Originally published in The New York Times Magazine, December 6, 1970.
One of the obstacles to building an anarchist society is that there is no place where you can secede from the Union. Hess lives in a floating community of houseboats; periodically, its location shifts as it tries to keep a jump ahead of official harassment.
The heat, noise and tensions of Washington are still with you when you come upon the present site, a boatyard hidden behind a row of oak trees. You are immediately struck with the timeless serenity of the place, like the uncle's farm of your childhood. It is cool under the trees; a tanned girl in frayed short-shorts lounges on a hammock; muscular young men tinker with motors in the wordless communion of craftsmen doing what they like. Down to the right, fragile catwalks lead to a wharf, the hitching post for more than a dozen blocky boats, which rise and fall almost imperceptibly. A hairy man wearing only a half loincloth is painting one of the boats; he stops to banter as two girls pass on the wharf. Beyond is the sweep of Anacostia, where in the distance sailboats glide and rowing teams compete. Up to the left is a shack which serves as the boatyard office and two sheds with a long workbench in front that seems to be communal headquarters.
There, attended by a noble looking goat and a big, black dog of indeterminate parentage, Hess receives visitors. He is dressed in a white hunter's shirt, the kind Stewart Granger used to wear in safari movies. He bought it in Rhodesia, where he sculptured the 6-foot metal artwork that until recently stood in front of the Archives Building in Salisbury. He rises now in mock courtesy, sweeping his arm in a broad arc.
"Welcome to a self-governing community of 21 free citizens living amidst a colony of 900,000 disenfranchised subjects," he says.
He conducts a tour of the place, with as much proprietary pride as if it were Mount Vernon. One of the community is Karl's oldest son, Karl 4th, a strapping, articulate youth, formerly president of Young Americans for Freedom at the University of Virginia, now a conscientious objector; whatever other gulfs may now separate Hess from his past, he has conquered the generation gap.
"We share here in all the chores and decisions. No step is taken that any one of us violently objects to, and we've never yet come to the situation where the majority wanted to do something badly enough to alienate any one of us. In an anarchist world, of course, there would be thousands of different communities, enough variety to accommodate everyone except someone who wanted power over others. We have different leaders for every task, on the basis of personal competence. I'm the welder; someone else is the carpenter. Last week the job was getting the sheds ready for the winter, this week it's mending the wharf. We have communal meals a couple of times a week, at which we decide things, and talk and entertain each other. This is more than an efficient way to live; it is a happy way. Everyone has a boat here, but nobody goes out in his boat because they don't want to miss the fun."
There are bicycles and fishing gear in the sheds; recreation and leisure are an important item.
"We want to do more than plot anarchy in cellars; we want to live the life. I'm 47 years old and this is the first time I have known what it means to live in a real family -- to be surrounded in my daily life by people who take time for each other, who are completely open, who do everything together, whose happiness comes from sharing experiences, not owning things."
The community is, of course, artificial in part: its members must earn their bread in the square world. One runs a duplicating shop in the National Press Building, another is a nurse, some are mechanics, others congenially earn marginal livelihoods in Washington left-wing think tanks. Hess earns money as he needs it from lecturing, writing, sculpturing, and occasionally getting back under the bulldozers. And he is a fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, where he conducts a seminar on "The Ways in Which Left and Right Political Positions Have Merged in the New Left."
"The revolution occurs," Hess says, "when the victims cease to cooperate."
Full article at: http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/from_far_right_to_far_left.html
Originally published in PLAYBOY, March 1969.
Power and authority, as substitutes for performance and rational thought, are the specters that haunt the world today. They are the ghosts of awed and superstitious yesterdays. And politics is their familiar. Politics, throughout time, has been an institutionalized denial of man's ability to survive through the exclusive employment of all his own powers for his own welfare. And politics, throughout time, has existed solely through the resources that it has been able to plunder from the creative and productive people whom it has, in the name of many causes and moralities, denied the exclusive employment of all their own powers for their own welfare.
Ultimately, this must mean that politics denies the rational nature of man. Ultimately, it means that politics is just another form of residual magic in our culture -- a belief that somehow things come from nothing; that things may be given to some without first taking them from others; that all the tools of man's survival are his by accident or divine right and not by pure and simple inventiveness and work.
Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised the power to live off the output of other men. But even in a world made docile to these demands, men do not need to live by devouring other men.
Full article at: http://fare.tunes.org/books/Hess/dop.html
It's also available as part of Karl Hess' autobiography, available from Laissez Faire Books: http://www.lfb.org/