Post-production anarchism

Abstract

Come! Unity Press was an anarchist community in New York City in the mid nineteen-seventies that based its operations on the ideas of Murray Bookchin, the organizer best known for his theory of “Post-Scarcity Anarchism.” Come! Unity Press offered free access for the publishing of literature and visual propaganda of all sorts; it attracted a wide range of the underserved and unacknowledged: Native Americans, Puerto-Ricans, blacks, gays. Despite this, and like other cultural movements before it, the project initiated “the metamorphosis of political struggle from a compulsory decision into an object of pleasure, from a means of production into an article of consumption” [Walter Benjamin]. Come! Unity Press was a forerunner of the consumer-oriented cultures of today. This article suggests parallels with the ideology of Cubism and the cultural program of the Bavarian People’s Republic of 1919.