The Taborite communities that commit slow suicide are contemporaries of communities of Guanches murdered by mercantile Catholics. The Guanches are the last free inhabitants of Atlantic Ocean islands called Canaries, the first non-Europeans exterminated by seekers of Fortunate Isles.
The Guanche communities were previously visited by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Muslims, yet they survived until a Norman adventurer called Bethencourt settled among them at the time when Rector Jan Hus refused to sell indulgences. By the last Hussite extinguish the unintended consequences of the Rector’s refusal, the Guanches are on their way to extinction. The hospitable Guanches, like the radical Taborites, are not allowed to live in Eden.
A... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Escape from death in a gas chamber or a Pogrom, or incarceration in a concentration camp, may give a thoughtful and capable writer, Solzhenitsyn for example, profound insights into many of the central elements of contemporary existence, but such an experience does not, in itself, make Solzhenitsyn a thinker, a writer, or even a critic of concentration camps; it does not, in itself, confer any special powers. In another person the experience might lie dormant as a potentiality, or remain forever meaningless, or it might contribute to making the person an ogre. In short, the experience is an indelible part of the individual’s past but it does not determine his future; the individual is free to choose his future; he is even free to choos... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “Be Realists,
Demand the Impossible!”
This slogan, developed in May by revolutionaries in France, flies in the face of common sense, especially the “common sense” of American corporate-military propaganda. What happened in May also flies in the face of official American “common sense.” In fact, in terms of American “common sense,” much of what happens in the world every day is impossible. It can’t happen. If it does happen, then the official “common sense” is nonsense: it is a set of myths and fantasies. But how can common sense be nonsense? That’s impossible.
To demonstrate that anything is possible, this essay will place some of the myths alongsid... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) “Heretics are always more dangerous than enemies,” concluded a Yugoslav philosopher after analyzing the repression of Marxist intellectuals by the Marxist regime of Poland. (S. Stojanovic, in Student, Belgrade, April 9, 1968, p. 7.)
In Yugoslavia, where “workers’ self-management” has become the official ideology, a new struggle for popular control has exposed the gap between the official ideology and the social relations which it claims to describe. The heretics who exposed this gap have been temporarily isolated; their struggle has been momentarily suppressed. The ideology of “self-management” continues to serve as a mask for a commercial-technocratic bureaucracy which has successfully conce... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Background
Yippies
The whole thing started at the end of last year, when some “kids with hair” founded the Youth International Party (which made them YIPpies), decided to run a pig for the presidency of the United States of America, and began to prepare a Festival of Life as a response to the Democratic Party’s Convention of Death in Chicago.
The Yippie candidate was nominated in February, 1968. Yippie militants Jerry Rubin and Ed Sanders presented Pigasus to the nominating convention as “the next President of the United States.” (Chicago Seed, Vol. 2, No. 11)
According to Rubin, “The Republican Party has nominated a pig for President and a pig for Vise-President.”
&ld... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) According to economists whose theories currently prevail in America, economics has replaced political economy, and economics deals with scarcity, prices, and resource allocation. In the definition of Paul Samuelson, “economics or political economy, as it used to be called, is the study of how men and society choose, with or without the use of money, to employ scarce productive resources, which could have alternative uses, to produce various commodities over time and distribute them for consumption, now and in the future, among various people and groups in society.”[1] According to Robert Campbell, “One of the central preoccupations of economics has always been what determines price.”[2] In the words of another expert... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Nationalism was proclaimed dead several times during the present century:
the First World War, when the last empires of Europe, the Austrian and the Turkish, were broken up into self-determined nations, and no deprived nationalists remained, except the Zionists;
after the Bolshevik coup d’etat, when it was said that the bourgeoisie’s struggles for self-determination were henceforth superseded by struggles of workingmen, who had no country;
after the military defeat of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, when the genocidal corollaries of nationalism had been exhibited for all to see, when it was thought that nationalism as creed and as practice was permanently discredited.
Yet f... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On February 24th, 1969, a radical student was arrested at her home early in the morning and taken to the Kalamazoo Jail. She was charged with “assault and battery” for defending herself from the insistent harassment and insults of a student who opposed her POLITICS: he insulted her because she had dared to question a Political Science Professor and had tried to PROVOKE DISCUSSION among students in a university. The Political Science Professor did not answer the questions she raised; he responded with VIOLENCE: he had her summoned to a Dean and a Disciplinary Board to suspend her from school for “disrupting” his class, and he proudly announced that she would be arrested by the Police FOR VIOLENCE against his “go... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) TAPED NARRATOR: (Sound of rewinding tape. Then:) ...hostility still survived, it was only a diminishing residue. At last the isolated fragments were unified into a community, a (Stop)
(Phone rings. TONI enters from right)
TONI (on phone): Yes — Yes, I’m her sister — What hospital? —
Oh my god! — Wait while I get a pencil. Could you tell me the wing and room number again? I’ll be right there. (hangs up. Shouts to right) Olympia!
VOICE OF OLYMPIA: Telephone for me?
TONI: No, it’s Donna. She’s in the hospital. She was hit by a car.
VOICE OF OLYMPIA: Really?
TONI: She tried to commit suicide!
VOICE OF OLYMPIA: I’ll tell Philip. Maybe he’ll be interested.
(TONI throws penci... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) INTRODUCTION
Man as History‑Maker
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it. — Karl Marx
For C. Wright Mills, the most important issue of political reflection—and of political action—in our time is the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social and institutional means of structural change.[1] The problem of social change, of revolutionary practice, occupies a central place in Mills’ writings, which stretch over a period of two decades. For Mills, this is not a speculative problem; it is not a subject for contemplation. It is an intensely practical and personal problem. It raises questions about the relation of th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Yarostan’s eighth letter
Dear Sophia,
Your victory is complete. I never dreamed the passion you just described lay below the surface of the person I knew twenty years ago. I was wrong. My outlook didn’t allow me to see below the surface. I was near-sighted; I still am. Mirna, Yara, your letter, all the events taking place around me are making me suspect I’ve been viewing the world through opaque glass. The frame of reference I acquired from Titus and Luisa and from comrades I met during two long prison terms suddenly seems inadequate; real people seem to move outside its boundaries. More is breaking down and more is rising up than I’m able to take m. Perhaps I never dreamed of anything more than a differen... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
One can only approach with trepidation the task of writing an introduction to a text that takes as one of its themes the ways in which forewords domesticate or recuperate the works they introduce. To forestall accusations of proving this thesis, the introductory remarks that follow will therefore attempt to open up debate rather than limit it through imposing a supposedly definitive reading of the two essays published in this volume.
These essays are important first and foremost because they are the last works of Fredy Perlman.[1] Written during February and March 1985, and subsequently typeset by the author, they were published in the October 1985 issue of the radical primitivist Detroit periodical, the Fifth Est... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Chapter 1: Generation of Revolutionaries
Plunder and war continue to spread across the world. They are stuff of past and present history. The greater the material product of society the greater the plunder; the larger the stock of productive forces the more extensive the destruction.
It is not the task of this manual to examine the plunder or the destruction, but to treat contemporary forms of resisting them. Among forms of resistance only two will be examined: a form which has become established as the modern model of revolution, and resistance which takes the form of a continually changing response to continually developing productive forces.
It is the task of the manual to apply the twentieth century model of revolut... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Happy the age and happy the times on which the ancients bestowed the name of golden, not because gold, which in this iron age of ours is rated so highly, was attainable without labor in those fortunate times, but rather because the people of those days did not know those two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were held in common. No man, to gain his common sustenance, needed to make any greater effort than to reach up his hand and pluck it from the strong oaks, which literally their sweet and savory fruit. Clear springs and running rivers offered him their sweet and limpid water in glorious abundance. In clefts of the rock and hollow trees the careful and provident bees formed their commonwealth, offering to every hand wit... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The premeditated poisoning of human beings, of soils and of other living species can only by the grossest hypocrisy be considered an “accident”. Only the willfully blind can claim that this consequence of Technical Progress was “unforeseen”.
The poisoning and removal of this continent’s living inhabitants for the sake of “higher entities” may have begun in Eastern Pennsylvania, but not during the past few weeks.
Eleven score years ago, in the region currently being poisoned by radiation from Three Mile Island, speculators with names like Franklin, Morris, Washington and Hale hid their names behind facades such as the Vandalia Company and the Ohio Company. These companies had one purpos... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The everyday practical activity of tribesmen reproduces, or perpetuates, a tribe. This reproduction is not merely physical, but social as well. Through their daily activities the tribesmen do not merely reproduce a group of human beings; they reproduce a tribe, namely a particular social form within which this group of human beings performs specific activities in a specific manner. The specific activities of the tribesmen are not the outcome of “natural” characteristics of the men who perform them, the way the production of honey is an outcome of the “nature” of a bee. The daily life enacted and perpetuated by the tribesman is a specific social response to particular material and historical conditions.
The eve... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Birth and journey
The baby’s cry pulled me out of my grandmother’s mask as if I were marrow that was sucked out of a bone. On the night when Sigenak, Wakaya, Isador and Aptegizhek gathered at Nizokwe’s lodge and told of the death of Nanikibi on the field of fallen trees, I was no longer in Nizokwe’s lodge, and I was no longer Katabwe. I was a tiny beginning in Namakwe’s lodge next door, shrieking alongside Cakima, kicking tiny feet and waving tiny arms. I knew nothing of what had happened, nothing of the people in Namakwe’s lodge nor of those next door. My memories would all be given to me later, when I was ready to accept the gifts. On that night I knew nothing of the spot where I lay, nothing of Tios... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) I
The Egocrat — Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Kim Ii Sung — is not an accident or an aberration or an irruption of irrationality; he is a personification of the relations of the existing social order.
II
The Egocrat is initially an individual, like everyone else: mute and powerless in this society without community or communication, victimized by the spectacle, “the existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue, the self-portrait of power in the epoch of its totalitarian management of the conditions of existence.” (Debord) Repelled by the spectacle, he longs for “the liberated human being, a being who is at once a social being and a Gemeinwesen.” (Camatte) If... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Publication Details
Worker-Student Action Committees was first published by its authors in Kalamazoo (Michigan) in the spring of 1969 and then reprinted by Black & Red (Detroit) in 1970. (Printed at the Detroit Print Co-op which Perlman co-founded).
The articles making up Part I were all written in Paris between May and July 1968 except for the last which was completed in the US. Some of the articles were published at the time in different journals — details are given in the notes for those articles. In the pamphlet no previous publication details are given for the first article The Second French Revolution but according to the bibliography in ’Having Little, Being Much’ an article with that title was pub... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)