John Zerzan interview pt 1 with CAL Press

Transcript

JM: We are today with John Zerzan. Prolific writer primitivist, author, critic of civilisation... happy to have you here for an interview. Can you tell me ... to start out with, how did you make your journey originally, being interested in the New Left and some of the currents in the 1960s and 70s to the point of critique of civilisation in its entirety?

JZ: Good to see you, Jason. Well, it's a long long road i guess. In the sixties very few of us were thinking of technology for one thing and those who were, they thought of it wrongly. [...] what's his name... He said: not too much passed the sixties. The question is technology, yes or no? He said yes. You know, this is going to be the new radical deal, with all kinds of possibilities and very enthousiastic about it. That was kind of ignored for a while. But now i think that's part of it. But actually, not for me, i wasn't thinking along those terms, so probably the biggest influence on me at that time, going back to the movement of the sixties are DIY union thing or sort of anarchist thing we were left with, given the complete corruption and passivity of the prevailing union. This is white collar stuff in San Francisco. That was a great big learning experience in terms of organising anyway. I began to realise i was working for the city and county of SF in the department of Social Services as a welfare case worker. We were organising clerks and case workers and hospital workers.

2.35
Personally, i just became aware that i was doing more writing than anything doing more than the case work. So i kind of moved out of that job. And also things came to an end for this particular experiment or project anyway, because it was really a function of the sixties and when that stopped as with other things it was kind of the end of it. I was going to go on in academe, studying unionism, because it was such a naughty problem that we had, that our biggest enemy that we had was labour.
They were out to stop us as something radical and challenging something to them. Whether or not how much radical possibility it had, i came later to think it wasn't as much as we thought.

3.30
Anyway, rapidly starting to study that, unionism in England, bascically the first industrial country and first unions in textiles and so forth... fairly rapidly the question became much more about technology, intentionality of technology and the disciplanary power of technology... which is where Marx got it completely wrong. If you hear the people in the factories, you don't create a big radical force you just have a bunch of beaten down, exhausted more domesticated people than before.
When they were on the land they had some autonomy. Weavers were given the right as they choose almost, whereas the great industrial proletariat didn't show that much promise shall we say.

4.28
Anyway, that opened the door. Ok, so if you think it isn't just economics, it's a way to control people. Get them to herd them together and controlled in a much more effective way, then you can start to think that maybe it isn't just the factory system of late 18th century England, but it's there always just there in some way or other. That there are values and choices embedded in any technology, which shows you the basic thing about society, gives you the read of society. That became pretty persuasive to me. So if you trace it back, you can run it all the way back to domestication. Which was the biggest move of control, the manual shift, to the control ethos, when the domestication of animals and plants begins.

5.40
I tend, frankly, to see the key thing in general, to be domestication, whether [it be] transhumanism would be, the latest projection or fantasy of domestication. If you set out to dominate nature, you're dominating everything in effect. Humans get domesticated in the process.

6.12
This was 70s and 80s kind of stuff. When i first got to know Fredy Perlman in the 70s, we were talking about these things and he's the one who told me about Fifth Estate btw, i never heard of it. On the westcoast it was never part of the scene afaik. I never heard of it before.
That became a great forum in the 70s. They published a lot of  interesting stuff from Europe. So these discussion in the pages of the Fifth Estate were real important to me

7.00
JM: So, domestication is the key as far as you are concerned as far as critique?

JZ: Yeah, I think so. You can go at this in different ways. We never talked about this before. The question that a lot of people now refer to themselves as anti-civilisation has become much more current. I really hear that quite a lot, at least on the west coast. And in some of the countries as well. Stuff along those lines appears that did not exist before, anyway. And so, is that the key factor, is that, and i think it is i mean for example... to put this a bit in focus, one thing that annoys me greatly is people say: well we don't really know what civilisation is. It could be this, whatever you want. It's just.. look in the dictionary. It's not some esotheric definition, some special knowledge, invention of anarchist. It's just, everyone knows what it is. That's.. you get domestication and right on the heels of that you get the civilisations. The reason why they all fail i think is another little point if you think about it is because they domesticate the hell out of everything and then they're done. They've ruined everything and now when we only really have one civilisation, one unitary.. it's the same game anywhere, despite cultural differences, there's really only now. It implies that when it goes down it has the possibility of dragging so much with it, if not everything. It really is a totalising thing at this stage of development of the planet. It's just more and more. As the crisis deepens, and you can see the connections of all the other parts of the crisis from the physical obvious eco catastrophe that's unfolding already, to the breakdown, the crazy pathological stuff in developed society.

These mass shootings which keep increasing. Last month, October that is FBI report said they are getting more and more frequent. They ain't going away. And why would they go away. Because now we're at this stage in mass society community is pretty much kaputt. So people are more there's no solidarity, no social bonds, not enough, there's less and less, so we're seeing these horrifying things all the time. You've got to explain on a deep level for that. That has not even been discussed that arch -- including the anarchist press. To me that's just such a completely compelling thing. Man, this is something unprecedented, not that it has never happened before, but with this kind of frequency it's unprecedented and i think that you know why that's happening? You wanna go there? That doesn't strike me as helpful.

JM: well, for a a long time you have documented some of the extreme current events of current civilisation as in.. In breakdown i say some things, talking about how the extremes of alienation are showing [...]


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