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what is anarchism? 23
living) and in action (the imposition of rules or norms of behaviour;
the formalization of patterns of organization).
Primitivists have found their inspiration in Stirner’s individualism
and the surrealist politics of the Situationalist International (SI)
– a French neo-Marxist current of thought associated with Guy
Debord and Raoul Vaneigem – that highlights the commodification,
cultural repression and psychological manipulation (‘spectacle’) of
individuals in capitalism. Their politics, like much new anarchism, is
ecological. Yet their blending of ideas results in a brand of anarchism
that disavows technology in favour of the ‘feral’: the condition of
wildness, ‘or existing in a state of nature, as freely occurring animals
or plants; having reverted to the wild state from domestication’. 34 For
many years, some women’s groups have complained about the
denaturalization of childbirth. Primitivism offers a similar critique
of modern life, but extends it to the whole experience of life, to
denounce ‘civilization’:
Civilization is like a jetliner, noisy, burning up enormous amounts
of fuel ...
Civilization is like a 747, the filtered air, the muzak oozing over
the earphones, a phony sense of security, the chemical food, the
plastic trays, all the passengers sitting passively in the orderly row of
padded seats staring at Death on the movie screen ...
Civilization is like a 747, filled beyond capacity with coerced
volunteers – some in love with the velocity, most wavering at the
abyss of terror and nausea, yet still seduced by advertising and propaganda.
35
Like postmoderns, primitivists reject systems of thought which
purport to describe reality in terms of linear, progressive development.
But rather than emphasizing theoretical diversity and rejecting
the idea of certainty, primitivists argue that it is possible to grasp
reality and to judge it. Moreover, where postmoderns look to
multiple and endlessly shifting communities as a basis for anarchism,
primitivists reject the possibility of realizing community in the body
of the hegemon: technology.
Of course, many of the currents of thought now associated with
new anarchism have been as inspirational to ‘old’ anarchist schools
of thought. For example, Daniel Guérin combined an anarchosyndicalist
enthusiasm for workers’ control with a deep admiration
for Stirnerite individualism. Nonetheless, there has undoubtedly