Anarchist Publishers
ANARCHIST PUBLISHERS. Socialist and Communist parties, even the smallest versions, have communicated principally through their newspapers, with pamphlets as a sideline growing in number after 1900. Lacking the needed institutional strength and finances, anarchists of various kinds have necessarily relied more often upon the publication of pamphlets and, especially after 1960, upon their own small press books.
The formation of anarchist groups of the United States during the 1870s-1880s took place largely among German Americans. The anarchist or “social revolutionary” press, centered in Chicago but with major outlets in New York, produced no books of its own and few pamphlets. The proliferation of Yiddish publications in the 1890s, including a burst of anarchist literary activity, likewise offered few published books or pamphlets.
“Free Love” advocates, best described as anarchists for lack of another description, marked a significant exception. “Individualist anarchist” Ezra Heywood began pamphleteering in the 1860s, reprinting fellow anarchist Josiah Warren’s True Civilization (1869), later working with the more notable Benjamin Tucker (and his Liberty magazine). Notoriously, woman’s rights supporter Heywood was arrested for mailing copies of his pamphlet Cupid’s Own Yoke; or The Binding Forces of Conjugal Life: An Essay to Consider Some Moral and Physiological Phases of Love and Marriage, Wherein is Asserted the Natural Right and Necessity of Sexual Self-Government (1873). Sentenced to two years’ hard labor, he was ardently defended in public protests and released by President Ruther B. Hayes. Among the smaller, forgotten pamphleteers of a similar type would be the late-stage Fourierist, M.E. Lazarus, whose Alabama-based pamphlet series popularized his quip, “Every vote for a governing office is an instrument for enslaving me.”
Emma Goldman, a riveting lecturer, may be said to have taken Heywood’s place and more, as early as the 1890s and for at least two more generations. Mother Earth Press, established by Mother Earth Magazine, brought out her Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) placing Goldman at the head of literary or any other anarchist writers in the United States. In the meantime, the Charles H. Kerr Company, informally the real publishing center of the Socialist Party, offered readers a handful of anarchist and quasi-anarchist volumes during the 1910s, including the writings of Prince Peter Kropotkin and free-lover Edward Carpenter.
The Industrial Workers of the World, early and often accused of being anarchist, published (or rather, one of its newspapers published) a handful of pamphlets, especially The Little Red Songbook, the five or ten cent pamphlet sold in the tens of thousands and passed hand to hand, edition to edition, for more than four generations. Other influential and popular Wobbly pamphlets included the cartoon booklet Mr. Block (1918), memorable for its acerbic humor, and Justus Ebert’s Trial of a New Society (1913) arguing that the Lawrence, Massachusetts, textile strike and the legal case against its leaders constituted the capitalist effort to block the emerging socialist society from taking hold of civilization.
By the 1910s, the use of radical pamphlets, greatly encouraged by socialist lecturers making their living through sales of literature, had grown significantly. The traveling lecturer Arthur Lewis famously urged his audiences to buy copies of Engels’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (an excerpt from the author’s Anti-Duehring) and place it under their pillows at night.
Meanwhile, the small but well-organized Socialist League of North America boasted pamphlets by the rising labor notable William Z. Foster calling for abandonment of the IWW for larger, more effective units within the AFL.
The American anarchist movement, never well-organized outside of its foreign-language section of a dozen different groups, declined sharply after 1920. But already, a principal function of its press had, in effect, been set into place. Lacking a stable publishing operation of their own, anarchists sold pamphlets and books already available commercially and meanwhile organized special committees around a revered individual, often listing the financial contributors in the last pages of the volume. A “Rudolf Rocker Committee” published several volumes of the famed editor’s memoirs at the end of the 1930s. A”Dud Edelshtot Kommitet” likewise published in 1953 a large volume devoted to the 1890s poet David Edelshtot, including his poems and essays of lavish praise by his admirers. Other anarchist authors, such as the literary scholar B. Rivkin, had their books printed in “vanity” editions of 500 copies or less, in this case by his widow, Minna Rivkin, for admiring readers of the essayist’s earlier works in various Yiddish periodicals.
English language anarchists, with their limited resources, offered various pamphlets on the fate of anarchists in the Spanish Civil War, seeking to set the record straight but mainly directed against Communists and their supporters. The modest upsurge of anarchist activities following World War II brought pamphlets urging non-violent revolution and the start of a literary outpouring that found its haven in City Lights Press. Anarchists opposed to the build-up of the leviathan State and its military-industrial economy seemed to find haven in Dwight Macdonald’s short-lived but popular magazine, Politics. His own most noted pamphlet, a personal attack on Henry Wallace, amidst the 1948 Progressive Party campaign, was taken up and popularized by Cold War devotees.
The rise of the civil rights movement helped to popularize non-violence, accentuating the role of one branch of anarchist pamphleteers. The emergence of the New Left expanded the potential readership of leftwing literature many fold, including anarchist-related poetry by the likes of Tuli Kupferberg, direct-action urgings from Europeans and Americans alike, and a more narrow but ideologically consistent anarchist literature aimed against the purported illusions of the mainstream Left.
This development paralleled a dramatic change in the format of radical expression. Arguably, when attendees to antiwar protests broke precedent by bringing their own, home-made signs in the middle 1960s, usually slogans illustrated with the sign-carriers own handiwork, something had shifted in Left sensibilities. The next and giant step, the creation of underground newspapers, challenged not only the politics of the print media but also the form, with strikingly fresh designs, poetry across the front page (or anywhere) and comic strips of a different, more challenging content, often flagrantly challenging existing standards in sex and violence. The day-glo psychedelia of marijuana-inspired Rock concert posters introduced youthful audience to new and different expressions, while their very look distanced the printed symbols of protest from the styles of the Old Left.
The outpouring hinted at an anarchist worldview or at least an acceptance of anarchism, the creation of community without coercion and perhaps without any violence. A growing variety of small press items, cultural pamphlets, poetry booklets, and others, offered rebellious and uncontrolled mixture of art and politics, like the pamphlet-publication Black Mask in New York. More formal expressions of anarchism, such as Listen, Marxist! (1969) by Murray Bookchin, with a title borrowed from C. Wright Mills’s Listen, Yankee! in defense of the Cuban Revolution a decade earlier, raked New Leftists, socialists and communists over the coals. This pamphlet attracted special attention because of the implosion of Students for a Democratic Society that year.
Amidst the New Left decline, Detroit-based anarchist and printer Fredy Perlman joined by Lorraine Perlman and others of the Black and Red group in launching pamphlets and later books with a special visual sensibility. The Reproduction of Daily Life (1968), issued in Kalamazoo, before the Perlmans’ departure to Detroit, offered the stamp of worker-student, May-June uprising in Paris (in which Fredy Perlman had taken part) redefined alienation in modern work and education, in a fresh visual and narrative appeal for direct action against authorities of all kinds. The group’s own edition of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1970, simultaneously an issue of Radical America magazine) attracted wide attention. His later writings on a variety of subjects, from Zionism and the Middle East to the experiences of the 1960s to life in the Detroit region before European invasion, continued to appear through Black and Red after his death in 1985. Black and Red also published a handful of classic anarchist texts, including the first English language edition of Voline’s Unknown Revolution and Nester Makhno’s history the Makhnovist movement, both of these translated from the Russian.
In another key but not unrelated, the innovative“ copy-shop anarchist” d.i.y. (do it yourself) culture or subculture spawned anarchistic trends or “zines” entirely idiosyncratic by nature from the 1970s until the displacement of the copy shop with newer technology. These zines often had a pamphlet-like presence. For many readers less politically-minded but just as cynical about hopes for mainstream politics and culture, The Onion would for decades offer steady doses of social and cultural insight, with a small series of “best of” Onion books.
Anarchy Comics from San Francisco, edited by Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides (1976-1983), satirizing anarchism itself along with contemporary class society, borrowed heavily from “klip-art” collage techniques, mocking Left cliches as they assaulted the tedium of class society’s daily life and consumer cravings-substitutes for authenticity. Anarchy also drew upon a wide array of other artists explored the history of anarchism from Emma Goldman to Kronstat to the Spanish Civil War. A singularly expressive and humorous cover showed an embittered punk emerging into a space-based, socialist future, clearly horrified at how happy everyone seemed to be. Through Mavrides in particular, Anarchy Comics connected to the Sub-Genius Foundation, rising from the early 1990s into a subcultural satire movement based in Texas, with a wide and sustained youthful following.
Crimethinc, “the decentralized collective,” a child of post-East Bloc collapse and revival of anarchist activity encompassing also Situationism and Punk among other influences, emerged first as a hard-core zine, Inside Front, and reset itself as an expression of autonomous local group gathered around InfoShops among other sites. Collective expression included a series of well-selling books, notably Days of War, Nights of Love (2001), also posters, pamphlets and assorted ephemera. For the most part, contributors to pamphlets and books have remained anonymous, in part because of the “direct action” history that includes “hacktivism” and defense of forest lands by any nonviolent means. Crimethinc became best known through its association with like-minded punk bands and for anarchist “gatherings.” The “pursuit of a freer and more joyous world” has meant revolution as a process of self- and collective-liberation. At the same time, a rigorous satire of historic and more mainstream Leftwing ideas went to the heart of their project: “Crimethinc Ex-Workers Ex-Collective,” or CWC, their alternative self-description.
The appearance of AK Press in 1987 marked the new phase from another, more eclectic angle. Originally founded in Stirling, Scotland by Ramsey Kanaan, it shifted its base with Kanaan himself to the Bay Area in the early 1990s. By publicizing its books and pamphlets as well as itself mainly on-line, also emphasizing a public presence and sales at events from conferences to protests, AK moved anarchist distribution and anarchist thinking itself towards the twenty-first century. Noam Chomsky, increasingly articulate in his own anarchist background and sentiments, quickly became a much-purchased author, and in short order, his voice could be heard as AK. As a new kind of publisher, AK also made a decisive turn toward non-print materials, including CDs, T-shirts, buttons, stickers and a line of anarchist-themed items popular around the world. AK pioneered in particular the spoken word CDs as an anarchist mainstay, with voices as diverse as Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Jello Biafra and Arundhati Roy, not to mention the music of Wobbly favorite Utah Phillips among others.
Kanaan stepped away from AK to launch PM Press in 2007. Taking a rather more eclectic tack, PM built up a list of socialist classics, including the writings of CLR James and the most requested books from the fading Charles H. Kerr Company. Its fields of interest stretched from English rebel songs of centuries past to oral histories of the Oxacan uprising of the Zapatistas, eco-philosophical texts, material on mass incarceration, the revival of labor syndicalism to anthologies of the writings of Staughton Lynd and Paul Goodman. Thereby, PM itself embodied the considerable dimensions of anarchist, anarchist-friendly and related literature for younger radical readers in particular.