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Title: Fredy Perlman: An Appreciation Author: David Porter Date: 1986 Language: en Topics: biography, Fredy Perlman, obituary Source: Scanned from KAIROS Vol. 2, No. 1 (1986) Notes: The current address for Fifth Estate is: P.O. Box 201016, Ferndale, MI 48220, U.S.A.
Revolution had two faces for Fredy Perlman. One was a series of
immediate, simple, and direct action: people in large numbers rejecting
the social roles for which they were trained, and asserting the need for
adventure and for responsibility for their own lives. Such an image
inspired Fredy to continuing efforts to demystify the process of
personal and community liberation, and to clarify the nature of direct
choices to be made. On the other hand, revolution was seen as a
long-range historical project, to date, in fact, easily manipulated by
vanguard elites. Here, Fredy fully recognized the power of emotional
inhibitions and the ability to channel such feelings in various cooptive
directions by establishment and “revolutionary” leaderships alike.
In this continually evolving dual awareness, Fredy learned from and
pushed beyond the libertarian socialist tradition. Limited only by his
premature death at the age of 50, his writing qualitatively expands and
imaginatively articulates a contemporary anarchist vision. In this
effort, Fredy avoided creating models potentially transformable into
new, more sophisticated ideologies: Instead, he sought to re-sensitize
us to the fact that self-responsible, nonhierarchical community had been
and still could be a genuine human possibility. He was more articulate
than most about the nightmares of domination in contemporary politics,
society, and culture, including the likelihood of global nuclear
extinction. Yet he was intellectually and emotionally committed to
revive the deepest level of anarchist hope. This commitment as well as
the magnificent poetic clarity of his later works are themselves
powerful symbols of the vitality of that potential.
Fredy’s broad cultural and political exposure no doubt provided the
basis for much of his insight.[1] Escaping with his parents shortly
before the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, he lived in Bolivia until
1945. Arriving in the United States and after several years of public
school in Brooklyn and Queens, Fredy moved with his family to Kentucky,
where he graduated from high school and began college studies. He then
attended UCLA for two years and, in the harsh atmosphere of the 1950s,
became openly active in politics for the first time. Subsequently living
in Mexico City, New York City, Copenhagen, Paris, Belgrade, and
Kalamazoo, he finally settled in Detroit in 1969. During these years,
Fredy pursued graduate studies at Columbia University (influenced
especially by C. Wright Mills), became printer for the Living Theatre,
received a Ph.D. in Belgrade for his work on economic development,
taught for two years at Western Michigan University, and participated in
the May-June 1968 upheaval in Paris.
It was in Detroit that Fredy, his companion Lorraine, and others
established a radical print co-op, and where Fredy pursued most of his
anarchist research and writing. He read enormously and eclectically,
drawing particular inspiration from literary, historical, and political
statements of the anti-authoritarian tradition. Among his published
translations, for example, are works by the 1920s Soviet economist I.I.
Rubin, Russian anarchists Arshinov and Voline, and contemporary French
writers Debord and Camatte.[2] At the same time, as his lengthy Letters
of Insurgents demonstrates, he drew constantly from the contexts of
daily life from the radical atmospheres of campus upheavals and Paris in
1968 to the immensely satisfying printing co-op and his rich network of
personal friends and comrades. At the time of his death, he was only a
few months from completing a large work, The Strait, that was seeking to
articulate the perspective of Great Lakes Native Americans in their
first clashes with Western “civilization.” Having personally examined
the notes and manuscripts involved, I can attest to the enormous range
of his research and the amazingly complex and intricate methods he used
to organize his material. Like so many in the past, Fredy was an
anarchist who truly defied the stereotypical images of disorganization,
inarticulateness, and inability to sustain projects to completion.
The unifying concerns of Fredy’s work are the obstacles, inhibitions,
and illusions that prevent genuine social liberation. Although
capitalism is seen as the overall framework for domination and
self-repression in the modern era, Fredy’s special talent was to
demonstrate the variety of its political forms. Bourgeois democracy,
fascism, nationalism, Marxism-Leninism, and even past attempts at
libertarian socialist alternatives-all in different ways permitted
continued accumulation of capital by elites, and the extraction of
surplus value from alienated populations. Also examining pre-capitalist
societies as far back as 5000 B.C.E., Fredy sought to uncover the roots
of all political ideologizing and domination (as well as evidence of
alternative human consciousness and behavior). Whether involving a
soldier caste, priesthood, or rebel directorate, the issue was the same
as in the modern period. “Liberation” that depends on others’
initiatives and specialized leadership creates its own servitude. Each
accumulation of unequal power leads to the privilege of a few and the
degradation of the others. Every major step toward apparent liberation
produces further domination instead.
The core energy of much of Fredy’s writing apparently came from an
intensely lived experience of revolutionary upsurge. in Fredy’s case,
this was the May-June 1968 upheaval in France. Arriving in Paris on the
last train before strikes closed the lines, Fredy thrived on that
enormously vital context of radical hope, imagination, and solidarity.
He was especially active in the occupied Censier University Center and
one of its products, the Citroen Action Committee. A booklet that he and
R. Gregoire later co-authored, Worker-Student Action Committees: France,
May ’68, dramatically presents the general exhilaration of these
contexts, especially resulting from the spontaneous abandonment of
traditional ideologies in favor of self-organized revolutionary
projects.
Yet the ultimate purpose of this writing was to demonstrate and critique
the limitations of what actually occurred. It focuses not on De Gaulle’s
police, but on the ultimate paralysis of the Center militants and others
before an apparent collapse of traditional social authority. Despite the
wildly social libertarian rhetoric and the actual suspension of everyday
institutions at Censier, militants (including Fredy) were unable to move
beyond passive voyeurism toward those-the factory workers-expected to
carry the struggle further. Despite the most creative visions to free
the means of production for the benefit of all, “the militants did not
go to the factory to liberate themselves; they waited for an inexistent
power to liberate them” (Worker Student Action Committees: France, May
’68, 90).
If the Censier militants did not feel themselves sufficiently deprived
to liberate the factories and other institutions on their own, the
workers in turn allowed themselves to be herded like sheep in and out of
the factory by their Communist trade union officials. In both cases, for
Fredy, the central issue thus posed was how “to break down the
indifference, the dependence, the passivity which characterize daily
life in capitalist society” (ibid, 93).
In pamphlets written during the next few months, Fredy described and
analyzed fetish worship by workers (The Reproduction of Daily Life) and
academics (The Incoherence of the Intellectual) alike. Each group
admires the institutionalized and reified objects of its own creation,
while continuing the daily pretense that its thoughts, activities, and
very life are truly its own. The second work- is actually a detailed
analysis of C. Wright Mills’ search for a radical politics and a
“historical agency of change.” Although clearly sympathetic to and
partially inspired by Mills’ quest for an activist role for
intellectuals, Fredy also portrays the tragic limits of Mills’ analysis
and self-development, his ultimate elevation of intellectuals to a
position detached from the field of concrete action. For Fredy, to
unmask the theoretical claim of revolutionary leadership for specific
social strata became as important as denouncing the pretenses of
self-proclaimed liberation movements.
Fredy’s brilliant analytical abilities, creative imagination, and sheer
delight at sophisticated satire emerged fully in the Manual for
Revolutionary Leaders (by “Michael Velli”), which he and Lorraine
Perlman wrote together and printed in 1972. The Manual is actually three
books in one. First, it provides a solid analysis of the evolution of
capitalist social relations up to their present stage of likely
collapse. It also offers an intricately convincing guide for a
“revolutionary leadership’s” appropriation of power in the midst of
capitalism’s demise. And, it scathingly indicts the contradictory and
absurd nature of precisely such vanguardist attempts. Unfortunately, as
Fredy later wrote, “every exposure of the ravages of the dominant
system, every critique of the system’s functioning, becomes fodder for
the horses of liberators, welding materials for builders of armies” (The
Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, 49). It seems that at least half of
the requests for the Manual came from “aspiring national liberators” who
failed to grasp the third dimension of the work. Nevertheless; the
valuable complexity of approach makes for a thoroughly unique work among
contemporary critiques of political liberation. And, not the least of
its accomplishments, as in Fredy’s other works, are the creative
graphics and sensitive publishing methods themselves, skilled products
of his own direct action as a self-publisher and printer.
In the mid 1970s, Fredy completed his most extensive statement yet.
Letters of Insurgents is a fictionalized exchange of twenty letters
between two veterans of the same Eastern European upheaval. Sophia
Nachalo, a young girl at the time, emigrated to Detroit shortly
afterwards. Her male friend Yarostan Vochek remained behind, struggling
for years in underground activity and prison before evolving to a more
tired and cynical perspective by the time of the letter exchange 20
years later. Fredy’s ability to interweave several evolving levels of
social analysis here again provides a highly successful, dramatic
approach. Each letter interprets the shared political upheaval of two
decades before, but with increasingly complex and sophisticated insight.
As each writer challenges the previous account, the reciprocal critiques
force the two to compare their experience with earlier revolutions and
to reflect on their own and other militants’ life courses following
their common political birth. A final dimension is the reciprocal impact
of each writer on the other’s interpretation of the present, as well as
the rapid development of the two present contexts toward new
revolutionary upheavals.
The actual result of this intense and complicated exchange is no less
than a brilliant and exciting analysis of radical and revolutionary
contexts ranging from Spain and Eastern Europe to France and the United
States in the late 1960s. It is a rare and thoroughly credible account
of the possibilities for and obstacles to genuine social revolution
through the eyes of sophisticated participants.[3] Fredy employs the
full power of his theoretical critiques, but grounds them in concrete
contexts, allowing the reader to feel the seething hopes and
contradictions they contain. More convincingly than ever, he clearly
defines the clash between vanguardist and genuinely anti-authoritarian
socialism, as well as how capitalist social relations become
internalized ‘within the minds of revolutionary protagonists themselves.
It is truly one of the finest, most sensitive fictional accounts to
emerge from the context of- the 1960s, and successfully and deservedly
places that decade in the wider historical spectrum of Western
radicalism.
Having encapsulated and critiqued the experiences of modern Western
revolt, Fredy was prepared to explore the historical roots of domination
itself, as well as past forms of nonhierarchical social relations. After
several years of extensive reading and” travel, he began work on The
Strait. More pressing priorities, however, soon emerged. In the early
1980s, he produced two pamphlets, Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom
and The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism, each work originally an
article in the Detroit anti-authoritarian publication Fifth Estate (on
which Fredy was a continuing and strong influence). Both writings
explored the issue of “national liberation,” for Fredy merely a subset
of revolutionary vanguardism of capitalist appropriation of individual
lives. No doubt he was moved to such efforts by the nationalist appeals
in those years from those defending Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and
those promoting liberation fronts in Central America. Yet the two
pamphlets clearly reflect the deeper historical research of the previous
few years as well.
A more substantial interruption, or rather a prolonged concentration on
one phase of his agenda, became ‘an intense book-length recapitulation
of the past few thousand years of human history. More specifically,
Fredy was interested in tracing the birth and expansion of a “cadaverous
beast,” the social system of institutionalized domination spreading from
the Middle East to eventually devour and incorporate all the original
free communities of humans which had covered the earth for thousands of
generations before. Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is a tightly
structured overview of the vast conflict between insatiable hierarchical
society and its victims, from the Sumerian origins of Western
civilization to 19^(th)-century North America.
Yet this was also a prelude to the manuscript, The Strait, which he
finally resumed and brought near to completion before his death. Tapping
another dimension of his own genius, Fredy here attempted to leap beyond
the consistently delimiting perspective of contemporary revolutionaries,
which had been the focus of so much of his earlier writing. Now, he
sought to discard the Western perspective entirely and to immerse both
the reader and himself as writer as fully as possible in the worldview
of Woodland Native Americans. Not only does the content describe a
mature vision of non-hierarchical society, but the language and syntax
of the presentation itself are an attempt to articulate non-Western
consciousness through the poetic imagery of that culture.[4] The
possibilities of this approach were important. In Fredy’s view, the
monster of domination was presently at a stage where pockets of humans
were being discarded as superfluous to its further progress. Although
unsure of the potentials for such people to regenerate their liberatory
energies, and while fully aware of the strong possibility of nuclear,
war, Fredy felt that an attempt should be made. As articulated in his
earlier Against His-Story, “It is a good time for people to let go of
[Leviathan’s] sanity, its masks, and armors, and go mad, for they are
already being ejected from its pretty polis” (301). Fredy sought to
participate in this process and to encourage others to understand and
immerse themselves in it as well. His final gift, through The Strait,
was to present a nonhierarchical alternative through its own voice, as
spoken in the context of its direct conflict with white encroachment in
the Great Lakes region, the first local agents of Leviathan.
In the end, Fredy was perhaps hopeful. He saw America today as “a place
where human beings, just to stay alive, have to jump, to dance, and by
dancing revive the rhythms, recover cyclical time. An-archic and
pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its linear
His-story as All, but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy
night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end,
when the sun rises (Against His-Story, 302). Through his life and work,
Fredy not only identified the wounds, he did his best to enlarge the
circle of that dance.
Fredy Perlman’s publications are still available from Black and Red,
P.O. Box 02374, Detroit, Michigan 48202.
The Fifth Estate is available at P.O. Box 02548, Detroit, Michigan
48202.
KAIROS Vol. 2, No. 1
KAIROS/Hermes House Press
900 West End Avenue Apt. 10D
New York, New York, 10025
1986
[1] More specific autobiographical details are found in his
Worker-Student Action Committees: France, May ’68 (with R. Gregoire) and
Anti-Semitism and The Beirut Pogrom. Much of the Detroit material in
Letters of Insurgents is also based on Fredy’s life experience from a
variety of contexts.
[2] In some cases, through collaborative efforts.
[3] Among its accomplishments, the account is a startling anticipation
of the Solidarity experience in Poland a few years later.
[4] Revealingly, in a note in the Strait manuscript, Fredy attributes
part of his inspiration for this task to his surreal trans-historical
dreamlike experience in the midst of a high-tech institutional context,
while recovering from heart surgery a few years earlier.