[p2p-research] communitiy organizing vs. coops

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/24/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> do you have some details about Karl Hess,
> author of Community Technology.

He came from an Old Right background, and was a speechwriter for Barry
Goldwater in the early '60s.

In the late '60s, he helped found the Radical Libertarian/Anarchist
Caucus of the Young Americans for Freedom, and led the walkout from
the St. Louis YAF convention in 1969 (and the subsequent meetup with
similarly libertarian/anarchist dissidents from the SDS).  He was
closely associated at this time with Murray Rothbard's project of a
New Left/Old Right alliance against the corporate state, and was a
frequent contributor to Libertarian Forum.  After Rothbard abandoned
his attempt at an entente with the New Left, Hess continued to
gravitate leftward, and joined the Wobblies for a while (although he
remained very market-friendly.

It was in the early '70s that he organized the Community Technology
group, a project of the Adams-Morgan Organization (a community
activist organization in the Washington, DC neighborhood of that
name).  They experimented with passive solar heating systems made from
tin cans, basement trout farms, and the like.  In this time period, he
also cowrote Neighborhood Power with David Morris (it included a lot
of material on community industry and community economies).  At his
most left-wing, he wrote Dear America, a rambling denunciation of both
government and corporate power.

>From the late '70s until his death in the '90s, he gravitated back the
right and became a more conventional free market libertarian.  But he
remained fond of economic decentralism and community institutions to
the end.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html