Fredy Perlman
Encyclopedia
Fredy Perlman was an author, publisher and activist. His most popular work, the book Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
!, details the rise of state domination with a retelling of history through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan
. The book remains a major source of inspiration for anti-civilisation
perspectives in contemporary anarchism
. Though Perlman detested ideology and would claim that the only "-ist" he would respond to was cellist, his work both as an author and publisher has been very influential on modern anarchist thought.
, Czechoslovakia
. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba
, Bolivia
in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover
. The Perlman family came to the United States
in 1945 and finally settled in Lakeside Park, Kentucky
.
In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953-55. Perlman was on the staff of The Daily Bruin
, the school newspaper, when the university administration changed the constitution of the newspaper to forbid it from nominating its own editors, as the custom had been. Perlman left the newspaper staff at that time and, with four others, proceeded to publish an independent paper, The Observer, which they handed out on a public sidewalk at the campus bus stop, since they were forbidden by the administration to distribute in on the campus.
In 1956-59 he attended Columbia University
, where he met his life-long companion, Lorraine Nybakken. He enrolled as a student of English literature but soon concentrated his efforts in philosophy, political science and European literature. One particularly influential teacher for him at this time was C. Wright Mills
.
while Perlman worked on a statistical analysis of the world's resources with John Ricklefs. They participated in anti-bomb and pacifist activities with the Living Theatre and others. Perlman was arrested after a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. He became the printer for the Living Theatre and during that time wrote The New Freedom, Corporate Capitalism and a play, Plunder, which he published himself.
In 1963, the husband and wife left the U.S. and moved to Belgrade
, Yugoslavia
after living some months in Copenhagen and Paris. Perlman received a master's degree in economics and a PhD at the University of Belgrade
's Law School
; his dissertation was titled "Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region," which created an outrage among some members of the faculty. During his last year in Yugoslavia, he was a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo
and Metohija.
, Michigan
. Perlman taught social science courses at Western Michigan University
and created outrage among some members of the faculty when he had students run their own classes and grade themselves. During his first year in Kalamazoo, he and Milos Samardzija, one of his professors from Belgrade, translated Isaac Illych Rubin's Essay on Marx's Theory of Value. Perlman wrote an introduction to the book: "An Essay on Commodity Fetishism."
In May 1968, after lecturing for two weeks in Turin
, Italy, Perlman went to Paris on the last train before rail traffic was shut down by some of the strikes that were sweeping Western Europe that season. He participated in the May unrest in Paris and worked at the Censier center with the Citroen factory committee. After returning to Kalamazoo in August, he collaborated with Roger Gregoire in writing Worker-Student Action Committees, May 68.
During his last year in Kalamazoo, Perlman had left the university and together with several other people, mostly students, inaugurated the Black and Red magazine, of which six issues appeared. Typing and layout was done at the Perlman house and the printing at the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan
. In January 1969 Perlman completed The Reproduction of Daily Life. While traveling in Europe in the spring of 1969, he spent several weeks in Yugoslavia and there wrote Revolt in Socialist Yugoslavia, which was suppressed by the authorities, who called it a CIA plot.
In August 1969 he and his wife moved to Detroit, where he wrote The Incoherence of the Intellectual and with others translated Guy Debord
's Society of the Spectacle. This edition was indicated by Debord himself as containing "obvious weaknesses."
In 1970 Perlman was one of a large group that set up the Detroit Printing Co-op with equipment from Chicago. For the next decade, Black & Red publications were printed there, along with countless other projects ranging from leaflets to newspapers to books.
Between 1971 and 1976 he worked on several books, originals as well as translations, including Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, Letters of Insurgents
, Peter Arshinov
's History of the Makhnovist
Movement, Voline's The Unknown Revolution, and Jacques Camatte
's The Wandering of Humanity. During the same years, Perlman began playing the cello, often in chamber music sessions twice a week. In 1971 he and his wife traveled to Alaska by car.
In 1976 Perlman underwent surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. After, he helped write and perform Who's Zerelli? a play critiquing the authoritarian aspects of the medical establishment.
During 1977-80 he studied (and charted) world history. During these years, he traveled to Turkey, Egypt, Europe and regions of the U.S. to visit historic sites with Lorraine. In 1980 he began a comprehensive history of The Strait (Detroit and surroundings). He did not finish this work, and the first and last chapters remain unwritten. In July 1985, he estimated that it would take him eight or ten months to complete and edit the manuscript.
Both Perlman and Lorraine helped on the anti-authoritarian magazine, Fifth Estate, doing typesetting and proofreading as well as contributing articles. His most recent contributions were Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom and The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism.
During 1982-83, he suspended work on The Strait to write his indictment of technological society,
Against His-story, Against Leviathan!. Anarchist historian John P. Clark states that Against His-tory,Against Leviathan! describes Perlman's critique of what he saw as "the millennia-long history of the assault of the technological megamachine on humanity and the Earth." Clark also notes the book discusses "anarchistic spiritual movements" such as the Yellow Turban
movement in ancient China and the Brethren of the Free Spirit
in medieval Europe.
In 1983, Perlman joined the cello section of the Dearborn Orchestra and in June 1985 performed quartets by Mozart and Schumann at a program for Physicians for Social Responsibility.
In 1984 Perlman wrote a work on the subject of nationalism called The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism In it he argues that "Leftist or revolutionary nationalists insist that their nationalism has nothing in common with the nationalism of fascists and national socialists, that theirs is a nationalism of the oppressed, that it offers personal as well as cultural liberation." And so "To challenge these claims, and to see them in a context," he asks "what nationalism is - not only the new revolutionary nationalism but also the old conservative one." And so he concludes that nationalism is an aid to capitalist control of nature and people regardless of its origin. Nationalism thus provides a form through which "Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic negative of the oppressor nation" and that "There's no earthly reason for the descendants of the persecuted to remain persecuted when nationalism offers them the prospect of becoming persecutors. Near and distant relatives of victims can become a racist nation-state; they can themselves herd other people into concentration camps, push other people around at will, perpetrate genocidal war against them, procure preliminary capital by expropriating them."
During 1985, Perlman wrote two essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne
, who Perlman regarded - along with Hawthorne's contemporaries
Thoreau
and Melville
- as a critic of technology
and
imperialism
.
On July 26, 1985, Perlman underwent heart surgery at Henry Ford Hospital, where he died.
In 1989, his widow Lorraine Perlman published a biography of Fredy, Having Little, Being Much on the press they founded, Black & Red. Lorraine Perlman continues to run the press in Detroit, Michigan and still contributes to Fifth Estate.
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan
Against His-Story, Against Leviathan! is a 1983 book by Fredy Perlman, for which he is best known. It is a personal critical perspective on contemporary civilization and society...
!, details the rise of state domination with a retelling of history through the Hobbesian metaphor of the Leviathan
Leviathan (book)
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil — commonly called simply Leviathan — is a book written by Thomas Hobbes and published in 1651. Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan...
. The book remains a major source of inspiration for anti-civilisation
Anarcho-primitivism
Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation...
perspectives in contemporary anarchism
Contemporary anarchism
Anarchism is a political philosophy encompassing theories and attitudes which consider the state, as compulsory government, to be unnecessary, harmful, and/or undesirable, and favors the absence of the state ....
. Though Perlman detested ideology and would claim that the only "-ist" he would respond to was cellist, his work both as an author and publisher has been very influential on modern anarchist thought.
Childhood and youth
Perlman was born in BrnoBrno
Brno by population and area is the second largest city in the Czech Republic, the largest Moravian city, and the historical capital city of the Margraviate of Moravia. Brno is the administrative centre of the South Moravian Region where it forms a separate district Brno-City District...
, Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia or Czecho-Slovakia was a sovereign state in Central Europe which existed from October 1918, when it declared its independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, until 1992...
. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba
Cochabamba
Cochabamba is a city in central Bolivia, located in a valley bearing the same name in the Andes mountain range. It is the capital of the Cochabamba Department and is the fourth largest city in Bolivia with an urban population of 608,276 and a metropolitan population of more than 1,000,000 people...
, Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover
Munich Agreement
The Munich Pact was an agreement permitting the Nazi German annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland. The Sudetenland were areas along Czech borders, mainly inhabited by ethnic Germans. The agreement was negotiated at a conference held in Munich, Germany, among the major powers of Europe without...
. The Perlman family came to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1945 and finally settled in Lakeside Park, Kentucky
Lakeside Park, Kentucky
Lakeside Park is a city in Kenton County, Kentucky, United States. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 2,869.- Geography :Lakeside Park is located at ....
.
In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953-55. Perlman was on the staff of The Daily Bruin
Daily Bruin
The Daily Bruin is the student newspaper at the University of California, Los Angeles.-Frequency and governance:When classes are in session, the Bruin is published Monday through Friday during the school year and once a week on Mondays in the summer quarter.It is overseen by the ASUCLA...
, the school newspaper, when the university administration changed the constitution of the newspaper to forbid it from nominating its own editors, as the custom had been. Perlman left the newspaper staff at that time and, with four others, proceeded to publish an independent paper, The Observer, which they handed out on a public sidewalk at the campus bus stop, since they were forbidden by the administration to distribute in on the campus.
In 1956-59 he attended Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, where he met his life-long companion, Lorraine Nybakken. He enrolled as a student of English literature but soon concentrated his efforts in philosophy, political science and European literature. One particularly influential teacher for him at this time was C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship...
.
Travel and study
In late 1959, Perlman and his wife took a cross-country motor scooter trip, mostly on two-lane highways traveling at 25 miles per hour. From 1959 to 1963, they lived on the lower east side of ManhattanManhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
while Perlman worked on a statistical analysis of the world's resources with John Ricklefs. They participated in anti-bomb and pacifist activities with the Living Theatre and others. Perlman was arrested after a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. He became the printer for the Living Theatre and during that time wrote The New Freedom, Corporate Capitalism and a play, Plunder, which he published himself.
In 1963, the husband and wife left the U.S. and moved to Belgrade
Belgrade
Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...
, Yugoslavia
Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia
The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was the Yugoslav state that existed from the abolition of the Yugoslav monarchy until it was dissolved in 1992 amid the Yugoslav Wars. It was a socialist state and a federation made up of six socialist republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia,...
after living some months in Copenhagen and Paris. Perlman received a master's degree in economics and a PhD at the University of Belgrade
University of Belgrade
The University of Belgrade is the oldest and largest university of Serbia.Founded in 1808 as the Belgrade Higher School in revolutionary Serbia, by 1838 it merged with the Kragujevac-based departments into a single university...
's Law School
University of Belgrade Faculty of Law
The University of Belgrade Faculty of Law , also known as the Belgrade Law School, is one of the first-tier educational institutions of the University of Belgrade, Serbia...
; his dissertation was titled "Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region," which created an outrage among some members of the faculty. During his last year in Yugoslavia, he was a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo
Kosovo
Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...
and Metohija.
Professional life
During 1966-69 the couple lived in KalamazooKalamazoo, Michigan
The area on which the modern city stands was once home to Native Americans of the Hopewell culture, who migrated into the area sometime before the first millennium. Evidence of their early residency remains in the form of a small mound in downtown's Bronson Park. The Hopewell civilization began to...
, Michigan
Michigan
Michigan is a U.S. state located in the Great Lakes Region of the United States of America. The name Michigan is the French form of the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "large water" or "large lake"....
. Perlman taught social science courses at Western Michigan University
Western Michigan University
Western Michigan University is a public university located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, United States. The university was established in 1903 by Dwight B. Waldo, and as of the Fall 2010 semester, its enrollment is 25,045....
and created outrage among some members of the faculty when he had students run their own classes and grade themselves. During his first year in Kalamazoo, he and Milos Samardzija, one of his professors from Belgrade, translated Isaac Illych Rubin's Essay on Marx's Theory of Value. Perlman wrote an introduction to the book: "An Essay on Commodity Fetishism."
In May 1968, after lecturing for two weeks in Turin
Turin
Turin is a city and major business and cultural centre in northern Italy, capital of the Piedmont region, located mainly on the left bank of the Po River and surrounded by the Alpine arch. The population of the city proper is 909,193 while the population of the urban area is estimated by Eurostat...
, Italy, Perlman went to Paris on the last train before rail traffic was shut down by some of the strikes that were sweeping Western Europe that season. He participated in the May unrest in Paris and worked at the Censier center with the Citroen factory committee. After returning to Kalamazoo in August, he collaborated with Roger Gregoire in writing Worker-Student Action Committees, May 68.
During his last year in Kalamazoo, Perlman had left the university and together with several other people, mostly students, inaugurated the Black and Red magazine, of which six issues appeared. Typing and layout was done at the Perlman house and the printing at the Radical Education Project in Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Ann Arbor is a city in the U.S. state of Michigan and the county seat of Washtenaw County. The 2010 census places the population at 113,934, making it the sixth largest city in Michigan. The Ann Arbor Metropolitan Statistical Area had a population of 344,791 as of 2010...
. In January 1969 Perlman completed The Reproduction of Daily Life. While traveling in Europe in the spring of 1969, he spent several weeks in Yugoslavia and there wrote Revolt in Socialist Yugoslavia, which was suppressed by the authorities, who called it a CIA plot.
In August 1969 he and his wife moved to Detroit, where he wrote The Incoherence of the Intellectual and with others translated Guy Debord
Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International . He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.-Early Life:Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931...
's Society of the Spectacle. This edition was indicated by Debord himself as containing "obvious weaknesses."
In 1970 Perlman was one of a large group that set up the Detroit Printing Co-op with equipment from Chicago. For the next decade, Black & Red publications were printed there, along with countless other projects ranging from leaflets to newspapers to books.
Between 1971 and 1976 he worked on several books, originals as well as translations, including Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, Letters of Insurgents
Letters of Insurgents
Letters of Insurgents is a 1976 novel by Fredy Perlman dealing with anarchist themes and relationships.-Plot introduction:...
, Peter Arshinov
Peter Arshinov
Peter Andreyevich Arshinov, also P. Marin , was a metal worker from Ukraine who in 1904, joined the Bolshevik Party and began to edit the paper Molot . In 1906, to escape the attention of the police, he fled to Ekaterinoslav...
's History of the Makhnovist
Nestor Makhno
Nestor Ivanovych Makhno or simply Daddy Makhno was a Ukrainian anarcho-communist guerrilla leader turned army commander who led an independent anarchist army in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War....
Movement, Voline's The Unknown Revolution, and Jacques Camatte
Jacques Camatte
Jacques Camatte is a French writer who once was a Marxist theoretician and member of the International Communist Party, a primarily Italian left communist organisation under the influence of Amadeo Bordiga, which denounced the USSR as capitalist and aimed to rebuild a "true" Leninism...
's The Wandering of Humanity. During the same years, Perlman began playing the cello, often in chamber music sessions twice a week. In 1971 he and his wife traveled to Alaska by car.
In 1976 Perlman underwent surgery to replace a damaged heart valve. After, he helped write and perform Who's Zerelli? a play critiquing the authoritarian aspects of the medical establishment.
During 1977-80 he studied (and charted) world history. During these years, he traveled to Turkey, Egypt, Europe and regions of the U.S. to visit historic sites with Lorraine. In 1980 he began a comprehensive history of The Strait (Detroit and surroundings). He did not finish this work, and the first and last chapters remain unwritten. In July 1985, he estimated that it would take him eight or ten months to complete and edit the manuscript.
Both Perlman and Lorraine helped on the anti-authoritarian magazine, Fifth Estate, doing typesetting and proofreading as well as contributing articles. His most recent contributions were Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom and The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism.
During 1982-83, he suspended work on The Strait to write his indictment of technological society,
Against His-story, Against Leviathan!. Anarchist historian John P. Clark states that Against His-tory,Against Leviathan! describes Perlman's critique of what he saw as "the millennia-long history of the assault of the technological megamachine on humanity and the Earth." Clark also notes the book discusses "anarchistic spiritual movements" such as the Yellow Turban
Yellow Turban Rebellion
The Yellow Turban Rebellion, also translated as Yellow Scarves Rebellion, was a peasant revolt that broke out in 184 AD in China during the reign of Emperor Ling of the Han Dynasty...
movement in ancient China and the Brethren of the Free Spirit
Brethren of the Free Spirit
The Brothers, or Brethren of the Free Spirit, was a lay Christian movement which flourished in northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Antinomian and individualist in outlook, it came into conflict with the Catholic Church and was declared heretical by Pope Clement V at the Council of...
in medieval Europe.
In 1983, Perlman joined the cello section of the Dearborn Orchestra and in June 1985 performed quartets by Mozart and Schumann at a program for Physicians for Social Responsibility.
In 1984 Perlman wrote a work on the subject of nationalism called The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism In it he argues that "Leftist or revolutionary nationalists insist that their nationalism has nothing in common with the nationalism of fascists and national socialists, that theirs is a nationalism of the oppressed, that it offers personal as well as cultural liberation." And so "To challenge these claims, and to see them in a context," he asks "what nationalism is - not only the new revolutionary nationalism but also the old conservative one." And so he concludes that nationalism is an aid to capitalist control of nature and people regardless of its origin. Nationalism thus provides a form through which "Every oppressed population can become a nation, a photographic negative of the oppressor nation" and that "There's no earthly reason for the descendants of the persecuted to remain persecuted when nationalism offers them the prospect of becoming persecutors. Near and distant relatives of victims can become a racist nation-state; they can themselves herd other people into concentration camps, push other people around at will, perpetrate genocidal war against them, procure preliminary capital by expropriating them."
During 1985, Perlman wrote two essays on Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne was an American novelist and short story writer.Nathaniel Hawthorne was born in 1804 in the city of Salem, Massachusetts to Nathaniel Hathorne and the former Elizabeth Clarke Manning. His ancestors include John Hathorne, a judge during the Salem Witch Trials...
, who Perlman regarded - along with Hawthorne's contemporaries
Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist...
and Melville
Herman Melville
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick and the posthumous novella Billy Budd....
- as a critic of technology
Technology
Technology is the making, usage, and knowledge of tools, machines, techniques, crafts, systems or methods of organization in order to solve a problem or perform a specific function. It can also refer to the collection of such tools, machinery, and procedures. The word technology comes ;...
and
imperialism
Imperialism
Imperialism, as defined by Dictionary of Human Geography, is "the creation and/or maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural, and territorial relationships, usually between states and often in the form of an empire, based on domination and subordination." The imperialism of the last 500 years,...
.
On July 26, 1985, Perlman underwent heart surgery at Henry Ford Hospital, where he died.
In 1989, his widow Lorraine Perlman published a biography of Fredy, Having Little, Being Much on the press they founded, Black & Red. Lorraine Perlman continues to run the press in Detroit, Michigan and still contributes to Fifth Estate.
Selected publications
- “Essay on Commodity Fetishism”. Telos 6 (Fall 1970). New York: Telos Press.
- "The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism"
- "The Reproduction of Daily Life"
- Against HIStory! Against Leviathan!
- Worker-Student Action Committees, France May '68 with Roger Gregoire
- Manual for Revolutionary Leaders
- "Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats"
- "Obituary for Paul Baran"
See also
- Situationist International
- May 1968
- Original Affluent SocietyOriginal affluent societyThe "original affluent society" is a theory postulating that hunter-gatherers were the original affluent society. This theory was first articulated by Marshall Sahlins at a symposium entitled "Man the Hunter" held in Chicago in 1966...
- Anarcho-primitivismAnarcho-primitivismAnarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, and alienation...
- John ZerzanJohn ZerzanJohn Zerzan is an American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author. His works criticize agricultural civilization as inherently oppressive, and advocate drawing upon the ways of life of prehistoric humans as an inspiration for what a free society should look like...
- Fifth Estate periodical
External links
- Black and Red Books, the press founded by the Perlmans
- Having Little, Being Much: A Chronicle of Fredy Perlman’s Fifty Years by Lorraine Perleman
- Loud Bark and Curious Eyes: A History of the UCLA Daily Bruin, 1919-1955
- Fredy Perlman's writings online
- Excerpt from Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
- Fredy Perlman Page Daily Bleed's Anarchist Encyclopedia
- Fredy Perlman page at Libcom
- Fredy Perlman page at Spunk Library
- Fredy Perlman archive at The Anarchist Library