Surrealist Manifesto

2024 marks the 100th anniversary of the formal announcement of surrealism in the Surrealist Manifesto written by French poet, André Breton. It gathers strength today as it combines with anarchism to shout: ALL POWER TO THE IMAGINATION!

by David Tighe

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination by Ron Sakolsky. Eberhardt Press, 2023

“Contrary to prevalent misdefinitions, surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine, nor a philosophical system, nor a mere literary or artistic school. It is an unrelenting revolt against a civilization that reduces all human aspirations to market values, religious impostures, universal boredom, and misery.”

—Franklin Rosemont, André Breton and the First Principles of Surrealism

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination is Ron Sakolsky’s most recent book in a string of texts exploring different aspects of the fertile crossroads of surrealism and anarchism. It contains fifteen pieces, ranging from poems and collective manifestos to longer essays.

These pieces argue passionately that it is precisely at the crossroads of these two currents that surrealists and anarchists are at our rebellious best. For that insight alone it is a very valuable book. Early on, the surrealists described themselves as “specialists in revolt”, and it is the spirit of total refusal that has kept surrealism a vital force for more than 100 years. The surrealist slogan, “All Power to the Imagination,” rang out in Paris during the revolutionary events of May 1968 and is still ringing today.

Throughout the book Sakolsky gives examples of the intersecting of anarchist and surrealist currents. From the anarchist/feminist/surrealist publication The Debutante to the visual art of Maurice Spira; from anarchist involvement in indigenous land defence to Hakim Bey’s concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone, which was influenced by and critical of surrealism.

In Undoing Reality, Sakolsky examines the surrealist concept of miserabilism and his related concept of mutual acquiescence. It is crucial for us to reject miserabilism: “a way of life rooted in the rigid assumptions of a status quo finality that constitutes ‘reality.'” Sakolsky points to John Clark (and his surrealist alter-ego Max Cafard) as seeking “to subvert such realist thinking by examining the miserabilist basis of the ubiquitous popular culture meme of ‘It is what it is!'”

Clark argues, “From the viewpoint of dialectical thinking, the crucial challenge is to see the ways in which things are not what they are. It always is what it isn’t and isn’t what it is. Getting trapped in the world of ‘it is what it is’—what I call Isisism—is the royal road to delusion, disaster, and domination. The right road to illumination and liberation is what I call Isisntism.”The essay ponders the “question of why we are willing to surrender our individual and collective autonomy to the repressive demands of ‘reality’.” Equally important, it examines what tools anarchism and surrealism can provide us to resist and overturn this “absence of the will to revolt.”

Free Jazz: Imagining the Sound of Surrealist Revolution is the longest essay in the book and a tour de force of radical scholarship. It provides all the facts that you need, but suffused with rebellious energy. Surrealists value free jazz because “as a musical form of insurrection, free jazz improvisation is a convivial creative practice that fully embodies the surrealist search for a revolution of the mind (which pointedly includes a critique of the dreariness of the commonsensical in favor of an explosion of the insurgent imagination) and is emblematic of the flowering of its libertarian aspirations for society as a whole.”

Sakolsky points to these aspirations as having a “particularly powerful resonance with the Black Liberation movement.” Archie Shepp is an example given of a free jazz musician dedicated to Black Liberation who also had a strong connection to surrealism, but he isn’t the only one. There is a long list of prominent figures within free jazz who have had short or long term connections with surrealism.

Joseph Jarman and Henry Threadgill were participants in the 1976 International Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago and both composed pieces specially for the exhibition. Doug Ewart’s Sun Song Ensemble performed there as well. Pianist Cecil Taylor was in attendance at the exhibition and also contributed to Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion, the international journal of the Chicago Surrealist Group. William Parker, who played with Taylor for more than a decade, is quoted in the piece as saying, “black surrealism is a vision that has come to me most of my life.” Sakolsky invokes the potent mixture of radical political vision and the visionary power of the human imagination present in free jazz. “In combination, these improvisational acts can provide the sparks that ignite the powder keg of surrealist revolution.”

Opening the Floodgates of the Utopian Imagination: Charles Fourier and the Surrealist Quest for an Emancipatory Mythology is another of the long essays in the book. It discusses the work of 19th century Utopian Socialist Charles Fourier who has been a figure of fascination for surrealists and anarchists alike. Sakolsky explores the history of surrealist engagement with Fourier starting at the very beginning of the Paris Surrealist group in the 1920s.

Fourier’s refusal to be limited by political realism infuriated his later critics Marx and Engels but has endeared him to anti-authoritarians. Fourier dreamed so wildly that he imagined the political equality of women and coined the term feminism. He imagined a world of passional attraction and refused to be limited by the tyranny of what is (deemed) possible.

The essay also discusses the rejection by progressive movements of mythology, which French philosopher George Bataille saw as one of the factors that led to the spread of fascism. The lack of any emancipatory myth left a vacuum for the fascist nightmare. Recent translations into English of Bataille’s journal Aciphale, as well as public lectures that he gave around the same time, have provided more detail of his thoughts on this subject. Sakolsky argues that Fourier could provide at least parts of an emancipatory myth for anarchists and surrealists. It is very heady stuff and a fascinating discussion.

The third long essay in the book is Chance Encounters at the Crossroads of Anarchy and Surrealism: A Personal Remembrance of Peter Lamborn Wilson A.K.A. Hakim Bey. It is a remembrance of Sakolsky’s 35 year long friendship with Wilson. As the title implies, it provides details about Wilson’s engagement with and critique of surrealism, and how Wilson’s critiques encouraged Sakolsky’s own explorations of the crossroads of surrealism and anarchy.

It is a touching tribute to Wilson, a long-time anarchist comrade of Sakolsky’s, not to mention prolific author and contributor to Fifth Estate.

The shorter pieces in the book have a lot to offer too. A Spark in Search of a Powder Keg: An International Surrealist Declaration is a strong reminder that the surrealist movement is vibrant, not a dead historical art avant garde. It provides a glimpse of the internationalism of surrealism. There are signatories from the US and Canada, Central and South America, North Africa and the Middle East, Australia, and all over Europe. It highlights the surrealist spirit of total refusal in opposition to Canadian pipeline projects and the violence of the police. The declaration is a strong voice for solidarity with Indigenous land defence and radical environmentalism.

It is well known that André Breton and many of the French surrealists had an interest in and affinity with West Coast Indigenous art. The declaration states: “as surrealists we honor our historical affinity with the Kwakwaka’wakw Peace Dance headdress that for so long had occupied a place of reverence in Breton’s study during his lifetime before being ceremoniously returned to Alert Bay on Cormorant Island by his daughter, Aube Elleouet, in keeping with her father’s wishes.”

The authors also draw connections to outrage and resistance in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis which occurred during the period that signatures were being gathered for the declaration. A postscript points out that it “was only fitting that in solidarity with the uprisings about police brutality kicked off by George Floyd’s execution/lynching at the hands of the police, anti-racism protesters in the United States would take direct action by beheading or bringing down statues of Christopher Columbus, genocidal symbol of the colonial expropriation of Native American lands.”

Uncovering the Surrealist Roots of Détournement is an excellent short examination of what the Situationists termed detournement, the subversive appropriation of popular imagery, usually a comic combined with radical text, and its roots in surrealist practice. The piece is accompanied by an example of contemporary anarcho-surrealist detournement, a collaboration between Sakolsky and John Richardson. The same image and 20 others, along with an introduction by Sakolsky can be found in their recently co-authored book Surrealist Détournement, published by Dark Windows Press.

Surrealism and the Anarchist Imagination benefits from a beautiful printing job by Eberhardt press and full color art throughout by Rikki Ducornet, Maurice Spira, Zigzag, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sheila Knopper and many others, which contributes greatly to the effect of the book. Surrealist visual art is a powerful aid to help fire the anarchist imagination.

David Tighe is an anarchist, mail artist, and zine maker living in Alberta, Canada.

Newsletter | vol. 32 | no. 4 | 15 October 2024 André Breton: the deluxe edition of Magic Art Dear Eugene In celebration of the centenary of the publication of the First Manifesto of Surrealism on 15th October 1924, we are delighted to announce the deluxe edition of André Breton's Magic Art is now available to pre-order.     Inspired by the work of the surrealist bookbinder Paul Bonet (left, Second Manifeste du surréalisme, 1930), our full morocco deluxe is signed by André Breton's daughter, Aube Elléouët Breton. It is limited to 88 copies and is presented in a silk box, with a supplementary volume, Magic Art Redux.   PRE-ORDER DISCOUNT We have just a few weeks left of the special pre-order price for the standard hardback issue, and with advance sales over the last few weeks the edition is currently 30% sold. Full detail can be found below. SHIPPING DATES Standard Hardback Edition: 04 November 2024 Special limited 'Jappard' Edition: 02 January 2025 Deluxe signed 'Enigma' Edition: late January 2025   Click here for further details LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for SURREALISM

 

Book Review: Fighting to be Free

Oct

12

2024

0comments

From Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024
by Andrew/Sunfrog

A review of Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019

“I began to identify as an anarchist nearly 20 years ago, after a demonstration where I realized that the people cooking the food, doing the dishes, and administering first-aid were mostly anarchists. Rather than a rigid political doctrine, I understand anarchism as an ethical stance focused on making justice and caring for each other without hierarchy, without asking permission from power-brokers, and with whatever tools we have available. I call on these ethics daily.”
—Madeline ffitch

Is a long-form creative writer from the anarchist tradition an anarchist novelist or an anarchist who writes novels? Is there such a thing as an anarchist tradition within fiction? I am not sure that these were the first questions swirling in my mind as I devoured Stay and Fight, the debut novel by Madeline ffitch.

The story did, though, take me directly back to the 1990s and the founding of an explicitly anarchist land project in rural Tennessee. For a brief time, that same feral land project was an infoshop, the sprawling site of several small festivals, and the publishing hub for the Fifth Estate. Stay and Fight reminds that communal living and idealistic homesteads are a durable feature of numerous countercultures. The stories told here also remind, in stark, stunning, and often hilarious terms, that we social creatures will smack into the hard wall of our limitations when we try to live in close proximity with our comrades.

The subtle, surreal, and miraculously anti-authoritarian aspects of the book come in the choices that ffitch makes as a narrative curator. Put plainly, the story gets told from multiple perspectives, with several main characters taking a turn at first-person storytelling. The novel makes no attempt to resolve or reconcile how jarring and juicy that this can be.

When the youngest character narrates, the story becomes as magical and fantastic as one might imagine, especially when this same character struggles with hostile encounters, neurodivergence, all mediated by an internal reality that is once more optimistic and marvelous than the real world might allow.

So often in mainstream media and social media, the culture wars get blasted in the most cartoonish of ways, but when culturally colorful and queer anarchists navigate small towns in Appalachia, these interactions are hardly reducible to slogans, denunciations, or memes. The myriad ways that ffitch forges these realities and surrealities are at times comic and chaotic, especially as we learn how the main characters negotiate conflict among themselves, even as they are each misfits and radicals compared to their larger social structure.

Anarchist idealisms in the past have come to die in utopian communes, when more rigid ideologies cannot suffer under the interpersonal and basic life realities of rain and snow, fights and finances, critters and compost. The ways these characters’ desires and dreams grow, falter, and evolve amid all of that are truly energizing and believable, even when they face outward struggles such as natural gas pipelines that have been a focal point for environmental radicals in this century.

As someone who moved to a rural area with similar dreams, but also was forced to change and adapt, I fully endorse the underlying idea of beautiful but difficult relationships, of deciding to stay and fight.

 

They once were rebels

Ranters, Diggers & mystics who challenged church authority

by Bill Weinberg

Fifth Estate # 415, Summer 2024

a review of
Resistance to Christianity: A Chronological Encyclopaedia of Heresy from the Beginning to the Eighteenth Century by Raoul Vaneigem, translation by Bill Brown. ERIS, 2023

While evangelical Protestantism has for generations overwhelmingly been a force of deep reaction in this country and is poised, if Donald Trump regains the White House this November, to instate a situation such as depicted in Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale (and its screen and TV adaptations).

This potential recently made a media splash when Trump posted to his Truth Social platform an ultra-creepy video entitled “God Made Trump,” portraying a personification of him as Redeemer and Avenger sent by the Almighty. Ralph Reed, founder of the Christian Coalition, is hawking his new book, For God and Country:: The Christian Case For Trump.

Under a restored Trump regime, evangelical Protestantism could play the same role that reactionary Catholicism did in the clerical-fascist regimes of Francisco Franco in Spain, Ante Pavelic in Croatia and, to an extent, Benito Mussolini in Italy, in which the state and the ultimate leader are sanctified, labor suppressed, harsh and repressive interpretation of Christian morality made law, and enemies of the state eliminated.

A contemporary example of such a clerical-fascist regime is Putin’s Russia, in which rights for women and sexual non-conformists are being rapidly repealed, even very indirect expressions of disagreement with the regime are severely punished, with the Russian Orthodox Church of Patriarch Kirill, a key propaganda pillar of the aggressive war in Ukraine. The church promotes a narrative of protecting Russian traditional values against Western liberal assault, and is in explicit alliance with the evangelical right in the U.S., despite the denominational gulf.

However, beside the usual role of Christianity functioning as a handmaiden of repressive state authority, heresies have emerged under its rule that have a long history of birthing rebellious groups. They are chronicled by Situationist Raoul Vaneigem in this comprehensive account of rebels, ranters, and millenarians.

In Resistance to Christianity, he traces a chronology from the heresies of the ancient and medieval periods, especially those in the Gnostic tradition that rejected the Church and worldly authority as inherently corrupt, through the millenarian movements that ultimately prefigured the Protestant Reformation, a heresy that succeeded.

A key episode was the German Peasants’ War of 1524, which had a spiritual and millennial aspect in the person of the revolutionary priest Thomas Müntzer. He was a contemporary of Martin Luther, who disavowed Müntzer as being far too radical with his call for expropriation of the aristocracy by the commoners. The peasant army flew a rainbow flag as a symbol of solidarity and hope, but were ultimately defeated by armed forces of the lords.

This spirit was also present in the revolutionary movements of the English Civil War of the 1640s. This period famously saw the Diggers, who in 1649 at St George’s Hill pulled off what the historian George Woodcock called the world’s first anarchist direct action, reclaiming land from the aristocracy for their collective farms, with a vision of the earth as a “common treasury for all.” The Ranters of the same period were fiery mystical anarchists who rejected all worldly authority and Christian morality.

Both the Puritans and the Quakers also came out of this ferment, and have had a significant influence on our side of the Atlantic. The Quakers were deeply involved in slavery abolitionism, aiding escaped slaves through the Underground Railroad, and in later struggles for social justice, especially war resistance based on their pacifism.

The more militant abolitionism of the armed insurrectionist John Brown in the 1850s, of Harpers Ferry and Bleeding Kansas fame, was steeped in Puritan millenarianism. And, there is a stamp of this a century later in the Baptist and pacifist Martin Luther King, Jr., seen in his famous invocation of the Old Testament: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”

So, how did this trajectory warp into its opposite?

A turning point can be seen in the late 19th century with the rise of Biblical literalism in reaction to the rise of science, characterized by the application of a strict literal interpretation to scripture.

In the 1890s, the fundamentalist and populist politician William Jennings Bryan was a fighter for small farmers and laborers who sought to abolish the gold standard in the interest of working people. But he was on the wrong side in the 1925 Scopes trial, opposing the teaching of evolution in the schools. Battles still going on today a century later strongly echo such religiously-inspired themes.

The 1920s saw the formal, doctrinal establishment of fundamentalism. But the critical turning point was the weaponizing of the abortion issue by the Republican Party after the 1973 Roe v Wade decision. This culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, concomitant with the founding of the Moral Majority, comprised of conservative Christian political action committees.

This sealed the pact between the GOP and Protestant fundamentalism, with the fundis abandoning any remnant of economic populism to close ranks with neoliberalism and Reaganomics as the price for mainstreaming of their cultural-conservative agenda.

The surviving millenarian stamp in this new ultra-reactionary and Biblical-literalist form is particularly ominous. In the Book of Revelations, with which evangelicals are so obsessed, the foretold Apocalypse for John the Revelator, writing in the first century CE, was the fall of Rome. Jumping forward a millennium and a half to the English Civil War era, the prophecy was reconceived as overthrow of the aristocracy and lords of property, exemplified by the execution of the king.

For contemporary evangelicals and fundamentalists, the Apocalypse can be seen as a literal rain of fire and brimstone which state rulers now have the power to bring about through modern military weapons technology. The notion of believers in an imminent and literal Apocalypse getting anywhere near the U.S. nuclear arsenal is terrifying.

Despite his supposed love affair with Putin, the blustering, erratic Trump taking power in what is, after Ukraine and Gaza, a world at war, holds unprecedented risk of escalation to the unthinkable despite those sectors of the left who view Trump as the less dangerous candidate because he would be less likely to get into a war with Russia.

Vaneigem’s title, Resistance to Christianity, is in some ways more relevant and in other ways less than the author himself anticipated when he first wrote the book in 1994. Vaneigem ends his story with the 1789 French Revolution, saying that it brought about the “fall of god”—after which liberatory movements no longer had to resort to the vocabulary and iconography of religion. In an afterword for the new English edition, Vaneigem doesn’t really rethink that, seeing the world as moving “beyond religion.” This is, especially at this moment, entirely too optimistic.

On the other hand, secularism isn’t sufficient to resist the MAGA variant of clerical fascism on its own. Resistance is going to have to come, in part at least, from within elements of Christianity, and others who view the struggle in spiritual rather than rationalist terms.

Hopefully, the contradiction will be too blatant for some of those rallying around the obviously irreligious Trump in the name of religion. Some lonely figures have indeed broken ranks, such as Russell Moore, once a top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and now author of Losing Our Religion: An Altar Call For Evangelical America, warning that evangelism is becoming the antithesis of everything it supposedly stands for by embracing MAGA.

There are also pastors in the Black church who are keeping the MLK tradition alive, such as Rev. William Barber in North Carolina, who led the Moral Mondays campaign in that state against the overturn of civil rights protections and imposition of restrictions on abortion rights. And, there are Christians who are risking their freedom to assist desperate migrants in the southern borderlands. These are a reminder that there are other currents in the Christian tradition, broadly defined, than its most reactionary exponents now preparing a bid for total power.

The history chronicled in Vaneigem’s book, as obscure as much of it may seem for contemporary readers, is well worth grappling with at this moment.

Bill Weinberg rants weekly on his podcast CounterVortex.

 

How a Student Revolt Made a New World Possible

The 2012 Quebec Rebellion Went Beyond Tuition

by Jim Feast

Fifth Estate # 414, Fall 2023

a review of
Red Squared Montreal: A Fictional Chronicle by Norman Nawrocki. Black Rose Books, 2023

One thing we know about capitalism: it can’t have a past (or at least acknowledge one), for the past is filled with resistance.

That’s why it’s so important to keep this history alive, as Norman Nawrocki does so well in his novel Red Squared Montreal. It tells the story of the Quebec 2012 seven month long massive student strike involving 300,000 participants throughout the province. The revolt, ignited by a proposed hike in tuition, didn’t consist of just a few protests, but first, daily marches and then daily and nightly demonstrations with actions involving tens of thousands.

This is a novel, not a memoir, but Nawrocki was deeply involved at the time, actively supporting the strike as one of the “Professors Against the Hike” at Montreal’s Concordia University, giving workshops to striking students about creative resistance, and joining in solidarity demonstrations, including nightly casseroling, banging pots and pans as part of the protests.

With extraordinary vigor and verve, Nawrocki recreates the days of the strike as viewed mainly through the eyes of a student/worker/activist, Huberto, as he deals with elation, and commitment, fending off police attacks, demonstrating, recharging at parties and poetry readings, and burn-out.

As if to emphasize the need for history the book fulfills, the strikers inform themselves of their historical antecedents. Members of Huberto’s affinity group discuss the Riel Rebellion of 1869, which started as a protest by the French speaking Metis population and ended with them rebelling, the Federal government sending troops to squash the rebellion, and some of the leaders, including Louis Riel, being captured and hanged.

Inspired by past rebellions, Huberto’s partner Pascale helps found a Simone de Beauvoir Tea Society. De Beauvoir is best known for her thoroughgoing exposure of patriarchy in The Second Sex, first published in France in 1949.

With the knowledge of previous acts of rebellion, the Quebec students set out to make their own history. It’s a hard road because, even with the demonstrators’ nonviolence, the cops come down heavy. The police routinely attack protestors with clubs, teargas, flash grenades, and rubber bullets.

Scene after graphic scene details police excesses. Zaphire, a medic attending a patient in critical condition, describes, “an SQ[a member of the provincial police] knees me, knocks me over. ‘I’m a medic … This guy is seriously bleeding,’ [she tells him] … the fucking cop says, ‘Shut up, bitch! … Don’t demonstrate if you don’t want this.’ He wrenches my hands behind me … and shoves me onto the ground.”

Where is all this unprovoked violence coming from, the students ask? One character says, perhaps with limited understanding of the role of the police, “What gives them carte blanche to brutalize?”

Something of an answer can be found in de Beauvoir who discusses this puzzle in The Ethics of Ambiguity. To her, the carte blanche stems from a hatred of freedom. A person who refuses to recognize she is free and responsible for her actions will erect some authority such as the Catholic Church or the police, and convince herself she must follow its dictates.

De Beauvoir writes, “It is natural that [such a person] makes himself a tyrant. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he pretends that the unconditioned value of the object [such as law and order] is being asserted through him.” With this attitude, the person can run roughshod over others. It might be objected that cops are following the orders of superiors, but de Beauvoir focuses on the type of person who takes a job where they will follow such orders.

The red square of the title was the symbol of the student protest against the tuition increase. Être dans la rouge translates to “in the red,” to be broke. The tuition hike would have impoverished most of the students even further.

Red squares made of felt were worn on jackets and shirts by tens of thousands of strikers and supporters. The propagation and elevation of these symbolic accents in every form were everywhere, on buildings, schools, bridges, residences and even businesses. In Nawrocki’s telling, undoubtedly from events having actually occurred, there is a red food potluck featuring tomatoes, strawberries, peppers, and red wine.

One arts group makes birdcages filled with red feathers and squares. More spectacular is changing the urban landscape. “Six of us board the metro … Each carries a bag of red balloons, streamers, confetti, feathers, large red squares, ribbons, tapes, and string. Our mission: redecorate our subway car. … When the doors open three minutes later at the next stop, our job is done.” Innovation is also applied to traditional marches. For instance, to symbolize the government’s attitude toward education, in one march, everyone walks backwards.

As the months pass, new structures emerge that suggest the development of a counter-society. Neighborhood assemblies are established where people get together to discuss and work on solutions to their problems. Nawrocki gives vivid descriptions of the evening cacophonous casseroles, a tradition with a long history in protests against tyranny dating back to the 19th century. They would in Montreal, as in other cities and small towns and often spontaneously.

As Huberto describes a march of pot bangers, “One person starts at 8 p.m. Several neighbours hear and join in. Together we walk down the street and watch our numbers swell as more people pour out of their homes. Small streams feed into bigger ones until we are thousands strong.”

Why these demonstrations are so different and so valuable is pointed out by one of the characters,

“Whole families participate without fear of being attacked by the police. Why? Because it’s not just downtown anymore. It’s rocking dozens of family neighbourhoods … Meandering, joyful street marches snake all over the city.”

What gives the fiction of Red Squared Montreal its power is not just that it recaptures an important chapter of resistance, but that it portrays living for months outside the capitalist routine joyful and engaging. As Huberto says, “A lifestyle of taking over the streets is anathema to a system that grinds people under boring, exhausting, meaningless workdays.” And, within this new reality grows a type of wild freedom, more discernible each day. “When I see other red squares on the bus or the metro, or in grocery stores, I see myself—and all of us—everywhere. … I swear we red squares who take back the streets from cars, walk differently. There is a bounce and joy in our footsteps.”

Eventually, the strike is lost and people go back to their jobs and classes. But as Huberto closes, “For seven long months we sensed that the impossible was within reach. We tasted it, breathed it, felt it in our bones.”

This is a work of fiction, a genre which does not demand the writer provide all the explanations a historian might feel are necessary. Exactly why the strike ends is not fully portrayed, but the characters begin to exhibit exhaustion in the face of the government’s refusal to budge combined with economic pressures.

Some of the scenes are expressed so vividly it feels as if the writer was present at every march and every meeting; everything that happened over those months. However, while the novelist interviewed many participants who shared their stories, this is not a personal memoir. By using multiple eyewitness accounts of the actual events, the characters fashioned from his interviews provide a wide view of the sprawling events and the emotions they engendered.

Jim Feast helped found the action-oriented literary group, The Unbearables. He writes frequently for the Fifth Estate. His latest book is Karl Marx Private Eye (PM Press, 2023). He lives in Brooklyn.