Anarcho-Primitivism
Anarcho-primitivism holds that the root of domination is civilisation itself, beginning with agriculture and continuing through industry and technology. It looks to small hunter-gatherer bands as evidence that humans can live without hierarchy, and calls for dismantling industrial society.
- Agriculture, division of labour and industrial technology produced hierarchy and alienation.
- Technology is not neutral; it brings social control with it.
- A freer life requires returning to smaller, simpler and wilder ways of living.
The current emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, chiefly through John Zerzan's essays in Elements of Refusal (1988) and Future Primitive (1994). It drew on anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins, whose "original affluent society" essay argued that foragers worked less than farmers. Fredy Perlman's Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! (1983) was another influence.
Critics point out that the world's population could not be fed without agriculture and industry, so the programme implies mass death. Other anarchists consider it a rejection of the emancipatory potential of technology and of solidarity at scale.
No country or historical regime in our data has Anarcho-Primitivism as its closest ideology.
Method: each ideology is placed at a typical position on the 12 axes, scored from 0 to 100 toward the first pole. Ranks compare it with the other 45 ideologies; matches are 100 minus the average distance across all axes. The positions are our own calibration, not taken from any third-party source.