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An Open Letter to John Zerzan

From Activist Journeys

(A Primitivist Philosopher of Technology)

TL;DR John Zerzan is one of the most well known and philosophically adept writers within the the primitivist political tendency. I hope to ask questions of him to clarify his theory, plus critique him and his ideology in the process.

Any last minute edit suggestions or questions you’d want to add before I send it off or discussion on the points, just let me know.

Hello John,

A primitivist blogger passed on your email on the off chance you may be interested in answering a few questions that would help towards a podcast episode I’m preparing for.

The podcast is a discussion between me, I am pro technological advancement, and a primitivist who has spent a great deal of time studying and writing essays on Kaczynski’s work.

So, below I have 4 questions for you which I’d be very interested in reading your views on, plus explanations of my thoughts on each. I’ll also link my podcast notes encase they’re of any interest to you.

With your consent I’d like to post this question and answer discussion around, to help clarify your theory for others and promote my critique of primitivism.

Thanks for your time.


How do you determine what direct action targets are justifiable today?

Obviously ideally we would be able to win by simply choosing targets which have caused people the most amount of misery, so actions for which people can sympathise most, like sabotaging a draft office to attempt to materially challenge the US’s war in Vietnam.

But to the extent some targets are not as optically advantageous, but still useful to sabotage, I’d say that it would be valid as long as you can still envision a probable future in which the action is vindicated in hindsight through its usefulness for the movement, for example John Brown’s attempt to incite a slave rebellion.

Some guiding principles that I find useful to this calculation are:

1) Never act with reckless indifference to human and non-human animal life.

2) Never with premeditation physically hurt people for the primary purpose of making a political statement or to earn money, as it runs counter to our philosophy on the left that material conditions create the person and so we should make every peaceful effort to rehabilitate people.

Some tricky to explain, justified, but only just outside the principle just laid out are:

(A) Survivor-led vigilantism, where to the extent that some current institutions fail to rehabilitate people and the process of seeking justice through these institutions can cause more trauma, then personal violence to get to resolve feelings of helplessness in the face of evil acts can be an ethical act.

(B) Personally desiring to fight fascists in the street to block them from marching through immigrant communities or pushing your way through huntsmen to save a fox from getting mauled to death by dogs.

3) Never take actions on the basis of anti-science beliefs or with the intent to propogate anti-science beliefs e.g. disproven conspiracy theories.

4) Take care to respect the difference between property which is personal, luxury, private, government owned and cooperatively worker owned.

So, it could be seen as ethical to choose material targets of evil actors in order to cause economic damage and make a statement, so long as in the case of personal property, the item has no intrinsic sentimental value i.e. can be replaced because the person is wealthy. Or is a luxury item that was paid for through the exploitation of others labor. Or is private property, meaning the means of production which should be owned collectively anyway.

The action would be an outlet for legitimate anger against that which causes us suffering and a means of developing people’s thinking and creating a wider base of people joined in sympathy for those ideals.

For example, if taking the risk to slash slaughterhouse trucks’ tyres in the dead of night both draws attention to animal suffering and also helps you to develop stronger bonds with a group of people and learn from other liberation struggles, then the action is both productive and leads to personal growth.

5) Never take actions in the hopes of helping in part instigate a revolutionary war sooner than it’s reasonable to believe you would have the capability to win. Similarly don’t use rhetoric about how tensions in society have escalated to the state of civil war or a third world war. For example, even if the revolutionary left got really good at assassinating captains of industry and getting away with it, there would be reasonable fears around the psychology of people who would take such an act against people who they could have grown up and been socially conditioned to be themselves, which would inexorably lead to a more authoritarian society and worse foundations on which to work towards a better society.

As a socialist, I do think we can hypothesize the unrealistic case of 99% of society desiring a referendum on a shift from parliamentary representative system to a federated spokes council system and the MP’s dragging their feet, the same way both parties gerrymander the boundaries to make it easier to win despite it being the one issue most everyone agrees is bad, and people needing to storm the halls of power to force a vote to happen.




As well as a responsibility to put down arms after winning political freedoms and a majority are in favor of diplomacy through electoral politics, like in Northern Ireland today.



Firstly with your statement on what kind of technology is likely good and which is bad:

If you have a tool that anybody can make, that’s great. You’re in contact with it in a very sensual way. But tools that require a hierarchy of coordination and specialization create a kind of distancing. That’s the kind of technology to avoid.

Are you not concerned you could be promoting direct action which falls well outside ethical principles like the ones above, such that you run the risk of motivating someone to take direct action which makes your rebellion look insane and preserve the status quo or facilitate a move to a more authoritarian society?

Secondly is physically hurting people for the primary purpose of making a political statement or to earn money bad?

For example you stated “Bonanno, it should be added, has been prosecuted repeatedly and imprisoned in Italy for his courageous resistance over the years.” Is it your view then that armed robbery or similar violence is justified? And are you aware that Bonanno promotes the strategy of kneecapping journalists?

Similarly do you regret at all the manner or substance of previous defences you’ve given of Kaczynskis actions? For example you wrote:


Would industrial society not simply re-emerge?

I’m sceptical of Kaczynskis’ confidence that a new industrial revolution wouldn’t simply re-emerge, especially with people passing down memories and books of all the benefits to modern life.

My concerns are that firstly, the harm to the environment would be much worse than us simply transitioning to renewable energy and rewilding areas as we depopulate as is the trend in advanced countries. Secondly, I would argue the probability that we will achieve a long-lasting, mostly peaceful, technologically advanced, left-anarchist society is far more valuable to me than returning to an either never ending series of warring feudal societies or feudal societies that repeats the industrial revolution and has another series of world wars for resources.

Primitive life is more appealing to me personally than feudalism in that I could be born into a fairly egalitarian tribe like the Penan or that I wasn’t but I wouldn’t know any different life or if I had some of the egalitarian ideals I had now, the possibility would be there to strike out on my own and form an egalitarian tribe. But bar convincing everyone to be hunter gatherers, or technological incentives to have fair and democratic communication among societies who trade with each other, you just are going to recreate feudal era societies, where you’d have to be very lucky to escape from conscription and tyrants and environmental destruction could be far worse.

Do you worry that you affirmed the irrationally violent desires of the school shooter who called your radio show through your shared desire for de-industrialisation, which I suspect the caller would view as leading to worse violence and think is good?

I applaud you for trying not to answer fluff questions for the CNN piece on the school shooter who called into your radio show, so leveraging audience interest in your relationship to the story for trying to get important issues on the air. It’s advice I hope more activists will be trained with in the future.

The doctor of criminology they had on at the end of the CNN piece did interest me though when she said “the subtext of what he’s [the school shooter is] saying is violence is innate and instinctual to humans, and really should not be punished because it’s their natural basis, that’s the message I think he’s trying to get across, and the parallel to himself is obvious, he feels possessed by this need, this compulsion to commit violence.”

So my question is, do you agree that he was in part using the story of the domesticated ape to justify his own violent desires? And if you had suspected that was part of his motivation at the time, how do you think you would have responded to his story differently? Finally has the experience led you to be more cautious of what motivations callers are bringing with them to have affirmed when they call in?

Finally is primitivism motivated primarily by a desire to return to a more innocent time in one’s childhood?

There’s a quote I like by Saul Newman from the book the ‘Politics of Postanarchism’ on page 156, about how the desire for a primitive way of life is often a desire for a more innocent time in one’s childhood which I would love to read your response to if you have the time. I’ll attach a file of the full ebook also if you’d like to see it in context:

Where Zerzan’s argument becomes problematic is in the essentialist notion that there is a rationally intelligible presence, a social objectivity that is beyond language and discourse. To speak in Lacanian terms, the prelinguistic state of jouissance is precisely unattainable: it is always mediated by language that at the same time alienates and distorts it. It is an imaginary jouissance, an illusion created by the symbolic order itself, as the secret behind its veil. We live in a symbolic and linguistic universe, and to speculate about an original condition of authenticity and immediacy, or to imagine that an authentic presence is attainable behind the veils of the symbolic order or beyond the grasp of language, is futile. There is no getting outside language and the symbolic; nor can there be any return to the pre Oedipal real. To speak in terms of alienation, as Zerzan does, is to image a pure presence or fullness beyond alienation, which is an impossibility. While Zerzan’s attack on technology and domestication is no doubt important and valid, it is based on a highly problematic essentialism implicit in his notion of alienation.

To question this discourse of alienation is not a conservative gesture. It does not rob us of normative reasons for resisting domination, as Zerzan claims. It is to suggest that projects of resistance and emancipation do not need to be grounded in an immediate presence or positive fullness that exists beyond power and discourse. Rather, radical politics can be seen as being based on a moment of negativity: an emptiness or lack that is productive of new modes of political subjectivity and action. Instead of hearkening back to a primordial authenticity that has been alienated and yet which can be recaptured – a state of harmony which would be the very eclipse of politics – I believe it is more fruitful to think in terms of a constitutive rift that is at the base of any identity, a rift that produces radical openings for political articulation and action.

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