I had no desire to pursue any relationship with any conventional institutional university, especially not in the field of critical social and political theory which was my main interest. Perhaps I would go for a Ph.D. in a few years, but I did not want to do that now. I was fascinated by the idea of an alternative university or “free” university. In the 1970s, there were alternative free universities in New York City. The most notable one was “the Marxist School.” Yet I never set foot in that place, not even once. Their version of doctrinaire orthodox Marxism-Leninism was anathema to me. I was much more attracted to the “Free Association,” a cultural and educational Center on 20th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues in Manhattan. The name of the school was taken from a quotation from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “We shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” Free Association, 5 West 20th St., NYC, NY 10011.
The Center was open seven days a week. It hosted courses, seminars, lectures, discussion groups, research projects, art exhibitions, and literary readings. There were art classes for kids and childcare. There were film showings, parties, forums, panels with audiences, concerts, and theater events. There were comfortable spaces with sofas where people could “hang out” at all daytime hours and into the late evening. There were kitchen facilities.
There was a schedule of twenty-four courses, meeting once a week for two hours each, Monday through Thursday in two time slots beginning at 6 pm and 8 pm. There were thirty-two faculty members. The class offerings included a writers’ workshop, and sessions in film theory, filmmaking, graphic design, handcrafts, mastering videotape, music, and dance. Stanley Aronowitz, a heavyweight in the left socialist movement who later would become a celebrity sociology professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, was a driving force at the school and taught American working-class history. Stuart Ewen, later a well-known cultural historian, taught about the mass media. Barbara Ehrenreich, later the author of the bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America, taught socialism and feminism. Judith Young led a consciousness-raising group exploring masculine and feminine gender identities via body movement, improvisation, theater, games, play, and storytelling. There were seminars on philosophy, psychology, racism, sexism, and on the disciplinary and socialization functions of the mainstream school and university system. There was an internship-oriented TV research project. There was a course on the news media and propaganda. There were classes in Marxist and anarchist theory, and on workplace organizing from a libertarian socialist perspective.
The Free Association “alternative university” was steered by a collective of eleven people with no hierarchy of rank or power. The collective met once a week to define the direction of the cultural, artistic, political, and educational Center. The main goal of the project was to create a community in the sense of an “Antonio Gramscian” understanding of the building of a revolutionary popular culture. There was rejection of the classical Marxist idea of a vanguard party leading the working class, and critique of the assumption that culture and consciousness are mere reflections of economic relations. Beyond the desired redistribution of wealth and power, it is daily life experience that must change. This includes how we live in the workplace, the family, and the neighborhood.
I attended a series of lectures on the anti-authoritarian strands of the revolutionary socialist movement in different periods of twentieth-century European working-class history. Guest speakers who talked about the legacies of anarchism and unorthodox Marxism included the early ecological thinker Murray Bookchin and the Queens college historian Paul Avrich.
My growing interest in anarchism and unorthodox Marxism when I was in my early twenties can be explained entirely as having to do with my psychological relation to my parents. I argued with my parents about politics and fundamental questions of economic systems. Their ideas were from the American Cold War era mainstream worldview. They dismissed all critical points that I would make about American society or capitalism with the counter-assertion that the economic-social organization of Soviet-Union style Communism was a terrible totalitarian system. To counterargument their counterargument, I had to find a way to acknowledge the evils of State Socialism from Above while asserting that that did not invalidate the idea of socialism, since there could alternatively be socialism from below with direct democracy. My political philosophy emphasis was on decentralization rather than autocratic rule from above, whether capitalist or state socialist (the bureaucratic collectivist state). I had to stake out a position from which my parents were seen as being right on an essential point but wrong in the big picture. It was the “middle way” of letting them be right without being too right, and me being a rebel without my going completely off the deep end. I had to achieve individuation.
I met Bernie T. at the Free Association. He became a lifelong friend. I met Peter H. We became friends. Peter was about my age. He was a philosophy major and was very well read. Peter was a very ethical person who devoted his life to Marxist philosophy and leftist political activism. He was a scholar of the German language. He later became the editor and translator of the complete works of Rosa Luxemburg in English. Peter was a principal figure in a Marxist-Humanist organization. After we met, we had intellectual discussions until late in the night.
Peter generously helped me out in my predicament of having no money and no place to live. He invited me to live with him. He had very little money and was happy to have someone pay half the rent. Peter lived in a one-room studio apartment on the ground floor of a run-down building on West 20th Street, further towards the Hudson River. We had two single beds, one on either side of the only room. I lived there with Peter for nearly one year. The apartment was infested permanently with hundreds of cockroaches. From time to time, the “exterminator” sent by the landlord would come and spray around a bit and the roaches would be temporarily suppressed. Within twenty-four hours they would be back, in even larger numbers. They were everywhere in the bathroom and in the small kitchen corner. It was not advisable to go to the bathroom during the night. When it was dark, the roaches were happily in their element. It was a terrifying sight to see when you turned the light on.