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Iseul has been covering it pretty well, but I wanted to add a couple of points:
Material abundance is a necessary prerequisite to communism, even the primitivist communism some envisage. Even if we accept that they are stable in the long term, that there is some way of preventing repopulation/technological advancement without some kind of global police state, primitive societies would be more vulnerable to the vagaries of nature - at all levels from the dangers of childbirth and infancy all the way to the extinction of the human species.
There is also the issue of potential; how many potential world-class athletes have we missed out on because the sport hadn't even been concieved of yet? How many potentially great artists have been born into a world without the riot of colours and styles humans have developed thanks to industrialisation? How many potential scientists were unlucky enough to be born in a time and/or place where literacy was rare to "not invented yet"?
After billions of years of slow and painful evolution, why should we just suddenly stop and say "nope, no more, we can't make the universe any more awesome to live in, let's forget the whole idea and return to the naive ignorance of the wild"?
The Human Progress Group
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker - Mikhail Bakunin
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains - Karl Marx
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value - R. Buckminster Fuller
The important thing is not to be human but to be humane - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Check out my speculative fiction project: NOVA MUNDI
after billions of years of slow and painful evolution, why should we just suddenly stop and say "oh shit we've turned the planet into a miserable hell for most people that is quickly promising to do the same for everybody"
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
It seems you are just arguing over semantics now.
Well to be frank, it's not like the whole of the revolutionary left has a lot of influences on ordinary real-life workers either. The majority of the working class today in the entire world do not subscribe to Marxism or communism. Many don't even believe in Social Democracy.
Given how small the revolutionary left as a whole is today, even a tiny proportion of primitivists could potentially still have some influence.
Also, do I detect a subtle and implicit attempt at trying to call me a "stagnant dipshit" for "worrying over primitivism"?I guess you might as well call the admins on RevLeft who restricted primitivism in the first place "stagnant dipshits" too.
It doesn't matter. This is not primarily a moral critique. The fact is, strategically speaking, workers will never be able to overthrow capitalism until workers can genuinely acquire control over it. This is why Trotsky pointed out the need for the revolution in Russia to link up with the revolution in the advanced capitalist countries, because the workers in more advanced countries tend to have a more advanced consciousness on many issues. This is one reason why I disagree with Third Worldism which tends to neglect workers in advanced industrialised countries. (Not the "West", since Lenin and Trotsky never made any cultural essentialist comments about the "West" in any special way. Non-Western countries with a different culture could also be industrialised and advanced, e.g. Japan. China and India today are also rapidly becoming the new advanced industrialised countries in the world)
Certainly not completely. Communism would be the dialectical negation of capitalism, not its absolute negation. Even Marx pointed out that capitalism had some progressive features. Communism should inherit the positive aspects of capitalist civilisation and reject the negative aspects, rather than "destroy everything".
It's not an "excuse" at all. It's an objective fact that technology is never intrinsically reactionary. If technology generally tends to benefit capitalism within a capitalist society, then that is the fault of capitalism, not technology. Don't blame the tools for the sub-standard jobs a carpenter does, blame the carpenter himself/herself.
I disagree. I think Marxist historical materialism has a far better analysis of human society in general than the hare-brained theories of some tree-huggers.
Yeah, empirically it's true that most "third worldists" that have ever appeared on RevLeft are trolls. It doesn't mean Third Worldism is not without its points though.
One more point on gender: I'm well aware that many primitive societies have a certain social niche for "third sex" people. Countries like Thailand still have this today. But the problem is I don't want to treated as some kind of "queer third sex" by society, I want to considered as 100% a woman in the social sense. I'd rather have the modern Western categorisation that legally forces everyone to be either "male" or "female" socially than traditional systems which forces all LGBT people to be considered as "third sex".
I'm not "third sex". I'm a woman.
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only if you see the difference between capitalism and communism as semantics
couldn't agree more
i think that's a stretch
you're paranoidAlso, do I detect a subtle and implicit attempt at trying to call me a "stagnant dipshit" for "worrying over primitivism"?
i'm still more or less convinced the bangledeshi workers who burn their factories to the ground have a better class perspective than the people in the us/uk who want to "occupy" the same apparatus of oppression. i'm sure we can make an "industrial communism." i'm also positive it will look nothing like what exists today and the most exploited sections of the producing class are absolutely right to burn that shit down
yeah well marx lived when things were a wee bit different. today, i respect his opinion on a lot, but basically communism means the total destruction of the existent.
i blame what exists for what exists and i maintain skepticism of the existent so as long as it exists. i don't believe your "objective fact" is such. technology exists to serve what creates it and everything that has created it so far is...
that you would dismiss people like camatte as "hare brained tree huggers" is telling
but primitivism is just hare brained tree huggers?
'heavens above, how awful it is to live outside the law - one is always expecting what one rightly deserves.'
petronius, the satyricon
I do believe that's the first time in my life I've ever heard the tripods referenced. Hadn't thought about them in 15 years.Self-sustaining tiny groups and anti-civilisation/technology would naturally require a massive depopulation of earth, therefore, reactionary.
Economic regression and anti-industrialism are regressive policies. Oh the life of the hunter-gatherers, how simple it was, how lovely, the bucolic innocence tainted by evil industrial society; how I wish the tripods would come and return us to the innocence of times past...
Abstract arguments aside, I think much of this is pointless. Fact is, primitivism will never become a reality because it is literally against the biological essence of homo sapiens. Humans specialise in the ability to transform the natural world through their own labour in the basic evolutionary sense. It's really the defining feature of the human species, like the eyesight of an eagle, the speed of a cheetah or the strength of a bear.
The ancient Chinese atheist philosopher Xunzi once asked: Why is it that although humans are much weaker physically and slower than many animals, it is humans and not these animals that dominate the world? Even the fastest human sprinters can run at no more than a mere 36 km per hour, while cheetahs charge at a speed of over 100 kph. Human muscles are puny and pathetic compared with those of a bear, and human eyes are nearly useless compared with the keen eyesight of a bird-of-prey that can make out objects several kilometres away. It's no other than through our intelligence and our technology. To want to abandon this is to lose the only real evolutionary advantage homo sapiens have over other species of life on this planet. It's literally a kind of species-suicide.
In fact, a general evolutionary tendency to greater intelligence and more developed nervous systems is not just the defining feature of human evolution, it is one of the defining characteristics of all vertebrate evolution. Only vertebrates have a true brain and a true central nervous system, and for the last 400 million years, from fish to amphibians, from reptiles to birds and mammals, the vertebrate nervous system has evolved to become more and more complex. Since then vertebrates have dominated almost every ecological niche on Earth, from the deepest oceans to the highest mountains, and even outer space. The elaborate vertebrate central nervous system is one of the most amazing features among all forms of life on Earth.
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It's not the difference between capitalism and communism at all, unless you think "technological communism" which is partly based on present-day technologies under capitalist society is not real communism, which is an absurd ultra-leftist position.
And it's the fault of some revolutionary leftists with their crazy fringe ideas that has made communism in general seem inaccessible for the ordinary working class of the world. It's not the fault of ordinary workers who can't accept such outlandish theories.
You are stupid and rude for calling people who oppose primitivism "stagnant dipshits" because you think primitivism shouldn't be criticised.
And you are wrong. If all workers ever did was burning down factories, capitalism will never be overthrown.
You are beginning to sound like some of those reactionary Third Worldists now, and I say this even though I'm from China originally and actually somewhat "sympathetic" to some Third Worldist arguments.
How was industrial capitalism in Marx's day less oppressive than industrial capitalism today?
Communism is not the total destruction of the existent. That's a ridiculous nihilist viewpoint, which is against the basic principles of historical materialism.
And if technology is really destroyed and humanity runs into different kinds of problems in the "primitivist future" you might start blaming "primitivism"...the problem with such an existentialist perspective is the lack of long-term foresight. Just deal with problems as they emerge rather than tackle them intrinsically.
That you would consider extremist primitivism to offer better insight into human society than Marxist historical materialism is very telling...
As I said before, I didn't say primitivism is completely stupid. However, what is stupid is to consider primitivism to be more valid than orthodox historical materialism.
It's one thing to say that primitivism shouldn't be completely written-off, it's quite another to say that it can't be seriously criticised at all.
Maybe you ought to read Lenin's work Left Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
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The technophiles have made yet another thread on a topic they don't understand in an epic failure and epic display of their own ignorance.
1) Primitivism is not genocidal. Even the primitivists who would be seen as revolutionary (i.e. they actually want to actively hasten the collapse of capitalist civilization), do not want a mass die off. They write and act in order to convince people that capitalist civilization is inherently unsustainable (they are correct), and that a collapse is coming (they could be correct), and so they must prepare themselves for a hunter-gatherer life. Jensen, for instance, makes this explicitly clear in Endgame, where he stresses the need for people influenced by his book to get out and start learning a) primitive skills and b) teaching people how to survive the collapse.
2) Absolutely none of the technophiles have adressed the issue of alienated labor. The standard response, and then one I have always used, as a communist, is that labor is not alienated in a socialist economy because the economy is actually controlled democratically, therefor the worker has direct control over his labor and its not alienated. This is really horseshit though. Of course the individual worker does not have direct control over the economy, and Marx's own maxim, the one to which all communists generally adhere is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", which I fundamentally agree with. But that still implies coercion, and therefor alienated labor. Especially in regards to jobs that people just won't want to do.
Of course the technophiles will tell you that there will be no such jobs because the workers who preform them will be "held up as heroes" or whatever the fuck. But I'm sorry, I don't think you will be able to find enough people to clean the sewers, or go down in the mines. And so you will either force people to do it (prepare for some nonsense about sharing the social responsibility or something), or certain technologies will no longer be implemented.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
The fact that capitalist technological civilisation may indeed collapse ecologically does not imply at all that technology cannot be made intrinsically sustainable in a socialist society.
The post-collapse society would be like the "barbarism" described in Rosa Luxemburg's "socialism or barbarism". It would be nothing like a socialist or communist society. In fact, it would be the opposite in some ways, and more like a social darwinist anarcho-capitalist hell hole.
The idea of Marxism is to have a successful socialist revolution before such an ecological collapse happens.
There is no real "coercion" in worker's democracy since there is no coercive organs of power like say a capitalist or feudal state. Obviously individuals will never simply be able to do "whatever they want" in an absolutist sense in any kind of society. Freedom is never absolute. "Absolute freedom" doesn't exist anywhere in the physical universe. Humans live in a social collective, and therefore have rights and duties relative to other people. But with continued technological progress under communism I can certainly see human freedom increase more and more in quantity, whereas in a hunter-gatherer society humans would be coerced by the natural elements to do things they don't want to do anyway. E.g. I'm tired and I can't be bothered to hunt or gather fruits today, but I have to, since otherwise the tribe will starve to death within a short space of time. In an industrial and technological society this isn't really much of an issue. People can afford to be "lazy" more.
All forms of coercion are fundamentally bad, whether it's human or "natural". Just because some forms of limitations come from "nature" don't make it somehow more "holy" or more acceptable than human-created coercion.
Ultimately I want freedom from both human oppression and the natural elements, as much as possible.
Why would the idea of "social responsibility" be nonsense? The concept of "absolute individual freedom" is ridiculous, and even in a hunter-gatherer society social responsibility would still be required for the survival of the tribe.
The jobs you describe may be unpleasant, but with improved technology we wouldn't really need anyone to clean the sewers anymore. Robots could potentially do it. On the other hand decreasing the technological level would make these tasks even more difficult and unpleasant.
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Does this mean you support the restriction of all the technocracy/transhuman/Zeitgeist advocates on Revleft?
Eppur si muove -- Galileo Galilei
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This is probably the main point. Because if the primitivists had it their way 95% of us would be dead.
“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” Charles Bukowski, Factotum
"In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining... We demand this fraud be stopped." MLK
-fka Redbrother
Made, sustainable...maybe, sustainable technology can be developed? Probably. But none of this matters if it doesn't come to pass, pretty fucking soon.
Agreed, this is why primitivists (who believe the collapse to be inevitable, because they don't think people like you or I will be able to pull off our revolution in time) are trying to promote their ideas and primitive skills. This is why they want people to plant urban gardens, learn to hunt and fish and prepare food, learn how to do the things necessary to live the hunter gatherer life which will follow the collapse, so that it does not descend into barbarism, but can be a future primitive.
Duh? Do you think I got this many posts on here without understanding that? The basis of primitivism is that ecological destruction has come to far by this point, and that any further industrial society will not be sustainable because of the damage allready done/that will continue to be done until sustainable methods are found.
And there also tend to be philosophical differences, such as seeing nature and non-human animals as being just as important as humans (which I agree with), and seeing humans and their eco-systems (earth and non-human animals) as being spiritually connected.
You proceed to talk about how you cannot do away with coercion/alienated labor. As far as I have been able to tell, you are correct, in industrial society. But the reason why hunter-gatherer "work" is not alienated is because it directly benefits you. You actually control your labor, so its not coercive or alienated.
What's laughable is that you ought to be able to force me to clean a sewer, even if its "for the greater good". And that certain people (especially anarchists) will dress it up in fancy, revolutionary language.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
The primitivist answer to that statement is unsatisfactory on multiple levels, particularly the two I mentioned, which have not been addressed.
The Human Progress Group
Does it follow that I reject all authority? Perish the thought. In the matter of boots, I defer to the authority of the boot-maker - Mikhail Bakunin
Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains - Karl Marx
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value - R. Buckminster Fuller
The important thing is not to be human but to be humane - Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
Check out my speculative fiction project: NOVA MUNDI
Your answers are irrelevant if the primitivists are even partially correct.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
I agree with you, but I don't feel as though the issue is as important as you make it. There will inevitably be alienated labor in a communist society, but unlike its rampant existence in capitalist society, it will likely be little more than a nuisance in a post-revolutionary society. Furthermore, even should it be a significant problem, I think most of us would argue that the increase in life expectancy and material well-being would supplement the trade-off.
I used to not really concern myself with the question of alienated labor, farther than to say "democratic control of the economy ensures the end of alienated labor", but I mean, even if its just a philosophical exercise, that is not an answer, and the question, thus far has not been answered by marxism or anarchism. And attempts to do so have led to primitivism (see Camatte).
As for your "pay-off", you're certainly entitled to that position, I think the primitivists see their pay-off as increased leisure time (hunter-gatherer societies require about 2 hours and 10 minutes per person/per day of work in order to sustain themselves comfortably) and a return to the natural balance with their eco-system.
Put capitalism in a bag of rice.
Survivalism certainly has its merits in the pragmatic sense. Recently I downloaded the SAS Survival Guide on the iphone to read a bit about basic survival skills in the wild. These things can be useful, but it would be a mistake to use these to eclipse the need for socialism within an industrialised society.
I'm not going to debate about animal rights here, but what I will say is basically what I said before: coercion in any form is bad, whether the source is human or natural. For me it is just as bad to be murdered by capitalist cops as it is to be mauled down by a wild boar. Alienation due to technology really isn't the only issue concerning human welfare. I'm a humanist and I believe in human welfare, and for me communism is a kind of society where humans are free (as much as possible) from both natural limitations and social oppression.
I'm concerned with environmental protection and sustainable development, but I do not worship nature. I worship no-one, whether a supernatural god of religion, or a human deity, or "nature" in the general philosophical sense. I simply have no ultimate object of respect at all. No gods, no masters.
I didn't say one cannot do away with coercion and alienation. I said it is impossible to have "absolute individual freedom" in any kind of society, no matter how equal or advanced. Even the gods in Buddhist mythology who can live for eons and are as beyond humans as humans are beyond ants are certainly not absolutely free or absolutely omnipotent. The basic concept of "absolute freedom" seems to be derived from the Judeo-Christian tradition (God is apparently absolutely free), which I think is illogical. I prefer the Buddhist idea that everything in the universe is fundamentally dependent on something else. There is no "absolute ego" or "absolute individuality".
The goal of "absolute freedom" is an absolutely futile one, but one does not need "absolute freedom" to eliminate coercion and alienation. Coercion and alienation mean something specific in Marxism.
Even in a hunter-gatherer society, people may still have to do things they don't like because they need to do it for the tribe or band they live with. Unless you advocate humans should simply live alone...
Besides, as I said, in a primitivist society humans would have so little control over the natural elements that we would be coerced to do all kinds of things we don't really want to do anyway all the time.
How is it laughable? Frankly I don't really see how "cleaning a sewer" is such a bad thing anyway. I mean if we really lived in a communist society right now, I would probably volunteer to clean the sewers every week. It's beneficial to me because it's beneficial to all of us. I also use the sewers. So I don't think anyone will "force" you to do it if you don't want to, because to be frank there will be plenty of volunteers for this kind of job.
On the other hand, even in a hunter-gatherer society sometimes individuals have to do certain tasks to benefit the entire tribe or band as well. I just don't see the essential difference, apart from a quantitative difference in scale and technological level.
Also, why do you have to be so rude in a personal sense, just because we have an ideological disagreement? It's not even like I'm a hardcore technophile/technocrat who is completely against all of the concerns of primitivists. To be frank, I'm generally a pragmatist so I tend to care more about human welfare in the concrete sense than some kind of purely abstract dogma about alienation and freedom. Abstract philosophy does not interest me, and abstract freedom is worthless when one doesn't even have basic antibiotics to treat infectious diseases. Partly I guess I come from more of an Asian Buddhist philosophical tradition rather than a Western Judeo-Christian one so fundamentally I see happiness as more important than freedom.
Last edited by Queercommie Girl; 7th July 2011 at 17:14.
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Not in general. Only if they put "technological efficiency" before mass democracy. I'd rather have a democratic society that is less efficient than an autocratic technocracy that is super-efficient but not democratic.
I don't see how trans-humanism (that is to say, using technologies to change basic biological traits of human beings) is intrinsically bad, unless you have some kind of quasi-religious idea about the "natural human body" being "sacred" or some BS nonsense like that. For instance, the use of genetic engineering to fundamentally transform a male body into a female body (or vice versa) is an useful technology for transgendered people.
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Communism is also supposed to bring increased leisure time, as far as I understand it; getting rid of capitalist waste and the profit motive would doubtless reduce whatever labour time was necessary to sustain ourselves comfortably....
There is also no such thing as a "natural balance" to which we, through doing away with technologies acquired under the rule of capitalists, could "return". I don't believe nature can have the appearance of balance outside of a very narrow view of it.
Dann steigt aus den Trümmern der alten Gesellschaft, Die Sozialistische Weltrepublik!
The Soul of Man under Socialism
Agree. The idea of a metaphysical "natural balance" is just pseudo-feudal romanticist nonsense. I believe environmental protection and sustainable development is ultimately in the interests of humanity in general, but this needs to be considered in a logical and scientific rather than quasi-religious manner.
As I said, I don't worship "nature".
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