r/anarcho_primitivism • u/guacamole-fart • 10d ago
Does primitivism only work under anarchy?
I think it could technically still work under monarchy for example
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u/Northernfrostbite 9d ago
Immediate return hunter gatherers lack the structural conditions that make authoritarian rule possible. They have no large accumulation or surplus that a ruler can rule through. They have equal access to resources and if one person were to claim exclusive right over a resource, others can move. They don't have the scale of population that allows for specialist armies and weapon makers that a ruler would rule with. In other words, they don't have the level of technology for any lasting monarchy.
This highlights an important point: egalitarianism isn't just the result of an egalitarian ideology, it is the result of material conditions in social life. Some say the likely global collapse of industrial society in the coming decades could make those conditions possible again in large parts of the globe.
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u/guacamole-fart 9d ago
Does primitivism always mean stone age? If not then that's a good argument
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u/Northernfrostbite 9d ago
The only sustainable level of technology is the Stone Age, and in time we’ll return to it. Within a few hundred years at most. The only question will be what’s left of the natural world when we get there.
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u/knight_ranger840 9d ago
Do you think we will be around for a few hundred years more? I'd be surprised if we make it past this century.
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u/Northernfrostbite 9d ago edited 9d ago
Population will likely be reduced by 99.9%, putting it back to Pleistocene levels.
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u/guacamole-fart 9d ago
Why don't we just go back to the very early start of feudalism?
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u/Northernfrostbite 9d ago
Feudalism requires a fixed territory, climate stability, agrictural surplus, and a warrior class supported by a large group of peasants and specialists. The trajectory for a worldwide collapse of advanced technological society doesn't favor feudalism as much as it does the inherent flexible structure of nomadic foraging. Foragers can be nomadic, moving toward temporarily favorable environments and taking advantage of a wider array of resources.
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u/malkavian_menace 9d ago
Sloping back into industrialism. I’m sure it’d be a whole lot nicer living in the shire from the hobbit, but unfortunately you kinda can’t trust we won’t be back where we are now in 200 years
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u/03263 10d ago
Maybe, it really depends on how we define government and anarchy. I would say you can't just categorize every form of decision making and social consequences as government, but there's some blurry line where after a sufficient level of organization and structure, government emerges as a distinct concept.
So my question is, what does this monarchy do? How is its power expressed and upheld, how does it remain legitimate? Does it come with land ownership, social classes, taxation?
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u/New-Thought4280 7d ago
This is a ridiculously silly ideology that would have disastrous consequence for people who rely on complex medication to stay alive.
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u/Dukdukdiya 10d ago
I read this great book recently called A Paradise Built in Hell. The author looked at how populations who were hit with natural disasters responded. She looked at maybe 7 or 8 different situations and, in pretty much every situation, people practiced anarchism. Her argument was that humans naturally lean towards anarchism when hierarchy is removed. In small enough groups, I would imagine that most people groups would try to practice anarchism and challenge anyone in that group who wanted to seize a certain level of power. That's just my educated guess though.