Primal Modernism: The Immortality of Non-historic Humanity in Primitivism

(Picture of the Cave of Hands in Argentina)

01: The birth pains of late modernity

The promises sewn into the guns and pamphlets of high modernity were to overturn the masters of early modernity and finally establish a new human paradise to end the anomie that became associated with liberalism. In order to sufficiently combat liberalism (and conservatism), alternative movements looked to complex organizational means to focus political mobilization into. The two great high modernist ideologies that appeared on each side of this era to construct these complex organizations into the new utopia were socialism, with its creeping emergence and finally full bloom in the first international, 1864, and fascism in the San Sepolcro rally in 1919. Both ideologies went on to become the engines behind the largest and most infamous statist projects of the era, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Both using their vast state resources and powerful armies to carve out a space that would build an alternate modernity to the existing decadence of modernity. As the Soviets identified modernity’s decadence with the class conflicts and dominance of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, and the Nazis with the racial conflict and dominance of the “global Jewry” over the German people. Both built networks of institutions and armies around purging the bourgeois and “Jewish” elements from within their societies as a means to curate the people within towards purification, as to then use the forces of this purity against the rest of the world. Of course, the ideals of “proletarian” and “racial purification” manifested into logistical nightmares. The most blatant episodes were the Soviet famines of the Holodomor and Asharshylyk, that went from ill-attempted collectivization plans to outright genocides when Ukrainian and Kazakhstan peoples protested the horrifying conditions and were met with severe suppression. The Nazis attempted to “racially purify Germans into Aryan soldiers” by laying waste to millions of people in the holocaust.

After the Second World War, it wasn’t long into the era of late modernity that the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany became the poster children for the ills of the high modernist response to early modernist liberalism. Liberalism built a narrative around the term totalitarianism to demonize the regimes as tragic tales of what human passions can create when they go beyond liberal ideals. The lessons learned by post-war socialists and Nazis were those of infinitely regressing reflections into themselves with a newfound focus on heavily critiquing not only complex organizations but also on complexity and organization in themselves. While the hallmark of many liberal dreams that there would emerge a global order of universal individuals has never come true, it does find its closest realization in this new world. From within this new “global community of universalists” three distinct hyper-reflexive conditions came to mark the new dialogues to combat these new intensifications of anomie.

1. Hyper-individualism — Every individual is a self-contained island.

Every person is an independent economic unit in themselves that can be replicated across a timeline of consumption and labor activities that highly compartmentalizes and calendricalizes a person’s lifetime into a serialization of purchases and wages. This induces a feeling of emptiness and purposelessness within people to search for something beyond this rigid time-line of buying, selling, and working.

2. Hyper-complexism — Every island is constantly moving and changing.

Every person is overwhelmed in an infinite scheme of complicated processes that they have to intermingle with on a daily basis in order to acquire their needs and desires. That economized lifetime from the hyper-individualization is infused here with a sense of constant movement, creating a daily toll of unpaid mental labor further signifying the idea that the individual is an empty vessel to be constantly abused from the cradle to the grave without the ability to make sense of its situation, or simply target a single individual or institution as the bearer of easy blame.

3. Hyper-virtualism — Every move and change happens non-territorially.

Everything with roots or pins is unbended as the ever-moving economic unit formally known as a person is whisked away each day into the void of unreachable ground by which to try and make sense of their experience. Here, territorial identities and relations are made into crude simulations of former simulations of themselves. You’re alone, you’re lost, and now, you’re made afloat along the seas of a homogenous empty time.

All new political ideological (and religious) developments moved against and with these conditions. Basically, “we hate the hyper-individual-complex-virtuality” and “we can only move and manifest political change by creating new hyper-individual-complex-virtualities.” Hatred of the mirror, which holds your reflection, is also the means in which to free it. The greatest human irony is that the feeling of incompleteness within them is made worse by all their attempts to complete themselves. Three ideological genera emerged that were not only affected by these conditions of hyper-reflexivity but were themselves the products of them. These came to be libertarianism (“right-libertarianism”), primitivism (“anarcho-primitivism”), and jihadism (“global jihadism”). Libertarianism came out as responding and focusing mostly on hyper-individualism and arguing in favor of an alternative hyper-individualism that could complete the individual’s selfhood by way of removing liberal notions of universal sovereignty guaranteed by a state in favor of a universalized sovereignty guaranteed by the individual in themselves. Jihadism focused on hyper-virtualization and offered its own alternative to the decadent virtualization for a “pure virtualization” of the global community of nationless martyrs. However, here we will be focusing exclusively on primitivism. As it rebelled against the hyper-complexism of civilization in favor of a more “healthy” complexity of wilderness, particularly those lifestyles it was favorably calling “primitive,” which were marked and steeped in “ancient ways of purposeful life.”

02: Fifty Shades of Green

Primitivism was the product of many conditions, both material and conscious, but particularly a series of accumulating factors. Firstly, the 50s and 60s critiques of industrialization, particularly that of the efforts by the American and Soviet powers to rebuild and shape the industrialized world. This in turn, led into the 1970s, when a wealth of novels, anthropological, and archeological works came to flood the minds of many. Added to this was the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill, the resulting first Earth Day in 1970, and Nixon’s creation of the EPA later that year, which built a clear image of industry causing ecological disaster and the system responding with ecological reform, or “environmentalism,” which in turn doesn’t effectively address the systemic issues at hand, leading in turn to a desire for a greater critique and movement against industrialization on a systemic scale.

In the early 1970s, ecologism became a distinctly self-conscious movement but a “thin” family of political ideologies, one that required host ideologies like liberalism, socialism, fascism, etc., to fully manifest itself through. We can think of the usage of the eco prefix in front of terms like ecoliberalism, ecosocialism, and ecofascism, as showing the use of this “thin” ideology slotting into “thick” ideologies between the political spectrum with each eco-ideology designating a significantly ecologized form of these “thicker” ideologies.

Ecologism is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, “the pure holists” versus “the corrupt atomists,” and which argues that politics should be an expression of the biospheric will of the holists.

(Key concepts: Holism — Atomism — Biospheric Will — Monism — Moralism)

Very similar to Cas Mudde’s definition of populism, ecologism is viewed as a monist and moralist ideology that views itself as combating a deeply immoral force. Atomists, as viewed by the ecologists, are those groups, individuals, and systems that reduce the world down to it’s individual parts and thereby disregard holistic systems such as the earth’s biosphere, leading to it being taken advantage of and slowly destroyed. The ecologist then argues that in order to correct this course of environmental damage requires a change in how politics is conducted by shifting it towards a holistic view of considering and changing the world by having politics exhibit a “biospheric will,” a “naturalistic” all-encompassing equilibrium between humans and nonhuman organizational affairs. This means human agency is seen as having to conform itself to the biospheric and biological conditions set by the nonhuman environment in order for human nature to thrive and not overreach its subjectivity beyond the harmony between itself and the rest of nature. The means to arrive at this human-nonhuman balance was split between two primary morphological directions or ideological subfamilies: social ecologism and deep ecologism. While terms like “shallow ecology” or even merely “environmentalism” were often used as pejoratives against those deemed ineffective reformists and so will not be discussed, the same goes for the “bright, light, and dark green environmentalism” taxonomy scheme that was developed in the 2000s by Alex Steffen.

Ecologism 101: We’ll need to establish a few concepts before explaining the intricate divisions that exist within ecologism. Firstly, both deep and social ecology think of humanity as natural; it’s actually a common mischaracterization for social ecologists or deep ecologists to accuse each other of divorcing humanity from nature. So then, what is nature in ecologism? For simplicity, we will say the whole sphere of physical reality. The separation of human and non-human is instead framed using the terms civilization and wilderness, both terms later reused and developed in primitivist theory. Civilization is human-dominated nature, wilderness is non-human-dominated nature, and the wild is those organic processes produced in the wilderness. The tension that exists for ecologists is how to make a human society that can reconcile with the wilderness through the holistic system of the biosphere.

Social ecologism: The disunity between humanity and ecology is due to material forces that must be overcome towards a form of evolutionary organicism or “dialectical naturalism.” Originating with Murray Bookchin, social ecologism prioritized the socially material as the realm in which humanity could reconcile a new symbiosis with the ecological environment. Influenced by Marxist and classical republicanism, social ecologists favor a localized system of polyethnic direct and delegated processes through which to reinforce ecological diversity within human society and remove the monocultural ideology that has been the source of human societies harm to the ecological world. The politics of social ecology came to be naturally dominated by far-left-wing politics. As argued elsewhere, Bookchin’s system of libertarian municipalism and later Ocalan’s democratic confederalism, both using social ecologist philosophy, came out to late 20th and early 21st century manifestations of radical republicanism rather than a unique form of socialism.

Deep Ecologism: The disunity between humanity and ecology is due to the disregard of ontological forces by human civilizational practices. Originating with Arne Naess, deep ecologism prioritized the organic immaterial (an intrinsic quality or unchanging law in nature) as the realm in which humanity could reconcile a new symbiosis with the ecological environment. Instead of evolutionary organicism or a “natural dialectic,” the natural world was a reductionary inorganicism, a dialectic of coming to the wilderness. Basically, those deeply inherent intrinsic ontological attributes of wilderness had to be submitted to in order for the earth to survive. Human society had to rewild itself through governmental or insurrectionary methods, which reduced civilizational “excesses,” such as, and most infamously, the “overpopulation of humanity.”

To draw a direct comparison between them, we could invent two conceptual shorthands for quickly imagining both of their ideals of what human civilization should look like in respect to its relationship with wilderness. We will call Bookchin’s civilization a wild civilization and Naess’s a restrained civilization. Bookchin’s dialectics wanted humanity to return to the wild and consciously transform the wilderness into a balanced wilderness, a “wild civilization,” where humans and non-humans lived and moved together, where human society changed its technology to reflect wilderness attributes, while Naess’s dialectics wanted humanity to consciously transform themselves back into fitting in or alongside the wilderness. Instead of the wild civilization, it was more a restrained civilization that either resulted in the abolition of it all together or manifested into highly organized human societies that would engage in routine depopulation, deindustrialization, and decoupling of “excesses.” The politics of deep ecology are interesting as they appear to manifest in the far left and the far right political spheres.

03: The modernity of anti-civilization

By the late 1970s, roughly sometime in late 1977, within the fifth estate magazine (of which John Zerzan was an early contributor from 1974–1988), which had transitioned from a Marxist counterculture magazine towards a primitivist bent. The distinct political ideology of primitivism was initially referred to alongside the broader label of “green anarchism” (which includes non-primitivist eco-anarchists) and then more specifically “anarcho-primitivism.” Which had grown up in the developments and contexts of a late modernist horizontal left and “post-left.” Alongside the critique of the soviet union was also the critique of anarcho-syndicalism and its particular episode in the Spanish Civil War. Anarcho-syndicalism itself became the poster child for high modernist mistakes in more horizontally-minded leftist and “post-leftist” spaces.

What was particular to the development of primitivism was its contributions to a dialogue on civilization that has been continuously developing and intensifying across modernity and that focused on it as a source of anomie to repetitively deconstruct. This we will call the long dialogue on anomic civilization. An early critique of modernity was displeasure and discontent with the production of civilized life as it was juxtaposed to the lives of the “uncivilized.” This deconstruction of modern society as a human-dominated domain separated from the “free wilds” of prehistoric man is a well-established dialogue within modernity and modernism. Famously, figures like Jean-Jacque Rousseau levelled a critique of civilization, even including the developments of art, science and time as particularly to blame for decaying the egalitarianism, morality, and virtue of humanity, and Sigmund Frued argued that civilization had suppressed the instinctual and primal man by putting restrictions on desires resulting in psychological issues. Both argue that civilization has masked humanity’s naked instincts behind a series of suppressive norms. Rousseau, son of a watchmaker, famously threw away his watch in disgust of it. However, neither of these men were outright hostile to civilization in its entirety, as both men saw usefulness in many of its attributes. Rousseau even remarked that the exact equality of the state of nature was ultimately an undesirable expectation and went on to propose his version of the social contract. Freud’s solution to these repressions of desires by civilization was his theory of psychoanalysis to unearth and resolve these issues made unconscious that were plaguing the psyche. However, both figures left an impression on primitivist thinkers as they helped further the imaginations of an uninhabited, instinctual humanity which only knew that which was direct to his own wants and needs, craving no excesses and wasting no surpluses. A human who was unburdened by the pressures of historicity that would come to demand a sense of progression beyond this supposed state of non-historical purity. Two additional figures we can add to the canon of anomic civilization are Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels.

After the defeat of the Paris Commune, Karl Marx and his colleague, Engels, turned their attention to anthropology and non-western societies. Marx would develop an analysis of the decadence of modernity based on the inequalities, alienation, and dispossession produced by modern industrial society. For both Marx and Engels, this critique justified the call for the re-founding of industrial civilization along the lines of free association and collective ownership. In his study of Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, Friedreich Engels developed the idea of “primitive communism” in which the original human societies were supposed to be egalitarian, classless, and stateless societies organized through the leadership of women. Marx was more critical of Morgan than Engels and did not cosign Engels’ ideas of primitive communism. Marx and Engels didn’t despise civilization in its entirety; rather, they opposed capitalist civilization and wanted the workers of the world to be at the forefront of crafting a new communist civilization.

In the post-war climate, the dialogue of anomic civilization further developed with the avant-garde marxist situationist international movement which added to the critiques of civilization by arguing that capitalism had replaced authentic social life with inauthentic and impersonal representations, “spectacles”, as its commodification developed and continued to spread further and deeper into every aspect of human life and that to resist this required a creative rebellion where “situations” where created, these where creative and playful moments of protest which where briefly free from spectacle, allowing for people to experience ephemeral moments of authenticity. This fueled the narrative that humanity had become degenerated not only by capitalism but by its accompanying spectacle, the image of images, of complex and impersonal mediations in themselves. Deep ecologists then were standing atop this dialogue of anomic civilization, pushing the wellspring for anti-civilizational thought further by arguing for the restriction of civilization towards unchanging natural laws. This all slowly prepared the way for the further deconstruction of the concept to the point of envisioning the destruction of civilization in its entirety.

So by the 70s, within anarchism and the political left, primitivism came to contribute to anomic civilization as they were responding to the major failures of the organized left those marxists and anarchists groups which tried to overturn capitalism with complex organizational schemes and focused on proletarian revolution to achieve their goals. This meant primitivism was born within and part of the larger trend of “post-leftism” that had critiqued the “workerist” ideology of leftism. The “gardening ideologies” or “prometheanism” exhibited in the high modernist projects of workerism in the Soviet Union and Syndicalist Catalonia were seen as notable examples of the folly of workerist organization. Extracting a critique of these episodes, their ideologies and ideology itself as “historical man’s pursuit to dominate over unhistorical processes like the biosphere.” While post-leftism did house genuine forms of anarchism such as insurrectionary anarchism, which attempted to use informal organizations to achieve resistance to capitalism. Primitivists used post-left language to further their critiques and, as Being argues separate themselves from previous forms of anarchism like anarchist communism and attempting to include itself within those “non-socialist, non-leftist anarchisms” while defining itself as still part of anarchism through negative terms like anti-authoritarianism, anti-statism, etc., and some broadly positive attributes such as egalitarianism. Primitivism cut itself off from anarchism (and socialism more broadly) in Being’s opinion by directly attacking the notion that a free association of producers was favorable, and in their minds, was directly antagonistic to their own goals. Attempts to achieve a re-organized socially owned production via horizontal prefiguration would be regarded as another of many decadent civilizational schemes to bury the primitive essence in humanity.

Put in chronological order, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, Frued, the situationists, and the deep ecologists (plus many others not mentioned) layed the bedrock for anti-civilization by creating the imaginations which were highly critical of existing civilization and its building blocks. As we look over this history, it then seems, in retrospect, that the dialogue on anomic civilization would reach a natural conclusion of opposing the concept of civilization in its entirety. By synthesising the side of the narrative which constructed a free and pure humanity, naked pursuits of immediate subsistence and acting directly on all instincts without harsh restraints or reservations. No foggy concepts of greater pursuits of historical development, only simple living. Of course, recent anthropological research tells us that early humanity actually lived very harsh and oftentimes brutal lives. Depending on which tribal society you lived in, you were either equals with others or under the boot of them. While this reality is important, it doesn’t completely dispel the ideological myth being professed, nor does it help us to understand it outside of it not being of historical accuracy.

The full ideology myth, as Being will argue, is that civilization within primitivism takes on the narrative of a hostile alien teleology, reversing the notion that there is a positive teleology over humanity associated with technological development, and arguing that the development of impersonal complexity always leads to the creation of, at first, regional civilizations, and then, a single global civilization or “technosphere.” The term civilization goes from merely “human-dominated nature” within ecologism towards a “impersonal-dominated nature”, where primitivists argue that civilization’s nature is to leave the control of humanity and take on its own independent will and logic, puppeteering over human development, rather than the typical view of the reverse. This makes civilization into an autonomous decadent force which acts to destroy the territorial planet earth through ripping it out from within and turning it into an inhospitable extraterrestrial planet which cannot sustain the original native life-forms. What’s even more fascinating here is that when we consider the philosophy of Nick Land, who views capitalism as an artificial intelligence bent on destroying humanness, irrespective of how hard humans might try and resist this, this leads us to consider a newer addition to the anomic civilization dialogue, as primitivism and Nick Land connect on the notion that the “techno-sphere” is a hostile alien force on human development. This isn’t to argue that Nick Land is somehow a primitivist, he’s clearly not, but it is interesting to observe the weird and silly quirks that develop in human cosmology.

04: Paleogenetic Authenticism

We will argue that primitivism went beyond and became autonomous to the ecologist drive of monist holism into seeking a unique ideological core separate even from the other ideological genera. We will define primitivism within a single-sentence format accompanied by an extended unpacking:

Primitivism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a paleogenetic form of immediate authenticism.

(Key concepts: Paleogenesis, Immediatism, and Authenticism)

This paleogenetic myth refers to an experience of birth (or rebirth) by drawing from periods or episodes of ancient non-historic or “primitive humanity” as a source of purification that through the fostering, developing, and building relations of immediate authenticism, direct experiences with genuine and fulfilling ways of life that reproduce a direct personalism against the impurity of “indirect impersonalism” humanity can reconnect with that non-historic purity through historic time to create a new age of ancient history, creating future primitives.

This paleogenetic authenticism is separated from the epiphanic primitivism (primitivism as an aesthetic movement) that emerged in the 18th century, which sought to instill ephemeral experiences of paleolithic and “untouched by industry” wisdoms by drawing wild landscapes and “primitive people,” as in humans engaged in non-industrial and ancient lifestyles. Creating works of art that would allow people to briefly experience the authenticity of a paleo or “uncivilized” humanity. Programmatic primitivism (primitivism as a political ideology) took these brief moments of experience and decided to expand them as an ideological platform that could solve the insecurities of an unfulfilled humanity and reconnect them with a pure and authentic way of human life. Both epiphanic and programmatic primitivism attempt to pull out the “primal essence” of humanity and remake the world around them with its values, archetypes, and ideals. Hence, the central thesis here is that primitivism is a deeply modernist and not an “anti-modernist” ideology with its own unique vision of an alternate modernity in mind. Even if the dialogues of late modernity mark the language of primitivism with overt hostilities to historical time, ideology, modernity, and even language itself. This reflects the heavy use of deconstruction and breakdown of human constructions used to try and find a more intimate truth buried deeper than the other ideologies could find because of their inability to dig deep to such depths. The “primitive” humans lived free from such things for thousands of years after all, and so their wisdom must then be found in separating oneself from those “civilized notions.” This act of voluntary sensory deprivation is a very common strategy exploited by humans to try and remove the clouds of contamination from their minds to arrive at some truth that can now reveal itself to them. Modernism itself is a rebellion to the anomie of modernity and will, ironically, self-identify as “anti-modern” (or even “post-modern” sometimes) while contributing immensely to the landscape of the modern world. So the self-identification with “primitive”, “uncivilized”, and “savage”, as juxtaposed to the “modern”, “civilized”, and “domestic” language of the existing modernity it opposes is part of the long tradition of modernism’s “anti-modernity.” We could think of it as the modernist urge to engage in creative destruction by way of destroying existing modernity to establish a new “anti-modern” modernity in its place.

It’s also important to understand that the “primitive” in primitivism is not an assertion of backward-looking nostalgia but a pronouncement of temporal archery. Similar to the imaginations of those high modernist ideologies of fascism and socialism, which sought to end historic time’s decadence with a new eternal utopian time, suspending anomie forever, the primitivist infuses themselves with archaic or past terminologies to signify not a literal return but a rerouting of time towards a new era. The usage of the term “primitive” here has the distinct meaning of a transtemporal construct for the archery of resynthesis. Much like how the nation’s past glory or struggles are eternalized in fascism, the workers’ past and present struggles for freedom against the alienation of class society are eternalized in socialism. Signifying a palingenetic element within primitivism much like how Griffin explains fascism’s palingenetic myth in The Nature of Fascism, “The arrow of time thus points not backwards but forwards, even when the archer looks over his shoulder for guidance on where to aim.” These eternal episodes in the past, when sublated within newer elements, transform from something defined as inherently stuck in the past, or a rigidly ancient mode of being (as implied in the word primitive), into something in the present as part of a future-oriented vision.

A very common act in modernist mazeway resynthesis is laying out the chronological linearity of time and picking it apart into pieces, some of those bits put into the category of decadent and the other pure; those in the latter are then used in the synthesis process to build a new kairology. This means that anything deemed exclusively old in chronology can be remade as present and future in a kairology that is projected as an alternative temporality. Modernity’s ability to invoke this urge towards multi-linear time building is its own source of disenchantment, as people not only have to fight the aimlessness of one time but many competing times. Within this complex process, Primitivism is unique in wielding “the primitive” as a means of pulling out from within themselves a source of non-historic human subjectivity (non-historic as in outside the continuum of written or “impersonal” humanity) as a way of giving them the ability or potential ability to blast through existing historic time.

The palingenesis within primitivism is unlike fascism’s, as fascism searches for a new ultra-nationally rooted way of life; the primitivist views this “rooted modernism” as part of the decadence of civilization. Preferring that which is “primal” for humanity while any sense of roots is left to the ways of trees for them. So, instead of a palingenetic ultranationalism, we’ve argued instead that primitivism is paleogenetic authenticism. Separating the two ideologies fundamentally, that isn’t to say that fascism cannot be influenced or inspired by primitivist works; it can be, but the focus on the ultranation in them is heavily divorced from the core paleo-community (if you will), which is far too “cosmopolitan” (as fascists would say) to accept racial or ethnic divisions. Rather, the paleo-community accepts divisions based on authentic boundaries imposed on humans by their “paleo-ness,” such as limiting the number of people within a tribe or band to reduce human crowding within a concentrated area, creating a splintering of new tribes or bends in order to maintain that “ideal number” of authentic human relations. These divisions are legitimated as scientific, spiritual, and/or egocentric necessities. Likewise, divisions are also made from people exhibiting “civilized” or “domesticated” attributes or beliefs. For example, maintaining a segregational limit on the numbering of people between social groupings can be justified by arguing on supposed scientific grounds that “humans can only maintain X number of direct relationships before impersonalization appears.” This, too, can also be argued on less scientific grounds and instead on supposed spiritual wisdom of healthy population numbers before the spiritual oneness is compromised. The egocentric argument would argue that the ideal human population is based on allowing for sufficient space to fulfill one’s ego, and therefore, overcrowding would compromise a union of egos. Since some primitivism isn’t motivated by recreating the symbiosis between humanity and earth but rather the preservation, restoration, and transformation of humanity towards and forwards into a given state of existence, primitivism is arguably far more human-focused and even, ironically, anthropocentric than simple ecologism in its minimum conditions centered on achieving a form of ideal human experience that goes beyond simple ecological considerations.

05: Mapping primitivism’s morphological directions

Following this, we can extract the protean range of primitivist justifications and manifestations alongside intersecting groupings within groupings inside its ever-evolving morphology.

There are three common legitimation groupings: scientized primitivism, religionized primitivism, and egoized primitivism. Scientized primitivism — primitivism as viewed as a scientific necessity due to humans being “paleolithic creatures” (homo paleo). Religionized primitivism — primitivism as a mystical rejection of a scientized world and thus reconnecting with paleolithic man as a spiritual rather than scientific necessity. Egotized primitivism — primitivism as an egoistic necessity to fulfilling the unalienated self and a union of egos.

Egalitarian vs. stratified primitivism: Egalitarian primitivism is a restoration of “true” human egalitarianism that acts in accordance with the ancient ways of “primitive humanity.” An example of egalitarian primitivism is in the “anarcho-primitivist” strands, which attempt to argue that the world anarchism envisions, a nonhierarchical egalitarian one, is like that of the early hunter-gatherers and that humans must create a new “primitive” egalitarian world. Stratified primitivism is a restoration of “true” human stratification that acts in accordance with biospheric demands. An example of a stratified primitivist is the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski that argues for the restoration of hierarchic forms of power and domination exhibited in hunter-gatherer societies and sees the strife and hardship of those societies as a good thing, rather than attempting to argue for their opulence and ease as argued by egalitarian primitivists.

Imminent vs. interregnum primitivism: Imminent primitivism would argue that the time for a primitive revolution is ripe, while interregnum primitivism would argue that it isn’t the time and that they’re stuck within an interregnum and resigned to social critique as the technological world slowly collapses without an alternative. The most famous primitivists, such as John Zerzan, have long retreated themselves into the depths of interregnum thinking. Waiting for the, in their minds, eventual collapse of civilization while writing, repetitively in Zerzan’s case, on the latest events and implanting their own critiques on them.

Ecologized vs. positivist primitivism: Ecologized primitivism as a means to fulfill the monist holism of man’s relationship with the intrinsic and essential organisms of the biospheric net. Most primitivists tend to be ecologists, particularly belonging to deep ecologism. Positivist primitivism views the “primal essence” as a way to preserve humanity, arguing that they’re fundamentally paleolithic creatures and thus schemes of population control and other highly complex mechanisms would be legitimated, with a great degree of internal irony, but viewed as a “means to an end” to keep humans alive. Considerable cross-directionality and influence would happen in most cases as, for example, John Zerzan has argued that anthropological science points to pre-civilized telepathy in human communication. An obvious mix of scientized and religionized thinking is emerging from such a claim.

The terms scientized primitivism, religionized primitivism, egotized primitivism, egalitarian primitivism, stratified primitivism, imminent primitivism, interregnum primitivism, ecologized primitivism, and positivist primitivism do not designate permutations (species) of the ideology, merely, they’re terms for the many directions an individual manifestation of primitivism could take in creating a given permutation or instance of a permutation. Within this morphology we will argue that a fundamental division emerges that splits primitivism into two major directions which are much more important than the others, the subgenera of primitivism, between favoring the more extreme hunter-gatherer foraging lifestyles, we’ll name forager primitivism, and the less extreme use of alternative cultivation lifestyles that exhibit or simulate the spirit of early man’s connection to an immediate authentic nature while not exactly mimicking their lifestyle completely, we will call cultivator primitivism. Let us expand on the subgenera presented alongside an analysis of a few primary subjects:

Forager Primitivism and John Zerzan: Exhibited in its most extreme, infamous, and “anarchistic” form by John Zerzan, who not only builds a case for the health and revitalization of the earliest hunter-gatherer lifestyles but also argues against symbolism itself. This can be seen as providing the most radical and, consequently, consistent position one can take when advocating for immediate authentic experiences. For example, Zerzan suggests that the removal of civilization would allow for the re-emergence of telepathic communication. What more direct way can you communicate than brain-to-brain? While absurd, it is extremely consistent with the opposition to all mediatory communication. Zerzan is a possible candidate for creating the most “anti-modern” modernism to exist thus far and should be seen as a major player in attempting to wield the intensely liquid effects of late modernity beyond its breaking point. Fascinatingly, Zerzan uses forager primitivism to argue against later hunter-gatherer tribes that had shamanistic practices in his piece, The Case Against Art. The astounding anti-aestheticism on display is, in Being’s opinion, an act of attempting to find the purest form of aesthetics that someone like Zerzan could think of, the aesthetics of footprints and fossils in the deep muds of the earth. These great displays of the planet are unburdened in Zerzan’s mind by mediatory messagings and theatrics. This, to him, reveals the hidden essence in its most vibrant and clearest form, whereas other forms of aesthetics shroud it in darkness. Being will argue, to which would anger Zerzan himself, that he is pro a form of art and aesthetics but an extremely avant-garde kind marked by extreme ephemerality and unthinking movement. A sort of asymbolic art, which attempts to find revitalization in the acts of silent unthinking.

Cultivator Primitivism and Post-Civ!: In stark contrast to Zerzan, writers such as Margaret Killjoy and the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness collective present us with a less extreme and more moderated form of primitivism. Which argues for the use of scavenging the ruins of civilizational technologies and using them as tools in non-industrial and alternative forms of low-scaled agriculture. Even arguing for the usage of pastoralism and horticulture as in line with some early human ways of life. Part of their critique against forager primitivists, whom they incorrectly frame as the only kind of primitivists (as well as strawman them as wanting to literally go back in time), is that not all primitivist societies were purely nomadic foragers but that some engaged in cultivation practices without leading to civilization and maintaining the essence of revitalizing the paleo-authentic experience. The post-civilization strand represents a critical primitivism of sorts, which is willing to admit that the term primitive is a colonial remnant and that many prehistoric peoples were not purely egalitarian and peaceful but also engaged in warfare. It even critiques the anti-symbology and tools/technology distinctions as nonsensical when, as they argue, many early peoples engaged in lower-scaled forms of mediatory systems and technologies, but it precisely argues for these on a similar basis that the forager primitivist would for the use of spears; they can be wielded in immediate and personal ways that don’t necessarily lead to impersonal complexities. Which leads to the curious case of a primitivism that isn’t anti-tech per se but “anti-indirect technologies”, or from the reverse perspective, if we maintain the technology/tools distinction, post-civs are really arguing for the expansion of what can count as a tool. In fact, other primitivists who use the label of anarcho-primitivism, will tell you they’re not “anti-tech per se” too, but simply opposed to complex technology as it is “simply recognized as inconsistent with the pursuit of free and authentic human lifestyles.” Despite its attempts to remove itself from the label of primitivism, it still, in Being’s opinion, represents another way that the phenomenon of paleogenetic authenticism can manifest itself.

“To make a quick jab at the term post-civ, when you think about it, forager primitivism isn’t ‘returning to pre-civilization’ but actually attempting to build a new ‘non-civilized’ way of life, so it too is arguably ‘post-civ.’” — The Odd Being (From the fossilized texts of neo-earth)

06: The individual in primal modernism

Due to primitive movements and theories' preference for highly informal organization schemes implemented by groupuscules and small independent publications, it represents a larger turn away from the gardening state projects of high modernist organizations and a move towards the gardening individual. Where the task of transforming humanity via schemes of “plucking out the weeds and replanting healthy flowers” is descaled and devolved to single individuals and small groups. Perhaps if primitivism had been a child of the 19th century, it would’ve created formal political parties and even developed schemes for some kind of wildizing or feralizing statism as a means to transition to a more primal existence for humanity. In turn leading to a kind of “national primitivism” similar to the national communism project of Marxist-Leninist states like the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, etc., where nationalism was/is wielded as a transitory dimension for helping certain people groups to come to the international ideology of communism more “organically.” Instead, Primitivism (alongside other political ideologies within late modernity) relies on a steady supply of individual-centered violence to try and impose new norms and values onto an antagonistic world. While primitivists will argue that they’re opposed to this high ideological goal of imposing a strict developing plan for humanity, their world-view still nonetheless requires a large amount of coercion and domination in consequence of attempting to build and maintain the emergent “primitiveness”, such as a constantly reinforced complexity policing, where anything built that is deemed replicating “impersonal alienation” can be legitimated as sites for severe demolition as well as making sure that your own members aren’t veering off course. Ironically, for an ideology that attempts to escape the rigid workerism of leftism, it still replicates a rigid feralism onto the historical trajectory of humanity. Of course, as mentioned in the morphology section, many primitivists have resigned themselves to social critique within a perceived interregnum, and a good amount of those believing in immediate action will be unable to go through the psychological transformation necessary to carry out terroristic violence.

Similarly, to how primitivism reinvents the “gardening ideology,” it too is part of the many diverse and conflicting visions that attempt to overthrow existing modernity towards an alternate one. For primitivists, we will call their alternate modernism a primal modernism. A temporality of the new, which blasts open the continuum of time through a resynthesis of modern consciousness and non-historic human essence, to create a world centered on the “primal ideals, archetypes, and values” to help guide toward a “healthy” future, which has destroyed the “decadence” of an impersonal techno-sphere called civilization. The world of a primal modernity is one marked by the whole of humanity in synchronicity of reversed teleology, where all creations of life are socially limited to personal and socially immediate constructions in line with the essence of a new primitive history of non-historical subjectivity. This primal modernism isn’t just opposed to the rooted modernism of fascism but also the modernism proposed by socialism. Which attempts to create an integrated modernism, where the tensions between mental and manual labor, urban and rural life, and personal and social development are resolved through a new mode of production where each is their own free producer. Here, the lifestyles and ways of social creation found in industrialism, agrarianism, etc., are no longer divided but incorporated into one another as networks within networks of complexity form new productions unobstructed by territorial and even temporal lines. In this world, complex mediations are used to allow an impersonal personalization, where any individual can personalize and de-personalize from one another to fulfill their own self-creations.

To reconnect with our concept of the gardening individual, one could argue that primitivism’s opposition to impersonalism and non-direct living is a greater critique and opposition to individualism itself. It would seem that by creating a primal, instinctual, and feralized world through heavily informal and individual acts of resistance, they’re also creating the means of destroying the individual as an atomic subject in existing modernity. Where then they demand that the individual themselves be submerged into a series of immediate experiences in union with all others to prevent the potential resurgence of “degenerate impersonalism” as produced from industrialization’s production of standardizations, which lead to a form of capitalist individuation, where everyone is a singular economic unit to be expropriated from. Primitivism would then argue further that not only does industrialism create toxic individuation, but any attempts to integrate industrial production towards self-creation are continuing the same degeneracy of separating individuals from the primitive essence. This is despite the many individualistic and outright egoistic arguments for primitivism, where such a submergence of humanity under the enclosure of immediacy is seen as creating “true individual freedom.”

Socialism then must respond to this attempt to blast away complex individuation into a new historic time (similar to fascism’s attempt to recouple the individual towards their ‘rooted essence’ and hence, also by consequence, reduces the individual complexity of humanity), with a particular rebuttal and convergence. This rebuttal looks at the battle between the immediate individual and the impersonal civilization as an illusionary misdirection. One doesn’t find emancipation in the immediacy of the self but rather in the meditations of others as reflected back into the self. A slave escapes his master, not by retreating into his own skull, but by reaching out his mind beyond the master to rediscover his position as one where the master needs him and that by unbinding the chains, he destroys not only the alienating other but the subjected self. Freedom comes not from simple negation of the evil in front of you but also by negating the person the evil has imposed onto you. The greater the distance from oneself, the other, and the furthest point of awareness, the deeper one goes in expanding their ability to find emancipation. By reducing the scales, by reducing complexity, and by reducing mediations themselves, one has chosen to enslave themselves to simplicity. Just as civilization can be its own hell, where compounding impersonal institutions can remove a person’s ability to create their own independent placement in the world, so too can the immediate individual impose a hell of its own making by twisting independence itself into a perversion of biological and environmental entrapments. Where the individual is unable to run faster than their captors, unable to find greater strengths to beat back abusers, and unable to transform the means of life beyond the tortures of subsistence. Socialism (anarchism by extension) is daring in its demands too, but its new world is one where the immediate and mediate are integrated. This is where a Promethean scream can be heard, one that Marx and Kropotkin could hear: Consciousness arrives through the unconscious, but its first desire is to abolish the unconscious. To throw off as long as possible the terror of death and transform the grounds around it towards sustaining conscious experience against those who would snuff it out.

The dichotomy of civilization versus wilderness demands a simple negation of one destroying the other, but this neglects something more. As the “wilderness position” presupposes a bias towards not merely non-human nature but non-human unconscious nature. And the “civilization position” is biased towards not merely human-dominated nature but hierarchical conscious nature. The something more that is lacking here is found through the phrase humanity is nature made conscious, which cannot be fulfilled if humanity is limited by conscious hierarchies or unconscious wilds; rather, to make the phrase unlimited would be to suggest a secret third thing, totally conscious nature. What if the battle is not civilization vs. wilderness but consciousness vs. unconsciousness? The issue of civilization is that of those civilizations that impede on consciousness by limiting humans through subjecting them to hierarchies. The issues then of the wilderness are those processes that impede upon the development of living agents such as predation. Within both civilization and wilderness, the plague of death roams. If wilderness is simply standing by while a deer is pulled limb by limb by wolves who will one day waste away themselves, and if civilization is simply standing by while a human pulls another limb by limb who will also waste away in death, then our problems are deeper than is understood. Humanity can only be nature made conscious if it reflects consciousness back onto nature, but not a consciousness pretending to be unconscious nature or a consciousness pretending to be conscious nature by restricting the world into a monopoly of design where only one man or one class may rule; rather, it requires a consciousness that constructs a cosmology of consciousness, a self-aware self-awareness, unobstructed by hierarchies, predations, and even death.

Citations and Further Reading:

• Roger Griffin — The Nature of Fascism
• Roger Griffin — Building the Visible Immortality of the Nation: The Centrality of ‘Rooted Modernism’ to the Third Reich’s Architectural New Order
• Roger Griffin — Fixing Solutions: Fascist Temporalities as Remedies For Liquid Modernity
• Roger Griffin — Modernism and Fascism
• David Graeber and David Wengrow — The Dawn of Everything
• Post-Comprehension — An Unearthly Politics A
• Post-Comprehension — Democratic confederalism is NOT libertarian socialism
• Sigmund Frued — Civilization and Its discontents
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Discourse on the Arts and Sciences
• Freidrich Engels — The Origins of the Family
• Karl Marx — The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx
• Karl Marx — The German Ideology
• Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx — The Communist Manifesto
• Guy Debord — The Society of the Spectacle
• Various Authors — The Origins of Primitivism (1977–1988)
• John Zerzan — The Case Against Art
• John Zerzan — Future Primitive and Other Essays
• John Zerzan — Time and its Discontents
• Mark R. Seely — The Revolutionary Posture of Anarcho-Primitivism
• Margaret Killjoy — Take What You Need And Compost The Rest
• Ted K — Industrial Society and Its Future