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  • No Regrets: Counter-Culture and Anarchism in Vancouver by Larry Gambone
  • Abby Rolston
Larry Gambone, No Regrets: Counter-Culture and Anarchism in Vancouver (Edmonton: Black Cat Press 2015)

Given the recent growth of scholarship on the New Left, on contemporary social movements, and anarchist histories in Canada and beyond, Larry Gambone’s No Regrets: Counter-Culture and Anarchism in Vancouver is a timely production. Offering insider reflections on a half century of anarchist and counter-cultural activity, this memoir focuses largely on the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, a time some argue was characterized by a declension on the left as factionalism grew, “identity politics” eclipsed the New Left, and revolutionary adventurism alienated the general public. Gambone paints a different picture, one of a vivid protest era enlivened by ideological debate, gaining momentum until the early 1980s when workers and social movements came under government attack and the British Columbia left entered a dry spell from which it has only recently begun to recover. Drawing on this revisionist history, he argues for the importance of anarchist organizing methods, namely diversity of tactics, broad-based mobilization, and direct democracy and action, in movements past and present.

Gambone was introduced to direct action and civil disobedience through the 1965 Comox Project, an alliance of locals and urbanites agitating against the storage of nuclear war heads on a Vancouver Island military base. This led him to the city and a Beatnik milieu which put him on the scene for the development of Vancouver Yippie!, and later, punk. He contends that these countercultures were a connective tissue for the proliferating 1970s left-wing tendencies and activisms, from anarchism to the back-to-the-land movement. Gambone’s discussion reveals that despite divides over strategy, focus, and theory, a fluidity marked the extra-parliamentary left and social movements of the late sixties whose members shared homes and radical spaces, classrooms, study groups, arts and entertainment, lifestyle politics, and an opposition to oppression and exploitation.

Gambone argues that counter-culture did more than bridge divides – it was itself a politicizing force, bringing the practice of politics into everyday life. Co-op living, the alternative press, free schooling, and the fostering of a notion that art and music could be made by anyone, anywhere, for example, emphasized communitarian values and entailed new forms of exposure. These efforts came with hurdles. This fairly open culture, Gambone notes, was a haven for runaway youth and other marginalized individuals, a target for “anti-freak” violence from the outside, and occasionally violence from the inside and unhealthy levels of drug use. Members sought to combat and heal these issues, he [End Page 284] shows, through self-defence, working with affected peers in community programs, and politicizing alienated youth. While some counter-culture types invariably “went straight,” others bled into emerging movements, contrary to some stereotypes which see generational opposition between, for example, hippies and punks. Gambone demonstrates, as Eryk Martin has done (“The Blurred Boundaries of Anarchism and Punk in Vancouver, 1970-1983, Labour/Le Travail, 75, Spring 2015), that former Yippies became an important force in Vancouver’s punk scene, which itself brought a new energy to anarchism in the city.

Gambone’s contact with anarchism began when he discovered the Vancouver Industrial Workers of the World (iww) while involved with Students for a Democratic University (sdu) at Simon Fraser University (sfu). His discussion of the sdu’s 1968 occupation of the school’s Administration buildings, the later Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology dispute, and the censure of teaching assistants and faculty that ignited those actions are of interest to scholars of this period’s student organizing, as well as those currently involved in union activity at sfu and other post-secondary settings. While involved in these agitations Gambone began an sfu branch of student Wobblies, arguing that university-educated white collar workers would form the new working class. After leaving sfu, Gambone continued with the non-academic study of classic and contemporary anarchist and socialist texts and histories.

As one decade turned over to another, Gambone became involved in the theatrical Vancouver Yippie! which reached its height with a string of protests...

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