May 2020 – Empty Hands History

Learning from Bread and Puppet

Late at night after a Bread and Puppet show, we sat around our kitchen table with several puppeteers chatting over handfuls of leftover Halloween candy. I had noticed a certain presence from the Bread and Puppet members: a sense of ease and warmth that rubbed off on everyone they met. I found myself smiling more around them, talking and laughing freely, feeling more alive. After a round of Laffy Taffy jokes, I couldn’t help asking how they did it. What produced this sense of comfort, this easy joy and connection with others? The oldest of them laughed kindly and responded: “it’s just early in the tour.”

Bread and Puppet’s bus outside the Moth Mother Collective (2019)

A fair response. But what exactly is it about Bread and Puppet that generates this feeling of comfortable humanity, this ease and presence in the world? My partner and I discussed this for weeks after they left. Of course, the answer is not hard to discern. They are a group of lovely people who live collectively on a farm and spend their days making beautiful art. A few times a year, a number of them pile into a painted old school bus to travel from town to town sharing their creations with the world. Bread and Puppet has been producing and sharing incredible art, puppets, theater, and (of course) bread since the 1960s, and their method works. They put an incredible amount of life into their art, which in turn sustains so many thousands of people. My own house is filled with Bread and Puppet art that brings me daily joy.

I have yet to actually play the game featured under this Bread and Puppet poster in our living room

Of course, not all of us can spend our days making art on a collective farm in Vermont. How can we find a similar sense of happiness and fulfillment as do the puppeteers? It is perhaps a banal observation that some form of self-directed creative labor is key. Capitalism devalues our creative projects, forces them into niche “hobbies” to pursue in our precious little free time away from work. We find ourselves having to justify every hour spent on our projects—or conversely, we feel guilty when we don’t have time for them. As Marx pointed out so long ago in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, the problem is that work under capitalism alienates us from our humanity and our sense of creative possibility. The only real solution is to collectively regain control over our time and labor.

Until then, making art and puppets seems like as good a way as any to find some happiness and relief from the soul sucking despair of the present. Puppets are also, as David Graeber reminds us, vital for fun and provocative demonstrations and for sustaining our culture of resistance. So a few weeks ago, in the doldrums of coronavirus melancholia, we at the Moth Mother Collective cleared out our garage of junk and transformed it into an art and puppet studio. (We have big plans for it to double as an infoshop space and pop-up zine distro in the future; stay tuned!) We’re still a little way out from finishing any puppets, but we are making progress. And I’ll tell you what: it feels good.

The Grounded Intellectual: Articulating Self-Knowledge from Within the Movement

As a PhD student working on movement history, I think constantly about how to best use my position within the academy. It is easy to get sucked into the logics of the academic world, no matter our political commitments. How do we prevent this? How can we relate to movements outside the academy in a way that both strengthens them and transforms our own subjectivity? It seems key to me to remain grounded within movement spaces. We must function as part of movements—certainly with our own particular knowledge and tools to contribute, but as part of the movement and thus helping to articulate self-knowledge from within.

I recently read Raúl Zibechi’s excellent book Territories in Resistance and I appreciate how he frames this process:

“We strengthen and expand social movements by understanding the meaning of the actual social practices, of the ‘historical movement that is unfolding before our eyes’ (Marx). Understanding is a creative act […] But the process of understanding is a form of action; one understands only what one lives. Hence we can only understand the meaning of social practices in and with them—from within. […] In Argentina, Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD Solano have developed the concept of ‘the militant researcher.’ This is being part of the social movement—not just integrating into the organization, but participating in the disengagement or place shifting that the whole movement pursues, an act of moving-oneself that captures and reconfigures.”

In the words of the Italian Autonomist Marxist Raniero Panzieri, “analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.”

When I was involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop, I felt that my studies and my political activity were each part of a connected whole. I shared my research with my non-academic (but equally intellectually committed) comrades, who in turn kept me grounded and pointed in the right direction. Without this anchor, my research process feels adrift. I feel an urgent need to rediscover a radical intellectual community on the border between academia and movement spaces, dedicated to consciously articulating self-knowledge from within the movement.