sabotabby | Even evil has standards

Primitivism is a totalitarian ideology. They go beyond just wanting to control what you think--but want to make certain kinds of thinking impossible.

I suspect that many people who are attracted to the ideology have not complicated it's logical consequences.

Misanthropy does not require a concern for ecology. Nor vice versa. Though for some people that overlaps like a Venn diagram. You could toss anarchism into that Venn diagram as well.

People don't need to be nice to be anarchists. Being nice is generally helpful for people getting along and contributing to our collective niceness... but anarchism doesn't require any fundamental change in what makes people human. Arguably, statelesss communal societies have been the predominant social organization among human beings for the last 200,000 years or so--with considerable conflict with exploitive states for the last 10,000 to 500 years depending on geographic location--however given that more people are now alive than have ever been alive and most of them do not live in anarchies... but I'm babbling.

I think you have to be relatively nice to live sociably in stateless communal societies. Either that or have given up a lot of the individualism we nowadays take for granted. I think people used to living in big cities and within a state would not have developed the characteristics needed for living in a cooperative, communal society. It would require much adjustment or education or something even if it is natural for humans. It is difficult to know what is ideal - when I watch lovely program Tribe (amazing cool program where man visits cool tribes) it always strikes me and horrifies me seeing how insular and restricted the people's lives are and how narrow minded they are. Not all of them, of course, but it does make me think eek do we need particular world views and mindsets to be able to live in particular conditions and types of society, wah. And if so, who does the educating and who wants what and would people really agree and cooperate with one another?
I still think Kropotkin-style communities would be lovely, though. With nice libraries.

I guess it depends on how you define "nice".

Cities and states do not function without people, generally speaking, being cooperative (in the broad sense of the word, not the economical arrangement). I'm afraid I don't think that you've made much of an argument that people living in big cities don't know how to share. May I ask where you live?

To get back to the substance of our disagreement on small communities versus large ones, I think I'll quote Bookchin:

"integrally the confederal association of cities and towns is part of the development of a free, ecologically oriented society. Localism, in the narrow sense of a virtually autarchial locality that aspires to "self-sufficiency"--in the sense so popular in the ecology movement today--could easily produce a parochialism notable for such evils as racism, cultural insularity, and a stagnant traditionalism. Conceived localistically, municipalities would be as regressive as authoritarian nation-states."
Bookchin, Urbanization Without Cities

"It is a troubling fact that neither decentralization nor self-sufficiency in itself is necessarily democratic. Plato's ideal city in the Republic was indeed designed to be self-sufficient, but its self-sufficiency was meant to maintain a warrior as well as a philosophical elite. Indeed, its capacity to preserve its self-sufficiency depended upon its ability, like Sparta, to resist the seemingly "corruptive" influence of outside cultures (a characteristic, I may say, that still appears in many closed societies in the East). Similarly, decentralization in itself provides no assurance that we will have an ecological society. A decentralized society can easily co-exist with extremely rigid hierarchies. A striking example is European and Oriental feudalism, a social order in which princely, ducal, and baronial hierarchies were based on highly decentralized communities. With all due respect to Fritz Schumacher, small is not necessarily beautiful.

Nor does it follow that humanly scaled communities and "appropriate technologies" in themselves constitute guarantees against domineering societies. In fact, for centuries humanity lived in villages and small towns, often with tightly organized social ties and even communistic forms of property. But these provided the material basis for highly despotic imperial states. Considered on economic and property terms, they might earn a high place in the "no-growth" outlook of economists like Herman Daly, but they were the hard bricks that were used to build the most awesome Oriental despotisms in India and China. What these self-sufficient, decentralized communities feared almost as much as the armies that ravaged them were the imperial tax-gatherers that plundered them.

At the risk of seeming contrary, I feel obliged to emphasize that decentralization, localism, self-sufficiency, and even confederation each taken singly - do not constitute a guarantee that we will achieve a rational ecological society. In fact, all of them have at one time or another supported parochial communities, oligarchies, and even despotic regimes. To be sure, without the institutional structures that cluster around our use of these terms and without taking them in combination with each other, we cannot hope to achieve a free ecologically oriented society."
Bookchin, The Meaning of Confederalism

What does he mean about the institutional structures that surround them, in the last sentence? I must read his writings! Sounds interesting.

He's talking about democracy and communalism as institutional structures; that is established social relationships.

Let me put it another way... a cooperative farm, a single family farm, and a small farm that uses wage exploited labor, and a farm that uses slave labor might all resemble each other in their material components. What's important is not so much the size of the farm, what it plants or what equipment it has--so much the social institution of how people work together.

Yes, you should definitely look into Bookchin. I suspect that he will be far more appreciated in the 21st century than he was in the 20th.

Education is no guarantee of cooperative, communal or liberatory lives or community. Though who is doing the educating is important, what is probably more important is determining who gets what, when, why and where. People know that society is authoritarian and exploitive. Knowing, apparently, is less than half the battle. Bakunin had quite a bit to say in regards to red intelligentsia who thought their socialism was "scientific".

Kropotkin is a sweety--for an insurrectionary anarchist who advocated using explosives to assassinate the Czar (to whom he was distantly related).

"That we are Utopians is well known. So Utopian are we that we go the length of believing that the Revolution can and ought to assure shelter, food, and clothes to all--an idea extremely displeasing to middle-class citizens, whatever their party colour, for they are quite alive to the fact that it is not easy to keep the upper hand of a people whose hunger is satisfied."
Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread

All I remember of studying him, apart from that he seemed nice, is that he escaped from prison in his dressing gown at the signal of a violin playing! I knew someone who met him, an old family friend who died a few years ago in his nineties.

Kropotkin is getting a lot of respect these days from scientific corners as a naturalist. Steven Jay Gould and Frans De Waal to name two recent admirers. Kropotkin also did quite a study of ethics. Believe me, his daring escape from prison is the least interesting thing about him.

I still find it hard to imagine people managing to live without laws and cooperatively without smaller social structures to give them a structure of unwritten or unspoken rules instead of laws that they would stick to, such as not stealing from one another or killing one another. I have never imagined anarchism in a huge community or nation - just not sure how it would work. I suppose that's because I've only read as far as anarchists who envisaged small communities.
My own experience of people is that they tend to lack empathy for most people even within their own families, yet alone people from other backgrounds. Not all people of course, but most.
London is a very nice place to live - only it is hard in England to find anywhere without people or buildings in sight. Perhaps it is just a matter of taste, but it would be nice to have areas of wilderness and forests and other forms of life in abundance, not just houses and people everywhere.
Also there are lots of violent and scary people about, but not just in London - villages seem to have their share of them too, and smaller towns in England seem to have more. I suppose I have often put violence and people being horrible down to urban alienation, but then you get horrible people in villages too. I find it hard to believe people could manage without laws to keep such people in some kind of check, although I would like to think that in happier societies people would be happier so less prone to violence.

Those smaller social structures- structures based around cooperation and free association- are what anarchism is, not some inane Mad Max fantasy.

Definitely read some Kropotkin and Bookchin- defining anarchism by anarchists' words instead of by their enemies' is kind of important.

That's what I was saying - I thought smaller communities were necessary, but now I've been told (see above) that Bookchin says not necessarily so. I have read Kropotkin but not Bookchin, and I don't know any enemies of anarchism who actually know what it is! What I was wondering was how an anarchist community could work on a large scale, with huge populations in huge cities. I can't imagine it, I think because I see human nature as not that naturally cooperative, or perhaps not since it has developed in huge cities under capitalism - people might need readjustment and re educating, and it might be a lengthy process and they might not want it!

But most people I meet DON'T think society is exploitative or authoritarian, so education must be pretty important. Most middle class people think we live in a happy, free society where people just have to work and find nice opportunities. Most working class people I know don't question the social structures around them, but just want to be closer to the top in material terms - having HD tvs and cars and all that. Do you mean that if they were given more material things they would not mind the change in social structure? I think they would need first to understand that life is not necessarily about having more material goods, and that wealth does not make you a cooler or better person. I think consumerism is so entrenched in our culture now that it would take a lot to rearrange society.

Even evil has standards

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