Category: Politics

The model for mobilizing to protect abortion rights beyond voting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Socializing Truth: Marxism, Gramsci, and Intellectual Struggle

It is common for our DSA chapter to lament our over-abundance of “intellectuals,” given our location in a university town. This lamentation often produces paralysis rather than action. What might it mean to embrace the role of Marxist intellectuals and engage in local struggle from that position? The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci, who was imprisoned and killed by Mussolini’s fascist regime, provides useful tools for us to address this question and sharpen our political practice.

In last night’s DSA Marxist Reading Group, we discussed Gramsci’s essays “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism” and “The Formation of Intellectuals,” from the Prison Notebooks. In these essays, he lays out the role of Marxist intellectuals: to combat capitalist “common sense,” produce “good sense,” and socialize and propagate truth to make it a basis for action. This can only be done by active “new intellectuals” through sustained contact with the people.

Here are key concepts from the texts:

Common sense: the received ideas and norms of society, “borrowed conceptions” of the world that render people subordinate to the capitalist social order. These are the ideas of the ruling class. The social function of intellectuals is to reproduce this common sense through institutions including schools, churches, media, etc.

Ideology: common sense functions as an ideology, i.e., “a world view showing itself implicitly in art, law, economic activity and in all the manifestations of individual and collective life.”

Hegemony: the dominance of capitalism through reproduction of its “common sense” to convince the masses that the current system is natural and beneficial to all. “The ‘spontaneous’ consent given by the great masses of the population to the direction imprinted on social life by the fundamental ruling class, a consent which comes into existence ‘historically’ from the ‘prestige’ (and hence from the trust) accruing to the ruling class from its position and its function in the world of production.”

Organic intellectuals: these are the “natural” intellectuals who reproduce common sense. They are connected with the masses and play important social roles in producing and reproducing ideology. Capitalism has organic intellectuals of its own, for “the capitalist entrepreneur creates with himself the industrial technician, the political economist, the organizer of a new culture, of a new law, etc.” The socialist movement must develop its own organic intellectuals who will produce the new common sense of a new social bloc.

“Organic quality of thought and cultural solidarity could only have been brought about if there had existed between the intellectuals and the simple people that unity which there should have been between theory and practice; if, that is, the intellectuals had been organically the intellectuals of those masses, if they had elaborated and made coherent the principles and problems which those masses posed by their practical activity, in this way constituting a cultural and social bloc.”

Good sense: the role of intellectuals is not to “discover” abstract truths but rather to criticize common sense and “socialize” and propagate truth in order to make it the basis for lived action. This is the production of what Gramsci sometimes calls “good sense.”

The new intellectual: a person of action who unites theory and practice (not a disconnected academic). “The mode of existence of the new intellectual can no longer consist of eloquence, the external and momentary arousing of sentiments and passions, but must consist of being actively involved in practical life, as a builder, an organizer, ‘permanently persuasive’ because he is not purely an orator.”

Creation of intellectual cadres: The new intellectuals cannot act alone. We must collectively develop our analysis and unite theory with practice. This is the role of the Marxist Reading Group and the Socialist Night School. “Critical self-consciousness signifies historically and politically the creation of intellectual cadres: a human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself and does not become independent ‘by itself,’ without organizing itself (in a broad sense) and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is, without organizers and leaders, without the theoretical aspect of the theory-practice nexus distinguishing itself concretely in a stratum of people who ‘specialize’ in its conceptual and philosophical elaboration.”

Role of the party: “We must emphasize the importance and significance which the political parties have in the modern world in the elaboration and propagation of conceptions of the world, inasmuch as they elaborate an ethic and a policy suited to themselves, that is, they act almost as historical ‘experimenters’ with these conceptions. . . the parties are the elaborators of new integrated and all-embracing intellectual systems, in other words the annealing agents of the unity of theory and practice in the sense of real historical process.”

Lessons from the example of intellectual/cultural struggle within religion:

“Certain essentials are deducible from this for every cultural movement which aims to replace common sense and the former conceptions of the world in general: (1) never tire of repeating its arguments (changing the literal form): repetition is the most effective didactic mean of influencing the popular mind; (2) work incessantly to raise the intellectual level of ever-widening strata of the people, that is, by giving personality to the amorphous element of the masses, which means working to produce cadres of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses though remaining in contact with them and becoming ‘the stay of the corset.’ This second necessity, if satisfied, is the one which really changes the ‘ideological panorama’ of an age.”

Fascism and Anti-Fascism in the Post-War United States

I haven’t posted anything in a little while, in part because I’ve been working on a few proposals for academic panels and fellowships as well as revising a chapter for the Anarchism and Punk book project. I want to share some of what I’ve been writing, so here is the proposal that I submitted to the American Historical Association for a panel I am organizing on fascism and anti-fascism in the post-war United States. Fingers crossed that it is accepted and that we can present in person at the conference, which is in Philly in January 2023.

Anti-fascism exploded into the public spotlight after Donald Trump’s electoral victory in 2016. Spectacular street battles between fascists and anti-fascists in the heart of liberal cities like Berkeley and Portland led to antifa becoming a widely discussed phenomenon and a new bogeyman of the far right. Yet despite their meteoric rise to popular consciousness in the past decade, neither fascism nor anti-fascism came out of nowhere. In the United States, fascists continued to mobilize after World War II in the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Christian far right, and beyond. In turn, antifascists have long fought to disrupt their organizing, in part by drawing on the experience of past generations who fought the rise of fascism in Europe. As the far right spreads across the globe today, it is critical to explore the history of post-war anti-fascism and use it to inform contemporary struggles against fascism.

This panel offers new historical perspectives on the development of fascism and anti-fascism in the United States in the post-war period. Panelists argue that, far from marginal or anachronistic political phenomena, fascism and anti-fascism substantively shaped the development of American politics in the second half of the twentieth century. Christopher Vials opens the conversation by providing an explanatory framework for understanding post-war fascism before turning to a case study of the Christian far right. Anna Duensing then shows how the Black anti-fascist tradition shaped Black organizing and coalition-building in the classical civil rights era of the 1950s-60s. Next, Montse Feu discusses the use of humor in US-based solidarity work to undermine Francisco Franco’s “imperial will” in fascist Spain. Finally, Spencer Beswick explores how the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation contributed to the development of contemporary antifa by situating anti-fascism within a broader revolutionary strategy. Mark Bray, the author of Antifa: The Antifascist Handbook, will provide commentary before the floor is opened to audience discussion and questions.

The importance of this history has only grown more urgent in the wake of the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol Building in an attempt to reinstate Donald Trump as president. Given the tumultuous contemporary political situation, we anticipate a broad audience of scholars seeking to understand (and debate) the legacy of post-war fascism and anti-fascism.

Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School

I’m taking a seminar on Public Humanities to inform my own public history work, particularly my approach to oral history projects and public events. For the first session, one of our readings—Robyn Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Humanists (2021)—traces the history of Public Humanities as a concept to its birth in the 1980s. Since then, Schroeder reflects, there have been two somewhat distinct models of public humanities: vertical and horizontal. After giving brief summaries of the differences, this post reflects on my own research as well as my political education work with DSA. I conclude that Ithaca DSA’s approach to our Socialist Night School is exemplary of a horizontal, dialogical approach to collective knowledge production.

In her article on the public humanities, Schroeder explains that the “vertical” model promotes a “one-way flow of knowledge from the university to the public (15).” This is informed by a laudable desire to break down the barrier between the academic and public realms by sharing knowledge. The model is problematic, however, because it assumes that only academics have access to real knowledge and that the public is simply an empty receptacle waiting to be filled.

A horizontal model, on the other hand, takes a more dialogical and collaborative approach to public scholarship. It, too, seeks to break down the barriers between academia and the public, but does so in a way that avoids reifying the position of the university as the ultimate source of knowledge. Practitioners of this model seek to engage with communities to design and implement projects together with the ultimate goal of both advancing scholarly knowledge and providing real benefit to the community.

Naturally, I would like for my own work to follow the second model. Yet for me the lines appear more blurred, as I straddle the line between academia and the “community” that I study—that is to say, the radical left. My dissertation aims to be the book on late 20th century anarchist history that I would like to read, and which I think will be useful for my “own” community. It is based in large part on extensive oral history interviews and I am in constant dialogue and collaboration with others on the left, both within and outside of the academy. I hope that this public humanities seminar will provide me with more tools to further develop my approach.

In any case, Schroeder’s article made me reflect as well on the public programming I help to run through Ithaca DSA’s political education working group. I think that this programming, which includes an internal Marxist reading group and a public-facing monthly Socialist Night School, follows the horizontal model of dialogic, collaborative education and knowledge production.

Although I personally designed the syllabus for our Marxist reading group, it is based on ongoing conversations in the group about what we want to read. Given my own background in the material and my experience teaching it in a college setting, I inevitably play somewhat of a “teacher” role in the group. But we structurally decenter my role by rotating co-facilitation of the meetings and by organizing discussion in rounds so that everyone has equal chance to speak. For the coming year, we are planning a series of mini-units on various topics which will each be designed and implemented by different members of the group.

Our Socialist Night School meets monthly to provide public education and discussion about radical politics. The education is self-consciously dialogical and democratically oriented. Each month, we collectively decide on a new topic and choose two or three short readings, usually including a video, that attendees are encouraged but not required to read. We then develop discussion questions to guide the conversation. The night school meetings themselves, which usually attract between twenty to forty participants, center collective discussion in small groups. Each session begins with a short introduction before we turn to an invited speaker to give a ten to fifteen minute informal talk. The remainder of the event is dedicated to discussion.

Discussions take place in breakout rooms of around four to six participants, each of which has a DSA member facilitating it. The discussions, which are structured in rounds so that everyone has a chance to contribute to each topic, often lead to vibrant personal and intellectual exchange. Indeed, they are crucial sites of collective knowledge production for the local Ithaca left, especially when they enable intergenerational exchange of experiences. After these breakout rooms are finished, we come back together to share out from the discussions and collectively reflect on what we have learned. We end by explicitly addressing how to apply lessons from the reading and discussion to our political work in Ithaca.

Rather than a vertical one-way flow of knowledge from the university to “the public,” the Socialist Night Schools exemplify the horizontal co-production and distribution of knowledge. This is a question of good teaching pedagogy just as much as it is one of Public Humanities as a discipline. Of course, the ultimate goal of the Socialist Night School is to collectively educate ourselves and to strategize about how to build a truly free and democratic world, beginning locally in our own communities. This is a project to which I remain fully committed.

Marxist Reading Group: Introductory Syllabus

Lenin says that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Taking this lesson seriously, I developed this introductory syllabus on revolutionary Marxist theory for Ithaca DSA’s Marxist Reading Group, which has been meeting for almost a year. The study group’s purpose is to sharpen our theoretical tools and collectively develop the knowledge that we need in order to build a new world. The syllabus provides a background in classical Marxist theory written by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Luxemburg, as well as select pieces by Trotsky, Gramsci, and Mao.

Participants are expected to do around 20 to 30 pages of reading for each session. We meet every other week on Zoom, although we hope to begin meeting in person soon (Covid permitting). This is not like a university class; we read and discuss the theory together, help each other understand it, and apply it to our own lives and political work.

Each session is led by two co-facilitators (rotating each meeting) who facilitate the conversation around discussion questions that they have developed—usually three main questions, ideally referencing specific points in the texts. They will sometimes give brief framing thoughts at the beginning of the session. The final discussion question typically relates the text to our own political work so that we can collectively draw out lessons from it.

Unit One: Classical Marxism (Marx and Engels)

All page numbers here are from the Marx-Engels Reader (2nd edition, edited by Robert C. Tucker) Link to PDF

Week One: Intro to Marx

  • (Marx and Engels) The Communist Manifesto (1848) [472-500]

Week Two: Wage Labor and Alienation

  • (Marx) Excerpt from Wage Labor and Capital (1847) [203-206]
  • (Marx) Excerpt from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (1844) [70-84]

Week Three: Commodity Fetishism

  • (Marx) Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 1: Commodities (1867) [302-329]

Week Four: Historical Materialism

  • (Marx) “Marx on the History of His Opinions” (1859) [just read the long paragraph on page 4-5]
  • (Marx) Theses on Feuerbach (1845) [143-145]
  • (Marx) The German Ideology Part 1 (1846) [148-175 and 192-200]

Week Five: History, Anthropology, Proto-Feminism

  • (Engels) The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884) [734-59]

Week Six: The Paris Commune

  • (Marx): The Civil War in France (1871) [625-642]

Week Seven: Scientific Socialism

  • (Engels) Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1892) [683-717]

Unit Two: Revolutionary Socialism (Lenin and Luxemburg)

Week Eight: What Is To Be Done?

  • (Lenin), What Is To Be Done? (1902) [I heavily excerpted this; I am happy to share the document I made, email me at emptyhands@protonmail.com. Alternatively, you could read this whole piece over the course of multiple sessions.]

Week Nine: Luxemburg’s Critique of Lenin

  • (Luxemburg) “Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy” (1904) in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (edited by Peter Hudis & Kevin B. Anderson)[248-65]

Week Ten: The Mass Strike

  • (Luxemburg) “The Mass Strike,” (1906), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [168-99]

Week Eleven: Reform or Revolution, Part One

  • (Luxemburg) Reform or Revolution (1899), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [128-46]

Week Twelve: Reform or Revolution, Part Two

  • (Luxemburg) Reform or Revolution (1899), excerpts in The Rosa Luxemburg Reader [146-67]

Week Thirteen: The State and Revolution, Part One

  • (Lenin) The State and Revolution (1917), Chapter 1, Chapter 2 (only section 3), Chapter 3 (section two and short part of section 5, beginning “Marx deduced from the whole history of socialism… and ending with “confirm Marx’s brilliant historical analysis) [email me at emptyhands@protonmail.com for the document I made with these excerpts]

Week Fourteen: The State and Revolution, Part Two

  • (Lenin) The State and Revolution (1917), Chapter 5 “The Economic Basis of the Withering Away of the State”

Week Fifteen (Optional): Discussing DSA’s National Political Platform

Unit Three: Mini-Unit on Socialist Strategy (Trotsky, Gramsci, and Mao)

Week Sixteen: The Transitional Program

  • (Trotsky) Excerpts from “The Transitional Program” (1938)

Week Seventeen: Hegemony and the Role of Intellectuals

  • (Gramsci) “The Study of Philosophy and of Historical Materialism” [58-75]
  • (Gramsci) “The Formation of Intellectuals” [118-25] (page numbers from The Modern Prince & Other Writings)

Week Eighteen: The Mass Line

  • (Mao) Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, “Chapter 11: The Mass Line”
  • (Liberation Road) “The Mass Line: What It Is and How to Use It”

Writing Movement History: Fall 2021 Posts

I was based at the Brooklyn Interference Archive for Fall 2021 conducting dissertation research and interviews with support from Cornell’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies. During this time, I wrote sixteen new blog posts, which I am collecting here:

Sept 12: ‘To Repulse The State From Our Uteri’: Anarcha-Feminist Abortion Struggle

Sept 14: ‘We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We Hate the Government!’: Queer Anarchism in Love and Rage

Sept 16: Neither East Nor West: Anarchism and the Soviet Dissolution

Sept 20: On Writing: Identity vs. Practice

Sept 21: Living Communism: Theory and Practice of Autonomy and Attack

Sept 26: Creating ‘New Porn’: Anarcha-Feminism vs. Onlyfans

Sept 29: Reading Amyl and the Sniffers’ ‘Capital’ Politically

Oct 2: Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Oct 13: ‘Anarcho-Beef People’: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

Oct 17: Building the Movement: The Rebirth of Anarchism, 1986-89

Oct 19: A Roving Band of Anarcho-Punks: The Vermont Family’s Revitalization of American Anarchism

Oct 28: Analyzing Biden’s Spending Bill: A Debate Between Sectors of Capital

Nov 6: White Workers and Race Treason in Revolutionary Struggle

Nov 23: ‘Feminism Practices What Anarchism Preaches’: Anarcha-Feminism in the 20th Century (Panel Recording)

Dec 8: Learning from Ithaca’s Socialist Mayor: Electoralism and Movement Building

Dec 12: Red and Black Unite: The Paris Commune and Socialist Democracy

Abolitionist Communism: Theorizing Our Practice

One of my favorite recent albums is Bambu’s EP Sharpest Tool in the Shed. Released in October 2020, it is a product of coronavirus and the George Floyd Rebellion. It speaks directly to the moment in the summer of 2020 when mutual aid networks proliferated, insurrection grew across the country, and the political logic of abolitionist communism was developed in the streets.

In the interlude track “Signing Off,” Bambu is quoted at an activist panel as he lays out the basic points of unity developed in the recent struggle:

“It’s still one rifle per family, still working for the party.

It’s not socialism versus communism or communism versus anarchy or whatever.

It’s about us toppling the machine and worrying about that shit when we win.

Dismantle the state, fuck the law, abolish the police, educate the masses, organize the hood.”

What can we make of this? Bambu is a communist. He is steeped in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, informed by his experience as a poor Filipino in California and referencing the Maoist movement in the Philippines. And yet, what is the political program that he lays out as the basic points of unity? “Dismantle the state, fuck the law, abolish the police, educate the masses, organize the hood.”

There is nothing here about seizing the state and wielding it to build socialism. It’s about self-organization to topple the power structures of the state and capitalism and build a new world from below. Here we see the fundamental challenge that abolitionism poses to Marxism-Leninism and all political orientations that seek to use the state as a tool for liberation.

Am I calling Bambu an anarchist? Regardless of his own self-identification, I’m not sure that would be a useful label. Here, our traditional linguistic/political categories fail us.

Bambu is an abolitionist communist, which necessarily entails an anti-state orientation. Abolitionism has fundamentally changed the political landscape of the left, and I think we’re still reckoning with what that means. Abolitionist communist practice has outstripped our theorization of it. As the George Floyd Rebellion recedes into the past, we need to sharpen our analysis and develop new theoretical tools for liberation.

A few places to begin:

William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition (2021)

Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013)

The Invisible Committee, Now (2017)

Geo Maher, A World Without Police: How Strong Communities Make Cops Obsolete (2021)

Anarcha-Feminism at the San Francisco Men’s Gathering (1989)

There was a lot of defensiveness around, ‘well I don’t participate in the patriarchy, I’m an anarchist, and I don’t believe in that.’

As women organized their own day of workshops before the 1989 San Francisco anarchist gathering, men assembled for a corresponding gender-specific meeting. Despite constituting the majority of attendees to the broader convergence, the men’s meeting was only around a third of the size of the women’s. As some women later pointed out, this was presumably because men felt less need to discuss “men’s issues” than did women. Around 60 men gathered at Delores Park and Fort Funston for a day of workshops and discussions meant both to interrogate their male privilege and to provide support for each other. Despite some promising discussions, the men’s meeting disappointed both its attendees and the women who observed part of it.

Mike E., who lived at the Chaos Collective (the co-op that hosted the women’s conference) and was a core organizer of the San Francisco convergence, helped put together the men’s gathering. He explained to me in an oral history interview last summer that the men were not initially planning to meet but that some key male organizers decided that they needed to “do work around sexism and gender” in solidarity with anarchist women.

Due to a combination of poor planning and defensiveness from some men, things did not go very well. Mike reflects “that to be honest unfortunately we didn’t put the amount of care and work that the women put into their workshops, and so the discussions were not that great. Also, a lot of the men just were not used to having those kinds of conversations. Talking about their role within, you know, the patriarchy. You know, there was a lot of defensiveness around, ‘well I don’t participate in the patriarchy, I’m an anarchist, and I don’t believe in that.’ […] and so, our conversations, honestly, my memory of them is that they were not that productive. There [were] small groups of us who I think had some good conversations, but they were also not that organized.”

In part to try to ease tensions and establish connections, the men broke halfway through the day to have an impromptu soccer game. But, as Mike recounted ruefully, “unfortunately, some of the women who were at their meeting showed up right as the soccer game was going on [laughs], and were like ‘oh really, so we are having conversations about the patriarchy and you guys are bro-ing down, having a soccer game. And this is your way of addressing the patriarchy.’ And that shit busted loose. And so there was a pretty intense confrontation around that, and sort of, you know, um, pretty strong, very pointed and good critique of that. Um, we ended up sitting back down, and sort of having more conversations.”

This confrontation and its fallout did not make it into the official reportback to the Without Borders Chronicle. Instead, they said that “the numbers were somewhat small but many men left the gathering with the feeling of having connected with other men, learning & sharing with each other.” But the report did call out the lack of engagement from men and issued a call to action: “Hopefully more men will plan to attend future mens gatherings. The lack of numbers seems to speak of an evasion or lack of interest amongst many men of the very important topics of men supporting men, men dealing with their own sexism (as well its prevalence in the @ community) and the need to deal with gender issues [that] affects us all.”

The San Francisco men’s gathering was somewhat of a false start. It is certainly easy to criticize its small attendance, the defensiveness of many men, and the ill-fated soccer game. But it also helped to introduce feminist concepts to men who believed that their anarchist politics meant that they couldn’t be sexist. It also built connections and trust between anti-sexist men who would go on to play active roles in promoting feminism in the anarchist movement. The men’s gathering is a good example, warts and all, of the kind of difficult but necessary work that men must do in order to contribute to women’s liberation.

The “Obnoxious Wimmin’s Network”: Anarcha-Feminism at the 1989 San Francisco Gathering

Anarchist women formed the “Obnoxious Wimmin’s Network” in the late 1980s in order to build the anarcha-feminist movement and fight against male dominance in the radical scene. In 1989, they organized a women-only gathering preceding the “Without Borders” Anarchist Gathering in San Francisco. They decided to meet on their own in order to address women’s issues, talk politics without men dominating the conversation, and strategize about how to deal with sexism within the movement. This gathering helped establish anarcha-feminist connections and community that went on to transform the anarchist movement in the coming decades.

Around 150 women (trans inclusive and usually styled as “wimmin”) came together from July 18-19 under the banner of the “Obnoxious Wimmin’s Network” at the Collective Chaos anarchist space in Oakland, which had been founded by members of the Vermont Family. Over the course of two days, they hosted a series of workshops, discussions, and performances ranging from self defense and home abortion techniques to participation in the sex trade industry.[1] (Note that there was also a men’s gathering at the same time, which was significantly smaller and did not go as well. This will be the subject of a future post. Edit: Here it is: Anarcha-Feminism at the San Francisco Men’s Gathering (1989))

The first evening was dedicated to open mic performances including poetry, music, dance, and collective theater. Women gave presentations on fashion and the media, showed videos about women in the sex industry, and shared art based on their experiences of patriarchal violence. There were also multiple music acts: a trio called The Yeastie Girls “performed feminist rap on subjects ranging from safe sex to the joys of masterbation [sic],” and the Blue Vulva Underground “entertained us with rock/trash music featuring such topics as menstruation and sexism in relationships.” This open mic performance space provided an opportunity for women to meet each other in an informal setting before the following day’s workshops.

Day two featured a series of workshops dealing with women’s issues. It began with a session on self defense (both physical and psychological), followed by a workshop on “wimmins health skills, including vaginal health and cervical self examination” at which “Eden demo[n]started technique & explained how wimmin can take cont[r]ol of their health care away from the medical establishment and put it back into our own hands.” Along with a session on home abortion techniques in the afternoon, this continued a long tradition of feminist self-help infrastructure in the women’s liberation movement. These workshops led to the formation of more sustained women’s self-help groups and infrastructure in the Bay Area.

In 1990, a participant named Sunshine Smith, who went on to help organize a self-help group, reflected in the Love and Rage newspaper that “Being in a self-help group has had a very strong effect on my relationship to my own body, as well as my understanding of women’s bodies in general. Women who go through this process together develop a very strong bond. We are truly taking control of our own bodies: learning our cycles of change, learning what a uterus feels like inside another woman, and becoming intimately familiar with the look and feel of the inside of a woman’s vagina.”[2] This is a quintessentially anarchistic approach to women’s health: not relying on trained clinicians, even feminist ones, but rather taking one’s body into one’s own hands—and doing it collectively with friends and comrades.

Next came a workshop on the “intolerance of sexual diversity,” in which women discussed “ways in which bisexual, lesbian, and heterosexual wimmin can work on understanding and relating supportively with eachother [sic], as well as dealing with non-monogamy, S&M, and relationships involving more than two people.” This was followed by workshops on women political prisoners and women in the sex industry. The latter involved around 60 participants, including a number of sex workers, who “discussed how their sex work related to anarchism, self-empowerment, and non-work relationships. Discussion also focussed [sic] on the difficulties sex trade workers face in dealing with feminists who are anti-pornography and against the sex industry.” (For more on an anarcha-feminist approach to pornography that references debates in this time period, see my piece, Creating ‘New Porn’: Anarcha-Feminism vs. Onlyfans.)

The day ended with a workshop on anti-racism, which delved into “the relationship between feminism and racism, how wimmin’s perception of the threat of violence from men is related to racial issues, and how the anarcha-feminist movement, as mostly white wimmin, can be more inclusive and supportive of wimmin of colour.” This reflected a growing awareness of the problem of anarchism’s whiteness, which would become a central issue in the movement in the 1990s. The reportback does not go into any more detail on how these conversations about anti-racism went or if there were any concrete takeaways or next steps proposed.

The wimmin’s gathering ended with “an open discussion [that] ran into the night, including the topic of dealing with sexism within the anarchist community.” The reportback’s author says nothing more about this topic, and I do wonder why there was not a dedicated time to discuss this problem, since it was one of the major impetuses for hosting the gathering. The reportback ends by reflecting that “The Obnoxious Wimmin’s Gathering was a valuable opportunity for wimmin to meet each other and discuss issues of importance to the anarcha-feminist community, and it is hoped that such events will be part of future anarchist conferences.”

This kind of gathering was crucial for the formation and strengthening of a continental anarcha-feminist movement. It enabled women from across North America to meet each other, discuss women’s issues, compare their experiences, learn new skills from each other, engage in self-critique, and strategize about how to continue developing anarcha-feminist theory and practice.

[1] Unless otherwise noted, all quotes come from an anonymous reportback printed in the “Without Borders Chronicle” on Thursday, July 20, 1989. I also consulted a flyer with the schedule for the wimmin’s gathering (image included here).

[2] Smith, Sunshine. “East Bay Women’s Community Gets Rolling: Smashing scales, wielding speculums, and demanding much more than our rights.” Love and Rage, Vol. 1, No. 1 (April 1990), 11.