Month: April 2020

Reflections on Defeat and Disorientation: Nine Years on the Left

I have been feeling very politically unstable and unsure lately. Experiencing several projects fall apart in the past couple years as I struggled to hold them together while immersed in my PhD really took a toll on me. I’m currently teaching a course on anarchism to a class of 18-year-old freshmen—my age when I first got involved in radical politics with Occupy Boston—so I’ve been reflecting on that time period. During Occupy the possibilities seemed endless and I was convinced of the rightness of our approach and the imminence of change. Now I feel cautious, a bit bitter, and so unsure of what the correct political approach is. My optimism has been tempered by almost nine years of defeats, by countless hours poured into campaigns and projects of many kinds, often with barely anything to show for it.

I generally maintain an anti-state left orientation, but I simply do not know how to get from where we are to the world I want to see. My growing disillusionment came to an inflection point last fall. The anarchist projects to which I had dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy for the previous two years—Food Not Bombs and an infoshop we named the Antidote—had fallen apart, in part due to a lack of structure and unwillingness to have serious conversations about politics and strategy. An attempt to establish a local version of Cooperation Jackson likewise collapsed. Bitter from the latest setback, I felt incapable of mustering the energy to co-found yet another organization. Although I flirted with the idea of founding a Black Rose chapter, what I wanted was simply to join a national organization with an established structure and plug into the work they were doing.

In light of this disorientation, and in the context of living in a relatively small town without many options for a political home, I joined DSA. Yet I quickly discovered that our DSA chapter suffered the same basic problem as the anarchist groups I had left: an aversion to real conversations about our politics, our goals, and our strategy. Months into my involvement, the truth set in: I had nothing in common with the people in my chapter. I disagreed with their politics, though I was willing to accept this. We did not have a shared cultural understanding, as I had with the punk-adjacent anarchist crowd. I came away from every meeting more frustrated than the last. Worst of all, we barely even did anything political. I began to see the organizational structure as an impediment to taking action. A week ago, I finally decided that I was done. This experience has driven home a simple point to me: if you want to take action, then you need to find a few friends and comrades wherever you can, link up with others with similar ideas and affinities, and take action together. You may find these people in your local DSA chapter or you may not.

I don’t currently have the capacity to help found yet another small organization and struggle to keep it together—if that would even be possible in the context of coronavirus. So I try to take a step back, focus on my studies and their political implications, teach my class on anarchism, and regroup. Yet I am wracked by feelings of political impotence and frustrated by inaction. The relative success of the Bernie campaign was of course a spot of hope in all this, as is the burgeoning climate justice movement led by young people. But in some ways it all feels too little, too late (particularly after Bernie’s defeat) and I don’t have the patience for the long hours of strategic discussion to produce the reorientations that we desperately need. Instead, I read for hours each day desperately searching for lessons from those who came before.

In this context, I found resonance in a piece by Nietzsche that I recently read “On The Use and Abuse of History For Life.” “To be sure, we need history […] we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action […] We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life.” So I ask myself: how can I work to put history into the service of life? Perhaps this question will help reorient me in a disoriented time. I want—I need—to rediscover a new sense of possibility and a new mode of political engagement. Maybe then I will recover my previous faith in our collective project of building a new world.

This post is by nature quite melancholic. But as I survey the last nine years I am also struck by how much I have learned and grown since my days in Occupy Boston. In many ways I am now much better equipped to contribute to radical projects. Yet I have also calcified and have brought a certain bitterness to my recent activities. As I struggle to correct the course, I am reminded of the way that CrimethInc. ended their somewhat satirical but very earnest 2006 CrimethInc. Shareholder Report: An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity: OUTDO US! OUTDO US! OUTDO US!

I wrote most of this before the coronavirus crisis really hit. The crisis has produced a widespread disorientation and the left has struggled to respond. But in the mutual aid networks and beyond, we see glimpses of the new world struggling to be born.

Sharing the mic with future Occupiers (2011)

The Quarantine Commune

We call ourselves the Moth Mother Collective to honor our kitchen’s many winged inhabitants. Even before coronavirus, we strove to live our lives in common. Six days of communal meals each week, a rotating chore wheel, a garden and workspace, and collective care for the needs and desires of five beings: three humans, our cat Reno, and our wise old hamster Toby. Social distancing measures have forced us to band even closer together to face the crisis. We are becoming the quarantine commune.

Social distancing has paradoxically compelled every household and living group to orient towards the commune form. In their book To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee argue that “what constitutes the commune is the mutual oath sworn […] to stand together as a body […] So a commune was a pact to face the world together. It meant relying on one’s own shared powers as the source of one’s freedom. What was aimed for in this case was not an entity; it was a qualitative bond, and a way of being in the world.” Today, a home must be a commune or it will fracture and die. Each decision must become a collective decision: how much risk to take, how to relate to others outside the living group, but most importantly the collective decision of how to live together, of how to be together in the world. The quarantine commune-orientation is a silver lining of the crisis which we should embrace and deepen.

We cannot go back to normal when this crisis ends, for returning to life as atomized individuals would be a significant defeat. Instead, the commune may become the new foundation for our social relationships. Before, during, and after social restrictions are lifted, each commune should make prudent contact (physical or otherwise) with other communes. Links should be forged, networks formed (mutual aid and beyond), the territory of communal relations deepened and enlarged. We have taken the first step—whether by choice or necessity—in the fragments of our own immediate living situations. The next step, when we can take it, is to link the fragments, to form circulation between them and collectively elaborate a new form of life-in-common.

Lifting social distancing restrictions will release a torrent of energy, mobility, and circulation. In our fragmented, socially distanced world, bringing people and places back into contact and re-articulating our social relationships in new forms becomes even more crucial. There is an opportunity to build from our communal foundation towards an entirely new community. As The Invisible Committee put it years ago but seemingly speaking to our moment, our goal “is the great health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with life.”

For the Moth Mother Collective and each other quarantine commune, it is time to begin.

From the Archive to the Infoshop: Reflections on Movement History

Forty sweaty people stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowded punk space listening to an old anarchist talk politics. Despite the familiar atmosphere, we were not between songs at a show. The crowd was gathered for one of the most popular events in a “Week of Anarchy” that I helped organize in August 2018 at our local infoshop, The Antidote. Ramsey Kanaan, founder of the anarchist publishers AK Press and PM Press, was animatedly sharing his experience organizing against the UK poll tax in the 1980s. Ramsey was sharply critical of the fact that our local political work was centered around Food Not Bombs and the infoshop. He argued that we needed to organize around more substantial political issues and engage in mass social struggle, as did UK anarchists fighting in the poll tax rebellion. Infrastructural projects might feel good, he maintained, but they would not lead to revolution. Let the Catholic charities feed people—they could do it better than Food Not Bombs, anyway.

We were indignant and a little defensive. Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop were the foundation for our political work in Ithaca. They helped us build community and find meaning in our own lives. Most of all, they were a living example of the new world we sought to build based in mutual aid and solidarity. And yet within half a year the infoshop fell apart; after another eight months I quit Food Not Bombs, frustrated by our lack of strategic vision.

Why did these projects fail? After much reflection and conversations with comrades, I concluded that these projects became ends in themselves which sucked up an enormous amount of time and energy. Rather than expanding our capacity to engage politically, they ended up constricting our field of vision. Frustrated conversations about this with my partner would often end with us saying “shit, was Ramsey right after all?”

Later, conducting dissertation research at the Brooklyn Interference Archive, I eagerly pored through numerous zines, personal reflections, and debates from the infoshop movement in the 1990s. I was shocked to read many of the exact same discussions and debates that we had had about our own infoshop, particularly the lack of political direction and the drain of energy. Without knowledge of the history of infoshops, we had tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Had we known about this previous generation of infoshops and learned from their errors, we could have avoided some major pitfalls.

Most importantly, perhaps we could have seen the danger of putting too much focus on maintaining the space itself at the expense of serious discussions about our political strategy. Had we been familiar with this history, we could have pushed ourselves to have more political discussions from the start, worked out a broader intentional strategy to build anarchism as a force in Ithaca, and positioned the infoshop as something that contributes to that broader strategy rather than being an end in itself. Of course, many participants did have their own sense of political strategy; the problem was that we did not have these discussions as a group. We fell into the trap that Joel Olson (himself an active participant in the 1990s anarchist movement) identified in his essential essay Between Infoshops and Insurrection, that all too often “infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it.”

Movement history is necessary because it brings these histories to a new generation of radicals. Not everybody can spend weeks in archives reading obscure documents from previous movements. Historians can compile these resources and interpret lessons from them for new waves of anarchist activity. This is what I hope to do with my own historical work. The highest honor I can imagine as a historian would be to someday see my book sitting on an infoshop bookshelf, marked as the material for an upcoming meeting of an anarchist reading group.

Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement

Despite this blog’s title, I have not yet posted anything “historical.” Partly this is due to the times; responding to coronavirus seems more pressing, and I don’t study any history that might be useful (relatedly, does anyone know how anarchists responded to the Spanish Flu?). I plan to start posting more historical writing related to my research as well as reflections on the kind of movement history that I find most useful. To give a sense of my research here is a short prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement.”

From Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to the rebirth of democratic socialism and antifascism, today’s American left has regained a strength and vision absent since the 1960s. A revival of anarchist thought and practice has been central to this revitalization of anti-capitalism. Ostensibly marginalized since the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, anarchism underwent a global revival following the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the early twenty-first century, most radical social movements in the United States operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, and rejection of the state and capitalism.  My dissertation traces this anarchist resurgence to its roots in a critique of the New Left, inspiration from the women’s and Black liberation movements, and transnational connections to German autonomists and the Zapatistas. This transnational history of American anarchism is guided by three primary questions. First, how and why did anarchism gain hegemony within the American left by the end of the twentieth century? Second, how have transnational networks shaped American anarchism? Third, what lessons can we learn from this history?

My dissertation is an intellectual and social history of contemporary American anarchism. From preliminary research, I argue that social anarchism—organized socialist anarchism, as opposed to individualism—was central to the revitalization of the anti-state left through the development of intersectional anti-authoritarian politics. Social anarchism provided a meeting point for feminist, anti-racist, anti-state, and anti-capitalist traditions which together produced a revolutionary intersectional politics for the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, social ecologists like Murray Bookchin critiqued all forms of hierarchy, anarcha-feminists such as Ithaca’s Tiamat collective challenged masculinist class-essentialism, and ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism. In the 1980s-90s, these currents converged in organizations like the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Anti-Racist Action, and the Black Autonomy Federation. My research critically evaluates their theory and practice in order to understand the development of intersectional social anarchism.

My work contributes to three primary academic and activist conversations. First, it encourages historians of the left to more fully engage anarchism, which has been viewed as Marxism’s immature sibling despite its growing importance. My research historicizes how anarchists have shaped the strategy and tactics of left-wing social movements to the point that horizontal, leaderless forms of organization have become dominant in social struggle from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. Second, I contribute to the literature on intersectionality by exploring Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, and white “race traitor” politics, which offer much to today’s identity politics debates. Third, my research strengthens the anarchist movement’s historical self-knowledge by framing conversations around organizational form and emphasizing post-1960s continuity. Could privileging continuities alongside ruptures offer insight into practicing anti-capitalist politics in periods of low mobilization? I explore the anarchist movement’s successes and failures during a counter-revolutionary era to offer lessons for a time of resurgent global fascism.

From Mutual Aid to Counter-Institutions: Revisiting scott crow

Mutual aid networks have rapidly spread across the United States in response to the coronavirus crisis. While mainstream media outlets have approached this with some confusion, this is nothing new for anarchists: mutual aid is the bread and (vegan) butter of anarchist theory and practice. Following the post in which I compiled a reading list on Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid, I found it useful to revisit scott crow’s excellent book on the anarchist response to Hurricane Katrina, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011). scott crow’s book is a gripping, eminently useful account of mutual aid that also points beyond the immediate responses to disaster. How can we transform mutual aid networks into permanent institutions with transformative capacity? crow encourages us to embrace our “emergency hearts” and act in a spirit of love and solidarity to meet people’s needs now while planting seeds in the concrete that can blossom into broader autonomous infrastructure and counter-institutions.

Black Flags and Windmills tells the story of the Common Ground Collective, a mutual aid organization formed in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. As we know, the state cared far more about establishing military order than it did about helping people, particularly poor Black people. crow rightly insists that the real disaster was the long history of oppression and exploitation of the poor Black community in New Orleans. In response to the state’s inaction, the Common Ground Collective was established by Malik Rahim (a former Black Panther), scott crow, Sharon Johnson, and others to provide food, shelter, medical aid, and other necessities. Common Ground successfully organized to save lives and rebuild destroyed neighborhoods—not only without the help of the state, but indeed in spite of the efforts of the state and white racist vigilantes to disrupt their organizing. For anyone interested in this experience and its political implications, Black Flags and Windmills has so much to offer, from practical organizational knowledge to theoretical background. I can’t recommend it enough, especially in these times.

crow encourages us to think about turning mutual aid networks into durable autonomous infrastructure. “Could street medics and their temporary first aid stations become a permanent clinic or hospital? Could groups who served food once a week set up long-standing free kitchens? Would we be able through alternative media […] to tell the deeper untold stories that countered mass-media sensationalized hype?” (66). This seems crucial to moving from networks of limited mutual aid to actually establishing anti-capitalist alternative infrastructure that can support life long-term. crow’s reflections upon his experience in New Orleans showed him that “movements need infrastructure and counter-institutions if we want people to stay engaged. If we want people to leave the destructive capitalist system, we have to create something better” (168). This led him to help create a network of cooperatives and mutual aid projects in Austin. Could we similarly pivot in the coming months from mutual aid networks to counter-institutions and infrastructure? One could certainly imagine local food systems deepening in strength, neighborhood networks transitioning to grassroots organizing, and online organizing becoming real-world activity.

Apart from mutual aid, crow’s discussion of his political influences is fascinating and very helpful. He identifies three main movements that inform his work: anarchism (largely from Spain), the Black Panthers, and the Zapatistas. These three influences lead him to approach political work undogmatically, and he takes some of the best parts from each. He emphasizes the kind of anarchism that I can most identify with, which is based in building autonomy and direct alternatives to capitalism. From the Black Panthers, he emphasizes self-defense, survival programs, and political education. His entire approach is shaped by the Zapatistas, who he says created a “living revolution” which “chang[es] people’s lives now and after the revolution” (83). The Zapatistas’ “anarchism that is not anarchism” provides perhaps the best path forward for serious anti-state and anti-capitalist political work, acting as what crow calls “a living synthesis of two disparate methods for liberation: the Black Panther Party’s integrated programs and the open-ended horizontal practices of anarchism” (83).

This was realized, however imperfectly, in the Common Ground Collective, which crow says was “closer to the Zapatista model, with a base decision-making body that consulted and accepted some leadership from the various communities we were in” (136). What more do the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and undogmatic anarchism have to offer to our own practice of mutual aid today? In moments of respite, we can reflect on the political implications of this crisis and orient ourselves towards the radical possibilities of mutual aid networks.

In response to the continuing disaster we live in and the greater ones we see coming in the future, Black Flags and Windmills provides hope. In response to these disasters and crises, crow reminds us that “another beautiful and flourishing tendency has been revealed: the efforts of decentralized responses to disasters, both ecological and economic, rooted in anarchist-inspired solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid. These emerging tendencies are offering rudimentary, but viable alternatives to the continuing crisis wrought by climate change and capitalism’s effects on communities in direct response and in rebuilding pieces from below” (178). If we all embrace our “emergency hearts” and help to cultivate seeds in the cracks of the system, perhaps we will not only survive the coming disasters but actively use them to help create another world.

Theory as Toolbox for Everyday Life

Reading Guy Debord and Hannah Arendt side by side in the past week, I was struck by how alive the former feels while the latter feels hollow and distant. Why is this? Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle helps me explain my own life and experience; he lays bare the alienation and inhumanity of the total commodification of human society and the domination of life by the spectacle. Debord and his Situationist comrades also give tools for changing our lives; see of course Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life. For me, this gets to the heart of theory’s purpose.

At its best, theory helps us explain our lives and experiences, deepens our understanding of society, and provides us tools to change both our own lives and the world. As Gilles Deleuze put it in a conversation with Foucault, “a theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it, beginning with the theoretician himself (who then ceases to be a theoretician), then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate.”

To bring this closer to our own times, I have been moved by the outpouring of writing about Aragorn!, the recently-deceased anarchist responsible for Little Black Cart, The Anarchist Library, and numerous other anarchist projects and infrastructure of the past two decades. (See CrimethInc.’s excellent elegy for him here. Though I disagree with much of his political approach, I particularly enjoy Aragorn!’s “Stories of the Raccoon People” and “Stories of the Bear People,” the first part of a planned series of Anarchist Myths.) In a wide-ranging oral history interview conducted in 2018, Aragorn! addresses his approach to theory, practice, and everyday life, particularly regarding the impact of the Situationists on his own life:

“The [Situationist International] Anthology, just that book and then Society of the Spectacle: that was a full decade of my life, to really understand all the threads and the connections and why that shit mattered. No, absolutely.”

Interviewer: “As you’re struggling through these difficult texts and wrapping your head around them, did you have sense of how those connected to your daily life and your immediate sense of engagement with the world?”

Aragorn!: “[…] For me the, the immediate question I ask any time I receive a new text is, is, how does this matter to my life? That’s always basically been my central project. The reason I became a publisher was because I wanted these things not just to be relevant to my life, but to share that enthusiasm with other people. For me, the idea, the beautiful idea, is about—how do you connect ideas to living?

[…] So early on, I said that all of the anarchist texts that I’ve read, perhaps some of the reason why it took me a long time to read them was because I really found every page to be a challenge: how do I put this into practice in my life?”

Of course, this is decidedly not the dominant approach to theory within the academy. Even the most radical Marxist academics are typically divorced from social struggle, political engagement, and attempts to “live the revolution.” And as Raoul Vaneigem reminds us, “people who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.”

As theorists and academics, we must work from within—or at least connected to—movements to change the world. Our own experience of struggle, of the creation of new ways of being and relating to each other, is necessary to produce theory which is useful to the movement. Just as important, we should take inspiration from Aragorn! and constantly ask how to apply theory to our everyday lives. Theory should be a tool for both individual and social transformation. If it isn’t, then what are we doing?

My Body, Too, Is A Battleground: Fighting Where We Stand

“Once the collapse of colonial power revealed the colonialism of all power exercised over human beings, the issues of race and skin colour became about as significant as a crossword competition. […] Far be it from me to contest the spirit of generosity that inspired antiracism in times still not far distant. But since I cannot alter the past it holds scant interest for me. I am speaking in the here and now, and nobody can persuade me, in the name of Alabama or South Africa and their spectacular exploitation, to forget that the epicentre of such problems lies within me, and within every human being who is humiliated and scorned by every aspect of a society that prefers to think of itself as ‘well policed’ rather than as the police state that it clearly is. I shall not relinquish my share of violence.”

Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

This passage has long stuck out to me for its crudity. As I reread Vaneigem today, I see a note from my past reading scrawled in the margin: “bad take!” I am inclined to agree with my past dismissal. There is so much wrong in this passage that addressing it hardly seems worth it: the idea that colonialism and racism was a thing of the past, that the violence and humiliation suffered by a white male French intellectual was in any way comparable to that of Apartheid South Africa or the Apartheid US South. Better, perhaps, to just bracket Vaneigem’s “bad takes” and focus on what the book still has to offer.

And yet, I keep returning to the passage. For all its flaws, what can we take from it? For I, too, am a middle-class white male intellectual. It is all too easy for those like me to deny our own stakes in social transformation. Indeed, it is much simpler to acknowledge our privilege and perform allyship with the oppressed than it is to acknowledge that we, too, have something to fight for. I do not trust people who only fight for others.

Capitalism is not simply a system outside of us; it is within us, too. Commodity production tears us in two. Our labor, that which should make us feel human, is alienated and turned against us. Our lives are deadened and anxious. As Vaneigem puts it, “what about the impossibility of living, this stifling mediocrity, this absence of passion? This jealous fury to which we are driven when the rankling of never being ourselves makes us imagine that others are happy? This feeling of never really being inside your own skin? Let nobody say these are minor details or secondary considerations.”

Are these at all comparable to police brutality, oppression, and systemic violence carried out against Black people in the United States? No! Of course not! But unless privileged white people recognize the fault lines within ourselves, our own reasons to fight, our own skin in the game, then it is all too easy for our action to resemble (and descend into) liberal charity.  

“I shall not relinquish my share of violence.” This line can be read in multiple ways—and these multiple meanings can co-exist. Capitalism runs through each of us. My body, too, is a battleground. And we must each fight where we stand.

Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid: A Reader

The coronavirus mutual aid response networks that have been created to care for each other through this crisis are inspiring examples of anarchism in action. I’m reworking the syllabus of my current undergraduate course on anarchism to add a unit on disaster and mutual aid which will use the coronavirus mutual aid networks as a case study. Here is a modified version of the readings and videos for the unit (almost all of which are available for free online through these links, with the exception of a few of the books).

Week 1: Introduction to Mutual Aid

Week 2: Disaster and Its Uses

Week 3: Mutual Aid Disaster Relief

Week 4: Coronavirus and Mutual Aid

Stay safe, stay healthy, and take care of each other.