DIGGING FOR FREEDOM

            The Diggers were a group of post-Beatnik revolutionary thinkers living in San Francisco during the 1960’s who wanted people to reconsider their place within the existing sociopolitical structure. They did this by mobilizing fellow San Franciscan’s in the streets through freely distributed food in the city’s parks and home-published zines containing art and literature detailing the new Left’s attempt to reconstruct the dismal state of social order. In actuality the group started as a kind of public guerilla theatre group, entitled the Mime Troupe. Through their performances the members of the Diggers created a myriad of varying public displays in which the audience and police who responded to these public gatherings were as implicit as the actors themselves. In particular I was struck by the example of the police theatre that in effect launched the Digger group to public stardom in San Francisco and across the nation. When the group was setting up for one of its very first performances in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood they were confronted by a group of officers who told them that the first individual to step up on the stage would be arrested. In response the leader of the Mime Troupe, dressed in full costume, stepped up on stage and announced to the gathering audience “Today you will witness an arrest!” and then he willingly gave himself over to the police. By performing this “illegal” act in front of people, the police themselves would then become implicit in the event and become actors driving the message of the Digger group, that the hostility and reactionary response of the police to a simple public performance shows how very oppressive our own society can be.

            Today I see the legacy of the Diggers in the Occupy Wall Street movement that began a couple of years ago. Much in the same vein of the Diggers, the Occupy Wall Street movement consists of members of the American public who are outraged by the massive economic inequality in the United States and around the world and are calling for collective change. By organizing large-scale sit-ins (as in literally “occupying Wall Street”) the members of this group were attempting to make the presence of the “1%” known in the eyes of the world economic powers trading on wall street and were met with brutal resistance from police. Similar to the Digger movement as well, it seems there really wasn’t any one specific leader for this group, but rather consisted of a greater network of individuals all working towards the same goal. In this way the Diggers were very successful in mobilizing people to think differently in their everyday lives, however because they were such a minority social faction little actual change actually occurred and they were simply lumped in with the hippie-flower-child “free love” deviants that were much less interested in actual social change and more focused on sexual and spiritual exploration. As the group realized this they slowly lost ambition to rework the social order within the structures of the pre-established America. This is why I believe they moved to commune living in the wilderness: to create a new kind of social structure on their own terms. However, once in the wild it can sometimes become impossible to come back.

Photo credit: http://foundsf.org/images/c/c9/Digger-cohort-rural-retreat_0364_Chuck-Gould.jpg