Anarchism, John Zerzan, Primitivism, and Green Peace

[darcyshirley33]

I just finished a research paper last night for the UC system where I used John Zerzan as a source.... the professor that's been working with me on it thinks it's great. lol. Now I just have to watch out for the FBI to come and kill me.

Here's an interview of John Zerzan for those of you interested.
John Zerzan Interview

I decided to post some of the interview in here, cuz I figure no one ever likes to click links and read something that's about twenty pages long. So I'm breaking it up into the individual questions and answers.  

[darcyshirley33]

K, I'm just gonna post segments of it then. This is all part of an interview by Derrick Jensen of John Zerzan.

INTRODUCTION:

My conversation with John Zerzan was as free-form as I might have expected of a meeting between two anarchists. What I hadn’t expected was Zerzan’s softspoken character. His writing is so sharp, uncompromising, and tenacious that I’d feared he would be as fierce in person as he is on the page. I was pleasantly disappointed: he is one of the most gracious, courteous, and simply nice people I’ve ever met.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Anarchism is not only the desire to be free of domination, but also the desire not to dominate others personally. This abhorrence to manipulate permeates Zerzan’s personality. He is also an extraordinarily good listener. This latter trait, though desirable in a friend, made my task as an interviewer much more difficult. Much as I tried to turn this into a “normal” interview, Zerzan steadfastly refused to play the role of guru. Finally, I quit trying to place him in a role he clearly did not want and just let the tape recorder run while we talked.

John Zerzan is the author of Elements of Refusal (CAL Press/Paleo Editions, 1999, 2nd edition – first edition originally published by Left Bank Books, 198 cool and Future Primitive (Autonomedia, 1994).  

[darcyshirley33]

Derrick Jensen: What is Anarchism?

John Zerzan: I would say Anarchism is the attempt to eradicate all forms of domination. This includes not only such obvious forms as the nation-state, with its routine use of violence and the force of law, and the corporation, with its institutionalized irresponsibility, but also such internalized forms as patriarchy, racism, homophobia. Also it is the attempt to expose the ways our philosophy, religion, economics, and other ideological constructions perform their primary function, which is to rationalize or naturalize—make seem natural—the domination that pervades our way of life: the destruction of the natural world or of indigenous peoples, for example, comes not as the result of decisions actively made and actions pursued, but instead, so we convince ourselves, as a manifestation of Darwinian selection, or God’s Will, or economic exigency. Beyond that, Anarchism is the attempt to look even into those parts of our everyday lives we accept as givens, as parts of the universe, to see how they, too, dominate us or facilitate our domination of others. What is the role of division of labor in the alienation and destruction we see around us? Even more fundamentally, what is the relationship between domination and time, numbers, language, or even symbolic thought itself?

The place where this definition gets a little problematic is that some Anarchists see some things as dominating, and some don’t. For example, some Anarchists don’t see the technological imperative as a category of domination. I do, and more and more Anarchists are finding themselves taking this anti-technological position. The further we follow this path of the technicization of both our interior and exterior lives, fewer and fewer Anarchists—and this is true as well of people who don’t call themselves Anarchists—valorize technology and production and progress and the categories of modern technological life.

Back to the definition. Most fundamentally I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.  

[darcyshirley33]

Isn’t all this just tilting at windmills? Has such a condition ever existed, where relations have not been based on domination?

That was the human condition for at least 99 percent of our existence as a species, from well before the emergence of homo sapiens, probably all the way back for at least a couple of million years, until perhaps only 10,000 years ago, with the emergence of first agriculture and then civilization.

Since that time we have worked very hard to convince ourselves that no such condition ever existed, because if no such condition ever existed, it’s futile to work toward it now. We may as well then accept the repression and subjugation that define our way of living as necessary antidotes to “evil human nature.” After all, according to this line of thought, our pre-civilized existence of deprivation, brutality, and ignorance made authority a benevolent gift that rescued us from savagery.

Think about the images that come to mind when you mention the labels “cave man,” or “Neanderthal.” Those images are implanted and then invoked to remind us where we would be without religion, government, and toil, and are probably the biggest ideological justifications for the whole van of civilization—armies, religion, law, the state—without which we would all live the brutal cliches of Hobbes.

The problem with those images, of course, is that they are entirely wrong. There has been a potent revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past 20 years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication—in which by domesticating others we domesticated ourselves—was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health.  

[darcyshirley33]

How do we know this?

In part through observing modern foraging peoples—what few we’ve not yet eliminated—and watching their egalitarian ways disappear under the pressures of habitat destruction and oftentimes direct coercion or murder. Also, at the other end of the time scale, through interpreting archaeological digs. An example of this has to do with the sharing that is now understood to be a keynote trait of non-domesticated people. If you were to study hearth sites of ancient peoples, and to find that one fire site has the remains of all the goodies, while other sites have very few, then that site would probably be the chief’s. But if time after time you see that all the sites have about the same amount of stuff, what begins to emerge is a picture of a people whose way of life is based on sharing. And that’s what is consistently found in pre-neolithic sites. A third way of knowing is based on the accounts of early European explorers, who again and again spoke of the generosity and gentleness of the peoples they encountered. This is true all across the globe.  

[darcyshirley33]

How do you respond to people who say this is all just nutty Rousseauvian noble savage nonsense?

I respectfully suggest they read more within the field. This isn’t Anarchist theory. It’s mainstream anthropology and archaeology. There are disagreements about some of the details, but not about the general structure.  

[darcyshirley33]

But what about the Aztecs, or stories we’re told of headhunters or cannibals?

Considering that our culture is the only one to ever invent napalm or nuclear weapons, I’m not sure we’re in much of a moral place to comment on the infinitely smaller-scale violence of other cultures. But it’s important to note a great divide in the behavior of indigenous groups. None of the cannibal or headhunting groups—and certainly not the Aztecs—were true hunter-gatherers. They had already begun agriculture. It is now generally conceded that agriculture usually leads to a rise in labor, a decrease in sharing, an increase in violence, a shortening of lifespan, and so on. This is not to say that all agricultural societies are violent, but to point out that this violence is not by and large characteristic of true hunter-gatherers.  

[darcyshirley33]

Can you define domestication?

It’s the attempt to bring free dimensions under control for self-serving purposes.  

[darcyshirley33]

If things were so great before, why did agriculture begin?

That’s a very difficult question, because for so many hundreds of thousands of years there was very little change, it was almost frozen. That’s long been a source of frustration to scholars in anthropology and archaeology: how could there have been almost zero change for hundreds of thousands of years—the whole lower and middle paleolithic—and then suddenly at a certain point in the upper paleolithic there’s this explosion, seemingly out of nowhere? You suddenly have art, and on the heels of that, agriculture. Virtual activity. Religion.

And what’s especially striking, it seems to me, is that now we see that the intelligence of humanity a million years ago was equal to what it is now. Thomas Wynn, for example, argues this very persuasively. Recently there was a piece in Nature magazine of a new finding that humans may have been sailing and navigating around what is now Micronesia some 800,000 years ago. All of this means that the reason civilization didn’t arise earlier had nothing to do with intelligence. The intelligence argument has always been both comforting and racist anyway; comforting in that it reduces the role of choice by implying that those who are intelligent enough to build a lifestyle like ours necessarily will, and racist in implying that even those humans alive today who live primitive lifestyles are simply too stupid to do otherwise. If they were just smart enough, the reasoning goes, they too could invent asphalt, chainsaws, and penitentiaries.

We also know that the transition didn’t come because of population pressures. Population has always been another big puzzle: how did foraging humanity keep the population so low, when they didn’t have technologies? Historically, it’s been assumed they used infanticide, but that theory has been kind of debunked. I believe that in addition to the various plants they could use as contraceptives they were also much more in tune with their bodies.

But back to the question: Why was it stable for so long, and then why did it change so quickly? I think it was stable because it worked, and I think it changed finally because for many millenia there was a kind of slow slippage into division of labor. This happened so slowly—almost imperceptibly—that people didn’t see what was happening, or what they were in danger of losing. The alienation brought about by division of labor—alienation from each other, from the natural world, from their bodies—then reached some sort of critical mass, giving rise to its apotheosis in what we’ve come to know as civilization. As to how civilization itself took hold, I think Freud nailed that one when he said that “civilization is something which was imposed on a resisting majority by a minority which understood how to obtain possession of the means of power and coercion.” That’s what we see happening today, and there’s no reason to believe it was any different in the first place.  

[darcyshirley33]

What’s wrong with division of labor?

That depends on what you want out of life. If your primary goal is mass production, nothing at all. It’s central to our way of life. Each person performs as a tiny cog in this big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is relative wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, or an intact world, there’s quite a lot wrong with it.

Division of labor is generally seen, when even noticed at all, as a banality, a “given” of modern life. All we see around us would be completely impossible without this cornerstone of production. But that’s the point. Undoing all this mess will mean undoing division of labor.

I think that at base a person is not complete or free insofar as that person’s life and the whole surrounding set-up depends on his or her being just some aspect of a process, some fraction of it. A divided life mirrors the basic divisions in society and it all starts there. Hierarchy and alienation start there, for example.

I don’t think anyone would deny the effective control that specialists or experts have in the contemporary world. And I don’t think anyone would argue that control isn’t increasing with ever-greater acceleration.  

[Weazel]

Logical, but don't tell the others  

[darcyshirley33]

Weazel

Logical, but don't tell the others

question  

[Weazel]

just saying it makes sense... granted I'm not giving up my interweb and puter-tooter though  

[darcyshirley33]

Weazel

just saying it makes sense... granted I'm not giving up my interweb and puter-tooter though

yeah, we really don't have the ability to just leave civilization now. It would take a lot of work, both physically and ideologically. But I'm trying to get through that. It's a strange thing to negotiate...  

[Weazel]

darcyshirley33

Weazel

just saying it makes sense... granted I'm not giving up my interweb and puter-tooter though

yeah, we really don't have the ability to just leave civilization now. It would take a lot of work, both physically and ideologically. But I'm trying to get through that. It's a strange thing to negotiate...

not exactly what I meant, just saying that as a human contributing to any sort of civilization, society, group, village, I'm only good with computers, I be the first thing to be thrown out of town when times got tough