We’ve prepared a poster in homage to Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, the self-styled “street gang with an analysis” active in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the late 1960s. Up Against the Wall Motherfucker gained notoriety participating in the occupation of Columbia University in 1968; they were instrumental in introducing anarchist politics into the hippie counterculture and resistance to the Vietnam War, emphasizing the importance of affinity groups and direct action. The text is taken directly from an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker broadside.
Click on the image to download the poster.
Our utopia is an environment that works so well we can run wild in it.
Until our most fantastic demands are met, fantasy will be at war with society. Society attempts to suppress fantasy, but fantasy springs up again and again, infecting the youth, waging urban guerrilla warfare, sabotaging the smooth functioning of bureaucracies, waylaying the typist on her way to the water-cooler, kidnapping the executive between office and home, creeping into the bedrooms of respectable families, hiding in the chambers of high office, gradually tightening its control, eventually emerging into the streets, waging pitched battles and winning (its victory is inevitable).
We are the vanguard of fantasy.
Where we live is liberated territory in which fantasy moves about freely at all hours of the day, from which it mounts its attacks on occupied territory.
Each day bring new areas under our control.
Each day a new victory is reported.
Each day fantasy discovers new forms of organization.
Each day it further consolidates its control, has less to fear, can afford to spend more time in self-discovery.
Even in the midst of battles, it plans the cities of the future.
We are full of optimism.
We are the future.
Fantasy Armed
In a time of escalating repression and desperation, it is bracing to revisit the avowed optimism of our revolutionary forebears. This optimism concerns not just whether it is possible to win, but what would constitute victory and who stands to benefit.
Fantasy—the imaginative excess that escapes the confines of prevailing reality—is common to all human beings. The most repressed and conservative individual could ruthlessly suppress his tendency to daydream while awake, but nonetheless, every night, when he closes his eyes to sleep, he will dream uncontrollably.
To side with fantasy is to side with the suppressed creativity within every human being against everything that is constraining about our institutions, everything that is suffocating about our rituals and routines. It means fighting on behalf of all against everything we do to limit ourselves and each other.
Fantasy represents sensitivity to possibility itself. Anarchists aspire to create conditions in which all creatures are able can fulfill their potential on their own terms. This entails abolishing the boundaries between the excluded and the included, the subordination of what is called “wild” to what is called “civilized,” the subordination of the physical to the mental and the body to the mind.
If fascists have gained the upper hand in our society for now, it is precisely because they have been so successful in subjugating fantasy, channeling it towards their narrow-minded pursuit of coercive power rather than letting it run wild and free. Fantasy can serve oppressors when it is caged and yoked to machinery of domination—but fantasy, liberated, liberates all in turn.
The Source
The original version of this text appears in two different forms. The collection Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: the incomplete works of Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group presents it with two frames of an image of a primate, whereas page 46 of this collection includes three frames and an additional phrase:
To put thought underground… so that wildness can come above ground.
The more complete version bears the letters “ESSO” in the lower left, with a hand-drawn circle around them, standing for the East Side Service Organization. Sometimes known as the East Side Survival Organization, this was the business front that UAW/MF established to receive donations with which to support the hippie runaways and others who were living precariously on the streets of lower Manhattan in the mid-1960s.
Those who want to learn more about Up Against the Wall Motherfucker can read Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion, a memoir by prominent participant Ben Morea, just released by Detritus Books this spring.
You can consult Ben’s Instagram page to see some of his artwork. His now-defunct blog is archived here.
Further Reading
- Up against the Wall, Motherfucker—The Game? Revisiting a Simulation of the 1968 Occupation of Columbia University
- Up against the Wall Motherf**ker : A Memoir of the ’60s, with Notes for Next Time, Osha Neumann
