Anarcho Primitivism

Ted Kaczynski innocent

Communism is the realization of true humanism and true naturalism (cf. MEW 40, p.535). I normally post as an Anprim but actually I'm not radical as most theories suggest it.

We shall return from a mode of having to a mode of being like Fromm proposed. This means we should be frugal and not consumistic as we are today. The lack of ressources, species extinction and climate change indicate this necessarity. A certain regress to a natural harmony is IMAO ethical mandatory because the very possibility of humankind is jeopardized. This is simply an application of the regulative idea of practical reason.

Nonetheless many material technologies provide beneficial improvements despite their costs. I don't want to die from a easily curable disease. Progress should be regulated to a reasonable process of growth by the primacy of sustainability. In a radical anprim society, science and arts would probably be aggravated. As Hegel said the pure coexistenz with nature is boring and not satisfying. Praising the primitive state is based on a superficial imagination and depends on a misapprehension of the nature of spirit.

After all, there should be room for those who want to live primitively. Here in Central Europe, human living environments are now predominantly in private hands. There is no legal way to just live. Anrpim's strategy is to postulate a right to live freely in nature. The most unalienated work is to build something in cooperation with nature to fulfill one's basic needs. Building one's house and a garden with nutritous soil should be a basic human right.

I could go really deep into this refering to Adorno who saw the repression of the inner and outer nature as a necessary element for societies of Enlightment. Or mention how Lao-Tse conceptualized a natural-frugal society. Or how Marx and Engels philosophy is based on the metabolism between nature and humans.

Transhumanism is imperialistic. Check your ideology for transfiguring hope for a better future undermining your present potential for a change.

No, we keep pushing forward. Man will fuse with machine and we'll achieve immortality.

How so? Nobody has to cyborg themselves if they don't want to.

Shit. All primitivism is shit. Technology isn't the problem, it's capitalism.

Fuck you.

heh

Pick one, anprims want to go back to fucking Paleolithic.

I agree that it should be a basic human right but people should also have access to high-techs if they want to, green anarchism or social ecology is great but anprim is just destructive and regressive.

So what would you do to Robocop? Let him die?

Honestly, things like these make me warm up to the anprims

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gydydm/gal-gadot-fake-ai-porn

This stuff is degrading, and it will probably be normalized in a couple of years (the cat is out of the bag) it's not celebrities I'm worried about, but the people in my life that matter to me. Technology was a mistake.

It's for the best.

Agreed.

Technology is something that our ancestors never would have even dreamed of. I hate capitalism but I really want to push innovation as far as it can go. The Soviet Union was really cool and all but there is no denying that they had stagnant innovation.

As long as we don't harm the earth or any of it's innocent creatures I will most definitely be on board for pushing human capabilities to infinity and beyond.

First in space, first thing in orbit, first man and woman in space, first to reach the moon, first and only to send anything to Venus (twice?), first fucking space station, invents predecessor to modern cellphones, GODDAMN TETRIS.

That third pic

What was his problem?

And those things are really cool man. I'm not denying the awesomeness of the Soviet Union.

But look at capitalism now. Our technology is getting so good that poor people can have smartphones and for a few bucks extra can turn it into a Virtual Reality headset. That is so unbelievably cool. And I can't help but doubt that any socialist country could have provided the same thing for it's people.

This is how neocons will think in the 22th century.

Your proposed optionality is a fallacy. Advancements become dogmas. Group dynamics and economic pressure . Also, lack of ressources means only a few can be cyborgs. Furthermore, some cyborgs are more advanced than others. The egalitarian value is compromised in as much as
the consenting transhumanists . Moreover, overpopulation is a crucial problem. According to transhumanism, people live longer. Other planets have to be conquered. All in all, humankind has to be imperialistic to satisfy its transhumanistic needs.

It isn't that onesided. Material technology surpresses psychic technology and is deeply interconnected with capitalistic dynamics. I recommend some life philosophy for a better understanding:

-Bergson: "Mechanics and Mystic" (4th chapter of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion)
TL;DR: nature->progress->technology. Humans are toolmaking animals. War is a natural instrument for the pursuit of property. Superiority of a reigning class isn't based on heredity but rather on habits. Exclusion is a natural element of a society. History is like a pendulum. Imperialistic mystic (mainly Abrahamitic religions) promotes the will to power which summons mechanics. Static ideology is prefered since dynamic ideology implies uncertainty.

-Spengler: Man and Technics
TL;DR: Humankind's evolution is coined by practical thinking and hand usage. Rational abilites which can be purely theoretical are a power to counter soul and life. Lacking knowledge lead to a division into guides and the guided which again leads to a deprivation of freedom since higher organisations are build to maintain societal structures (e.g. states). Politic is ideological warfare. Material technology can increase labor because more technical inventions demands more technical workers. Faustic culture with a boundless will to power corrupts humans to slave of material technology. The occidental world will perish because it depends on industy and energy ressources which evoke ecological crises. Machines are build for self purpose and force civilisation to its realization by which civilisation itself becomes a machine. This leads to clash of classes or world wide export of material technology which will evoke a new culture.

-Ortega y Gasset: Self-absorption and alteration. Meditation on the technique

-Lessing: "The Machine" and "The Creativtiy and the Creators" (19th and 20th chapter of Europe and Asia. The Dawn of the Earth by the Spirit)

I'm not a radical anprim but a communist in its very definition.I totally agree that anprim is destructive, regressive and therefore is based on a reductionistic and submissive conception of human. Its supporters are by tendency fixated and necrophile.

What do you think Google is doing?

Read some basic communist texts, ffs.
Positing a non-existent "good old days" (that never existed in reality) to strive towards is one of the arch-ideological reactionary inventions. The same with the myth of "harmonic coexistence with nature" – we have been struggling against nature from the very beginnings of our history.

You miserable idiot.

How can one be so deep into ideology?

Fire, weapons, huts, etc. are technology as well.

...

Thanks to studying psychology and philosophy. Ideologies are effective although they are spooks.
I agree that the thesis is the struggle against nature. But nowadays, many humans are alienated from nature. Many emancipated from its demands. Some even think they can rule over nature.
Téchne means as much as preternatural skill. According to Ortega, humankind passed different stages of technology:
1st level: technology of coincidence: primitive, non-conscious, mystical.
2nd level: technology of handcraft: civilized conscious, cultural.
3rd level: technology of technicians: overcharging, alientated, antithetical.
We are now on the 3rd level. But there is a possibility for a 4th stage:
4th level: technology of spiritualists: harmonic, transcended, synthetical. This is what is usually is termed as communism.

"The process of history is the process by which man develops his specifically human qualities, his powers of love and understanding; and once he has achieved full humanity he can return to the lost unity between himself and the world. This new unity, however, is different from the preconscious one which existed before history began. It is the at-onement of man with himself, with nature, and with his fellow man, based on the fact that man has given birth to himself in the historical process. In Old Testament thought, God is revealed in history ("the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob"), and in history, not in a state transcending history, lies the salvation of man. This means that man's spiritual aims are inseparably connected with the transformation of society; politics is basically not a realm that can be divorced from that of moral values and of man's self-realization."

"Peace, in the prophetic vision, is one aspect of the Messianic time; when man has overcome the split that separates him from his fellow men and from nature, then he is indeed at peace with those from whom he was separated. In order to have peace man must find “atonement”; peace is the result of a transformation of man in which union has replaced alienation. Thus the idea of peace, in the prophetic view, cannot be separated from the idea of man’s realization of his humanity. Peace is more than a condition of no war; it is harmony and union between men; it is the overcoming of separateness and alienation."

Pretty sure it would take an extinction level event before humans would regress back to living in small tribes of 50-100 people and practicing primitive horticulture to survive.

implying beneficial genetic modifications are somehow provided in a separate realm from metal appendages

if porky is the first to get one, he's the first to get and control both

This is your only good point

Ideally, this is all happening under communism so we're post-scarcity

As if there aren't more "advanced" people already. Einstein and Kim Kardashian aren't the same "model".

We're robots, why are we breeding? There are so few planets out there that would need conquering, as most are uninhabited. If they are, then there are a billion other planets to choose from.

An entirely different option is to create a super powerful computer and download everybody's consciousness to it.

Didn't finish my answer to you. Sorry.
My research topic is the neural basis of self-consciousness and self-transcendence.
Your worldview relies on a material-positivistic neuroreductionism. Its tradition is in one line with Darwinism and eugenics. The self is not yet proved to be an solely material phenomenon which can be transfered from the brain into an equivalent structure. Mind-uploading projects like 2045 are by tendency eskapistic. To fulfill the ancient alchemic desire of immortality is wishful thinking. The hope for an external material advancement leads to diffusion of responsibility and distracts from current potentials for disobedience. In addition, a transhumanistic society is thanks to big data easy to transform into a totalitarian society. There is a realistic threat for algorithms to reign over transhumanity. Like in the movie Matrix machines could exploit them. Why should a reasonable being agree to an utter dependency of artificial energy production?

There is no post-scarcity. Scarcity of water, soil, metals etc. are facts. Some earth metals and rich sand is already now rarealthough they are fundamental for biotechnologies and nanotechnologies.

A humanistic democracy overrules natural evolution. There might be a neccessity for another rational species which niche is filled by humankind. However, I prefer to conceptualize the ubermensch in a radical humanistic way. Notice how I emphasized psychic technologies. We should focus on those practices and iniate a shift in paradigms. Instead of material accumulation we should promote ideal accumulation like knowledge, equanimity and love. Before transhumanism we need a qualitative change of consciousness towards a transcending being. And in such sane society, there is no need for transhumanism. This is why transpersonal psychology was iniated which was former called transhumanistic.

Good luck with that.

I'd support fascists over anprims. I'm a socialist precisely because capitalism is a threat to civilisation.

I like that it pisses off Bookchinfags.

Sounds Kabbalistic tbh

The amount of blind modernism in this thread is absolutely astounding. What if history doesn't move in a straight line? What if we aren't able to upload our consciousnesses before we destroy the planet? Transhumanism (and industrialism) is based on a blind faith in technology, and taking into account the latter's track record, this faith is poorly placed. While tech has been able to cut out strenuous labour to an extent, it has made us more connected to our work than ever before. Let's not also forget that the adaptation of technology is rarely voluntary after its been introduced. Just look at cars: while they started out being a luxury, now it's required that almost everyone buys and uses one. To think that becoming a cyborg would be any different is ignorant.

Believers in liberatory technology, read Black (yes, I know, the cop-calling man):
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/bob-black-anarchy-after-leftism

This is a totally imbecilic statement, and runs contrary to everything we know bout ourselves and our place in the world. We are in a dialectical relationship with our environment, driven by natural selection, and we are simply adapting to a new environment that we have created for ourselves.
See this is what is so frustrating about primitivism: it's a total unwillingness to wrestle with our wold as it is, and pretending that it should be something that which it is not.
We are in a global industrial society and have to find our place in it and manage it as best we can, because it is what we have grown to require. The alternative is genocide, and I'm not going to consider that just because of your emotional attachment to some spooky vision of "true" humanity.

It's going to happen anyway once the system collapses. We can do it now while we still have salmon in the rivers and deindustrialize in a controlled way, or we could have nuclear and toxic waste everywhere in a post civ world.

It's inevitable once we fuck up the world.

Those salmon are going to be gone in a jiffy if all locals start relying on them. And then we're back to genocide.

Reading comprehension? Once the techno-industrial system collapses, a mass population die off is inevitable. The only way we can support billions of people is through mechanized agriculture and that can't happen if we don't have the cheap fossil fuels needed to make pesticides herbicides and fertilizer.

Even in the case of an near extinction event, like the one you're theorizing, do you really think people are simply going to collectively decide to forget all technological advancements? I think not. You're going to see even more competitive, and wasteful, exploitation of what little resources there are left. You're not proposing a solution to any problem. What we need is a sane way of distributing valuable resources. Not a free-for-all.

Any day now.

More like a decade or two:

sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/sites/default/files/docs/MSSI-ResearchPaper-4_Turner_2014.pdf

Wind and solar cannot save the system.

To be left means to be egalitarian. Humankind in its anarchistic primitive state is not egalitarian. The lottery of birth would be even more grave. In contrary transhumanism could provide this humanistic value by avatars which could be designed by individual desire. Mind-uploading might be just euthanasia. Humanism is about changing the external material and psychic conditions to grant a free personal development of each human. To change the internal conditions is against humanism. Nietzsche postulated this basic conflict of every future: the clash between small breeder and big breeder of humans. Transhumanism and anprim want both a redesign of the material human nature - transhumanism on a progressive personal level, anprim on a regressive societal level. But communism can only be reached by accepting the ontological uncertainty and transience of our nature. We as humans in ourselfs are not the problem. Our alienated consciousness and alienated metabolism between us and nature are the problems.

Thanks. Scientific revolutions are based on bold hypotheses. So I go with the rational supervenience theory. Quantum mechanics show how the dialectic method is anchored in the depth of nature. Why should our minds elude from this principle? We should not hand over these topics to mystics and esoterics. I don't want a New Age back. Therefore scientific investigation is required.

There are many similarities to Kabbalah and Hasidic Judaism. But its philosophy is transcultural. Taoism, Vedic traditions, some Buddhist traditions, Sufism, Christian traditions coined by Meister Eckhart or Böhme and many shamanistic traditions have that in common. The universal principle of the nameless oneness is anchored in cultures all over the world. Teachings of relationship with nature and perspective taking formulate positive dialectic which counters negative dialectics of Kant, Adorno and Deleuze. Then we can rid of postmodernism.

Pol pot did nothing wrong

Pol Pot did everything wrong.

Proof this photo was taken during Pol Pot?

Read Ted Kaczynski

I'm just saying Porky hasn't found a way to remotely fuck with flesh and bone as precisely and from as far away as he can fuck with electronic crap, and that I'd sooner put a bullet in my brain than chrome running on a Wangblows 10 OS.

Have you considered MK ultra or Gentoo?

Pol pot is a CIA puppet.

This. Also, is anyone here an actual green anarchist but just too embarrassed by the anprim memes to say it? Legitimately curious.

I believe we're on the wrong path as a species. To correct that, we must take a big step backwards before we can start moving forwards on a correct path that isn't based upon the rape of the earth and any commodity that's to hand.

boards.4chan.org/diy/thread/1298450

You anprims should help this guy out. He apparently is moving to Africa to run a region his grandfather owned.

Our ancestors lived in a state of perpetual warfare with other tribes, while within their own tribe the strongest men would rape and abuse whoever they wished.

If you want to return to that you should be shot.

This is NOT progress.

Literally reactionary

yes

Our ancestors strove for technology exactly because natural living sucked. If you bombed us to hell and back the first thing our generation would do would rebuild tech. You've accomplished nothing. Even worse, you missed the point that capitalism is the problem, not technology. What the fuck did your computer ever do to you?
go fuck yourself. Read Marx.

fuck off shill

People romanticize civilization way too much. For most people it has been bad. Only now in the West is it much better. But I think it will escalate.If you think that a revolution can bring us to a post-civ life you are delusional. It is not practical and neither is it ethical. I think it might happen on its own but in ways that people cannot imagine.

I consider myself an anarch-primitivist (see Junger).

Interesting post. Thank you.

I think primitivism shouldn't mean that we also culturally revert back but instead mix the old and new. I do not even have a problem with technology, Mad Max fury primitivism is fine. I think civilizaiton is the problem. Certain technology can make the transition towards a civilization more like though.

Primitivism is literally just another flavour of reactionary thought that has some how Trojan horsed its way into leftist thought despite it being a rally point for thinly veiled fascist and right wing ideals as well as non material magical thinking that doesn’t reflect reality. So basically it’s one of the worst parasites that has ever attached itself to the left.

It's not a question of what we want but of reality. Pandora's box has been opened and you can't close it. There's no way the bourg are going to give up their tech toys and life changing technology like gene therapy. The best we can do is go full steam ahead and hope technology progression can outpace total climate disaster. What we've already done is irreversible as far as the next couple thousand years go, all we can hope for is to try to minimize its impact, and ff the modern world collapses what's left of mankind will simply adapt to the new one we've created for ourselves. Humans are so intelligent that we won't go extinct, I think it would have to take a literally globally life ending disaster like a meteor or gamma burst to end every last human.

this

Pick one, the closest thing to Mad Max is ancap.

luv 2 die of typhoid at 25 years old

I was an anprim in high school. Read edgy shit like Zerzan, unabomber, VHEMT, etc, along with more nuanced thinkers like Jacques Ellul. I still don’t believe the meme that technology is a neutral tool, but the problem with anprim is that it leads to a primordial fascism, which is the fascism of the state of nature. Material progress isn’t wholly good, but it does allow for the possibility of satisfying survival values and allowing us to pursue less agonistic ‘surrogate’ values higher on Maslow’s hierarchy.

Eco-anarchism = the good bits of Marxism minus the shitty bits. They keep the theory of alienation, anti-capitalism, critique of work, qualitative focus, creative agency, but lose the statism, progress-fetish and teleology.

The main point IMO is not "back to the stone age" so much as 1) rewilding, getting rid of alienation, living without the inhibitions caused by capitalism and 2) rejecting the alienating effects of technology and bureaucracy.

The Hegelian-Marxist progressivist narrative is more faith than science, and easily falsified. A lot of things have *not* got better over time, and past civilisations have collapsed pretty often, either from social contradictions or because their resource supply ran out. Capitalism seems "progressive" because it needs to constantly innovate to substitute for resources it burns up. But we've also seen the increasing disenchantment of life and the destruction of everything which matters, as capitalism has expanded. Everything from biodiversity and wilderness areas, to craft skills and worthwhile labor, to social connections to neighbors and co-workers, to non-commodified popular and elite culture. Now even the old working-class rustbelt areas are destroyed, and the value of labor for workers. Capitalism replaces qualitative with quantitative value and ruins everything.

TBH I think full primitivism takes the critique of technology too far, and the tech-tools binary is more fluid than they allow.

Positing a non-existent "inevitable future" to strive towards is also an arch-ideological invention, found for example in Nazism (eugenic perfection, thousand year reich), Confucianism (great harmony), capitalism (progress, end of history), etc.

Indigenous peoples *do not* conceive themselves to be "struggling against" nature. Also if you're gonna critique primmies then learn the tech-tools distinction. "Psychic tech", I assume means techniques of enjoyment, creating meaning, etc. Which capitalism lacks.

Primmies are in two camps on this. Some expect a big civilisational collapse leading to mass extinction (which is more likely than it sounds). Others seek a gradual transition by way of degrowth and intermediate tech. Creating small, agriculturally self-sufficient, organic permaculture communes using all artisan-level or recycled tech is perfectly viable without mass die-offs.

OK then clever-dick, where in the material body do you situate the "self"? Anterior cingulate cortex?

Transhumanism would be "voluntary" in the same way that other kinds of consumption and conformity are "voluntary". Without it, you can't get a job, can't claim welfare, can't access services, can't fulfill various legal or social duties, so basically you're fucked. Yeah, cars are a good example, but also computers, non-mandatory ID documents, mobile phones, permanent address, psychiatric medication.

We don't know what paleolithic peoples were like. But, hunter-gatherers are often egalitarian. Bushmen for example.

Replace "tribes" with "nations" and that's modern capitalism.

Only a tiny percentage of stateless societies (about six to be precise) spontaneously became "civilisations". The rest were either conquered, formed states to protect against other states, or stayed stateless indefinitely. We don't know why a few of them became states (there's huge debates in archaeology) but it seems to be either to conquer other groups or for trade (i.e. early capitalism).

Technologies are hard to shift because they affect the opportunity-structure (you can't stop the enemy army using guns). But they *have* been shifted before. We don't know how to build pyramids like the Egyptians - somewhere along the line, it was forgotten.

Mad Max is scientifically impossible because there is no food production in those films. Bandit cultures are necessarily smaller than, and dependent on, societies with an agrarian surplus - otherwise they'd have nobody to rob. Bandits robbing bandits would wipe each other out at geometric rates. There's accounts which suggest that this is why banditry tends to convert into tributary feudalism - it's more reliable to extract a regular surplus while not killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

Disease doesn't spread very much among small-scale groups, hence why Amerindians and Native Americans had no disease resistance at first contact. Disease spreads a lot easier in cities (which suffered net domestic population loss until the nineteenth century) and in societies with high-speed trade networks. You also won't get eaten by predators unless you live at the North Pole or someone brings back saber-tooth tigers. The most likely causes of early death in "primitive" societies are accidents or violent death. Depending on the society, violent death is often no more common than in the west, and certainly less common than in Mexico today.

Very conflicted on all this myself. On the one hand I have a sort of Catholic welfare goal, on the other hand I am an animal, I am nature, etc. The notion that anprim is reactionary ONLY because it talks about deindustrializing and so on I think is absurd and that sort of stigma can be dispelled by understanding that Hegelo-Marxist progressism and "development of the productive forces" is so much nonsense when decoupled from immaterial human needs. I'm not saying we should "crash" things, but that once the means of production are communized humans CAN CHOOSE to produce less, live more closely with nature, etc. The issue with Ted K is that he confuses technology with valorization. He says violence is okay because we see it in nature, and also that violence is something that we can choose how to use. But technology is presumably not natural (spurious) and therefore is utterly beyond our control. I think this is just metaphysics – not that I am a technophile or workaholic. Technology is human, capital is inhuman.

I think it is clear that the industrial system must be destroyed or we face incalculable peril.

my dudes

That is not the only reason people think its reactionary. Ive spent much time around anprims observing their behavior and Ive yet to see a more blatant example of thinly veiled fascism in my fucking life. The mystical yearning for a fictional past where everything was pure/return to the womb fantasy. The underlining nihilism and anti-humanist rhetoric that delights in schadenfreude and yearns for a coming apocalypse that will revert everything to the pure unblemished utopia of the past that might as well be taken from a traditionalist tract of Evola or the like. FFS I spent barely a minute searching through a anprim forum yesterday and I was able to find a thinly veiled eugenics thread talking about how hospitals are bad because the weak SHOULD die for the environment and planet earth and was only a step away from talking about untermensch.

your ideology is literally a fucking meme. just stop.

read kaczynski

theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ted-kaczynski-the-truth-about-primitive-life-a-critique-of-anarchoprimitivism

Posted yet again.

I fucked up. I mean anti-civ doesn't need to be primitivism. Mad Max is a horrible example.

Many of you here have cultural depictions of nature that are simply not true. It started with culture detaching itself from nature, which still stands. We think of terms of human nature and culture as separates when in fact both are the exact same fucking thing. As for human nature it is both the ability to learn, thus it is not fixed and it varies between humans.

A lot of metaphors we use for nature are informed by our Greek and Christian heritage, and capitalism. You communists think of nature as "nature red in tooth and claw" and "a dog-eat-dog world". That is not to say there's reality in it, but they are exaggerated. It is like that alpha stuff. It is a reflection of our day and age, a cultural bias.

A more mature view emerges from studying biology and anthropology, and the combination of both.

I think that pre-civ life should not be romanticized, but the opposite happens too. Some seem to think that it was all competition, alpha and dominance stuff. Prehistoric humans cared for the sick. It is not all black and white.

And people act as if there is some universal pre-civ life, well there's not. But I think a problem with primitivism and anti-civ is that civilization could emerge again, and that civilization in the beginning is so much worse as the current state we are in.

Anarchy has no rules, we can use technology if we want to

marx was a darwin fanboy and based communism off of rudimentary evolutionary principles

I think there's no natural. Only that which has not co-evolved with the natural world. I think that technology is dangerous EXACTLY because it acts as some natural organisms. It acts as a self-propagating machine and one without restrain.

Evolutionary biology has progressed a lot since Darwin. We are currently still in the Dawkins paradigm with a heavy emphasis on selfishness. The Extended Synthesis in some way or another i.e. in some form, will shake things up and enter collective knowledge.

Of course.
But in anarchy we want no coercive leaders, authority, and I think technology is both a tool for coercion + control and liberation.