The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman
Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, 2000
$29, paperback
BY RJURIK DAVIDSON
In August 1967, 15 or so hippies took a tour of the New York Stock Exchange. There, at the Mecca of global commerce, the free spirits ran to the railing of the observation gallery and threw several $100 bills onto the market floor. Some stockbrokers scrambled after the money in a mad display of greed, others booed. Outside, reporters with cameras waited. It brought to prominence one of the greatest guerrilla theatre activists of the 20th century Abbie Hoffman.
Hoffman, like many activists of his generation, had been schooled in the late-1950s civil rights movement. He travelled to Mississippi to help organise the struggle of African Americans against the apartheid Jim Crow laws that dominated the US south. Shortly afterwards, Hoffman began to organise protests against the US war in Vietnam, which was to be the dominant issue for radicals of the 1960s.
It was when Hoffman joined the youth counter-culture young people whose rebellion was expressed in terms of lifestyle and challenging conservative mores and conformism: long hair, beads, sex and drugs that his distinctive political trajectory was defined.
From the time he moved into the Lower East Side of New York in 1967, he made it his aim to bring the counter-cultural and the political movements together. With collaborator Jerry Rubin and others, Hoffman was to coalesce this political orientation into the Youth International Party, or Yippies.
Hoffman's favoured method of protest against the structures of US power was guerrilla theatre symbolic actions designed to convince, not by use of reason, but by employing irony, humour, inconoclasm, references to popular culture and civil disobedience.
The Yippies famously attempted to exorcise and levitate the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam War march in Washington in 1967.
Hoffman describes some of the other actions in his recently re-released autobiography: The Army recruiting center in Times Square was plastered with stickers: See Canada Now. Stop signs on street corners now read STOP WAR. Witches in black robes, bearing roses, exorcised the FBI building of evil spirits. Hundreds crowded the lobby of the Daily News, smoking grass and passing out leaflets to employees that began, 'Dear Fellow Members of the Communist Conspiracy'. A tree was planted in the center of St Marx place (we took the liberty of changing the spelling) while 5000 celebrators danced to rock music. Midnight artists snuck into subway stations and painted huge murals on the walls.
Guerrilla theatre's political power was partly due to the proliferation of television. Earlier radicals did not have this instrument to wield. Hoffman made a point of studying TV. His sharp wit made Hoffman profoundly suited to inventing media stunts. Novelist Norman Mailer described him as one of the funniest people I ever met... Abbie has a charisma that must have come out of an immaculate conception between Fidel Castro and Groucho Marx.
Hoffman saw the Youth International Party not as an organisation but as a current which attempted to fuse radical politics with the counter-cultural practice. He promoted the conception of structured non-leadership, which meant creating a blank space through which people could express themselves, involve themselves, use their creativity.
Contemporary activists will notice the similarity with sections of the anti-corporate globalisation movement's views and activities. Indeed, Hoffman remains an inspiration to culture jammers, dedicated to subverting the icons of corporate advertising and capitalist culture. structured non-leadership also has echoes in today's affinity groups and spokes councils.
Noticeable in Hoffman's autobiography is the total lack of reference to working-class action. This is no accident. Central to Hoffman's political current was the lack of an orientation to the working class or its traditional organisations, the trade unions.
During the 1960s, the great industrial muscle of the organised working-class remained dormant. At the same time, left-wing organisations and parties entered the decade marginalised and weak from the repression of the 1950s. When the youth radicalisation of the 1960s exploded, the weakness of the left meant that it was not in a position to lead.
In contrast, in France where the traditional left organisations remained strong, the counter-culture was more marginal and the left was at the centre of the 1960s radicalisation. The culmination was the May-June 1968 near revolution.
In the US, the missed rendezvous of the youth radicalisation and organised working-class action provided the basis for the influence of hippie counter-culture and the elevation of Hoffman to such world renown.
The book is full of wonderful descriptions and anecdotes that illuminate how exciting and extraordinary the radical 1960s were. Fascinating as this is, it is offset by a discomforting lack of strategic thinking. Hoffman's anecdotes and stories are just that: isolated moments without connection to any overarching view of the movement.
Hoffman lacks the ability to connect these moments with a more significant analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the movement, of the role of the various social forces and of what was needed to unite them so as to challenge the US rulers.
In this, Hoffman personifies the US radical movement in the 1960s. It failed to consolidate any institutional forms capable of resisting the ruling-class backlash of the 1980s and 1990s. Instead, many of the radical organisations dissipated with the mass movements that underwrote them.
However, Hoffman remained true to his roots. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he remained an activist until the end of his life in 1989. Underground, using an assumed name, he began to organise his local community, and again came to national prominence.
Hoffman's autobiography is an important document by a remarkable activist. It has its flaws but also has much to teach.
From Green Left Weekly, March 20, 2002.
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