New York Archives of Autonomist Marxism

One of our goals with this site is to draw out some of the international connections in either influence or direct interaction (or both) between the Movement of ’77 and movements and theories from outside of Italy. The impact and interpretation of situationist thought into Italy during the 1970s is particularly interesting, and we look forward to writing more, through the lens of ephemera, on that matter.

The instant example is the co-publication by Edizioni Puzz and Edizioni Buco of Raoul Vaneigem’s “Terrorismo o rivoluzione: An Introduction to Ernest Coeurderoy,” published in French in 1972 (here is an English translation).

This edition, according to a fairly comprehensive rundown of Puzz publications in the Nautilus collection Puzz & Co. 1971-’78…1991, was printed in 800 copies, which was relatively small compared to the typical 2000 print run of the Puzz press. As Duccio Dogheria notes in his wonderful book on Italian pirate editions of the 1970s, Max Capa – the leading figure of Puzz – had used Vaneigem quotes in various comics.

For those unfamiliar, Max Capa (a pseudonym, his legal name was Nino Armando Ceretti) is considered by many to be the father of Italian underground comics, and his work formed an important aesthetic piece of Italy’s long 1970s. In a 2017 interview, Capa noted “With Puzz we came close to the radical theses of the communists, situationists and anarchists. This encounter greatly influenced our drawings and comics.” In situationist spirit, he continued “They were underground comics but also had a level of social and political content. They were often accompanied by theoretical texts and short subversive essays. Radical criticism and everyday life were merged in the comics.”

Il Buco was a paper and publisher (Edizioni Buco) out of Putignano in southern Italy, which played an important role in the political underground press of the period. (Some information is available here).

Because of constrictive legal requirements that required government registration, this was published as a supplement to Notizie Radicale (many underground and radical publications were produced as “supplements” of registered journals, which allowed their legal publication).

This edition of Terrorismo o rivoluzione is, according to Dogheria, the second Italian edition. The first being the “official” publication by Arcana in 1973.

This edition of Terrorismo o rivoluzione is rare. We have encountered it just one time in the trade in recent years and OCLC lists a single holding in Amsterdam, at the Institute of Social History. Thankfully, a good copy has been scanned online here, via the incredible collection of Puzz materials provided via the Primo Moroni Archive in Milan.

This wonderful little brochure was left inside a Dutch pamphlet we had purchased sometime back and we couldn’t quite locate its exact history.

The brochure is a photocopied, tri-fold flier calling potential participants to come to a collective act of proletarian shopping in Groningen, Netherlands. The term used here for proletarian shopping – put simply, collective acts of taking commodities without paying – is “jat bewust,” or, roughly, a call to “steal consciously.”

The context in the brochure what is described as yet another round of austerity cuts, which cause lower wages and an increased cost of living. The historical reference points are really interesting. Philosophically, the author(s) note Paul Lafargue’s work The Right to be Lazy as well as P.A. Kooijman’s work. Kooijman is not very well known in the U.S., but was a Dutch militant anarchist who forwarded a concept of theft in context of capitalist surplus (for a very brief intro, see here). In terms of movements, the pamphlet references the Dutch group Alarm and initiatives in Italy in the 1970s among others.

The pamphlet includes an image that dates back to a poster from 1983, and was presumably a graphic used in other places. From the dates mentioned inside our best guess is that this dates to 1986.

We could not find any holdings of this little brochure and we reproduce images of it below.

I have written about Marty Glaberman a few times on this blog and still have many more publications of his I could write about (and hopefully will, one day).

After he died, if I understand correctly, his archives got split up. Wayne State took a substantial amount of it (see here), and what they didn’t take ended up in the hands of the Portland IWW chapter, after some of their activists organized a vehicle to pick up and drive the boxes from Michigan to Oregon. Those boxes were then organized in the basement of a building that was called Liberty Hall, now closed, which was home to the offices of a number of left groups. Liberty Hall went through at least one major flood, which caused damage to a lot of the documents, but most remained in fine shape. The PDX Wobblies setup bookshelves, and one could peruse Glaberman’s notes in Gramsci or Marx volumes, some informal correspondence with other radicals, and so on.

I spent much of the summer of 2006 sorting through the archives, trying to create some order out of file cabinets worth of pamphlets and journals, and scanning pieces here or there. What happened to the archives thereafter is not entirely clearly to me. Rumor has it that after the library at Liberty Hall closed, they were then stored in a garage or a basement, and then eventually set back up elsewhere, but subsequently “lent” out in ways the substantially reduced the collection. More recently, I heard that much of the collection remains viewable via the Portland wobs. I am not entirely clear. In any case, going through the collection that summer really helped me to grasp Glaberman’s work, and get some sense of various key points in the autonomist left between the 1970s and 1990s.

This pamphlet is composed of two essays that are classic Glaberman, along with a brief introduction. Both essays had been published in Vol. 2 #9 of Correspondence (copies of which are exceptionally rare), and this pamphlet is a reprint of them in pamphlet form.

The first essay, The Nationwide Auto Workers’ Wildcat looks at the wildcat cycle in context of auto contract negotiations, and particularly how union leadership (under Walter Reuther) sought to control workers (in this case, via a Guaranteed Annual Wage) and how workers struggled against that control and against the boss’s control on the factory floor. One can certainly see significant foreshadowing of Glaberman’s later dissertation and then, even later, his book, Wartime strikes: The struggle against the no-strike pledge in the UAW during World War II, in the piece. Unsurprisingly, the last paragraph of the piece ends with this hopeful commentary:

The second essay in the pamphlet, “The Left Wing Union Committeeman,” is a critical reflection on the role of “enlightened” radicals in the class struggle. In this case, Glaberman writes about former Correspondence editor, Johnny Zupan, who left the paper out of a fundamental political disagreement. For Glaberman, Zupan’s role as a full-time committeeman made him into a bureaucrat, whether or not Zupan was a good person or perceived himself to be a dedicated militant. He explains:

This essay is a powerful analysis of the often contradictory role of radicals in the unions and a classic document of the “working class as autonomous from the unions” perspective. It is also a helpful (and evergreen) analysis of how vanguardism appears in the political work of people who may otherwise say they are against vanguardism. This essay later appeared in Lynd’s collection of Glaberman’s work, Punching Out.

We could not locate a scan of this pamphlet online, and we couldn’t locate the first essay online, so we scanned it and placed it on Libcom, here. (Apologies for the pretty poor quality, but it’s readable). Our copy of the pamphlet is in bad shape – the covers are separated from the booklet and the paper (newsprint) has become frail and frayed. This pamphlet is rare but OCLC locates 18 copies, though many of them are of the later 1971 Bewick Editions reprint. – Craig

N’Drea has been kept in circulation because anarchists and fellow travelers have been committed to making it so for the past thirty years. In a period where the term “care” is used all across the radical left, increasingly to a point of nearly unlimited (and near-meaningless) expansiveness, N’Drea stands out as a particularly substantive reflection on illness, death, and medicine, in context of contemporary capitalism, and a powerful reminder of comradeship, friendship, and autonomy.

Andrea was diagnosed with cancer in 1985. She suffered both breast and lung cancers. She submitted herself to chemotherapy and other treatments and, when those were unsuccessful and she was asked to consent to participate in experimental treatment, she made the carefully considered decision to refuse. She subsequently disconnected from medical engagement entirely. She passed away in 1991. This book is a collection of letters (to her nurses, to her friend Bella) and reflections on her experiences and their context.

The pieces in this book are written in conversation with the movements of the mid/late 1980s and early 1990s, particularly the anti-nuclear struggles and the movement of people with AIDS. At one point Andrea writes, in frustration, “Having been rather successfully conditioned and rendered guilty as to the extent of our ignorance, we cancer patients have failed up to now to fight back, as some AIDS sufferers have done, by calling the bluff of all those medical researchers whose bluster and trumpet blowing on the subject of their supposed discoveries are nothing but a cover for their own very considerable confusion” (p. 33-34 of the Eberhardt edition).

Andrea was a member of the French anarchist group Os Cangaceiros, who have become storied (to the point of fable) in anti-authoritarian milieus’ across the globe (Rolling Thunder, Crimethinc’s journal, had useful commentary on the reality vs. the myth of Os Cangaceiros in their eighth issue, here).

It is worth taking note of the name of the author – Andrea Doria. The full name “Andrea Doria” appears once in the original French text, in the second to last letter written to Andrea’s friend Bella. It is entirely conceivable that this was Andrea’s legal or chosen name, and it is also entirely conceivable that this was a pseudonym. “Andrea Doria” is, of course, also the name of an historically notable 15th & 16th century Italian statesmen, and later the SS Andrea Doria – an Italian luxury ship that sank on its way to New York in 1956.

The context of the book makes knowing this particularly difficult. Andrea, as a participant in Os Cangaceiros, reports to have been under significant surveillance from the police beginning in 1987:

As a group that purportedly survived for many years via robbery and petty crime, shielding identity would have been an important part of the Os Cangaceiros project. Moreover, the use of pseudonyms was (and is) common practice in the milieu of the pro-situ and anti-authoritarian left, for reasons practical, political, and theoretical.

We also do not use the subtitle that has been repeatedly used, “One Woman’s Fight to Die Her Own Way,” which initially appeared in the first formal English-language translation, published by Pelagian Press in 1998.

For purposes of this bibliography we are only including formally printed editions of the book. That means there are other versions of it that we are leaving out, for example editions we have found online that seemed to have been published as photocopied pamphlets by anarchist presses etc. This isn’t to minimize the importance of that kind of pamphleteering work, but including those would make this kind of bibliography less useful. That said, at the end of the post we are including links to each of those in a bulleted list.

First edition, February 1992. Self-published by Os Cangaceiros. French language.

The first edition was self-published and is uncommon but shows up from time to time in the book trade (at the time of writing there is one known copy available from a French seller). This original version is where one finds the pictures of Andrea – the headshot, the picture of her dancing – that show up in later editions (sometimes as copies, sometimes as drawings). It is 65pp (and priced at 30f). We could not find any institutionally-held copies in OCLC.

First Italian edition. May, 1993. Published as N’drea: Medicina maledetta e assassina by Quattrocentoquindici.

The first Italian edition was published by the anarchist and post-situ press Quattrocentoquindici (415) and, to our knowledge, was the first published translation after the original French edition. It is arguably the hardest to find edition of the book. This edition includes an introduction by the publishing collective, as well as essays by Giorgina Bertolino (“In ospitale”) and Ricardo d’Este with Simone Peruzzi (“La maledizione e l’assassinio”). A scanned edition of the full book can be found online, here. As an aside Ricardo d’Este – of whom Guy Debord once wrote that, “In 1968 he did the most in Italy to import the spirit of [the French] May and notably among the workers” – may be familiar to readers of this blog as a significant name in the history of Italian’s communist left, including as a founder of the “comontismo” current. We found no institutionally-held copies in OCLC.

First Spanish edition (Castilian). November, 1993. Published by Virus Editorial in Barcelona.

The first Spanish (Castilian) language translation came out a year after the first French edition and was published by Virus Editorial, the now-long-running anarchist press based in Barcelona, which had started just about two years earlier. The Virus edition is out of print but is pretty common in the book trade. OCLC locates one institutionally-held copy at the Universidad del País Vasco.

First English edition (UK), published as N’Drea: One Woman’s Fight to Die Her Own way in 1998 by Pelagian Press.

The first English-language edition of N’drea was translated, in 1997, by Donald Nicholson-Smith, a leading translator of radical French thought and former member of the English section of the Situationist International. This is the first time the subtitle of the book (“One Woman’s Fight to Die Her Own Way”) appears. It is 90 pages. According to David Wise (King Mob, BM Blob), Nicholson-Smith did the translation for free. Pelagian Press, who Wise reports was associated with the situationist-ish journal Here and Now, published this edition. OCLC locates a few institutionally-held copies of this edition, but it often appears in the book trade.

First Greek edition. Published 2006 by εκδόσεις (Foreign) Editions as Andria Doria, Η εξαιρετική περίπτωση μιας συνηθισμένης ιστορίας.

In 2006, the first Greek translation was published as Η εξαιρετική περίπτωση μιας συνηθισμένης ιστορίας (English: The Exceptional Case of an Ordinary Story) by Foreign Editions, which was also the name of a journal and the publisher of situationist titles. It was translated by Katerina Marcianoudi. This Greek edition is available online for download, here. OCLC locates no institutionally-held copies of this edition.

Second English-language edition (first US-edition) 2005, published by Eberhardt Press in collaboration with Venomous Butterfly.

The second formal English-language publication of N’drea was a re-print of the Pelagian edition printed by the anarchist Eberhardt Press along with Venomous Butterfly (the press run by the writer who goes by Wolfi Landstreicher). A note inside the book states “We decided to reprint this book because it is otherwise out of print and generally unavailable, and we believe Andrea’s words should live on. […] This is the first printing of this edition.” While we think this is the first formal US edition, OCLC lists an earlier Venomous Butterfly edition from 2002, and we could not confirm (despite our efforts to!) either way on the accuracy of that record (if you know please write us!). The Eberhardt edition is available for download online, here. It is rare. OCLC locates no institutionally-held copies of this edition.

Second French edition, June 2016, published as N’Drea: Perdre ma vie est un risque plus grand que clui de mourir by Les editions du bout de la ville.

We thought that this could not be the second French-language edition, but rather the third or fourth, but we could not find proof of that and the editorial introduction notes that it had circulated for a quarter-century in French, and was translated into other languages, before it was reissued in this edition. The editors added the subtitle “Perdre ma vie est un risque plus grand que clui de mourir” (“Losing my life is a greater risk than dying”), as well as a helpful glossary. Information on the publisher can be found here. OCLC locates no institutionally-held copies of this edition.

First Portuguese edition (partial), June 2017, Barricada de Livros.

The first Portuguese translation was partial, consisting of Andrea’s August 1991 reflection (pp. 68-76 in the Eberhardt Press edition), for which the editors used the 2016 French edition. This chapter was in a book of texts from Os Cangaceiros, which is the first in Portuguese. Barricada de Livros is an anarchist publisher based in Lisbon. OCLC locates no institutionally-held copies of this edition.

Original comic drawn by Giuseppe (Beppe) Madaudo and, as far as we know, unpublished (if you know of publication please let us know!) The comic, which measures 12×16 inches, depicts Piperno in a French jail awaiting a judge’s determination on extradition to Italy. The judge finds Italy’s evidence insufficient and denies the request. (Some background on Piperno’s travails is found in a previous post, here).

The comic is particularly notable because the artist behind it, Beppe Madaudo, was himself targeted for prosecution related to a separate comic in a famous (relatively speaking) and related incident (he was not tried or incarcerated). The artist had drawn a piece on the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, which was published in the first issue of the autonomist journal Metropoli (copies of which were seized two days after publication) in the spring of 1979. A brief interview with former Metropoli editor Paolo Virno, published on the DeriveApprodi website (here), is well worth reading for those interested in the incident.

This piece was purchased from LibriSenzaData in Milano (a great shop).

Franco Piperno, a physicist and founding member of Potere Operaio, was one of many militants targeted by the Italian authorities, following the kidnapping and subsequent killing of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978. He was a founder of the autonomist journal Metropoli (along with Oreste Scalzone and others) whose editorial team was targeted in the 1979 sweep against the radical left.

Piperno fled to France, and was extradited in 1979 on charges related to the Moro kidnapping. Those charges were subsequently dropped, with the Christian Science Monitor noting that they illustrated “the penchant of Italian police to often arrest first and hope to find concrete evidence later.” Piperno went back to France and was subsequently arrested twice during the fall of 1981 in Montreal (Canada). Subsequently, Piperno – with strong international support – won a fight against extradition back to Italy, only to be arrested again, for a third time, on additional charges; he subsequently beat that case. With a tourist visa expiring, Piperno sought to leave Canada and go back to France, only to be refused entry. He then filed for refugee status in Canada. In 1988, he returned to Italy, where, having been sentenced to 10 years of incarceration, he served a reduced prison sentence. (The CIA was a bit contemptuous of him). He has since been involved in other projects.

The international organizing in support of militants targeted by the Italian state in 1979 is a story in need of its own book(s). Interesting pieces of that struggle include Marty Glaberman (and Toni Negri’s) lawsuit against a voice expert in Michigan, the Committee Against Repression in Italy coordinated by Federici and Caffentzis, the organizing of Guattari and Moulier-Boutang’s Centre d’initiatives pour de nouveaux espaces de liberté (CINEL), etc. For those interested in a starting point, it’s worth looking at Red Notes’ fantastic collection Italy 1980-81: After Marx, jail! The attempted destruction of a communist movement, available here.

The subject of this post is the second of two pamphlets put together by activists in the Netherlands who were concerned about the repression in Italy and similars developments elsewhere. The first of the two pamphlets was put together by the Komite Bella Italia and participants in the psychiatry journal Narreschip, entitled “De autonome beweging in Italië,” and published in 1979. The second of the pamphlets, with the focus on Piperno, was put together by two participants in the Narreschip project, Martijn Bool and Ronald Kampman. Per the introduction, their interest is not just in Piperno but in the wider meanings of cases against activists internationally:

“We are not only interested in Piperno, but also in the fact that it is an example of how in Western Europe the (certainly outdated, dating from the King’s era) right of asylum is being eroded, and how there is an ever-increasing judicial and police cooperation at the European level: the creation of a European judicial area.”

(Translation via DeepL).

The two writers go on to note, “This brochure is written by two people from the group that made the first brochure. In itself we like to make such a brochure, but we have also become lonely, unpaid journalists; that means a lot of work, especially since there are only a few of us.” While they appeal for others to take up their project and engage in dialogue, we could not find published evidence of that having occurred.

The main text of the pamphlet is a Dutch translation of Piperno’s last interview prior to his extradition to France in 1980. The interview was done for the French journal Liberation (we, unfortunately, could not locate a copy online). The pamphlet also includes a court statement from Piperno and a call for Piperno’s freedom, written by CINEL.

This pamphlet is rare. We locate one copy, via OCLC, at the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. As we could not find a copy online, we scanned it (not too well) and posted it on Libcom, here.

(Last update – November 11th, 2023).

Early essay written by historian Peter Linebaugh in 1968, published in Ripsaw, the radical student journal of the Graduate Union of Columbia University.

An early piece by Peter Linebaugh – editorial member of Zerowork and collective member of Midnight Notes – who would go on to write the seminal work The London Hanged (1991).

The essay is very much a work of its time. Couched within the historiography of the period, its targets are the “New History,” with its move toward quantification, its use of specific jargon, and its positivism. He gets some digs in at Staughton Lynd and the historicans associated with Radical America, which was interesting. The influence of EP Thompson, Linebaugh’s mentor, is clear.

Ripsaw published a total of 5 issues, the first two with the tagline “published by the graduate student union of Columbia University,” and then after that by the “graduate students at Columbia University.” As we understand it the journal ceased publication in 1970.

Interestingly, few copies of Ripsaw are held by institutions. We locate a complete set of 1-5 at NYU, but even Columbia only seems to have 1-4. Number two is held by just a handful of schools, per OCLC.

The Linebaugh article is of interest for our project, but the other pieces less so. Accordingly, we have scanned his article and placed it on Libcom, here.

Our copy of the poster

Call it Sleep is a situationist film created by Isaac Cronin and Terrel Seltzer. Released in 1981, the film has become a bit of a cult classic for those interested in situationist ideas in the decades since. It is available for free online via YouTube, here. It really is quite well done and we strongly recommend watching it.

While copies of the film script are often available in the trade, copies of the poster used to advertise individual screenings are far less common. OCLC locates no institutional holdings. Our copy is for a July, 1982 screening at The Roxie in San Francisco.

According to Cronin, the event at The Roxie was the second public showing of the film and some 600 people attended. Readers can hear him discuss the development of the film in a very helpful interview done by Aragorn! (RIP) on the The Brilliant podcast, here.

First edition of this pamphlet, published without authorship, in 1973. While it is often stated that the pamphlet was published in 1977, that doesn’t make sense from the content of the essay, which is clearly contemporaneously written during the upsurge of factory-based struggles in the early 1970s. The 1977 edition refers to the second edition, which was published by Editions de l’Oubli and includes a notation that the first edition was published in 1973.

This essay is a powerful communist analysis of the struggles at the GM plant in Lordstown, Ohio, that was opened in 1970. In 1972 the overwhelming majority of workers voted to authorize a strike. But Lordstown 72 focuses less on the strike authorization or actual strike than on the culture of working class sabotage and self-organization that it occurred in.

The essay is a striking assessment of the generalization of sabotage and everyday resistance, which occurs in context of widespread forms outside of the union and party structures. The author(s) analysis seamlessly flows from shop-floors in the U.S. to those in Italy and elsewhere. From a culture of resistance the author(s) then try to locate seeds of communism in the workers’ struggles.

As mentioned above, the first edition of the pamphlet stated no authorship. The second edition would attribute its authorship to “Pomerol et Medoc,” though those appear to have been pseudonyms. The pamphlet was produced as a supplement to the fourth issue of 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs and published, presumably by the same people, under the moniker of Les Amis de 4 Millions de Jeunes Travailleurs. The group published a number of relatively important essays within the French ultra-left milieu of the 1970s, as well as a collection of pieces from the Internationale Situationniste. The major figure behind the project, at least from what we could find online, was Dominique Blanc, who would later go on to found the antisemitic journal La Guerre Sociale.

The first edition of the pamphlet is rare. Copies very rarely show up in the trade. We did not locate any on OCLC but copies are probably held in one of France’s anarchist libraries.