#earth first

Because of their continuous history of radicalism in relation to the ecological outrages being perpetrated by industrial civilization, the Chicago Surrealist Group, in recent years, has found a radical green affinity with such direct actionist-oriented magazines as Green Anarchy (which is now sadly defunct) and the Earth First! Journal (which is still alive and kicking). In 1971, years before the Animal Liberation movement started making headlines, the Chicago Surrealists issued The Anteater’s Umbrella: A Contribution to the Critique of Zoos, a tract initiated by Penelope Rosemont, who once noted that her first word as a child was “outside.” It was initially distributed by the Chicago Group at the entrance to Lincoln Park Zoo. The unsuspecting zoogoer who took the proffered leaflet read:

It is not without significance that animals in zoos are captured and brought against their wills to this, the penitentiary of the instincts. Here, in the zoo, in this place of hypnotic fascinations, human beings come to see their own instincts caged and sterilized. Everything that is intrinsic to humankind, but smothered by capitalist society, appears safely in a zoo. Aggression, sexuality, motion, desire, play, the very impulses to freedom are trapped and displayed for the alienated enjoyment and manipulation of men, women and children. The cages are merely the extensions of the cages that omnipresently infest the lives of all living beings. The brutal confinement of animals ultimately serves only to separate men and women from their own potentialities. [24]

This “zoo-as-Bastille” polemic problematizes an unexamined part of everyday spectacular reality considered to be as normal as a family picnic. In turn, it also causes us to reflect deeply, not only on the problem of animals as victims, but also on our own victimization and submerged desire for freedom. In this regard, “The Anteaters Umbrella” would later be republished in Green Anarchy magazine in the Fall of 2002 because of its anti-civilization affinities and commended therein for attacking the animal liberation issue from a revolutionary rather than a moralistic perspective.

Later, two other articles excerpted from Penelope Rosemont’s Surrealist Experiences book would also be published by Green Anarchy in their Winter 2004 and Summer 2005 issues. One of them, “The Psychopathology of Work” is of particular interest in reference to our previous discussion of the Wobblies. Because her argument was based on a refusal of work in the revolutionary context of an end to wage slavery, it was welcomed by Green Anarchy for publication. Though Green Anarchy has sometimes been mistakenly criticized, particularly by anarcho-syndicalists, for being anti-worker, their editorial philosophy was actually more nuanced. Penelope’s article appealed to the GA editors precisely because while the magazine had always been critical of workerist tendencies in the anarchist movement, it did not seek to self-righteously direct its editorial wrath at wage slaves themselves, but rather at the institution of wage slavery. Similarly, before their demise, Green Anarchy would publish surrealist-inspired pieces of my own on miserabilism and Eurocentrism [25] as being compatible with a green anarchist analysis.

In addition to these Green Anarchy reprints, the Earth First! Journal’s Special Thirtieth Anniversary Issue, volume 1 (November 2010) decided to run an excerpted version of a recent collaborative text by the Chicago Surrealist Group/Moon First! Collective: “No Compromise In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon.” [26] The tract was originally written in response to NASAA’s LCRoss (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) Project A119 which committed the “unimaginable poetic atrocity” of engaging in the nuclear bombardment of the dark side of the moon. And volume 2 of the Earth First! Journal’s Thirtieth Anniversary Issue (February 2011) reprinted an excerpt from a much earlier article co-authored by Franklin Rosemont and David Roediger entitled, “Three Days That Shook the New World Order” which had originally appeared in both the 1993 Chicago Surrealist Group publication, What Are You Going To Do About It?, then soon after in Race Traitor (Summer, 1993), and a decade later in my own Surrealist Subversions anthology.

As to the latter article on the Los Angeles Rebellion of 1992, the original piece began with Wobbly T-Bone Slim’s quote on injustice and the politeness of attack that I have used earlier as an epigram for the “Wobbly Surrealist Axis” section of this essay. The text emphasizes solidarity between ghetto/barrio street fighters, eco-activists, radical feminists and point-of-production rebel workers in order to inspire the kind of radical inclusivity that will destroy the toxic institutional structures that are killing both the planet and its human inhabitants. It is alternately a call to mutual aid, play, and adventure that proclaims:

The struggle for wilderness is inseparable from the struggle for a free society, which is inseparable from the struggle against racism, whiteness and imperialism, which is inseparable from the struggle for the liberation of women, which is inseparable from the struggle for sexual freedom, which is inseparable from the struggle to emancipate labor and abolish work, which is inseparable from the struggle against war, which is inseparable from the struggle to lead poetic lives and, more generally, to do as we please. The enemies today are those who try to separate these struggles. Outsiders of the world unite! Freedom Now! Earth First! These three watchwords are for us but one.” [27]