The Seattle Group Bulletins

The Devil to Wicked John:

"Here - Take a Chunk of Fire and Start Your Own Hell"

The Bulletins were issued separately and then collected into compilations. The same stencils were used for the compilations as for the individual Bulletins. The original Bulletins were signed only with initials, but the compilations listed authors’ names on the cover (Table of Contents). The covers of the compilations were hand lettered.

Introductory Statement

The Seattle Group is very small -- not because we’re elitists (far from it!) but because the function we have set for ourselves can best be done by a little band able to act with maximum spontaneity and flexibility, either independently or in voluntary cooperation with other groups. When we grow, it’s time to split. Our goal is freedom: we do not intend to negate it with a ponderous organizational structure.

Nor will we be bogged down in a morass of secretarial and organization-maintenance routine. There just isn’t any time for it. Revolution must be soon, or never.

The Seattle Group was formed in October, 1965. It meets every two weeks, alternately at the Id, now 1408 N.E. 42nd Avenue, for discussion and at the home of a participant for planning and ways-and-means. The group has no organizational structure, and anyone who takes part in its activities is considered a member. In the first year of its existence, its most sustained activity has been the publication of its Bulletins.

Seattle Group Bulletins come out irregularly, whenever anyone writes one. It seems to average a little over a Bulletin every two weeks. They are of varying lengths, up to eight legal-size pages. Each is initialed by its writer, who alone is responsible for it, the group simply providing the media and the milieu. Each quarter we re-run the quarter’s bulletins and compile them in a booklet, along with notes on publications received and excerpts from correspondence; these quarterly compilations sell for 25¢.

Bulletins are free for the asking. But we can’t afford to waste postage sending them to the Dead Letter Office or to people who don’t really want them, so periodically we enclose coupons for readers to fill out and return, to verify addresses and spellings, to confirm interest, and to add new readers. Then we revise our mailing list on the basis of the returns. The Seattle Group wants a live readership.

We’ve stubbornly resisted putting a subscription price on the Bulletins, for two reasons: (1) we don’t want to inhibit the growth of readership, and (2) we don’t want to divert our own efforts to keeping track of sub expirations. And because we know that most Bulletin readers are activists, already deluged with fund appeals from causes at least as worthy, we minimize our requests for financial support. Most of our readers know that ink and paper and postage cost money, and we trust them to send us what they can.

The Seattle Group has produced one pamphlet, and expects to issue others. We’ve issued leaflets for mass distribution; unlike Bulletins and pamphlets, these are undersigned by the group as a whole and express a unanimous position. Since they are of mainly local interest, we haven’t included them in our mailings. (Of course we’ll send on request any that are in stock, as we do with back issues of the Bulletins.)

One of the things -- the main thing, really -- that we hope the Seattle Group’s propaganda will do is to spark similar efforts from others. There’s something forbidding about a printed, regularly scheduled periodical -- somehow, its very format suggests that its staff and contributors have to be professionals, or at least to have some academic or experiential qualifications for expertise, and this tends to discourage just anybody from turning a hand to it. But a mimeograph machine is a really free press. It doesn’t intimidate by hinting that what’s turned out on it has to be slick and professional, and it’s available to anyone; the old machine the Seattle Group uses was bought for five dollars at a St. Vincent de Paul thrift shop. A wide exchange of this sort of informal dialogue, with no force beyond the appeal of ideas, is the logical means of co-ordinating the diverse libertarian groupings now springing up all across the country (and elsewhere!) and the fit carrier for an imperative resurgence of anarchist thought and action.

For the scarcity and the need for constrained labor that have in all times past removed the vision of a functional anarchy to the realms of utopia become obsolete with the advent of cybernated production. However desirable an envisioned state of society, even the most brilliant and dedicated efforts to bring it to reality cannot but fail while the material preconditions for its viability are lacking. Hence the spectacular defeat of past anarchist movements presages nothing. Anarchism is on the rise again, and this time no valid economic need precludes its victory.

This is an entirely new state of affairs, and one for which the existing body of anarchist theory is unprepared. Earlier anarchist thinkers devoted themselves, in the main, to the questions of the desirability of an anarchic society, and of its compatibility with human nature; the tough tactical problems of the anarchist revolution received little attention. Three main streams did emerge: nihilism -- simply bring the social structure into crisis by terror or whatever means, and see what happens; communalism -- withdraw in small groups from the authoritarian society and build ideal communities, hoping that as their virtues are demonstrated the example will be followed; and syndicalism -- by direct action, supplant the present state apparatus with a structure representing the workers and based upon the workers’ organizations. The new anarchist trend appears to lay greater stress on individual behavior -- live as freely as you can within the existing society, seeking a personal emancipation from its shibboleths and taboos. None of these theories, in their present state of development, is adequate to the task of overthrowing the power structure of an entrenched capitalist nation. And that is what must now be done.

In this situation, the widest possible dialogue among activists becomes of critical urgency. Somehow, among the diverse forces now striving for freedom, the prototype of a free society’s organizational forms must emerge -- forms of wholly voluntary association flexible and potent to pool the efforts and realize the desires of each of the infinitely varied individuals in the family of man.

Let all the rebel voices be heard!”