The Original Invitation to come to Chicago for the 1968 Festival of Life

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin
Yippie Manifesto

Come into the streets on Nov. 5, election day. Vote with your feet. Rise up and abandon the creeping meatball! Demand the bars be open. Make music and dance at every red light. A festival of life in the streets and parks throughout the world. The American election represents death, and we are alive.

Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, bomb throwers, bank robbers, peacock freaks, toe worshippers, poets, street folk, liberated women, professors and body snatchers: it is election day and we are everywhere.

Don’t vote in a jackass‐elephant‐cracker circus. Let’s vote for ourselves. Me for President. We are the revolution. We will strike and boycott the election and create our own reality.

Can you dig it: in every metropolis and hamlet of America boycotts, strikes, sit‐ins, pickets, lie‐ins, pray‐ins, feel‐ins, piss‐ins at the polling places.

Nobody goes to work. Nobody goes to school. Nobody votes. Everyone becomes a life actor of the street doing his thing, making the revolution by freeing himself and fucking up the system.

Ministers dragged away from polling places. Free chicken and ice cream in the streets. Thousands of kazoos, drums, tambourines, triangles, pots and pans, trumpets, street fairs, firecrackers–a symphony of life on a day of death. LSD in the drinking water.

Let’s parade in the thousands to the places where the votes are counted and let murderous racists feel our power.

Force the National Guard to protect every polling place in the country. Brush your teeth in the streets. Organize a sack race. Join the rifle club of your choice. Freak out the pigs with exhibitions of snake dancing and karate at the nearest pig pen.

Release a Black Panther in the Justice Department. Hold motorcycle races a hundred yards from the polling places. Fly an American flag out of every house so confused voters can’t find the polling places. Wear costumes. Take a burning draft card to Spiro Agnew.

Stall for hours in the polling places trying to decide between Nixon and Humphrey and Wallace. Take your clothes off. Put wall posters up all over the city. Hold block parties. Release hundreds of greased pigs in pig uniforms downtown.

Check it out in Europe and throughout the world thousands of students will march on the USA embassies demanding to vote in the election cause Uncle Pig controls the world. No domination without representation.

Let’s make 2‐300 Chicago’s on election day.

(On election day let’s pay tribute to rioters, anarchists, Commies, runaways, draft dodgers, acid freaks, snipers, beatniks, deserters, Chinese spies. Let’s exorcise all politicians, generals, publishers, businessmen, Popes, American Legion, AMA, FBI, narcos, informers.

And then on Inauguration Day Jan. 20 we will bring our revolutionary theater to Washington to inaugurate Pigasus, our pig, the only honest candidate, and turn the White House into a crash pad. They will have to put Nixon’s hand on the bible in a glass cage.

Begin now: resist oppression as you feel it. Organize and begin the word of mouth communication that is the basis of all conspiracies....

Every man a revolution! Every small group a revolutionary center! We will be together on election day. Yippie!!!

From the 1970 Poster:

YOUTH INTERNATIONAL PARTY MANIFESTO!

WE ARE A PEOPLE
We are a new nation. We believe in life. And we want to live now

We want to be alive 24 hours a day. Nine-to-five Amerika doesn't even live on weekends. Amerika is a death machine. It is run on and for money whose power determines a society based on war, racism, sexism, and the destruction of the planet. 

Our life-energy is the greatest threat to the machine. So they're out to stop us. They have to make us like them. They cut our hair, ban our music festivals, put cops and narcs in the schools, put 200,000 of us in jail for smoking flowers, induct us, housewive us, Easy-Rider murder us. Amerika has declared war on our New Nation!

WE WILL BUILD AND DEFEND OUR NEW NATION
But we will continue to live and grow. We are young, we have beautiful ideas about the way we should live. We want everyone to control their own life and to care for one another. And we will defend our freedom because we can’t live any other way.

We will continue to seize control of our minds and our bodies. We can't do it in their schools, so we'll take them over or create our own. We can't do it in their Army, so we'll keep them from taking our brothers. We can't make it in their jobs, so we'll work only to survive. We can't relate to each other like they do - our nation is based on cooperation not competition.

We will provide for all that we need to build and defend our nation. We will teach each other the true history of Amerika so that we may learn from the past to survive in the present. We will teach each other the tactics of self-defense. We will provide free health services: birth control and abortions, drug information, medical care, that this society is not providing us with.

We will begin to take control of drug manufacture and distribution, and stop the flow of bad shit. We will make sure that everyone has a decent place to live: we will fight landlords, renovate buildings, live communally, have places for sisters and brothers from out-of-town, and for runaways and freed prisoners. We will set up national and
international transport and communication so we can be together with our sisters and brothers from different parts of the country and the world. We will fight the unnatural division between cities and country by facilitating travel and communication. We will end the domination of women by men, and children by adults. The well-being of our nation is the well-being of all peace-loving people.

WE WILL HAVE PEACE
We cannot tolerate attitudes, institutions, and machines whose purpose is the destruction of life and the accumulation of "profit.” Schools and universities are training us for roles in Amerika's empire of endless war. We cannot allow them to use us for the military-industrial profiteers.

Companies that produce waste, poisons, germs, and bombs have no place in this world. We are living in the capital of the world war being waged against life. We are not good Germans. We who are living in this strategic center of
Babylon must make it our strategic center. We can and must stop the death machine from butchering the planet.

We will shut the motherfucker down!

WE WILL MAKE OUR NEW NATION FIT FOR LIVING THINGS
We will seize Amerika’s technology and use it to build a nation based on love and respect for all life. Our new society is not about the power of a few men but the right of all humans, animals and plants to play out their natural roles in harmony. We will build our communities to reflect the beauty inside us. People all over the world are fighting to keep Amerika from turning their countries into parking lots!

WE WILL BE TOGETHER WITH ALL THE TOGETHER PEOPLES OF THE EARTH
Pig Empire is ravaging the globe, but the beautiful people everywhere are fighting back. New Nation is one with the black, brown, red & yellow nations. Che said: 'You North Americans are very lucky.  You live in the middle of the
beast. You are fighting the most important fight of all, If I had my wish, I would go back with you to North Amerika to fight there. I envy you.'"