John Zerzan Livres

Has civilization been a good idea? Zerzan doesn't think so. We may need this critical perspective, as the nature of civilization becomes clearer--and more frightening!

Future Primitive is Zerzan's iconic and long out-of-print work. The new version has many new articles.

These are dark and darkening times, challenging us to look deeper to grasp the roots and dynamics of the looming civilizational crisis. Chronic illness of the planet calls for radically new thinking if there is to be any hope of renewal. When We Are Human offers thought at a necessary and primal level.All previous civilizations have failed, and now there's just one global civilization, which is starkly, grandly failing. To deny or avoid this fact is to remain in the sphere of the superficial, the irrelevant. The physical environment is reaching the catastrophe stage as the seas warm, rise, acidify, and fill with plastics. Icebergs ahead and floating past beachgoers idly watching the planet die.So much is failing, so much is interrelated in the technosphere of ever-greater dependence and estrangement. Social existence, now strangely isolated, is beset by mass shootings, rising suicide rates, slipping longevity, loneliness, anxiety, and the maddening stream of lies and concocted politics.Zerzan trains his passionate focus on several fields of discourse: anthropology, history, philosophy, technology, psychology, and the spiritual. Points of light that become a kaleidoscope refracting new insights and contributing an overall picture of late civilization.

“Read it and you will never think of civilization in the same way again.”—Kirkpatrick SaleThis anthology about "the pathology of civilization" offers insight into how progress and technology have led to emptiness and alienation.

Thinker and revolutionary John Zerzan has been widely credited with inspiring the new generation of antiglobalization activists. Collecting essays and interviews, Running on Emptiness reflects Zerzan's wide range of interests, from the political ("We All Live in Waco") to the personal ("So ... How Did You Become an Anarchist?"). This book deftly mixes history, anthropology, science, cultural theory, and politics to offer a critique of society as well as a blueprint for change

The infamous eco-anarchist John Zerzan whose books have resulted in recent interviews by Vice and Believer magazines, checks in with further provocative articles about the chaotic results of civilization and technology. Says novelist Lang Gore in his "The present collection of essays continues the overarching thrust of John's scholarship, unveiling the post-apocalyptic nature of our times by noting the apocalypse was yesterday, several thousand years ago, to be precise, and that nothing produced by civilization can ever redeem the systematic attempt it has undertaken these (very) few millennia to destroy or alienate any human connection with the earth. "In fact, when civilized Europeans imposed themselves everywhere on Earth, they created a terminal crisis for themselves by their very contact with indigenous societies. Suddenly, those with eyes to see and ears to hear could recognize that patriarchy, property and authority, and certainly slavery, were neither necessary nor desirable, let alone determined by 'human nature.'"