Class war veteran Ron Sakolsky has always been a fearless pathfinder in the
wilds of revolutionary culture and cultural revolution. In the last decade
alone, he has co-edited three important, stimulating anthologies on some of
the histories and cultures which weave through and orbit around the
anti-authoritarian underground -- Gone to Croatan: Origins of North
American Dropout Culture (Autonomedia, 1993); Sounding Off! Music as
Subversion/ Resistance/Revolution (Autonomedia, 1995); and Seizing the
Airwaves: A Free Radio Handbook (AK Press, 1998). Sakolsky's projects seem
inspired by the idea that positions of heterodoxy and autonomy are the best
revenge against a world violently dominated by the mediocrity and
fundamentalism of reactionaries. He keys into vital creative experiments
and radical folklore that speaks directly to the concerns of revolutionary
anti-capitalists and anti-statists, and takes the reader by the elbow to
point out new sites of alignment, cross-pollination, and synthesis in a way
that a friendly seasoned bird-watcher might take a city slicker for a walk
in the woods. This time around, Sakolsky turns his attentions towards
surrealist activities first instigated by a circle of young Chicago
Wobblies in 1966 and which continue to this day (my review copy of
Surrealist Subversions came with flyers dated October 2002 that railed
against the corporate media's attacks on Amiri Baraka and the upcoming U.S.
invasion of Iraq).
Like anarchism, surrealism suffers from layers of misrepresentation
shoveled upon it by corporate mass media and ignorant academic
pontification. Today's anarchists are no more white college boys with trust
funds sporting black bandana masks than they were the wild-eyed
bomb-throwers with thick unkempt beards seen in so many Haymarket-era
editorial cartoons. What actually defines surrealism is a burning
commitment to the principles of liberty, desire, and rage against the
slave-drivers of Capital, State, Church, Patriarchy, and miserabilizing
authoritarian bureaucracies of all forms, a position that has been endorsed
by surrealists worldwide since 1924 and one that many anarchists have felt
comfortable supporting in their collaborations with surrealists. As
explored in Sakolsky's collection, that connection is more fundamental for
surrealists in the U.S. since they have a special affinity with the dreams
and dynamite of the I.W.W.'s revolutionary unionism, an influence that
becomes obvious in the surrealists' celebration of the "Chicago Idea" legacy.
Basically, the Chicago Idea among anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists
of the late nineteenth century stressed spontaneous rank-and-file direct
action as the alternative to laborist reformism and the Stirnerite
anarcho-egoism of loners like Benjamin Tucker. As articulated in the 1883
"Pittsburgh Manifesto" of the International Working People's Association
and the preamble to the 1905 I.W.W. constitution, the Chicago Idea called
for the destruction of capitalism and the State through a federation of
autonomous revolutionary councils of self-emancipated workers and
subproletariat (the I.W.P.A. had organized the unemployed in Midwestern
cities during the economic depression of 1884). The pre-World War I Chicago
Idea revolutionary unionists were also dedicated to fostering the growth of
internationalist working-class revolutionary culture through parades,
music, dances, games, poetry readings, gun clubs (!), amateur theatrical
productions and potluck cookouts. The kaliedoscopic flair with which the
surrealists adopted the old Chicago Idea sixty or seventy years later
provides this anthology with countless impressions and expressions of
spontaneous uprisings in thought and deed that innovatively link radical
politics to oppositional popular culture on dozens of fronts and with an
endless array of weapons and tactics.
As if to underline this point, Sakolsky presents the material collected in
Surrealist Subversions according to themes of theory, critique, and action,
rather than using a simple chronological format. The first big "theory"
section reads surrealism in the context of "Total Nonconformism,
Insubordination, & Revolution as the Way to a Non-Repressive Civilization";
the second segment offers surrealist critiques of neoliberal globalization,
work, patriarchy, whiteness, religion, the traditional Left, and the
capitalist destruction of the environment; and the third "surrealist
action" section looks at "Social Transformation as Festival" with chapters
on revolutionary poetry in everyday life, direct action, humor, blues and
jazz, outsider artists, history, and playful surrealist group experiments.
Personally, I can't say if this carefully-calibrated road map is successful
or not because I just picked up the book and read random parts for a couple
weeks before writing this review. Really, it's almost impossible to sum up
what is covered in the more than two hundred texts in Surrealist
Subversions: in addition to plenty of collages and drawings to puzzle over,
there are essays on prison abolition, Bugs Bunny, heroin addiction, the
L.A. uprising of 1992, horror movies seen on TV, Charlie Parker, work as
psychopathology, the MOVE massacre, Herbert Marcuse, the Battle in Seattle,
erotic emancipation, and the urban ecology of squirrels.
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