Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 09:23 AM CDT

http://www.zmag.org/zerzan.htm

Check out Albert\'s latest rant - this time he\'s dissing John Zerzan and primitivism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2001 @ 06:19 PM CDT

Right on, Lawrence! For the first time in a long time, anarchism is the only visible revolutionary current in North America, we don\'t need power-hungry socialist scum like Mike Albert sucking up our energy and coopting our movement. Let\'s get real. Read Resistance and Green Anarchy magazine for a dose of revolutionary ideas and practice.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 21 2001 @ 06:59 PM CDT

There\'s a line to be drawn between allowing \"The Left (TM)\" to be divided and conquered, and merely offering up the various leftist alternatives as the only choices to be debated.

Many leftists have long complained that the issues debated in the mass media are only within very narrow frameworks - no matter what side you take, you are still on the side of the status quo. The diversity of leftist opinions opens up new opportunities and new dangers. If we let our internal divisions grow to the point of preventing people of diverse opinions from working together, then we are suicidal. On the other hand, if we push these debates between the various leftist ideologies to the forefront of conscious debate, then the question is no longer whether we should keep capitalism or not (or whether unregulated capitalism is better than regulated capitalism), but rather which is the best way to dismantle capitalism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 12:55 PM CDT

i think mr albert is right. I think zerzan is a moron. rejecting language and number?? anarchism is not a fucking game, or a bunch of philisophical mumbo jumbo. Its about people living in a free society. And if you think going back to the stone age will solve all your problems fine. Go out to the woods and live there. But when your society ends right back up where it left off dont go to zerzan for help.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 01:12 PM CDT

I just read the latest essay by michael albert and it was right on. Really helped me get an insight in why the primitivists have been doing what they do. They are a joke. Anyone that doesnt come out of the essay albert wrote saying \"oops maybe i was wrong\" is just an idiot. Why doesnt zerzan answer the criticisms put forth. I think i know why

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 01:48 PM CDT

I think its ignorant to think that Albert is a social democrat. If you read his book \"Thinking Forward\" he definetly doesn\'t support \"market socialism\".

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 01:57 PM CDT

What\'s with all the attacks on Zerzan? He is pretty much alone in his critique of language. I don\'t know of any other primitivist or anarchist thinkers who have formulated such a critique, but he has every right to feel the way he does. However, I think John\'s critique of industrialism is irrefutable. I believe that part of the problem with Marxism and state communism is that it assumes you can have an advanced industrial economy without exploitation, hierarchical division of labor, and the dispossession of non-industrial cultures. This is an a-historical approach which I believe is related to why Marxists and other revolutionaries who are proponents of industrialism end up creating something just as bad if not worse than before. You should check out Russell Mean\'s article \"Fighting Words in Defense of the Earth\" for a sound critique of Marxism, anarchism and western ideology in general.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 02:04 PM CDT

Primitivists have proven to be a much more militant and dedicated branch of first world anarchism and have done more to promote anarchist ideas in the course of the last 3 years than any other school of anarchism. They haven\'t achieved too much, but they\'ve achieved more than any of the white, middle-class \"class struggle\" anarchists who are posing as the voice of the working class. If the aim of the green anarchists were to bomb us back to the stone age, then they would indeed be silly. But since there aim is to halt industrialism, they should be acknowledged and supported by anyone genuinely interested in revolutionary change. Given the fact that industrial technology has been built on hierarchy, ecocide, genocide, and slavery, it\'s hard to refute many of their arguments. And I think their perspective is much deeper than the usual rhetoric coming from Left anarchists.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 02:05 PM CDT

Even where people are critical of the blatantly negative effects of mass technics and media, they tend to argue that technology does not have to be as it is; in a different, more perfect world, it could be different. This hypothetical justification of some mystical possibility for technology refuses to face reality. Certainly, if human beings were radically different, if society had built-in defenses against technological runaway, if everyone had the superhuman ability to learn every specialization in order to make decisions, if this were a different planet with a different history, if, if, if.... Meanwhile, what is legitimized is the material reality of a technological system which demands social stratification and compartmentalization, technological hierarchy and domination, runaway development, deadening labor, passivity, stupefaction, and the ever-present risk - or certainty? - of disaster.
Contrary to McLuhanesque fantasies, the wheel is not an extension of the foot, but a simulation which destroys the original. Media do not extend meaning, but duplicate it, rendering any contrast between authenticity and in-authenticity, between a genuine experience rooted in human symbolic activity and a simulated meaning manufactured by technology, both absurd and deadly. The emerging hyper-reality is completing the circle, replacing the symbolic integration of human beings in autonomously generated culture, with a functional integration within the technological universe. Little of the original territory now remains.
Abolishing mass media means abolishing a way of life, of learning to live in a different way. I don

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 02:33 PM CDT

Life would indeed be \"nasty, brutish and short\" without pencils. Thanks for pointing that out, Mike.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 02:34 PM CDT

Sometimes it

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 02:37 PM CDT

Limitations of Leftism - Eli Maybell
Despite numerous insights into commodities and the market economy, the left historically has always embraced the industrial, energy-intensive system originally generated by private capitalism as a

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 03:14 PM CDT

i <3 technology

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 03:36 PM CDT

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 08:11 PM CDT

Anarchism is a rich and beautiful ideology that should be tolerant and embrace all flavors of anti-authoritarianism. Aside from anarcho-capitalism, of course!

By the way, Adolfo Nanquil, a Mapuche Indian activist from Chile, recently stated in Eugene, OR, that the \"Mapuche are anarchist by nature. They have always rejected private property\".

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 22 2001 @ 11:49 PM CDT

zerzan...err. while i do not agree with the primitivist stances i can understand them and work with folx coming from that direction. zerzan is another animal all together. he needs to go the way of margret sanger (good friend of emma\'s- which tells you something about emma). in his essay on grassroot radicalism of the KKK in the 1920s he is revisionist on the history of the klan.
no, they were not racist, they were socialists (national socialists that is..) he contends. zerzan even points out that racist and xenophobic anarchistSanger spoke to over a 100 different klan groups, as if that is proof that they were not racists, rather than that they were.
sure a critique of the left is needed, but not when it puts you in bed with the right.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2001 @ 01:27 PM CDT

sanger became a communist quite early in her life if i remember corectly

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 23 2001 @ 01:53 PM CDT

I have yet to hear of any anarcho-primitivists, or any anarchists, advocate forming alliances with the Right. I think many anarchists think it is appropriate to break off from the Left considering the \"Left\" includes Maoists, Marxists, and all the variants of state communists (i.e. totalitarians), as well as green capitalists, confused liberals, and social democrats. This is not to say that there are not groups who identify as \"Left\" that we should not support or work with, but rather that the Left is generally at one end of the authoritarian political spectrum and we should be our own separate movement that has its own methodology, ideology, and goals which are distinct from the bulk of the Left.
I personally feel that, generally speaking, what state communists and liberals are trying to achieve (a \"better\" form of political organization which is still centralized and rigidly hierarchical)is just as foreign and undesirable to me as what the Right is trying to achieve (a more wholesome, Christian or fundamentalist form of political organization that is patriarchal and homophobic as well as centralized).
I think that in order to avoid becoming some onerous and incoherent mix of of ideologies all going under the banner of the Left, anarchists, decentralists and anti-statists need to distinguish themselves from the Left. Not necessarily condemn the Left, but be an alternative to it.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 24 2001 @ 04:49 PM CDT

Personally, I like indoor plumbing. Getting out of a nice warm bed in the middle of a winter night and trudging through the snow to the outhouse is not my idea of a good time. Some people might think that it\'s a gas; but me, I think it sucks. I also like the fact that heart bye-pass surgery is possible, otherwise I wouldn\'t be around to write these lines.

Critiquing technology is all well and good but we still need to produce the things that the most people need; like housing, clothing, food, etc. even in an anarchist society. Critiquing technology also has nothing particular to do with anarchy, which simply means without rulers. A person can be an anarchist and a technophile or a technophobe. It don\'t matter.

Albert obviously doesn\'t know squat about anarchism, historically or modern, or he would know that we have proposed many clear alternatives to the state and capital. I guess he just doesn\'t get it.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 25 2001 @ 12:20 PM CDT

sanger was never an anarchist... she worked with emma when their paths crossed in working on birth control.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 04:44 AM CDT

Zerzan\'s critique of language is neither original nor noteworthy.
Budhist\'s Taost\'s and Hindu\'s have been critiquing language for thousands of years.
I highly suggest checking out Krishnamurti for his critiques of everything.

http://www.kinfonet.org/excerpts/Default.asp?id=1&qd=26&qm=5

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 04:52 AM CDT

mOre Krishnamurti stuff if anyone is interested:
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/K/K.html

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 05:14 AM CDT

Thanks for that beautiful and inspiring piece on your experiences.
It inspired me greatly.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 03:27 PM CDT

Primitivists are most commonly ANARCHO-PRIMITIVISTS; they have no desire to force people to give up technology. However, in a communal society where there are no rulers, most aspects of industrial society would fall apart, because very few people would be willing to volunteer to go down in the mines, to waste their lives away in the factories, or subject themselves to the poisons our brave new world produces. There are, no doubt, technologies which are desirable (heated housing for instance) but whether we can have those technologies without having dispossessed indigenous peoples, ecocide, and subjugation is another question. Industrialism has been an imperialistic warmachine since its inception: it requires expansion, resource extraction, and centralized organization. Industrial technology is only as neutral as the power structures which have designed it, and the fossil fuels it emits into our life-systems.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 29 2001 @ 01:02 PM CDT

Unanimous decision making is only possible with small groups. The point of anarchism is that you don\'t have to do what everyone whats. If there are groups that disagree, they simply each go off and do their own thing - so long as those most affected by a decision are the most involved in making them.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 29 2001 @ 02:43 PM CDT

I basically agree with the above comments. But, it is important to point out that the only societies which have functioned stabily without the State and with rulers for any significant period of time are primitive societies, societies with a minimal division of labor.

I don\'t think that anarchism means just doing whatever you want. In the absence of the state/rulers there is very few restrictions on behavior, and even fewer methods of enforcing codes of conduct, but I think anarchism means unobstructed freedom in respect to the freedom of others, and I think anarchism is so practical and desirable precisely because of an emphasis on personal responsibility and autonomy, in the context of a collective and communitarian reality, as opposed to individualism and \"do whatever you want and fuck everyone else\" mentality. I think that anarchism should be diverse and we shouldn\'t get too worked up over specifics. A high-tech anarchy is undesirable and impossible, but I imagine some anarchies will employ different technologies, as well as different modes of decision making, depending on their environments and such.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2001 @ 11:52 AM CDT

Anarchy doesn\'t mean people will freely kill and rape each other once the flood gates are let loose. That\'s just what the media portrays as \"the state of anarchy\" when such things happen. People will continue to rape and murder under anarchy just as much as under any other form of government. At the same time, people will continue to stop murders and rapes just as much as under any other form of government. The only difference is that anarchy, everyone is part of the government (or as the case may be, their own sovereign government if it\'s none of anybody else\'s business).

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2001 @ 05:27 PM CDT

I doubt if \"anarcho-syndicalist\" is a genuine anarcho-syndicalist since his/her statement is antithetical to what anarcho-syndicalists believe. He/she is obviously an anarcho-primitivist asshole trying to discredit anarcho-syndicalism.

As to questioning technology, civilization, etc..
Questioning and critiquing are good things and there are probably lots of technology we can do without and once we get to a point where we can make those decisions we can argue in our workshop and community councils what to save and what to abandon. The problem with the primitivists is that they don\'t seem to have any clue about how people with provide themselves with food, clothing, shelter, health care, etc. after the revolution. In other words they have no constructive program and willing to bet that the majority of people, in the first world anyway, which is where we live and struggle, won\'t risk revolution if they think they are going to end up worse off than they are now. So, either the primitivists have to count on a minoritarian \"revolution\" against the will of the vast majority, which will either result in a \"revolutionary dictatorship\" ala Pol Pot or a counter-revolutionary dictatorship ala fascism, or settle for permanently living on the margins. I suspect they\'ll settle for the latter and spend their time bad-mouthing the work of everyone else.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2001 @ 08:43 PM CDT

Most of the luddite anti-authoritarians and advocates of anarcho-primitivism that I am aware argue that there needs to be a TRANSITION from a statist, industrial society to a non-statist, communal and self-sufficient society. A quantum leap would indeed be disasterous, but since industrialism is disasterous to our health and our environment, it need be eventually dismantled. They argue for radical agriculture ala Fukuoka\'s non-labor-intensive agriculture which allows for people to produce much food in a small space. Anti-industrialists in India, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere are involved in exploring traditional medicines and subsistence strategies. I recommend William Koetke\'s book \"The Collapse of Civilization\" for a very indepth analysis of why and how we can leave industrial civilization. He covers everything: the transition, subsistence strategies, medicine, etc.

In THE CASE AGAINST THE GLOBAL ECONOMY, indigenous activists, bioregionalists, and neo-luddites advocate making a turn toward localism with a reliance on local products made from ecologically sustainable and decentralized polities, as opposed to relying on products shipped from all across the world which are ecologically destructive and made from centralized and authoritarian political systems (such as petroleum, which is the backbone of industrialism).
Luddites and primitivists do not seek to impose primitivism any more than syndicalists seek to impose worker\'s bureaucracy. However, an end to centralization and imperialism would render some technologies simply impossible (unless in your anarchy it is okay to strip mine the forests of Venezuela because your council directly and democratically decides that\'s okay)and anarchists and radical ecologists need be prepared to compensate for this.

And by the way, any action against this system in our current context is going to be anti-democratic. But I don\'t think it\'s okay for people to further fuck over indigenous peoples and the environment by drilling in the arctic just because the West Coasters decide [democratically] that it\'s okay to do so.

\"Democracy is a concept created by the smallest group of people on earth and imposed on the rest of us. Democracy, socialism, capitalism, communism... it\'s just another Euro-industrial empire to me\".
- John Trudell

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2001 @ 08:53 PM CDT

I\'m curious as to who\'s bad-mouthing who. The above post from \"anarcho-syndicator\" is ridiculous, but I think that\'s the point: it\'s not really hostile to anyone. I consider myself an anarcho-communist, but my primitivist allies are also doing there part to spread radical analysis and alternatives to this state. We should embrace one another and critique one another, respectfully. I\'ve seen Graham Purchase and M. Bookchin get much more worked up about the primitivist philosophers than I have seen on the part of any anti-tech people.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2001 @ 08:57 PM CDT

Syndicalism and environmentalism both have a history of fascist elements (Mussolini\'s \"Nationalist Syndicalism\" and Hitlerian \"back-to-nature\" respect the earth stuff). But I think syndicalism would more likely lead to fascism flourishing considering the hyper-authoritarian control that becomes necessary to coordinate an advanced industrial economy. So, unless they take a more luddite approach (reducing technology) your ideals will be impossible, or they will result in something horrendous.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 07:58 AM CDT

i can accept the argument that many marxists have been uncritical of industrialism. indeed, many marxists have been down right anti-ecological (if that\'s even a term...). Yet, this ignores all of Marx\'s writings on the environment as well as dozens of other Marxists that have developed sophisticated ecological perspectives. One of the biggest problems in the \'anarchist movement\' is its complete ignorance on matters of Marxism. And, of course, most Marxists know little about the various currents of anarchism. It seems that anarchists read Ward Churchill\'s, Russel Mean\'s, or Michael Albert\'s ridiculous attacks on caricatured \'Marxisms\' and then think that they know everything about Marx as well as everything written by every other Marxist. And, again, some Marxists are guilty of doing the same thing...IF, however, anyone is interested in READING about Marx\'s ecology check out the work of John Bellamy Foster. Check out: _Marx\'s Ecology_, _The Vulnerable Planet_, and \"The Communist MAnifesto and the Environment\", in The Socialist Register 1998_. Paul Burkett also has some awesome work on Marxism and the Environment that people should read. Can people actually read this stuff before blabbering nonsense...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 11:45 AM CDT

All the different power-hungry political ideologues like to make there stale ideologies seem more appealing by calling them \"green\" and so fourth.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 11:47 AM CDT

Yea, I suppose every tyrannical socialist government in the world isn\'t \"real\" socialism, right?

You shoud look at the new ARSENAL Magazine for an analysis of this called The Continuing Appeal of Authoritarianism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 12:05 PM CDT

Funny. The point of anarchy is people get to do what they want. If a group of people all choose to return to nature, they can return to nature. If a group of people all choose socialism or capitalism or even suicide, then they can do exactly that. The point is that not all people currently living under capitalism have the choice to choose anything else. There is no diversity, no choice. It is a monopoly of ideology.

An ideology is only as good as the people who follow it. Some screw it up, some don\'t. It\'s a process without end. Some try to fix things within their current framework, some fail. Others try something completely different. It\'s called memetic evolution.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 01:39 PM CDT

I agree with you. I don\'t think the problem right now is that there isn\'t some kind of global anarchy (or global direct-democracty, as some \'anarchists\' propose). The problem is that industrialism and the State cannot limit itself to a small scale: it must expand or it will die.

In a post-industrial, post-capitalist world, some communities will likely be direct democracies, others consensus-based groups, some communist, some completely anarchist, and others will be something we\'ve yet to of ever seen before. But I think they will all be relatively small in scale and self-sufficient.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 03:21 PM CDT

I will. Tell me the link. I\'ll read it and have a discussion with you. I\'m going to look for it on the net right now. And I\'ll respond if i find it. I doubt, however, that you\'ll take my suggestion seriously. imagine...learning something new...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, May 31 2001 @ 06:19 PM CDT

I learn new things all the time. I\'m not so arrogant as to be closed off to non-anarchist thinkers, I read Vine Deloria, Ward Churchill, lots of anthropology, and other good stuff.

However, despite the fact that there may be good aspects to certain socialist theorists, I am not at all interested in embracing [state] socialism any more than I am interested in embracing fascism or capitalism [they all pan out relatively the same in the end].

State commies and socialites will justify anything in order to reach a dictatorship of the proletariat in the process of creating a \'communist\' authoritarian order. I ain\'t interested in that shit.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 03:34 PM CDT

Nuclear missles, like all other technologies, can be used for good as well as bad purposes. When in the hands of rich capitalists, technology is usually used for bad purposes. When in the hands of anarchists, it can be used for good purposes. Once we seize the means of production, bad technology will likely vanish and good technology will be the norm.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 03:39 PM CDT

You\'re a really intelligent human being, aren\'t you? I vow to never question Mike Albert again. I promise.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 04:25 PM CDT

I can think of no use for nuclear weapons other than to kill. Is this a joke? Did you actually read the above long passage?
Questioning technology is needed but that may not mean getting rid of everything. Why is even questioning technology so anxiety producing to some people??

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 10:32 PM CDT

Certainly some technologies are consistent with an anarchist opposition the state and coercive rulers. Mike Albert makes a very good case for keeping pencils, without which life would be \"nasty, brutish, and short\". Murray Bookchin and Noam Chomsky have made it clear that only more technology, not a turn away from high technology and a move toward decentralization, will stop the current crisis

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, May 26 2001 @ 11:37 PM CDT

Technology is neutral: A gun can be used to shoot an anarchist or to shoot a police officer.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 29 2001 @ 09:38 AM CDT

technology = division of labour, is how it sometimes goes. I\'m not so inclined to think that we should get rid of it all, but I think we need to minimize it, in accordance with the desires of people.

I have to admire Zerzan\'s subversive use of mainstream anthrology. Clastres and Sahlins have radical demands implicit in their work, and Zerzan just teases them out. We don\'t have to adopt all of the conclusions, its just a matter of not being satisfied with \"worker\'s self-management\" of boring, stupid work. I always thought anarchism tried to be as utopian as possible...

Albert, on the other hand, while being a smart,confident(white) guy who loves to issue directives and advice, is so fucking condescending in his writing it makes me puke.

Plus, the parecon stuff is somewhat flimsy(as far as economics goes), as anyone who has sat through a hellish consensus meeting knows that collective decisions are not made as easily as Albert claims. I never see any stuff from them on addressing face-to-face power dynamics within meetings.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 01 2001 @ 10:10 AM CDT

i found the Arsenal web page, but couldn\'t find the article you were talking about.

i don\'t get what you\'re trying to get at. I made a post saying that the idea that marx and other marxists were anti-ecological is fundamentally inaccurate and really displays an ignorance that we should shun. I then suggested some academic literature on the subject that I think every activist, Marxist, anarchist, reformer, or whaterver, should read. maybe i should be more blunt: go to your local library and pick up copies of Marx\'s Capital and Philosophic and Economic Manuscripts. Read these and tell me if I\'m right orif I\'m wrong. Now, I admitted than many people and regimes that considered themselves to be \'Marxist\' not only had nothing in common with Marx\'s own views but were down-right environmental-destroyers. However, the fact remains that Marx\'s views were different. indeed, through my readings of marx, i think a case can be made that he had deep ecological insights. Intellectual honesty demands that we look into this. You, however, don\'t want to do this. Maybe this is completely irrelevent on a political level, but intellectually/academically, it is very important.

and, by the way, i\'m not interested in recreating Stalinism or \'state socialism\'. In fact, i\'ve always considered myself as some sort of class struggle anarchist. however, this hasn\'t stopped me from actually reading the works of marx (who i read as a radical democrat and an anarchist) and others. to be honest, even though i consider myself an anarchist, i don\'t many anarchists worth reading. in any case, my original point was that too many people who consider themselves as anarchists or marxists don\'t know shit about their own label or the label of their \'enemy\'. i think this might suggest that the LEAST effective way of building a revolutionary anti-capitalist movement is to do so in the name of marxism or anarchism. why don\'t we stick to substance, eg. socialism from below, internationalism, anti-racism, feminism, anti-state, etc. etc. Neither anarchism nor marxism has encompassed all of these, so why don\'t we drop the labels and stick to substance. there have been good and bad marxists/marxisms, and there have been good and bad anarchisms/anarchists. let\'s take what\'s best from both and drop the sectarian shit.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 01 2001 @ 02:16 PM CDT

Hitler was very ecologically-minded too.

There may be a \"few\" good socialists (is this Michael Albert speaking?), there may be a few \"good\" Maoists, there may be a few \"good\" aspects to any ideology.

But there is too much negative baggage that goes along with socialism for me to want anything to do with it. The examples of socialists and state commies fighting for wimmin\'s rights and worker\'s rights are overshadowed by examples of sheer homophobia, rigid and hierarchal politiking, assisting colonial powers in the assimilation and genocide of indigenous peoples, and creating totalitarian regimes.

I want nothing to do with anyone whose idea of \"freedom\" consists of a world of hierarchy, mass-0production

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Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, June 02 2001 @ 11:29 PM CDT

I find it interesting that many primitivists/neo-luddites echo the marxists when they claim that industry requires hierarchy and domination. The only difference being that marxists opt for keeping industry with hierarchy and domination whereas the primitivists/neo-luddites believe that they can dispense with production and that we can all be hunters and gatherers again. Anarcho-syndicalists believe that people are capabale of managing their working lives without hierarchy and domination. Our point is that either the producers will make the decisions about what is produced and how or some other force will (ie, bosses).

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 03 2001 @ 06:33 PM CDT

I suppose you can\'t be critical of industrialism without wanting to return to a hunter-gatherer way of life. I know of no anarcho-primitivists or luddites who advocate a return to gathering and hunting, but I know of plenty syndicalist yahoos who think that you can have all of the luxuries that capitalist society produced without all their negative aspects: hierarchal and repressive division of labor, poisonous chemicals with unavoidable leaks and spills, centralized and bureucratic organization, dispossessed indigenous peoples, etc. etc. etc.

Every civilization in the course of human history has been built on slavery. For very few individuals would ever volunteer to go down in them mines, or break their backs to build the structures necessary for the empire, or go to war with neighboring groups in order to acquire land to cultivate for your masters.

I don\'t advocate going back to the stone age. But industrialism must be halted or this very planet made soon be uninhapitable to us.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 03 2001 @ 09:49 PM CDT

The frequent charge that all or most primitivists want to go back to being hunters and gatherers is a straw man argument. See the main IndyMedia website for their special page on straw man arguments.

I don\'t consider myself to be a primitivist, but I\'m sympathetic to many primitivist and anti-civilization arguments. They just happen to jive with my research over the years. But it never ceases to amaze me how so many non-primitivist anarchists ascribe positions to primitivists that simply have no basis in reality. I\'m still racking my brain trying to figure out why non-primitivist anarchists are so hostile to the anti-technology critique that these anarchists have developed. If anarchism has been able to absorb new thinking on race, gender, sexuality, and the environment, why not an anti-authoritarian anti-statist critique of technology? I certainly don\'t think that technology is the most important thing threatening the planet, but it\'s an awfully important one. The ozone hole affects all of us: primitivists and anarcho-syndicalists.

I think that anarcho-syndicalism would greatly benefit from adopting a critique of technology, perhaps not the same one as the primitivists, but a critique nonetheless. As anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists certainly wouldn\'t want to replicate a society that reproduces the same division of labor and inequality that capitalism already gives us. When it comes to most modern technology, it simply can\'t exist without the presence of capitalism. There is no way to have an anarcho-syndicalist semiconductor plant. These billion dollar factories require the existence of a command and control economy that provides raw materials for the chips and toxic chemicals for the manufacturing process. At the same time, our current automobile culture is simply unsustainable in any way, shape or form. Even if you had solar-powered cars, you\'d have to keep a large road infrastructure so that the cars could get around. Of course, even if we had an anarchist revolution ten years from now, cars would exist for a long time. The question then becomes, as anarchists, would we have an anarchist society if people were coerced into working in auto plants? Can we imagine a society without cars and computers?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, June 03 2001 @ 10:27 PM CDT

I really liked the above comments by Chuck O.

However, one things I would like to point out is that solar, wind, and tidal power, even if exploited to a maximum, would not really be able to produce all that much energy. Certainly not enough to fuel a significant amount of automobiles. Solar, wind, tidal power should be used, but it has pretty limited capabilities.

Also, some of the worst pollution involved with cars comes from the very production of cars, which makes me think that changing the source of energy is not enough.

Chuck, your comments seem to most balanced and sensible in this debate. Some of the syndicalists and primitivists seem overly self-righteous. I think a future free society will likely involve the best aspects of both.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 04 2001 @ 12:09 PM CDT

Every civilization built on slavery? That either implies we should accept slavery if we want civilization, or that we shouldn\'t want civilization. Is civilization without slavery possible? If the answer is no, it sounds like ruling-class rationalization of doing things they are secretly ashamed of.

As for whether people will choose to go down into mines without slavery, there are two issues - a practical one and a psychological one. First, what are they mining? Is it necessary? Some primitivists arguments do apply here, but in addition, it has been amply shown that \"precious\" metal mining is a waste of time based on extremely shoddy (and often intentionally misleading) understanding of economics.

As for psychology, quite anything is possible. Why do people pay good money to scare themselves witless on roller coasters? Why do people sacrifice themselves on political and military missions? Why do people put themselves through the pain and suffering of running marathons? Putting inanimate objects through their bodies voluntarily?

Cultures change with time and so do the things people do willingly - and even pay money for... One of the most powerful aspects of American culture today is consumerism - it is nearly impossible to avoid because the media is saturated with it (and funded by it). Brainwashing works - advertisers don\'t take psychology classes for nothing. Without consumerism, the amount of resource use would drop dramatically.

Secondly, the Keynesian inclination to create jobs mindlessly also contributes to the needless use of resources. Was it Emma that said we had the right to be lazy? If nothing more is needed, why worry so much about \"consumer confidence\" and unemployment, when people can simply take turns doing what has to be done (less hours of work per week), and simply spend the rest of their time as they see fit.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, June 04 2001 @ 02:58 PM CDT

You don\'t really address my concerns. Every civilization has been built on slavery. There is not one exception to this rule. The ruling class will rationalize slavery, or make slavery appear to be something other than slavery. The wage-system is slavery. People have to be given a wage to perform most tasks in this society because otherwise it would not be rewarding enough to do so.

People don\'t need to be rewarded to garden, hunt, fish, or fuck. It\'s worth doing just for the sake of doing so.

Our ancestors didn\'t get up every morning only to reluctantly and miserably force themselves to go to some shitty job. They just did what they needed to do and thought nothing of it. That\'s not to say that people didn\'t run into problems which forced them to do things they wouldn\'t ordinarily do, they did, of course.

There are most certainly groups of people who will willingly go in the mines, drill oil, waste their lives away in factories etc. But this small portion of individuals would not be able to maintain an industrial economy. Industrialism requires coordination on a large scale, it requires compulsory servitude.It requires resources to be shipped all around in order to acquire the fuel that is necessary for it to continue.You could not maintain an advanced industrial economy without the extraction, production and shipment of petroleum and nuclear energy, even the most naive proponents of solar/wind/tidal power recognize this.

To say that industrial civilization is neutral, and that anarchists need to run it properly, is no different than saying that capitalism is neutral, we just need to change it, it doesn\'t have to be this way.

Unless your idea of anarchy involves self-managed nuclear power plants, and democratic committees of oil drillers, then anarchists must stress technological reductionism.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 05 2001 @ 02:02 PM CDT

Well, I don\'t think there\'s any disagreement from syndicalists that wage slavery needs to be abolished just as much as any other kind of slavery.

Industrial civilization is not neutral. Nor is capitalism. Nor is environmentalism. Will everyone ever agree on the same goal? Probably not. You can force them, you can convince them, or you can leave them alone.

Now if there\'s a bunch of workers in a nuclear power plant that actually want to keep it running, what are you going to do about it? If what they are doing hardly affects you, there\'s hardly a need to do anything. However, if the effects of their action are great, you can certainly attempt to force your way in there, fight off their guns with your guns, and shut it down. On the other hand, if you consider violence to be something undesirable in your society, then the only recourse you have would be to convince them to stop by actually talking to them, determining their motivations, and finding alternative methods of satisfying their motivations.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, June 05 2001 @ 02:26 PM CDT

You\'re a wing-nut!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, June 15 2001 @ 06:43 PM CDT

I think Michael Albert himself is nasty, brutish, and short.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, August 21 2001 @ 02:16 PM CDT

One thing I\'d like to point out. You said you were going to a Quiche village in South America. I assume perhaps you meant Quechua. The Quechua live in the area you described-the Quiche are Mayan people in the highland area of Guatemala

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, October 28 2001 @ 12:43 AM CDT

so this is where anarchist debate is at? Pencils, language and math? Great.

You guys have no clue. You know whay the Quechua want? Water systems to keep dysentary out of their children you stupid suburbanite twits.

Really, Thoreau said it so much better quite some time ago.

Regarding straw-man arguments: What do you do when your opponent is cartoonish? Really is a straw man? Do you try to give their argument the flesh and blood it lacks on its own? Primitavism is so stupid, so out of touch with the world I live in that it breaks my heart fellow radicals are drawn to it.

Move to the woods. Live it and stop debating technology over the internet. You\'ve lost as you begin.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, October 29 2001 @ 12:40 AM CST

Yes, and soon after like most primitive societies, we will be swallowed up by all that we despise(or all that despises freedom, wildness etc.)

Myself like most primitivists have a great liking for wildness, but we\'d rather be destroying techno-industrial society with our own feralness.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 30 2001 @ 12:50 AM CST

Primitivism is really stupid. So are primitive peoples. Before civilization people were chased off cliffs by dogs, and they couldn\'t call for help because they had no idea how to speak. It is extremely unrealistic to advocate dismantling industrialism and moving towards a more decentralized, self-sufficient mode of existence. Rather, we should have more realistic goals, like one global, technologically advanced, directly-democratic anarchist community suitable for trillions of people.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, October 30 2001 @ 12:55 AM CST

You\'re so ignorant it\'s laughable. How many times must one say \"Primitivists should move to the woods\", \"Communists should just go to Cuba\", it\'s so ass backwards. I\'m certainly wouldn\'t call myself a \"primitivist\", but I recognize the necessity of dismantling the advanced industrial economy given that it is centralized, expansionistic, imperialistic and destructive by nature. Yet, I don\'t believe that a literal \"return to the primitive\" is very promising either. However, I understand that primitivists have much more to back up their arguments than any other school of radicals, and I support it (primitivists have history, anthropology, indigenous narratives, experiences in the wild. Commies have totalitarian regimes. Red anarchists have shorted lived communes that are quickly devoured by communist regimes).

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 01 2001 @ 10:44 AM CST

the problem with societies like the one you describe is not their way of living, but their inability to defend themselves. as soon as the capitalists decide that their land would serve better as a parking lot or a mine, they are done for. end of story. what primitivists fail to understand is that any culture that destroys its technological capacity will eventually be overrun, subjugated, slaughtered and/or assimilated by a more technologically advanced society. if we want lasting freedom, we need to accept technology as a reality of the world in which we live, and strive to build social structures that can withstand all forms of oppression within this context.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 04 2001 @ 11:31 PM CST

the problem with \'primitivism\' is that while some argue it has \'evidence\' to \'back it up\' (\'science, anthropology, archaeology...\') it only has about as much as say \'creation science\' (which uses the entire library of evolutionary science to prove the bible is right and evolution wrong). So, primitivism and creation science both
have alot of commonly accepted \'truths\' to them, and as zerzan has pointed out for primitivism these are \'mainstream\'. The problem is both primitivism and creation science advocates throw in a whole
lot of ideas which are not in the \'scientific record\' that they use to support their arguments
and they also leave out even more.
the same could be said about say \'the media\'. the result is its basically a biased argument, also called propoganda. Its like saying jesus discovered the golden rule, which leaves out some \'details\', or columbus discovered america, though both may in some sense have some truth.

if anarchism is to have any value, it seems it should not follow the \'religious\' and \'uncritical\'
approach of just swallowing whatever story some comrade or religious scam artist or saint is offering. (anarchists arer good at criticizing others, but seem unable to criticize their own ideas, probably because this might cause \'dought\' which is the enemy of \'faith\', even the faith of the atheist). this is just spectacular politics, believing in something because its more conveniant than say \'going to the library\' (the way zerzan did) and checking the facts.


(nobody knows for example if \'primitives\' were \'spontaneous\' \'wild\' \'nonalineated\' and lived \'sensual\' lifves of desire, because they disappeared 30 or more thousands of years ago, using zerzan\'s arbitrary \'non-time\' consciousness determination of when primtivism ended (with its degraded forms persisting in language, religion, and tool using hunter-gatherors who by zerzan\'s definition are basically alienated and impure. one could actions against shaman (though some anthropological accounts for example suggest the shaman were an \'escape valve\' for nonconformists and dissidents and fools, rather than the \'devils\' who led the herd of anti-authoritarian uncivilizeds in their \'passive resistance\' to being civilized---i.e. maybe these early radicals had a bad process which somehow \'let the dogs out\' of Pavlovs cage and hence turned them into Pavlovs). Of couourse, the alineating hierarchical process probably started long before, when molecules and cells, which had long resisted domination by \'brains\' and multicellular aggregates were free and spontaneous. )

Of course, if one reads animal communication one will find animals have a sense of number, and while they don\'t score well in say \'english\' they also use \'alienating symbols\' or protolangyuages such as bird calls, tree markings, and so on, none of which are connected to \'what they mean\'.
Reather they are connected to \'food\', predators\' and \'territory\' for example. Animals also invented hierarchy before humans, though unlike the first \'anarcho-primtivist\' they didn\'t invent government.

The \'unalineated\' idea actually seems similar to the immigrants dream that in the USA the roads are paved with gold; i think people should take a more \'skeptical\' view beyond the \'coke is it\' style. In fact, these dreams are the \'reifications\' zerzan talks about; so that \'taking a walk in the park\' with the plan to move south to a warm climate (one will write the folks down in the Amazon to move over, we\'re coming)
becomes a spectacular subsitute for reality---like taking a walk because its ok and you actually don\'t know where the path is going. Marx, before zerzan f course called this false consiousnessess, though Marx was unable to admit that his own \'scientific theory\' immerdiately turned into a \'religion\' from which \'sinning reformists\' could not deviate. Marx\'s science, like zerzan\'s of course is the last word on the subject, since both of these authorities have figured out what we have to do, which includes not having any \'deviant\' opinions particularily those found by reading \'improper literature\' in the library such as the 10 recent books on each side of Marshall Salins or Adorno. Its nice that these scientist-cooks have found the \'theory of everything\' recipe for anarchy so all thats left is for the \'kitchen help\' to make it. They don\'t have to ask anyone\'s else\'s opinions, any more than any religious prophet who has also figured it out. \'I Read the right books, and figure out we must throw them all out. So lets plan the burning, though of course buy mine while they\'re still legal\'.



Of course Chomsky is the same way with the more restricted venue of lanbguage, which he and other solvers of Plato\'s problem at MIT have dealt with, leaving the rabble to just solve the messy Orwellian problem not requiring anything more than generic babble one can pick up in the gutters of Boston, and hence no threat to Platos. you work on your problem,we\'ll work on ours, and help you with yours, but keep your gutter hands out of the ivory. (What is interestiung is how simolar zerzan and chomsky are; both are right, both are humble, both see an \'essence\' ([primtivie
consiousness or \'the language organ\') and are very sure that what they see is not due to some deformed character structure formed in places like Stanford< berkely, MIT or Cambridge which has generated ideological delusions which are just too good to give up. They pay the bills, for the speaking tours, which may not be anarchy but anarchy may just be talk anyway.)

So, creation science and primitivism, because they do use alot of science, what they promote comes across sounding quite reasonable, and they have references, but if you go to the \'library\' you will find that what they argue for is a pretty complete misrepresentation of the \'scientific type argument\' they make. The same is true of Lyndon larouche, and alot of new agers and postmodernists---they bundle their speculations in a scientific wrapper the way one traps wolves using poisoned bait. Larouche now sells his politics as scientific, using his own \'nonEinsteinian\' physics (based on a more racially pure German brand.).

Zerzan\'s \'primtivism\' has two aspects---recent studies of hunter gatheror \'affluent societies\'; this part is a somewhat better representation of the \'litterature\' (the publish/perish scientific record) but too simplified. zerzan seems not have read any of the \'huntergatheror literature\' ofm the past 20 years (post Sahlin), and the \'anarchists\' apparently only read the \'authoritarian truths\' of their \'comrades\' ratherr than the \'biased ones\' of \'heretics\' not in the \'club\' (or tribe) (though of course anarchists are permitted to use the \'biased\' and \'authoritarian\' language of \'windows\' by microsoft because in this case the \'technology is neutral\' so \'primitvism\' is exempt from being a Mcluhanesque \'spectacle\' in which the \'medium\' of \'tapping on a rad computer\' (as opposed going to the bourgeois library and checking zerzan\'s, or chomsky\'s theory of language with the range of \'nonanarchist\' or \'nonanarcho leftist\' opinions that exist. )

while zerzan dismisses Kropotkin as classical anarchism irrelevant today because its uninformed (just like Adidas may be irrelevant compared to Nikes, or the reverse), maybe because Kropotkin stopped writing due to laziness after death, most of the more recent huntertgathertor studies are based to some extent on Kropotkin\'s early work. (The new work also follows Kropotkin in arguing that \'language\' was an \'evolutionary adaptation\' which permitted humans to for example \'serperate from apes\' and \'earlier humans\'.)

of course, anarchists probably hate evolution because its not \'revolution\'.


as for michael albert, this clone of one part of Chomsky\'s chromosome also has the problem of doing the \'litterature\' search; like zerzan, he would rather \'serve\' by poutting his own litter on the pile than sift through that pile. so, as zerzan\'s critiques of technology, number etc are neither new nor particularily useful because they are not balanceds with either a self-critique (ie asking whats wrong with my ideas given the common problem that ideas are oftren wrong) nor with presentation of the ideas he cops from others,
alberts critiques of zerzan seem to amount to nothing except the same sort of half arguments (anbd alberts have as much truth as zerzan\'s; homework: figure out what half).

well there are more important issues; ewe have to whose argument is better, that the holy war is against the afghans or against the US. Like most arguments these days, one can commend them because they often are in complete sentences, conveniant on the net, etc.

They also will generate books and speaking tours, and help keep people out of bourgeois libraries where some fear \'knowledge will set them free\'. But people
have been conditioned not to want to be free, or to be free to believe whatever crap they want to, and free to claim that \'learning anything\' is a form of intellectual servitude, while repeating some standard party line dogma about mutual aid, revolution, desire, etc is liberating.

Of course, christians have been promoting going to jail for years as the right thing to do, and the bible is apparnelkty useful rhetoric, along with a blanket there. ands they make the outside like jail too with the rheotric. so given that \'action\' means going to jail one needs the rheotric which also makes the world outsdie
similar.

me, i don\'t \'take walks\' in the woods, i take walks in the city ands then go home. and i dip into the rhetoric and dip out. As for primtivies i also think they have no trouble with civilization they just don\'t like the buerocracy and work required. i feel the same way about anarchy.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, November 07 2001 @ 06:48 PM CST

Whoa, is it just me, or is \'ishi media\' totally crazy?!?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, November 07 2001 @ 06:53 PM CST

The problem I have with \'Ishi Media\', as well as many anarchists and socialists (and some primitivists) is that they seem to think that aboriginal peoples no longer exist, as if they are just some relic in a museum. Whereas in reality you can base your arguments against civilization based on the narratives and aspirations of REAL LIFE, existing indigenous peoples and their contemporary struggles to preserve their cultures from colonialist onslaught. You don\'t need to romanticize them, or use them to further your own agenda, or envy them, but rather look to them and listen to them to understand a different way of living.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 08 2001 @ 10:30 AM CST

and the \"different way of living\" is precisely where anarchists and other anti-statists can learn something of value; these cultures (whether we call them indigenous, primitive, forager, gatherer-hunter, or something else) are enduring examples of living without the state, without government, without much of what anarchists identify as the basis of their self-identification. the point, quite correctly, is not to romanticize them, or to uncritically emulate them, but to try to figure out how they have more or less successfully refused the state and capitalism.
ishi media isn\'t crazy, just incoherent, something all too common among anarchists.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 08 2001 @ 03:49 PM CST

\'for the record\' i used to try living off the land in alaska south of arctic village (on the yukon) and was quite aware one could learn from the \'locals\' (indigenous). where i was it was \'athabascan\' people,
or as some told me \'half a gas can\'. i read their \'religion/poetry\' and hunted, fished, and so on, talked with the ones who would tolerate it.
i still do a little subsistance but in warmer/less mosquitoey climes.

my biggest problem with primitivism is that it self-confident, and unself-critical, and seems to ignore a large fraction of the literature on the evolution of language and humans, while pretending it doesn\'t (this is the part of the primtivist critique that goes back to pre-history, and is disitnguished from current hunter-gatherors).
its like getting your \'evolution\' from the bible and then going to the library---one ends up with a different story. to me this is basically propoganda. (but as noted, its the pre-history issue.
hunter gatherors are current events.)

this practice seems to be at odds with the \'arm your desire manifesto\' which i read as arguing that everyone better watch their \'character structure\' which has been downladed from the spectacle. in other words, anybody who says anything might just be seeing through their own alienated glasses, and not reality.

my primtivism is \'moderate\' or agnostic----can go either way and am not commited to this
world of computers nor the one without electricity and getting by finding what one can.
i am very suspect of \'armchair primitives\' who read Sahlins and think, gee its easy.
just like Jefferson found it easy to say \'abolitoion of slavery is a good thing, for somebody else\'.
i also think people nmight be \'culturally literate\' and try gathering, and try reading einstein (who was one who made computers possible).

i have also triued to visit such sorts in other places like mexico.
but i do not romanticize them.

also i had a small problem with jaruche\'s book review when he seemed to suggest the professors should advocate \'primtivism\'
as opposed to sday \'reformist accomodation\' to civilization. my view of this issue is similar to mine \'nonanarchist\' view of the Chiapas issue----its their own business what they want, and \'by any means neccesary\'. of course, they may be sold out by the \'professors\' but it is conceivable at times people can articulate what they want and get it without reading Anarchy..

in fact, despite the standard \'dis\' to voting by J McQuinn in apr, one reason i thought of voting was to protect the north slope from oil companies.

so, \'diss /incoherent\' for sure. but i tend to get kicked off the terminal when i just get started.

i might say the \'primitivist\' theme might like many issues have a good side if it gets people to read some about indiegenous people, evolutionm, and go outside and \'forage\'.
unfortuantely, like christianity which can inspire many good things, too often the wrong ideological rigidity gets attached to it so the value is mixed.

(as for other jarach stuff in anarchy, i agreed with the \'anarchists should seek reciprocity\' in his leftism article, and also that \'propoganda by deed\' has unfortunately been seen as the only \'direct action\' . i think \'organizing one\'s brain\' might also be useful. perhpas these email lists are the only way. )

cheers

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, November 09 2001 @ 10:15 AM CST

\'footnote\'.
one of the themes of the primitivism \'origin myth\' is that for millions of years humans resisted being civilized, which was caused by evil shaman who convinced people somehow to get involved in alineating activitires, like agriculture.

one can compare this view with one in a recent book review in Nature. an anthropoligist named Binford, L. suggets that despite the primitivist notion that indigenous pre-history people had \'natural birth control\' and hence a static population, that humans were continually evolving and reproducing, and spreading through territory. when climate shifts and increased population made the old foods or methods inadequate, new ones like agriculture were developed. so, noone knows who specifically introduced it. it seems one could imagine a \'comunity\' might endorse this form of \'civilization\' for the same sort of \'reasons\' apes became humans (when they moved into new niches involving \'walking upright\'), the humans themselves evolving.

obviously this involves belief in the \'evolution myth\' but this is based on the same science as
primitist anthorpology.

the review is in october 2001 nature, p.567. its similar to the standard views which are commonly reviewed in those pages, which also include discussion of the evolution of language and other technologies or behaviors (the issue in language is whether there is a \'chomskyian language organ\' or just a general intelligence, though chomksy dismisses the other views in the standard dogmatic way characteristic of propogandists for a speific cause or ideology they are attached to---he mostly denies they exist (and hopes perhaps that people don\'t read nature of anything else).

\'crazy\'. this term is used by the status quo, so like other slurs its aok; just another reification which might hopefully eventually cuase the blind to stumble.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 11 2001 @ 03:18 PM CST

I think Michael Albert hits it right on target. Ignoring that anarchism stands for a constructive side - which also includes ways to actually manage our society ourselves is a luxury only some anarchists can afford themselves. If they are intent on actually creating a massmovement they will find themselves all too disappointed with that kind of outlook.

I can\'t understand in which way Michael Albert is trying to make himself a \"new leader\". I think he is proposing ideas in a sensible way, if you don\'t like them, well, just don\'t agree then. But just because of that doesn\'t make him your enemy.

I haven\'t read the stuff about primitivism yet, but I do sure he slags it off seriously. I\'m glad that that kind of thinking hasn\'t found much root in the swedish anarchist movement (even if we have several problems with it, but wishes to destroy industrialised society wouldn\'t help it any more).

Mikael Altemark
Syndicalist Youth Federation Uppsala

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 22 2001 @ 12:25 PM CST

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, November 22 2001 @ 03:21 PM CST

Some of his thoughts on anarchism I find intriguing. I don\'t think he\'s without good intentions or good ideas. What bothers me about him, which hasn\'t been mentioned in this discussion, was how he treated the black bloc after N30 Seattle. The guy basically said that the property destruction was untimely and counter-productive (which it wasn\'t), and that while he didn\'t \"condemn\" property destruction, he didn\'t exactly endorse it either. Yet, in Mike\'s anthologies on Socialism, does he ever condemn the socialist movement for their violent activities, which are often not directed at corporations or capitalist institutions, but rather anarchists, dissidents, indigenous peoples, and others who do not go along with their authoritarian programs?

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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, November 25 2001 @ 04:12 PM CST

you guys are all so lost. I\'m pretty sure you\'re mostly all guys. This has the kind of wind-bag nonsense only men really excel in.

You\'re debating civilization? Is this serious? I\'m all cool with collective living and all that. But come on.

If the suburban primitives I\'ve met are any fair sampling of your movement, which I think they are, I would rather live the rest of my life in a K-Mart eating CheezWhiz and shitting myself than have to spend it in a world that you people create.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2001 @ 04:30 PM CST

Chuck,

I really don\'t understand your position on this issue...and I tend to think you say a lot of valid things on these boards. Albert HAS identified himself as an anarchist, several times, and to say that because a lot of people agree that he is an anarchist suggests that people don\'t know what anarchism is smacks of dogmatism. Are you really infallible? Do you and your friends, and only you and your friends know what anarchism is? Are hundreds of people committed to and active in social change utterly ignorant?

To me at least, it\'s clear that Albert has a lot to say, not only simply to activists but also to anarchists, specifically. We could do without all this sectarian nonsense....trust me, I\'m from the UK, it\'s all we do. :)

Much peace,

Matt

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2001 @ 04:40 PM CST

to me \'anarchy\' is like \'christianity\' or \'evolution\'. one can \'use\' it or one can \'believe\' it, or both. computers are the same--one can use them, or believe in them.
the former use means \'anarchy\' is a method, one even a \'fascist\' might use at times. the latter is a label, which means even fascists can pass themselves off as anarchists. (given the common occurence of anarchists being ejected from their own groups it seems fascists can be anarchists.)
albert\'s book on \'participatory economics\' is compatible with alot of anarchism (its similar to the FAQ, or syndicalism, though like most writing pretends to have invented something). if albert believes in this, then he is an anarchist \'believer\'. he doesn\'t practice it at Z.
but then most anarchists only practice it a bit. either they are non-anarchists who at times practice anarchy, or they are \'believers\' who do whatever they want, just as christians do.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2001 @ 04:51 PM CST

added----jaruch raises a few interesting points. is all authority illegitimate, and the same for control. is a parent who feeds a baby or prevents it from running into a street exerting illegitimate authrotity? is the \'webmaster\' an
illegitimate authority because infoshop is not open for all to deal with as they wish? is \'self-control\' the same as \'control\' that anarchists are against.

as for the basic \'anarchist premise\' that \'we\' believe that the state is pernicious and unnecesary, i am anAGnostic. i have never lived without a state around; what i begin with is the idea that \'illegitimate authority\' whether it is a cop or a writer (for z or anarchy) is permincious and unnecesary. also, i believe that most anarchists are heavily into authority and control, though they make their definitions such that they can never be accused of this; they are like \'businessowners\' who claim they \'work harder\' than the \'slave wager\' because of something they have done, which typically is not much.
so in this sense anarchy tends to be a \'cult\' of anti-statism of an authoritarian cast.
maybe it can move past that, or maybe not. thats an issue of human nature.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, November 26 2001 @ 06:51 PM CST

Obviously, the anarchist community has lots to say about Mike Albert, primitivism, syndicalism, the Left, and everything else. But I think that this particular issue, whether or not Mike A. is an anarchist, is tired. This article has been up for over 6 months. There\'s a lot of different opinions, and a lot of them are good. But perhaps now that there\'s 75 comments we could just give this particular discussion a rest in order to pursue more meaningful activities.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, November 27 2001 @ 02:08 PM CST

I agree, Saber. There will be additional opportunities to discuss these issues. Lawrence has a new pamphlet coming out that I think will prompt more debate. Michael Albert has done many excellent things for activism and I can see his anarchist tendencies. But I think too many new anarchists go ga-ga whenever a famous leftist says something about anarchism. I think that this desire to see anarchist ideas get adopted by lots of people has created a climate where some of the basics of anarchism have been watered down. Anarchism is not progressive leftism. It shares many of the same values, goals, and tactics, but it has its own critique and vision (Albert claims that anarchism has no vision, which demonstrates how little of anarchist theory he has read). Anarchism is an anti-statist tendency which has been broadly extended to critique all other forms of hierarchy, domination, and alienation.

Another big problem is that too many anarchists don\'t understand the importance of the anarchist movement setting its own agenda, or at least working with people who have similar agendas. There is much more work that needs to be done to separate anarchists from their easy relationship with vanguardist leftists. This isn\'t merely a sectarian argument, but one about principles and survival. The vanguardist left is history folks. Their numbers are dwindling and their politics are poision to any type of broad coalition-building. We just don\'t need to work with them any longer--it would make more sense for us to focus more of our energy towards building ally relationships with community groups that are engaged in social change.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, November 28 2001 @ 12:29 PM CST

i agree the \'vanguardist left\' is irrelevant. why a\'s think one still needs to talk about \'leftism\' in this way seems mostly because they are still dealing with wounds suffered in paris 68 or spain 30\'s.maybe a psychotherapist would help to help treat the \'inner child\' suffering PTSD. the current \'scene\' is \'new leftist\' which is very anarchist influenced---in fact many seem to call themselves the \'movement\' because they don\'t want to get sucked into discussions over who is or who isn\'t a \'real\' whatever. this also avoids conflcits of interests given that many in the \'movement\' are also workers or students in \'their movement\' (the status quo).
the real issue is whether the current scene can invent anything different from the \'new left\' (which is well known for german green real politicians who have morphed from anarcho street fighters, or similar cases in usa). this means its only people have to figure out how to survive without contributing to the status quo/spectacle, while at the smae time making a path that other people can take (underground railroad) to also get out. for example, all anarchists could get tenure at universities, and then try to hire the masses for an ever expanding faculty who would do nothing but sit around and discuss theoretical anarchy. Harvard has 18 billion in endowment, so this could fund a reasonable squat.

i think the next movement should consider focusing on ideas in Disarm Authority (which makes the same point made in a co-authored book by Albert, liberating theory, that \'authoritarianism\' does not currently only originate in the state or in \'vanguagrdists\' (old commies) but rather in new forms of vanguardists/authroitarians who cannot be easily identified as being say \'trotskyist\'. noone knows who they are, because the species morphs. Disarm authority also makes the point that everyone contributes to a spectacle that is the \'general authority\'. activism should move towards disarming this, and that means maybe people need to look at less obvious targets than either the SWP or the WTO---though both should not be ignored either.)
i also thought Trotter\'s \'post-leftist\' idea was on track that the \'right to be lazy\' (eg refuse to accept someone else\'s definition of whether one is performing a \'valuable social function\' by contributing to their opinion of GDP) should be considered. until one can define what is productive why bother.

as for whether this topic is too long, since the others seem mostly ignored one could just collpase them into one.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, February 19 2002 @ 02:33 AM CST

This discussion really does not need my two cents, but I have insomnia and nothing else to do, so here we go.

I see a great deal of value in criticizing technology, industrialization, and so forth. I think the primitivists are right in that centralized, hierarchical command structures are essential for production of high technology. (The free software movement has shown that such structures are not necessary for software, but I contend that they ARE necessary for production of computers and such.)

However -- and I think a lot of primitivists will agree with me here -- I don\'t think that a return to a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural way of life is tenable at all. But the whole point of the unfortunately-named primitivists is NOT a return to primitive life, but rather, a way of learning from different cultures about what could be possible.

Remember that we have been told for centuries that it is \"human nature\" to dominate and be dominated, to exploit and be exploited. The research of many anarchists, including and especially primitivists, demonstrates that this is absolutely not true, and that centralized domination is only a relatively recent human invention.

Obviously we cannot go back to a hunter-gatherer existence. The critics of primitivism are right when they say that such a throwback would be impossible without the mass extermination of human life. But I don\'t think anyone is arguing for such an extreme solution (except maybe some misanthropic deep ecologists and Church of Euthanasia adherents).

One of my main critiques of primitivism is its tendency to assign a single cause to all of our problems. Want to end ecocide? End civilization as we know it. Want to end sexism? End civilization as we know it. Want to be happy and less alienated? End civilization as we know it. It really does smack of the \"we have the same answer to everything\" Borg-analysis that so many factions, revolutionaries, kooks, nuts and weirdos have.

The longing for a primitive-like lifestyle sounds exactly like the Christian longing for the perfection once found in the Garden of Eden, and the primitivist descriptions of introduction of agriculture and technology are quite reminiscent of Christian myths about temptation in the Garden and the Fall. \"Once, everything was perfect; then this horrible thing was introduced (Christians say Satan, primitivists say technology/agriculture/language/etc.) and we fell from grace.\" The longing for a revolution is also quite similar to the Christians pining away for the Second Coming or Rapture or whatever. The point being: it\'s never that simple, and we should have learned that by now.

Question: \"After the revolution,\" when the syndicalists set up a factory at the edge of the river, and the primitivists are outraged that the river\'s ecosystem is disrupted by the factory, what then? Whose needs and ideas prevail? The syndicalists would like to have the factory so they can build (for the sake of argument) farm implements, so that they can produce more food for their families. But the primitivists think that the factory (and the agricultural society for which it exists) is the beginning of a new era of domination. How would such a situation be resolved?

If it were up to some of the people posting on this site, I bet they\'d just yell insults at each other from each side of the river:
\"Primitivist idiot!\"
\"Syndicalist git!\"
\"Ignorant, pro-genocide, middle-class buffoon!\"
\"Moronic, pro-ecocide, middle-class jerk!\"
Etc., etc.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 14 2002 @ 03:49 PM CST

iN reply to the person sounding pretty burned-out and a band member of SUBHUMANS (?):

i\'m a guy in his 30s who is feeling some of the pressures you talk about when radically-minded people basically seem to *hit their heads against the allegedly immovable walls of the status quo* and \"sell out\" and such. Having said that, I think you\'re missing some key things just beyond the easily perceptable; things which it seems to me the anarchist milieu misses too much and ought to start taking on more:

Basically, i\'m talking about the meta, a situation going on beyond the immediate perception. The \"meta\" is the unspoken game of awareness which people play with each other, especially on issues which are deemed \"too controversial\" in today\'s world. Here\'s R.D. Laing articulating it in a way that originally moved me into exploring the concept:

\"...I discover there is a meta-road...[Society] is playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing the game.\"--R.D.Laing, in a biography called A Divided Self p.151

I\'m trying to think of a way to illustrate the value of why anarchists should pursue a deep awareness of the meta. Okay, how about what appeared to be a huge solidarity of u.s. patriotism in the few months after Sep.11. Namely, the brandishing of the u.s. flag.

Hmmm. The hype has died down a lot now, and few people still put this flag up...Did you by chance get a look at some of the diversity of people who put it up (on homes, cars, bikes, etc)? I got the idea that there was more going on than \"met the eye\"--a meta situation. I wouldn\'t put it past people to have realized the unique opportunity in putting that flag up. Some surely worried about roving bands of \"patriotic\" fascists and wanted to protect themselves; others may\'ve wanted to avoid po\'lice scrutiny for some reason. Think about that one.

So, there\'s a socially Given imagery of *What People Are Doing* when they go about their lives, and appear to \"sell out\" or such things. And then there\'s the meta imagery.

Now, how about this Given image that anarchists are so totally isolated and without influential power. You use the Master\'s Tools (including the Master\'s *frames of references* like the institution of formal political activity) in order to \"see\" and you can pretty much convince yourself with your \"realistic\" or \"pragmatic\" belief systems that anarchy is impossible. Now, if you realize that there are OTHER ways of \"looking the situation\", you won\'t be so easily fooled.

Consider, for instance, the marijuana underground. In every category they are \"nonexistent\", yet people continue to get pot all thru-out the u.s.

Now, on this idea that anarchists *have to* follow the norms of influence-making (as formal, above-ground groups do). How about when anarchists teach *resistance consciousness*; basically, taking the micro resistance of the underground pot culture and spreading it into a macro resistance where people learn:

a) they are not as alone as they believe they are.
b) many of the rigid beliefs/ideas they trust are full of holes and there are other ways of looking and doing.
c) that the seeming complexity and enormity of *what\'s going on* (in the macro) is not actually so complex and impossible of a situation as we\'re led to think; that we are collectively, given foggy, mystified, complexified notions of what\'s happening which, once *demystified* show a much more simple situation.

One pretty simple situation is the challenge of how elite ideology controls the meta mindsets of people allowed to be in positions of formal influence: namely, pretty much the way Chomsky articulates the belief systems of policymakers and social planners and their implementers.

Anarchists and others inclined to wish to figure things out in meaningful ways really ought to take the time needed to read this portion of Chomsky\'s *institutional analysis*. See a pretty good outline here:
www.zmag.org/chomsky/ni/ni-c01-s05.html (and next section, which gets into more contemporary aspect)

Chomsky may be a \'stick-in-the-mud\' leftist, but even his leftist handlers have been known to get quite antsy when he wanders into his detailed critique of \"liberal scholarship\" and \"progressive intellectuals\"(i.e. Walter Lippmann, Edward Bernays, Reinhold Niebuhr, Harold Lasswell) while speaking in public.

There\'s probably some important points I missed this time around from your original text above; well, I\'m going to print out this whole thing and study it closer...!

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 15 2002 @ 01:49 AM CST

Russell Means\'s speech is called

\"For America to Live, Europe Must Die\"
http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/e-sermons/means.html

or \"Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth\"
http://www.ecn.org/freedom/luddling/ling002.html

It is indescribably excellent.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 15 2002 @ 02:46 PM CST

russel means is a crackpot. for a member of an ethnic minority (in his case an indian) to say that the disney empire has always had a great relationship to minorities, and indians in particular, whether in portrayals or in person, flies in the face of reality. this from a guy who ran as the vice presidential candidate on the libertarian party with larry flynt as the presidential candidate... plenty of people who aren\'t cracked have critical things to say about america without relying on an opportunistic \"actor\" whose role in the AIM split is anything but revolutionary. as it is said, \"consider the source\"...

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 15 2002 @ 11:25 PM CST

guissepe is off the wall. russel was promoting pocaHontas, which every informed authority knows was a good pc flic. hey, pocahantas cty west va is home of the physics PhD from oregon, author of the turner diaries and head of natl. alliance. also, means was a golf professional. what more credibility do you need? i bet guissepe never did a photo op with andy warhol, so he should be ignored as a crank.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 18 2002 @ 10:37 AM CST

shit, i\'ve been exposed. i am indeed a wannabe poser, a self-defined important person with no public credibility due to no (in)decent exposure. curses, foiled again.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, May 10 2002 @ 10:46 AM CDT

I know nobody will probably read this.. But.. what if you don\'t happen to live next to a lush jungle? Then what? It was a very inspiring story, but at the end of the day, an impossibly miniscule fraction of the world\'s population lives in such natural conditions. What about the rest of us?

chris

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