Jason Adams writes:

"The Re-embedding of the War Machine:

Resistance to Mediation in Societies of Primary Orality and Primary Literacy"

By Jason Adams

"The problem is that the exteriority of the war machine in relation to the State apparatus is everywhere apparent but remains difficult to conceptualize -- the State has no war machine of its own; it can only appropriate one in the form of a military institution. Could it be that it is at the moment the war machine ceases to exist, conquered by the State, that it displays to the utmost its irreducibility, that it scatters into thinking, loving, dying or creating machines that have at their disposal vital or revolutionary powers capable of challenging or conquering the State?" -- Deleuze and Guattari, 1987

Introduction

In the course of "Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine," Deleuze and Guattari construct a theory about the mediation of everyday life, based on Clastres' argument that nomadic (oral, gatherer-hunter) societies are marked by the presence of a "war machine" at the core of their social being, which serves to ward off the emergence of the state-form. Thus the function of war in oral societies is not to win hegemony but rather "to assure the permanence of the dispersion, the parceling, the atomization of groups" which, as Deleuze and Guattari state, valorizes the smooth space of difference over and against the striated space of identity. These assertions are well supported by contemporary political anthropology; as I will show in this essay, Sahlins, Goody and others have demonstrated that the Paleolithic era was marked primarily by multiplicity and abundance; thus hegemony and scarcity were not, as is often stated, the norm for the majority of the species' lifespan prior to "civilization." But the point of Deleuze and Guattari's inquiry into "nomadology" is not so much to examine the egalitarian function of the war machine in oral society as it is to question how and why the state-form arises and how and why it then appropriates the war machine in order to redeploy it for its own ends. It is in league with such a question that this essay proceeds, arguing that this becomes possible only with the decline of the Paleolithic era and the rise of the Neolithic as the immediacy of primary orality is replaced with the abstractions of primary literacy as the dominant code of civilization.

These "primary abstractions" of agriculture, number, art, time and language evolve into the ever-more intensely mediational web of abstractions that constitute contemporary society through television, film, newspapers and other media of communication. This general shift from primary immediacy to the extreme mediation of mass culture thus facilitates the rise and continuity of the state-form worldwide -- and with it, the appropriation and universal monopolization of what becomes a global war machine. In the process, oral societies from "Europe" to "the Americas" to "Asia" to "Africa" and everywhere in-between are subsumed under its logic as the war machine, which once ensured multiplicity and abundance within the realm of the local, is redeployed as the brutal metastabilizer of the universal state-form and its enforcement of hegemony and scarcity.

The question for political theory, then, is would it or would it not be possible or desirable to reclaim the global war machine from the state-form and to go back to this "pre-civilized" world of multiplicity and abundance? If so, what would this entail exactly, and how would it be done? Would all forms of mediation need to be abolished in the process, ranging from television to writing to art? Or could the war-machine (and thus immediacy itself) be reclaimed from the state without such drastic and perhaps, impossible, measures? The critics of primary literacy and its related mediations are not of a unity on these questions; in fact, they tend to make extremely divergent cases for the problematization and overthrow of the state-form and the re-embedding of the war machine. On the one hand are the arguments such as those pursued by Zerzan, which argue forthrightly that civilization (defined as mediation in general) should be abolished en total. On the other hand are the arguments of those like Deleuze and Guattari and their interlocutors Hardt and Negri who argue for a "pushing through" of the logic of the global war machine in order to "come out the other side." Considering these two perspectives, it seems clear that something quite important is missing in both; an honest coming-to-terms with the nature of the contemporary moment, the articulation of a practical alternative to it and a consideration of how we might get there, for a start. In other words, while Zerzan misses that once an abstraction of this degree has occurred there is no "going back" in any complete sense, Hardt and Negri miss that the opposite strategy of pushing through of the current trajectory may well be suicidal. Rather than supporting either of these, I argue that such binary political positionalities of wilderness/civilization speak much more from a place of dogma and closure than they do from a consideration of alternatives through the open space of critical theory. A practical alternative to either of these "options" would be to accept the validity and importance of the critique raised by Zerzan, Clastres, Deleuze and Guattari and others but to critically analyze what they presume to be the "obvious" alternative in order to consider others that may have been overlooked. This is precisely what I intend to do in the course of this essay through my own critique, which I develop with the assistance of the work of Ian Angus and Hakim Bey and their respective concepts of comparative media theory and immediatism.

The Rise of Literacy and the Appropriation of the War Machine

In order to consider how the original appropriation of the war machine occurred with the rise of the state-form, we must consider the nature of the oral societies that preceded it, the intensification of mediation and the rise of the state-form itself. In order to do this, we will engage the work of Sahlins, Clastres, Havelock, Goody and Zerzan and consider both the tensions and interconnections between these thinkers' often divergent conceptualizations. Despite their many differences, there is at least a general agreement with Sahlins that societies of primary orality were "the original affluent society" rather than the conventional Hobbesian understanding that they are loosely anchored by a "subsistence" economy whose instability leads to recurring periods of starvation and thus a "war of all against all" for security. Instead, Sahlins argues that such societies are characterized much more by abundance than are most present day "civilized" societies and that in fact, leisure rather than the struggle to survive are its central ordering principles. For Sahlins, it is industrial capitalism that constructs the illusion of scarcity in order to enforce its logic over the whole of society, thus bringing all differences under the One of the state-form which sentences us all to a "life at hard labor". Further, the evidence produced to back up such neo-Hobbesian arguments typically relied upon the way oral peoples lived after the introduction of literacy, colonialism and capitalism; thus it is no wonder that there would suddenly be widespread poverty and a war of all against all. It is upon such realizations that he argues, "to assert that the hunters are affluent is to deny... that the human condition is an ordained tragedy" which provides a powerful counterpoint to those who would argue in league with Hobbes that the centralization of power and authority is a necessary evil. It is in this sense that Horkheimer and Adorno can argue that "abundance needs no law, and civilization's accusations of anarchy sounds almost like a denunciation of abundance." Critics of industrial civilization make their often-convincing case today based on these logics and arguments -- but there is often little understanding of what makes it so, of what makes it all "hang together" in such societies. If the original affluent society is a highly desireable society of abundance and multiplicity, which may have elements worth integrating into the present, how exactly is it that scarcity and homogeneity are avoided? For the answer to this question we must move to the work of Clastres, who attempted to answer it throughout his writings in a way Sahlins never really considered.

In his original articulation of the war machine, Clastres extends Sahlin's implicit critique of the realist discourse of Hobbes by critically cross-examining with it the economist discourse of Levi-Strauss that it is an exchange of each with each and attempting to articulate a possibility beyond the binary of peace/war. Countering the structuralist arguments of Levi-Strauss, he argues that the function of exchange is not merely to prevent the war that arises as a result of scarcity but rather that it is to prevent hegemony since autarky is the mode of choice in such "societies of abundance". And countering Hobbes who argued that the state is a necessary to prevent the pervasiveness of war in a fight for subsistence, Clastres argues that war is necessary to prevent the rise of the state which merely constructs the illusion of scarcity and the denial of abundance. In sum, for Clastres, oral societies are not societies-for-exchange ala Levi-Strauss, nor are they societies-for-power a la Hobbes, but rather they are societies-for-war as a means to maintain the centrifugal logic of abundance and multiplicity. Clearly, for both Sahlins and Clastres -- if not always for those who cite them - oral societies were not utopias of peace and equality even if they were "affluent" in many respects; the description of the war machine should make this obvious enough, as should the descriptions of torture, slavery, cannibalism and other such features. They are not rearticulating Rousseau's discourse of the "noble savage" any more than they are rearticulating Hobbes' discourse of a war of all against all; what they seek is to demonstrate that they were remarkably different, perhaps in some desirable ways, from the literate, more highly mediated societies that emerged through their subjugation. An unromantic understanding of the good, the bad and the gray aspects of such societies, in all their full spectra is invaluable to any attempt to really understand the processes that got us to the point where we have arrived today, and from which we might depart to construct a different kind of society.

At a certain point, the original affluent society begins to disintegrate, generally around the time of the rise of literacy, which can also be read as the massive intensification of mediation. This was the initial separation that formed the preconditions for the rise of centralized authority as the division of what had previously been an undivided autonomous totality, a point recognized by both Clastres and Levi-Strauss, despite their other differences. This development was not simultaneous and is not even complete today, since most existent languages have no literature of their own; thus, it is clear that this occurred unevenly, at different times in different places for different reasons. Havelock argues that in ancient Greece, it developed through the rise of the alphabet, which relied on the fundamental element of the "discovery of the consonant" in which "vowels" render "consonants" pronounceable and thus words become understandable outside of the original context in which they emerged. Once the word had become autonomous, it continued to develop through the work of Plato, Herodotus and Thucydides to delegitimize the oral tradition of the Muse and to valorize the emergent tradition of literacy. The tremendous shift that this involves is indicated by the way in which essentialism becomes thinkable after it; when one asks "what is philosophy?" or "what is justice?" the answer is not an example of it, but rather the essence of the idea defined in the abstract. Rather than everyday life being deeply contextual and subjective as in conditions of primary orality, literacy encourages abstraction and decontextualization in every facet. Soon the word of the Muse is nearly universally distrusted as being too subjective, in not conforming to the emerging subject-object distinction -- and increasingly, the argument heard is that "their stories cannot be tested" and that the "presentation of the facts will be discredited by the truth."

Focusing on the Near East and West Africa, Goody takes these theses further, demonstrating in a manner quite akin to Foucault's concept of governmentality, how with the rise of literacy, an innumerable number of "firsts" became possible, culminating in the rise of centralized authority in the state. With literacy, for the first time, a "religion" could become abstracted from its particular cultural context and through the Word be universalized to the global level, thus allowing for such things as "conversion" which had previously been unthinkable. This original decontextualization can be seen also as the origin of universalism -- and with univeralism, the openness and flexibility of culturally embedded religion is replaced with closure, orthodoxy and dogma since the Word must be learned to the "letter." This universalization of religion is also of course a universalization of norms; one of the central functions of the state which arose hand-in-hand with universalism and decontextualization. Also central to the state was the rise of specialization in the new social roles of priests and literati, an effect of those able to master the Word in a way not accessible to the general population. The concept of a unified "nation" (rather than a village or a locality) in which a sovereign could regulate laws from a highly centralized location equally over a widely dispersed geographic space; this became thinkable with the universalist bias of writing as well. Further, this is precisely the moment at which the war machine is appropriated and the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence emerges, in the sense that all divergent communities, localities, tribes and individuals become engulfed under the logic of the One. Once appropriated by the state, the war machine is then parceled out to a specialized bureaucratic division, that of the "military" whose reliance on writing to transmit orders from the very highest down to the very lowest levels, and across wide geographical expanses was as paramount as it was in any other division of the bureaucratic state-form. The military emerges of course, because the rise of "the" state was not a singular event, but was in fact plural, and thus "international relations" emerges simultaneously with the formalization of the "nation". The intersubjective context of international relations is then articulated in the form of "objective" written treaties thus making explicit and hardened what had been implicit and fluid in societies of primary orality. This "making explicit" of the nation, the military and international relations is what allows for the subjective war machine appropriated by each state separately to coalesce into the intersubjectivity of the global war machine as a unity. The global war machine, as guardian of the emerging literate world order, enforced its universalist bias over those societies still outside of its grasp through various subordinations; by subordinating pagan cults to the logic of religion, acephaleous societies to the logic of the state and embedded war machines to the logic of the global war machine. Further, the global war machine feeds upon itself, pitting the world religions of Islam, Christianity and others that arose through the spread of literacy against each other in a Jihad for souls, which leads to more wars and more treaties both to prevent and facilitate them.

For theorists such as Zerzan, Havelock and Goody's focus on the rise of literacy is merely scratching the surface of technological-industrial civilization and is thus much too late in the game to be useful. Determined to reject the totality and to reclaim "undivided life" he argues that mediation and technology (which are not adequately distinguished) begins not merely with writing but also with language, art, number, time, agriculture and the division of labor -- some of which predate literacy by tens of thousands of years. For Zerzan it is symbolic thought itself that is at the core of modern malaise; thus he goes on to state that "symbols at first mediated reality and then replaced it" the implication being that at one time humanity lived entirely without mediation at all, thus allowing the possibility that this golden age of humanity can somehow be reclaimed en total. The golden age is described as one in which "devices for social cohesion were unnecessary; division of labor, separate roles, and territoriality seem to have been largely non-existent." Thus, on the basis of this belief (which directly contradicts many of his more careful anthropological sources) he argues that "language... must be ended... we couldn't live in this world without language and this is just how profoundly we must transform this world." In the course of making his argument, Zerzan relies heavily on the work of Sahlins and to a much lesser degree on the work of Clastres; even so, he does not adequately follow through with their commitment to a critical analysis of oral societies, pointing out both their liberatory as well as repressive aspects. Indeed, the heavy reliance on Levi-Strauss' structuralist anthropology in Zerzan -- who Clastres has demonstrated fetishized the Rousseauian myth of the universally peaceful Noble Savage -- may well be the reason why the very relevant and antiauthoritarian voice of Clastres is so lacking here. Further, there is little or no discussion of the use of slavery amongst Northwest Coast aboriginals, of pervasive gendered division of labor or any of the other instrumental "elements of authority" articulated by Sahlins and Clastres, other than when he uses Levi-Strauss' Kantian/Rousseauian arguments to discount these claims. This gap within an otherwise compelling critique of contemporary civilization has lead some who are quite sympathetic to his views to describe them as ideological, uncritical and overly positivist; hopefully the discussion of some of the other critics I have presented here will add to this discourse a constructively critical element in order to more fully understand the mediations of everyday life and the ability we might have to reduce them to a bare minimum.

Comparative Mediations and the Problematization of "Primitivism"

It was mentioned earlier in this essay that there is a tendency in critical discussions of mediation to either swing over to the extreme of denouncing all mediations completely on the one hand or to resignedly calling for their intensification in the hopes that they will disintegrate in the process on the other. While the philosophical critique of the mediations brought into being through literacy and civilization is as important as the urge to actively challenge them, it is also important to recognize the extreme difficulties inherent in "going back" (or "forward" as Zerzan phrases it) to a preliterate, precivilized state en total, especially when one's understanding of the nature of that state is overly idealized in the first place. Contrary to the dismissiveness of many critics, I argue that an acceptance of this realization does not therefore mean that humanity is doomed to simply accepting technology as is, swinging to the extreme opposite position, but instead, should recognize that no society is now or ever has been truly "non-technological" -- this of course, recasts the whole discussion about where we might be headed thus allowing for more eclecticism and less absolutism in such theorizations. As Angus has argued, what differs much more than technology (per se) between less-mediated and highly-mediated societies is the overwhelming predominance of an ideology of progress; this ideology emerges in the West as an element of the Renaissance and carries through into the Enlightenment and on into the present time. It is the tautological pervasiveness of this ideology that allows it to appear "normal" for there to be continuous technological innovations, developing each year, month, week and day with greater and greater speed, all legitimized by the self-perpetuating rhetoric of the "scientific mission" which then negates the need for public debate over what technologies might or might not be positive additions to the biosphere. A lack of attention to this ideology in favor of other elements often leads one astray; a overfocus on technology itself for instance, has lead many to assume that the Industrial Revolution simply came about because there was "more technology" -- but obviously the technology didn't just "appear" -- clearly it would not have come about without the ideology of progress. The point of such an approach, Angus argues, is that it allows one to critically assess the differences between what Mumford referred to as "democratic and authoritarian technics" rather than brashly accepting or rejecting all technics as though there were no difference between them; what differs most clearly between the two is whether an ideology of progress is pervasive enough to preclude critical evaluation of technologies or not.

But to continue to discuss in this manner is to miss another important aspect of Angus' critique, for he argues that in many ways much of these debates are really focused on the wrong question; it is not just "technology" in and of itself that defines a society but rather it is the dominant media of communication and its complex interwoven relationships with other media of communication that do. This is because "a medium is not simply a technology, but the social relations within which a technology develops and which are re-arranged around it" and thus the two categories are actually very tightly bound together, if even separable at all. This understanding, then, serves to prevent the rise of a new form of technological determinism -- which would, of course, be no more enlightening than any other form of deterministic theorizing -- by turning the primary focus onto the social relations that constitute them instead. This is important for a poststructuralist critique of mediation (such as that found in Clastres or Deleuze and Guattari) because rather than simply focusing on the content of a discourse -- as is increasingly typical after the "linguistic turn" -- it allows for a more fruitful focus on both the linguistic and the extralinguistic elements of the social construction of civilization and progress. It is thus a critique that seeks to escape the binary materialism/idealism split, which then allows for the possibility of a critique able to articulate the "living materiality" of the body rather than simply the "dead materiality" of the object along with the social construction of everyday life. Angus has explained this concept more clearly through the use of Laclau's discussion of the building of a wall; the construction of a wall can be described either as the "objective" dead materiality of the wall itself or as the "intersubjective" living materiality of the communicative relations between the brick layers that allowed it to be built. The former reflects a technologically-deterministic explanation of the wall, while the latter reflects what Angus calls a comparative media theory explanation.

A similar argument has been made by Hakim Bey in his concept of "immediatism". Like Angus, Bey argues that throughout the species' lifespan it can be seen that "all experience is mediated -- by the mechanisms of sense perception, mentation, language, etc -- however, mediation takes place by degrees. Some experiences (smell, taste, sexual pleasure, etc.) are less mediated than others (reading a book, looking through a telescope, listening to a record). Some media, and especially 'live' arts such as dance, theater, music or bardic performance are less mediated than others, such as TV, CDs, Virtual Reality." He concludes therefore, that an "immediatist" alternative would seek a form-of-life based on the lowest degree of mediation possible, without buying into the illusion that technology can be (or ever has been) completely non-existent. His primary suggestion is the construction of communities of resistance outside of the work-family-school matrix ascribed by contemporary society; the implication being that these "unapproved" communities would tend towards insurrection naturally since this is precisely what is precluded by the channeling of desires for community into work-family-school mediations. As he puts it, what sets this form-of-life apart from the matrix is that in this case, "the group as medium, or as mechanism of alienation, has been replaced by the immediatist group, devoted to the overcoming of separation." Such a world, based on the logic of the face-to-face rather than face-to-screen, face-to-phone, or face-to-speaker would have many points in common with that of cultures constituted by primary orality, though they would certainly be different in other ways as well; in short, rather than a return to the primitive, immediatism would be the return of the primitive in conversation and interaction with the contemporary moment. So rather than the resigned acceptance of the "inevitability" of a massive, separated global or even national economy, which reduces the ability of all communities to provide for themselves and thus reinforces dependence on the state apparatus and the global war machine, such a decentralized, immediatist society as articulated by Angus and Bey would allow too for the possibility of a society without economy; a society of the potlatch. Thus while Polanyi's call for the "re-embedding" of the economy would no longer be relevant, a re-embedding of the war machine, of that which explicitly prevents the mediations of both economy and state might finally become possible instead.

Conclusion: Immediatism and Postcivilization

Throughout this essay I have argued that the rise of literacy and the forms of mediation that developed out of it are what formed the basis for the rise of the state apparatus and the subsequent appropriation of the war machine by it. I employed supporting orality/literacy arguments made by Sahlins, Clastres, Havelock, Goody and Zerzan while critically comparing the merits and drawbacks of each approach. This was followed by a more pragmatic, yet also more critical consideration of mediation (drawing on Havelock and Goody with implied affinities to Sahlins and Clastres) than that found in the Zerzanian advocacy of a "complete" return to the undivided "utopian" world of the socially constructed Noble Savage. Rather than indulging in such absolutism which leaves us endlessly trying to recover a utopia that never existed as such, I have sought to outline how the perspectives of Angus and Bey can help to begin to sketch out a possible answer to the question that can be inferred in the Deleuze and Guattari epigraph to this essay. Reading this quote today -- and thus acknowledging the bias of the contemporary moment -- they seem to be asking how the war machine can be reclaimed from the state-form and reembedded into "global civil society." Though it was more or less nonexistent at the time they wrote these words, I think the praxis of the contemporary antiglobalization and antiwar movements in many ways prefigure this possibility, especially in the rhetoric of "diversity of tactics" and "a world in which many worlds fit." Such phrases evoke a return of the logic of multiplicity and abundance as much as they do a refusal of the logic of hegemony and scarcity. Rather than any one tactic, world or constituency gaining hegemony over any other (which leads to a "scarcity" of consituents), there is a growing acceptance in these movements for the need for dispersion, multiplicity and decentralization. While there are certainly tensions between the various elements of these movements, from the black bloc to United for Peace to the Lesbian Avengers, there is also an implicit acceptance of the strength of a dispersed, network-centric approach. Here we can see the beginnings of a reembedding of the war machine, which Clastres describes as the centrifugal "logic of the multiple" which maintains the autonomy of all groups yet which requires a tentative, at times conflictual, "agreement to disagree" at the core of each social being. Besides this there is also the growing specter of autarky as an economic focus for communities and regions of the world that are currently subjugated under global capitalism. The alternative of the "subsistence" economy is rearing its head all over the world, from the thousands of independently organized huertas (community gardens) and bartering networks that help to sustain Argentinian families to the squatted City of the Dead that autonomously provides housing and infrastructure to the Egyptian poor. This was the other element of Clastres' war machine, that separated his analysis from the exchangism of Levi-Strauss; rather than being reliant upon global exchange, such societies above all else sought to be independent and self-determined through their own internally nurtured capacities.

How can these two elements of contemporary social movements be explained in terms of comparative media theory and immediatism? Both the diversity of tactics approach to social organization and the subsistence approach to economy emphasize a fundamental refusal of mediation and a demand for alternatives that can be directly implemented by local communities within a singular -- rather than universal -- context. In this sense, the black bloc is able to legitimize its actions as action for themselves and the context in which they choose to engage, while pacifist antiwar marches do essentially the same. Perhaps there is some relevance here too, in Havelock's assertion that "we have only very recently woken up to the presence of orality as a contemporary fact in our midst, revived in the electronic media." The less-mediated, more "oral" elements of certain new media of communication as found in the internet -- despite their other highly mediational elements -- has often been credited with forming the basis for the rise of these such pluralistic, network-centric movements. In fact, this media-of-communication both increases mediation and decreases it simultaneously; thus, while it should not be absolutely rejected as such, its many limitations and drawbacks should not be overlooked; one obvious drawback is the ease with which internet communications can be surveilled as opposed to other forms of mediation. Yet all of these elements seem to recommend a move toward greater and greater immediatism and a complex of media of communication that will allow for the constitution such a hybrid society. To build on these existing developments in a more immediatist direction will require a thinking through of the various mediations and examining the degree to which they are either one-way systems (such as televisions) or two way systems (such as HAM Radios); clearly the one-way systems are the most fully mediated of all and are thus less about communication then they are about propaganda. In regards to the governmental, corporate and specialist mediations of our everyday lives, clearly an immediatist alternative would be multiplicitous and varied given the variations of locality, but would include the dismantling of these unneeded formations which have only really existed for a short amount of the species' lifespan. As Bey argues, "if immediatism begins with a group of friends trying not just to overcome isolation but also to enhance each other's lives, soon it will want to take a more complex shape; nuclei of mutually self-chosen allies, working (playing) to occupy more and more time and space outside all mediated structure and control. Then it will want to become a horizontal network of such autonomous groups; then a 'tendency'; then a 'movement'; then a kinetic web of 'temporary autonomous zones'." The war machines that once kept authoritarian mediations such as the state and the "army" of experts from emerging have now been appropriated by the state-form; and as is increasingly apparent in the contemporary moment, this global war machine seeks with each day to further tighten its grip on the destiny of the world. Thus, the largets grassroots movement in the history of global civil society has arisen with potential to strip the state-form of its monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and to reembed the war machine logic of multiplicity and abundance. Paradoxically, a re-embedding of the war machine may be one of the most important steps towards a more peaceful, unmediated future -- but not one that is entirely peaceful, nor entirely unmediated -- in a world that is now and has always been multiple but which has been redeployed by the state-form to appear as One.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ian Angus, "Technology, Being and Subjectivity," speech given at the Dialectics of Determination: Rethinking Society, Culture and Technology Conference

Ian Angus, Primal Scenes of Communication

Hakim Bey, Immediatism

Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology

Pierre Clastres, Archaelogy of Violence

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Jack Goody, The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire

Eric Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write

Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning

Amory Starr and Jason Adams, "Antiglobalization: The Global Fight for Local Autonomy" 18 February, 2003 http://lamar.colostate.edu/%7Eamerica/delink.html

Marshall Sahlins, "The Original Affluent Society" in Culture in Practice: Selected Essays

Thucydides, History of the Peloponessian War

John Zerzan, Elements of Refusal; Future Primitive; Running on Emptiness