Steal This Book - Abbie Hoffman

 STEAL THIS BOOK - ABBIE HOFFMAN

Steal This Book, by Abbie Hoffman, as described in the blurb on the back cover is 'A handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock Nation'. The question to ask, of course, is whether any of it still has any relevance? The answer is that due to it being written in 1970, the vast amount of the information it contains is useless as it's just too out of date. So, Steal This Book is a book of and for its time, and therefore in that alone it's now an irrelevance. Up to a point, at least.

All of the addresses and telephone numbers it lists are obviously obsolete as are practically all of the organizations it mentions. But what of the ideas? Or rather, what about the mindset it lays out? Well, if you need a manual and a guide on how to shoplift, then you probably shouldn't be shoplifting or even contemplating it in the first place. Likewise for making molotov cocktails. This sort of stuff should be instinctive and born of need not desire, and if there's no need to throw molotovs - only a desire to - then in my book you're basically fetishizing them. 

There's that scene in the BBC drama Our Friends In The North when the father confronts his son with the bag of submachine guns his son has stashed, that have been used in an attack upon the Spanish Embassy. 'You're kinky', the father says, to which his son doesn't really have an answer apart from 'There's a bloody war going on out there!'. The fetishization of molotov cocktails, pipe bombs and guns for the revolution is the equivalent of extreme virtue signaling but a lot more dangerous.

The same can also apply to the advocacy of shoplifting in the name of some noble cause. The problem being that once you start stealing, then all boundaries come down and you can start stealing from anyone and anything. I can remember as a kid being at the Stonehenge Free Festival and somebody stole a pipe or something similar from a stall. The stallholder, however, had spotted him and as the thief walked off he called out to him: 'I saw you take that and do you know what? You're a cunt. I know it, all the people around now know it but worst of all - you know it yourself. You're a cunt.' 

It's an incident I've always remembered because in the rarified atmosphere of the festival where everyone was turned on and tuned in via copious drug use, the accusation hung heavy.

Steal This Book also offers advice on dumpster diving and eating for free, living off the out-of-date food thrown out by supermarkets. This is all well and good if needed but to advocate it as a way of living rather than a way of survival is ridiculous. I remember during the late Nineties or thereabout when I was living in Bristol and there was a Swampy-like campaign to stop the expansion of a quarry in a place called Ashton Court.

The campaigners/activists were filmed confronting the contractors who were there with their diggers and whatnot, and the contractors - who were all ordinary working men - were being harangued. The contractors were very calmly and very politely explaining they were just ordinary blokes working to pay their bills and to feed their families, whilst the activists were telling them they should find another way of living. 'How are we meant to eat? How are we meant to feed our kids?' one of the contractors asked, to which one of the activists replied 'You could dumpster dive'.

The lack of any sense of class consciousness on the activists part (whose spokesperson's father was an airline pilot) was shocking.

For all this, there are bits of Steal This Book that still has some semblance of relevance such as the advice on how to create posters and newspapers, for example. In today's age of the Internet and social media this is less important than it used to be but it's still useful to a point.

'If your scene doesn't have a paper,' Abbie Hoffman writes 'You probably don't have a scene together'. Which is kind of true, even if the 'paper' nowadays is an online one.

Abbie Hoffman was an interesting and somewhat important character during the Sixties, and Steal This Book serves as a reminder of the state of play back then. There are lessons to be learned here. One of the most telling things about the book, however, is that it was written whilst Abbie was in jail. Make of that what you will.

John Serpico