A Life in Rebellion

From Ill Will by Ariel Uesseler

On Saturday May 2, 2026, our friend and comrade Ben Morea (1941-2026) — animist, artist, and lifelong revolutionary — passed away near his home in Colorado. 

The following text forms the preface to the Japanese translation of Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion (Detritus, 2025; Kawade Shobo, forthcoming), an autobiographical dialogic account of Morea’s life. Coauthored by Morea and 1000 voices, the book was a labor of love by many. While leaving behind a trace of Morea’s extraordinary life, it asks what is possible and necessary for revolutionary change in the world today. 

For more of Morea’s writings, check out “The Pancho Villa Syndrome,” an excerpt from Full Circle, as well as our two recent interviews: “The Ultimate Dilemma” (2016) and “We Wanted to Destroy the University" (2024).


I first learned of Ben Morea from a zine. Authored anonymously and titled simply Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker: The Story of a Small, Underground 1960s Revolutionary Group in New York City, this obscure artifact was circulated through anarchist scenes around the country when I was a teenager. At the time, in the early 2000’s, this 8-page zine was the only existent record of the group’s activities. In breathless prose, it told the story of a “tightly-knit guerrilla unit” whose essential quality was its militant yet creative oppositionality to almost everything: capitalism, authoritarianism, the Vietnam War, government and police, consumer culture, emotional and sexual repression, white supremacy, imperialism and indeed Western civilization, generally speaking. Deploying every tool at their disposal from psychedelics and street theater to organized crime and guns, their war against the existent mounted along with the mass revolutionary impetus of the late 1960s. The three years from the beginning of Black Mask in 1966 to the end of Up Against the Wall in 1969 were a perpetual festival of riotous activity: they shut down the Museum of Modern Art, cut the fences at Woodstock, broke into the Pentagon, helped to occupy Columbia University, and forced the Fillmore East to give them weekly use of the theater for free — to name just a few of their more audacious actions. Meanwhile their everyday struggle was two-fold: (1) to communalize life among the diverse underclass of the Lower East Side vis-a-vis crash pads, free stores, community defense street patrols, and dinners feeding hundreds of people multiple nights a week, all while (2) taking every possible opportunity to fight with the police. Then in 1969, they suddenly disappeared, presumably forced underground by the growing heat from both the local police and federal agencies. Or perhaps, as cryptically hinted in the final paragraph of the zine, they left the city for disparate locales around the country to explore new forms of revolutionary organization, dissolving their core group into “an occult network of resistance” beyond the scrutiny of the State, media, and indeed, the records of history.

Today, dozens of historical accounts and scholarship in multiple fields attest to the influence of Black Mask and Up Against the Wall and their radical interventions in the art, culture and politics of the 1960s. But for my friends and I in our teenage years, the only reference was this mysterious zine, and its subject was not a part of history, but rather a living legend, exciting our imagination and compelling us with their story. In the pure radicalism of our youth, it seemed to express the limit of what was possible for a small group of revolutionaries to achieve — in the words of the zine — “to join together to combat the whole of reality.”

At the time that I first saw the name “Ben Morea” in print, it never crossed my mind that he was a real person, still living his life — much less that we would eventually meet and work together to bring his life story into writing. I knew nothing of the turns his life took after 1969, when his notorious group disbanded and he himself apocryphally disappeared. Nor could I have realized that this moment marked the beginning of a whole new story, involving an extraordinary transformation even beyond the purview of what I had imagined as “revolutionary.”

In 1969, Ben and several of his comrades left New York City for the wild country of northern New Mexico, to join forces with the Chicano insurgents of La Alianza Federal de Mercedes — but that’s another story. For Ben, this was the last stand before going totally “off the radar,” disappearing into the wilderness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains where he lived for five years with his wife and two horses, surviving off the land by hunting and foraging. As Ben says, it was this way of living which ultimately saved his life, not only from detection and assassination by the State, but also in the positive sense that it allowed him to reorient as a revolutionary. At that moment he was at a dangerous crossroads: he was armed and ready to die, but the revolution on which he’d staked his life was no longer possible. To continue the same militant struggle would be suicidal; he had to find a way to continue to fight, yet in another dimension. And what grounded him and kept him from a more self-destructive course was his life in the wilderness, struggling to survive in relation with the elements while enduring extreme deprivation and exposure. It was an experience of life pared down to its essential meaning: what do you need to live?

At the same time, what also saved Ben’s life was that he was open to allowing his life to radically transform. When he left New York, he says that he was searching for something, that was missing from the struggle in the city. He didn’t know what it was, but he felt that it was necessary, and he was drawn to Native American cultures and understandings. Then when he went out west, he encountered another world, which he entered not as a hardened militant, but as a child, ready to learn. Regarding this, Ben is very guarded about what he shares, determined not to expose that world to public scrutiny and exploitation; suffice it to say that he was welcomed into a Native community and ceremonial tradition, which he has continued practicing until today. Over fifty years later, Ben is now an elder in this tradition, one of very few who can still remember the old people and their ways, passed down in turn from their elders since the beginnings of the ceremony. Originating during a critical phase of Native resistance, at the moment when many tribes in the southwestern and central regions of the present-day US were finally forced to give up their ancestral lands and ways of life and move onto reservations, the ceremony has been a lifeline for generations of Native peoples around the country — both as a vital communal spiritual practice, and as a mode for the continued survival of Native life and spirituality. After several years in close contact with Ben, observing his conduct in the role that he plays as part of this powerful living tradition, I learned that, in a poetic way, the revolutionary had become a steadfast traditionalist, committed to passing on what he had learned from his elders, precisely without change. 

It is not that Ben has lost the fervor to change the world. Today, at 84 years of age, he is still a total radical, not only in terms of his thinking, but in his whole way of living. It is not an exaggeration to say that Ben is as pure a revolutionary as anyone I’ve ever known — equally sincere as he is intense. I came to understand that, within him, the conjunction of revolutionary and traditional is no contradiction, but a matter of conflicting worlds: of which social reality is to be overturned, and which ways of life are to be fought for, to be upheld.

After disappearing into the wilderness, Ben remained in intentional obscurity for decades, working as a lumberjack while homesteading in the mountains of the Southern Rockies. As he says, many people from his former life assumed that he was dead, and he wanted to keep it that way. But eventually, he decided to reemerge. As he puts it, the situation in the world was only getting worse, and he wanted to share something from his experience to contribute to the struggle today. And so, sometime around 2006, he returned to New York City to speak publicly for the first time in nearly forty years. It is largely thanks to his return that more and more interest has gathered around Black Mask and Up Against the Wall; whereas, when I was a teenager, our only reference was a zine, now there are entire books written about them. Meanwhile, Ben has been meeting with people as much as he can, and he has become a beloved elder to a new generation of young people. When he holds events, they crowd into the room, eager to speak with him and hear his perspective on the potential for revolutionary struggle today. I recognize in them an intensity which is at once familiar, yet markedly different from that of myself and my friends at their age, just twenty years before. Having grown up under the premise of the end of the world, they speak with a gravity which corresponds to the insanity of this moment in human history. Ben doesn’t claim to have any answers; in fact he is insistent that he can’t tell anyone what they should do. But he full-heartedly shares their feeling. In my experience, these conversations are invariably somber, and yet at the same time, emboldening. They create a space to collectively bear the weight of the present reality — both the despair that the situation has never been worse, and the realization that the time to act is now, because there is no time to waste.

This book is the result of a long collective effort. It was a special collaboration between multiple generations. It came about organically; in the beginning, when we started meeting, we had no plan for publishing our conversations. But the more we sat and talked with Ben, the more we felt we had to learn, and we grew eager to find a way to share what we had learned from him with others. Together, we sought to create a medium for transmission, to draw insight and inspiration from Ben’s lifelong engagements as a revolutionary, and pass it on for the generations to come. And so what began as a visit to interview an old comrade turned into a four-year process to make this book.

Respecting Ben’s principled silence, we have edited the text to avoid identifying specific Native communities and traditions. Instead, the discussion is presented in general terms, revolving around what Ben calls “revolutionary animism.” According to Ben, animism is the understanding that all of creation is alive and interconnected, and that the human is a part of it — not above it or in control of it, but part of it. In this sense, he says, all Indigenous peoples were once animists, living ways of life founded on recognition of this connection. And the grave challenge for us today is to recover the essence of that awareness, or at least to move towards it, to begin to repair our relationship with life in the cosmos and on this planet. It is a problem which is not only urgently political and material, but metaphysical and spiritual, involving the whole of existence.

However removed the reader may be from the Indigenous ways which are everywhere today facing mass extinction, we believe that Ben’s story shows that there is still the choice to be made, or the question of how far you will go — to fight for life on Earth against the world-destroying forces of colonialist capitalist civilization, and to reestablish kinship with all living beings, to honor our role as part of creation.

This book aims to contribute to that struggle. It is shared with love, for the coming generations, in the spirit of total rebellion.


Full Circle: A Life in Rebellion is available now through Detritus Books

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 05/24/2026 - 12:23

In classical appelist style, not a single critical thing about Morea has been published by the Ill Will/Woodbine fan club. Reading the texts, Morea seems to at least have *offered* comradely criticisms of some of them. But never mind all that, it's time to make a revolutionary idol out of a white guy in a cowboy hat without ever hearing the voices of any of his [ex-]partners or children. What could they possibly have to contribute?

https://dimanche.pm/english.html

anonymous (not verified) Mon, 05/25/2026 - 18:26

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

Really can't tell what your criticism is. Are you saying you want to cancel Morea because his ex-partners or children feel bad? Do they feel bad? If you're not saying there's some monstrous issue being brought by his family, why can't you let comrades mourn another another anarchist who just left us?

anonymous (not verified) Wed, 05/27/2026 - 06:22

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I think it's a criticism of the appelistas recuperation of Morea. More like, the channel through which Morea was made famous again. It's interesting that we also had this pompous text by Crimestink/Void Network published earlier... as this seems to be the same crowd.

GEF (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 08:04

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

It's a "western hat", and it's only been attached to cowboy subculture along the way.

As an occasional wearer, despite having been made famous again by annoying Millenial hipsters, it's a very comfy, elegant and convenient way to protect from the sun, rain, as well as branches while going fast through the bush. And I'd like to know what would be a better alternative... fedoras!? Bowler hats? Those dumb, wobbly fishers hats? Goddamn baseball caps for your usual edgy normies with chewing mandatory bubblegum? Oooor... black bloc balaklavas 24/7? Medieval skullcaps!? COME OOON...

As you'll see... our options for hats are limited as they all got taken over by one or another kind of tools. So it's about what you look good with, or feel good wearing.

But thanks for the link brow!

Lebou (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 09:10

In reply to by GEF (not verified)

Yeah, I wear a cowboy hat with the brim pulled downwards, not too much, and without all the adornments and leather ring or feather (wtf) stuck in it.
I've labored in the sun in a desert for years, now I stop further skin damage with this practical and cooling hat. I've had a few melanomas removed, rugged looking, some say a resemblance to Clint E. I'm a Yeee Haaanarchy type of dude.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 10:16

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I don't have a dog in this fight, but none of the texts you link to seem to be written by Morea. So I'm curious about what his criticisms might be? Otherwise it seems like you are trying to suggest that Morea was somehow in agreement with the texts you've linked to.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 11:07

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I'm suggesting that Morea has been heavily promoted/revived by appelists because what he represents to them aligns with what they believe in (constructions of autonomy that brush aside fundamental criticism of "revolutionary" racial, gender, & colonial politics). I'm also pointing out that his politics aren't necessarily the same as theirs.

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 15:16

Seems like you've built a box to think within and can't get out of, and that distorts your perspective. Whose politics are all homogenous and who disagree with Ben but who are also falsely repping him? Do Sabu Kohso and Ariel Uessler agree with the Invisible Committee? More than they agree or disagree with Ben? If all these people you dislike all publicly disagree on many things but secretly agree on everything, how is that decided? And where do they make these decisions?

And I also couldn't understand your point about criticism of "revolutionary" racial politics, for example. Are you saying that they're using Ben to push their anti-racism because of his "revolutionary" racial politics and that is bad? Or the opposite, and they're not really anti-racist? I'm not sure I even disagree with you but don't understand because this is all so bound up in hostility (I'm guessing we prob agree about various things but my hunch is just that I am less paranoid).

anonymous (not verified) Tue, 05/26/2026 - 19:27

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

It's possible that Appelistas may be covert racists as they're very White milieus and never seemed to care much reaching to non-White people (thankfully, in a way). The bigger concern with their identity politics is their *classism*. Or how these privileged White "radical" academics (sounds familiar, I knows!) have worked hard forming a caste and securing a dual power for their own, but against the poor not the rich capitalist establishment.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/05/2026 - 13:36

the comments on this page are filled with crypto fascist anti communist trash. you guys are so obsessed with a tendency that is nearly identical to your own, because without them you would have no way to police the boundaries of your preferred dating scene. this is a post memorializing a lifelong anarchist who recently died. not everything is about you and your high school scene beef.

anonymous (not verified) Fri, 06/05/2026 - 19:16

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

"the comments on this page are filled with crypto fascist anti communist trash"

Ah, nahh... you're the one who's been *forcefully* equating anarchism with communism. In the real world anarchos are under no contractual commitment to associate with Reds. And nobody cares or even knows about commies in my dating scene. Some commenters got issues with the fact that Morea was recuperated by Appelistas and similar commies, who otherwise only have a coffin to offer to anarchists.

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 06/06/2026 - 07:11

i'm no fanboi, but the fact that he talked to various people, while not changing his ideas, and that you're complaining about it on his obit page is an example of a generational clash probably more than anything else. 

we can disagree with people's ideas and still talk to them. or at least, we used to be able to. 

anonymous (not verified) Sun, 06/07/2026 - 08:11

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

I nowhere did blame Ben for it. Those trying to recuperating him, just like they recuperate anarchy's "edgyness" are those to blame. At worst, Ben only was ill-informed about the crowds he was hanging out with... or just had a bit too much faith in all those "comrades".

Naiveté is an acceptable mistake, even if it can cause problems. To be abusing it, that's the problem.

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