John Sinclair

(Amsterdam, October 18, 2004) Quiet as it's kept, Amsterdam is blessed with a vital underground arts and cultural community that thrums and vibrates with creativity and intelligence but only rarely can be seen to intersect with the surface world of popular culture.

The city's cannabis coffeeshops, seed stores and psychedelic dispensaries provide visible proof that there's something quite different going on here, and its permissive approach to public sexuality is equally refreshing. But these tendencies are merely the tip of the metaphoric iceberg with respect to the depth and vastness of Amsterdam's alternative community.

Underneath the city's image as a picturesque, friendly but a little edgy tourist destination beats its secret heart, pumping out cutting-edge art and expressive culture that inspires and informs the level of intelligence and consciousness necessary to sustain urban life on a human scale the way it used to be in the United States, way back in the day before they started to dummy everybody down.

The cultural revolution that erupted in America and Europe in the 1960s may have sputtered into terminal stasis by the mid-70's, but it took root in the consciousness of an entire generation of Dutch artists, cultural and social activists who simply refused to give up the struggle to create for themselves a world they could live in.

These young visionaries extended the oppositional principles and creative social strategies of the cultural revolution into effective action and developed operational methods for moving their ideas into the realm of social reality. When their progress was impeded by the refusal of the established order to embrace innovative forms of social organization, the cultural warriors banded more closely together, redoubled their efforts and persisted in their determination to make social change in their lifetime.

As a result, the impact of the cherished ideals of the cultural revolution may be felt in the workings of everyday life in 21st-century Amsterdam, where citizens enjoy universal health care, public welfare for the disenfranchised, extended unemployment benefits and early retirement for the workers, stringent rules for the protection of the working class on the job, price controls and other measures for the protection of the consumer in the marketplace, the operation of an efficient public transportation system, government funding for a wide range of arts and cultural activities, unstinting support for the city's incredible array of museums and cultural institutions, total decriminalization of the recreational drug user with a workable system for the licit distribution of marijuana and psychedelic substances, intelligent regulation of the legal sex industry, and a general sense of tolerance for individual differences and active concern for the well-being of the entire populace.

Spearheaded by organized labor, founded in the principles of collective bargaining and social consensus, and informed by the tenets of the cultural revolution, this national system of social organization has come to be known as the Dutch way.  It's worked well to serve the needs and aspirations of most of the citizenry and to take care of people who have less,  as one worker put it.

But right now the Dutch way  is under serious attack by the current government of the Netherlands, a reactionary right-wing coalition led by the Christian Democrat party. Its ascension to power two years ago coincided with a sharp and unexpected economic downtown which the right wing proposes to combat by adopting the American method of attacking, denigrating, undermining and stripping working people and the unemployed of hard-won wage gains, comprehensive medical coverage and other essential benefits and entitlements. So they're looking to the ugly, inhuman, socially irresponsible policies of the Bush administration for ways to weasel out of the Dutch social compact and institute a more efficient  system that will better serve the obscenely greedy corporate sector.

But while the great mass of Americans dazzled perhaps by the spectacular entertainment media and the prospect of unlimited product acquisition have mutely acquiesced to the insistent corporate demand that they reduce their lives to fit the ever smaller dimensions dictated by the insatiable profit cravings of their employers, our Dutch counterparts are beginning to fight back in a big way.

This is a declaration of war, the president of Holland's biggest trade union federation told the International Herald Tribune on the eve of the October 3rd anti-government demonstration that filled Amsterdam from the Museumplein to the Leidseplein with 300,000 angry citizens. This massive outpouring of opposition to the government's plan to reduce taxes, cut government spending, slash unemployment and disability benefits, and push back the retirement age from 55 to 65 followed effective one-day strikes on successive Mondays which shut down the public transportation systems in Rotterdam and Amsterdam. And the week after the demo, the railroad union walked off the job for a day, curtailing travel throughout the country.

The Dutch resistance to the right-wing attack on their way of life is a hopeful sign indeed. As we see in America, when people fail to resist they are forced to accept whatever degrading conditions the bully-boys of the government and its corporate masters wish to impose upon them. These right-wing demagogues are weak, cowardly characters who get over by intimidating the people, propagating an endless series of Big Lies and bullying the populace into bowing down to their demands. But when people stand up in resistance and refuse to back down, the bullies can be forced to turn and run.

That's why a culture of resistance is so important to a healthy social order. A culture of resistance in everyday life, shaped and expressed by the creative imagination and defiant attitude of committed artists and cultural workers, can form the ideological and emotional underpinnings for popular movements of resistance to oppressive and exploitative conditions of every kind. And a culture of resistance to the idiocy and reductive intent of the popular entertainment industry Turn Off Your TV Set! can help engender a high level of sensual intelligence and creative production throughout the entire community.

The culture of resistance in Amsterdam today is mentally and physically rooted in the raggedy community of avant-garde artists, musicians, poets, other creative individuals and their compatriots in poverty who have squatted  and established residence in myriad vacated apartments and abandoned buildings all over the city. Living nearly rent-free, often in quarters much larger and more desirable than they could otherwise afford to occupy, the squatters have gained the time and space to concentrate on their creative pursuits and make any kind of art or social action they might want to.

The squatters' movement in turn is rooted in the civic belief that buildings and housing units left unoccupied tend to be detrimental to urban life and can sap the health and vitality of the neighborhoods they infest. Thus property owners and real estate speculators are allowed only one year of vacancy before their space is up for grabs. Once installed, the squatters may remain in place unless and until paying tenants are secured or other legitimate uses are approved by the local governing body.

There are squats of all sorts in Amsterdam, but most intriguing are the communal art squats where sizable groups of artists and creative associates take over large empty industrial buildings and make them into places where they can live, work, exhibit and perform to their hearts content. The larger squat communities have established impressive on-site cafes where exhibits, performances and dances are staged and food and drink are served to the residents.

I had the pleasure of visiting a gigantic squatters' community called ADeM on John Coltrane's birthday, a holy day of obligation which falls on September 23rd, for the opening night of its seventh annual ROBODOCK festival. Housed in a former shipyard on the waterfront in the western sector of the city, the venerable ADeM collective was ousted from its previous spot in 1997 when the area it inhabited was slated for redevelopment. ADeM's fierce resistance to the threat of displacement ultimately resulted in the city authorities granting them possession of the abandoned shipyard as their new base of operations. The initial ROBODOCK festival was staged the following fall in celebration of the community's first year on the site.

Entering the ADeM grounds was like stepping back in time 30 years to the glorious days of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, free concerts in the parks, rude rustic rock festivals thrown together on somebody's farm, the exhilarating theatrical spectacles created by the Living Theatre, Ken Kesey's mind-blowing Trips Festivals, the utter irreverence of the Fugs and the MC5 and the Mothers of Invention, the all-pervasive spirit of pleasure in the pursuit of sensual experience and creative expression, and the thrilling vibration of mass communal resistance to the insane machinations of the established order.

Suddenly here on the Amsterdam waterfront was a living realization of the hallowed concept of Free Space a liberated zone dedicated to creative production in a harmonious communal environment fully controlled by its inhabitants. This was exactly what we had dreamed about back in the day, and it was exhilarating to witness this contemporary manifestation of the revolutionary spirit in action almost three decades after it had been given up for dead in the United States.

But this is one of the rewards of prolonged resistance, and it provides compelling testimony to the positive effect of a culture of resistance that keeps alive the social visions and humanistic values advanced by the creative artists and cultural warriors who labor at the very core of modern life to infuse their fellow citizens with the spirit of intelligence, compassion, imagination, experimentation and discovery.

Next month we'll look at some of the events, organizations, groups and creative people I've come across in the Netherlands. In the meantime, if you're coming to Amsterdam for the Cannabis Cup November 21-25, stop by the 420 Café and buy me a coffee and a reefer. And wherever you are, please join me then for the opening week of my new internet radio program, The John Sinclair Radio Show, broadcasting live from the cannabis coffeeshops of Amsterdam at www.JohnSinclairRadio.com. The program premieres on-line at 10:00 pm (Dutch time) on Monday, November 22, with a new one-hour show posted at the site each night that week and every Monday night thereafter.