Author: Empty Hands

Empty Hands History is written by Spencer Beswick, a historian of anarchism and the left who hopes to offer inspiration and lessons for today's movements.

Is Anarchism a “White” Phenomenon?

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

The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it? (WaPo Article)

On the two year anniversary of the attempted Jan. 6 coup, I published a new piece on fascism, anti-fascism, and Anti-Racist Action in the Washington Post:

Two years after the failed Jan. 6, 2021, coup, the far right continues to escalate threats against marginalized groups and to our democratic system more broadly. The mass killing at Club Q in Colorado Springs, followed soon after by an attack on an electrical grid, which some suspect might have been motivated by a desire to disrupt a drag show in North Carolina, offer a grim foreshadowing of more violence to come. This is particularly worrying given Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) recent statement to the New York Young Republican Club that if she and Stephen K. Bannon had been in charge on Jan. 6, the mob “would have been armed” and “we would have won.”

This movement has many of the elements we recognize as fascism. Fascism is a far-right political approach that offers what the historian Robert Paxton calls “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity” to people obsessed with perceived humiliation and social decline. Historically, fascist movements have taken the form of militant nationalist parties that turn against democracy in alliance with elements of the conservative elite. They engage in “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Although it may seem to have come out of nowhere, today’s American fascism has roots in a surge of far-right violence in the late 20th century. We have much to learn from the recent evolution of fascism — and from anti-fascist responses — to help understand far right violence today. . .

You can read the whole article in the Washington Post here: The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it?

Or you can read it without a paywall here at the Anchorage Daily News.

A Year of Anarchist History

I published a lot this year!

My writing on anarcha-feminist abortion struggles was kicked off with my first piece in the Washington Post, “The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting” (May 17)

That same week, I published “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom” (May 19) in It’s Going Down

I was then interviewed with Suzy Subways for the It’s Going Down podcast episode “Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s: A Discussion” (June 17)

My last piece on anarcha-feminist abortion struggle was “Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting: Women’s Liberation, Reproductive Care, and Dual Power” (August 30) for Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life’s excellent series on Reproductive Freedom. You can also find me reading this on Youtube here.

I also published a longer piece on the German Autonomen and the Invisible Committee, “Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack” (July 29) in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory

I published a short essay, first written in the early covid days, in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory’s Pandemics from the Bottom Up series, “The Quarantine Commune” (September 11). You can also find me reading this on Youtube here.

Finally, I published my first peer reviewed academic journal article “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s),” in the Anarchist Studies journal (email me for a PDF of my article!)

I’m looking forward to writing and sharing more in the coming year! My new year’s resolution is to finish my dissertation, titled “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

Theories of Power, Resistance, and History: Marx, Althusser, and Foucault

I recently stumbled across this essay I wrote some five years ago on the nature of power, resistance, and history in Marx, Althusser, and Foucault. I think it remains useful today, so I am sharing it here.

Analysis of schemas of power and resistance provides a framework through which to understand theorists’ conception of the nature of society, the possibilities of resistance and change, and their theory of history itself. This essay analyzes the impact of Karl Marx, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault’s theories of power and resistance on their radically different approaches to and theories of history. Marx’s teleological view of history follows from his conception of power as the repressive domination of society by a ruling class. Class struggle to obtain state power (and thus remake society) is the driving force of historical progress. Louis Althusser expands upon the classical Marxist theory of power through his focus on ideology and the productive role of Ideological State Apparatuses alongside the Repressive State Apparatus. Foucault, on the other hand, rejects the Marxist theory of power and reimagines it as a diffuse, generative force that acts imminently through every social relation. Struggles over state power do not have grand historical import for Foucault; instead, he reimagines history as a genealogy of beginnings, series, discontinuities, and juxtapositions that challenge positivist and evolutionist theories of history. While their theories vary dramatically, the three thinkers are united by their belief in the possibility of resistance and revolution to challenge power and produce a better – or at least differently configured – world.

Classical Marxist conceptions of power emphasize its class character and centralization in the repressive apparatus of the state. Power is always exercised by one class dominating another. While power originates in the economic system, it is alienated (or we could say exteriorized) into the class power of the state. Out of the “contradiction between the interest of the individual and that of the community the latter takes an independent form as the State” which, Marx says, is based “on the classes, already determined by the division of labor.”[1] Each economic mode of production throughout history has its corresponding version of state power based on class rule. The ruling class in each era wields state power to perpetuate its economic domination and repress resistance. As Althusser succinctly puts it, “the Marxist tradition is strict […] the State is explicitly conceived as a repressive apparatus. The State is a ‘machine’ of repression which enables the ruling classes […] to ensure their domination over the working class, thus enabling the former to subject the latter to the process of surplus-value extortion.”[2] Thus under capitalism, Marx famously argues, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”[3]

Part of the appeal of classical Marxism lies in the straightforward relationship between its critique of capitalism and its theorization of the corresponding form (and historical inevitability) of resistance and revolution. Despite its ostensibly competitive individualism, capitalism necessarily socializes production. Workers, forced together in the factory through various processes of enclosure and primitive accumulation, must labor together and thus organize collectively. As Marx argues in the Communist Manifesto, “the advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association […] What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.”[4] The very functioning of capitalism brings the proletariat into contact with each other, makes workers depend on each other, and reveals the form of struggle necessary to complete the socialization of the production and distribution of goods. Workers must complete the process of socialization by assuming state power and collectively controlling the means of production.

The classical Marxist conception of resistance and revolution privileges the conquest of state power as the necessary condition for social transformation. If power is centralized in the state, then the object of political struggle is clear: communist workers must seize state power and wield it in the class interests of the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie. In The German Ideology, Marx explains that “every class which is struggling for mastery, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, postulates the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of domination itself, must first conquer for itself political power in order to represent its interest in turn as the general interest.”[5]Thus the replacement of the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” by the “class dictatorship of the proletariat.”[6] Of course, the proletariat uniquely wields state power in order to abolish the state itself. Its dictatorship is “the necessary transit point to the abolition of class distinctions generally” and thus what Lenin would come to call the “withering away” of the state.[7] This is the ultimate end point of Marxist historical progression: a classless, stateless society in which power is no longer alienated into the state but instead is collectively exercised by all people. Even in his early writing, Marx recognizes “human emancipation” as when “[man] has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers […] as social powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.”[8] The collective organization of social power is what he would soon call communism.

Marx’s theory of power leads directly to his materialist theory of history. History, as we know from the famous beginning of the Manifesto, “is the history of class struggles.”[9] These class struggles are fought largely over control of the state machinery in order to exercise class power over the economic system of society. Class struggle itself is based on the economic progress of society and conflicts over the relations of production. Marx argues in his preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy that “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production [and] thus begins an epoch of social revolution.”[10] He clarifies in the Communist Manifesto that each of these periods of conflict ends “either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”[11] History progresses in economic stages based on the outcome of class struggle.[12] Revolutionary classes drive history forward by seizing state power and remaking society in their image. Of course, historical development all leads down the inevitable path towards communism, which will bring “the prehistory of human society to a close” through the abolition of classes themselves.[13] This teleological historical schema depends on Marx’s conception of power as based in class struggle and centralized in the state.

We may read Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” as a bridge between the classical Marxist theory of power and Foucault’s radical reimagining of it. Althusser maintains much of Marx’s original conception of power in his idea of the Repressive State Apparatus (RSA). The core of the state still functions via repressive force in the RSA, which includes “the Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, the Prisons, etc.”[14] Althusser’s main innovation to the Marxist theory of power is his addition of the Ideological States Apparatuses (ISAs) which reproduce the relations of production through the inculcation of ruling class ideology. There are many ISAs, ranging from religious and educational systems to unions and political parties, which all reproduce ruling ideology in their own particular fashion.[15] Althusser emphasizes that “no class can hold State power over a long period without at the same time exercising its hegemony over and in the State Ideological Apparatuses” (italics in original).[16] Althusser frames the distinction between the RSA and the ISAs as primarily between repression and ideology.[17] Although he never uses this wording, we may interpret that he sees power as performing both repressive and productive roles.

While Althusser ultimately believes in the need for proletarian revolution to seize the Repressive State Apparatus, he also asserts the importance of ideological struggle within the Ideological State Apparatuses. Simply seizing the RSA is not enough to revolutionize society, as unreformed ISAs will continue to reproduce the same capitalist ideology. Althusser points to Lenin’s “anguished concern to revolutionize the educational Ideological State Apparatus (among others), simply to make it possible for the Soviet proletariat, who had seized State power, to secure the future of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transition to socialism.”[18] ISAs, Althusser argues, “may be not only the stake, but also the site of class struggle, and often of bitter forms of class struggle,” for “the resistance of the exploited classes is able to find means and occasions to express itself there, either by the utilization of their contradictions, or by conquering combat positions in them in struggle.”[19] Althusser analyzes the historical example of the Church as the main ISA under feudalism and thus the center of ideological social struggle, and argues that the school is the dominant ISA under capitalism.[20] Schools are integral to capitalism because they force children to learn “a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology […] or simply the ruling ideology in its pure state,” and prepare them to fill their roles as particular kinds of workers in the capitalist machinery.[21] It follows that the “unprecedentedly deep crisis which is now shaking the education systems […] takes on a political meaning” and threatens the entire capitalist system.[22]

While Althusser expands upon the classical Marxist theory of power, Michel Foucault turns it on its head and reimagines it as a productive rather than repressive force. Foucault clearly demarcates his opposition to traditional conceptions of power: “I do not mean ‘Power’ as a group of institutions and mechanisms that ensure the subservience of the citizens of a given state. By power, I do not mean, either, a mode of subjugation which, in contrast to violence, has the form of the rule. Finally, I do not have in mind a general system of domination exerted by one group over another.”[23] Power is not centralized but diffuse, not top-down but bottom-up, not repressive but generative and productive, and finally not exterior but imminent to every social relation. Perhaps the most succinct definition Foucault offers is that “power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitutes their own organization . . . [Power] is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”[24] Power acts as the level of each social relation through a “directly productive role” and infuses all of society.[25]

Foucault further distinguishes power through its modern function as “biopower” which generates and governs life itself. Power works to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: [it is] bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than […] impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”[26] In modern Western civilization, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death.”[27] Power over life operates through discipline of the body and regulation of the population. Foucault argues that the development of biopower was “without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism,” which depends on “the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes” as well as “the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility.”[28] Power is no longer the sovereign right to kill; today, power operates through the productive realm of life itself.

While Foucault is sometimes accused by Marxists of neglecting or even negating the possibility of resistance and revolution, his work points instead towards new imaginings of networked forms of resistance within and against the matrix of power. Indeed, far from denying the possibility of resistance, Foucault argues that resistance to power will always exist, as “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”[29] As power is distributed into each social relationship, the possibility of resistance is also ever-present on the micro level. Foucault speaks of a “multiplicity of points of resistance” which “are present everywhere in the power network.”[30] He rejects the idea of a “single local of great Refusal […] or pure law of the revolutionary” in favor of a “plurality of resistances” which he describes as “mobile and transitory points.”[31] Instead of what he would view as a misguided heroic proletarian struggle leading to a new revolutionary storming of the Winter Palace, Foucault identifies nodes of resistance that form a shifting “swarm” of what theorists in other traditions might call counterpower. And, as Foucault says, “it is doubtless the strategic codification of these points of resistance that makes a revolution possible, somewhat similar to the way in which the state relies on the institutional integration of power relationships.”[32] He stops short of explaining what form this “strategic codification” could take, leaving the theorization of biopolitical revolution to his successors.

Foucault’s theory of power is directly related to his fraught attempt to redefine historical work outside the traditional boundaries of the discipline. Patricia O’Brien argues that Foucault’s project was fundamentally meant to “represent a new history of Western civilization.”[33] Foucault scathingly criticizes the “stereotypical” historians, who see themselves as “the virtuous knight of accuracy […] the doctor of inexhaustible information […] the great witness of Reality […] the heartbroken scholar who weeps over his little piece of earth just pillaged by barbarians.”[34] Foucault’s project was explicitly conceived against the grain of historical work. Rather than write a “total” history, his project was to produce a “general” history, which rejects concepts of totality “in favor of interplays, correlations, dominances.”[35] A general history, Foucault writes, “would deploy the space of dispersion.”[36] Foucault calls as well for genealogical work, which he describes as “patiently documentary […] record[ing] the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality.” [37] Genealogy searches for beginnings, not origins, juxtaposition and differences rather than evolution or recurrence. It accounts for power’s dispersion and shifting relational forms. Genealogy and juxtaposition are used to “[undermine] progressive assumptions about change.”[38]

We can read The History of Sexuality as a case study of Foucault’s mobilization of his theory of power in the service of the history of sexuality and resistance. The book fundamentally challenges the “repressive hypothesis” of sexuality, the idea that sex(uality) really exists on some fundamental level which is then repressed by power. Foucault explains that rather than repressing sexuality, power has in fact generated sexuality itself through a far-ranging incitement of discourse. Rather than cataloguing repression, The History of Sexuality “[searches] instead for instances of discursive production […] of the production of power […] of the propagation of knowledge” and “[writes] the history of these instances and their transformations.”[39] Power employed various mechanisms, including confession and new scientific and medical technologies, to produce a “veritable discursive explosion” around sex.[40] Power deployed discourses of sexuality to accomplish specific aims of social control. Sex was “at the pivot of the two axes along which developed the entire political technology of life,” which allowed power to use sex as “a means of access both to the life of the body and the life of the species.”[41] Thus, sex was perfectly situated to enable power’s ability to discipline bodies and manage populations.

Foucault calls for new forms of struggle against power’s deployment of sexuality. Resistance to power’s discourse of sexuality cannot take the form of sexual liberation, a naïve hope that if we can just cast off the yoke of repression then “tomorrow sex will be good again.”[42] It is worth quoting Foucault at some length here to understand his critique of the politics of sexual liberation and his call for a future with “a different economy of bodies and pleasures.”[43]

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power; on the contrary, one tracks along the course laid out by the general deployment of sexuality. It is the agency of sex that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures.[44]

The pleasures and knowledges produced by the direct contact of bodies, ostensibly unmediated by power’s deployment of sexuality, might form nodes of resistance against power.

Active political struggle is the red thread running through Marx, Althusser, and Foucault; for each thinker, theory and practice were inseparable. Marx was constantly active in workers’ struggles across Europe, most notably in the International Workingmen’s Association, or First International. Althusser was a lifelong member of the Communist Party and active in ideological struggle within the university Ideological State Apparatus. Foucault came out of the Communist Party as well as Maoist and ultra-left milieus in the 1960s – which he rejected as his theoretical analysis progressed – and participated in many political struggles (including anti-racist and anti-prison activism) throughout his life. He also participated in the sado-masochist scene in San Francisco in the early 1980s, which he praised as allowing “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously” and a “desexualization […] of pleasure. […] These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies.”[45] For Foucault, the sado-masochist sex club is a starting point, a node in the networks of resistance that will eventually produce a “different economy of bodies and pleasures.”

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press 1972.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction. New York: Vintage 1990.

Halperin, David. “Queer Politics,” in The New Social Theory Reader, edited by Steven Seidman and Jeffrey C. Alexander, 294-302. London: Routledge 2001.

Marx, Karl. “The Class Struggles in France,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 586-93. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.

———. “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 146-200. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.

———. “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 3-6. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.

———. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 469-500. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.

———. “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 26-52. New York: WW Norton & Co 1978.

O’Brien, Patricia. “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” in The New Cultural History, edited by Lynn Hunt. Berkeley: UC Press 1989.

[1] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 160.

[2] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 92.

[3] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 475.

[4] Ibid., 483.

[5] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 161.

[6] Karl Marx, “The Class Struggles in France” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 592-93.

[7] Ibid., 593.

[8] Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 46.

[9] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 473.

[10] Karl Marx, “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 4-5.

[11] Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 474.

[12] Karl Marx, “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 5.

[13] Ibid.,5.

[14] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 96.

[15] Ibid., 96.

[16] Ibid., 98.

[17] Ibid., 97-98.

[18] Ibid., 98-99.

[19] Ibid., 99.

[20] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, 102-3.

[21] Ibid., 104-5.

[22] Ibid., 106.

[23] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 92.

[24] Ibid., 92-93.

[25] Ibid., 96.

[26] Ibid., 136.

[27] Ibid., 138.

[28] Ibid., 141.

[29] Ibid., 95.

[30] Ibid., 95.

[31] Ibid., 95-96.

[32] Ibid., 96.

[33] Patricia O’Brien, “Michel Foucault’s History of Culture,” 33.

[34] Ibid., 30.

[35] Ibid., 33.

[36] Ibid., 34.

[37] Ibid., 37.

[38] Ibid., 37.

[39] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 12.

[40] Ibid., 17.

[41] Ibid., 145-46.

[42] Ibid., 7.

[43] Ibid., 159.

[44] Ibid., 157.

[45] David Halperin, “Queer Politics” in The New Social Theory Reader, 300.

Spread Anarchy, Live Communism: A Revolutionary Tradition [Syllabus]

The real communist question is not ‘how to produce,’ but ‘how to live.’

The Invisible Committee

People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth.

Raoul Vaneigem

What is communism? Can it mean anything beyond either a future mode of production or a repressive ideology disproved by history? What might it look like to pursue a communist politics and communist “form-of-life” today? This course traces a revolutionary communist orientation through a broad history of subversive European thought and practice. Putting classic Marxist and anarchist texts in conversation with contemporary revolutionary theory, we will follow a line from the medieval commune’s “passionate intensity of life” to the present-day call from the Invisible Committee to “spread anarchy, live communism.” Particular attention will be paid to the concept of alienation, the daily practice of radicals, and what became known as the “revolution of everyday life.” The first half of the course offers a grounding in classical anti-capitalist thought and practice, from Marx and Kropotkin to Lenin, with inflection points in the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. The remainder of the semester explores the post-WWII revolutionary praxis of the Situationists, Autonomist Marxism, and what we might call a rhizomatic Deleuzian communism. Authors include Marx, Kropotkin, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lukács, Benjamin, Debord, Vaneigem, Deleuze, Guattari, Bifo, Federici, Hardt, Negri, Ross, Agamben, Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, and more.

Unit One: Historical Groundings: A Medieval Commune/ism?

Week 1: The Passionate Intensity of Medieval Life and the Use of History

  • Johan Huizinga, “The Passionate Intensity of Life” from The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919)
  • Mikhail Bakhtin, short excerpt from the Introduction to Rabelais and His World (1965)
  • Peter Kropotkin, “Mutual Aid in the Medieval City” from Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
  • CrimethInc., “The Brethren of the Free Spirt” from Days of War, Nights of Love (2001)
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, short excerpt from “On the Use and Abuse of History for Life,” in Untimely Considerations (1874)

Week 2: Modernity and the Capitalist Counterrevolution

  • Silvia Federici, “All the World Needs a Jolt” and “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women,” from Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (1998)
  • Stephen Toulmin, excerpt from “What Is the Problem About Modernity?” from Cosmopolis (1990)

Unit 2: Marxism and Anarchism: The Communist Imaginary

Week 3: Marxism

  • Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848)
  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844)
  • Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852)

Week 4: Anarchist Communism

  • Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread (1892)
  • An alternative vision: Sergey Nechayev, “Catechism of a Revolutionary” (1869)

Week 5: The Paris Commune

  • Kristin Ross, Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (2016)

Week 6: What Is to Be Done? Two Answers

  • Michael R. Katz and William G. Wagner, “Introduction” to Nikolai Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done? (1989)
  • Nikolai Chernyshevsky, “Ch 4: Second Marriage; xvi: Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream” from What Is to Be Done? (1863)
  • Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902)

Unit 3: The Russian Revolution and Beyond: the Leninist Vision

Week 7: The Russian Revolution and the Leninist Vision of Communism

  • Vladimir Lenin, The State and Revolution (1917)
  • Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on Machiavelli’s Politics” from The Modern Prince & Other Writings (1957)

Week 8: Marxist Alternatives to Lenin?

  • Rosa Luxemburg, “The Mass Strike” (1906)
  • Leon Trotsky, “Results and Prospects” (1906)

Week 9: Selected Insights from The Frankfurt School

  • Gyorgy Lukács, excerpt from “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness (1923)
  • Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1942)

Unit 4: The Situationists and Autonomism: The Revolution of Everyday Life

Week 10: The Situationists and May ‘68

  • Guy Debord, chapters 1-4 and 8-9 from The Society of the Spectacle (1967)
  • Raoul Vaneigem, Introduction, chapters 1-2 and 12-25 from The Revolution of Everyday Life (1967)

Week 11: Autonomist Marxism

  • Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
  • Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Labor and Alienation in the Philosophy of the 60s” from The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy (2009)

Week 12: Italian Autonomia and German Autonome

  • George Katsiaficas, “From 1968 to Autonomy,” “Italian Autonomia,” “Sources of Spontaneous Politics in Germany,” and excerpts from “The (Anti)Politics of Autonomy” and “The Theory of Autonomy” from The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Social Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (2006)
  • Geronimo, “Appendix: ‘Autonomous Theses 1981’” from Fire and Flames: A History of the German Autonomist Movement (2012)

Unit 5: Rhizomatic Communism: The Communist Form-of-Life

Week 13: The Rhizome and the Nomadic War Machine

  • Michel Foucault, “Method” and excerpt from “Right of Death and Power over Life” from History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 (1976)
  • Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Introduction: Rhizome” and excerpt from “1227: Treatise on Nomadology:—the War Machine” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980)
  • Aragorn Eloff, “Children of the new Earth – Deleuze, Guattari and anarchism” (2015)

Week 14: Communists Like Us

  • Felix Guattari and Toni Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance (1990)

Week 15: Empire and Multitude

  • Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, introduction to Empire (2000) and “Democracy of the Multitude” from Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

Week 16: A Communist “Form-of-Life”?

  • Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics (2000)
  • Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War (2010)

Week 17: Spread Anarchy, Live Communism

  • The Invisible Committee, “Spread Anarchy, Live Communism” (2011)
  • The Invisible Committee, “Get Going!” “Find Each Other,” “Get Organized,” and “Insurrection,” from The Coming Insurrection (2007)
  • The Invisible Committee, chapters 2 and 5-8 from To Our Friends (2014)
  • The Invisible Committee, chapters 2-4 and 7 from Now (2017)

New Publication: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)”

My first peer reviewed journal article was recently published in the Anarchist Studies journal: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).”

Here is the abstract:

After almost a century of Marxist predominance, how did anarchism develop from a marginal phenomenon into a force at the centre of the anti-globalisation movement? This article explores how anarchism was reborn in a counter-revolutionary age. Part one investigates how the New Right’s post-1960s counterrevolution defeated the New Left and remade US society, including by recuperating potentially liberatory elements of social movements. Part two examines how a new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and popularised the anarchist analysis and principles that provided the foundation for the anti-globalisation movement. The article discusses five examples of the development of anarchist theory and practice: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, eco-anarchism, punk anarchism, and revolutionary social anarchism. Ultimately, the article argues that anarchism was revitalised in the late twentieth century because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the neoliberal counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism.

Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting: Women’s Liberation, Reproductive Care, and Dual Power

This week I published a new piece on the history of abortion struggles in Hard Crackers: Chronicles of Everyday Life.

“At recent pro-choice demonstrations, we have been told that the only way to protect abortion is to vote for Democrats in November. Yet the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate. The Democrats appear more interested in fundraising off of Roe and attacking grassroots activists than they do fighting the right-wing assault on abortion. But reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them. The historical experiences of feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies for building power and transforming society.”

Read the full piece here: Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting: Women’s Liberation, Reproductive Care, and Dual Power

I also recorded an audio version that I uploaded to YouTube, which you can listen to here: Abortion Struggles Beyond Voting.

Prefiguration or Dual Power? Infoshops and Revolutionary Anarchism in the 1990s

I recorded my recent talk at the Anarchist Studies Conference and uploaded it to youtube, check it out!

“Spencer Beswick gives a short overview of the anarchist infoshop movement, including its historical roots in West German squats and rapid growth in the US in the 1990s. He also addresses critiques of the model, particularly from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which argued that infoshops should be subordinated to the task of building a revolutionary movement and dual power structures. Love and Rage was inspired by the Zapatistas in Mexico, who they saw as a model and a vision of the future. Ultimately, the debates over infoshops reflected very real differences in revolutionary strategy and tactics that are relevant for today’s movements.

This talk was originally presented at the Anarchist Studies Network Conference in August 2022 on a panel called ‘Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions.'”

Rhizomes and Anarchist Infoshops: Deleuze & Guattari in Practice?

I’m writing a piece on infoshops in the 1990s, which led me to revisit an earlier essay I wrote on our Antidote Infoshop and Food Not Bombs in Ithaca in 2018. I wrote it as I read Deleuze & Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, which helped me think through the rhizomatic forms of anarchist organization. I don’t necessarily agree with much or all of the piece anymore, and it is notable that the Ithaca anarchist groups it highlights each fell apart within a year… But I still think it is interesting. Here is a brief excerpt from the middle of the piece:

Alternative infrastructure and anarchist organizations more broadly should be organized in fluid rhizomatic networks to resist state control. Here, anarchists can benefit from Deleuze and Guattari’s exploration of the possibilities of non-hierarchical rhizomatic networks of organization.[1] Counter to all efforts to develop hierarchies and centralize control, we should fight for decentralization and fractal organization; as the Curious George Brigade argues, “fractalized resistance cannot be adequately met by predesigned management and crowd control strategies.”[2]

Against a hierarchical, arborescent organization of thought and practice, Deleuze and Guattari pose another mode of organization: the rhizome. Anarchist infrastructure and organization are largely structured as rhizomes already, but this principle should continue to be embraced more consciously.

Rhizomes have six main characteristics. The first two are principles of connection and heterogeneity. That is to say, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.”[3]

Third is the principle of multiplicity, which treats the multiple “as a substantive, ‘multiplicity’ […] Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities.”[4]

Fourth, the principle of asignifying rupture, holds that rhizomes can be broken at any spot but continually reform along new lines. “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another.”[5] In this principle, Deleuze and Guattari provide a strategy for how to practice rhizomatic expansion by following deterritorializing flows.[6]

Finally, the fifth and sixth principles are of cartography and decalcomania. Against the “tree logic” of “tracing and reproduction,” D&G argue that “the rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. […] What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.”[7] This experimentation in concrete projects is core to the anarchist approach.

Networks of anarchist infrastructure should turn a potential weakness—the fluid and often ephemeral nature of autonomous spaces—into a strength by organizing rhizomatically. Each node within the network should make as many connections as possible to other spaces and draw lines to connect them. The network should embrace its ever-shifting quality and constantly reconfigure itself, moving fluidly around shifting nodes. And finally, anarchists should continually experiment with new organizations and institutions, never falling back on tracings of previous efforts.

This relates as well to the common anarchist organizational form of the affinity group. Affinity groups are small collectives of people (usually around five to ten) who naturally share certain affinities regarding political practice and ideology. They often begin as or become close friends. As the members share common affinities, the goal is to operate as a unit and thus be more effective politically. Deleuze and Guattari write of the multiplicity of the wolf pack in a manner reminiscent of an affinity group.

among the characteristics of a pack are small or restricted numbers, dispersion, nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses, inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions, lines of deterritorialization, and projection of particles. […] The pack, even on its own turf, is constituted by a line of flight or of deterritorialization that is a component part of it.[8]

Rather than attempt to organize more traditionally in formal structures, anarchists embrace the small, shifting multiplicities of affinity groups that come together for specific actions and projects before dispersing again to new areas and pursuits.

[1] Indeed, as I plan to argue in subsequent academic work, one can trace a genealogy relatively directly from Deleuze and Guattari’s work in the 1970s to contemporary anarchist practice in the United States, via Italian Autonomia and the West German Autonomen.

[2] The Curious George Brigade, Anarchy in the Age of Dinosaurs, 45.

[3] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 7.

[4] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 8-9.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 9.

[6] “Always follow the rhizome by rupture; lengthen, prolong, and relay the line of flight; make it vary, until you have produced the most abstract and tortuous of lines of n dimensions and broken directions. Conjugate deterritorialized flows. Follow the plants: you start by delimiting a first line consisting of circles of convergence around successive singularities; then you see whether inside that line new circles of convergence establish themselves, with new points located outside the limits and in other directions. Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialization, extend the line of flight to the point where it becomes an abstract machine covering the entire plane of consistency. ‘Go first to your old plant and watch carefully the watercourse made by the rain. By now the rain must have carried the seeds far away. Watch the crevices made by the runoff, and from them determine the direction of the flow. Then find the plant that is growing at the farthest point from your plant. All the devil’s weed plants that are growing in between are yours. Later . . . you can extend the size of your territory by following the watercourse from each point along the way.’” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 11.

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12.

[8] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 33.