The Anti-Authoritarianism of Fredy Perlman

April 24, 2001

Today, the thinker most likely to be associated with anarcho-primitivism (also called anti-authoritarian primitivism, or radical primitivism, or the anti-civilization movement, or just, primitivism) by non-primitivists is John Zerzan. This focus, in my opinion, is undeserved. There are a number of other thinkers who have had just as much influence on primitivist thought as John Zerzan. One major thinker in anarcho-primitivist philosophy was Fredy Perlman. Primitivism is not a monolithic philosophy; there are numerous disagreements among primitivists and many disagreements between Zerzan and Perlman. Primitivism, and by extension Fredy Perlman's ideas, are too often maligned as wanting to "return to the stone age" and advocating "nazi-style death camps to reduce the population." This smear tactics only serve to obscure that, while certain aspects of primitivism are flawed, it still offers some insights that should not be ignored.

Fredy Perlman was born on August 20, 1930 in Brno, Czechoslovakia. His family moved to Bolivia in 1938, just before the Nazi takeover, and then to the United States in 1945. They eventually settled in Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, where he graduated from high school. He attended Moorhead State College in Kentucky in 1952 and then transferred to UCLA, which he attended from 1953-55. From 1956 to 1959 he attended Columbia University, originally enrolling in English Literature but his efforts soon concentrated in philosophy, political science and European literature. One of his most influential teachers at Columbia University was C. Wright Mills. It was at Columbia where he met his lifelong companion Lorraine Nybakken.

In the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis he and Lorraine left the United States for Europe. He was in France during the May-June revolt of 1968 and subsequently collaborated with Roger Gregoire to write Worker-Student Action Committees, May '68. In 1970 Fredy was one of a large number of people who helped found the Detroit printing co-op and Red & Black publishing. From 1977 to 1980 he studied and charted world history, travelling to historic sites in Egypt, Turkey, Europe and parts of the United States with Lorraine. In 1980 he began a comprehensive history of The Straight (Detroit and surrounding areas), which he never completed. On July 26th, 1985 Fredy underwent heart surgery to replace two valves. His heart did not resume functioning at the end of the operation.

Central to many of Perlman's writings was the problem of freedom - why people choose to remain passive participants in our own alienation and reproduce our own oppression. An essay he wrote in 1969, "The Reproduction of Daily Life" dealt with this issue. In this essay, he claimed that people reproduce their own oppression through our daily lives, by following oppressive social patterns.

It was in the 1970s that Perlman started to move beyond Marxism and classical anarchism towards what is today called anarcho-primitivism. It is important to note that Perlman usually avoided labels, once stating, “the only -ist name I respond to is ‘cellist’.” (Moore) Anarcho-Primitivists do not seek to be adherents to any particular ideology but to be free people living in a free society. Primitivism is not an ideology but rather a convenient label used to characterize diverse individuals with a common goal: the abolition of all power relations.

It is a common misconception that anarcho-primitivists seeks to simply return to a hunter-gatherer society. A major part of primitivism is the acknowledgement that we can learn a lot from primitive peoples and that the development of civilization has been a generally negative experience. For primitivists pre-civilization peoples are a profound source of inspiration, not necessarily something that should be completely replicated. Many acknowledge that primitive peoples had some negative aspects, such as elements of geronocracy and patriarchy, and do not seek to recreate those negative aspects. In "The Primitivist Critique of Civilization" the Primitivist Richard Heinburg even says that: "we cannot all revert to gathering and hunting today because there are just too many of us."

Anti-Authoritarian Primitivists are opposed to industrialism, technology, civilization, hierarchy, and all other systems of control. From the perspective of primitivism, all other radical philosophies are reformist. They all seek to take over civilization, to rework it so as to remove their worst abuses, but will ultimately leave most of daily life unchanged. Impersonal institutions, technology, the western model of progress, mass society, and the separation between humans and nature would continue to exist in both Marxist and classical anarchist societies; primitivists would abolish them all. There is no blueprint for what such a society would look like, but pre-civilization societies can serve as a useful guide.

In 1982-3 Perlman took time out from writing The Straight to write Against His-story, Against Leviathan!, one of the most important anarcho-primitivist texts written. This book is basically his interpretation of history and the story of the resistance to civilization. In addition to containing an excellent interpretation of history, it is also an entertaining and well-written book. Anyone with an interest in history should read this book.

He begins with a description of life before civilization, of hunter-gatherer societies, of anarchy. He refutes the myth that primitive peoples lived in some kind of hellhole and that civilization is inherently superior to primitivist anarchy. He is correct that, in many parts of the world, life in hunter-gatherer societies was not "short, brutish and nasty." In fact, "short brutish and nasty" would be a better description of life in civilization, not outside of it.

Just imagine yourself in such a society:

There is complete equality of the sexes, no government, no ecological destruction, no property, no hierarchy and no one forcing you to do anything you don't want to do. You are born into a loving community that you stay with your whole life; there are no bullies or abusive parents to torture children and create psychological diseases that last into adulthood. Plagues cannot spread as far as they can today because there are no worldwide lines of transportation to spread the disease. Modern industry & technology actually creates more health problems then it solves; Mark Nathan Cohen's Health and the Rise of Civilization found that primitive peoples actually had pretty good health compared to modern societies.

If you are hungry simply pick some fruit off a tree or berries of a bush or kill an animal. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying data on hunter-gatherer societies, found that they worked an average of 4 hours a day and what she called work is almost indistinguishable from what we call play. Compare this to the over eight-hours a day of alienated, oppressive labor the average American worker must perform today. Would such a society really be so bad? Especially for the billions who live in poverty today, it would not be.

Not all primitive societies were exactly like this, however. Some places had limited resources, so people had to work longer to produce food. Others didn't have total equality of the sexes and some had elements of ageism. Perlman ignores this and idealizes pre-civilization life. He describes the state of nature, life outside civilization, as a "community of freedoms":

Trees, fish and insects are free as they grow from seed to maturity, each realizing is own potential, its wish - until the insect's freedom is curtailed by the bird's. The eaten insect has made a gift of its freedom to the bird's freedom. The bird, in its turn, drops and manures the seed of the insect's favorite plant, enhancing the freedom of the insect's heirs.

The state of nature is a community of freedoms. (Page 7)

This description is rather absurd. I really doubt the insect views his/her being attacked and eaten as a "gift". There was definitely more freedom in the state of nature, but there were still some injustices.

Perlman ridicules various "stages" theories of history, including Marxism, which see the rise of civilization as an inevitable advance in human history. These stages theories of history are essentially just an apology for oppression, mass murder, and slavery. The Marxist interpretation of history is based on the racist Lewis Henry Morgan's stages theory of cultural evolution. This theory saw all societies evolving from "savagery" through various stages, with the "great white race" on the top of the evolutionary ladder. In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State the revolutionary factory-owner Fredrick Engels modified this racist theory by renaming the great white race the capitalist class and adding a new rung - the rule of the leaders and followers of Marx's political party - on top.

Perlman's critique of the Marxist theory of history is dead on. Many societies did not follow these stages (the Chinese and the Mayans are two societies who didn't follow them). Furthermore, its account of the origins of civilization is erroneous. Just because a society produces a surplus doesn't mean it must develop classes and a state. As Perlman sarcastically states, "this surplus, this margin, is what supports, literally feeds, the brave new world that now becomes possible: kings, generals of armies, slavemasters, bosses of labor gangs. Man had always wanted rulers, permanent armies, slavery division of labor, but he couldn't realize these dreams until the material conditions became ripe." There were many societies in North America and elsewhere which had a surplus but did not create classes or the state. In Mesopotamia the surpluses didn't come about until after the development of classes, the state and civilization.

Perlman then describes the beginnings of civilization, which he calls leviathan, in Mesopotamia. Basically, Mesopotamia was a place which was difficult to survive in (one of the exceptions to the pre-civilization utopia) and some of the tribes selected a person, called a Lugal, to be in charge of building irrigation to make planting easier. Eventually, one tribe's dam broke and flooded another tribe's irrigation, destroying their work. This angered the second tribe's Lugal, who led an attack on the first tribe and forced them to rebuild their irrigation. By forcing the other tribe to build irrigation for them, classes were created. This act lead to armed conflict and the establishment of the state.

From there the leviathan spread around the globe. Faced with an aggressive attack, pre-civilization peoples had to either flee the area or find some way to resist being conquered. Resistance generally meant forming defensive federations, armies and the like. In most cases, if the resistance managed to defeat the attacking civilization they would still be enslaved in a leviathan because in order to defend themselves they would have to create impersonal institutions and/or a state. This encased the defending peoples in a leviathan of their own, and hastened the spread of leviathans. Perlman sees the creation of impersonal institutions as the moment where anarchy begins to be dismantled by civilized social relations. This is different from John Zerzan, who sees symbolic mediation (language, numbers, time, art, agriculture, etc.) as the point where anarchy starts to give way to civilization.

Perlman claims that the first one somehow caused all other leviathans. Conquest, wars, trade and other means caused others to create their leviathans across the globe. He claims that people with leviathanic conditioning who traveled to the Americas caused civilizations in ancient America, such as the Mayans and Incas. This seems to be a bit of a stretch and there isn't a lot of positive evidence to support this contention. There is a definite anti-realist tendency in Against His-Story, Against Leviathan!, so that lack of evidence probably wouldn't bother Perlman as much as it bothers me. This doesn't weaken his claims much, though, because his critique of civilization would be true even if it evolved independently in different areas.

Perlman described the first Leviathan as a worm. Later leviathans would be what he would call an octopus. Worm leviathans are land based military empires, octopuses are commercial empires. The Phoenicians were the first octopus and Europe would later develop a hybrid worm-octopus starting in the renaissance and the crusades.

Against His-story, Against Leviathan! also discuses the problem of freedom which was central to many of his other writings. With the rise of the leviathan society became divided into classes. There was the Lugal, the guy on top, the Ensi, his underlings, and the Zeks, who were the first workers/slaves. The first Zeks were forced to be Zeks by physical force. But this was not the case with many later Zeks, who greatly outnumbered the Ensi and Lugal. The process of encasing people in a leviathan also encases our minds in armor. We are socially conditioned to be slaves; institutions take on a life of their own and begin to rule us. No one, not even the rulers, is free anymore. We are all subject to the rule of impersonal institutions.

These leviathans are dead things in constant decay and decomposition. The people trapped in them are not free, living human beings but wheels and springs in leviathan. Against His-story, Against Leviathan! is the tale of the resistance to civilization. There are countless resistance movements, which the his-story we are taught in government schools completely ignores. Virtually every pre-civilization society experiences unrest from it's Zeks. Ancient Egypt even experienced an anarchist revolution that nearly destroyed their civilization. Several generations after the revolution what remained of the leviathan were able to reestablish itself and destroy anarchy. Given enough time, every leviathan eventually decays and dies. When this happens another leviathan usually swallows it.

Many people resist by fleeing civilization and returning to the wild. One of these retreats was lead by a man called Moses. Once out of the grips of civilization, they start to form their own leviathan. Many of Moses's followers started to return to a pre-civilization spiritually by worshiping a golden cow. Moses, who still wore the armor of civilization despite fleeing it, put a stop to this. He forced the population to instead worship Yahweh, the personification of leviathan itself. As Perlamn puts it, "he lets the armor take over. He stiffens. … He lets Leviathan speak through him. … Now Moses becomes an actual forerunner of Lenin." (page 57).

The resistance against Leviathan continues into the Roman Empire. During its reign there developed numerous "crisis cults" which resisted civilization. These cults did not flee from Rome the way Moses & followers fled. They attempted to remove the armor while remaining in leviathan. Many prophecies were developed predicting the imminent fall of Rome and a return to freedom, a utopia, afterwards. These revolutionary theories remind me of the many socialist theories in our own day which claim that the fall of capitalism is imminent and that a communist utopia will be ushered in afterwards.

One of the largest crisis cults was Christianity. This cult was co-opted by the Romans and used to support their cruel regime. Christianity went from a liberation force to one that supported tyranny. Immediately after the fall of the Roman Empire they tried to resurrect it, eventually creating the Holy Roman Empire. Official Christianity has been a mainly evil force ever since.

The Catholic church succeeded in resurrecting leviathan in Europe, but not the Leviathan they wanted. Their Holy Roman Empire was never a fully functional leviathan and eventually fell apart. Before that happened they planted the seeds which would evolve into kings, nation-states, and lords.

Later the rulers would throw off the Catholic Church in an event known as the reformation. Before the reformation there was a massive radical, sometimes anarchist, movement against the church, the lords, and civilization. Peasant rebellions broke out all over Europe. Part of northern Europe erupted in a social revolution more radical and profound then the later French and Russian Revolutions. His-story records this as the Hussite wars, but that is a misnomer since the Hussites were only one of many factions involved (and the most moderate faction, at that).

Anarchy was restored and a "league of five cities" proclaimed. The Catholics did not like this and sent armies to attack them. They did not intend to force the revolutionaries to go back to living in civilization; they intended to kill every last revolutionary. The anarchists organized their own army and defeated the church. In doing so they defeated themselves and destroyed anarchy. The military basically turned into a new state and destroyed anarchy.

This presents a very powerful case for pacifism. If we institutionalize violence then we will end up re-enslaving ourselves to the new institutions we create. On the other hand, it's only when this violence is institutionalized that this happens. The Adamites, another faction in the Hussite wars, used non-institutionalized violence to fight the Catholics and did not recreate the same institutions they were fighting. But non-institutionalized violence was not nearly as effective against the Catholics as the institutionalized violence.

The influence of Muslim merchants created markets in Europe, which helped create the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie would take advantage of wars, at first the crusades, to sell their goods. Unlike Muslims, these Burghers did not have the restraints on trade imposed by Islam. As soon as the Catholic church gets thrown off and the bourgeoisie goes secular they develop an ethic of production for production's sake and civilization for civilization's sake. Profit gets put before all else. Leviathan no longer has to hide behind religions or other ornaments; the rationalists worship it directly. This new beast eventually eats all the other leviathans and begins to eat the biosphere herself.

Throughout the book, Perlman critiques the Marxist interpretation of history. He correctly points out that the development of the means of production is not the driving force behind his-story. The means of production are one of many characteristics of each leviathan and change with different leviathans. Their development goes up and down. For example, the Phoenicians had an advanced maritime technology that would not be rivaled for millennia until after their fall. Perlman sees technology as being a relatively minor part of civilization, its "fangs and claws." This is very different from other primitivists, such as John Zerzan, who see technology as being a central evil.

Perlman also critiques the ideas of many anarchists. He claims that the networks of factories and neighborhood councils advocated by many anarchists are basically a state, although we don't call them that. He says that to have Anarchy you have to dismantle industrialism. While I wouldn't call networks of factories a state, he does have a point that such a society would be less then ideal. We'd still be subject to control by various impersonal institutions and wouldn't be completely free. However, I have a hard time seeing how you could feed a world of six billion people without having some kind of industrialism. We could slowly reduce the population after the revolution until we can abandon industry without starving to death, but this would be a multi-generational project.

One of the last places where people remained free was the Western Hemisphere, the "new" world. Leviathans had very limited success here. The reason for this was not some "material conditions" which was hostile to civilization. According to Perlman, "those who cling to this pseudo-explanation must first explain why the most powerful of Leviathans will subsequently flourish in the very same material conditions. The so-called material conditions are Leviathan's garments, not the ground it stands on." The reason for the previous failure of civilization to conquer the Western Hemisphere was due to human resistance to it. The population refused to wear the armor and to become slaves. Their resistance was successful, whereas the Europeans had not been.

The main reason they were unable to resist the wave of conquest unleashed in the wake of Columbus was the plague. European diseases devastated both continents, enabling the Europeans to conquer the hemisphere. By the time their victims recovered from the plague it was too late. Massive resistance happened even with the plague. As previous peoples had done, the Native Americans formed defense federations and militaries to fight off the invaders. Unlike previous peoples, the Native Americans dismantled their militaries whenever they threatened to encase themselves in their own leviathan. Many whites left their settlements and joined the native tribes, to live in freedom. Very few natives did the opposite, showing that civilization is not as attractive as the progress-worshipers would have us believe.

Eventually the Western Hemisphere was conquered and the entire globe came to be ruled by the Europeans. There are no more free peoples. Everyone has been enslaved.

By conquering the globe, this European leviathan also laid the basis for the destruction of all leviathans. Every empire eventually falls. In the past, whenever an empire would fall there would be another empire that would swallow up its remnants or create new empires. But now there is only one empire spanning the entire globe. When this empire falls there will be no other empires to take it's place and we will have a real opportunity to rid ourselves of empires forever. Perlman thinks the fall of this empire will probably come about as the result of a military conflict and the subsequent destruction of civilization.

When I first started reading Perlman's works and other anarcho-primitivist writings I had a very negative attitude towards primitivism and thought they were totally wrong. I read them because I think you should understand a philosophy before you entirely reject it. The more I have read the more sympathetic to primitivism I have become. With a critique of almost everything, anti-authoritarian primitivism is the most radical philosophy I have ever encountered. Although there are some flaws in it, it also offers insights into many aspects of society which are too often ignored and deserves a far more serious examination then most people, even so-called radicals, have given it.