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Title: Rebel Worker 6 Author: Rebel Worker group Date: May Day, 1966 Language: en Topics: anarchist periodicals, Rebel Worker (Chicago) Source: Scanned from original
[unnumbered page]
The Rebel Worker
A Revolutionary Journal published by members of the Industrial Workers
of the World
Address subs and correspondence to:
The Rebel Worker
c/o Solidarity Bookshop
1947 North Larrabee
Chicago, Ill. 60614
This issue published in London, England, May Day, 1966
Cover by Charles RADCLIFFE
Pierre MABILLE was a leading surrealist theoretician of the 1930s and
1940s, author of La Conscience Lumineuse, Egregores, Le MIROIR du
Merveilleux, etc. Another excerpt from this last work (âThe Destruction
of the Worldâ) will appear in the forthcoming Rebel Worker pamphlet
Surrealism & Revolution.
Karl MARX was a 19^(th) century socialist whose works have exerted
considerable influence on the revolutionary movement.
Kenneth PATCHEN is an un-American poet exiled in the United States.
Benjamin PERET was a surrealist poet and theoretician who fought in the
ranks of the C.N.T. during the Spanish Revolution; author of Mort aux
Vaches and many other works.
Archie SHEPP is a poet, playwright and one of the major tenor sax voices
amongst the current jazz avant-garde. He has a number of albums
available both in England and the U.S.âFire Music (Impulse A86) is
particularly recommended.
This is the first English âeditionâ of The Rebel Worker. Everyone who
wants to put out further issues in England, and/or is interested in
helping to do so should write-to the address below. We would also
welcome letters and comments on this issue, as well as addresses of
bookshops and individuals who wish to distribute copies of The Rebel
Worker.
Charles RADCLIFFE
13 Redcliffe Road
London SW10
Anything appearing in The Rebel Worker may be freely reprinted,
translated, or adapted, even without indicating its source, and we
reserve the same freedom for ourselves regarding other publications.
This is the Chicago printing of Rebel Worker 6 (June, 1966), originally
published in London on May Day, exactly two years since our first issue.
Response to the London issue has been encouraging, both in terms of
sympathetic letteres, subscriptions, and offers of future collaboration
as well as the outcries and disdainful comments of traditional radicals
and liberals. (One English cat said it was the first revolutionary paper
which actually frightened him, Another, a member of the Young Communist
League, said he would have none of these âlittle sects,â adding that he
at least, belonged to a âwell-organized groupâ!) Let us note here that
the London Solidarity Group are graciously distributing 100 copies of
the London printing for us; this is the group which publishes
Solidarity, one of the best revolutionary periodicals in the world
todayâwrite to Bob Potter, 197 Kingâs Cross Road, London W.C.1; sample
copies are available from us for 15 cents.
Charles Radcliffe, our London soul-brother, has written to us that
further issues of an incandescent-carbonated journal sharing similar
scandalous preoccupations with the Rebel Worker will appear there with
the name Heatwave, adding its own delirious lucidity, vengeful humor and
millenarian sensibility to the revolutionary movement in England.
Heatwave #1 shall appear in 3â4 weeksâfor details write to
Charles Radcliffe, 13 Redcliff a Road, London SW 10. Copies will, of
course, be available from us at 25 cents each.
The London printing carried a last-minute-type cover, hastily prepared
by Radcliffe portraying a bearded bombe-toting anarchist in a balloon;
we have decided to use here, instead, an engraving (âThe Temptation of
St. Anthonyâ) by Radcliffeâs distant relative, the Flemish anarchist
Pieter Bruegal the Elder. H. Arthur Klein, in his Graphic Works of
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (Dover Books, paperback) writes about this
particular engraving: âIn its drastic criticism of the conditions of
both the Church and State, this may well be the most âoutspokenâ of
Bruegells graphic works. Corruption and decay beset both the State (the
one-eyed head below) and the Church (the rotting fish above).â (p. 268)
This engraving is for us a pretty accurate presentation of contemporary
reality, although we feel that the curious figure in the lower
right-hand corner (who) happens to be St. Anthony) is now historically
and poetically outmoded, to say the least, and would perhaps be replaced
best today by a passionate saboteur, armed to the teeth with mad love
and the uncontrollable desire to be free.
On the back we have reprinted the text of a leaflet issued by The
Anarchists of Chicago (April, 1966). The only other additions to this
issue, aside from the cover, are this page of notes and the message from
René Cravel, on the other side.
The time is coming when seas of boiling rage will reverse the icy
current of rivers, overflow and fertilize, fathoms deep, a crusted,
petrified soil, tear away frontiers, uproot churches, clean the hills of
bourgeois complacency, decapitate the headlands of aristocratic
insensitivity, drown the obstacles, the exploiting minority set in the
way of the mass of the exploited, restore humanity to its future by
freeing it from outdated institutions, religious fears, jingoistic
mysticism and all that constitutes and consecrates the evils of the
majority for the benefit of the two-legged sharks, their mates and the
whole gang.
âRenĂ© CREVEL
This sixth issue of The Rebel Worker is being produced in London,
several thousand miles from its customary home in Chicago. We hope this
issue, and subsequent ones, will help give our ideas a wider audience
than they have had so far in Britain.
The Rebel Worker is an incendiary and wild-eyed journal of free
revolutionary research and experiment devoted principally to the task of
clearing a way through the jungle of senile dogmas and aiming towards a
revolutionary point of view fundamentally different from all traditional
concepts. We believe that almost all political propaganda is useless,
being based on assumptions which are false and situations which do not
exist. We are tired of the irrelevant concepts and the old platitudes.
The revolutionary movement, in theory and in practice, must be rebuilt
from scratch.
Many of us around The Rebel Worker are members of the Industrial Workers
of the World (IWW), once one of the largest and most powerful
rank-and-file revolutionary organisations the world has ever seen. We
have joined the IWW because of its beautiful traditions of direct
action, rank-And-file control, sabotage, humor, spontaneity and
unmitigated class struggle.
It is those principles that constitute our editorial basis, but our task
is not limited to mere recruitment. Our role is: to promote âWhatever
increases the confidence, the autonomy, the initiative, the
participation, the solidarity, the equalitarian tendencies and the
self-activity of the masses and whatever assists in their
demystification.â We want and support revolutionary direct action on
every levelâin the factories, on the docks, in the fields, in schools,
in colleges, in offices and in the streets. But this is not enough.
Revolutionary action should be accompanied by theoretical understanding.
The revolution must be made by men, women and children who know what
they are doing. Consciousness and desire must cease to be perceived as
contradictions.
The Revolution, for us, cannot be limited to economic and political
changes; these are urgent and absolutely necessary, it is true, but we
see them as a beginning rather than as an end; we see social liberation
as the essential prerequisite, the first steps, in the total liberation
of man.
It is especially to young peopleâyoung workers, students drifters,
draft-dodgers, school dropoutsâto whom we address ourselves and our
solidarity: You are one of the largest and most oppressed sectors of our
society, and it is you who must make the Revolution.
What we want, and what The Rebel Worker is about, in short, is
Freedomââthe only cause worth serving.â **
Ben COVINGTON, Charles RADCLIFFE, Franklin and Penelope ROSEMONT
Nat TURNER, Emillano ZAPATA
When the anarchist poet Jeff Nuttall spoke at the final rally of this
yearâs CND easter march, he added new dimensions to the usual ritual,
just as did the giant political puppet theatre which showed politicians
as they really areânot just without conscience but small, grovelling
men, sustained only by the persecuting knowledge of their own vacant
treason to their humanity. By calling for the destruction of the
Ministry of Defence Jeff Nuttall gave intention to an affair which had
none of its own. By speaking he let it be known that any number of
people saw in CND and its charmless entourage of parliamentary vipers
nothing so much as the sell-out of a once genuine popular movement
against nuclear war to the so-called immediate imperatives of political
relevance and political advance.
Since the CND leadership made public its refusal to challenge
societyâafter the Spies for Peace revelations in 1963âthe Campaign has
lived on borrowed time. The complex manoeuvres to present a libertarian
image while denying to anarchists the right to speak at the rally, the
dummy-protests and the dummy-members of Parliament are not going to save
it. CND is doomed. It is time for a young movement which addresses the
contemporary reality, a movement which will challenge every tiny aspect
of our war-sustained society, even unto the last public utility, which
will militarise the dissatisfaction of almost every young person in this
country. For dissatisfaction is not confined to politics; it extends
into every street, club and classroom.
It must be encouraged in its every aspect; its active expression may be
welded into a revolutionary weapon which will strike fear into the
deepest recesses of our society. Imagine briefly: if every time the
police decided to victimise young people they were faced with the united
fury of such people, if young people were to turn on their attackers
with all the venom their frustration could muster. Then we might talk of
protest.
Such a movement would support the emotional eruptions of all youth;
would learn to sanction the outrages of youth recognising in them a
kindred spiritâalbeit a bolder oneâin the rejection of the spiritual
death of a society which has attempted too long and too successfully to
postpone the irrefutable logic of its indifferenceâdestruction. This
society, if we will it, can drown in its own corrupted blood. It can die
in its tracksâon the streets, in the clubs, in the factories. The new
revolution may be obscene and blasphemous; it must deface the power
structure when it cannot destroy it; the criterion is defiance not
discipline.
The new revolution must support every last insurrection of the mind and
body against this bloodfed societyâour movement is symbolised by the
bomb-thrower, the deserter, the delinquent, the hitch-hiker, the mad
lover, the school drop-out, the wildcat striker, the rioter and the
saboteur.
This year 500 anarchists caused a ânear riotâ in Trafalgar Square, until
the âplatformâ capitulated to their demand for a speaker. Significantly
it was Nuttall who spoke on their behalf, rather than an âEstablishment
anarchistâ (as Peace News delights to term those comrades who are old
enough to have sold out but have not done so). The anarchists were
roundly condemned by the national press. The peace movement, as
represented by Peace News, condemned them in more sophisticated fashion.
(The dedication of the liberals to respectability has so clouded their
vision that they no longer care about the effect of their actions, only
that they should not be attacked for them). The relevance of the action
of these predominantly young anarchists is obvious. Their voices and
actions exploded their precise consciousness of the fact that
respectability finally involves simply this: Clamber into your own
arsehole and quietly die.
âCharles RADCLIFFE
Precursors of the theory & practice of total liberation
Franklin ROSEMONT
It is clear that man has lost his comfortable foothold in the
provincial, one-dimensional flatlands where bourgeois society originally
built its little mental world. The peace-loving resident of the suburbs,
for instance, used to looking outside and seeing only his overfed
neighbor or somebodyâs excuse for an automobile, now sees through his
window only the most terrible darkness, the most violent natural
calamities, the most permanent insurrections. He may try, fond as he is
of wearing a heavy overcoat of ignorance wherever he goes, to lose
himself before his television set, or in an uninspired affair with his
best friendâs wife; he may even succeed in utterly exterminating the
last traces of the free play of his imagination by utilising any of the
various means lying conveniently along a well-trod path of emotional and
intellectual exhaustion: golf, for instance, or watching baseball. But
such efforts are useless. Every scream of protest and genuine anger,
every signal of true resistance, whether expressed in wildcat strikes,
in certain strains of pop music, in violence against the police on
anti-war demonstrations, in ghetto uprisings, in the blues, in jazz, in
poetry or in guerilla warfare against the stateâwholehearted revolt in
any and every formâgives the lie to the fact and hypocritical
complacency of those who cower in fear behind locked doors, afraid of
the people in the streets, afraid of their own children, afraid of
everything that gets in the way of their stupidity, afraidâabove all of
any vestige of a human being concealed within themselves.
It is also clear, however, that the presently emerging movement of
protest is too little conscious of the implications of its actions, too
unsure of whence it came, where it is going and why. Certainly one of
the most important tasks of a revolutionary journal is to expand,
broaden and deepen this consciousness. The motives, inspirations and
aspirations of the present movement, of which The Rebel Worker
constitutes one of the more adventurous forces, cannot be understood
properly without a complete re-valuation of revolutionary values as well
as a vast reassessment of the whole revolutionary tradition, necessarily
involving research into, and reinterpretation of, all levels and all
varieties of past struggles. This requires the complete repudiation of
those pitiful âradicalsâ who look to history only to justify themselves
and their actions with the âsacred texts,â and who thus demonstrate only
their weakness and blindness in confronting the reality of today. It
goes without saying that we reject, absolutely, both those who choose to
hide themselves in the past, or attempt to impose the past upon the
future (reactionaries of all traditional varieties) and those who
manipulate the past to conceal or distort the true nature of the present
(liberals, social democrats, elitist âsocialists,â conservatives, etc.).
âIn matters of revolt,â as AndrĂ© Breton once said, âone should not need
ancestors.â It is no less true that we must redefine the past according
to the needs of the future determined by the situation of the present.
If there are a few people of the past whose words are still meaningful
for us today, it is obvious that they cannot be the same ones presented
to us for our admiration in school. Teachers, after all, in class
society, are usually little more than cops, and who can respect the same
things as a cop? The most relevant voices of the past are not the ones
sanctified in the bourgeois mausoleum of heroes. The degree to which
they are acceptable to this society is the degree to which they are
useless to us. Nor can we hope to find most of them in the genealogy
cherished by the traditional left, whose dogmatism, sectarianism,
humorlessness, elitism and myopia we reject here as in everything else.
The revolutionary movement, presently rebuilding itself from scratch,
will have to re-envision its history from scratch as well. In
particular, I think it is necessary now to give special consideration to
precisely those past revolutionaries who have been most consistently
ignored by the traditional left. It is also essential that we do not
seek from them exclusively political or economic or even sociological
revelations. âIn periods of political inactivity,â as fellow worker
Lawrence DeCoster wrote not long ago, âthe greatest hope of
revolutionaries lies in non-political activity.â (Of course we must also
work like hell to revive serious rank-and-file political activity,
primarily on the shop-floor level and in the streets where it matters
most.) Today, with the resources of psychoanalysis, surrealism,
anthropology, the physical and biological sciences being placed
increasingly at the service of the revolution, we know that certain
allegedly ânon-politicalâ works of the past are more thoroughly
subversive, more liberating, more revolutionary than the most obviously
âpoliticalâ works of the same period. Every effort of man to realize his
dreams in total freedom is revolutionary. But politics, by itself, no
matter how revolutionary, remains a partial truth.
Let us note here a few of those whom we can unhesitatingly affirm as
precursors of our own theoretical and practical activity, a few
desperate enchanters whose magical lucidity still burns in our eyes
today, a few lone soul brothers of whom we can still speak in connection
with freedom. Academic and journalistic parasites may attempt to obscure
them with their false elucidations, or ignore their work through the
ignoble âconspiracy of silence,â but nothing will stop us from pouring
into the crucibles of the revolution these splendidly subversive
inspirations and implacable dreams:
It was Aragon who, before his Stalinization, observed that just as Marx
had laid bare the economic contradictions of society, and Freud the
psychological contradictions, so Lautréamont threw into a dazzling new
light the ethical contradictions: the whole problem of morality, not to
mention such other problems as the animalization of the intellect and
the purpose of literature, assume with Lautréamont an excruciating
significance next to which most of the philosophical babbling of his
contemporaries seem to us today as nothing more than a handful of lies.
The importance of Lautreamont on the ideological development of
surrealism is second to none. His work has been called âa veritable
bible of the unconscious;â the validity of many of his discoveries and
revelations were subsequently demonstrated by Freudian psychoanalysis.
It can probably be generally agreed that the liberal-humanist pantheon
has, in the last century and especially during this century, crumbled to
ruins; and it is Lautreamont whose criticism of it was most thoroughly,
most devastatingly to the point, and who, moreover, best indicated a way
out of the morass of confusion by rallying around the âreality of
desireâ which, theoretically elaborated by surrealists, remains the key
to our most revolutionary aspirations.
The traditional left of the 20^(th) century has almost invariably
consigned the many so-called âutopian socialistsâ to a position
amounting to historical irrelevance, assuming them to be of interest
exclusively for their influence on Marx and Engels, or Proudhon and
Bakunin. Critical re-examinations of utopians by revolutionaries have
occasionally appeared, and sometimes they are very good (see, for
instance, Marie-Louise Berneriâs Journey Through Utopia, which discusses
not only the best-known utopians but also Winstanley, Diderot, Sade,
William Morris, etc.). But much more still needs to be done. In
particular the fantastic and visionary works of Charles Fourier (whose
delirious cosmology and âpassional psychology,â no less than his
penetrating social analysis, intrigued Marx and later Trotsky as well as
many anarchists) deserve sympathetic and serious study. Fourier, more
than any of the other utopians, pioneered many of our own
preoccupations. He was very aware, for instance, of the central problem
of love and the crucial role of human passions in social life. He
insisted on the necessity of completely changing the very fabric of life
to meet the needs of desire. The implications of his theory of analogy
suggest a possible new development in revolutionary theory. His
Importance, in any case, cannot be limited to the experimental rural
phalansteries (Fourierâs name for communes) of his disciplesâwhich are
important too, of course, but in a very different wayânor to his most
immediate influences on later socialists: it is above all Fourier the
poet and seer who interests us today.
The theoretical and imaginative work of the Marquis de Sade, along with
the practical efforts of the celebrated Enragés, can be considered, from
the revolutionary point of view, the highest points reached during the
French Revolution (and the so-called Age of Reason). The rising
bourgeoisie was anti-feudal, anti-monarch, anti-superstition: but its
talk of liberty and reason soon reduced itself to platitudes to be
carved by the State above the doors of prisonsâit was a limited freedom,
freedom defined to meet the needs of only one comparatively small class
of exploiters. The Enragés struggled for a deeper revolution,
representing the class needs of the proletariat: this effort was to
receive its theoretical analysis and justification later, first in
certain workersâ papers and eventually in the monumental contributions
of Marx and Engels. Sade, too, realized the inherent weaknesses of the
revolution (see particularly his Frenchmen! One More Effort If you Wish
to be Republicans, which was, incidentally, reprinted as revolutionary
propaganda in the struggles of 1848). He was aware of the social
conflictâthe class struggleâbut brought to his analysis a consciousness
of other problems (love, sexuality, desire, crime, religion, etc.) which
were not to receive systematic exploration until surrealism. His works,
which have at various times been reduced to providing tea-party chatter
for senile litterateurs, and are currently enjoying a paperback revival
(doubtless for being âclassic pornographyâ), should now be read by
everyone struggling for a revolution which will not end in a new set of
chains.
The editions of his own works printed by William Blake are highly prized
by cretinous bourgeois rare book collectors (let us spit in their faces
and note in passing that everything he wrote spit in their faces too).
Probably the greatest poet in the English language, most radicals seem
to know nothing about him in connection with revolutionary politics
other than the fact that he hid Thomas Paine, who at the time was wanted
by the British government. It is insufficient to add that, in England at
least, his poem âLondonâ has become a âsocialistâ hymn: for Blakeâs
importance lies far beyond any isolated minor work which can be unfairly
harnessed to the anti-working-class needs of the Labour Party. Let us
note only that Blake was, for a time, associated with the circle that
included William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and that he and his
works are thoroughly imbued with the revolutionary ideas of his epoch.
But Blake saw much farther than any of the other English radicals of his
time, and his worksâwhich are only now really becoming active influences
on the revolutionary movementâbear witness to the extraordinary depth of
his perception and the prophetic surreality of his vision. The
Revolution, too, will become ânon-Euclidean:â common sense, already
abandoned in almost every significant contemporary thought current
(non-Euclidean geometry, non-Maxwellian physics, non-Newtonian
mechanics, probability theory, psychoanalysis, general relativity
theory, surrealism, etc.) must give way in revolutionary politics, as
well, to less limited points of view, to superior methods of knowledge.
Blake cut through the superficial rationalism of his day with the axe of
poetry and vision. It is true that the semi-religious symbolism he often
employed has detracted somewhat from the truly subversive,
anti-religious and liberating message of his works; but compared to his
contemporariesâand that was a revolutionary age!âBlake was the brightest
star in a cloudy, moonless night.
Professional literary critics and academics today are practically
unanimous in their rejection of that extraordinary profusion of works of
the late 1700s and early 1800s usually known as âGothic novels.â These
tales of haunted and crumbling castles, apparitions in the night,
maddening lust, pacts with the devil and bleeding nuns are quite
evidently not suited to the refined tastes of our numerous literature
experts, who dismiss the entire genre as âmusty claptrapâ or with some
such other derisive appellation. Like most matters of interest to us,
the academics put them down, utterly missing the point. These works,
like the real meaning of the revolution, are simply beyond their
understanding. What makes the Gothic novels of special importance is
both the immense popularity they enjoyed at the time of their
publication (they were the best-sellers of their day) and also the great
influence they exerted upon some of the most brilliant and critical
minds of the younger generations: Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Sade, Hugo,
Baudelaire, the Bronte sisters, etc. Very few works of any period enjoy
this double privelege: it was, I believe, André Breton who first pointed
out that these works were highly successful expressions of the latent
content of the period in which they were Written (i.e., the days of the
bourgeois revolutions). Now certainly one of the greatest weaknesses of
the traditional left has been its neglect of the problems of the
individual, and human personality in general; these have been ignored
through the exclusive preoccupation with social problems, analysis of
which in turn has been weakened through ignorance of psychology. There
has been, for instance, little investigation of the psychological
changes occurring during periods of great social upheavals (or for that
matter, little investigation of the psychology of factory workers). It
is obvious that people who support reactionary candidates in bourgeois
elections do not think the same way as do the people who take over the
factories and smash the government. Workers as a class cannot make a
really successful revolution (that is, one leading to complete freedom)
unless they are individually, psychologically, as well as socially,
capable of it. That is why it is important for revolutionaries to
reinforce spontaneity, creativity, self-reliance, independence and
rebellion of individual workers as well as of the working class. (This
is also one aspect of the relevance and importance of sabotage, In
individual act serving the needs of the class.) Obviously much more work
must be done along these lines. Meanwhile, we should re-study the
imaginative works of sensitive writers of the past who, more or less
automatically, documented some aspects of this Problem. In particular,
the greatest of the Gothic novels (Horace Walpoleâs Castle of Otranto,
Lewisâs The Monk, Maturinâs Melmoth the Wanderer) offer us valuable
testimony in tracing the genesis and evolution of individual
revolutionary sensibility, the latent and personal drama unfolding with
the manifest and general cataclysm.
Of course we have only penetrated the surface of a hardly-explored sea,
to which no limits can yet be assigned. Living, as we do, in a
civilization rapidly falling to ruin, it is up to us to trace the
trajectory of its destruction, to propel it further along this path, to
read the prophecies of tomorrowâs dawn with a defiantly critical eye, to
explore all the unknown worlds inside and outside of man, and,
eventually, to pool our collective resources with our billions of fellow
workers and soul brothers in the really fundamental tasks of the
Revolution: to realize our desires, and âto rebuild human
understanding,â as Breton put it, âfrom scratch.â
We must remember that we are in the preliminary stages of our
experiment. We know that we cannot build a new revolutionary movement
with the skeletons of the old. The old left has taught us very little of
what we want to know; we must learn to teach ourselves. Every
exploration must be the preface to several others. Every new dream must
lead to new actions.
We are children, we are savages; we are dangerous and godless. We
possess an extraordinary ruthlessness, a profound sense of the
marvellous, an aggressive consciousness of our dreams. And, in our
hands, the dialectical materialist conceptions of history and desire
become a beautiful red and black wolf to set at the door of those who
deny us our freedom.
Penelope ROSEMONT
âHumor is not resigned; it is rebellious. It signifies the triumph not
only of the ego but also of the pleasure principle...â
âFreud
âBeautiful as the fortuitous encounter, upon a dissecting table, of a
sewing-machine and an umbrella.â
âLautrĂ©amont
Humor, which has long been neglected by many so-called revolutionaries
in their attempts to prove to themselves that their intentions are
altogether noble and serious (no doubt, also, because of the desolation
and barrenness of their thinking), ought to be given the recognition it
has long deserved and regain its rightful place in the revolutionary
struggle.
The Wobblies have long been recognized for the humor they have
contributed to the class struggle, for instance their use of humor as a
means of lowering the bossâs self-esteem to a minus one, often expressed
in acts of collective sabotage such as the planting of cherry trees
upside down with their roots blowing in the wind. Another famous
incident in the history of revolutionary humor occurred when I.W.W.
construction workers, whose pay had been cut in half, reported for work
the:following day with their shovels similarly cut in half. (The pay was
raised.)
âSabotage is the soul of wit.â (Solidarity, 1913â15).
Besides these examples of on-the-job humor there is the Little Red Song
Book containing such songs as âThe Preacher and the Slaveâ which mocks
the famous religious hymn âIn the Sweet Bye and Byeâ used by the
Starvation Army when it tried to sell its âpie in the sky.â And the
telegram which Joe Hill sent before he was legally murdered, in which he
asked his fellow workers to come get his body because he didnât want to
be âcaught deadâ in Utah... And, aside from being the greatest of the
IWW writers, T-bone Slim is also one of its greatest humorists. (Watch
for reprints of his writings as well as previously unpublished material
in forthcoming issues of The Rebel Worker.)
Humor has vast, as yet only partially realized, powers as a polemical
weapon. Its users can with the least possible effort pull the keystone
out of any argument leaving his opponent standing stunned amid a pile of
bricks. Solidarity, for instance, one of the outposts of revolutionary
humor today, once recommended that non-violent demonstrators âgo limp
and refuse to bleed.â
The movies of the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Bugs Bunny are all
implicitly dangerous to bourgeois society; they express their bitterness
and aggression in humor. They attack society and everything it holds
dear and if you do not leave the movie theatre and destroy the nearest
squad car, itâs your fault, not theirs.
Potential potentates are notorious for their lack of humor and their
total inability to cope with it. The entire functioning of a bureaucracy
depends on the fact that it is taken seriously. The bureaucrat as an
individual usually has little control over the violence which is at the
command of the state. This is functional in that it serves to absolve
him of any guilt which might result from the use of this violence, for
in a bureaucracy as in a firing squad no one really knows who has the
live bullet. Bureaucrats have at their disposal little more than the
prestige, respect and all the trappings of their position. They take
themselves and their positions utterly seriously, and because of this it
is possible to utterly demolish both them personally and also the
sacristy of their office. Humor is the archenemy of prestige!
The most violent and extreme form of humor, known as black humor, has
found its greatest expression in the work of Lautréamont, Alfred Jarry,
Jacques Vaché and Benjamin Péret. A popular, if diluted, variety of
black humor is found in the elephant jokes and âsickâ jokes (What is
black and white and lies in the gutter? A dead nun). An example of
proletarian black humor which originated during the Spanish Revolution
of 1936 is the saying âhang the last politician with the guts of the
last priest.â Unlike other forms of humor, black humor is totally
unacceptable to present society. It has an extremely disturbing effect
because whereas milder wit functions merely to deflate the ego of the
person whom it happens to be used against, black humor threatens it and
devastates it.
It surveys reality, sees through it and exposes it. Black humor releases
all the power of unconscious desire.
Through the adoption of humor as a conscious attitude we can assert
ourselves over the confines of environment, reality, and in effect
topple the whole structure and reassemble it as we wish, thus revealing
a glimpse of the pride which the Revolution will restore to man.
Revolutionaries must be the enemies of realityâthey must be poets and
dreamers with uncontrollable desires that will not be repressed,
sublimated or sidetracked. They must be willing to be ruthless. The
economic change brought by the Revolution is only the first of our
demands: we will not be content with anything less than the total
annihilation of existing reality and the total triumph of Desire.
Pierre MABILLE
From Le Miroir du Merveilleux (excerpt reprinted from the surrealist
review London Bulletin, June 1940)
He who wishes to attain the profoundly marvellous must free images from
their conventional associations, associations always dominated by
utilitarian judgmemts; must learn to see the man behind the social
function, break the scale of so-called moral values, replacing it by
that of sensitive value; surmount taboos, the weight of ancestral
prohibitions, cease to connect the object with the profit one can get
out of it, with the price it has in society, with the action it
commands. This liberation begins when by some means the voluntary
censorship of the bad conscience is lifted, when the mechanisms of the
dream are no longer impeded. A new world then appears where the
blue-eyed passerby becomes a king, where red coral is more precious than
diamond, the toucan more indispensable than the cart-horse. The fork has
left its enemy the knife on the restaurant table, it is now between
Aristotleâs categories and the piano keyboard. The sewing machine,
yielding to an irresistable attraction, has gone off into the fields to
plant beetroot. Holiday world, subject to pleasure, its absolute rule,
everything in it seems gratuitous and yet everything is soon replaced in
accordance with a truer order, deeper reasons, a rigorous hierarchy.
In this mysterious domain which opens before us, where the intellect,
social in its origin and in its destination, has been abandoned, the
traveller experiences an uncomfortable disorientation. The first moments
of amusement or alarm having passed, he must explore the expanse of the
unconscious, boundless as the ocean, likewise animated by contrary
movements. He quickly notices that this unconscious is not homogeneous;
planes stratify as in the material universe, each with their value,
their law, their manner of sequence and their rhythm.
Paraphrasing Hermesâ assertion that âall is below as what is above to
make the miracle of a single thing,â it is permissible to assert that
everything is in us just as that which is outside us so as to constitute
a single reality. In us the diffuse phantoms, the distorted reflections
of actuality, the repressed expressions of unsatisfied desires mingle
with the common and general symbols. From the confused to the simple,
from the glitter of personal emotions to the indefinite perception of
the cosmic drama, the imagination of the dreamer effects its voyage,
unceasingly, it dives to return to the surface, bringing from the depths
to the threshold of consciousness the great blind fish. Nevertheless,
the pearl-fisher comes to find his way amid the dangers and the
currents. He manages to discover his bearings amid the fugitive
landscape bathed in a half-light, where alone a few brilliant points
scintillate. He acquires little by little the mastery of the dark
waters.
But the mind is not content to enjoy the contemplation of the
magnificent images it sees while dreaming, it wishes to translate its
visions, express the new world which it has penetrated, make other men
share therein, realize the inventions that have been suggested to it.
The dream is materialized in writing, in the plastic arts, in the
erection of monuments, in the construction of machines. Nevertheless,
the completed works, the acquired knowledge, leave untouched, if not
keener, the inquietude of man, ever drawn to the quest of individual and
collective finality, to the obsession of breaking down the solitude
which is ours, to the hope of influencing directly the mind of others so
as to modify their sentiments and guide their actions, and, last and
above all, to the desire to realize total love.
Franklin and Penelope ROSEMONT
Paris, March, 1966
The gray pillow decorates the omnivorous moon, upsetting the wizardâs
organ of the electric sidewalk. Later, the silence grows sinister and
delinquent. The old women run frequently, and the monkey loses track of
the crisp cathode. There is a striped squirrel on the roof, and a
staircase on the bridge or bog. The night is as spacious as a sacrificed
mirror, and all I know is that I love you because goldfish are cavernous
and the sea is as singular as a rose.
Meanwhile, the cliffs overlook the visible waves, and the trees are
black with ostriches. The automobiles entice the chairs in the desirable
rain, as if the pedestrians had all recalled their spiral doorbells. The
streets are full of rugs and windows; the shopwindows full of waves. Who
knows what the thunder will be like tomorrow, or the day after? The
wheels are forlorn like the sleeping finger, or the tigers running
loosely on the shore, observed only by the prickly scorpion, who sleeps
with one eye open as wide as a paper and always keeps another eye
bearded next to his winding ear.
Finally, the woman cuts open the resourceful pendulum. There are the
usual uncanny screams, the bloodstains on the sky, astonished limits in
the dimly-lit ocean. The wolves are rheumatic. The house burns foolishly
like a sacrificial accordion. The deceptive goat lies in the osteopathâs
bed. Every door leads to a new thief; but the blind adjectives own all
the pencils,:Every old winner is an alphabetical loser, every red table
a letter of white sugar. Fallacious pipes are always rare, and I love
you as madly as the sky is contagious.
Paris, March, 1966
Ben COVINGTON
I first heard about The Who before they were The Who; just another mod r
ânâ b group, playing one of Central Londonâs most fiercely mod clubs,
but apparently doomed to remaining unknown outside a small circle of
fans, despite their defiantly hip nameâthe High Numbers. I didnât hear
any more about them for nearly two years, when suddenly a rash of
posters appeared in Central London advertising a new groupâThe Who. The
posters were superbâheavily shadowed, crudely dramatic and featuring The
Who lead guitarist, Pete Townshend, his arm raised in an arc over his
head, his guitar barely visible. A few months before they had been
unknown, under the new name, outside the Shepherds Bush area but
gradually the news spread that the Marquee Clubâwhence came, among
others, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, the Moody Blues and Manfred
Mannâhad a fantastic new group. They were taken up by Melody Maker, the
hippest British music weekly, and shortly afterwards by Record Mirror.
Despite the enthusiasm of the fansâthe musical press, for the most part
managed little more than perplexed astonishmentâThe Whoâs first record,
âI Canât Explainâ, one of the best pop records of 1965, didnât really
move nationally at first though it created enough interest in the group
for their explosive views about pop to gain some attention. More people
went to the Marquee. Provincial fans carried back the news. The record
took off, finally making the top ten. When The Who made their second
record, âAnyway, Anyhow, Anywhereâ, they were again able to go almost
into the Top Ten. The weird feedback sound effects, the carefully
cultivated Pop Art imageâthe wearing of jackets made from the Union Jack
and sweat shirts embroidered with the free-form sound effects of
American comics, as well as military insigniaâand later their
championship of auto-destructive pop guaranteed them attention in a
world where long hair was becoming more a recommendation for respectable
employment than a mark of depravity.
The Whoâs stage act is a shattering event. They start off quietly but
providing the audience is with them they soon turn on the special
effects. The singer, Roger Daltrey, legs slightly apart, torso jutting
forward, begins to smash his microphone with a tambourine, first gently
and then with increasing fury until the amplifiers howl. Alternatively
he crashes a hand-mike against the cymbals or screams harshly into the
microphone, leaning forward at an absurd angle, his body straight, held
above the stage by the microphone stand. While singing he cavorts round
the stage in the curiously paralytic dance of a reigning mod.
Occasionally he blows harmonica, furiously and grotesquely, like the
screeching of a moon-struck tom cat. One way or the other he often
leaves microphones smashed. Meanwhile Pete Townshend, face bland and
impassive, creates banshee howls, stutters and the staccato burr of
distant machine guns from feedback and by scraping his instrument
against the amplifier, before finally smashing it into the amplifier to
produce the noise of tearing metal and screeching car tyres. His arm
swings wildly, higher than his head, arcing before smashing back onto
the guitar. He strikes chords and his arm swings in circles, faster and
faster. He holds a pose, arm extended, beforeâ once again swinging onto
his guitar. Or, he holds his guitar at the hip, shooting notes at the
audience. The Whoâs stage act can end with his guitar hurled into the
crowd. John Entwhistle, on bass-guitar, keeps the thread of the groupâs
performance with heavy double rhythms and a driving bass line. Drummer
Keith Moon, mouth wide open; head gyrating from side to side, eyes wide
and glazed,thunders out a furious rhythm, acknowledging the howls of the
crowd for whom he has always been the main attraction.
The whole effect of The Who on stage is action, noise, rebellion and
destructionâa storm of sexuality and youthful menace. They proudly
announced after the success of âAnywayâ that their next record was going
to be anti-boss, anti-war and anti-young marrieds.
The result was this:
âPeople try to put us down
just because we get around.
Things they do look awful cold
Hope I die before I get old
my generation, this is my generation, baby,
Why donât you all f-f-fade away
Donât try to dig what we all say
Not trying to cause a big sensation
Talking about my generation.â
âMy Generationâ was the most publicised, most criticised and possibly
the best record yet by The Who.
If it didnât entirely live up to its expectations and if it wasnât quite
so unrecalcitrantly hip as âAnywayâ the offence it causedâparticularly
when the group announced that the singer was supposed to sound âblockedâ
(high) on the recordâwas extremely gratifying.
There is violence in The Whoâs music; a savagery still unique in the
still overtly cool British pop scene. The Who donât want to be liked;
they donât want to be accepted; they are not trying to please but to
generate in the audience an echo of their own anger. If their insistence
on Pop Art, now dying a little, is reactionaryâfor of all art, pop art
most completely accepts the values of consumer societyâthere is still
their insistence on destruction, the final ridicule of the Spectacular
commodity economy.
Townshendâs room has shattered guitars hanging as trophies on the wall.
There is also their insistence on behaving as they wish, Townshend told
Melody Maker:
âThere is no suppression within the group. You are what you are and and
nobody cares. We say what we want when we want. If we donât like
something someone is doing we say so. Our personalities clash, but we
argue and get it all out of our system. Thereâs a lot of friction, and
offstage weâre not particularly matey. But it doesnât matter. If we were
not like this it would destroy our stage performance. We play how we
feel.â
Likewise their manager told reporters that he saw their appeal lying in
rootlessness. âTheyâre really a new form of crimeâarmed against the
bourgeois. Townshend talked defiantly on the âhipâ TV show, âWhole Scene
Going,â to denounce the other members of the group, the pop scene,
society at large, and non-drug users in particular. âDrugs donât harm
you. I know, I take them. Iâm not saying I use opium or heroin, but
hashish is harmless and everyone takes it.â Townshendâs views, which he
expresses freely and frequently, are weirdly confused. On the General
Election: âComedy must come in the end and it just has...I think the
tories will win because so many people hate Wilson...I still reckon
English Communism would work, at least stronger trade unions and price
freedom. Iâve always been instructed by local communists to vote Labour
if I canât find a Communist candidate. The British C.P. is so badly
runâsort of making tea in dustbins like the Civil Defence.â On the
Chinese: âThey are being taught to hate. But they are led by a great
person who can control them.â In the same Melody Maker interview he came
out against the Vietnam war but curiously did not support the Vietcong,
complained about vandalism in phone booths and Keith Moon getting old
(âOnceâif I felt ageing, I could look at Keith and steal some of his
youthâ). The conscious revolution, if at all, is however submerged under
the unconscious and consuming fury of The Who.
The Who are at full volume; despite predictions of their imminent demise
they have two records in the English charts and they will not die until
they are replaced by a group offering more far-reaching explosions of
sounds and ideas. The Who are symptomatic of discontent. Their
appearance and performance alike denounce respectability and conformity.
They champion their own complete expression of feeling. Bernard
Marszalek has written: âOne can only work towards this goal (âthe
intrusion of desire with all of its marvellous aspects into a decadent
and crusted societyâ) by developing with youth a sense of rage and
urgency to unite the realms of dream and action fearlessly and with
candor.â *
The Who may be a small particle of this explosion but they have a power
unlike any other pop groupâs; on a good night The Who could turn on a
whole regiment of the dispossessed.
Archie SHEPP
I address myself to bigotsâthose who are so inadvertently, those who are
cold and premeditated with it. I address myself to those âinâ white
hipsters who think niggers never had it so good (Crow Jim) and that itâs
time something was done about restoring the traditional privileges that
have always accrued to the whites exclusively (Jim Crow). I address
myself to sensitive chauvinistsâthe greater part of the white
intelligentsiaâand the insensitive, with whom the former have this in
common: the uneasy awareness that âJassâ is an ofayâs word for a
niggerâs music (viz. Duke and Pulitzer).
Allow me to say that I amâwith men of other complexions, dispositions,
etc.âabout art. I have about 15 years of dues payingâothers have spent
moreâwhich permits me to speak with some authority about the crude
stables (clubs) where black men are groomed and paced like thoroughbreds
to run till they bleed or else are hacked up outright for Lepageâs glue.
I am about 28 years in these United States, which, in my estimation is
one of the most vicious racist social systems of the worldâwith the
possible exceptions of Southern Rhodesia, South Africa and South Viet
Nam.
I am, for the moment, a helpless witness to the bloody massacre of my
people on streets that run from Hayneville through Harlem. I watch them
die. I pray that I donât die. Iâve seen the once-children-now men of my
youth get down on stag, shoot it in the fingers, and then expire on
frozen tenement roofs or in solitary basements, where all our frantic
thoughts raced to the same desperate conclusion: âIâm sorry it was him;
glad it wasnât me.â
I have seen the tragedy of perenially starving families, my own. I am
that tragedy. I am the host of the dead: Bird, Billie, Ernie, Sonny,
whom you, white America, murdered out of a systematic and unloving
disregard. I am a nigger shooting heroin at 15 and dead at 35, with
hogâs head cheeses for arms and horse for blood.
But I am more than the images you superimpose on me, the despair that
you inflict. I am the persistent insistence of the human heart to be
free. I wish to regain that cherished dignity that was always mine. My
esthetic answer to your lies about me is a simple one; you can no longer
defer my dream. Iâm gonna sing it. Dance it. Scream it. And if need be,
Iâll steal it from this very earth.
Get down with me, white folks. Go where I go. But think this: injustice
is rife. Fear of the truth will out. The murder of James Powell, the
slaughter of 30 Negroes in Watts are crimes that would make Godâs left
eye jump. That establishment that owns the pitifully little that is left
of me can absolve itself only through the creation of equitable
relationships among all men, or else the world will create for itself
new relationships that exclude the entrepreneur and the procurer.
Give me leave to state this unequivocal fact: jazz is the product of the
whitesâthe ofaysâtoo often my enemy. It is the progeny of the blacksâmy
kinsmen. By this I mean: you own the music, and we make it. By
definition then, you own the people who make the music. You own us in
whole chunks of flesh. When you dig deep inside our already
disembowelled corpses and come up with a solitary diamondâbecause you
donât want to flood the marketâhow different are you from DeBeers of
South Africa or the profligates who fleeced the Gold Coast?
I give you, then, my brains back, America. You have had them before, as
you had my fatherâs, as you took my motherâs: in outhouses, under the
back porch, next to the black snakes who should have bitten you then.
I ask only: donât you ever wonder just what my collective rage willâas
it surely mustâbe like, when it isâas it inevitably will beâunleashed?
Our vindication will be black as the color of suffering; is black, as
Fidel is black, as Ho Chi Minh is black. It is thus that I offer my
right hand across the worlds of suffering to black compatriots
everywhere. When they fall victim to war, disease, povertyâall
systematically enforcedâI fall with âthem, and I am yellow skin, and
they are black like me or even white. For them and me I offer this
prayer, that this 28^(th) year of mine will never again find us all so
poor, nor the rapine forces of the world in such sanguinary
circumstances.
I leave you with this for what itâs worth. I am an antifascist artist.
My music is functional. I play about the death of me by you. I exult in
the life of me in spite of you. I give some of that life to you whenever
you listen to me, which right now is never. My music is for the people.
If you are a bourgeois, then you must listen to it on my terms. I will
not let you misconstrue me. That era is over. If my music doesnât
suffice, I will write you a poem, a play. I will say to you in every
instance, âStrike the Ghetto. Let my peeple go.â
(Archie Sheppâs article is reprinted here in part from Down Beat, where
it presumably had a readership akin to the magazineâs policy of wooly
blue-eyed liberalism. We hope this reprint will let his words reach a
small part of the audience they deserve. We agree with what he says but
think Fidel and Ho would sell him short. Maybe one day weâll get the
chance to discuss this with him.)
Karl MARX
From the Economic & Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (Bottomore
translation)
The power to confuse and invert all human and natural qualities, to
bring about fraternization of incompatibles, the divine power of money,
resides in its character as the alienated and self-alienating
species-life of man. It is the alienated power of humanity.
What I as a man am unable to do, and thus what all my individual
faculties are unable to do, is made possible for me by money. Money,
therefore, turns each of these faculties into something which it is not,
into its opposite.
If I long for a meal, or wish to take the mail coach because I am not
strong enough to go on foot, money provides the meal and the mail coach;
i.e., it transforms my desires from representations into realities, from
imaginary being into real being; in mediating thus, money is a genuinely
creative power.
...The difference between effective demand, supported by money, and
ineffective demand, based upon my need, my passion, my desire, etc. is
the difference between being and thought, between the merely inner
representation and the representation which exists outside myself as a
real object.
If I have no money for travel I have no needâno real and self-realizing
needâfor travel. If I have a vocation for study but no money for it,
then I have no vocation, i.e., no effective, genuine vocation....Money
is the external, universal means and power (not derived from man as man
or from human society as society) to change representation into reality
and reality into mere representation. It transforms real human and
natural faculties into mere abstract representations, i.e.,
imperfections and tormenting chimeras; and on the other hand, it
transforms real imperfections and fancies, faculties which are really
impotent and which exist only in the individualâs imagination, into real
faculties and powers. In this respect, therefore, money is the general
inversion of individualities, turning them into their opposites and
associating contradictory qualities with their qualities.
Money, then, appears as a disruptive power for the individual and for
the social bonds, which claim to be self-subsistent entities. It changes
fidelity into infidelity, love into hate, hate into love, virtue into
vice, vice into virtue, servant into master, stupidity into intelligence
and intelligence into stupidity.
Since money, as the existing and active concept of value, confounds and
exchanges everything, it is the universal confusion and transposition of
all things, the inverted world, the confusion and transposition of all
natural and human qualities.
He who can purchase bravery is brave, though a coward. Money is not
exchanged for a particular Quality, a particular thing, or a specific
human faculty, but for the whole objective world of man and nature.
Thus, from the standpoint of its possessor, it exchanges every quality
and object for every other, even though they are contradictory. It is
the fraternization of incompatibles; it forces contraries to embrace.
Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human
one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If
you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person; if
you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a
stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your
relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression,
corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life.
If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able,
by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a
beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.
Kenneth PACHEN
from The Journal of Albion Moonlight (New Dimensions)
Until all men unite in hating the poor, there can be no new society.
Stalin loves the poorâwithout them he could not exist.
The revolutions of the future must be directed not against the rich but
against the poor. To be poor means to be blind, demoralised, debased.
The poor have been the slop pails of capitalism, repositories for all
the filth and brutality of a filthy, brutal world. Do not liberate the
poor: destroy themâand with them all the jackal-Stalins that feast on
their hideous, shrunken bodies. How the Church and the false
revolutionaries draw together: love the poorâfor they are humble. I say
hate the poor for the humility which keeps their faces pressed into the
mud. The poor are the product of a false and cruel society; but they are
also the cornerstone of that society. Lift them to the stars; tell them
to walk proudly on this earth: the cathedrals and broad roads were made
by the labor of their hands; it is the duty of all true revolutionists
not only to restore these things into their hands but alsoâand this is
the keyâto put them into their heads. Empty stomachs, empty heads: fill
both with good food. Donât shove Peter the Great back into their
throats.
Bernard MARSZALEK
...i wrote a leaflet in honor of barry bondhus a minnesota youth who
took two buckets of shit into his draft board office and dumped them
into six file drawers. I hope to pass these out at Dick Clarkâs World
Fair of Youth being held for ten days at the amphitheatre and which will
present 10 rânâr groups, mod clothes exhibits, youth culture
generallyâit is being billed throughout the Midwestâa real blowout! But
very conservativeâseveral of us plan to change that. we still get
suburban kids in to talk and i am beginning to come up with nice
variations on disruptive activity that they can pull off.
what generates me at present is the altogether exquisite future that i
see...wait till you get back; the climate is changing,here at a
surprising rate; the acceleration is simply fantastic. everybody is
flipping out.
another thing i am working on is a ball for may, probably outdoors,
maybe at the tap root after we get chased off open lots. with several
rock bands, blues, etc. several anarchists are interested, but i may
have to do all the work, ecch.
there is a group here from the western suburbs called the shadows of
night have they been heard of in england?
bruce elwell is hoping to start a theater of provocation in phillie...
what i am DOING is getting high and higher on one little
realizationâthat i have one task alone and that is to bring out the most
delicate outrage in myself, explode the hair follicles whee...
...i can think of only lovely destructive stuff, like painting ourselves
blue & walking on water. these scandals...must be spontaneous. iâll talk
to you when you are both back in this land of the brave & home of the
free, or is it the other way around, i never could get it straight...may
day...iâll send you a letter from prison.
by Benjamin PERET
The aigrettes of your voice spurt out from the burning bush of your lips
where the Chevalier de la Barre would be pleased to decay
The hawks of your gaze fishing thoughtlessly all the sardines of my head
Your breath of wild thoughts
reflecting from the ceiling on my feet
running through me from all sides
follow me and precede me
lull me to sleep and awaken me
throw me from the window to make me come up in the lift
and conversely
...the only radical libertarian bookshop in the United States, run by
members of the Industrial Workers of the World for the purpose of
disseminating revolutionary literature to the widest possible
readership. The following list is a brief selection of available
material.
SOLIDARITY BOOKSHOP Annotated Catalogue of Radical Books In Print $.50
3/6d
53 Pages; sections on anarchism, socialism, surrealism, etc.
Mods, Rockers & the Revolution (Rebel Worker Pamphlet no. 1) $.15 6d
Collection of articles on the youth revolt
Blackout! (Rebel Worker Pamphlet no. 2) $.15 6d
24 hours of BLACK ANARCHY in New York
Revolutionary Consciousness (Rebel Worker Pamphlet no. 3) $.15 6d
Collection of articles aimed at collective consciousness expansion by
Jim Evrard, Bruce Elwell, G. Bachelard (Forthcoming: to be published
June 1, 1966)
Surrealism & Revolution (Rebel Worker Pamphlet no, 4) $.35 1/9d
Anthology of surrealist writing (ready July 1966)
Sabotage Anthology (Rebel Worker pamphlet no. 5) $.50 3/6d
The only anthology of articles on sabotage, including classics of the
past and articles by younger revolutionaries in and out of the IWW today
(ready August 1966)
IWW Songs: To Fan the Flames of Discontent $.40 3/-
The famous Little Red Song-Book of the rebel band of labor; songs by Joe
Hill, T-Bone Slim and others
The IWW: Its First Fifty Years by Fred Thompson, paperback $2.00 16/-
cloth $3.00 24/-
Summary of Wobbly history
Hungary â56 by Andy Anderson (Solidarity) $.75 2/6d
The first proletarian revolution in a modern, fully-industrielized,
bureaucratic country
Vietnam (Solidarity) $.15 6d
Background outline of the current crisis: âThe only solution is world
revolution.â
Eros and Civilization by Herbert Marcuse paper $1.25 10/-
Revolutionary implications of psychoanalysis
Nadja by André Breton $1.95 16/-
One of the greatest surrealist works (English trans.)
K.C.C. Versus the Homeless. The King Hill Campaign (Solidarity &
Socialist Action) 44 p. illus. $.30 1/6d
The epic struggle of homeless of King Hill, providing a blueprint for
future struggles against bureaucracies in local government.
Add 4% sales tax & postage. SOLIDARITY BOOKSHOP, 1947 N. Larrabee,
Chicago
from the Minneapolis Star, February 25, 1966
Barry Bondhus a 20-year-old Big Lake youth was being held in Hennepin
County Jail under $10,000 bond today on a charge that he dumped two
buckets of human excrement into the files of the Sherburne County draft
board at Elk River.
The arrest climaxed a series of difficulties he and his father have had
with the draft board. The elder Bondhus said he has told the Board
repeatedly that he is opposed to any of his sons serving in the Armed
Forces. âIf you draft Barry I have nothing to look forward to for the
next 24 years but flag-draped caskets,â he said.
Barry is the second oldest of 10 Bondhus boys. After a board hearing
February 15 the youth was classified 1-A and ordered to take a
pre-induction physical examination in Minneapolis. The FBI said the
youth refused to cooperate.
Wednesday, the complaint charged, the young Bondhus walked into the
boardâs office and dumped the substance into six draft board file cases.
His draft board status is still pending.
---
The Anarchists wish to express their collective support for Barry
Bondhusâ noble and appropriate response to the most obscene attempts by
the Stateâs flunkies to enslave and possibly murder him. Barry has
renewed our faith in mankind and for that we must thank him; but more,
we must develop in ourselves, and of course others, the same altogether
exquisite outrage which moved him to so poetically reveal his profound
humanity. Along with wheelbarrows of desire, buckets of shit will stop
the War in Vietnam.