John Zerzan (born 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticise (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).

Zerzan's work

Zerzan's theories draw on Theodor Adorno's concept of negative dialectics to construct a theory of civilization as the cumulative construction of alienation. Zerzan claims that original human societies in paleolithic times, and similar societies today such as the !Kung, Bushmen and Mbuti, live a non-alienated and non-oppressive form of life based on primitive abundance and closeness to nature. Constructing such societies as a kind of political ideal, or at least an instructive comparison against which to denounce contemporary (especially industrial) societies, Zerzan uses anthropological studies from such societies as the basis for a wide-ranging critique of aspects of modern life. He portrays contemporary society as a world of misery built on the psychological production of a sense of scarcity and lack [1]. The history of civilisation is the history of renunciation; what stands against this is not progress but rather the Utopia which arises from its negation [2].

Zerzan is an anarchist, and is broadly associated with the tendencies known as green anarchy, anti-civ, anarcho-primitivism and post-left anarchy. He rejects not only the state, but all forms of hierarchical and authoritarian relations. "Most simply, anarchy means "without rule." This implies not only a rejection of government but of all other forms of domination and power as well." [3].

Zerzan's work relies heavily on a strong binary between the "primitive" - viewed as non-alienated, wild (hence free), non-hierarchical, ludic, and socially egalitarian - and the "civilised" - viewed as alienated, domesticated (hence enslaved or subordinated), hierarchically organised, work-obsessed and socially discriminatory. Hence, "life before domestication/agriculture was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, sexual equality, and health." [4]

Zerzan's claims about the status of primitive societies are based on a reading of the works of anthropologists such as Marshall Sahlins and Robert B. Lee. Crucially, the category of primitives is restricted to those societies which are pure hunter-gatherers with no domesticated plants or animals. For instance, hierarchy among Northwest Coast Native Americans whose main activities were fishing and foraging is attributed to their having domesticated dogs and tobacco [5]. His claims are thus insulated from the criticisms made by critics such as Murray Bookchin, based on ecocidal, hierarchical or oppressive practices by other peoples labelled as "primitive". However, this comes at the cost of narrowing his empirical reference to an extremely small number of existing societies and a controversial reading of archaeological records.

The call for a "Future Primitive", for a radical reconstruction of society based on a rejection of alienation and an embracing of the wild. " It may be that our only real hope is the recovery of a face-to-face social existence, a radical decentralization, a dismantling of the devouring, estranging productionist, high-tech trajectory that is so impoverishing." [6] The usual use of anthropological evidence is comparative and demonstrative - the necessity or naturality of aspects of modern western societies is challenged by pointing to counter-examples in hunter-gatherer societies. "Ever-growing documentation of human prehistory as a very long period of largely non-alienated life stands in sharp contrast to the increasingly stark failures of untenable modernity." [7]. It is unclear, however, whether this implies a re-establishment of the literal forms of hunter-gatherer societies or a broader kind of learning from their ways of life in order to construct non-alienated relations.

Zerzan's political project calls for the destruction of technology. This is differentiated from tools, in that while a tool is under the control of the user, technology tends to dominate its users. One difference is the division of labour, which Zerzan opposes. While tools can be used by everyone in a community (albeit with varying levels of skill), hence leading to an equal distribution of power and a situation of individual autonomy, technology requires specialised knowledge which is possessed by an elite, which automatically has power over other users. This power is one of the sources of alienation, along with domestication and symbolic thought.

Zerzan's typical method is to take a particular construct of civilisation (a technology, belief, practice or institution) and construct an account of its historical origins, its alleged destructive and alienating effects and its contrasts with hunter-gatherer experiences. In his essay on number for example, Zerzan starts by contrasting the "civilized" emphasis on counting and measuring with a "primitive" emphasis on sharing, citing Dorothy Lee's work on the Trobriand Islanders in support, before constructing a narrative of the rise of number through cumulative stages of state domination, starting with the desire of Egyptian kings to measure what they ruled [8]. This approach is repeated in relation to time [9], gender inequality [10], work [11], technology [12], art and ritual [13], agriculture [14] and globalization [15]. Zerzan also writes more general texts on anarchist [16] and primitivist theory [17] [18], critiques of "postmodernism" and of perceived opponents such as Hakim Bey [19] and Noam Chomsky [20], and cultural commentaries on shows such as Star Trek [21].

Bio

Zerzan was born in 1943 in Oregon to immigrants of Bohemian heritage. 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.

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 attended events organized by 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 city of San Francisco welfare department. 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.

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 the journal Telos. During this time he was also drifting into alcohol abuse, 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.