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Title: Anarchism = Zerzan?
Author: Michael Albert
Language: en
Topics: anti-civ, critique, John Zerzan, primitivism, technology
Source: Retrieved on 1 January 2010 from www.insurgentdesire.org.uk/albert.htm
Notes: From Z Magazine

Michael Albert

Anarchism = Zerzan?

In a number of mainstream media outlets, anarchism has recently been

associated with John Zerzan. In my last ZNet commentary (

www.zmag.org

), I instead suggested that anarchism ought to be associated with

identifying structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination

throughout life and with challenging them as conditions and the pursuit

of justice permit. Anarchism would seek to eliminate subordination based

on political and economic power, power relations among men and women and

between parents and children, power among cultural communities, power

over future generations, and much else as well. I then suggested that

emerging from this were different strands of activism. One, I argued,

went from the above to rejecting technology, institutions, and reforms

per se. The other, I argued, is seeking to expand the conceptual base of

anarchism to more fully comprehend extra-political dimensions of life,

to develop sound vision, and to elaborate and win non-reformist reforms

that enhance people’s current lives and further empower future struggles

leading toward ultimate goals.

I made this differentiation and opted firmly for the latter approach

without naming advocates of either because I wanted to avoid discussing

individual people and instead focus on ideas and choices. Some felt,

however, that I was wrong to critique a trend — the “not so desirable

anarchism” — without giving evidence of its actual existence and

examining its actual self-representations.

Okay, the most visible advocate and exemplar of what I called “not so

desirable anarchism” is John Zerzan. Of course other folks are also in

the camp, but sticking to Zerzan’s work should amply display at least

the most touted arguments behind the positions I reacted against.

Zerzan starts out by anarchistically rejecting all authoritarian

constraints on human well being and development. This is admirable, of

course, but where does he wind up?

Well, Zerzan rejects technology per se. He rejects all institutions that

distinguish different tasks and responsibilities for different actors,

which is all institutions per se. He derivatively contributes to

rejecting the idea of all reforms because no institution is worthy of

improvements, so no improvements are worthy of our time. But even beyond

these three themes of my last essay, Zerzan also rejects language, math,

and even counting items or registering time passage. I think all these

rejections repeat the same error that other opponents of all technology,

all institutions, and all reforms also make, though Zerzan does it most

relentlessly. Let’s see.

Zerzan tells us “that technology has never been neutral, like some

discreet tool detachable from its context. It always partakes of and

expresses the basic values of the social system in which it is embedded.

Technology is the language, the texture, the embodiment of the social

arrangements it holds together.” This is unobjectionable, though it

neglects another point that Zerzan never returns to. Yes, technologies

bear the mark of the society they are born and used in. How could it be

otherwise? However, technologies not only reflect those societies’

attributes, including their worst, but also often meet real needs and

expand real potentials. So you get electric chairs to kill people and

assembly lines to constrain them, but you also get warm clothes for

people to wear, and penicillin to enhance their longevity.

Zerzan says technologies are contextual, and of course they are. They

arise in some social setting. They are produced in it, or perhaps

another. They are used in it, or perhaps a third. Technologies don’t

spring spontaneously from nothing with no lineage and imprint. Nor are

technologies utilized in social vacuums. Zerzan is correct that each

technology, whether a pencil or a shoe lace much less a guided missile

or an assembly line, bears a social inscription carrying into it diverse

imprints of the motives of its conception, production, and utilization —

part of which generally reflect the defense of social elites, but

another part of which often reflect the accomplishing of needed

functions. We should therefore expect technologies conceived, produced,

and utilized in feudal times to be different than those in prehistoric

times, or than those in capitalist times. So it is elementary.

Zerzan moves on, however, to a point that is not at all elementary. He

says, “the idea that [technology] is neutral, that it is separable from

society, is one of the biggest lies available. It is obvious why those

who defend the high-tech death trap want us to believe that technology

is somehow neutral.” This is disingenuous hand-waving, I think, or else

evidences an immense confusion.

That is, when someone says that technology per se is neutral, they of

course mean that technology does not by its internal logic have to serve

only dominating elites. Technology can serve any constituency including

broad populations. Technology can arise in any social setting and

system, and can accomplish diverse tasks that can be beneficial or

horrendous, humane or cruel, liberating or stultifying. Technology isn’t

necessarily prehistoric, or feudal, or capitalist, or anything else

other than always a product of human design and labors, and having a

human origin imposes on technology no particular social direction, no

universal social stamp. Zerzan rightly notices that our contemporary

technologies encapsulate forces at play in our societies. He wrongly

concludes, however, that all technology must forever and always be as

our technology is now. It is therefore not true that if we don’t like

specific instances of our technology now, to get rid of them we must

dispense all technology per se.

The most obvious way to discern the unwarranted leap in Zerzan’s claim

is to note that without technology humans would have no clothes, no

source of power outside their own muscles, and not even agriculture to

renew their muscles. Life would be brutish, isolated, and short. Disease

would be rampant. Communication, mobility, knowledge, music, art, play,

and pretty much everything else would be harshly limited. This alone

ought to close the case, of course, that eliminating technology per se

is not the way to avoid the ills of harmful technologies. But another

way to see the point rests on examining Zerzan’s logic.

Suppose I were to say that all human thought, all human expression,

emotion, and even locomotion, manifests an imprint of the society in

which it occurs. This is certainly equally true as saying that all

technology bears such a societal imprint. So now what? Do I follow

Zerzan to deduce from the fact that it is imprinted — like technology is

— that all human thought, expression, emotion, and even locomotion must

always embody oppressive attributes so that I should reject them all in

the same way that Zerzan says we should reject technology? Or do I

assert that in desirable social settings (and to a degree even in

undesirable ones) human thought, expression, emotion, and even

locomotion also have wonderful and essential attributes that we

certainly don’t want to reject, and that in good environments the

defining features can become overwhelmingly positive making the idea of

rejecting them utterly ridiculous? I prefer the latter logic, both for

human attributes and for technologies.

Zerzan, in contrast consistently prefers the former logic. His mistake

is to rightly notice various horrible technologies but then wrongly

attribute the problem they pose not to mutable social structures and

institutions which impose the bad features on the technologies and the

bad technologies on us, but to the entire category of technology per se.

Ubiquitous manifestation of this leap from disliking instances of some

category to rejecting the whole category would lead to rejecting pretty

much everything that is social or otherwise a product of human exchange

and thought, but which turns up with horrible aspects in contemporary

societies, and would thus imply wanting humans to revert to a kind of

pre-humanity state. Amazingly, Zerzan follows exactly that trajectory.

Thus, Zerzan offers that “my working hypothesis is that division of

labor draws the line [between a desirable prehistory and everything

since], with dire consequences that unfold in an accelerating or

cumulative way. Specialization divides and narrows the individual,

brings in hierarchy, creates dependency and works against autonomy.” And

he continues by deducing that “tools or roles that involve division of

labor engender divided people and divided society.”

That is, again Zerzan drags partial truths to outrageous conclusions. Of

course typical corporate divisions of labor diminish and even destroy

individual and social potentials. Zerzan points out, for example, that

“the first ‘breakthrough’ for me was in terms of the Industrial

Revolution in England. Namely, it became clear that the factory system

was introduced in large part as a means of social control. The dispersed

craftsmen were deprived of their autonomy and brought together in

factories to be de-skilled and disciplined. This shows that technology

was not at all ‘neutral’.” Perhaps Zerzan first encountered brilliant

expression of such ideas a quarter century ago in the same places I

first did, for example, in the wonderful essay by Steven Marglin, “What

do bosses do?” or in Harry Braverman’s Monthly Review work. But if so,

he missed the key insight that the imposed division of labor served

specific social relations and elites, and that the problem posed for

suffering humanity wasn’t that different people were doing different

tasks per se, but was the particular limited combinations of tasks that

most of the people were compelled to do, as well as what little they

received for it.

Zerzan is right, of course, that (corporate and sexist and racist)

divisions of labor have buttressed hierarchy, imposed dependency, and

impeded autonomy. And of course many institutions incorporate these

damaging divisions of labor and therefore deserve rejection. But beyond

this, virtually all institutions involve roles that diversify people’s

tasks and responsibilities. To jump from the correct and familiar

insight that some divisions of labor are horrible so that institutions

embodying them are unworthy, to then claiming that no division of labor

at all can be abided and therefore all institutions are unworthy, says

that each individual must, in essence, either do everything for him or

herself or at least only randomly seize on doing this and that task

without lasting institutional coordination with others. It rejects roles

per se and leads to an anti-institutional, anti-social, and I think

ultimately even anti-human stance. So rather than solely rejecting

imposed divisions of labor that are contrary to our aspirations, which

would be fine, Zerzan argues all divisions of labor of any kind have to

go.

Should we reject divisions of labor that relegate many to obedience and

rote boredom while privileging an elite few with empowering and engaging

endeavors? Of course. About this Zerzan and I presumably agree. But the

way to do this isn’t to have everyone do everything with no

differentiation of different people’s responsibilities. The way to do it

is not to ignore that people have diverse tastes and inclinations that

they rightly wish to express in their actions. And it is not to forego

garnering the worthy gains that can accrue from taking advantage of

skills and training. Why throw out the baby of productivity and

individuality/diversity with the bathwater of alienation/hierarchy? Why

not divide tasks into jobs that are balanced for empowerment and quality

of life implications (to eliminate hierarchy), and that are self-managed

(to eliminate alienation), even as they also respect different actor’s

personal tastes? Get rid of the hierarchy/alienation inducing aspects —

the bathwater — of course. But keep the fulfilling and beneficial

attention to different people’s preferences and the utilization of

diversity to increase the breadth of our collective experiences and also

increase output and diminish required labor.

So why does Zerzan pose the problem as no division of labor versus a bad

division of labor (and similarly as no technology versus bad

technology), rather than as a bad division of labor versus a good

division of labor (or as bad technology versus good technology)? One

possible line of thought leading someone to propose such limiting

polarities would be to notice the one thing that all divisions of labor

(and all technologies) have in common, which is their being a human and

social creation, and deciding that this commonality somehow inevitably

infects them with harmful aspects. I am not sure Zerzan believes this,

nor sure if it matters much, because in any event intended or not this

is the practical and intellectual implication of his stance. Thus,

Zerzan says, “it seems evident that industrialization and the factories

could not be gotten rid of instantly, but equally clear that their

liquidation must be pursued with all the vigor behind the rush of

break-out. Such enslavement of people and nature must disappear forever,

so that words like production and economy will have no meaning.” In

other words, we not only have to eliminate bad economic activity that

divides us into unequal classes, or that exploits us, or that despoils

us, or that degrades us, all of which I certainly agree with, but we

have to eliminate economic activity tout court. It is human artifacts

that must go, it seems. As with technology and division of labor, so

with economy as a whole, we must opt for all or nothing. No more

production for Zerzan. No more workplaces. And what do we put in their

place? Foraging, it seems, because that bears no mark of specifically

human invention. So Zerzan rejects tools and roles, technologies and

institutions, and even production and economy, but amazingly, doesn’t

stop there. He takes this line of thought all the way to its ultimate

destinations, going well beyond the confusions of “the not so desirable

anarchism” I discussed last essay.

Zerzan rejects even language, for example. He tells us that in “the

process of transforming all direct experience into the supreme symbolic

expression, language, monopolizes life. Like ideology, language conceals

and justifies, compelling us to suspend our doubts about its claim to

validity. It is at the root of civilization, the dynamic code of

civilization’s alienated nature. As the paradigm of ideology, language

stands behind all of the massive legitimation necessary to hold

civilization together. It remains for us to clarify what forms of

nascent domination engendered this justification, made language

necessary as a basic means of repression.” The problem is now

civilization...that is, humans entwined in social arrangements of their

own creation, conceived to allow each to pursue their lives as they will

without having to operate atomistically or in opposition to all others.

Since words are a big part of the glue of such arrangements, says

Zerzan, let’s dispense with them rather than try to fulfill their

potential.

“Words bespeak a sadness; they are used to soak up the emptiness of

unbridled time. We have all had that desire to go further, deeper than

words, the feeling of wanting only to be done with all the talk, knowing

that being allowed to live coherently erases the need to formulate

coherence,” says Zerzan. And of course one doesn’t want to live by words

alone, or bread alone, or technology alone, or anything else alone. But

that is not the same as wanting to entirely dispense with each.

Likewise, of course we express sadness in words, but also in deeds and

feelings. Should we thus relegate not only words, but also deeds and

feelings to the junkyard? And consciousness is surely also often a

bulwark of existing oppressions. Conscious sometimes manifests sadness

and is often used in authoritative ways. Let’s lobotomize, too. For that

matter, why not notice that sexual intercourse has very often been

fraught with painful ramifications, not to mention outright violations,

and virtually universally to date in history with asymmetries of power?

Why not dump sex too? Shortly thereafter there will be no more humans,

and, Zerzan is correct, also no more human suffering. Terminating just

short of this species suicide, Zerzan’s agenda, or hope, seems to me to

be that we should end divisions of labor, reject technology, discard

institutions, silence language, eliminate numbers, reject time, and

perhaps dispense consciousness — though not reproduction — returning to

prehistoric relations. And the mainstream media says Zerzan is an

exemplar of anarchism. No wonder.

You think I exaggerate? Well, judge for yourself. Zerzan says, “my

tentative position is that only a rejection of symbolic culture [that

is, language] provides a deep enough challenge to what stems from that

culture.” Thus: reject language. Or “only a politics that undoes

language and time and is thus visionary to the point of voluptuousness

has any meaning.” Not just language, but time too. Wordplay is all well

and good for provocative or aesthetic exercises or entertainment. But

Zerzan claims to be challenging the realities that crush out people’s

lives. That carries a responsibility, it seems to me, to attend to

reality.

Zerzan rejects numbers too. To explain why, he tells us that “Euclid

developed geometry — literally, ‘land measuring’ — to measure fields for

purposes of ownership, taxation, and the assignment of slave labor.”

And: “When members of a large family sit down to dinner, they know

immediately, without counting, whether someone is missing. Counting

becomes necessary only when things become homogenized.” Can this be

serious? Apparently so. The thought pattern is by now familiar, after

all. Zerzan rightly notes that numbers can be used in harmful or

alienating ways and to service authority and power. Anyone would

conclude that in some pursuits we are better off without numbers. Fair

enough. But Zerzan wrongly extrapolates that we’d be best off without

numbers all the time. Goodbye to language, goodbye to numbers and time,

goodbye to technology and institutions...why not goodbye to sex one

wonders? After all, sex frequently manifests and undergirds harmful

behavior too.

In the prior essay on Anarchism’s trends I tried to focus on the

important confusions about technology, institutions, and reforms that I

think are diminishing the affectivity of a particular strain of “not so

desirable anarchism,” and also on the more positive insights about

breadth of focus, new vision, and non-reformist reforms that give

another strain of anarchism the potential to become central to

successful activism in years ahead.

Zerzan’s thinking examined for this essay may or may not typify why some

folks hold the not so desirable views they do about technology,

institutions, and reforms. I have no way of knowing that. In any event,

Zerzan is most forthright, and the Zerzan quotations I employed are from

various essays and interviews he has done, all available on the

internet. I found most of the essays quoted on a site named

“Primitivism” at

www.primitivism.com

Additional sites will immediately pop up if you search Google or Yahoo

or any other large internet engine for primitivism or for Zerzan, and

within the links listed, if interested, you will find other adherents of

views like Zerzan’s.