Empty Hands – Page 5 – Empty Hands History

Red and Black Unite: The Paris Commune and Socialist Democracy

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!
Otto von Bismarck (1872, reflecting on the split in the First International)

What is socialist democracy? And can Marxists and anarchists unite in building new political forms that enable true proletarian self-government?

Revisiting Marx’s classic piece on the Paris Commune, “The Civil War in France,” with our DSA Marxist Reading Group reminded me of his liberatory vision of the new form of proletarian power. Although Marx and Engels name it the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” their description of it is actually very similar to the explanation of anarchist communism outlined by Peter Kropotkin in his classic book The Conquest of Bread.

Is it possible to reconcile the two visions? This is not a new argument, but I think that the Commune lays out the basic political form of what libertarian socialism looks like in practice—one that anarchists and Marxist alike could support.

First, a clarification of terms. When I teach about Marxism, one of the first things I stress to my students is that Marxists define the word dictatorship very differently than others do. It does not mean the authoritarian rule of one person. Rather, dictatorship simply means which class has power in society. Thus, capitalism is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie because the capitalist class holds power. A dictatorship of the proletariat would mean that the working class holds power instead. But these two classes cannot hold the same orientation towards the state. Proletarian power must look different than bourgeois power. Why?

The state, as Marxists define it, is a structure of class rule. Anarchists, on the other hand, argue that the state to a certain degree stands outside of society and has its own interests. In either case, the state is alienated power par excellence. It is necessarily a small group of people holding power and ruling over society. This works very well for the bourgeoisie, as they are a small group of people seeking to hold power. But it does not work for the proletariat.

How can the proletariat, the vast majority of society, exercise power through the state when it is necessarily a small group of people making decisions for majority? We have seen that neither representative democracy nor the Soviet state model actually enables true proletarian rule. We need new political forms that enable the proletariat to hold and wield power directly as a class, rather than mediated through alienated state forms.

In “The Civil War in France,” Marx and Engels agree. Marx famously argues that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (629). Rather, this machinery must be “shattered” and new forms of power built. The “true secret” of the Paris Commune was that “it was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour” (634-35, emphasis added).

What is the new political form that enables the emancipation of labor? It cannot be modeled on the bourgeois state, nor the ancien regime. In his introduction, Engels says that the Paris Commune encapsulates his vision of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He says that the Commune’s political form was shaped by “two infallible means” which differentiate the DotP from the bourgeois state:

“In the first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. […] In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides” (628).

Marx then demonstrates how the Commune’s political structures enabled a new form of proletarian democracy. He explains the bottom-up structure, emphasizing how workers elected and empowered delegates to carry out the democratic will of local assemblies. Each local assembly made decisions about what directly impacted them—for example, workers would democratically decide how to run their own workplace, and a neighborhood could organize its own public safety measures. Then these local assemblies coordinated their decisions through the higher Commune bodies. They sent delegates to these bodies who were empowered to carry out the will of the lower bodies. If they erred, they were immediately recallable.

This structure of delegation is a fundamentally different system than that of representative democracy, in which the people elect representatives to ostensibly carry out their will in the halls of power. The delegates are workers themselves, paid a workers salary, and directly accountable to the decisions made by local assemblies.

These structures would be replicated across the country. Local communes would coordinate with one another through this same system of revocable delegation. It is worth quoting Marx at some length explaining the Paris Commune’s (and thus his own) vision of the reorganization of national democracy: “the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet […] the rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assembles were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandate imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.

The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis-stated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence” (633).

Readers familiar with the anarchist tradition may be justified to think I am accidentally quoting Kropotkin describing his anarchist vision of a federated Commune of Communes. No! This is Marx describing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the new working-class state!

Later, Lenin would draw new lessons from the Paris Commune, emphasizing the need for workers to seize and exercise centralized State power. The Bolsheviks quickly broke the autonomy of the soviets (the workers councils), and the Soviet state certainly did not function as the bottom-up system of delegation that Marx and Engels describe. The Soviet Union did not operate as the “political form […] under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour,” but rather continued the system of political alienation in modified forms.

Red and Black can unite around a vision of a political form of libertarian socialism, as articulated by both Marx and Kropotkin, each reflecting on the experience of the Paris Commune. We need political forms that enable true democracy, the self-organization of the vast majority of people in our society. I personally find much of value in Murray Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism and democratic confederalism, which we can see in practice today in Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and in revolutionary Rojava in liberated Kurdish territory. This is an articulation of radical democracy and a vision for self-organization of political power from the bottom up. To put it simply: this is socialist democracy.

Learning from Ithaca’s Socialist Mayor: Electoralism and Movement Building

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” the small college town of Ithaca, New York did something remarkable: it elected an openly socialist mayor. Benjamin (Ben) Nichols, a Red Diaper Baby and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, would go on to serve three terms as mayor, holding office from 1990-96.

Ithaca DSA recently organized a Socialist Night School to learn about this history and discuss lessons for today. We hosted the activist scholar (and wife of the late Ben Nichols) Judith Van Allen to give a talk and share her experience with Ithaca’s radical history. There are many lessons to learn from Ben Nichols’s campaigns and his experience in governing as a pragmatic socialist. Nichols’s successes encourage us to be bold and advance a transformative vision of municipal socialism; his failures teach us that local electoral work must serve social movements and help build grassroots power rather than misdirecting or co-opting our energy.

Although Nichols recognized the significant limitations of operating within the constraints of city government, he was able to achieve a great deal while in office. In the tradition of municipal “sewer socialism” that began in the early 20th century, Nichols attempted to put the city government at the service of improving Ithacans’ lives. He led the city to successfully demand a much larger “voluntary” monetary contribution from Cornell (which does not pay taxes), created “mutual housing” governed by residents, passed ordinances supporting domestic partnerships and freedom of reproductive choice, strengthened the community police board, built the Alex Haley Pool, and generally made the city government function more efficiently and democratically. His accomplishments can serve as inspiration for achieving concrete victories and passing progressive legislation in towns like Ithaca.

That said, errors in political strategy and lack of attention to movement-building left Nichols isolated and vulnerable to opposition. Various policies he passed alienated elements of his fragile progressive coalition and he was defeated by an “independent” candidate who took office in 1996. Surprisingly little has been written about this history. I plan to write more about this in the future, but I want to lay out what I see as the biggest lesson.

Ben Nichols was by all accounts a very charismatic and dedicated man who ran largely on the force of his personality. He was able to assemble a progressive coalition to back his campaign, but it was all aimed at the single purpose of electing him. The coalition identified a clear enemy—the major property developers—and mobilized around progressive issues, but they never developed a substantive political program or a strategy for building grassroots power outside of the mayor’s office.

The campaign for mayor focused almost entirely on GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts: identifying supporters and getting them to the polls. By Judith’s account, they never attempted to win people over to a socialist program to transform Ithaca. Although these GOTV efforts were successful in electing Nichols as an individual, they did not build a committed movement base that could support him and push him from the left. That meant that when he advanced legislation that alienated certain elements of his coalition, he had no mass base to turn to—or to hold him accountable. Ithaca’s DSA chapter put in a large amount of work to elect Nichols, but they did not seem to maintain an organic relationship with him once in office. Movement building was subordinated to progressive electoralism, which derailed and defanged the radical grassroots energy that could have produced more transformative results.

The main lesson for me is that local electoral work needs to be simply one element of a broader political strategy to build power from the bottom up and promote a municipal vision of socialist transformation. The position of mayor as well as city councilors should be accountable to the grassroots base. Individuals in these positions should run on a clear political platform and serve as representatives of radical organizations and social movements. They should work to restructure and democratize the city government—for instance, by helping to establish popular assemblies with real decision-making power. We can look to Murray Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism for inspiration and models.

We have many lessons to learn from this experiment in municipal socialism, including the need to put local electoralism at the service of movement building. But perhaps the greatest takeaway is simply to be bold: we can and must articulate a visionary program of municipal socialism and run campaigns on this platform. If Ithaca could elect a socialist mayor within the right-wing context of 1989, then we can certainly do it today. Let’s get to work!

“Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches”: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording)

I recently organized an online panel at the Boston Anarchist Bookfair on November 14th (2021), which was recorded and uploaded to Youtube. My own talk, which begins around 41:20, is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” It is based on research and interviews that I have been conducting for my dissertation on North American anarchism in the late 20th century.

My talk explores the theorization and practice of revolutionary intersectional anarcha-feminism, with a major focus on abortion and reproductive freedom but also addressing queer and trans liberation, debates around pornography, CUNY student struggles, and the fight against patriarchy within Love and Rage itself. You can watch it here:

As I say in my presentation, if you were involved with any of what I discuss I would love to talk to you about it! Check out more about the anarchist oral history project I’m involved in here.

White Workers and Race Treason in Revolutionary Struggle

Noel Ignatiev used to say that the biggest impediment to revolution in the United States is that most white workers identify more with their race than with their class. Thus, they side with the white ruling class in order to obtain what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “wages of whiteness” that separate them from workers of color and prevent effective working class unity [ed: a friend reminded me that this phrase was actually from David Roediger riffing off of Du Bois]. How does this play out in practice and how can we break the cycle of white identification?

A friend of mine told me about his recent trip to the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, which chronicles the miner’s strike and armed uprising that led to the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain. As he explored the town, he saw a flyer advertising a support group for addicts. It was a standard pitch, something like: “Do you feel alone and unsupported? Are you dealing with addiction? Are you in debt and struggling to make ends meet? Come to our weekly support group for help to get back on your feet.” The kicker was that at the bottom, it was signed by the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

Let’s dig into this scenario. Imagine a poor white opiate addict, a young person working a minimum wage job without a clear future. The relatively good jobs that had given their parents and grandparents a higher standard of living have disappeared. They feel that they have nowhere to turn for support, for community, for hope of a better life. What comes next?

1. They could see this flyer for the KKK-run addiction group. They go to a meeting where they find a supportive community that tells them that they are not alone and they are not broken. The group make them believe that there is the possibility to be strong and whole with hope for a better future. The problem is that immigrants, Black people, and globalist (Jewish) elites have stolen their job and their dignity. Rather than identify with a multiracial working class, their problems (and their solution) are articulated along racial lines. They are led to identity with their whiteness as the only path towards a better life. This is the base for fascism in the United States.

2. Imagine that this person encounters a different flyer. It has a similar message around addiction support but it is posted instead by a local DSA chapter or anarchist mutual aid network. This group provides support for them on an individual level but they also supply a different analysis of their problems and a very different solution. The blame is not placed on immigrants, Black people, or Jews, but rather on the capitalist system that exploits and oppresses the vast majority of people. The group helps to unionize the worker’s low-wage job, thereby showing the material benefits of struggle and solidarity with all workers (including, we might imagine, an immigrant worker who was previously the target of scorn and abuse by white workers). This process helps the person to identify with their class rather than their race. They see that multi-racial workers’ solidarity actually improves their material conditions, and they are drawn into the anti-racist left.

3. What do the Democrats offer to this person? For better or worse, liberals tell them that they can identify neither with their race nor their class. Dems perhaps offer a tepid job training program and admonish them to abandon the white privilege that they cling to as their last remaining hope. Is it any surprise that the person might reject this option? And that, in the absence of a strong leftwing alternative, they might be pulled in by the fascist, white supremacist path of the KKK? If the left isn’t there offering a model for white workers to identify with and fight for their class interests, then the fascists will certainly do it with race.

After Trump’s election in 2016, people wrote a whole series of postmortems evaluating the role that the white working class played. On the one hand, “economic anxiety” was blamed; on the other, white supremacy and racism. I think that this debate misses the point of how politics actually works. Most people are exploited under capitalism, including the white working class. Most people, again including the white working class, also experience assaults on their sense of dignity and worth. The question is not whether or not individual white people are fundamentally racist, but rather how their grievances are articulated into a coherent set of politics.

The same grievances can be framed in either race-based terms (Trump tells white workers that Mexican immigrants stole their jobs) or class-based terms (Bernie tells white workers that capitalists shipped their jobs overseas). In the first case, immigrants are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in racial terms. In the second case, capitalists are the enemy that must be combatted, and thus struggle is articulated in class terms. The point is not to convince white people in abstract moral terms that they should give up their white privilege, but rather to offer a political analysis and strategy for improving their lives through identification and struggle within the multi-racial working class.

This analysis is not based on morality but rather on strategy. None of this is a call for people of color to have more sympathy for white people or move to rural areas to organize them. I think white radicals have a specific role to play here. It’s not just about doing what is morally right, but rather preventing fascism from spreading further and offering a revolutionary alternative.

Note that I am not calling for “color-blindness.” Disidentification with whiteness requires an active process of treason and struggle against white supremacy, not a simple disavowal of the privilege of one’s skin color. The point is not for white people to simply check their privilege, but rather for us to develop and popularize modes of analysis and struggle that enable white people to identify common interests with people of color and fight together to overthrow this system and build a new world in its place.

Analyzing Biden’s Spending Bill: A Debate Between Sectors of Capital

Here is my general read of the current situation with the Democrats trying to pass Biden’s spending bill, framed within a broader conflict between different sectors of capital:

The Republicans and the Democrats represent different sectors of capital, broadly speaking. The Republicans generally represent less dynamic (even dying) sectors whereas the Democrats represent more progressive and dynamic sectors (particularly big tech and “green” industry).

Part of why the Republicans have gotten more reactionary is that they literally represent dying industries and the white labor aristocracy that has benefited from these industries (think coal mining, old manufacturing jobs, etc.). All that the Republicans can do is to try to preserve what they see as the good old days, from the perspective of both their capitalist and working class bases. I think the future for them is either fascist seizure of power (electoral or otherwise) or a major shakeup.

The Democrats, on the other hand, represent more of the future of capitalism. They are concentrated in the most dynamic, forward-looking, innovative sectors. Big tech gets a lot of the focus, but I think the key here is the green energy sector. Green capitalism—which will still depend on the exploitation of people, land, and animals, but in an ostensibly kinder and more sustainable guise—is likely the way that capital will try to save itself both from climate catastrophe and mass movements demanding a livable world. This might require a relatively substantial break with neoliberal orthodoxy.

But not all Democrats are united around this. It seems clear that Joe Manchin represents one of the major dying sectors of capitalism: coal mining. The fight between different sectors of capital is not over within the party, although it could conceivably be over soon.

I think this framework of understanding the Dems and Repubs as representing different sectors of capital helps explain what is going on here. For what it’s worth, I actually think that most Democrats in office truly want to pass the spending bill. This isn’t all just a show with Manchin and Sinema acting as convenient scapegoats (though I imagine that is part of it). Biden’s plan isn’t radical or socialist. It will arguably be good for the reproduction and growth of capitalism—or at least, for the most dynamic sectors of the nascent green capitalism.

There is a real split within the capitalist/ruling class here. The options on offer are two different visions of the future of capitalism—green capitalism vs fascist reaction. I obviously don’t think either are good. But this dissension gives an opening for us to organize and push for a truly transformative vision that will overcome the contradictions of capitalism and present an alternative both to fascist reaction and to the “green capitalism” that is waiting in the wings.

A Roving Band of Anarcho-Punks: The Vermont Family’s Revitalization of American Anarchism

The Vermont Family was a roving band of anarcho-punks that helped build the American anarchist movement in the 1980s. They were a key element of the connective tissue that linked the dispersed anarchist milieu. The Family originally came together within the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” in which hundreds of people walked from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over the course of nine months in 1986. As many of the liberals dropped out or retreated to cars, a core group of anarchists coalesced to form a traveling “anarchy village” which grew from 15 to around 70 or 80 people. They ran the village through consensus and promoted anarchist politics within the march. After the march reached DC, the Family stayed together as a loose network of travelers, comrades, and friends.

The name of the Vermont Family came from a sort of collective joke. One punk in the anarchy village shared a story about Vermont: apparently it was written in the state constitution that in 1991, two hundred years after its founding, there would be a popular vote on whether the state would remain part of the country. Thus, a fantastical plan was hatched to convince anarchists to move to Vermont and push it to secede from the union. It goes without saying that this did not happen, and it turned out that Vermont had no such plan to put its status to a vote (the similarity of this plan to the later right-libertarian New Hampshire Free State Project is interesting to note). But the moniker stuck as both an inside joke and badge of identification, and many people in the crew adopted it as part of their names.

The Vermont Family formed on the road and stayed on the road throughout their existence until 1989. In their years of traveling, they played a crucial role that has gone unacknowledged in the histories of this era: they formed the interpersonal connections that were necessary to build a continental network of anarchists.

This past summer, I interviewed a person named Mike, who was one of the core members of the Family. He pointed out that in the age of the internet, it is hard for us to understand how an anarchist milieu could function in the 1980s. It required people to travel and make physical connections between far-flung collectives and projects. Some of the Family traveled in an old bus, some hitchhiked; like a punk version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, the Family spread anarchy everywhere they went. A few of them even made their way to West Germany, where they lived in squats and participated in the larger, more militant movement there. 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.

When major actions or gatherings were planned in an American city, members of the Vermont crew would show up months in advance, put down temporary roots, and help organize a bigger and better event. They were central to the series of annual national convergences—Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989—that established continental networks of dedicated anarchist militants. The Crew stayed on the road until 1989, when a large number of them went to San Francisco to help organize the 1989 Anarchist Gathering. Finding fertile ground, many of them settled down for the long term in the Bay Area. They established several large collective houses that served as major hubs for both the local and national movement in the 1990s. Many of them remained active in Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, and other anarchist projects.

I have not yet been able to find any documentation of the Vermont Family beyond my oral history interviews, but its story is central to the broader history of the revitalization of anarchism in the 1980s.

Building the Movement: The Rebirth of Anarchism, 1986-89

I’m working on a new piece that will become the first chapter of my dissertation on American anarchism in the late 20th century. I will share more in the future, but here is a short excerpt:

The American left floundered in the 1980s. Reagan and the New Right led a counterrevolution against the social gains of the 1960s and 70s. The last vestiges of the New Left splintered into increasingly irrelevant Marxist-Leninist sects and single issue campaigns. State repression, particularly targeted against Black, Chicano, and indigenous national liberation movements, targeted and crushed a generation of their most talented organizers and fighters. The left in the 1980s was in retreat, fighting rearguard battles to defend what they could against the onslaught of neoliberal globalization and to act in solidarity with movements elsewhere (particularly in Central America and South Africa).

Yet in the middle of this generalized defeat of the left, the anarchist movement underwent a process of revitalization and rebirth. It went from a marginalized, fragmented collection of local struggles and small collectives in the early 1980s to a strong, relatively coordinated national movement by the beginning of the 1990s. This decade marked the shift from Marxism-Leninism and state socialism to the anarchistic forms of social struggle that came to define the turn-of-the-century anti-globalization movement. What caused this shift?

In this article, I argue that the revitalization of anarchism took place for two main reasons. First, the transformation of social, political, and economic conditions, in the US and globally, discredited other forms of left-wing politics. The New Left fizzled under repression, the Soviet Union continued down the path of decay and fought a losing (arguably imperialist) war in Afghanistan, and neoliberal globalization swept the world. State-centered socialism, whether revolutionary or parliamentary, appeared increasingly unviable and even undesirable. Anarchism was particularly well-suited to offer an alternative, as anarchists offered an anti-state and anti-capitalist analysis and set of practices that pointed a new way forward through the challenges of neoliberal globalization. But favorable circumstances did not guarantee the rise of the anarchist movement.

More importantly, a core group of anarchists across the country took advantage of the circumstances and began to consciously build a national movement. Committed pro-organization anarchists, most notably the roving band of anarcho-punks in the “Vermont Family” and the rabble-rousers of the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), formed a pole around which the diffuse anarchist milieu began to coalesce into an actual movement that could coordinate across the country. This took place largely through a series of annual convergences: Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989. In telling the story of these gatherings, I argue that this series of national convergences was the most important factor in the revitalization of anarchism as a revolutionary movement in the 1980s. The convergences laid the foundation for the flowering of the anarchist movement in following decade.

“Anarcho-Beef People”: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

A series of annual gatherings from 1986 to 1989 revitalized the anarchist movement and built the infrastructure for national and continental coordination. I will share more writing about this in the future, but I wanted to share a quick anecdote about the debates over food and animal liberation at these convergences. They offer a window into the evolving values and ethical norms of the anarchist movement at the time. Anarchists developed a commitment to fighting all forms of oppression, hierarchy, and domination—including of other species—rather than solely focusing on capitalism and the state.

*****

The first national convergence was held in Chicago in 1986 to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket Affair. Several hundred people from across the country attended a few days of workshops and a major demonstration. Tensions at the gathering reflected the political and ethical debates taking place within the anarchist movement around the question of animal liberation. Although there is a long history of vegetarian anarchism, this became a major concern in the late twentieth century.

The Chicago organizers served a non-vegetarian friendly (and certainly non-vegan) meal at the major Saturday banquet. This, some attendees felt, was no accidental oversight. Rather, it happened because (as one attendee later reflected) “they don’t like vegetarians.” Tensions rose, fueled by both ethical concerns and hunger. An impromptu demonstration ensued in which, a participant describes, “the street theater crowd from San Francisco began milling around the middle of the room on all fours, mooing and clucking and being herded by a vegan speechifier with an imaginary whip” who then proceeded to “slaughter” the “cows.”

Although the demonstration was largely received in good humor, an associated group handed out incendiary flyers attacking “anarcho-beef people.” The distribution of this flyer provoked strong negative reactions against “preachy vegans” and for a moment it appeared that a physical fight might actually break out. Tensions soon calmed, however—or at least, much of the anger was redirected towards an argument around anti-Semitic flyers distributed by another attendee. (The latter is a story for another time.)

*****

The next annual anarchist gathering, in Minneapolis in 1987, was a crucial step in the path towards a national anarchist network. It was organized with the intention of coordinating the de-centralized movement and laying the groundwork for a national organization. Unlike the previous convergence, which was organized mostly by older folks in a group called “Some Chicago Anarchists,” this one was put on by younger people who were more immersed in the growing anarchist milieu (including its ethical debates).

The Minneapolis crew framed the convergence around “Building the Movement.” While they hosted a wide range of workshops, including anarcho-punk DIY staples like how to dumpster food and brew your own beer, the focus was on facilitating strategic conversations and building the infrastructure for a coordinated national movement. Thus, throughout the gathering there was a “movement building track” of strategic discussions and meetings.

Part of this focus on building the movement entailed avoiding the unnecessary, distracting conflicts of the previous year’s gathering. For one, the organizers vowed to avoid the previous year’s arguments around food by simply serving all vegetarian meals. Of course, this was based in large part around an ethical commitment to animal liberation, but one key participant shared in a recent interview with me that it was also a conscious decision to avoid unnecessary drama and dissension.

The banquet was catered by a vegetarian workers’ cooperative called the New Riverside Cafe. This was specifically noted in a pre-convergence mass mailing to anarchists across the country. It seems that the organizers meant to be clear from the beginning that the meat-headed (sorry) mistakes of Chicago would not be repeated. There would be no protestors pretending to be mooing cows, no near fist fights over burgers.

In part because of its superior organization (including around the question of food), the Minneapolis gathering was a smashing success. It laid the groundwork for the next two annual meetings, in Toronto (‘88) and San Francisco (’89), which set the scene for the anarchist movement in the 1990s.

(Sources for the Chicago gathering come from the zine “Mob Action Against the State: Haymarket Remembered… An Anarchist Convention.”)

Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Have you been involved in anarchist projects or organizations in the United States from the 1970s-2000s? We would like to interview you for an Anarchist Oral History Project!

Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD candidate writing his dissertation on the history of US anarchism in the late 20^th century, with a particular focus on Love and Rage. Spencer has been active in anarchist and other left projects for the past decade, beginning with participation in Occupy Boston and currently consisting of helping to run a Marxist reading group and socialist night school where he lives in Ithaca, NY.

Connected to his dissertation research, Spencer is involved with a broader Anarchist Oral History Project seeking to interview a wide swathe of movement participants from the 1960s to today. He is looking to interview anyone involved in anarchist projects and organizations in the late 20^th and early 21^st century, particularly (but certainly not limited to) Love and Rage and associated groups like Anti-Racist Action. Spencer is located in NYC for Fall 2021 and will be traveling for research and interviews in 2022. You can reach him at spencerbeswick@gmail.com or emptyhands@protonmail.com.

Reading Amyl and the Sniffers’ “Capital” Politically

“Comfort to me, what does that even mean? One reason, do we persevere?/
Existing for the sake of existing, meaning disappears.”

Thus opens the song “Capital” from the Australian punk band Amyl and the Sniffers’ new album, Comfort To Me. The album is shaped by the same driving intensity of their previous music, but it takes further steps towards conscious political opposition to patriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism. In this short piece, I analyze the lyrics of “Capital” to explore this political evolution. After detouring through Marx’s “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” I ultimately argue for the utility of cultivating radical political consciousness in subcultural milieus, which seemingly laid the foundation for Amyl and the Sniffers’ political turn.

***

The turn to conscious politics is signaled first by the recognition of the politics of personal experience. The singer, Amy, attempts to reclaim her body and life from the world of patriarchal standards and violence, and she recognizes this as the first step in “basic politics”:

“Meanwhile, I only just started learning basic politics/
Meanwhile, they sexualize my body and get mad when I exploit it”

On another song on the album, “Knifey,” she addresses the threat of violence against women and vows to fight back.

“All I ever wanted was to walk by the park/
All I ever wanted was to walk by the river, see the stars/
Please! Stop fucking me up
. . .
Out comes the night, out comes my knifey/
This is how I get home nicely.”

Since society will not accept her efforts at self-determination or even basic safety, Amy realizes that she has to fight for it. This basic recognition of the contradictions of patriarchal violence and exploitation lay the foundation for a broader reckoning with a sick culture that is ultimately driven by capital. The chorus of the song puts it simply:

“It’s just for capital/
Am I an animal?/
It’s just for capital, capital, capital./
But do I care at all?”

The “animalization” of humanity by capital takes us back to Marx’s early analysis of wage labor under capitalism in his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Marx argues that labor under capitalism has been transformed into an experience that alienates us (removes us) from what makes us human, and thus reduces us to the level of animals.

Marx argues that capitalism is experienced as an intensely alienating social system because it perverts the fundamental activity that makes us human. Unlike animals, humans produce the conditions of our own social lives: food, clothing, shelter, culture, etc. When we labor, we put part of ourselves into the object of production. In a non-capitalist system, we produce goods for the use of ourselves, our families, and our communities. We put our life into the products, but we “regain” this life when our community uses the goods.

Under capitalist wage labor, commodities are produced not for use but rather for exchange value. We labor not to feed, clothe, and shelter ourselves and our community, but rather for the sake of profit for a capitalist. We imbue the commodities we produce with our life, but they confront us as something outside of ourselves, in control of another person for their profit. These commodities become “fetishes”: they seem to be imbued with energy of their own which is disconnected from the labor that has produced them. Capitalism becomes a system in which commodities interact with each other in the marketplace, disguising the real social relations between humans. We suffer a profound disconnect with the world and our own sense of humanity.

The characteristic of labor as external to the worker means that “the worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.” But this feeling of alienation at work has expanded to encompass our entire lives. Unlike in Marx’s time, we are now confronted with an entire world that takes the commodity form. Western societies have turned into mass consumer societies, where what makes us human outside of work is literally buying commodities. If these commodities are the products of something that is so alien to us, this is bound to be a very alienating existence. We have as little control over the world of commodities as we do over the political processes that lead to the destruction of the natural world. Again, “It’s just for capital/Am I an animal?”

***

In the next verse, Amyl and the Sniffers turn towards the destructive effects of climate change:

“Australia is burning, but, aye, I’m not learning how to be more conscious/
And the farmers hope for rain while the landscape torches/
Swimming in the river, I’m part of the river, not convinced how much will change/
Experiencing experiences as if they’re all the same”

Amy is swimming in the river of existence, seeing the terrible effects of climate change but unable to conceive of how her actions could change the situation. She is left with a feeling of alienation from existence, alienation from her own experience. This is a classic response to the alienation of life under capitalism. As she says in a second part of the chorus: “Freedom don’t exist/humans don’t exist/existing to exist/life is meaningless.” This again reflects Marx’s analysis: capitalism animalizes us, meaning that humans no longer exist; under capitalism, we exist just to exist, work just to survive, and thus life is meaningless.

***

After beginning with her own experience as a woman under capitalism, Amy begins to question the entire existence of Australia itself. In the next verse, she snarls that:

“First port of call should be changing the date and changing the flag/
Of course I have disdain for this place, what are you thinking?/
You took their kids and you locked them up, up in a prison”

She is referring to the process of settler colonialism in Australia, specifically how the children of the aboriginal peoples were stolen as official government policy up until the 1960s and into the 1970s. Settler colonialism and genocide of the indigenous peoples laid the foundation for Australia as a country. Thus, the entire project is rotten and must be challenged at its core.

The key here, for me, is how she expresses this analysis: “*of course* I have disdain for this place.” It is a common sense rejection of the brutality of settler colonialism, a common sense rejection of the Australian project: “of course.” And yet, this is clearly not broadly shared across Australian society. Rather, I think it is a common sense that is actively cultivated in youth subculture, particularly punk. This is how a punk band such as Amyl and the Sniffers can release a song with a “common sense” rejection of the Australian state and capitalism. The common sense is also based on an ethical connection between the personal and the political: Amy easily connects her own experience as a woman fighting to determine her own relationship to her body and sexuality to an ethical rejection of settler colonialism and capitalist exploitation.

***

So, where do we go from here? Given our alienation and the meaninglessness of life under late capitalism, perhaps an answer begins with the cultivation of intensity: new forms of life that are non-commodified, that prioritize direct experience in the search for meaning. The last verse of “Capital” gestures towards this possibility:

“So ordinary and normal, don’t see the intensity that it is/
And I wonder why I get dopamine released when I give/
Disdain and excitement dually, the illusion can be fleeting/
I love feeling drunk on the illusion of meaning”

Of course, this ends on an ambivalent note. Does the intensity of a punk show provide real meaning, or is it just another illusion? The next step, I think, is to take the intensity of a punk show—and the broader forms of life and common sense that the punk scene enables—and draw connections with other oppositional spaces, intensities, and projects. This can help create archipelagos of resistance, networks that produce a fighting coalition of (sub)cultural forms that together can challenge capital and replace its animalization with a meaningful life. The question then becomes how to move from scattered subcultural resistance to a broader, more coherent counterhegemonic force. We can start with punk, but we cannot end there.