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anarchy 91
permanent advantages in property, leadership or exchange.
Bookchin applauds this aspect of ‘primitive’ life, but he regards it as
a consequence of a deeper set of values embedded in preliterate
societies – their organic relationship to the eco-system and their
inability or unwillingness to distinguish between human and
non-human worlds. Bookchin admits that in the 1960s and ’70s he
had ‘an excessive enthusiasm for certain aspects of aboriginal and
organic societies’. His mature work, however, concentrates on the
ways in which this ethical matrix might be recovered, not on
preserving the behaviours and habits of the preliterate peoples it
supports. Bookchin’s call is to
... [r]ecover the continuum between our ‘first nature’ and our
‘second nature,’ our natural world and our social world, our
biological being and our rationality. Latent within us are ancestral
memories that only an ecological society and sensibility can
‘resurrect.’ The history of human reason has not yet reached its
culmination, much less its end. Once we can ‘resurrect’ our subjectivity
and restore it to its heights of sensibility, then in all likelihood
that history will have just begun. 6
Perlman and Zerzan define primitive society in opposition to
civilization. They take a developmental view of the relationship
between the two. However, they invert the indicators of development
suggested by Kropotkin’s evolutionary system to define
changes in the behaviours of primitive peoples in terms of the corrupting
influence of domestication rather than the progressive
march of civilization. Perlman located these changes in the shift
from nomadic ways of life and the emergence of tools as ‘productive
forces’. Zerzan’s view is that ‘the wrong turn for humanity was the
Agricultural Revolution’. This brought ‘a rise in labor, a decrease in
sharing, an increase in violence, a shortening of lifespan’ and alienation
‘from each other, from the natural world, from their bodies’. 7
Like Kropotkin and Bookchin, Zerzan draws on mainstream
anthropology to support this view, but he uses these studies to
describe what the absence of civilization means, rather than to
abstract an anarchist ethic from the stateless condition. The
contrast he draws between primitivism and civilization is stark.
Without exception, Zerzan argues, the peoples in ‘non-agricultural’
society ‘knew no organized violence’. Elsewhere he argues: the
‘violence of primitives – human sacrifice, cannibalism, head-hunting,