Anarcho-Primitivism

Historical development

The position took shape in Detroit’s anarchist circles in the 1980s, around the journal Fifth Estate. Its founding texts are Fredy Perlman’s Against His-story, Against Leviathan! (1983) and John Zerzan’s Elements of Refusal (1988) and Future Primitive (1994).

It leaned on anthropology that had changed the picture of hunter-gatherers, in particular Marshall Sahlins’s description of them as “the original affluent society” (1972). It also drew on Paul Shepard, who argued in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1973) and Nature and Madness (1982) that the human mind is adapted to Pleistocene foraging. Primitivism influenced parts of Earth First!, the green anarchist scene of the 1990s and 2000s, and Derrick Jensen’s wider writing against civilisation.

Principal claims

• Domesticating plants and animals produced hierarchy, property, war and ecological destruction.
• Technology is never neutral. Industrial technology, and most technology before it, depends on domination and builds it in.
• Hunter-gatherer societies were egalitarian, healthy and sustainable, and those that survive still are.
• Civilisation cannot be reformed. It should be rejected and resisted, and as it collapses it should give way to “rewilded” human lives.
• The freedom of wild nature and the freedom of wild people are one cause.

Policy implications

Primitivism has no policies in the usual sense, because it refuses to use the state. In practice its adherents “rewild” themselves and their communities, teach one another foraging and primitive skills, and resist industrial infrastructure. Some welcome the collapse of civilisation.

Internal disagreements

Primitivists disagree about how far the critique reaches. Zerzan’s rejection of symbolic culture is a minority view. They also argue over whether any farming, gardening or technology can be accepted, and whether to wait for collapse, speed it up or prepare for it. Hardest of all is the question of what to say about the fall in population that the end of agriculture would bring.

Criticisms and controversies

Murray Bookchin and other social ecologists dismissed primitivism as “lifestyle anarchism”, a romantic mysticism hostile to reason. Anthropologists dispute its idealised account of foragers. Critics of many kinds point out that the present human population could not live by foraging. In their view this makes the position either utopian or, by implication, genocidal. Primitivists reply that they do not advocate mass death and that collapse is coming anyway.

Public debate has sometimes connected the movement’s fringe with eco-extremism. Most primitivists reject eco-extremism.

Relationships to other traditions

Anarcho-primitivism is the most extreme wing of green anarchism and the furthest point of distrust in technology. It shares deep ecology’s love of wilderness and goes well beyond degrowth in rejecting growth. It is completely opposed to ecomodernism, planetary stewardship and every tradition that would manage the planet. Its idea of human “rewilding” is a different thing from the conservation movement called rewilding.