primitivism

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.

Marx claimed that "the vitality of primitive communities was incomparably greater than that of ... modern capitalist societies." This claim has since been vindicated by numerous studies which are neatly summarised in this entry from the prestigious Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. As the Encyclopedia says: "Hunting and gathering was humanity's first and most successful adaptation, occupying at least 90 percent of human history. Until 12,000 years ago, all humans live this way."

Transcript of a talk on primitivism given by Miguel Amorós in 2003 in which he distinguishes “between those who want to understand archaic societies in order to acquire conceptual weapons for confronting and transforming the world, and those who seek innocence and beatitude, lost in the passage of time, in primitive lifestyles” and compares the ideology of the latter—“vulgar” and “philistine” primitivists—to the bourgeois “idealization of nature” of the Enlightenment era.

Ex-Black Panther and ex-political prisoner Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin on being a Black Autonomist, and uninterested in the syndicalist v. primitivist debate.