RADICAL ELDER: ANARCHIST PRIMITIVIST JOHN ZERZAN

John Zerzan gave a presentation in January 2005 at Laughing Horse Books in Portland OR. This piece was done just prior to JZ's reading there.
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RADICAL ELDER: ANARCHIST PRIMITIVIST JOHN ZERZAN

When investigators in the Ted Kaczynski case narrowed the scope of their search for an ideology that seemed to match that contained in the communiqué sent to the New York Times OP-ED by the then unidentified Unabomber in April of 1995, they found themselves taking a look at the anarchist and radical environmentalist communities of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest.

It was not long before a NY Times reporter found his way to Eugene, Oregon to speak with anarchist and primitivist theorist John Zerzan. The resultant full-page article on Zerzan, which appeared on May 7, 1995, moved Zerzan (who was never a Unabomber suspect) and the city of Eugene into the spotlight.


As a resident of Eugene for nearly 30 years, John Zerzan has been well known and respected as an elder within anarchist activist circles in the Northwest long before broad media attention came his way. The June 1999 Eugene Reclaim the Streets celebration (where gallant anarcho street fighters had police on the run) and the Seattle anti-WTO protest, which occurred later that year (and came to be a full blown riot of Gestapo-like police brutality), brought Zerzan into focus once again as the media sought him out to shed light on anarchism and black bloc tactics.

It is his association with Ted Kaczynski that has perhaps most indelibly marked Zerzan as radical elder. Zerzan was present throughout Kaczynski’s 1996 trial and conversed with him often. Two essays by Zerzan, “Whose Unabomber?” and “He Means It, Do You?” are evidence of his shared anti-technology Kaczynski ideology.

I recently asked Zerzan some questions about his work via e-mail.

ME: Can you share a bit about your background and what it was that brought you to anarchist thought?

JZ: I've been around since the movement of the '60s and '70s when I was a union organizer and activist in SF and Berkeley. After those days passed many of us wondered what happened, why it stopped, and why it didn't go further. Something seemed to be missing in the way we looked at things and of course since then we are seeing the deepening environmental crisis and the accelerating technologizing of society, to mention two major developments we weren't much aware of then.

Today we have new challenges and new questions and are being forced to look more deeply to explain the very threatening negative phenomena of today and to imagine how much things would have to change to qualify as liberatory change, as qualitative change.

One way of putting it is that it isn't enough to only oppose capitalism; the origins and dynamics of a worsening totality involve more than that.

ME: Your most recent work, “Running on Emptiness” touches on this.

JZ: Yes. Running on Emptiness (2002) is my latest book and my next one, “Twilight of the Machine,” will appear sometime in 2007. I've tried to explore possible beginnings of alienation and domination, in such basic social institutions as division of labor (specialization) and domestication/agriculture (control of nature), which make civilization possible. More recently my focus has been on modernity/mass society. We have taken the latter for granted; even radical theorists have only criticized it without proposing its abolition.

The promise of modernity has turned to ashes at every level, from the barrenness of daily life to warming. Anti-modernity has begun to emerge as a serious topic and not just among some anarchists.

ME: How does anti-civilization or green anarchy theory come into play? Do you see this kind of theory as a necessity for the future?

JZ: Given the failure of the Left to address reality, new sources - such as indigenous wisdom - are needed for sustenance and inspiration. The acceptance of mass production, mass society, mass culture, mass consumption is unacceptable; instead we need visions and critiques that refuse the industrial techno-culture and its suicidal trajectory.

Green anarchy/anti-civilization/primitivism poses questions without judgment. What has passed for opposition or resistance has gone along with what is questioning mainly only who is in charge in lieu interrogating and opposing the components of the dismal present.

To be anti-authoritarian is to be willing, as we see it, to make a break with "givens", today's politics, and all the rest that confines us.

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Catch up with John at www.johnzerzan.net