, let me restate that primitivism, anarcho-primitivism and anti-civilizationism are nothing more than reactionary pipe-dreams. They offer absolutely no way forwards in the struggle for a free society, and often its adherents end up undermining that struggle by attacking the very things, like mass organisation, that are a requirement to win it. It must be said that those primitivists who are actually serious about changing the world need to deeply re-examine what they are fighting for.

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