This post will focus on how anarchy is a feature of hunter-gatherer societies. (In a later Chapter I include a post on the implications of anarchy in respect of energy available to humans).
Because of the dominance of the top-down centralised Western World and the primacy of our way of being, hunter-gatherer societies are nowadays very rare in the world in general. For good or bad, better or worse, more and more tribal societies that once lived at one with nature are moving to farming and/or towns and cities to go to school or work.
On this note, I always feel a little guilty when I am watching programmes about the Amazon rainforest and such places where the (always a Western World) presenter is tut-tutting at farmers cutting down trees to grow cash crops or logging companies doing the same to use the wood to make a profit. Since humans became farmers, in every part of the world, trillions of trees have been cleared for farming, profit and thereafter, human habitation.
I don’t have a solution to this problem and I truly understand the importance of the rainforests, the lungs of the world, as they are known. But for us well-fed Western Worlders to be criticising those who are trying to do the exact same as we did over many centuries is a little hypocritical.
It does bring it home to me though that hunter-gatherers are the only societies that truly respect the environment and are in relationship with it rather than trying to dominate it.
Getting back to anarchy, one anthropologist, the Russian Piotr Kropotkin, who lived from 1842 to 1921, linked the lives of hunter-gatherer societies to a kind of positive anarchy. In the best case scenario, Kropotkin argued that the level of mutual support that is evident in such societies can be an example to modern, developed society.
He argued (as I do, in a different way, in this website) that very little in the way of positive substantial change for people who need it most will arise from initiatives from Governments as we know them. (The Pillars of his time)! Of course this was Russia (and Switzerland, where Kropotkin also lived for a time) in the late nineteenth century, but I don’t think that things have changed that much really.
He also argued that voluntary organisations (the TSO’s – remember them) had much more potential to bring about change in people’s lives than organisations set up by Government. In his writing he argued that what he called Bushmen, or savages (for example those in the Kalahari Desert) had been terrorised and subjugated by so-called civilised society (agriculturalists) who saw the nation state as the only valid society.
(Just as an aside, Kropotkin used the term savages in a very positive way – but then it began to have negative connotations. I have, however, heard young people nowadays describe very positive experiences as savage, so perhaps there is a little positivity coming back to the term or else Kropotkin was way ahead of his time)!
He was also a proponent of systems theory, maintaining that history, ecology, geography, ethnicity, culture, politics etc. were all interrelated and interdependent. His notions of mutual aid and sharing are relevant for our time and in particular supporting vulnerable people.
He pointed out that anarchists did not want to end society but instead envisioned a completely different society, not simply a clone of the top-down society typical of that era – and that is still, in a different guise, popular today. And, how it suited the bureaucratic centralised nation states of his time to promote the centrality of the family to society – to better exercise control.
He concluded that because the origins of mutual aid among humans stretched back to the days of hunting and gathering, it must be of great value to humankind, and it has survived to the present day. This resonates with modern studies on attachment, as we have come across already – in particular our care-giving tendency.
In another Chapter I state that the family is the basic unit of society as we know it today – and our support should be designed to include the family if we are to protect the children who need it most. Obviously, the typical family that prevails nowadays (Mammy, Daddy and children) was not how children were/are brought up in hunter-gatherer societies.
Mostly, Kropotkin, (like modern anthropologists) drew on personal observations of tribes that had not been modernised positing them as examples of the sharing and co-operation ethos which he deemed to be most desirable for society to thrive.