Wayne Collins on the Karl Marx Tree, SF Express Time May 23, 1968. Click on the image above to download a PDF version.

Recently while doing some research on 1960’s radical publications, I came across this text on Kaweah and the Karl Marx Tree, by Wayne Collins, from the San Francisco Express Times, of May 23, 1968. The SF Express Times was an underground newspaper, published in SF, which lasted for about two years before changing its name to SF Good Times. It was edited by Marvin Garson and Robert Novick.

It was exciting to come across this article as a link to my other projects The Karl Marx Tree Marker, but also to learn that an interest in Kaweah has been ongoing. But perhaps what was most interesting for me is Collins lack of position, vacillating between criticism and commemoration. The article was printed in an issue mainly focused around the ongoing student protests in Paris, and was included likely to suggest that the ‘great refusal’ was far from novel; that it had a foundation, even in the pristine west? But what was amazing to realize, granted I am someone consumed by questions around the good place or no place, is that the word Utopia is never mentioned. It seems clear to me and to many others that Kaweah was most certainly a utopian society, based partially on the ideas of Utopian fiction, namely Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward: 2000-1887″. So then what does it mean not to use the word utopia? What did Utopia mean to these SF radicals in 1968? Was it seen as an elitist and separatist idea or a totalitarian one, as the attacks against it, by Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and others, have suggested? This attitude is certainly suggested by Collins derision of the colonists for leaving, growing “tired of the struggle in the city” and retiring “to the countryside”. Suggesting they were more like businessmen, retiring to a life of leisure in their country home, then radicals, though we know this was certainly not the case, life in Kaweah was not easy.

Yet despite this derision, Collins still seems impressed by their endeavor, their struggles against capitalism and a bit saddened by their colonies petty downfall. Though this all sounds quite familiar, the patricide, the resentment and disillusionment combined with the championing of Labor, the disenfranchised, and self praise that was so much a part of the 60’s counter culture sentiment by the end of 68. But perhaps the new age and the new radical movement that Collins is now a part of, was not so distant as it may seem, to the struggles and the triumphs of the preceding generations.

Sarah Elliot holding the most recent issue of The Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper (2008), and right John Elliot holding the first issue of the original Kaweah Commonwealth newspaper (1890)

On Monday November 17th I drove a sculpture called Karl Marx Tree Marker, down to the offices of the The Kaweah Commonwealth a weekly newspaper of Three Rivers and all of Kaweah Country, California. I invited the French artist Aurelien Froment to come with me, both to help me photograph the sculpture in the offices of the Kaweah Commonwealth, and also to see the huge sequoia trees—giants symbolizing the hopes and failures of American westward idealism—in the Sequoia National Park nearby.
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