radicalism replaced by tucker max and revolutionary gardening (not!)
By shag carpet bomb • Mar 7th, 2009 • Category: Horseshittery, Identity Politics, Politics, Social movementsin a discussion thread at lbo, where people were talking about a gawker piece about how lacking in radicality today’s young people are, i had a little sarcastic rant. mostly because, as anyone who’s paid attention to the 60s know, the so-called radicals were a pretty teensy weensy part of society then and, today, nothing much as changed. so the entire premise of the rant was absurd to begin with.
> College Radicalism Replaced by Tucker Max
that is because today’s radicals are busy planting gardens as a form of revolutionary liberation and solidarity with migrant workers!
below, i’ve pasted a quote which was written in comments to a post recently. it strikes me as something someone could easily have written in the supposedly radical 60s. He can’t imagine anything more radical than retreating to your kitchen and backyard or community garden. well, back then, neither could most people!
i hasten to remind folks that community gardens were all the rage in the 60s and 70s! and they were the rage for the reasons this guy outlines as well. because 40 years later, all those community garden and patio plots and rooftop gardens and shit really revolutionized things, yessireejimbob!
Academic study of American community gardening by T.J. Bassett and more recently Laura Lawson (”City Bountiful”) suggests that the community gardening “movement” is best described as a series of distinct phases each with contrasting ideologies and purposes, even though all resulted in people creating gardens on public or abandoned land. The latest phase began with the alternative politics and culture and dawning ecological activism of the late 1960s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_gardening
I mean seriously, does it occur to no one to take a look at the literature in the supposedly radical 60s and 70s and realize: wow, there was this whole movement that was into getting back to nature and the earth and shit. Mother Earth catalogs. Rodale’s gardening guides. Blah Blah. The Victory Garden Cookbook. God, I can’t even remember all the names of people who made tons of money pumping out cookbooks for vegetable gardening, cookbooks for canning, drying, and freezing produce, and books about how to garden — anywhere. I know about them because, as a young woman, trying to feed three step-kids on a meager income, i had a garden because, well, we needed it to survive. and my mother planted one, too, because it helped us squeeze dollars out of nickels — and, of course, they were all the rage during my 70s youth.
yes! all those books about gardening and getting back to “health food” and “natural foods” in the 60s and 70s were all written and marketed under the banner of getting away from an alienated, capitalistic (sic), horrid awful injust racist, sexist, oppressive society of unfreedom!
Today, it’s growing your own veggies — so as to be in solidarity with migrant farm laborers — and also because, as such, it is somehow the first step in the revolutionary transformation of society. it’s gonna reverse the entire “historical arc” and suchlike. wheeee!
after 40 years of an already existing revolutionary gardening movement — which actually goes back even further thn that — which was designed to fight against, among other things, the loss of a knowledge transfer from one generation to the next, too . Hmmm. Can I tell you about the reams of books and movies of the week about what we do to old folks in modern society? hmmm? they were produced in the 70s and courses and workshops and consciousness raising groups and such on aging and stuff sprung up like rocks in NY state soil.
because 40 years ago we were wringing our hands over the way we shunt off old people into lifestyle communities and old age homes and shit!
christ.
because after 40 years of all that revolutionary gardening and working against all these ills described in the comment, all that back to the earth, individualistic, baby steps, we have to start with the small stuff — it really really really worked!
because we are doing it again, revinventing a wheel — thinking we need a wheel at all, instead of realizing that the wheel has always been turning and turning, unnoticed by people reinventing it, because it wasn’t working so great to begin with.
it was unnoticed, the already existing movement of revolutionary gardening, community gardens, etc. because it didn’t work. it wasn’t enough to even get anyone to notice. and all of a sudden, gardening is being discovered as if it were a virgin concept! and not something people have been doing, all along, and not as some isolated hippy dippy thing but as something that once was very much part of the popular culture. right alonside the rise of hamburger helper.
that small, individualistic stuff worked so poorly that people don’t even realize this entire movement existed and still exists and has always been there. right alongside the rise of hamburger helper and mcdonald’s. because it was so fucking ineffective at actually stopping betty crocker and burger king.
fuck me dead if it wasn’t already emerging in the mid 1800s! Think: Kellog’s. Read up on the history of Kellog’s. Think utopian socialism!
Anyway, the comment that made me larf and larf and larf:
“I haven’t given up on protests and placards and organizing meetings with annoying white leftists who never fail to dominate discussion. I still do some of that. But my passion pours so much more freely into the kinds of things you’ve been writing about. The outdoors. Walking. Gardening. These are areas of transformation and direct action which lie at the nexus of so much of what has gone wrong in our society.
I mean, it’s hard to even imagine today that cities once served communities; not always, of course, but it was possible, a century ago. People lived together and worked together and played together and organized together and pursued happiness together in public spaces which they controlled. Such spaces were consciously destroyed in the service of fossil-fuel-based industrial capitalism. Zoning laws were created explicitly to break up communities. Highways were built on top of fenced-in ghettoes and the internal combustion engine became the heart of economic expansion. The suburban nuclear family was held up as the social ideal by propagandists of the capitalist state, to isolate people in television dens filling their minds and bodies with stupid destructive crap. The elderly who no longer served capitalism were carted off and abandoned, disrupting the inter-generational transference of knowledge. Much wisdom was lost. Today the word “urban” is a bizarre code word having something to do with people of color and hip hop.
Hehe, wow I had no idea I was about to go off on some wild history lesson. But what you’re doing, it appears to me, is an attempt to reverse that entire historical arc. In small ways. It has to happen in small ways. At the literal grassroots. And squash roots. And lettuce roots. If we’re going to make it on this planet, if we’re going to turn this ship around and stop our pathological self-annihilation, this is how it’s going to happen. One garden at a time. I can’t imagine anything more radical.”
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Mother Earth catalogs. That’s ‘Whole Earth.’ I had one. Or more. Go ahead and laugh.
Hey, more bashing:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/05/AR2009030501541.html
And equally stupid. When I started reading, I immediately thought of richard Brautigan as an example of non-radical literature of the time, and then he’s cited as an example of radical. Ditto Motorcycle Maintanence.”
Like it’s the young folks’ fault it’s 2009.
ahh. the motorcycle maintenance book. oh god. i’d forgotten that one. i saw it on the shelves of people for whom i baby sat.
and i had a whole earth catalog too. for some reason, i always conflate mother jones and whole earth. i have no idea why.
i ching. that was another one. i don’t know about that one in details. but i can remember the older teen boys in my neighborhood had in stashed in the cinderblocks of a fort they’d once build and we took over.
and dewd: how could i larf at you. i used to make organic teething biscuits for the sonshine, from some recipe out of some cornell organic gardening cookbook.
and for god sake: moosewood restaurant!
Although he didn’t advocate gardening, presumably because in the 1840 everyone had a garden and had to have one, Proudhon’s anti-political and apolitical strategy for social justice could be the template for this ‘radical’ gardening. This wheel has been spinning since capitalism installed the axle. Spontaneous generation.
And about the WaPo bash. Vampires. Right. Like the Lord of the Rings was not the #1 huge fad book. Much bigger than any of the political stuff. And more apropos to vampires, like it was not possible to read Conan the Barbarian and H.P Lovecraft with pleasure, at the same time as reading Marx and Eldridge Cleaver. At least I know someone who did. Possibly me. Possibly not.
Much as I hate to say it, with the passing of time, Tolkien has held up better than Cleaver.
Yeah, my mom had one of those gardens and, as I grew up, it seemed as if she and all of her sisters were constantly competing with each other to prove their mother earth cred or something. We lived in one of the uber-fertile outlying parts of New Orleans where the snakes still came out whenever it rained. She grew eggplants and tomatoes and cucumbers and all kinds of other stuff. Instead of eating chocolate, my aunt used to eat these carob bars as a snack and always tried to convince us kids to give up chocolate, too.
I grew up with all of these books around the house that talked about the natural treatments for yeast infections and ring worms et cetera. It was really fascinating stuff. My partner and I have been growing our own herbs for a few months now and it’s been a lot of fun. I had no idea that basil grows so effing fast.
Do any of y’all remember the “Back to Eden” book? When I was little, I thought it was actually a part of the Bible because of its name and how much my religious mother consulted it on a daily basis.
chuckie — yes, ‘zactly. as i was writing that, i kept going back in history and was reminded that, of course, an individualistic reaction to capitalism and industrialization was spawned right alongside the emergenece of capitalism. this is why Michael Pollan’s work is reactionary contemporary romanticist horse puckey.
i like the imagery: capitalism installed the axle. yes.
and yes about the books that were quite popular then. i remember having a grade school teacher who spent afternoons reading tolkein to us. he also filled our heads with that crazy stuff about how there were all these mysterious connections between lincoln’s and kennedy’s assasination: like kennedy had a secretary name lincoln and vice versa, there are the same number of letters in their names, etc. i’ve probably got the details wrong, but i’m assuming your remember some of that crap.
occultism, the supernatural, witchcraft, extra-sensory perception, seances, etc. — from my kids’ eye it seemed all the rage. i can remember a gang of neighborhood girls would regular hike to the supermarket and drugstore nearby so we could hangout and read the periodicals — teen beat and crap. what always caught my eye was all this crazy stuff about ESP, witches. freak, in the fifth grade, i even did a report on witchcraft. i was quite inspired by it, until i did the report, standing in front of the room, traumatized by the experience in and of itself, but even more traumatized when i realized that the teacher thought i was crazy or something. ;)