Primitivism & 'rewilding' -- split from S&E

[Kropotesta]

This has been split from the Nuclear power -thread in Sciences & Environment, conflicting_interests is answering the question 'should we use nuclear power?' -- Sentinel

I'm against.
all sources of power are wasteful and inefficient creates tension between nations. we are better not to have any at all.
rewilding WOOOOO

[Sentinel]

I'm against.
all sources of power are wasteful and inefficient creates tension between nations. we are better not to have any at all.
rewilding WOOOOO

So, I gather you are for the abolition of technology and industry. Have you ever stopped to reflect what this would actually cause, or are you just trolling again? And if you have thought it over and are being serious, does this mean that you are indifferent to the unimaginable human misery and horrors that would follow?

The initial collapse of civilisation and mass deaths? The following cruel existence of the survivors, where suffering and dying of previously easily curable diseases becomes the norm? Nothing of this means anything to you?

[chimx]

I would add that you need to reassess what you really believe. Anarcho-primitivism is antithetical to vegan lifestyles, and anarcho-primitivists adamantly condemn veganism partly because of veganism's reliance on the agricultural industry, technology -- in short civilization.

The allure of anarcho-primitivism comes from its roots as a Marxist movement. It is heavily influenced by Rousseau, Freud, as well as Marxism and the Frankfurt School. While the latter argue that human alienation exists under industrial society today, they always make it clear that capitalism and class society that creates alienation. In short, the tools of production are only oppressive when used by one class against another class, i.e. capitalists vs. laborers.

[Os Cangaceiros]

I've never really understood those who think that technology is inherently oppresive.

It just seems very illogical to me.

[Bilan]

I'm against.
all sources of power are wasteful and inefficient creates tension between nations. we are better not to have any at all.
rewilding WOOOOO

What a terrifying prospect for humanity, not to mention completely unrealistic!
Why would you want to do such a thing?

It's not technology itself, or even industrialism, or energy which is 'wasteful' or detrimental to our existence, or the existence of the planet, it's the way it's used which defines that.


. In short, the tools of production are only oppressive when used by one class against another class, i.e. capitalists vs. laborers.

Werd.

[Kropotesta]

First point- I am NOT a full blown anarcho-primivitist and I do not criticise technology in that comment. I do however believe that we should stop using pollutative fuels to merely further the human race and to accomdate our ridiclous materialism, which ideally would mean partial rewilding. I do believe that communities should be as self-reliant as possible, through people having the basic skills to look after themselves, survival techniques as it were.
So to clear up, I ain't opposed technology, merely the fuels that are used which are harmful to everything, not just the people using it.
Oh yeah, please no comments like "why you on a computer then!?"
I know this idea is some what farfetched but we can all have an ideal, however this is not my absolute top priority.
So don't even think about trying to restrict me on here.

[Jazzratt]

You oppose fuel, how - then - do you suggest we power technology? With love?

[Kropotesta]

Not particulary bothered as long as it is not a massive polluter. Wind farms? Solar? Tidial? I'd like to think that the people that want to continue technological advancements would be able to find a safe and reliable way if it was completely neccessary.

[JDHURF]

Murray Bookchin thoroughly put to waste so-called primitivism - a concept which Noam Chomsky pointed out would necessitate the worst human genocide in history, I know I sure can't hunt with bows and arrows or tend a garden, let alone survive in a cave or hut in the dead of winter - with his Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism. Specifically in chapters 6 and 7:

Against Technology and Civilization:

http://libcom.org/library/socanlifean6

Mystifying the Primitive:

http://libcom.org/library/socanlifean7


Some relevant excerpts:


ven more troubling are the writings of George Bradford (aka David Watson), one of the major theorists at Fifth Estate, on the horrors of technology -- apparently technology as such. Technology, it would seem, determines social relations rather than the opposite, a notion that more closely approximates vulgar Marxism than, say, social ecology. 'Technology is not an isolated project, or even an accumulation of technical knowledge,' Bradford tells us in 'Stopping the Industrial Hydra' (SIH), that is determined by a somehow separate and more fundamental sphere of 'social relations.' Mass technics have become, in the words of Langdon Winner, 'structures whose conditions of operation demand the restructuring of their environments,' and thus of the very social relations that brought them about. Mass technics -- a product of earlier forms and archaic hierarchies -- have now outgrown the conditions that engendered them, taking on an autonomous life. . . . They furnish, or have become, a kind of total environment and social system, both in their general and individual, subjective aspects. . . . In such a mechanized pyramid . . . instrumental and social relations are one and the same.[11] This facile body of notions comfortably bypasses the capitalist relations that blatantly determine how technology will be used and focuses on what technology is presumed to be. By relegating social relations to something less than fundamental -- instead of emphasizing the all-important productive process where technology is used -- Bradford imparts to machines and 'mass technics' a mystical autonomy that, like the Stalinist hypostasization of technology, has served extremely reactionary ends. The idea that technology has a life of its own is deeply rooted in the conservative German romanticism of the last century and in the writings of Martin Heidegger and Friedrich Georg J'nger, which fed into National Socialist ideology, however much the Nazis honored their antitechnological ideology in the breach.




Denouncing technology and civilization as inherently oppressive of humanity in fact serves to veil the specific social relations that privilege exploiters over the exploited and hierarchs over their subordinates. More than any oppressive society in the past, capitalism conceals its exploitation of humanity under a disguise of 'fetishes,' to use Marx's terminology in Capital, above all, the 'fetishism of commodities,' which has been variously -- and superficially -- embroidered by the Situationists into 'spectacles' and by Baudrillard into 'simulacra.' Just as the bourgeoisie's acquisition of surplus value is hidden by a contractual exchange of wages for labor power that is only ostensibly equal, so the fetishization of the commodity and its movements conceals the sovereignty of capitalism's economic and social relations.


There is an important, indeed crucial, point to be made, here. Such concealment shields from public purview the causal role of capitalist competition in producing the crises of our times. To these mystifications, antitechnologists and anticivilizationists add the myth of technology and civilization as inherently oppressive, and they thus obscure the social relationships unique to capitalism -- notably the use of things (commodities, exchange values, objects -- employ what terms you choose) to mediate social relations and produce the techno-urban landscape of our time.



Thus, instead of disclosing the sources of present-day social and personal pathologies, antitechnologism allows us to speciously replace capitalism with technology, which basically facilitates capital accumulation and the exploitation of labor, as the underlying cause of growth and of ecological destruction. Civilization, embodied in the city as a cultural center, is divested of its rational dimensions, as if the city were an unabated cancer rather than the potential sphere for universalizing human intercourse, in marked contrast to the parochial limitations of tribal and village life. The basic social relationships of capitalist exploitation and domination are overshadowed by metaphysical generalizations about the ego and la technique, blurring public insight into the basic causes of social and ecological crises -- commodity relations that spawn the corporate brokers of power, industry, and wealth.


Which is not to deny that many technologies are inherently domineering and ecologically dangerous, or to assert that civilization has been an unmitigated blessing. Nuclear reactors, huge dams, highly centralized industrial complexes, the factory system, and the arms industry -- like bureaucracy, urban blight, and contemporarymedia -- have been pernicious almost from their inception. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did not require the steam engine, mass manufacture, or, for that matter, giant cities and far-reaching bureaucracies, to deforest huge areas of North America and virtually obliterate its aboriginal peoples, or erode the soil of entire regions. To the contrary, even before railroads reached out to all parts of the land, much of this devastation had already been wrought using simple axes, black-powder muskets, horse-driven wagons, and moldboard plows.


It was these simple technologies that bourgeois enterprise -- the barbarous dimensions of civilization of the last century -- used to carve much of the Ohio River valley into speculative real estate. In the South, plantation owners needed slave 'hands' in great part because the machinery to plant and pick cotton did not exist; indeed, American tenant farming has disappeared over the past two generations largely because new machinery was introduced to replace the labor of 'freed' black sharecroppers. In the nineteenth century peasants from semifeudal Europe, following river and canal routes, poured into the American wilderness and, with eminently unecological methods, began to produce the grains that eventually propelled American capitalism to economic hegemony in the world.


Bluntly put: it was capitalism -- the commodity relationship expanded to its full historical proportions -- that produced the explosive environmental crisis of modern times, beginning with early cottage-made commodities that were carried over the entire world in sailing vessels, powered by wind rather than engines. Apart from the textile villages and towns of Britain, where mass manufacture made its historic breakthrough, the machines that meet with the greatest opprobrium these days were created long after capitalism gained ascendancy in many parts of Europe and North America.


As I said, Bookchin put this petty-bourgeois excess to waste definitively.

[apathy maybe]

Electricity for the win ;)


I was going to add some more, but this thread is stupid and irrelevant, and I can't really address any points that deserve addressing without just saying what someone else already said.

[careyprice31]

First point- I am NOT a full blown anarcho-primivitist and I do not criticise technology in that comment. I do however believe that we should stop using pollutative fuels to merely further the human race and to accomdate our ridiclous materialism, which ideally would mean partial rewilding. I do believe that communities should be as self-reliant as possible, through people having the basic skills to look after themselves, survival techniques as it were.
So to clear up, I ain't opposed technology, merely the fuels that are used which are harmful to everything, not just the people using it.
Oh yeah, please no comments like "why you on a computer then!?"
I know this idea is some what farfetched but we can all have an ideal, however this is not my absolute top priority.
So don't even think about trying to restrict me on here.

I dont think you are a reactionary. I've read a lot of your posts.

I love Yuri Gagarin's quote on technology. "We have faith in the boundless possibilities of the human intellect and we want the achievements of humankind to be used for peaceful purposes, for the enjoyment of man."

Our increasing technology would benefit us all, the environment, animals, and humans, as we learn how to treat disease and so on, animals and humans will live much longer and better lives.

[pusher robot]

I do however believe that we should stop using pollutative fuels to merely further the human race and to accomdate our ridiclous materialism, which ideally would mean partial rewilding.

Why? If we, as a society, decide that we are willing to suffer a little pollution in exchange for the material benefits it brings, on what basis do you judge that wrong? By what standard of value?

[Kropotesta]

Why? If we, as a society, decide that we are willing to suffer a little pollution in exchange for the material benefits it brings, on what basis do you judge that wrong? By what standard of value?
the enviroment, animals and other communities that would be affected from our own pollution.

[Forward Union]

I've never really understood those who think that technology is inherently oppresive.

I am not a primitivist, so many primitivists may disagree with my presentation of their views. But here are the main points...

The idea is that to create technology, for example electricity, you need to dig up a lot of copper and other materials. The people who sit on the copper reserves don't want you to have it, and so, to get it, you need to massacre or displace them.

The other thing is that it creates power relations through specialisation, If I know how to use the Meat-growing vat and you don't I can ransom you all I want.

Most primitivists also argue that the current technological level is completely unsustainable and will cause humanity to suddenly and abruptly wipe itself out within the next 100 years. Even those that don't want or use technology.

The other thing is that if you follow technocracy through to it's logical conclusion we may as well sit in stasis pods being pumped full of drugs that put our mind in a state of eternal bliss until we live out our 3000 year long lives...

[Jazzratt]

The other thing is that if you follow technocracy through to it's logical conclusion we may as well sit in stasis pods being pumped full of drugs that put our mind in a state of eternal bliss until we live out our 3000 year long lives...

THat isn't taking it to its logical conclusion that's reducing it to absurdity. :rolleyes:

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

The other thing is that if you follow technocracy through to it's logical conclusion we may as well sit in stasis pods being pumped full of drugs that put our mind in a state of eternal bliss until we live out our 3000 year long lives...

As a reductio ad absurdium, that's pretty poor. What is actually wrong with such an existance?


the enviroment, animals and other communities that would be affected from our own pollution.

That's a bland statement of fact which does nothing to support your position, or oppose anyone else's. What would you consider an unacceptable level of effect?