Empty Hands – Page 6 – Empty Hands History

Living Communism: Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Attack

“So the revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to simply destroy the world of capital… it’s clear that the worlds one constructs can maintain their apartness from capital only together with the fact of attacking it and conspiring against it… Only an affirmation has the potential for accomplishing the work of destruction. The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture.”
The Invisible Committee[1]

I wrote this piece after I read Now (2017) when all I could think and write about was the Invisible Committee. I’m revisiting it to decide if I want to do anything with it. It still feels useful to me. Here’s the introduction:

May Day, 1987: thousands of Autonomen, the mysterious masked and black-clad “unruly youth” who are the terror of West Germany, riot in West Berlin. After a decade spent honing their street-fighting tactics, the revolutionaries stage an offensive against state repression by blocking streets, occupying buildings, and fighting a low-intensity urban guerrilla war against state forces. Continually expanding their liberated zone throughout the night, the Autonomen eventually control much of Kreuzberg, the dilapidated neighborhood that is their base. After a night of violent jubilation, they return to their numerous squatted houses and social centers to nurse their wounds, curse the police, and celebrate a temporary victory. Although the German media depicted the Autonomen as little more than violent mobs whose only motivation was destruction,[2] the radicals had also spent the previous decade painstakingly constructing—and fighting to defend—an extensive network of squatted alternative infrastructure across West Berlin and throughout West Germany.

Throughout the 1980s, the Autonomen squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings and turned them into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural spaces used by the thousands of squatters and tens of thousands of supporters. They constructed rich networks of autonomous spaces meant to provide both alternative forms of living and bases of attack. At their best, these networks of alternative spaces and infrastructure functioned as dual power and urban liberated territory in which the revolution was lived through a communism of everyday life.

More recently, the Invisible Committee has theorized the commune as a space of everyday communism that constructs counter-infrastructure, transforms our relationship to each other and the territory we inhabit, and destitutes state power. The Invisible Committee is a collective of French post-autonomist communists (formerly operating under the moniker Tiqqun) who trace their intellectual lineage through Italian Autonomia and the German Autonomen, among others.[3] The collective is the best known of the contemporary theorists of post-autonomist communization.[4]

Though born in the Parisian squatting scene, the collective grew disillusioned with the radical subcultural milieu in the capital and moved to the tiny town of Tarnac, where they live communally and collectively run a farm, bar, and general store.[5] Introduced to the American popular imagination primarily through the controversy surrounding their book The Coming Insurrection (2007, 2009) and their sensational trial for domestic terrorism beginning in 2008 which finally concluded with acquittals earlier this year, the Invisible Committee has greatly influenced the contemporary ultra-Left in the United States.[6]

The Invisible Committee continued to develop their particular variety of post-autonomist communization theory in To Our Friends (2014), which reflects on the European movements of the squares and associated spectacular abortive insurrections (especially in Greece), and their latest work, Now (2017), which explores the possibilities and practices of communism present within the fragmented world of late capitalism. Although the collective is relatively widely read (sometimes even beyond the academic post-autonomist ultra-Left!), their historical and theoretical background is less well-known in the United States. This paper in part attempts to connect the collective’s theoretical work with the history and praxis of European autonomous movements that it draws from.

This paper will combine 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 of organizing production. Fourth, alternative infrastructure provides the means to practice this everyday lived communism. Finally, revolutionary insurrectionary practice takes the form of networks of communes seceding from the capitalist system to form liberated territory that functions as a base from which to attack and destitute capitalist state power.

[1] The Invisible Committee, Now, 86-88.

[2] A stereotype that many within the movement cared little to contest; indeed, some Autonomen went so far as to believe that “freedom is the short moment between throwing a rock and the rock hitting its target. However, we all agree that, in the first place, we want to dismantle and to destroy—to formulate affirmative ideals is not our priority.” “Autonomous Theses 1981,” Fire and Flames, 174. I take some issue with this intentionally provocative statement though: as this paper details, it is clear that the Autonomen did indeed formulate affirmative ideals and act on them.

[3] In an early work of theirs, the Invisible Committee make this connection explicit. It is well worth quoting this section in full, in part to orient ourselves to the radical position from which to write of communes and revolution: “The ‘we’ that speaks here is not a delimitable, isolated we, the we of a group. It is the we of a position. In these times this position is asserted as a double secession: secession first with the process of capitalist valorisation; then secession with all the sterility entailed by a mere opposition to empire, extra-parliamentary or otherwise; thus a secession with the left. Here ‘secession’ means less a practical refusal to communicate than a disposition to forms of communication so intense that, when put into practice, they snatch from the enemy most of its force. To put it briefly, such a position refers to the force of irruption of the Black Panthers and the collective canteens of the German Autonomen, to the tree houses and art of sabotage of the British neo-luddites, to the careful choice of words of the radical feminists, to the mass self-reductions of the Italian autonomists, and the armed joy of the June 2nd Movement. From now on all friendship is political.” The Invisible Committee, Call, 10.

[4] The closest equivalent in the United States revolves around the currents of anarchism associated with CrimethInc. and the more recent formations expressed through the popular autonomist/anarchist website “It’s Going Down,” as well as the journal Endnotes (which is international, though mostly based in the UK). The Invisible Committee’s work is put out in the US by Semiotext(e), which has been responsible for the translation and popularization of much Italian and French autonomist theory. Several other small radical presses, including Minor Compositions, Autonomedia, and Little Black Cart, also publish (post-)autonomist theoretical work. See for example Benjamin Noys’s edited volume Communization and its Discontents: Contestation, Critique, and Contemporary Struggles (2011) for a contemporary exploration of some of the theoretical currents of post-autonomism and communization.

[5] Aaron Lake Smith, “Vive Le Tarnac Nine!”

[6] For US anarchist analysis of the trial and its impact, see CrimethInc., “The Tarnac Verdicts: Unraveling the Logic of Anti-Terrorism,” which traces the history of the trial as well as a little of the impact of the Invisible Committee on the US radical scene and the common roots and resonances of the Invisible Committee and CrimethInc.; and It’s Going Down, “The Palace of Justice: Inside the Tarnac Nine Trial.” The trial received widespread international attention because the (alleged) members of the Invisible Committee were charged with domestic terrorism for the act of (allegedly) sabotaging a train line that was transporting nuclear waste to Germany. Sabotage is, of course, a time-honored tradition in France, and many were aghast that this venerable historical practice was being treated as “terrorism.”

On Writing: Identity vs. Practice

I’m sure many friends can relate to this tweet. It made me laugh out loud. But I’m going to take it seriously: I think it reveals the problem of viewing one’s life through the framework of identity rather than practice (or Being rather than Becoming, or representation rather than production). I have spent a good chunk of my time in therapy over the past couple years working through this issue in my own life; the transformation of my own relationship to writing is evidence of how my approach has changed.

I used to view writing through the lens of identity. I AM a writer. I AM an academic. The extent to which I live up to these identities is the measure of how successful I am as a person—indeed, the degree to which I am “good.” This means that when I do not write I am failing my identity. I am not simply “not doing” a thing: I am a failure at the kind of person that I want to be.

This focus on the identity of “writer” was demonstrably counterproductive for me. It in fact prevented me from doing the actual act of writing. The pressure to live up to the ideal was too great, and it was easier to avoid it altogether than to work through the problem. This resulted in a whole host of negative reactions and even a good deal of self-loathing (all too common for grad students).

Talking through this problem with my therapist over the course of months was extremely helpful. Together, we practiced identifying the emotions I felt around writing, feeling them in my body, connecting them to specific experiences, and understanding the thought-patterns that fed into them. Once I had this understanding, I could begin to break away from the identity-based approach. Instead, I understood the problem as a set of processes and thus a set of practices. The solution would not be found through finally “living up” to the identity, being a “good” writer (and thus a “good” person). Rather, the solution was to be found in abandoning this focus on Being in favor of a practice of never-ending Becoming.

As part of my re-orientation, I read several books about writing, including Stephen King’s On Writing, Paul J. Silvia’s How to Write a Lot, and Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. The authors of each of these books approach writing as a set of practices to be cultivated rather than as an identity. It turns out that the key to writing is… writing. You have to actually sit down and write, whether you want to or not, whether you “feel inspired” or not.

Following this, I have cultivated the practice of writing as part of my morning routine. I wake up, I drink coffee and read, and then I sit down at my computer and write for at least fifteen minutes. It can be about anything, although usually it is connected to my academic work in some way. I don’t check my email. I don’t go looking for a source. I write.

The key for me is to simply write. This is not the time for editing, not the time for revising. I simply get words down on the page for at least fifteen minutes. I do not identify with them, and I do not identity with the representation of myself as a “writer.” I just produce words. I write. And I do it every day. These sessions add up, and they form the basis for longer writing sessions in which I bring the ideas together, revise, and form them into something that I want to share with others. This post is itself the product of a morning writing session.

I do not mean to trivialize this or present a facile solution. “Oh, the key to writing is to write? Sure, super helpful, thanks.” This is the product of many hours of therapy and a long, at times painful, process of self-evaluation and transformation. Writing is but one of many manifestations of this re-orientation in my life.

But I maintain that the shift from identity and representation to practice and production has completely transformed my relationship with writing. Instead of worrying about being a good writer, I write. And it has been by far the most productive year of my life.

Neither East Nor West: Anarchism and the Soviet Dissolution

Since I’m based at the Interference Archive for a whole semester, I decided to start sharing interesting things that I find. Here is one: an anarchist analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is happening, in 1990.

It’s fascinating to read an anarchist analysis of the Soviet Bloc at this time. Bob McGlynn of “NYC Neither East Nor West,” who had extensive contacts with anarchists and other lefty dissidents in Eastern Europe, wrote an article in the Love and Rage newspaper (April 1990) titled “Whoopie! East Bloc Explodes!” in which he expresses the great hope but also danger of the time.

The hope:
“Watching one Stalinoid dictatorship after another crumble with embarrassing speed is even more fun than drinking beer! (Well almost.). . .

Many wonder if this [East-West solidarity] movement is over. Not at all. In fact, it’s needed now more than ever, given that Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

Opposition movements in the Soviet bloc remain. These are made up of anarchists, independent socialists, draft resisters, ecologists, anti-nuclear activists, workers, women, youth, gays. The battle for relative civil liberties may appear to be won, but the war for everything else is on. . .

In many ways, we’re only just beginning. For instance, the sporadic contacts between anarchists in both blocs can now be cemented. In April and Italian group is sponsoring a large gathering of East and West anarchists – the first time ever. In a sense we are at point zero. Now we can really move.”

The danger:
“Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

The barbed wire and concrete borders are now being replaced by a border less tangible: that of money/commodity relations and rule. And this game, like the old one, has only enough room for a few players.”

In 1990, the future was open for action. McGlynn ends:
“The paradox is that as the world has gotten very interesting recently, it’s also simultaneously becoming increasingly monotone and banal. Pepsi power, etc. This, then, is prime territory for adventurers seeking seams in this seemingly seamless whole. It’s been remarked that with Stalinism collapsing, we are now ‘at the end of history.’ Rather, perhaps, we are only at its beginning.”

Indeed. But McGlynn’s fears were realized as capitalism remade the former Soviet Bloc in its image. Could this have been prevented with more effective anti-state socialist organizing and more widespread solidarity work across borders from below? Was a libertarian socialist alternative possible? Or was the choice always simply between Stalinism and neoliberalism?

“We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We Hate the Government!”: Queer Anarchism in Love and Rage

Anarchists in Love and Rage (1989-98) pushed the struggle for queer liberation in radical directions. Members actively participated in gay and lesbian marches, developed an anarchist approach to queer politics, and joined ACT UP in fighting for people with AIDS.

Anarchists often had a visible presence at queer demonstrations and pushed radical action at them. For instance, Jan Kraker from the NYC Autonomous Anarchist Action describes how AAA brought a militant edge to queer organizing at a 1990 rally commemorating the Stonewall uprising. They dressed in Black Bloc and brought a banner to the rally that provided direction for the otherwise inchoate crowd. Kraker describes how “what had been a [sic] unorganized mass of people outside a bar had turned into a spirited march behind a ‘Queer Without Fear—Autonomous Anarchist Action’ banner.”[1]

This exemplifies how Love and Rage encouraged broader movements to take a more radical, confrontational approach. It was not necessarily about convincing them to become anarchists or join the organization, but rather spreading new tactics and values that had been developed within the anarchist movement of the 1980s. In this vein, Liz A. Highleyman advocated collective participation in the queer march on Washington in 1993, arguing that “it is important that anarchists have a presence in the march to let people know that we cannot rely on laws and the government to guarantee queer liberation.”[2] Anarchist chants included “We’re fucking anarchists, we’ll fuck whoever we want!” and “We’re here, we’re Queer, and we hate the government!”[3] A group of Red & Anarchist Skinheads marched with a banner reading “Anti-Racist Skinheads and Punx Against Homophobia” and chanted “Oi! Oi! Oi! We fuck boys!”[4]

Beyond participating in queer activism, anarcha-feminists argued that there was something inherently queer about the anarchist rejection of all structures of social domination. For instance, Highleyman notes about the anarchist contingent at the 1993 march that “Gay, Lesbian, Bi, hetero or undefined, all the anarchists were queer in their own way.”[5] Lin L. Elliot goes further, arguing in a powerful article linking queer and indigenous resistance that the “new activism of the 80s and 90s has already shown us the way. ACT UP and, more recently, Queer Nation, embody an unmistakably Queer perspective; non-hierarchical, even anarchical, they combine seriousness with humor, politics with play.”[6] Queer and anarchist politics both embodied this non-hierarchical, fluid approach to the world.

This perspective prefigured later developments in queer anarchist theory. The Mary Nardini Gang argues in “Toward the Queerest Insurrection” in 2014 that queer is not simply a sexual identity but rather “the qualitative position of opposition to presentations of stability […] Queer is the cohesion of everything in conflict with the heterosexual capitalist world. […] By ‘queer’, we mean ‘social war.’ And when we speak of queer as a conflict with all domination, we mean it.”[7] In this view, anarchism is inherently queer because it rejects the “normalcy” of capitalist patriarchy and struggles against all forms of hierarchy and oppression.

Anarchists also participated in AIDS activism, although they critiqued the state-centric elements of the movement. ACT UP drew upon many anarchistic values and practices: it was decentralized, grassroots, and direct-action oriented, and it operated outside of the state in many ways. Members formed alternative health networks, squatted buildings for people with AIDS to live in, provided safer-sex education, volunteer service organizations, and more.[8] Despite this, ACT UP focused largely on spectacular actions meant to pressure the government to act on AIDS. Anarchists generally rejected this strategy on principle.

Liz Highleyman critiques ACT UP from an anarchist perspective in her article “Anarchism and AIDS Activism.” She argues that “the government does not represent our best interests [so] it would be foolish to rely on it as a source of solutions […] we would be better off putting the time, money (including taxes), and effort that we currently devote to petitioning, supporting, and evading the government into alternative activities that meet our needs directly.”[9]

It is unclear from Highleyman’s piece, however, what she sees as the alternative: despite her call to “develop solutions that do not rely on the state,” would it really have been possible or practical to quickly develop effective treatments for AIDS without state intervention?[10] Indeed, Highleyman’s critique of ACT UP did not go unchallenged. In the next issue of the newspaper, a letter from Eric L. Sambach pushed back against her conclusion that ACT UP did not live up to the “anarchist ideal.” Sambach says that

ACT UP was not set up as an anarchist ideal, but to develop an effective response to the AIDS crisis. ACT UP members see a situation where rapidly growing numbers of people are dying as an emergency. In an emergency we do whatever works to enhance and save lives. Whether that action fits an anarchist or other model of social organization is another, and in these terms, theoretical question.[11]

Whether or not ACT UP strictly conformed to anarchist theory and practice was beside the point; AIDS activists took whatever opportunity they could to respond to an existential crisis. It may be useful to lay out an anarchist critique of state-centered AIDS activism, but to apply a “pure” anarchist standard to ACT UP verged on a dogmatic prioritization of anarchist politics over the lives of people with AIDS.

[1] Jan Kraker, “Faeries, Anarchists and Others Commemorate Stonewall,” Love and Rage, Vol. 1 No. 5 (August 1990), 4-5.

[2] Liz A. Highleyman, “Queer March in April,” Love and Rage, Vol. 4, No. 1 (February/March 1993), 3.

[3] Liz A. Highleyman, “Anarchists Join Queer March,” Love and Rage, Vol. 4 No. 3 (June/July 1993), 1. I personally witnessed a similar chant at the NATO summit protests in Chicago in 2012: “we’re here, we’re queer, we’re anarchists we’ll fuck you up!”

[4] Ibid., 6.

[5] Ibid., 6.

[6] Lin L. Elliot, “500 Queers of Resistance,” Love and Rage, Vol. 3, No. 5 (June 1992), 2.

[7] Mary Nardini Gang, “Toward the Queerest Insurrection,” (2014).

[8] Liz Highleyman, “Anarchism and AIDS Activism,” Love and Rage, Vol 2. No. 6 (June/July 1991), 10.

[9] Ibid., 11.

[10] Ibid., 11.

[11] Eric L. Sambach, letter titled “Purpose Pragmatism and Privilege,” Love and Rage, Vol. 2 No. 7 (August 1991), 2.

“To Repulse The State From Our Uteri”: Anarcha-Feminist Abortion Struggle

Woman holding a flag and a sign reading “Free my uterus! And all other political prisoners.” From Liz A. Highleyman, “Reproductive Freedom in Everyday Life,” *Love and Rage* Vol. 3, No. 2, 1992.

I’ve been working on an article on anarcha-feminism in the late 1980s-90s, focusing primarily on abortion struggle (in part in response to the new Texas anti-abortion law). As the anarcha-feminist Liz Highleyman put it 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.”

Anarcha-feminists were on the front lines of the militant struggle for abortion. 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 abortion, so their analysis and political practice feel particularly relevant today. Anarcha-feminists generally took a three-pronged approach to abortion struggle: construction of women’s infrastructure, defense of abortion infrastructure, and a combative relationship with the state. (Note that the language in this post is very gender-normative because this is the language that the feminists I’m looking at used at the time.)

1. Construction of women’s infrastructure: establishing autonomous infrastructure (health clinics, etc.) and self-help groups in which women learned to take care of their own bodies and induce abortions on their own terms. As one anonymous anarchist put it in an article called “Laws and Outlaws,” “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?”

This meant first and foremost an urgent need to (as Highleyman wrote) “rebuild the network of feminist women’s health and reproductive resources that existed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s,” particularly organizations like the Chicago Jane Collective which provided underground abortions before they were legalized. While anarcha-feminists supported abortions provided by accredited doctors, their focus on women’s autonomy led them to draw on alternative traditions of women-controlled health practices. This includes herbal and holistic methods which women have used “throughout the ages […] to control their fertility and reproduction.” Thus anarchists advocated expanding grassroots infrastructure and self-organization to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to perform their own reproductive care. This would produce true reproductive freedom and autonomy, independent of the state and its laws.

2. Defense of abortion infrastructure: physically protecting abortion clinics from the attacks of Operation Rescue and others. Many non-anarchists took part in this, of course, but anarcha-feminists brought Black Bloc tactics and a willingness to engage in physical confrontation, and they were very successful in preventing Operation Rescue from shutting down clinics in NYC, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and in many other places across the country.

But anarcha-feminists believed that defense of infrastructure was not enough. They vowed to go after Operation Rescue, prevent them from meeting, and disrupt them anywhere they went. When Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993, anarchists physically confronted Operation Rescue, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.

3. Combative relationship with the state: anarcha-feminists did not appeal to the state to maintain the right to abortion. They believed that the state was inherently patriarchal and was ultimately the enemy of women. In place of the slogan “we’re pro-choice and we vote,” anarcha-feminists marched behind a banner reading “we’re pro-choice and we riot.”

Anarcha-feminists attempted to insert anarchist analysis into the mainstream feminist movement and convince feminists not to focus on legalistic, state-centered activism. They supported struggles to maintain legal abortion, but they cautioned that the state could not be trusted to maintain the right to abortion, and women must be ready to act on their own terms to maintain their bodily autonomy and self-determination. This meant taking power into their own hands.

As Sunshine Smith remarks, forming self-help medical groups and abortion infrastructure in the Bay Area “has, in very concrete ways, made our struggle against the anti-abortion group Operation ‘Rescue’ and the ‘Supreme’ Court stronger and more effective. We have learned that if the time comes, we can and will do home abortions. We are becoming physically aware of the invasion the government is conducting into our bodies. We are now able to repulse the state from our uteri because we are gaining the knowledge that enables us to control our own bodies.”

David Graeber’s Anarchism: A Vision, an Attitude, and a Set of Practices

I realized that I missed the anniversary of David Graeber’s death a few days ago. I want to mark it, because Graeber was in many ways a model for the kind of engaged intellectual work that I aspire to do.

Graeber’s book on anarchism in the anti-globalization movement, Direct Action: An Ethnography, remains one of my favorites. I used a section of it, combined with his classic short pamphlet “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” to introduce anarchism in a class on American Anarchism that I taught to first-year college students a couple years ago. In Direct Action, Graeber argues that anarchism consists of three interlocking parts: a vision, an attitude, and a set of practices.

1. First, the anarchist vision refers to people who endorse an explicitly anarchist doctrine or what Graeber refers to as “a certain vision of human possibilities” (214)

2. Second is the anarchist attitude, meaning a rejection of unjust authority and hierarchy. In this sense, anarchism has always existed, across time and across every society, for people have always rebelled against unjust authority and have fought for equality and justice

3. Third is a set of practices—or a set of institutions, habits, and practices. This entails building egalitarian forms of organization which produce and are supported by an egalitarian ethos.

Graeber says that it is the combination of these three things—the vision, the attitude, and the set of practices—that produces something we can call anarchism: “It’s when the three reinforce each other—when a revulsion against oppression causes people to try to live their lives in a more self-consciously egalitarian fashion, when they draw on those experiences to produce visions of a more just society, when those visions, in turn, cause them to see existing social arrangements as even more illegitimate and obnoxious—that one can begin to talk about anarchism. Hence anarchism is in no sense a doctrine. It’s a movement, a relationship, a process of purification, inspiration, and experiment. This is its very substance” (215-16).

And of course, let us all remember Graeber’s ultimate insistence that “direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free.” But it is clear that we must simultaneously act as if we were free today AND build the structures, organizations, relationships, and institutions that enable true freedom for all. This is the task and the promise of anarchism.

Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics

Check out the recording of the panel discussion I organized on Race, Gender, and Anarchist Cultural Politics! (See the description below.) We are thinking about hosting an event series on anarchist history this fall, please reach out if you are interested in participating! You can email me at scb274@cornell.edu

Anarchist movements have not only organized workers and challenged state power, but also produced vibrant cultures of resistance. In this panel, Kirwin Shaffer, Montse Feu, and Spencer Beswick examine how anarchists have engaged with questions of race and gender in their cultural production in Cuba and the United States.

Tracing diasporic networks and grappling with intersectional identities that traversed political and cultural boundaries, the presenters explore the mixed legacy of anarchist movements in their struggles to overcome racialized and gendered limitations to their emancipatory visions. ————————————————————————-

Kirwin Shaffer: “The Multiple Uses of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Sexuality in Cuban Anarchist Culture” 0:15

Montse Feu: “Women Fighting Fascist Spain: Protest and Solidarity in the United States” 19:56

Spencer Beswick: “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation” 37:30

————————————————————————-

Panelists:

• Kirwin Shaffer is Professor of Latin American Studies at Penn State University – Berks College. He is author of three books on anarchism in the Caribbean (Anarchist Cuba, Black Flag Boricuas, and Anarchists of the Caribbean) and co-editor of the award-winning edited collection In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History.

• Montse Feu recovers and examines the literary history of the Spanish Civil War exile in the United States, US Hispanic periodicals, and migration and exile literature at large. She is the author of Correspondencia personal y política de un anarcosindicalista exiliado: Jesús González Malo (1943-1965) (Universidad de Cantabria, 2016) and Fighting Fascist Spain: Worker Protest from the Printing Press (University of Illinois Press, 2020). She is co-editor of Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States (University of Illinois Press, 2019).

• Spencer Beswick is a PhD candidate at Cornell University studying the history of anarchism and the left. A chapter he wrote based on the material for this presentation will be featured in a forthcoming book series on anarchism and punk published by Active Distribution. Spencer’s dissertation is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, 1989-98

I just submitted my chapter for this upcoming book series on anarchism and punk coming out from the UK radical publisher Active Distribution next year (distributed by AK Press in the US). I’m excited to get published in print for the first time! Here is the introduction to the chapter:

*Love and Rage banner at a 1993 anti-fascist demonstration in Chattanooga,* TN

“What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”-Love and Rage member Joel Olson

“Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white […] Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building” (Love and Rage, 1997, p. 3). Thus argues a 1997 editorial that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial or should it accept its whiteness and try to work in coalitions with people of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage (1989-98), which was the most significant American anarchist federation since the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. Love and Rage was embedded in the largely white punk world. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive in the post-1960s counterrevolution, members worried that punk’s white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and “race traitor” politics that sought to abolish whiteness in order to build revolution.

This chapter begins by situating Love and Rage within the history of race and anarchism in the United States. Despite a rich tradition of anti-authoritarianism among people of color, American anarchism is typically thought to be a largely white phenomenon. But in the 1980s, imprisoned ex-Black Panthers began to theorize a new form of Black Anarchism that reverberated through the anarchist world. Love and Rage drew on this tradition as well as the theorization of white skin privilege by the Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-86) to center whiteness as one of the major barriers to revolutionary politics. Given its focus on race, the federation was keenly aware of its own racial demographics. Co-founder Chris Day argued that the group’s social base was the newly “reproletarianized” children of the white middle class who came to anarchist politics through the punk scene. I employ political theorist AK Thompson’s notion of white middle class “ontological politics,” which explains how dissident youth sought a new way of being in the world, to analyze how punk culture provided new forms of life and politics for white reproles. The punk scene provided a refuge for young dissidents to live their anarchist politics.

Anarchist punks practiced a form of white race traitor politics: they sought to actively repudiate their privilege in order to break up the “white club” that upholds the US racial hierarchy. But the efficacy of these tactics is questionable, and I end by critically evaluating Love and Rage’s approach to anti-racism. Despite its commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism, the group failed to adequately address the problems posed by its own whiteness and experienced great difficulty both recruiting and working in coalition with people of color. I argue that, aside from anti-fascist organizing against white supremacists, the federation’s punk-influenced ontological politics largely favored individual, performative rejection of white privilege rather than collective political action. This undermined Love and Rage’s efforts to build multi-racial revolutionary dual power beyond the boundaries of punk subculture. I end by identifying lessons that anarchists, punks, and anti-racists can draw from the federation’s history.

“We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot”: Anarcha-Feminists Fight Operation Rescue

Anarchist contingent at the “March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom” (Love and Rage, 1989)

In the 1980s, the Christian Right waged war on abortion. When President Reagan failed to outlaw it, anti-abortion activists in Operation Rescue (founded in 1985) took to the streets to physically shut down abortion clinics. Using the slogan “if you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder,” they even defended far-right activists who firebombed clinics and killed abortion providers.

Operation Rescue was met by a new generation of anarcha-feminists across the country who drew on an evolving repertoire of anarchist tactics to defeat them. They confronted anti-abortion activists in the streets as part of their broader fight against patriarchy, capitalism, and the state in the late twentieth century. Instead of symbolic protest, anarcha-feminists directly confronted Operation Rescue in order to defend abortion and women’s autonomy from both the far right and the state itself. Anarchist interventions in reproductive justice struggles helped revitalize a feminist movement that had fought a decade of rearguard battles against the neoliberal Reagan counterrevolution.

Militant abortion defense became a key element of late twentieth century anarchist feminism. Anarchists announced their presence at the 1989 March on Washington for Reproductive Freedom with a banner reading “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!” This slogan is a far cry from the mainstream feminist emphasis on voting and other legal strategies. This demonstrates the anarchist commitment to both women’s autonomy and militant direct action. In New York City, a group affiliated with the anarchist organization Love and Rage (1989-98) used black bloc tactics to defend an abortion clinic from Operation Rescue in 1990. Dressed in all black to preserve anonymity, two dozen helmeted anarchists linked arms alongside members of Women’s Health Action and Mobilization (WHAM!) and AIDS activists in ACT UP to prevent Operation Rescue from disrupting the clinic.

Several years later, Operation Rescue attempted to host a summer training camp in Minneapolis in 1993. The anarcho-punk Profane Existence collective set the tone for the local response when they vowed in a widely distributed poster that if Operation Rescue came to town, anarchists would “lock [them] in a church and burn the fucker down.” While things did not go quite this far, anarchists physically confronted Operation Rescue, blocked them in their church, disrupted their meetings, vandalized their materials, protected clinics from their attacks, and generally made them unwelcome. Although some liberals opposed these tactics, anarchists and other militants handed Operation Rescue a major defeat and ran them out of town.

Reflecting on the experience, an anarchist named Liza wrote in an article titled “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue,” that “it seems like no matter how hard activists fight, we rarely win. Except this time we were victorious. We fought against these fascists […] We saw the demise of Operation Rescue in the Twin Cities, partly due to our unprecedented aggressiveness and opposition, and partly because their movement is losing, big time.” Operation Rescue soon suffered a split and major demobilization, in part due to legal action taken by President Bill Clinton’s administration against anti-abortion militants. But before this, they were defeated in the streets by anarcha-feminists who took matters into their own hands. Direct action proved critical to defending reproductive freedom.

Although grounded in the 1970s Women’s Liberation Movement, this younger generation of revolutionary feminists who confronted Operation Rescue was also inspired by the group Anti-Racist Action, who fought fascists in the streets, as well as squatters in Western Europe Autonome groups who began using black bloc tactics in the 1980s. Anarchists introduced these radical street tactics to the feminist movement and proved their efficacy in the fight against anti-abortion activists. Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism: feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists offered a new vision of revolutionary feminism.

Poster distributed in Minneapolis by anarchists in preparation for an Operation Rescue “summer training camp” (Profane Existence, 1993)

Note: I wrote this short text for an online exhibit on the 1980s. It is connected to an article I am writing on anarcha-feminism in the late twentieth century, primarily in Love and Rage.

Primary Sources:

Kraker, Jan. “Anarchists Confront Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 5 (August 1990), 3.

Lib, Laura. “An Introduction to Anarcha-Feminism.” Love and Rage, Vol. 2, No. 3 (March 1991), 6.

Liza. “Minnesota Not Nice to Operation Rescue.” Love and Rage, Vol. 4, No. 4 (September 1993), 1, 3, 19.

Love and Rage New York Local. “Member Handbook.” (August 1997).

“Run ‘Em Out of Town: Operation Rescue Are Coming, But Pro-Choice Radicals Are Grinding Our Axes.” Profane Existence, No. 19-20 (Summer 1993), 4.

Secondary Sources:

Carroll, Tamar W. Mobilizing New York: AIDS, Antipoverty, and Feminist Activism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Hadley, Janet. Abortion: Between Freedom and Necessity. London: Virago Press, 1996.

Martin, Bradford. The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan. New York: Hill & Wang, 2012.

Tanenbaum, Julia. “To Destroy Domination in All Forms: Anarcha-Feminist Theory, Organization, and Action, 1970-1978.” Perspectives on Anarchist Theory N. 29 (2016), 13-32.

Ziegler, Mary. After Roe: The Lost History of the Abortion Debate. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2015.

Democracy, Whiteness, and Fascism: Reflections on the Jan. 6 Capitol-Storming

What follows is a collection of three short reflections on the far-right storming of the Capitol on January 6th.

Initial Thoughts on Tactics Vs. Politics

I have seen a lot of people say that the far right storming the capitol is a terrible assault on democracy and its institutions. Many of these comments conflate condemnation of the tactic with condemnation of the politics of the demonstrators. But I’m not sure that this is a good read of the situation.

Many (most?) of these people in DC actually truly believe that the election was stolen and that democracy is dead (though many of them are indeed straight up fascist opportunists). The protestors are totally wrong in the specifics of their conspiracy theories (but perhaps correct that US democracy is largely a sham)… But isn’t it true that storming a capitol building in defense of democracy against a real coup would actually be a good thing? At least arguably?

Let’s say that Trump was a more effective fascist and he managed to throw out the results of the election and install himself as the Great Eternal Leader, with support of the DC police and the national guard as well as most of the elite political institutions that might otherwise act against him. Might it not be a good idea to storm the capitol to try to remove him?

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that I think the left has been totally outmaneuvered here. Somehow many people on the left (we could say many socialists/socdems/progressives, rather than anarchists and communists) find themselves defending the sanctity of US democracy as Biden and Co. prepare for four more years of the status quo, while the far right has managed to position itself as the more radical opposition in the streets. This sets a dangerous precedent.

This is in many ways a reversal of the politics and street norms of how things played out last year with the George Floyd rebellion. How did this happen? What can be done to build a more effective left in the coming years?

Note: I probably overemphasized the fascists’ belief that they were indeed “saving democracy.” What follows are further thoughts on how to interrogate their relationship with democracy.

Saving White Democracy — or Abolishing It

I’ve been thinking about how to evaluate the far-right Capitol-stormers’ claim that they were “saving democracy” from being “stolen.” On the face of it, it’s ridiculous. The QAnon conspiracy theories are dumb and the many known fascists and neo-nazis photographed in the heart of the action are quite likely using “saving democracy” as a cover for what they really want: white power. But I think it’s not this simple, or rather, it is more accurate to say that in many ways “democracy” has always been a cover for white power and white supremacy in this country.

These reactionary white people have a very different understanding of what democracy means than we do. For many white people in the US, “democracy” has always meant “white capitalist democracy.” We know how this worked historically.

White (male) democracy has from the beginning rested on systematic exclusion of BIPOC, poor people, and women. Democracy and citizenship were originally conceived as the domain of only white male property owners. Only certain people were considered “fit” for self-government, and Black people in particular were understood to be constitutively unfit for self-government. Their exclusion was part of the foundation of republicanism (not meaning the GOP), democracy, and whiteness in the US. I’ve been reading David Roediger’s The Wages of Whiteness and Joel Olson’s The Abolition of White Democracy, which have helped me contextualize the historical interweaving of whiteness, citizenship, and democracy.

But democracy has always been a contested category, and it has changed over the years as BIPOC and women have fought for and won the right to vote. They have not simply expanded the electorate, but indeed expanded the very notion of democracy itself. In order to understand the current “stop the steal” mobilization, we have to see that for a certain sector of fascists and white supremacists, these changes have always been illegitimate. In their minds, Black people in particular are not and cannot be fit for self-government. They are not democratic citizens. They are necessarily the excluded Other, so their participation threatens white democracy itself.

This is why, Joel Olson argues, we must abolish white democracy. We need to abolish whiteness as a social category that produces hierarchy and racial oppression, and we need to abolish the system of white democracy that defends whiteness and capitalism.

But I do believe in democracy. My vision of it is similar to that old vision of “participatory democracy” that they talked about in the 1960s. Democracy is an active practice in which people make decisions about the things that affect them. It is about self-government, true equality, and true freedom. It is incompatible with the vision of white democracy that these fascists support. It is also incompatible with the settler empire called the United States.

Final Thoughts on Fascism’s Growing Threat

To be clear, I think that the storming of the Capitol is a Very Bad and Scary Thing and that fascism is a large and growing threat that must be taken very seriously. But I do think the danger is probably more in the medium to long term rather than in the short term. This gives us time to prepare so that we won’t continue to be outmaneuvered by them.

Short term: they are not well organized. They clearly had no idea what they were going to do in the event that they actually got into the capitol building. Trump is largely ineffective. Most Republican officials have repudiated them. The majority of the government and the majority of the population clearly found the whole thing awful and I don’t see a real possibility of any kind of actual coup before Biden takes office.

Medium term: the far right gets to claim a major win and this will embolden them. We will very likely see a major escalation in both street violence and lone wolf violence coming from fascists (and as a friend pointed out, likely further actions on inauguration day and future coordinated actions at state Capitols). I would not be surprised if this also functions as the beginning of the consolidation of a more significant mass fascist party/organization/movement. Which brings me to…

Long term: think of this as analogous to Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. A couple thousand Nazis led a doomed insurrection, some of them were killed, Hitler ended up in prison for treason. This is when he wrote Mein Kampf. Although the putsch was a total failure, it was a very important moment in the development of the Nazis, and we know what happened ten years later. Is this the most likely direction that history now heads in? Probably not. But this is the danger: that fascists successfully use this experience to help build a militant mass movement.

This is why we must continue to vigorously oppose fascists at every turn. Biden won’t save us. The Democrats won’t save us. The State won’t save us. Only sustained organization and action will.