I
was recently invited to an anarcho-primitivist talk with John Zerzan as speaker
by my friend Marmaduke Hutchings. It was packed out with around 120 to 130
people going on my own estimations. It also became apparent that this crowd
were already won over and weren’t here to pick a fight with Zerzan. The talk
was at Raven’s Row near Spitalfields, there some of his books as well as
t-shirt slogans and videos exploring primitivism were on show. After the talk
there was food and booze available to the audience. God knows who bankrolls
that place. It would be a lively discussion that night. The questions and
answers opening featured talk of the ‘proto-fascist’ Batman movie and
suggestions that the victims of the recent shooting were really ideologically
complicit in the ‘proto-fascistic’ regime. It should be noted that Zerzan
didn’t endorse this position. At one point the discussion was derailed over the
topic of drug consumption, which culminated with a statement to the effect that
“Although koalas are addicted to eucalyptus, they don’t commit genocide.”
The height of hilarity was when John recalled the culmination of a questions and answers session that took the form of a man yelling at him "Did you swim here?! Did you swim here?!" The
initial emphasis of the talk was on community and its notable absence in our world before
making it clear that we don’t want the ‘old hell’ of patriarchal domination and
hierarchical control. Rather we want the ‘new hell’ which would be a
prelapsarian organic whole of individuals set free from all the old forms of
domination and power. The problem here is that there isn’t really a beginning. You can trace these problems to
domestication, but then you could trace the roots of domestication back even
further. Ultimately you could end up with the view that it is the human race
that’s the problem. So we should enjoy the ride and await the end with the
knowledge that there will be a great beginning after man. There is nothing that
can be done about the fundamental condition of humanity, which we are really
just rapacious homonidesand nothing can be made of us.
You can easily see where the conservative ethos of John Gray would
clamber into bed with the nihilistic poetry of Charles Bukowski. Of course, Zerzan stresses that he isn’t a ‘collapsist’
who’ll be singing in a meadow while it all falls down. But it is easier to
dream of tearing it all down than overthrowing one system for another. When it got topical as Zerzan took up the Batman
shootings as an example. Noting the same old songs, the two primary responses
in the narrative around the shooting were that the killer is simply evil or
that there are too many guns in America. But the US has always been full of
guns and there hasn’t always been these shootings, he notes, the same goes for
violent psychos. The almost recreational violence and mass-killing must be a
social phenomenon, a symptom of the technological society where there are more
shootings than elsewhere. This isn’t particularly insightful, as the most
violence can be pinned down to where there is a high concentration of available
firearms, political fear and social alienation.
It’s
the techno-culture stupid! It’s ideological and not neutral in any sense. The
rolling back of cultural solidarity comes at the same time that the
technological ideology pitches its universal solution. It will connect each of
us, but it actually helps to atomise us. It promises us a better world and
reduces us to passive appendages of machines. We are increasingly inert in our
reliance on GPS systems, the internet and mobile phones. In Japan you can buy
bathing machines which close over you like a coffin. In South Korea there is
robotic teaching, hugging and even French-kissing. He could’ve included the sex
doll craze in Japan, that there are many men who prefer fake women that they
can keep in the boot of their car to real women. We’re at the end of sensual
experience.In the background of the problems which plague our civilisation
Zerzan sees technological domestication at the root of it all: overpopulation
and environmental degradation as well as drugs and disease. According to this
view industrialisation generates cancer and other diseases.
It’s
not just that domestication removes us from what used to be ordinary aspects of
human life. He notes that America is an over-drugged society where it has
gotten to the point that the drugs can actually be detected in the water
supply. There are 80 million Americans with sleeping disorders, tens of
millions using drugs to get through the day.In the same vein industrialisation
coupled with domestication that the problem of overpopulation came about. The
advent of agriculture was the beginning of this. It was the mistake to go from
taking what nature gave to us for free to attempts of controlling and
engineering nature. When confronted the horrors of pre-civilisation Zerzan
maintains that cannibalism, head-hunting and genital mutilation are all
products of domestication. He knew Freud’s writing on civilisation in the
aftermath of war, that the civilisation is a construct for regulating the
suppressed forces of violent sexual urges inside us. Domestication is a wound
that never heals, it’s a machine for happiness that creates unhappiness.
According
to this view private property emerges from domestication, John Zerzan contrasts
himself against the Marxists here. He skips over the materialist reading of
history, that the productive modes of exploitation create the pre-conditions
for the next stage. In this way slavery and feudalism created the necessary
conditions for capitalism to emerge, in turn capitalism may lead to socialism.
Zerzan would probably reject this as another notion of technological progress,
for him every political project is reducible to this fetish for technology. But
it seems as though Zerzan, to some extent, wants technology without technology
as he claims that there are other ways of powering respiratory machines than
the systems we fall back on today. His example of electricity generated through
cycling. At the same time it could be said that the anarcho-primitivism to
which Zerzan subscribes really falls into the ease with which we can imagine
the collapse of our entire world than it is to foresee a post-capitalist
future.
In
the same way that Zerzan dismissed the ‘same song’ of the American narrative
around shootings to differentiate his position from conservatives and liberals
he made time to distinguish himself from the other factions of the Left. Even
though Zerzan may not see himself as a man of the Left, it is the case that the
anarchist tradition comes out of 18th Century classical liberalism
and developed into libertarian socialism in the 19th Century. The
free-market libertarians are really a 20th Century phenomenon,
another outgrowth of classical liberalism. For him the Left and the Right are both
subject to the ideological shibboleths of technological progress, this dynamic
is something to overcome and transcend. In a classic display of left-wing
sectarianism Zerzan made periodic slights against Noam Chomsky and
environmentalists, the main competition to his position at the eco-libertarian
end of the radical Left. Really this is where Zerzan comes across as
ultra-leftist and as we shall see he’s not adverse to forms of comfortable
resistance.
Chomsky
is wrong to claim that there isn’t a way of eliminating technology and even if
there is we shouldn’t. Yet Zerzan isn’t all that clear about how we can break
apart the system and return to that land of ‘Once upon a time…’ where there is
no racism, homophobia, misogyny and no more hierarchical authority, no statism
and no capitalism. When pushed on this Zerzan seems to opt for a dichotomy of
‘small actions’ such as cycling and ‘big acts’ of violence. He shirked away
from any kind of mass-violence in a Khmer Rouge style destruction of society.
Though he doesn’t evade the endorsement of political violence, it has to be
about the destruction of private property. In such cases Zerzan stands on the
side of rioters, the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. He
also shirked away from a sudden collapse as that would reap a high body-count,
in this sense Zerzan seems like less of an anarchist as it would imply a
gradual transition. Rather than simply endorse the coming collapse of Western
civilisation as a new hope, he calls for a primitive future.
This
is where the ultra-leftist sectarianism converges with comfortable resistance
and the nostalgia for a world outside of all our modern problems. Similarly the
Greens can be damned if they deny that the system can’t be saved through
innovations to eventually replace fossil fuels with sustainable energy. As much
as the eco-Right are deluded in their plan to save capitalism through carbon
caps, it isn’t the case that the eco-socialists are about the preservation of
capitalist society. Really many Greens share Zerzan’s nostalgia for a human
community of communities which precedes the horrors of industrial capitalism.
In his vision community will instil responsibility in the same way that it is
in co-ops as the ‘fuck-ups’ are present at meetings where collective
deliberating goes on and everything is discussed democratically. This is where
it’s clear that Zerzan is a product of the 60s, when the commune movement hoped
to establish an alternate society free of any kind of power structure only to
find the old structures were quickly reconstituted.
It seems then that there would be a need for
conservatives to hold it all in place once it had been achieved. Actually you could read a conservative nostalgia out of Zerzan's view of the past. Amnesia is for reactionaries, though he isn't guilty of wiping away inconvenient truths it is the case that the anarcho-primitivists are selective about what they want to go back to. It is fitting then that Zerzan stands by autonomous deference
within the system, this way we can all do our bit in the resistance. There is a
conservative side to this also, as we remain inside our bubbles without
televisions and mobile phones reading about the future primitive. The political
is not just an individual decision, if we want to change the world we need
collective acts and organisation. The wish almost matches the nightmares of
many environmentalists: that we could sit still for too long and the world as
it is would be gone forever. But this would be a crude anarcho-primitivism. The
more civilisation, the more neuroses seems to summarise Zerzan’s position –
it’s better to go back than to continue forward, backwards is forward!
