It will be necessary to build a new revolutionary movement that will keep itself strictly separate from the Green Anarchist Movement and its soft, civilized values. I don't mean that there is anything wrong with gender equality, kindness to animals, tolerance of homosexuality, or the like. But these values have no relevance to the effort to eliminate technological civilization. They are not revolutionary values. An effective revolutionary movement will have to adopt instead the hard values of primitive societies, such as skill, self-discipline, honesty, physical and mental stamina, intolerance of externally-imposed restraints, capacity to endure physical pain, and, above all, courage.
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The Problem Of Ideology: Eurocentrism, Globalisation And Autonomy
“Agriculture itself must be overcome, as domestication, and because it removes more organic matter from the soil than it puts back. Permaculture is a technique that seems to attempt an agriculture that develops or reproduces itself and thus tends toward nature and away from domestication. It is one example of promising interim ways to survive while moving away from civilisation.”
- John Zerzan
Where does this leave us now? Indeed, permaculture is a continuum to horticulture. Perhaps then, that allows for permaculture as a transitory process in line with an anti-civilisation critique, and perhaps even anarcho-primitivism. However, as with everything under capitalism, under civilisation, they have insidious mechanisms which help perpetuate and reproduce themselves. And through globalisation and colonisation, the ideology of Eurocentrism has spread. John E. Drabinski posits this:
“Eurocentrism is a key component of colonialism not just as a political and economic relation, but as a cultural project: taking itself as its own measure, Europe could do its violent work across the globe without ever being put in question by the victims. Further, and doubling the violence, taking itself as its own measure underpinned the missionary relation as civilizing force that figured as central to global domination after conquest and enslavement. Conversion to European languages and values (in the broadest sense) becomes equivalent to installing civilization where none previously existed.”
And the zine Desert relates this to anarchism:
“That this is happening as part of globalisation, and the growth of cities is not surprising given that the seeds of social movement Anarchism are largely carried around the planet on the coat tails of capitalism and often grow best, like weeds, on disturbed ground.”
The same, of course, could be said about anarcho-primitivism, autonomous Marxism, insurrectionary anarchism, as well as many other Western -isms, such as the multitude of those used in identity politics. You can see it in the plants in permaculture gardens – diets imported from elsewhere, and consolidated through genocide. Countless are the arguments I got into with my fellow permaculturists about the romanticisation of European plants and animals. You can see it in the ideas that are normalised in our societies, in the microcosm, in our communities (or lackthereof). The point isn’t to prevent idea-sharing (nor to create some false dichotomy of “pure” and “not pure”), or to disallow criticism, but simply to recognize autonomy. The imposition of ideas, and the held superiority of these ideas from a place of power (i.e. White supremacy/Eurocentrism), is the very antithesis of this. In Green Anarchy, Aragorn! similarly talks about Self-determination and Radical decentralization. The point here is that people, anarchists for example, may form a politic into a singularity. This is where solidarity dies, a place where you don’t engage with people outside your “understanding of reality,” but rather expect “reality to conform to their subject understanding of it.” Furthermore, Aragorn! presents some interesting ideas on what he thought could be an Indigenous Anarchism:
“... an anarchism of place. This would seem impossible in a world that has taken upon itself the task of placing us nowhere. A world that places us nowhere universally. Even where we are born, live, and die is not our home. An anarchism of place could look like living in one area for all of your life. It could look like living only in areas that are heavily wooded, that are near life-sustaining bodies of water, or in dry places. It could look like travelling through these areas. It could look like travelling every year as conditions, or desire, dictated. It could look like many things from the outside, but it would be choice dictated by the subjective experience of those living in place and not the exigency of economic or political priorities. Location is the differentiation that is crushed by the mortar of urbanization and pestle of mass culture into the paste of modern alienation. Finally an indigenous anarchism places us as an irremovable part of an extended family. This is an extension of the idea that everything is alive and therefore we are related to it in the sense that we too are alive. It is also a statement of a clear priority. The connection between living things, which we would shorthand to calling family, is the way that we understand ourselves in the world. We are part of a family and we know ourselves through family. Leaving aside the secular language for a moment, it is impossible to understand oneself or one another outside of the spirit. It is the mystery that should remain outside of language that is what we all share together and that sharing is living.”
I take inspiration from many things, such as permaculture and anarcho-primitivism, amongst others. I don’t see them as roadmaps to our liberation (that is not necessarily how they intend to be taken, though that doesn’t mean people don’t perceive them that way). The way I see it, both encourage location specific, adaptive strategies for the roads ahead. I also see them as tools for us to discover liberation in ourselves, in our friends, family, communities, and in our landbases. But it doesn’t really matter whether you use these words or not. As for me, things like permaculture and anarcho-primitivism are to some degree re-inventing the wheel. However, they are helpful for us in remembering what we were already doing right in our cultural histories. We can use different words, words from our own cultures for example, but if we were to truly search for any words that could describe our desires, of love, of wildness, and of total liberation, I would find that there are no words at all: silence.
Becoming wild and free, again, is a progression. The disease of the spectacle, of such things as instant gratification, creates these delusions that things are immediately consumable and causes us to move on to the next thing. In nature, this is a falsehood. When we develop direct relationships with our food, friends/family/community, bioregion, etc, our perception of time inevitably changes. We can’t rewild overnight. Not likely even in our lifetime. The destruction of civilisation is a long-term project as well. But we are but a speck in the lifespan of this earth, and the beginnings of the world we are building will be in our children, and in their children, in the children of the foxes who ate your chickens. And in the ashes of the world we leave behind.
“Any bioregion can be liberated through a succession of events and strategies based on the conditions unique to it.”
- Seaweed
It will be a process, both wild and organic, adaptive and local, generational, learning from yourselves and each other, where in the diminishing of ideological homogenisation, diversity reigns, human and nature. Permaculture could be a step. Anarcho-primitivism could be too. I may not stick entirely to the path, but the tracks seem to lead me in a direction I want to be going.
- Tanday Lupalupa
Bibliography:
Anonymous, Desert.
aragorn!, Locating An Indigenous Anarchism, Green Anarchy #19
The Community Solution, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
John E. Drabinski, Derrida, Eurocentrism, Decolonization
Jason Godesky, Thirty Theses
Toby Hemenway, How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and The Planet, but not Civilization
Toby Hemenway, Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?
Bill Mollison & Scott Pittman, La Tierra Community CA PDC flyer
Seaweed, Land and Freedom: An Open Invitation
Hugh Warwick, Cuba’s Organic Revolution
Wikipedia.org, “Carrying_capacity”
Wikipedia.org, “Energy_descent”
Wikipedia.org, “Permaculture”
Koorosh Zahrai - Eurocentrism: The basis of our society, culture, and source of our problem coexisting with nature
I'm not an anarcho-primitivist. I'm not saying I'm not anti-civ and I'm not in love with modern technological society, but I usually just talk about being primitivist as a joke, and meanwhile I tend to think of anarcho-primitivism as too Christian for me. It just seems like, at least if John Zerzan's work is anything to go by, it's impossible to escape the sense that anarcho-primitivism, and primitivism generally, is sort of a yearning to return to the garden of Eden. Its critique of civilization and technology predicates itself not only on the notion of technological hierarchy but also on a particular emphasis on even symbolic though and language as a kind of alienation from what might be perceived as the natural order of human life. But the root myth consists of our exile from Eden, viewed as a curse, a mistake, something to go back from, and Eden as something to be repatriated with. In this sense, it is entirely at odds with the serpent's whisper of apotheosis.
Nothing personal to the anprims out there. I just kind of think it's too Christian for me, and you can be anti-civ or be invested in the idea of the wild as worthy of its own existence without being anprim.
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