Dropping out of Capitalism, 1939 Style

Many contemporary anarchists believe that one of the most effective ways they can resist capitalism and other systems of oppression is to live their lives as free from them as possible. Some try to "drop out" of capitalism by dumpster diving food, squatting houses, and running scams instead of working. These days this idea is frequently associated with CrimethInc. but it certainly predates that group. Just how far back it goes, I've never been sure. In one sense, the idea of building pre-figurative communities can be traced to the utopian socialists like Fourier and Owen, as Richard Day argues in his very informative book Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. Still, I had no idea how much longevity there was to some of the specific forms this (anti-) strategy has taken. In a letter I found today from someone whose name I can't make out to Marcus Graham, written in 1939, just on the eve of the U.S. entrance into World War II, this became much clearer.

Dudebro is proud to announce to Graham that he is 1) totally vegetarian, 2) living on less than 10 cents a day, 3) has only one change of clothes, 4) walks around barefoot, and 5) has a beard down to his belly. What's more, he has had nearly 700 people crash on his couch in the last year! Can you say crust punk?! I looked in vain for mention of an emaciated dog collared with a piece of rope, but apparently that didn't catch on until the '40s or so.

Interestingly, this guy sees himself living in the image of Tolstoy. From Tolstoyan simplicity to fetishized lifestylism in 68 short years! Okay, I'm being a little glib here. I actually have quite mixed feelings about the politics of living one's principles in this manner, and have written about the subject in a number of places, including the book Letters From Young Activists. But others have also made important and serious criticisms of these practices. See for example the excellent article on the Class Matters website by Betsy Leondar-Wright, "It's not 'them'--Its us!"

Anyway, stay tuned for a discussion of 20th century anarchists evolving conceptions of anti-colonial liberation struggles. I'm finding some really interesting stuff on that front...

The Primitivist Response to the Great Depression

When we last left Marcus Graham, he was bashing the Freie Arbeiter Stimme group for kowtowing to the feds after the Palmer Raids. Today, lets take a more positive look at the man, the mystery that was Marcus, Graham, editor of MAN!

Little has been written about the anarchists' responses to the Great Depression or their thoughts about the New Deal (and Keynesianism in general). This is one of the issues I plan to explore in some depth in the first chapter of my dissertation. I made some progress last week when I found this newspaper clipping about a speech Graham made while on a tour organizing people to demand freedome for Mooney and Billings (the Mumia Abu-Jamal's of the day).

Machine Age Doom of Man, Poet Asserts—Marcus Graham Finds Civilization of Today Sterile—Speaks in Albany Tonight at Workmen’s Circle Institute

Albany News, Dec. 18, 1931

Civilization is doomed by the machine. In taking man away from the soil and depriving him of the sense of shaping the means of his existence with his own hands it has robbed him of his sole chance for happiness. These are the views of Marcus Graham, poet and writer…

“Proof of the sterility of machine civilization is seen in the fact that we have no more Shakespears, Poes or Whitmans,” Mr. Graham said today. “Not only have we produced no artists of note in the last 50 years, i.e., since the maching gave the dominant note to our culture, but we have been unable to compensate for its increasing maiming of life, in accidents, as well as for technological unemployment.”

“At present the world is in the throes of depression,” he continued. “Let no one glibly assume that we will easily emerge from this depression. Europe, South America and Australia have larned enough of America’s technology to produce sufficient for their own needs and have goods left over for exportation.”

The only way we can emerge from the depression is through a long-continued worldwide war, he declared, which in the end will leave man far worse off materialistically than ever before.

“Out of these ruins humanity will evolve the pre-ancient, more experienced man, a self-reliant individual, striving to bring back the ancient civilization of the artisan, working out his destiny for the principles of voluntary co-operation, which in turn can only come through understanding, toleration and respoect between human beings,” he asserted.

Graham sees no hope of surcease from the bane of machines in Russia, for there he finds the maching more of god than here...

I think this article is fascinating in so many regards. First, I think it shows that despite their shortcomings, the anarchists (at least some of them) were really smart and on the ball. Graham pegs the cause of the depression on overproduction brought on by the rapid proliferation of machinery. In 1932 he predicts the only way to get out of the slump is to destroy surplus through an orgy of destruction. This seems to me pretty prescient. But then he goes on to connect the materialist problems arising from machines to a psychological cultural crisis that he sees as just as great. He doesn't go as far as Zerzan, et al. in advocating a pre-agricultural existence, but he does offer a return to small scale cultivation and artisinal production as a way out of this dual crisis. Against the Megamachine! (As David Watson would later put it.)


Okay, so I stacked a bunch of posts tonight because I'm heading to the East Coast tomorrow. On Tuesday there is a book launch party for The University Against Itself, which I have a chapter in. Go buy one! And then its NCOR next weekend. See you there I hope!

Good lookin'!

On another note, how is it that so many important figures in black freedom movements have such an incredible sense of fashion? I used to think that Bob Moses had the look with his thick black glasses and white t-shirt under a pair of grey overalls. That was fab.

But, check out John Watson of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers! This is a man who knew how to rock a P-Coat!

If you will recall, the LRBW were a Detroit based group of militant autoworkers that organized a series of wildcats to fight the racism of the company, their fellow workers, and the union officials at the UAW. Tutored by James and Grace Lee Boggs. With connections to the Revolutionary Action Movement. Check out Detroit I Do Mind Dying by Surkin and Georgakas and We Will Return in the Whirlwind by Muhammad Ahmad for more on them.

I've been thinking about their relation to autonomous marxism quite a bit, but that will have to wait for another time.

The photo is again from the Labadie Collection online archive.

A Dialogue in a Coffee Shop

A: Oh, you’re rocking the Gramsci, huh?

B: [Putting book down over knee] Eh…yeah…you read Gramsci?

A: Of course.

B: What do you think of him?

A: I’m totally down. Man, fuck Jim Croce!

B: Jim Croce?

A: Yeah Jim Croce! I’d hate that asshole too, “If I could save time in a bottle…”! See how fast time goes in a fascist jail cell! Right? Fuck that!

B: I think you are a little confused…

A: Oh, what…you think “Don’t tug on Superman’s cape” is some kind of great Machiavellian aphorism warning of the dangers of a frontal assault before you’ve adequately waged the war of position, or something?

B: Uh, okay, I’m just going to go.

A: Whatever, man, suit yourself! [Under breath:] Dilletante western marxist motherfuckers!

Anarchist Infighting, 1921 Style

Let's face it, anarchists can be catty with each other. I've been guilty of this myself. Perhaps its because there are few opportunities to debate our real enemies. Maybe its because it was easier to mimic Debord's caustic style than to comprehend his arguments. I don't know the root cause, but I'll tell you this much: its a practice that goes back a long way.

Take for example the little polemic that Free Society printed in December 1921. Free Society, you'll remember, was the English language anarchist rag issued underground after the Espionage and Sedition Acts, originally titled the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin. Since my earlier post, I noticed that Paul Avrich claims the editor of the Anarchist Soviet Bulletin was none other than Marcus Graham (pseudonym for Schmuel Marcus) who later contributed to Road to Freedom and then founded the paper Man! in the 1930s. Most likely Graham was also responsible for Free Society. (Note: Its important not to confuse the paper Free Society issued underground from January 1921 until August 1922 with the group of Chicago anarchists that in 1923 formed a group called the Free Society group and briefly issued the Free Society Bulletin.)

Anyway...Free Society decided to denounce the east coast Jewish Anarchist movement centered around the long running newspaper the Freie Arbeiter Stimme for what those at Free Society saw as caving in to the state and abandonment of central anarchist principles.

The manifesto [agreed to at a Jewish Anarchist convention in Philadelphia] agrees to conspirative work only "where all possibilities for open work are abolished." This sounds quite queer having been written in these United States where our ideal has been outlawed since November 1919.

At that time the Anarchist Movement was attacked by the government. Scores of Russian, English, Italian and Spanish comrades were beaten jailed and deported. Only the Jewish Anarchist Movement and its organ Die Freie Arbeiter Stimme remained intact. Why? Not because it was any "favorite" of the State but for the simple fact that since the anti-anarchist law became effecitively, in 1919, the movement and this organ only spoke and wrote that which was "withing the law."

After a few more jabs, FS concludes:

We believe such a movement does more harm to the Anarchist ideal than its political opponents could. As long as there will not arise a movement among the Jewish comrades that will even be small in numbers, but uncompromising in speech and tactics, the present one will not have any reason to expect to be considered anything else than what it is, a movement misrepresenting our ideal--Anarchist-Communism.

Damn...burn! This commentary is especially interesting because it comes at a time when the rhetoric of the English-language Anarchist press in the U.S. is changing. The Anarchist Soviet Bulletin represents the fiery, insurrectionary tone of earlier papers like Cronaca Sovversiva or The Blast, but by the time Road to Freedom started rolling off the presses, the anarchists had toned down the rhetoric about the imminent collapse of capitalism and the coming of the revolution. The language change seems to reflect, at least to some degree, a shift in how anarchists believed change would come about. In the 1920s anarchists started to place more stock in education than in propaganda of the deed or calls for immediate attacks on property. There were reactions to this approach, of course. Graham started Man! to put a little feist back in the movement, and the upstarts in the Vanguard group, including a young Sam Dolgoff, argued for a more confrontational approach was necessary to meet the crises of the 1930s. But papers of the 1940s, such as the journal Retort, returned to a more philosophical tone. Not surprisingly, there seems to be a correlation between the fortunes of workers/resistance movements and the level of belligerence in the anarchist press. More on Man!, Vanguard, and Retort in future posts...

If only Earth Crisis was privvy to this...

No one posted any theoretically accute responses to my last post about time-space compression, so I guess I need to get a little juicier.

I learned something new about alcohol today. W.S. Van Valkenburgh, who took over editorship of Road to Freedom after Havel stepped down, penned a letter to the editor of Colliers magazine in August 1925 making a unique case against Prohibition.

"Historically, the prohibition of alcohol has inevitably wrought decimation upon every people practicing it for any considerable length of time. The effect of total abstinence naturally does not dampen the ardor of the existing generation; its effects show themselves upon posterity...

Every pioneer group and every militant nation, has imbibed in alcoholic stimulants while it was in the ascent...

In those vast domains of Asia where a handful of militant invaders holds hundreds of millions of abstainers in subjection, we have a fine illustration of the ability of alcoholics to dominate a large portion of the non-drinking population...

In the case of the Jews perhaps alcohol is the one secret factor which has made it possible for them to persevere and reach the very apex of achievment in every walk of modern life, regardless of the barriers placed in their way...

The great question of prohibition is not its effect on the immediate present, but to what lines it will reduce the victims of its enforcement when a future occasion arises to defend themselves against a virile fighting force through whose vein pioneer blood, inspired by the moderate use of alcohol, still flows.

In all history no abstaining group ever conquered a group of drinkers nor has any drinking population long remained under the domination of an oppressor."


Apparently Mr. Van Valkenburgh has a theory of drinking similar to that of this kid Billy Bates in my 1st Grade class. Billy had ways of gaining "special powers." One was to say the the immortal words of He-Man standing at the gates of Castle Greyskull: "By the power of Greyskull....I have the power!" The other way was to get a drink from the water fountain in the corner of the room. One day we had an unsuspecting substitute who stepped out of the room for a minute or two--long enough for Billy to instigate both powers. By the time she returned Billy had flipped over half the desks in the room and was throwing everything he could find on the floor, while the rest of us cowered in the corner. (Somehow, Billy later got into the Gifted and Talented Program. He got the boot after a few weeks when he drew all over the work table and his face with magic markers, than tried to scrub himself down with a sponge full of Ajax!)

Like with Billy's water drinking power (well, sort of) its unclear whether Van Valkenburgh's moderate alcohol drinkers use their super powers for good or bad--does it make them fearsome imperialists, or has it helped them to heroically lift themselves from the depths of oppression? His logic is just a little muddy on this point.

I'm starting to understand what earlier sweet awesome anarchist historians have meant when they claimed the U.S. anarchist movement never again produced leading lights matching the caliber of those that were deported in December 1919.

Anarchists Read David Harvey and Hardt and Negri in 1924

Free Society, the conspiratorial anarchist newspaper I mentioned in my last post, lasted until August 1922. The most restrictive aspects of the Espionage Act were repealed in 1921 and anarchists started testing the waters to decide the extent to which they could operate above ground. Not only did they have to deal with the official sources of state repression, but they were also on the lookout for thugs from patriotic and veterans groups ready to stomp on radicals, immigrants, and African-American's who had moved north during the war.

Anarchists did not re-establish an English language press in the U.S. until November 1924. At that point they launched the Road to Freedom, under the editorship of Hippolyte Havel. Havel was born in what is now the Czech Republic, met Emma Goldman at an anarchist conference in London in 1900, returned with her to the U.S., and became a leading figure in the English speaking anarchist scene. Eugene O'Neill based a character in The Iceman Cometh on the dude.
Ms. Goldman, exiled in France by that time, was very happy to see The Road to Freedom emerge, but pissed it had taken her comrades so long. In a letter to the editor printed in issue two she said:

“…That is good news that you are to start a paper. Heaven knows it is necessary after so many years of silence. I confess the fact that nothing was being done in America since our deportation has been harder to bear than many other things that made life so difficult the last seven years. It merely proves to me that my thirty years of hard effort had left no trace whatever, if no one attempted to revive what has been paralyzed with our unwilling departure.”

Could you lay it on any thicker, Emma? But I guess they had it coming.

Anway, one of the most interesting contributions to the first issue of Road to Freedom, was an unsigned tid-bit, a rumination on changes in how the world works, or seems to work, most likely written by Havel. It seems to capture, in essence, David Harvey's understanding of postmodernism as the experience of "time-space compression." Towards these changes Havel evinces a giddy optimism similar to that of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri when they are discussing the way economic and technological developments have made possible the emergence of a global "multitude" ready to smash capitalism and empire.

“Thanks to the unprecendented facilities of intercourse and communication, we are in the midst of an epoch of immense diffusion which cannot but smooth the way toward some kind of social synthesis of humanity. The goal of this development—a goal which we approach but never quite attain—is the suppression of distance. As we approach it, human groupings are transformed in type. They are less dominated by geography and more by affinity and preference. They are less a product of circumstances and more a product of choice. Social bonds become less and less territorial, more and more intrinsic and purely human. “Neighbor” means less; “comrade” and “friend” more. Eventually, it would seem, human society will be made up of numerous face-forming, closely interlacing social organizations extending all over the civilized world.”

Not bad for 1924.

Thanks to everyone checking out the blog and posting responses. Keep it up!