The Rebel Worker & Solidarity Bookshop

THE REBEL WORKER & SOLIDARITY BOOKSHOP. In advance of the formation of Chicago surrealist movement in 1966, members of this community collaborated with other young radicals associated with Roosevelt University to open the Solidarity Bookshop on Armitage Avenue and published the ultra-left mimeographed journal The Rebel Worker. Solidarity Bookshop opened in 1964, facilitated by Robert Green, Tor Faegre, Bernard Marszalek, Franklin Rosemont, and other participants. Called ‘Solidarity’ after an IWW phrase, its shelves were stocked with IWW materials, books gifted from the defunct IWW Work People’s College in Duluth, comic books, and diverse surrealist publications. IWW meetings were held there regularly. The Rebel Worker served as the mouthpiece of Solidarity Bookshop.

The Rebel Worker was published under the aegis of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Its title was taken from the masthead of a IWW paper circa 1919. The first issue reflected this lineage by broadcasting the union affiliation on the outside and inside covers and in the table of contents. It was mimeographed on an antique electric machine owned by the IWW international headquarters in Chicago and housed at Solidarity Bookshop. The journal also published pamphlets and leaflets covering various leftist subjects such as proletarian pop culture and workplace sabotage.

Most of the students involved with The Rebel Worker were interested in and engaged with a host of ultra-left movements from anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism, to anti-Stalinist and libertarian Marxism, Trotskyism, and Black Power. In addition, they adhered to the key IWW principle of worker control and self-management.. Although The Rebel Worker was one of the official organs of the IWW and remained unaffiliated with the surrealist movement, its contents combined the ‘radical union’ of IWW protest culture with the surrealist revolt against bourgeois culture.

The Rebel Worker was one of the earliest in a wave of radical periodicals associated with surrealism to emerge from the United States over the course of the 1960s, such as Resurgence (1964–67), Black Mask (1966–68), and Antinarcissus/Surrealist Conquest (1969–70). Thus, it is arguable that The Rebel Worker played an influential role in shaping New Left interest in surrealism by linking avant-garde aesthetics to anti-capitalist tactics through an ultra-leftist critique of wage labor and the racist nation state. Franklin Rosemont explained: “Our aims were simple: we wanted to abolish wage-slavery and to smash the State ... we preferred to call ourselves anarchists, or surrealists — or Wobblies.’.

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Rosemont, Franklin and Charles Radcliffe. Dancin' in the Streets: Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists and Provos in the 1960s as Recorded in the Pages of Rebel Worker and Heatwave, Charles H Kerr. 2005.

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