Tag: Anarchism

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.

Red and Black Unite: The Paris Commune and Socialist Democracy

Crowned heads, wealth and privilege may well tremble should ever again the Black and Red unite!

Otto von Bismarck (1872, reflecting on the split in the First International)

What is socialist democracy? And can Marxists and anarchists unite in building new political forms that enable true proletarian self-government?

Revisiting Marx’s classic piece on the Paris Commune, “The Civil War in France,” with our DSA Marxist Reading Group reminded me of his liberatory vision of the new form of proletarian power. Although Marx and Engels name it the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” their description of it is actually very similar to the explanation of anarchist communism outlined by Peter Kropotkin in his classic book The Conquest of Bread.

Is it possible to reconcile the two visions? This is not a new argument, but I think that the Commune lays out the basic political form of what libertarian socialism looks like in practice—one that anarchists and Marxist alike could support.

First, a clarification of terms. When I teach about Marxism, one of the first things I stress to my students is that Marxists define the word dictatorship very differently than others do. It does not mean the authoritarian rule of one person. Rather, dictatorship simply means which class has power in society. Thus, capitalism is a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie because the capitalist class holds power. A dictatorship of the proletariat would mean that the working class holds power instead. But these two classes cannot hold the same orientation towards the state. Proletarian power must look different than bourgeois power. Why?

The state, as Marxists define it, is a structure of class rule. Anarchists, on the other hand, argue that the state to a certain degree stands outside of society and has its own interests. In either case, the state is alienated power par excellence. It is necessarily a small group of people holding power and ruling over society. This works very well for the bourgeoisie, as they are a small group of people seeking to hold power. But it does not work for the proletariat.

How can the proletariat, the vast majority of society, exercise power through the state when it is necessarily a small group of people making decisions for majority? We have seen that neither representative democracy nor the Soviet state model actually enables true proletarian rule. We need new political forms that enable the proletariat to hold and wield power directly as a class, rather than mediated through alienated state forms.

In “The Civil War in France,” Marx and Engels agree. Marx famously argues that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” (629). Rather, this machinery must be “shattered” and new forms of power built. The “true secret” of the Paris Commune was that “it was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour” (634-35, emphasis added).

What is the new political form that enables the emancipation of labor? It cannot be modeled on the bourgeois state, nor the ancien regime. In his introduction, Engels says that the Paris Commune encapsulates his vision of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. He says that the Commune’s political form was shaped by “two infallible means” which differentiate the DotP from the bourgeois state:

“In the first place, it filled all posts—administrative, judicial and educational—by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, subject to the right of recall at any time by the same electors. And, in the second place, all officials, high or low, were paid only the wages received by other workers. […] In this way an effective barrier to place-hunting and careerism was set up, even apart from the binding mandates to delegates to representative bodies which were added besides” (628).

Marx then demonstrates how the Commune’s political structures enabled a new form of proletarian democracy. He explains the bottom-up structure, emphasizing how workers elected and empowered delegates to carry out the democratic will of local assemblies. Each local assembly made decisions about what directly impacted them—for example, workers would democratically decide how to run their own workplace, and a neighborhood could organize its own public safety measures. Then these local assemblies coordinated their decisions through the higher Commune bodies. They sent delegates to these bodies who were empowered to carry out the will of the lower bodies. If they erred, they were immediately recallable.

This structure of delegation is a fundamentally different system than that of representative democracy, in which the people elect representatives to ostensibly carry out their will in the halls of power. The delegates are workers themselves, paid a workers salary, and directly accountable to the decisions made by local assemblies.

These structures would be replicated across the country. Local communes would coordinate with one another through this same system of revocable delegation. It is worth quoting Marx at some length explaining the Paris Commune’s (and thus his own) vision of the reorganization of national democracy: “the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet […] the rural communes of every district were to administer their common affairs by an assembly of delegates in the central town, and these district assembles were again to send deputies to the National Delegation in Paris, each delegate to be at any time revocable and bound by the mandate imperatif (formal instructions) of his constituents.

The few but important functions which still would remain for a central government were not to be suppressed, as has been intentionally mis-stated, but were to be discharged by Communal, and therefore strictly responsible agents. The unity of the nation was not to be broken, but, on the contrary, to be organized by the Communal Constitution and to become a reality by the destruction of the State power which claimed to be the embodiment of that unity independent of, and superior to, the nation itself, from which it was but a parasitic excrescence” (633).

Readers familiar with the anarchist tradition may be justified to think I am accidentally quoting Kropotkin describing his anarchist vision of a federated Commune of Communes. No! This is Marx describing the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the new working-class state!

Later, Lenin would draw new lessons from the Paris Commune, emphasizing the need for workers to seize and exercise centralized State power. The Bolsheviks quickly broke the autonomy of the soviets (the workers councils), and the Soviet state certainly did not function as the bottom-up system of delegation that Marx and Engels describe. The Soviet Union did not operate as the “political form […] under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour,” but rather continued the system of political alienation in modified forms.

Red and Black can unite around a vision of a political form of libertarian socialism, as articulated by both Marx and Kropotkin, each reflecting on the experience of the Paris Commune. We need political forms that enable true democracy, the self-organization of the vast majority of people in our society. I personally find much of value in Murray Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism and democratic confederalism, which we can see in practice today in Cooperation Jackson in Mississippi and in revolutionary Rojava in liberated Kurdish territory. This is an articulation of radical democracy and a vision for self-organization of political power from the bottom up. To put it simply: this is socialist democracy.

“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.

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

The Vermont Family was a roving band of anarcho-punks that helped build the American anarchist movement in the 1980s. They were a key element of the connective tissue that linked the dispersed anarchist milieu. The Family originally came together within the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” in which hundreds of people walked from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over the course of nine months in 1986. As many of the liberals dropped out or retreated to cars, a core group of anarchists coalesced to form a traveling “anarchy village” which grew from 15 to around 70 or 80 people. They ran the village through consensus and promoted anarchist politics within the march. After the march reached DC, the Family stayed together as a loose network of travelers, comrades, and friends.

The name of the Vermont Family came from a sort of collective joke. One punk in the anarchy village shared a story about Vermont: apparently it was written in the state constitution that in 1991, two hundred years after its founding, there would be a popular vote on whether the state would remain part of the country. Thus, a fantastical plan was hatched to convince anarchists to move to Vermont and push it to secede from the union. It goes without saying that this did not happen, and it turned out that Vermont had no such plan to put its status to a vote (the similarity of this plan to the later right-libertarian New Hampshire Free State Project is interesting to note). But the moniker stuck as both an inside joke and badge of identification, and many people in the crew adopted it as part of their names.

The Vermont Family formed on the road and stayed on the road throughout their existence until 1989. In their years of traveling, they played a crucial role that has gone unacknowledged in the histories of this era: they formed the interpersonal connections that were necessary to build a continental network of anarchists.

This past summer, I interviewed a person named Mike, who was one of the core members of the Family. He pointed out that in the age of the internet, it is hard for us to understand how an anarchist milieu could function in the 1980s. It required people to travel and make physical connections between far-flung collectives and projects. Some of the Family traveled in an old bus, some hitchhiked; like a punk version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, the Family spread anarchy everywhere they went. A few of them even made their way to West Germany, where they lived in squats and participated in the larger, more militant movement there. 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.

When major actions or gatherings were planned in an American city, members of the Vermont crew would show up months in advance, put down temporary roots, and help organize a bigger and better event. They were central to the series of annual national convergences—Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989—that established continental networks of dedicated anarchist militants. The Crew stayed on the road until 1989, when a large number of them went to San Francisco to help organize the 1989 Anarchist Gathering. Finding fertile ground, many of them settled down for the long term in the Bay Area. They established several large collective houses that served as major hubs for both the local and national movement in the 1990s. Many of them remained active in Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, and other anarchist projects.

I have not yet been able to find any documentation of the Vermont Family beyond my oral history interviews, but its story is central to the broader history of the revitalization of anarchism in the 1980s.

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

I’m working on a new piece that will become the first chapter of my dissertation on American anarchism in the late 20th century. I will share more in the future, but here is a short excerpt:

The American left floundered in the 1980s. Reagan and the New Right led a counterrevolution against the social gains of the 1960s and 70s. The last vestiges of the New Left splintered into increasingly irrelevant Marxist-Leninist sects and single issue campaigns. State repression, particularly targeted against Black, Chicano, and indigenous national liberation movements, targeted and crushed a generation of their most talented organizers and fighters. The left in the 1980s was in retreat, fighting rearguard battles to defend what they could against the onslaught of neoliberal globalization and to act in solidarity with movements elsewhere (particularly in Central America and South Africa).

Yet in the middle of this generalized defeat of the left, the anarchist movement underwent a process of revitalization and rebirth. It went from a marginalized, fragmented collection of local struggles and small collectives in the early 1980s to a strong, relatively coordinated national movement by the beginning of the 1990s. This decade marked the shift from Marxism-Leninism and state socialism to the anarchistic forms of social struggle that came to define the turn-of-the-century anti-globalization movement. What caused this shift?

In this article, I argue that the revitalization of anarchism took place for two main reasons. First, the transformation of social, political, and economic conditions, in the US and globally, discredited other forms of left-wing politics. The New Left fizzled under repression, the Soviet Union continued down the path of decay and fought a losing (arguably imperialist) war in Afghanistan, and neoliberal globalization swept the world. State-centered socialism, whether revolutionary or parliamentary, appeared increasingly unviable and even undesirable. Anarchism was particularly well-suited to offer an alternative, as anarchists offered an anti-state and anti-capitalist analysis and set of practices that pointed a new way forward through the challenges of neoliberal globalization. But favorable circumstances did not guarantee the rise of the anarchist movement.

More importantly, a core group of anarchists across the country took advantage of the circumstances and began to consciously build a national movement. Committed pro-organization anarchists, most notably the roving band of anarcho-punks in the “Vermont Family” and the rabble-rousers of the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL), formed a pole around which the diffuse anarchist milieu began to coalesce into an actual movement that could coordinate across the country. This took place largely through a series of annual convergences: Chicago 1986, Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, and San Francisco 1989. In telling the story of these gatherings, I argue that this series of national convergences was the most important factor in the revitalization of anarchism as a revolutionary movement in the 1980s. The convergences laid the foundation for the flowering of the anarchist movement in following decade.

“Anarcho-Beef People”: Against All Domination at Anarchist Gatherings (1986-89)

A series of annual gatherings from 1986 to 1989 revitalized the anarchist movement and built the infrastructure for national and continental coordination. I will share more writing about this in the future, but I wanted to share a quick anecdote about the debates over food and animal liberation at these convergences. They offer a window into the evolving values and ethical norms of the anarchist movement at the time. Anarchists developed a commitment to fighting all forms of oppression, hierarchy, and domination—including of other species—rather than solely focusing on capitalism and the state.

*****

The first national convergence was held in Chicago in 1986 to commemorate the centennial of the Haymarket Affair. Several hundred people from across the country attended a few days of workshops and a major demonstration. Tensions at the gathering reflected the political and ethical debates taking place within the anarchist movement around the question of animal liberation. Although there is a long history of vegetarian anarchism, this became a major concern in the late twentieth century.

The Chicago organizers served a non-vegetarian friendly (and certainly non-vegan) meal at the major Saturday banquet. This, some attendees felt, was no accidental oversight. Rather, it happened because (as one attendee later reflected) “they don’t like vegetarians.” Tensions rose, fueled by both ethical concerns and hunger. An impromptu demonstration ensued in which, a participant describes, “the street theater crowd from San Francisco began milling around the middle of the room on all fours, mooing and clucking and being herded by a vegan speechifier with an imaginary whip” who then proceeded to “slaughter” the “cows.”

Although the demonstration was largely received in good humor, an associated group handed out incendiary flyers attacking “anarcho-beef people.” The distribution of this flyer provoked strong negative reactions against “preachy vegans” and for a moment it appeared that a physical fight might actually break out. Tensions soon calmed, however—or at least, much of the anger was redirected towards an argument around anti-Semitic flyers distributed by another attendee. (The latter is a story for another time.)

*****

The next annual anarchist gathering, in Minneapolis in 1987, was a crucial step in the path towards a national anarchist network. It was organized with the intention of coordinating the de-centralized movement and laying the groundwork for a national organization. Unlike the previous convergence, which was organized mostly by older folks in a group called “Some Chicago Anarchists,” this one was put on by younger people who were more immersed in the growing anarchist milieu (including its ethical debates).

The Minneapolis crew framed the convergence around “Building the Movement.” While they hosted a wide range of workshops, including anarcho-punk DIY staples like how to dumpster food and brew your own beer, the focus was on facilitating strategic conversations and building the infrastructure for a coordinated national movement. Thus, throughout the gathering there was a “movement building track” of strategic discussions and meetings.

Part of this focus on building the movement entailed avoiding the unnecessary, distracting conflicts of the previous year’s gathering. For one, the organizers vowed to avoid the previous year’s arguments around food by simply serving all vegetarian meals. Of course, this was based in large part around an ethical commitment to animal liberation, but one key participant shared in a recent interview with me that it was also a conscious decision to avoid unnecessary drama and dissension.

The banquet was catered by a vegetarian workers’ cooperative called the New Riverside Cafe. This was specifically noted in a pre-convergence mass mailing to anarchists across the country. It seems that the organizers meant to be clear from the beginning that the meat-headed (sorry) mistakes of Chicago would not be repeated. There would be no protestors pretending to be mooing cows, no near fist fights over burgers.

In part because of its superior organization (including around the question of food), the Minneapolis gathering was a smashing success. It laid the groundwork for the next two annual meetings, in Toronto (‘88) and San Francisco (’89), which set the scene for the anarchist movement in the 1990s.

(Sources for the Chicago gathering come from the zine “Mob Action Against the State: Haymarket Remembered… An Anarchist Convention.”)

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.”

Neither East Nor West: Anarchism and the Soviet Dissolution

Since I’m based at the Interference Archive for a whole semester, I decided to start sharing interesting things that I find. Here is one: an anarchist analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union as it is happening, in 1990.

It’s fascinating to read an anarchist analysis of the Soviet Bloc at this time. Bob McGlynn of “NYC Neither East Nor West,” who had extensive contacts with anarchists and other lefty dissidents in Eastern Europe, wrote an article in the Love and Rage newspaper (April 1990) titled “Whoopie! East Bloc Explodes!” in which he expresses the great hope but also danger of the time.

The hope:
“Watching one Stalinoid dictatorship after another crumble with embarrassing speed is even more fun than drinking beer! (Well almost.). . .

Many wonder if this [East-West solidarity] movement is over. Not at all. In fact, it’s needed now more than ever, given that Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

Opposition movements in the Soviet bloc remain. These are made up of anarchists, independent socialists, draft resisters, ecologists, anti-nuclear activists, workers, women, youth, gays. The battle for relative civil liberties may appear to be won, but the war for everything else is on. . .

In many ways, we’re only just beginning. For instance, the sporadic contacts between anarchists in both blocs can now be cemented. In April and Italian group is sponsoring a large gathering of East and West anarchists – the first time ever. In a sense we are at point zero. Now we can really move.”

The danger:
“Western capitalism is poised to eat the East alive, through debt and capital penetration. . . .

The barbed wire and concrete borders are now being replaced by a border less tangible: that of money/commodity relations and rule. And this game, like the old one, has only enough room for a few players.”

In 1990, the future was open for action. McGlynn ends:
“The paradox is that as the world has gotten very interesting recently, it’s also simultaneously becoming increasingly monotone and banal. Pepsi power, etc. This, then, is prime territory for adventurers seeking seams in this seemingly seamless whole. It’s been remarked that with Stalinism collapsing, we are now ‘at the end of history.’ Rather, perhaps, we are only at its beginning.”

Indeed. But McGlynn’s fears were realized as capitalism remade the former Soviet Bloc in its image. Could this have been prevented with more effective anti-state socialist organizing and more widespread solidarity work across borders from below? Was a libertarian socialist alternative possible? Or was the choice always simply between Stalinism and neoliberalism?

“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.