February 2023 – Empty Hands History

The core of the radical environmental movement that developed in the 1960s-90s largely embraced anarchist thought and practice. Radical environmentalists criticised Marxists for their support of rampant industrialisation and their propensity to delay environmental action until ‘after the revolution.’ Eco-anarchists like prominent Earth First!er Judi Bari argued that the environmentally destructive practices of socialist countries reflected both a failure of Marxism and the fact that all states privilege economic growth and stability above the health of the environment.

The theorisation of eco-anarchism was a central component of the broader attempt to revise anarchist politics for the new era. Anarchism’s ecological focus also expanded its appeal to a new generation of environmental activists who saw the pressing need for radical change. As Marxists downplayed the importance of environmental struggle and even championed the industrial policy of socialist states, anarchists began to fight back against the catastrophic damage being done to the earth.

A variety of anarchist positions competed for leadership of the radical environmental movement. Beginning in the 1960s, Murray Bookchin theorised ‘social ecology’ as a synthesis of social anarchism with ecological thought and advocated for decentralised political action to build an ecological society. Opposed to Bookchin’s social ecology was an ecologically-motivated ‘anarcho-primitivism,’ centered around the Fifth Estate newspaper, which went beyond the New Left’s anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism to critique industrial civilisation itself. Both tendencies were influential in the aforementioned anti-nuclear movement, as was anarcha-feminism.

Later organisations like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front would take up aspects of the critique of industrial civilisation in their growing commitment to Deep Ecology. Many anarchists also embraced veganism and animal liberation in this era, in part for environmental reasons, and went on to develop an intersectional vision of ‘total liberation.’

The eco-anarchist tendency took center stage in the 1990s in the actions of the Earth Liberation Front as well as the much-celebrated alliance of ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ (labour unions and environmentalists) in the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization. Anarchism’s ecological focus helps explain its increasing appeal in an era of growing environmental consciousness.

This is an excerpt from my article in the journal Anarchist Studies, “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).” Contact me for a PDF!

The heyday of American anarchism around the turn of the twentieth century was dominated by European immigrants who, although racialized by mainstream society, were predominantly ‘white’ by later twentieth-century standards. The number of self-identified Black anarchists was vanishingly small; even the most prominent Black anarchist in US history, Lucy Parsons, denied her own racial ancestry. The reason for Parsons’s repudiation of her Blackness was complex, but it took place in the context of what we would today criticize as the colorblindness of classical anarchism.

Anarchists rejected all forms of racism on principle and the anarchist-influenced Industrial Workers of the World was one of the first unions to organize across racial lines. Most anarchists, however, felt that addressing race directly only served to reify it and divide the working class. This produced a familiar result: in their dedication to universality, anarchists offered little to the particular problems of African Americans. This contributed to the decline of American anarchism and the corresponding rise of competing leftist tendencies that supported revolutionary forms of Black Nationalism, including the Communist Party in the 1930s. Although anarchists contributed to both the post-World War Two Civil Rights Movement and the social movements of the 1960s, anarchism as such remained marginal.

As Love and Rager Joel Olson later reflected, most white anarchists in the late twentieth century – including leading theorists like Murray Bookchin, Bob Black, and Hakim Bey – inherited the racial blindness of their predecessors.

This account of anarchism’s whiteness and its historical decline has become common sense among activists and historians alike. Yet the extent of US anarchism’s whiteness has been overstated – indeed, we can trace an alternative trajectory of anarchists of color who theorized and practiced anarchism in the face of white supremacy.

In the 1910s, for instance, Mexican and US anarchists worked together in the southern border region to aid and spread the Mexican revolution. Latino anarchists in Los Angeles supported Ricardo Flores Magón’s anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano and helped organize a radical multi-racial workers’ movement that included the Industrial Workers of the World. In the 1930s, Civil Rights leader Ella Baker helped lead an anarchist-inspired organization of Black cooperatives and taught Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in her classes on cooperative economics.

Recent work on African American history has also emphasized the anarchistic qualities of Black life and revolt, from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) to William C. Anderson’s The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (2021). Insisting on anarchism’s whiteness can contribute to the marginalization of anarchists of color. Yet despite this alternative tradition of US anarchism, race as such was not central to anarchist praxis until the late twentieth century.

Anarchist racial politics were transformed with the theorization of Black Anarchism as a distinct tendency in the 1980s. Ex-Black Panthers who were imprisoned for revolutionary activity – most notably Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Ashanti Alston, and Kuwasi Balagoon – theorized what they variously called Black Anarchism or New Afrikan Anarchism. While they upheld the Black Panthers as the leading organization of the 1960s, they critiqued the party’s authoritarian and patriarchal tendencies.

Black anarchists synthesized anarchism with Black Nationalism and advocated national self-determination through non-hierarchical federations of Black communes rather than nation-states. This analysis inspired the birth of a generation of Black and people of color anarchist organizations, including the Federation of Black Community Partisans and Anarchist People of Color. Despite the profound contributions of these revolutionaries, however, they remained little known outside of a small number of activists.

This is excerpted from a forthcoming chapter of mine called “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Subculture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98)” in the Anarchism and Punk book project: https://anarchismandpunk.noblogs.org

Month: February 2023

Is Anarchism a “White” Phenomenon?