corrections to primitivist misconceptions on this board

the ''subtle nuances'' of marxism eh?, well we discussed that one three pages ago, get with the times you narodnik bastard

You what? How does that make any sense?

How were the peasantry of europe in 1848 anti-authoritarian? If anything i think you'll find its the other way, that the industrial working class in the mid 19th century favoured revolutionary change but were held back by a peasantry tied to the land and stuck in rural idiocy.

Have you even thought about what you said before you typed it, or was this just some froth mouthed hysterical anti-marxist rant?

john

ps and someone who works on a planation for a company like say united fruit, is an agri-worker, as was previously discussed in the thread...several times

Mass immigration to cities and towns of excess rural population didn't happen, because most european peasants were serfs, or tied to the land by some other means.

A largish town of 40,000 people, would increase in size steadily, because people have more kids in cities. Now say some 5-10% of the population in feudal society is urban, wouldn't that already account for most of your population increase.

I mean the biggest population increase in fedual times was between 1500 and 1600, and almost every historian i've read on the subject tends to agree this was concentrated in towns and cities.

Non seasonal food only accounts for a small fraction of total food production in industrialised countries and even less in world terms. Not all peasants use "backward farming techniques".

Yes they do.

And jeez, have you been in any supermarkets lately, what do you notice about where we get our food from in an industrial society...?

john

Obviously those working on large plantations are not petty captitalists, but I still say that a farmer who owns some land is also working class, maybe not in classic marxist terminology, but in a lot of the ways that matter. Moreover it is silly to think that you can organize and not include farmers, especially in rural areas like where I live.

In any event Jack Ninjas are never outdated, so there. And moreover my politics can and will beat up your politics. And I suspect that my daddy could beat up your daddy.

Nah, my Dad would declare a wildcat strike and force your Dad to STFU. 8)

jesus christ how many times, PEOPLE WHO WORK ON PLANTATIONS FOR A WAGE ARE AGRI-WORKERS

perhaps, but what you fail to see is that i don't care about rural areas where you live.

john

...Well I guess my dad would lose, but a loss for my father is a win for the revolution, so its chill.

And Jack, how the fuck am I a trot? You are one of the most annoying people I have ever encountered on the interweb. I think we should just meet and hash this out. You pick the weapon, the time, and the place and we will have a duel to the death for the future of international communism.

watch it jack, he'll gun you down like a partridge

Intresting. Will check it out more. Still many anarchist uprisings has comed from the peasants(wether it is against capitalist or marxist opression) and many peasants has had anarchic values beacuse of their situation(some peasants has always lived long away from the state and the law and only paid some taxes now and then) or their values that in some cases goes back to the days of anarcho-primitivsm like with the Iranian Kurds.

The Insurrectionary Anarchist Army of the Ukraine (known as 'Makhnovists') were composed of peasants, labourers and urban wage workers. Their propaganda used the term 'toilers' to refer to all the kinds of people who survive through their labour.

Jack -- have you read any Voline? was he a trot?

No he only reads Marx. If you call masturbating to the verbal diahrea of some crusty authoritarian reading. And if shooting you is good for the movement...well you gotta go. It says so right here in the Communist Manifesto "assholes who preach authoritarain useless retoric must be hung upside down until their heads explode, oh yeah and all that stuff about communism."

Thanks I think

Na most of the ukrainian farms in the area were sugar or beet plantations or large farms,so the ukraine employed modern capitalist farming techniques, which meant that most of ukrainians were agricultural workers as most of them worked for a wage instead of owning a small strip of land, or working in the primitive backward looking ''communes'' set up by the tsarist autocracy after 1861 in order to keep the ex-serfs tied to the land and in debt to the state.

Think paris commune, german workers uprisings etc and then see the trend repeated with the 1905 revolution in russia and the shanghai soviet in 1921. The list of examples is endless.

Peasant villages are isolated, so yes their localism will have ''anarchic'' aspects to it. And may in a few cases have led to attempts to destroy state authority, but i don't think that should be confused with a realistic example of socialism/anarchism in practice.

Personally i don't think peasants could ever have overturned the feudal order, they simply did not have the military power or defenses to do so.

But even if they had done so what would you get? A series of localised isolated communities, a largely illiterate population, communities run by ''elders'' and obviously male householders, with the constant risk of shortages and a generally low standard of life and a life expectancy of 40 odd. Peasants could not hope to create the industrial technology needed to overcome these shortcomings.

Peasants could not realistically acheive any lasting form of anarchism or socialism on their own

john

Its hanged, marx didn't even speak english as a first language and he got it right in the manifesto.

Historicaly this might be true in some cases. In todays world of masscomunication there is an acess to information and news for even the poorest peasants/agri-workers.

But that means that everyone must know someone who has!

Seriously though ideas can and do spread without technology

No they don't, because without technology we'd basically be apes and therefore might just have a few problems with the concept of ''ideas'', unless your idea of socialism is picking fleas out of your ears.

I was thinking modern devices like telephones and the internet, which simply spread ideas faster.The most important breakthrough would be universal literacy.

er, literacy is technology (prinitng press, paper production, infrastructure etc)

Also for example, industrial society has a higher level of literacy than a feudal society, specifically because of the technological developments.

cantdocartwheels but canmovegoalposts wrote

and then

and

Surely you have contradicted yourself? But to get around this introduced a new element.

So you agreed that population did in fact increase, but claim only in town and cities. Who do you think did the food cultivation?

World population was estimated to be 3 million two thousand years ago, it reached an est. 1 billion appox in 1800. Throughout this period most food production was carried out by peasants, so it is obvious that peasants are capable of producing a sustainable surplus.

also

In England the population stats were (Russell 1985)

1086 1.1m

1348 3.7m

1377 2.2m

1430 2.1m

1603 3.8m

1690 4.1m

Most of the reduction can be attributed to plague, war and it's resulting social disruption. Hardly an anomaly.

this only true for Europe, China's population growth spurt started two centuries earlier.

i replied

John you replied

Peasants weren't only serfs and what exact responsibilities serfdom actually entailed varied widely over the world and time period. The heads of households were usually responsible to the lord. Younger sons (and daughters) who were not needed for agriculture frequently migrated.

Armies were mainly recruited from the peasantry who were considered healthier and were more numerous.

No, the death rate was also higher due to 1) poor sanitation, lack of clean water, overcrowding etc. 2) disease vectors such as population density, close living quarters, major transport links. Which lead to a higher instance of epidemics in towns and cities, which were more long lasting and widespread causing significant population decreases.

The increase you see from about 1500s onwards is due in large part to most major epidemic diseases becoming endemic (becoming largely childhood diseases ) at this time due to centuries cross exposure around the world and population density meaning a continuously infected group

available leading to evolutionary co-existence stability with the human host. A major exception to this were small pox and measles which continued to ravaged both rural and urban populations for some time to come.

Jason

cantdocartwheels

That we get it from all over the world, not that it is predominately non-seasonal.

While i would agreed that the Ukraine was certainly much more intergrated with the world capitalist marketplace, with widespread large modern farms growing wheat etc. It still seems unlikely that at least a large minority (40% plus) weren't peasants and that a disportunate number didn't join Makno and co. What did you base your figures on.

Anyway i will leave this for now before lovely Lucy82 gets on my case again. Apologies for the excessive re-quoting i just thought it would be easier for other people to follow (not that anyone else is actually gonna read this) .

Hardly a direct contradiction.

A x4 population increase over 600 years is pretty insignificant. If you continued your figures into the dawn of capitalism and up to the mid to late 20th century when the population began to level out you'll see it's pretty clear that while Feudalism can sustain a very slow population build up, only capitalist production can really make it really shoot up. Also your figures proove how unstable the population was under feudalism - a drop from 3.7 to 2.1 million in 30 years is pretty severe.

[somebody might have said this already - I just couldn't read all 18 pages of this thread..]

Seems to me that zerzan style primitivism has something interesting toi say - on the issue of whether hierarchy is a product of civilisation per se (rather than certain social formations). However it has numersous flaws and, most of all, is just twaddle as a strategy for contemporary anarchism. How are we going to persuade the world to depopulate itself? How are we going to 'forget' certain technologies? etc etc. On the other side, 2 quick points:

1. most green anarchists (note the lower case) are simply not primitivists. Groups involved in eco DA such as EF! and RTS have actually sought to tie in their struggles with class based actions.

The general berating of 'Green Anarchist' and the essentially non-existant primitivist position is a bit like repeating the worst bits of the Bob Black/Bookchin debate.

2. If forced to make what is really a false choice between lifestyle and social anarchism, I would have to go for the latterr. However I get worried about the tone of attacks on green/primitivist positions. Those (as I say, rightly) attacking zerzan seem to have a pretty uncritical attitude towards 'science', 'progress' and a whole range of products of bureaucratic modernity. With all this it sounds to me like these attacks are being carried out within a modernist metanarrative. I ain't a postmodernist, but there are moments when I think thy have a point..

jason, my comments earlier in the thread weren't directed at you in particular i think your posts are interesting. i just sometimes start to drown in the gulf between theoretical arguments about the meaning of peasantry and the reality we actually live in. i think at moments like that i should just put the keyboard down and back away slowly.

anyway, i am in fact 82 years old and i like pie. (but i hope that means no waterwheel to harness the waterpower to grind the wheat to make the flour... or motherearth will withhold her bounty and the pie will burn)

Lucy is wind power okay? Surely the sky god wishes transmit his energy into the harvest of our mother? Pie will be ready late spring. Damn the dictates of the seasons.

redyred wrote

Population growth is exoponetial, so a larger base will lead to massive increases, a smaller base will mean a long, slow growth before take off. We simply don't know the upper limits of peasant argiculture. I'm not argueing that population would have been as large without the industrial revolution, just that some of the assumptions made about peasants are based speculation with little to sustain it. The population was unstable due in large part because of epidemic diseases, which started to become endemic around 1600ish for reasons i have already stated.

It is quite plauseable that a new disease epidemic could substantially reduce the current population.

That will please the more misanthropic primmo's.

Nice post Offcentre! I wouldn't bother reading the last 18 pages because its mostly crap.

It seems a lot of people on these boards deliberately misrepresent a lot of primitivist and anti-civ ideas - so it boils down to mass die-offs and giving up language. There is a lot to be learned from examing the foundations of civilisation, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find many people advocating going back to the trees or whatever.

It's a shame that the level of debate surrounding primitivism on enrager has become such that many interesting ideas - such as questioning the neutrality of technology for example - is immediately dismissed as primmie bollocks.

And why's the green and black star been moved to the second page eh? :greenblackstar:

windpower is only ok if everyone blows hard enough at the same time but the problem is the pie ends up covered in spit.

i feel as if i've been arguing this less eloquently than offcentre for ages..

i agree we should be critical of 'science', 'progress' and the supposed neutrality of technolgy and it is not useful to polarise the debate with crude characturisations which are actually useless and do not seem to bear much relation to reality.

didn't you see the thread about the hidden code of emoticons? its a conspiracy i tell yer.

I know this part of the conversation died down but some of it was so crazy i felt i had to jump in definitivley, so if Anarch and Wendal are about...

Working class = you sell your labour for wages

Capitalist/bourgeois = you extract surplus value from the working class with the justification of property rights

in capitalism these are the only 2 classes. There could be people of the working class who are remunerated sufficiently that they'd side with the status quo, but this just makes them stooges. Class is about your relationship to the means of production not how big your house is.

There's the petty bourgeoisie aswell but they sort of fit under the bourgeois umbrella, but they can work quite hard.

The last post on this thread before yours was six years ago!