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Charles Bufe, better known as Chaz Bufe, is a contemporary American anarchist author. Bufe writes on a wide variety of topics, and has published 16 books, most under the See Sharp Press imprint but one ("Godless") was published by PM Press and another ("Dreams of Freedom") by AK Press.
Chaz Bufe is principally known as an anarchist publisher and author. Originally from Arizona, he was influenced by the anarchist magazine The Match! published by Fred Woodworth in Tucson, AZ. He received a Bachelor of Music Theory and Composition from Boise State University in 1979. He moved to San Francisco in 1982 and became a member of the anarchist Bound Together Bookstore Collective in San Francisco. He also wrote for and did design, layout, and editing for several anarchist and far-left periodicals including Processed World, a magazine which was written by and for "dissident office workers".
The magazine sustained years of attacks by attorney and police informant Bob Black, and his followers, with many of the attacks being of a highly personal nature. The attacks included the slashing of "Processed World" issues on newsstands and the attempted firebombing of their office on Rincon Hill. (Black fled California after being handed a court summons at a law class he was teaching at UC Berkeley.) Bufe defended the magazine in an influential pamphlet titled "Listen Anarchist," which led to an ad hominem attack in pamphlet form by two of Black's allies, and which Freedom Fortnightly (London) labeled as "crazy".
While in San Francisco, Bufe founded See Sharp Press in 1984[1] and eventually relocated to Tucson Arizona in 1992. In the approximately 40 years of its existence, See Sharp Press has published over 50 books, almost as many pamphlets, and for the last decade has been publishing occasional e-book-only titles.
Of the 16 books Bufe authored, co-authored, compiled/edited, or translated, 11 are still in print, and several of those have gone through multiple printings.
Reviews have been mixed, but mostly positive, with favorable reviews in publications such as Publishers Weekly ("Free Radicals"), Z Magazine ("Heretic's Handbook of Quotations"), Free Inquiry ("American Heretic's Dictionary"), Booklist ("Free Radicals"), Guitar Player ("An Understandable Guide to Music Theory"), and Jazz Player ("An Understandable Guide to Music Theory"). His "American Heretic's Dictionary"/"Devil's Dictionaries" went through several printings, and reviewer's either loved or hated it. It was referenced by IslamOnline, recommended by Cape Cod Times[2] and he has been called "the Ambrose Bierce of our time" from AlterNet.[3][4] Bufe is also a musician, and author of An Understandable Guide to Music Theory, now in its third edition.[5] He translated the only English-language collection of the writings of Ricardo Flores Magón – Flores Magón Dreams of Freedom: A Ricardo Flores Magón Reader – and translated the Spanish language book Cuban Anarchism: The History of a Movement by Frank Fernández (writer) into English as well as Venezuela: Revolution as Spectacle, by Rafael Uzcategui.
[Listen Anarchist!] is sure to become one of the most bitterly hated, fought over, and denounced tracts about Anarchism that has appeared in the last twenty years. The reason is that Bufe comes right out and says what he has to say, rather than couching it in a lot of dreary, boring, diffuse verbiage ... Nobody can mistake his meaning; nobody can pontificate on what he "really meant" to say, and for this reason you should read this pamphlet.
Fred Woodworth, The Match!, Issue #80, Fall 1985
Listen, Anarchist! is an influential 1987 essay by Bufe on the internal dynamics of the American anarchist movement.[6]
In this essay, Bufe[7] launches heavy criticism against anarcho-primitivists, including Fredy Perlman and the Vancouver Five eco-terrorist group, as well as the publications Fifth Estate, Resistance, The Spark, and Open Road.[6] In a section entitled "What Can Be Done?", Bufe advocates minimal use of violence in revolutionary political struggle, condemning the vanguardist "urban guerillas" of insurrectionary anarchism. He criticizes these and other so-called "lifestyle" anarchists in the movement for deliberately alienating mainstream society, and falling to victim to dangerous irrationality and mysticism.[8]
In his account of "marginalised" anarchists, Bufe criticizes the anti-work tendency in contemporary anarchism, accusing some of its advocates of being parasites of those who do work.[8] In response, Feral Faun wrote an article called "The Bourgeois Roots of Anarcho-Syndicalism" in which he claims that the endorsement of work showed that anarcho-syndicalists "embrace the values essential to capitalism", only objecting to who is in charge.[9] The Summer 2005 issue of Green Anarchy included an "update on workerist morality", in which they characterised "Listen, Anarchist!" as Sam Dolgoff's Relevance and Murray Bookchin's "Listen Marxist!" poorly rewritten by Bufe to "shake his fist at all the young rapscallions who were throwing rocks at his perfect, beautiful philosophy".[10]
In the introduction to the second edition, Janet Biehl proposes that many of the tendencies within anarchism that Bufe criticizes stem from its individualist wing, inspired by the philosophy of Max Stirner, which she maintains is the source of "lifestyle anarchists" who are at odds with the ethical socialist tradition of anarchism.[11] Biehl criticizes the perceived lack of concern for morality among post-left anarchists such as Bob Black.[11]
Allan Antliff described the work as "abusive", and said that its distribution by the Workers Solidarity Alliance belied the organisation's pretensions of anti-sectarianism.[6] Mutualist Kevin Carson recommended the pamphlet as suggested reading for "getting from here to there".[12]
Bufe's "A Future Worth Living" and "Design Your Own Utopia" were critically reviewed by Bob Black in "Bufe Goof" and "Views From Nowhere", respectively.[13][14]
