I so badly want to write an article on Deleuze & Guattari’s influence on the US anarchist movement in the 1980s-90s. One path is obvious–Hakim Bey’s use of their idea of the Nomadic War Machine in his popular concept of Temporary Autonomous Zones. But there is more.
I’m equally interested in tracing a thread through Italian Autonomia & the German Autonome. A group of Italian autonomists including Bifo formed a study group on Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus that contributed directly to them forming the pirate station Radio Alice in 1976. They envisioned Radio Alice as a node in a decentralized, rhizomatic structure of a new kind of post-1968 revolutionary movement. Radio Alice, which operated out of Bologna, played an important role in the upswell of Autonomia in 1977.
Squatters and autonomists from West Germany traveled to Italy, where they were influenced by Autonomia and helped draft a set of Autonomous Theses in 1981 in Padua, Italy. They called for a “politics of the first person,” explaining that “we fight for a self-determined life in all aspects of our existence, knowing that we can only be free if all are free… We have no organization per se. Our forms of organization are all more or less spontaneous. There are squatters’ councils, telephone chains, autonomous assemblies, and many, many small groups.”
The rhizomatic organizational model had many sources, including traditional anarchism and council communism, but it was undoubtedly influenced to some degree by efforts to put Deleuze & Guattari into practice by Radio Alice within the context of Italian Autonomia.
The German Autonomen were young radicals who squatted hundreds of abandoned buildings and turned them into group housing, social centers, movement bars, and cultural spaces. 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. You can read more in my article Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack.
As Love & Rage put it in a history of anarchism in the 1980s, “The Autonomen were an important inspiration for the young activists in the U.S. and Canada who would be attracted to and who would reinvigorate the anarchist movement.”
A number of US anarchists traveled to Germany in the late 1980s, where they stayed in squats and were inspired by the militancy of the movement. They took what they learned back to the US, where they helped to popularize models from the German Autonomen: squatted social centers, infoshops, and black bloc tactics.
I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that the grassroots transnational spread of Deleuze & Guattari played a key role in the development of the new anarchist movement. All of this happened before their embrace in academia and before Hardt & Negri popularized them in radical spaces with the Empire trilogy.
