Empty Hands – Empty Hands History

Revolutionary Anti-Fascism: the Role of Anarchism in Anti-Racist Action

I have a new article out called “Revolutionary Anti-Fascism: the Role of Anarchism in Anti-Racist Action” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

“Centering the contributions of anarchism in our historical analysis reveals how ARA fought fascists but also provided a radical alternative to the Far Right’s war against the state. . . For Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action, anti-fascism could not simply mean the defense of the liberal democratic state against fascism, but rather necessitated its revolutionary overthrow and the construction of a libertarian socialist society.”

The article draws from a chapter of my dissertation, which is called “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

I previously published a piece called “Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. That article is in the latest print edition of the journal, which you can buy from the Institute for Anarchist Studies here or from AK Press here.

“We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98)

In the past two days, I successfully defended my dissertation (“Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century”) and had a new peer reviewed article published in the open access journal Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power. The article is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98),” and it is part of a fantastic special issue called “Burning the Ballot: Feminism Meets Anarchy.”

Here is how the editors describe my article in their introduction to the special issue:

“As we draw towards the end of our special issue Spencer Beswick continues the discussion of anarcha-feminist contributions to struggles for abortion access, queer and trans liberation, and challenging all forms of oppression and domination within movement spaces themselves. Looking at the Love and Rage organization, and highlighting its contributions throughout the 1990s to keep the anarchist flame alive, Beswick shows the continued intersectional promise of anarcha-feminist politics against liberal forms of inclusion and continually furthering anti-racist and feminist concerns within broader anarchism. The wide ranging work of Love and Rage shows the necessity, but also the difficulties, in expanding intersectional work within movements that continues to resonate today.

In particular, Beswick details the efforts by Love and Rage to foreground and incorporate an explicit anti-racist feminist politics as the organization grew and developed by carefully considering the interventions of Women of Colour feminists and organizers. Importantly, the growing pains of the organization are highlighted, including a critical discussion of its own internal challenges with racism, patriarchy and male domination, and they serve as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance to confront systems of domination in all movement spaces. Externally, the militant contributions of Love and Rage to confronting anti-abortion reactionaries provide lessons and points of consideration for the movements of today. “Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism,” Beswick argues, “feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists helped build a fighting, revolutionary feminist movement.” By examining the contributions, complexities and contradictions within Love and Rage “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98)” charts the history of anarcha-feminist agitation and its enduring legacy, while revealing the continued work that needs to be done in the present.”

You can read the article for free here: “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” Let me know what you think!

Rhizomes and Revolution: Deleuze & Guattari’s Impact on US Anarchism

I so badly want to write an article on Deleuze & Guattari’s influence on the US anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. One path is obvious–Hakim Bey’s use of their idea of the Nomadic War Machine in his popular concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones. But there is more.

I’m equally interested in tracing a thread through Italian Autonomia & the German Autonome. A group of Italian autonomists including Bifo formed a study group on Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus that contributed directly to them forming the pirate station Radio Alice in 1976. They envisioned Radio Alice as a node in a decentralized, rhizomatic structure of a new kind of post-1968 revolutionary movement. Radio Alice, which operated out of Bologna, played an important role in the upswell of Autonomia in 1977.

Squatters and autonomists from West Germany traveled to Italy, where they were influenced by Autonomia and helped draft a set of Autonomous Theses in 1981 in Padua, Italy. They called for a “politics of the first person,” explaining that “we fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free… We have no organization per se. Our forms of organization are all more or less spontaneous. There are squatters’ councils, telephone chains, autonomous assemblies, and many, many small groups.”

The rhizomatic organizational model had many sources, including traditional anarchism and council communism, but it was undoubtedly influenced to some degree by efforts to put Deleuze & Guattari into practice by Radio Alice within the context of Italian Autonomia.

The German Autonomen were young radicals who squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings and turned them into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural spaces. They constructed rich networks of autonomous spaces meant to provide both alternative forms of living and bases of attack. At their best, these networks of alternative spaces and infrastructure functioned as dual power and urban liberated territory in which the revolution was lived through a communism of everyday life. You can read more in my article Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack.

As Love & Rage put it in a history of anarchism in the 1980s, “The Autonomen were an important inspiration for the young activists in the U.S. and Canada who would be attracted to and who would reinvigorate the anarchist movement.”

A number of US anarchists traveled to Germany in the late 1980s, where they stayed in squats and were inspired by the militancy of the movement. 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.

I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that the grassroots transnational spread of Deleuze & Guattari played a key role in the development of the new anarchist movement. All of this happened before their embrace in academia and before Hardt & Negri popularized them in radical spaces with the Empire trilogy.

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.

Élisée Reclus: Veganarchism, Violence, and Colonialism

Vegetarianism and concern for animal rights has a long history in the anarchist movement. The great geographer and theorist of anarcho-communism Élisée Reclus (1830-1905) was one of the most prominent radical vegetarians in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Reclus was part of a milieu of Fin de siècle radicalism that was often anarchistic and concerned with a wide range of social issues, including vivisection and other forms of animal exploitation. Reclus wrote a stirring defense of his ethical position in a classic essay called “On Vegetarianism” (1901) in which he argues that vegetarianism is both an ethical and aesthetic necessity.

Reclus called for a beautiful, joyous life that only the total transformation of anarchism could provide. He extended this criteria of maximizing beauty and joy to the realm of food and the related concern of animal exploitation. Reclus decried slaughterhouses and the display of dead animal bodies for food as ugly, violent, and disquieting. These ugly displays were interwoven into everyday life under capitalism (and, to be sure, before it as well). This cannot help but affect our own lived experience and deaden our senses, decrease the beauty of our lives. Like the ugly scar of a concrete dam blocking a river, the slaughter and vivisection of animals dammed the beautiful potential of a life well lived.

The violence of animal exploitation and consumption at home was intimately connected, in Reclus’s mind, to the violence of colonialism and war abroad. Colonized peoples were dehumanized and reduced to the level of animals, which justified their slaughter. Of course, Reclus decried this dehumanization. At the same time, he believed that it was enabled by the treatment of animals themselves as disposable and beneath ethical concern. If, he argued, we could learn to approach animals ethically at home, it would destabilize the justification of colonial violence abroad. It would transform our relationship with the world in a way that precludes violence and exploitation directed at any human or non-human animals.

While the argument is compelling, it rings slightly hollow to our ears today. One concrete example suffices to expose the faulty reasoning: today, the Israeli Defense Force uses the relatively widespread prevalence of veganism in its armed forces as an example of its supposed dedication to peace. The IDF uses it as both a shield to deflect attention from its violence against Palestinians as well as a weapon to justify this violence against the supposedly “brutal” and “backwards” colonized subjects. This fits alongside the Israeli “greenwashing” and “pinkwashing,” (environmental and queer justifications for colonial violence).

Thus, it seems clear from our vantage point in the twenty-first century that Reclus was naïve in his belief that ending animal exploitation would end colonial violence. Capitalism and colonialism are able to co-opt and mobilize liberatory calls into their “humanitarian” defenses of the status quo and of the forms of violence that they practice.

Yet there is still an appeal to Reclus’s call for an ethical, beautiful life free of exploitation of human and non-human animals alike. In the late twentieth century, a new generation of anarchists and punks would develop this position and further interrogate the relationship between the violence of animal exploitation and the violence of colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy.

Anarchism Reborn: Eco-Anarchism in the 1960s-90s

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!