Home from the Dark Side of Utopia

by Clifton Ross

  Ben Clarke had saved me in more ways than just showing me an exit from the police riot at the Democratic Convention. Soon thereafter he began to send work my way from Red Star Black Rose and I made enough money to meet modest expenses while I lived at House on the Way.

  Then on May Day of 1985 Gwen Gilliam danced into my life, introduced to me by a mutual friend I’d met in Nicaragua. Gwen was an exotic dancer in New York, and was just visiting the Bay Area to meet with her literary agent. She was only planning to stay around a few days, but we ended up at a demonstration in Berkeley against the embargo Reagan imposed on Nicaragua that day, and that evening she came back to stay with me at House on the Way. Given her free spirit, her eccentricities, and her open and defiant honesty, it was clear to me there was just no way we were going to live a problem-free life in the basement of a Catholic Church. After a few days living together in the basement we briefly moved into Dave Smith’s apartment; we house sat for different people and stayed in a friend’s vacant house as we looked for something more stable. Then, by chance, as Gwen skateboarded through East Oakland looking for apartments, she found a studio upstairs from Red Star Black Rose (RSBR).

  I began working nearly full time at RSBR and in the evenings I translated and edited A Dream Made of Stars: A Bilingual Anthology of Nicaraguan Poetry (ADMOS). Eventually a storefront space next door to RSBR opened up and Gwen and I shared that space with Jim Martin who started working on a project called Flatland Distribution. It was a strangely tranquil time in many ways, even accounting for all the non-traditional facets of our life together.

  Ben Clarke and I spent many hours in RSBR printing and playing what we called “ideological ping pong” as the presses ran. The game was an ongoing political argument that ranged between anarchism, communism, socialism, and points between. When we tired of arguing a side, anarchism, or communism, for instance, we’d switch sides in the argument and begin the argument over again. By this method we would pass through a work day having argued any number of contrary political perspectives, both pro and con, and the time would pass quickly. It was only conceivable because both of us found major problems, and virtues, in all the radical Left perspectives, but neither of us found any one of them problem-free. Speaking for myself, the sectarianism of the Left amused and also infuriated me. I couldn’t understand how people who were so far from realizing their own utopian projects could be so dismissive of other ideas of utopia. On the other hand, for my part I perhaps overestimated the Sandinista’s ability to carry out their revolutionary project with great success. RSBR was a great resting place but the peace of that oasis wasn’t to last. There were too many shadows wandering in our midst, and I include my own as one.

  By summer of 1986 I had finished the layout of ADMOS and put it on the press. I printed a thousand copies and it sold out within a month. RSBR decided it wanted to reprint the book, but problems were emerging in the collective, especially after it had expanded to include three or four more graphic designers. Political disagreements between collective members (framed as an ideological issue between anarchism and Leninism) and my own unresolved resentments toward the collective, about which I no longer even recall the details, all made it easy for me to decide to jump ship and take a job in Managua the following spring.

  Dave Smith, now living in Managua, heard about a position for a translator in the Managua office of Centro de Reportes Informativos Sobre Guatemala (CERIGUA). He called me up one spring morning in 1987 and asked me if I was interested in the job, and since I was always happy to run away from problems I couldn’t immediately solve in those days, I said yes. Within a month or so, I’d sold most of my possessions and was ready to leave.

  I went overland to Nicaragua and arrived a month later, ready to start work at CERIGUA. I wasn’t happy at CERIGUA, which, as it turned out, was a political project of the Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unity (URNG), a grouping of many revolutionary organizations and, like all Marxist-Leninist organizations, governed by a “democratic centralism” that was hierarchical, elitist, and directed top down. Still, I hung in because I didn’t know what else to do.

  One day I took the afternoon off from work and rode my little Yamaha 175 to the market to do some shopping. I’d just bought the motorcycle from an Italian who, I got the strong impression, had been part of the Red Brigades and now, after working a few years in Nicaragua, was on his way home. I loved the bike: it had cross-country tires and “Tierra, Viento y Fuego” (Earth, Wind and Fire) painted on a side cover. It kept me off the buses: slow, always overloaded with people and a perfect place for pickpockets to practice their art.

  The market was the usual scene, like being in the jungle, listening to and watching all the bright birds sing and preen and flit about, and I was one of them. It was a beautiful hot day in Managua so the shade of the market stalls offered a cool respite from the afternoon sun as I wandered, called to by the market ladies to buy from them. As usual, I had very little money so I just continued walking toward the section where I hoped to buy some dried beans. Suddenly the voices around me stopped and all eyes turned toward two Sandinista policemen making their way through the market.

  I felt a jolt of confusion. Here were the representatives of the state with which I was working in solidarity, policemen “of the people” who in earlier years had been celebrated and loved. Yet now the people in the market had fallen into a sudden hostile silence at their appearance. In that instant I recognized some contradiction I couldn’t quite process. I therefore tried to put the incident out of mind, as I went on to make my purchase and ride down the Panamerican highway home.

  I’d already seen a couple of instances in which robberies had actually been perpetrated by the Sandinista police—some of them had stolen batteries and tapes from journalists who were covering that year’s celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution in Matagalpa, on July 19th. It was understandable, given the economic situation, that the Sandinista police, whose wages were proving inadequate, would begin trying to make ends meet by any means available. But the comandancia didn’t seem to notice such problems, or if they did, they didn’t seem to acknowledge them, or the growing dissatisfaction, expressed in the graffiti around the city.

  But it was also true that the FSLN resembled very little of the original Sandinistas, named after the anarcho-syndicalist anti-imperialist “General of Free Men,” Augusto Sandino. He had fought with the Liberals against the Conservatives, and then broke with the Liberals and led the first guerrilla war against occupying US Marines from 1927 until he drove them out in 1933. A messianic figure, he combined anarcho-syndicalist ideas with vegetarianism and magnetic spiritualism of a theosophical nature. Given Sandino’s spiritualist anarchism, it’s understandable that he was unable to pact with his Salvadoran secretary, the Communist Farabundo Martí, and as a result the two conducted simultaneous, yet unrelated, guerrilla struggles in the neighboring Central American republics. They were both killed within two years of each other. Martí was killed in the peasant uprising in El Salvador, along with thirty thousand others in February 1932. In February 1934, while in Managua to sign the peace treaty, Sandino was murdered by soldiers of the Nicaraguan National Guard under General Anastasio Somoza. Somoza went on to slaughter or disperse the remaining Sandinistas and take power as “president.” He and his sons ran the country as his own private finca (ranch) until he was overthrown by the latter version of the Sandinistas, the FSLN. These latter coalitions of guerrilla fighters were all Cuban-trained communists with a strong Marxist-Leninist orientation. It was, in fact, a group of people with whom Augusto Sandino would likely have eschewed contact, given that the General of Free Men had separated with Farabundo Martí precisely over the latter’s communism.

  Gwen joined me after a few months and we were just starting to get settled in Managua together when I had a fairly serious motorcycle accident, breaking both wrists. It was five months into my time in the country, but since I could no longer work, and really wasn’t interested in continui
ng on with CERIGUA, we decided to return home.

  A couple weeks after we returned I heard about a job opening at another printing collective, Inkworks, so I took the splints off my hands (they had no material to make casts with in Nicaragua) and went in to apply for the job. I really wanted the work and didn’t want any appearance of weakness to screw my chances of getting the job. I got the position of small press operator and I was welcomed into the Marxist collective despite a past association with the anarchists at Red Star Black Rose.

  The freedom and the easy-going style of RSBR contrasted with the more “professional” Inkworks, which was afiliated with the AFL-CIO. Inkworks was certainly successful, but it seemed to me that basic questions were never raised. In the collective meetings there was always a discussion about how to expand the business, and no one seemed to pay attention to my question about why the business needed to expand. Was this Marxist collective simply incapable of questioning the logic of the capitalist system? Didn’t anyone feel that they would prefer free time to more work? Most of the core people at Inkworks did overtime, and lots of it. After my six-month trial period I decided to leave. I went on unemployment and worked on some translations of Sandinista poetry, and eventually I was invited to join a partnership with a friend who was growing marijuana in Northern California. Suddenly I found myself living in Laytonville, or just outside of it, on a marijuana farm. It was a serene location on a little creek fed by snowmelt from the Sierras and between the tasks of carrying grow mix up the hillsides to well-hidden plots where the plants were installed, I read a translation of Don Quixote and planted a vegetable garden outside of the geodesic dome cabin where I was staying.

  Within a couple of months I ended up back in Berkeley after a disagreement with my partners, wondering if marijuana was causing more problems in my life than I could deal with. That suspicion was confirmed when Gwen and I finally broke up in late 1989. After an emotional tailspin that led to a “bottom,” I decided to get into recovery for marijuana and alcohol addiction. I started going to “Anonymous” or Twelve Step meetings.

  I moved back to Calhoun House, but it was in a new post-political phase and it seemed the only thing that held the house together was the cheap rent and a collective love of marijuana. The exception to that were two straight-edge punks who gave me inspiration to look at my own life and modeled for me a sober lifestyle.

  Thus began a long process of struggling with my personal demons as I found myself frequently slipping back into my old habits and just as frequently returning to sobriety.

  The collapse of USSR was shocking, elating, and also quite depressing. Communism, most of us already knew, didn’t work, but neither did capitalism. However, capitalism obviously functioned better than its enemy, and with the USSR gone the US could now do what it wished. The US invaded Panama and the long terrorist war against Nicaragua contributed to the defeat of the Sandinistas at election time in February 1990, although the Sandinistas shared responsibility in their defeat. Socialist insurgency gave way to the neoliberal economic model that had come to power with Reagan and Thatcher as the new orthodoxy. Within a few years even “socialists” and “communists” would be advocating “lean, mean government” and neo­liberal economics.

  Chapter Seven: Wobblies, Zapatistas, and Cubans

  I watched the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Panama, the defeat of the FSLN, and the first Gulf War between homework and classes at San Francisco State University. I worked and studied, supporting myself by odd jobs, mostly printing and cleaning houses. It was a depressing time, the emergence of the unipolar world under the hyper-US empire. Socialism had been cleared from the table in what seemed to be an instant and the “victory” celebrations lasted just about as long. Now it was time for the United States to take over, from the USSR, the task of designing a utopia of the future, and it was called “neoliberal capitalism.”

  Locally, these big international events were presaged by the demise of the Consumer’s Cooperative of Berkeley (CCOB) in 1988. The Co-op had been an institution in the city since the New Deal years (1939) and grew to twelve stores and over 100,000 members by the time it closed. In addition to providing groceries, the Co-ops were community intersections. There were community billboards inside and someone was always tabling outside or nearby. This venerable Berkeley institution was a meeting place not just for shoppers, but also for members of the community and members of the Co-op.

  The collapse of CCOB, due to mounting debts and internal faction-fighting, and a lackluster line of products—the chain’s brand designs seemed to have been outsourced to Moscow rather than Madison Avenue—was a real blow to progressives in Berkeley, but it also was part of a whole process many of us recognized as a general decline of the aging “New Left” and hippie counter-culture. Worker cooperatives and community houses had begun to disappear and of the worker cooperatives only Inkworks Printing and a few dozen others remained.

  Many socialist organizations and parties had already begun disbanding, some after doing good analysis of the shortcomings and problems inherent in socialist and communist models. But as the Soviet Union began to break apart, so too did the socialist parties that were left, until only a few small sects of Maoists or Trotskyists remained. Protests diminished in frequency and size as well as in militancy. There seemed to be a sense of defeat among people my age and older. And then I began noticing the circle “A”s of anarchism appearing all around Berkeley.

  For over seventy years the big Marxist-Leninist Communist tree in the forest of the Left had overshadowed, and dwarfed all other variations of the Left in the world. Non-Marxist socialisms and the wide variety of anarchisms hadn’t seen the light of publicity nor had room to grow for the enormous and monolithic hegemony of Communism. With the USSR removed, new discussions began to take place. Out of communism came the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism in the US, the New European Left Forum in Europe, and other attempts to redefine communism, or at least find a new language to describe it in a way that would grant it some credibility after all the disasters it produced in the twentieth century. But more interesting to me were the initiatives that would emerge on the libertarian Left, and the most immediate one exploded in Oakland, California in May 1990. Literally.

  When Darryl Cherney and Judi Bari were hit with a car bomb in Oakland I began paying greater attention to Earth First! and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), two organizations with which Darryl and Judi worked closely. I joined the IWW soon after and as I’d put a printing press together in the basement of St. Joseph the Worker Church (thanks to Father Bill O’Donnell), I was able to print up flyers for Redwood Summer the following year.

  Redwood Summer was an interesting initiative that, due to my other commitments, I was only able to observe from afar. The activists developed a strategy to stop the clearcutting of old growth forests by combining the issues of labor and environmentalism, since the capitalists and traditional unions tended to divide the two issues and make them appear to be at odds. That was the logic behind the alliance between Earth First! and the IWW, and the tactics mostly involved tree sits and other forms of non-violent protests and blockades. It was an inspiring moment in an otherwise dismal scenario on the Left, and in addition to saving trees, organizing and transforming many young people into labor and environmental activists, it was a powerful signal that new radical forces were emerging from the interstices between collapsing communism and emerging neoliberalism.

  At the time I knew very little about the IWW, other than the books I’d read on the early history of the union, in particular Eric Foner’s fourth volume of his History of the Labor Movement in the United States: Industrial Workers of the World, 1905–1917. I knew the union had been decimated by the Palmer Raids under Woodrow Wilson and that it had survived only in a very small and weakened form—but it had survived. As a revolutionary industrial union, it incorporated socialists and anarchists, although, I would soon discover, socialists were a distinct minori
ty in the contemporary IWW. The IWW had a strong democratic tradition; it was ethnic­ally integrated almost from its inception and it was about the only union I knew of that was willing to incorporate all workers in the same organization: white, pink, and blue collars. Only police and bosses weren’t allowed.

  I started attending meetings of the local branch where I met Dave Karoly, at that time a young man just a few years out of college at UC Santa Barbara where he’d been a student organizer. He’d gotten involved in Redwood Summer and moved to Oakland where he’d started volunteering at the IWW headquarters which had recently moved from Chicago to San Francisco when Jess Grant was elected General Secretary Treasurer (GST) of the union precisely on that platform.

  The IWW was flush in those days, thanks to money bequeathed the organization by old Wobblies who had recently died. The union was also experiencing a minor growth spurt as a result of Redwood Summer, and a few organizing drives around the Bay Area, so the energy was high.

  The union, as I gradually discovered, was an odd mix of anarcho-punks, old union activists, and eccentrics of all kinds, and there might have been a sprinkling of average working Joes and Jills. The “One Big Union” wasn’t very big with under a thousand dues-paying members, but it certainly was diverse, and it had a broad cross-section of the Left, including bob rivera, who had joined up a few years before when he moved back to Flint, Michigan where he was from. I edited the Bay Area General Membership Branch bulletin for a while, until someone complained about the surreal cartoons I included on its pages from my friend the Mexican artist Arnold O (also known as Arnoldo Pintor) and I turned the work over to someone else. It was a good lesson to me that even on the anarcho-syndicalist Left, art seemed valued only for its functional role and not for itself. I also participated in the editorial collective of the union paper, The Industrial Worker (IW), which included Dave Karoly and a mix of (mostly) anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists.