Kenneth Rexroth
Five Columns from San Francisco Magazine
In the Grip of the Militantly Mindless
Recently I was told by a mutual friend that Octavio Paz, Mexico’s greatest poet and probably the greatest poet in North America, had resigned as Ambassador to India and returned to Mexico to protest the wholesale butchery of Mexican students by the government late last year, and that he had then been arrested. Yet not a word in the press.
It is as though a generation ago T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost had been put in a concentration camp along with the Japanese Americans, and not a whisper had penetrated the public prints. Mexico is not Greece or Indonesia but right next door, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens coming and going all the time; yet a takeover like that in Greece, Santo Domingo or Indonesia is going on, and nobody seems to know anything about it. Since September, the Indonesian government has been exterminating the so-called Communists in the concentration camps, and the genocidal program in Indonesia from the coup d’état to the present has assumed proportions comparable to Nazi Germany’s. Santo Domingo has been reduced to a bloody shambles. Yet news of these events can be found only in the Swedish or French press.
If the French Communist writer Louis Aragon, or the Mexican painter Sequieros, were locked up protest meetings would pop up all over the world within a week. Yet it proved impossible to organize any protest for the younger Papandreou, and a spontaneous movement by his colleagues at the University of California was speedily squelched. In Japan, the Communist Zengakuren called in the police at Tokyo University and fought shoulder to shoulder with them against the students in the Left Zengakuren. All over the world concerned people have tried to involve their black brothers in Biafran relief and a settlement of the Nigerian war, without success. What is happening?
It’s very simple. The entire world has been divided into spheres of influence by the Kremlin and the White House, or rather by the CIA and the GPU. It’s not for nothing that bushy-browed, brutal-jawed Brezhnev and Nixon look alike or that the cabinets of Russia and America consist of vulgar, uncivilized parvenus, unequaled for sheer lack of culture by any members of the administrations of any other major country in the world. It’s not for nothing that the J. Walter Thompson boys glorify Nixon, the homey lad who eats ketchup on his cottage cheese when lunching with California’s peanut butter cowboy. It’s not for nothing that the Agitprop Commission envelops the mindless bureaucracy of Russia in clouds of Marxist-Leninist verbiage in which the incisive language of Marx and Lenin has been reduced to a synthetic perfume, much like that J. Walter Thompson persuades Zellerbach and Kimberly-Kennecott to sprinkle on their toilet paper.
All over the world the independent Left has invited confrontation for 1969. The philosophy has been, “If we can’t changed the society we can at least bring it down. The present situation is totally morally intolerable.” Can they bring it down? “Power,” said Mao, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.” But that phrase has been used to justify a kind of worldwide interracial Pantherism. Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver may be infinitely more sensitive and civilized than the police chiefs of Oakland and San Francisco, but they found out their armament was meaningless. The other side has more, infinitely more, and bigger, mouths of guns out of which power flows inexhaustibly. This is even true of Mao himself. His collection of atomic firecrackers means nothing compared to the overkill and second and third and fourth strike capacities of Russia and America.
It’s the second part of that slogan which remains valid. What can be done about the ever-increasing moral and spiritual desolation spreading over the world like a lava flood of ketchup, peanut butter and cottage cheese in which we are all drowning? How can Ronnie Davis prevail against J. Walter Thompson? What will he do after the J. Walter Thompson government has had the Mime Troupe in a concentration camp in the American desert for a couple of years? What can the youth of Czechoslovakia do to stop the Russian decerebrator from chopping out all their frontal lobes? They can’t all set themselves afire.
Read the reports of the last two or three trials of writers and intellectuals in Russia. Read the publications of the Chinese office for cultural relations with foreigners. Read the carefully stage-managed picture stories in the American news weeklies of the new Cabinet. The world is in the grip of the militantly mindless. Not Ronnie Davis, not Allen Ginsberg or not even Father Scheelbincx and all of their horses and all of their men are going to prevail against “Nixon’s Cabinet at Home and at Play,” against an avalanche of tennis balls, golf clubs, bumper pool tables, garbage-can-lid toboggans, Liberace records, Parcheesi, fake African sculpture, and rare antelopes called bongos. These PR releases have been put together with great skill by the most experienced soap peddlers in the business. Their point is, and they drive it home incessantly: “Nobody thinks, can think, wants to think, or can spell the word. And you’d better not try to think either, you dope fiend, Communist, homosexual deviant, because power comes out of a gun, and we’ve got the guns.”
Ladies and gentlemen, my friends of sense and sensibility and pride and prejudice, you wanted confrontation and now you’ve got it. How are you going to survive? The other-directeds have taken over and the inner-directeds are going to the lions. Let’s hope you’ve got Androcleses amongst your ancestors and have always been kind to animals.
The Ecological Point of No Return
In the past, men have planned utopias where life would be better, and they have advocated revolution to get rid of the predators of society and bring about a world where man was no longer wolf to man. Meanwhile, the human race struggled on, crippled and thwarted by exploitation and its side effects, from alcoholism to silicosis, but it survived.
For the last 200 years we have seen the growth of an economic and social system based fundamentally on the extractive industries and with a built-in dynamism that forces it into ever-increasing production at all costs. This competitive system has universalized a morality based on covetousness. For the last 50 years, the benefits, such as they are, of this system have been extended to most of the productive workers of the major industrial countries, the “metropoles.” This is least true of the United States, where about a tenth of the population is redundant — youth, the aged, Negroes, Southern poor whites and others. This is not due to the backwardness of the American economy; quite the contrary.
We have just gone through a long boom period with ever-accumulating surpluses; yet the overall production has never passed 80 percent of capacity. The source of profit is no longer, as it was in Marx’s day, labor power. Every year we need fewer people to produce more. The surplus we lock up in subsidized housing projects, in Aid to Dependent Children or in Garrison State College or toss in the Disposall of Vietnam. Our social-economic structure is itself in a state of civil war. The old extractive, industrial, financial structure based ultimately on the exploitation of labor power applied directly to primary raw materials is at war with the new technological society of computers and transistors and the Keynesian morality of Hugh Hefner’s la vie luxueuse. Meanwhile, outside the metropoles, starvation, disorder, breakdown sweep over the southern three-quarters of the globe.
Twenty-five years ago all the contradictions and conflicts of the present had already come into existence, but they only threatened individual men with war, hunger, and crippled lives. Today, an extractive, accumulative society more than just threatens — makes certain — the extinction of the human species within a comparatively short time.
The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere can no longer be kept in balance even over the equatorial regions. A dense fog of carcinogens blankets whole areas — the Rhine-Saar, the Upper Po, the Bay of Naples, the Tokyo-Osaka-Nagasaki metropolitan complexes — as well as the major cities. I have crossed the Siskiyous and seen the smog filling the entire Central Valley of California, and I have seen it rise on the warm morning air from around Milan and cover Lake Como in the Alps. Lake Erie is a cesspool. Lake Michigan is unfit for swimming at Milwaukee and Chicago and stinks all summer long so that the grand rich are now abandoning their lakeside stately homes to charitable institutions, dance seminars and apocalyptic Black religious groups. If all the atomic energy installations now planned are built, they will raise the temperatures of the oceans with cataclysmic results. The things we are doing to our environment are changing it far more drastically than the changes necessary to account for the extinction of the great reptiles at the end of the Jurassic Age and incomparably more quickly.
I have quoted before the old, now-abandoned slogan of the U.S. Forest Service: “The forest is a crop, not a mine.” Unless we can stop treating the planet as a mine and start treating it as a crop, people now living will see the beginning of the end of the human species.
What can we do about it? Probably very little, because the old order is shutting down with a police state. In the Thirties the Marxists called Fascism and Nazism “forced rationalization” of the German and Italian economies. (Lenin admitted that Bolshevism was precisely forced rationalization.) Today, the state, but most especially the American state, is dedicated to forced irrationalization. Unless this can be halted, there is no hope for the human race. But what does this mean? It means de-mounting the whole structure, rebuilding it and starting in the opposite direction. Growth rates and GNPs and capital expansion have got to be replaced by changing the standard-of-living value system so that the possession of large numbers of commodities becomes a vice, not a virtue.
The extractive industries must be reduced to a minimum. The use of fossil fuels must be brought to a complete stop; coal, oil and gas should be consumed totally with nothing but completely inert residues at the sites and sent out over wires. Atomic plants should be stopped until it can be determined how to destroy the wastes. More and more articles should be made of organic plastics. Chemical fertilizers and insecticides must be replaced by organic manures, which now pollute all our bodies of water instead of being pumped into the fields, and by the ecological management of the health of agricultural crops; for instance, replacing poison sprays with ladybird beetles. There are innumerable ecological maneuvers of this kind now known. Along with this would have to go a complete moral conversion from the acquisitive, competitive, covetous “virtues” of present society to a whole new scale of cooperative mutual-aid simplicity value system not unlike the South Sea Islanders of romance. The population growth must not just be stopped, but reversed. The optimum is probably about one billion people to the planet.
You say this sounds like turning the whole world into a national park? Precisely. We must save ourselves as we are trying to save the sandhill crane. All power to David Brower!
Can San Francisco Be Saved?
It’s far too late to save anything of that old San Francisco, the last stand of la vie méditerranée which made it the most beloved city in the world. The City’s principal newspaper is a wide-page magazine for lenitive reading over the grapefruit, built around a City columnist [Herb Caen] whose job is to pump hot air into a myth, not punctured with a thousand holes but cut to ribbons. There’s nothing left at the nozzle of his pump but the smell of carcinogenic smog and gunsmoke. The liberal newspaper’s idea of civic responsibility is about on the level of a stoned PR man reading Marshall McLuhan while on a bad trip. When the Mafia bought its way into North Beach, people who said it would soon be in City Hall were mocked and scorned as puritans who objected to bare breasts. Today, marijuana moves into the City in truckloads and a whole generation of young people who had sincerely repudiated the values of an evil society are being forced at pistol point to graduate from grass to smack.
There is no source of heroin other than the three major international crime syndicates. It is not manufactured pharmaceutically. Where there is heroin, there is the Organization. It is easier to buy on Haight Street than a newspaper. Does anyone in his right mind believe that the San Francisco police — who can have a small army, equipped with the very latest and most expensive matériel, at the Black Panther headquarters in a matter of seconds, for no apparent reason — could not dry up the heroin traffic in the City in a month? Name one major figure now running organized crime in San Francisco who has ever been given so much as a parking ticket. It’s the kids who are busted — for grass, a far less harmful substance than nicotine or alcohol. Why? The government can’t tax it. The Organization can’t control it.
Respectable male homosexuals are still being entrapped. The old setup of expensive bondsmen and conniving police still operates to blackmail them. Meanwhile, the Tenderloin swarms with male prostitutes dressed as women and ridden with disease, some of them only 12 years old. The young girls with white and orange and purple and green wigs and microskirts that hustle the Fillmore not only roll their tricks, they have driven off the older, respectable black prostitutes at switchblade point, and roll them when they can. I have seen the skunk cars roll past these hustlers, male and female, on downtown Ellis Street and on Fulton while the boys in blue waved and laughed and called the hustlers by their first names. Once in a great while they’ll stop for an exchange of pleasantries. The gang of young toughs who operate at night out of a parking lot off Hayes Street and who mug and roll anybody they can lay hands on, old or young, male or female, black or white, are well known. Why haven’t they been rounded up? It’s the blacks they terrorize, including the hardest black militants. How many “men down” have been found in this immediate vicinity? How many dead homosexuals have been found in the bushes of San Francisco’s parks in the last year? Yet a retired movie actor once famous for playing Oriental hatchet men opposite Lilian Gish can blow his pig whistle and produce a heavily-armed battalion on the campus of Garrison State College.
San Francisco has become a city of incredible violence, but what kind of violence? There are no pictures in the papers or on TV of Kathleen Cleaver clubbing police sergeants, or of middle-aged ladies, leaders in the A.M.E.Z. Church, spraying Mace in the faces of handcuffed patrolmen; nor are there any pictures of pretty coeds kicking prone and bleeding coppers. The idea that youth and the blacks are on the offensive is both tragic and comic in the extreme. This situation can be laid directly at the door of Police Chief Cahill and the mayor. The latter has done nothing to restrain the systematic and organized violence of the forces of lawn ordure, except whimper gently in a Humphreyite manner on television.
The turning points were the arrangement between the Visitors and Convention Bureau and the lords of the “entertainment business” as the Shelley campaign began to falter and fail, and the firing of Lieutenant Andreotti. As soon as Shelley took office the bare boobies hit Broadway and the good old joints where you were sure of getting an honest money’s worth of entertainment were bought out, though often the original owners were forced to remain as front men. San Francisco once was famous for having the one entertainment district where you never got clipped.
The Rockefellers and the frightfully civilized San Francisco elite, led by Harold Zellerbach, are systematically destroying downtown San Francisco and the waterfront and want to take over some of the public parks, though they vaunt themselves as the guardians and patrons of culture. The Haight is in the shape it is for only one reason. “They” wish the neighborhood totally deteriorated so they can buy it at bargain rates and put up expensive high-rise slums. Are you aware that you cannot borrow a penny from the banks run by San Francisco’s culture elite to buy the finest Victorian homes in perfect condition in Western Addition Number Three and the Haight-Ashbury, unless you plan to demolish and rebuild? Maybe only a paranoiac would say that the banks, the police, the Mafia and the big-time real estate and urban renewal operators sit around and plan it all in smoke-filled rooms, but that’s the way it works out. Meanwhile, orders go down from the top desk of the great liberal newspaper to mention independent critics only if they get in jail. Did you read in the papers that Grover Sales last year got the most prestigious kudos in the profession? I don’t have to mention you either, Baby Miller & Lux. Andreotti for Mayor!
The Battle for Food
The Greek scholars and scientists who accompanied Alexander the Great on his expedition to India or who visited there a short time later during the reign of Chandragupta were dumbfounded by the high standard of living of the common people. They found that peasants and city workers lived better than Athenian merchants and that slavery in the Greek sense was unknown. The plenitude of food of the highest quality never ceased to amaze them. Today, the annual increase of the Indian population is greater than the total population of Australia and New Zealand; the same is approximately true of China.
At this moment, the great majority of the world’s population are not just malnourished; they are actively hungry, and far more are dying of starvation than are dying in the wars now raging in Vietnam, the Near East and Africa. Only the faintest rumors of the explosive expansion of the Chinese into Tibet and Inner Asia at the expense of the native populations reaches the outside world. In the days of China’s glory under the early T’ang dynasty, land was periodically redistributed to ensure that each head of a peasant household had a minimum of 19 acres to farm. By preindustrial techniques, a family of six could be able to raise sufficient food for itself on two acres of the unexhausted loess or flood plain soils of those days. Today, the Chinese ruling class dutifully repeats Marx’s crazy diatribes against Malthus, and black militants with little red books raid the Planned Parenthood centers in the ghettos and beat up the workers.
Due to backwardness and listlessness, caused usually by malnutrition, primitive technology, exhaustion of the soil, or exploitation by a monoculture whose profits are drained off by foreign capital, many comparatively thinly populated countries are densely overpopulated relative to the food supply. For instance, all levels except the highest of Peruvian society suffer from chronic protein famine. From Peru’s coastal waters American and Western European fishing fleets take over 11 million tons annually of anchovies. These are ground into fish meal and used for fertilizer, chicken and stock feed. Not more than nine million tons can be removed without tipping the balance and driving the fish to extinction. Only five percent of all the fish caught in Peru for any purpose remain in the country. This is genocide.
There is no longer any doubt about the outcome of the battle for food. It has been lost. Demographers, ecologists and other scientists in this field no longer talk about the possibility of famine, but about Famine I, Famine II, and Famine III, all to occur between now and 1985, in which . . . [line missing] . . . half a billion people will die. Specialists in the African part of this problem say it is unlikely that very many species of large, edible wild animals will survive in Africa. Yet, throughout the tropics and the Far East, heads of state, the ruling classes and political parties violently resist birth control and have been sold on the program of outbreeding the white man.
When Russian experts and politicians visited Peking for the last, big, full-dress conference during the Korean War they said in denial of their own Marxist anti-Malthusianism that one of the first steps to a solution of China’s problems would be a program designed to eventually reduce the population by 100 million. The Chinese have since broadcast this story with the interpretation that the Russians demanded that the Chinese “expend” 100 million soldiers in a war with America. The man in charge of the birth control program in India proposes to solve the problem with a year of national total abstention from sexual intercourse.
Yet Japan and the Scandinavian countries do not expect their well-organized programs of population control to make a significant difference for 30 years. By that time, if things go on as they are now, there will be more than seven billion people in the world. Few people understand this and if they do, they have difficulty believing it — like their own deaths. We are seeing today the already horrifying beginnings of irreversible processes. The Great Lakes are all going to become cesspools, like Lake Erie, and even if all population growth was stopped immediately it would take a generation to restore not the original condition, which is gone forever, but a healthy life association, a biota that would provide fish and pure water. Lake Michigan from Milwaukee south and around to Benton Harbor is not fit to swim in. This could only be changed by getting rid of every sewer, cesspool, septic tank and artificially fertilized field along the shores as well as all industrial pollution. Meanwhile, the excess nitrogens and the DDT are mostly still in the soil. Only a minor part has already drained into our rivers, lakes, bays and seas.
Overpopulation and the destruction of the environment are forces now moving at an exponential rate of acceleration and there are no equal and opposite forces in being. We talk about urban disorder, breakdown of the family, chaotic sexuality, organized crime as a major industry, suicidal drug addiction, pandemic mental illness, violent and virulent war between the generations. Let us forget that we are human beings and imagine that we are octopod scientists observing the planet from a flying saucer. If we were to observe social animals — ants, bees, termites, prairie dogs, baboons, starlings — acting like this we would have no doubt about what was happening. These are the acknowledged symptoms of species death. Man is becoming extinct. To reverse the process requires both an intelligence and a morality which the species as a whole has never shown. It requires an abolition of the profit system and of all exploitative relationships, a change in the social system incomparably more drastic than the Russian or Chinese Revolution, more drastic really than that envisaged even in utopian visions like Plato’s or St. Thomas More’s. It’s perfectly obvious this isn’t going to happen. Even if it did tomorrow morning the chances of winning are slim.
Nothing more significant has happened recently (and that includes the trip to the moon) than the discovery of the ecological revolution by the youth revolt, the counter-culture. When George Kennan two years ago in a rather foxy grandpa book told the youth revolt that they had their priorities wrong, that the destruction of the planet was more important than the laws against marijuana, everybody called him a square. Now ever larger numbers are beginning to agree. It’s not just that the oldies want to take them out and murder them in a marsh in Southeast Asia; they’re busy poisoning them at breakfast here at home, yet the majority of people in the world have little breakfast or none. The Bodhisattva’s vow is “I will not enter Nirvana until all sentient creatures have been saved.” If the alternative society becomes a society of ecological Bodhisattvas we will have reached the final confrontation — mutual aid and respect for life, full awareness of one’s place in the community of creatures — these are the foundations for an alternative society. Here are to be found the objectives, the self-discipline, the understanding that can create a purposeful challenge to the murderous dominant society.
Will the alternative society win? Almost certainly not. The forces of the dying world order are far too strong. The human race has no desire to be saved from its own folly. At least as we enter apocalypse we can enter it with clean consciences and sanely ordered lives and a community of mutual aid and respect. The actions which would follow from the morality of such a community lie outside the context of massive confrontation, of counter-aggression against aggression.
Against the aggression of the dying society it is impossible to win with its own kind of force. The world is in the grip of an Oedipus complex turned upside down. The dinosaurs did not become extinct because their balls got cold in the chilly marshes of the Jurassic. They ate their eggs.
The Ecological Revolution
Harold Gilliam, in the San Francisco Daily Playboy [the SF Chronicle] Sunday edition which is combined with the 19th Century Bulletin [the SF Examiner], writes: “It would have been unthinkable at the beginning of 1969 to write that the college generation was being turned on by ecology.” The piece is headed: ECOLOGY IS NOW A WITH-IT WORD—AND CONCEPT. Gilliam is a tireless propagandist for the ecological revolution, is far and away the best writer on the staff and not responsible for the smart-aleck tone of the headline writer. Still, the article itself shows the signs of a corruption of prose style by Merlaism or Caenitis.
The sudden tremendous interest in ecology amongst students, and in Berkeley and San Francisco amongst older people, and spreading across the country like wildfire, is not a fad, and it is not unheralded. For years, KPFA and the other Pacifica stations and their associates have hammered on the subject. On my own book review program, the oldest thing on the station, I have talked about it at every opportunity. Twenty-five years ago a group of us were conducting lectures and seminars at the Workman’s Circle, whose whole emphasis was on ecology as a scientific foundation for a philosophy of social reorganization. The period of David Brower’s leadership of the Sierra Club witnessed an attempt to turn that organization of Sunday hikers and summer trippers into the leading cadre of an ecological revolution — which is why he was ganged up on by corporation lawyers, power company executives and Native Sons and Daughters of the Berkeley Hills.
The reason for the sudden explosion of the ecological revolution in the Bay Area is simple. It was prepared by many years of work, and it is occurring at the critical point when the ecology of California has become intolerable. Water turns into steam very suddenly; just as suddenly we have been brought face to face with the question, in the words of Lawrence Halprin, “Is man merely a dominant species in a transitional life association or is he the characteristic member of a climax of living things that will endure for a geological epoch or more?” The cockroaches and the octopuses are waiting. Perhaps we cannot turn the steam back into water. Perhaps the critical point is gone. The Santa Barbara Channel has become a dead sea. DDT is killing off the crab fisheries. In Berkeley, mother’s milk has been found below the standards for human consumption. Environmental specialists tell us that within months people will start dying by the thousands in smog-filled cities. Others say famines will kill hundreds of millions in the next decade and it is too late to prevent it.
The sudden popularity of ecology is not a craze. It is the response to the deadly crisis caused by a craze called the profit system. Man’s end is in sight. One thing ecology has always taught is that the relationships of living things to each other and their environment are governed by critical points where catastrophe occurs with great suddenness.
For example, Monterey recently staged a festival in memory of Ed Ricketts, the ocean scientist who was the brain trust for John Steinbeck and the “Doc” of his novels. Ricketts told his employers in the sardine industry that if they continued their fertilizer factories in the sea — their wholesale destruction of the sardines — the species would vanish suddenly. They hired other scientists to say, “Oh, nonsense, there are billions of sardines and the ocean is illimitably fertile.” Ed pointed out that in the ocean, above all places, creatures, no matter how numerous, live in the most delicate balance and when that balance is destroyed they become extinct. So it happened. Most of us who knew Ed well believe he committed suicide, not, I hope over the greed and folly of the sardine industry. Mankind at this moment is in exactly the fix of the sardine when Ed Ricketts issued his warning, and man is his own sardine canning industry. We are all implicated.
The prospect of the imminent extinction of the human species is a final perspective of 400 years of the growth of value neuter science and technology. Today terribly fashionable amongst old academicians, we still have “value neuter” philosophies,” whatever in the Hell those are, and I mean in Hell. Marx’s revolutionary drive came from the tradition of the Hebrew prophets; the profoundly moving exhortations and denunciations in Capital and The Communist Manifesto are in contradiction to his “scientific” economics. But only superficially different from the bourgeois economists who were his masters (“the sum total of private evils add up to the social good”) and the process is governed by the value neuter laws of physics. We can no longer endure a value neuter science, neither chemistry and physics nor the sciences of man. Ecology is the science that automatically produces evaluation without ceasing to confine itself to purely scientific methods. This is nothing new. Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), Lamarck, Buffon tried to develop an evaluative theory of evolution. Peter Kropotkin, the great anarchist leader, at the end of the last century attacked Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” and the social Darwinism derived from it as well as Marxism, with his classic Mutual Aid. Kropotkin and his libertarian, communitarian colleague Élisée Reclus were actually ecologists, though in those days they called them geographers. It is no accident that college students who call themselves (lower case) communist-anarchists now say, “Down with the red flag, down with the black flag, up with the green, forward to the ecological revolution!” Lenin refused to talk about postrevolutionary society and dismissed such speculations as utopian. He really believed in a value neuter revolution. So today most Marxist groups and most black revolutionary groups refuse to answer, because they cannot, the simple question, “What do you want?” History and evolution are assumed to be the only source of value. This means that one situation is better than another simply because it follows it in time. Absurd in itself, this has now been proven a lethal assumption. The old hymn, popular with Socialist summer camps, “We are climbing higher, higher,” is false. We are not on Jacob’s ladder but on a greased toboggan to the everlasting bonfire. For us, evolution has turned out to be value negative. If the processes are not reversed in the next 10 years the human species will not survive much beyond the century. Most of those 10 years promise to be the years of the administration of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the most powerful empire the world has even seen — hardly a cheery prospect.
If you want to bone up read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid; Frederick Clemens’s Plant Ecology; Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and a collection of articles on all aspects of ecology, The Subversive Science; and subscribe to Keith Lampe’s bulletin Earth Read Out, 439 Boynton Avenue, Berkeley 94707. You better learn. You haven’t got much time and your life is in the hands of Nixon, Agnew and Hinkle — ventriloquist’s dummies for J. Walter Thompson.
Five Columns from San Francisco Magazine
Recently I was told by a mutual friend that Octavio Paz, Mexico’s greatest poet and probably the greatest poet in North America, had resigned as Ambassador to India and returned to Mexico to protest the wholesale butchery of Mexican students by the government late last year, and that he had then been arrested. Yet not a word in the press.
It is as though a generation ago T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost had been put in a concentration camp along with the Japanese Americans, and not a whisper had penetrated the public prints. Mexico is not Greece or Indonesia but right next door, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens coming and going all the time; yet a takeover like that in Greece, Santo Domingo or Indonesia is going on, and nobody seems to know anything about it. Since September, the Indonesian government has been exterminating the so-called Communists in the concentration camps, and the genocidal program in Indonesia from the coup d’état to the present has assumed proportions comparable to Nazi Germany’s. Santo Domingo has been reduced to a bloody shambles. Yet news of these events can be found only in the Swedish or French press.
If the French Communist writer Louis Aragon, or the Mexican painter Sequieros, were locked up protest meetings would pop up all over the world within a week. Yet it proved impossible to organize any protest for the younger Papandreou, and a spontaneous movement by his colleagues at the University of California was speedily squelched. In Japan, the Communist Zengakuren called in the police at Tokyo University and fought shoulder to shoulder with them against the students in the Left Zengakuren. All over the world concerned people have tried to involve their black brothers in Biafran relief and a settlement of the Nigerian war, without success. What is happening?
It’s very simple. The entire world has been divided into spheres of influence by the Kremlin and the White House, or rather by the CIA and the GPU. It’s not for nothing that bushy-browed, brutal-jawed Brezhnev and Nixon look alike or that the cabinets of Russia and America consist of vulgar, uncivilized parvenus, unequaled for sheer lack of culture by any members of the administrations of any other major country in the world. It’s not for nothing that the J. Walter Thompson boys glorify Nixon, the homey lad who eats ketchup on his cottage cheese when lunching with California’s peanut butter cowboy. It’s not for nothing that the Agitprop Commission envelops the mindless bureaucracy of Russia in clouds of Marxist-Leninist verbiage in which the incisive language of Marx and Lenin has been reduced to a synthetic perfume, much like that J. Walter Thompson persuades Zellerbach and Kimberly-Kennecott to sprinkle on their toilet paper.
All over the world the independent Left has invited confrontation for 1969. The philosophy has been, “If we can’t changed the society we can at least bring it down. The present situation is totally morally intolerable.” Can they bring it down? “Power,” said Mao, “comes out of the barrel of a gun.” But that phrase has been used to justify a kind of worldwide interracial Pantherism. Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver may be infinitely more sensitive and civilized than the police chiefs of Oakland and San Francisco, but they found out their armament was meaningless. The other side has more, infinitely more, and bigger, mouths of guns out of which power flows inexhaustibly. This is even true of Mao himself. His collection of atomic firecrackers means nothing compared to the overkill and second and third and fourth strike capacities of Russia and America.
It’s the second part of that slogan which remains valid. What can be done about the ever-increasing moral and spiritual desolation spreading over the world like a lava flood of ketchup, peanut butter and cottage cheese in which we are all drowning? How can Ronnie Davis prevail against J. Walter Thompson? What will he do after the J. Walter Thompson government has had the Mime Troupe in a concentration camp in the American desert for a couple of years? What can the youth of Czechoslovakia do to stop the Russian decerebrator from chopping out all their frontal lobes? They can’t all set themselves afire.
Read the reports of the last two or three trials of writers and intellectuals in Russia. Read the publications of the Chinese office for cultural relations with foreigners. Read the carefully stage-managed picture stories in the American news weeklies of the new Cabinet. The world is in the grip of the militantly mindless. Not Ronnie Davis, not Allen Ginsberg or not even Father Scheelbincx and all of their horses and all of their men are going to prevail against “Nixon’s Cabinet at Home and at Play,” against an avalanche of tennis balls, golf clubs, bumper pool tables, garbage-can-lid toboggans, Liberace records, Parcheesi, fake African sculpture, and rare antelopes called bongos. These PR releases have been put together with great skill by the most experienced soap peddlers in the business. Their point is, and they drive it home incessantly: “Nobody thinks, can think, wants to think, or can spell the word. And you’d better not try to think either, you dope fiend, Communist, homosexual deviant, because power comes out of a gun, and we’ve got the guns.”
Ladies and gentlemen, my friends of sense and sensibility and pride and prejudice, you wanted confrontation and now you’ve got it. How are you going to survive? The other-directeds have taken over and the inner-directeds are going to the lions. Let’s hope you’ve got Androcleses amongst your ancestors and have always been kind to animals.
[March 1969]
In the past, men have planned utopias where life would be better, and they have advocated revolution to get rid of the predators of society and bring about a world where man was no longer wolf to man. Meanwhile, the human race struggled on, crippled and thwarted by exploitation and its side effects, from alcoholism to silicosis, but it survived.
For the last 200 years we have seen the growth of an economic and social system based fundamentally on the extractive industries and with a built-in dynamism that forces it into ever-increasing production at all costs. This competitive system has universalized a morality based on covetousness. For the last 50 years, the benefits, such as they are, of this system have been extended to most of the productive workers of the major industrial countries, the “metropoles.” This is least true of the United States, where about a tenth of the population is redundant — youth, the aged, Negroes, Southern poor whites and others. This is not due to the backwardness of the American economy; quite the contrary.
We have just gone through a long boom period with ever-accumulating surpluses; yet the overall production has never passed 80 percent of capacity. The source of profit is no longer, as it was in Marx’s day, labor power. Every year we need fewer people to produce more. The surplus we lock up in subsidized housing projects, in Aid to Dependent Children or in Garrison State College or toss in the Disposall of Vietnam. Our social-economic structure is itself in a state of civil war. The old extractive, industrial, financial structure based ultimately on the exploitation of labor power applied directly to primary raw materials is at war with the new technological society of computers and transistors and the Keynesian morality of Hugh Hefner’s la vie luxueuse. Meanwhile, outside the metropoles, starvation, disorder, breakdown sweep over the southern three-quarters of the globe.
Twenty-five years ago all the contradictions and conflicts of the present had already come into existence, but they only threatened individual men with war, hunger, and crippled lives. Today, an extractive, accumulative society more than just threatens — makes certain — the extinction of the human species within a comparatively short time.
The carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere can no longer be kept in balance even over the equatorial regions. A dense fog of carcinogens blankets whole areas — the Rhine-Saar, the Upper Po, the Bay of Naples, the Tokyo-Osaka-Nagasaki metropolitan complexes — as well as the major cities. I have crossed the Siskiyous and seen the smog filling the entire Central Valley of California, and I have seen it rise on the warm morning air from around Milan and cover Lake Como in the Alps. Lake Erie is a cesspool. Lake Michigan is unfit for swimming at Milwaukee and Chicago and stinks all summer long so that the grand rich are now abandoning their lakeside stately homes to charitable institutions, dance seminars and apocalyptic Black religious groups. If all the atomic energy installations now planned are built, they will raise the temperatures of the oceans with cataclysmic results. The things we are doing to our environment are changing it far more drastically than the changes necessary to account for the extinction of the great reptiles at the end of the Jurassic Age and incomparably more quickly.
I have quoted before the old, now-abandoned slogan of the U.S. Forest Service: “The forest is a crop, not a mine.” Unless we can stop treating the planet as a mine and start treating it as a crop, people now living will see the beginning of the end of the human species.
What can we do about it? Probably very little, because the old order is shutting down with a police state. In the Thirties the Marxists called Fascism and Nazism “forced rationalization” of the German and Italian economies. (Lenin admitted that Bolshevism was precisely forced rationalization.) Today, the state, but most especially the American state, is dedicated to forced irrationalization. Unless this can be halted, there is no hope for the human race. But what does this mean? It means de-mounting the whole structure, rebuilding it and starting in the opposite direction. Growth rates and GNPs and capital expansion have got to be replaced by changing the standard-of-living value system so that the possession of large numbers of commodities becomes a vice, not a virtue.
The extractive industries must be reduced to a minimum. The use of fossil fuels must be brought to a complete stop; coal, oil and gas should be consumed totally with nothing but completely inert residues at the sites and sent out over wires. Atomic plants should be stopped until it can be determined how to destroy the wastes. More and more articles should be made of organic plastics. Chemical fertilizers and insecticides must be replaced by organic manures, which now pollute all our bodies of water instead of being pumped into the fields, and by the ecological management of the health of agricultural crops; for instance, replacing poison sprays with ladybird beetles. There are innumerable ecological maneuvers of this kind now known. Along with this would have to go a complete moral conversion from the acquisitive, competitive, covetous “virtues” of present society to a whole new scale of cooperative mutual-aid simplicity value system not unlike the South Sea Islanders of romance. The population growth must not just be stopped, but reversed. The optimum is probably about one billion people to the planet.
You say this sounds like turning the whole world into a national park? Precisely. We must save ourselves as we are trying to save the sandhill crane. All power to David Brower!
[May 1969]
It’s far too late to save anything of that old San Francisco, the last stand of la vie méditerranée which made it the most beloved city in the world. The City’s principal newspaper is a wide-page magazine for lenitive reading over the grapefruit, built around a City columnist [Herb Caen] whose job is to pump hot air into a myth, not punctured with a thousand holes but cut to ribbons. There’s nothing left at the nozzle of his pump but the smell of carcinogenic smog and gunsmoke. The liberal newspaper’s idea of civic responsibility is about on the level of a stoned PR man reading Marshall McLuhan while on a bad trip. When the Mafia bought its way into North Beach, people who said it would soon be in City Hall were mocked and scorned as puritans who objected to bare breasts. Today, marijuana moves into the City in truckloads and a whole generation of young people who had sincerely repudiated the values of an evil society are being forced at pistol point to graduate from grass to smack.
There is no source of heroin other than the three major international crime syndicates. It is not manufactured pharmaceutically. Where there is heroin, there is the Organization. It is easier to buy on Haight Street than a newspaper. Does anyone in his right mind believe that the San Francisco police — who can have a small army, equipped with the very latest and most expensive matériel, at the Black Panther headquarters in a matter of seconds, for no apparent reason — could not dry up the heroin traffic in the City in a month? Name one major figure now running organized crime in San Francisco who has ever been given so much as a parking ticket. It’s the kids who are busted — for grass, a far less harmful substance than nicotine or alcohol. Why? The government can’t tax it. The Organization can’t control it.
Respectable male homosexuals are still being entrapped. The old setup of expensive bondsmen and conniving police still operates to blackmail them. Meanwhile, the Tenderloin swarms with male prostitutes dressed as women and ridden with disease, some of them only 12 years old. The young girls with white and orange and purple and green wigs and microskirts that hustle the Fillmore not only roll their tricks, they have driven off the older, respectable black prostitutes at switchblade point, and roll them when they can. I have seen the skunk cars roll past these hustlers, male and female, on downtown Ellis Street and on Fulton while the boys in blue waved and laughed and called the hustlers by their first names. Once in a great while they’ll stop for an exchange of pleasantries. The gang of young toughs who operate at night out of a parking lot off Hayes Street and who mug and roll anybody they can lay hands on, old or young, male or female, black or white, are well known. Why haven’t they been rounded up? It’s the blacks they terrorize, including the hardest black militants. How many “men down” have been found in this immediate vicinity? How many dead homosexuals have been found in the bushes of San Francisco’s parks in the last year? Yet a retired movie actor once famous for playing Oriental hatchet men opposite Lilian Gish can blow his pig whistle and produce a heavily-armed battalion on the campus of Garrison State College.
San Francisco has become a city of incredible violence, but what kind of violence? There are no pictures in the papers or on TV of Kathleen Cleaver clubbing police sergeants, or of middle-aged ladies, leaders in the A.M.E.Z. Church, spraying Mace in the faces of handcuffed patrolmen; nor are there any pictures of pretty coeds kicking prone and bleeding coppers. The idea that youth and the blacks are on the offensive is both tragic and comic in the extreme. This situation can be laid directly at the door of Police Chief Cahill and the mayor. The latter has done nothing to restrain the systematic and organized violence of the forces of lawn ordure, except whimper gently in a Humphreyite manner on television.
The turning points were the arrangement between the Visitors and Convention Bureau and the lords of the “entertainment business” as the Shelley campaign began to falter and fail, and the firing of Lieutenant Andreotti. As soon as Shelley took office the bare boobies hit Broadway and the good old joints where you were sure of getting an honest money’s worth of entertainment were bought out, though often the original owners were forced to remain as front men. San Francisco once was famous for having the one entertainment district where you never got clipped.
The Rockefellers and the frightfully civilized San Francisco elite, led by Harold Zellerbach, are systematically destroying downtown San Francisco and the waterfront and want to take over some of the public parks, though they vaunt themselves as the guardians and patrons of culture. The Haight is in the shape it is for only one reason. “They” wish the neighborhood totally deteriorated so they can buy it at bargain rates and put up expensive high-rise slums. Are you aware that you cannot borrow a penny from the banks run by San Francisco’s culture elite to buy the finest Victorian homes in perfect condition in Western Addition Number Three and the Haight-Ashbury, unless you plan to demolish and rebuild? Maybe only a paranoiac would say that the banks, the police, the Mafia and the big-time real estate and urban renewal operators sit around and plan it all in smoke-filled rooms, but that’s the way it works out. Meanwhile, orders go down from the top desk of the great liberal newspaper to mention independent critics only if they get in jail. Did you read in the papers that Grover Sales last year got the most prestigious kudos in the profession? I don’t have to mention you either, Baby Miller & Lux. Andreotti for Mayor!
[June 1969]
The Greek scholars and scientists who accompanied Alexander the Great on his expedition to India or who visited there a short time later during the reign of Chandragupta were dumbfounded by the high standard of living of the common people. They found that peasants and city workers lived better than Athenian merchants and that slavery in the Greek sense was unknown. The plenitude of food of the highest quality never ceased to amaze them. Today, the annual increase of the Indian population is greater than the total population of Australia and New Zealand; the same is approximately true of China.
At this moment, the great majority of the world’s population are not just malnourished; they are actively hungry, and far more are dying of starvation than are dying in the wars now raging in Vietnam, the Near East and Africa. Only the faintest rumors of the explosive expansion of the Chinese into Tibet and Inner Asia at the expense of the native populations reaches the outside world. In the days of China’s glory under the early T’ang dynasty, land was periodically redistributed to ensure that each head of a peasant household had a minimum of 19 acres to farm. By preindustrial techniques, a family of six could be able to raise sufficient food for itself on two acres of the unexhausted loess or flood plain soils of those days. Today, the Chinese ruling class dutifully repeats Marx’s crazy diatribes against Malthus, and black militants with little red books raid the Planned Parenthood centers in the ghettos and beat up the workers.
Due to backwardness and listlessness, caused usually by malnutrition, primitive technology, exhaustion of the soil, or exploitation by a monoculture whose profits are drained off by foreign capital, many comparatively thinly populated countries are densely overpopulated relative to the food supply. For instance, all levels except the highest of Peruvian society suffer from chronic protein famine. From Peru’s coastal waters American and Western European fishing fleets take over 11 million tons annually of anchovies. These are ground into fish meal and used for fertilizer, chicken and stock feed. Not more than nine million tons can be removed without tipping the balance and driving the fish to extinction. Only five percent of all the fish caught in Peru for any purpose remain in the country. This is genocide.
There is no longer any doubt about the outcome of the battle for food. It has been lost. Demographers, ecologists and other scientists in this field no longer talk about the possibility of famine, but about Famine I, Famine II, and Famine III, all to occur between now and 1985, in which . . . [line missing] . . . half a billion people will die. Specialists in the African part of this problem say it is unlikely that very many species of large, edible wild animals will survive in Africa. Yet, throughout the tropics and the Far East, heads of state, the ruling classes and political parties violently resist birth control and have been sold on the program of outbreeding the white man.
When Russian experts and politicians visited Peking for the last, big, full-dress conference during the Korean War they said in denial of their own Marxist anti-Malthusianism that one of the first steps to a solution of China’s problems would be a program designed to eventually reduce the population by 100 million. The Chinese have since broadcast this story with the interpretation that the Russians demanded that the Chinese “expend” 100 million soldiers in a war with America. The man in charge of the birth control program in India proposes to solve the problem with a year of national total abstention from sexual intercourse.
Yet Japan and the Scandinavian countries do not expect their well-organized programs of population control to make a significant difference for 30 years. By that time, if things go on as they are now, there will be more than seven billion people in the world. Few people understand this and if they do, they have difficulty believing it — like their own deaths. We are seeing today the already horrifying beginnings of irreversible processes. The Great Lakes are all going to become cesspools, like Lake Erie, and even if all population growth was stopped immediately it would take a generation to restore not the original condition, which is gone forever, but a healthy life association, a biota that would provide fish and pure water. Lake Michigan from Milwaukee south and around to Benton Harbor is not fit to swim in. This could only be changed by getting rid of every sewer, cesspool, septic tank and artificially fertilized field along the shores as well as all industrial pollution. Meanwhile, the excess nitrogens and the DDT are mostly still in the soil. Only a minor part has already drained into our rivers, lakes, bays and seas.
Overpopulation and the destruction of the environment are forces now moving at an exponential rate of acceleration and there are no equal and opposite forces in being. We talk about urban disorder, breakdown of the family, chaotic sexuality, organized crime as a major industry, suicidal drug addiction, pandemic mental illness, violent and virulent war between the generations. Let us forget that we are human beings and imagine that we are octopod scientists observing the planet from a flying saucer. If we were to observe social animals — ants, bees, termites, prairie dogs, baboons, starlings — acting like this we would have no doubt about what was happening. These are the acknowledged symptoms of species death. Man is becoming extinct. To reverse the process requires both an intelligence and a morality which the species as a whole has never shown. It requires an abolition of the profit system and of all exploitative relationships, a change in the social system incomparably more drastic than the Russian or Chinese Revolution, more drastic really than that envisaged even in utopian visions like Plato’s or St. Thomas More’s. It’s perfectly obvious this isn’t going to happen. Even if it did tomorrow morning the chances of winning are slim.
Nothing more significant has happened recently (and that includes the trip to the moon) than the discovery of the ecological revolution by the youth revolt, the counter-culture. When George Kennan two years ago in a rather foxy grandpa book told the youth revolt that they had their priorities wrong, that the destruction of the planet was more important than the laws against marijuana, everybody called him a square. Now ever larger numbers are beginning to agree. It’s not just that the oldies want to take them out and murder them in a marsh in Southeast Asia; they’re busy poisoning them at breakfast here at home, yet the majority of people in the world have little breakfast or none. The Bodhisattva’s vow is “I will not enter Nirvana until all sentient creatures have been saved.” If the alternative society becomes a society of ecological Bodhisattvas we will have reached the final confrontation — mutual aid and respect for life, full awareness of one’s place in the community of creatures — these are the foundations for an alternative society. Here are to be found the objectives, the self-discipline, the understanding that can create a purposeful challenge to the murderous dominant society.
Will the alternative society win? Almost certainly not. The forces of the dying world order are far too strong. The human race has no desire to be saved from its own folly. At least as we enter apocalypse we can enter it with clean consciences and sanely ordered lives and a community of mutual aid and respect. The actions which would follow from the morality of such a community lie outside the context of massive confrontation, of counter-aggression against aggression.
Against the aggression of the dying society it is impossible to win with its own kind of force. The world is in the grip of an Oedipus complex turned upside down. The dinosaurs did not become extinct because their balls got cold in the chilly marshes of the Jurassic. They ate their eggs.
[September 1969]
Harold Gilliam, in the San Francisco Daily Playboy [the SF Chronicle] Sunday edition which is combined with the 19th Century Bulletin [the SF Examiner], writes: “It would have been unthinkable at the beginning of 1969 to write that the college generation was being turned on by ecology.” The piece is headed: ECOLOGY IS NOW A WITH-IT WORD—AND CONCEPT. Gilliam is a tireless propagandist for the ecological revolution, is far and away the best writer on the staff and not responsible for the smart-aleck tone of the headline writer. Still, the article itself shows the signs of a corruption of prose style by Merlaism or Caenitis.
The sudden tremendous interest in ecology amongst students, and in Berkeley and San Francisco amongst older people, and spreading across the country like wildfire, is not a fad, and it is not unheralded. For years, KPFA and the other Pacifica stations and their associates have hammered on the subject. On my own book review program, the oldest thing on the station, I have talked about it at every opportunity. Twenty-five years ago a group of us were conducting lectures and seminars at the Workman’s Circle, whose whole emphasis was on ecology as a scientific foundation for a philosophy of social reorganization. The period of David Brower’s leadership of the Sierra Club witnessed an attempt to turn that organization of Sunday hikers and summer trippers into the leading cadre of an ecological revolution — which is why he was ganged up on by corporation lawyers, power company executives and Native Sons and Daughters of the Berkeley Hills.
The reason for the sudden explosion of the ecological revolution in the Bay Area is simple. It was prepared by many years of work, and it is occurring at the critical point when the ecology of California has become intolerable. Water turns into steam very suddenly; just as suddenly we have been brought face to face with the question, in the words of Lawrence Halprin, “Is man merely a dominant species in a transitional life association or is he the characteristic member of a climax of living things that will endure for a geological epoch or more?” The cockroaches and the octopuses are waiting. Perhaps we cannot turn the steam back into water. Perhaps the critical point is gone. The Santa Barbara Channel has become a dead sea. DDT is killing off the crab fisheries. In Berkeley, mother’s milk has been found below the standards for human consumption. Environmental specialists tell us that within months people will start dying by the thousands in smog-filled cities. Others say famines will kill hundreds of millions in the next decade and it is too late to prevent it.
The sudden popularity of ecology is not a craze. It is the response to the deadly crisis caused by a craze called the profit system. Man’s end is in sight. One thing ecology has always taught is that the relationships of living things to each other and their environment are governed by critical points where catastrophe occurs with great suddenness.
For example, Monterey recently staged a festival in memory of Ed Ricketts, the ocean scientist who was the brain trust for John Steinbeck and the “Doc” of his novels. Ricketts told his employers in the sardine industry that if they continued their fertilizer factories in the sea — their wholesale destruction of the sardines — the species would vanish suddenly. They hired other scientists to say, “Oh, nonsense, there are billions of sardines and the ocean is illimitably fertile.” Ed pointed out that in the ocean, above all places, creatures, no matter how numerous, live in the most delicate balance and when that balance is destroyed they become extinct. So it happened. Most of us who knew Ed well believe he committed suicide, not, I hope over the greed and folly of the sardine industry. Mankind at this moment is in exactly the fix of the sardine when Ed Ricketts issued his warning, and man is his own sardine canning industry. We are all implicated.
The prospect of the imminent extinction of the human species is a final perspective of 400 years of the growth of value neuter science and technology. Today terribly fashionable amongst old academicians, we still have “value neuter” philosophies,” whatever in the Hell those are, and I mean in Hell. Marx’s revolutionary drive came from the tradition of the Hebrew prophets; the profoundly moving exhortations and denunciations in Capital and The Communist Manifesto are in contradiction to his “scientific” economics. But only superficially different from the bourgeois economists who were his masters (“the sum total of private evils add up to the social good”) and the process is governed by the value neuter laws of physics. We can no longer endure a value neuter science, neither chemistry and physics nor the sciences of man. Ecology is the science that automatically produces evaluation without ceasing to confine itself to purely scientific methods. This is nothing new. Erasmus Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), Lamarck, Buffon tried to develop an evaluative theory of evolution. Peter Kropotkin, the great anarchist leader, at the end of the last century attacked Darwin’s “survival of the fittest,” and the social Darwinism derived from it as well as Marxism, with his classic Mutual Aid. Kropotkin and his libertarian, communitarian colleague Élisée Reclus were actually ecologists, though in those days they called them geographers. It is no accident that college students who call themselves (lower case) communist-anarchists now say, “Down with the red flag, down with the black flag, up with the green, forward to the ecological revolution!” Lenin refused to talk about postrevolutionary society and dismissed such speculations as utopian. He really believed in a value neuter revolution. So today most Marxist groups and most black revolutionary groups refuse to answer, because they cannot, the simple question, “What do you want?” History and evolution are assumed to be the only source of value. This means that one situation is better than another simply because it follows it in time. Absurd in itself, this has now been proven a lethal assumption. The old hymn, popular with Socialist summer camps, “We are climbing higher, higher,” is false. We are not on Jacob’s ladder but on a greased toboggan to the everlasting bonfire. For us, evolution has turned out to be value negative. If the processes are not reversed in the next 10 years the human species will not survive much beyond the century. Most of those 10 years promise to be the years of the administration of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in the most powerful empire the world has even seen — hardly a cheery prospect.
If you want to bone up read Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid; Frederick Clemens’s Plant Ecology; Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, and a collection of articles on all aspects of ecology, The Subversive Science; and subscribe to Keith Lampe’s bulletin Earth Read Out, 439 Boynton Avenue, Berkeley 94707. You better learn. You haven’t got much time and your life is in the hands of Nixon, Agnew and Hinkle — ventriloquist’s dummies for J. Walter Thompson.
[December 1969]
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