This ethnographic study explores the enduring presence of Slab City, an openly non-capitalist and anarchic community situated on a decommissioned military base in the Sonoran Desert. Based on two weeks of immersive fieldwork, I examine how this ideologically diverse population, alienated from mainstream US society, creates new lifeways in a hostile environment. The study analyzes the ambiguous spatiotemporal boundaries, highlighting the significance of the "Dark Thirty" event-time index and the social categorization of residents as Slabbers, snowbirds, and tourists. I then elaborate on the peculiar cash economy, arguing that the moral economy orients the cash economy, emphasizing the collective provisioning of food and water, pricing practices contrary to supply and demand determination, and resistance to surplus value extraction. Crucially, the study suggests that to live anarchically entails a moral economy of collective action. Further, the research explores the creative-affirmation of values through a Nietzschean reading of value in Slab City, exemplified by the transvaluation of "trash" into artistic expressions and the will to potentiate a multiplicity of non-normative lifeways. I argue that the transvaluation of bourgeois garbage to anarchic art is an analogous expression of Slabbers' affirmation of lifeways disallowed by hegemonic US society, constituting what I refer to as social art. In concluding, I suggest that Slab City embodies a "field of coexistence," a dynamic assemblage of diverse value-cliques interacting through adjustment, responsivity, and the continual creation of new values. I close by offering a reconceptualization of anarchism as an ongoing process of "anarchic becoming," highlighting it as a social art.
Bailey Hauswurz (2024) studied this question.