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John Zerzan Speaking Dates in the UK

The Critique of Civilization and the Growing Crisis

John Zerzan


May 29th London Anarchist ForumRampArt Centre – 7:30 PM

15 Rampart Street London

For more information: londonevents2004@yahoo.co.uk

May 31st, University of Leicester Centre for Philosophy and Political Economy – 3:30 PM

Ken Edwards Building Room 501, Leicester

For more information: bartelby@refusingstructures.net. Maps/directions here.

Today we experience a deepening crisis in every sphere, which urges us to rethink our acceptance of the most basic social institutions. Divisions of labor and domestication, the cornerstones of civilization itself, are in need of problematizing. The absence of fundamental critique would mean that we accept an unfolding, multifaceted disaster as merely inevitable. Might we find, in the prospect of a new paradigm/ framework/vision that breaks out of the confines of failed earlier approaches to health and liberation? Keeping in mind that there should never be a single “correct” path, there is much promise in what is called anti-civilization theory, primitivism, and green anarchy in various parts of the world. Mass society and its technological imperative are now increasingly seen as the problem, not the solution.

John Zerzan is an anarchist author and activist and editor of Green Anarchy magazine. His writings include Elements of Refusal (1988), Future Primitive (1994), and Running on Emptiness (2002). He has also edited Against Civilization (1999) and (with Alice Carnes) Questioning Technology (1991).