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Title: The Left? No Thanks! Author: John Zerzan Date: 2008 Language: en Topics: post-left, primitivist Source: Retrieved on March 19th, 2009 from http://www.johnzerzan.net/articles/the-left-no-thanks.html
It isn’t that there’s no energy afoot in the world. On any given day on
any continent, one can see anti-government riots; direct actions in
support of animal liberation or to protect the earth; concerted efforts
to resist the building of dams, superhighways, industrial installations;
prison uprisings; spontaneous outbreaks of targeted vandalism by the
fed-up and pissed-off; wildcat strikes; and the energy of countless
infoshops, zines, primitive skills camps, schools, and gatherings;
radical reading groups, Food Not Bombs, etc. The list of oppositional
acts and alternative projects is very considerable.
What isn’t happening is the Left. Historically, it has failed
monumentally. What war, depression or ecocide did it ever prevent? The
Left now exists mainly as a fading vehicle of protest in, say, the
electoral circuses that fewer and fewer believe in anyway. It hasn’t
been a source of inspiration in many decades. It is dying out.
The Left is in our way and needs to go.
The juice today is with anarchy. For about ten years now it has become
steadily clearer that kids with passion and intelligence are anarchists.
Progressives, socialists, communists are grey-headed and do not turn on
youth. Some recent writings by leftists (e.g. Simon Critchley’s
Infinitely Demanding) express the hope that anarchy will revive the
Left, so in need of reviving. This seems to me unlikely.
And what is anarchy today? This is the most important story, in my
opinion. A basic shift has been underway for a while, one that has been
quite under-reported for fairly obvious reasons.
Traditional or classical anarchism is as outmoded as the rest of the
Left. It is not at all part of the oft-noticed surge of interest in
anarchy. Note the usage here: it isn’t anarchism that is moving forward,
but anarchy. Not a closed, Eurocentric ideology but an open,
no-holds-barred questioning and resisting.
The dominant order has shown itself to be amazingly flexible, able to
co-opt or recuperate countless radical gestures and alternative
approaches. Because of this, something deeper is called for, something
that can’t be contained within the system’s terms. This is the primary
reason for the failure of the Left: if the basics are not challenged at
a deep level, co-optation is guaranteed. Anarchism, until now, has not
left the orbit of capital and technology. Anarchism has accepted such
institutions as division of labor and domestication, prime movers of
mass society — which it has also accepted.
Enter a new outlook. What is pre-eminently coming on goes by many names:
anarcho-primitivism, neo-primitivism, green anarchy, civilization
critique, among others. For short, let’s just say we are primitivists.
There are signs of this presence in many places; for example, in Brazil,
where I joined hundreds of mostly young people at the Carnival Revoluçao
in February 2008. Many told me that the primitivist orientation was the
topic of conversation and that the old anarchism was visibly expiring.
There is an anti-civilization network in Europe, including informal ties
and fairly frequent gatherings in countries from Sweden to Spain and
Turkey.
I remember my excitement upon discovering Situationist ideas: the
emphasis on play and the gift, earthly pleasures not sacrificial
self-denial. My favorite line from that current: “Under the pavement,
the beach.” But they were held back by the workers
councils/productionist aspect of their orientation, which seemed at odds
with the playful part. Now it is time to drop the latter, and fulfill
the other, far more radical part.
A young woman in Croatia took it all further with her conclusion that
primitivism is at base a spiritual movement. Is the quest for wholeness,
immediacy, reconnection with the earth not spiritual? In November 2008 I
was in India (Delhi, Jaipur), and could see that presenting an
anti-industrial approach resonated among people of various spiritual
backgrounds, including Gandhi-oriented folks.
Scattered primitivist voices and activities now exist in Russia, China,
and the Philippines, and doubtless elsewhere. This may not yet
constitute a movement surging below the surface, but reality is pushing
in this direction, as I see it. It’s not only a logical development, but
one aimed at the heart of the reigning denial, and long overdue.
This nascent primitivist movement should come as no surprise given the
darkening crisis we see, involving every sphere of life. It is ranged
against industrialism and the high-tech promises, which have only
deepened the crisis. War on the natural world and an ever more arid,
desolate, meaningless technoculture are blatant facts. The continued
march of the Machine is not the answer but, profoundly, the problem.
Traditional, leftist anarchism wanted the factories to be self-managed
by the workers. We want a world without factories. Could it be clearer,
for example, that global over-heating is a function of
industrialization? Both began 200 years ago, and each step toward
greater industrialization has been a step toward greater global
overheating.
The primitivist perspective draws on indigenous, pre-domestication
wisdom, tries to learn from the million years of human existence prior
to/outside civilization. Gatherer-hunter life, also known as band
society, was the original and only anarchy: face-to-face community in
which people took responsibility for themselves and each other. We want
some version of this, a radically decentralized lifeworld, not the
globalizing, standardizing reality of mass society, in which all the
shiny technology rests on the drudgery of millions and the systematic
killing of the earth.
Some are horrified by such new notions. Noam Chomsky, who manages to
still believe all the lies of Progress, calls us “genocidists.” As if
the continued proliferation of the modern techno-world isn’t genocidal
already!
I see a growing interest in challenging this death march we are on.
After all, where has Enlightenment or modernity made good on its claims
of betterment? Reality is steadily impoverished in every way. The now
almost daily school/mall/workplace massacres speak as loudly as the
eco-disaster also unfolding around the globe. The Left has tried to
block a sorely-needed deepening of public discourse, to include
questioning the real depth of the frightening developments we face. The
Left needs to go so that radical, inspiring visions can come forth and
be shared.
An increasingly technified world where all is at risk is only inevitable
if we continue to accept it as such. The dynamics of all this rest on
primary institutions that must be challenged. We are seeing the
beginnings of this challenge now, past the false claims of technology,
capital, and the culture of postmodern cynicism — and past the corpse of
the Left, and its extremely limited horizons.