Anarcho-primitivism

There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication — of animals and ourselves — was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health. ~John Zerzan

Anarcho-primitivismis ananarchistcritique ofcivilization(anti-civ) that advocates a return to non-civilized ways of life throughdeindustrialization,abolition of thedivision of laboror specialization, and abandonment of large-scale organization andhigh technology.Anarcho-primitivists critique the origins and progress of theIndustrial Revolutionandindustrial society.According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift fromhunter-gatherertoagricultural subsistenceduring theNeolithic Revolutiongave rise tocoercion,social alienation,andsocial stratification.

Quotes

• Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? The founders of political science did not think so. "I put for a general inclination of mankind, a perpetual and restless desire for power after power, that ceaseth only in death," declaredThomas Hobbes.Because of this innate lust for power,Hobbesthought that life before (or after) the state was a "war of every man against every man" — "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Was Hobbes right? Do humans have an unquenchable desire for power that, in the absence of a strong ruler, inevitably leads to a war of all against all? To judge from surviving examples of bands and villages, for the greater part of prehistory our kind got along quite well without so much as a paramount chief, let alone the all-powerful EnglishleviathanKing andMortal God,whom Hobbes believed was needed for maintaining law and order among his fractious countrymen.

• Marvin Harris,Our Kind: Who We Are, Where We Came From, Where We Are Going(1989)

• If we once — and for so long — lived in balance withnatureand each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that’s overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of naturalanarchyreaches much further into our sharedhistory.
  • John Zerzan,"Whose Future?", from the bookTake My Advice: Letters to the Next Generation from People Who Know a Thing or Two(2007) by James L. Harmon

• Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massivedivision of labourat the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.
  • John Zerzan,Future Primitive and Other Essays(1994)

• There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication — of animals and ourselves — was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health.
  • John Zerzan,Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization(2002)

See also

• Anarchism