#zerzan

Finally, John [Zerzan]'s relentless hostility to agriculture raises an obvious question: what meaning can his apocalyptic jeremiad have in a world of five billion people, only a fraction of whom could be supported by hunting and gathering? Can such an appeal, if taken seriously, lead to anything but despair and nihilism? The answer, judging by John’s essay, is 'no.' Wondering how the world’s billions are supposed to survive without agriculture, John concedes he has 'few if any prescriptions' for reaching the hunter-gatherer Paradise. Yet he still concludes, somewhat masochistically, that liberation is impossible without agriculture’s dissolution. This final pronouncement is nothing but wishful thinking punctuated by desperation—theory at the end of its rope, openly proclaiming the impossibility of its realization.

What is such a misanthropy except another form of human exceptionalism, another way of making the human the one and only Other who stands apart from everything else? As the Invisible Committee notes, referencing the anthropocentrism motivating the widespread move toward naming our era the Anthropocene, 'For the last time, [Man] assigns himself the main role, even if it's to accuse himself of having trashed everything - the seas and the skies, the ground and what's underground - even if it's to confess his guilt for the unprecedented extinction of plant and animal species.'

As he's been doing for about fifteen years, Bookchin argues in this work for the formation of citizen's councils and popular municipal self-management groups to save the cities from the mismanagement of professional politicians and bureaucrats. Bankrupt of history and method, his rescue mission consists in advancing the totally non-anarchist (and illogical) thesis that increased participation in local politics points the way to the collapse of the state. We must, he counsels, slowly enlarge and expand the 'existing institutions' and 'try to democratize the republic.' It is a tedious, even somewhat embarrassing review chore, as if such a book can be taken seriously from any remotely anti-authoritarian perspective. - He tries to make his pure reformism palatable by such devices as the false antinomies - urbanization vs. cities, representation vs. sovereignty, and politics vs. statecraft, and unsupportable assertions, like referring to politics as having once been the 'activity of an entire community.' Another device is to ignore the real history of urban life, as if illusory; he resorts at times to putting such terms as 'elected' representatives, 'voters' and 'taxpayers' in quotes as though the terms really don't, somehow, correspond to reality. Open the book at random and you will find similar absurdities and evasions.  [....] And if his grasp of history is faulty (to put it generously), it is what is missing altogether that renders his book terminally pathetic. Nowhere does he find fault with the most fundamental dimension of modern living, that of wage-labor and the commodity.... While people turn off increasingly to representation and work, new schemes to 'democratize' these fundamentally alienating modes must be promoted. Bookchin, in a parallel to the legitimizing of work via workers' councils, works for the legitimation of both politics and cities via citizens' councils. Massified society, with its ever-greater division of labor and standardizations, realizes itself in cities while destroying our very sense of place.