Introduction

This archive, although such a description may be called hyperbole, is a selection of leaflets and pamphlets produced and distributed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1970s and early 1980s by groups and individuals who for simplicity sake could be identified as anarchists, council communists and Situationist. These leaflets were stapled to telephone poles, wheat pasted to walls and windows, left in store fronts, and handed out at demonstrations, during street theater performances and disbursed during direct action interventions.

 The events  of the times: from local –anti-gentrification,  gay rights  (White Night Riot), to national - the anti-nuclear movement  (Three Mile Island), the emerging new economy of technology and service workers, to the international- the interventions and maneuvers of Empire in the Middle East, Iran and Afghanistan, served as the topics for analysis,  and commentary of these leaflets. In other words many of same issues that provides the headlines for today. The sampling included here is not, however, restricted to those events but includes cultural critiques of everyday life, and few that reflect conflicts within the small but vocal community that produced them. Rather than identifying and categorizing each piece, the visitor to this virtual archive is encouraged to read the texts for themselves. The context for most will be obvious, although some knowledge of the historical events in San Francisco surrounding the assassination of the city's mayor and supervisor is helpful.

Most of the individuals and small groups who produced them lived within a few square blocks of each other in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, along with a few others who lived in other parts of the City, Berkeley and Palo Alto but who were nonetheless part of this community within Haight. Most everyone knew each other or knew of each other. There were a number of anarchist household collectively renting old Victorians cheaply at a time before gentrification completely changed the psychogeograpy of neighborhood. Certain bars were informal meeting places for discussion groups, and there was an anarchist bookstore that somehow manages to survive today (Bound Together Books).

 For the most part they were young under employed and united in there common rejection of the capitalism and, just as importantly, by their rejection and disgust for traditional leftism particularly the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist varieties that history has so completely discredited.  Earlier in this introduction they were described as anarchists, council communists who were heavily influenced by the Situationists, but other political adjectives could be applied and other self identifications would be used.  These would include anti-authoritarians, anarcho-communists and nascent anti-technology anarchist.  Some would have rejected all such attempts at categorizing and still others would have hidden their political roots when speaking to an audience outside of the small network of friends and associates that formed this community. (This issue became one of the fissures that would eventually divide the community)

Besides producing these diatribes for distribution they engaged street theater, clandestine assaults on gentrification and direct action forays in to corporate offices. They did legal fund support work for people arrested during the White Night Riot. They produced magazines and journals. On occasion they joined mainstream leftists in anti-eviction fights and in anti-nuclear events. They almost always did this with an eye toward radicalizing the wider group of participants and connecting them to a theory and practice that is both anti-capital and against hierarchy.

The copies of the these leaflets that are scanned on this site have been buried in the closets and garages of a few survivors of this community who carted them from place to place as the gentrification and disillusionment of the 90s forced them to move farther and farther from the City. The paper on which they were printed has grown moldy in the dark damp environments in which they have been stored. Have the ideas embodied in them suffered a similar fate?  While some may be dated by the events that they respond to and others have an odor of youthful naivety a careful reading of some will show them to be just as relevant  today as when they were written. This has as more to do with the stagnation and lack of progress within the anti-authoritarian movement as it has to do with any genius in those pieces that have stood the test of time. The most advanced analysis and commentary presented in these pieces were based on ideas already formulated 20 years before. Capital has continued in the last to 25 year to relentlessly triumph in total global domination through mechanisms already  understood at the time this community tried to live in opposition to it. It's our hope that this archive of leaflets might in some small way inspire those searching for ways to oppose the juggernaut of capital.