Letters of Insurgents (Fredy Perlman, 1976)
by cominsitu
Letters of Insurgents by Fredy Perlman
Black and Red Press, Detroit, 1976
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But what happened to you, Sophia? What have you done to your memory? How can you refer to the resistance by mentioning, in one and the same sentence, the “thousands of working people fighting and dying to free their city” and the “approach of the liberation armies”? If we fought to free the city, then we lost; the “liberation army” destroyed the city’s freedom. But if we fought to free the city, why did we — thousands of us in the streets, as you say — cheer and dance when the tanks and soldiers of the “liberation army” marched into the already liberated city? If we fought to liberate the city, why didn’t we turn our guns on the new occupiers? Why didn’t we shoot the commanders, fraternize with the soldiers and begin building our free city? It’s the same, familiar and distorted picture. We were pure; we fought for freedom. They were despotic; they fought to enslave us. This picture is false. I was one of those thousands. I shot to avenge and to kill. So did the people alongside me on the barricades. I learned that I had helped to “free the city” only after I met Luisa. And then I “remembered” having done that. But it’s not true. I didn’t for a moment believe that I and the people with whom I built barricades were going to create a new social activity, invent new modes of transportation, dream up new ways to relate to each other, to our activity, to our environment. I knew that gangsters, cops and soldiers had always governed in the past and I didn’t think anything I did would keep them from governing in the future. I didn’t relate any of that to my activity on the barricades. While I shot and while hundreds like me were killed, we cleared the streets for the “victorious liberation army.” I didn’t help clear their path intentionally; I wouldn’t ever have risked my life to do that. Yet among the thousands you say were “freeing their city,” there were some who did actually risk their lives in order to clear the path for the new occupiers. Perhaps they thought they’d be praised and rewarded by the new masters. Perhaps they were in fact rewarded. I had met some of them in the resistance organization. I suspect they couldn’t have fought hard and couldn’t have taken great risks since the dead can’t enjoy their rewards. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe like the noblest of slaves they risked everything, hoping that if they died the new masters would at least decorate their graves.
Fredy Perlman Bibliography:
Against His-story, Against Leviathan — Fredy Perlman
Anti-Semitism and the Beirut Pogrom — Fredy Perlman
Anything Can Happen — Fredy Perlman
Birth of a Revolutionary Movement in Yugoslavia
Chicago 1968 — Lorraine Perlman, Fredy Perlman
Commodity Fetishism: an introduction to I.I. Rubin’s Essay on Marx’s Theory of Value — Fredy Perlman
The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism — Fredy Perlman
I Accuse This Liberal University of Terror and Violence — Fredy Perlman
Illyria Street Commune — Fredy Perlman
Letters of Insurgents — Sophia Nachalo and Yarostan Vochek
The Machine Against The Garden — Fredy Perlman
Manual for Revolutionary Leaders — Michael Velli, Lorraine Perlman, Fredy Perlman
Progress and Nuclear Power: The Destruction of the Continent and Its Peoples — Fredy Perlman
The Reproduction of Daily Life — Fredy Perlman
Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats — Fredy Perlman
The Incoherence of the Intellectual — Fredy Perlman
Worker-Student Action Committees. France May ’68 — Roger Gregoire & Fredy Perlman
communists in situ 