You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive now available!
AK Press is proud to announce the 20th Anniversary edition of Seth Tobocman’s You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. The book arrives this week (and will be 25% off for the next month) and Seth’s new t-shirt is already flying off the shelves.
And what better time to bring the book back into print? Unemployment is now in the double digits, cities are going bankrupt, and everyday people are developing new survival strategies for an increasingly dicey future. Alan W. Moore, from his introduction to the book says,
“Seth’s graphics penetrate directly into the schizophrenia described by Guattari and Gilles Deleuze in the late 1970s: a mental condition that capitalism creates as the necessary conditions for producing us as proper subjects for its economies and its governing states. It’s the social Petri dish in which we all grow up. This book reaches into the squirming mass of our post-Fordist subjectivities, the mindsets of workers with no guarantees, entering the period of neoliberalism—when all jobs are temporary, bosses are cruel and capricious, and the social refuse, those who failed to adapt, are everywhere as a lesson to those still on the treadmill what might happen if they slip off.”
These are uncertain times and we are getting pushed pretty hard. As we push back let’s remind ourselves that you don’t have to fuck people over to survive.
Below is a piece Seth wrote for the new edition, it’s called “Continuity.”
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The story of this book is an odd one and I think it says something about the American media in this historic period.
Most of the work in this book was originally published in the radical comic book World War 3 Illustrated. I started this magazine in 1979 with the help of Peter Kuper and Christoff Kolhofer because we saw no outlet for the kind of work we wanted to do in mainstream media. Comic book companies were not interested in serious comics on political issues. Book publishers were not interested in comics. The term “graphic novel” had not yet been popularized. While Peter and I got some work doing illustrations for newspapers and syndications, they were often afraid to publish our more radical pieces. We published World War 3 Illustrated for the same reason that some of us did graffiti. We needed to get heard.
Ten years of putting out an underground zine didn’t earn me a cent but it put me in touch with some really interesting people. One of them, writer Peter Plate, introduced me to Martin Sprouse who was starting a small not-for-profit publishing company. He decided to put out an anthology of my work and we agreed on the title You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive. Chuck Sperry did the graphic design on the first edition. The book came out in 1989. Sprouse at first had a hard time finding a printer who would put out a book with a four-letter word in the title. But once he did, things went quite well for a while.
The book never got a review in any major magazine or newspaper. But the first print run sold out completely in less than a year. Unfortunately, Sprouse had lost money on other projects and could not afford a second printing of the book. So the book would remain out of print for years while stores, distributors, and readers kept asking for copies.
Meanwhile, the demand for these graphics was met by people who pirated them to make patches, posters, tattoos, and even murals based on the images in the book. Most of this was done by amateurs who made little or no money at it and did it for the love of the art or the belief in the message.
In 1999, Sander Hicks, who used to work at our local Kinko’s and print flyers free for the activists, started Softskull Press. He agreed to put the book back into print. This time it took about two years to sell out. But Softskull was sued because of two controversial biographies, one about George W. Bush and one about John Lennon. This, plus the bankruptcy of a distributor who owed them money, put Softskull into bad straits financially. And so they couldn’t afford to reprint the book and it vanished again.
Today in 2009, twenty years since the first printing, AK Press is again printing the book; hopefully it will stay in print this time.
So this is a book from the 1980s, the “Age of Reagan,” although I am not sure we have ever really escaped the influence of his disastrous policies and ideas.
But I have never believed that the Left should engage in nostalgia for its past battles. I grew up hearing a bit too much about the 1960s and the 1930s. So each time this book goes to print I update it. In 1999 I added comic strips about Amadou Diallo and Mumia-abu-Jamal. Today I am adding stencils about the war in Iraq, the bombing of Gaza, the shootings of Brad Will and Tristan Anderson, the radical housing movement, and today’s foreclosure crisis.
Thank you for looking at this book. It is people’s involvement that gives these words and pictures meaning.
—Seth Tobocman