Ritual for revolution

In the last 15 to 20 years, the failure of Communism as a viable revolutionary project has turned many on the Left to its historical rival: Anarchism. Merging with environmental discourses like deep ecology and the struggle for indigenous rights, Anarcho-Primitivism models its utopian discourse on ethnographic descriptions of hunter gatherer societies and mythologized notions of the "Noble Savage." Furthermore, its adherents retain high rates of visibility in the burgeoning antiglobalization movement, notorious for their black uniform and tactics of property destruction. My paper critically and pragmatically engages their attempts to invoke "the Primitive" as a metaphor for resisting the ascendance of global capitalism in the twenty-first century.