The Co-op Bug

Review of The Detroit Printing Co-op: The Politics of the Joy of Printing

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.    

1 https://www.calverts.coop

2 Baines, Jessica (2016) Democratising print? The field and practices of radical and community printshops in Britain 1968-98. PhD thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3452/

3 https://www.aldgatepress.co.uk

4 https://wiki.coops.tech/wiki/Main_Page

This review was originally written for the UK Society for Co-operative Studies, June 2020