Ali's Blog
One sometimes suspects that Hobbes came up with his “State of Nature” after waking up one night from a particularly vivid nightmare, the sort in which feral ghosts jostle for survival on a barren heath while thunderclouds gather in the distance. If there’s a singular achievement in his Leviathan, it’s his success in persuading generations of thinkers that these visions described an actual human past (even if this was not his original intention). The concept itself was a crisis-laden pitch to justify a sovereign, one that might keep the newly restored King Charles II (who Hobbes tutored as child) safely enthroned after a period of English Civil War and bouts of relgious wars across the Contintent, in which Hobbes perhaps saw that, without a paternal figure in the palace, we are all doomed to tear at one another’s throats like starved wolves. The story itself was successful (though the book was not at first; it was ceremonially burned in Oxford, as it was considered blasphemous to claim that political legimtacy is not grounded on the divine rights of kings, but our 'common human nature'). The phrase 'state of nature' was common and regularly invoked in popular culture such as plays. It tapped into the anxieties of an age when the crumbling of feudal hierarchies and religous dogma left people grasping for new myths to suture the social order. In other words, it was a parochial, historically contingent story during 17th century England. The Leviathan thus comes to be a confession that authority, to sustain itself, must first invent the specter of its own impossibility
One of the more troubling Hobbesian legacies is the caricature of hunter-gatherers as inherently violent and inept. When Hobbes wrote that “the savage people in many places of America” are statleless and “live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before” he was in fact renewing an old prejdice, I'd like to call the Neolithic prejudice; a prejudice born out of the agricultural revolution, when the tillers of soil began to construct their identity in opposition to the wanderers beyond the fence. Obviously, I am not positing a rigid binary that existed everywhere, at all times; we find semi-nomads across the Arabian Peninula to the Seppe well into the early 20th century. Notwithstanding that the imagination of the so-called agricultural revoltution often conjures up the image of a sudden overnight switch from pure foraging to pure farming, when in fact groups, until relatively recently, often only partially or seasonally farmed, mixed it with fishing, hunting or gathering.
Be that as it may, I see no reason to think that farmers developed the nasty image of foragers through the same exclusionary identity formation processes at play more generally. Identities are forged through their negation. They are constitutionally exclusionary; their ontological make-up depends on not being some other group, and boundaries are drawn in relation to one another through categorical oppositions that are reified over time. More often than not, these distinctions are grounded on ecological and economical factors, hence the prejudice of sedentary vs nomadic, serf vs free Cossack, hill vs valley, coastal vs desert, and so on, such that each identity boundary is marked by what ecological niche it excludes (the other group). This is partly because, as anthropologist James Scott notes, many group labels begin as a mere descriptor of where people live (hill, valley, upstream/downstream) or how they make a living (foraging, pastoralism, paddy farming, etc.). Over time, that ecological or occupational label (“those who live in the hills,” “those who live by the river”) turns into an ethnic or tribal name, first as an exonym (“hill savages,” “people beyond the mountains”), and later, sometimes appropriated as an autonym (“we are Mizo,” “we are Orang Bukit”).
Put another way, differences in where and how people subsist, where they farm, herd, fish, or gather, often overlap with the social boundaries between ‘ethnicities’ - as so constructed. Thus the common exonym applied to hunter-gatherers by agrarians as ‘savages’. But because many foraging peoples historically had fewer channels (written, media, political) to articulate a public reappropriation, they were simply known as the various synonyms of ‘savages’. Though I can recall a couple examples, such as that of the San Bushmen, which was a colonial/settler label given by the Afrikaans to the foraging groups in South Africa. ‘San’ is itself an older exonym from the Khoikhoi language meaning roughly ‘those without cattle’, also a derogatory label. Today many of those who speak Khoisan languages in Botswana and Namibia do occasionally self-refer as ‘Bushmen’ and ‘San’ for pragmatic reasons as it is the recognised category in legal or NGO contexts. A similar case is found with the Eskimos (derived from a neighbouring Algonquian term glossed as ‘eaters of raw meat’ but some in Yupik and Inupiat communities use the label).
The identity of Agrarians thus became contingent on a Neolithic prejudice in relation to other groups, not least, hunter-gatherers, who are not simply peoples occupying a different ecological niche, but are also fundamentally different people, people who are less advanced, barbarians, savages, backwards, uncivilised, and so on. However, here, I must rely on inference since there is a principled distinction between the first farmers who were small-scale agriculturalists and left little or no written record, and the early literate agrarian societies that emerged later (like those in the Fertile Crescent and the Nile Valley). Most of the textual sources describing how settled peoples viewed nomads or foragers come from the second category. That’s where we see clear evidence of 'othering' and negative stereotyping. Once we get to Bronze Age city-states and early empires in Mesopotamia, China and Egypt, there are references to “barbaric” peoples in the hills or deserts.
Thus the Mesopotamian descriptions of the Gutians and Lullu mountain peoples as animals, and the Epic of Gilgamesh itself portrays Enkidu as the ‘wild man’ from the steppe, lives among animals, drinks at water holes, knows no clothes, no city customs until a harlot ‘civilises’ him into the superior Uruk’s way of life. Thus, too, one finds in early Chinese discourse (starting roughly in the Western Zhou period, ca. 1046–771 BCE, and continuing into the Spring and Autumn period), references to peripheral groups collectively called the Róng (戎), Yí (夷), Mán (蛮), and Dí (狄), namely the ‘Four Barbarians’, describing them as outsiders who do not follow the Chinese rites, have strange customs, speak unintelligible languages, etc. This same discourse is carried through on to the Han Dynasty which frequents the idea of how the sedentary Chinese Han farming society is superior to that of the nomadic pastoralists and semi-foragers on China’s norther frontier, who are described in Sima Qian’s ‘Records of the Grand Historian’ (Shǐjì, 史记) in disdainful terms for their “uncivilised” lifestyle. Even during the modern periods of the Ming/Qing dynasty, gazetteers often describe mountain-dwelling Miao or Yao peoples as wild, living off the mountains, refusing assimilation, and hence ‘uncivilised’. The texts rarely posit, “They are hunter-gatherers, so they are inferior in virtue of that”, but one find a general prejudice: “They do not live like us (no walled cities, no stable fields, no rituals we recognize), so they are inferior".
In any case, whether the neolithic prejudice intensfied with the formation of large-scale, organised settlements or emerged with the first farmers (who were often quite small and relatively egalitarian themselves) is orthogonal to my thesis. The general process of identity formation against an 'other' is a constant in human groups, and the fact that it is often tied to ecological-subsistence differences is well-established. As agriculture began to dominate in response to population growth, the identity of Agrarians became more entrenched as ‘not hunter-gatherers’, and the narrative of 'civilisation' was built in opposition to ‘primitive’ and agricultural societies started to project their own values (such as permanence, productivity, and control over the land) as superior to the values of hunter-gatherer life (leisure, mobility and freedom). The forager’s mobility is now recast as rootlessness, their leisure as laziness and their adaptability as ignorance. The Neolithic farmer, sweating under the sun for most of the day, could only justify his toil by rendering the hunter-gatherer who neither cultivated fields nor built permanent settlements, as an unproductive and backward.
That is not to deny that there are real, observable differences between foragers and agrarians in terms of subsistence routines, material cultures, rituals, and ways of life, and these difference are not social constructs. But the point is that these differences do not, in themselves, provide any meaningful grounds for making decisions about what evaluative views one group should hold about the other, nor for that matter, about what actions one group should perfom unto the other. It is, in other words, the political significance and the social meanings that were, and are, attached to these differrences which are socially constructed. It is entirely possible, for example, for a group to think of itself as having one shared identity but where memebers of the group practice differing susbsitence activities, or for two groups who occupy different ecological niches and practice different subsistence activites to be completely in awe of one another, or even to hold the view that, they are part of the same group just in virtue of those differences. But what had happened is that these descriptive differences developed into a Neolithic prejudice that justified the dispossession of foragers and monopolised their resources, most illustratively when Europeans landed on the shores of the New World.
It was upon this prejudice that Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823 very candidly iterated his version of the Neolithic prejudice and colonial history, stating that, though it is usally the case that when a "title [to land] by conquest is acquired and maintained by force", the conquered peoples are made to assimilate into the society of the colonial power, and their rights to their property remain intact. But this cannot be applied to the Indians, due ot their "character and habits":
“But the tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages, whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the forest. To leave them in possession of their country, was to leave the country a wilderness ... As the white population advanced, that of the Indians necessarily receded. The country in the immediate neighborhood of agriculturalists became unfit for them. The game fled into thicker and more unbroken forests, and the Indians followed. The soil, to which the crown originally claimed title, being no longer occupied by its ancient inhabitants, was parceled out accordingly to the will of the sovereign power”.
And just like that, a linguistic speech act erases a millennia of reciprocal relations with the land and prepare the ground for their displacement. In the next decade, Georgia invoked reasoning similar to that of Chief Justice Marshall to displace all tribes from within its borders and President Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act 1830 into law, saying “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it”.
Morally appalling though such events may be, they also rest on a fundamental anthropological fallacy. In many recorded cases, hunter-gatherers understood full well what farming entailed and simply refused it. They were often surrounded all around them by farming communities. “Why,” they retort, “should we chain ourselves to a plot of dirt, praying for rain and fretting over blight, when the forest offers figs and game without the hassle of tax collectors or warlords?” The forager’s calculus was simple: why work harder for less freedom, less health and more hierarchy?
That agrarian societies eventually proliferated says less about the inherent superiority of ploughs than about the demographic vise of population growth—a material constraint masquerading, in hindsight, as a moral triumph. That is, as populations grew, agriculture became more common, land more valuable, and labour less so. The idea of surplus production became the norm within Agrarian settlements to protect against annual variation in crop yield. No longer needing a nomadic lifestyle, these settlements expanded and began to tie the legitimacy of land use to its transformation into private property and productive output, where the development of property and surplus production became synonymous to economic 'progress', and societies that didn’t fit this logic were considered deficient.
The transition to agriculture was never a Lockeian covenant with Progress. It was a messy, reluctant adaptation that demanded new tools and new stories to stamp out egalitarian tendencies. Collective labour must be re-imagined as individual duty, communal land as private property and shared abundance as sinful indolence (though Calvin would later perfect this ideology and transmute toil into virtue and leisure into vice). In short, the Neolithic workaround began as a way to feed more mouths on less land but hardened into a teleology that still embodies our economic imaginaries. A Neolithic hangover still, for example, equates “progress” with stockpiling surplus instead of sufficiency, still believes in infinite human wants, that production and consumption must be organised around the principle of scarcity, and assumes human flourishing to be reducible to yield-per-acre ratios.
None of this is to deny the brute facts of demography or ecology. But facts, as Nietzsche says, are stubborn only until we reinterpret them. When Chief Justice Marshall declared Indigenous lands “wilderness”, he wasn’t exactly parsing ecosystems; he was performing a speech act that turned reciprocal kinship with the land into a void awaiting colonial inscription. The forager’s "failure” to “improve” the soil—a failure that justified dispossession—was never about agronomy but about the power to define what counts as work, value, in short, civilisation.
Decades before Hobbes wrote his Leviathan, Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) gave a strikingly different perspective on 'savagery' in his essay 'Of Cannibals'. Although Montaigne never sailed to Brazil himself, he read accounts of the Tupinambá people—often labeled “barbarians” and rumored to engage in cannibal rituals—and used them to reflect on the violence of his own European context. Unlike Hobbes, Montaigne suspected that what Europeans derided in others might well exist in more insidious forms at home, that self-congratulatory talk of 'civilisation' is a European projections, and that the concept 'savage' may well be more suited to describe the actions of the soldiers who pillaged across the continent in the name of creed or crown, the Europeans who burn heretics alive on the cross, least of all, that there are “people “bloated with all sorts of comforts” while others are “begging at their doors.”
In one well-known passage, Montaigne writes:
“I find that there is nothing barbarous or savage in this nation, by anything that I can gather, excepting that every one calls ‘barbarism’ whatever is not his own practice; for indeed, we have no other level of truth and reason, than the example and idea of the opinions and customs of the country we live in.”
If we accept the Hobbesian story and its underlying Neolithic prejudice, then we are also accepting the hierarchies, control systems, and coercive structures of the state as unavoidable, even beneficial. But the entire narrative hinges on speculative philosophy about what we believe life was like before the agricultural revolution. Unfortunately, we do not have time machines to travel back 12,000 years ago and observe pre-contact hunter-gatherer societies as they were then.
Other than recent archaeological data in paleopathology, barely any careful ethnological observations of pre-contact hunter-gatherers exist outside of the meandering, ethnocentric journals of 18th-century European explorers and missionaries. Contact has always been overwhelmingly destructive for these societies. But even so, the ethnological data of the few surviving contemporary hunter-gatherer groups paint an entirely different picture of our traditional understanding of hunter-gatherers.
Reappraisal of Hunter Gatherers: The Original Affluent Society
Our perception of early hunter gatherers societies really only began to change during the mid-20th century, when a confluence of anthropological and archaeological discoveries, synthesised most provocatively by Marshall Sahlins in his seminal 1966 essay The Original Affluent Society, dismantled these entrenched narratives through a radical reconceptualisation of ‘affluence’ itself. Sahlins’ intervention was levied at, first: the ethnocentric presuppositions smuggled into earlier accounts by colonial observers and Enlightenment social theorists, whose bourgeois materialist frameworks equated well-being with accumulation; and second, the teleological assumptions undergirding stadial theories of progress that positioned hunter-gatherers as prisoners of a Hobbesian “state of nature.” Against these axioms, Sahlins posited that such societies achieved affluence not through maximal production but through the minimization of desires, thereby securing a “satiety of wants” with minimal labor expenditure. This counterintuitive reformulation necessitated, as we shall see, both a rigorous relativising of evaluative criteria and an analysis of how cultural practices shape the very desires they purport to fulfilll.
To understand Sahlins’ thesis, one must first decouple ‘affluence’ from its colloquial association with material plenitude. Affluence, he insists, is not an objective state indexed to absolute resource thresholds but a relational condition contingent on the alignment between culturally mediated desires and the means available to satisfy them. Thus affluence must be indexed to the internal value structures of a society. Early European travellers who were acculturated in the logic of industrial capitalism, committed a categorical error by projecting their own insatiable appetites for surplus onto hunter-gatherer groups, and thereby misdiagnosing a deliberate rejection of accumulation and a preference for leisure, mobility, and communal reciprocity as evidence of civilizational deficiency. This epistemic violence, Sahlins argues, is a violence commited when universalising desires as culturally-independent entities insofar as it lead to equating affluence with material abundance and thus naturalising historically contingent notions of scarcity and obscuring how cultures actively cultivate and constrain desires through symbolic and institutional practices.
Thus, the first axiom of Sahlins’ analysis—that judgments of affluence must be relativised to the agents’ own frames of reference—leads inexorably to the second: the cultural construction of desire. If affluence is the ratio between wants and means, then societies pursue it through two antithetical strategies. The Galbraithean model (productive affluence), dominant in industrial capitalism, operates under the premise that desires are infinite and insatiable; affluence is thus pursued via the Sisyphean project of expanding productive capacities to narrow the chasm between escalating wants and limited means. The hunter-gatherer model (Zen affluence), by contrast, achieves equilibrium not by producing more but by desiring less, a feat accomplished through cultural practices that inculcate ascetic dispositions, ritualise sharing, and stigmatise hoarding. Importantly, this is not a ‘natural’ condition of primal simplicity but a systemic outcome of institutional norms that actively suppress materialist aspirations and ensures that wants remain “few and finite” and easily met within existing ecological constraints.
Where the Galbraithean model binds affluence to exponential growth (a trajectory ecologically untenable and perpetually self-defeating) the Zen model severs well-being from accumulation and redefines prosperity as freedom from superfluous wants rather than freedom to consume. Sahlins thereby inverts the Neolithic prejudice narrative: hunter-gatherers, far from being precursors to ‘economic man’, emerge as pragmatic agents of sufficiency where their affluence is in the disjuncture between modest desires and abundant means.
Hunter Gatherers Are Healthier than Us
Australian Aboriginals
The teleological narrative of human progress, in which a linear ascent from the ‘primitive’ privations of hunter-gatherer subsistence to the nutritional security of agrarian and industrial societies, collapses under the weight of empirical data. Not only were hunter-gatherers better nourished than the majority of contemporary urban populations, but their dietary regimes surpassed the caloric and nutrient standards of the National Research Council of America. At Hemple Bay, a four-day observational study recorded a mean daily intake of 2,160 calories per person; at Fish Creek, over eleven days, the figure was 2,130 calories. The San Bushmen, long mythologised as emaciated inhabitants of the Kalahari, consumed approximately 2,140 calories daily, exceeding their estimated requirement of 1,975 calories when adjusted for body weight, activity levels, and demographic variables. Meanwhile the Hadza of Tanzania averaged a robust 3,000 calories per day, with surplus provisions redistributed to communal networks or, intriguingly, to domesticated dogs. Malnutrition was conspicuously absent. Compare this with the urban poor in many undeveloped nations who consume around 1500 calories per day and where malnutrition is prevalent, trapped as they are in food deserts and subjected to the caprices of global commodity markets.
The presumption that calorific adequacy correlates with agricultural surplus is further dismantled by bioarchaeological evidence. In their seminal 1984 meta-analysis, Cohen and Armelagos demonstrated that pre-agricultural populations, such as Late Upper Paleolithic European hunter-gatherers, exhibited greater stature, denser bone structures, and superior dental health compared to their Neolithic successors, whose transition to sedentism and grain dependence coincided with a marked decline in physiological robustness, primarily for their trade of dietary heterogeneity for caloric dependency on starch-heavy staples (wheat, rice, maize). Skeletal remains from agrarian sites reveal pervasive signs of anemia, enamel hypoplasias, and infectious lesions, pathologies conspicuously absent among nomadic foragers.
The Material Plenty of Hunter Gatherers
Upon even a cursory examination of the ethnographic record, one finds that food is abundant and easily accessible in hunter-gatherer societies. The Dobe !Kung Bushmen, for example, who were visited by a group of anthropologists during a year of atypical harsh environmental conditions, in which annual rainfall was as low as 6 to 10 inches, they nevertheless thrived in abundant vegetation in which mangetti nuts were found littering the ground in such profusion that they rotted unused and their caloric redundancy rendered accumulation superfluous. Here, the labour of a single individual could sustain four to five people, a ratio that, as Sahlins wryly notes, surpasses the productive efficiency of French agriculture circa 1939, when over 20% of the population was engaged in feeding the rest.
A similar condition of abundance was witnessed among the the southeastern Australian Aboriginals, whose women devoted a mere six hours daily to gathering, half of which was “loitered away in the shade or by the fire,” as one observer marvelled. This leisurely pace stemmed from a cultural ethos that prized ease that must have been enabled by ecosystems so fecund that “two or three hours” sufficed to secure a day’s sustenance. Rivers were full with fish; seasonal inundations, like the Murray’s annual flood, yielded such quantities of freshwater crayfish that hundreds could feast for weeks without depleting stocks. Critics might dismiss such accounts as romanticided, yet the data resists reduction: in regions where carrying capacities could theoretically support double the extant population, scarcity remained conspicuously absent, suggesting that hunter-gatherer ‘indolence’ was less a failure of industry than a rational disinvestment in unnecessary labour. This deliberate moderation—what Sahlins terms the “Zen road to affluence”—stands in stark contrast to the agrarian compulsion to extract ever more from the land.
The Hadza of Tanzania, taken by some to be among the last ‘unassimilated’ hunter-gatherers, exemplify this ethos with striking clarity. Residing near Lake Eyasi, where wild game, honey, and tuberous plants are plentiful, the Hadza allocate less than two hours daily to food acquisition. During dry seasons, men often gamble away their metal-tipped arrows—a seemingly reckless act that, above all, highlights their confidence in nature’s largesse—while women gather tubers at a pace so unhurried that observers mistake it for lethargy. Yet this apparent laxity belies a sophisticated equilibrium: by resisting the seduction of surplus, the Hadza avoid the trap of storage-induced stratification (granaries, as James C. Scott observes, beget tax collectors), preserving both egalitarianism and leisure. Their “efficiency” thus resides not in maximising yields but in minimising effort.
2-5 hour work day: Hunter Gatherers Work Less Than We Do and Have More Fun
Ethnographic data also shows that such groups worked a mere 2–5 hours daily to meet subsistence needs. “Foragers,” Sahlins quipped, “keep bankers’ hours". This is because their production was driven by immediate needs rather than an endless pursuit of surplus, resulting in a deliberately "erratic" work pattern.
Note, though, that to even assume that a work-leisure modern conceptual schism is to impose etic categories onto a lifeworld where such binaries, empirically speaking and documented across ethnographies, dissolve into some form of phenomenological unity. Emically, the very notion of ‘work’ as a discrete, alienated activity, compartmentalised from play, ritual, or sociality, and governed by external compulsion, remained absent and altogether inconceivable within hunter-gatherer ontologies. Consider the hunter who sings while tracking game, the gatherer who ornaments baskets as she collects tubers, the artisans who transform tool-making into a medium for mythic storytelling: here, the capitalist demarcation between labor (instrumental, burdensome, extrinsically motivated) and leisure (autotelic, pleasurable, intrinsically valued) collapses into what Bourdieu might term a habitus of undifferentiated flow, where productivity and creativity, necessity and desire, coexist without contradiction. The absence of a ‘boss’ as a figure of hierarchical surveillance meant that labour unfolded as a self-regulated collective practice, and its rhythms erratic, determined not by the ticking clock or the overseer’s whip but by the logic of sufficiency. Once immediate needs were met, activity ceased, not at all because ‘work’ had ended and ‘leisure’ begun, but because the very premise of separating life into such domains would have struck foragers as nonsensical. To illustrate this further, one might analogise this to the modern hobbyist who forages mushrooms or fishes for fulfilment and not wages—except that, for hunter-gatherers, such activities constituted the totality of economic life, untainted by the capitalist imaginary that relegates ‘authentic’ living to weekends and vacations.
The McArthur study’s observation that “the quantity of food gathered… could in every instance have been increased” thus takes on hermeneutic significance: it reveals a cultural refusal to transmute abundance into surplus, a rejection of the Faustian bargain that binds productivity to accumulation. Without bosses to appropriate excess, without states to tax it, without markets to commodify it, surplus lost its raison d’être, rendering the very notion of “working harder” as absurd as digging a second hole to fill the first. In this light, the hunter-gatherer’s “laziness” emerges not as a deficit of industry but as a radical critique of modernity’s alienating abstractions—a lived rebuttal to the lie that human worth resides in ceaseless striving.
The McArthur study (1960) of Australian hunter-gatherers observed that “The quantity of food gathered in one day by any of these groups could in every instance have been increased”. The researchers note, that despite this, no such expansion occurred, for the absence of extractive hierarchies (bosses, landlords, states) and markets to commodify it, surplus lost its raison d’être. ‘Working harder’ is then as absurd as digging a second hole to fill the first. Again, this is cultural choice to refuse to transmute abundance into surplus despite the evident capacity for it.
Arnhem Landers, for instance, structured their economies to maximise affluence as so defined: only 65% of the population engaged in food production, and even those individuals devoted a mere 36% of their waking hours to labour, averaging 2 hours and 9 minutes of work per day. The women, while gathering, frequently paused to rest in the shade, while the men, after a successful hunt, took take days off. One anthropologist noted: “Perhaps they judge what they consider to be enough, and when that is collected they stop”. The remainder of their time was lavished on crafts, social rituals, and what we might anachronistically term ‘leisure’ where basket-weaving or tool-making might occur amid laughter, song, or the casual sharing of stories. Even the existence of ‘full-time craftsmen’ among them (individuals whose primary identity revolved around artistry) subverts capitalist logics insofar as these artisans intermittently engaged in fishing or foraging as a fluid extension of their creative praxis, their lives otherwise devoted to “talking, eating, and sleeping”. The Dobe Bushmen, too, followed this logic: women routinely gathered three days’ worth of food in a single morning, while men hunted sporadically, often allowing weeks to lapse between expeditions, their time otherwise devoted to dancing, storytelling, or the cultivation of social bonds. Even subsistence-adjacent tasks like cooking, fetching water and so on, rarely demanded more than 1–3 hours daily.
This cultural achievement began to falter only when groups were displaced into marginal environments by encroaching agrarian pastoralists or industrial societies. In such cases the labour burden intensified and work compressed into frenetic bursts followed by prolonged rest, yet even here, the imperative remained sufficiency, not surplus. Work is merely a fleeting interruption in a life otherwise oriented toward what Graeber and Wengrow term “the real work of life”, that is, the cultivation of meaning, kinship, and play.
Want Not Lack Not
To mistake the hunter-gatherer’s paucity of belongings for poverty is to misapprehend the radical intentionality of their asceticism: what appears to the bourgeois eye as deprivation is, in fact, a systemic disavowal of accumulation, a refusal to conflate existential security with material hoarding. As one ethnographer lamented,
We were humiliated by the realization of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a loin strap, a skin blanket and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap up in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession.
The Bushmen’s entire material world—loin strap, skin blanket, leather satchel—could be gathered, bundled, and borne across continents in moments and their lives are unencumbered by the dead weight of excess. This was a "matter of policy" and not a misfortune: "Want not, lack not" is their credo. It cannot be the case that this was because they were too busy with 'food quests', because anthropologists testify that foraging and hunting was "so successful that half the time the people seem not to know what to do with themselves.”
Another anthropologist describes the !Kung's indifference to material possessions:
“The European observer has the impression that these [YahganJ Indians place no value whatever on their utensils and that they have completely forgotten the effort it took to make them. Actually, no one clings to his few goods and chattels which, as it is, are often and easily lost, but just as easily replaced. . . . The Indian does not even exercise care when he could conveniently do so. A European is likely to shake his head at the boundless indifference of these people who drag brand-new objects, precious clothing, fresh provisions, and valuable items through thick mud, or abandon them to their swift destruction by children and dogs. . . . Expensive things that are given them are treasured for a few hours, out of curiousity; after that they thoughtlessly let everything deteriorate in the mud and wet. The less they own, the more comfortable they can travel, and what is ruined they occasionally replace. Hence, they are completely indifferent to any material possessions.
Herein lies the subversive core of Sahlins’ thesis: affluence is not a function of having but of not wanting. The ultra-rich minimalist today, paring life to a curated selection of designer artifacts, and the hunter-gatherer, discarding tools with equal aplomb, are united by a shared recognition: that autonomy begins when possessions cease to possess us. The difference, of course, is that the hunter-gatherer’s minimalism is democratised, a collective praxis rather than a bourgeois affectation. Where the Galbraithean model inflames desire to fuel growth, the Zen road extinguishes it to preserve freedom. The data thus compels to think of the ‘primitive’ forager, with her three-pound satchel, as having achieved a form of affluence that the overburdened modern, drowning in clutter, can scarcely achieve.
Prodigality
The economic behaviour of hunter-gatherers can be understood as a reaction to their context of abundance. The notion of ‘prodigality’, viz., the immediate consumption of available resources, is indicative of the psychological and cultural disposition that emerges from a society that operates without the constraints of market economies. Without the pressure of scarcity or surplus accumulation, the hunter-gatherers’ behaviour is one of satisfaction, totally unbothered by the cycles of production and consumption that dominate modern life.
The Hadza are a great case in point. They remain surrounded by cultivators in East Africa but have historically refused to adopt farming, citing "too much hard work" as their reason. Their attitude aligns with that of the Bushmen, who famously quip: "Why should we plant, when there are so many mongomongo nuts in the world?" This reluctance stems not from incapacity but from a deliberate preference for leisure and minimal labour. Farming is serious graft, for many hours a day, often in an un-ergonomic posture. Hadza expend less energy and probably less time obtaining food than do their agricultural neighbours. This pattern extends globally. The Yamana people of South America, for instance, frustrated European employers with their "fits and starts" work rhythm, interspersed with long rest periods. What appeared to outsiders as laziness was, in reality, a cultural disposition that valued rest over continuous labor. Sahlins notes this reflects a fundamentally different relationship to work—one that does not equate productivity with virtue.
From the perspective of industrial societies, where labor is endless and scarcity institutionalised, hunter-gatherers’ relaxed approach might seem irresponsible. But this nonchalance toward labour is a product of confidence in the hunter-gatherer economy, rather than evidence of foolishness or imprudence. Therefore, their refusal to embrace agriculture and their seemingly carefree attitude toward labour points to a trust in the success of their subsistence strategies.
Post-Hunter Gather Societies
Subsistence
The so-called "evolution of economy" introduced a significant regression in human well-being. Neolithic societies, through the development of agriculture, achieved the ability to harvest surplus food in one season to survive others where nothing grew; a triumph over the "biological law of the minimum"—the principle that human survival is constrained by immediate ecological limits. The newfound capacity for surplus allowed for greater population growth and material expansion. But, on the whole, this did not raise the wellbeing of human beings. Yes, agriculture supported larger populations by providing a greater quantity of food but it was of much poorer quality. As humans dependent on fewer food sources, primarily crops, malnutrition increased. Even today, two or three main plants are the bulk of our consumption—wheat, rice and corn, which barely have any nutrients. When these crops failed, so too did the economic and social systems that depended on them, often leading to famine and widespread suffering (see: The Irish Potato Famine). Herders are deeply dependent on livestock health and face catastrophic losses from plagues, often forcing them to resort to fallback strategies like fishing. Sahlins asserts that "The amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture". Perhaps neither progress nor regression is as linear; we are certainly better off in most respects than Agarian societies in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, starvation has become institutionalized in modern societies, with one-third to one-half of humanity going to bed hungry each night. Industrial economies simply failed to overcome scarcity and, in some ways, have exacerbated it. In contrast, as anthropologist Woodburn observes, for most hunters, it is "almost inconceivable" to die of hunger or endure prolonged deprivation.
Early agriculturalists where reliant on unsophisticated methods such as slash-and-burn cultivation which had them constantly grappling with soil exhaustion and drought. It also meant they had to work harder for less, as studies of the Hanunoo, a Philippine group practicing swidden (slash-and-burn) agriculture, show that adults spend an average of three hours and twenty minutes per day on cultivation alone, excluding additional labour for food gathering, animal raising, and cooking, such that the overall workload of early agriculturalists certainly exceeded that of hunter-gatherers. As Sahlins notes, “The neolithic saw no particular improvement over the paleolithic in the amount of time required per capita for the production of subsistence; probably, with the advent of agriculture, people had to work harder".
Disease
Infectious diseases also increased, where parasite load increased with the size and density of a population, and the permanence of a settlement, where people mingled, stored food rots, filth accumulates, water supplied become contaminated and other sanitation issues. Pests also increased, and we face the uncertainty of the day when they evolve faster than our ability to cope with them (e.g. antibiotic resistant pathogens, or extreme plant pathogens, as in the southern corn leaf blight epidemic, which destroyed 60% of US corn production in a single summer). The domestication of animals also facilitated the transmission of diseases from animals to humans, leading to the emergence of several infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza, while urbanisation and globalisation made plagues deadlier on a wider scale This is not to mention the mental health issues unique to civilisation, and particularly urbanisation, alone. The majority of communicable diseases are a result of animal domestication/husbandry (civilization). A tiny list of diseases wrought by civilisation and civilisation+ (industralisaiton): Tooth decay and crooked teeth (the latter is especially a result of industrial civilization). Asthma from pollution. Obesity. Myopia. Depression and anxiety. In contrast, hunter-gatherers spend much less time around animals because they do not domesticate them and do not store food because of their nomadic lifestyle. Overall, their lower rates of disease meant that their nutritional needs are lower, on top of their higher caloric intake and more varied diet. In fact, paleopathological data shows that the proportion of skeletons with pathologies increased after the Agricultural Revolution, specifically, increases in frequencies of skeletal lesions and iron deficiency anemia, and a decrease in height (from 5'9 to 5'5) in agricultural samples compared to hunter-gatherers.
The Birth of Class Divisions
| Stage | Hierarchy | Ontological Mode | Driving Force |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paleolithic (Hunter-Gatherer Bands) | Minimal/Situational Hierarchy | Interdependence and Survival | Lack of surplus; communal survival |
| Neolithic (Early Agricultural Societies) | Emergent Stratification | Subsistence, Sedentism, and Surplus Accumulation | Surplus production and sedentism |
| City-State and Early Empires (Urban Societies) | Early Bureaucracies and Resource Control | Civic Obligation, Early Governance, and Religious Authority | Trade, conquest, and centralized resource control |
| Proto-Class (Gerontocratic and Ranked Societies) | Ranked Societies and Kinship-Based Elites | Obligation, Kinship, and Hierarchy | Division of labor and hereditary power |
| Feudal (Tributary Societies) | Clear Class Divisions with Religious Legitimization | Divine Order, Servitude, and Land Ownership | Land ownership, tribute systems, and religious ideology |
| Industrial Societies | Capitalist Class System with Industrial Stratification | Instrumentality, Consumerism, and Mechanized Labor | Industrialization and capital accumulation |
| Late Capitalist (Consumer and Globalized Societies) | Technocratic and Financial Elites; Global Inequalities | Hyper-Individualism, Financialization, and Spectacle | Globalization, digital economies, and ecological crises |
On top of this, structures of power and property emerged alongside agricultural advances, increasingly expropriating resources from individuals and concentrating wealth and entrenching inequality where surplus production served to benefit a privileged elite rather than ensuring collective security. Thus, even though the society produced surpluses, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few left the majority precariously exposed. Wherever civilisation springs up, you find an acute form of hierarchies and authoritarianism. On the other hand, hunter-gatherers have far less social stratification since there is no way to sustain a class of elite of non-producing people who live on surplus produced by others. Peasants—the majority of the Agarian population—often faced significant vulnerability to natural disasters than even the most precarious hunter-gatherer groups, such as droughts or floods, because of their dependence on elites and the systems of tribute and exploitation that governed their lives.
In this sense, poverty, in the final analysis, is a social construct rooted in the dynamics of civilisation that agriculture made possible, and not a natural condition. While the most "primitive" societies may have minimal material goods, they are not poor because poverty is not simply about having little; it is about the social relationships that define and reinforce inequality. It is a social status that emerged with the rise of civilisation, growing alongside the development of surplus production, private property, and class divisions. In stratified societies, some groups accumulate wealth while others are deprived.
Loss of Autonomy
Technology fosters large-scale, impersonal institutions that require strict control over human behavior. To sustain a technological society, individuals must be continuously engaged in building, maintaining, and consuming its outputs. This dependence necessitates mass obedience, not because of the specific purpose of any given technology, but because of the vast, interconnected systems required to produce and sustain it. Modern life is structured by rigid rules largely beyond individual control. For example, when traveling, one must adhere to traffic laws and the flow of vehicles. At work, individuals must follow rules set by employers, states, and organisations. Even those in positions of power, such as business owners, are constrained by the broader technological and economic systems within which they operate. They must adapt to external regulations, market demands, and the momentum of technological development, just as much as their employees must. As civilization advances, individuals—regardless of status—find themselves swept along by its trajectory. Behavior and even desires are shaped to align with the system’s requirements. Large-scale, highly organized systems demand coordination across thousands or even millions of people. Decisions in such systems, whether political, economic, or technological, are often made by a small group of elites—politicians, corporate executives, or technocrats. For the vast majority, these decisions are inaccessible and incomprehensible, given the complexity of modern technological systems. Citizens must also rely on distant, opaque institutions to manage their physical security, from the safety of nuclear power plants to the competence of regulatory bodies, employers, and governments. People are expected to trust that these systems will function in their best interests, even though they have little understanding of or influence over them. Whether these systems are governed dictatorially or democratically makes little practical difference to the average individual, as the decisions that shape their lives are fundamentally out of their hands. These problems are contingent and avoidable in smaller, non-technological communities.
Environmental Impact
Surplus → population growth - demand for more surplus - intensified land/water use → environmental strain (deforestation, soil degradation, biodiversity loss) → civilisational collapse.
One of the most glaring contradictions of civilisation is that it relies on a stable environment to function, yet it actively degrades that very environment. This inherent tension makes civilisation ultimately self-destructive, as its foundations erode under its own weight. This is the same feedback loop which ended all other civilizations including the Maya and the Easter Islanders who's agricultural overreach + environmental limits, led to their collapse. Today, the planet is experiencing an unprecedented ecological crisis. Climate change, deforestation, the acidification of oceans, air and water pollution, soil erosion, and the loss of biodiversity on a massive scale. We are currently in the midst of the Holocene extinction, with extinction rates vastly exceeding natural background levels—by some estimates, a hundred to a thousand times higher. These environmental problems are not merely abstract threats; they represent clear evidence that the systems underpinning modern civilisation are unsustainable and will ultimately lead to collapse. Advocating for the status quo is adovcacy for mass genocide.
By contrast, the hunter-gatherer way of life exemplifies a mode of existence that is far less taxing on the environment. For tens of thousands of years, humans lived as hunter-gatherers without significantly destabilising ecosystems or compromising the biosphere’s long-term health.
Technological Dependency
The consequences of technolgoy are rarely ever neutral.
Tools that expand human agency without binding us to industrial bureaucracies are emancipatory. Spears, clay pots, handlooms. These are convivial; they’re simple, repairable and free of supply chains (not that they can’t be bad; handlooms were also embedded in coercive labor relations, guild monopolies and gendered divisions of work). The problem is when technologies evolve beyond tools into self-replicating socio-technical systems that demand hierarchical control and ecological extraction. Which is often a byproduct of civilisation.
The toilet for example. Its existence hinges on sewer networks, PVC pipelines and water treatment plants. These infrastructures are reliant on fossil fuels, globalised supply chains and regulatory bureaucracies. Few of us possess the knowledge to repair, let alone reconstruct, such systems (not even a single toilet); fewer still grasp the geopolitical entanglements (rare earth mining, patent wars over flush mechanism etc) that sustain them. We inhabit systems no one fully understands or controls yet everyone depends on.
This is what Langdon Winner called ‘reverse adaptation’ where technology reshapes society to serve *its* needs instead of ours. Cars as machines started off increasing our autonomy as an alternative choice to horse-drawn transport but eventually became mandatory to live a normal life in much of the world. Traffic laws criminalise walking, cities bulldoze neighborhoods for highways and expanded under the assumption that people could travel long distances quickly. The tech took a self-sustaining life of its own independent of anyones intentions and continues to shape the world and the people within it in ways that cannot be directed nor reversed.
The issue isn’t technology itself but the structures it necessitates. Modern tech externalises its costs: convenience for users, exploitation for miners, degradation for ecosystems. It has left its droppings everywhere such that solutions to the problems it creates require more tech like carbon capture or AI … which only deepen our dependency on the systems causing harm.
Comapre this with societies like the !Kung, whose material needs were met through tools fashioned from stone, bone, wood, and skin, and technological praxis was characterised by radical accessibility and ecological symbiosis: raw materials “lay in abundance around them”, freely available to all, while the knowledge required to transform these elements into functional artefacts was democratised, requiring neither specialised guilds nor obscure technical expertise. This Paleolithic open-source ethos ensured that technological systems remained legible, repairable, and subordinate to human agency. The !Kung’s adze and digging stick, crafted in hours and discarded without remorse, embodied are precicely convivial tools insofar as they amplify human capacities without enslaving their users to bureaucratic cum industrial complexes.
Economic Inequality
The standard of living for the poor majority, throughout most of human history following the Palaeolithic era, was constrained by subsistence economics. The majority of the population worked in agriculture or manual labor, producing just enough to survive. Any surplus wealth created by the society was extracted by elites through taxes, rents, or forced labour, and was offset by rising population sizes. For centuries, the living conditions of the poor changed incredibly little as they remained tied to minimal caloric needs and basic housing they always had. Meanwhile, for the rich, more property equaled more wealth, access to imported goods, accumulation of capital via investment trade and infrastructure, and so on. Any economic growth via agriculture or industrialism disproportionately, perhaps only, benefited the wealthy as they captured all the surplus. Essentially, for most of history, the poor stayed poor while the rich got richer. A report from Credit Suisse found that the top 1% of the global population held 43.4% of the world's wealth in 2020.
Desire-Means Misalignment
The primordial "economic problem"—the basic challenge of aligning desires with material needs—had been easily solved with Paleolithic techniques. Nothing needed to be done. They deliberately negated technological advancement. It was only as culture reached the heights of its material abundance, through technological advances and the rise of capitalism, that humanity constructed a shrine to the unattainable: the idea of "Infinite Needs." This is now done through mechanisms such as advertising, consumer culture, and the commodification of nearly every aspect of life, ensuring that individuals are perpetually seeking more, and creating a structural misalignment between their desires and the means to achieve them. The economic system itself relies on this misalignment: scarcity is made explicit through calculated trade-offs, where resources such as wages, capital, or time are treated as finite and must be allocated among competing needs. Every act of consumption forecloses other possibilities—buying one thing means foregoing another. Even when desires are temporarily satisfied, the system quickly generates new ones, ensuring that satisfaction is always fleeting. This cycle of deprivation makes scarcity a perpetual condition, even when, technically, there is material abundance.
In our industrial society, increased productive capacity just ends up increasing consumption, driven by capitalist ambitions for generating evermore capital (guided by measures like “increase GDP”) and thereby increasing labour needs. Bertrand Russell almost a century ago captures this in a thought experiment:
“Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?”
At an individual level, this is verified by the Easterlin Paradox, based on economist Richard Easterlin’s paper "Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence". The paradox suggests that once your income reaches a certain level, any additional increase in earnings won't impact your overall happiness. He also found that consumption levels directly correlate with income levels, meaning that when people reach a certain satisfaction point, any increase in consumption also does not make them any more happier. The point is that in fact there hunter gatherer societies produce a surplus, and don't just "have enough to get by": every society produces a surplus.
Then Why Did Agriculture ‘Win’ Out?
Hunter-gatherers lived in small, mobile groups with very low population densities, maybe one person per ten square miles because their food sources were scattered and so they had to constantly move. They couldn’t carry large surpluses, so their population was naturally constrained. In contrast, agriculture allowed for denser populations. When you replace a forest with a field of wheat, you’re converting the land into a concentrated food source that can support many more people. Farmers could live shoulder-to-shoulder compared to the wide dispersal of hunter-gatherer bands.
Reproductive strategies also mattered. In a hunter-gatherer society, women had to space their children out by several years—four years was typical—because mothers had to carry their young as they moved. You couldn’t have multiple toddlers in tow when you’re constantly on the move, so methods like infanticide were used to manage population. Farming, changed this; once societies settled, women no longer needed to carry their children for long distances. They could have children more frequently, about every two years. Over time, this created an exponential growth in population that outgrew hunter-gatherer societies. Their sheer numbers also gave them an advantage in conflicts. Even if farmers were less healthy, a hundred farmers could still overwhelm a smaller group of healthy hunters.
As populations expanded at the end of the Ice Age, hunter-gatherer bands faced a choice. They could adopt agriculture to support more people, or they could find ways to limit their growth—usually by sticking to their traditional practices. Some groups chose agriculture because there's an initial abundance that it brought, but it was temporary. Population growth quickly caught up with food production which meant: overwork, resource depletion and poorer health. Still, the groups that farmed expanded rapidly and displaced those who didn’t. They often drove out or outright eliminated hunter-gatherers. Over time, hunter-gatherers were pushed into the least desirable lands, the deserts, the mountains, the forests that weren’t useful for farming. Many others were forced to adapt or face extinction. So, agriculture 'won' because it could sustain more people, but it was not a more 'affluent' way of living.
The Problem is Civilisation?
Our economic systems are deepl flawed. But so is the structural nature of civilisation itself. In civilisation, land ceases to be a shared part of the biosphere and becomes a controlled, regimented resource subject to human domination. Wild animals are replaced by domesticated ones, and given enough time for Agrarian socieities to expand, non-human animals are eventually bred by the billions a year and shaped to serve human purposes, and mass slaughtered. Humans, too, are transformed into instrumental resources whose primary function is to sustain and perpetuate civilisation. Autonomy is sacrificed as individuals are moulded to fit the demands of the system at the expense of their own interests and well-being. This applies even to those who are relatively materially affluent, as their roles within civilisation are defined by their utility to the larger structure rather than their intrinsic humanity. To that end, it becomes difficult to consider that reform within this civilisation system solves the issues we highlighted, as civilisation, by its very nature, is a means of domination. To attempt to use such a system to achieve egalitarianism is somewhat contradictory: domination cannot be a tool for dismantling hierarchy; it can only perpetuate it.
Just as anarchist argue that Marxists are wrong in rely on the state—a hierarchical, authoritarian structure—as a tool to achieve a stateless, classless society given that the the state, by its very nature, fosters domination and inequality, and over time, Marxist political parties cease to act as workers and instead adopt the values and practices of the ruling class. So too do anti-civlisation proponents extend this principle to their critique of civilisation and technology whose tools are tools of domination that cannot be repurposed to build a society based on liberation and equality. Tools are objects that can be created by individuals or small groups in a straightforward and cooperative manner—things like spears, pots, or walls. These are simple, tangible creations that do not require extensive systems of extraction, production, and distribution. Technology, by contrast, refers to objects that depend on large-scale, interconnected systems. These systems of extraction, production, and consumption inherently require hierarchy, specialisation, and control, and thus inherently require the dynamics of domination that anti-civs critique.
Present-Day Primitvism
As shown, present-day hunter-gatherer societies don’t quite fit the harsh image often painted of their lives being nasty and brutish, but because they’ve been in contact with agricultural societies for millennia, their lifestyles are not representational of what life was like before the advent of farming 10,000 years ago. Many have been relegated to some of the world’s most marginal lands due to the expansion of farming communities. The claim that human life improved with the transition from foraging to farming, is fundamentally about a much earlier era.
In practice, we cannot return to that pre-agricultural world. The genie is out of the box. Ours is a post-contact world, where the conditions necessary to restore the original productive capacities of hunter-gatherer societies no longer exist, nor is it preferable to return to that state. There is simply no untouched, pre-contact hunter-gatherer society to return to. Even the few-hundred Amazonian tribes have been displaced through logging practices. And we have simply become too many. Even when they do not want to, hunter-gatherers like the Indians at Dickson Mounds were forced to adopt farming in response to population growth.
Thus, the ethnographic data which Sahlins cites remains an account of displaced and disenfranchised peoples in post-contact conditions, and not those that were in their original productive capacities. The historical and ecological disruptions caused by colonialism, industrialisation, and environmental degradation have fundamentally altered the landscapes and ecosystems that once sustained these societies. Early European contact brought with it new diseases, forced labor, violence, and cultural disruption. The San Bushmen which Sahlins cites through Richard Lee's descriptions in the 1960s, have today largely been displaced by modern agriculture and land policies, and only a minority continue a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, with most now reliant on wage labour or government aid. The Eskimo no longer hunt whales due to disrupted marine ecosystems. In the Americas, many were forced to abandon their lifestyle and adopt Christianity. Almost all Australians Aboriginal groups have been settled in government-assigned communities or urban areas and live off welfare benefits. The Shoshoni’s pinon groves were timbered, and their hunting grounds were overtaken by cattle. Many Pygmy groups have been marginalised and now work for farming societies. Only the a few Hadza, a few Bushmen, the Sentinelese, and some scattered Amazonian tribes survive (though barely any ethnological data exists on the last two due to their isolation), and even they are increasingly exposed to pressures like tourism, trade, privatisation, deforestation, illegal logging and settlement.
The Hadza are a great case in point, even though they're always pointed out as the prime example of unscathed hunter-gatherers. Since 1961, Tanzanian authorities have introduced initiatives to shift the Hadza toward settled ‘civilised’ lifestyles by offering goats and building houses to encourage farming and herding. They ignored the housing, and ate the goats. Still, the rapidly growing population of pastoralists and farmers has devastated the local ecosystem, eradicating much of the wildlife, destroying the berry groves, depleting the honey, and burning out the tubers, each of which traditionally contributed 20 percent of the Hadza diet's caloric intake. In 2000, the UAE bought a third of the Hadza territory so that the royal family could go hunting animals which Hadza hunters would have otherwise caught. For the past two decades or more, the Hadza have also been made into a commodified wildlife spectacle for tourists. Most recently with the influencer era, their entire identity/lifestyle has basically been turned into content for social media influencers in another layer of commodification. Their existence is used to fuel influencer engagement farms, every hunting trip is a gamified point optimised for algorithmic virality. They're kind of stuck in this weird loop where to make money, they now have to perform a hollow version of their traditional lifestyle for tourists, acting it out performatively. They would accompany tourists to hunting trips to hunt small animals not because it feeds them, but because that's what tourists want to see. For the sake of the show, the Hadza would act out certain religious ceremonies which would otherwise only be performed for a certain reasons, at a certain time and place.
Where as before they did not assign property values to things, the Hadza have now also been introduced to the cash economy and have access to village markets, all thanks to tourists. They are making money through entrance fees, selling souvenirs or working seasonal gigs in these tourism programmes, and a large chunk of that goes toward buying a new commodity they had never known before: booze. Alcoholism has become so endemic that during high tourist seasons, the men, women and children would drink and smoke weed all day. As a result of their alcohol addiction, AIDS and tubercolousis have now been introduced to their communities and the rate of murder has increased.
At any rate, its clear that a literal return to the pre-contact hunter-gatherer conditions may well-nigh be impossible, but we may nevertheless draw inspiration from the values and principles of these societies to imagine alternatives ways of being.
Anti-civ as Critique
Individuals associated with this current do not wish to be adherents of an ideology, merely people who seek to become free individuals in free communities in harmony with one another and with the biosphere, and may therefore refuse to be limited by the term ‘anti-civ’ or any other ideological talking. At best, then, anti-civ is a convenient label used to characterise diverse individuals with a common project: the abolition of all power relations — e.g., structures of control, coercion, domination, and exploitation-and the creation of a form of community that excludes all such relations.
–John Moore, in A Primitivist Primer
Anti-Civ is a critique of civilisation and its institutional power structure, and not a prescription of personal practices. It is a structural critique. On an individual level, I have developed many aversions: I hate the sun, camping, outdoor activities. But, as we stipulated in the beginning, individual preferences and aversions are socially constructed and not innate. I am a product of the cultural conditions of my life, that of a wealthy bourgeois, urbanised society. One can critique the conditions of one’s existence while also acknowledging how deeply those conditions inform one’s desires and behaviours. A modern human would not find it desirable to go live among the Hadza today, because she has been conditioned by bourgeois culture into having an assemblage of desires and impulses that have become needs. The means available to the Hadza simply would not satisfy those instilled needs. But this is not a counter-argument against anti-civ; it is simply a reflection of the unfortunate conditions shaped by modern civilisation.
In this sense, theory should be used as a critique of power and not an apologia in its service, as many have done when invoking the ‘State of Nature’. It is often the case for those who are engaged in the critical analysis of social and political phenomena that they find themselves accused of advocating for ideas, systems, or principles, that they merely introduce as diagnostic, heuristic tools; instruments for dismantling, challenging, opening up questions that have become closed to scrutiny, and not as prescriptive manuals for the literal instantiation of these ideas within present circumstances. This is particularly evident in discussions of political anarchism, as we find in figures such as Michel Foucault, James Scott, David Graeber, and others, who wished to produce highly empirical studies with rather anarchist themes as a form of critique through which to examine and denaturalise the power structures of the present.
They do not call for the immediate dismantling of the state tout court, nor are they advocating for a 'return to a golden age'—the reactionary fascist's mythic logic—some romantic utopia that might be drawn from the more extreme fringes of anarchist thought. What they are doing is something rather different. They are, in effect, performing an act of what one might call defamiliarisation, a term drawn, appropriately enough, from literature. We may think of what they are doing as a suggestion to ‘try looking at it this way’ (‘try bringing this context to the work’, for example, or ‘try ascribing to it this aim, purpose, or thematic concern’), so that what once appeared puzzling may start to resonate, or so that what used to strike us as reasonable and perceptive comes to seem biased and simplistic. This perspectival shifting exercises is often performed through historicising the systems we inherited—the division of labour, the state, the market, hierarchies, institutions, the norms by which we live—of which we now take for granted and forget that they are not inevitable, eternal, divinely ordained, following from necessary premises; but are rather constructed, fallible, articulated at particular times and in particular ways for particular people, and therefore, potentially, alterable. It is worthwhile to have a small group of people such as these asking such questions, peeling back the layers of reification, to see how behind it all, power operates, how it stretches into institutions, identities, and permissible ways of life. The end goal is to offers us—the majority of society, the everyday unreflexive, le tout-venant, for whom relentless self-examination remains an impractical and perhaps undesirable luxury—the imaginative space, however tentatively, in which to consider more equitable, liberatory forms of social organisation. One can therefore appreciate the critiques of anti-civ without advocating for their immediate implementation in contemporary circumstances, much like how other philosophical views—such as negative utilitarianism or antinatalism—can involve conclusions that are impractical or extreme when fully instantiated. This does not mean that the principles themselves are invalid. Their incompatibility with current conditions reflects the constraints of the present, not the ideas' intrinsic merits.
In part, the point is to say "look, if it is logically and physically possible for human communities to, deliberately throigh cultural choices. organise themselves in such a way as to reduce hierarchy or arrange it in such a way as to be less cruel, and we have empirical evidence of this happening in the past, then it follows that human communities can do so today through tinkering our cultural practices". It is entirely possible to have an egalitarian society, and not at all something that goes against our ‘human nature’. Not is egalitarianism a "natural" state either, but a collective cultural project. As just one example, Graeber and Wengrow’s show in The Dawn of Everything that pre-state societies often seasonally shifted between hierarchical and egalitarian modes. Modern societies could institutionalise such fluidity in something like temporary task-based leadership. We can develop norms against material accumulation and mock those who do. We can ahold people an accountable through participatory assemblies, recallable delegates, solidarity networks and so on. We can learn from the mutual aid ethics of the Ubuntu that “easy for all”. We have agency, through altering or dismantling or scaling down the structures that govern us, to divert our cultural practices towards less or more hierarchy.
Anti-anti-anti-civ (being against those who are against those who are against civilisation)
When considering the primary site of human oppression, civilisation is to anti-civ what the state is to traditional anarchism, and what the economic system is to Marxism, and in their canonical forms, all these doctrines espouse total revolution as the dramatic showdown that ends it.
Anti-anti-anti-civilisation starts with the core insight that drives anti-civ: much of what we call ‘civilisation’ is the source of domination and hierarchy, especially through large-scale technologies and infrastructures that demand centralised oversight. Rather than dismiss that critique, it remains open to anti-civ suspicions about the ways civilisation disciplines bodies, exploits ecosystems, and enforces progress as an unquestioned good. It resists any denial of primitivist insights and the traditional critiques levied against anti-civ—hence the 'anti-anti'. It shares with traditional anti-civ, for instance, the suspicion of technology as merely a set of neutral tools, and accepts that a large part of it cannot be repurposed to serve egalitarian values without retaining many of its original structures of control (managerial oversight, hierarchy, labor exploitation, environmental degradation and so on).
It also shares with anti-civ the belief that civilisation is inherently unsustainable as it demands more growth, and thus more ecological destruction. Sooner or later it will collapse. The status quo is, therefore, genocidal, and the ecological collapse and corporate exploitation already disproportionately harm marginalised communities. Even non-capitalist civilisations (e.g., state socialism, feudal empires) rely on resource extraction, surplus accumulation, and ecological disruption. Industrialisation under the USSR, just in virtue of being a socialist project, did not negate the environmental degradation it caused. Moreover, global supply chains, energy grids, and pharmaceutical production require hyper-specialization, centralized coordination, and constant growth. These systems are vulnerable to collapse, regardless of who controls them—a communist or capitalist state or an anarchist commune. And lastly, civilizational scale (cities, states, megaprojects) necessitates administration, bureaucracy, and divisions of labor that concentrate power, even in "classless" systems. In my opinion, anti-civs are the most pragmatic bunch in that they are the only group calling and prepating for an alternative, equitable transition in lieu of civilisation's eventual collapse.
At the same time, anti-anti-anti-civ is suspicious of anyone arriving with a grand narrative of where history is heading, including capital 'A' Anti-civ. This is its post-structuralist dimension. To think like a post-structuralist anti-anti-anti-civ is therefore to first stop thinking that power lies in one singular system that can be cleanly toppled. Power embedded within civilisation which leaves its droppings everywhere in a network of power relationships, scattered and sprouting up wherever people start organising themselves. It disperses through the very infrastructure, discourse, and values that define civilised life. That includes industrial-scale food production, global supply chains, and the social norms that demand people be 'useful' to the system instead of free to shape their own paths. The post-structuralist reading goes further and argue that our very languages, classifications, our ideas of 'progress' and ‘development’, and our standards for what counts as a good and successful life originate in these civilisational logics. The real challenge isn’t only to swap out big technology for smaller tools, but to also remain vigilant about how power infiltrates even the most localised, seemingly unproblematic practices.
This is where it differs from stricter forms of anti-civ positions; in its refusal to insist that we must abandon every aspect of civilisation at once and revert to a hypothetical state of nature. We can’t simply exit civilisation overnight without massive human suffering. What we can do is improvisational efforts; local attempts to live differently, to scale down technology and adopt cooperative and non-hierarchical crafts. These experiments chip away at the logic of endless growth, standardisation and top-down control. If new hierarchies start forming, people try something else; figure out what works and what doesn't, at least for a while, until new hierarchies start to rear their ugly heads. Even for the nomadic hunter-gatherers, hierarchies existed in the form of those least capable of moving, namely, infants, the elderly, the pregnant, and the disabled.
The point is that there isn’t a single final showdown in which all modern machinery collapses at once. Nor is there a neat historical narrative promising that a particular class or movement will inevitably triumph. And since civilisation expresses itself every time we reinforce norms of efficiency and large-scale coordination at the expense of autonomy, there’s no single lever to pull to topple it. The name itself—as cumbersome and somewhat tongue-in-cheek it may be—is meant to signal the idea’s refusal to become a banner under which someone rallies the masses for a singular, dramatic moment of revolt. That is to say, it is closer to a thought process than a doctrine, and it calls for something of a cultural revolution that opens the path to behavioural revolutions: What counts as “necessary” progress and affluence? Why do we take civilisation’s assumptions for granted? Are technologies neutral or do they bind us into harmful systems that might not be redeemable in their current forms?
In this sense, you could not ever stitch anti-anti-anti-civ onto a flag. It’s all too easy to propogandise lefties like me with by waving a red banner, adding a few yellow stars, then invoking a sweeping historical narrative about the inevitable triumph of the masses. This fixation on bloody revolutions, the aesthetics of warfare, and heroic tales of a single, dramatic moment of liberation is all too common in leftist thought. It is anarcho with a small ‘a’ because it says: 'Whether it makes any difference to the world we wish to instantiate if we dropped that term ‘anarchism’ doesn't matter. Let’s not worry too much about whether we call ourselves anarchists'.
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