Abbie Hoffman: 'Fidel and Groucho's love child'

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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From GLW issue 485