Define "primitivism"? Not sure what you mean. But, the Romans managed to have hot and cold running water without electricity - yet we require it and complex manufacturing processes to produce the pumps and generators required to do it. How much more advanced are we, really?
Because instead of electricity they had armies of slaves to pump whatever they needed and
huge deforestation campaigns to heat the water. Energy doesn't come from nothing. Primitivism means essentially turning the clock back a couple hundred years before industrialization.
It's not a hippie pipe dream to have functioning, stable communities wherein people work together for the common good and are able to sustain their own settlement via methods that don't rape the environment around them.
But in the US, everyone kind of just assumes that working and living together in communities ("communes") automatically equals hippies - even forgetting the country's own history with local townships, settler posts, and native american tribes. No, everyone remembers a bunch of long haired stoners with extraordinarily bad fashion sense.
Communes are equated with hippies because they were the ones who did it. Such things sound nice in theory, but in reality "for the common good" has never panned out. Many nations built their economies on that idea, the Soviet Union, India, China, Warsaw Pact and to a lesser extent pre-thatcher UK and latin america. The result? Every one of these economies essentially stagnated and went bankrupt resulting in traumatic reforms. And frankly given that people only had a life expectancy of less than 50 in those townships you describe back in the day I'm not willing to go back to it.
Localization sounds good until people realize that would mean giving up the ammenities and lifestyle they are accustomed to. I'll give the Unabomber credit for one thing, he actually did live this kind of "oneness with nature" he was preaching by living in the middle of nowhere in a shack without electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing.
