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Thursday October 06, 2005 19:10 by Andrew - WSM (personal capacity)
Over the last decade a generalized critique of civilization has been made by a number of authors, mostly based in the USA. Some of these have chosen to identify as anarchists although the more general self-identification is primitivist. There overall argument is that 'civilisation' itself is the problem that results in our failure to live rewarding lives. The struggle for change is thus a struggle against civilization and for an earth where technology has been eliminated. This primitivist critique of anarchism is based around the claim to have discovered a contradiction between liberty and mass society. In other words they see it as impossible for any society that involves groups much larger than a village to be a free society. If this was true it would make the anarchist proposal of a world of 'free federations of towns, cities and countryside' impossible. Such federations and population centers are obviously a form of mass society/civilisation.
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This is very good, but sometimes I think the primitivists are just an illusiory gold mine for witty critiques. Short of a few sociopaths, none of them truly desire to off six or seven billion people. The doctrine is therefore simply incoherent, for the reasons noted, and as is well known, you can make anything of a contradiction.
The article could be improved by citing more recent academic studies of carrying capacities, but it would probably be overkill. The misreading of anthropology in green anarchist circles maybe deserves a separate article.
For my part, I find it amusing how the primitivist doctrine entails astonishingly difficult organizational problems, like convincing people not to have children...somehow. Well, how do we do that...without NGOs, states, large organizations to coordinate the human pruning, democratic feedback so that the numbers targeted are right and fair? How do we that with tiny little feralized clusters of horny of primitivists, and without the industrial production of contraceptives? It's very funny. They are reduced to praying for comets, since ecological destruction alone will probably take several hundreds of years. Who the fuck knows what will happen three hundred years from now?
I think there are valuable lessons to be drawn from primitivism, but they are mostly for other anarchists, especially the primitivists' mirror image, the insurgentists.
I love the part where he compares pine trees and lettuce. He says that pines don't produce any food for us with the solar energy they capture. Looks like somebody needs to read up on his wild edibles. The inner bark or cambium of a pine tree is edible, tasty, and highly nutritious. And a healthy tea (high in vitamin C) can be made from the needles.
if its speciesist to to only care about what humans do, then shouldnt we also be looking at non-human animals who are ememies of primitivism? not only are the civilizationists the enemies of primitivism, but so are the beavers and the ants! what right to they do to build dams just to give themselves a more comfortable home? and ants- what rihgts do they have to live in organized colonies which "farm" local resouces? speciesist bastards! only looking out for number 1! and while were at it, what right to all those murdering carnivores have to hunt and kills herbivores. death to the carnivores! murerers! and squrrels- nut storage is the first step towards division of labour.
lets start attacking all of the enemies of primitivism, not just the human ones. or else we are just speciesists outselves arent we?
I've just uploaded a new version of the PDF that contains both essays to http://struggle.ws/pdfs/andrew/primitivism.pdf
In reading this article I kept noticing your convenient neglect of one of the most basic points of primitivism. That point is the complete rejection of anthropocentrism, which means that we primitivists don't think that humans can be placed anywhere above any other living thing in the web of life. That is a far truer rejection of heirarchy that what you are putting forth here.
It is this kind of thinking that leads to your point about fields of corn. You only look at the natural world and see what you can make out of it for your own use. Well guess what, the trees that used to live in your monocrops of corn were pretty damn valuable in and of themselves and had just as much right to live on this earth as the rest of us. And that goes as well for any wild creature that has to put up with the murderous rampage that is civilisation.
Same goes for the vegan hobos comment about slaughter houses, where the liberation of the animals who are being exploited by agriculture is concerned, I cannot be concerned about the jobs of those who daily perpetrate this system. Try asking a dairy cow if it would rather feed its babies or have them taken away so humans can have her milk. Also, ask the baby cow if it would rather be with its mother or be slaughtered for its tender young meat.
Your argument is also extremely racist, you seem to think that everybody on the planet wants the civilised way of life and you also argue that that is the "natural" outcome of humanity. None of the indigenous cultures who actively resisted the encroach of civilisation and died trying to protect their way of life seemed to want your agriculture and "high technology", and neither do the indigenous folk still actively resisting.
so ya, I'm certainly valuing spirituality over rationality, since after all rationality is the excuse given daily for the destruction of everything sacred on the earth.
The scientists call it global warming or climate collapse or whatever. I'll call it Gaia, the earth, kicking the civilised the fuck out, and I'm here to help her.
french translation here :
http://endehors.org/news/10380.shtml
You said that none of the energy put into a pine tree is converted into food. Not true. The inner bark, or cambium, of pines is both edible and nutritious. It is very high in vitamin C and was used by several of the North American tribes as a source of food, especially during the winter.
Actually this is correct, the surface layer of the many trees contain some nutrients and in times of famine are often stripped as a last resort food source. In the case of Pine you'll find the author of 'Hunting the wild asparagus' gives an account of how to do this but also reports that his experiments failed to produce anythin g he considered palatable. I don't think this famine usage is a significant contradiction to the original point in the article though - there is a huge amount more palatable food in the same acerege of corn.
It is also theoriesed that the name Adrondick (after the national park) originated in a derogatory term applied to a section of the Irioquis because they supposadely eat bark in winter because they were too weak to hunt.
Here is a response to Andrew Flood article (in french):
http://endehors.org/news/civilisation-anarchie-et-anarc...hisme
Although there are many problems with the original essay/rant, I'll just take one example: The corn vs. wooded acreage. Flood asserts that an acre of corn produces more calories than an acre of trees. He is wrong for several reasons. For one thing, the issues of the acorns, wild edibles, and the contribution of wild land to the general health of a wider whole living ecology. For another, corn does not offer much habitat for animals that might be hunted, and normally farmers exclude animals from their corn, so as you gain corn output you lose other types of output. Man cannot live on corn alone... Also, monoculture is vulnerable to disease, and Flood optimistically assumes that not to be a factor. But those are minor issues. There are more similar issues that could be discussed, and I'm sure anyone so inclined can think of many.
The real point is that Flood is demonstrating a typically short-term, anthropocentric mindset in his post, and perfectly exemplifying the problems with this current culture. While perhaps we can grant that the field of monoculture organic corn will produce more output of calories for exclusively human use than the intact forest, for a short time, that is all we can grant.
In the longer timeframe, all agriculture is quite damaging to the soil, and corn cultivation is no exception. So the greater the yield in the short term, the greater the damage in the long term. Desertification and salination are the frequent historical results of agriculture. So if a patch of ground puts out more calories for a relatively short period of time, and then ends up depleted, devitalized, and perhaps desertified for a much longer period of time, the average caloric output of that piece of land has decreased, not increased. Unless we are thinking of the future in terms of mere months and years (or perhaps quarterly profits, as is so common now) rather than millennia or longer, it makes no sense to trade a brief short-term advantage for long-lasting losses. As Derrick Jensen says, "Forests precede us, and deserts dog our heels." On a finite planet, that is a recipe for eventual disaster.
And as we convert wild land and intact ecologies into domesticated farmland, we damage and kill the entire surrounding ecology. We can't just convert forest to farmland without widespread and long-term consequences. Focusing only on the caloric output of some acreage is a uselessly narrow measure of impact. To appropriately evaluate the impact of an action, we need to look at its systemic, total effects over a long span of time. This is the only sane way to decide which actions are good. If, as is so often the case, we cannot know in advance what the consequences will be, we should proceed very slowly, very carefully, and on a small scale. Of course, our present culture does precisely the opposite: We charge in at full force, with zero thought given to consequences beyond the immediate.
Personally, I'm not exactly a primitivist, (or an anything-ist) but I do think that primitivism offers and implies some important critiques that Flood seems to have missed. What good is it to create temporary booms when larger busts must always follow? Seems to me that with more wisdom and respect for the fact that nature does many things better than we can, even with all our vaunted technology, we could create a more stable-state global culture that would be more rewarding to live in and more ultimately sustainable- not that a culture could be much more unrewarding and unsustainable than this one... Seems to me that our pattern of extracting the most possible stuff for our exclusive benefit as quickly as possible is foolish, and consistently blows up in our faces. Until we get much wiser, my opinion is that we would do well to do less. Of course, one quality of fools is that they cannot discern wisdom, and thus cannot heed it. So the fools will continue to act foolishly, and reality itself will be the arbiter of results, as always.
I don't have all the answers, but I think a good question is "How can we live well in the long term?" I am not convinced that no technology past that of the upper paleolithic can be made to work, but we do know that this system isn't working, hasn't worked, and won't even continue on its dysfunctional trajectory much longer. Perhaps we would do best to return to what works, and work our way slowly and carefully from there. If we don't, I imagine that we will damage our environment to the degree that we become limited by "external" factors like declining access to foodstuffs. I suppose it'll be boom-and-bust until we either learn wisdom, or somehow manage to wipe ourselves out. Personally, I think we'll learn wisdom eventually. Hopefully when we do the world will still be healthy enough to heal.
" Flood asserts that an acre of corn produces more calories than an acre of trees. He is wrong for several reasons. For one thing, the issues of the acorns, wild edibles, and the contribution of wild land to the general health of a wider whole living ecology"
Your wrong on several points here
1. I don't assert anything. I provide some factual measurements that show there are more human consumable calories in an acre of corn. An assertion is when you just claim something is true without providing evidence, I actually spent quite a bit of time getting the measurements.
2. You are wilfully not understanding the point being made. I'm not making an argument about best agricultural methods, I'd demonstrating why a hunter gather lifestyle would require the deaths of billions of people because there are not the quantity of human consumble calories available in non-agricultural settings. It's been very interesting in the years since I wrote the piece watching the complete non response of the primmies and their hangers on to this fundamental point and instead lots of weird distractions as above being thrown in.
3. I actually agree on the usefulness of also having 'wild' land which is why I tend towards technological methods that would enable us to feed everyone and reduce the surface area of the planet we use in doing so., check out http://anarchistblackcat.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=287 for a discussion around one possibility (vertical farms)
Not that is matters much but this statement "What good is it to create temporary booms when larger busts must always follow?" show the faith based nature of your argument. The statement is very obviously is not true. The busts have not been bigger than the booms. If they had been we'd see less availability of weath, food and as a consequence a shrinking population. We are not worse off for instance than we were in 1928. The problem with the boom periods is that under capitalism they are exhausting resources, not that a bigger bust follows!
I'm pretty amused when a follower of the cult guru Derrick Jensen accuses me of being foolish. I'm not sure how smart I am but I'm not dumb enough to fall for yet another preacher proclaiming how you should send him your money because the rapture is coming. Your emperor has no clothes. Jensen is making a good living out of his huckstering so I get why he is doing it, he doesn't care that he is writing nonsence, he only cares that the cash keeps flowing.
Finally the key issue here is that while there are large problems with the current system your alternative which would involve the death of 5.8 billion people (and you guru has admitted these would in particular be drawn from the global urban poor) is worse than any possible alternative. Only the blind followers of some faith could even try and peddle such muderous nonsence.
Agreed, "vegan hobo" is an absolute embarrassment. Primitivism (and deep ecology) are racist and masturbatory fantasies of the privileged. Platitudes on the sentience of cows are incredibly unproductive, and the fact that there are a few people out there who look forward to mass human die-offs for the sake of snail and fish liberation is totally obscene.
But Andrew, your article does not address climate change. How could your article not address climate change? The potential effects (and potential is enough) of climate change are so horrifying they re-set the framework of pretty much everything that's been said here.
This is not expertise talking, but neither is it hysteria. Global warming is a very serious problem, possibly the most serious in human history. Jensen junkies are obsessed with it, but that doesn't make it less urgent. Serious anarchists need to wake up to this.
Yes I didn't get into climate change directly in that article although if you look at the related article I wrote in the same period on Peak Oil Panic you will see I do deal with it there
Otherwise
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/cat/climate-change
is that I've written on the topic and
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/cat/rossport
is what I've done on the topic of energy struggles
I'd rather like to write a grand theoretical piece on Climate Change in general but rather suspect I don't have the knowledge base
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Spring zu Komment: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32I would agree that there is ample historical precedent to predict that, while an oil crisis might impose misery and death on millions, it will by no means mandate the end of capitalism or "civilization". I am not so sure we can say the same of global warming. The markets, and the will of the elites, which make decisions under the status quo, while quite capable of responding to the destruction of cities or energy supply crises (and turning them into profit making opportunities) may well see climate change spin out of control. This seems to be a threat that is not of the same nature, as the bombing of cities in WWII or an energy crisis. I don't see any real clear historical parallels.
Also, anarchism has no magic cure for overpopulation. Surely, better technological responses are possible (or are even already available) than those that are now in use, as this article cites. But the fact remains, human numbers cannot increase continue to increase exponentially, forever. I don't know what the limits are, and the exact number is dependent on technology. But there are limits.
Would a horizontally organized society be capable of making decisions that would stabilize our numbers at a sustainable level? I am not sure. But that is a far more likely scenario, than, say, the markets or bosses making these decisions for us. Anarchism is our best shot at survival as a global society. But it not a sure thing, imo.
Yes global warming is a different sort of threat than the Oil crisis but unless you believe in the very worst 'Earth becoming like Venus' case it is something that might kill millions or billions but is unlikely to overthrow capitalism never mind civilisation.
It also offers 'investment opportunities' both directly in terms of CO2 scrubbing and storage which is becoming quite significant but also in recovery.
What do I mean?
There is a chance that the verocity of Hurricane Kathrian was a produce to the greater energy pumped into the weather system by global warming. Not worth arguing about as you can't prove this one way or the other. But it provides an example of how capital turns disaster into profit - anarchos essay 'The real looting of New Orleans begins' on this site at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=1432 gives examples.
On overpopulation - the evidence is already very clear that a rise in prosperity coupled with the education and empowerment of women results in a huge decrease in births. Across most of Europe - were in not for migration - the population would already be dropping drastically. Many of the most prosperous countries now have negative population growth.
That suggest that in an anarchist society where we would expect women to be empowered and everyone to be prosperous the 'problem' might not be population growth but the reverse.
The fact that the end of the world is near is not a new thing, and it's been proved right before.
To the inhabitants of Easter Island, the end of the world as they knew it came to a stop. almost, that is 90% of the population disapeared.
It didn't only happen in small islands but also on mainland!.
Look at the greenland Norse, the Anasazi tribe in North America reduced to canibalism and starvation.
The Maya civilisation for example collapse and died through in parts overpopulation, environmental damage, lack of resources, etc...
Yesteryear population couldn't move their problems to other areas because of lack of transport or resources. Today callapses occur less frequently because of migration. But because problems get transposed to other regions of the World, we are evolving towards the collapse of the whole planet.
And no this time we won't be able to flee to another planet.
The other problem is that we can't recognise a problem of environmental / population collapse when it hits us in the face. How else to describe the Rwandan collapse? it has all the ingredients of overpopulation, lack of arable land, environmental destruction, breakdown of society, etc....
Please read Jared Diamon "Collapse". it makes for fascinating reading.
Olivier
Yes, of course the reaction of the bosses may be predicted with some certainty. With regard to global warming, as with disasters and crises of all stripes, they will reap profit from death and destruction.
My point was that, where the rebuilding of European cities after WWII (like the reconstruction of tsunami or hurricane zones) could be safely predicted, we can't safely predict that capitalism will be capable of "repairing" damage done by global warming.
What are the implications for the anarchist project? Only that our efforts are more urgent than ever. We can ill afford to patently await some projected final crisis, whose outcome would likely be horrific. Or, to glibly ignore such a possibility. IMO, measurable changes in the planets temperature merit a greater degree of concern (and are more likely to be a harbinger of dramatic social upheavals) than such things as market pressures on energy prices.
I like this article a lot. Its good to see some literature out there countering the blatantly authoritarian primitivists. Hopefully this will get to reach more people.
What I think would be much more interesting, would be an article on climate justice from an anarchist perspective.
I, and many other people involved in climate justice campaigns, do beleive that if we don't do anything soon we are going to be more than screwed by climate chaos.
What we should be talking about, is the likely response to increasing weather chaos by capitalists, reformists and the general public aswell as the real human and environmental effects it has (particularly those in the poorest countries with the least ability to deal with the consequences of something they didn't create.)
Storaging co2 underground is not a solution and carbon sinks and other neoliberal solutions like the Kyoto Protocol are making things worse.
What is our solution as anarcho-communists?
How are we going to combat the likely environmental rascism from spreading and is already starting to occur? Things like finger pointing at countries like China. They want to have 50 new coal stations in the next 20 years and to have a car for every family - which will obviously exacerbate the problem of climate chaos.
But what people forget is that the western capitalist societies have created the problem which we are now feeling. What we are only just starting to feel in our climate, is the result of 50 years ago. There is a lag effect. Our whole society and standard of living has been based on the fossil fuel economy and greenhouse gases.
When people point the finger at China and other third world countries (Which are quickly reaching our output of CO2s) they seem to forget what our society was build on. How are we going to pay this ecological debt? Obviously we need solutions and we don't want more coal power stations - but it is environmentally racist to suggest that poor chinese workers can't have coal fire powerstations when they don't have insulation etc etc.
I think one of the important questions we should be asking, is wether a society based on needs and not profit will still be environmentally damaging if we maintain our current standard of living (despite the redistribution of wealth from the capitalists.) We can not forget, that environmental collapse would occur despite climate chaos, and is likely to egacerbate it. (If we hadn't chopped down all the trees, erosion from flooding wouldn't be as big a problem for example.)
Is it desireable, for "Everyone in the world to have a toaster" as someone once saw our future society.
Is it possible to sustain our entire population with non-mono culture organic produce? Has the industrialisation of food production allowed us to maintain large populations? Would it be environmentally stable in our damaged ecosystem to have collectively owned non-exploitative farmicuetical production?
And how will the working class (And small revolutionary groups) deal with the dual onslaught of the capitalist class and climate chaos? (keeping in mind that many of the working class organisations are either non-existant or highly reformist or misorganised).
Someone once suggested that climate chaos and environmental collapse is making the need for a communist revolution even more urgent and will most likely play a key part in igniting world revolution.
i often see critiques of primitivism, sometimes they have quite good things to say, but i rarely find them useful. (Which is also my fault because i haven't gotten around to writing anything useful either although i've been involved in grassroots climate justice stuff... none of it popular or mass etc etc.)
SImilarly, some of the anarchist writing that I have recently read on environmental issues (or environmental racism) read like marxist writings on the same topic. They often pull out the anti-human kill all the people type arguements and leave it at that.
Looking forward any replies!
(Oh and I disagree that it's not useful to look at Katrina in the context of climate chaos. It is quite right that you can not look at one incident and say it is the result of climate chaos - the climate is too complicated for that. But what you can do, is look at the increasing frequency and the response by neoliberal forces and the devastation it has on people. Climate chaos will be worse and wider spread. There are lessons to learn.)
As the great IWW industrial organiser once put it:
"the earth is not dying, it is being killed. ANd those killing it have names and addressess."
yours
simon
It's great to see critiques to primitivism, its association with anarchism is completely embarrassing.
btw.. i am a class struggle anarchists who organises low paid workers, and i am definelty not primitivist. i like the article, its just in nz/aotearoa here we have no primitivists, so it seems like a waste of breath worrying about them. although i know that its a different situation over thataways.
bobo
So what is you union going to do for the few remaining forests or coal reserves (industrial production does have to continue for you to have the working class to organize)? How are you helping the 200 billions animals slaughtered every year by organizing slaughter house workers to get better wages (must we really make murder a more comfortable job?) or helping UPS workers win the strike and get back to work while UPS support HLS (giant animal research lab). Your working class struggle is selfish and short sighted. Get a clue working class humans are not the only beings oppressed on this planet. Primitivism is a war of total liberation, human, animal, and earth. Primitive anarchy exsisted for nearly 3 million years. Many primintivsts have stated that the return to a naturally sustainable population level will be a process over many generations. No mass die-offs just lower birth rates. Primitivists dont need to explain how 6 billion can be fed because we dont intend to live in a world with that many people...POPULATION LEVELS IF GIVEN TIME CAN DROP WITHOUT DEATH CAMPS! Its called not having so many babies...can you handle that?...now lets start working on a way to convince people to stop having all those kids and find ways to distribute birth control info so that people can voluntarily lower the population....or do you thing that people could never do that of their own free will? Is it impossible that humans will realize that our population is out of control and think that maybe they should do something about it. You accuse primitivists of being heartless and possibly supporting the idea of mass die off while you defend a system of production that has created an epidemic of cancer, while you support industrial production that kills millions directly and indirectly (humans that is...for non-humans it would be in thew upper billions) A greater percentage of the population has starved under intensive agriculture than went hungry in H/G societies. Agriculture dosent prevent famine...it causes it. As population rises you have more mouths to feed so you have to grow more crops and then the population keeps expanding because there are non natural boundaries left soon you have to put alot of work into feel all those people and their survival becomes dependent on a good harvest...so you put millions at risk of starving in a situation that would hardly phase a H/G band. A nomadic H/G band was far less susceptible to famine because they didnt rely on having a good harvest but rather the naturally occurring plants in the area. The climate change would have to be quite extreme to kill off all native foliage...and even then it is a natural disaster...you cant blame its victims. With out being settled the nomadic bands were much more free to move about to avoid over gathering or hunting (which they didnt do alot of until much later in the paleolithic...early man was primarily a gatherer since you can get more calories per calorie expended from gathering plants and scavenging than from hunting)
But primitivism isnt a dogmatic ideology that say we must all live just liek H/Gs only that we must (for the survival of the planet and all life on it) we must recognize that we are just one animal among many and then begin to step down from our role as denominators of all that is wild and free and stop seeking to control nature for our own ends. Agriculture circumvents a vital natural population check. Unsanitary conditions in cities isnt caused by lack of technology but by the fact that urban environments exist at all. As our population increases we have to find more ways to feed the masses, protect them from disease that are created( or made worse) by industiral production and civilization ( http://www.primitivism.com/health-civilization.htm ). We have become dependent on technology for our very survival...sure going cold turkey would collectively be quite painful...but what about slowly weening ourselves off of it. Move towards local organic gardens to feed the people while other obliterate their prisons and factories (or are they one and the same) to make way for wilderness to take back over. Over the period of several generations we could be on our way to global healing.
"We'd at least have wheeled carts and possibly draft animals if any of the large game were suitable for domestication." yeah cause its ok to dominate a sentient being just as long as its not human right?...damn speciesists
While primitivists seeks to overthrow all forms of domination wether man on man, man on animal, or man on the planet. While your moral sphere only includes those genetically closest to you...wheres the rationality in that? Other beings that die daily for the survival of our precious civilization have a capacity for pain and and emotional life (some even have self consciousness). I dont know of any anarcho-primitivist that has advocated imposing their will upon others while you certainly have shown you have no problem with mass killing or making slaves of animals and exploiting the land for you own good (taking away vital habitat and feeding ground)
i think this article is a well-written and long needed critique of primitivism and its offshoots.
i dont know why you put it on the sf bay area snarchist website though, it is controlled by primitivists aand postleftists, i try and do my mental health a favour and stay away from it.
just incase "vegan hobo" ever checks this site again i just have to respond to his outrageous comment.
i will comment on just the most ridiculous and ill-informed statements.
"Its called not having so many babies...can you handle that?...now lets start working on a way to convince people to stop having all those kids and find ways to distribute birth control info so that people can voluntarily lower the population....or do you thing that people could never do that of their own free will? Is it impossible that humans will realize that our population is out of control and think that maybe they should do something about it."
it has been shown that even when birth control is readily available, women continue to have children. there are muliple reasons for this including but not limited to the fact that capitalism and colonialism and 'globalization' has resulted in more than half the world living in poverty (the half that are most likely to die as the earth "balances itself out". this means that A) many families need more children so there is more workers bringing in income and more hands to help the mother with her unpaid labor and B) poverty- (i.e. capitalist)- causing illnesses result in high infant and child mortality so as a result women will have more children in the hopes that they will survive, c)women are all over the world oppressed on multiple levels, unless all these levels are addressed (and seriously, meat-eaters are not one of them) then control over reproduction will remain out of their hands (i.e. people "choosing" not to reproduce with their "free will" is an absurd assumption about how people experience oppression)
also, i have to point out the absolute obvious which is that it is the relatively "controlled" populations in the United States andWestern European countries that cause the most waste -and the even more obvious that capitalism as a mode of production is by DEFINITION wasteful and that working towards abolishing it (through workplace organizing, community organizing -things that you think are ignoring the real suffereing experienced by cows....) is working towards ecological sustainability.
my suggestion for you "vegan hobo" is to read Angela Davis' "Race, Class, and Women" and see how progressive (white)activists (activists that actually are a lot more progressive than you, i would say really that you are 100% reactionary...) that talk about "birth control" completely side step white supremacy's historical mission to destroy (through, for example as Davis mentions, forced sterilization) communities of color. my other suggestion is to read up on the eugenecist movement in the first part of the 20th century and see the problematic paths that "population control" arguments can take you down...
" Agriculture dosent prevent famine...it causes it."
this is also totally mis-informed. once again, capitalism and state corruption (ofcourse all states are corrupt...) causes famine. if you knew anything about famines you would know that usually, indigenous agricultural methods allow for surplus to be created in case of a bad season so as to prevent famine. it is the fact that capitalists are more concerned with making money off of starving people than allowing a minute decrease of profits by not allowing increased inflation under famines to make food prices sky rocket that causes famine. during famines, there is usually foood available its just that a little thing called CAPITALISM makes it impossible for poor people to afford to buy food.
in the end, i have to say that myself and most sane people think that human suffering is a million degrees more inhumane than cow and chicken suffering. while my personal LIFESTYLE choice is to be vegetarian, i certainly am not going to focus my energies trying to get slaughterhoue workers' wages reduced, or worse get them fired or killed (as you insinuate would be a postive move towards liberation of animals ). ill leave that for the capitalists and their unlikely supporters such as yourself and other primtivists and 'green' anarchists.
i apologize for the length but i cannot stand seeing this garbage on a website meant for meaningful discussion.
-robyn
I'm working on responses to the replies this article has received here and elsewhere - but I've only posted it on infoshop and here - someone else is distributing it elsewhere. If you have a URL for the SF version I'd appreciate it.
heres the link to where they posted your essay. they like to cut and paste peoples essays there without telling them i suppose so peeople can just berate the person who wrote them without them ever being able to defend their arguments.
http://anarchistnews.org/
another thing i have to add, besides the eurocentric romantisization/exotification of the 'primitive' and the 'tribal' which andrew brought up in his pointing out the absurdity of privileged folks in eugene arguing for the end of technology when millions of people are suffering precisly because of a lack of access to technology (due to global capitalism's underdevelopment of the'third world') is the male chauvenism inherent in any philosophy which thinks i should spend fourteen hours a day picking berries (and, as has been proven often doing the hunting and the fishing as well) just so i can come home, go to sleep, wake up the next day and do it again (and maybe every once in while rear children). 'primitivism' is inherently against women's liberation , inspite of the twisted ways 'primitivist' women like to say otherwise.
for the revolution and the shortening of the working day,
robyn
This article in Italian:
A follow up article dealing with some of the replies to this one is to be found at
If I eat cake I become it and it becomes me. Neither of "us" is the same afterwards. That act of transformation is fearless, based upon a non-dream: me and not-me becoming more than what we were. It's as the Native Americans who proceded beyond primitivism to see themselves as integral moment of universal life. Energy is made for transformation and that requires motion, action. That requires stepping beyond who you are to become more than that, quantitatively and qualitatively. Primitivism is species-guilt implemented. It sucks at the nipple of life and yet rejects life, basking in tantrumic guilt because it hates itself as "taking", never noticing what it gives back because it closes its eyes. Milk is for milking. So is the adventure that starts with the Milky Way.... Life begets life. It expands or dies. Period. Primitivism is a walk with dead time.
The point of fusion energy and the applied dialectical understanding of quantum physics is to learn to make things from their unperceived, from the dareful dream of what they are "not". Need is imposed and "necessity" seems quite dictatorial as prime mover. To jump through the views of dear M. Bakunin: if God exists then it will be desirable, useful, and exciting to transcend it - otherwise, boredom and slavery. "Cake" first of all and not merely taken metaphorically - is a human creation. We made it from what it was not. We create it through dimensions unfelt by daily existence trapped in the "primitive" moment of being: time and space. We become by reaching beyond our dimensionalized "realities". Better yet, "cake" always existed in the possible. Unless we innovate, it remains impossible. We remain less for the non-act. We remain primitive to and for ourselves. In fact our "selves" remain as external to us. Only through us does the universe's implied or potential for "cake" become real, become kinetic. I don't have a limited amount of "cake" potentials either. I don't need cake on other planets or in other universes. I only "need" my innovative direct (inter-)action. The whole notion of "direct democracy" is found interleaved with the notion of self-evolution and generalized self-management - with expansion of SELF. It is only by transcending the partialities, the fuller universe of selfishness - do we embrace all, do we become totality. To not reach such is to recuperate one's self into that abyss of a zero-sum universe wherein all quality is condemned by "what is possible" according to the lower-leveling of dumbifying quantity. Do we have enough imagination to go beyond a self-imposed unit of measurement? Surely we are more than ourselves and wait only to pull that newness from the universe within.
The rejection of science as a method of understanding and innovating - based on the current lack of its use by capitalism - is the anti-humanist tendency of primitivism. Here it finds its bedmate: religio-mysticism. If the bourgeoisie failed at eradicating the kernel of life within that sphere it is precisely also why they cannot achieve science via a flat and commercial "use". It is only by grasping all that is seeking the human that we become more than a blade of grass, cake, or animals with primitive consciousness of our possibilities.
While I agree with many of your points about this juvenile and often ridiculous ideology, there is one part of the article that seriously undermines your argument and probably should be changed if your intent is to provide a factual debunking of the weak philosophies which underpin this small movement: while it may be true that tree fruits which can be gathered may not meet many peoples taste preferences, your statements regarding a field of corn producing more nutrition and caloric value than an acre of oak trees is actually incorrect. Corn is delicious and I wouldn't give it up for anything, but in North America, at any rate, the mast crop of a mature oak forest is relatively huge compared to the small yield of a corn field. Likewise with Chestnuts (before the blight, or with blight resistant hybrids), Walnuts, and a variety of other wild nuts found in North America. Moreover, a wide variety of low-light crops or wild plants can be planted in the understory, unlike in a corn monocrop. Perhaps the situation is different in the UK? You might could make a stronger case by talking about hunting for game animals, which many primitivists propose as an alternative to our current food production system.
Thanks for bringing this issue to my attention - however I believe your figures are incorrect (see below). Also I use the phrase 'available to humans' in the article in part to reflect that while harveting an agricultural crop will see a large percentage of calories going to humans a gathered crop in a natural setting will see a large percentage go to non human animals - in teh case of acorns 15% will be eaten before they even reach the ground.
Acorns certainly were used as a major foodstuff in parts of north American into historic times. In Europe because of the work involved in processing acorns into a palatable food stuff it appears they were more commonly feed to pigs who were of course eaten in turn. But acorns were one of tne major foods in Syria before the development of agriculture there.
The figures
David Bainbridge in Acorns: The Grain That Grows on Trees says "Corn yields range from 2,500 to 10,000 pounds per acre. In comparison, acorn yields in natural forest have been recorded as high as 2,000 pounds per acre from the live oak(Q.virginiana), and - in a good year - I've recorded black oak(Q.velutina) yields per tree that would amount to more than 6,000 pounds per acre in a pure stand." One pound of northern red oak acorns contains approximately 1,300 calories so high high figure he gives for natual forest would be 2000*1300 or 2.6 million calories - most of these would of course go to birds and squirrels.
David is clearly an acorn promoter but anyway lets use his lowest corn yield estimate of 2,500 pounds per acre. There are 1535 calories per pound of corn so this gives 3.8 million calories - already above the best estimate for natural forest. But take his high end estimate of 10,000 pounds an acre and you get 15.3 million calories or almost 6 times the raw calories output of a high yield natural acorn forest.
His figures are however a little suspect, the Forest and Forestry division say "Woodlands that attract and hold the greatest numbers of deer, turkeys and squirrels produce in excess of 100 pounds of acorns per acre per year." This would only be 0.13 million calories. I also found figures for the Turkey Oak of 278 lb/acre which would be under 0.4 million calories. It is hard to find other figures for yields but scaling up from the per tree figures that are availavle for various varities it appears David's yields are very high indeed.
I'd a difficult time finding other figures for corn as corn production is measure by volume rather than weight. However I found some conversion tables which suggest that a bushel of corn corresponds to between 56 (shelled) and 70 (ear) pounds. I'll take the lower shelled figure of 56 pounds per bushel. In terms of average yield an interesting one to use for this discussion are those given in a University of Minnesota study into how much corn production decreased using organic methods of cultivation. The organic method gave close to 130 bushels an acre or 7280 pounds. This converts into an actual calorie value per acre of 11.2 million.
When you compare these figures it appears that the total calories per acre from acorns may only be 3.5% of that from the same area of organically grown corn. Even David's best measured figure is only 23% of the average organic corn yield.