Kazimir Kharza on the Uncivilized Podcast (some excerpts)

The following are transcribed excerpts from my interview on the Uncivilized Podcast with Arthxmis Graham Thoreau. They have been edited slightly for readability’s sake, but I’ve made an effort to change as little as possible. You can find the full one and a half hour episode here.

Artxmis Graham Thoreau: Let’s start with what’s your background and how did you come to primitivism?

Kazimir Kharza: […] You could say that I’ve been a conscious primitivist since about 2021, but I have actually intuitively arrived at these positions pretty early on. So, the question of when I became a primitivist is kinda tough to answer, but probably somewhere in my early childhood. Because I spent a lot of time by the local river. And those memories are some of the nicest.

I spent a lot of time by the local river. My parents would take me out to play in nature. I’d watch when fish were reproducing in this little area where there were these tiny rapids, and my dad even caught a fish by hand one time, and I could look at it. […] My country was not on the same level of consumerist fervour in the early 2000s. It gained independence from Yugoslavia in the early 90s, and it took some time for the full-blown consumerist economy that we have today to develop. So, back then there wasn’t so much trash, even the one big shopping center that we have in the city [was built] the same year that I was born, in the year 2000. Compared to now there was very little plastic waste, the fish were very abundant in the river, the nature around me was much purer. This environment then got gradually degraded before my eyes; there was more and more plastic, and I’d find birds tangled in plastic bags. This made me resent the consumerist, rapidly technologising social milieu.

And my affinity to nature was, probably as a result of all these positive experiences, so great that I’d rarely watch cartoons. I really adored nature documentaries. And I didn’t watch child nature documentaries, you know, the ones with overly happy tone.

AGT: Right, that very censured interpretation of what nature is.

KK: Yeah, I watched very non-idealised and even non-dramatised nature documentaries that just showed what’s going on. Our national television actually had and still has incredible nature documentaries. This is what I’d watch. And I also saw a lot of documentaries about indigenous peoples. […] This, I guess, formed my expectations for life. I thought this was how things were going to be. But then, obviously, when I started going to school I found out that’s not what my life was going to be [like]. It was a very disappointing experience. I realised that people have jobs, and what jobs are, and how people feel about them, and figured out it was all really lame. This is what gave me the first push towards primitivism at the ripe age of five or six.

AGT: I find it interesting, when people come to primitivism or have those primitivist inklings, [it’s] for two very different reasons. “I grew up in nature, and I came to appreciate it, and want to defend it,” or “I wasn’t allowed or didn’t have the capacity or ability to grow up in nature, and I resent that.” I’m that second one, where there wasn’t so much opportunity. I grew up in a suburban environment, but now that I’m older I try to take more effort to be outside.

AGT: What is your conception of anarcho-primitivism? You seem to align with a revolutionary conception of primitivism, so I’m curious how do you respond to the general trends in primitivism that are generally not revolutionary, they’re either insurrectionary or drop-out oriented. I’m really curious how those interconnect.

KK: So, Ted Kaczynski — I guess I didn’t mention that, but he was the person who introduced me to “conscious primitivism” — remains a big influence. When I first encountered Industrial Society And Its Future and a bunch of related stuff, that was the moment I realised that I was not alone in my thinking. I like the idea of the anti-tech revolution; in effect a revolution of this sort would be an anti-civilization revolution. But, I think his idea of the revolution needs some augmentation. In Anti-tech Revolution: Why and How [Ted] he says this revolution is a purely negative one, in a sense that it only aims to get rid of the whole thing.

AGT: It’s a destruction-oriented movement.

KK: Yeah, it’s purely destruction-oriented, there’s nothing beyond that. And I’d like to augment this idea by adding to it some sort of positive element that goes beyond this whole “the system will be gone, and then we’ll have wild nature, the end” [narrative]. So, I’d like to add certain aspects that I’ve seen in cases of indigenous resistance, having to do with building communities that will, once the whole system falls apart, [pursue] primitive lifeways, so that what remains is not just complete disarray.

AGT: So, building a subculture that can propagate more positive values post-collapse, post-revolution is what you’re saying?

KK: Basically, that’s how I’d describe it. And I do mean communities in a very real sense. I know that leftist anarchists often talk about how the state needs to fall into this network of communities, but what they really mean is just a mirror image of this society with a different form of organization.

AGT: The “totally-not-a-state.”

KK: Yeah, that is not what I have in mind.

AGT: I want to continue this conversation, it’s interesting. One moment I had that made me stop being a left-wing anarchist and move to primitivism was, I just sat down and said “what would it look like?” And I was explaining it, and was like “this shit sucks, actually.” I still gotta work? This sucks. When I read Proudhon, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and all of them, they have something there, but they don’t go far enough with it at all. But then I found some individualist anarchists — not market “anarchists,” but more those that are anti-social— and had much more affinity for that.

KK: You mentioned how the classic leftist anarchist society wouldn’t be that much different from what we currently have. Ironically, when I was int he early stages of my political or philosophical development, this was what made me consider anarchism. Because when I first heard of anarchism I thought “there’s no way anything like this could work.” And then I read some of these authors, some Kropotkin, some other essays by other big anarchists, and went “huh, this could actually function.” But then as I moved towards that — wild individual freedom has always been the thing I was most deeply concerned about, was my highest goal — , I thought these societies didn’t really accomplish that much in bringing me closer to this goal.

I was always this deep ecology person. For example, when I was 11 or 13 I started watching Whale Wars and became an enthusiastic supporter of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. That actually started moving me into politics.

AGT: That’s really cool.

KK: Paul Watson was my childhod hero … despite being a vegan.

AGT: Oh, boy.

KK: I begged my parents to donate to them, and planned to join them the second I was gonna turn 18, and I was gonna destroy the whaling industry, and so on. I guess that didn’t end up happening.

But this is what got me into politics, so right before highschool I actually wrote this little political manifesto which has been lost to time, and nobody by me read it. It had this set of policies, suggestions on how to improve society. Like how we should teach kids more practical skills of how to have a garden. Most of them weren’t actually too bad, it’s just that it took me some time to realise that my ultimate goals were completely incompatible with a state, and that’s when I became disillusioned with state politics and started drifting towards anarchism that I didn’t know of at the time.

AGT: A lot of people who take particularly Ted’s idea of strategy or the general idea of anti-tech revolution don’t call themselves primitivist or anarcho-primitivist because of his disillusionment. And I think a big part of that is a lot of people whoa re really into Ted — and I’m not saying this is you at all — border on cultism. The way Marxists are with Marx, right, they’re Kaczynskiites. So, I’m curious why do you continue to call yourself a primitivist? Is it because, to you, there’s no functional difference between primitivism and Kaczynski’s ideas?

KK: I really do think there’s no functional difference. I think that a part of his disavowal comes down to him being a weird guy. I’ve actually read all of his personal journals, I haven’t read his autobiographical book that’s like 400 pages long.

AGT: I forget about that fucking book. When he was in prison — oh, why am I blanking on the guy’s name? — Timothy McVeigh! — he said McVeigh wasn’t a bad guy. And I was like “oh, what the fuck dude.” When you actually get into him, there are levels to Ted, and you remember: this guy is just a fucking human. And holy shit, he was a weirdo.

KK: Yeah, he was … very human. His journals make him into a really, really weird person. Which, I have to say, I appreciate that he had the balls to just write everything down. All of his really bizarre thoughts and everything. But once you understand his way of thinking, you realise what the whole reason he had this fallout with primitivists was — I think there are certain things about his critique that are fair, legitimate criticisms, but a lot of it comes down to his weird sense of ego.

AGT: Yeah.

KK: And he was a really pedantic person who [couldn’t] tolerate anyone having any slight disagreement with him. But I definitely have to say that in his critique, “The Truth About Primitive Life,” there are some valid points. For example, nature is not a hippy paradise. Life in nature can be very hard. […] Life can be hard, it can be very challenging. Sometimes really bad things can happen, like tragedies. People will get injured, die. That’s part of the deal, it’s not gonna be the literal Garden of Eden.

AGT: And that’s the issue, leftists, and anarchists, and radicals have a conception in general of utopia that is fictional. That people are gonna live healthy, totally healthy, not sad lives their whole life. And we have to confront reality. That’s not how it works. It just wont happen. [And they say] “you’re just not radical enough, you don’t have the creativity to think about it.” No, I’m just not an idiot, that’s the problem, that I’m not stupid.

AGT: I think resistance is necessary, but I’m critical of revolution as this thing that — and maybe you have a different conception, and we can talk about it — demands subservience, the loss of autonomy. Right? You’re giving yourself up to the group or a cultural movement or to an idea in a way I don’t feel comfortable with as an anarchist. Because I’ve been historically very sympathetic to the anti-organizationalist milieu. But let’s dig into that, what is your conception of a revolution in terms of organization and practice?

KK: I guess that to some extent you do inevitably lose some degree of autonomy in the process of doing a revolution. […] I have to say that I’m not that particularly well read on all the insurrectionary anarchist literature. I’ve read some Alfredo Bonanno, and I’ve read Blessed Is The Flame and Desert and some minor works too. But to my understanding the difference between insurrection and revolution is that insurrectionists like to have these little affinity groups and these work independently. I know that there can be some degree of collaboration between them. But ultimately I think that the whole system is so big that I’m not sure it could really be sufficiently challenged by these smaller affinity groups, which is why I believe that to some degree you have to do more organizing, on a larger scale.

Obviously I am weary of hierarchies of leaders and subservients [sic]. You know Deep Green Resistance? I read that book, and looked at their organizational strategy, and came to the same conclusion as everybody else, that they’re just trying to replicate some sort of standard political party. And they’re a cult of personality. This is something we should be weary of, and anarchist thought does offer a lot in terms of how we can organize in ways that prevent these rigid hierarchies from forming, but then again I don’t think we should sacrifice our efficiency to extreme concerns over personal autonomy within the movement.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it is important that there is personal autonomy, that you aren’t being just dragged around in some sort of machine, because if you want that you can just go to work every day and be normal. There is a fusion to be made between the successful practices of revolutionary movements of various kinds, past [and present], and I’m talking everything from the Bolsheviks to Al Qaeda or whatever, with anarchist practices that make these structures resilient. Because there are, for example, benefits to these little affinity groups, like they’re notoriously difficult to infiltrate or crack down on. We need to do some sort of synthesis, because I don’t think these little groups like Earth Liberation Front are going to cut it.

AGT: Ok, so, why do we need a revolution? Because I’m almost doubtful — and maybe this is me being a pessimist — , but I doubt it’s gonna happen, because it didn’t happen with Ted and what Ted was doing. It’s important to remember, the decade before and after, that was the height of that radical environmentalism in contradiction with globalism. An then it didn’t go anywhere. If there was going to be a time for it to happen, it was probably going to be then.

KK: There are a couple of issues. For example, Ted emphasises that it has to be a global revolution, everybody agrees with this. But the way Ted writes is so distinctly American that he has a very limited appeal outside of America. Ted and also the original Earth First! people like Dave Foreman had this very American energy, and were very successful due to that in America, of course. They used the prevailing mythos or values of America to their advantage.

AGT: Earth First! definitely did that, that was part of the reason why they had such an internal struggle. […] Because a lot of them came from a conservative [or] libertarian background. Very American, very cowboy. They appealed to that. And Ted does that too.

The revolution-thing. Is it even gonna work? To Ted’s credit, […] he’s not trying to build anything. So, at least in that regard it is almost insurrectionary. Versus, like, the Bolsheviks, the French revolution, the Haitian revolution, the American revolution — they wanted to build something that was going to be led by these revolutionaries. So to him, this criticism doesn’t apply in the same way. But to me it’s the feasibility of it, it’s the autonomy of it, but also, Steve Kirk who’s been a guest, edits Oak, makes a great point that revolutions are really just a bourgeois conception. Because when we talk about revolutions, in terms of class struggle, [they] do not exist in the past. You have peasant “revolutions,” but those are not functionally really revolutions. Most of them were millenarian “we wanna drop out of culture” kind of thing, they weren’t looking to reframe it most of the time, or they were a proto-bourgeois type of revolution. And since then every revolution since has been functionally very bourgeois in character, or has been constrained by bourgeois expectations. So, maybe the reaosn it never happened was: revolutions that are against capitalism don’t really make sense, right? Because it’s how capitalism comes about.

Marx has this idea that revolutions define the stages of history. But a revolution didn’t end Rome, and didn’t bring about feudalism. It happened because it collapsed. It literally couldn’t sustain itself anymore, and its own tension. Again, to Ted’s credit, he made the point, the revolution is a pressure on the system. It’s not even the secondary reason the system will collapse, it is just another way to increase social stress and discontent. Out of all the revolutions, at least his kinda makes the most sense, strategically speaking.

KK: When I said I wanted to have all these little communities and everything, I’m not talking about building some sort of society on a mass scale, I’m trying to find ways where a Ted-type revolution is compatible with people forming these organic, normal, human-scale communities, so there is something afterwards and they get to survive the aftermath.

But people often forget that Bolsheviks, the Marxist-Leninists, tankies, whatever you want to call them, actually had many, many successful revolutions throughout the world, for example the big ones: USSR, China. But also Africa, Latin America, many places. I remember looking at a map once, with Soviet-aligned states, and one third of the globe or something like that belonged in that political bloc at some point, usually as a result of little revolutions that happened. So, from that point of view, something like this could be possible. Now, obviously, those people didn’t end up destroying capitalism successfully, but they were a different kind of revolution.

Maybe “revolution” isn’t the most appropriate term, maybe something like “devolution” would be more appropriate, but most people are familiar with “revolution,” right, so I’m just using the term, because one of the goals of this website that I’m creating is to make it very accessible to the average Joe. Because what a lot of people in the primitivist milieu do is that they write in an overly intellectual or overly sophisticated manner, and I want to approach an average person who maybe reads two books per year.

AGT: The last section I had for you was … you and I connected when, with Civ Fucks Distro, I collected the essays and put the zine together, Anti-tech Isn’t Dead, and you wrote “The Myth of Human Weakness.” The summary is, I love the piece, you say that humans love to see ourselves as underdogs, and we used our superior intelligence, and we overcame the brutish nature we grew up in, and that’s kinda just bullshit. We’re not the nerds on the playground, so to speak, it’s a bit more complicated than that. I want you to speak to that, I think it’d be really cool.

KK: […] “The Myth of Human Weakness” was something very personal to me, which is why it was one of the first things that I wrote, because all throughout my life I’ve listened to these ridiculous narratives. For example, in history class the teacher said how people, before they started doing agriculture, were these starving, lowly creatures. And this didn’t make any sense to me. Because, first of all, just understanding the human body and human ingenuity it made no sense for humans to live in squalor for tens of thousands of years. And also because I knew about various indigenous peoples around the world I thought, “how come aren’t they living in squalor, huddling naked in caves?”

AGT: It’s the “short, nasty, brutish” bullshit we get from Hobbes, that’s what it is.

KK: Yeah, it’s the Hobbesian idea. And how everybody killed everybody and there was constant warfare and stuff. It is literally the ghost of Hobbes still fucking around. So, this was a topic I dedicated a lot of my time to, spent a lot of time thinking about it, and I think at this point I could expand this essay, and am gonna do another version that’s gonna be much longer, because there’s just so much more stuff.

The fundamental concept of the Myth of Human Weakness is that there is a mismatch between us and nature, and then that civilization is a solution to that, a kind of magic cure, because we like to imagine that through civilization we’re creating an environment we are better suited to. Which is obviously not the case, the truth is quite the opposite: civilization wasn’t created for the purpose of improving our lot. For example, Marvin Harris’ book Cannibals and Kings is relevant here, as well as Cultural Materialism. And the reason we think we’re unfit for life in the wild is purely because of retrospective projections of all the contemporary ills, for example warfare, health issues, even our general physical unfitness, on the past.

In the essay I briefly mentioned this journalist who found a survey where Americans talked about what animals they could defeat in a fight.

AGT: The one where they talk about how they could beat grizzly bears? That was so fucking hilarious!

KK: And then some people thought a rat could end their existence. And that guy wrote “an average human is a fat sack of potatoes and TV dinners” or something, and I thought, speak for yourself! There are so many people, not even indigenous people who live in nature, but anyone who’s not an American or Westerner who can do a lot more than watch television and flail arms around or whatever. This one is particularly infuriating, when people think that their physical condition, when they’re a secretary or work in a phone center, reflects some general human reality. It’s so absurd.

The same goes for our health. Primitivists get accused of ableism like “but all the disabled people died.”

AGT: Yeah, that’s what happened, not that some of the oldest neanderthals were all disabled. Not at all.

KK: I would recommend Mark Nathan Cohen’s book Health and the Rise of Civilization. This book covers the entire picture of health in pre-civilized societies and civilized societies, and shows so beautifully how the most challenging health problems like, for example cancers, many parasitic infections, viral infections, bacteria, etc. only became problems because of the way people started living when they left hunting-and-gathering lifestyles. People say “how are we gonna treat cancer” or “how are we gonna help people with Down’s syndrome,” when all of these conditions were exceedingly rare.

AGT: Hunter-gatherers were healthy, it’s not like they never got sick, but again, this idea that we’ll never get sick. What you’d have to do to the human body, the genetic engineering, and further and further destruction of the environment to obtain resources to do these things. Fuck you! I’m not accepting that, this idea that human health can only come at the expense of the Earth is just insane.