Time, Time, Time is Not on Your Side

“Time and Time Again,” by John Zerzan, 2018

This book by an academic anarchist is chock full of quotes on the oppressive role of time in elite-run societies.  In its 78 pages it contains over 150 cited quotes and many more uncited, so if you want quotes on time, this book is a good compendium!  Otherwise, it flip flops between idealist philosophy and materialism.  Zerzan is a primitivist philosopher who wants to go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.  Which, given the coming climate Armageddon, might be doable in larger parts of the world in the next 20-30 years.  However, the proletariat might question his agenda. He’s now a middle-class consultant to non-profits and museums.  I question whether this guy has ever tried living off hunting or berries.  After all, most animals are nearly gone.

The Civic God

Zerzan’s main point is that the development of the calendar, the clock, maps and other technologies of economic change (the computer!) have imprisoned us in a false sense of time.  And certainly anyone working and living in the present understands the terrible crushing role of time that is demanded by modern, world-wide capitalism.  He enlists Marx in one quote about clocks as driving industrialism, hoping to turn Marx upside down.  Zerzan’s angle ignores class struggle and economics .  He says: “…the beginning of Time – constitutes the Fall: the initiation of alienation, of history.”

Marx and Engels actually pointed out that economic factors and classes made calendars useful in the agricultural slave societies of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Meso-America; religious clocks and calendars useful in the medieval economies of serfdom; and the punch clock and watch of capitalist industrialism a necessity.  Now the 24/7 ‘clock’ of a sped-up computerized global web never sleeps - a natural outgrowth of globalized imperialist economics.  Class society introduced alienation, not calendars. The calendars and clocks amplified the economic structures, facilitating each mode of class production.

Zerzan is inconsistent in talking about time’s origins, and sometimes claims that ‘the division of labor’ caused different methods of time-keeping.  Yet he does not explain why there was a division of labor. In addition, Zerzan rages against ‘linear time,’ yet no one has proved any other kind exists.

Megalith stone circles - Portugal

Zerzan insists that prior to ‘the Fall,’ hunter-gatherers had no sense of time.  He insists that natural rhythms are not time, yet any musician knows otherwise.  The seasons, the moons, the movement of the sun, the process of day and night, the weather – all are a natural form of time.  Death of humans and animals itself certainly ends at least one form of existence, even among primitive societies who might believe in an afterlife.  Early people constructed circular megalith ‘clocks.’  Native American tribes tell oral tales of the past, of their origins, of their people, so for these hunter-gatherer societies, history also exists.  Children and teenagers, especially during summers outside the time-controlled regimentation of schools, can still experience a sense of timelessness – a timelessness which seems to be Zerzan’s goal.

In the same sense regarding ‘space,’ mercantile trade demanded exploration, which required maps, astrolabes and primitive compasses.  Horses, canoes, ships, trains and planes expanded the sense of space necessary to various modes of production and commodification. He also addresses the alienation caused by the development of language, which is too absurd and ahistorical to deal with. At bottom, he doesn’t believe that change is built into existence or society.

In all this, he fails to chart a rational path back to a timeless primitive communist hunter-gatherer society – perhaps because it is impossible at this point except through disaster.  Communists have always been inspired by the initial classless nature of this period in history, and want to use present technologies to create a modern communism, where people live longer, work less, are able to be creative, do not fight (hunter-gatherers practiced warfare on a regular basis) and have their necessities taken care of.  I.E. getting rid of alienation will not come from getting rid of time but firstly, getting rid of capital and its notion of labor and production.  Zerzan never mentions this.

Other reviews on the subject of time or primitivism, use blog search box in the upper left with these terms:  “Time Wars,” “The Big Bang,” “The Philosophy of Space-Time,” “Captain Fantastic,” “Flash Boys” “Ten Assumptions of Science,” “Factory Days,” “Night Shift.”   Or ‘anarchism,’ ‘Dimitry Orlov,’ and ‘deep ecology.’

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

April 19, 2019