Know Your Place
Thursday, April 16
Come: climb the Dark Mountain
Well, I've been thinking about it for what seems like years, working on it for many months and hinting at it on this blog for God knows how long. Now, finally, it's just about mature enough to be exposed to the world.
Today, myself and my co-conspirator Dougald Hine are announcing an attempt to coax into being a new literary and artistic movement for an age of massive global change. We are calling it the Dark Mountain Project.
We live in insecure and unprecedented times. A collapsing economy and a collapsing environment are turning all our assumptions on their heads. Nothing that we currently take for granted is likely to survive the 21st century unscathed. Civilisation as we have known it is coming apart at the seams.
And yet hardly anybody - not politicians, not economists, not environmentalists, not writers - is really facing up to the magnitude of this. We are all still wedded to the idea that the future will be an upgraded version of the present. It is in our cultural DNA. Perhaps this is why, as the warning signs flash out ever more urgently, we still go shopping, or plan for more economic growth, or campaign for new energy technologies, or write novels about the country house or the inner city.
A civilisation is built not on oil, steel or bullets, but on stories; on the myths that shore it up and the tales it tells itself about its origins and destiny. We believe that we have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of 'progress', of the conquest of 'nature', of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.
I believe it is time for new stories, and it seems I am not the only one. The Dark Mountain project aims to foster a new movement of writers, artists and creative thinkers, a new school of writing and art for an age of massive global disruption. We are calling it Uncivilisation.
Here's the plan. Today, we announce our intentions to the world, and we hope to start attracting the interest of like-minded people. Then, within a month or so, we'll be launching the Dark Mountain Manifesto, as a hand-crafted pamphlet and on the web. At the same time, we will launch our full website, an online gathering-place for discussing and plotting and crafting a new way forward. If enough people seem interested, we then plan to begin publishing a journal of Uncivilised art and writing. Then ... who knows?
For the moment, though, we are looking for help, support, potential collaboration and expressions of interest. The Dark Mountain Project is not a prescriptive attempt to tell people how to write or think, but the raising of a flag around which we hope like-minded people will gather. So we are looking for people who might want to be involved: writers, artists, illustrators, designers, thinkers - anyone with whom this strikes a chord.
If you think you are one of them, or if you'd just like to be kept informed about what we're up to, visit our pre-launch website and register your interest. You can also, if you are so inclined, join our Facebook group.
Finally, we are working right now to raise money for the printing of our manifesto and for the construction of our website. We have set a target on this fundraising site, where we need to raise £1000 (well, $1500) in three weeks, through small donations. Every little will help, so if you feel you'd like to spend a bit on a good cause, please pop over there. If you spend more than $20 you get a signed, numbered copy of our manifesto, which I can promise you will be well worth the money!
Posted by Paul at 5:37 PM 
5 Comments
I support this. It is encouraging to find so many people marching to a different drum beat. One wouldn't know it from political and business leaders; they have too much at stake. Therefore it seems to make revolution morally worth consideration should the world refuse to wake up to its peril. I support any effort to organise and empower these alternative voices. I write a blog at www.maccurrach.com where I cover many of these themes, often from a Serbian perspective where I have been living. I've also written a book on Vojvodina, Serbia's northern Province, covering especially the peasant village culture that has so much wisdom to teach us. Someone help me get it published please! And help me make some documentaries about the voices of the Balkan landscapes. Sign me up. Rob MacCurrach
Posted by: 
Rob MacCurrach at 9:44 AM
1ST OXFORD WORKING CLASS BOOKFAIR
SATURDAY 20TH JUNE, 11 am - 6 pm at Ruskin College, Walton Street, Oxford
Supporters of the event include Oxford & District TUC & local IWW
Books, talks, badges, workshops, posters, postcards, DVDs, CDs, music, culture, short films, magazines, lectures, warm atmosphere, fellowship, meet new people, education, entertainment, magazine, newspapers etc. To book a stall/more info. email us!
Includes 100th Anniversary of 1909 RUSKIN COLLEGE STRIKE meeting, the first radical student uprising in English history that saw students breakaway to form radical & anti-capitalist educational networks such as the PLEBS LEAGUE and CENTRAL LABOUR COLLEGES + Talks/workshops on anti-fascism & anti-racism, situationism/dada/surrealism, anti-capitalism, people’s history, trade unions, war, peace & empire, radical bookselling, bash the rich marches, psychogeography, feminism & women’s equality, social ecology, popular & radical education, poetry/culture/art, music etc
Speakers include -
COLIN WAUGH Radical educator/FE teacher, active on the Post 16 Educator journal, recently author of pamphlet on the 1909 Ruskin College Student Strike & Plebs League
IAN BONE English anarchist associated with Class War group. In 1984 he was labelled ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’ by a British tabloid newspaper & was involved in the legendary Bash the Rich marches on wealthier areas of England such as Kensington, Henley-on-Thames & Hampstead.
RICHARD SEYMOUR Author of ‘The Liberal Defense of Murder’, a searing critique of the B52 liberals and pro-war left & the brains behind Lenin’s Tomb, one of the best-known political blogs in Britain, listed in 2005 as the 21st-most-popular blog in the country.
ANDREW BURGIN Radical seller/collektor of books, badges, posters, pamphlets & other emphemera. As press officer for the Stop the War Coalition he has worked particularly closely with the Military Families against the War campaign. He has also been linked to the Public Reading Rooms in London . . .
JUDITH ORR Author of ‘A Rebel’s Guide to Women’s Liberation’
MALCOLM HOPKINS Our man from Housemans, London Town’s oldest radical bookshop who boast the largest range of radical newsletters, newspapers and mags of any shop in Brtain! He also does talks on situationism, dada, and surrealism - top bloke!
Cllr JOHN TANNER Lefty Labour Councillor supports good causes like the Palestinians and anti-fascism - top bloke!
DAVID RENTON Independent writer & historian. Written extensively on the history of anti-fascism including ‘When We Touched the Sky’ a history of the Anti-Nazi League & ‘Red Shirts & Black’ (Published by Ruskin College Library) the story of how the facist Blackshirts were driven out of Oxford in the 1930s.
CIARAN WALSH IWW/Wobblie Member involved in Traveller education. ‘The IWW is a union unlike any other. It is a grassroots, democratic and militant union that seeks to organise ALL workers in ALL industries in ALL countries’ … Sounds like a good idea!
PETER DWYER has done many silly and good things including working with NGOs and the labour movement in South Africa and speaking at World Social Forums in Rio, Mali and Kenya. During the daytime he teaches radical economics at Ruskin College
GUY DEBORD Sadly Monsieur Debord can’t make this festival, but we have received a copy of The Society of the Spectacle - The Movie that will receive a free screening and Ruskin College premier during the course of the bookfair
LUCY PARSONS once described by the Chicago police as ‘more dangerous than a thousand rioters’, Parsons died in 1942, she will be brought back to life for one day during the bookfair with a public reading of her infamous address To Tramps
Also for OUR FRIENDS IN THE NORTH, there is another WORKING CLASS BOOKFAIR THE WEEK BEFORE IN SUNDERLAND!
http://workingclassbookfair.vpweb.com/
For more info. - www.oxfordworkingclassbookfair.blogspot.com or oxfordworkingclassbookfair@googlemail.com
Posted by: Respectable Citizen at 1:42 PM
Looks intereresting. I gave it a thumbs-up on StumbleUpon, and will be interested to see how it develops.
Posted by: Steve Hayes at 6:56 AM
You're saying all the right things, ok, some of the right things, but I'm unsure what is hoped to be achieved other than another talking shop/think tank/pressure group, in a sea of the same. I see no end to human greed and selfishness, it's a simian thing, and expect a global collapse at some point when the environment will cull our species, perhaps leaving sustainable remnants to survive, perhaps not.
Far too many humans are homocentric to the exclusion of all else, even those who realise what's going down, still appear to think of only the human consequences. I speak for the wolf; the wild, the non-humans, the delicate ecological balance our clumsy ape greed has screwed up. We are, quite simply, a plague. Perhaps good riddance is the only sane attitude.
Posted by: PetePassword at 8:59 AM
Yor vision is by no means the first. Read "After London" by Richard Jefferies (1885), "News from Nowhere" by William Morris
(1890), and "A Crystal Age" by W H Hudson (1906).
Good luck to your project!
Abaris
