Karen Goaman's summary of my ideas (issue 10/1/04) is at such odds to what I actually wrote I don't know where to begin. Perhaps it is just me, but it often seems that supporters of primitivism speak a different language to the rest of us. After all, I said in my first reply that I doubted that people who went to the trouble of having a revolution would leave everything pretty much the same as before (as asserted in the first "Green and Black Bulletin"). But, no, apparently by this I meant the opposite! So when she labels me a lover of "modern industrial society" she is distorting my position slightly.
Then there is the whole "primitivist" rhetoric itself. The first Bulletin stressed primitivism was "not posing the Stone Age as a model for our Utopia." Now Karen points to "only 150,000 years of our own pre-history" as "models and examples"! She stresses that the "small-scale land-based cultures" primitivism wants are not peasant communities (although she also says that "peasants and small farmers" were what "the Wildfire writers argue for"!), which leaves us with the "gathering and hunting" tribes the first Bulletin rejected. So to recap. Primitivists don't want to go back to the Stone Age, they just imply they do. They also consider peasant life a "return to a life of drudgery," but also "argue for" it. Which, I suppose, shows that Zerzan was right to combat the evils of language!
Then there is the whole issue of (to quote the first "Green and Black Bulletin") when "civilisation collapses" through "its own volition." Now, that can only mean one thing. It means the destruction of life as we know it in a short period of time, whether we want it or not. Primitivists, when pressed, seem to say that they don't mean instant chaos and mass starvation by that expression but that is what it sounds like. And they get huffy when you point it out!
Karen shows this contradiction between the rhetoric and reality. She says I raise an important issue "of how people could manage nuclear and toxic waste caused by decades of military and industrial production." She suggests "skilled people to contain the legacy of industrialism or to allow them to degrade as safely as possible in areas that people can avoid." So, to get this right, no one will want to work in a mine or in a factory but they will want to look after toxic and nuclear waste? And how will they do that? Both bulletins rejected workers' control out of hand. And it will require technology and industry to provide the means of containment, but that is (yet again) rejected out of hand. So, how will this task be done? As for dumping it into one area, surely Karen knows that the environment cannot be subdivided in this way. The effects of a rotting pile of industrial waste will not stop at human made barriers.
The key problem with Karen's reply is that it does not address the pretty basic question of how we get to her primitivist utopia. She talks about "small-scale land-based cultures" yet does not explain how the UK will support 58 million people living like that. Nor how we get there. The very crux of my critique, incidentally. And which none of the "primitivists" have bothered to acknowledge, never mind address.
Given that primitivists reject workers' control, federalism, the "continuation of industrial society" (even temporarily), and so forth, I fail to see how it will ever happen without starvation and misery on a massive scale. Perhaps "primitivism" will be as wonderful as Karen says it will be but until she and her fellows actually discuss how to get there, I'll be unable to sign up to it. Perhaps the reason why they don't do this is because they know that it will involve all the things they slag off "traditional" anarchists for. In other words, a process of transition involving workers' control, federalism and the use of industry. Also, if they admit to that they would also have to acknowledge that "traditional" anarchists do not want the "continuation of industrial society" at all but rather a total transformation of how we live. We just recognise this cannot be done overnight nor need involve the elimination of all forms of industry/technology.
I'm glad she says I may be "happier and more satisfied living" in her utopia, after all she does not give me any other options to choose from. The idea that we can choose the level of technology we want is dismissed out of hand. Without irony, she says that it is "industrialism" that "removes the choice for people to decide how to live" and so condemns us all to live under primitivism. Saying that there is no alternative does seem a little bit authoritarian to me, sorry. Particularly when the use of appropriate technology shows it's not true.
Iain McKay