Paths Toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism - Softcover

Cindy Milstein; Erik Ruin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1604865024 ISBN 13: 9781604865028

Publisher: PM PRESS, 2012

Synopsis

10 collaborative picture-essays that weave poetic words with intricate yet bold images. This collection aims to challenge readers into thinking of community action in a positive light. Depicting what it would be like to live, every day, in a world created from below, where coercion and hierarchy are largely vestiges of the past and showing some of the practices that prefigure the self-organisation that would be commonplace in an egalitarian society. A stirring read that mines what people do in their daily lives for the already-existent gems of a freer future.

About this title

About the Authors

Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations (AK Press, 2010), and has contributed essays to anthologies such as Realizing the Impossible (AK Press, 2007) and Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2003). She is an Institute for Anarchist Studies board member, and has been involved in collective projects ranging from Black Sheep Books to the Hope from People, Not Presidents campaign, from the New World from Below convergence to the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference.

Erik Ruin is a printmaker, shadow-puppeteer, and occasional maker/editor of various publications, including the anthology Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority (coedited with Josh MacPhee, AK Press, 2007). He frequently works collaboratively with other artists or activist campaigns, such as in imagery created for urban farming and prison abolition groups, and collectively, most prominently as a founding member of the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative.

Josh MacPhee is an artist, curator, and activist currently living in Brooklyn, NY. His most recent books are Celebrate People's History! The Poster Book of Resistance and Revolution (Feminist Press, 2010) and Signal (PM Press, 2011).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Paths Toward Utopia

Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism

By Cindy Milstein, Eric Ruin

PM Press

Copyright © 2012 PM Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60486-502-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Foreword by Josh MacPhee, 
Prologue by Cindy Milstein, 
Solidarity Is a Pizza, 
Good Defense, 
Food for Thought, 
What to Keep, 
Borrowing from the Library, 
Picking Up the Park, 
Paths toward Utopia, 
The Gift, 
Deciding for Ourselves, 
Waking to Revolution, 
About the Contributors, 

PROLOGUE

I remember reading Martin Buber's Paths in Utopia long ago, before I'd ever heard of one of the book's guiding lights, Gustav Landauer. It was before I'd visited the rebuilt-kitsch landscape of Munich, where Landauer had helped to make a revolution from below with his fellow anarchists nearly a century before, only to be murdered in the process, and where he now lies buried in that city's forever-bloodied soil. It was also before I'd lived in Europe for over two years, where I'd daily felt the ghosts not only of Landauer and other revolutionaries but so many "ordinary" people too — Jews, Roma, queers. They haunted my every footstep, whether I meandered past the sleek global architecture in Berlin being erected, literally, over Hitler's final bunker or walked along Treblinka's isolated dirt road crudely paved with pieces of broken Jewish tombstones, ransacked from cemeteries for this space of the final solution.

Landauer and his friend Buber's faith in "living and life-giving collaboration, an essential autonomous consociation of human beings, shaping and re-shaping itself from within," as Buber puts it, haunts Paths in Utopia, written in 1944, and to some degree, the work you now hold in your hands. It's hard to imagine that anyone could still hang on to a concept of utopia in the mid- 1940s, given that much of the world had become a graveyard. And it's just as difficult to understand how this pair of radical Jews and critical thinkers could find promise in the kibbutzim experiment, albeit its socialistic impulse — one of the paths in Buber's book — in the land that wasn't yet Israel but soon would become another kind of graveyard.

At the time, few saw much potential for the "renewal of society," to again cite Buber. As another radical Jew and critical theorist, Theodor W. Adorno, famously observed in 1949, "Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today." Nearly all was lost. Perhaps the best that could be hoped for was meticulously penning messages in a bottle, such as Adorno's, for future generations to find long after the wreckage of the twentieth century had sunk to the bottom of our collective experiences and memories.

Still, like a trash picker in a vast landfill, Buber set about the task of scavenging useful fragments in the here and now, from the given social reality, so as to "sketch the picture of an idea in process of development": utopia. For him, utopia was "the unfolding of the possibilities, latent in [hu]mankind's communal life, of a 'right' order." Buber's utopia at once sought "to stimulate" a "critical relationship to the present" in order to illustrate "perfection" as an ideal, but crucially, also had to serve "as something towards which an active path leads from the present." As he further explained, "We must be quite unromantic, and, living wholly in the present, out of the recalcitrant material of our day in history, fashion a true community."

And now, in a different world altogether, although one exhibiting barbaric elements of neofascism in the United States and elsewhere, Erik Ruin and I heft aside more rubble so as to uncover paths of our own, but paths you can walk on too — or maybe already do. The switch to the preposition toward in our book's title is less a matter of splitting grammatical hairs — or avoiding outright plagiarism in our nod to Buber's book — than it is a substantive shift in how those of us fighting for individual and social freedoms see such transformation — revolution — happening. We harbor a far less messianic faith than Buber. Our preposition indicates that for us, like so many of our contemporaries, the road seems longer and fraught with more perils, offering faint probability of reaching a particular destination. Indeed, even as Erik and I seek directionality in behaviors and practices along with forms of self-organization close at hand, we're overly self-conscious about making any claims to an exit strategy from the resilient logic of domination. Or perhaps we're just a much more tempered bunch, healthily so, given that capitalism, to name one obvious foe, has only continued to extend its reach and recuperative powers over the decades. As Guy Debord contended in 1967, "The entire expanse of society is its portrait," and one could easily argue that this is truer now than ever before. Utopian desires all too quickly become just another tempting commodity.

But if Buber, amid the dystopia of the 1940s, could proclaim that utopia, in Karl Marx's words, entailed people "consciously participating in the historical revolutionary process of society that was taking place before our eyes," then it behooves us to find cracks that we can further pry open in what seems like the smooth surface of social control.

Halfway through creating our Paths toward Utopia, in fact, a yawning gap in history opened up: occupy everywhere. Months before that other fissures appeared, from the creation of a do-it-ourselves city within a dictatorial one in Egypt to the directly democratic occupation of the Wisconsin State Capitol, and so many more. Each and every instance has shared several features, not least among them the element of surprise — with the participants perhaps being the most surprised of all. The Coming Insurrection's counsel that a few like-minded radicals should "find each other," picked up as tinder for the "occupy everything" student movement in the United States a couple years ago, suddenly took on a substantively different meaning this past year. People of dissimilar minds, and most far from radical, not only found each other by the hundreds and thousands in plazas, encampments, and assemblies worldwide in new face-to-face relationships; they also discovered and flexed their communal power-from-below, in all its startling beauty and messiness.

Erik and I kicked off our picture-essay making at a time when nothing seemed possible, well before the Arab Spring, by first testing our own creative relationship through pieces ("Paths toward Utopia" and "Food for Thought") for two issues of the graphic journal World War 3 Illustrated. We've finished this book amid the nervous anticipation of even more audacious uprisings globally this spring. Throughout our collaboration of artistically "sketch[ing] the picture of an idea in process of development," we've balanced on the tightrope between the tension that marks any inching toward utopia, and that especially today, is stretched taut by the push-pull of utter despair and utter hopefulness. Almost by surprise to us, our book found its defining motif — the commons — inside this tension, precisely because it unfolded at this unanticipated yet wholly remarkable crossroads.

John Holloway states in his recent book Crack Capitalism that "the commons can be seen as the embryonic form of a new society: 'If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common.' ... If capital is a movement of enclosing, the commons are a disjointed common-ing, a moving in the opposite direction, a refusing of enclosure." He describes "an enclosure, an appropriation, [as] a separating of something from common enjoyment or use." This can happen by privatizing land or anything else for that matter, including information, politics, caring, or the ecosystem.

A commons is a simple idea really, and something that humans have done throughout our existence, even before we had languages, even before we made up the word commons in multiple languages. It is the exact opposite of enclosure: something held by people in common, to be used, shared, and enjoyed. It can be a physical space, like a field for grazing or planting, or a library or park; knowledge, like the ideas within our libraries or free and open-source software; those things that sustain all of life, like the air and water; and what make us most human, such as empathy, imagination, and love. What all commons share is, precisely, a deep sense of sharing, in which our usage does not diminish the commons but rather increases its "worth" for everyone, and its worth is determined not by money or its exchange value but instead by how intrinsically useful it is to everyone. Like love, it only increases through our freely given shared use and enjoyment. We thus have a coequal interest in sustaining our commons. Much more than that, Buber maintains, "the real living together of [hu]man with [hu]man can only thrive where people have the real things of their common life in common."

But besides commons as what we hold in common to use, enjoy, and share, there is the implicit and essential corollary: a commons is inherently something that we must self-manage and self-govern. If we share a field to graze our individual sheep on, each and every one of us knows that if one of us overgrazes their animals, the field won't sustain any of our sheep, so we'll need to figure out informal or formal ways to voluntarily manage our usage, enjoyment, and sharing such that the commons is sustainable and yet still commonly ours. Alongside collective management, though, a commons needs to be collectively governed. Again, implicit in the notion of something held in common is that we also all commonly have the ability to determine its use, enjoyment, and sharing along with the parameters around such activities.

Enclosure, then, goes well beyond denying us material sustenance; it also involves closing off possibilities and, critically, our power-together. In this way, the commons differs not only from privatization of all kinds but equally from anything dubbed public, including space, resources, or even the public good. There's always someone or something above "the public" that has the final say. Such ultimate power-over ensures that some humans — and in this era, fewer and fewer of them — will perpetually dominate not only the majority of humanity and even what it means to be human. They also will dominate the nonhuman world and what it means to supposedly be ecological. The commons instead intimately involves our collective power as caretakers to envision, decide, and implement a world in common, knitted together by a politics of dignity and solidarity. Holloway frames this notion as "the assertion, against a world that treats us as objects and denies our capacity to determine our own lives, that we are subjects capable and worthy of deciding for ourselves."

This book's designer and author of the foreword, Josh MacPhee, was my guide, as it were, across the bridge of despondency toward the embankment of a commons looming, tantalizingly, so much closer than I could have ever dreamed. I happened to be in New York City this past September a couple days early for our twice-yearly meetings of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, of which Josh and I are both collective members, and Josh said, "You have to come see Occupy Wall Street!" He and his longtime partner, Dara Greenwald, were grappling with her near-imminent death from cancer, yet when Josh and I rendezvoused with her at a Brooklyn subway stop to travel to Zuccotti Park, I'd almost never seen either of them looking so alive. (Variations of the phase "I haven't felt this alive in years" would soon come to be echoed repeatedly to me during our own self-generated "beloved community" at the Occupy Philly encampment. And Josh would later tell me, after the Wall Street and Philly occupations had both lost their physical spaces, and he and so many others had lost Dara, that Dara was drawn to Occupy Wall Street because it embodied a caring community — prefiguring a caring commons.)

Occupy Wall Street was a scant four days old, but Josh and Dara had already grasped its quirky import. Josh toured me around the outdoor occupation, from the concrete-bench-turned-library of a dozen or so mediocre books to the cigarette working group's table where several folks were busily rolling smokes, from a lone person silk screening T-shirts of his own design to the small group of MacBook users encircled into a tiny media area, to the two historical accidents that would so characterize this movement: the people's mic, because amplification was illegal, for increasingly large general assemblies, and an increasingly expansive mosaic of hand-painted cardboard signs, because there were so many discarded pizza boxes from the mountain of pie donations. Both the verbal sentence fragments and mass of eclectic written messages were near incomprehensible; misspeaks and misspellings abounded. When I asked person after person why they'd made their sign, using the instantly assembled materials in the on-the- ground art area, or why they had come to Zuccotti, they offered vague responses. They usually simply repeated their sign's slogan back at me, as if those words or images — which I could obviously just read or see — said it all. "Why the American flag?" I inquired of one hippie dude, who'd also drawn a smiley face, heart, and peace symbol on his creation. "The American flag," he answered, then added, with a look of wonder as to why I couldn't understand, "The American flag," followed after a pause by, "The American flag."

But like Josh and Dara, I recognized the power of this moment — like them, not fully, but enough. I was transfixed. Like Josh, I too became obsessed with the cardboard signage. For one, no one seemed to move any of the pizza-box placards once they were placed so reverently on the cold, hard pavement. And thus second, this crazy quilt (and it was overwhelmingly crazy — crazy incoherent, but also crazy homophobic, crazy racist, and so on) of signs kept spiraling outward, while huge crowds of strangers mingled on its edges to engage in animated though often- incoherent conversations. When at one point I tiptoed between the pieces of cardboard to take photos, alarmed voices backed up by gesticulating arms warned me to step out of what clearly was seen by most not as a corporate-owned and police-protected private plaza, or a public one, but a sacred space, a commons. This commons, in turn, was making visible its participants' deepest intuition that something in the world was terribly, terribly wrong and that somehow, here, they'd be able to figure out together how to make the world, a new world, terribly, terribly right. That was about as much as anyone could articulate, but it was enough.

In a generational moment when, up until Occupy Wall Street, community frequently meant the disembodied aloneness of social networking via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, texts, and cell phones, or a thoroughgoing estrangement from the world, this occupy commons was all about the power of embodying one's "status update" among so many others, and having those others "find each other" — be able to directly look each other in the eye, listen, respond, dialogue. Time and time again, those at Zuccotti, usually completely new to politics or apolitical, kept saying, "You don't understand how incredible it is to be here with everyone else." As the working groups started to click, as Occupy Wall Street hammered out its "Declaration of the Occupation of New York City" using an intriguing mix of directly democratic debate along with paper drafts posted near the people's library for hundreds to scrawl comments on, thereby aiding in redrafting followed by more debate and amendment before its affirmation, as this occupation in the symbolic heart of global capital sent shock waves around the world and aspirational lifeblood to other cities to do their own takeovers and tent cities, it increasingly hit me just how deeply capitalism had damaged the majority (or that way too uncritically defined 99 percent) and created a shared sense of suffering (the truth, on the other hand, that's encapsulated in the 99 percent slogan) — enough that face-to-face communities felt, and alas are, novel. Or enough that, well, "enough is enough," ya basta!

Particularly in this space called the United States, where "our" very origin story elevates the entrepreneurial individual, where the "American dream" is about pulling oneself up by one's own bootstraps, where every home foreclosure or imprisonment is seen as a personal failure, the near-overnight shift in sensibility from private, nuclear relations to common, collective ones was astonishingly utopian in itself. What I didn't understand at first was how powerful it actually was for many, many people to simply find each other — in person. Self-organization and self- governance was almost an accidental by-product of the desire to stay put with this spontaneous beloved community, so qualitatively different than anything most of those people in Zuccotti, and soon other cities and small towns, had ever experienced and literally lived within before. If everyone wanted to stick together in this newfound "family" (another word that would be repeated ad nauseam initially, but given substance as our contingently assembled family began to learn how to get along in all our startling beauty and messiness, through thick and thin, consensually), by necessity we had to provide ourselves with everything we needed, or everything for everyone, because anyone could enter the space of occupy. We had to set about becoming, unexpectedly and without a map, do-it-ourselves cities within cities, with us occupiers as part do-it-ourselves city self-managers and part do-it-ourselves camp counselors.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Paths Toward Utopia by Cindy Milstein, Eric Ruin. Copyright © 2012 PM Press. Excerpted by permission of PM Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: PM PRESS
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1604865024
• ISBN 13: 9781604865028
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120