MRCC Communiqué #10
Midwest Radical Culture Corridor
If you attend potlucks
If you live in a co-op
If you grow your own greens
If you conceive of art practice as a form of social justice
If you speak against the settled history of a place and work to expose its hidden and haunted histories
If you have have lost your house to neighborhood speculation run amok
If you farm food not fuel
If you attend letter-writing campaign meetings
If you want to shut down prisons
If you oppose the military industrial complex in all forms
If you seek to create and sustain alternative economies
If you live in an area that has been written off as a cultural backwater
If you actively seek to gain and grow knowledge from the people and places around you…
then you are already part of the Cultural Corridor of Midwest Radicals!
The Midwestern counterculture today grows out of generations of radical democratic practice. In the 1880s, farmers and laborers organized against the coastal cartels; in the 1910s and 20s Midwest radicals used song, art, and performance to organize labor unions and farmers cooperatives. In the 1930s and 40s they were at it again, building unions in Detroit, Gary, and Chicago. In the 1960s and 70’s, political organizers and civil rights activists took to the streets to demand social justice. Each movement fertilizes the next: a palimpsest of imagined alternatives to “business as usual” in the land of corn and greed.
The Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor is an infrastructure of support for long term change, beyond spectacle. Standing in opposition to the monoculture, greenways and open fields are our models. Here is where new, hybrid cultures and critical ideas can be planted. This is a call to farms.
We’ve had enough and now it’s time to start relating to each other:
How do we connect cities beyond roads?
How can we collectivize sustainable energy?
How can we create social exchange instead of capital extraction?
How can the highest stakes be our own community and everyone in it?
What does it mean to practice democracy on a deep level?