Category: Politics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

White Workers and Race Treason in Revolutionary Struggle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

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

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

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

Reading Amyl and the Sniffers’ “Capital” Politically

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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.”

“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.

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.”

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.”

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

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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.”

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.