Zerzan defends primitivism against social anarchism.
A reply to criticism, written from the pattern of John Zerzan
Michael Albert’s essay “Anarchism = Zerzan?” appeared some years ago in Z Magazine, and I’ve been asked many times to respond to it directly. I’ve generally preferred to continue developing my own work rather than engaging in point-by-point polemics, but perhaps the time has come to address his arguments—or rather, his misrepresentations of my arguments—systematically.
Let me begin by acknowledging what Albert gets right. He correctly identifies my starting point as anarchistic: the rejection of authoritarian constraints on human well-being and development. He correctly notes that my critique extends to technology, to institutions based on division of labor, to language and number and time. He even accurately quotes several of my formulations. Where he goes wrong—disastrously wrong—is in his interpretation of what these critiques mean and why they matter.
Albert’s central claim is that I commit a logical error: observing that some technologies (or divisions of labor, or uses of language) are harmful, and wrongly concluding that all technology (or division of labor, or language) must therefore be harmful. He frames this as the “baby and bathwater” fallacy. The argument sounds reasonable until you examine it carefully.
Albert writes that when someone says “technology per se is neutral,” they mean “that technology does not by its internal logic have to serve only dominating elites. Technology can serve any constituency including broad populations.”
But this is precisely what I deny, and Albert never engages with my actual reasons for denying it. He simply asserts that technology “can accomplish diverse tasks that can be beneficial or horrendous, humane or cruel, liberating or stultifying,” as if this were self-evident. It is not.
Consider the assembly line. Albert himself acknowledges that factory systems were “introduced in large part as a means of social control.” He even cites Marglin’s “What Do Bosses Do?” and Braverman’s work. But then he claims that “the problem posed for suffering humanity wasn’t that different people were doing different tasks per se, but was the particular limited combinations of tasks that most of the people were compelled to do.”
This is precisely where Albert and I part ways. He believes you can redesign the assembly line—or the factory, or industrial production generally—so that it no longer serves domination. I believe this is a fantasy that misunderstands the nature of technological systems.
Let me be specific. The assembly line is not simply a neutral tool that happens to be used badly by capitalists. The assembly line embodies a particular relationship between humans and their activity: the subordination of the worker’s rhythm to the machine’s rhythm, the fragmentation of meaningful work into meaningless repetition, the separation of conception from execution. These are not accidental features imposed on a neutral technology by bad social arrangements. They are constitutive of what an assembly line IS. An assembly line that didn’t subordinate human rhythm to mechanical rhythm, that didn’t fragment work, that didn’t separate conception from execution, wouldn’t be an assembly line anymore.
Albert wants us to believe that we could have “good” assembly lines in a “good” society. But the assembly line was invented specifically to control workers, to deskill them, to make them interchangeable and therefore replaceable. The technology and the domination are not separable. The domination is built into the technology at the level of design.
This is what I mean when I say technology is not neutral. Not that every individual tool serves elites—obviously a pencil can be used to write revolutionary tracts or corporate memos. But that technological SYSTEMS, the integrated complexes of machinery and technique and social organization that characterize industrial civilization, embody in their very structure the relations of domination they were created to serve.
Albert accuses me of rejecting all division of labor when I should only reject bad divisions of labor. He proposes instead “jobs that are balanced for empowerment and quality of life implications (to eliminate hierarchy), and that are self-managed (to eliminate alienation), even as they also respect different actor’s personal tastes.”
This sounds lovely. It’s also impossible within any technological framework that requires specialized expertise, which is to say any technological framework beyond a very simple level.
Here’s the problem Albert doesn’t address: meaningful self-management requires understanding what you’re managing. You cannot self-manage a nuclear power plant unless you understand nuclear physics, reactor engineering, radiation safety, electrical grid integration, and a dozen other highly specialized fields. The knowledge required is so vast that no individual can master it all. This means that in any nuclear power facility, the workers who actually operate the plant must defer to experts who understand what they do not. This deference is not a result of bad social arrangements that could be reformed. It is intrinsic to the technology itself.
Albert’s “balanced job complexes” might work for activities that any reasonably intelligent person can learn in a few weeks or months. They cannot work for activities that require years or decades of specialized training to understand, let alone perform competently. And modern industrial technology is overwhelmingly composed of such activities.
The division of labor I critique is not merely the allocation of different tasks to different people. I have no objection to one person gathering berries while another hunts game, if both activities are meaningful and comprehensible to both parties. What I critique is the division between those who understand and those who merely execute, between those who design and those who operate, between those who possess knowledge and those who must trust them. This division is not an accidental feature of industrial technology that could be reformed away. It is a necessary consequence of technological complexity.
When technology becomes sufficiently complex that ordinary people cannot understand it, control inevitably shifts to those who can. This is not a matter of bad intentions or poor social design. It is a structural necessity. And the whole trajectory of industrial civilization has been toward ever-greater complexity, ever-more-specialized expertise, ever-deeper divisions between the knowledgeable few and the ignorant many.
Albert’s proposed solution—balanced job complexes and self-management—addresses only the surface of this problem. It imagines that we could redistribute the empowering and disempowering tasks more equitably without questioning whether empowerment is even possible when the tasks themselves are incomprehensible to those performing them.
Albert treats my critique of language as if it were obviously absurd—as if I were simply proposing that humans stop talking. He reduces my argument to: “language is sometimes used to oppress people, therefore we should eliminate language.” Then he mocks this reduction.
But this is not my argument. My argument is that language itself—not its misuse but its fundamental structure—creates a distance between humans and their experience that enables and perhaps even necessitates domination.
Consider what happens in the act of naming. When I call something a “tree,” I have already separated myself from it. The word is not the thing. The word stands in place of the thing, represents it, allows me to think about it without being present to it. This is tremendously useful in many ways, but it is also a kind of violence. It reduces the infinite specificity of this particular tree—its exact shade of bark, the way its leaves move in this particular wind, its relationships to the soil and insects and birds around it—to a generic category. The word “tree” makes all trees interchangeable in thought, which prepares the way for making them interchangeable in practice, which prepares the way for treating them as resources to be exploited rather than beings to be encountered.
Language doesn’t just occasionally serve domination. Language is the first step toward domination because language is the first step toward abstraction, and abstraction is the mental operation that makes domination possible. You cannot exploit what you are present to. You can only exploit what you have already reduced to a category, a resource, a thing to be used.
This doesn’t mean I think we can or should simply “stop talking.” That interpretation is Albert’s straw man, not my position. What I am trying to do is trace the roots of our alienation deeper than reformers like Albert want to go. I want to understand how we got here, not just propose superficial solutions that leave the deep structures intact.
When I say that “only a rejection of symbolic culture provides a deep enough challenge to what stems from that culture,” I am not issuing a practical program. I am diagnosing the depth of our crisis. Albert wants to fix capitalism while keeping industrialism. Others want to fix industrialism while keeping civilization. I am saying: look deeper. The problems go all the way down to the most fundamental ways we relate to reality, which include language itself.
Does this mean I have a practical program for transcending language? No. I am under no obligation to have such a program. The role of critique is to illuminate the nature and origins of our predicament, not necessarily to solve it. If our predicament is deeper than we thought, the critique that reveals this depth is valuable even if it doesn’t come with a ready-made alternative.
Albert quotes my observations about numbers and time with apparent incredulity. How absurd, he implies, to suggest that counting and measuring might be problematic!
But consider the history. Number systems emerged not from pure mathematical curiosity but from the practical needs of early states: counting populations for taxation, measuring land for ownership, tracking time for labor discipline. The first writing was accounting. The first uses of standardized measure were imperial. This is not accidental.
When I note that “Euclid developed geometry—literally, ‘land measuring’—to measure fields for purposes of ownership, taxation, and the assignment of slave labor,” I am not suggesting that every contemporary use of geometry serves these purposes. I am pointing out that the entire conceptual framework within which we think about quantities and measures emerged from and originally served the project of domination. This leaves traces in the framework itself.
Consider time. Before clocks, people lived according to the rhythms of the sun and seasons, the needs of their bodies, the demands of their immediate tasks. Time was qualitative and experiential. The clock transformed time into something abstract and quantitative, a resource to be spent, saved, wasted. Clock time enabled the factory system because it allowed the measurement and control of labor. Clock time disciplines us still—we organize our lives around schedules and deadlines and billable hours, subordinating the natural rhythms of human existence to the mechanical rhythm of industrial production.
Is it absurd to suggest that this transformation was a loss as well as a gain? Albert seems to think so. I think he has simply never questioned the categories he thinks with.
When I say that “counting becomes necessary only when things become homogenized,” I am making a point about the relationship between quantification and abstraction. In a face-to-face community where each member is known as a particular individual, you don’t need to count them. You notice immediately when someone is missing because each person has a distinct presence that cannot be substituted for another. Counting presupposes interchangeability—the idea that one unit is equivalent to another unit. This is the logic of commodification, applied to everything including human beings.
Again, I am not offering a practical program for living without numbers. I am tracing the genealogy of our alienation, showing how deep it goes, refusing the comfortable illusion that our problems can be solved by rearranging surface features while leaving the foundations untouched.
Albert’s deepest objection to my position is that it seems to imply an impossibility: returning to a pre-civilized state that cannot support the current human population. He writes: “without technology humans would have no clothes, no source of power outside their own muscles, and not even agriculture to renew their muscles. Life would be brutish, isolated, and short.”
This is a common objection, and it deserves a serious response.
First, the empirical claim is simply wrong. Anthropological research—Sahlins’ Original Affluent Society, Lee’s studies of the !Kung, and many others—demonstrates that hunter-gatherer life was not brutish, isolated, or short. These were societies of abundance, not scarcity. People worked fifteen to twenty hours per week, enjoyed rich social lives, and lived in relative equality with one another and in sustainable relationship with their environments for hundreds of thousands of years. This is not romantic projection; it is the accumulated finding of modern anthropology.
Second, I have never claimed that seven billion people can return to foraging. I am fully aware that the current human population exists only because of agriculture and industry. But this awareness should prompt humility about our situation, not complacency. We are locked into a system that is destroying the planet, destroying human freedom, destroying the conditions for meaningful life—and we cannot simply exit it because too many of us now exist. This is not an argument for the system. It is an argument that we have painted ourselves into a corner from which there may be no escape.
What I refuse to do is pretend that the corner is actually quite comfortable, that with a few reforms and redesigns we could make it into a pleasant room. Albert’s vision of balanced job complexes and self-managed workplaces and neutral technology serving human flourishing is, in my view, a fantasy that allows us to avoid facing the depth of our predicament. It offers false hope.
I prefer to look clearly at where we are, how we got here, and what that means—even if what it means is disturbing, even if it offers no obvious way forward. Honesty is more valuable than comfort.
Albert claims that my position “contributes to rejecting the idea of all reforms because no institution is worthy of improvements, so no improvements are worthy of our time.”
This is not quite accurate. I have never said that reforms are worthless or that people shouldn’t fight for better conditions within the existing system. If workers can win higher wages or shorter hours, that’s good. If environmental regulations can slow the destruction, that’s good. If oppressed groups can secure rights and protections, that’s good.
What I reject is the notion that such reforms add up to fundamental change, or that they can if pursued long enough and cleverly enough. Albert believes in something he calls “non-reformist reforms”—changes that not only improve immediate conditions but also build power and consciousness for further changes, leading eventually toward ultimate goals. This is a seductive idea. It allows one to engage in ameliorative work while believing it contributes to revolution.
But the history of such reforms is not encouraging. The welfare state was supposed to be a stepping stone to socialism; instead it stabilized capitalism. Labor unions were supposed to build working-class power; instead they became integrated into the management of labor markets. Environmental regulations were supposed to shift society toward ecological sanity; instead they legitimized the continuation of destructive practices by making them slightly less destructive.
The pattern is consistent: reforms that seem to challenge the system are absorbed and become part of its functioning. This is not because reformers are naive or their reforms poorly designed. It is because the system is resilient and adaptive. It can accommodate enormous changes in surface arrangements while maintaining its essential character.
My critique of institutions goes deeper than noting that existing institutions are bad and should be improved. I am questioning whether institutional forms as such—the codification of human relationships into formal structures with defined roles and rules—don’t inherently tend toward rigidity, hierarchy, and domination. Institutions by their nature constrain spontaneous human interaction and replace it with prescribed behavior. They reduce the infinite complexity of human relationship to manageable categories. They create insiders and outsiders, authorities and subjects, the competent and the incompetent.
Can we imagine institutions that don’t do this? Perhaps. But we should be suspicious of our imaginings. We have imagined humane institutions many times before, and they have consistently betrayed our hopes. At some point we should consider the possibility that the problem is not poor design but the nature of institution itself.
Albert concludes by implying that my position offers no hope, no way forward, no possibility of improvement. In contrast, his “desirable anarchism” offers positive vision and practical strategy.
But what kind of hope does Albert offer? The hope that we can maintain industrial civilization while eliminating its dominating aspects. The hope that technology can be made to serve everyone rather than elites. The hope that properly designed institutions can coordinate complex production without creating hierarchy. The hope that human beings can continue living as we do now, only more equitably and sustainably.
I consider these false hopes. They underestimate the depth of the crisis we face—ecological, social, spiritual. They assume that the basic trajectory of human civilization over the past ten thousand years is sound and merely needs adjustment. They cannot see that this trajectory itself is the problem.
What hope do I offer? Not the hope that our current way of life can be saved. Not the hope that reforms will eventually transform the system. But perhaps a different kind of hope: that by looking clearly at our situation, understanding how we got here, and refusing comfortable illusions, we might discover possibilities we cannot currently imagine.
The history of civilization is not the only possible human history. For the vast majority of our species’ existence—hundreds of thousands of years—human beings lived otherwise. They lived in face-to-face communities, in immediate relationship with their environments, without states or armies or prisons or factories. This is not romanticism; it is anthropological fact. If such life was once possible, it may be possible again—though certainly not for seven billion people, and certainly not through any transition we can currently envision.
I don’t pretend to know what the future holds. I don’t pretend to have a strategy for getting from here to somewhere better. What I offer is a diagnosis, as accurate as I can make it, of where we are and how we got here. If the diagnosis is correct, it rules out certain false solutions—like Albert’s reformed industrial civilization—and keeps open the question of what real solutions might look like.
That may not seem like much hope. But false hope is worse than no hope, because it keeps us investing in projects that cannot succeed and diverts our attention from the depth of our predicament. The first step toward real hope is honest despair.
Albert dismisses the anthropological evidence for my position with a wave of his hand. He acknowledges that “life without technology” would be “brutish, isolated, and short”—directly invoking Hobbes’s famous slander of pre-civilized existence—without engaging with the mountain of evidence that contradicts this claim.
Let me be specific about what we know. Richard Lee’s decades of research among the !Kung San demonstrated that these hunter-gatherers worked an average of fifteen to twenty hours per week to secure their subsistence, spent the rest of their time in leisure, socializing, and ritual, and showed none of the stress-related diseases that plague modern populations. Marshall Sahlins, surveying the ethnographic literature, concluded that hunter-gatherers were “the original affluent society”—not affluent by producing much, but by wanting little and easily satisfying those wants.
This was not a marginal existence on the edge of starvation. The !Kung diet was more varied and nutritious than that of many modern populations. Their lives were not dominated by the desperate search for food but by the pleasures of community, story, dance, and what we might call spirituality—immediate presence to the living world.
Were these societies perfect? Of course not. No human society is perfect. But they demonstrate something crucial: the arrangements we take for granted—wage labor, hierarchy, alienation from nature, the tyranny of the clock—are not inevitable features of human existence. They are specific historical developments that emerged with civilization and could, in principle, be transcended.
Albert treats my invocation of hunter-gatherers as romantic nostalgia. But nostalgia is longing for a past that never existed. What I describe is documented anthropological reality. The question is not whether such societies existed—they did, and a few remnants still struggle to survive against the expanding reach of civilization—but what their existence means for our understanding of human possibility.
What it means, I suggest, is that the deep structures Albert wants to preserve—technology, division of labor, institutions, even language as we know it—are not requirements of human existence but specific developments that came with civilization and brought with them the domination, alienation, and ecological destruction we now experience. If humans lived without these structures for hundreds of thousands of years, and if their lives during that time were in many ways richer and more satisfying than our own, then Albert’s breezy confidence that we can keep these structures while eliminating their harmful effects deserves serious skepticism.
Albert repeatedly accuses me of “throwing out the baby with the bathwater”—rejecting entire categories when only specific instances within those categories are problematic. But this metaphor obscures more than it reveals.
Consider: if a batch of bathwater contains enough poison that every cupful will make you sick, you don’t carefully try to filter out the poison while keeping the water. You throw out the whole batch. The question is not whether the metaphorical baby exists, but whether the bathwater can actually be separated from the poison.
Albert assumes that technology, division of labor, institutions, and language are essentially benign categories that happen to have been implemented badly in existing society. Reform them properly, and their benefits will flow without their harms. But this assumption is exactly what I challenge. I am arguing that the harms are not incidental to these categories but intrinsic to them—that there is no way to have industrial technology without hierarchy, no way to have complex division of labor without alienation, no way to have formal institutions without domination.
If I’m right about this, then Albert’s “baby”—the good technology, the liberatory institutions, the empowering division of labor—doesn’t actually exist. There is no baby to throw out because there never was a baby. There was only bathwater, and it was poison all along.
How would we determine who is right? We would look at the evidence. We would examine the history of technology and ask whether there have ever been technological systems that didn’t serve domination. We would look at the history of institutions and ask whether there have ever been formal organizational structures that maintained equality and freedom over time. We would study the history of civilization and ask whether its trajectory has been toward or away from human flourishing.
The evidence, I submit, supports my position. Technology has consistently served those who control it against those who merely use it. Institutions have consistently drifted toward hierarchy and rigidity. Civilization has consistently expanded at the expense of human autonomy and ecological integrity. If Albert wants to maintain that these patterns are accidental rather than essential, the burden of proof is on him. He needs to show not just that good technology and liberatory institutions are imaginable, but that they are achievable—that the forces that have corrupted every previous attempt can somehow be overcome.
Until he does this, his optimism is faith, not analysis.
Albert implies that my position is irresponsible because it doesn’t offer practical solutions. I want to address this directly.
The intellectual is not obligated to have solutions to every problem they diagnose. A doctor who identifies a terminal illness is not failing in their duty by being unable to cure it. Their responsibility is accurate diagnosis, not miracle working. Similarly, my responsibility as a thinker is to understand our situation as clearly as possible, not to conjure up hopeful programs that obscure its severity.
In fact, I would argue that Albert’s position is the irresponsible one. By offering false hope—the hope that industrial civilization can be reformed into something humane and sustainable—he encourages continued investment in projects that cannot succeed. Resources, energy, and attention that might be directed toward genuine alternatives (whatever those might be) are instead channeled into reforms that will inevitably be absorbed and neutralized by the system they aim to transform.
The history of the twentieth century is littered with reform movements that promised to humanize capitalism, democratize states, and redirect technology toward human benefit. Where are they now? Absorbed, co-opted, forgotten. The system they challenged is stronger than ever. The trajectory they sought to reverse has accelerated.
At what point do we conclude that this approach doesn’t work? At what point do we admit that the problem is not poor strategy or insufficient commitment but the fundamental nature of what we’re trying to reform? I suggest we’ve already passed that point. The evidence is in. The reforms have been tried. They have failed.
My “irresponsibility” consists in acknowledging this failure and refusing to pretend otherwise. Albert’s “responsibility” consists in ignoring the evidence and promising that this time will be different. I know which position seems more honest to me.
Let me end with something other than critique. Albert asks, in effect, what I’m for rather than just what I’m against. It’s a fair question.
I am for honesty about our situation. I am for refusing false comfort. I am for looking at human history whole—not just the ten thousand years of civilization, but the hundreds of thousands of years that preceded it—and asking what that history tells us about who we are and what we might become.
I am for remembering what we have lost. Not sentimentally, not as escape, but as a way of keeping open possibilities that civilization wants us to believe never existed. We once lived in face-to-face communities where everyone knew everyone, where no one was a stranger, where belonging was not achieved but given. We once lived in immediate relationship with the living world, not as its exploiters but as its participants. We once had time—not clock time, not scheduled time, but the time of the seasons and the body and the unfolding present moment.
These are not fantasies. They are descriptions of how humans actually lived for most of our species’ existence. Civilization has taught us to see that past as primitive, as brutish, as something we should be grateful to have escaped. But the anthropological evidence tells a different story. That past was in many ways richer, more satisfying, more fully human than our present.
I am not saying we can return to it. I am saying we should remember it. We should hold it up against the claims of civilization to have improved our lot. We should ask whether the trajectory we’re on is really progress or really catastrophe.
And I am for wildness. The wildness that remains in us despite everything. The rebellion against domestication that stirs even now, in everyone who feels that something is deeply wrong with how we live. That feeling is not neurosis. It is not maladjustment. It is the voice of our deepest nature, protesting its confinement.
Civilization has not fully tamed us. Alienation is not our natural condition. What we have lost, we remember in our bones. And what we remember, we might yet recover—not by reforming the system that has taken it from us, but by refusing that system’s claims on us, one by one, in whatever ways become possible.
This is not a program. It is an orientation. A way of standing in the world that keeps faith with what we were and what we might become, rather than with what civilization has made of us.
Albert wants a program. He wants strategies and tactics and non-reformist reforms. He wants to believe that with the right approach, we can get from here to a good society through a series of achievable steps. I understand the appeal of this. It offers something to do, something to hope for, something to organize around.
But I have come to believe that this approach is part of the problem, not part of the solution. It keeps us focused on managing a system that cannot be managed humanely, on reforming what cannot be reformed. It absorbs our energy into channels that lead nowhere.
What I offer instead is simply this: keep faith with what you know in your bones. The feeling that something is deeply wrong is not illusion. The longing for something different is not escapism. The wildness that stirs in you is not to be suppressed or sublimated but honored. Where that leads, I cannot say. But I believe it leads somewhere truer than Albert’s reformed industrial paradise.
That is my answer. It is not the answer Albert wants. But it is the only answer I have that is honest.
Albert’s critique exemplifies a common pattern in responses to radical analysis. He takes positions that challenge fundamental categories—technology, institutions, language—and reduces them to absurdity by interpreting them as practical programs requiring immediate implementation. Then he mocks the absurd programs he has invented and congratulates himself on his superior reasonableness.
But I am not offering a practical program. I am trying to think as deeply as I can about the nature and origins of our alienation. This is valuable intellectual work, regardless of whether it issues in a ten-point plan for revolution.
Albert wants to save industrial civilization by making it more equitable and democratic. I am suggesting that industrial civilization cannot be saved, that its fundamental structures—technological, institutional, even linguistic—are inherently dominating, and that our task is not to reform it but to understand it, to trace how we got here, and to refuse the comforting illusions that keep us from facing our predicament honestly.
This may be a disagreement we cannot resolve. Albert has faith that technology can be made neutral, that institutions can be made liberatory, that the trajectory of civilization can be redirected toward human flourishing. I have no such faith. The evidence of history—not just recent history, but the entire ten-thousand-year history of civilization—suggests otherwise.
But I note this: Albert’s position requires believing many things that have never been demonstrated and that there is little reason to expect. Neutral technology has never existed. Liberatory institutions have never been sustained. The trajectory of civilization has been consistently toward greater complexity, greater hierarchy, greater alienation, greater destruction. One can hope that all this will somehow reverse if we just get the reforms right. But one should recognize this as hope against evidence, faith against experience.
My position requires believing only what anthropology has demonstrated: that humans once lived otherwise, in arrangements that were more egalitarian, more sustainable, and in many ways more satisfying than our own. It requires being honest about the depth of our current predicament and refusing false consolation. It requires humility about our ability to engineer our way out of problems created by our engineering.
I know which position seems to me more honest, more rigorous, more faithful to what we actually know about human history and human nature. I leave readers to make their own judgments.
What I will not do is soften my critique to make it more palatable, or pretend to have solutions I don’t have, or offer false hope to those desperate for comfort. The truth, as best I can discern it, is that we are in very deep trouble, that the trouble goes much deeper than most people want to acknowledge, and that the paths forward most commonly proposed—including Albert’s—don’t really address the depth of the problem.
Whether there are paths forward that do address it, I cannot say. Perhaps there are none. But if there are, they will only become visible to those who first see clearly where we actually are. That is what my work attempts to provide.
John Zerzan Simulacrum, not in Eugene, Oregon
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