Clearly Kabouter: Chronicle of a Radical Dutch Movement, 1969-1974

by Coen Tasman, Jordan Zinovich (Editor)

Third in a series of titles on “the Provo period” in the Netherlands. The Provo Movement and the political movements that followed it changed Holland’s socio-political perception, impelling an expanding general cultural awareness of consciousness-changing ideas, impulses, and substances. The Provo period is almost unique in radically reshaping the political foundations of an important Western-European nation virtually without violence. This spectacularly Dutch revolutionary period stands as exactly the kind of case study of revolutionary change that anarchists have searched for since Kropotkin and Woodcock first began exploring our historical antecedents.

388 pages, Paperback

Published May 1, 2023

Reviews

[Stevphen Shukaitis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Clearly Kabouter, Coen Tasman composes a lucid yet kaleidoscopic cartography of a movement that refused to be domesticated by either liberal tolerance or revolutionary orthodoxy. The Kabouters, with their surrealist folkloric aesthetics and unapologetic ecological insurgency, are not merely a charming footnote in Dutch countercultural history. Tasman shows how they conjure an embodied, clown-communist refusal that is neither nostalgic nor utopian, but materially inventive. Reading this chronicle is like being handed a bag of tactical compost. The Kabouters offer tools, not blueprints, for generating non-state public spheres: media as playground, urban space as living commons, governance as a temporary hallucination. They politicized the invisible – air pollution, bureaucratic opacity, capitalist boredom – through playful interventions that blurred the line between joke and infrastructure. They practiced a politics of presence rather than petition. Tasman’s narrative is alive to these ambiguities, presenting the Kabouters not as idealized heroes, but as processual figures, rhizomatic agents in a transversal ecology of resistance. Their legacy, as Tasman implies, lies not in replication but in resonance. Their experiments resonate with today’s movements seeking ways to inhabit the public without appealing to the state: to become ungovernable in joyful, situated ways.