ABSTRACT
How does a new society grow out of the old one? Like a toadstool on a rotting tree stump [. . .] in fact the existence of an autonomous, new community in the heart of the old order is the most effective sabotage. But whatever techniques the people’s army of saboteurs may use, it will always remember that it cannot resemble the old world’s armies in anything, anything, anything [. . .]
(from the Proclamation of the Kabouters’ Orange Free State (Plant 1992: 93))
Well, it was all just a joke, you know? (Simen de Jong, Kabouter city council member,
referring to the Kabouter electoral campaigns (De Jong 2000))
Would you vote for a gnome? In the spring of 1970, a countercultural group called the Kabou-
ters (Dutch for “Gnomes”) launched a ludic electoral campaign that included many acts of mass absurdism and civil disobedience, nonviolent sabotage and symbolic, utopian inversion/subversion in the Netherlands. An ideologically heterogeneous, loosely organized anarchist/environmental movement, the Kabouters were unified in their opposition to the Dutch capitalist, social-democratic system and its attendant paradigms, symbols, and rituals. They referred to their counter-institutions and people’s meetings as the organs of the “Orange Free State,” a mythical, mystical, New Left fantasy-
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movement was anti-parliamentarian, their electoral campaigns and their overall history were completely intertwined. In fact, the ebb and flow of Kabouter unity, power, and grassroots energy were reflected by their various showings at the polls. Though the Kabouters’ accomplishments included the creation of an impressive array of non-electoral, grassroots, and egalitarian counter-institutions, the movement began with a municipal electoral campaign and ended with a campaign for the national parliament. This was a result of their innovative use of the electoral system as a central forum for their guerrilla theatre media strategy.
