Why the hatred for anarcho-primitivists? II

[MarxSchmarx]

Carried over from this thread, as it reached the 500 post mark.
http://www.revleft.com/vb/why-hatred-anarcho-t144936/index.html


While I no longer associate myself with primitivist ideas, I don't understand the disdain for them on RevLeft. When I was looking at the guidelines for "Opposing Ideologies" I saw that it was for right-wingers, capitalists, preachers, primitivists, and other restricted members.

I used to consider myself an Anarcho-Communist/Primitivist, but I agree with agriculture.

[Aurorus Ruber]

I mostly find their proposals annoying, since they generally preclude much in the way of practical action or progressive vision. My conversations with them always seem to end with the need to just smash everything because it's hopelessly corrupt and alienating. Not a very productive basis for political activity. If the entire edifice of civilization must go, that doesn't leave much room for improving on the present world.

[The Douche]

If the entire edifice of civilization must go, that doesn't leave much room for improving on the present world.

Or is it the only way to make room for the development of a new way of living which is truly devoid of alienation?

[Zanthorus]

Or is it the only way to make room for the development of a new way of living which is truly devoid of alienation?

Alienation is the result of commodity-capitalist social relations, not modern civilisation. I feel Lucio Colleti said all that really needs to be said on this subject:


...when the substance is examined it is easy to see that it [One Dimensional Man] is not an indictment of capital but of technology. Marcuse, who rebels against 'integrated thinking', does not realize that he is arguing like the most integrated of bourgeois sociologists. For him there is no difference between capitalism and socialism; what he fights is 'industrial society', 'industry' without class connotations, industry 'in itself'. Not machinery insofar as it is capital, not the capitalist employment of machinery, but machinery plain and simple.

In his analysis of the 'Industrial Revolution' in the chapter of Capital entitled 'Machinery and Heavy Industry', Marx frequently underlines the bourgeois economists' identification of machinery and capital... Marcuse equates machinery and capital, not in order to attribute to the latter the advantages of the former, but rather to impute to machinery the enslavement and oppression of the labourer for which in fact capital is responsible. In the first case, the result is the apologetic approach of Vulgärökonomie. In the second case, it is that of the so‑called 'romantic critique' of bourgeois society—i.e. a critique of the present, not in the name of the future but in the name of, and inspired by, 'nostalgia' for the past. For the economist, whoever wants modern productive forces, i.e. machinery and modern industry, must also want capitalist relations of production. (As Marx writes: 'No doubt he is far from denying that temporary inconvenience may result from the capitalist use of machinery. But where is the medal without its reverse? Any employment of machinery, except by capital, is to him an impossibility. Exploitation of the workman by the machine is therefore, with him, identical with exploitation of the machine by the workman.') For Marcuse, on the contrary, whoever does not want exploitation, or rather (given that for Marcuse, in the final analysis, exploitation does not exist) whoever does not want... 'integration', must return to patriarchal conditions of life, or even perhaps to feudalism—a subject upon which our author expatiates like any highthinking social prophet. Taken to its extreme, Marcuse's approach leads to that cult of 'primitivism' and 'barbarism' which the abstract spiritualism of the bourgeois intellectual so easily turns into. His perspective, like that of Horkheimer and Adorno, is one of Luddism, as Lukacs recognized: 'If we say that manipulation has arisen as a consequence of technological development, then to fight manipulation we must transform ourselves into some kind of Luddites fighting technical development.' (See Gespräche mit Georg Lukacs, Hamburg, 1969.)

This reference to the 'romantic critique' of bourgeois society may seem amazing. This is, in fact, an adversary about which we never think. In reality, there is not just Marxism on the one hand and bourgeois‑capitalist ideology on the other; the game is more complex and has three players. No less than against bourgeois ideology, Marxism fights against 'the romantic conception that,' Marx says in his Grundrisse, 'will accompany the former as its legitimate antithesis until its dying day'.

Obviously, Marcuse is not Carlyle or Sismondi. But he is neither of these, apart from a series of obvious reasons, also because of the subtly apologetic implications of his entire argument. The concept of 'industrial society', the idea of 'industry' without class connotations, or industry 'in and for itself', that he shares with bourgeois sociology (see, for example, Dahrendorf), is to defer involuntarily to the great corporations. Industry and technology are oppressors everywhere, in Russia no less than in America. 'Soviets plus electrification' (Lenin) is an empty illusion. If we wish to escape oppression it is pointless to attempt socialism. The remedy that Marcuse proposes is in keeping with the gravamen of his analysis. It is enough for us all to oppose the system with the 'Great Refusal' and set sail together, perhaps, for Tahiti.- From Hegel to Marcuse (http://www.autodidactproject.org/other/colletti1.html)

[Black Sheep]

I place primitivists in the same mental gulag with hippies, pacifists tree huggers and posadists.

[ellipsis]

Wow i hope this second incarnation is as good as the first.

[Cencus]

I dislike primativists because they would kill me.

I am a diabetic and without the industrial infrastructure to manufacture insulin which I have to inject multiple times a day I would loose my eyesight, may even have to have limbs amputated, and eventually die.

[The Douche]

I dislike primativists because they would kill me.

I am a diabetic and without the industrial infrastructure to manufacture insulin which I have to inject multiple times a day I would loose my eyesight, may even have to have limbs amputated, and eventually die.

Say goodnight.