Month: May 2022

A caller on Anarchy Radio last week mentioned something about some folks on the progressive liberal left calling the green anarchist/anarcho-primitivist view a perspective coming from privilege.

I have heard this accusation before leveled against anarchists in general, and it irritates me because there is a kernel—maybe a bit more than just a kernel—of truth to it. If you look at the demographic breakdown, the folks who call themselves anarchists or primitivists (and perhaps to a lesser extent the folks who call themselves green anarchists) are, statistically speaking, overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male.

However, those hurling the privilege accusation don’t seem to realize that that very fact actually makes the anarchist point.

I am a white male. And my white male privilege means that I have a degree of freedom of expression and affiliation, and the opportunities to explore and choose my politics, that a person of color or a woman or a trans person might not have. I’m more likely to be listened to and less likely to suffer any serious repercussions when I speak my mind.

I’m a white male, and I’m an anarchist: what are you going to do about it?

If I was a person of color, or a woman, or trans—or god forbid all three!—I would have far more immediate and pressing concerns to deal with related to racism or sexism or transphobia. And the burden of racism or sexism or transphobia would make it less likely that I would want to make myself even more of a target by calling myself an anarchist.

The very existence of my white male privilege makes the anarchist point exactly. As an anarchist, I’m saying that there shouldn’t be privilege of any kind. Inequities based on race or sex or sexual orientation or gender identification are systemic, they are baked into the system, a system that is based on exploitation and oppression, a system that requires social inequality—inequities in power and the unequal distribution of access to resources are the fuel that drives the consumer capitalist machine.

And as a primitivist, I’m saying that once you remove inequities in power and access, the system will grind to a halt, and people—people of every kind—will be free to live authentically human lives.  

Addressing the leaked upcoming Supreme Court ruling on abortion at a news conference a few days ago, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said:

In recent years republican legislators have been racing to pass extreme anti-choice legislation that would send women’s rights back into the Stone Age.

That’s actually a great idea! In fact, I can’t think of a better solution to the abortion rights issue.

Up until the very end of the period known as the “Stone Age,” all humans on the planet were living as small band hunter gatherers, an overwhelmingly egalitarian lifestyle. The very idea that a woman could lose her right to choose what happens to her own body would have been inconceivable.

Part of that has to do with the fact that the notion that people have “rights” was inconceivable. The idea of rights only makes sense after the social world has been embedded within hierarchies of power and oppression. What would it mean to say that I have a “right” to choose to do a thing when there is no one around with any legitimate authority either to force me to do it or to prevent me from doing it?

And when it comes to “reproductive rights,” women living in modern-day hunter-gatherer societies typically have more or less complete bodily autonomy, and can choose to end a pregnancy at any time up to (and even immediately after!) birth. No questions asked.

Seriously, Chuck, we really should send women’s (and everyone’s) rights back into the Stone Age!

Given the point he was obviously trying to make, Schumer’s choice of “Stone Age” was off by a minimum of ten thousand years. In reality, Republican legislators only want to send women’s rights back to the 19^th century, back to a time when women didn’t have much in the way of any rights at all.