I just submitted my chapter for this upcoming book series on anarchism and punk coming out from the UK radical publisher Active Distribution next year (distributed by AK Press in the US). I’m excited to get published in print for the first time! Here is the introduction to the chapter:
“What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”-Love and Rage member Joel Olson
“Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white […] Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building” (Love and Rage, 1997, p. 3). Thus argues a 1997 editorial that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial or should it accept its whiteness and try to work in coalitions with people of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage (1989-98), which was the most significant American anarchist federation since the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. Love and Rage was embedded in the largely white punk world. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive in the post-1960s counterrevolution, members worried that punk’s white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and “race traitor” politics that sought to abolish whiteness in order to build revolution.
This chapter begins by situating Love and Rage within the history of race and anarchism in the United States. Despite a rich tradition of anti-authoritarianism among people of color, American anarchism is typically thought to be a largely white phenomenon. But in the 1980s, imprisoned ex-Black Panthers began to theorize a new form of Black Anarchism that reverberated through the anarchist world. Love and Rage drew on this tradition as well as the theorization of white skin privilege by the Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-86) to center whiteness as one of the major barriers to revolutionary politics. Given its focus on race, the federation was keenly aware of its own racial demographics. Co-founder Chris Day argued that the group’s social base was the newly “reproletarianized” children of the white middle class who came to anarchist politics through the punk scene. I employ political theorist AK Thompson’s notion of white middle class “ontological politics,” which explains how dissident youth sought a new way of being in the world, to analyze how punk culture provided new forms of life and politics for white reproles. The punk scene provided a refuge for young dissidents to live their anarchist politics.
Anarchist punks practiced a form of white race traitor politics: they sought to actively repudiate their privilege in order to break up the “white club” that upholds the US racial hierarchy. But the efficacy of these tactics is questionable, and I end by critically evaluating Love and Rage’s approach to anti-racism. Despite its commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism, the group failed to adequately address the problems posed by its own whiteness and experienced great difficulty both recruiting and working in coalition with people of color. I argue that, aside from anti-fascist organizing against white supremacists, the federation’s punk-influenced ontological politics largely favored individual, performative rejection of white privilege rather than collective political action. This undermined Love and Rage’s efforts to build multi-racial revolutionary dual power beyond the boundaries of punk subculture. I end by identifying lessons that anarchists, punks, and anti-racists can draw from the federation’s history.