“The Future in the Past”: Anarcho-primitivism and the Critique of Civilization Today

Abstract

This essay examines the core ideas and contemporary relevance of anarcho-primitivism, a current of ultra-leftist thought that flourished between the mid 1980s and mid 1990s. The influences of anarcho-primitivism can be traced to periods from the late nineteenth century to the Great War and from 1945 to the mid 1960s, with challenges to conventional leftism issued by thinkers such as Jacques Camatte. In place of a narrow criticism of capitalism and the modern state, anarcho-primitivism offers a wide-ranging critique of civilization. The utopian complement to this critique is to advocate a “future primitive” mode of being, reconciling with nature and reestablishing community. After considering critical issues with anarcho-primitivism, this essay examines how its themes have reappeared in more recent critical thought—as seen in the work of Derrick Jensen and Timothy Morton—and how these themes continue to raise important challenges against a hegemonic liberalism that emphasizes growth, competition, and individualism.

Key Words:

• Critical Theory
• Environment
• Ideology
• Left Politics
• Radical Social Theory

Notes

1 The search for precursors can go back further than we outline here. Becker (2012, xxvii), for instance, suggests that Diogenes and the cynics expressed and actively lived a “primitivist philosophy,” and he notes that Zerzan locates traces of anarchists of “a primitivist bent” in the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit in the fourteenth century, in the Radical Levellers and Diggers active in the English Revolution, and later with the Luddites. We focus on the nineteenth century in our search for antecedents to anarcho-primitivism. While primitivist currents were present earlier, it was in the nineteenth century, we suggest, that a systematic and explicit rejection of civilization, as tied to capitalism and industrialization, was formulated and activated within various philosophical and activist currents.

2 In this vein, we could also mention the “guild socialism” current—found, for instance, in the journal New Age (1904–20)—which focused on the alienating consequences of the division of labor and looked toward the establishment of a more democratic type of small-scale artisanal production (Schecter 1994). This romantic socialism attracted minds such as G. D. H. Cole, Alfred Richard Orage, and Bertrand Russell.

3 We have not discussed the pioneering work of Murray Bookchin, whose essays through the 1960s, collected in Post-Scarcity Anarchism (see Bookchin 1986), chart much of the initial critical and utopian territory here, developing an early green anarchism. Bookchin later came into bitter conflict with deep-ecology activists and primitivists, but much of his critique of leftism is consonant with that developed by anarcho-primitivists. For instance, aspects of what Bookchin says in “Listen, Marxist!” coalesce with elements found in Camatte’s work through the late 1960s and early ’70s.

4 See el-Ojeili (2014) for a detailed discussion on this point.

5 Perlman encountered Camatte’s work in the early 1970s and translated the latter’s “The Wandering of Humanity” in 1975 (see Perlman 1989). The importance of Camatte’s work is underscored in the early part of Perlman’s (1983) primitivist masterpiece, Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, and Perlman’s connection with Fifth Estate and other radical groups in Detroit and beyond was likely crucial in the spread of Camatte’s influence. We see Camatte mentioned early on by a number of key primitivist thinkers: Peter Werbe in 1977; in an exchange of letters between John and Paula Zerzan and Fifth Estate in 1978; by George Bradford (aka David Watson) in an essay of 1981 (see Brubaker, et al. 2010). More recently, his work has been featured in journals such as Green Anarchy and has been cited by Bob Black (1997) as an important influence in primitivist/green anarchist thinking about organization. See also Millet’s (2004) discussion of Fifth Estate.

6 Camatte (1995, 236–7) suggests that we return animals to a state of nature, and he also argues for more natural behavior on a number of fronts—abandoning meat eating, pursuing a fruitarian diet, natural childbirth, and greater amounts of touching between people as “psychogenetically important.”

7 Perhaps the greatest literary example of what the “future primitive” might look like can be found in Le Guin’s (2016) novel Always Coming Home, first published in 1985. This work offers an archaeology of the future whose subject matter is a people named the Kesh, who “might be going to have lived a long, long time from now in Northern California” (xiii). The Kesh’s way of life and philosophical outlook echoes the precolonial life of the First Peoples of North America. The Kesh recognize the personhood of natural phenomena—animals, rocks, mountains. They live in small villages and have retained some of the technology of the civilization that had inhabited this area before them, thanks to “exchanges” run by an AI (“The City of the Mind”) that has separated itself from humanity but who shares previous human knowledge in return for new material. This prior time, the period of civilization, which had excluded “primitive cultures,” is referred to by the Kesh as “the time outside” (152–3)—outside nature, including our own nature as a species. A key theme of this work, as encapsulated in its title, is that what currently passes as civilization is an aberration, a historical (ontological) sequence at odds with our past and potential future. In step with the catastrophic themes of the primitivist thinkers treated in this article, Le Guin envisages the culture of the Kesh as arising in the wake of a toxic crash of our current civilization (which includes a dramatic rise in sea level, the toxification of the soil, and widespread conflict).

8 We should underline here that, while anarcho-primitivists were critical of the patriarchal nature of civilization, the most prominent thinkers in this tradition were men. Space limitations have prohibited our exploring the commonalities shared between anarcho-primitivism and ecofeminism. d’Eaubonne (1980) was instrumental in opening this field, with her work equating the suppression of women with that of nature by patriarchal Western society.

9 For more, see Black (1997), Bookchin and Foreman (1991), Bradford (1989), and Watson (1996).

10 For instance, in the 1960s and 1970s, Perlman (1989) was associated with Glaberman’s Facing Reality and Dunayevskaya’s News and Letters, and Zerzan was involved in union and then ultra-leftist politics.