In defence of wildness

The intensification of industrialism and the spectacle of capitalist production have led to the expansion of surveillance and management over the entirety of the biotic and abiotic. Luckily, the world is not entirely tame, and hopefully never can be, no matter the desires of capital to standardise the world. The forces of standardisation confront the impulse for wildness and anarchy in an ongoing struggle. This article takes critiques of the top-down state’s attempts to dominate and manage the planet found within political theory, such as the work of critical theorists, Situationists, Autonomous Marxists and Green Anarchists, and puts them in dialogue with insights found within hunter-gatherer studies. Hunter-gatherer cultures provide some of the most meaningful and successful examples of how to actively confront state formation, and thus can provide crucial insight for political thinking and movements which seek to do the same. This article endeavours to address a gap in most academic work in political theory which only centres statist and industrial politics, ignoring or erasing hunter-gatherer societies from its imagination. As a result, many of the supposed ‘solutions’ that political theory offers to address our socio-ecological crises merely expand the spheres of control and domination, rather than providing liberation.