There isn’t much I hate more than Christiania. Started as a project of privileged kids looking for a place to smoke weed and occupying a land that was meant for redevelopment and actual communal housing. Cool, cool. It quite quickly became a class society, with peddlers (those who sell drugs) ostentatiously flaunting their wealth, with the other side of the “commune” developing into a typical bourgeoisie, nuclear-family powered suburb, all with a horse rink included.
In this revolutionary commune that is not bound by the laws of European Union, as they claim, you can buy Nestle products and pay for them with a card.
It is, ultimately, a weed dispensary with state monopoly, holding together with the police violence against mostly minorities that sell weed outside its walls indispensable for its well-being.
But then, I wouldn’t say it’s a problem of the anarchist movement. Anarchists are generally aware of those contradictions and the anarchist praxis is that of building an alternative to the society within the society. Christiana was a hippie project. Hippies, in my opinion, destroyed the left wing movement. They decided that they can use their privilege (because, of course, it was mostly white, middle class kids) to fuck off from the society. They withdrew from the class struggle at large. Instead of working in the unions, instead of organizing with Rainbow Coalition, they just fucked off the their “horizontally governed communes” to smoke weed and have sex.
Fuck hippies. And fuck Christiania.
Also, fun fact, last year they legally bought the land from the city, using a loan from the city.
I’ve never heard this take on hippies but you make a compelling argument. I’m the US, Ive always blamed Gen X from withdrawing from the class struggle at large but it makes sense that the problem happened also with earlier generations. Arguably 3 generations after the labor movement in the US did very little to keep the fight going (though I will say civil rights has come very far during those generations)
