Uncivilized Podcast 29 - Interview With John Zerzan

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ4sFrfLFU8&t=4s

Reduced Description
Anarchist author John Zerzan joins us to talk everything primitive. It was an absolute pleasure having you on John!

Anarchy Radio: https://johnzerzan.net/radio/

Some of Zerzan's books for purchase can be found here: https://feralhouse.com/?s=john+zerzan

List of books (and his website): https://www.johnzerzan.net/books/

Zerzan's works on Anarchist Library: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/john-zerzan

Artxmis' new zine, "Plastic in Utero: a journal of anti-civ anarchy reborn from the compost of wasteland modernity" is out now! $3/copy OR trading for zines, stickers, etc.

You can reach Artxmis here: tmwg1995@protomail.com
or
Artxmis Thoreau
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There are 27 Comments

wow, whoa, well there you go.

a perfectly innocuous conversation.

the questions were good but i wish there had been more follow through, more effort to get Zerzan to answer them. as in the discussion of why fascists try to claim primitivism. there was no real explanations for how they are not and how to push back when leftists or mainstream-ers try to assert this. it's mostly a jz problem, this rambling and never quite landing the real points i think he is trying to make.

But you gotta admit, most primitivists aren't exactly academic library types, they are outdoors men, very masculine, often homophobic meat-eaters with a territorial imperative, that's proto-nationalist, and they are gruff and mono-syllabic, like when they are stalking a deer, NO SPEAKING,,,,SSSHHHH,,,,,YOU'LL SCARE TONIGHT'S MEAL AWAY NANCY-BOY,,,,,And they don't believe in social welfare, it's find your own food OR DIE. So you can understand why many folk regard them as fascists, just saying.

into JZ and Daniel Quinn's narratives about hunter gatherers and how that relates to modern nation state? The "homophobic meat eaters" to me seem like the former. I knew someone who was a combination of both a survivalist and primmie and he was all about trying to appear like some wise radical feminist in order to get some pussy, so this caricature you speak of seems pretty damn alien to me.

Identity politics...

huh? where'd you get that description? did you meet one person and base your take on that? or did you read an article? what? honestly, I've never met a "primitivist" that fits your description. maybe if you comb through the "survivalists" and "prepper" communities online, you'll find "alpha male" types with perfectly trimmed beards and F150s that match your description, but I've yet to see them elsewhere.

and trying to shit jacket anyone who doesn't fit their mold of a perfect anarchist. That definitely seems like a William Gilles move, i personally was very inspired by Daniel Quinn at the end of high school. He seemed to be describing, with exact precision, all of the shitty things i was going through in my life.

just saying your a fucking idiot. that is the stupidest way to box people in i've heard in a long time, and i've heard a ton of stupid shit

10:17, this kind of comment could really use a time stamp. i for one have no idea who you're referring to.

> your

I appreciate the kind words. I agree, early on, the dialogue feels a bit robotic (no pun intended) but I feel it becomes more organic as it goes on.

good thing some of us have good sarcasm-dar, with comments like this one...

I love John and his work so much.

What an important anarchist thinker and one of the more down to Earth people in the milieu we could all learn a thing from. I hope thecollective's ressentiment has subsided and John's work is continued to be promoted in these projects.

Thanks for a great interview, Artxmis!

Much love, anon!

I agree, John is great. His work, particularly Future Primitive and his speeches were part of my turn from right wing libertarian in community college to anti civ anarchist, 6 years in the making...

It wasn't just me but Brady and Emanuel and Gavin (editor) too!

hey Artxmis,
i think it is awesome that for you reading Zerzan has taken you from right-wing libertarian to anti-civ anarchist.

for myself, i first read Zerzan a long time ago. i got a lot from his 'origins' essays. over time though, i have begun to shift how i see his framing of 'the problem'. sure, domestication is, perhaps, all the bad things he says it is. but i don't think there was ever a time where humans were 100% free of messy entanglements with each other and the natural world (for lack of a better term). really, my disappointment with JZ is more about how we are here, now, in the wake of this mess that has been made and he has nothing to say about how to work with that, in that. sure, domestication may be only about control, but does that knowledge do anything for us here & now living as we are in this entanglement?

i mean, jz may be correct, but, i don't know about you, i don't see a day coming where i am not using language or numbers or art. this abstract knowledge of the evils of domestication doesn't really do anything to make my life better here & now, or help with navigating our current messiness.

anyway, thanks for doing your podcast.

"my disappointment with JZ is more about how we are here, now, in the wake of this mess that has been made and he has nothing to say about how to work with that"

What do you have to say or what solutions do you have to offer, Nettle?

Your criticism is akin to: being lost, being given a map, and then complaining that the person who gave you a map did not build you a GPS.

youre injecting quite a bit of hostitility into others words, impatient anon

You think that comment showed "hostility"?? I fear for you, 10:24. The world is a scary place offline. Get a good suit of armour or never leave your home is my advice to you.

well, dearest anon, firstly, just because i offer a bit of critique does not mean i must also offer the answer for that critique. secondly, who are you to demand that i do anything?

but since you asked so imperiously, i don't know. jz does not know. i don't expect him to have the answers, but after 30+ years making the same argument i kinda do expect he might say "you know what, my critique is incomplete." if everyone woke up tomorrow morning and agreed domestication is the problem what does that solve? there are still melting ice caps, warming oceans, microplastics in our flesh, etc etc. i think that we are domesticated is orthogonal to undoing this mess. and i think there never was a point when humans were pure & un-domesticated. we have always been entangled in the messiness of embodiment.

"who are you to demand that i do anything? "

Who are you to demand that John do anything?

Recognizing that domestication and symbolic thought are sources of the problems is a fucking starting point. Use you imagination. Implement a little anarchy to address the problems you perceive in the world that you think John's thought has not been updated enough to answer.

Sorry, Nettle. I try to reply but the moderators keep deleting anything that is not wholly a shitpost so, uh... No u hAve echOLocation! Ur a bat!

i would like to be a bat, either an instrument for playing baseball or the animal. thx 4 ur blessing

12:41 seems like you're the one demanding things. first one being that people take you seriously when you misread them.

of course it's not john's responsibilitly to continue being creative and fresh, working on new ideas. it's not anyone's, except that it's everyone's, perhaps. would still be nice if it happened. still makes sense to note that someone's best work is his earlier works, so that people can focus on what is best out of many years of book production.

Yep, jz is only an abstract mouthpiece/collapsist without a pragmatic bone in his vegan driven reality. Doomology is on steroids everywhere now that global warming has been adopted by corporatism, there are now thousands of dynamic ancap babyjayzees all over creating even more clean commodities and extracting MORE clean minerals and emitting MORE pollutants.
So, the dream, 8 billion primitivists living without electricity, plastic or fossil fuels, somethings gonna give.

sure.

follow up, of a sort...
to be clear, when i first read JZ i also found his writing intriguing and eye opening, and props to John for that. but it has been 30 + years since Elements of Refusal and his stuff is, to my mind, just rehashing of what was said there.
in trying to engage further though, i went back and looked at other of his stuff.
what is meant by domestication? the dictionary says (in part) - "the act or process of taming an animal for human use or companionship." so, for sure, the "human use" part is suspect, but i like my companion animals.
what does JZ have to say? that was harder to find. he uses the word in the dictionary definitional way mostly except for this bit in Running on Emptiness. there is an interview with Derrick Jensen from the Sun (1998) where DJ asks JZ to define domestication. John replies – "It's the attempt to bring free dimensions under control for self-serving purposes." there seem to be no follow up questions or any clarification. like, what are "free dimensions"? when i read this my first thought was is he talking about toilet training? that would seem to fit into this definition.
okay, i have satisfied my curiosity. putting the jz back on the shelf.

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