Ah... good old anarcho-primitivism. If I had a euro for every time someone accused me of that (or, more often, 'neo-primitivism') I'd be at least... ooooh... twenty quid richer than I am now!
As it is though, my primary affiliation with the Green and Black is with the caramel flavour one, though Maya Gold is quite nice too. And if you put the mint one in the freezer overnight it's lovely on a hot day.
Anyhoo. Chocolatey wordplay aside, I think your thread title really sums up my personal view on this. Namely that I have yet to encounter a political ideology under whose flag I'm comfortable to stand. There is much about anarcho-syndicalism that I like for instance (not least the Monty Python connotations and the fact that Bakunin was actually a half-decent writer). But there's also plenty that I dislike.
The same is true of anarcho-primitivism, though the ratio of good stuff to bad stuff is tilted far further towards the bad in my view. In fact, as a political ideology, primitivism (of any hue) is a complete bunch of arse. And dangerous arse at that.
That is to say, any political ideology that attempts to direct modern man towards a hunter-gatherer existence is doomed either to failure or a success that involves unprecedented levels of suffering and death. 7 billion people cannot live "primitive" lives on this small planet. Sadly, we have reached the point where -- assuming we seek a managed reduction to a sustainable population rather than a catastrophic reduction -- we must accept cities, agriculture and a fairly high level of technology in our lives.
Yes: Our cities need to be transformed significantly, agriculture needs to be radically rethought and overhauled, and we need to be more selective about the technologies we adopt. And some of this, certainly, will involve a return to practices long-abandoned. But much won't. A political movement that seeks the wholesale rejection of modern science and technology is wrong-headed in the extreme.
BUT. That is not to say that there is nothing of merit within anarcho-primitivism.
I suspect there might be some opposition to this; but I actually find the historical narrative presented by anarcho-primitivism to be perhaps the most compelling of all. I'm speaking specifically of anthropologist Pierre Clastres and his book Archeology of Violence which is, I believe, considered to be something of a seminal text within anarcho-primitivism.
But simply because Clastres / anarcho-primitivism might provide a convincing explanation of how we got "from there to here", it doesn't necessarily tell us much about what we should do now we're here.
It's similar to my one major criticism of Gregory Bateson (whose work has become a huge influence on me). He offers the clearest and most insightful explanation of exactly what's wrong with modern civilisation that I've yet to find... a way of understanding the crisis of unsustainability that faces us in the immediate future. And he also offers us as coherent a definition of a sustainable civilisation as you're likely to find. But in the words of Geoffrey Samuel, Bateson "gives us very little idea of how to get from here to there."
Anarcho-primitivism provides us with some insight into where we've gone wrong. But the remedies it suggests will almost certainly just make things worse.
