Prosthetic Conscience

An excellent article distinguishing between a productive, admirable anarchism, and a counterproductive, unadmirable anarchism, largely along the same lines as Bookchin’s Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism or Brian Oliver Sheppard’s Anarchism vs. Primitivism.

Personally, I find Parecon to be unnecessarily complex, at least as it’s been explained to me, but it’s nice to see people actually thinking about what egalitarian modern social relations would look like.

Also, a side note. It’s interesting to see how the anthropology of smale-scale societies is abused by both primitivists and their opponents. Opponents of primitivism often feel compelled to deny that small-scale, forager societies have any desireable features compared to modern society (or historical agricultural societies), which is simply not true. Primitivists tend to both deny the undesireable features of forager societies, and attribute to them characteristics from primitivist fantasy (absence of technology, absence of language, ideology, and symbolic culture) that probably aren’t true for chimps or extinct hominids, much less human foragers.