zek life

Zek: an imprisoned laborer.

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from Bob Brubaker’s “Community, Primitive Society and the State” . . .

Life prior to civilization was, according to Hobbes’ well-known assertion, “nasty, brutish, and short.” Clastres, in Society Against the State, points out that this assumption of primitive scarcity runs as a thread through both the chronicles of early explorers and the work of modern researchers, and this despite the frequent condemnations of the Savages by European explorers as “lazy” and indifferent to work, lying about and smoking in their hammocks all day long. But clearly one cannot have it both ways: either subsistence was a difficult full-time occupation or the primitives did not live under the duress of a “struggle” against nature for survival.

Recent ethnographic evidence regarding all types of aboriginal societies demonstrates that, whether nomadic hunters or sedentary agriculturists, primitive peoples spent an average of less than four hours a day in normal work activities. Their leisurely, and successful, acquisition of food belies the notion of subsistence at near-starvation levels. Concomitant with the successful securing of nourishment and comfort is a marked aversion to drudge work; Clastres argues that the refusal of work is a distinguishing feature of primitive society in general. This assertion is confirmed, for example, by Lizot’s experience with the Yanomami: “The Yanomami’s contempt for work and their disinterest in technological progress per se is beyond question.”

Impelled arduous labor begins with the transition into the statist-technocratic socio-economic complex (which characterizes our “civilization”). In Against His-story, Against Leviathan! Fredy says the vast majority had to endure zek life ever after. Not all so different from life within a labor camp.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/zek#English

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Which explains why life post-apartheid was not all so different for many.

https://jacobin.com/2023/02/south-africa-apartheid-nostalgia-inequality-democracy-authoritarianism

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Which explains why life post-Emancipation was not all so different for many.

(plus, also: the way the North handled Reconstruction was so insensitive that it led to a hundred years of Jim Crow and even-worse-than-necessary life for the post-Emancipation Black populace)

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Which explains why life post-1917-revolution was not all so different for many.

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Life ain’t too bad for the affluenza sliver of humanity that benefits from neo-colonial extraction. Ninety percent of humanity lives a zek life under “modern” conditions. Sucks.