International Proletarian Hammer Throwing and Rhetoric Flinging Competition

On: MAY 1, 1984. At: (where else?)

MARX MEADOW in GOLDEN GATE PARK

CONTEST RULES

 

You will have two hours to compose a manifesto using the terms struggle, heroic, vanguard, revolution, revolutionary, reified, liberated zone, workers party (penalty for use of apostrophe), people’s army, revolutionary government, youth (as a plural), people of color (not colored people), differently (insert preferred adjective — abled is acceptable though pedestrian), phallocracy, womyn, wimmin, wimin, wimmen, wymyn, petit bourgeois, trade union consciousness, moral imperative, moral duty, revolutionary duty, infantile, objectively reactionary, objectively counterrevolutionary, imperialism, bosses, stooge, puppet, decadent, exploitation, fight, smash, hands off, build, stop, unleash, free (fill in the blank—Bob Avakian is a good choice), revisionist, fascist, opportunist, deviationist, running dog, white skin privilege, and islamophopic. You must use all terms!! (Special prize for the most inventive neologism. Last year’s winner: cisgender.)

You will then have two hours to put your manifesto into publishable form. Supply your own tools. Preferred typesetting equipment: dot-matrix printer or old manual typewriter (extra points for worn ribbons, broken or filled-in characters, handwritten corrections). The longest, most unreadable entry wins. The triumphant manifesto will then be copied on a 25-year-old xerox machine which hasn’t been cleaned since 2002, bound with a staple in one corner, and distributed to contest participants. Losers will face the moral imperative of reading it. Those who refuse will be unmasked as objectively counterrevolutionary petit bourgeois anarchists and will face the revolutionary justice of the people’s democratic dictatorship.

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–from The Anarchist Cookbook; this is a slightly edited version of a fake ad that appeared in Processed World magazine about 35 years ago. Amusingly, a few people reportedly showed up at the designated time and place for the “contest.”

(And, yes folks, in case you’re wondering, “The People’s Democratic Dictatorship” is the actual title of one of Mao Tse-Tung’s — nowadays Mao Zedong’s — essays.)