When Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another was released last year, some critics and online pundits took issue with how the film portrayed the members of the French 75, the fictional group of socialist revolutionaries fighting against American imperialism and authoritarianism. One character ends up killing someone during a robbery gone wrong, and in an effort to stay out of prison, she turns to the military man she’s been sleeping with for help. Real revolutionaries, the detractors wrote, would not snitch on their comrades to avoid a prison sentence, they would not kill a security guard, and they would not abandon their children to go on the run.
What started as a marginal grumble soon came to include professors, political consultants, and high-profile members of the new American left. It was part of a larger nostalgia for the great groups of “resistance” and political radicals of the late 1960s. When campus protests were organized against Israel’s war in Gaza, they were modeled directly on Vietnam war-era campus takeovers. And then of course there was Beyonce, dressed as a Black Panther, performing at the Super Bowl.
But people in revolutionary groups did do all those things, and more. A few recent releases and reissues have me thinking about this mythologized period of revolution, and the hangovers that followed. Jason Burke’s The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s, published this January, documents the various leftist groups that embraced violent resistance in the hopes of bringing on revolution. Many of the men and women who waged armed combat were true believers in socialism and the Palestinian cause, but some just got pulled in by charismatic leaders like Carlos the Jackal and Andreas Baader, and others were just enchanted by the violence and spectacle of it all, eager for an opportunity to blow up a shop or take a plane full of people hostage.
Principled people like Ulrike Meinhof, a journalist who abandoned her children and husband to join the Red Army Faction and fight for revolution, were outnumbered by the likes of her collaborator Baader, whom Burke describes as “spoiled, arrogant, and lazy.” Baader took credit for other people’s work, quoted Marxist rhetoric to get laid, and waged campaigns of humiliation and manipulation on fellow members of the group. Other groups were similarly run into the ground, starting off fighting for “revolution”—vaguely defined—and ending up in drug trafficking or assassination-for-hire schemes.
Burke focuses mostly on revolutionary groups in Europe and the Middle East because they were the most active, long-lasting, and interconnected. German groups collaborated with Palestinian networks, Japanese revolutionaries showed up in North Africa. Trinidadian novelist and journalist Shiva Naipaul focuses on the Americans, who were less interconnected and less effective: “the children of a prosperous middle class [who] exploded into a semblance of a revolt. They were well nourished, they were more or less educated, they were sentimental, they were spoiled, they were bored, they were looking for kicks, they were touched with half-digested idealisms, they were scared of dying in a war in Southeast Asia.” These were the young people who protested Vietnam, amassed guns and bombs, blew up a few buildings, did time in prison, and then—some of them at least—became tenured professors at prestigious universities.
That is not to say that their protests were not valid. As Burke documents, there existed a real desire among those active in European leftist groups to liberate Palestine, root out the legacy of Nazism in Germany, and bring an end to imperialism and exploitation. Naipaul is clear about the entrenched racism, police brutality, and warmongering that drove young Americans into organizations like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers. But their methods were nonsensical, their goals were impossible, and their organizations were infiltrated by egomaniacs, psychos, and informants.
There’s an uncomfortable scene near the end of Naipaul’s Journey to Nowhere: A New World Tragedy (first published in 1980 and reissued this year by Outsider Editions) in which he visits Huey Newton at the Black Panther headquarters in Oakland, California. It’s the late ’70s at this point, so Malcolm X and MLK have been assassinated, Cointelpro has been unleashed and uncovered, and the massacre at Jonestown has just happened. The Black Panthers have been decimated and reduced to a few social programs—providing buses so that loved ones can visit family members in prison, establishing a small school, offering some health clinic hours.
Newton and Bobby Searle had originally written the Black Panther manifesto, which Newton claims took them only 20 minutes to compile. “We want full employment for our people,” the manifest read. And: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society.” They are mostly utopian ideas that would take decades to implement, but they are being presented by people who, when going on armed patrol, have agreed to go down fighting in any confrontation with the police.
Naipaul writes that “none of [these demands] were realizable. Only the truly powerless could be so detached from reality, could write a manifesto in twenty minutes that demanded everything.” Less than a decade after their encounter, Newton would be dead, shot by a member of a rival Marxist Black empowerment paramilitary group.
Naipaul is meant to be writing about Jonestown. Generally, when people write about the Peoples Temple—the California cult that moved to Guyana to create an Eden on Earth and ended up in a mass suicide that left more than 900 people dead—they compare it to other cults, like Heaven’s Gate or the Branch Davidians of Waco—other religious groups that confused charisma with wisdom and death with peace. Naipaul was writing immediately after the tragedy, and so he instead sees Jonestown as just another example of people in the 1970s claiming to want better lives who decided to take them instead:
It has often been said that the Temple was reared on an idealism which, somehow, became perverted. It would, I think, be more correct to say that the Temple was reared on—or, better still, inherited—an idealism that had already gone wrong, that had already lost its way and been twisted out of shape in the promiscuous chaos of the sixties.
Jim Jones built his congregation in San Francisco with a combination of politics and faith healing. In a time of segregated churches, his audience was notably mixed, with more than half coming from working-class Black neighborhoods. His sermons, which went on for hours, mixed gospel with a vision of a kind of heaven on earth, where discrimination based on race, class, and gender did not exist. He also claimed he could heal the human body with just a touch or a glance, and many adherents credited him with their renewed ability to walk or see or hear.
Jones’s followers believed that their mission was to establish socialism within the United States. Members pooled their financial resources to create the utopia of which they dreamed: They built soup kitchens to feed the hungry, clinics to heal the sick, and homes to house the aged. It was the sorry state of social programs in the Bay Area of the time that made people vulnerable to organizations like Jones’s. And when Jones then started preaching about how the American government would never allow the community of racial harmony and social justice to find peace, and that the Peoples Temple would have to start somewhere fresh in another country far from interference and surveillance, his congregants were ready to sell their belongings and move to Guyana.
In Guyana, Jones found a compatible host. In 1970, Guyana’s dictator Forbes Burnham declared the nation to be a Cooperative Socialist Republic. He had been installed by the CIA, but the tide in the region had since turned away from Western influence and toward political radicalism and revolution. The bauxite mines and sugar estates were nationalized; diplomatic relations were established with Cuba and the USSR. Soon Burnham was one of the richest Black men in the world, but the shelves at the grocery stores were bare, the hospitals had run out of supplies, and 50,000 Guyanese—more than six percent of the population—had emigrated.
As the Peoples Temple Agricultural Project (as Jonestown was formally known) grew, followers would write letters to family members and friends back in the States, boasting of the abundance they had created. Their communal kitchens were overstuffed with the most delicious foods they had ever eaten. The health clinics were providing state of the art care to the sick and elderly. And all property was held in common, because no one would be treated differently based on their ability to work or pay. A large percentage of Jonestown residents were elderly, who were independently housed, fed and cared for in exchange for signing over their social security checks.
Jones was well connected with the politically radical at the time, with friends and contacts in both the San Francisco mayor’s office and the Black Panthers. For him, it was all part of the same fight, whether conducted by gun, ballot, or spade. As Naipaul moves through the associates, friends, and fellow travelers of Jonestown, he encounters people who can imagine only cataclysm and destruction: the end of patriarchy, the end of capitalism, the end of imperialism. Once these obstacles are removed, then real life could begin.
But not all the Westerners seeking socialist relief went to Guyana, and some of them are still around.
For about a decade, it was very chic for an architect to have his own city. Le Corbusier had Chandigarh, India. He designed the government buildings and many housing projects, created a grid system for the urban layout, and built the monument of the Open Hand as a symbol of honesty and generosity. Oscar Niemeyer had Brasilia, Brazil. He designed the new capital city’s presidential palace, city museum, and city hall, among others. And then Roger Anger had Auroville, India, which got its own book this year.
These were planned cities, cities built where there had not been humans before: all the better to scrape clean and start again, without the burden of existing infrastructure, ingrained habits, and memories. In the case of India, Auroville and other planned cities were meant to establish a new start after independence and partition. They could clean away all the violence and suffering from the country’s troubled birth in 1947, and incubate a better world. As Polish journalist Katarzyna Boni puts it, these were “cities untainted by a colonial past, free of expended symbols, cities that showed the way for the entire nation. A cradle of hope for the entire country.” Her new book, Auroville: A City of Dreams (translated by Mark Ordon) documents her second trip to the southern state of Tamil Nadu, following an initial visit in 2009.
Built in 1968, Auroville was founded on the teachings of one guru, Sri Aurobindo, who believed that human beings were on the cusp of an important spiritual evolution. Life on earth could be transformed into something more harmonious if enough people reached enlightenment. Prior to his spiritual turn, he had been a political radical, active in the nationalist movement to gain independence from England, and his revolutionary group was responsible for several bombings. He died before Auroville could be created, so the implementation of his ideas and philosophy were handled by Mira Alfassa, also known as the Mother.
The city, which still stands today, is meant to foster spiritual enlightenment, and anyone from any part of the world can live there as long as they agree to abide by the rules. In order to create human unity, each resident must be willing to serve the Divine Consciousness. That means no engagement with politics, no speaking in the silent zones, and no displays of physical affection out in public. Meaningful contributions must be made to communal kitchens, public areas, and community resources.
It’s strange that Boni engages so infrequently with the ideas behind Auroville, instead choosing to focus on the feelings and experiences of those who live there. Most of the long-term residents are Westerners who made their way to India in the 1960s and ’70s. Several seem to be bored rich kids who are ensnared by Mother’s charisma.
Many of them talk about making a better world … somehow. “This is where true democracy will finally appear, and taxes will not even be needed, because everyone will naturally and unforcedly co-create the prosperity of Auroville and its inhabitants.” Because Boni is determined to document the lives and desires of the residents, rather than put them in any kind of political perspective, what we get is something like a tourist pamphlet, bidding us to join this new world. The few moments of skepticism or uncertainty have mostly to do with how the built world is misaligned with the grand plans. No ideas or goals needed, then. “Humans will create a rainbow tribe that will save the Earth and restore its beauty. A new era will come, there is no doubt about it. Common spiritual effort can help accelerate it.”
That last bit seems to come from a man named Roy, an Auroville resident who had left behind a middle-class New York City existence because he was seeking spiritual connection. Boni is vague about who is saying what, what is quotation and what is her interpretation. The stories are all very similar: I can never tell if I’m listening to the disillusioned son of wealthy Washington parents or the resentful daughter of wealthy British parents. They all insist on how different and special they are and are ultimately indistinguishable from one another. It’s almost as if for this group of utopian dreamers, having a recognizable personality or story or way of communicating would get in the way of creating paradise on earth.
Boni was driven to return to Auroville in 2018, a particularly difficult year, she insists, citing a school shooting in the United States, the war in Syria, and a humanitarian disaster in Yemen. “People who were feeling increasingly more lost were constantly looking for a different world,” she writes. But everyone always thinks their era is uniquely terrible, uniquely perilous. No one has ever suffered the way they have suffered. It’s interesting to note how little any of the problems she lists would directly affect her own existence as a Polish journalist. The war in Syria might have caused a migration crisis that she saw on the news, one that she felt helpless to do anything about, but she herself was not displaced and was likely no more than inconvenienced by the war.
Auroville, 50 years after its creation, has around 3,000 residents from 59 nations. They meditate, they try to reach enlightenment, and still the world is in shambles. Lately, plans to expand the city and allow more residents have been met with protest from current residents, who believe Auroville would lose its special quality. Putting the harmony of the city at risk would put the fate of a better world at risk. Only one person in Boni’s book dares to say what’s really going on, that Auroville is not an attempt to improve the world but a retreat from it: “Don’t take responsibility for the whole world … You just need to take care of yourself.”
Near the end of Journey to Nowhere, Naipaul attends a discussion led by Buckminster Fuller, a utopian architect who believed that one could design a better world with the right ideas, the right architecture, the right urban planning—and the right billionaires converted to the cause. At this particular event, Fuller holds the audience in a state of rapture as he talks about how they can all turn the world into a paradise. “I felt I was working shoulder to shoulder with a chosen few,” Fuller tells the crowd, “a handful of people who were really willing to put their lives out for something beyond themselves.”
“The people here had not come to learn anything,” Naipaul writes. “They had come in search of revelation; they had come to discover how they might save themselves, save mankind, save the world.” And yet here we all still are, half a century on, having the same arguments about the people committed to saving us.
