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anarchism: a beginner’s guide
Leviathan, he notes elsewhere, is ‘an excretion’ of the reproductive
process. The exploited are alienated because they spend their time
recreating the complex social, economic and political structures
responsible for their domination and oppression.
Zerzan develops his view of alienation from Marx but suggests that
Marx defined the concept too narrowly as a ‘separation’ from the
means of production. Being alienated, Zerzan argues, means being
‘estranged from our own experiences, dislodged from a natural mode
of being’. Like Perlman, Zerzan argues that exploitation lies at the heart
of alienation because it has brought into being a colossal industrial
system that forces individuals to regard the world as an object of consumption.
Dependent on industrial technology to provide for their
wants, people destroy the only thing that they really need: the natural
world. In America the effect has been to create a ‘jarring contrast
between reality and what is said about reality’. People are encouraged
to think in terms of ‘dreams’ but are frustrated by the impossibility of
their achievement. The ‘nightmare scenario’ is that the
contrast can go on forever: people … won’t even notice there’s no
natural world anymore, no freedom, no fulfilment, no nothing. You
just take your Prozac everyday, limp along dyspeptic and neurotic,
and figure that’s all there is. 49
The scenario, Zerzan argues, is aptly captured in Ted Kaczynski’s
Unabomber Manifesto. Kaczynski distinguishes between three
‘human drives’ – those that can be satisfied ‘with minimal effort’,
those that can be satisfied ‘at the cost of serious effort’, and those that
cannot be ‘adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one
makes’. In a healthy society, human drives are channelled into the
second group: individuals must make some effort to secure their
physical and social needs. Modern industrial society pushes these
drives into the ‘first and third groups’. Physical necessities are
provided with minimal effort and, to compensate for the loss, the
market invents artificial needs which ‘modern man’ [sic] feels
obliged but unable to satisfy. The result is a profound sense of
‘purposelessness’. 50
These critiques of exploitation and alienation provide an
important bridge between anarchism and non-anarchist schools of
socialism. The strength of the anarchists’ commitment to end state
exploitation and put an end to alienation is acknowledged by
non-anarchists to play an important part in contemporary protest.
As Michael Albert argues, anarchists ‘fight on the side of the