Review of The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of
Printing
Between 1970 and 1980, anarchist and ultra leftist students in English-speaking countries devoured texts by European and American thinkers like Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Barrot and Fredy Perlman; writers who produced elegant, turbocharged and wildly exciting critiques of contemporary capitalist social relations. Dog-eared copies of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life, Barrot and Martin’s Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement and Perlman’s On the Poverty of Student Life circulated on UK campuses. Many of them were printed by Detroit Printing Co-op, and exported by Black & Red, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman’s publishing project.
1 https://www.calverts.coop
4 https://wiki.coops.tech/wiki/Main_Page
Danielle Aubert, Inventory Press, 240pp, ISBN 978-1-941753-25-5
Between 1970 and 1980, anarchist and ultra leftist students in English-speaking countries devoured texts by European and American thinkers like Guy Debord, Raoul Vaneigem, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Barrot and Fredy Perlman; writers who produced elegant, turbocharged and wildly exciting critiques of contemporary capitalist social relations. Dog-eared copies of Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life, Barrot and Martin’s Eclipse and Re-emergence of the Communist Movement and Perlman’s On the Poverty of Student Life circulated on UK campuses. Many of them were printed by Detroit Printing Co-op, and exported by Black & Red, Fredy and Lorraine Perlman’s publishing project.
Starting in 1970 and over the next ten years, Detroit
Printing Co-op produced dozens of book titles and millions of pamphlets,
journals and posters for diverse social and political currents in Detroit, the
Great Lakes area and internationally. Legendary co-ops often have competing and
murky origin stories. Danielle Aubert has interviewed some of the key
participants, as well as going to secondary sources to show how the co-op stood
in a tradition of propaganda, education and organising by anarchist and socialist
printers in America going back to the early nineteenth century. Fredy Perlman
wasn’t a tramp printer, but arrived in Detroit in 1969, having spent time in
Yugoslavia and much of 1968 as a witness to the political upheavals in Europe:
“Detroit in 1969 held palpable revolutionary potential.
Radicalized students were dropping out of college and moving to working class
manufacturing cities where they saw possibility for enacting system change.
Various leftist groups were active and labor unions were strong…the effects of
the 1967 rebellion were felt widely. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers
organized in auto factories. The Republic of New Afrika was founded in Detroit
in 1968 and the city also had a vibrant chapter of the Black Panthers.”
Reflecting the politics of the place and time, the printing
co-op came out of an ecosystem of radical publishing and production platforms
that collaborated and co-evolved, including The Community Print Shop, Radical
Education Project (REP) and Black Star Productions, the publishing wing of the
League of Black Workers. When they first arrived in Detroit, the Perlmans –
already publishing as Black & Red – joined forces with people from REP, the
underground newspaper Fifth Estate, Community Print Shop and a printing
co-op in nearby Ann Arbor, to form the Revolutionary Printing Collective. The
Collective’s mark or ‘bug’ featured the red and black flag of anarchist
communism. Later, the Collective and then Detroit Printing Co-op itself
incorporated the formal mark of the revolutionary syndicalist union Industrial
Workers of the World (IWW), to create a new bug that included the slogan “Abolish the Wage System, Abolish the State,
All Power to the Workers!”
 |
| Fredy Perlman at the Detroit Printing Co-op in 1979. The entrance to the two darkrooms is on the right. |
Most of Detroit Printing Co-op’s printed outputs were simple,
by professional graphical standards, but although the Perlmans were largely
self-taught printers, their work was of a higher quality than you’d see from
the generality of samizdat printshops. Coarse screen rulings for halftone pictures,
with crisp reproduction in black line and usually one other printing colour, meant
that student punk printers could cut up and re-paste images and chunks of
content from Black and Red pamphlets, collage them with our own texts done on
golfball typewriters, then scan them to make stencils for the Gestetner rotary
duplicators in the student union office to produce fantastically crude leaflets,
pamphlets and posters.
In 1977 I followed in the footsteps of the Glasgow anarchist
publisher and printer Stuart Christie, by making a pilgrimage to Spain. My host
in Barcelona, a veteran of the 1936 revolution, half-jokingly invited me to
help equip an underground press with the purpose of forging travellers cheques
to bankroll the movement. Instead I went to London, to learn the trade and get
involved in its radical publishing, printing and political scene.
By the end of the 70s London and other UK cities had diverse
networks of typesetting, printing, publishing and distribution collectives and
co-ops, set up to serve feminist, anti racist, ecological, gay and autonomist political
causes. Community groups, the radical arts milieu and leftist parties were also
setting up their own presses. Like Detroit, London was a magnet for young working
class radicals from smaller towns, as well as ex-students looking for action and
a different kind of life. Inner London boroughs had empty houses and underpopulated
blocks of flats that could be squatted or turned into ‘short life’ housing
co-ops. There were opportunities to get down with black urban culture and link
up with rebellious youth in the working class neighbourhoods. Unemployment and
social security benefits helped subsidise the lifestyle, giving us time to ‘learn
on the job’ in low-rent, low-tech co-op startups.
One such arrival was Jessica Baines, who arrived in London aged
18 from Oxford, already with community printing experience and looking to do
more. She worked at See Red Womens Workshop, then later Calverts North Star
Press1, before going into
education. She recently wrote a definitive study of the scene2, finding that:
“the heterogeneity of printshop memberships kept them open to
diverse movement struggles and internal self-criticism, but…this could also be
a source of internal instability and conflicts about aims”.
Disregarding party-managed printshops
like The People’s Press (Communist Party) and East End Offset (International
Socialists), there were dozens of radical presses, ranging from community
printshops with a mission to educate, to typesetting collectives, screen poster
printers and back-alley presses. While most of them were organised
democratically, only a minority identified as cooperatives. An even smaller
number incorporated under co-op rules or joined the Industrial common Ownership
Movement (ICOM, the UK worker co-op federation). Most of these formal worker
co-ops were what Baines identifies as ‘service’ presses; they had a mission to
create decent jobs by trading with and serving customers in the social
movements, but also commercial and private clients. They tended to become the
most professional outfits. By the early 80s, there were enough of them to form
a co-buying group called London Cooperative Printers Association, whose members
included Calverts, Blackrose Press, Lithosphere and Spiderweb. Two of them –
Calverts and Aldgate Press3
– are still in business, having weathered the 1990s when the development grant
money, trade union and local authority work dried up. Significantly, while both
these co-ops invested heavily in technology and skills over the years – and as
a result are among the few ink-on-paper printing businesses left in inner London
– they are both still ‘social movement’ enterprises, providing subsidised print
for political causes.
Aubert’s book illustrates both the radical
ethos and the joyful aesthetic of the Detroit Printing Co-op. She describes how
falling entry costs, fuelled by technological innovations, enabled the growth
of the co-op printshops. Entry-level tech in 1970s was an IBM Selectric setting
machine, a basic darkroom and a Multilith press; nowadays it’s basic Adobe
software and a Risograph. Design and print worker co-ops and collectives are
still very much around - the RedGrafica network in Argentina includes more than
25 of them. But as the terrain of public communication technology, and the struggle
for control over its means of production, shifted, so did the worker co-ops.
There are parallels - as well as
important differences - between the development of the printshops and the
growth of digital technology co-ops. In 2020, local and global networks of
worker co-ops in digital tech are just as diverse in politics, composition and
production. They share a commitment to free and open source technology, and to
creating digital resources for the social movement. The Cooperative Technologists
network, CoTech4, was launched
in the UK in 2016 and now brings together 43 primary worker co-ops. FACCTIC,
the Argentine Federation of Worker Coops in Technology, Knowledge and
Innovation, fosters high level collaboration between co-ops inside the country
and internationally. Tech worker co-ops are also at the forefront of innovations
in democratic participation, adapting techniques of dynamic governance and
combining them with web-based tools.
The political, social and economic context
for the new generation of worker co-operators, and their co-ops, couldn’t be
more different to the 1970s. They have to be better organised than we were, and
they waste less energy on political infighting. But one commonality is that creating,
or being, worker co-ops is not an aim in itself. Now as in the past, once the
model is discovered, it simply becomes the default way to organise an
enterprise in line with what the members are aiming for. The founders of the Detroit’s
Revolutionary Printing Collective expressed this in their own maximalist way:
“The co-op is not its own goal…its activity is restricted by
capitalist commodity production. But survival within capitalism is not its
aim…Its aim is to contribute to the junking of the capitalist carcass.”
Aubert writes with restrained
lyricism about the sensory and aesthetic aspects of print. It’s true, print is
a medium you can smell, touch and hear as well as read. There’s even print you
can eat. If it’s no longer the peoples’ number one communication tool, print is
still very much around - and maybe due for a recall, should we eventually lose
the fight over the internet. Meanwhile, someone should think about writing a long
blog post called CoTech: The Joy of the Politics
of Writing Code.
