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Concept
John Zerzan
Summary
John Edward Zerzan (ˈzɜrzən ; born August 10, 1943) is an American anarchist and primitivist author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocates drawing upon the ways of life of hunter-gatherers as an inspiration for what a free society should look like. Subjects of his criticism include domestication and symbolic thought (such as language, number, art and the concept of time).
His six major books are Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994), Running on Emptiness (2002), Against Civilization: Readings and Reflections (2005), Twilight of the Machines (2008), and Why hope? The Stand Against Civilization (2015).
Zerzan was born in Salem, Oregon, and is of Czech and Slovakian descent. He received his bachelor's degree in political science from Stanford University in 1966. From 1967 to 1970, Zerzan worked as a union organizer for the Social Service Employee's Union in San Francisco. Zerzan returned to school and received a master's degree in history from San Francisco State University in 1972. He completed his coursework towards a PhD at the University of Southern California but dropped out in 1975 before completing his dissertation.
In 1966, Zerzan was arrested while performing civil disobedience at a Berkeley anti-Vietnam War march and spent two weeks in the Contra Costa County Jail. He vowed after his release never again to be willingly arrested. He attended events organized by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and was involved with the psychedelic drug and music scene in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury neighborhood.
In the late 1960s he worked as a social worker for the city of San Francisco welfare department. He helped organize a social worker's union, the SSEU, and was elected vice president in 1968, and president in 1969. The local Situationist group Contradiction denounced him as a "leftist bureaucrat".
In 1974, Black and Red Press published Unions Against Revolution by Spanish ultra-left theorist Grandizo Munis that included an essay by Zerzan which previously appeared in the journal Telos.
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