“Becoming inhuman is in the best interests of humanity�
What I like about primitivism is it’s rigorous anti-humanism. Actually existing primitivists don’t always live up to this, but the program(me) of primitivism, unlike bourgeois environmentalism (which is just the flipside of industrial enviro-dominance), has no time for human protection or (even worse) preservation of the natural world, which just reproduces a separation of people from the environment; which is to say, opression, which is to say The Problem. This is where the Animal Rights discourse, like Singer’s idea of speciesism, gets it exactly wrong (my emphasis):
…other animals are not resources or property for us to use; that they are sentient, conscious beings with individual interests, like humans.
Rather than seeking to get rid of the cage of individualism, the plan is to extend it to the whole natural world, and make animals suffer from it too. And what could be a better example of human dominance over the environment that that?
So it’s ironic that primitivism tends to support this anti-humanism towards nature with a fanatical humanism towards technology. Technology is seen as completely inhuman and denigrated as such. See, for example, this combined criticism and misunderstanding of Deleuze and Guattari (which actually comes from insurrectionists, but is similar to, for example, Zerzan’s objections to Hakim Bey):
…the philosophers known as post-structuralists, those French thinkers who, in order to defend this society from the subversion caused by the death of God … announced the death of man in every sphere, with the aim of spreading resignation by making the individual into a mere lump of social, political, technological and linguistic devices. The influence of the “desiring machines� of Deleuze and Guattari is particularly strong …
[Poststructuralists argue that] the human being must fade into the gear, that autonomy must give way to automatism, and that fantasy must surrender before functionality.
All of which could be avoided if primitivists would just read k-punk, from where the title of this post is drawn (I was going to call it ‘Half man, half machine, what does it mean, what does it mean’ but thought better of it). His Deleuzean-Gauttarean cyberpunk take on anti-capitalism, combined with his Spinozist post-humanism, is precisely what is needed to move forward the movement of movements. And I don’t share his pessimism about that movement. It’s true that its media representatives (Klein, Monbiot) don’t really have any new ideas, and that its media representations are “a pantomime sideshow,� but isn’t that what all we should expect of representation? On the streets, things look quite different (I have a story to tell, at some point, about Deleuze, Gauttari, and riot police): IndyMedia and Ya Basta! are both world-wide networks of fictional cyborgs.
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