Paul Z Simons Excerpts from BLACK EYE print
Paul Z Simons Excerpts from BLACK EYE Read
Black Eye was an anarchist zine from NYC. Here is a collection of writing from one of its contributors on topics such as the history of fascism, the contradictory nature of “revolutionary” organization, and more. Including “The Organization’s New Clothes,” “How to Think like a Jacobin,” “Seven Theses on Play,” and “Book and Gun.”
“Black Eye was a zine out of New York, and this book offers some of the best pieces from this fiesty, piss-and-vinegar, punk-inspired series. Pieces on living your life creatively at work, fiction starring John Zerzan, journal notes on the process of a budding anarchist leaving a Trotskyist group, the taking (and taking back) of Tompkin Square Park, the significance of play, and much more.
Black Eye was born pathogenic and perverse in a basement in the Lower East Side’s Heart of Darkness in the 1980s. Half a dozen comrades armed with even fewer weapons (besides pens and typewriters, a few cartoons and quite a few ideas) set out to upend this rotten yuppified, spectacular world and provide first-hand reports of its demise. Initial articles ranged from paganism to the poverty of student life to the confessions of an ex-Trotskyist. Fiction and poetry complement revolutionary theory and resurgent utopianism. Eclecticism continues to be a virtue, is desired and cultivated, a political gesture itself in an era of heterogeneity. The common ingredient is liberation.
Black Eye wants to corrode all your received ideas and cherished ideological assumptions. It will give you a Black Eye if it doesn’t open your eyes, and it might just set you on an adventurous path of zero-work role refusal and you’ll discover you’re a voluntary conscript in an army of conscious egoists practicing the permanent revolution of desire.
Black Eye is a proto-council of the marvelous.”