The New Right’s neoliberal counterrevolution dramatically reshaped American society. Neoliberal economics remade the system of production and decimated the labor movement, in part by recuperating struggles against the Fordist factory. This counterrevolution set the stage upon which much of the radical left moved towards anarchism in the late twentieth century.
Reactionary masculine individualism was reinscribed as the welfare system was attacked and the liberal wing of the women’s movement was absorbed into the capitalist system. Formal legal equality was granted to Black people while the radical wings of the civil rights and national liberation movements were violently repressed. The expansion of the prison system served both to contain the radical left and to address an economic crisis.
The shifting terrain of late twentieth century society produced a crisis for the left that destabilized Marxism-Leninism and gave rise to an anti-state socialist politics. The state launched an all-out assault on radical organizations and revolutionary fighters. From FBI infiltration and disruption to long term imprisonment and even outright assassination, the state reacted violently to the threat that it perceived from revolutionary forces. By the late 1970s, the state had essentially defeated the revolutionary wing of the New Left, from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground.
Alongside this frontal assault, the changing nature of capitalist production and state power destabilized the analysis and program of the Marxist-Leninist left. Offshoring production to the global south decimated the industrial working-class base of the Old Left while repression disoriented the national liberation movements that had provided the locus of struggle for anti-imperialists in the long 1960s. Traditional approaches to organizing factory workers under the direction of a communist party no longer appeared viable to many militants.
Further, capturing the state no longer appeared to be a sufficient condition for building socialism—and was increasingly seen as undesirable in the first place, echoing the critique of the state formulated by earlier generations of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalist turn of post-Maoist China, the “betrayal” of the French Socialist President François Mitterrand’s 1983 “turn to austerity,” the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, and the failure of national liberation movements to build socialism in the decolonizing world all contributed to a global re-evaluation of the state-centric mode of politics.
A new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and turned towards anarchism. Marxism-Leninism certainly did not disappear, but anarchism grew more quickly and recaptured the imagination of the radical left and broader social movements. This was driven both by the neoliberal counterrevolution’s decimation of the Marxist left and the development of new theory and practice in the anarchist movement.
After decades of subterranean development, the turn-of-the-century global justice/anti-globalization movement marked the renaissance of anarchist politics. Beyond the growing popularity of formal anarchist ideology and organizations, an anarchist ethos had spread across the radical left. As David Graeber put it in 2010, “for activists, ‘anarchist process’ has become synonymous with the basic principles of how one facilitates a meeting or organizes street actions.” This anarchist process includes consensus-based decision making, organizing in horizontal and non-hierarchical fashions, coalescing in networks and bottom-up federations rather than democratic centralist parties, and a commitment to direct action in many forms.
Ultimately, anarchism was reborn because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism in a way that Marxism-Leninism could not.
Read more in my article “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)” (email me at scb274@cornell.edu for a PDF).
