Jumpstarting a Cultural Revival

I have spent most of my adult life traveling and performing on the global left, mostly going between North America, Europe, and Australia, but also a bit in Latin America and Asia as well.  I have worked extensively as a performer in countries with active social movements, and at times when there weren't any happening; in countries with tremendous state support for the arts, and countries with very little to none of that.

I'm also old enough that I used to know a lot of people from generations that are entirely gone, such as the 1930's generation of communists and socialists in the US.  I'm familiar with the social movements that have been big in the US over the course of the past century, and specifically how they made use of music and culture generally to keep their movements thriving as much as possible.

We're living in a time where, for various reasons, what remains of the left in the US is more alienated from culture than ever before.  On the rare occasion that there is a protest these days, it almost never involves live music, theater, dance, puppets, or even food.  Protests today are completely removed from culture of any kind.

The way we've gotten to this point has been a process involving decades of effort on the part of intelligence agencies, tech companies and other elements of the elite, I'm convinced, though much of what's happened could be chalked up to technological and cultural developments that weren't premeditated by powerful people with nefarious intentions.

Some of my friends and I often lament how things have gotten this way.  Around the world, everyone knows that music is the heartbeat of the resistance, but this vital reality has been erased from our collective memory in the USA, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries that are very influenced by everything that happens in the US, and on the English-language internet.

I was discussing this situation with some folks recently at an antinuclear gathering recently on the Olympic Peninsula, saying how what we needed was a real cultural revival of the sort that this country has experienced before.  Someone then asked me if I had a budget of $5 million, how would I use a budget like that in the service of the goal of jumpstarting a cultural revival in the US?

Confronted with this very direct question, it occurred to me that I should stop just fantasizing and actually come up with a game plan.  From my own experience, if someone with the resources is going to use their resources for a project small or large, they're only going to even think about doing that in the first place if someone has a plan and a budget in mind.

Before I get into the details, just on the question of jumpstarting a cultural revival as a concept in the first place:  can it be done?  The unequivocal answer to that is yes, particularly under the right circumstances, and history is full of great examples.  It can be both done as well as undone.  We can be turned on to culture and community and resistance by various means, and we can also be turned off to those things by other means.

There are endless different ways -- death by a thousand cuts -- to turn people and communities off to culture, to spread alienation.  There are endless ways, as well, to bring people together, and to bring music and art back into the hearts and minds of the people.  Assuming a large but limited budget for this jumpstarting project, here would be my program.

The Student Environmental Action Coalition used to have chapters on college campuses across the US in the 1990's.  They divided the country up into ten regions, each of which had regular regional conferences.  I think we can start with that model, of dividing the country into ten regions, for our purposes.

I also want to make a note on the subject of money involved with most of these ideas.  In various other countries, and in the past in the US as well, things are or were different.  The cost of living, for example, is far lower in many parts of the world, and used to be in the US.  In other countries there are still functional systems of support for the arts, and for the unemployed, as there used to be in the US.  In some countries, the average worker gets paid well, has good healthcare, cheap housing, and two months' paid vacation every year.

In the US today, everything is very expensive, and only the top quintile might be in a position to dedicate their time in a serious way to activities that don't involve earning necessary income.  This kind of phenomenon is easy to observe in the real world.  When I first moved to Portland, people were building public sculptures all over the city.  Once the cost of housing tripled, that kind of thing pretty much all stopped.

People don't have that kind of free time anymore, when they're all so busy coming up with the rent or mortgage payments.  For ideas such as the ones I'm sharing here to work in the modern US context, not only is lots of money required for things like land, buildings, and vehicles, but also for the people involved, if they are to dedicate serious time and effort to any of this.

Summer Camps

Around the world today, and in the US a long time ago as well, the left has actively been involved with running summer camps, for kids as well as for families.  Of course, this practice is far from unique to the left, and in recent decades it has been abandoned by the left, as the left has shrunk dramatically and become more and more insular in the US.  But summer camps did not used to be just a thing for the Boy Scouts, it was a big domain of the left.  There were camps run by communists, socialists, and anarchists, back in the early twentieth century in many parts of the US.

This tradition is one that desperately needs to be revived.  Each of the summer camps that would be part of the Jumpstart would serve multiple purposes, just as they did before.  They would be an opportunity for bringing people together, for the formation of and the building of community, and for children and adults to learn all kinds of vitally important skills.

As with some of the leftwing summer camps in Scandinavia where children today learn, among other things, my songs, at our cultural revival camps people would learn songs from social movements from around the world, through the interwoven histories of such movements here and abroad.  Camp activities would include lots of group singing, playing musical instruments, learning about theater (including writing, acting, costume and set design), and puppetry.

As with summer camps generally, our camps would provide people with the chance for largely urban or suburban people to get closer to the land, learn about edible and medicinal plants, where food comes from, and to be involved with things like preparing food as well as sharing meals together.

The aspect of inclusion is essential to the functioning of such summer camps.  These are traditionally places for all the families or children, depending, who are members or associated with unions or left parties, and they must be easily affordable by anyone.

Free Festivals

Easily one of the most influential social movements that has existed in the modern era was the antiwar movement that had as its root the free festivals in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

This movement has been vilified and ridiculed ever since, specifically because it was such a powerful movement.  The model of movement-building that involved holding a free festival every weekend spread from San Francisco across the continent and beyond.  The music was the tool that, when part of a free festival in a public space in the center of a city, was effectively used to win the hearts and minds of millions of draft-age men who, in one way or another, refused to fight for the empire.

In the late 1960's the free festival model spread in a mostly decentralized way, as with things like Food Not Bombs a bit later.  The Cultural Revival Jumpstart model would be different, taking into account the different times we're in now as compared to sixty years ago.

Sticking with the idea of dividing the country into ten regions, my free festival model would involve ten flatbed trucks set up with sound systems appropriate for a relatively small festival, along the lines of the Guinness Big Rigs I have seen around Ireland in the past, or the city-owned sound system available for public use in the center of Trondheim, Norway.

When people think of the free festivals in Golden Gate Park they might focus on the bands that were playing at them, since they were oftentimes bands that were popular far beyond the Bay Area, such as Jefferson Airplane or the Grateful Dead.  But essential to the whole free festival scene then or with our Cultural Revival Jumpstart project is the vaudevillian nature of it all.  We would not just have bands performing, but also the other kinds of performers and activities long associated with both the free festivals and the vaudeville circuit, such as puppeteers with giant puppets, aerial and circus performers, skits and theater, as well as the occasional rabble-rousing speechifier.

Rather than just having these weekly free festivals in one city, the Jumpstart program would involve the truck and the organizers and artists involved going from city to city, a different city each weekend.

Peace and Justice Centers

During what I call the Golden Age of the internet (approximately 1995-2005) a lot of great online organizing took place, before it was mostly hijacked by anti-social media corporate platforms, which have successfully poisoned everything and turned it into shit.

It's more important now than ever that we get back to gathering in physical locations.  Camps, festivals, protests, and other outdoor kinds of things, absolutely.  But we also desperately need our physical gathering places in city centers back again.  

Such institutions can be much like what we used to call Convergence Centers during the global justice movement.  Places that are free to be in, that are not connected to a religious institution, a for-profit business, or a college campus, and that are centrally located for people who are taking the bus.

Like the antiwar coffeehouses that the antiwar movement used to have outside of every military base in the US, the peace and justice centers can play the role of a sort of secular church.  A gathering place for people seeking community, a sense of belonging, as well as popular education and entertainment.  Peace and Justice centers have played this role throughout the country in the past, and should do so again.

Naturally, the Jumpstart would feature a P&J center in each of the ten regions, with the hope being to have many more of them, each with at least one paid staff member, and a budget for paying speakers and performers and for organizing other free or subsidized events.

Whether the P&J centers have paid staff and a budget for events, the most essential thing for such places having any kind of longevity in the US, according to my abundant observations, is not having to come up with rent every month.  This is especially the thing that kills off one such center after another.  Another model is necessary.  In Europe this is often accomplished through state support for the arts.

Folk Clubs

When people think of the early 1960's folk music revival, as it is often called, they think of smoky folk clubs in places like Greenwich Village.  These were cafes where when there was a concert or an open mic going on, everyone paid attention.  They were what we in the music biz sometimes refer to as "listening rooms."

Hardly any places like the little folk clubs that used to thrive in the centers of many US cities exist anymore.  The cafe where you go to get your take-away latte is not the same kind of scene.  For folk clubs to exist like they once did, a different economy is necessary, because under capitalism a place like that doesn't really work.  The European model -- state support for the arts -- can make it work, but otherwise we need the rent covered, as well as a paid staff member who is entirely occupied with booking acts and promoting shows.

As with the Peace and Justice Centers, our Jumpstarted revival would begin with a folk club in each region, hopefully expanding from there.

Media/Indymedia

When we think of the folk revival of the early 1960's, or the intensely musical Civil Rights movement, or the free festivals of the latter 1960's, we often think of spontaneous developments that were just part of the times they sprang out of.  While it's definitely true that ideas and practices can spread like wildfire, it's also true that there were foundations for all these cultural and political movements that can be traced back to the radical labor movement of the turn of the twentieth century, and prior to then as well.

Some of the most well-known songs of the Civil Rights movement came out of the labor movement from decades earlier, and so many of the strategies of that movement were hatched in conjunction with institutions that also have roots in the labor movement.  By the same token, the apparently spontaneous folk music revival and free festival movement of the 1960's were a bit less spontaneous than they appear.

The Communist Party of the 1930's was culturally rooted in the intensely musical and theatrical organizing tradition established in the 1910's by the Industrial Workers of the World, whose chief spokespeople were musicians and poets.  The IWW was crushed by the FBI, for all practical purposes, during the course of the 1920's.  When the old IWW members who joined the Communist Party discovered Woody Guthrie, they convinced the party leadership to pivot from their embrace of the classically-trained composers of Worker's Music and embrace the folk music represented by people like Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Paul Robeson.

In their efforts to promote this powerful kind of music the CP had rediscovered, the CP was also instrumental in starting Sing Out! magazine (and many other publications), which became an important voice for and promoter of the folk revival.

We desperately need to reclaim that kind of media.  In more recent times, the Indymedia phenomenon of the internet's Golden Age -- the Indymedia Centers, or IMC's -- filled the kind of role that publications like Sing Out! did before.  As part of our Jumpstart, we would revive Indymedia, with certain important adjustments to the old, mostly dead model.

From my direct observation, when there's a thriving social movement happening, it tends to find funding as well as physical spaces for holding events, and so many other things it needs to thrive and grow.  People, when mobilized like that, are very resourceful.  But then when the movement collapses, as movements eventually tend to do, all those resources collapse with it.

This can be mitigated in a big way with resources coming from elsewhere, like whatever hypothetical person or institution might foot the bill for the Jumpstart.  Rather than relying on people with free time and energy for mostly thankless tasks like running an Indymedia node, and all the moderation that is absolutely essential for making any IMC function, every IMC node that is part of the Jumpstart needs a paid staff member.

I won't try to break the Jumpstart down into a projected budget, because really there are many different versions of the endeavor that could be wonderful, depending on available resources.  What is beyond question is the resources needed to get this sort of project off the ground -- and very importantly, to continue to fund it over time -- would be very significant.

If there's an individual or some kind of institution out there who wants to invest in reversing the course of the rapid decline of this civilization, I can't imagine a better way to spend a few million.