Month: October 2021

Analyzing Biden’s Spending Bill: A Debate Between Sectors of Capital

Here is my general read of the current situation with the Democrats trying to pass Biden’s spending bill, framed within a broader conflict between different sectors of capital:

The Republicans and the Democrats represent different sectors of capital, broadly speaking. The Republicans generally represent less dynamic (even dying) sectors whereas the Democrats represent more progressive and dynamic sectors (particularly big tech and “green” industry).

Part of why the Republicans have gotten more reactionary is that they literally represent dying industries and the white labor aristocracy that has benefited from these industries (think coal mining, old manufacturing jobs, etc.). All that the Republicans can do is to try to preserve what they see as the good old days, from the perspective of both their capitalist and working class bases. I think the future for them is either fascist seizure of power (electoral or otherwise) or a major shakeup.

The Democrats, on the other hand, represent more of the future of capitalism. They are concentrated in the most dynamic, forward-looking, innovative sectors. Big tech gets a lot of the focus, but I think the key here is the green energy sector. Green capitalism—which will still depend on the exploitation of people, land, and animals, but in an ostensibly kinder and more sustainable guise—is likely the way that capital will try to save itself both from climate catastrophe and mass movements demanding a livable world. This might require a relatively substantial break with neoliberal orthodoxy.

But not all Democrats are united around this. It seems clear that Joe Manchin represents one of the major dying sectors of capitalism: coal mining. The fight between different sectors of capital is not over within the party, although it could conceivably be over soon.

I think this framework of understanding the Dems and Repubs as representing different sectors of capital helps explain what is going on here. For what it’s worth, I actually think that most Democrats in office truly want to pass the spending bill. This isn’t all just a show with Manchin and Sinema acting as convenient scapegoats (though I imagine that is part of it). Biden’s plan isn’t radical or socialist. It will arguably be good for the reproduction and growth of capitalism—or at least, for the most dynamic sectors of the nascent green capitalism.

There is a real split within the capitalist/ruling class here. The options on offer are two different visions of the future of capitalism—green capitalism vs fascist reaction. I obviously don’t think either are good. But this dissension gives an opening for us to organize and push for a truly transformative vision that will overcome the contradictions of capitalism and present an alternative both to fascist reaction and to the “green capitalism” that is waiting in the wings.

A Roving Band of Anarcho-Punks: The Vermont Family’s Revitalization of American Anarchism

The Vermont Family was a roving band of anarcho-punks that helped build the American anarchist movement in the 1980s. They were a key element of the connective tissue that linked the dispersed anarchist milieu. The Family originally came together within the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” in which hundreds of people walked from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over the course of nine months in 1986. As many of the liberals dropped out or retreated to cars, a core group of anarchists coalesced to form a traveling “anarchy village” which grew from 15 to around 70 or 80 people. They ran the village through consensus and promoted anarchist politics within the march. After the march reached DC, the Family stayed together as a loose network of travelers, comrades, and friends.

The name of the Vermont Family came from a sort of collective joke. One punk in the anarchy village shared a story about Vermont: apparently it was written in the state constitution that in 1991, two hundred years after its founding, there would be a popular vote on whether the state would remain part of the country. Thus, a fantastical plan was hatched to convince anarchists to move to Vermont and push it to secede from the union. It goes without saying that this did not happen, and it turned out that Vermont had no such plan to put its status to a vote (the similarity of this plan to the later right-libertarian New Hampshire Free State Project is interesting to note). But the moniker stuck as both an inside joke and badge of identification, and many people in the crew adopted it as part of their names.

The Vermont Family formed on the road and stayed on the road throughout their existence until 1989. In their years of traveling, they played a crucial role that has gone unacknowledged in the histories of this era: they formed the interpersonal connections that were necessary to build a continental network of anarchists.

This past summer, I interviewed a person named Mike, who was one of the core members of the Family. He pointed out that in the age of the internet, it is hard for us to understand how an anarchist milieu could function in the 1980s. It required people to travel and make physical connections between far-flung collectives and projects. Some of the Family traveled in an old bus, some hitchhiked; like a punk version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, the Family spread anarchy everywhere they went. A few of them even made their way to West Germany, where they lived in squats and participated in the larger, more militant movement there. They took what they learned back to the US, where they helped to popularize models from the German Autonomen: squatted social centers, infoshops, and black bloc tactics.

When major actions or gatherings were planned in an American city, members of the Vermont crew would show up months in advance, put down temporary roots, and help organize a bigger and better event. They were central to the series of annual national convergences—Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989—that established continental networks of dedicated anarchist militants. The Crew stayed on the road until 1989, when a large number of them went to San Francisco to help organize the 1989 Anarchist Gathering. Finding fertile ground, many of them settled down for the long term in the Bay Area. They established several large collective houses that served as major hubs for both the local and national movement in the 1990s. Many of them remained active in Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, and other anarchist projects.

I have not yet been able to find any documentation of the Vermont Family beyond my oral history interviews, but its story is central to the broader history of the revitalization of anarchism in the 1980s.

Building the Movement: The Rebirth of Anarchism, 1986-89

I’m working on a new piece that will become the first chapter of my dissertation on American anarchism in the late 20th century. I will share more in the future, but here is a short excerpt:

The American left floundered in the 1980s. Reagan and the New Right led a counterrevolution against the social gains of the 1960s and 70s. The last vestiges of the New Left splintered into increasingly irrelevant Marxist-Leninist sects and single issue campaigns. State repression, particularly targeted against Black, Chicano, and indigenous national liberation movements, targeted and crushed a generation of their most talented organizers and fighters. The left in the 1980s was in retreat, fighting rearguard battles to defend what they could against the onslaught of neoliberal globalization and to act in solidarity with movements elsewhere (particularly in Central America and South Africa).

Yet in the middle of this generalized defeat of the left, the anarchist movement underwent a process of revitalization and rebirth. It went from a marginalized, fragmented collection of local struggles and small collectives in the early 1980s to a strong, relatively coordinated national movement by the beginning of the 1990s. This decade marked the shift from Marxism-Leninism and state socialism to the anarchistic forms of social struggle that came to define the turn-of-the-century anti-globalization movement. What caused this shift?

In this article, I argue that the revitalization of anarchism took place for two main reasons. First, the transformation of social, political, and economic conditions, in the US and globally, discredited other forms of left-wing politics. The New Left fizzled under repression, the Soviet Union continued down the path of decay and fought a losing (arguably imperialist) war in Afghanistan, and neoliberal globalization swept the world. State-centered socialism, whether revolutionary or parliamentary, appeared increasingly unviable and even undesirable. Anarchism was particularly well-suited to offer an alternative, as anarchists offered an anti-state and anti-capitalist analysis and set of practices that pointed a new way forward through the challenges of neoliberal globalization. But favorable circumstances did not guarantee the rise of the anarchist movement.

More importantly, a core group of anarchists across the country took advantage of the circumstances and began to consciously build a national movement. Committed pro-organization anarchists, most notably the roving band of anarcho-punks in the “Vermont Family” and the rabble-rousers of the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), formed a pole around which the diffuse anarchist milieu began to coalesce into an actual movement that could coordinate across the country. This took place largely through a series of annual convergences: Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989. In telling the story of these gatherings, I argue that this series of national convergences was the most important factor in the revitalization of anarchism as a revolutionary movement in the 1980s. The convergences laid the foundation for the flowering of the anarchist movement in following decade.

“Anarcho-Beef People”: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

A series of annual gatherings from 1986 to 1989 revitalized the anarchist movement and built the infrastructure for national and continental coordination. I will share more writing about this in the future, but I wanted to share a quick anecdote about the debates over food and animal liberation at these convergences. They offer a window into the evolving values and ethical norms of the anarchist movement at the time. Anarchists developed a commitment to fighting all forms of oppression, hierarchy, and domination—including of other species—rather than solely focusing on capitalism and the state.

*****

The first national convergence was held in Chicago in 1986 to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket Affair. Several hundred people from across the country attended a few days of workshops and a major demonstration. Tensions at the gathering reflected the political and ethical debates taking place within the anarchist movement around the question of animal liberation. Although there is a long history of vegetarian anarchism, this became a major concern in the late twentieth century.

The Chicago organizers served a non-vegetarian friendly (and certainly non-vegan) meal at the major Saturday banquet. This, some attendees felt, was no accidental oversight. Rather, it happened because (as one attendee later reflected) “they don’t like vegetarians.” Tensions rose, fueled by both ethical concerns and hunger. An impromptu demonstration ensued in which, a participant describes, “the street theater crowd from San Francisco began milling around the middle of the room on all fours, mooing and clucking and being herded by a vegan speechifier with an imaginary whip” who then proceeded to “slaughter” the “cows.”

Although the demonstration was largely received in good humor, an associated group handed out incendiary flyers attacking “anarcho-beef people.” The distribution of this flyer provoked strong negative reactions against “preachy vegans” and for a moment it appeared that a physical fight might actually break out. Tensions soon calmed, however—or at least, much of the anger was redirected towards an argument around anti-Semitic flyers distributed by another attendee. (The latter is a story for another time.)

*****

The next annual anarchist gathering, in Minneapolis in 1987, was a crucial step in the path towards a national anarchist network. It was organized with the intention of coordinating the de-centralized movement and laying the groundwork for a national organization. Unlike the previous convergence, which was organized mostly by older folks in a group called “Some Chicago Anarchists,” this one was put on by younger people who were more immersed in the growing anarchist milieu (including its ethical debates).

The Minneapolis crew framed the convergence around “Building the Movement.” While they hosted a wide range of workshops, including anarcho-punk DIY staples like how to dumpster food and brew your own beer, the focus was on facilitating strategic conversations and building the infrastructure for a coordinated national movement. Thus, throughout the gathering there was a “movement building track” of strategic discussions and meetings.

Part of this focus on building the movement entailed avoiding the unnecessary, distracting conflicts of the previous year’s gathering. For one, the organizers vowed to avoid the previous year’s arguments around food by simply serving all vegetarian meals. Of course, this was based in large part around an ethical commitment to animal liberation, but one key participant shared in a recent interview with me that it was also a conscious decision to avoid unnecessary drama and dissension.

The banquet was catered by a vegetarian workers’ cooperative called the New Riverside Cafe. This was specifically noted in a pre-convergence mass mailing to anarchists across the country. It seems that the organizers meant to be clear from the beginning that the meat-headed (sorry) mistakes of Chicago would not be repeated. There would be no protestors pretending to be mooing cows, no near fist fights over burgers.

In part because of its superior organization (including around the question of food), the Minneapolis gathering was a smashing success. It laid the groundwork for the next two annual meetings, in Toronto (‘88) and San Francisco (’89), which set the scene for the anarchist movement in the 1990s.

(Sources for the Chicago gathering come from the zine “Mob Action Against the State: Haymarket Remembered… An Anarchist Convention.”)

Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Have you been involved in anarchist projects or organizations in the United States from the 1970s-2000s? We would like to interview you for an Anarchist Oral History Project!

Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD candidate writing his dissertation on the history of US anarchism in the late 20th century, with a particular focus on Love and Rage. Spencer has been active in anarchist and other left projects for the past decade, beginning with participation in Occupy Boston and currently consisting of helping to run a Marxist reading group and socialist night school where he lives in Ithaca, NY.

Connected to his dissertation research, Spencer is involved with a broader Anarchist Oral History Project seeking to interview a wide swathe of movement participants from the 1960s to today. He is looking to interview anyone involved in anarchist projects and organizations in the late 20th and early 21st century, particularly (but certainly not limited to) Love and Rage and associated groups like Anti-Racist Action. Spencer is located in NYC for Fall 2021 and will be traveling for research and interviews in 2022. You can reach him at spencerbeswick@gmail.com or emptyhands@protonmail.com.