West of Eden

Description

In the shadow of the Vietnam War, a significant part of an entire generation refused their assigned roles in the American century. Some took their revolutionary politics to the streets, others decided simply to turn away, seeking to build another world together, outside the state and the market. West of Eden charts the remarkable flowering of communalism in the 1960s and ’70s, fueled by a radical rejection of the Cold War corporate deal, utopian visions of a peaceful green planet, the new technologies of sound and light, and the ancient arts of ecstatic release. The book focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area and its hinterlands, which have long been creative spaces for social experiment. Haight-Ashbury’s gift economy—its free clinic, concerts, and street theatre—and Berkeley’s liberated zones—Sproul Plaza, Telegraph Avenue, and People’s Park—were embedded in a wider network of producer and consumer co-ops, food conspiracies, and collective schemes.

Using memoir and flashbacks, oral history and archival sources, West of Eden explores the deep historical roots and the enduring, though often disavowed, legacies of the extraordinary pulse of radical energies that generated forms of collective life beyond the nuclear family and the world of private consumption, including the contradictions evident in such figures as the guru/predator or the hippie/entrepreneur. There are vivid portraits of life on the rural communes of Mendocino and Sonoma, and essays on the Black Panther communal households in Oakland, the latter-day Diggers of San Francisco, the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, the pioneers of live/work space for artists, and the Bucky dome as the iconic architectural form of the sixties.

Due to the prevailing amnesia—partly imposed by official narratives, partly self-imposed in the aftermath of defeat—West of Eden is not only a necessary act of reclamation, helping to record the unwritten stories of the motley generation of communards and antinomians now passing, but is also intended as an offering to the coming generation who will find here, in the rubble of the twentieth century, a past they can use—indeed one they will need—in the passage from the privations of commodity capitalism to an ample life in common.

Sujets

• Counterculture
• Communitarianism
• Activism
• Black Panther Party
• Ecology
• Hippie
• Cyberculture

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604867169
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for West of Eden
"As a gray army of undertakers gather in Sacramento to bury California’s great dreams of equality and justice, this wonderful book, with its faith in the continuity of our state’s radical-communitarian ethic, replants the seedbeds of defiant imagination and hopeful resistance."
Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Magical Urbanism
"Utopias we can’t live without them, nor within them, for long. In West of Eden we see California, an earthly utopia, and the 1960s, a utopian moment, in full flower. Brave souls creating a heavenly host of communal spaces on the edge of America, hoping to break free of a world of capital, sexism, oligarchy, race. An amazing place and time that, for all its failures, changed the world and which finally gets its due in this marvelous collection."
Richard Walker, UC Berkeley, author of The Country in the City
"There are a lot of versions of the 1960s, and this is one that isn’t stale or familiar, a book by a lot of good writers and original thinkers about how some much older ideas about the commons and the community were tinkered with, enlarged upon, turned into experiments that sometimes succeeded, sometimes failed, but left legacies that mattered. It’s also a book about California’s tendency to go experimental, idealistic, and eclectic, a fit successor to the classic California’s Utopian Colonies that looked at some of the great nineteenth-century experiments."
Rebecca Solnit, author of Storming the Gates of Paradise
"The counterculture from the North Beach Parnassus to the underground press and ‘the Movement’ from Marxists to anarchists all of it depended on a magnificent base, and here it is described, magnificently: the Oakland breakfast program, the Alcatraz occupation, the Mime troupe, and pot farms, the communes, the collectives, the co-ops of California during the 1960s. On the lam? A bad trip? Burnt out? Cracking up? AWOL? Dropping out? Requiring metamorphosis? These could provide rural and urban alternatives to Cold War, patriarchy, speed-up, or death in the jungle. With roots in previous decades of struggle by trade unions, ethnic enclaves, religious breakaways, and nineteenth-century dreams, and with branches in the lore of our own contemporary food-ways, child-rearing practices, decision-making and meeting protocols, sexual politics, and DIY culture, the California communards cleared the path. Both veterans and young folk, grey-hairs and newbies, will find beautiful memoire, authentic experience, and brilliant analysis in the pages of West of Eden.
Peter Linebaugh, author of The Magna Carta Manifesto
The Retort imprint publishes books and pamphlets in the spirit of resistance to capital and empire, emerging from the collaborative activity of the Retort group of antinomian writers, artists, and artisans.

West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California © 2012 by Iain Boal, Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow as well as the individual contributors.
This edition © 2012 by PM Press
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher except
"Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now," Lee Worden, used under a Creative Commons Attribute-ShareAlike license: http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-sa/3.0/
ISBN: 978-1-60486-427-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011927960
Cover design by Lisa Thompson ( www.duckdogdesign.com )
Cover illustration by Mona Caron ( www.monacaron.com )
Retort logo by Lori Fagerholm ( www.lorifagerholm.blogspot.com )
Layout by Jonathan Rowland
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com
Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue by Iain Boal
PART I. CONTEXT
Chapter 1. California Communes: A Venerable Tradition by Timothy Miller
Chapter 2. Conviviality and Perspicacity: Evaluating 1960s Communitarianism by Michael William Doyle
Chapter 3. The Counterculture as Commons: The Ecology of Community in the Bay Area by Jeff Lustig
Chapter 4. The Commune as Badlands as Utopia as Autonomous Zone by Jesse Drew
PART II. THE CITY
Chapter 5. Bulldozers in Utopia: Open Land, Outlaw Territory, and the Code Wars by Felicity D. Scott
Chapter 6. The Dome and the Shack: The Dialectics of Hippie Enlightenment by Simon Sadler
Chapter 7. Occupied Alcatraz: Native American Community and Activism by Janferie Stone
Chapter 8. Communalism and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California by Robyn C. Spencer
Chapter 9. Magus of the Counterculture: Ramon Sender talks with Iain Boal
PART III. THE COUNTRY
Chapter 10. The Albion Nation: Communes on the Mendocino Coast by Cal Winslow
Pathways
Dawn Hofberg "We ‘longhairs’ inhabited a certain patch at lunchtime"
Weed "We did become a commune, eventually decided to share everything"
Bill Heil "Hippies from Alabama headed for the Promised Land"
Carmen Goodyear "We met in Berkeley..that heady summer of love"
Chapter 11. Our Bodies, Our Communal Selves by Janferie Stone
PART IV. LEGACIES
Chapter 12. Green Gold and the American Way by Ray Raphael
Chapter 13. Counterculture, Cyberculture, and the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now by Lee Worden
Chapter 14. Caught on the Hop of History: Communes and Communards on the Canvas of ’68 by Michael Watts
Epilogue by Cal Winslow
Contributors
Bibliographic Note
Index
For Jeff Lustig
Bay Area denizen, radical communitarian, and dean of California Studies
Acknowledgments
T he editors would like to extend their thanks, first and foremost, to the West of Eden contributors, who have given generously of their time and energy in this collective effort; to the dozens of communards, coop-erators, and intransigent utopians who gathered at various events conferences, workshops, and convivia in Berkeley and Mendocino, to excavate and discuss the history of commoning in California; and to all those who shared their experiences over the microphone or around the tables at Arch Street, Gibney Lane, Jughandle Farm, the Caspar headlands and Albion Ridge. Their communal memories gave form and their enthusiasm fuel to a project both lengthy and heterogeneous, a many-hued patchwork of memoir and documentation, testimony and analysis.
Among the many people who helped, unstintingly, in the weaving of West of Eden informing, enriching, nourishing what the book became we wish to acknowledge in particular the assistance of Zo Abell, Russell Bartley, Sylvia Erickson Bartley, Gillian Cartwright Boal, Jim Boydstun, Michaela Brennan, Summer Brenner, Charles Briggs, James Brook, Chris Carlsson and Shaping San Francisco, Edward Castillo, Lincoln Cushing and Docs Populi, Massimo De Angelis, Erin Elder, Tom Farber, Jack Forbes, Carmen Goodyear, John Gillis, Shirley Guevera, Bill Heil, Margo Hinkel and the pioneers of Project Artaud, Dawn Hofberg-Schlosser, Helen Jacobs, Billy X Jennings, Dave Jenson, Judith Keyssar, Sara Kirkpatrick, Walter Kirkpatrick, Jeff Kitzes, Art Kopecky the chronicler of New Buffalo and keeper of the communal flame, Sasha Lilley, Peter Linebaugh, Andrea Luna, Malcolm Margolin, Claude Marks and the Freedom Archives, Joseph Matthews, Marina McDougall, Bruce and Rosalind Moore, Richard Moore, Vijaya Nagarajan, Micah Perks, Joan Peterson, Megan Shaw Prelinger, Rick Prelinger, Mary Beth Pudup, Retort and its sustaining web of friendships, Walter Schneider, Carl Schoen, Steve Seid and the Pacific Film Archive, Faith Simon, Penny Stinson, Terry Stone, Lee Swenson, Jim Tarbell, Judy Tarbell, Davis Teselle, Jason Wallach, Annie Waters, Dick Whetstone, Margie Whetstone, Diana Wiedemann, Andrea Wilder, Loyes Wilkinson, Mac Wilkinson, Tom Wodetzki, Eddie Yuen, and the late H.K. Yuen’s Social Movement Archive and Frog in the Well Project.
A special word of thanks are due to Mona Caron and Lisa Thompson for their artistic and graphic skills with the cover design; the détournement of Holbein’s woodcut the frontispiece to Utopia might have made even Sir Thomas More smile. Zoe Friedman-Cohen assiduously researched the illustrations, for which we are indebted to the Bancroft Library and staff, and to Tom Copi, William Gedney, Michelle Vignes, the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Stephen Shames, the Stanford University Library (Special Collections), and Ramón Sender.
We are grateful to the Mendocino Institute and the Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley for hosting the inaugural workshop and conferences; to Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities for material support; and to the now dismantled Department of Community Studies, UC Santa Cruz, which was born on the floodtide of the 1960s and for forty years worked to keep the idea of the commons alive.
Finally, we are gratified that West of Eden is being published by PM Press, and encouraged by their unflagging support. The tireless editorial skills of Gregory Nipper, Jonathan Rowland, and Romy Ruukel brought order to an unruly manuscript, and Ramsey Kanaan is that rarissima avis, a publisher who combines comradely and practical good sense, a sharp wit, and fierce commitment to a better world.
IB, JJS, CW, MW September 2011 Berkeley, San Francisco, Mendocino
Prologue
Iain Boal
W est of Eden is the f