20 quotes
Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities.
Elements of Refusal (1988)
Democratic forms have always cloaked the rule of elites.
A People's History of Civilization (2018)
Most fundamentally, I would see Anarchism as a synonym for anti-authoritarianism.
Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2008)
In the specialist culture of our bureaucratic-industrial age, the reliance on experts to interpret and evaluate inner life is in itself the most malignant and invasive reach of division of labor.
Future Primitive Revisited (2012)
If we once — and for so long — lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that’s overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history.
If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it.
It is clear that a retreat from the social, based largely on the experience of defeat and consequent resignation, promotes the personal as the only possible terrain of authenticity.
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)
A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification.
Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the world of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system.
Elements of Refusal (1988)
Urban reality is primarily about trade and commerce, with a nearly total dependence on support from external areas for continued existence. To guarantee such an artificial subsistence, city fathers turn inevitably to war, that chronic civilizational staple.
A People's History of Civilization (2018)
All of us prefer what is friendly, sincere, pleasant - nice. But in an immiserated world of pervasive and real crisis, which should be causing all of us to radically reassess everything, the nice can be the false.
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)
Cities and factories are never at base freely chosen by the people inside them; domination keeps them there. Aristophanes put it well in his 414 BC creation The Birds: "A city must rise, to house all the birds; then you must fence in the air, the sky, the earth, and must surround it by walls, like Babylon."
A People's History of Civilization (2018)
Division of labor is central to our way of life. Each person must perform as a tiny cog in a big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it.
Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)
Victor Frankenstein and his creation perish, of course; his “Adam” is as doomed as he is. If this monster cannot be saved by his father/creator, however, today’s cyborg/robot/Artificial Intelligence products do expect to be saved. For those at the forefront of technological innovation today, there will be no return to a previous, monster-free state.
A People's History of Civilization (2018)
To wonder what was so radical about a movement which seemed to demand "only" the cessation of fraudulent work, is to fail to perceive the inner truth of the valid assumption, made on every side, of the connection between frame-breaking and sedition. As if the fight by the producer for the integrity of his work-life can be made without calling the whole of capitalism into question. The demand for the cessation of fraudulent work necessarily becomes a cataclysm, an all-or-nothing battle insofar as it is pursued; it leads directly to the heart of the capitalist relationship and its dynamic.
Elements of Refusal (1988)
Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution
Elements of Refusal (1988)
There's been a revolution in the fields of anthropology and archaeology over the past thirty years, and increasingly people are coming to understand that life before agriculture and domestication — of animals and ourselves — was in fact largely one of leisure, intimacy with nature, sensual wisdom, gender equality, and health.
Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)
Stress, loneliness, depression, boredom—the madness of everyday life. Ever-greater levels of sadness, implying a recognition, on the visceral level at least, that things could be different. How much joy is there left in the technological society, this field of alienation and anxiety.
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)
For Plato, the first upward steps out of the cave toward wisdom begin with mastery of the arts of number. This put thought on the path of representation and mathematical objectification. Mathematics' more concrete, everyday rule—to serve the needs of power—makes this path the history of oppression.
Why Hope?: The Stand Against Civilization (2015)
Postmodernism contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, "the new realism." Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm [postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological "life"-system of universal capital.
Future Primitive and Other Essays (1994)