| Notes |
“The public is any fool on the street” was an early recurring Digger phrase, first taken from a San Francisco Chronicle columnist who used it disparagingly in reference to interviews with Black students during the Hunters Point uprising. The Diggers inverted the phrase, turning the columnist’s contempt into a democratic axiom: the public is not an audience, institution, or managed constituency, but anyone present and alive in the street. |
| Abstract |
This sheet is a dense Digger “term paper” on poetry, revolution, and commodities, beginning with the startling claim that Gregory Corso’s poem “Power” supplied the original Digger concept of autonomy. Its argument moves beyond the politics of minority status to a broader refusal of America itself as a system organized around commodities, wage labor, hierarchy, and the magical requirement that everything must be paid for. In this frame, FREE becomes both tactic and revelation: by taking goods out of the money system, the Diggers expose the falseness of commodity values and open abundance itself to criticism, modification, and communal use. The sheet links Watts, drop-outs, Blacks, and Diggers within a new consciousness opposed not only to poverty but to the deadening material paradise of modern affluence, ending with a call to create alternatives, recover one’s own creative powers, and act in the world without guilt. |
| Full Text |
term paper:
the relationship between poetry and revolution has lost its ambiguity — gregory corso's poem POWER was the sole reason behind the
concept of the Diggers: autonomy.
The issue is no longer the status of an american minority, but the status of America. the diggers are a rebellion against commodities and the hierarchy of commodity values.
Through FREE diggers expose the lie of the oppressive rationality of commodities and affirm their human superiority.
THE ROAD OF EXCESS LEADS TO THE PALACE OF WISDOM. when it is no longer bought with money, the commodity lies open to criticism and modification.
affluence is by no means natural or human, it is simply an abundance of goods. the cops' job is to make sure that a commodity maintains the magical property of having to be paid for instead of becoming a mute, passive, insensible, submissive thing. how do men make history starting from the pre-established conditions to persuade them not to take a hand in it/
WATTS DROP-OUTS DIGGERS FREE
freedom now is for the first time not freedom from poverty, but freedom from material abundance.
WE demand the control of abundance, not just the changing way it is shared out, but the
redefining its every orientation, superficial and profound alike. this is the first skirmish in an enormous struggle, infinite in its implications….
THE BLACKS, isolated for so long in their struggle, are not alone any longer a new consciousness is forming in america — the consciousness of not being the master of one's activity, of one's life, in the slightest degree. WE all refuse modern capitalism and communism and ism and ismismismsimk WE express a disgust for affluence and its price WE are the advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values
INTEGRATION for the BLACK man is absurd because intergration ne plus ultra of all intergration promised is intergration into a system of isms
WE are the products of modern induotry and are repulsed by the material paradise. Commodities are universal and as the world of commodities is based on class conflict they are hierarchic and we all live within that universal hierarchisation.
the Diggers have proven the communal possibility of living without having to earn wages or hire yourself to the highest bidder. other groups should pool their resources and
stick with it for the holding action….soon there will be organic communes all over the world and anyone is welcome.————
Western society has destroyed itself. the culture is extinct.
Politics are as dead as the culture. capitalism, communism, socialism are political confrontations and are meaningless.
BE SICKENED BY THE ONCOMING MASS STARVATION AND CONCOMITANT REVOLTING DEGREE OF OVERPOPULATION AND THE ACCOMPANYING PRODUCTION OF INCREDIBLE NUMBERS OF USELESS PHYSICAL OBJECTS WHOSE RAW MATERIALS DEMAND A DESTRUCTION OF THOSE PARTS OF NATURE WE KNOW AS BEAUTIFUL
EACH MAN IS INNOCENT BUT THE POINT OF LIFE IS NOT REST BUT ACTION.
DEATH IS REST. EVERYONE WILL HAVE ENOUGH REST FOR ETERNITY
NOW IS THE TIME FOR ACTION
THE WORLD MUST BE SEEN CLEARLY
create alternatives…turn people onto their own creative powers….
the public is any fool on the street and power is standing on a streetcomer waiting for no one
AND WE ARE NOT GUILTY
WE ARE LIVING CREATURES
kill voyeurism.
the colombia encyclopedia. |
