struck a dramatic chord and earnestly explained, “This is a song the workers sing when they’re oppressed.” In retrospect, I think they were kind of sweet, but at the time I was scornful: “ This is the Red Menace?”
A few of the CP’s older and more politically conscious people were usually on hand as well, and these I found evasive, dishonest, and ignorant. After listening to them recite their catechism, I concluded that however loathsome and psychotic the Red-baiters were, they had got one thing right: the CP was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less. They were stolid organization men, and a revolutionary looking for a home might as well have checked out the Kiwanis or the Boy Scouts.
I was in search of a movement that somehow combined socialism with individualism—a tall order. The model in my mind’s eye was the old IWW, which had no use for government as we know it, but thought the whole shebang should be run by democratic workers’ councils. As a workable
blueprint, this sounded pretty far-fetched even at the time, but that bothered me not a bit. The important thing was that the world had fallen into the hands of a bunch of insane greed-heads and obviously needed a thorough overhaul.
So there I was, sitting in Johnny Romero’s bar on Minetta one night with some of my fellow refuseniks from Richmond Hill, and we fell into an amiable political argument with some people at the next table. “What are your politics anyway?” one of them asked me.
“I’m an anarchist,” I said. That usually shut them up.
“Oh yeah? Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Nechaiev?”
I was caught flat-footed. This was the first I had heard that you had to read anything to be an anarchist. It sounded distinctly unanarchistic. And who were all these Russians he was talking about? They sounded like fugitives from an obscure novel. With patient condescension, he informed me that they were essential anarchist theoreticians, and that all would be revealed to me if I showed up Friday night for the weekly forum at the Libertarian Center, 813 Broadway, third floor. I wrote down the address.
The center turned out to be a big loft on the corner of 12th Street, which they would set up on forum nights with long trestle tables and folding chairs for about thirty people. I went down that Friday, and within a few weeks was signed up as a full-fledged member of the Libertarian League. (In those prelapsarian days, the word “libertarian” was still in the hands of its rightful owners: anarchists, syndicalists, council communists, and suchlike. The mean-spirited, reactionary assholes who are currently dragging it through the mud were not even a blot on the horizon. We should have taken out a copyright.) The league was a loose-knit anarchist group run by an elected steering committee. Discipline was voluntary—hell, everything was voluntary. It was almost purely a propaganda operation, mainly concentrating on running the forum and publishing an eight-page newsletter, Views and Comments . Unlike the Marxists, who expected “History” to descend like a deus ex machina and pull their chestnuts out of the fire, the anarchists knew how long the odds were, and they went about their business with a kind of go-to-hell, cheerful, existential despair.
They were quite a group. Of course, there were a few old guys down there who were just lost souls looking for something to do on a Friday night, but there were also genuine firebrands who had fought in the Spanish
Civil War, people who had been forced to flee Europe because of their revolutionary activities, veterans of the IWW strikes. “Mitch” Mitchell, for instance, who later got me my seaman’s papers, was the brother of H. L. Mitchell, who had been the main founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He had fought in Spain as well, and came out of that experience an extremely bitter anti-Communist. He was convinced that he had returned alive only because he had been
A few of the CP’s older and more politically conscious people were usually on hand as well, and these I found evasive, dishonest, and ignorant. After listening to them recite their catechism, I concluded that however loathsome and psychotic the Red-baiters were, they had got one thing right: the CP was the American arm of Soviet foreign policy, no more, no less. They were stolid organization men, and a revolutionary looking for a home might as well have checked out the Kiwanis or the Boy Scouts.
I was in search of a movement that somehow combined socialism with individualism—a tall order. The model in my mind’s eye was the old IWW, which had no use for government as we know it, but thought the whole shebang should be run by democratic workers’ councils. As a workable
blueprint, this sounded pretty far-fetched even at the time, but that bothered me not a bit. The important thing was that the world had fallen into the hands of a bunch of insane greed-heads and obviously needed a thorough overhaul.
So there I was, sitting in Johnny Romero’s bar on Minetta one night with some of my fellow refuseniks from Richmond Hill, and we fell into an amiable political argument with some people at the next table. “What are your politics anyway?” one of them asked me.
“I’m an anarchist,” I said. That usually shut them up.
“Oh yeah? Have you read Kropotkin? Bakunin? Nechaiev?”
I was caught flat-footed. This was the first I had heard that you had to read anything to be an anarchist. It sounded distinctly unanarchistic. And who were all these Russians he was talking about? They sounded like fugitives from an obscure novel. With patient condescension, he informed me that they were essential anarchist theoreticians, and that all would be revealed to me if I showed up Friday night for the weekly forum at the Libertarian Center, 813 Broadway, third floor. I wrote down the address.
The center turned out to be a big loft on the corner of 12th Street, which they would set up on forum nights with long trestle tables and folding chairs for about thirty people. I went down that Friday, and within a few weeks was signed up as a full-fledged member of the Libertarian League. (In those prelapsarian days, the word “libertarian” was still in the hands of its rightful owners: anarchists, syndicalists, council communists, and suchlike. The mean-spirited, reactionary assholes who are currently dragging it through the mud were not even a blot on the horizon. We should have taken out a copyright.) The league was a loose-knit anarchist group run by an elected steering committee. Discipline was voluntary—hell, everything was voluntary. It was almost purely a propaganda operation, mainly concentrating on running the forum and publishing an eight-page newsletter, Views and Comments . Unlike the Marxists, who expected “History” to descend like a deus ex machina and pull their chestnuts out of the fire, the anarchists knew how long the odds were, and they went about their business with a kind of go-to-hell, cheerful, existential despair.
They were quite a group. Of course, there were a few old guys down there who were just lost souls looking for something to do on a Friday night, but there were also genuine firebrands who had fought in the Spanish
Civil War, people who had been forced to flee Europe because of their revolutionary activities, veterans of the IWW strikes. “Mitch” Mitchell, for instance, who later got me my seaman’s papers, was the brother of H. L. Mitchell, who had been the main founder of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. He had fought in Spain as well, and came out of that experience an extremely bitter anti-Communist. He was convinced that he had returned alive only because he had been
Similar Books
