anarchism - 1994 - Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Anarchism and the Black Revolution

Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin

Monkeywrench Press and The Worker Self-Education Foundation of the Industrial Workers of the World

1994

153 pages

This book, Anarchism and the Black Revolution, was a title that surprised me when I was trying to get to know the library book collection of the midwestern rural community college I was tasked with managing. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is a black power activist and anarchist who spent from 1969 to 1983 in prison for hijacking an aircraft. Before his incarceration he spent the late 60s in the black power movement as a member of the Black Panthers. Towards the end of his prison term he began to write anarchist pamphlets which are collected in this small volume.

One of the most interesting aspects of the first of his pamphlets collected here, “Anarchism and the Black Revolution”, was that Ervin attempted to chart an anarchist course for black revolutionary action in the US, divergent from the Maoist or pacifist courses of action taken by black revolutionaries before him. Furthermore, he addresses, in a 994 piece, issues of white privilege among anarchists and tackles the question of why there aren't more people of colour in the anarchist scene, a question that radical movements keep returning to. Ervin noted that white anarchists exercise their white privilege when they sweep questions of race to the side in strict favour of focusing on class issues. Ervin argues that black workers (along with women) have historically, and continue to be, placed below white men, who, as unionists, are collaborators of oppression when they claim this privilege.

He also advocates for the development of an international Anarchist Black Cross network, the anarchist prisoner support group that took up his case in the late 70s.

He wrote these pamphlets in prison and I don't know how many other things he wrote after his release or if prison was his most productive time as an anarchist philosopher. He does emphasize direct action in his work which he took to extremes in the 60s with ‘skyjacking’, and he also emphasizes the importance of the worker to social movements, and advocates anarcho-syndicalism.

hippies - 2012 - Wanderlust

Wanderlust

David Wain

2012

Apatow Productions

This film is a tale of counterculture tourism. A journey of the heart where the human spirit is led back to their place of origin to find that, yes, yes, middle class conformity is the best possible lifestyle. Thank you... so much, for this portrayal of hippies, culture industry.

Wanderlust is a stupid movie that is sometimes funny although it is mostly exactly the shallow movie anyone who’s watched movies before should expect. A married pair of Manhattan yuppies lose their foothold on the success ladder and are forced to leave the city. The man works in an investment firm that’s shut down by the feds and the woman’s a documentary film director who blows a screening of her latest work in front of HBO executives. After this meeting when the wife seeks solace for her failure from her husband, it's revealed that her filmmaking career was simply a dalliance in a long list of discarded career-paths, revealing that the professional realm is a world of struggle for some and a playground for others. Not just anyone, afterall, can jump into filmmaking on a whim and obtain meetings to screen their projects in front of high-status industry personnel.

So anyways this couple leave Manhattan, the gilded city of success. They had to, because they’re failures now and Manhattan doesn’t accommodate failures. On their trip out of the city they need a hotel, and they find one, but it’s also a hippie commune called Elysium where they feel the good vibrations and decide to become permanent residents after a brief rest in the suburbs with the man's materialistic and success-driven brother. That the commune is also a hotel is crucial in indicating that this turn in their life is as tourists seeking a temporary escape, rather than as explorers of alternatives to dominant values. The man, who was also in the movie Clueless, talks Jennifer Aniston, his wife, into staying with the hippies. Over the course of the film Jennifer Aniston comes to love her new habitat while the Clueless guy wants to leave. Throughout this film there’s all the stuff about naked communing with nature and swaying back and forth to folk music and hallucinogenics and long hair on men that make hippies so hilarious.

There are a few moments in the film that are of interest to me. The first is the already mentioned HBO meeting. Another prime moment of interest occurs towards the end of the film. The husband receives a call for a job interview and is ready to return to the mainstream and besides, he’s not as cool as he thought he was and he likes the commune less and less, so he has a fight with his wife where suddenly he’s arguing that conformity is great if it means enjoying air conditioning again. He argues so passionately in favour of technologically mediated bourgeois urban lifestyles that its easy to forget that earlier in the film he was convincing his wife to give the hippies a chance. The two interesting things about the husband’s statements are, first, at one point he shouts that experiencing air conditioning is the norm in the United States. This statement indicates at once that it is just plain incorrect to live in violation of norms of any kind, and also immediately repositions himself as harshly opposed to the commune. It is interesting to me that his loudest opposing statement to communal life is in reference to air conditioning, which evokes the title of Henry Miller’s critique of American conformity, The Air Conditioned Nightmare.

The second interesting statement in this argument was when the husband accused his wife of ‘drinking the koolaid’. Drinking the Koolade, of course recalling the Jonestown mass suicide where followers of Reverend Jim Jones drank cyanide-laced flavour-ade in 1978, has become a term of critical conformity. Use of this term is how the squares quickly criticize non-conformists for adopting non-conformist dress, language, ideas, etc.

Another scene of interest appears when Jennifer Aniston eats a breakfast meat platter or something like that at a diner in town, far from the isolated rural environment of Elysium. All this meat has to be eaten in secret because the commune is strictly vegan and, uh oh! she finds that the guy who founded the commune is also at the diner eating a big hunk of meat. She’s scared because she’s caught but the commune patriarch reveals that he’s been eating secret meat for years. This scene interests me because it was an opportunity to demonstrate that the strict rules of the commune and its adherents may actually be elastic to some extent... after all, if this hardcore old time hippy can violate the rules, anyone should be able to, to some extent, without facing exile. Instead, this is a secret they share with the implicit knowledge that this violation of the rules means they don’t really believe in the hippie life after all.

The final thing that interests me in the movie is that the commune has a charismatic leader who’s good at everything and has everyone’s admiration and truly believes in the hippie way of living. For some reason he wants to go steady with Jennifer Aniston, and sells out the commune so that he can impress her with his new wealth, even though she had come around to committing to life at Elysium. This was clearly just a lazy movie crisis inserted into the film to move the action along to some conclusion, but it also expresses, I think, a widespread skepticism among mainstream people that anyone can truly avoid the lure of success in mainstream society, because not only is Clueless-man enticed back rather quickly, the hardest-core hippie of the film gives up his lifestyle for reasons that don’t even come close to making sense.

Students for a Democratic Society - 1969 - Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Up Against the Ivy Wall: A History of the Columbia Crisis

Jerry L. Avorn

Atheneum Press

1969

307 pages

Up Against the Ivy Wall is a detailed account of the April-May 1968 student uprising at Columbia University. This brief and highly concentrated event involved, most dramatically, the occupation of administration offices and other campus spaces by dissident students led by Mark Rudd and his chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a national organization for leftist students. The uprising had many different dimensions to it, but it largely stemmed from student opposition to Columbia’s contributions to military research, and the expansion of the wealthy university’s campus into impoverished Harlem by dispossessing poor nearby residents of their homes for the purpose of building a new gymnasium.

The main thing that interests me about this book is that it appears to be an example of a book that’s no longer published. Up Against the Ivy Wall is a scholarly and densely detailed account of a brief moment in time, 307 pages describing four weeks of life in a tiny section of New York City. This was published in 1969, months after the events themselves, which almost indicates an urgency in publishing a clear account of the events in question. This book, in the density and quality of the detail it provides of a short period of time in the life of a social movement, is similar to Donn Teal’s The Gay Militants, which, in similar depth tells the story of year one of the gay liberation movement in America shortly after it concluded. I know that other such events, including the Occupy Movement and the 1999 Seattle WTO protests inspired books which were published quickly, but I haven’t read any such book that reaches the level of detail found in the two older texts.