Re: John Zerzan: Future Primitive (was Re: Current implications forSouth Africa)

["Ken Hanly" <khanly@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I don't hate modern life. I am grateful for it. I would have been long dead
and buried were it not for modern life. I am not even sure that we lack the
capital to give a reasonably curtailed but healthy portion of modern life to
everyone. Is it resources we are short of or equitable sharing and efficient
use of them. Using them to meet basic needs rather than allocating them on
the basis of dollar holdings. Using them to build missile defence systems
against mythical rogue states instead of using them assure safe water
supplies and basic health and education services to the whole world? We use
biotechnology to make plants resistant to a patented herbicide rather than
resistant to drought and capable of serving the needs of areas that are
suffering increased water shortages.
 I grow quite a bit of my own food actually and supplement it with gifts of
wild game etc. But even the aboriginals go out hunting with their 4X4's and
their high tech rifles. Bow hunting is a niche sport for the well-off who
could care less if they get anything to eat from their labors and the bows
are not homemade for sure!..Anyway if this neoprimitive utopia (dystopia) is
to be adopted we will need to ensure a good crop of marijuana to make it
bearable. Maybe the Amish should recruit these people to make sure they get
some new blood lines.
 .


Cheers, Ken Hanly

----- Original Message -----
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>
To: <pen-l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, June 24, 2001 7:32 PM
>Subject: [PEN-L:13915] John Zerzan: Future Primitive (was Re: Current
implications forSouth Africa)


> > >Louis Proyect
>
> If the fundamental problem facing the world is that we are running
> out of fossil fuels & that no alternative energy source will ever be
> available due to technical impossibility as Mark argues, it appears
> socialism won't be able to meet even the historically evolved basic
> needs of all in the world, much less doing more than that.  If that's
> really the case, why not turn to John Zerzan?
>
> *****
> AAA
> P.O. Box 11331
> Eugene, OR 97440
>
> On the Transition
>
> Postscript to Future Primitve
> by John Zerzan
>
> ...Who doesn't hate modern life?  Can what conditioning that remains
> survive such an explosion of life, one that ruthlessly removes the
> sources of such conditioning?
>
> We are obviously being held hostage by capital and its technology,
> made to feel dependent, even helpless, by the sheer weight of it all,
> the massive inertia of centuries of alienated categories, patterns,
> values.  What could be dispensed with immediately?  Borders,
> governments, hierarchy....What else?  How fast could more deep-seated
> forms of authority and separation be dissolved, such as that of
> division of labor?  I assert, and not, I hope, in the spirit of
> wishing to derive blueprints from abstract principle, that I can see
> no ultimate freedom or wholeness without the dissolution of the
> inherent power of specialists of every kind.
>
> Many say that millions would die if the present techno-global fealty
> to work and the commodity were scrapped.  But this overlooks many
> potentialities.  For example, consider the vast numbers of people who
> would be freed from manipulative, parasitic, destructive pursuits for
> those of creativity, health, and liberty.  At present, in fact, very
> few contribute in any way to satisfying authentic needs.
>
> Transporting food thousands of miles, not an atypical pursuit today,
> is an instance of pointless activity, as is producing countless tons
> of herbicide and pesticide poisons.  The picture of humanity starving
> if a transformation were attempted may be brought into perspective by
> reference to a few other agricultural specifics, of a more positive
> nature.  It is perfectly feasible, generally speaking, that we grow
> our own food.  There are simple approaches, involving no division of
> labor, to large yields in small spaces.
>
> Agriculture itself must be overcome, as domestication, and because it
> removes more organic matter from the soil than it puts back.
> Permaculture is a technique that seems to attempt an agriculture that
> develops or reproduces itself and thus tends toward nature and away
> from domestication.  It is one example of promising interim ways to
> survive while moving away from civilization.  Cultivation within the
> cities is another aspect of practical transition, and a further step
> toward superseding domestication would be a more or less random
> propagation of plants, a la Johnny Appleseed.
>
> Regarding urban life, any steps toward autonomy and self-help should
> be realized, beginning now, so that cities may be all the more
> quickly abandoned later.  Created out of capital's need to centralize
> control of property transactions, religion, and political domination,
> cities remain as extended life-destroying monuments to the same basic
> needs of capital.  Something on the order of what we know now as
> museums might be a good idea so that post-upheaval generations could
> know how grotesque our species' existence became. Moveable
> celebration sites may be the nearest configuration to cities that
> disalienated life will express.
>
> Along with the movement out of cities, paralleling it, one might
> likely see a movement from colder climes to warmer ones.  The heating
> of living space in northern areas constitutes an absurd effort of
> energy, resources, and time.  When humans become once again intimate
> with the earth, healthier and more robust, these zones would probably
> be peopled again, in altogether different ways.
>
> As for population itself, its growth is no more a natural or neutral
> phenomenon than its technology.  When life is fatally out of balance,
> the urge to reproduce appears as compensation for impoverishment, as
> with the non-civilized gatherer-hunters surviving today, population
> levels would be relatively quite low.
>
> Enrico Guidoni pointed out that architectural structures necessarily
> reveal a great deal about their social context.  Similarly, the
> isolation and sterility of shelter in class society is hardly
> accidental, and deserves to be scrapped in toto.  Rudofsky's
> Architecture Without Architects deals with some examples of shelter
> produced not by specialists, but by spontaneous and evolving communal
> activity.  Imagine the inviting richness of dwellings, each unique
> not mass produced, and a part of a serene mutuality that one might
> expect to emerge from the collapse of boundaries and artificial
> scarcities, material and emotional.
>
> Probably `health' in a new world will be a matter even less
> recognizable than the question of shelter.  The dehumanized
> industrial `medicine' of today is totally complicitous with the
> overall processes of society which rob us of life and vitality.  Of
> countless examples of the criminality of the present, direct
> profiting from human misery must rank near the top.  Alternative
> healing practices are already challenging the dominant mode, but the
> only real solution is the abolition of a setup that by its very
> nature spawns an incredible range of physical and psychic
> immiseration.  From Reich to Mailer, for example, cancer is
> recognized as the growth of a general madness blocked and denied.
> Before civilization disease was generally nonexistent.  How could it
> have been otherwise?  Where else do degenerative and infectious
> diseases, emotional maladies, and all the rest issue if not from
> work, toxicity, cities, estrangement, fear, unfulfilled lives - the
> whole canvas of damaged, alienated reality?  Destroying the sources
> will eradicate the suffering.  Minor exigencies would be treated by
> herbs and the like, not to mention a diet of pure, non-processed food.
>
> 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.  A graffito
> from the rising in France in '68 was simply `Quick!'  Those partisans
> apparently realized the need to move rapidly forward all the way,
> with no temporizing or compromise with the old world. Half a
> revolution would only preserve domination and cement its hold over us.
>
> A qualitatively different life would entail abolishing exchange, in
> every form, in favor of the gift and the spirit of play.  Instead of
> the coercion of work -- and how much of the present could continue
> without precisely that coercion? -- an existence without constraints
> is an immediate, central objective. Unfettered pleasure, creative
> endeavor along the lines of Fourier: according to the passions of the
> individual and in a context of complete equality.
>
> What would we keep?  ``Labor-saving devices''?  Unless they involve
> no division of labor (e.g. a lever or incline), this concept is a
> fiction; behind the `saving' is hidden the congealed drudgery of many
> and the despoliation of the natural world.  As the Parisian group
> Interrogations put it: ``Today's riches are not human riches; they
> are riches for capitalism which correspond to a need to sell and
> stupefy.  The products we manufacture, distribute, and administer are
> the material expressions of our alienation.''...
> <http://www.subsitu.com/kr/futurep.htm>   *****
>
> Ecoanarchists are wrong, but at least their primitivist political
> solution is consistent with their analysis.
>
> Yoshie
>