Hold your tongue, demagogue

Ha ha ha. Chaz Bufe's notorious classic "Listen, Anarchist!", presumably named after Murray Bookchin's "Listen, Marxist!" This seems to be the 1985 original version. I have the special edition published by The Match in 1987. I'm old enough to remember the ensuing controversy, featuring Bob Black, Michael Williams, Spider Rainbow and sundry others, in a bewildering and many-sided drama. Of course, I wasn't actually *in* San Francisco at the time. Instead, I had somebody send me the relevant pamphlets to my mysterious, pseudonymous postal office box in far-away Sweden. (I still haven't gotten hold of Black's "The Baby and the Bathwater", though.)

The author who started this pamphlet war, Chaz Bufe, was a leading member of the Workers' Solidarity Alliance (WSA), a small anarcho-syndicalist outfit officially recognized as the U.S. contacts of the International Workers' Association, the legendary but probably moribund (outside Barcelona) anarcho-syndicalist international. Ostensibly, "Listen, Anarchist!" is a criticism of various strands of the anarchist milieu considered non-anarchist by the author. Urban guerrillas, anarcho-primitivists and anti-work hippies are in for a lash. So are spiritual anarchists and people who use Situationist jargon. Bufe is particularly incensed at Fred Perlman, who talks about being "possessed by the spirit of a tree" and having "orgiastic communion with the beyond". This was 1985, remember? Only good ol' blue-collar working class stuff counted back then. (Ironically, the WSA were bashed by a competing group in Illinois which wanted the IWA franchise for itself and condemned the WSA for not being anarcho-syndicalist and blue collar enough. Too much petty-bourgeois leftism, comrades!) The affinity between Bufe's tract and Bookchin's attacks on lifestyle anarchists and deep ecologists are pretty obvious. Bufe even has a conflict with George Bradford of Fifth Estate, just like Bookchin.

Here, the story could have ended. But, of course, it didn't.

In reality, Bufe's little pamphlet is a highly personal attack on a number of Bay Area anarchists he had conflicts with at the time. Most of them are unnamed, but one person stands out - Bob Black (a.k.a. The Last International), who still enjoys quite a reputation on the American anarchist scene as its perennial black sheep (or is it bobcat). Black had a violent conflict with a council communist magazine called Processed World (PW), which was widely distributed in Frisco. Bufe sides with PW, painting Black as a deranged madman with a penchant for slamming axes into doors late at night, not to mention pouring gasoline on his opponents' front porches. Black, unsurprisingly, had a somewhat different version of events, available on the web if you seek diligently enough. As an outsider, I can only conclude that the Northern California anarchists were pretty good at tearing each other apart, without any "assistance" from the FBI! Still, I have to admit that The Black One does reveal a few things about context not mentioned in Bufe's text.

Due to its emphasis on the author's private crusades, "Listen, Anarchist!" isn't really of much use to the neutral bystander, unless you also have access to the other side (or sides) of the story. Besides, what's wrong with communing with a tree, anyway?