dreamer042 said:
Burners Without Borders were the very first ones on the scene in New Orleans providing shelter, food, water, medical care, etc... Long before FEMA showed up.
To be fair, the Common Grounds Collective and other local organizations were the very first ones on the scene, providing support and mutual aid. These groups were operating in the face of massive state repression before BWB, FEMA, or other outside help showed up.
In 2007 when the theme of the festival was "The Green Man" bmorg ran the major festival infrastructure with a solar array, which they then generously donated to the Gerlach public school system.
The Burning Man Project has put large scale art projects up in major cities such as Reno and San Francisco.
BMORG also recently became a 501(c)(3) non-profit.
I think that all of this could be labelled "liberal reformism" at best, which is part of the critique presented in the video.
In my limited opinion, I find myself inclined to side more with the video's presentation of BM social projects. When the possibility of large(r)-scale radical action with insurrectionary tendencies raised its head in the form of Occupy, the kitchens and on-site infrastructure of OWS and ODC were run by Rainbows, not Burners, (something that I think is worth noting, especially in light of the points made in the video regarding privilege). This may have been different in different cities/towns, but it is telling, imo, that this was the case in two of the first (and largest) encampments.
Obviously I don't know the full scope of projects at varying levels, but imo, from the few political discussions I had while at BM (something I tried to avoid while there because for me, BM was a party/vacation without a radical/activist bent) and the small bits of the world that I've seen with my eyes, Burner culture (as a vaguely-defined whole) is much more insular and self-focused than radically-participatory and socially active. Obviously this is just my limited perspective.
Burning Man isn't and never was meant to be a sustainable festival, it's meant to be temporary autonomous zone.
Precisely! And it succeeds at that quite well ,imo, even with its massive increase in size. Well, at least for a sanctioned-autonomous zone with heavy police presence...
Burning Man exists within this wider context of global festival culture and many of the same arguments that can be lobbied against burning man can be lobbied against the culture in general. They are all shining seas of metal and burning petroleum, many of them are heavily commodified with vendors everywhere and exorbitant budgets to get big name musical acts to perform and the like. In the end the whole culture is fairly unsustainable.
100% agree...only replace "fairly unsustainable" with "entirely unsustainable"
That doesn't mean they can't be a blast, nor does it mean that by not participating in them you automatically affect greater change in the world around you. The unsustainability/ecological cost of BM is likely a fairly insignificant blip within the context of industrial capitalism. Render BM irrelevant and inaccessible by dismantling industrial capitalism, because you sure as hell aren't going to render industrial capitalism irrelevant by dismantling burning man.
The question I've been asking for years is, when are we going to give up the weekend warrior go party your arse off aspect of it and begin to work toward creating something more permanent and sustainable?
I agree with you here as well, but I don't think that this is the goal for many who attend. There are countless Burners who stand to lose too much from a true paradigm shift, i.e. the slumlords, the tech entrepreneurs, the CEOs, etc. These people have no interest in a deeper culture of sustainability or restructuring the world in which we live. In fact, there are many Burners who we will actively have to fight against in the event that we want to break free of a paradigm of industrial capitalism. I know this because one of the few (and by far the most heated) political discussions I was involved in at BM revolved around precisely this issue.
Or put another way, dreamer, you have asked the question of what would happen if one year the people just didn't leave. Now obviously there are logistical and tactical difficulties stemming from the fact that this is in the middle of the desert, but we can ignore that for the minute. The counter-question is, how many Burners are ready to fight the police for their principles? Because that's what happens when non-sanctioned autonomous zones are declared. What percentage of Burning Man not only believes in creating some kind of sustainable community that challenges dominant culture, but is also willing to act on that within the context of the intense real-world action such an endeavor would demand?
Burning Man is a pre-figured utopia, available to those who are able to pay for it. For me, that's it, nothing more, nothing less.
And, with that in mind, alongside dreamer's comments, I'd like to share something a friend wrote on prefiguration:
Prefiguration
We must be the trouble we wish to see in the world.
Anarchists have long sought to demonstrate the virtues of their vision through prefigurative projects: free food distribution, do-it-yourself health care, collective living arrangements. If only a working model of a better world could be created in microcosm, the thinking goes, everyone who experienced it would become partisans in a revolutionary struggle. Yet in a capitalist society, these experiments can only be carried out at the margins: the dregs making the best of debris.
Meanwhile, at the Googleplex, cafés staffed by world-famous chefs offer healthy organic food in all-you-can-eat buffets. Google employees drop their children off at free day-care, avail themselves of free hairstylists and laundromats, take their pets to work, and play Ping-Pong or volleyball on pristine facilities. After they ride in on the free shuttle or park their electrical cars at the charging station, free scooters wait to convey them from one shining example of sustainable architecture to another; they are encouraged to decorate their workspaces however they wish, and whimsical features ornament the campus, including a tyrannosaur skeleton and a rocket ship.
Massage therapists remedy their every complaint; a personal lifeguard watches a single swimmer exercising in a swim-in-place pool the size of a bathtub, with different speed settings for water flow. The brightest luminaries in every field are brought in on a daily basis to present free seminars to which everyone is invited—everyone, that is, who produces enough profit to keep a foothold in this city on a hill, and doesn’t flinch at swimming through a sea of blood to hold onto it.
If corporations can prefigure a world of abundance more effectively than revolutionaries can, what does that tell us about this strategy? Perhaps that the important thing is not to prefigure utopia—which is already available to the winners of the rat race, albeit intramurally—but rather to prefigure the offensive that would render it accessible to all.
PS - Regarding the OP, I don't understand why the fact that he identifies as an anarchist requires a disclaimer and aside from a few poorly chosen words that were close enough to not make an issue of and some less-than-perfectly articulated analyses, imo, I didn't catch "a lot of pseudo-academic rhetoric."
