About This Project
Ethical steps taken by this project
Was Abbie Hoffman an anarchist?
This is a newly restored back up of an old wiki project.
The website works just like wikipedia, where anyone can submit new texts to the website and new edits of texts currently on the website.
Which texts go up on the website is decided by a small collective of librarians, but all decisions will be put to a debate that anyone can join, in the live chat discussion spaces linked below.
Discussion Spaces
On the discord and matrix live chat spaces you’ll get:
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Updates on when new texts go live.
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Help with how to request rare documents from university archives.
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The chance to co-ordinate with others on copy typing up handwritten documents onto the website.
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The option to debate what new texts go up on the website.
Ethical steps taken by this project
Anyone can join the debate on discord and matrix over the creation of new pages and how texts should be edited, obviously if you join just to troll or spam though, you will be removed.
A record will be kept of all texts that were rejected, whether for minor formatting reasons or deeply held political reasons.
A record will also be kept of controversial texts that were approved, where for example there was a sizable disagreement.
Frequently asked questions
Was Abbie Hoffman an anarchist?
Yes, we think so, although his desire and many of the hippies desire to resist fixed ideologies did come narrowly close to what Chesterton warned against when he said “Do not be so open-minded that your brains fall out”:[1]
Abbie Hoffman (1936–1989) and Jerry Rubin were active anarchists during the New Left era of the 1960s and 1970s. They were founders of the Youth International Party (Yippies), an anticapitalist, antiwar, and antigovernment group, whose chief weapons were mockery and ridicule. In 1968 the Yippies nominated a pig for President of the United States. Their aim, declared Hoffman, was to “win the election, declare victory, and eat the candidate.” Hoffman’s books include Revolution for the Hell of It (1967), Woodstock Nation (1969), and Steal This Book (1971). Rubin, who abandoned anarchism and became a stock broker, is the author of Do It (1970), We Are Everywhere (1971), and Growing Up at Thirty-Seven (1976).
Abbie:[2]
We became friends. I told him I would support what he was doing in the national antiwar movement and give him access to the counterculture. I took him up to WBAI and interviewed him on Bob Pass’s show—translating what he was saying for the hip audience, as he was still unfamiliar with making language and imagery fit the style of the times.
Although Jerry was familiar with the be-in style, having been a participant of the first one in San Francisco, his presentation was still too forceful and rhetorical. It didn’t have a silly element and the appeal to the spirit. This was how I complemented Jerry. In turn, he was more versed than I in getting the cultural revolution incorporated into a broader structure. We were two people who sensed the opportunity of blending the political and the cultural revolutions. Jerry’s forte was the political timing, mine dramatic. I trusted his political judgment more than anyone’s in the country. We were anarchists, but even among anarchists there are not that many who can map out a strategy and lead. Some anarchists are just more equal than others in that ability. Stubborn, attentive to the ways of power and the universe, Jerry had the drive and the political instincts to ride the movement waves. ...
Although we were close, Mark considered freaks an interesting sideshow to the main event, your standard commie interpretation of anarchist history. ...
In Europe there were several anarcho groups working on similar tracks. From Berlin came word of Fritz Teufel, Karl Pawla, and Kommune # 1.
Wiki:[3]
When asked about the Yippie flag, an anonymous Yippie identified only as “Jung” told The New York Times that “The black is for anarchy. The red star is for our five point program. And the leaf is for marijuana, which is for getting ecologically stoned without polluting the environment.”
Abbie:[4]
The Motherfuckers, Jim Fouratt, Anita—the whole gang was there, all battle-wise veterans by the spring of ’68. Our colors were anarchist black or yippie pink and purple. Not exactly the hippieflower motif of Avery Hall, not as severe as the SDS students in Administration nor practicing the military discipline of the blacks who held the fort in Hamilton Hall. Like the Paris uprising of the same year, there was little centralized leadership. We had walkie- talkie communication between buildings, but everything that went on was more or less spontaneous.
Abbie:[5]
We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.
Abbie:[6]
Begin now: resist oppression as you feel it. Organize and begin the word of mouth communication that is the basis of all conspiracies. ...
Every man a revolution! Every small group a revolutionary center!
Abbie:[7]
Well the Democrats, the Republicans, you know, they’re all sort of pigs. We don’t, maybe. We don’t believe in the concept of President. You know, [that] there ought to be a president and that kind of centralization of power. So yeah, central government has a tremendous amount of power in this country, and it’s very bureaucratic. And it’s as much the bureaucracy of this country and the sterility of this country as much as its evilness, especially in terms of war in Vietnam and the way it treats poor people and black people that brings us to this park. So does that do it?
What was the Yippies New Nation concept?
Wikipedia:[8]
The Yippie “New Nation” concept called for the creation of alternative, counterculture institutions: food co-ops; underground newspapers and zines; free clinics and support groups; artist collectives; potlatches, “swap-meets” and free stores; organic farming/permaculture; pirate radio, bootleg recording and public-access television; squatting; free schools; etc. Yippies believed these cooperative institutions and a radicalized hippie culture would spread until they supplanted the existing system. Many of these ideas/practices came from other (overlapping and intermingling) counter-cultural groups such as the Diggers, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Merry Pranksters/Deadheads, the Hog Farm, the Rainbow Family, the Esalen Institute, the Peace and Freedom Party, the White Panther Party and The Farm. There was much overlap, social interaction and cross-pollination within these groups and the Yippies, so there was much crossover membership, as well as similar influences and intentions.
“We are a people. We are a new nation,” YIP’s New Nation Statement said of the burgeoning hippie movement. “We want everyone to control their own life and to care for one another ... We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life, the accumulation of profit.” ...
The Youth International Party quickly spread beyond Rubin, Hoffman and the other founders. YIP had chapters all over the US and in other countries, with particularly active groups in New York City, Vancouver, Washington, D.C., Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, Tucson, Houston, Austin, Columbus, Dayton, Chicago, Berkeley, San Francisco and Madison. There were YIP conferences through the 1970s, beginning with a “New Nation Conference” in Madison, Wisconsin in 1971.
Finally, a quote from an article called The Real Abbie Hoffman:[9]
I like Abbie Hoffman because he knew how to, in his words, “make outrage contagious.” He pissed people off, but he did it in the name of values worth defending. When he wore his American flag shirt on the Merv Griffin show, the network censors were so horrified that they turned the entire screen blue for the duration of his appearance. In retrospect, it seems incredible that this could ever have been controversial, but the counterculture had not yet won. This was a time when people were roughed up and arrested for having long hair, before the right to abortion had been secured. America had to be liberated from the reactionaries and squares, and the hippies and yippies were a vital part of it.
When Hoffman spoke, he said, he “never tried to play on the audience’s guilt, and instead appeal to feelings of liberation, a sense of comradeship, and a call to make history. I played all authority as if it were a deranged lumbering bull and the daring matador.” This gleeful “fuck you” anarchist spirit is valuable.
How easy was the website to set up?
We just bought the domain then asked the good folks at Anarchist Libraries.net to set up the Amuse Wiki software. They did it all for us for free, had it running virtually right away and have helped answer any questions.
If you’re curious to live chat to them, there’s a channel on the Hexchat program under Libera.Chat channels #amusewiki and #anarchistlibrary.
If you’d like to set up your own anarchist library you can attempt to follow the steps described here and/or email anarchistlibraries-request@inventati.org.
[2] Soon to be a major motion picture: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture
[3] Wikipedia – Youth International Party
[4] Soon to be a major motion picture: Soon to be a Major Motion Picture
[5] Wikipedia – Youth International Party