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Fredy Perlman
From the Fifth Estate Vol. 20 #2 Fredy Perlman, born August 20, 1934, Brno, Czechoslovakia, died July 26, 1985 Detroit, Michigan Fredy Perlman was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1934. He emigrated with parents to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1938 just ahead of the Nazi takeover. The Perlman family came to the United States in 1945 and lived variously in Mobile, Alabama, Brooklyn, Queens before settling in Lakeside Park, Kentucky, a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio where Fredy graduated high school. In 1952 he attended Morehead State College in Kentucky and then UCLA from 1953-55. Fredy was on the staff of The Daily Bruin, the school newspaper, when the reactionary university administration fired all of the editors of the publication. The five editors, including Fredy, proceeded to publish an independent paper which they distributed on the campus. In 1956-59 he attended Columbia University where he met his life-long companion, Lorraine Nybakken. He originally enrolled as a student of English Literature but soon concentrated his efforts in philosophy, political science and European literature. One particularly influential teacher for him at this time was C. Wright Mills. In late 1959, he and Lorraine took a cross-country motor scooter trip mostly on two-lane highways traveling at 25 miles per hour. From 1959-63, he and Lorraine lived on the lower east side of Manhattan while Fredy worked on a statistical analysis of the world's resources with John Ricklefs. They participated in anti-bomb and pacifist activities with the Living Theater and others. Fredy was arrested following a sit-down in Times Square in the fall of 1961. He became the printer for the Living Theater and during that time wrote The New Freedom, Corporate Capitalism and a play, Plunder, which he published himself. In January 1963, Fredy and Lorraine sailed for Europe on a Swedish freighter for what they considered a definitive departure. In September of that year they arrived in Belgrade, Yugoslavia after living some months in Copenhagen and Paris. In June he had inquired about becoming a student in Czechoslovakia, but the country of his birth found his request to be suspect. From 1963-66 Fredy studied at the Belgrade University Economics Faculty where he received a master's degree. His thesis was titled "The Structure of Backwardness." He received his Ph.D at the Law Faculty; his dissertation was titled "Conditions for the Development of a Backward Region," which created an outrage among some members of the faculty. During his last year in Yugoslavia, he was a member of the Planning Institute for Kosovo and Metohija. During 1966-69 Fredy and Lorraine lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan where Fredy was a professor in the Economics Department at Western Michigan University. Most of his teachings was in introductory social science courses and again he created outrage among some members of the faulty when he initiated student-run classes and let the students grade themselves. During his first year in Kalamazoo, he and Milos Samardzija, one of his professors from Belgrade, translated I.I. Rubin's Essay on Marx's Theory of Value. Fredy wrote an introduction to the book: "An Essay on Commodity Fetishism." |
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