Books

West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California
Edited by Iain Boal, Janferi Stone, Michael Watts, & Cal Winslow
PM Press, 2012, 302 pp.

Review by Seth Sandronsky

If you favor the Occupy Wall Street moment, you might also savor the personal and political flavors of communal living during the 1960s and 1970s. In West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, 13 contributors enlighten us about these alternate living and working arrangements.

Of the editorial quartet who oversaw this book, seven years in the making, two are from the city and two from the country. Iain Boal of Berkeley situates West of Eden’s four-part focus around the historic dynamics of rural and urban “communing.” His interview with the influential artist, communalist, and writer Ramón Sender helps us to understand the social context of his inspired invention to counter the mainstream culture.

Historian Timothy Miller opens part one, placing the trend for communes in the Golden State a half-century ago as “part of the larger emerging Zeitgeist,” with a nod to the communalism of American Indians. Their relationship to the land stands in stark contrast to the regime of private property that marks a capitalist order based on alienated labor. Michael William Doyle evaluates the San Francisco-based Diggers. In the 1960s, they made food free for all via ingenious means and foreshadowed current groups, such as Food Not Bombs.

Jeff Lustig, dean of California studies and a retired professor of government at Sacramento State, highlights the crucial role of common lands of UC Berkeley and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park in nurturing communalism. Such venues partly provided people the space and time to emulate those in the Civil Rights movement where putting one’s body on the line paved the way to overturn Jim Crow segregation.

Jesse Drew recalls his time as a teenage runaway in “networked” communes, a modern-day Underground Railroad that sheltered the marginalized—from draft resisters to military deserters. Communards flourished in “a Badlands…that brought the euphoria of utopia and the freedom of autonomy, a tonic that showed that a new world is possible.”

Felicity D. Scott addresses in part two what violent measures the state took against communes’ “open lands” in places such as Sonoma County. There, authorities used bulldozers to flatten shelters of communards, attempting to live outside the capitalist system.

Simon Sadler connects the idealism and pragmatism of communes and the geodesic domes of Buckminster Fuller. Sadler argues that the result was a “design ethos,” which, mostly rejecting Fuller, attempted to recapture what American culture had destroyed, specifically a “respect for nature.”

Janferie Stone, an editor, with help from people in the Native American Program at UC Davis, recalls the occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. There, Native Americans in late November 1969, recaptured their culture of self-provisioning that U.S. government intervention via boarding schools from the 1870s to 1960s tried to end.

Robyn C. Spencer contributes an eye-opening chapter on the practice of communalism within the Black Panther Party. Spencer’s scholarship provides detailed analysis of the BPP’s community programs and living arrangements as covert police disruption took a grim toll on members, two-thirds of whom were female.

Stone and co-editors Cal Winslow, in the book’s third part, “the country,” reflect on the ebbs and flows of communal living in Mendocino’s Albion Ridge. According to Winslow, the communards based there “shared no grand vision, no religion, no structures; they were not the followers of a particular leader, there were no gurus.” Reading him, you appreciate the promises and perils of these utopian living arrangements, as his interviews with participants make clear.

Stone gives form and shape to the dynamics of sexual politics in the communal movements of the 1960s. Two examples she examines centered on childbearing and rearing. Ray Raphael, in the final section “legacies” unpacks the contradictions of marijuana production and back-to-the- land communards in California’s back country. You might read this trend as a triumph of small businesspeople.

Lee Worden hits the nail on the head in his critical essay about the rise of a commercialized techno-counterculture and communal living that entrepreneurs such as Stewart Brand personified. This is a cautionary tale of individuals commoditizing social movements for the purpose of accumulating wealth.

Berkeley-based editor Michael Watts ties together many threads of “radical individualism” and social activism culminating in the global upsurges of 1968. What propelled such utopian experiments stateside, of course, was rebellion against an “American Dream” of consumerism, militarism, racism, and the right-wing reaction.

You can read in West of Eden about communal living experiments as generational spirits of today’s OWS movement for justice. I did.

Z

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution

By David Harvey
Verso Press, 2012, 206 pp.

Review by Seth Sandronsky

From Canada, Egypt, and Greece to Spain and the U.S., city dwellers—with jobs and without, in and out of schools—are rallying in the streets to demand better lives. Thus David Harvey’s Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution arrives at a moment ripe with radical possibilities. His preface builds on the views of Henri Lefebvre, a French thinker and writer who develops the concept of a “right to the city” for all who live and work there. For Lefebvre and Harvey, precarious laborers and ostentatious capitalists alike should enjoy free reign in city parks and streets. And not just to observe community activities. Rather, the demands of ordinary people can create new alliances and groups to produce humane alternatives to the status quo. One is democracy in the workplace.

Stateside, a century later, urban designers propelled by the imperatives of accumulation and urbanization, ringed city cores with freeways. That protected moneyed interests and facilitated so- called urban renewal (black removal) during a post-WW II era of white suburban sprawl. A trickle and then a flood of capital flight ensued, devastating industrial cities.

As urban areas began to lose blue-collar jobs, scores of uprisings unfolded against Jim Crow customs, laws, and policies. Despite urban planners’ goals of containing democracy, rebellion flowered. But mass incarceration fueled by the War on Drugs proved more effective at containing such dissent.

A dramatic point in America’s urban class and race conflict was the 1975 fiscal crisis of New York City. There, ruling elites’ resolution to the Gotham City budget tumult, Harvey notes, was a dress rehearsal of sorts for what became decades of governing policies in the U.S. and globally that redistributed capital from wages to profits.

Harvey, an academic geographer by profession, in Rebel Cities fleshes out the how and why of urbanization as a central arena for accumulation. Thus his conceptual approach situates cities as sites for periodic economic crises. We’re living through a particularly harsh example of one now.

At the root of this pattern of disruption is what Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” The driving force is surplus capital blocked from profitable investment outlets in the production of goods. The mainstream ignores this recurring situation. Harvey doesn’t. He brings a critical thinking about theory to the space and time dynamics of surplus capital accumulation.

This crisis tendency, Harvey theorizes, drives the constant reforming of the capitalist and working classes. The rise of Wall Street’s growth is a current case, showcasing the impact of an urban-based and global hub of finance, real estate, and insurance interests that occupiers are fighting, in large measure creating a public commons for people to debate and discuss their lives face-to-face.

Crucially, Harvey urges readers to rethink the changing character of the work in cities. That means seeing beyond the working class as blue-collar laborers on assembly lines. Harvey urges us to focus instead on workers, immigrant and native-born, who provide caring and cultural labor, whose rents are rising as their access to public services is falling.

Women play a big part in this evolving composition of the working class. Harvey writes: “The gender composition of oppositional politics looks very different when relations outside of the conventional factory (in both workplaces and living spaces) are brought firmly into the picture.”

Harvey’s is not the final word on social shifts towards a post-capitalist future. Yet his new book can expand your horizons of the possible.

Z

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento, California. (sethsandronsky@gmail.com).