Aurora was a two-person situ-influenced-anarchist group out of Madison, WI composed of the late Bob Brubaker and Scott Polar Bear. While they were prolific there is also very little written about the group and their projects, though they were an important piece of the late 1970s and early 1980s anarchist scene in the U.S.
Aurora had a tense and eventually broken relationship with the Madison underground paper Free for All and split off, with others, to publish the situ-inspired anarchist newspaper No Limits. They published posters similar to those of the Zerzans’ Upshot project, and, among other things, published editions of work by More to Come, John Zerzan, and an abridged version of On the Poverty of Student Life.
The instant poster is a two-sided collage the reprints and repurposes various graphics. In context of the environment of inflation and austerity of the late 1970s/early 1980s, the creates turn their eyes toward the bankruptcy of the left – liberal, socialist, and armed sects and groups. On one side is the Lenin “57 Varieties” graphic that, to the best of our knowledge, originated in Solidarities As We Don’t See It pamphlet. The text bloc in the middle ends with: “Anyway, many of us are tired of self-sacrifice and the monotony of our miserable religious lives. After all, as individuals we are not all pigs; some of us now see real life lies in total revolution based on the generalized self-management of the councils.” On the top right they target some of the New Communist groups (OL, PLP etc) as “turkeys” and on the top left go they go after various Trotskyist factions.
On the opposite side of the poster the authors reprint, as poster, the “On Living” pamphlet originally published by the California-based pro-situ group Reinvention of Everyday Life.
While there are likely institutional holdings of this poster, we don’t locate any. We acquired our copy (not in the best condition but not in the worst condition!) from a farmer participant in the Free for All group.
New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism 