CONTENTS - ouroboros ponderosa

.l.1O hllM :\ NII (·(INII·N I IN 1·I I·kll·N I .... (II· 1{1.I.l l .... :\1
Paris Commune or J '(1, 71, Makhnovisls, III{". New York ('ily Il( '()p,ic-I ill ya
puke party and power outage of 1'177, the MLK assassination riots, May
'68 in France and so i()rth, While not all of the abovt: events arc
discussed in EoR, investigation into these occurrences revcJls si m ilar
findings as to their participants; the vast majority were employed, or
employers, artisans, weavers, farmers, mechanics, sailors, officer catkts,
studcnts, merchants, tavern keepers, local elected officials; they were not
solely nor even conspicuously the industrial proletariat. Throughout the
historical essays in EoR, Zerzan makes this point, implicitly and explicitly
using primary sources. Zerzan isn't the first theorist to unCOver this
information. Crane Brinton, a colleague of Marcuse's at the Office for
Strategic Services (forerunncr of thc CIA), in a study of the rcvolutionary
milieux during the Terror, found that the Jaeobins presented t()r
a brief period of time the spectacle of men acting without regard for
their own material interests. Brinton, an apologist for the dominant
society with a sneaking admiration for revolution, seems clearly stunned
by this and fails to follow the insight to its logical conclusion.
The potential impact of this thesis regarding the insurrectionary
subject, particularly in the context of a post-industrial economic situation,
is shattering.To enumerate just one development, it provides some
empirical substantiation to Camatte's thcsis that humanity, in the years
since the Second World War, has been utterly proletarianized, altering
the insurrectionary project from one of class versus class to species versus
society or specifically, social concept. There are many other implications
of this thcsis, to be workcd out in the coming years by theorists who have
as yet to find a voice, a method (and a publishcr).
Violcnce, as tool for social change, fell into disrepute in the midtwentieth
century, and has yet to regain the prc-eminentplacc it formerly
held in the revolutionary milieLLx of the nineteenth century. It is
sometimes forgotten just how enamored our political ancestors were of
violence. Albert Parsons' publication of Johann Most's article on
dynamite in The Alarm, indeed Most's popular pamphlet, Revolutionary
Military Science, contained recipes and use instructions for everything
from fulminate of mercury to prussic acid. Beyond the printed word, the
global wave of assassinations, bombings and bank robberics, that virtually
defined anarchist revolutionary activity during the last decade of the
nineteenth and the first decade of the twentieth centuries.
Somewhere, however, all this was replaced with the gospel of nonviolence,
civil disobedience, non-cooperation, etc, lt is only recently that
violcnce has re-entered serious discussion in anarchist milieux. Zcrzan in
many of his essays draws the proper conclusion when he finds that
1·1 1 {l.1I III', III '\[·I II·,.\[
Vi(}il-IHT has hTII all I"SS('llli;tI !";HTI Ill" historical refusal. In addition, he
Ililillis ou l Ilial violellCl seems to have just as great a propensity . to
deliver the goods as other methods of redrcss or refusal. P.M., the SWI SS
;Iul hor of holo 'halo, an anarchocommune·ist utopian blueprint, discusses
vinlcncc in detail as an integral part of his post-revolutionary society
(requiring its own institutional resolution), framing the argument in
allthropological terms. This seems a proper next line of inquiry and
returns us once again to the project of a philosophical anthropology. The
rc-valuation of violence also indicates one of the final breaks with the
"New Left" of the sixties, and its failure to achieve even a single positivc
outcome.
Finally, it should be noted that the Unabomber has focused much
discussion on the debate about the re-valuation of violence. As one might
expect many who once endorsed propaganda by the deed are now
running fo r cover as fast as their trcmbling legs can carry them (hfth
b'late, as an example), while there arc those who, in spite of the
problems with the choice of targets and the possibility of collateral
casualties (a handy term providcd by the nation-state to justify its
random violence, why not ours?), support FC, in some instances, for no
other reason than the fact that someone, somewhcre finally and really
did something. For those who would doubt the efficacy of violence, the
Unabomber also presents a powerful cxample of just what a political
bombing campaign can produce; the FC Manifesto (Industrial Society and
Its Future) has been translated into dozens of languages and read and
discussed by thousands if not hundreds of thousands of persons.
It should be clear as well that the project that Zerzan has outlincd is
far from finished. Indeed, in many of his essays he leaves more unsaid
than explicated, more questions remain than answers given. In some
cases this is unavoidable, in others it indicates a necessary working out
of some of thc more basic philosophical questions. An example is the
issuc of identity.
Theorists currently working the critical fields fall, to my thinking, into
two general categories, those who abhor the identity thesis and those
who uphold it. Adorno in Negative Dialectics forccfully raised the issue
of identity and the conundrum continues unabatcd. To my knowledge
Zerzan has as yet to wrangle with identity, though it's difficult to
contextualize any critical statement without understanding where the
theorist stands on this most central issue. In addition, Zerzan identifies
division of labor as one of thc single concepts responsible for the
dominant culture . This is accurate, howcver, an examination of division
of labor, particularly in the context of post-industrial society needs to be