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Title: Leviathan’s Body
Subtitle: Recovering Fredy Perlman’s anarchist social theory
Date: 2023
Source: Forthcoming in *Anarchist Studies* (2023)
Authors: Uri Gordon
Published: 2023-06-14 04:31:00Z

Abstract

Fredy Perlman’s anarchist maximalism had a formative influence on the

movement’s post-1960s revival, quite apart from his later and

better-known critiques of domestication. Perlman’s longneglected books,

pamphlets and parodies from 1968–1972 show him championing an

antivanguardist ethos of direct action and practical de-alienation,

while working towards an original and distinctly anarchist social theory

of domination. This article traces the influences of Isaak Rubin, C.

Wright Mills, and possibly Henri Lefebvre and Peter Kropotkin, on

Perlman’s thought. Perlman’s originality was to generalise a heterodox

Marxian critique of social reproduction, including but exceeding

productive relations. Thus, he explicitly sets the state in analytical

parity with capital, theorising authority as a fetish distinct from

exchange value. Implicitly, he points to other containers for alienated

powers, including the family, religion and scholarship. Perlman’s

account of self- and community powers remains incomplete, however,

eliding constitutive violence and inviting engagement with current

intersectional approaches.

<play>

Keywords: Perlman, Fredy (1934–1985); alienation; New Left; power; the

state

</play>

Introduction

Some Anarchists differ from Marxists only in being less informed. They

would supplant the state with a network of computer centers, factories

and mines coordinated ‘by the workers themselves’ or by an Anarchist

union. They would not call this arrangement a State. The name-change

would exorcize the beast.

(Perlman 1983:5)

The scholarly neglect of Fredy Perlman contrasts sharply with his

posthumous legacy. Alongside Noam Chomsky and Murray Bookchin, Perlman

was easily the most influential American anarchist writer of his

generation, a ‘prophet‘ whose ‘penetrating vision cuts across and

reveals the essential orderliness and limitedness of his [former two]

peers’ conceptions of anarchy’ (Moore 1995:363). Perlman produced four

book-length political works, over twenty articles and pamphlets, two

novels, two plays, and (with his Detroit co-operative *Black & Red*) the

first English translations of key texts including *The Society of the

Spectacle* (Debord 1970), *History of the Makhnovist Movement* (Arshinov

1974) and **The Wandering of Humanity **(Camatte 1975). His richly

illustrated, selfprinted works were also a landmark in DIY visual

culture, infusing underground aesthetics with its now-familiar mix of

Dada, Surrealism and Situationism.

Nevertheless, outside the direct action movement Perlman remains

virtually unknown. His work is the focus of a single academic study to

date: Mark Huba’s (2005) courageous PhD on spiritual politics in

<em>Against His-story, Against Leviathan! </em>(*AHAL*) (Perlman 1983).

While this mythopoeic opus occasionally resurfaces in discussions of

anarcho-primitivism and technological overreach (el-Ojeili and Taylor

2020, Dunlap and Jakobsen 2020), Perlman’s abundant earlier work has

received no sustained treatment. Lorraine Perlman’s biography (1989),

two graphic retrospectives (Blauvelt 2016, Aubert 2019), and several

brief tributes and reviews exhaust the available literature (Poynton

2018, Tucker 2017, Artnoose 2014, Lee 2010, Cohen 2009, Black 2004,

Watson 1997, Cafard 1996, Moore 1995).

The neglect is doubly puzzling in view of the last two decades’ upswell

of interest in all aspects of anarchism, radical aesthetics and the New

Left. Even the recent semi-centennial of the French May 1968 uprising,

of which Perlman co-wrote the first extended critique (Gregoire and

Perlman 1969), did not occasion a revival of interest. To be sure,

Perlman’s iconoclastic, genrebending oeuvre is easier to approach

experientially than analytically. Imaginative prose, blistering parody,

and textual collage came to outweigh intellectual commentary in his

work, as ‘Fredy went from brilliant theoretician to singer, from

political activist to intuitive rebel … approaching those now forgotten

archaic rhythms which beat deeply in us all’ (Watson 1997:246). Perhaps

the very richness and variety of Perlman’s expression has stood in the

way of critical appraisal, with no help from his own scorn towards

academia. Whatever the reason, engagement with his rich output remains

as rewarding as it is scarce.

This article focuses on Fredy Perlman’s middle-period work (1968–1972),

amid the political and intellectual debris of the sixties miscarried

revolutions. Over a decade before his ideas were reshaped by rising

concerns with genocide, femicide and ecocide, and by his encounter with

the indigenous past of the Great Lakes, Perlman was already grappling

with the obstinate reassertion of domination and representation through

cycles of social upheaval, and with their durability in everyday life.

In the process, he began to work towards an original and distinctly

anarchist theory of domination as a totality, which could account for

diverse human powers’ alienation into the hierarchical institutions they

reproduce, and by the same token make the case for direct action and

immediacy in transformative struggle. Recovered from their diverse

stylings, and from under the shadow of his later work, Perlman’s essays

in social theory can richly inform current anarchist discussions of

power and liberation.

Perlman’s starting point, which informs his entire body of work, is a

critique of alienation as practice. Initially drawn from Marx via Isaak

Illich Rubin, and later influenced by the Situationists and possibly

Lefebvre, the key to this critique is the concept of fetishism, which

stands for the inverted domination of social forms of alienated power

over the individuals who reproduce them. Influenced by his activist

experiences and by the anarchist histories he read and translated, and

taking further selective cues from C. Wright Mills and possibly from

Kropotkin, Perlman’s breakthrough is to generalise this account of

fetishism to include but exceed productive relations. Thus, he

explicitly sets the state in analytical parity with capital, theorising

authority as a fetish distinct from exchange value. Implicitly, he

points to various other containers for alienated human powers, including

the family, religion and scholarship. In further identifying direct

action with the reclamation of alienated powers, Perlman adds

sociological coherence to the anarchist case against representation and

for collective autonomy in social struggles.

Perlman’s work in the period studied here displays a mix of

post-scarcity expectations and critiques of modernity, alongside

sustained textual and graphic references to ancient and mythical themes.

I must leave it to others to trace these themes to his 1980s critiques

of domestication, patriarchy and progress. This is not to discount

anarcho-primitivist political expression (el-Ojeili and Taylor 2020),

let alone anarchist engagements with early humanity (Wengrow and Graeber

2015, Scott 2017) and critiques of technology (Firth and Robinson 2020).

However, my central argument here is that Perlman’s earlier and more

lasting contribution to the anarchist revival of the last decades is to

be found in his *maximalism* – Moore’s term for an anarchist critique

encompassing not only state and capital but the ‘totality of power

relations and the ensemble of control structures’ (Moore 1998:9),

coupled with anarchist practices ‘committed to direct action’ and

experimental alternatives (13). Despite and because of its centrality to

the anarchist tradition, it was this maximalism which Perlman

championed, not only against New Left vanguardists but also those

anarchists focused on membership and propaganda rather than affinity and

action. Perlman refused to call himself an anarchist, or any other -ist

except ‘cellist’ (Perlman 1989:96). However, as we shall see, he often

uses the terms ‘anarchy’ and ‘anarchists’ with ironic approval, as

something feared by state officials and leftist organisers alike, and

increasingly deploys an anarchist rather than Marxian political

vocabulary. Inasmuch as maximalism has come to (re)define both anarchist

practice and readings of the anarchist tradition, it is in large part

thanks to Perlman and his followers.

Following a biographical sketch, sections 2–3 below trace the

development of Perlman’s ideas, with special attention to

<em>Worker-Student Action Committees </em>(*WSAC*) and the <em>Manual

for Revolutionary Leaders. </em>Section 4 concludes the interpretative

commentary, then moves to a substantive critique. This problematises

Perlman’s elision of violence in his account of self- and community

powers, opening the way for engagement with current intersectional

theories. In conclusion, avenues are suggested for further research on

Perlman’s rich but neglected work.

</quote>

(De)Alienation as Practice

Born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, Perlman and his family fled the Nazi

invasion to Cochabamba, Bolivia and later settled in Kentucky. From 1959

to 1963 he studied at Columbia University and lived in Manhattan with

his partner, Lorraine, becoming the printer for the Living Theatre and

writing the anti-imperialist play *Plunder*. The couple then moved to

Yugoslavia, where Perlman completed his doctorate on rural development

policy at the University of Belgrade. Between 1966– 69 Perlman taught at

Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, where the first *Black & Red*

pamphlets were published. In May 1968, after teaching a two-week course

on economic theory in Turin, he boarded the last train to Paris before

the railway lines were closed, and was immediately engrossed in the

heady scenes of the French uprising.** **Perlman soon afterward

broke with academia and the couple settled in Detroit. They became part

of a co-operative press that printed most of Perlman’s works and

translations under the imprint **Black and Red. **Perlman’s

articles in the Detroit paper **Fifth Estate **marked his turn

towards ecofeminism and primitivism (Perlman 1979, 1982,

1984), capstoned by <em>Against His-story! Against Leviathan (AHAL)

</em>and the unfinished novel <em>The Strait. </em>Perlman had lifelong

health problems, and died following his second heart surgery in 1985

(Perlman 1989).

Perlman’s accidental role at the epicentre of the Paris uprising was

crucial to his political and intellectual development. In Paris, Perlman

‘took part in a loosely-organized group of intellectuals, students and

young workers who held discussions at the Sorbonne university’s Censier

classroom complex and who also tried to communicate their aspirations to

auto workers who lived and worked in the Paris suburbs’ (Perlman

1989:47). These Student-Worker Action Committees produced several

leaflets, one of them calling for ‘worker-student unity in the struggle

‘to destroy this police system which oppresses all of us’’; another

promoted uncompromising internationalism and solidarity with foreign

workers (Gregoire and Perlman 1969:14; cf. Gordon 2011). During this

time he ‘learned about ideas and histories which influenced him in the

decade which followed: the texts of the Situationist International,

anarchism and the Spanish Revolution, the council communists’ (Perlman

1989:48). Inspired by the spectacle of the black and red flags flying

side by side over the Sorbonne and the Bourse, he would later make

• Black & Red* a main artery for the French-English transmission of

anarchist, left-communist and Situationist texts.

Perlman’s reports from Paris, written as the events took place, became

the first part of *Worker-Student Action Committees*. The further

critical discussion was completed in Kalamazoo with Roger Gregoire

visiting from Paris. The book is illustrated with many cartoons and

graphics from the uprising. The authors located the exemplary nature of

Censier occupation in its practical break with the social division of

labour: it replaced the university’s institutional norms with a

selfmanaged structure of working groups and a general assembly; it

transformed the building from an authoritative institutional enclosure

for specialised knowledge into a site for self-directed creation,

reflection and action; and it practically abolished the distinction

between ‘worker’ and ‘student’ as personifications of social roles.

Through this conscious ‘process of political dis-alienation’ (Gregoire

and Perlman 1969:43), the participants for the first time realised their

social power in practice.

In contrast, as the Communist Party-controlled unions rapidly move to

control the strikes,

the occupied factories are not transformed into places for expression

and learning; general assemblies are not formed; workers do not become

conscious of their collective power, and they do not appropriate

society’s productive forces. The appropriation of social power by the

working population would have meant the transformation of the entire

society into a place for collective expression, a place for active,

conscious, de-alienated creation. Such anarchy is averted. (67)

The book contains twelve further positive-ironic uses of ‘anarchy’ and

‘anarchists’. The thrust of the critique, however, points to the Censier

occupiers themselves (including the authors), who failed to carry over

their practical and cognitive break with alienation to actions outside

the occupied space: ‘When the people who organized their activities

inside an occupied university went to “the workers,” either on the

barricades, or in the factories, and when they said to “the workers”:

“YOU should take over YOUR factories,” they showed a complete lack of

awareness about what they were already doing in the ex-universities’

(71, orig. caps.).

In addressing the workers as a specialised sector of society, the

occupiers reverted to accepting the dominant social division of labour.

Instead of taking direct action on their own behalf, the occupiers chose

to defer to the initiative of the factory workers: ‘One of the favorite

arguments of “anarchists” and “libertarians” at Censier was: “The

workers must make their own decisions; we cannot substitute ourselves

for them”. This is a blind application of an anti-bureaucratic tactic to

a situation where this tactic had no application at all’ (89).

Since no assemblies were organised in the factories, such deference

merely abandoned the field to the Communist unions, rather than

autonomously confronting them. Perlman imagines a genuine revolutionary

escalation, with thousands invading multiple factories and declaring

them social property – not ‘on behalf’ of ‘the workers’ but as an act of

collective power that transcends alienated social categories. Such an

opportunity may have existed early on, but was lost as soon as the

Action Committees defined their role in terms of outreach. Subsequent

conflicts over institutionalisation, the antics of self-appointed

leaders, and the final police clampdown were merely a drawn-out

epilogue.

To contextualise this critique, we should turn back to trace Perlman’s

intellectual formation.

Here, the catalyst is easily identified as Isaak Illich Rubin’s

<em>Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value. </em>

Perlman co-translated this book in 1967 (via Serb-Croat) with his former

Belgrade supervisor Miloš Samardźija, adding an original preface (Rubin

1973; cf. Perlman 1970)**. **From 1926 until his arrest in 1931,

Rubin had been a Research Associate at the Marx-Engels Institute in

Moscow . Forced to implicate the Institute’s director, David Ryazanov,

in an alleged Menshevik conspiracy, Rubin’s actual transgression was

ideological (Boldyrev and Kragh 2015). Rubin’s value-form approach to

capital centred on the reification of abstract labour, and regarded

commodity fetishism as the cornerstone of Marx’s political economy. This

not only ran contrary to Stalinist economism, but was also dangerously

applicable to ‘a state bureaucracy that purchases alienated labor and

accumulates Capital in the name of Marx’ (Perlman 1969a:17). Perlman

bookended his preface with strident critiques of American college

economics, where ‘intellectual legislation’ excludes political economy

and renders Marx illegible (Perlman in Rubin 1973:x). His exposition

centres on Rubin’s argument that Marx doses not discard the concept of

alienation found in his early work. Instead, Marx’s critique of

political economy contains its further development as the theory of

commodity fetishism. Rubin does not mention Marx’s *Economic and

Philosophical Manuscripts*, which were published in Russian by Ryazanov

in 1927 but misidentified as ‘Preparatory Work for *The Holy Family*’

(Musto 2015:234). Perlman fills an important gap in Rubin’s argument by

quoting extensively from the *Manuscripts*. He argues that while there

is ‘no doubt that in 1844, Marx spoke of a human society and a human

essence which could be rehabilitated, returned, or restored ... an

unalienated, ideal, unhistorical man’, after his break with Proudhon in

1859 ‘the conflict reappears on a new plane ... [not] between ideal and

reality, but as a conflict between productive forces and social

relations which are both parts of reality’ (1973:xxi).

Perlman’s accessible presentation of value-form theory, <em>The

Reproduction of Daily Life </em>(Perlman 1969a)**, **was widely

read by New Left students (Cohen 2006:3ff.)**. **Its central

argument is that ‘the deliberate alienation of living activity, which is

perceived as necessary for survival by the members of capitalist

society, itself reproduces the capitalist form within which alienation

is necessary for survival’ (Perlman 1969a:14). Perlman indicates his

diachronic view at the very opening, using tribal and slave societies as

first examples to illustrate how humans’ daily activities ‘reproduce the

inhabitants, the social relations and the ideas of the society ... the

• social* *form* of daily life’ (Perlman 1969a:2; *orig*. *italics*).

Under capitalism, daily activity reproduces wage labour and capital, and

people ‘reproduce the personifications of the dominant forms of activity

under capitalism; they reproduce the wage-laborer and the capitalist’

(7). Perlman borrows the term *personification* from Rubin’s

interpretation of Marx’s passing comment in *Capital* v.3 (1966:866)

that the capitalist and the landlord ‘personify’ capital and land. This,

according to Rubin, points to the inverted domination of fetishes over

the persons whose social relations they mediate, with the result that

‘<em>particular individuals are subsumed under the dominant type of

production relations </em>... In this way, the apparent contraction

between the ‘reification of people’ and the ‘personification of things’

is resolved in the dialectical, uninterrupted process of reproduction’

(Rubin 1973:23–25, emph. in orig** **). On this reading, alienation

is ‘neither a feeling nor an idea’ (Perlman 1969a:5); ‘Men[1]do

in fact relate to each other through things; the fetish is in fact the

occasion for which they act collectively, and through which they

reproduce their activity’. (8–9) To borrow terms from Norman Geras

(1971), Perlman’s account is clearly one of fetishism as real domination

rather than as mystification and false consciousness – a ‘constitutive

account of fetishism in which human social relations constitute external

and alien entities that dominate society’ (O’Kane 2013:22).

The pamphlet’s title echoes Henri** **Lefebvre’s <em>Critique de la

vie quotidienne </em>(Lefebvre 2014). According to Lorraine Perlman

(personal communication, 2.6.20), ‘The book is not in our library and I

don’t remember Fredy reading it. But he certainly knew about it and the

title of

‘Reproduction’ acknowledges the link’. Whether Perlman read Lefebvre or

only Rubin and the Situationists, the similarities are instructive.

Lefebvre starts from practical activity and the ‘forms of appearance’ it

assumes under specific historical conditions. He thus views fetishism

neither as a property of the fetishised object nor as an individual’s

epistemological error; instead it is a social category, both abstract

and concrete, which in the process of social reproduction ‘tends to

function as an objectivity independent of men [*sic*] ... both a mode of

existence of the social reality, an actual mode of consciousness and

human life, and an appearance or illusion of human activity’ (Lefebvre

2009a:80–1). Therefore, a break with alienated social reproduction

implies not merely a cognitive break, but the deliberate practice of

different social relations. This was the basis for Lefebvre’s explicitly

pro-anarchist support for **autogestion **(self-organisation),

which along with its inherent anti-statism ‘tends to restore primacy to

use value. It ‘is’ the use value of human beings in their practical

relations’, valorising them ‘against the world of the commodity’ and

pointing to a radical contestation of both capital and the state

(Lefebvre 2009b:148).

Returning to the Action Committees, we can now see how Perlman

concretely applies this approach to assess them in terms of their

(limited) practical break with alienation. In doing so, he is

effectively using value-form theory to formulate the hallmark anarchist

principle of unity between means and ends. While such unity can equally

be framed in terms of virtuous practice (Franks 2020) or path dependency

(Gordon 2018), Perlman ties it to a specific explanatory account of

social reproduction. On this view, de-alienation is at the same time the

overall aim of social transformation *and* the essential quality of

practices in its furtherance. While based on a heterodox reading of

Marx, and notwithstanding Perlman’s criticism of the ‘anarchists’ and

‘libetarians’ at the occupied Censier, his argument promotes the same

ethos of direct action which anarchists associate with terms like

prefigurative politics or concrete utopia.

Importantly, we also begin to see Perlman generalising fetishism beyond

value-form categories. Early on in *WSAC*, he explicitly distinguishes

between four forms of alienation and the divisions they sustain (39–40,

my paraphrased summary):

1. Alienation of political power by all members of society, and its

2. Sale of productive labour by producers and its purchase by

3. Alienation of reflective activity to a specialised corps of

4. Alienation of creative activity to ‘artists’ (creators and

The account does nothing to assign analytical primacy to component (2),

and thereby points away from the orthodox Marxist privileging of

production and proletarian agency. It could be said that, for Perlman,

since de-alienated practice cannot be grounded in the fetishised social

categories which it no longer reproduces, during revolutionary

transformation both ex-students and ex-workers are equally members of a

class in self-abolition (cf. Proletarios Revolucionarios 2020).

From Theory to Parody

Direct action was also central to the first <em>Black & Red

</em>pamphlets, published by the Perlmans in

Kalamazoo. Issue 2, a critical report from the 1968 Democratic National

Convention in Chicago (Perlman 1968a), commends the Yippies’ occupation

of a public park: by ‘organizing their own activities without orders or

permission, without compromise or negotiation’, they ‘acted out’ their

freedom in reclaiming public space and thereby ‘ceased to recognize the

legitimacy of the state’ – drawing out its violence. In contrast, the

failures of student organising are lampooned in Issue 4, <em>We Called a

Strike and No One Came </em>(Perlman 1968b). At the printing press,

Perlman began to discover many new graphic possibilities, and his work

would now rapidly move away from conventional textual formats. *Strike*

is a case in point: a 46-page A5 collage-comic, with speech bubbles

coming from the mouths of figures in renaissance paintings, grotesque

sculptures, and white men in suits.

This ‘Allegorical Epic with Footnotes’ (1) is loosely inspired by

• Paradise* *Lost*, and narrates a botched student organising effort as

the latest round in a cosmic struggle between Satan and God. Satan’s

avatars discover that God means to re-establish his slipping power by

abandoning Christianity and appropriating Satan’s gift of Reason; he

will ‘herd men into rationally organized institutions where each does

the work established by Authority’ (5). Failing that, he will bring

about Doomsday. God, portrayed as Clark Kent and Superman, then

introduces his own essence as ‘the social relation of Authority and

Submission ... any relation between Rulers and Ruled’ (10). He promises

to disrupt the plans of Satan’s followers, who ‘on the verge of absolute

negation, of freedom ... will only use this freedom to enslave

themselves anew’ (12). As it transpires, the new SDS chapter draws a

circus of hippies, liberals and Leninists. They call a strike but

dismiss the avatars’ proposals for concrete actions in preparation, and

on Doomsday end up marching through the administration building yelling

‘Strike! Strike!’. God concludes:

Even thine own avatars…could barely pass from the word to the deed. And

as for the rest ... I have ‘til now kept from them the knowledge of

their power … Yet am I not satisfied. For well do I know that My Time

draws to a close. Well do I know that the elimination of scarcity

foreshadows the elimination of Authority. Well do I know that I cannot

long continue to keep man ignorant. (45)

This sense of technological optimism sits alongside the comic’s

immersive mythological framing, predating *AHAL* by 15 years. *Strike*!

is much more playful, but also significant in terms of Perlman’s

political language and affinities. He uses comical archaisms (God to

Satan: ‘Thou grooveth, but thou diggeth me not’) but also the archaism

of capitalising nouns to highlight key concepts such as Authority,

Submission, Reason, Bureaucracy, Power, Scarcity, Fear, Law and

Order – all associated with the anarchist lexicon. Also striking is

God’s grotesque restatement of the Ten Commandments under four headings:

Religion (unquestioning acceptance, normalised hypocrisy, no depiction

of a sense of community); The State (ageism, killing of ‘enemies’);

Private Property (sexual privation, minority ownership, dominant regimes

of truth); and The Family (women as property; slavish deprivation). The

Sabbath is omitted and the tenth commandment is split in two. Like the

keywords he capitalises, and like the example from *WSAC*, these four

institutional headings are plainly divorced from Marx’s analytical

prioritisation of productive relations, which even *heterodoxoi* like

Rubin and Lefebvre preserve.

Instead, we find Perlman increasingly aligning himself with anarchist

accounts of class and domination – specifically those ‘oligarchical<em>’

</em>accounts (my term) whereby several groups concentrate different

forms of power through distinctive, if related, institutional

structures, none of which enjoys analytical primacy over the rest. Thus

Malatesta argues that, in addition to the owning class, the history of

conquest and exploitation has also given rise to ‘a special class

(government)’, which legalises and protects property but also ‘uses the

powers at its disposal to create privileges for itself and to subject,

if it can, the owning class itself as well’; and ‘another privileged

class (the clergy)’ which ‘as well as serving the interest of the owning

class, serves its own; (1899/2014:280). Consider also Kropotkin’s

account of the State as ‘The power which was created for the purpose of

welding together the interests of the landlord, the judge, the warrior,

and the priest’ (Kropotkin 1903:ch.10) – qualitatively distinct

concentrations of power which preceded capitalism. The

Perlmans’ library contains a read but unmarked copy of the 1969 Freedom

Press edition of Kropotkin’s selected works. According to Lorraine

(pers.comm. 26.09.20), ‘we may have bought it when we were in London

that year ... So I guess my answer would be: ‘It’s likely he read it’.

Even if he didn’t the parallels are relevant’.

Perlman’s interest in non-Marxist theories of class and domination is

further evident in his last scholarly work, a critique of his former

teacher C. Wright Mills titled <em>The Incoherence of the Intellectual

</em>(1969). Early on, Perlman praises the young Mills for attempting to

grasp domination at its root: ‘Mills did not read [Franz] Neumann’s

dissection of the Nazi Behemoth as a description of a distant enemy:

‘The analysis of Behemoth casts light upon capitalism in democracies ...

he

[Neumann] locates the enemy with a 500 watt glare. And Nazi is only one

of his names ...

Behemoth is everywhere united’. (Perlman 1969b quoting Mills

1942:177).[2]

However, Perlman argued, throughout his ensuing career ‘Mills the

independent revolutionary continues to coexist with Mills the academic

cynic’. Thus, ‘Weberian leaders and the leaderless Wobblies occupied

separate compartments in Mills’ mind ... [and] never directly confronted

each other’ (1969a:np). Alongside his astute critiques of post-war

American society, argues Perlman, Mills continued to publish works in

positivist sociology which muddle the analysis of these same issues –

betraying Mills’s limited understanding of alienation as disaffection,

rather than as the daily activities through which people in fact

‘alienate their power to shape their environment’ (1969a:n.p.).

In** Incoherence** we find Perlman engaging with the non-Marxist

political sociologies of

Mills’s two contradictory masters, Max Weber and Thorsten Veblen.

Perlman finds Mills ‘reverent, ‘objective,’ and uncritical’ towards

Weber’s scientism and his appeal to charismatic leadership. Again,

Perlman argues, Mills fails to identify alienation as the link between

‘Marx’s emphasis upon the wage worker as being “separated” from the

means of production’ and Weber’s view that the ‘modern soldier is

equally “separated” from the means of violence; the scientist from the

means of enquiry, and the civil servant from the means of

administration’ (Mills 2009:88). Yet if alienation is properly accounted

for, this Weberian insight reveals its value. Perlman may well have

quoted Mills’s further statement that Weber’s thereby ‘rounds out’

Marx’s analysis with a ‘political and military materialism’, and that

therefore ‘military and religious, political and juridical institutional

systems’ should be analysed on par with ‘the economic order’ (85) – thus

dislodging productive relations from their analytical primacy in Marx.

In contrast to Weber, Perlman held Thorsten Veblen in high esteem

(Perlman 1989:43). Mills (1962:35) had called Veblen ‘the best social

scientist America has produced, who probably ... was at heart an

anarchist and syndicalist’, and grouped him with the Wobblies. However,

writes Perlman, in **The Power Elite **Mills ‘completely

obfuscates’ Veblen’s ethics, and excludes the possibility of

transformative social change:

According to [Mills’s] files elites make history, and consequently Mills

addresses himself to the people characterized by Veblen as ‘the noble

and the priestly classes, together with much of their retinue,‘ the

‘intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars, and

scientists’**...**fragmentary men whose social positions rest on

their service to power (1969a:n.p.)

This is again to highlight Perlman’s interest in non-Marxist sociologies

of class – in this case, Veblen’s institutional account which is not

ultimately indexed to productive relations. These elements would come

closest to a synthesis in the final work considered here, the <em>Manual

for </em>

• Revolutionary Leaders*.

Published under the pseudonym Michael Velli, the <em>Manual

</em>ostensibly advocates the ‘modern model of revolution’, namely

‘revolutionary organizational ideology, leadership and the struggle for

State power’ (Perlman 1972, 11). It is the Perlmans’ most richly

illustrated work. The menacing cover features a Balinese fanged dancer

and Gothic fonts, anticipating his use of Blake’s devouring monster on

the cover of *AHAL*. The first chapter (‘Generation of Revolutionaries’)

features nine full-page surrealist collages, in which tanks ride the

tiers of Breugel’s *Tower of Babel,* a motley religious procession

traverses a wall of televisions, and Matisse’s *Dance* revolves amid

fiery riots at the Capitol. In the second chapter (‘Rise to

Leadership’), the historiated initial of each of the 62 paragraphs

portrays a ‘Great Leader’, running backwards from the likes of Castro,

Dmitrov and

Lenin to Robespierre, Henry VIII, Ceasar, and finally Sargon of Akkad (a

key character in *AHAL)*. Images of machinery, restaurant food,

wasteland and mass murder illustrate the third chapter

(‘Seizure of State Power’).

No less striking is the *Manual*’s** **use of textual collage.

While the first, theoretical chapter is wholly original, the

programmatic second chapter is a prank of egregious plagiarism,

sequencing hundreds of unattributed quotations from contemporary

articles in *New Left Notes*, *National Guardian, The Movement*,<em> Red

Papers </em>and similar outlets**. **Threaded through these are

quotes from three other sources: Marx and Engels’s <em>The German

Ideology, </em>Michels’s** The Iron Law of Oligarchy, **and

Hitler’s *Mein Kampf*. In the scenarios narrated in chapter 3, Lenin and

Mao often speak from the mouths of party officials and lackeys. Only in

the second edition was a list of references added, explaining that Velli

had ‘re-constituted the project which unifies these widely dispersed

statements’ and ‘placed them into the single Thought of which each of

these ideas is a mere fragment’ (263).

Crucially, a third thread in the text – also italicised in the second

edition – consists of key sentences from the first chapter that reappear

in the next two. Prefixed to blocs of authoritarian quotations, they

recast the latter as a twisted appreciation of the first chapter’s

original analysis. Hence, I would like to argue that Velli’s ‘modern

model’ ‘is not merely a parodic mirror of authoritarian trends in the

New Left, but the grotesque inversion of Perlman’s genuine social

analysis; Velli cynically instrumentalises an accurate understanding of

fetishised power to develop his totalitarian programme. Chapter 1’s

consistency with Perlman’s evolving ideas, and the powerful case it

would otherwise make for anarchist strategies of de-alienation, make

this reading compelling. Beneath the irony, we find Perlman advancing a

strikingly original critique of authority and the state.

In fact, the *Manual* moves to account for capital and alienated labour

only after an account of the state, ‘by far the most important’ among

‘the personifications, embodiments, representatives of society’s

estranged powers’: ‘The State is the personification of the power of

community, the estranged power of individuals to decide collectively the

methods, means and purpose of their social activity. It is the specific

office of the State to use all available means to ensure that the power

of community remains estranged’ (17).

Unlike productive power, whose alienated form of appearance is

commodities or money, social or community power is alienated into

offices bearing socially legitimated authority. Perlman construes

authority as a separate, first-order category of fetish, invested with

normative rather than exchange value:

By accepting the legitimacy of an office to wield a specific social

power, individuals abdicate their own power over that part of social

life ... the office to which the power is abdicated becomes an

‘authority’ which has the ‘right’ to wield that power; an individual who

does not abdicate the power becomes a ‘criminal’ who has no ‘right’ to

wield it; all others are obedient, ‘good,’ and ‘law-abiding citizens’ to

the extent that they exert no power over that part of social activity.

(18)

Perlman goes no further to work out the substance of social- or

community power absent authority, an issue I take up below. For the

moment, I would like to argue that in placing an account of community

power, authority-fetishism and the state prior to his account of

productive power, commodity-fetishism and capital, Perlman clearly aims

to set them in analytical parity. Further evidence is provided by dyadic

statements about humans ‘abdicating their power of community to the

State and their productive power to Capital’(19); ‘wielding the

estranged human powers represented by money and wielded by offices’(29);

and living in a society where ‘estranged power of community — the State,

government — is experienced as the only real community. Estranged

productive power — Capital, money — is experienced as the only real

productive agent’ (29).

This points away from any view of the state as auxiliary to productive

relations, whatever relative autonomy it may possess. Instead, the state

is a first-order domain of alienated power, an institutional container

that cannot be reduced to its role in enforcing owner-worker relations.

Moreover, while Perlman continues to use the term ‘personification’ to

denote the subsumption of individuals by dominant social forms, he

explicitly dissociates the fetish of authority from the

Marxian material base:

complete types, perfect embodiments of the ruling behavior, can be found

in activities which are physically separated from society’s productive

forces, which are geographically quarantined: the activities of artists,

independent ‘professionals‘, full-time political organizers, and

particularly the activities of members of the political and educational

hierarchies (25).

Perlman goes further to argue that the state, as a domain for estranged

power, is not only older than capital but also poised to succeed it in

dominance over production. This portrays capitalism as a ‘brief

digression from the normal histories of civilizations’ (35). As evinced

by the examples of colonialism, Meiji Japan, the USSR, and post-colonial

socialist states, it ‘becomes possible to institute the central

relations of Capital accumulation directly by means of State power,

without recapitulating the historical development of capitalism’ (42).

In the West, the ‘seizure and consolidation of the estranged power of

community, the State, has become the form of development of productive

forces in conditions where earlier forms of Capital accumulation ceased

to perform their historical task’ (43).

For the sake of stability and order, the development of productive

forces must be controlled, obstructed, reversed. The cornucopia of

technological progress ceases to give rise to hopes and increasingly

spreads vague fears. Behind the productive forces slouches a rough

beast, its hour come round at last, ready to loose mere anarchy upon the

world. (36)

Hence, the role of the vanguard is not to promote a transition to

communism, but to *interrupt* it – instating a totalitarian state which

then takes over the production process itself, along with all aspects of

life. The anarchist reading of the vanguard party as a totalitarian

state-in-waiting is thereby cynically embraced in Chapter 2, describing

how the organisation and its leader should appropriate the militants’

estranged self-powers.

The problem, however, is that workers in advanced capitalist countries

are the ones least inclined to follow party militants. In their daily

contact with the means of production, modern workers ‘are expected to be

simultaneously automatic and imaginative, simultaneously obedient and

creative’(240). This drives their anarchic ferment, manifest in

‘absenteeism, sabotage, wildcat strikes, occupations of productive

plants, and even attempts to dismantle the entire social order...a

growing resistance to State power...refusal to alienate productive

activity...rejection of specialization’ (239; cf. Zerzan 1988). Thus,

Chapter 3 narrates the misadventures of party organisers who offer their

leadership to insurgent workers and communities who are already

reclaiming their self-powers, passages acclaimed as ‘comic skits in the

finest tradition of Sid Caesarism and Groucho Marxism’ (Black 2004).

Hence Velli’s brazen strartegy: when ‘<em>a revolutionary upsurge

</em>takes place the revolutionary leaders <em>must take power at once –

otherwise a wave of real anarchy may become stronger than we are’

</em>(137, italics quoting Lenin 1917:234).

Twisting Perlman’s analysis, Velli writes that state power should be

seized:

when people are on the verge of independence, when they reach the

frontier ... and temporarily recoil. It is the moment when all the

official authorities have been *sprung into the air*, but when society’s

individuals have not yet actively appropriated the powers they had

vested in the deposed authorities’ (184; italics quoting Marx and Engels

1848).

Anarchist Practice and Maximalist Theory

So far, we have seen how Perlman’s encounter with anarchism not only

informed his antiauthoritarian politics, but also enriched his social

theory. In between the lines of his parodic critiques of vanguardist

politics, Perlman was developing an account of domination as a totality,

casting fetishism as a general dynamic with explanatory force towards

several domains of estranged powers: notably the state and capital but

also, implicitly, the family and religious and intellectual

institutions. Exceeding Marxian materialism, Perlman suggests a

differentiated account of** power** as the basis for social

critique – reflecting not only his critical debt to Veblen and Mills,

but also his growing engagement with anarchism, whose ideological core

concepts he increasingly employs (cf. Franks, Jun & Williams, 2018). At

stake here is Perlman’s generalisation of Marx’s key insight on

alienation as practice, with labour no longer the explanatory

cornerstone but only a special case of *power*, whose diverse forms are

alienated through interlinking regimes of domination and the

institutions that reproduce them.

Perlman would never offer a more systematic account of his political

sociology, and the conceptual apparatus of power, alienation and

personification echoes but faintly in his later work. Indeed, as Huba

(2005) convincingly argues, the spiritual politics of **AHAL **is

framed by a quasiManichean dualism. While the initial description of

Leviathan makes plain its reliance on human operators, it is also

portrayed as a terrifying alien power, unstoppable in its race towards

planetary conquest and extinction. For all its force, this

one-directional, overpowering account – chiefly indebted to Jacques

Camatte’s concept of the ‘flight of Capital’ (cf. El-Ojeili 2014) –

moves away from Perlman’s earlier approach to fetishistic reproduction

and its potential dissolution in practice. As a result, the question of

social transformation is re-posited across the impassable strait between

humanity’s Edenic origins and the wasteland of civilisation. Perlman

ends up identifying revolutionary rupture with ecstatic rapture, an

escape from domestication into wildness.

Black (2004) thus finds in the *Manual* ‘not much anticipation of the

critique of civilization’ in **AHAL **and *The Strait*. This is

certainly the case regarding technological progress. Echoing God’s

concerns in *Strike*, Velli warns that independent workers who ‘sow the

seeds of anarchy’ would ‘spread with the continuing development of the

productive forces’ (1974:249–250). Yet already in the *Manual* this

post-scarcity teleology is set up to be interrupted by the authoritarian

vanguard, allowing the state to resurge in its archaic form. Indeed, the

• Manual* already shows Perlman’s long view of hierarchical civilisation,

and in particular his focus on the state’s ancient and inherent tendency

to colonise and territorialise – another possible debt to Kropotkin’s

writings on the Russian Empire and early-modern state formation in

Europe (cf. Kinna 2016: ch.4; Ince 2012). I would also suggest that the

abundance of ancient and mythical themes in the *Manual* are Perlman’s

indication of the diachronic generality of his social critique, valid

across time just as it is valid synchronically across the totality of

institutional concentrations of alienated human powers. Finally, the

central theme of capitulation to estranged powers returns to drive the

narrative of *AHAL*, where a succession of anarchic rebellions are

upstaged by *coups* *d’etat*, while indigenous peoples take up the logic

of domination even as they resist invasion.

In general, there is more continuity than disjuncture between Perlman’s

earlier and later work than some of his primitivist followers might

suggest. By the same token, however, his influence on contemporary

anarchism should by no means be limited to primitivist currents. While

his later writings were part of the Detroit paper *Fifth Estate*‘s turn

towards a critique of the megamachine (Millett 2018; cf. Watson 1981),

Perlman’s earlier works and translations had far broader impact. The

maximalist critique of domination across regimes and institutions, and

the coupling of revolutionary politics with a commitment to collective

and individual dis-alienation, successfully reflected the intersecting

grassroots mobilisations of the 80s and 90s, and became the discursive

boundary between anarchism and the Marxist and liberal left. By the time

the alter-global movement was in full swing, ‘post-left’ anarchists had

also turned this critique on anarchist platformism, syndicalism and

social ecology (Black 1998, Moore 2016, Jarach 1999, Landstreicher

2002), raising tensions that endure to this day. Therefore, although

critiques of domestication do remain central to eco-anarchism and total

liberation agendas, these build on Perlman’s earlier and more basic

articulation of anarchist maximalism as such, which is at the core of

the recent decades’ anarchist revival.

So much for a contextual interpretation of Perlman’s work. In the rest

of this section, I would like to shift to a more analytical approach,

and problematise Perlman’s model of power and how it ends up eliding

constitutive violence. Returning to the dual model in the *Manual*, we

find two distinctive forms of power (productive and community) with two

distinctive fetishised forms (commodities and offices), representing two

distinctive values (exchange and legitimation) and thus part of two

analytically distinctive domains (capital and state). In both cases, it

is daily practical activity (work and obedience) which reproduces these

powers’ estrangement, abdication or alienation. One problem with this

account is its incompleteness. While neatly constructing the above

parallel, it remains silent on which (other) powers are alienated in the

reproduction of the family and religious/intellectual institutions –

both of which seem to require equal consideration on Perlman’s view.

hence, it offers no grounds for a first-order analysis of either

patriarchy or ideological production.

More significantly, however, there is a basic conceptual problem in

Perlman’s account. While productive power is alienated through the

labour process, what he says is alienated into the state is community

power, ‘the power of individuals to decide collectively the methods,

means and purpose of their social activity’ (1972: 17). However, in

Perlman’s terminology, productive power is a <em>self-power

</em>which<em> </em>the individual continues to wield in practice, even

if it is alienated as wage labour, corvée or slavery. In contrast,

community power is (trivially) wielded by a group, and completely ceases

to be exercised once replaced with obedience. Perlman is not very

precise here – Velli says state power should be seized ‘during the brief

moment after the population has expropriated the ruling classes’ but

before it ‘gains confidence in its own self-powers’ (184)– the term

self-powers now applied collectively, becoming indistinct from community

power. Yet the discrepancy goes deeper. Consider that, absent

alienation, the ‘methods, means and purpose’ of social activity

determined through community power would also cover how *productive*

power is organised and allocated. Hence, community power is abdicated

just as much in the case of wage labour as it is in the case of

legitimated obedience.

At issue is Perlman’s substitution of a second-order, coordinative and

collective form of power for what should be another first-order,

constitutive self-power corresponding to the state. This raises the

question: which ‘specific social power’ (18), other than productive

power, does the state contain in its alienated form? Otherwise we are

left without a first-order form of power which could be regulated

through community power, but which today is alienated specifically as

state authority, on par with productive power’s alienation as

commodities and money. Velli’s argument that the state is poised to take

over from capital in administering production seems almost designed to

make this problem go away. Compelling as it may have been with the

Soviet Union still in existence, this argument only weakens the model’s

definition.

The answer – which should have perhaps been obvious to Perlman – is that

authority specifically masks not the capacity to organise life (which

commodities do as well), but the capacity to kill and injure. While

State power is always entangled with the productive process, its

distinct content lies not in its coordinative functions but in the

violent force that underwrites its commands. Perlman, who is keen to

emphasise daily reproduction, ends up side-lining violence from its

constitutive role:

Although many of the commands of a personification are enforced by

violent means, the granting of legitimacy is not the result of coercion.

If the power of a personification rested on violence alone, the

personification would not need to be legitimate to realize its commands…

Violence accompanies the power wielded by a personification, but does

not make the personification legitimate. (18)

Indeed, violence does not produce legitimation. But it also does more

than to ‘accompany’ it – violence is the institutionalised physical

force that underwrites obedience, and which emerges in the face of

resistance to coercive threats – as the Yippies had exposed. However, by

working backwards from powers’ fetishised forms, Perlman effectively

confuses empirical frequency with analytical order. While legitimation

is the most common source of obedience, it is not its ultimate

guarantee.

This is not just an anarchist and a Weberian insight; even Engels (in a

moment of candour) defines the State as ‘the institution of a public

force which is no longer immediately identical with the people’s own

organization of themselves as an armed power … Officials now present

themselves as organs of society standing above society … representatives

of a power which estranges them from society’ (1972; pp. 229–230).

Within the synthesis Perlman seems to be reaching for, the dyad of

productive and community power makes much less sense than one of

productive and destructive (or violent) power, regulated either through

community power or their respective processes of alienation. Both

represent ‘an individual’s self-powers’ (31), regardless of whether the

individual wields them within the context of a self-directed community

or as part of their function in an alienated process. To the

productive-violent dyad we can now add a second, regulative dimension,

ranging from full community power to full capture by fetishised social

forms.

While this analytical correction may strengthen the conceptual coherence

of Perlman’s

account, the dyadic structure itself is clearly limited: both in scope,

failing to account for gender, religion etc.; and in over-definition,

its neatness obscuring the entanglements between the powers and

institutions it describes. Nevertheless, the discussion above already

demonstrates the possibility of treating Perlman’s ideological

expression as substantive groundwork for a distinctly anarchist

political sociology. Directly promoting anti-representational practice,

his approach provides anarchists with the rudiments of their own

consistent lens through which to analyse institutional concentrations of

power, and the regimes of domination that intersect through them. It

thus does the double work of explaining the dynamics of power and

providing the rationale for a politics of direct action. Crucially,

Perlman does not assign analytical primacy to any of these institutions

and regimes, thereby inviting synthesis with newer theories of

intersectional, reproductive and state power (Pritchard 2021, Angulo

2019, Laursen 2021) as well as decolonial and total liberation agendas

(Black Seed 2021; Nocella et al. 2015). Whether such a synthesis can

truly inform social struggles remains an open question.

Conclusion

Fredy Perlman’s work remains richly available for study. Long due

recognition as a nova in the anarchist cynosure is long overdue, this

article has only skimmed the surface of his voluminous and varied

output. At this time, Lorraine Perlman is preparing the second,

unfinished volume of **The Strait **for publication. A great deal

remains to be written about Perlman’s literary treatment of

revolutionary politics and loyalties in *Letters of Insurgents*; about

his subsequent engagements with ecofeminist and decolonial critiques;

about his conflicted relationship with his Jewish heritage and the

Holocaust; and about his rapidly shifting visual language. Perlman’s

archives, to which I have not had access, may provide new insights into

all of these.

Perlman’s creative talents were so diverse, and his expressive fount so

individual, that he found no reason to specialise. One after another he

would master a scholarly discipline or a genre of expression and move on

to something else. Had he lived longer he may have found his way back to

a more systematic account of his social theory, but given his personal

and intellectual transformation this is doubtful.

The hopeful euphoria Fredy felt in 1968 dissipated during ensuing

decades, and his eager wish to participate in a collective effort to

abolish repressive social institutions went unrealized. His search for

an appropriate agency for social change was also unsuccessful. He

nevertheless remained committed to these goals both in his personal life

and in intellectual projects. He examined, with sympathy and attention,

attempts of a variety of resisters; and used his impulses for

craftsmanship to produce attractive publications hoping, through them,

to communicate with... (in [**Letters of Insurgents **character]

Sophia’s words) ‘his likes’. (Perlman 1989:139)

Today, Perlman’s earlier work communicates his sustained concern with

our daily reproduction of complex regimes of domination, but also his

continued faith in the power of mass uprisings to open the way for

community and mutual aid. Both are crucial themes, which should remain

in our focus as the planetary collapse continues to unfold. Late as we

may be to avoid the biospheric implications of climate change, ecosystem

loss and toxic contamination, we can still fight to face these

implications within free human societies, based on equality and

solidarity.

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[1] This is the last time I could find Perlman using ‘man‘ and ‘men‘

[2] This compellingly suggests Neumann’s title, and not only

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