Page Text: Collected Skirmishes of Ken Knabb
Bureau of Public Secrets, 1997
ISBN 978-0-93968-203-4
408 pages. $15.00
Ken Knabb has translated numerous works by Guy Debord and the Situationist International. Public Secrets is a comprehensive collection of his own writings over a period of three decades.
The first half of the book consists of two new texts. The Joy of Revolution is a series of observations on the problems and possibilities of a global antihierarchical revolution. Beginning with a brief overview of the failure of Bolshevism and the inadequacy of reformism, it examines the pros and cons of a wide range of radical tactics, then concludes with some speculations on what a liberated society might be like. Confessions of a Mild-Mannered Enemy of the State is largely concerned with Knabbs situationist activities, but it also includes reminiscences of the sixties counterculture and accounts of his Zen practice and other later ventures.
The second half of the book contains virtually all of Knabbs previous publications. Beginning with his 1970 disruption of a Gary Snyder poetry reading, it includes critiques of the New Left and the counterculture; accounts of situationist groups, tactics and scandals; translations of several French texts; an appreciation of the great writer and social critic, Kenneth Rexroth; pamphlets, posters, comics and articles on Wilhelm Reich, radical Buddhists, Japanese anarchists, Chinese dissidents, the 1970 Polish revolt, the 1979 Iranian uprising; and the widely reproduced Gulf war tract, The War and the Spectacle.
The aim throughout is to bring the real choices into the open and to incite people to make their own radical experiments.