Survivalism Redux
There seems to be waves of interest in survivalism. When the economy is tight poor people get resourceful and remember how to live close to the land. Intellectuals well they dream about the golden age of pre-civilization. I just picked up an oldie “Against Civilization” a collection of essays edited by my old friend John Zerzan. In it I saw an introduction by Chellis Glendinning, one of those intellectual types who found a way to live around genuine rural people without being so irritating that they wanted to burn her out.
I remembered she had written a book about drugs in her community, I guess she used to date a Junkie or something and being a nosy college educated woman, she decided to rat on her lovers scene, in a perfectly legitimate left wing intellectual way of course. I read the book. I even wrote to her, but I never heard back but I found it interesting that she was communicating with John, she is some kind of green anarchist therapist…whatever!!!
I will attach an interview with her from a blog site in my blog roll called “In the Wake”. It seems to be a collection of articles by Aric McBay and friends. A green anarchist site it seems that has moved on to other enthusiasms. As I say below it is pretty hard to stay interested in the rural life if you don’t make a living from it. Anyway here is a letter I wrote to the editor, my own experience with survivalism.
I went through the big wave in the 1970’s when as a youth I left the east coast, Connecticut, to go live on a spiritual commune in Colorado. I wanted to learn how to walk the walk, after all the radical talk i heard around anti war groups.
So I learned how to grow food, can fruits, raise turkeys and in general prepare for the end of civilization. We thought it was immanent, We had our own landscaping/construction business to pay the bills, lived communally and generally shared the wealth based on need. There was a spiritual focus with meetings and healing sessions but I didn’t take that part of it as seriously as the building of an alternative world.
Civilization did not collapse and after 7 years I got tired of life in the country outside of a college town.
I went back to school, hung out with the NAROPA poets, and eventually left the commune to become a punk rocker, anarchist activist, a founder of Rock Against Racism and an anti Nuke activist. I had a radio show, and at one point I was one of the main people in the Boulder alternative culture.
I listened to Wallace Black Elk and thought he was nuts talking about space ships and how radiation was not dangerous to native people. We had joined in an alliance with his people to stop the Uranium mining in the Black Hills and on the Navajo reservation.
But I will always remember that meeting in Boulder when I sat there with a bunch of Rocky Flats Truth Force people and wondered what the hell he was on. I figured he was high. But he was speaking from another perspective, the shamans world and in that world things are different. I still went to the Black Hills with some native Americans. What I appreciated about them was their lack of pretence, they were as interested in going to see Mt Rushmore and the Crazy Horse monument as they were about the protests. Leftist whites would have been too politically correct to go to a mere tourist attraction.
That was a while back. I moved to San Francisco where I met John Zerzan and the situationist left. I worked with Bound Together, formed an anarchist group called the Mindless Thugs who trashed institutions that represented the advancing of capitalist exploitation in our then still rather bucolic world of the Haight. We used to party and plot revolution and work as little as possible. Some were disgruntled academics like John, others were refugees from the communes like me, and there were later the Reagan Youth who grew up under the pretence that government was bad unless you were rich, in which case it was your plaything.
Anyway I saw in the late 80’s and the 90’s the growth of the Earth First Survivalist anarchism especially in the north west. I moved to LA in the early 90’s, mostly in an attempt to get away from the insulated urban party lifestyle of the underground elite that I had fallen into.
I moved to LA to be part of the working class, partly because in my perspective that whole survivalist path would be OK for a few people in the country but for the majority of Americans it held only a fantasy vision, like those of a golden age. Something that I had already tried and left behind. I mean if you like the farm life, if you like taking care of animals and getting into the modern industrial rural life, that takes capital, education and savvy to make it happen in today’s economy, otherwise you are just playing at being a ‘Noble Savage”, no more real than Marie Antoinette and her play farm imitating the natural life as Rousseau saw it.
If you are a smart marketer and are not squeamish about exploiting Mexican farm laborers there is always the niche truck farm with its intensive agriculture, dependence on a hip and wealthy urban market who can afford gourmet organic foods; then there is a possibility of being a new age capitalist farmer.
That is a far cry from the ideal of getting back to the land. In fact most back-to-the-landers end up commuting via the internet or their SUV into some urban occupation or if you are handy you get to service those same people as their plumber, carpenter, landscaper etc.
I have no illusions about modern capitalism, if you don’t have money or access to it then you are going to be a worker in a well paid or a poorly paid position depending on how much so called education you can stomach. Personally I would rather read what i want when I want and work as I have too, rather than become a highly trained performing monkey for the establishment with 2 or 3 degrees. As the old saying goes ‘Fuck em if they can’t take a joke” and in the meantime, lets see if Obama is able to keep us from rebelling this time.
Meantime I keep an eye open to where I would get my water from, er, just in case it does all fall apart.
Tags: Rural Fantasies, Survivalism and Political Culture. Black Elk Speaks