Review of Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion by Ben Morea

Ben Morea, for those who have encountered him in New York City in recent years, appears as a figure out of place and time. In his mid 80’s, with a handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, snakeskin boots, and bolo tie, he looks like an aged outlaw biker. Known (and mythologized) as an anarchist tactician, counterculture luminary, painter and graphic designer, propagandist and psychedelic militant, Morea was born in 1941 and raised amid jazz and heroin in Harlem. In the 1960s, he turned toward avant-garde art and revolutionary politics, co-founding the print magazine Black Mask and the anarchist group Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. By the end of the decade, he went underground, disappearing into the Southern Rockies and living off-grid for forty years, eventually immersing himself in ceremonial practice with indigenous communities. He returned to New York in his 70’s to share his experiences and insights.

That narrative sketches the contours of a truly unique life. But to grasp its textures, this story should be traced and retraced carefully. Full Circle guides us well. The book is an extended interview with Morea, drawing from over a dozen conversations spanning several seasons beginning in 2020. These were painstakingly edited by 1000 Voices Collective members Ariel Uesseler and Sabu Kohso in intimate collaboration with Ben Morea himself.

Full Circle presents the full spectrum of Morea’s uncompromising commitment to revolutionary existence. It is full of stories that are alternately inspiring, bewildering, and at times (and by his own admission) nearly unbelievable. Notable incidents include: breaking into the Pentagon; getting expelled from the Situationist International; encounters with Thelonious Monk, H. Rap Brown, Valerie Solanas and Ken Kesey; housing runaway youth in flats paid for by acid and pot sales; eating the still-beating heart of a deer. Such adventures are compelling, but also provide a deep well of insightful thoughts on the relationship between art and politics; theories of organization, freedom and autonomy; and relationships outside the bounds of white-settler supremacy and the nuclear family. Woven into every aspect of Full Circle is Morea’s spiritual wisdom, honed through decades of ceremonial life. And it’s these teachings that distinguish Full Circle, and Ben Morea, as an important voice. Morea is explicit about what he chooses to communicate about this major period of his life.

And slowly I began to articulate what I did, and what I learned during those forty years, that would not pose a threat to where I went. I formulated a conversation around general terms. Like animism. Where I came from, the people were animists. But I didn’t want to identify those people. They had made room for me in their world. In no way would I expose it. But animism is an understanding, I saw it could be introduced.1

Morea’s animism resonates with the teachings of the Buddha, the enlightenment theology of Spinoza, and even with dialectical materialism. But Morea dismisses the impulse to reduce these insights to theory:

I think your idea is a little similar to Buddhism.

I would go the opposite: Buddhism is similar to it. Animism came first. Animism was the original understanding of man. It wasn’t just a thought, it was a way of being… You don’t have to talk about it. The fact that you are alive, you are carrying that energy with, so are part of creation.2

This insistence on interconnectedness and immanence permeates his thinking, and is inseparable from his discussion of revolution and politics.

So striving to live is a sort of resistance?

Yes, it’s a resistance. Resisting the death that’s before it. And that’s what our generation, our culture, our consciousness should be. The will to live.3

My idea was always ‘something has to be done.’ We’re not trying to build a movement forever, we’re trying to accomplish something… Life has to be changed. I don’t know what the future holds… And the conception of the time you need: That could be the mistake. You need energy, correct. But it’s ongoing. It’s perpetual. It’s movement.4

However, analysis can only get you so far, and Morea often expresses the limits of language and categorizations.

…[the elders] don’t tell you. It’s unspoken. You just watch and understand. Western culture is so enamored with words. They think words are so important. But they’re not!5

With Morea’s sparse words, wild past, and interwoven narratives, Full Circle presents itself as a timely document of intergenerational transfer. The 20^th century is dead and buried, and its surviving witnesses and visionaries are fewer each year. We are now a full quarter into the 21^st, and the landscape of struggle seems to have changed utterly from Morea’s heyday.6 It is not immediately clear what we can learn from this unconventional perspective. What, exactly, is he telling us? A linear account of a pivotal moment in his biography might help us.

Morea’s flight from New York and retreat from confrontational militancy is a vividly-depicted inflection point in his life, and one in which the shape of his personality and psyche are exposed. It reads as a vulnerable, contemplative period, even after 50 years.

I had this gnawing feeling that the political struggle alone was not sufficient. I really did. You can see, if you look at the posters I was making, there’s a consciousness of another entity — I didn’t completely understand it — but I was feeling it out. Before it actually came to be. I had that premonition.7

As the 1960’s came to a close, Morea and others began to grow weary of the constant police surveillance, fragmentation, and conflicts amidst political militants alongside the rapidly changing political climate. They began to worry that the revolution fomenting among disaffected youth, bohemian dropouts, revolutionary students, and a racialized lumpen-proletariat might not take shape.

One of Morea’s recurring secular concepts is something he calls “Pancho Villa syndrome”: the tendencies of militants, partisans of armed struggle, to fail to adapt and renew themselves after the terrain shifts from revolutionary potential to counter-revolution and recuperation. They may lose themselves in fatalism, addicted to the intensity of conflict, and turn to anti-social banditry. Morea watched many of his milieu, especially those like himself who were criminalized as youths, succumb to this very syndrome. Some, including his own brother, did not survive. But Morea did. He went underground, shepherding some of the runaway youths he’d sheltered in New York to safe houses across the country (evading the FBI all the while), and made his way to the mountains of New Mexico to search for something different.

That began Morea’s decades underground and off-grid. But unlike some of his (former) comrades, he was far from alone, alienated, or defeated. For several years, he and his wife survived in the mountains, hunting elk and living in rough shelters, evading law enforcement, and even joining with Chicano ranchers in a land struggle against a National Guard occupation. Eventually, he emerged from the mountains with other like-minded comrades and began homesteading.

It is here that Morea spent the next several decades, sustaining a rich and integrated communal life, practicing ceremony, raising children, and working the land. Morea does not dwell on interpersonal relationships. None of his comrades, companions, or intimates are mentioned by name. But the fundamentals of this commonality are discussed at length:

When you started homesteading, that was before you had become part of the Native communities?

It all happened together. When we were in the mountains on horseback, that was exclusive, we couldn’t do other things as well… But when we homesteaded, we had a car and could go to different reservations, we got involved with different Native communities, we started adopting kids… We raised forty kids! I’m like the old man in the shoe!

On our land, there were three families… Each had their own home, we weren’t a commune. But we all lived on the same land, and shared everything. We did farming, and making crafts together, we did everything together. And we worked together, the three men worked as lumberjacks…8

Morea’s transition and his unlikely survival (both in terms of his very life, but also in his revolutionary, artistic spirit) do indeed provide lessons for us today. Whoever we are, we might ask ourselves: if not Pancho Villa syndrome, what morbid symptoms plague us now? Are we recovering from a period of intensive struggle? Are we battling complacency and alienation? Are we throwing ourselves into the furnace? Morea’s life, for all its flair, adventure, and mystique, instructs us to search for what is missing in our lives and our struggles. Where might we locate it? What wisdom lies beneath the surface of things? And crucially: with whom can we discover it?

Full Circle should be widely read. It will resonate with radicals, weirdos, militants, rejects, lumpens, dropouts, freaks, artists, and others who wonder how to push our creativity, our relationships, our very survival into a revolt against Leviathan. Morea teaches us that to do so, we must learn to pay attention. We must never stop transforming. We should cultivate loving and materially substantive relationships. And we must take risks, and we must never turn back. Ben Morea is in his last years, and Full Circle is his definitive account. We should accept his gift, take the time to sit with him and listen. Another turn in the cosmic spiral. In every apocalypse, a new world is born. (Review by Dan of The Unseen Book Club Podcast)9

• 1Morea, Full Circle, 104
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• 6The years 1968–2025 comprise a greater interval of time than do 1917–1968
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• 9Full Circle stands alone as text, but so much of its meaning is found in between the words. To deepen our understanding of the book, The Unseen Book Club Podcast spoke at length with Ariel Uessler and Sabu Kohso, members of the 1000 Voices collective, who worked intensively with Morea to produce Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion. They were powerfully affected by their relationship with Ben and this process of creation. You can listen to this discussion for free on unseenbookclub.buzzsprout.com.