Fragments of an Anarchist Dissertation

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

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

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

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

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

RAGE! Anarchist Militancy in Reagan’s America

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed radical slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America.

They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the pilot edition of what became the Love and Rage anarchist newspaper was called simply RAGE! The newspaper, which they distributed at a major national action at the Pentagon in 1988, reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad, including the so-called war on drugs.

Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out from political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving. Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites.

Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism (anti-state socialism) provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

Lessons from the History of Chinese Anarchism

In 1995, Love and Rage militant Joel Olson wrote an article called “The History of Chinese Anarchism” that drew lessons from the defeat of anarchism and the ascendance of communism (Marxism-Leninism) in China in the 1920s.

Marxists sometimes present this transition as an inevitable evolution from the supposed adolescent phase of anarchism into the maturity of Marxism. Not so, says Olson; as in Europe, this “was not an ‘evolution’ but a political struggle—one that the anarchists lost” due to “the anarchists’ failure to come up with a revolutionary strategy that could build a mass movement without violating their principles of autonomy and freedom.”

The problem for the Chinese anarchists was their faith in the spontaneity of the masses—so long as they were properly educated in the “new morality” which would “bring out the ‘natural’ anarchist inclinations in people.” They did not believe in class struggle or movement building. Indeed, Olson explains that “their anti-political stance led them to be skeptical of any attempts at organizing larger than the local level. […] Most Chinese anarchists believed in an ‘organic’ revolution. They saw social change not as class struggle but in terms of alternative forms of social organization such as communes, study societies, and other free spaces that would replicate themselves, spreading anarchism and anarchist ideas throughout society until eventually the state and capitalism were overthrown.”

In the final section of the article, aptly titled “Learning the Lessons,” Olson argues that:

“Before anarchism can be viable it must be able to effectively organize a democratic political movement that is based on the idea that humans built this world and thus humans are the ones who will have to change it, not on some apolitical belief in the power of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘organic’ local actions to spread throughout a society. This has to be done not by abandoning politics, but by creating a new, participatory, nonhierarchical democratic politics. […] The task now is to make that democracy eminently political, and bridge the gap between democracy and organization.”

This captures the essence of what Love and Rage was attempting in this period: to create new forms of mass, democratic, participatory politics that would be grounded in anarchism but resolute in the search for mass politics beyond radical subcultures and alternative spaces.

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

The core of the radical environmental movement that developed in the 1960s-90s largely embraced anarchist thought and practice. Radical environmentalists criticised Marxists for their support of rampant industrialisation and their propensity to delay environmental action until ‘after the revolution.’ Eco-anarchists like prominent Earth First!er Judi Bari argued that the environmentally destructive practices of socialist countries reflected both a failure of Marxism and the fact that all states privilege economic growth and stability above the health of the environment.

The theorisation of eco-anarchism was a central component of the broader attempt to revise anarchist politics for the new era. Anarchism’s ecological focus also expanded its appeal to a new generation of environmental activists who saw the pressing need for radical change. As Marxists downplayed the importance of environmental struggle and even championed the industrial policy of socialist states, anarchists began to fight back against the catastrophic damage being done to the earth.

A variety of anarchist positions competed for leadership of the radical environmental movement. Beginning in the 1960s, Murray Bookchin theorised ‘social ecology’ as a synthesis of social anarchism with ecological thought and advocated for decentralised political action to build an ecological society. Opposed to Bookchin’s social ecology was an ecologically-motivated ‘anarcho-primitivism,’ centered around the Fifth Estate newspaper, which went beyond the New Left’s anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism to critique industrial civilisation itself. Both tendencies were influential in the aforementioned anti-nuclear movement, as was anarcha-feminism.

Later organisations like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front would take up aspects of the critique of industrial civilisation in their growing commitment to Deep Ecology. Many anarchists also embraced veganism and animal liberation in this era, in part for environmental reasons, and went on to develop an intersectional vision of ‘total liberation.’

The eco-anarchist tendency took center stage in the 1990s in the actions of the Earth Liberation Front as well as the much-celebrated alliance of ‘Teamsters and Turtles’ (labour unions and environmentalists) in the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization. Anarchism’s ecological focus helps explain its increasing appeal in an era of growing environmental consciousness.

This is an excerpt from my article in the journal Anarchist Studies, “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).” Contact me for a PDF!

Is Anarchism a “White” Phenomenon?

The heyday of American anarchism around the turn of the twentieth century was dominated by European immigrants who, although racialized by mainstream society, were predominantly ‘white’ by later twentieth-century standards. The number of self-identified Black anarchists was vanishingly small; even the most prominent Black anarchist in US history, Lucy Parsons, denied her own racial ancestry. The reason for Parsons’s repudiation of her Blackness was complex, but it took place in the context of what we would today criticize as the colorblindness of classical anarchism.

Anarchists rejected all forms of racism on principle and the anarchist-influenced Industrial Workers of the World was one of the first unions to organize across racial lines. Most anarchists, however, felt that addressing race directly only served to reify it and divide the working class. This produced a familiar result: in their dedication to universality, anarchists offered little to the particular problems of African Americans. This contributed to the decline of American anarchism and the corresponding rise of competing leftist tendencies that supported revolutionary forms of Black Nationalism, including the Communist Party in the 1930s. Although anarchists contributed to both the post-World War Two Civil Rights Movement and the social movements of the 1960s, anarchism as such remained marginal.

As Love and Rager Joel Olson later reflected, most white anarchists in the late twentieth century – including leading theorists like Murray Bookchin, Bob Black, and Hakim Bey – inherited the racial blindness of their predecessors.

This account of anarchism’s whiteness and its historical decline has become common sense among activists and historians alike. Yet the extent of US anarchism’s whiteness has been overstated – indeed, we can trace an alternative trajectory of anarchists of color who theorized and practiced anarchism in the face of white supremacy.

In the 1910s, for instance, Mexican and US anarchists worked together in the southern border region to aid and spread the Mexican revolution. Latino anarchists in Los Angeles supported Ricardo Flores Magón’s anarchist Partido Liberal Mexicano and helped organize a radical multi-racial workers’ movement that included the Industrial Workers of the World. In the 1930s, Civil Rights leader Ella Baker helped lead an anarchist-inspired organization of Black cooperatives and taught Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid in her classes on cooperative economics.

Recent work on African American history has also emphasized the anarchistic qualities of Black life and revolt, from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) to William C. Anderson’s The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (2021). Insisting on anarchism’s whiteness can contribute to the marginalization of anarchists of color. Yet despite this alternative tradition of US anarchism, race as such was not central to anarchist praxis until the late twentieth century.

Anarchist racial politics were transformed with the theorization of Black Anarchism as a distinct tendency in the 1980s. Ex-Black Panthers who were imprisoned for revolutionary activity – most notably Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Ashanti Alston, and Kuwasi Balagoon – theorized what they variously called Black Anarchism or New Afrikan Anarchism. While they upheld the Black Panthers as the leading organization of the 1960s, they critiqued the party’s authoritarian and patriarchal tendencies.

Black anarchists synthesized anarchism with Black Nationalism and advocated national self-determination through non-hierarchical federations of Black communes rather than nation-states. This analysis inspired the birth of a generation of Black and people of color anarchist organizations, including the Federation of Black Community Partisans and Anarchist People of Color. Despite the profound contributions of these revolutionaries, however, they remained little known outside of a small number of activists.

This is excerpted from a forthcoming chapter of mine called “Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Subculture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-98)” in the Anarchism and Punk book project: https://anarchismandpunk.noblogs.org

Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League

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

Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the absence of imposed authority. Anarchy is a society that is built on the principles of respect, cooperation and solidarity. Anarchy is wimmin controlling their own bodies, workers controlling their own workplaces, youth controlling their own education and the celebration of cultural difference.
reprinted in Love and Rage, Aug 1990

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

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

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

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

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

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