Category: History

The Grounded Intellectual: Articulating Self-Knowledge from Within the Movement

As a PhD student working on movement history, I think constantly about how to best use my position within the academy. It is easy to get sucked into the logics of the academic world, no matter our political commitments. How do we prevent this? How can we relate to movements outside the academy in a way that both strengthens them and transforms our own subjectivity? It seems key to me to remain grounded within movement spaces. We must function as part of movements—certainly with our own particular knowledge and tools to contribute, but as part of the movement and thus helping to articulate self-knowledge from within.

I recently read Raúl Zibechi’s excellent book Territories in Resistance and I appreciate how he frames this process:

“We strengthen and expand social movements by understanding the meaning of the actual social practices, of the ‘historical movement that is unfolding before our eyes’ (Marx). Understanding is a creative act […] But the process of understanding is a form of action; one understands only what one lives. Hence we can only understand the meaning of social practices in and with them—from within. […] In Argentina, Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD Solano have developed the concept of ‘the militant researcher.’ This is being part of the social movement—not just integrating into the organization, but participating in the disengagement or place shifting that the whole movement pursues, an act of moving-oneself that captures and reconfigures.”

In the words of the Italian Autonomist Marxist Raniero Panzieri, “analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.”

When I was involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop, I felt that my studies and my political activity were each part of a connected whole. I shared my research with my non-academic (but equally intellectually committed) comrades, who in turn kept me grounded and pointed in the right direction. Without this anchor, my research process feels adrift. I feel an urgent need to rediscover a radical intellectual community on the border between academia and movement spaces, dedicated to consciously articulating self-knowledge from within the movement.

From the Archive to the Infoshop: Reflections on Movement History

Forty sweaty people stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowded punk space listening to an old anarchist talk politics. Despite the familiar atmosphere, we were not between songs at a show. The crowd was gathered for one of the most popular events in a “Week of Anarchy” that I helped organize in August 2018 at our local infoshop, The Antidote. Ramsey Kanaan, founder of the anarchist publishers AK Press and PM Press, was animatedly sharing his experience organizing against the UK poll tax in the 1980s. Ramsey was sharply critical of the fact that our local political work was centered around Food Not Bombs and the infoshop. He argued that we needed to organize around more substantial political issues and engage in mass social struggle, as did UK anarchists fighting in the poll tax rebellion. Infrastructural projects might feel good, he maintained, but they would not lead to revolution. Let the Catholic charities feed people—they could do it better than Food Not Bombs, anyway.

We were indignant and a little defensive. Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop were the foundation for our political work in Ithaca. They helped us build community and find meaning in our own lives. Most of all, they were a living example of the new world we sought to build based in mutual aid and solidarity. And yet within half a year the infoshop fell apart; after another eight months I quit Food Not Bombs, frustrated by our lack of strategic vision.

Why did these projects fail? After much reflection and conversations with comrades, I concluded that these projects became ends in themselves which sucked up an enormous amount of time and energy. Rather than expanding our capacity to engage politically, they ended up constricting our field of vision. Frustrated conversations about this with my partner would often end with us saying “shit, was Ramsey right after all?”

Later, conducting dissertation research at the Brooklyn Interference Archive, I eagerly pored through numerous zines, personal reflections, and debates from the infoshop movement in the 1990s. I was shocked to read many of the exact same discussions and debates that we had had about our own infoshop, particularly the lack of political direction and the drain of energy. Without knowledge of the history of infoshops, we had tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Had we known about this previous generation of infoshops and learned from their errors, we could have avoided some major pitfalls.

Most importantly, perhaps we could have seen the danger of putting too much focus on maintaining the space itself at the expense of serious discussions about our political strategy. Had we been familiar with this history, we could have pushed ourselves to have more political discussions from the start, worked out a broader intentional strategy to build anarchism as a force in Ithaca, and positioned the infoshop as something that contributes to that broader strategy rather than being an end in itself. Of course, many participants did have their own sense of political strategy; the problem was that we did not have these discussions as a group. We fell into the trap that Joel Olson (himself an active participant in the 1990s anarchist movement) identified in his essential essay Between Infoshops and Insurrection, that all too often “infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it.”

Movement history is necessary because it brings these histories to a new generation of radicals. Not everybody can spend weeks in archives reading obscure documents from previous movements. Historians can compile these resources and interpret lessons from them for new waves of anarchist activity. This is what I hope to do with my own historical work. The highest honor I can imagine as a historian would be to someday see my book sitting on an infoshop bookshelf, marked as the material for an upcoming meeting of an anarchist reading group.

Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement

Despite this blog’s title, I have not yet posted anything “historical.” Partly this is due to the times; responding to coronavirus seems more pressing, and I don’t study any history that might be useful (relatedly, does anyone know how anarchists responded to the Spanish Flu?). I plan to start posting more historical writing related to my research as well as reflections on the kind of movement history that I find most useful. To give a sense of my research here is a short prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement.”

From Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to the rebirth of democratic socialism and antifascism, today’s American left has regained a strength and vision absent since the 1960s. A revival of anarchist thought and practice has been central to this revitalization of anti-capitalism. Ostensibly marginalized since the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, anarchism underwent a global revival following the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the early twenty-first century, most radical social movements in the United States operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, and rejection of the state and capitalism.  My dissertation traces this anarchist resurgence to its roots in a critique of the New Left, inspiration from the women’s and Black liberation movements, and transnational connections to German autonomists and the Zapatistas. This transnational history of American anarchism is guided by three primary questions. First, how and why did anarchism gain hegemony within the American left by the end of the twentieth century? Second, how have transnational networks shaped American anarchism? Third, what lessons can we learn from this history?

My dissertation is an intellectual and social history of contemporary American anarchism. From preliminary research, I argue that social anarchism—organized socialist anarchism, as opposed to individualism—was central to the revitalization of the anti-state left through the development of intersectional anti-authoritarian politics. Social anarchism provided a meeting point for feminist, anti-racist, anti-state, and anti-capitalist traditions which together produced a revolutionary intersectional politics for the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, social ecologists like Murray Bookchin critiqued all forms of hierarchy, anarcha-feminists such as Ithaca’s Tiamat collective challenged masculinist class-essentialism, and ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism. In the 1980s-90s, these currents converged in organizations like the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Anti-Racist Action, and the Black Autonomy Federation. My research critically evaluates their theory and practice in order to understand the development of intersectional social anarchism.

My work contributes to three primary academic and activist conversations. First, it encourages historians of the left to more fully engage anarchism, which has been viewed as Marxism’s immature sibling despite its growing importance. My research historicizes how anarchists have shaped the strategy and tactics of left-wing social movements to the point that horizontal, leaderless forms of organization have become dominant in social struggle from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. Second, I contribute to the literature on intersectionality by exploring Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, and white “race traitor” politics, which offer much to today’s identity politics debates. Third, my research strengthens the anarchist movement’s historical self-knowledge by framing conversations around organizational form and emphasizing post-1960s continuity. Could privileging continuities alongside ruptures offer insight into practicing anti-capitalist politics in periods of low mobilization? I explore the anarchist movement’s successes and failures during a counter-revolutionary era to offer lessons for a time of resurgent global fascism.