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.

Marxism, Anarchism, and Anti-Colonialism Syllabus

The George Floyd Rebellion of Summer 2020 transformed the terrain of contemporary social struggle. In Fall 2020 I taught an intro class on “Marxism, Anarchism, and Anti-Colonialism” as an attempt to provide a theoretical and historical grounding for students involved in the movement. Here is the syllabus, with links/PDFs for all readings.

Course Description:

The US president tweets about “ugly anarchists” and pundits warn of a communist conspiracy to destroy America; meanwhile, abolitionists in Black Lives Matter offer a vision of a society without police, prisons, and capitalism. In a broad historical analysis of the contemporary political moment, this course asks: what do Marxists and anarchists really believe? This writing seminar will explore the theory and practice of Marxism and anarchism with particular focus on race, imperialism, and anti-colonialism. Students will write a persuasive political essay, a film analysis, papers exploring anti-capitalist theory, and historical reflections on national liberation movements. Readings will include Marx, Lenin, Kropotkin, Ho Chi Minh, Fanon, Mao, Mariátegui, the Combahee River Collective, Angela Davis, and more.

Note that the Marx readings all come from Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (1978). Here is a PDF.

Course Schedule

Week One: Introduction to Class

Unit One: Marxism

Week Two: The Communist Manifesto

  • Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”(1848) [p. 472-500]
  • Karl Marx, excerpt from “Marx on the History of His Opinions,” [Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (1859) [p. 4-5]

Week Three: Wage Labor and Alienation

  • Karl Marx, excerpt from Wage Labor and Capital (1847) [p. 203-206]
  • Karl Marx, excerpt from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) [p. 70-84]

Week Four: Marx and Colonialism

Week Five: Marxism-Leninism

Unit Two: Anarchism

Week Six: Introduction to Anarchism

Week Seven: Case Study: Mutual Aid and Coronavirus

Week Eight: Anarchism and Anti-Colonialism

Unit Three: National Liberation and Indigeneity

Week Nine: “Stretching Marxism” with Fanon

Week Ten: Marxism and Indigeneity

Week Eleven: Case Study: The Zapatistas

Unit Four: The Black Freedom Struggle

Week Twelve: Resistance, Marronage, and National Liberation

Week Thirteen: Black Power and Anti-Colonialism

Week Fourteen: Black Feminism and Abolition

Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack

I just published an article in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory called “Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack.”

This article combines historical insights from the Autonomen with theoretical interventions from the Invisible Committee in order to make several related arguments. First, the commune form creates alternative worlds in which liberalism is combatted and collective struggle against alienation takes place. Second, communes operate according to a unique spatial logic that ruptures capitalist geography, promotes new spatial practices, and establishes non-alienated inhabitation of territory.

Third, the Autonomen and the Invisible Committee theorize and act upon a new conception of communism as a collective practice of living the “good life” in revolutionary struggle rather than as solely a (future) economic system. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this in daily life. Finally, revolutionary practice entails networks of autonomous communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territories that function as bases from which to attack capitalist state power.

You can read the article for free online at Perspectives on Anarchist Theory!

American Anarchism Syllabus

A few years ago, I taught my first class: a first-year writing seminar called “American Anarchism.” Here is the syllabus, which may be useful to folks looking for a grounding in the history of anarchism in the United States!

“Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government. Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals…”

-Emma Goldman

“If it is the future you seek, then I tell you that you must come to it with empty hands… You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

-Ursula K. Le Guin

Course description:

Anarchists are notorious for bomb-throwing “propaganda of the deed,” but they have historically been far more likely to reach for a pen than a stick of dynamite. What do anarchists have to offer us as writers? This course explores the history of American anarchism through historical analysis paired with literature and manifestos. We will study the rebellious writing of anarchists like Emma Goldman, David Graeber, and CrimethInc in order to refine our own techniques. Students will write historical essays, artistic and literary analysis, a persuasive political essay, and a manifesto. We will take inspiration from Ursula Le Guin’s affirmation that “writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight.”

Course Schedule

Unit 1: Introduction to American Anarchism

Week 1: A Beginning

Tue., Jan. 21: Introduction to Class
Thu., Jan. 23: “Are You An Anarchist?”

Week 2: Classical Anarchism
Tue., Jan. 28: Anarchist Communism


Thu., Jan. 30: Anarchy in the US

Week 3: Settler Colonialism, Slavery, and Resistance
Tue., Feb. 4: Settler Colonialism and Resistance


Thu., Feb. 6: Slavery and Resistance

Unit 2: Classical American Anarchism (late 19th/early 20th century)

Week 4: Early American Anarchism
Tue., Feb. 11: Utopian Socialism and Individualist Mutualism

Thu., Feb. 13: Immigrant Anarchism and Haymarket

Week 5: Anarchist Apogee and Decline

Tue., Feb. 18: Syndicalism and the Anarchist Apogee


Thurs., Feb. 20: Propaganda of the Deed and Insurrectionism

  • Lucy Parsons “A Word to Tramps”
  • Luigi Galleani, excerpt from “Propaganda of the Deed,” from The End of Anarchism? (1925)
  • Andrew Cornell, short excerpts from “The Red and Black Scare, 1917-1924” and “A Movement of Defense, of Emergency, 1920-1929,” in Unruly Equality (2016)

Week 6: From the Depression to the 1950s
Tue., Feb. 25: February Break, No Class

Thu., Feb. 27: Depression, Spanish Revolution, and WWII

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “The Unpopular Front, 1930-1939” and “Anarchism and Revolutionary Nonviolence, 1940-1948” from Unruly Equality (2016)

Unit 3: Anarchism in the Long 1960s

Week 7: Long 1960s Part 1: From Civil Rights to the New Left
Tue., Mar. 3: The Avant-Garde and the Civil Rights Movement

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “Anarchism and the Avant-Garde, 1942-1956” and “Anarchism and the Black Freedom Movement, 1955-1964,” from Unruly Equality


Thu., Mar. 5: Anarchism and the New Left

  • Andrew Cornell, excerpts from “The New Left and Countercultural Anarchism, 1960-1972,” from Unruly Equality (2016) (240-279)
  • Murray Bookchin, “Post-Scarcity Anarchism” (1967/68)

Week 8: Long 1960s Part 2: Counterculture and the Rebirth of Anarchism
Tue., Mar. 10: Counterculture


Thu., Mar. 12: Anarchism “Reborn”

Unit 4: New Anarchisms: Anarcha-Feminism, Black Anarchism, and Environmentalism

Week 9: Anarcha-Feminism and Black Feminism
Tue., Mar. 17: Anarcha-Feminism


Thu., Mar. 19: Black Feminism and Anarchism

Week 10: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism and Radical Environmentalism
Tue., Mar. 24: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism


Thu., Mar. 26: Ecology, Primitivism, Earth Liberation

Week 11: Spring Break
Tue., Mar. 31: No Class (Spring Break)
Thu., Apr. 2: No Class (Spring Break)

Unit 5: Punk and Anarchism

Week 12: Punk, Anarchism, and Manifestos
Tue., Apr. 7: Punk and Manifestos


Thu., Apr. 9: Riot Grrrl and Zines

Week 13: Love & Rage, T.A.Z., and the Infoshop Movement


Tue., Apr. 14: Love & Rage (Revolutionary Anarchist Federation)


Thu., Apr. 16: Temporary and Permanent Autonomous Zones

Unit 6: Contemporary Anarchism

Week 14: Anti-Globalization Movement


Tue., Apr. 21: Anti-Globalization/Global Justice Movement


Thu., Apr. 23: 21st Century Anarchism, Earth & Animal Liberation, and the Green Scare

Week 15: Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter
Tue., Apr. 28: Occupy Wall Street


Thu., Apr. 30: Anarchist People of Color and Black Lives Matter

***Friday, May 1: Mayday, International Workers Day***

Week 16: Endings and new beginnings
Tue., May. 5: Whither Anarchism?

Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League

In the late 1980s, the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) theorized and practiced what they called “revolutionary anarchism” and helped build an organized anarchist movement across North America. In “Bowling for Beginners: An Anarchist Primer,” RABL offers an initial definition of anarchism:

Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the absence of imposed authority. Anarchy is a society that is built on the principles of respect, cooperation and solidarity. Anarchy is wimmin controlling their own bodies, workers controlling their own workplaces, youth controlling their own education and the celebration of cultural difference.

reprinted in Love and Rage, Aug 1990

RABL gives a short history of anarchism from the 1886 Haymarket Affair to contemporary squatters movements in order to demonstrate that successful movements all share a common thread of people taking power into their own hands and collectively struggling for a new world. RABL rejected the need for a revolutionary vanguard, arguing that “only the masses, completely involved and in absolute control, can make a real revolution.” In the end, “anarchism is about people empowering themselves to take control and to lead their own lives.”

But since those in power will not give it up without a fight, revolution is necessary. The basic point of unity for RABL was an agreement on the necessity of revolutionary action to reach a classless, stateless society. RABL brought together the most pro-organization and anti-imperialist anarchists in the Twin Cities—and eventually across the US—to advocate a combination of direct action and revolutionary organization.

True to their name, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League crew began referring to “going bowling” as a code for direct action, which could be anything from nighttime sabotage (gluing locks, spray painting, etc.) to acting as a militant bloc at a street demonstration. Many anarchists at the time practiced this sort of small-scale militancy, which could be organized in small affinity groups of friends. RABL’s intervention was to pair this individual and small-group direct action with a vision for a broad anarchist federation.

Anarchism could continue to exist forever on the margins of society in small groups, but if anarchists wanted to actually change the world, they needed to get organized and help build militant mass movements.

Despite their roots in a relatively small city, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League played an outsized role in transforming US anarchism and organizing a national movement at the end of the 20th century…

This is the latest in my new series Fragments of an Anarchist Dissertation. Check out the last post here: RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

“We have reached a breaking point” -Nikolas S., Rage! October 1988

“We must still know to direct our anger towards revolution.” -Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League, 1990

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. RABL, acting in a broad progressive coalition, 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 was threatening to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the first iteration of what became the Love and Rage newspaper was called simply RAGE! It reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad. 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—were dead, and the mainstream world offered little of value to save. Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in punk mosh pits and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts consisting of fragments from the dissertation writing process...

Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s [IGD Podcast Interview]

Suzy Subways and I were interviewed about anarcha-feminist abortion struggle for the latest It’s Going Down podcast! Check it out here: Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s.

Description:

“On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with both long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways and historian Spencer Beswick about how anarchists in the 1990s organized in the face of a deadly far-Right attack on abortion access across the so-called United States.

With the growth of both the above ground organization Operation Rescue, which mobilized thousands to shut down abortion clinics and the underground anti-abortion movement which targeted doctors and reproductive health offices with firebombings and assassinations, abortion access was under threat like never before. But while liberals stuck to legalistic attempts to sway the courts, anarchists, utilizing strategies and tactics from groups like Anti-Racist Action, brought a fresh perspective to the struggle and began to mobilize and build coalitions.

During our discussion we cover this history as well as what led to the passing of Roe v Wade; as Beswick argues that it was the creation of a mass, militant movement that centered bodily autonomy and freedom that forced the State to codify limited abortion rights into law. As the supreme court is poised to rule on striking down Roe v Wade, this history, and the lessons and questions that it raises, is needed now more than ever.”

More Info: We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom, Empty Hands History, and Claim No Easy Victories: An Anarchist Analysis of ARA and its Contributions to the Building of a Radical Anti-Racist Movement

Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions

A panel I organized for the upcoming Anarchist Studies Network conference was accepted! Titled “Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions,” it features a new generation of anarchist historians who I’m very excited to collaborate with. You’ll be able to tune in online for the conference August 24-26.

Here’s the panel abstract:

Prefigurative practices are driven by an anarchist ethics that attempts to “build the new world in the shell of the old.” But just what does this “new world” of the future look like, and how do we get there? This panel explores how visions of the future have shaped anarchist strategy and life across the twentieth century in the territory of the US state. Nikita Shepard argues that engagements with the future have been central to queer anarchist thought and practice for over a century, fundamentally shaping visions and practices of sexual and political liberation. Jacqui Sahagian explores how deindustrialization influenced the prefigurative practices and utopian visions of anarchists and artists in Detroit during the late twentieth century. Spencer Beswick explores competing visions of prefiguration and dual power in the 1990s through Love and Rage’s critique of the infoshop movement and their positioning of the Zapatistas as a vision of the future. Richard Saich looks at the 1999 Battle of Seattle and uses the slogan “this is what democracy looks like” to understand the turn-of-the-century anarchist approach to prefiguring the future. Collectively, these papers attempt to use historical analysis to engage with enduring questions of anarchist political theory.

Anarcha-Feminist Abortion Struggle: Reproductive Freedom and Dual Power

The Supreme Court’s plan to reverse Roe v. Wade means that abortion will likely soon become illegal for many people across the United States. As we search for effective responses, we can look to anarcha-feminist strategies to protect abortion by building mass movements and grassroots reproductive healthcare infrastructure. This week, I published two articles about this history; check out the excerpts below.

In the Washington Post, I contextualize our present moment and present The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting.

Beyond voting for candidates who support abortion rights at election time, what is to be done? The historical experiences of the feminist abortion struggle between the 1960s and 1990s offer alternative strategies. Feminists originally won reproductive rights through mass mobilization in the streets combined with widespread underground provision of abortion and other health care. These actions forced the Supreme Court to affirm a constitutional right to abortion in 1973.

[In the 1980s-90s] anarchists (anti-state socialists) within the feminist movement rejected voting and legal reforms in favor of radical grass-roots activism. Instead of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot!”

Following the example of second-wave feminists, anarchists framed abortion as a question of bodily autonomy and women’s liberation.

Heading into the 1990s, amid new right-wing attacks on abortion rights, anarcha-feminists in Love and Rage built grass-roots infrastructure to perform abortions and provide for reproductive health more broadly. They sought to build autonomy on their own terms by organizing self-help groups in which, San Francisco activist Sunshine Smith explained, “women learn the basics of self-cervical exams, do pelvics on each other, and learn how to do menstrual extraction.”

Anarchists believed this kind of infrastructure was key to bodily autonomy and helped lay the foundation for building revolutionary dual power: radical institutions that challenged the hegemony of the state. If women controlled their own bodies and institutions, they would no longer depend on the state to protect their rights.

The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”

In It’s Going Down, I explore the anarcha-feminist model for providing reproductive care and building dual power in “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom

As the Supreme Court prepares to reverse Roe v. Wade under a Democratic president, house, and senate, it is clear that action at the ballot box is insufficient to protect abortion. Reproductive rights were not won by electoral means, and that is not how we will defend them.

Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the struggle for abortion throughout the 1980s and ‘90s. They were convinced that Roe v. Wade would not last forever and that they could not depend on the state and the legal system to protect reproductive freedom. Anarcha-feminists took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: defense of abortion clinics, construction of grassroots reproductive health infrastructure, and an anti-state approach to building feminist dual power.

Anarcha-feminists physically protected abortion clinics from the likes of Operation Rescue, which was formed in 1986 to act as anti-abortion shock troops.

Anarcha-feminists established autonomous infrastructure and self-help groups in which people learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anarchist put it in a 1991 article, “medicine is something we must take into our own hands. Because how can you smash the state if you’re still walking funny from a visit to the gynecologist’s?”

Anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. They argued that this would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy that was independent of the state and its laws.

Anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain abortion rights. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of reproductive justice. Thus, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98) argued in its draft political statement that “our freedom will not come through the passage of yet more laws but through the building of communities strong enough to defend themselves against anti-choice and anti-queer terror, rape, battery, child abuse and police harassment.”

Establishing reproductive healthcare infrastructure is a key component of feminist dual power that challenges the hegemony of the state and capitalism. This kind of infrastructure prefigures—and concretely establishes—a world defined by mutual aid, solidarity, and autonomy.

The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting

I published a new article in the Washington Post’s Made By History section today, check it out here!

The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting: ‘We’re pro-choice and we riot!’ How anarchists reframed the fight for abortion

The argument:
The anarchist and feminist traditions of mass mobilization, autonomous health infrastructure and grass-roots struggle offer alternatives — or at least a radical complement — to voting. Reversing Roe v. Wade will not stop abortions; it will only make them more dangerous and less accessible. As anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman argued in 1992, “the day when abortion is again made illegal may come sooner than we like to think. We must be ready to take our bodies and our lives into our own hands.”

From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-90s)

My article on the transformation and revitalization of anarchism in the late 20th century was recently accepted for publication in the Spring 2023 edition of the Anarchist Studies journal. Here is a sneak peak at the introduction:

Anarchism exploded into public view in the 1999 Battle of Seattle. While the media focused on the spectacle of the black bloc smashing windows, they largely overlooked the role of anarchism behind the scenes where activists organized themselves in affinity groups and made decisions by consensus. Although self-identified anarchists remained a minority within it, the anti-globalization movement became known for its embrace of “common sense” anarchist values and practices. Large segments of the movement operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, rejection of the state and capitalism, and advocacy of both individual freedom and worker control of production. After almost a century of Marxist predominance, how did anarchism develop from a marginal phenomenon into a force at the center of the anti-globalization movement?

This article explores the subterranean development of American anarchism in the late twentieth century. As a reactionary counterrevolution remade society, the New Left was decimated by violent repression, and the Soviet Union collapsed, many on the radical left reevaluated the politics of the 1960s-70s. A new generation of radicals—together with many ‘60s veterans—critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and grappled with the fundamental changes in social, political, and economic life. As the ruling class embraced neoliberalism and repressive law and order politics, much of the left turned away from both party building and an orientation towards capturing state power. Their analysis of social changes and the failures of state socialism led many militants to reject the state, and the late twentieth century was marked by a spread of anarchist politics throughout the radical left.

Part one of this article analyzes the right-wing counterrevolution that defeated the radical currents of the “long 1960s.” Drawing on Corey Robin and Paulo Virno’s theories of conservatism and counterrevolution, I argue that we cannot see the New Right counterrevolution as a simple return to the past, but rather as the creation of a new social order that recuperated warped elements of the radicalism to which it reacted. In the United States, this took the form of neoliberal economics, masculine individualism articulated alongside a moral defense of the nuclear family, recuperation of elements of the feminist and civil rights movements, and a repressive law and order politics that embraced mass incarceration as a “fix” for both the radical left and the economic crisis.

In part two, I explore the evolution of the radical left in this period in order to understand the growing shift from Marxist to anarchist common sense. After analyzing the defeat of the Marxist-Leninist and national liberation movements of the long 1960s, I discuss five examples of the revitalization of anarchism and its underground development in a variety of movement spaces: the birth of Black/New Afrikan Anarchism from imprisoned ex-Black Panthers; the rise of anarcha-feminism in the women’s liberation movement; the growth of eco-anarchism; the role of punk in popularizing anarchism; and the foundation of nation-wide revolutionary social anarchist organizations like Love and Rage. Through these five cases—which each warrant an extended treatment beyond this article’s scope—I analyze a shift in the radical left towards an anarchistic politics which decenters and disavows the state in favor of grassroots dual power, direct self-determination, mutual aid, and non-hierarchical organization. This reorientation can only be understood by situating it in the context of the broad historical transformations of the post-1960s counterrevolution. I ultimately argue that anarchism was revitalized in the late twentieth century because it provided compelling, non-state-oriented answers to the new problems posed by the counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism.