Gender egalitarianism made us human: A response to David Graeber & David Wengrow's 'How to change the course of human history' - by Camilla Power
Submitted by hedgehog on Sep 5 2018 17:39
In an ambitious recent article in Eurozine David Graeber and David Wengrow try to rewrite the narrative of human history. They attack the ‘myth’ that humans had once enjoyed equality and freedom in hunter-gatherer bands, until the invention of farming sent us down the road to social inequality.
The illusion of the precapitalist gift - humanaesfera
What was the precapitalist gift? In what concrete material circumstances did it make sense? Here, we briefly want to show that the precapitalist conditions which made the gift to make sense are not only without return, but are also absolutely undesirable today. In communist society the enjoyment of the productive forces can neither be a gift nor an exchange of commodities.
Against Civilization - John Zerzan
The anthology 'Against Civilization', first published in 1999 by Uncivilized Books, is a well-regarded primer to anti-civ thought. For communists, it contains some valuable texts that are worth reflecting on.
Jacques Camatte and the new politics of liberation - Dave Antagonism
A compilation of a series of articles that were spread over three issues of 'Green Anarchy' (#18, #19, #20), as an introduction to Camatte's writing and their influence on green anarchism.
The brain of society: notes on Bordiga, organic centralism, and the limitations of the party form - C. Derrick Varn
Article examining Bordiga's idea that after the international class war is won, the organic-centralist party of the proletariat would, in a distant time, emerge as the 'brain' of the future, classless, stateless, communist society - the 'social brain', whose role would be to co-ordinate society's activities in accordance with the invariant communist programme.
The Proliferation of Neo-Primitives
Neo-primitives prefer an imaginary past to the work of creating a different society.
Primitivism in technological society - Miquel Amorós
In these notes for a 2006 talk, Miquel Amorós depicts primitivism as an example of “false consciousness and ideological deviation” whose initial “kernel of truth” in the 1990s (its fervent opposition to development) was annulled in the next decade when the movement “rejected the idea of revolution” and “fell into a paralyzing fatalism” that keeps the primitivist, who identifies “the humanization of the world with … the domestication and artificialization of man”, “in a state of waiting, hedonistically expecting that a catastrophe will resettle a disillusioned humanity in the aboriginal jungle and put rational thought back on the road of instinct, magic and voodoo”.
Primitive communism and women's role in its emergence
Submitted by hedgehog on May 25 2013 17:56
How did human evolution give rise to a species whose very survival is based on mutual confidence and solidarity? More particularly, what was woman’s role in this process?
This is a review of Christophe Darmangeat's recent book, 'Primitive Communism is Not What it Was'.
A Review of Jared Diamond's 'The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?'
Submitted by Lyceum on Jan 7 2013 20:22
Primitivism and history - Miguel Amorós
An index of key quotations from the utopian and philosophical predecessors of today's primitivism, from Diogenes to Battaille, via the bagaudae, the Diggers, Bakunin and Morris, featuring passages from Henri Zisly’s Voyage to the Beautiful Country of Naturia (1900) and Pierre Quirole’s The American Anarchist City (1914), with commentary by the author, who concludes that “[t]he hunter-gatherer of the primitivists is nothing but an idealized reflection of the atomized and déclassé individual of mass society produced by late capitalism” and that only social revolution (“the highest form of potlatch”) can make “the reconciliation of man and the world” possible.
