corrections to primitivist misconceptions on this board

Dude I'm a postman. Does that make me working class??

You've got my vote.

To return to the original thread topic,

I think some of you folks should reall read some anthropology, without getting so ethno-centric. Try "fragments of an anarchist anthropology" by David Graeber for a start, its only wee and its very interesting.

There is a lot we could learn from so called "primitive" cultures, without going down the anti-civilisation route of the primitivists such as Zerzan.

There were loads of North and South American pre-colonial societies, and they were primarily egalitarian and based on kinds of gift-giving 'economies'. These societies generally hated democracy, and prefered consensus-based decision making. They abhorred the pursuit of wealth and personal status, and had anti-power structures to maintain equality of wealth and power.

They pretty well all had flaws, and Im not saying lets all become hunter-gatherers, but there is alot to learn from these cultures.

No because you listen to ridiculous amounts of punk

I second that!

I'll probably regret sticking my oar in here, but what the hell. Isn't power as much an indicator of social class as income when you're discussing the differences between the working and middle or managerial class? In many ways, as you've pointed out, income is irrelevant but the power relationship between those who have control over decision making and gatekeeping of resources and those who don't is difficult to deny. It's all very subjective as middle class radicals may well feel they're not exercising power over the working class and may well go out of their way to act in an anti-oppressive way but if they're perceived as being in a position of power then does it really matter how they perceive their role? Take for example a social services or housing office reception as people sit there waiting to be interviewed by the duty officer. There's obviously an inbalance of power there. Shouldn't be but there is!

Now I don't believe for a minute that middle class people shouldn't be involved in revolutionary politics or shouldn't be involved in creating revolutionary structures but I do think the power imbalance that capitalism creates needs to be discussed openly and in a way that doesn't put anyone on a guilt trip.

Maybe it's already been discussed in an open way and I've missed it. If so point me towards it and I'll trudge off to expose the evil doing of middle class teachers

"Cos proportionally a western teacher + call centre worker have much more in common than a western call centre worker and african peasant, say."

All right, you are quite correct to point out that the differences between an African peasent and a western worker are important, but in my mind they would occupy the same position in a revolution. The peasent and the worker in the west are both working class, and would be the force for anachism in their respective nations. And I guess I could not really point out histroical evidence or an analysis of the middle class as reactionary. Unfortunately though I have read a lot of books by anarchists I am not really that well versed in political theory, and obviously GB you can run circles around me in this area. However, everything I have read on the middle class/working class from class war anarchist groups has pusuaded me to this current line of thinking and I think it is important for me to try and argue it amongst anarchists. Not to annoy you, if that happens I am sorry, but because in my mind this is the most important question that needs to be hashed out before our movement can become dangerous and effective. And while I cant really articulate it as clearly as I would like, I feel strongle that there is a difference between a plumber and a therapist. One is certainly necessary, the other probally can be sometimes, but a plumber is doing needed work and if he or she can get OK pay than that is good. While a therapist gets to live a comfortable life for no other reason that capitalist society has dictated that certain people get to live a life of privellege.

And Lucy82, from all the posts of yours I have read I can only gather that you were raised working class and I certainly do not regard you as a class enemy. Even working class people who get middle class jobs seem like they should still be helpful organizing. I think the real problem is people who have been rasied middle class and continue on that line of privellege.

"Twat."

Good one, quite clever of you. Actually, I dont even know why I am bothering to discuss this. In any event I am done on this thread as of now.

posted by Trained_Chimp:

Yes, I think most anarchists agree that there are aspects of those cultures - face-to-face communication, sometimes egalitarian economies, apparently quite a lot of leisure time in some hunter-gatherer societies. The problem isn't looking at those cultures and seeing some good aspects of them, it's romanticising those cultures and wanting to return to them - which is nostalgia, not historical/anthropological analysis.

--

Anarch, I do a lot of work with kids with special educational needs in a school, which makes me sort of a teacher. I also teach saxophone in the same school. Materially I'm better off than a lot of those kids, although my income is well below the UK national average, and way below proper class teachers. Is that work more or less useful than when I was taking orders for plastic trays down the phone in a factory, or doing clerical work in hospital offices/wards as a temp? My job security and annual wage in all jobs has been similar if averaged out. I get more money per hour for the teaching job, but no sick pay or paid holiday, even as a temp I got paid holiday.

I'd argue that being a doctor/therapist/teacher is more useful than pushing paper around in an office or taking orders for plastic food packaging (ideally we don't want all our food in little plastic trays no?). However, in the west, with so many jobs being based in service industries or state and private bureaucracies, many working class people are pushing pens, or pushing electrons, or giving useless information over the phone. This is all less useful than being a nurse or doctor, or fireman - are they middle class?

If you're going to restrict your working class to people with useful jobs, then my mate who delivers pizza delivery/metropolitan police/supermarket leaflets through people's doors for shit money isn't working class. If you're going to restrict it to people who don't have supervisory roles in their jobs, then you're going to miss all the people who get "promoted" and paid 3% an hour more, given a "manager" or "team leader" job title, then have to do much more work and take responsibility for training new staff for hardly any more money.

Put down Openly Classist now and walk away, go to the library, get out some Bookchin.

You've complained that the anarchist movement is really tiny. That's true. However, excluding people because they're teachers (overworked, underpaid, often pissed off with the State's reduction of resources for education and the turning of the curriculum over to business interests), doctors (who's going to fix your gunshot wounds when you're fighting the actual ruling class - not a plumber hopefully, don't think that funny foam stuff works on blood vessels), or Starbucks Late Shift Super Baristo's whatever arbitrary distinctions you're going to draw, then you're going to have only the most minoritarian movement possible. A lot of people, even with good incomes, are really, really pissed off with capitalism for many reasons other than the economic - war, environmental pollution/scary weather patterns, increased state/social control. Just as many working class people according to your definition don't necessarily link all of these with capitalism itself, merely the shittier aspects of it, nor do many people you'd call middle class. However the interest in maintaining the system lies only with the proper ruling class, of which teachers and doctors are not a part. Creating arbitrary divisions between people with many objective common interests does nothing to build any kind of revolutionary movement.

I think whether someone's middle class or working class is far less important than whether or not they have a decent class analysis. You could argue that (culturally) working class people are more likely to have a decent class analysis, but that isn't sufficient grounds for writing off each and every middle class individual as the class enemy.

I wrote something a while ago in this topic about even trying to get the upper-middle class and the upper class turned on to the revolution. The most common reply i got was that it would be pretty hard to reach out to those groups. Here is one atemp that some bloke did that is to some degreealso aimed at the most privileged. Read it and please make a post about what you think of it.

I think that it will be important to get away from the ideas that the rich people are so damn happy if we want to reach out to anyone. If you tell midle or workingclass that the upperclass is getting fat and happy on the labour that the audience does then you are also turning being upperclass into something worth strugling for. If they are already filled with neo-liberal propaganda then they might even belive that they have a chance to participate in the happines of luxury. If people know that they can only reach happines through an equal and good economy for all then they are not that likely to try to save themself through strugling to become uperclass.

The article:

http://www1.shellkonto.se/nilswarm/crimethinc/content.php?article.50

I agree, its not about romanticising, its about looking at these other cultures without looking down on them and thinking "our way is better" merely because it is "our way". We, and i mean westerners, seem to have inherited an evolutionist way of looking at the world. We always seem to place ourselves at the top of the ladder, when in truth there is no ladder, civilisation does not progress to some goal, it merely keeps on changing.

It would be interesting to see if the people living in a hunter-gatherer society were just as happy an contented as those living in a city, with sattelite telly. If it were the case that they were equally happy what does that say about our way of living?

I think it would say that all our modern technology is worthless, if the point of it is to make people more happy and contented, to fulfill their desires etc. The anthropology i have read suggests that hunter-gatherer societies were quite contented, while it does not seem to me that 'modern' societies are very contented.

Im not saying, to pre-empt some criticism, that we should 'go back' to living in hunter gatherer societies, The point i am trying to make is that perhaps we should challenge our beliefs about our whole way of life, including science and technology. Factories run by anarchist workers collectives are still factories, do we really need them? These are the kinds of questions that interest me. If the 'hunter-gatherers' were quite observably content and healthy, what does this say about us? If we were to have a political revolution, perhaps a cultural one as well.

See there's a bit of a leap of logic there. If members of some hunter gatherer societies were very contented (before they died at the average age of 22 or whatever), then were they contented due to the fact that they lived with very little technology (they had some after all) or because the societies were more egalitarian? If it's because the societies were more egalitarian, then it follows that a post-revolutionary society might be able to attain that contentment/satisfaction whatever, in addition to the benefits of modern technology and science.

Technology is a product of social relationships, not their cause, although some technologies can reinforce relationships and power structures once developed. Technology developed by libertarian socialist societies wouldn't be the same as it is now. Many factories could, indeed, close down, because they'd no longer be needed to make products no-one wants, or to replace products that fall apart every couple of years for no good reason. Solar and wind sources of energy could be developed to decentralise energy production, giving more control to communities. Manufacturing could be similarly decentralised, using technology like 3D printers to create complex items without the need for mass manufacture. Resource sharing could vastly reduce consumption and reduce the amount of labour each individual would have to undertake in order to maintain a decent standard of living. It would also allow those who wanted to live outside technological society to go make their own communes if they wanted, since potentially a lot of land would be freed up by more egalitarian land-use and the end of private property.

Catch>> Thumbs up for you. I like the way you think.

ta Wendal, just realised I didn't properly finish that post, though.

The problem with primitivism (amazed this thread ever went back on topic), is it wants the whole of humanity to reject technology, since it views technology as the source of man's power over nature, and ignores Man's _naturally evolved_ ability to devise and develop technology and affect our environment systematically, which is what separates us from other animals in the first place.

The application of knowledge into tools and other ways of affecting our environment _is in itself bad_ if you accept anti-technology arguments. This ignores animals such as ants, which also significantly affect their environment , and are even known to farm aphids (and ants are more numerous than humans, maybe we need a die-off!).

Someone, not sure if it was this on this thread, said that since anarchists reject the state, they reject a form of technology. Without arguing the semantics of whether the State is a technology or not. This implies that the State is seen by primitivists as simply an advanced form of the general oppressive technological apparatus which allows humans control over nature. Therefore, although primitivists may be against the State, they see its dissolution as simply one not necessarily chronological step in the dismantling of technology, and some are happy to use the state in order to dismantle other forms of technology as well.

Fundamentally, I see revolutionary libertarian socialist thought and movements as being about changing relationships between humans. The idea being that when decisions are taken face to face in assemblies by popular vote, then people are very likely to act in the interests of themselves and their peers, as opposed to the present system which works remotely from people's day to day lives in the interests of a few. Since human relationships exist in the context of their wider environment, any rational society would have to take into account the environmental impact of decisions, and the long term effect of that on human interests and survival. I think a libertarian socialist society would naturally gravitate towards one which had a much more developed attitude towards ecology, and associated ecological concerns with human concerns rather than opposed them - as misanthropic ecologists/primitivists/environmentalists do - view human interest as incompatible with the wider environment and therefore see us as irrevocably damaging - either to be removed or to be turned back into animals.

In that sense, an opposition to the State as merely one form of technology, and something arising naturally out of the human propensity to develop technology, can't be seen in the same way as the anarchist's opposition to it - as a social relationship which unnaturally imposes hierarchy upon a society quite capable of managing itself without it. The same with capitalism, anarchists aren't against production and distribution of goods, just the specific social relationship called capitalism and some other historical ones. For someone anti-civ, any social system which engages in the production and distribution of commodities is bad, and capitalism is to be opposed as much as anarchist-communism, except there isn't yet anarchist communism to oppose.

what class are they then? bourgeois? middle class? if you say something like lumpen proletariat i'll laugh at your ridiculous dogmatic marxist face and flick my non-existent beard in contempt like the kung fu master i wish i was...

otherwise, i agree with catch and others agreeing with him. in fact if you look at some of the statements released by members of "primitive" communities engaged in resistance at the moment, like the opm in west papua, they do not actually rule out higher technology or anything. they object to it being forced on them, having the land they have lived in for generations destroyed in the name of progress and other stuff, which is understandable and perfectly logical. if instead stuff such as better healthcare and stable food source was offered to them on an equal anarchistic basis without the imposition of conditions such as converting to christianisty and wage slavery, they might well have an entirely different approach. and listening to what they and others have to say is a lot more useful than the romanticised nonsense that those who identify as primitivists come out with.

right. because peasants and workers who not more than one generation before had been peasants were not the driving force behind the majority of revolutions in the 20th century, were they? marx was so unbelievably wrong about peasants. he was great on economics, but when it came to economic theory he was such an anti-human wanker, at least bakunin had the decency to be an insane adventurist...

well no, by saying that you're engaging in technological fetishism, giving it some abstract thinghood, treating it like a commodity, though one that can feed back and reinforce power structures. Technology ain't simply a product of social relations, it is a social relation. Its this whole problem with the primmie vs productionist debate both treat technology as an evolutionist development from 'no/low' technology to 'high' technology, both as technology as something largely exteneral to society, just differ on which end of this technologocial spectrum is the good side.

oh ffs your class anylsis is as slack as your rectum, the 'peasantry' a pretty muych useless term for discussing the concrete material conditions of the countless different labour relations that get lumped together as pesant labour. How does the terms 'Petit-bourgeois' or 'a class in themselves' (but never class for themsleves) adequately describe cnetral american tenant farmers who are supported by relatives working in America as farm labourers and domestic servants who'd come back to work the land in retirment? Or indonesian 'pesants' reliant on work done by female family members in free trade zones or home work? Or unemployed brazillian slum dwellers (not even functioning as a resevre army of labour) seeking to 're-ruralise' themselves?

no i haven't, I pointed out the uselessness the classic marxist catergory of 'peasantry'. I gave examples of the differnt labour relations of people who have been refered to as pesantry. Don't see how you can claim i'm lumpimg people together.

You reply to GT by saying that peasant are both petit-bourgeois or a class in themselves depending on the sitution (peasants are peasants, nice economic anylsis there mate). You've now added the term agricultural working class. But your still not saying what the specific economic postion of 'peasants' is?

no/low to high I wouldn't agree with, but evolutionary development, with false starts, wrong turns and dead ends, yes I would. If technology is the practical application of science, then when it actually fits that, it must in some way reflect the current state of science, which has managed to work out that the world is round, discover the atom and the quark, stuff like that, with a degree of evolutionary development (or progression, whichever word is best), yes.

Doesn't mean I think the progression is subjectively "better", and stuff like fast computer processors is outweighed by skimpy RAM or slower, fatter software, but the processor is still faster.

Technology external to society. Nope. Our communication is right now mediated by technology, quite a lot of it, and technology that's only been around for ten years. The technology to get me from London to Manchester quickly has only been around for a few decades longer, these changes in technology have undoubtedly had massive effects on human relations, but the reason those technologies were developed, and the relative positive and negative effects of their development were determined by society and the social relations that led to their development in the first place. Society precedes the individual. Society precedes individual technologies. Once it's here, you can't go back and change it, so you have to start from the position you're in.

doppelpost

"Basically, the crux of the matter is that peasants are a ridiculous and doomed class of the past, which has no part to play in capitalism, let alone a more advanced society."

Maybe it is because I dont understand what you are saying...but you sound like an ass. You are gonna die in the class war, just like Jesus. Marx is stupid and your mom is fat.

So there

A peasant does not have the tools for their own emancipation, they use backward methods of production and therefore cannot produce a sustainable surplus.

An agri worker would use advanced capitalist argicultural methods and therefore be able to produce what was needed.

Peasants live in rural idiocy, agriworkers don't, they are completely seperate classes. Looking at russia in 1917 for example you can see that the agri-workers in the ukraine working on sugar and beet plantations or larger farms were able to overthrough the social order far better than the peasants in the rest of russia. The basic drawback of much of russian socialism from bakunin to Lenins NEP had been an over reliance on the peasantry and existing peasants organisations.

Jack you must write out 100 times:

Marx never wrote that the peasanty were petit-bourgeois or a class in it self.

taken me ages to see this comment

http://allafrica.com/stories/200402230316.html

only if it contains lines like this

classic.

cantdocartwheels wrote:

Bollocks, human population growth (until 150 years or so) has been based on the peasants' ability to create a sustainable surplus.

Jack wrote

Now do it 99 more times

Jack, i still haven't had your lines yet.

So now you get another assignment.

Please explain in less than 200 words how your concept of petit bourgeois differs from that of Marx.

Your essay is due on the 5th Jan 2005.

So just the industrial workers? No peasents, no petty bourgeoise, how about retail workers and the like. And what the hell does reactionary mean? I have heard the term, but mostly from fucking marxists...and you know how I feel abou that.