hippy cull

[Matthew Fuller <matt@axia.demon.co.uk>]

1
Neo-hippyism is upon us: a bumper pack of seriously dumb tendencies that
cripple processes of change.  Some of these tendencies relate to ideas, and
some of them to action, they range from the 'political' to the way people
dress.  They form the aesthetic, theoretical and material databases people
use to inform and develop what they are getting up to.  This database needs
reformatting.

2
The essential concentration of people on the necessity of direct action,
hurling ourselves into the next conflict, getting the next flyposter up,
saying the right thing at the next meeting, can all make for an inevitable
postponement of actually thinking about what you're doing in broader terms
as part of that process of change.  This reduces movements to an
increasingly predictable series of reflex actions that quickly become
indistinguishable from the usual British anti-intellectualism.  Attacking
this is not an opt-out clause for cynics but a refusal to be suckered by
the willfully naive.

3
Power is distributed in greater or lesser concentrations throughout
society.  Direct action is an essential realisation of this.  It generates
circuits where the flow of power comes from the bottom.  This in itself
disrupts already established or nascent control.
        Nevertheless, because much direct action tends to focus only on the
most visible and most specific faces of power we can often miss much of
what's going on.  Unless this self-organising process is understood,
accelerated, and used to undermine those who want to channel the energy of
movement into pushing forward their careers or expand their power base,
movements become merely a management training resource for future
eco-professionals, documentary makers and party hacks filling up their CVs
with rad acts as the first few steps up on the alternative career ladder.

4
Can people really any longer base their activities on moralistic humanism?
Happy to save trees, defend ancient sites, venerate chillams and pretend to
be tribal but totally unprepared to attack a key problem that underlies
both 'mainstream' society and it's so-called opposition:  The Human - the
healthy, feeling, expressive, totally sound human construct whose
authenticity is the ultimate in portable micro-fascisms.  It presupposes a
standard perspective as a de facto truth which overrules the experience of
those who might see things otherwise or those processes which work
differently.  Is it any surprise that this standard perspective is nothing
but a slight variant on a replicating information pattern developed over
centuries by the ideologues of control?

5
Nature and The Community become the absolutes in a reigning pantheon that
includes deities such as love,  free speech (for the dumb), dolphins,
tree-hugging spirits and cosmic niceness.
Not that these things are necessarily 'bad' as such - although they're
likely to be pretty naff - it's just that when they are treated as
absolutes, they lose any possibility of change (they're absolutes right?
they're here for ever).  Thus when change is forced on them from outside,
from developers, power structures or capital it leaves people reeling in
amazement at the destruction of what they thought was inviolate - nothing
is, or should be sacred.

6
Environmentalism can all too easily fall into the agenda of national
heritage, preserving the past as an unadulturable 'good' - reducing
activists to an alternative National Trust, with all its inevitable
conservatism.
        This invocation of the sacred ground of Albion concomitantly
results, through the process of exclusion, in a summoning up of the primal
forces of ethno-tourism: the holiday in Goa, respect for authoritarian
religions such as Hare Krishna, the arrogant decontextualisation of
cultural processes brought on by a second-wave colonialism that desperately
hungers for 'authentic' novelty.

7
Granted, we desperately need to go beyond the present situation.  But, do
we need to go back to the sixties for the flavour of our opposition?    Do
we need to do an inaction replay of our parents or grandparents supposed
acts of defiance?  In 1967 the San Francisco Diggers held a funeral for
'The Death of Hippy'.  Why do people continue to animate this festering
corpse?
        What's the point of Doing It Yourself if your self is a tie-died,
long-haired morass of half-remembered clichˇs about consumerism and the
environment?

Mark Chapman
from Underground, PO Box 3285, London, SW2 3NN, UK