Adequate medical care has been a constant concern of anti-primitivists. They have decided that a desire to scale back the intrusion of industrial medicine equals sentencing thousands—if not millions—of people to death, either from lack of any medical care, from starvation, or both. In terms of the medical issue, who are the people whose lives would be in jeopardy in an anarcho-primitivist future? People in renal failure without access to dialysis? People who have to be fed through gastric tubes? People who can’t breathe without being attached to ventilators? Those who are dependent on other interventionist medical procedures like organ transplants? What about the nearly two-hundred thousand who die annually through misdiagnosis, incorrect drug therapy; through negligence or by accident in hospitals, rehabilitation facilities, skilled nursing homes (etc); from botched operations and/or exposure to contagious pathogens? Is there really no decent anarchist critique of the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, with its reliance on LD-50 protocols, animal experimentation, a plethora of injurious or deadly so-called side effects and other unintended results?
It is implied by anti-primitivist anarchists that infections (acne and sepsis?) are inevitably and invariably fatal—an annoyingly typical canard. Those who make this allegation have no understanding of healing techniques among non-civilized humans or the continual use of plant medicines by rural and urban dwellers, not to mention the documented 4000 year-old history of Traditional Asian Medicine. Studies of ethnobotanists and anthropologists overflow with examples of the long-standing use of plant medicines to treat everything from headaches and insomnia to hemorrhages and, yes, infections. Archaeologists have found skeletal remains of early humans who’ve clearly been seriously injured and who survived for years after.
Anti-primitivists who fear life-threatening medical issues also have no comprehension of the history and practice of allopathy—mislabeled Western Medicine by those who share the assumptions of Euro-American colonialism. Aside from being a relatively recent innovation, allopathy as a healing modality allopathy derives many of its successes specifically from military medicine, especially in trauma care. Allopaths tend to be authoritarian, basing their ameliorative treatments on perhaps the strictest division of labor of modern civilization, that between healer and patient. Allopathy is expansionist; its practitioners and protectors continually strive to supplant and/or suppress all other healing modalities. And it is infantilizing; patients are removed from the knowledge and ability to decide upon the course of their own treatments. Allopaths are certainly successful; thousands of their patients are healed, and lives are extended. But is the quantity of those extra years, months, and days in various kinds of debilitating treatments (like chemotherapy or dialysis among others) comparable to the quality of an unalienated, unmediated life—however short(er)? Health concerns seem paramount to most anti-primitivist anarchists, yet there also seems to be no concurrent analysis of the mainstream medical establishment and its inherent and attendant institutions of social control.
By way of contrast, Native American, African, Asian (Traditional and non-traditional), and European herbal healing has a much longer tradition, and is based on empirical progress through trial and error of both practitioners and those with ailments. Probably beginning with observing other animals in their environs, humans have had an extensive plant-based pharmacopeia for almost as long as we have been around as an identifiable species—and some paleo-anthropologists argue that the use of medicinal foods, like the use of fire, has been an integral part of hominid prehistory.

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Why I Am Not An Anti Primitivist

While there are certainly many horrible things about biomedicine, it seems really exotifying to assume that all of these other medical systems are equally efficacious with none of the downsides. All medicines/biologies have upsides and downsides.

But then, the author would probably classify me as anti-primitivist (i mean, just start with the name on the list of problems) anyway, so obv I would find fault in this reasoning.

The history of civilization is the history of beer. In every era and area untouched by civilization, there has been no beer; conversely, virtually everywhere civilization has struck, beer has arrived with it. Civilization – that is to say, hierarchical social structures and consequent relationships of competition, unbridled technological development, and universal alienation – seems to be inextricably linked to alcohol. Our sages, who look back and ahead through time to see beyond the limits of such pernicious culture, tell a parable about our past to explain this link:
Most anthropologists regard the beginnings of agriculture as the inception of civilization. It was this first act of control over the land that brought human beings to think of themselves as distinct from nature, that forced them to become sedentary and possessive, that led to the eventual development of private property and capitalism. But why would hunter/gatherers, whose environment already provided them with all the food they needed, lock themselves in place and give up the nomadic foraging existence they had practiced since the beginning of time for something they already had? It seems more likely – and here, there are anthropologists who agree – that the first ones to domesticate themselves did so in order to brew beer.
This drastic reorganization for the sake of intoxication must have shaken tribal structure and lifeways to the root. Where these “primitive” peoples had once lived in a relaxed and attentive relationship to the providing earth – a relationship that afforded them both personal autonomy and supportive community as well as a great deal of leisure time to spend in admiration of the enchanted world around them – they now alternated periods of slavish hard labor with periods of drunken incompetence and detachment. It’s not hard to imagine that this situation hastened, if not necessitated, the rise to power of masters, overseers who saw to it that the toilsome tasks of fixed living were carried out by the frequently inebriated and incapable tribespeople. Without these chiefs and the primitive judicial systems they instituted, it must have seemed that life itself would be impossible: and thus, under the foul auspices of alcoholism, the embryonic State was conceived.

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The Anarcho-Primitivist case for Straight Edge: Against His-Story, Against Alcoholocaust! [via]

anarcho-primitivists!

idk i guess the idea that its basically impossible to have enough excess grain to cook down and use as a base for alcohol (also: a pretty decent way of storing calories so they don’t spoil) without having some sort of organized cultivation of said grain wasn’t an interesting enough topic for a crimethinc. pamphlet! We obv moved out of the idyllic hunter/gatherer lifestyle only because of the raging alcoholic statists amongst us. Its not like human beings/other animals would have developed reward systems that would encourage us to repeatedly engage in pleasurable behaviors (e.g. consuming alcohol) in that beautiful period before we were domesticated.

Syndicalism and anarchism are complementary, but not identical, political theories of social and democratic transformation. Anarchists of all descriptions seek to eliminate state functions and institutions. But many disparate anti- or non-state world views are unified in the madness of armchair pseudo-anarchism. In the Anglo-American world, anarcho-syndicalists are confronted by the intellectual equivalent of pathological lunacy in the bipolarity of libertarian free-marketeers and libertarian survivalists (primitivists), both asserting a clearly unfounded claim to carry the anarchist flag. Anarchism, according to these ways of thinking, is either back to the caves or back to the market! Non-anarchist syndicalism provides an opportunity and an ideology, albeit a somewhat narrow one, to bypass such idiotic, impractical and contradictory pseudo-anarchist positions. The worst enemies of anarchism are often the “anarchists” themselves.

— Primitivism, post-Modernism, Chomsky and anarchism