The power to embrace and integrate entire continents

Jarod Diamond's latest book (the world until yesterday) I have not read but I have read reviews and it was trashed by almost everyone. Chris Knight, UK anthropologist and all round troublemaker is someone who I like to read. From Knight's review of Diamond's book this is I think a wonderful passage:

Excellent when he sticks to science, Diamond is less convincing when he turns to politics. Here is an example: “Large populations can’t function without leaders who make the decisions, executives who carry out the decisions, and bureaucrats who administer the decisions and laws. Alas for all of you readers who are anarchists and dream of living without any state government, those are the reasons why your dream is unrealistic… ” As I read these lines, I had the funny feeling they were directly aimed at me! It would be interesting to research the extent to which anthropologists’ political beliefs correlate with those of the people they study. My closest professional colleagues study African hunter-gatherers; all of us have witnessed and participated in emphatically egalitarian social, economic and gender relationships. As a result, we have all become “anarchist” in the sense Diamond intends. We have had an excellent education - by people who make anarchy work. I should add that anyone familiar with hunter-gatherer systems of extended kinship would be surprised at Diamond’s description of them as “small-scale”: unlike truncated Western notions of kinship and family life, these extraordinary systems have the power to embrace and integrate entire continents.

The journal for the protection of all beings

"The journal for the protection of all beings" was published as the fall 1978 issue of Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quaterly. The Journal was edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Gary Snyder (all present at the Six Gallery poetry reading that launched the Beats to the world) and David Meltzer. This publication therefore connects 50 years of West Coast experimentation from beat and anarchist Buddhism to the merry pranksters and early internet happenings. "The journal for the protection of all beings" takes a US Buddhist long view of death and destruction, from the Atom bomb and plutonium fear to the mass extinctions of biological species and human cultures. It brings together a fascinating range of material, a liberal sprinkling of poetry (it all reads great and actually works in the context), positional essays and a few very nice bits about the subjectivity of (linguistic, anthropological) field work. It shows the Beats not as a bunch of Benzedrine fuelled hobo hitch-hikers but as a serious,engaged and inclusive group of people working towards a sustained and coherent non-ideological critique of civilization. The journal is a fascinating document that is well structured and builds up nicely with each new contribution, but, despite myself, I can't really love it. It suffers from an overdose of Buddhist zeal, those poets are self-converted choir boys for a alien faith. Maybe I am missing something that would add a little concreteness to the meta-meaning this journal is hoping to generate bottom-up. Still: it's a thing to cherish and the Gary Snyder essay on Chinese poetry is a brilliant piece that I had not read before and which alone was well worth the 8 dollar the thing cost me on Ebay.

The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City

When the San Francisco Diggers (an anarchist group for who free meant free as in beer and free as in freedom) left Haight-Ashbury to found the Free Family in the summer of 1967 they started on a path that would establish a network of communes intending to share skills and resources on the basis of hospitality, total freedom and self-expression in such a way that all necessities of life were available for free. They were on their way to 'create the institutions of a new society in the shell of the old' (as David Graber wrote about OWS) on what appears to be a grand scale across the US. 

Next to the architectural fancies of Situationism and the shy, half-understood communal implications of Occupy perhaps 'The Post-Competitive, Comparative Game of a Free City' (source images) should be read as a leading text outlining a full set of problems that need to be solved before a community can step outside the confines of modern society. It is a fascinating text; both in living memory and strangely antiquated: for starters, its a vision of the future fully depended on cheap petrol.   

Of course, as Peter Coyote shows in his biography 'Sleeping Where I Fall': reality was more stubborn than the Free City vision anticipated. The 'four pearls of wisdom from the leader' he cites convey a picture of the daily realities at a rural, overcrowded hippie commune:

•  If you let the baby shit on the floor and then eat it, you'll have a sick baby and a shitty floor.
• Free food doesn't mean that I cook and you eat all the time, ass-hole.
• It's fine if you want to take speed, just don't talk to me! I don't actually care that the insects are communicating with you.
• I know the Indians used moss for tampons, but you're picking poison oak.  

Did you know that word 'hippie' was coined by Time Magazine as a derogatory term for baby hipster?

It is We who built these palaces, cities and haciendas......

Here is a quote from Buenaventura Durruti, the anarchist resistance leader from the Spanish civil war. It is not hard to see what it is making it rounds through the Occupy blogosphere (perhaps via the Indignados?). I am quoting it to show a trend within Occupy to move from camping to squatting and the uncharted world of DIY-architecture beyond that.

"We have always lived in slums and holes in the wall. We will know how to accommodate ourselves for a while. For you must not forget that we can also build. It is we who built these palaces and cities, here in Spain and America and everywhere. We, the workers. We can build others to take their place. And better ones. We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute." - Buenaventura Durruti