Perlman, Fredy

PERLMAN, FREDY (1934-1985). A unique writer, printer and activist within the Left, Fredy Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia, of middle-class Jewish parents. He was said to have been named for the beloved Hollywood star, Fred McMurray. His father had found success as a manufacturer, but the family set itself to escape the threat of Nazism, fleeing to Bolivia in 1939 and moving onward to the United States in 1945. Settling first in Mobile, Alabama, then New York, and finally a Kentucky suburb of Cincinnati, his parents had given their son international experience and multiple language fluencies at an early age.

Perlman worked as a stock boy in a wholesale business before entering college at Morehead, Kentucky. He left for Los Angeles in the summer of 1953, accepting a job at the UCLA student newspaper while he took courses. Rebellious and articulate, he quickly became embroiled in a free speech battle against the university. During his final year at UCLA, he edited the combative mimeographed newsletter of a student housing co-op. Drawn to traveling and leaving for Mexico before finishing a degree, he regained his Spanish fluency. Perlman then returned to Kentucky to complete a BA at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.

Perlman moved thereafter to New York and enrolled in graduate school at Columbia University in 1956. There he met his future wife, Lorraine Nybakken, and studied closely with the famed academic radical C. Wright Mills. Meanwhile, he threw himself into the activity of the then-young Living Theater. Founders Judith Malina and Julian Beck prided themselves on being militant pacifists and philosophical anarchists. He also joined a new artistic friend, John Ricklefs, in producing a unique socialist text, The New Freedom: Corporate Capitalism, with Fredy supplying the text and Ricklefs the accompanying woodcuts, created in a few hundred copies for friends rather than sales. He also wrote Plunder, a play for the Living Theater, never produced but published in 1962 and later reprinted among his other works.

Alienated by the Cold War atmosphere around the near-nuclear confrontation with the Russians over Cuba, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman headed for Europe, finally spending three years in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, the capital of Serbia. There, he gained a PhD on the study of an economically backward region. His later semi-fictional text, Letters of Insurgents (1976), was drawn in part from the complexities of the Yugoslavian experience where “socialism” was official doctrine but alienated labor continued. Drawn back to the United States by American political developments, he accepted a junior professorship at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. He collaborated with friends in producing six issues of the small but lively magazine, Black and Red. He also produced, writing, illustrating and printing, the twenty-four page pamphlet The Reproduction of Daily Life (1969), the first of his works to receive wide circulation in the New Left and in later years the most well-remembered. A crisp and vivid re-interpretation of commodity fetishism and the labor process, it was a perfect introduction to Marx but also to the saga of class exploitation, for young rebel readers.

Traveling and giving lectures in Italy two tumultuous years after becoming a Kalamazoo academic, Perlman visited Paris in 1968, taking part in the historic demonstrations, returning to take part in the American antiwar movement including the protests of the Democratic convention in Chicago. His experiences, especially among European young radicals, would remain among the most intense and informative of his life.

Leaving his professorship in Kalamazoo, resettling in Detroit, the Perlmans set up a printing press, producing the new left magazine Radical America among other projects at the new Detroit Printing Co-op. One of the other, most widely circulated of Perlman’s creations was Situationist theorist Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, translated and illustrated by a group around the Printing Co-op but highly influenced by Perlman’s collaboration. First printed as a special issue of Radical America in 1970, it introduced Situationist ideas in the United States and went on to many future editions.

A center of leftwing activity since the 1910s, Detroit of the 1960s-1970s became a hothouse of the Maoist Left, drawing Perlman toward ever more strident critiques of “vanguardism” as a replacement for democratic, collective engagements. A series of new and old pamphlets, translations of historic anarchist writings and assorted other literary projects continued amidst a sense of political defeat and collective depression among erstwhile new leftists. As political activity declined, Perlman turned toward creating a narrative of memory, an invented memory of revolutionaries across generations and continents. Letters of Insurgents (1976), more than 800 pages in length, recorded much of his own life and travels, placed into the memory of a Czech woman activist who sees past the bureaucratic corruption of Communist era something larger and more revealing than simple betrayal. His next major work, Leviathan (1983), struck out against the very idea of progress and the Renaissance origins of mechanical advancement.

In 1980, the Printing Co-op closed, and the childhood rheumatic fever that had damaged his heart caught up with Perlman. The Strait (1988), the first of two further volumes of his critique of civilization, was to be published posthumously. A second volume of The Strait awaits publication by the Black and Red press. Inspired by the teachings of North American shamen, he sought in these volumes to explore lives before and around the white settlements. Smoking cigarettes inveterately, undergoing two heart surgeries, Fredy Perlman died in Detroit.

Perlman, Lorraine. Having Little, Being Much: a Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years. Detroit: Black and Red, 1989.

Fredy Perlman Texts. Anarchist Library. http://theanarchistlibrary.org/category/author/fredy-perlman