Primitivism seems a very strange idea. I also don't see how you go from "here" to "there", even supposing it was a workable concept.
We join tribes who are surviving in the wilderness without farming nor electricity. We learn how to survive. I feel the more we let go of agriculture, the less we will populate the earth. I feel this because I've read our population started growing only after the agriculture revolution. I'm assuming, or maybe I've read that agriculture increases our population. Everybody on earth can't join tribes and live off the earth, today, 'cause we'd eat up everything there was to eat. Of course, not even half the people want to do this, so I don't see this as a problem. I don't think I'll live to see this world without agriculture if life on this planet will ever get back to such a state.
Anarcho-primitivists want things to hcange in the way all anarchists want change -- trhough direct action and people taking over their own lives.
I'm one anarcho-primitivist who doesn't believe in direct action. I mean I think we have a real enemy in the upper class and that they will even kill people like me in order to maintain their luxury, but I'm not going to force anybody to change.
Steven. wrote:
Lazlo - don't most primmies mean a society using agriculture as "civilisation"? And that'll still remain no?
yes, but from what i've been reading now in the past few weeks that distinction is arbitrary, just because historians put start of civilisation there primmies seem to have gone with it. Not for any kind of rational reason, exept the hatred of the concept of "civilisation".
I wonder when primitivist movement will split and the hardliners won't even use fire or language
and i've never really seen a deffinition of civilisation from primmitivists. i mean, if you use it to mean a society based around large cities, then i'm against civilisation, because having grown up in a small village i think it's a nicer way to live, as long as they're not too far apart and it's easy to get to and communicate with other villages, otherwise we could have some gene pool problems developing... i mean, i'm against present hierarchial civilisation as all anarchists are, but i've never seen the advantage in saying that you're against civilisation rather than just hierarchial society.
Everyone defines civilization the same way. Civilization is that thing that happened with villages and cities and states and armies and nations and empires. Without agriculture, I don't think any of this would have happened. If you compare civilization to tribes that existed before the agriculture revolution, then any anarchist would say it's obviously not smart to go from a life of complete autonomy to work fields for other families. The only reason I think they did this is because of the relaxing, addictive opioids we recently found in wheat. There's no way to know 'cause there's no way to prove these opioids existed back then. Primitivists aren't really against fire, but some are against language. a tribe is something like twenty people or less. a village is fifty to 100, and i wouldn't even be for a village.
) will be designated to castes.
is it brutal and harsh? no, that's not why i made that suggestion, and I don't even have a problem with the size of the global population although overcrowding such as cities does cause problems such as an increased disease spreading. since you didn't pick up on my reasoning, perhaps these quotes from Henry David Thoreau's Walden will help you out:
[M]en labor under a mistake. The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the soil for compost.
It is very evident what mean and sneaking lives many of you live; [. . .] always on the limits, trying to get into business and trying to get out of debt, [. . .] always promising to pay, promising to pay, to-morrow; [. . .] lying. [. . .] (Thoreau 108-110)
well, yeah, we can't have civilization and leisure without inequality.
Well, first of all, we don't have to create anything except our understanding of stuff like what we can and cannot consume. Secondly, this material existence that can't sustain a village, even, stops the suffering by not mandating regular, arduous work "oriented to future payoffs and the demands of superiors." Families wouldn't "cultivated the land [. . .] for strangers and for the future" rather than "for themselves and their immediate needs alone." Of course, there wouldn't be any cultivation in a primitive society. Such practices would lead to hierarchy anyway unless they kept it to permaculture maybe and abandoned it when they had healed the area. We wouldn't work "all day instead of a few hours a day, as hunter-gatherers had done." (Wadley & Martin 96-105)
yeah, sure, yo, whatever you want. this is anarchy! if one doesn't enjoy a tribe, then she/he is free to become a hermit, join another tribe, or return to civilization, no questions asked.
Works Cited:
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Other Writings. 3rd ed. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.
Wadley & Martin, Greg & Angus. "The origins of agriculture – a biological perspective and a new hypothesis." Australian Biologist 6 (June 1993): 96-105.