John Zerzan has a go (again)

Thanks to a friend on Facebook it has been brought to my attention that primitivist guru John Zerzan had a go at me on his weekly Eugene, Oregon radio show recently.  This is a little strange as Zerzan and his listeners are seperated from me by nine time zones including the entire Atlantic ocean and the entire width of North America but I guess we have history.  He’s part of a small but noisy anti fan base I seem to have developed on the west coast of the USA.

Thanks to a friend on Facebook it has been brought to my attention that primitivist guru John Zerzan had a go at me on his weekly Eugene, Oregon radio show recently.  This is a little strange as Zerzan and his listeners are seperated from me by nine time zones including the entire Atlantic ocean and the entire width of North America but I guess we have history.  He’s part of a small but noisy anti fan base I seem to have developed on the west coast of the USA.

For Irish readers who aren’t strong on N. America geography Oregan is the state to the North of California.  I spoke in Eugene, Oregon some 16 months back although I didn’t see Zerzan there, maybe he was out of town that weekend.  I regret I didn’t think of giving him a class and asking him our for a beer when I was in town, we’d probably have got on IRL and I’d have got to get a picture of us together, giving me an entry in the game being played by west coast class struggle anarchists.

John is joined by the San Francisco publication ‘Anarchy a Journal of Desire Armed’ who apparently awarded me a special column in their magazine declaring me an ’embarrassment to the movement’ some three or more years back.  At the time I’d only been in the US on brief holidays and had never been further than Vermont from the west coast.  Incidentally although I’ve been told of this column by more than one person I’ve not yet seen it. AJODA doens’t have a circulation in Ireland outside of the odd stray copy brought across the ocean by an anarcho coach surfer. If someone out there has it please scan it and email me a copy.

Some months after my North American speaking tour I discovered that a SF anarchist study group had discussed turning up at my meeting at AK press to "heckle and jeckle" me.  My brief blog of that meeting did note that a couple of people seemed to have turned up with the purpose of arguing with me, somewhere I think I may even have the audio I recorded of the Q&A session. As I suggest I seem to have a bit of an anti fan club out there that predates my visit to the area by a number of years.

To be fair I probably started the row back in 2005 when I published the online essay ‘Civilization, Primitivism and anarchism‘ which mentioned Zerzan twice, the second time in the paragraph that read: "Technology did not come from the gods. It was not imposed on man by a mysterious outside force. Rather it is something we developed and continue to develop. Even if you could turn the clock back it would just start ticking again. John Zerzan seems to be the only primitivist capable of acknowledging this and he retreats to the position of seeing language and abstract thought as the problem. He is both right and ludicrous at the same time. His vision of utopia requires not only the death of the mass of the worlds population but would require the genetically engineered lobotomy of those who survive and their off spring! Not of course something he advocates but a logical end point of his argument."

He in turn replied to this under the posting of the article on Anarchistnews, Anarchistnews.org changed their CMS software at some point in time which meant his reply has now vanished but I just recovered it for posterity using web.archive.org and repost it below

Flood probably knows that
Submitted by anon on Thu, 2005-10-13 03:04.

Flood probably knows that nowhere have I rejected "abstract thought" but it better serves his weak assault on "primitivism" to say otherwise.
Some of our ancesters were cooking with fire 2 million years ago, travelling on the open seas 800,000 years ago. And yet the evidence for symbolic culture hardly goes back 40,000 years. Thus, it would seem, there was intelligence that preceded what we think of as symbolic. Possibly a more direct kind in keeping with a more direct connection with the natural world.
Well, this is a long topic that I won’t try to rehash here. One that doesn’t quite fit Flood’s sound byte characterization…
It could also be noted that population is hardly a given. It seems to be more an effect than a cause, for instance : an effect of domestication ab origino, if we are talking about civilization. And so it seems to me likely that the numbers might come down fairly quickly were we to move away from domestication.
I do not know anyone who says this could happen overnight, Flood to the contrary. JZ

There were a whole heap of other replies on that thread from other members of my west coast anti fan club and I used all these as inspiration for a second essay titled ‘Is primitivism realistic? An anarchist reply to John Zerzan and others.’ I’m not aware of any reply by Zerzan or the others mentioned in the text to this piece but obviously, despite being unable to reply, he hadn’t forgotten it, hence his recent outburst.

Anyway on checking my Facebook today I saw that Daniel had left a link on my profile to an mp3 of Zerzan’s show saying he had called me a ‘Scottish syndicalist’.  I was intrigued and so followed the link to the archive of Zerzans show, also as it happens stored on the internet archive.org. It’s a strange sort of show, even more rambling than my blog but somewhere about midway through it launchs into the following

"But I notice Andrew Flood from Scotland, or was it Ireland, I think its Scotland, was here a year and a half ago I think it was, visiting 44 cities and towns in North America and they finally got around to ahh publishing an interview ‘Impressions of the north American anarchist movement’ this is on anarchistnews.org. Ahh heh heh the thing that jumped out, he’s talking about ohh all kinds of people, he’s a syndicialist, ahhh a wobbly kind of guy ahhh very, very class war kind of person. work place organising, eas

One of the questions was ‘Did anything stand out and or depress you about the tour". His answer was The acceptance of primitivism as a legitimate part of the anarchist movement but then he goes on to say ahh but they don’t have any organisations so it doesn’t matter so heh heh heh, he’s another one of these birds who worships Organisation with a big capital O so he doesn’t get it that ahh the organisation really isn’t the point but he has to concede he showed some honesty there that privimitivism is what’s happening and how sad it is that its ahh its seen as legitimate by quite a few people" He then plays some bit of music. 

It’s quite a strange snippet that only really makes sense in light of my previous essays, all the more so because his ‘summary’ of the interview is rather misleading. The bit he is referring to is in fact two seperate questions where I’m saying something rather different from his summary, its rather amusing to see the bits he choose to leave out

Q. And on the other side of the coin, did anything stand out and/or depress you about it?

The acceptance of primitivism as a legtimite part of the anarchist movement and even the left in general.  I was amazed for instance to discover that some union locals had sponsored the speaking tour of Derick Jensen whose primitivist writings amount to an argument for mass murder.  He was charging in the region of 2000 dollars an appearance in Ontario, it was quite extraordinary to me that unions would spend their members money on such a huckster.

Q. What are the major tendencies in the American movement? Which ones seem to growing and which ones declining?

My tour coincided with and fed into a wave of anarchist communist organizing across many of the regions I was visiting which meant I got to play some role in the formation process of five or six new organizations.  But I wouldn’t overstate this, as is true of the North America in general these organizations are tiny in comparison with the population of the areas they operate in.  The positive news on the primitivist front is that apart from the couple of celebratry gurus who are very visible on the internet there is very little primitivist organization anywhere, even in Eugene, Oregan.  I have the general impression that many of the people who might formly have been primmies had drifted into some form of insurrectional anarchism although again there are almost no organizations (formal or otherwise) outside of a couple of cities...

The second paragraph obviously says something more than a little different from John’s summary of "he has to concede he showed some honesty there that privimitivism is what’s happening and how sad it is that its ahh its seen as legitimate by quite a few people."  In fact I’m more or less saying the opposite. John there semes to be a lot of misrepresentation of argument in our relationship and this makes me sad.

The confusion about what country I’m from is funny as it probably down to the weird conspiracy theory held by some of this crew that myself and Anarcho are one and the same person (Anarcho is from Scotland which is why I presume this is what is going on with Joh’s confusion as to my location).  I guess this is because Anarcho has also been critical of primitivism but if its a deception its a very complicated one as we’ve not only maintained seperate internet identities as far back as Spunk Press in 1994 but have managed to present talks at the same anarchist meet ups on a couple of occasions.  The descriptions of me as a ‘syndicalist’ and worse still a ‘wobbly’ suggests a woeful inability on John’s part to understand the different positions that exist in the actual anarchist movement.

To be honest I quite enjoy this sort of nonsense when, as here, its with someone whom I’m never likely to find myself in a common project with.  This sort of misrepresentation is massively harmful when it comes between people or organisations that have a lot in common as it tends to generate a sectarianism that stops them working together.  That is both counter productive and annoying.  This on the other hand is quite comforting. I quite like the idea of John sitting out there in Eugene over the years waiting for an opportunity to come along when he can tell the good folk of Oregon why this guy on the other side of the planet whom 99.9% of them have never even heard of is wrong. 

As Oscar Wilde observed ovar a century back “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”  Thanks John.