Communism Never Looked So Good

by Stephen J. Gertz

In 1884, after artist-poet-designer-printer William Morris compulsively read his copy of the first edition in French (1872-1875) of Karl Marx's Das Kapital until its flimsy binding was a wreck, he asked the great T.J. Cobden-Sanderson, then new to the craft of bookbinding but with enormous promise and taste, to rebind the book's first volume before it completely fell apart within his enthusiastic hands.

Morris, who had joined the new Social Democratic Federation, Britian's first fan club for Marx, shortly before wading into Das Kaptial waist-deep, was besotted with the German philosopher. He "was full of Karl Marx whom he had begun to read in translation" according to an April 13, 1883 entry in his friend Cormell Price's diary. Morris loved Marx's take on history but Marx's economics were another matter: Morris admitted that they caused him "agonies of confusion of the brain."

Despite the headaches, on March 14, 1883 Morris participated in a march to Highgate Cemetery where pilgrims congregated at Marx's grave to celebrate the anniversary of his death. 

This was the second binding by Cobden-Sanderson in his own workshop, the Doves Bindery (he had previously apprenticed with Roger de Coverly), a remarkable achievement for someone new to the art and craft.

After William Morris's death in 1896, Cobden-Sanderson, at the behest of Sydney Cockerell, then Morris's secretary, recorded the story of this binding on its lower end leaf:

"This book - Le Capital - was bound and tooled for William Morris by me in my first workshop on Maiden Lane 1884 and finished the 9th. October and the pattern on its sides and back is the second of my making. The tools were second hand and bought - and used - at haphazard, but the tooling and the binding pleased William Morris and his pleasure was my own great delight. In Memoriam I write this the 24th. February 1897. T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. I should like to add the book was his own & before it came to me to be bound had been worn to loose sections by his own constant study of it. T.J.C-S."

It is unknown what formal arrangements were made between Morris and Cobden-Sanderson beyond the presumed from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs.

I suspect, however, that Lenin would have proclaimed this binding of Das Kapital an example of  excess completely out of touch with simple, proletarian utility. The fact that it wound up in the collection of Estelle Doheny, heiress to her husband Edward's vast oil fortune, would have surely thrown him into a fit. Karl Marx finely dressed and living with a capitalist fat cat? Nyet!

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MARX, Karl. Le Capital. Traduction de M.J. Roy, entièrement révisée par l'auteur. Paris: Maurice Lachatre et Cie, [1872-1875].

Tidcombe, Cobden-Sanderson no. 2. Wormsley Library 81.

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Death To The Fascist Insect!

By Stephen J. Gertz

It's Death To The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People Day at Booktryst. On this day thirty-eight years ago, Patty Hearst was on the lam with the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).

She had, on April  3, 1974, announced that she was now one of them and had adopted the pseudonym "Tania." Now she was in prep for her debut, on April 15, as an urban guerilla bank robber. Death To The Fascist Insect Blah, Blah, Blah, was the SLA's mission statement, radical politics at its buggiest.

In its dehumanization and abstraction of the individual it's a line, however, that Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to call his own, except, of course, for the anti-Fascist part. No little irony there. No matter  the politics,  the wider the division the more they all begin to look, sound, and behave alike until you reach, as here, the absurdum ad reductio, a Fascist anti-Fascist motto that, out of context, reads as a parody of political propaganda. But no laughing matter. When  radical extremists act out individuals tend to die.

The Secularist's Adopted Grandfather
N.p., n.d. [ c. late 19th century].
Handbill with unattributed woodcut.
 
Flanking the woodcut is text reading,
"Secularists, are you proud of your Grandfather?"
and " We should respect our Parentage - Dr. Darwin."
A previous owner has inscribed the words,
"Orang Outang - horrid beast - I am not like you in the least."

And so on this day we celebrate polarization in American politics. It's poisoning our political landscape but makes for entertaining, if somewhat frightening, reading when radicals of both the Right and Left come out to play, commit themselves to their cause in print, and wreak havoc on rational discourse. The fright aspect is heightened when one considers that radical seems to have  become the new mainstream and moderate the new extreme. 

International Workmen's Association. North American
Section, Pacific Coast Division, Organizer's Circular.
[San Francisco]: International Workmen's Association, [c. 1881].

Buried in the text is an offer to members of a "scientific and
comprehensive course of chemistry," i.e. explosives training.

Coincidentally. Lorne Bair, the social and political history rare literature specialist, has just issued a new catalog, delightfully devoted, as usual, to the often strident and out there voices of yesteryear, reminding us that extreme political expression has always been a part of the American character, an All-Terrain Vehicle cycling though the American psychic velodrome. Now, however, the stakes are higher, and we need to get the poles back on the true American path, a bicycle built for two heading in one direction. Good luck and God help us all.

BOYCOTT Campbell's Cream of Exploitation Soup -
In Support of Mid-Western Farm Workers.
Toledo: FLOC [Farm Labor Organizing Committee], c. 1980s.

"Mmmm, Mmmm, [not so] Good."

When Campbell's Soup refused to negotiate with Ohio
farmworkers, a brilliant functionary of FLOC appropriated
Andy Warhol's classic pop image and created a propaganda
poster that sharply crystallized their message without
inflammatory slogans or wild-eyed declarations of evil.
The boycott worked. In 1986, Campbell's finally sat down
and entered into a collective bargaining agreement.

FAGAN, Myron C. Moscow Over Hollywood.
Los Angeles: R.C. Cary, 1948.

Josef Stalin looms over Tinseltown in this, the foundation
document of the Hollywood Blacklist, preceding the notorious
Red Channels by two years.

Note the cinematic chorus line, presumably singing and
dancing their hearts out during a performance of
The International while a sinister director looks on with
satanic satisfaction.

Protection To American Labor and American Industries.
New York: Ballin & Berman, 1888. Silk bandana.

Republican souvenir of the 1888 election, based upon
the campaign's Protection v. Free Trade issue.

Department of Strange Political Metamorphoses:
In 1888, the Republican Party was anti-Free Trade and pro-Labor.
Their Presidential candidate, Benjamin Harrison, won the election.

The Most Exciting Story of the Century Will Be Printed
in the Utica Saturday Globe.
Utica: Utica Saturday Globe, 1889.

The post-Civil War period saw more than one brand
of white-hooded racist. Here, the Utica, NY Globe advertises
a series of exposés based upon an undercover agent's
infiltration of The White Caps, a vigilante group based in
southern Indiana and contiguous counties in Kentucky and
Ohio. By 1900, the White Caps had disbanded or had been
hijacked by local Ku Klux Klan chapters, which, apparently,
believed that their territory wasn't big enough for the both of them. 
How can you tell them apart?

Is There a Pink Fringe in the Methodist Church?
If so, what shall we do about it?
Houston: The Committee For the Preservation of Methodism, 1951.

Exposé of the Methodist Federation for Social Action,
a faith-based organization following the precepts of
Jesus Christ, written by Methodist followers who
had forgotten them in the midst of paranoia.

WHARTON, Charles S. The House of Whispering Hate.
Chicago: Madelaine Mendelsohn, 1932. A presentation copy.

If only the current U.S. House of Representatives
kept their snarls at a whisper.

Actually, a memoir of three years imprisonment at Leavenworth.
But it might just as well been a memoir of three years imprisonment
in Congress, for most of us a fate worse than death.

491 years ago, on April 19, 1521, Martin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms and proclaimed in defense of his convictions, "Here I stand. I can do no other. May God help me. Amen." It is Western Civilization's preeminent statement on individual liberty, conscience, and thought.

Now, however, that eloquent declaration has become debased coin, its currency counterfeit in a culture that has gone mad with self-interest. Martin Luther has transmogrified into Sammy Davis singing I've Got To Be Me (Whether I'm Right. Whether I'm Wrong. What Else Can I Be But Who I Am)," the national conversation deep in schlock-infested waters, the  cacophony of political savagery the diet of worms in the U.S. Diet, leaving the rest of us undernourished.

It's the result of political movements that assert, as Sammy did in that anthem of juvenile yearning, "I won't settle down. I won't settle for less, as long as there's a chance I can have it all."

Calling Dr. Spock...

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All images courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, Manuscripts & Ephemera, with our thanks.
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Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles: The Real Story

by Stephen J. Gertz

Listen, Do You Want To Know a Secret?  The truth has finally emerged, as truthy as truth can be. Finally, the Communist Master Music Plan has been exposed.

Before the Beatles went home, Back in the U.S.S.R. in 1968 and heard balalaikas ringing out, they invaded the U.S.A. in 1964 and  brought with them insidious secret Soviet techniques of Pavlovian mind-control for a thorough wash, rinse, and spin of the cerebral cortexes of American kids:

“...The destructive music of the Beatles merely reinforces the excitatory reflex of the youth to the point where it crosses the built-in inhibitory reflex. This in turn weakens the nervous system to a state where the youth actually suffers a case of artificial neurosis. And the frightening, even fatal, aspect of this mental breakdown process is the fact that these teenagers, in this excitatory, hypnotic state, can be told to do anything - and they will.”

Time has proven that the "artificial" neurosis of 1960s American youth was no more artificial than our sacred right to bear arms and die with a handgun to be pried from our cold, rigid digits. Baby Boomers are genuinely neurotic. Not our Boomers, of course, just Lefty Boomers.

Underground laboratories hidden beneath remote dales and bucolic glens throughout our fair land have discovered that the Beatles' classic love song, Michelle, when played backwards and slowed down,  is an ukase straight out of Red Square and the Kremlin that commands its listeners to, "Kill pigs, bad pigs,  ils sont des porcs bien connu comme étant prigs, oui ces porcs."

It's an all-out assault on liberty and the American way of life.

That French is superciliously recited with airy pretension and an English word thrown in for a cheap rhyme makes this threat even more insidious. We bailed the Frogs out of WWI and II and now they're killing us with French fries and conspiring with The Fab Four and the Comintern to rob our youth of their precious essence. D'gall!

It's enough to drive all true,  red-blooded Americans to purge themselves of godless hemoglobin so that only pure, white blood cells flow through our veins.

Who stands up for our children when they lie down to diabolical foreign influence and are ruthlessly trod upon by Marx and his brothers, Lenin, Stalin, and Zeppo?

I read the news today, oh boy. The Beatles were actually born in Kenya and raised to worship Baal. As if we didn't know.

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NOEBEL, David A. Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music - The Communist Master Music Plan. Tulsa: Christian Crusade Publications, 1965. Revised Third Edition. Octavo. Staple-bound illustrated wrappers. 26 pp.

This book went into not just three editions but, so popular, it went into five editions through 1965, winning that year's Noebel Prize for  Litterature.

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Image courtesy of Lorne Bair Rare Books, with our thanks.

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The Most Provocative, Revolutionary, Dangerous, Radical, and [insert adjective] Book Ever Written

by Stephen J. Gertz

Q1: What book, born of the political upheavals in mid-nineteenth century Europe,  spearheaded radical Leftist Anarchism in the United States during the late-nineteenth through early decades of the twentieth century and then, intellectually banished for a few decades, returned in the mid-twentieth century from exile  to rise, by the end of  the late-twentieth century, as the philosophical cornerstone of a Conservative wing of the Republican party?

Q2: Do Libertarians in the U.S. understand that the roots of their philosophy lie in Anarchism?  Does their leadership?

Q3: If so, why haven't their brains blown a fuse?

A1. Der Einzige und sein Eigentum by Max Stirner (b. Johann Kaspar Schmidt, 1806-1856), originally published in Leipzig, 1845 [1844, post-dating a dodge to confuse Prussian censors], translated into English and published in New York in 1907 as The Ego and His Own,  and reprinted, amongst other subsequent editions, in 1963 by the Libertarian Book Club.

A2. Probably not. If the leadership does, they're not talking; why scare the bejesus out of the current Libertarian constituency, which, if truth be known, would run for their lives?

A3. The answer, my friend, is explodin' in the wind.

STIRNER, Max (pseud. of Johann  Kaspar Schmidt, 1806-1856)). Der Einzige und sein Eigentum. Leipzig: Otto Wigand, 1845 [1844].

"Do truth, freedom, humanity, justice, desire anything else than that you grow enthusiastic and serve them?...God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing, for nothing but themselves...Away, then, with every concern that is not altogether my concern! You think the 'good cause' must be my concern? What's good, what's bad? Why, I myself am my concern, and I am neither good nor bad. Neither has meaning for me...The divine is God's concern; the human, man's. My concern is neither the divine nor the human, not the true, good, just, free, etc., but solely what is mine, and it is not a general one, but is - unique, as I am unique.

      "Nothing is more to me than myself!"

-Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own

The Ego and His Own presents the case for the individual against authority. It was forged in Europe during a time of roiling political change. Monarchy and the theocratic state were going down, Liberalism was on the rise. The monarchal “the State is me,” had lost its legitimacy; “The State is us,” its citizens, was the rallying cry. A strong sense of Nationalism was in the air. The modern secular state was beginning to emerge.

Stirner would have none of it. He saw no point in replacing one form of government with another. The Ego and His Own is the premier work of anti-Statism and Stirner's  anti-Statism is ecumenical in breadth. The State was the grand enemy and would always be tyrannical, no matter its political philosophy, what form it took, or how good its intentions. All governments presume sovereignty over the individual and are therefore an evil; that is the nature of things when individuals subsume their egos to the power of an Other and unite as a crowd. 

Stirner’s anti-Statism was only the beginning. He was vehemently against any sort of authority over the individual whatsoever. God, morality, family, country, theology, philosophy, ideology - there is no aspect of authority, none at all, that Stirner accepts. One’s conscience? The sum of all fears of authority. Though he admires Jesus Christ as an anti-Statist revolutionary, he is particularly harsh in regard to organized Christianity and other organized religions. Anarchism - in a truly, purely  free society every man is a law unto himself - was the message.

This was his appeal to the far-Left of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century who saw liberty threatened by the modern State and took individual action, sometimes violent, against it.

In America, the message of radical individualism found its voice in Benjamin R. Tucker’s Leftist magazine, Liberty, which, from 1881 through 1908, was the seminal publication to spread the cause of individual freedom. It was and remains the foundational publication of Libertarianism  and individual protest in the English-speaking world.

James L. Walker (1845 - 1904), a Texas newspaperman and, later, doctor, was the first American to think about Stirner’s radical anti-authoritarianism at length and depth. Texans, proud to this day that they were once an independent nation, are particularly keen on matters of individualism and freedom, and Walker was a frequent contributor to Liberty. Through his influence Stirner was translated into English and the book published, with an introduction by Walker written before his death, by Tucker (1854 - 1939) in 1907. "Fifty years sooner or later can make little difference in the case of a book so revolutionary as this," he wrote. The bible of zealous anti-authoritarian individualism was now available to American readers, the Anarchist’s New Testament available for study, and, for the true believer, a clarion call to individual struggle against the State was heard.

First U.K. edition in English, 1912.

 "...the most revolutionary book ever written...[Stirner] has left behind him a virtual breviary of destruction, a striking and dangerous book...it is dangerous in every sense of the word..." (James Huneker, Egoists: A Book of Supermen. Stendahl, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Anatole France, Huysmans, Barré, Nietzsche, Blake, Ibsen, Stirner, and Ernest Hello. NY: Scribner's, 1909).

The book’s association with domestic terrorism pushed it to the fringe and it became a forgotten relic of  a time in American history that all wished to forget. After World War II,  however, it was rediscovered by a segment of the American Right. Libertarianism, once the enemy of order and all that the average American citizen held sacred, was now the True Path. How could this possibly happen?

In the post-WWII era, the Right was in full-fear mode, Communism's  invasion of  Eastern Europe and Asia too much to bear.  Socialism, Communism's second cousin, had made inroads into Western Europe. Marx was on the march. What was the philosophical counter to these developments? What was the intellectual hammer? Where was rugged individualism when it was needed most?

With  fierce, remorseless passion The Ego and His Own provides an answer, countering Communism's radical beatification of the collective over the individual with the radical beatification of the individual above all else.

Stirner's scorn for  Liberalism, with its insistence upon the basic equality of Man, is overt and palpable. Liberals, he accuses, sacrifice the actual individual to an abstraction of individuality. "The Christian takes hold of my spirit, the liberal of my humanity," he says.

The Ego and His Own remains the strongest philosophical argument against Socialism and Communism ever written; Stirner predicted that a Communist state would be more oppressive than any other yet seen in history. The fact that Sirner's contemporary, Karl Marx, despised  The Ego and His Own (a manically  enthusiastic  Hegelian tract one imagines Stirner madly scribbling away at, the Marquis de Sade busy doing same in the cell next door) surely sealed the deal.  The enemy of my  enemy is my friend.

Be careful how you choose your friends.

Libertarianism, once the  territory of Leftist revolutionaries, was now adopted by the far-Right as an intellectual bulwark against the spread of Communism. Its deification of the individual had natural appeal.
  
But Anarchists and latter-day Libertarians both got it wrong.

It was never Stirner’s intent for The Ego and His Own to be translated into a formal political philosophy leading to political action. That would constitute a movement and movements impress their own authority over their adherents. Politics is just another lever for authority to assert itself over individual will.

The Ego and His Own is about self-liberation, a revolution of the mind. Stirner is demanding of us. To be truly free man must be ruthlessly, relentlessly, and brutally honest with himself to expunge all traces of authority from without that dwell within, imposing their will against the individual. Strip it away; it is interfering with the  free and full expression of your sovereign self. Slavery to ideas was as pernicious as physical bondage.  Nothing exists or is more important than the individual.

It should really come as no surprise, then, that this book has been, over time, embraced by both the far-Left and far-Right. The political extremes are in constant search for  a new Eden, idealists from Never-Never Land on a mission seeking a Peter Pan-Pied Piper to lead them to a new, bountiful paradise.

Stirner would laugh out loud, pitilessly; they have enslaved themselves to an idea - Freedom! - sacrificed their ego to it and not, as Stirner argues, the other way around.

Stirner would mock, despise, and disown Libertarianism’s bastard step-child, Ayn Rand. She got the radical individualism right but fell off a cliff worshiping Capitalism - all -isms are authoritarian -  and allowing  a cult to develop around her subject to her iron authority. She was an apostate, just another power subjugating  followers to her will. On the plus side, however, she defends and celebrates, in The Fountainhead, the action of her protagonist when he blows up a building he designed in violent protest against its owner. But was he motivated by anti-government, anti-authoritarian sentiment? Not quite. The owner made design changes. His ego offended, Howard Rourke whined with TNT tears and Rand called it artistic integrity against collective bad taste. A strong case can be made for upholding artistic integrity but this is not it. On the down side, the building's  entrepreneurial capitalist owner got the shaft. Her philosophy is thus a muddle, praising one individual's will to power while damning another's, one who represents the  economic system she so admires that rewards individual vision and risk. Rand looks good until you look close; the inner contradictions are stark. Stirner, as rigorous a logician as you'll ever encounter, would dismiss her out of hand, amateur hour during the philosophy talent show. Rand denied her philosophy's Libertarian roots, as she tried to remake herself from Russian immigrant Jewess (thus with Leftist Anarchism in her blood) to femme-fatale atheist Conservative intellectual.

The libertarian movement has splintered. How could it not have? A truly  unified movement is antithetical to  individualism. Autonomy of the self takes a hit; at some point authority must be asserted. The post-Modern Libertarian Party was born in 1971. It has since grown to become the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States. Many of its platform planks and core principles are right out of Stirner. How could they not be? He wrote the book.  

In his Introduction to the 1963 edition published by the Libertarian Book Club, Libertarian historian James J. Martin wrote  as much a warning as a welcome. “It may very well be that the largest number of mid-twentieth century individualists does not have the stamina to stick with Stirner to the bitter logical end. The various libertarians are free to decamp at that point of the journey beyond where they no longer care to proceed. But it is their responsibility to know whence individualism stems and where its logic goes.”

The proximal object lesson to glean from the contemporary American scene may be that the Post-WWII generations have more in common than not. We may have two political wings but  inordinate celebration of the individual self is not confined to either; it has become a cultural norm  that suggests  insecurity beneath exaggerated self-assertion, and not for irrational reasons.  We can feel individual liberties slowly, inexorably slipping away  as corporate interests march closer and closer to perfect, target marketing to an abstract individual with concrete buying habits, and we have become compelled to sell ourselves in the marketplace;  the individual as unique commodity,  come an' get it. But when rugged individualism becomes rabid individualism all of us suffer. We have responsibilities to each other as well as to ourselves. It’s called civilized society.

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main." (John Donne, Meditation XVII, 1624).
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