Month: April 2023

RAGE! Anarchist Militancy in Reagan’s America

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed radical slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America.

They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the pilot edition of what became the Love and Rage anarchist newspaper was called simply RAGE! The newspaper, which they distributed at a major national action at the Pentagon in 1988, reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad, including the so-called war on drugs.

Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out from political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving. Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites.

Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism (anti-state socialism) provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

Neoliberal Counterrevolution and Anarchist History

The New Right’s neoliberal counterrevolution dramatically reshaped American society. Neoliberal economics remade the system of production and decimated the labor movement, in part by recuperating struggles against the Fordist factory. This counterrevolution set the stage upon which much of the radical left moved towards anarchism in the late twentieth century.

Reactionary masculine individualism was reinscribed as the welfare system was attacked and the liberal wing of the women’s movement was absorbed into the capitalist system. Formal legal equality was granted to Black people while the radical wings of the civil rights and national liberation movements were violently repressed. The expansion of the prison system served both to contain the radical left and to address an economic crisis.

The shifting terrain of late twentieth century society produced a crisis for the left that destabilized Marxism-Leninism and gave rise to an anti-state socialist politics. The state launched an all-out assault on radical organizations and revolutionary fighters. From FBI infiltration and disruption to long term imprisonment and even outright assassination, the state reacted violently to the threat that it perceived from revolutionary forces. By the late 1970s, the state had essentially defeated the revolutionary wing of the New Left, from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground.

Alongside this frontal assault, the changing nature of capitalist production and state power destabilized the analysis and program of the Marxist-Leninist left. Offshoring production to the global south decimated the industrial working-class base of the Old Left while repression disoriented the national liberation movements that had provided the locus of struggle for anti-imperialists in the long 1960s. Traditional approaches to organizing factory workers under the direction of a communist party no longer appeared viable to many militants.

Further, capturing the state no longer appeared to be a sufficient condition for building socialism—and was increasingly seen as undesirable in the first place, echoing the critique of the state formulated by earlier generations of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalist turn of post-Maoist China, the “betrayal” of the French Socialist President François Mitterrand’s 1983 “turn to austerity,” the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, and the failure of national liberation movements to build socialism in the decolonizing world all contributed to a global re-evaluation of the state-centric mode of politics.

A new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and turned towards anarchism. Marxism-Leninism certainly did not disappear, but anarchism grew more quickly and recaptured the imagination of the radical left and broader social movements. This was driven both by the neoliberal counterrevolution’s decimation of the Marxist left and the development of new theory and practice in the anarchist movement.

After decades of subterranean development, the turn-of-the-century global justice/anti-globalization movement marked the renaissance of anarchist politics. Beyond the growing popularity of formal anarchist ideology and organizations, an anarchist ethos had spread across the radical left. As David Graeber put it in 2010, “for activists, ‘anarchist process’ has become synonymous with the basic principles of how one facilitates a meeting or organizes street actions.” This anarchist process includes consensus-based decision making, organizing in horizontal and non-hierarchical fashions, coalescing in networks and bottom-up federations rather than democratic centralist parties, and a commitment to direct action in many forms.

Ultimately, anarchism was reborn because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism in a way that Marxism-Leninism could not.

Read more in my article “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)” (email me at scb274@cornell.edu for a PDF).

Black/New Afrikan Anarchism

Ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism as a new political ideology for revolutionary Black struggle in the late twentieth century.

Black/New Afrikan Anarchists criticized what they perceived to be shortcomings of the Black Panthers, synthesized anarchism with Black Nationalism, and theorized the Black Commune as the revolutionary form of Black self-determination. While they lauded the Panthers as the leading organization of the long 1960s, they criticized the party’s authoritarianism and hierarchical and patriarchal tendencies. Their disillusionment with the Black Panthers led to a wider critique of the Marxist-Leninist approach to Black Nationalism that informed their turn towards anarchism.

The Black/New Afrikan Anarchist synthesis of Black Nationalism and anarchism upheld an anti-state nationalism. They contend that Black Americans are an oppressed nation, but that national liberation can and must take place without establishing a new nation-state. Ashanti Alston argues that revolutionaries must go “beyond nationalism, but not without it.” As he remarks, revolutionary Black Nationalists in the Panthers had perhaps the most advanced politics of the era. However, Alston emphasizes that we must learn from their mistakes and articulate national self-determination in a non-hierarchical manner so that it does not get captured in the state.

In “Anarchism and the Black Revolution,” first written from prison in 1979 as a series of pamphlets, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin lays out a program for a “Black Commune” consisting of local community control coordinated through federations of nested communes (the classic anarchist “commune of communes” with a focus on Black Liberation). After his release from prison, Ervin promoted a new edition of the book on a 1993 speaking tour coordinated by the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which also featured excerpts of the book in its newspaper. Although he soon broke from Love and Rage, Ervin remained active in the anarchist movement and his work provided a major foundation for the Anarchist People of Color organization and tendency.

It is striking that each of the leading theorists of Black Anarchism were ex-Black Panthers who critiqued the hierarchies of Black Nationalist and Marxist-Leninist parties from within prison walls. Black/New Afrikan Anarchism arose as a product of the counterrevolution and the struggle against it. Although they were quite marginal within Black social movements in the late twentieth century, Black/New Afrikan Anarchist theorists in this era laid some of the groundwork (alongside larger tendencies like Black Feminism and Black Marxism) for the recent popularization of Black Anarchism and abolitionism.

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

“Anarchist Anti-Fascism” Podcast Essay

I have a new podcast essay out today titled “Anarchist Anti-Fascism” in the Anarchist Essays podcast from the Anarchism Research Group. It’s based on presentations I recently gave at the American Historical Association and the European Social Science History Conference, and draws on a longer piece from my dissertation.

“In this essay, Spencer Beswick argues that anarchist infrastructure, values, and tactics played a key role in the development of militant antifascism in the late twentieth century United States. He explores how anarchists in Anti-Racist Action (1987-2013) and Love and Rage (1989-1998) confronted fascists in the streets while also organizing radical movements that sought to address the root causes of the broader social crisis.”

You also find it on YouTube: Essay #55: Spencer Beswick, ‘Anarchist Anti-Fascism’

Lessons from the History of Chinese Anarchism

In 1995, Love and Rage militant Joel Olson wrote an article called “The History of Chinese Anarchism” that drew lessons from the defeat of anarchism and the ascendance of communism (Marxism-Leninism) in China in the 1920s.

Marxists sometimes present this transition as an inevitable evolution from the supposed adolescent phase of anarchism into the maturity of Marxism. Not so, says Olson; as in Europe, this “was not an ‘evolution’ but a political struggle—one that the anarchists lost” due to “the anarchists’ failure to come up with a revolutionary strategy that could build a mass movement without violating their principles of autonomy and freedom.”

The problem for the Chinese anarchists was their faith in the spontaneity of the masses—so long as they were properly educated in the “new morality” which would “bring out the ‘natural’ anarchist inclinations in people.” They did not believe in class struggle or movement building. Indeed, Olson explains that “their anti-political stance led them to be skeptical of any attempts at organizing larger than the local level. […] Most Chinese anarchists believed in an ‘organic’ revolution. They saw social change not as class struggle but in terms of alternative forms of social organization such as communes, study societies, and other free spaces that would replicate themselves, spreading anarchism and anarchist ideas throughout society until eventually the state and capitalism were overthrown.”

In the final section of the article, aptly titled “Learning the Lessons,” Olson argues that:

“Before anarchism can be viable it must be able to effectively organize a democratic political movement that is based on the idea that humans built this world and thus humans are the ones who will have to change it, not on some apolitical belief in the power of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘organic’ local actions to spread throughout a society. This has to be done not by abandoning politics, but by creating a new, participatory, nonhierarchical democratic politics. […] The task now is to make that democracy eminently political, and bridge the gap between democracy and organization.”

This captures the essence of what Love and Rage was attempting in this period: to create new forms of mass, democratic, participatory politics that would be grounded in anarchism but resolute in the search for mass politics beyond radical subcultures and alternative spaces.