Drawing the Line Once Again: Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings

123 Pages·2010·1.57 MB·English

by  Paul Goodman

DRAWING THE LINE
ONCE AGAIN
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Drawing the Line Once Again
Paul Goodman's Anarchist Writings
Paul Goodman
Edited by Taylor Stoehr
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Contents
Preface by Taylor Stoehr 5
Sources of Texts 19
The May Pamphlet 21
Reflections on the Anarchist Principle 55
Freedom and Autonomy 57
Anarchism and Revolution 60
Some Prima Facie Objections to Decentralism 75
The Black Flag of Anarchism 89
The Limits of Local Liberty 98
Civil Disobedience 104
"Getting Into Power": The Ambiguities of Pacifist Politics 114
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Preface
hen I met Paul Goodman in 1950 I was eighteen, and he was thirty-nine.
WI was a callow youth from the Midwest, much in need of menroring,
and he was a bohemian guru with a little band of disciples already following
him around, and the author of many books, some of them still to be in print
half a century later. I saw Goodman only five or six times that spring before
going back to Omaha, but for the next ten years he did guide me, at first in a
few crucial letters of advice, then only through his writings, which I began to
collect and study in a way that I studied nothing else.
I say this to orient new readers of Goodman, some of whom I assume
will be at the age I met him and perhaps as much in need of counsel as I was.
Although it weighed heavily in my own case to have met him in the flesh, what
ultimately counted most, both then and later in the 1960s when I reconnected
with him, was not his physical presence but his lucidity and common sense.
He used to say it was "the obvious" that people never seemed to notice, plain
as the nose on your face. That was what was so irresistible about him. As if in
dialogue with Socrates, you felt you were in touch with your own wisdom, like
a kind of memory, for the very first time. Our mutual friend George Dennison
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Drawi ess, 2 omini Goodman's attitude. It was the primary tendency in the Gestalt therapy he was
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PREFACE
just beginning to practice at the time I meth im, and was also at the heart of the
artist's life he had chosen for himself. For me, however, Goodman's anarchism
best exemplifies this deep-going attitude. I have included two succinct sum­
maries of it in the pages that follow-"The Anarchist Principle" and "Freedom
and Autonomy"-but to get the feel of this habit of mind, which he some­
times called "the habit of freedom," I suggest reading through the more expan­
sive essays printed here. As he believed, character is revealed in a writer's style,
expressed in the very rhythms of speech, and of course character is the source
of any deep-going attitude.
Curiously, one finds in these longer selections a number of passages
where Goodman repeats himself, not merely in idea or attitude but verbatim,
quoting himself without quotation marks, as if it couldn't be said better than
he had already said it-a trick he developed early in his career, along with
footnotes referring readers to his other writings. In later years such cloning
was helpful in meeting multiple demands on him from editors and publish­
ers, but it also highlights what I'm trying to get across here: once we are famil­
iar with his voice, everything Goodman says seems reminiscent of some other
portion of his work. "Haven't I read this paragraph before?" Goodman's tone
changed dramatically after 1960, once he was no longer writing only for his
friends in the San Remo bar, but his "attitude" remained the same throughout
the twenty-five years represented by these essays. Near the end of his life he
said that he hadn't changed his political ideas "since I was a boy." This was true.
My own earliest encounter with the anarchist attitude came by reading
"The May Pamphlet" side by side with its imagined spelling-out in The Dead
of Spring, an expressionist novel he published in 1950. When Goodman gave
me a copy, hot off Dave Dellinger's Libertarian Press, I didn't realize what a
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PREFACE
In 1950, I was too naIve to truly comprehend what the opposite crime, treason
against natural societies (as it was termed in "The May Pamphlet"), might
mean for someone setting out on these paths, but what I did intuit, almost
wordlessly, was that the world I was entering was founded on lies and hypoc­
risy. Much as I loved my home and the family friends, teachers, and neighbors
I knew as a boy, I was aware that almost every adult I met was masked, and no
matter how smiling a face might be put on it, their lives were venal and empty.
In The Dead of Spring, Goodman had called their condition The Asphyxiation.
I had gotten a strong whiff of that self-betrayal festering in my parents' genera­
tion and was afraid that I, too, was infected.
Goodman amazed me because he did not live this way. As far as I could tell,
he had no secrets, no reticence, no shame. Whatever scary implications such
an open life might have for a shy and embarrassed young fellow like myself,
it was better than suffocation in conformity and complacency. There was
another way to live-one that presented something to believe in, pursuits to
follow wholeheartedly, countering the fear that there was nothing worth doing.
I began by paying attention to how he behaved in his family, among his
friends, in public spaces, and face-to-face with me, but it was not until I had
returned to the Midwest and read "The May Pamphlet" and The Dead of Spring
that I had any insight into what had bowled me over during our initial encoun­
ter. My misgivings about the adult world were embodied in what he called
"treason against natural societies": "every one knows moments in which he con­
forms against his nature, in which he suppresses his best spontaneous impulse,
and cowardly takes leave of his heart." It was precisely such moments of self­
betrayal that had led to the great wars of the century, long prepared in the
averted eyes and uneasy smiles of parents whose children would die in them.
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Drawi ess, 2 omini matter how much you can take from good advice, you have to make your own
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PREFACE
mistakes. I had gone back home and done all the things I admired him for refus­
ing to do, every one of the treasonous rites of passage I've listed above-even
though I carried the truth along with me too, if not fully in consciousness yet
alive in the books he had given me and continued to write.
By the next time I saw him, ten years later, I had begun to understand. His
voice had been ringing in my head as I read Communiws, Geswlt Therapy, The
Structure of Literature, and The Empire City. When I visited him in December
1959, Growing up Absurd was in page proofs on his dinner table, and when he
came to visit me in Berkeley two months later, chapters of it were already being
serialized in Commentary. A more receptive generation than my own, one that
included his own son Mathew, was about to have its first taste of his anarchist
attitude, focused now as the subtitle announced, on "problems of youth in the
organized society."
This would be the heyday of his influence. Of course there were other
compelling voices-Co Wright Mills at the outset, then Herbert Marcuse,
William Appleton Williams, Michael Harrington, to name some prominent
authors who figure in histories of the '60s-but outside of the Civil Rights
movement (another story entirely), Goodman was by far the most significant
of these social critics, despite the fact that he has become just another name in
the index of most books about the 1960s in recent years. As the landmark "Port
Huron Statement" of the Students for a Democratic Society made clear as early
as 1961, the first leaders of the youth movement were completely in tune with
his anarchist attitude, not only his critique of the "organized system" but also
his scorn for the value system that supported it, the "standard of living" and
the ''American Dream." Most of the other public intellectuals were still waving
red flags and calling for an old-fashioned taking of power, whereas like most
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PREFACE
It was near the end of his decade-long harangue when he wrote that exhausted
poem about "the old grey goose" that died in the mill-pond, but at his peak
in the early '60S he was indefatigable. In 1962 alone he published five books,
among them a new edition of "The May Pamphlet," combined with more
recent articles as Drawing the Line--critiquing Kennedy's "New Frontier" in
Washington, commenting presciently on the epidemic "war spirit," calling
the intellectuals to account, and endorsing the "Worldwide General Strike for
Peace" for which he had written the broadside. Another of his books that year
was titled Utopian Essays and Practical Proposals, where he described various
ways that "The May Pamphlet" might be implemented in direct action if not
official policy. Still another book insisted The Society I Live in Is Mine, gather­
ing letters to public officials and the media in which he showed how things
might be done differently.
The audience for all this analysis and exhortation was not only on the
campuses. There were more anarchists in the U.S.A. than anyone had imag­
ined. When Goodman had joined A. J. Muste, Dave Dellinger, Bayard Rustin,
and others on the editorial board of Liberation magazine in the late-fifties, it
was a thin twenty-page anarchist monthly. By 1962 it had grown to twenty­
eight pages, by 1966 a robust forry-eight. A light breeze compared to the dust
storms in the national press, but also a weather vane. When Goodman edited
a Seeds oj Liberation anthology in 1964, he quite rightly pointed out that "the
'news' has been catching up to Liberation," that the editors, by dealing with
"what they consider to be humanly important, ... [what] they themselves get
personally engaged in," had scooped all the big media by several years-their
intuitions had proved predictive of the issues that now made headlines. More
and more Americans wanted not only to hear the truth but to take part in it,
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