Bob Brubaker

There’s no end to discussion about the “crisis of the family.” From Reader’s Digest to obscure academic journals, in the halls of Congress and in countless homes, the crisis of the family is portrayed, analyzed, debated, or lived out. This discussion has become the litany of a society in crisis. This is so, as Jean Bethke Elshtain tells us, because the crisis of the family “is a crisis of meaning and it goes to the heart of our self-understandings and our social existence.” [1]

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Much of contemporary anarchist thought is completely reconciled with industrial society and technological social organization. This common anarchist viewpoint is summed up by Daniel Guerin thusly: “[Anarchism] rests upon large-scale modern industry, up-to-date techniques, the modern proletariat, and internationalism on a world scale. In this regard it is of our times and belongs to the twentieth century.” (Daniel Guerin, Anarchism, p. 154) The optimism of many anarchists regarding the liberatory potential of modern technology was echoed by a student-worker action committee formed during the May, 1968 French uprising. The committee urged the formation of workers’ councils, federated with the councils of other companies on a regional, national, and international level. In the committee’s view, “worker management of business is the power to do better for everybody what the capitalists were scandalously doing for a few.” (George Katsiaficas, “The Meaning of May 1968,” Monthly Review, May 1978)

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“Without Borders,” this year’s Anarchist Conference and Festival was held in San Francisco from July 20^th to 25^th. Taking place at the Horace Mann Middle School in the city’s Mission District, the gathering drew somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000 people from North America and around the world. The exact number will never be known since only the lower number “officially” registered as participants, but thousands more took part in the six-day conference and other events which provided opportunities for learning and discussion, direct action, performance, play and celebration.

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The massive and still-growing anti-nuclear movement in Europe has become a serious threat to the avatars of destruction who, through the auspices of NATO, are attempting to turn Europe into a nuclear battlefield by deploying Pershing II and cruise missiles on European soil. An American diplomat in Bonn recently warned the readers of the international edition of Newsweek (8/24/81): “If the peace movement isn’t defused soon, we might see the same kind of threat to cruise and Pershing installations after 1983 that you see directed against nuclear energy plants today.” The implications of this shocking development were clearly spelled out by the worried diplomat: “We’re talking about a serious threat to NATO planning as a whole.”

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John Zerzan’s essay, “Agriculture: Essence of Civilization,” appeared in FE #329, Summer 1988 and is available for one dollar from 4632 Second Ave., Detroit, MI 48201. It is also part of a collection of John’s essays entitled Elements of Refusal and can be obtained through our book service for $9.00.

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Primitive culture, Marshall Sahlins has argued, is not fetishized utility. “The practical function of (primitive) institutions,” he tells us, “is never adequate to explain their cultural structure....People employ customs and categories to organize their lives within local schemes of interpretation, thus giving uses to material circumstances which, cultural comparison will show, are never the only ones possible.” Consequently, diversity is the rule in the primitive world, as much because of the multifarious systems of meaning and interpretation peoples employ to constitute their worlds, as because of the varying climates and landscapes in which they are situated.

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On October 14 a bomb blast ripped apart a production building at the Litton Systems Canada Ltd. plant in Rexdale, Ontario, causing an estimated $5 million in damage. The group Direct Action claimed responsibility for the bombing, which also injured seven people.

Direct Action is apparently the same group that claimed responsibility for the bombing of power transformers on Vancouver Island in British Columbia (see FE #309, June 19, 1982, for Direct Action’s communique and our comments on it). This time, seven people were injured, due to the bomber’s mistakes and the apparent incompetence of Litton’s security personnel.

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“Anti-Work and the Struggle for Control” in this issue [FE #309, June 19, 1982] continues John Zerzan’s work demonstrating the massive erosion of traditional American values, in this case centering on popular allegiance to the work ethic. Below is a rebuttal from Tim Luke, which appeared in Telos magazine No. 50 (Box 3111, St. Louis MO 63130, $5); this is followed by a reply from Zerzan and a comment by Bob Brubaker of the FE staff.

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Much of primitivist theorist John Zerzan’s early work appeared in the Fifth Estate. His Cassandra-like predictions of imminent collapse of modern society began in 1976 with his FE article, “The Decline and Fall of Everything” [FE # 268, January, 1976]—a compendium of statistics of social dislocation.

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“Seen from a lower point of view, the Constitution, with all its faults, is very good; the law and the courts are very respectable; even this State and this American government are, in many respects, very admirable, and rare things, to be thankful for, such as a great many have described them; but seen from a point of view a little higher, they are what I have described them; seen from a point higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are, or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?”

—Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”

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Your growing conviction that people are unable (or have lost the ability) to learn from and develop conclusions about their experience, and to act to change the conditions of their lives finds its latest confirmation in Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism (See review, FE #299, Oct 22, 1979). Lasch’s central idea is that a given state of capitalist development contains a corresponding individual personality structure (the “narcissistic” personality type corresponding to the bureaucratic “consumer society” of “late capitalism”) and that the analysis of this personality structure is the key to understanding human behavior and activity. Despite lip service to revolutionary possibilities, Lasch’s thesis is a determinist one which vitiates the likelihood of the emergence of an autonomous politics in the present period.

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In response to Tech Examined a letter from Jeffrey Vega, FE #315, Winter 1984.

Jeffrey Vega would like to define primitive cultures “in the terms of class society” so he can assimilate them to the “historical materialist perspective.” In his mind this is a legitimate operation, since unlike “the self-definition of tribal society” (presumably to him a limited form of knowledge), a class analysis enables us to uncover “the dynamics which led to the development of class society.”

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In response to “Beginning of Time, End of Time,” FE #313, Summer, 1983.

The question of time and its relationship to domination is central to understanding our captivity. John’s article attempts to come to grips with this very difficult subject; while what follows is often critical of his attempt, I do not want to slight its radical intent or the hard work he put into it. Nor should these criticisms obscure the fact that it is an important introduction- to the question of time: it helps us to see our perception of time as unnatural, as something imposed upon us, as a force to be overthrown if we are to liberate ourselves.

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