John Zerzan
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John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works critique agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Some of his criticism has extended as far as challenging domestication, language, symbolic thought (such as mathematics and art) and the concept of time. His four major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), Against Civilization: A Reader (1998) and Running on Emptiness (2002).
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[edit] Origins and education
Zerzan was born in 1943 in Oregon to immigrants from the Bohemia region of today's Czech Republic. He studied as an undergraduate at Stanford University and later received a Master's degree in History from San Francisco State University. He briefly worked towards a Ph.D. at the University of Southern California but dropped out before completing his dissertation.
[edit] Political development
In 1966 Zerzan was arrested while performing civil disobedience at a Berkeley anti-Vietnam War march and spent two weeks in the Alameda County Jail. He vowed after his release to never again be willingly arrested. He was friends with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and was involved with the psychedelic drug and music scene in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
As a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist in the late 1960s he worked as a social worker for the state of California. Becoming frustrated with the mundane life of a low-wage government worker he helped organize a social worker's union, the SSEU, and was elected vice president in 1968, and president in 1969. Local Situationist group Contradiction denounced him as a leftist bureaucrat. He became progressively more radical as he was exposed to what he considered to be the counter-revolutionary role of his and other unions. He was also a voracious reader of the Situationists, being particularly influenced by Guy Debord.
At this time, Zerzan's cousin, Kathan, was an active member of the Weather Underground, a militant group that had grown out of the radical Students for a Democratic Society. Throughout the 1970s, the underground group planted bombs in dozens of buildings including The Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol, and the California Department of Corrections. This is regarded as a major influence on John Zerzan's growing radicalism.
In 1974 Black and Red Press published Unions Against Revolution by Spanish ultra-left theorist Grandizo Munis that included an essay by Zerzan which previously appeared in Telos magazine. During this time he was also drifting into alcoholism, something that would afflict him for most of the decade. At one point, while living in San Francisco, he pulled all of his furniture out of his apartment in the Mission District and burned it in the middle of Valencia St. Over the next twenty years, Zerzan became intimately involved with the Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Demolition Derby and other anarchist periodicals. After reading the works of Fredy Perlman, David Watson and others, he slowly came to the conclusion that civilization itself was at the root of the problems of the world and that a hunter-gatherer form of society presented the most egalitarian model for human relations with themselves and the natural world.
[edit] Zerzan and the "Unabomber"
In the mid-1990s Zerzan became a confidant to Theodore Kaczynski, the Unabomber, after he read Industrial Society and Its Future, the so-called Unabomber Manifesto. Zerzan sat through the Unabomber trial and often conversed with Kaczynski during the proceedings. It was after becoming known as a friend of the Unabomber that the mainstream-media became interested in Zerzan and his ideas.
In Zerzan's essay "Whose Unabomber?" (1995), he signaled his support for the Unabomber's doctrine, but hedged his bets by condemning the bombings:
- ...the mailing of explosive devices intended for the agents who are engineering the present catastrophe is too random. Children, mail carriers, and others could easily be killed. Even if one granted the legitimacy of striking at the high-tech horror show by terrorizing its indispensable architects, collateral harm is not justifiable....[1]
however:
- The concept of justice should not be overlooked in considering the Unabomber phenomenon. In fact, except for his targets, when have the many little Eichmanns who are preparing the Brave New World ever been called to account?.... Is it unethical to try to stop those whose contributions are bringing an unprecedented assault on life?[2]
Two years later though, in the 1997 essay "He Means It - Do You?," Zerzan altered his position:
- Enter the Unabomber and a new line is being drawn. This time the bohemian schiz-fluxers, Green yuppies, hobbyist anarcho-journalists, condescending organizers of the poor, hip nihilo-aesthetes and all the other "anarchists" who thought their pretentious pastimes would go on unchallenged indefinitely - well, it's time to pick which side you're on. It may be that here also is a Rubicon from which there will be no turning back.
[edit] Zerzan and Pacific Northwest anarcho-primitivism
In 1995 a full-page interview with Zerzan was featured in the New York Times. Another significant event that shot Zerzan to celebrity philosopher status was his association with members of the Eugene, Oregon anarchist scene that later were the driving force behind the black bloc at the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, Washington. The black bloc was chiefly responsible for the property destruction committed at numerous corporate storefronts and banks. (see Black Bloc communique from N30)
News media coverage started a firestorm of controversy after the riots and Zerzan was one of the those that they turned to to explain the actions that some had taken at the demonstrations. After gaining this public notoriety, John Zerzan began accepting speaking engagements and giving interviews around the world explaining anarcho-primitivism and the more general Global Justice Movement. Recently Zerzan has been involved, however tempestously, with the Post-left anarchist trend, which argues that anarchists should break with the Left, which they believe is mired in Ideology and mostly concerned with seizing state power and crushing individual freedom.
Zerzan is currently one of the editors of Green Anarchy, the leading journal of anarcho-primitivist and insurrectionary anarchist thought. He is also the host of Anarchy Radio in Eugene on the University of Oregon's radio station KWVA 88.1FM. The program airs on Sunday nights from 11 to midnight Pacific time. He is still a contributing editor at Anarchy Magazine and has been published in magazines such as AdBusters. He does extensive speaking tours around the world, and is married to an archivist from the University of Oregon.
[edit] Criticism
[edit] Use of technology in order to condemn it
Some critics have pointed out the fact that although Zerzan propagates the abolishment of technology, he still utilizes most of these technologies in order to spread his ideas; including the operation of a website, modern printing facilities, radio and television interviews, as well as the use of automobiles and airplanes for travelling to various speeches and events.
Zerzan’s critique of technology might be said to attack the technological institution as a whole and the implications it has on society rather than the individual use of a given technology. In that sense, Zerzan's use of various technological utilities for the purpose of spreading a message against industrialization could be justified by himself and his peers as out of the same necessity as placing warning labels on dangerous devices. As many other primitivist writers, he too thinks that, in a global mass society such as ours, mass communication and long distance travel technologies are necessary (or at the very least, useful) for propagating new ideas to such an extent that they might impose change in society. However, some consider using technology in order to abolish it hypocritical.
Others have criticized the fact that Zerzan chooses not to live in a primitive society himself, and instead resides in the Whitaker neighborhood of Eugene, Oregon. Among the speculations for the reason of this, it is said by some that industrialized, agricultural civilization has desecrated the wilderness to such an extent that no suitable wilderness areas can be found to reside in, or that what little remains has become the residence of dangerous fugitives from justice. Still, such criticisms could rightly be considered ad hominems, in that they attack the Zerzan and other primitivists themselves and not the positions of primitivism in general.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Insurgent Desire, where around 40 of his writings and three interviews can be read online
- Primitivism.com, another source of writings by Zerzan and other primitivist authors and essayists
- Green Anarchy web site
- A short autobiography
- Black and Green, writer archive, biography, and bibliography.
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