“If you don’t have a printing press, you don’t have a movement,” – A Review of Kathy Ferguson’s “Letterpress Revolution”

“Anarchists fiery, revolutionary publications embodied their determination to struggle. Their aesthetically pleasing publications embodied their beautiful ideal.”

 

What comes to mind when you hear the word “anarchist”? A crust punk serving salad behind as part of “Food Not Bombs”? A protestor clad entirely in black clashing with the police? The disheveled academic sitting behind an information table distributing photocopied zines? The bearded and bomb throwing cartoon caricature? Perhaps you picture the specific face of a historic anarchist with which you are familiar (Goldman with her pince-nez, Kropotkin with his bushy white beard)? A comrade or an enemy? A respectable idealist or a childish utopian?

Whichever of these you picture will probably say as much about your own views as about actual anarchists. Though it seems fairly safe to suggest, that when they hear the word anarchist, most people (including many who view anarchists and anarchism positively) will not necessarily think of someone laboring over a printing press.

In Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, Kathy Ferguson delves into the history of anarchism not to tell the story of a specific figure or a particular group, but to focus on the importance of the printing press to a range of figures and groups. Those with a passing familiarity with the history of anarchism will find many familiar names in Ferguson’s book, but the way they are framed in terms of their relation to print technology and print culture provides a new lens on these figures and a novel way of making sense of anarchism. Ferguson argues that “anarchist print culture thrived through a dynamic combination of media technology, epistolary relations, and radical scholarship” (3), and her book provides a fascinating analysis of the ways print technologies were both the media of choice and were used to mediate anarchist culture from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. Letterpress Revolution wonderfully demonstrates the ways that anarchists saw print technologies not only as a tool for advancing their own politics, but as technologies that were intrinsically aligned with their political goals. While the book is clearly interested in the ideas that were being conveyed in letters, books, and periodicals—Ferguson emphasizes that we need to also pay attention to the material things that allowed those ideas to be conveyed; as she puts from “anarchism’s vibrant history” contemporary radicals can learn that “we need to make things together, to express as well as be impressed by our relationships with things” (20).

This is a fascinating and important book. One that can certainly be read as a contribution to the history of anarchism, but perhaps one that can be even more productively read as an intervention in current discussions around political movements and the politics of technology.

 

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“If you don’t have a printing press, you don’t have a movement,” at least this is what Barry Pateman claimed (23). And while those words may sound faintly hyperbolic, they capture the centrality of the printing press for the anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Though there are a handful of figures in the history of anarchism—notably Joseph Ishill and Jo Labadie—who are remembered specifically as printers, there were many others closely engaging with print technologies. After all, “publications were the heart of anarchist communities,” (23) and this meant that printers were the ones keeping that heart pumping.

It may be easy to romanticize the printing press, and the work of printers, but there was a considerable amount of very real labor involved in using these technologies—even if it was labor that many of the printers found rewarding. The work of a letterpress involved a typesetter (who organized the actual type—which needed to be done backward and upside down on the composing stick), a pressman (who was responsible for managing the ink and paper), and a bookbinder (who assembled and joined the pages), with engravers often also being involved (should a work include illustrations) (28). All of this was complicated and skilled labor, which involved difficult techniques, the handling of often recalcitrant machinery, and the careful managing of limited resources (paper and ink)—and thus many anarchist printing presses were also the sites at which other anarchists were schooled in the art of printing. Indeed, typesetting was one of the skills that many of the students at anarchist “Modern Schools” learned (31). The development of printing skill allowed quite a few anarchists to eke out a living working as printers, with many of them (at least the male printers) joining the “International Typographical Union, the oldest craft organization in the United States” (34). Granted, the required apprenticeship period and gendered divisions of the time, meant that women printers had significantly fewer options and opportunities—even as “anarchist printers of all genders likely engaged in a substantial range of printing tasks as required” (36). For to be in the proximity of the anarchist printing press was to be pulled into the task of working that press.

And working that press provided the opportunity to not only be printer, but writer as well. At a larger capitalist press “there may have been a bright line between authoring and printing,” however “those skills were often combined among the anarchists” (42). There was something almost akin to jazz improvisation where musicians “compose the music as they play it,” at work on these anarchist presses where the printers would “improvise hybrid printing/writing” performing “writing and typesetting at the same time” (43). While this may conjure up an image of chaotic nonsense, the actual output of these presses is a testament to how skilled these printers were at blurring “the distinction between writing text and setting type” (43). And it was not only that the printers were taking turns at composing, but that many of the leading thinkers in the history of anarchism (Kropotkin, Rocker) were reputed to have also spent time setting type.

Despite the fact that printing presses could be stubborn machines that could be expensive to operate, it is clear that many an anarchist developed a genuine affection for their presses. And this was true even in the face of ongoing harassment and arrests which meant “their printing equipment was often confiscated or destroyed” (49). Technological changes—such as the invention of linotype—certainly altered the work of printing, yet “many anarchist printers continued their intimate relations with letterpress technology” (51). In some cases the resistance to these technological changes involved a certain stubborn commitment to the older letterpress technology—and the skilled craft labor it required—but in other cases the hesitance was reflective of a deeper political stance. Though “anarchist printers often defied the logic of technological progress” it was not done out of a defiance of technological progress as such, but rather was reflective of “financial and political” reasons (52). Simply put, the new print technologies were more expensive, whereas letterpress technology was much more widely available (even to relatively small groups without much in the way of capital). On the political front there was certainly some preference for the letterpress aesthetic, but the letterpress was also hailed for “its merger of mental and manual labor, of art, craft, and collective action” (53). It was not only that the old letterpress was a useful tool for printing and disseminating anarchist tracts, but that many anarchists came to realize that in the process of working the press those involved were also doing anarchism.

The printing press could certainly harm a careless worker, and it was quite possible to come away from an encounter with the press spattered in ink, but there is an important contrast between the smoky industrial factory and the anarchist printery. Certainly, there were some presses that churned out poorly printed agitprop, but many of the anarchist printers were committed to producing high-quality works that were aesthetically pleasing. Paper was itself expensive, but many a printer understood that the goal was not to fill every possible space with text—the content of the text may have been of primary importance, but lush engravings, and skilled printing were hardly tertiary concerns. While anarchists often engaged in attempting to prefigure the world they hoped to create, their printed works conveyed not only those ideas but embodied them as well. Indeed: “Anarchists’ fiery, revolutionary publications embodied their determination to struggle. Their aesthetically pleasing publications embodied their beautiful ideal” (81).

The circulation of the printed word was not the only important way in which the word was circulated amongst anarchists. Epistolary connections of correspondence kept anarchists engaged with one another, with these exchanges being a place not only of personal conviviality but also a site where anarchist thinking was further developed (and thus, it was not uncommon for such letters to wind up being printed and published for wider distribution). And at points in time when anarchism was under particularly heavy state repression, the act of gathering and archiving anarchist materials (be these printed texts or the aforementioned correspondence) was also of paramount importance. While a letter exchanged between two comrades may not express as obviously a certain technopolitical commitment, nevertheless “anarchists’ extraordinary chains of communication were not just about anarchism; they were part of anarchism” (85).

As examples of the importance of such correspondence, Letterpress Revolution presents the exchanges between Joseph Ishill and Rudolf Rocker, as well as the exchanges between Agnes Inglis, Bertha Johnson, and Pearl Johnson Tucker. While Rocker is quite likely the most well-known of these correspondents, Inglis deserves enormous credit for preserving a significant aspect of anarchist history thanks to her work organizing and curating the Labadie Collection (at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor). In contrast to books and periodicals, letters provide a much more personal narrative of a movement’s history, as these documents were places that melded significant comments on current events and political theorizing with more humdrum observations about aging and everyday life. Nevertheless, “letters and publications were the currency of the movement, its lifeblood” (102), with letters representing a particularly interesting written form as a letter (unlike a publication) always speaks to a reader who is envisioned as then becoming the next writer. The letters help track the spread of anarchist print culture—as correspondents sent each other various published texts or engaged in gathering material for archival purposes—while simultaneously helping to document chains of mutual aid (and mutual affection) that kept the movement alive through its loneliest days. Inglis’s correspondence is of particular note, as the connections she forged and maintained were essential for her work of collecting the personal papers (and personal libraries) of a range of anarchist figures so that they could be archivally preserved. Rather than treat correspondence (and archival collecting) as a curio on the side of the real work of a movement (whatever that may be), Inglis demonstrates how “acquiring, comprehending, and mapping a movement’s literature and making it available for future study is not only a record of the movement; it is participation in the movement” (114).

One of the ironies of the history of anarchism is that inexpensive periodicals were the site of much of the movement’s growth and theoretical development, but that those who are today interested in the history of anarchism are more likely to come into contact with complete books. Indeed, it is easier to find a copy of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid or Goldman’s Living My Life than it is to obtain a complete run of Mother Earth or Freedom (to say nothing of the many less well-known anarchist periodicals). As a movement that was made up largely of “bookish poor people” (132), periodicals were of particular import, indeed “at a few cents an issue, journals were more readily available than books” (130) and they were more easily shared and distributed. A consideration of anarchist print culture necessarily invites a consideration of what it was that was being printed in such quantities, and as lists of anarchist periodicals, which often appeared in other anarchist periodicals attest, quite a lot of these periodicals were being produced. And while some periodicals were relatively well-known and are relatively well-remembered, many more had fairly small print runs, were fairly obscure, or are largely forgotten today due to linguistic barriers to access.

While anarchist figures were not strangers to writing full books, for a range of important figures in the history of anarchism the periodical was the primary place where their works were published. These periodicals were collages of rebellion, bringing together poetry, reporting on current events, accounts of speaking tours, theorizing, printed correspondence, and much else besides—and it worth recognizing that “anarchism is not a politics that happens elsewhere and is subsequently reported in the pages of its journals. The journals embody the politics” (148). Thus, the history of anarchist publications is inextricable from the larger history of anarchism, as it was in these publications that much of that history played out. Furthermore, the trials and travails of these publications (their financial struggles, their repression by state forces, their internal political arguments) are central to the history of the movement. And while the pages of these journals might often feature pieces by more widely remembered anarchists (or serialized pieces of better-known works), these publications also point to how many largely forgotten figures played a role in advancing anarchist thought and politics. Furthermore, these periodicals could also be places of genre exploration such as in the case of vaguely fictionalized “social sketches” that evocatively captured people’s struggles in a style that was “both about anarchism and expressive of anarchism” (171). These publications represented places of study, where anarchists learned and debated, and which were in turn part of a larger network of places of study (all those other publications). More than merely printed pages, these publications are “a vigorous actant in anarchist assemblages” that brought together “writers, readers, correspondents, and distributors” alongside the various material technologies of the printed page, and in doing so enabled the creation of yet more assemblages (146).

The pages of anarchist periodicals frequently pointed to tensions within the movement, and though anarchists were clearly quite successful at printing, the overall success of the broader movement is more questionable. In many respects, anarchist’s focus on prefigurative futures and loathing of the state, led to a refusal to engage with reformism that in many ways undermined the movement. Indeed, “we cannot substitute a formal critique of power relations for a history of domination and struggle” (196), with anarchism’s focus on that “formal critique of power relations” frequently meaning that anarchists struggled around issues of race and gender. True, most of these anarchist journals saw themselves as avowedly anti-racist and committed to gender equality—but at the same time there could be a lack of willingness to engage in the type of “reformist” activities that were attempting to improve things in the present (in lieu of attempting to turn the world upside down in the future). And though there is much that is laudable in the bookishness and print adoration of anarchists, there was also a risk that the affection for these particular media technologies meant that anarchists were missing the opportunity to engage with other communities.

The late 19th century and early 20th century may have represented something of a golden age for classical anarchism—and though anarchism persists, it has not quite experienced the same resurgence as has been enjoyed by democratic socialism. Nevertheless, anarchist seeds are still shooting up fresh flowers, or are providing some of the theoretical and ethical grounding for other causes and movements. From Food Not Bombs to Protect Maunakea to the Feminist Bookstore Movement—anarchist practices can still be seen in movements today, even if those movements do not necessarily identify themselves solely with anarchism.

And yet amidst the contemporary focus on which social media platform, or app, or device a movement is using—the history of anarchist print culture provides an opportunity to consider not only movements’ political use of technology, but to really grapple with the politics of the technologies being used by movements.

 

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If you frequent anarchist bookfairs, political rallies, or punk shows, there’s a sort of joke that one is likely to see emblazoned on t-shirts, tote bags, and stickers. It is a joke that takes a well-known four-letter activist acronym and gives it a clever twist so that instead of its original meaning the acronym now stands for “anarchists care about books.” But Letterpress Revolution makes it clear that anarchists really do care about books, about periodicals, and about the printed word in general.

With Letterpress Revolution: The Politics of Anarchist Print Culture, Kathy Ferguson has made an important contribution to the history of anarchism, provided a fascinating engagement with the scholarly discussions around material culture and archiving, as well as a vital intervention into current conversations about the activist affordances of various technologies and the politics of technology more generally. While Letterpress Revolution is not really the best introduction to anarchism (nor does it purport to be), for those who already have some familiarity with the basic tenants of anarchism the book provides a novel engagement with those ideas (and with many of the movement’s figures). At several points throughout the book, Ferguson notes that anarchism often receives “the backhanded compliment” that its future vision “is a nice idea in theory but would never work in practice,” but she draws upon the history of anarchist print culture in order to counter “the opposite: the theory needs some work, but anarchism has been remarkably successful in practice” (188). True, this “successful in practice” has not entailed a worldwide revolution, but the print shops and printed publications that Ferguson discusses stand firm as examples of anarchist islands in the seas of capitalist domination.

Amongst the central characters in the book there is a great deal of affection shown towards printed material (and printing technology), and some of that affection can be felt in the overall tone of the book. Nevertheless, Ferguson avoids romanticizing print technology by focusing on the very real affordances of the technology alongside the material and political aspects of the technology that led to anarchists vesting so much adoration in print. And in discussing the ways a researcher’s emotions get stirred up while reading correspondence, Ferguson provides honest and essential insights into the process of working through personal correspondence. While not a complete history of a particular anarchist periodical, or a book focused on telling the full history of anarchist periodicals, by placing those periodicals alongside a discussion of the work of actual printers and printshops Ferguson is able to draw attention to the ways that the process of producing these periodicals (as opposed to just the published end products) was itself a site of anarchist organizing and struggle.

There are moments in Letterpress Revolution when a reader may wish that the book kept itself more narrowly focused on a single section of anarchist print culture: the print shops (and printers), the correspondences, the work of archiving, or the periodicals. Indeed, Ferguson points to an immense richness of material that has too rarely received appropriate scholarly attention. Yet to the extent that a reader may be disappointed to see Ferguson move on, this is likely just a testament to Ferguson’s impressive skill as a researcher and a writer—yes, it would have been interesting to spend even more time with the printers, but that is largely because Ferguson does such an excellent job of bringing these printers to life. And though many a historian (of many a topic and period) engages with various “personal” records (like correspondence), Ferguson captures not only the emotional tenor of the correspondence but is also able to thoughtfully comment on the odd voyeurism of the scholar reading through those personal correspondences. And though it does seem a little odd that Ferguson does not conclude with a consideration of the contemporary state of anarchist print culture (numerous anarchist presses still exist, anarchist book fairs are common occurrences, and zine culture remains vibrant)—the book remains grounded in a particular period, and is stronger for this focus.

Letterpress Revolution is a thought-provoking book in the absolute best sense of that term. And it is a volume that should appeal to activists and organizers (not only anarchists), historians, media scholars, librarians/archivists, and anyone interested in the politics of technologies. There are moments when the book veers into more theoretical territory, but the book never assumes that a reader already knows all of the relevant theory, and it never condescends to those who are not familiar with that theory.

As a work of historical and media scholarship, Letterpress Revolution is phenomenal. And yet—at risk of pushing the book in a perhaps slightly unfair direction—it may be that Letterpress Revolution can be most productively read as an intervention into current discussions around the politics of technology.

At the moment there are plenty of works in which a leftist/leftish writer/activist/thinker opines hopefully on the potential of the Internet. Generally, such works—which are not a new phenomenon—are highly critical of particular Internet platforms, lament what capitalism has done to the Internet, and dream about a return to the Internet of old (before advertisers screwed it up) as a model for what the Internet of the future could be. Books in this genre tend to praise the Internet as an organizing tool, draw attention to the ways social movements have seized on the activist affordances of social media, and speak of the Interned in terms of its (small d) democratic potential while often invoking the Internet alongside references to “the people.” It is not that concerns about misinformation, the proliferation of hate speech, the environmental cost of the Internet, or other major downsides of the Internet are ignored by the authors of such books…but most of these problems are seen as connected to the capitalist Internet we have, not as necessarily reflective of anything inherent to the Internet (and computers more generally). Whether you want to blame it on Facebook’s shenanigans, Musk’s destruction of Twitter, the dramatic rise (and quiet disappearance) of Web3, fears about AI eating the web, uncertainty about the extent of victories won by online movements, or just a general feeling of ennui when surfing the net—it is hard to deny that some of the original utopian luster of the Internet is chipping away, but with their dreams (and plans) for dismantling the tech giants and returning the Internet to “the people” such books beg their readers to redouble their hopes in the potential of the Internet (and computers more generally).

To be clear, many of the books in this genre of leftist plans to revitalize the Internet are quite good. And many of the figures who write these books are committed, caring, serious activists and scholars, who seem to genuinely believe that (even now) the Internet (and computing) still command great liberatory potential if we are only willing to seize it. These are not the works that tilt into the “is this a joke or not?” realm of paeans to “fully automated luxury communism,” but rather see technologies as sites of struggle, and thus see the Internet as a site of a struggle that can (and needs to) still be won. Though not entirely dismissive of other media formats, within this genre too much fondness for such formats (print, for example) is often treated as unwise romanticism…even as they engage in romanticizing the Internet and computers.

Letterpress Revolution does not feel like its primary objective is to make an intervention into the contemporary inter-leftist squabbles about “Internet good/Internet bad/Internet complicated.” Of course, there is little doubt that a history of anarchists online would be filled with numerous examples of anarchists fully embracing the Internet. And, to be up front about it, in many ways it is unfair to Ferguson and to her phenomenal book to be pushing it into these current arguments about what the left (broadly defined) should make of the Internet. Nevertheless, Letterpress Revolution is such a brilliant engagement with the politics of technology—and with political actors’ engagement with the politics of technology—that it seems like this book really can make a vital contribution to these debates. Much like Christina Dunbar-Hester’s essential Low-Power to the People, Ferguson’s Letterpress Revolution makes a vital contribution to the current discussions around the Internet by providing a necessary counterexample. Rather, than pick through the politics of the Internet, Ferguson invites us to reconsider the politics of a different media technology—and to do so through the eyes of some figures with serious political convictions.

The anarchists in Letterpress Revolution have a clear fondness for print technology, and much of this is connected to material realities of that technology. After all, printing presses were sturdy, they were inexpensive enough that a smallish group could buy one, the necessary skills could be taught, and they could genuinely be controlled by the people who used them. It may be this last point that is most significant. In fairness, the Internet is pretty resilient (even if individual computers are fragile), the costs of getting online have dropped considerably, and many a hacker will tell you that you too can learn how to code. And yet the Internet is not a printing press—something many an activist has realized when the social media platform on which they were “printing” their messages suddenly underwent a change. Furthermore, a group of comrades can get together and set up a printing press…but it’s going to be a lot harder to set up an Internet. Sure, they might have their own server, but who owns the other servers being connected to? And who owns the undersea cables, the satellites, and fiberoptic cables? There is absolutely a material history to printing (metal, ink, and paper have to come from somewhere), but are there really sweatshops pumping out printing presses or e-waste dumps overflowing with toxic printing presses? Despite recent activist efforts around “the right to repair,” there is widespread awareness that many digital devices are afflicted with planned obsolescence—while a well-maintained printing press could be in operation for decades. This does not mean that contemporary activists should abandon the Internet in favor of refurbishing old printing presses…but perhaps the act of getting a group together to refurbish such a press and beginning to collectively produce material on it is as worthy a political endeavor as setting up yet another blog or posting memes.

Of course, the previous paragraph could be accused of romanticizing print, and there is no doubt that someone committed to the Internet could go line by line through the previous paragraph in order to make a case for the greatness of the Internet and the backward folly of the printed word. But frankly it seems that maybe those are arguments that leftists (of all stripes) need to be having more of these days. Perhaps in this moment wherein it seems that there is growing skepticism towards the Internet the time has come to reevaluate the politics of the Internet (and the politics of other media forms) as opposed to simply trying to reaffirm faith in all things digital. One of the dangers of this moment is that as the Internet becomes more and more of an essential feature of everyday life, many activists have come to take it for granted, and feel a need to defend its politics because of how reliant they themselves are on those technologies. Yet what Letterpress Revolution does so wonderfully is provide us an opportunity to step back, and asks us to really reflect on the politics of our technologies by giving a counterexample of the politics of other technologies.

Ferguson closes out Letterpress Revolution with the comment that “Like the anarchists of old, we live in a time that needs effective resistance” (214). And perhaps as we look for sites of effective resistance we might do better standing in front of a printing press, composing a letter to a comrade, or working together to create something physical, than just scrolling on our phones. Perhaps as we dream about the technologies we will build tomorrow, we need to consider rediscovering some of the tools of yesterday.

 

Related Book Reviews

Astra Taylor’s “The People’s Platform”

Ben Tarnoff’s “Internet for the People”

Jonathan Taplin’s “Move Fast and Break Things”

Shannon Vallor’s “Technology and the Virtues”

The edited volume “Your Computers is on Fire”

Gavin Mueller’s “Breaking Things at Work”

Paris Marx’s “Road to Nowhere”

About Z.M.L

“I do not believe that things will turn out well, but the idea that they might is of decisive importance.” – Max Horkheimer librarianshipwreck.wordpress.com @libshipwreck

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