Our Impression

     The entire period, from the Artists Workshop to Rainbow People's Party, was a time in which we manifested a new social order – our homegrown version. It was utopian, and yet the statements we made, thirty or more years ago, agree with statements made by world populist movements springing up everywhere today.

     The difference is, things today are much more polarized. On one hand, we experience the collapse of an economy built by people who put self-interest first, and on the other, we discover an economy of consciousness shaped by people who put the planet first – and themselves in it. These are the same dynamics we encountered 40 years ago, except that the realities are far more obvious today.

• In its totally spontaneous activity;

• In its assimilation of massive effort at the local level;

• While it is locally vulnerable, it is virtually unstoppable – e.g., one may break a link in the network, but the damage is easily repairable.

     World populist movements? We’ve found a few of them, and you should check out their stories, such as: the story of a man, in the Australian outback many years ago, who discovered a vast silky network of spiders, and from that experience, a movement was born, integrating socio-cultural knowledge and aborigine wisdom -- the movement gradually expanded into a grass-roots network, empowering one-third of the world’s minority peoples.

• Modern society has succeeded to a frightening degree in alienating artists from each other…A community of artists means that a group of highly conscious people have resolved their individual, ego problems and can help each other in very real ways – by giving support, stimulation &c (John Sinclair in “A Manifesto”).

• Our goal was (as is) to pull together the active and potential artists in the Detroit area into a working, cooperative community of human beings that would offer to each individual an open, supportive artistic environment (Robin Eichele and John Sinclair in “Getting Out From Under”).

• We are operating on what is truly a “grass-roots” level – dealing with people, people who still can be saved – and the success, however large or small, of such a venture depends entirely on personal, individual, immediate direct action in the radical sense of cutting to the root of the problem and working from there (Robin Eichele and John Sinclair in “Getting Out From Under”).

• The real revolution that is forthcoming will be a bloodless one – or if blood is spilled it will be that of the revolutionaries only. It will be a slow and deliberate transformation of cities into places where people can live…What will be revolutionary about the community is that it will be to some extent cooperative and communal. It will be radically reactionary: in some cases a return to city-state democracy without slaves, more a return to ghetto or village economy…(Ron English in “A Manifesto”).

• The social order which has developed in the West since the Industrial Revolution is now obsolete. The conditions which have made the present mode of life for the development of humanity have now changed, irrevocably, and we must address ourselves to the need for creating a whole new social order (White Panthers Committee in “Program of the White Panther Party”). Top

   

• What other global populist movements have you found (i.e., grass-roots movements with global consciousness arising spontaneously) – what connections and networks can you bring to the table? What other manifestations of new civilization have you noticed (e.g., Laceweb, World Wide Web, Planet Art Network, etc.)?
• What is the destiny of your community and what role do you, as a person play in it? Aside from automobiles, what is the destiny of Detroit and does it have something to do with providing cultural experience to the new global order that is now emerging?
• How sustainable is your personal lifestyle? Based on your requirements for food, water, clothing, housing, energy, transportation, etc., how much longer do you think you can survive without compromise? One year? Many years? If we rephrased the question this way: how sustainable is your community lifestyle? Is there a better chance of survival for all of you together?
• If you take the major problems of the world, e.g., environmental factors, population factors, economic factors, sociological factors – and you put them all together in one focus – on a scale of one to ten, how would you rate the planet’s chances for survival?
• How are you going to do it (“it” meaning transformation into the new social order)? This is probably the most profound question of all, because the answer lies not in formulas nor in blueprints – but in creativity and community interaction. Top

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