By John P. Clark
Photo: At middle to lower left, Mama D, me, and Merc from the Soul Patrol, with the Family Farm Defenders from Madison, Wisconsin. In the 7th Ward, September 2005.
This is a somewhat expanded version of a text written for a PM Press authors session on “Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change” at the Left Forum on June 3, 2017. In this text I try to summarize briefly, if inadequately, some of the lessons I’ve learned about radical change over the past fifty years. I dedicate it to someone who taught me some of the most important of these lessons, Mama D, the great 7th Ward community leader in New Orleans, who died shortly before this was written, on May 20, 2017.
In the late 1960’s
and early 1970’s I participated in something that was rather vaguely
called “the Movement,” and which was for me above all a comprehensive
movement for grassroots democratic and cooperative projects. During that
time, I gradually learned certain lessons about the possibilities and
limits of grassroots organization from participation in child care
co-ops, food co-ops, alternative schools, the free university, the
worker coop movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, the
anti-nuclear and anti-war movements, various ecological, feminist, and
post-Situationist anarchist groups, and an anarchist affinity group, in
addition to many other experiences. Out of this milieu came a vision of a
new society based on values such as mutual aid and solidarity,
equality, dignity and freedom, peace, love and care. In the new world
that was envisioned, not only production and consumption, but personal
relationships and family life, education and child care, care of the
body and soul, arts, music and recreation, and all other spheres of
existence would be transformed in accord with these values.
Though
the movement of the period did not ultimately fulfill the vision many
of us had of the imminent fundamental transformation of society, it made
many breakthroughs and revealed much about the processes of radical
change. I learned that there exists at certain points in history a
possibility for creating a vast movement in which large numbers of
people quickly become open to change. I learned that there can be a
proliferation of small-scale transformative communities and projects
that become the basis for a large-scale movement for social
transformation. I learned about the power of the radical social
imaginary and the power of a transformative ethos or way of living
everyday life.
In 1974, I visited the Adams-Morgan neighborhood
in Washington, D.C., where I found, in one specific locality at one
particular moment, a convergence of initiatives in community technology,
local self-reliance, neighborhood self-government, community coops, and
communal living, in the context of an emerging liberatory culture with
its own forms of art, music, and communication. From seeing various
degrees of such a convergence, there and in many other places, I learned
that that we can collectively create a new culture and new forms of
organization based on freedom and solidarity.
I also learned
difficult lessons from seeing, by the mid to late 1970’s, the
disappearance or cooptation of most of the constructive social projects
that I had found so inspiring. I learned, on the one hand, that there
are powerful and usually underestimated or ignored obstacles to the
creation of a free, just society, but that, on the other hand, these
obstacles are not material or technical ones. I learned that to sustain
the kind of breakthroughs that we achieved we would have to address more
seriously and, in effect, much more radically, issues concerning the
self and character-structure, human relationships and interactions,
forms of social organization, the nature of ideology and social control,
and (as I learned particularly from the Situationists) the battle for
the imagination.
By the 1980’s I had become heavily involved in a
theoretical and political tendency called social ecology. I learned
more about the history of and possibilities for decentralized direct
democracy and community control of all major aspects of social life. I
learned that we need to have a vision of social transformation that
recognizes the problem of the transition. I developed a deeper
understanding in the rather obvious truth that we cannot merely do good,
and hope for the best, but rather we must consider, carefully and
realistically, what kind of organizational forms could create the new
society and replace the old one. I also learned about the pitfalls of
political sectarianism and the need for openness to many sources of
truth and enlightenment, and, above all, openness to the experience of
communities of people struggling for liberation.
At this time, I
also became active in Central America solidarity movements. From these
movements, I learned about the intimate connection between the
domination around me and the more intensified and brutal forms of
domination elsewhere in the world. I learned that the struggle for
liberation and solidarity must be at once local, regional, and global.
This process of learning continued during the 1990’s, as my political
ideas were transformed deeply by day-to-day involvement in support for
West Papua and East Timor, and especially by engagement in the struggle
against the global mining industry in West Papua. I learned from East
Timor that we should never forget the genocides that are going on at
this very moment, and that it is very easy for the vast majority of us
to do so. I learned from the Papuans about how extractive industry can
transform places with the greatest concentrations of natural wealth into
sites of sickness, death, oppression, poverty and devastation. I
learned, especially from the Papuans, that there are many fundamental
forgotten truths to re-learn from indigenous and traditional
communities. I learned that we have to break with Eurocentric models of
political organization and revolution that had been integral to my own
political formation.
I also became increasingly involved at this
time with the Green Movement. I worked on grassroots issues such local
control and municipalization of utilities, decentralization of political
power, community garden projects, and, above all, the fight against
ecocidal and genocidal transnational corporations and their powerful
influence over local political systems and communities across the globe.
I learned that our local struggles in the semi-periphery are in a great
many ways one with the struggles at the center and in the periphery.
A
crucial turning point at this time was the decision to take the
opportunity to begin buying land on Bayou La Terre in the forest of the
Gulf Coast of Mississippi. I had begun to study bioregionalism and to
think about the process of reinhabitation, or learning to create a
culture and way of life rooted in a sense of place and a knowledge of
the land and the life forms that are part of it. This was the beginning
of over a quarter-century at La Terre, in which I slowly learned about
the power and beauty of the way of nature, and about what Gary Snyder
calls the goodness, wildness, and sacredness of the land. This place,
whose name means both “the Earth,” and “the Land” was to become one of
my greatest educators.
At this time, I also became very active in
the movement against the several strong political campaigns of former
neo-Nazi and Klansman politician David Duke, and, more fundamentally,
against the resurgence of neo-fascism. I learned about the depth and the
insidious nature of long-neglected and long-denied authoritarian and
racist tendencies within contemporary society. I also undertook
extensive study of and writing about the resurgent religious
fundamentalism and the growing power and influence of televangelists and
their media empires. I learned that, in addition to becoming adept at
the use of mass media, the religious right was doing in practice the
kind of grassroots organization that the left, with a few notable
exceptions, has mainly talked about since the Civil Rights, Black Power,
student, anti-war, and community control movements of the 1960’s and
early 1970’s.
In the early 2000’s I began spending time in
India and working with Tibetan refugees fleeing their recent tragic
history of conquest, genocide, and ongoing oppression and colonization. I
learned additional lessons about the power of community and of
traditions of dedicated practice of compassion and non-egocentrism. I
also began studying Buddhist philosophy and its “Three Jewels” more
seriously, and discovered its relationship to radical critique and
revolutionary social transformation. I learned, first, about the
importance of the fully awakened mind, and what some Boddhisattva once
called “the ruthless critique of all things existing.” I learned,
secondly, about the importance of complete dedication to following the
truth along whatever path it takes, and of being completely open to the
lessons of experience of the world and nature. I learned, third, about
the importance of the sangha, or small awakened community of love,
compassion, and care. I learned that the great anarchist geographer
Elisée Reclus also discovered the importance of these “small loving
associations” to the process of social transformation.
I learned
many lessons from direct participation in, or contact with, communities
of this kind. For a number of years, I attended Quaker Meeting and
learned much about consensus decision-making, respect for the person and
the individual conscience, dedication to peace and justice, and the
value of having a long tradition of communal practice to draw upon. I
learned from friends who worked in or were inspired by the Catholic
Worker Movement about the great power of a small community living a life
together based on the everyday practice of peacemaking, pursuing
justice, and expressing love, especially for those greatest need. I also
learned from participation in Zen meditation groups and sanghas about
the deeper meaning of awakened mind, and the challenges of overcoming
egocentrism and the obsessions and distractions of a world of obsessive
consumption and accumulation. I learned that a good criterion for
assessing the value of a group is whether, when one is with its members,
one immediately becomes a better and more joyful person.
Perhaps
the most decisive turning point in the transformation of my perspective
on radical change occurred in 2005, when I experienced the trauma of
Hurricane Katrina, the devastation of much of New Orleans in the
flooding, and the corporate capitalist and structurally racist
re-engineering of the city in the post-Katrina period. I learned the
most important lessons from participation in Post-Katrina grassroots
recovery communities. I learned to appreciate more deeply the meaning
of crisis and collapse. I learned about the role of trauma in personal
and group transformation. I learned that another good criterion for
assessing groups is the extent to which at crucial moments they put
aside everything that is merely habitual and inessential and respond
whole-heartedly to the greatest and most vital needs.
I was
affected powerfully by working with a small recovery community in the
upper 9th Ward of New Orleans. I learned that living and working
together full-time with a small community devoted to serving the most
real and urgent needs of the community is the most fulfilling life
possible. I later learned from working closely with the legendary
community leader Mama D and the 7th Ward Soul Patrol, of the miraculous
powers of a grassroots, matricentric, Rastafarian-influenced
neighborhood group that followed only one principle, “Neighbors Helping
Neighbors.” Contact with many volunteers from the anarchist-inspired
Common Ground Relief, some of whom stayed with me in my home, taught me
about the vast underappreciated reservoir of compassion that exists in
our world, and how engagement in grassroots recovery can bring out the
cooperative and communitarian impulses in people. I learned from Common
Ground about the enormous good that comes from practicing “Solidarity
not Charity” and about the invaluable human quality that my friend scott
crow calls “Emergency Heart.”
I learned above all about the
awe-inspiring power of small communities of care. I learned that such
communities can help people appreciate more deeply what is of greatest
intrinsic value, of what we must, in effect, recognize as being sacred
and beyond all price. At the same time, the experience of disaster,
mourning, and regeneration gave me an increasing sense of urgency about
the need to change the entire present tragic course of world history. I
learned to have a much deeper awareness of and concern about the degree
of suffering and loss that is now taking place, and the vastly greater
level that is to come, should we continue the suicidal and ecocidal
course of capitalist, statist, patriarchal civilization. As the 2010’s
began, all these lessons and feelings were intensified through the
additional trauma of the BP oil spill, with its horrifying spectacle of
devastation, despoliation, and ecocide.
Over much of the past
dozen years, I learned much (as much as from anything else in my life)
from the unanticipated experience of again taking on the challenging
vocation of single parenting, and dealing on a day-to-day basis with
addiction, alcoholism, mental and spiritual sickness, and suffering
within the family and among many others close to family members. I have
learned crucial lessons about the need to reassess priorities as the
result of seeing so many young people lost to a society of nihilism, and
the craving for and obsessive consumption of objects and substances,
ideas and fantasies. I have learned equally important lessons from
seeing others, including those close to me, saved by the power of the
compassionate community. All these experiences and lessons led me to
begin studying non-hierarchical, non-medicalized therapeutic
communities.
I was invited to visit one of the largest and most
studied therapeutic communities in the UK, and had the opportunity to
spend time with people engaged in extraordinary processes of mutual aid
and self-transformation based on unconditional love and complete
acceptance of each unique person. I learned much from seeing the
processes of healing and regeneration at work, there and elsewhere. I
learned that miracles are possible through good practice, through care,
and through openness to possibilities. I learned that—given the ways
that the system of domination generates the voracious, insatiable,
self-destructive ego—the communities of liberation and solidarity that
will be capable of transforming and liberating the world must also be
therapeutic, that is, healing communities.
As a result of all
these slow processes of learning, I decided a few years ago that it was
necessary to leave the university where I taught for decades, and to
start working more directly, full-time, for the process of social and
ecological regeneration. I started a project called La Terre Institute
for Community and Ecology, situated on what has now grown to 87 acres at
Bayou La Terre, in addition to having programs in New Orleans, to help
pursue this work. I have learned from the early stages of the project
that it is urgently necessary to find a small community of similarly
motivated people who can work together, in order to make this
undertaking a success.
I have become preoccupied with the
question of how, given the actual conditions in the world, we can break
with, and then overcome, the capitalist, statist, patriarchal system of
domination, and prevent global collapse, while at the same time creating
a free, just, and caring society. I have learned that it is necessary
to focus carefully on the question: “What is the decisive step?” or
perhaps more accurately, “What is the decisive process?” A few years
ago, in a book called The Impossible Community, a work that was very
much a product of the Post-Katrina experience, I argued for the need to
address at once all the primary spheres of social determination. These
include the social institutional structure, the social ideology, the
social imaginary, and the social ethos. I concluded that to achieve this
goal the most urgent necessity is the creation of small communities of
liberation and solidarity, of awakening and care.
I have learned
from many years of study of social movements that such communities of
this kind can find inspiration in a rich history of micro-communities,
including (to mention just a few examples) anarchist affinity groups,
Latin-American base communities rooted in Liberation Theology, and the
“ashrams” of the Sarvodaya Movement in India, which were really like
prefigurative and transformative ecovillages that were to be created in
every village and neighborhood of India. Further inspiration now comes
from what is being created at this very moment by the Zapatistas in
Chiapas and by the Democratic Autonomy Movement in Rojava.
I
learned that the values and practices of indigenous people in Chiapas
offer much richer and more radical concepts of mutual aid and
solidarity, and much deeper images of communal personhood, than even the
most radical political theory that the dominant society has to offer
us. I learned that the revolutionary movement in Rojava has not only
challenged the centralized state, capitalism, and authoritarian
religion, but has gone further than any other popular social movement in
working to destroy patriarchy and the dominating, appropriating,
hyper-masculinist ego built on it.
I am continually led back to
certain core questions that are implied by everything I have learned and
experienced. What would a movement be like that included each person in
transformative and prefigurative affinity groups and base
communities—that is, in primary communities of liberation and
solidarity, awakening and care? Could such a socially regenerative
movement increasingly move on to create participatory democratic block,
street, neighborhood, town and city assemblies, councils, and
committees? Could such a movement ultimately replace the capitalist,
statist, patriarchal system of domination? Could it create a free, just
and compassionate human community, living in dynamic harmony with the
whole of life on Earth? These questions have only one answer. It is our
lives.
