Tag: Anarchism

“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.”

David Graeber’s Anarchism: A Vision, an Attitude, and a Set of Practices

I realized that I missed the anniversary of David Graeber’s death a few days ago. I want to mark it, because Graeber was in many ways a model for the kind of engaged intellectual work that I aspire to do.

Graeber’s book on anarchism in the anti-globalization movement, Direct Action: An Ethnography, remains one of my favorites. I used a section of it, combined with his classic short pamphlet “Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!” to introduce anarchism in a class on American Anarchism that I taught to first-year college students a couple years ago. In Direct Action, Graeber argues that anarchism consists of three interlocking parts: a vision, an attitude, and a set of practices.

1. First, the anarchist vision refers to people who endorse an explicitly anarchist doctrine or what Graeber refers to as “a certain vision of human possibilities” (214)

2. Second is the anarchist attitude, meaning a rejection of unjust authority and hierarchy. In this sense, anarchism has always existed, across time and across every society, for people have always rebelled against unjust authority and have fought for equality and justice

3. Third is a set of practices—or a set of institutions, habits, and practices. This entails building egalitarian forms of organization which produce and are supported by an egalitarian ethos.

Graeber says that it is the combination of these three things—the vision, the attitude, and the set of practices—that produces something we can call anarchism: “It’s when the three reinforce each other—when a revulsion against oppression causes people to try to live their lives in a more self-consciously egalitarian fashion, when they draw on those experiences to produce visions of a more just society, when those visions, in turn, cause them to see existing social arrangements as even more illegitimate and obnoxious—that one can begin to talk about anarchism. Hence anarchism is in no sense a doctrine. It’s a movement, a relationship, a process of purification, inspiration, and experiment. This is its very substance” (215-16).

And of course, let us all remember Graeber’s ultimate insistence that “direct action is a matter of acting as if you were already free.” But it is clear that we must simultaneously act as if we were free today AND build the structures, organizations, relationships, and institutions that enable true freedom for all. This is the task and the promise of anarchism.

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

————————————————————————-

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.”

Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, 1989-98

I just submitted my chapter for this upcoming book series on anarchism and punk coming out from the UK radical publisher Active Distribution next year (distributed by AK Press in the US). I’m excited to get published in print for the first time! Here is the introduction to the chapter:

Love and Rage banner at a 1993 anti-fascist demonstration in Chattanooga, TN

“What is the most damage I can do, given my biography, abilities, and commitments, to the racial order and rule of capital?”-Love and Rage member Joel Olson

“Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white […] Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building” (Love and Rage, 1997, p. 3). Thus argues a 1997 editorial that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial or should it accept its whiteness and try to work in coalitions with people of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage (1989-98), which was the most significant American anarchist federation since the heyday of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early twentieth century. Love and Rage was embedded in the largely white punk world. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive in the post-1960s counterrevolution, members worried that punk’s white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and “race traitor” politics that sought to abolish whiteness in order to build revolution.

This chapter begins by situating Love and Rage within the history of race and anarchism in the United States. Despite a rich tradition of anti-authoritarianism among people of color, American anarchism is typically thought to be a largely white phenomenon. But in the 1980s, imprisoned ex-Black Panthers began to theorize a new form of Black Anarchism that reverberated through the anarchist world. Love and Rage drew on this tradition as well as the theorization of white skin privilege by the Sojourner Truth Organization (1969-86) to center whiteness as one of the major barriers to revolutionary politics. Given its focus on race, the federation was keenly aware of its own racial demographics. Co-founder Chris Day argued that the group’s social base was the newly “reproletarianized” children of the white middle class who came to anarchist politics through the punk scene. I employ political theorist AK Thompson’s notion of white middle class “ontological politics,” which explains how dissident youth sought a new way of being in the world, to analyze how punk culture provided new forms of life and politics for white reproles. The punk scene provided a refuge for young dissidents to live their anarchist politics.

Anarchist punks practiced a form of white race traitor politics: they sought to actively repudiate their privilege in order to break up the “white club” that upholds the US racial hierarchy. But the efficacy of these tactics is questionable, and I end by critically evaluating Love and Rage’s approach to anti-racism. Despite its commitment to anti-fascism and anti-racism, the group failed to adequately address the problems posed by its own whiteness and experienced great difficulty both recruiting and working in coalition with people of color. I argue that, aside from anti-fascist organizing against white supremacists, the federation’s punk-influenced ontological politics largely favored individual, performative rejection of white privilege rather than collective political action. This undermined Love and Rage’s efforts to build multi-racial revolutionary dual power beyond the boundaries of punk subculture. I end by identifying lessons that anarchists, punks, and anti-racists can draw from the federation’s history.

Willem Van Spronsen and Histories of Resistance

A year ago today, 69-year-old anarchist Willem Van Spronsen attacked an ICE facility in Washington state. He attempted to sabotage the buses the facility would use to transport people to concentration camps. For this, he was shot and killed by the police. We should remember him, tell stories of him, and draw inspiration from his sacrifice. We need to believe in the possibility of collectively organizing and acting to stop the atrocities that the US capitalist state commits.

Last summer, a presenter at a critical theory workshop I attended outlined his conception of “counterhistory.” He argued that counterhistory has two main components: 1) Identifying and dismantling the dominant historical imaginary and 2) Reconfiguring our methodological tools for understanding how history operates. He primarily writes counterhistories focused on the operations of power and what he calls the military-academic-industrial complex. I agree with this, but I think he missed a crucial third step.

I am convinced that we must complement these two components of counterhistory with a third: telling histories of resistance, struggle, and the possibility of building alternative worlds. These histories inspire action today, instill the belief that resistance and alternatives are possible in the face of a history of oppression and loss, and give us practical lessons for how to fight most effectively. Willem Van Spronsen was guided by this conception of history.

Van Spronsen had a historical understanding of the dangers of our present times and the need to fight back against the rise of fascism. In his final note before attempting to sabotage the ICE buses, he says that: “when I was a boy, in post war Holland, later France, my head was filled with stories of the rise of fascism in the 30s. I promised myself that I would not be one of those who stands by as neighbors are torn from their homes and imprisoned for somehow being perceived as lesser. You don’t have to burn the motherfucker down, but are you just going to stand by?”

History provides both a caution of the dangers of fascism as well as inspiration for struggle. Willem identified himself in a line of struggle going back to John Brown’s attempt to start an insurrection to end slavery. This historical understanding of the possibility and duty of individuals to act against violent oppression seems instrumental to his ability to make the ultimate sacrifice in the fight for freedom and justice today. As he said, “I follow three teachers: Don Pritts, my spiritual guide, ‘love without action is just a word.’ John Brown, my moral guide, ‘what is needed is action!’ Emma Goldman, my political guide, ‘if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be in your revolution.’”

Spronsen follows with: “I’m a head in the clouds dreamer, I believe in love and redemption. I believe we’re going to win. I’m joyfully revolutionary.” And he ends with “keep the faith! All power to the people! Bella ciao.”

Willem Van Spronsen, presente!

Reflections on Defeat and Disorientation: Nine Years on the Left

I have been feeling very politically unstable and unsure lately. Experiencing several projects fall apart in the past couple years as I struggled to hold them together while immersed in my PhD really took a toll on me. I’m currently teaching a course on anarchism to a class of 18-year-old freshmen—my age when I first got involved in radical politics with Occupy Boston—so I’ve been reflecting on that time period. During Occupy the possibilities seemed endless and I was convinced of the rightness of our approach and the imminence of change. Now I feel cautious, a bit bitter, and so unsure of what the correct political approach is. My optimism has been tempered by almost nine years of defeats, by countless hours poured into campaigns and projects of many kinds, often with barely anything to show for it.

I generally maintain an anti-state left orientation, but I simply do not know how to get from where we are to the world I want to see. My growing disillusionment came to an inflection point last fall. The anarchist projects to which I had dedicated an enormous amount of time and energy for the previous two years—Food Not Bombs and an infoshop we named the Antidote—had fallen apart, in part due to a lack of structure and unwillingness to have serious conversations about politics and strategy. An attempt to establish a local version of Cooperation Jackson likewise collapsed. Bitter from the latest setback, I felt incapable of mustering the energy to co-found yet another organization. Although I flirted with the idea of founding a Black Rose chapter, what I wanted was simply to join a national organization with an established structure and plug into the work they were doing.

In light of this disorientation, and in the context of living in a relatively small town without many options for a political home, I joined DSA. Yet I quickly discovered that our DSA chapter suffered the same basic problem as the anarchist groups I had left: an aversion to real conversations about our politics, our goals, and our strategy. Months into my involvement, the truth set in: I had nothing in common with the people in my chapter. I disagreed with their politics, though I was willing to accept this. We did not have a shared cultural understanding, as I had with the punk-adjacent anarchist crowd. I came away from every meeting more frustrated than the last. Worst of all, we barely even did anything political. I began to see the organizational structure as an impediment to taking action. A week ago, I finally decided that I was done. This experience has driven home a simple point to me: if you want to take action, then you need to find a few friends and comrades wherever you can, link up with others with similar ideas and affinities, and take action together. You may find these people in your local DSA chapter or you may not.

I don’t currently have the capacity to help found yet another small organization and struggle to keep it together—if that would even be possible in the context of coronavirus. So I try to take a step back, focus on my studies and their political implications, teach my class on anarchism, and regroup. Yet I am wracked by feelings of political impotence and frustrated by inaction. The relative success of the Bernie campaign was of course a spot of hope in all this, as is the burgeoning climate justice movement led by young people. But in some ways it all feels too little, too late (particularly after Bernie’s defeat) and I don’t have the patience for the long hours of strategic discussion to produce the reorientations that we desperately need. Instead, I read for hours each day desperately searching for lessons from those who came before.

In this context, I found resonance in a piece by Nietzsche that I recently read “On The Use and Abuse of History For Life.” “To be sure, we need history […] we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action […] We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life.” So I ask myself: how can I work to put history into the service of life? Perhaps this question will help reorient me in a disoriented time. I want—I need—to rediscover a new sense of possibility and a new mode of political engagement. Maybe then I will recover my previous faith in our collective project of building a new world.

This post is by nature quite melancholic. But as I survey the last nine years I am also struck by how much I have learned and grown since my days in Occupy Boston. In many ways I am now much better equipped to contribute to radical projects. Yet I have also calcified and have brought a certain bitterness to my recent activities. As I struggle to correct the course, I am reminded of the way that CrimethInc. ended their somewhat satirical but very earnest 2006 CrimethInc. Shareholder Report: An Incomplete Report on and Critical Analysis of the Past Decade of Activity: OUTDO US! OUTDO US! OUTDO US!

I wrote most of this before the coronavirus crisis really hit. The crisis has produced a widespread disorientation and the left has struggled to respond. But in the mutual aid networks and beyond, we see glimpses of the new world struggling to be born.

Sharing the mic with future Occupiers (2011)

From the Archive to the Infoshop: Reflections on Movement History

Forty sweaty people stood shoulder to shoulder in a crowded punk space listening to an old anarchist talk politics. Despite the familiar atmosphere, we were not between songs at a show. The crowd was gathered for one of the most popular events in a “Week of Anarchy” that I helped organize in August 2018 at our local infoshop, The Antidote. Ramsey Kanaan, founder of the anarchist publishers AK Press and PM Press, was animatedly sharing his experience organizing against the UK poll tax in the 1980s. Ramsey was sharply critical of the fact that our local political work was centered around Food Not Bombs and the infoshop. He argued that we needed to organize around more substantial political issues and engage in mass social struggle, as did UK anarchists fighting in the poll tax rebellion. Infrastructural projects might feel good, he maintained, but they would not lead to revolution. Let the Catholic charities feed people—they could do it better than Food Not Bombs, anyway.

We were indignant and a little defensive. Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop were the foundation for our political work in Ithaca. They helped us build community and find meaning in our own lives. Most of all, they were a living example of the new world we sought to build based in mutual aid and solidarity. And yet within half a year the infoshop fell apart; after another eight months I quit Food Not Bombs, frustrated by our lack of strategic vision.

Why did these projects fail? After much reflection and conversations with comrades, I concluded that these projects became ends in themselves which sucked up an enormous amount of time and energy. Rather than expanding our capacity to engage politically, they ended up constricting our field of vision. Frustrated conversations about this with my partner would often end with us saying “shit, was Ramsey right after all?”

Later, conducting dissertation research at the Brooklyn Interference Archive, I eagerly pored through numerous zines, personal reflections, and debates from the infoshop movement in the 1990s. I was shocked to read many of the exact same discussions and debates that we had had about our own infoshop, particularly the lack of political direction and the drain of energy. Without knowledge of the history of infoshops, we had tried to reinvent the wheel from scratch. Had we known about this previous generation of infoshops and learned from their errors, we could have avoided some major pitfalls.

Most importantly, perhaps we could have seen the danger of putting too much focus on maintaining the space itself at the expense of serious discussions about our political strategy. Had we been familiar with this history, we could have pushed ourselves to have more political discussions from the start, worked out a broader intentional strategy to build anarchism as a force in Ithaca, and positioned the infoshop as something that contributes to that broader strategy rather than being an end in itself. Of course, many participants did have their own sense of political strategy; the problem was that we did not have these discussions as a group. We fell into the trap that Joel Olson (himself an active participant in the 1990s anarchist movement) identified in his essential essay Between Infoshops and Insurrection, that all too often “infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it.”

Movement history is necessary because it brings these histories to a new generation of radicals. Not everybody can spend weeks in archives reading obscure documents from previous movements. Historians can compile these resources and interpret lessons from them for new waves of anarchist activity. This is what I hope to do with my own historical work. The highest honor I can imagine as a historian would be to someday see my book sitting on an infoshop bookshelf, marked as the material for an upcoming meeting of an anarchist reading group.

Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement

Despite this blog’s title, I have not yet posted anything “historical.” Partly this is due to the times; responding to coronavirus seems more pressing, and I don’t study any history that might be useful (relatedly, does anyone know how anarchists responded to the Spanish Flu?). I plan to start posting more historical writing related to my research as well as reflections on the kind of movement history that I find most useful. To give a sense of my research here is a short prospectus for my dissertation, which is tentatively titled “Punks, Panthers, and Feminists: American Anarchism from the New Left to the Anti-Globalization Movement.”

From Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to the rebirth of democratic socialism and antifascism, today’s American left has regained a strength and vision absent since the 1960s. A revival of anarchist thought and practice has been central to this revitalization of anti-capitalism. Ostensibly marginalized since the Russian Revolution and the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, anarchism underwent a global revival following the collapse of the Soviet Union. By the early twenty-first century, most radical social movements in the United States operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, and rejection of the state and capitalism.  My dissertation traces this anarchist resurgence to its roots in a critique of the New Left, inspiration from the women’s and Black liberation movements, and transnational connections to German autonomists and the Zapatistas. This transnational history of American anarchism is guided by three primary questions. First, how and why did anarchism gain hegemony within the American left by the end of the twentieth century? Second, how have transnational networks shaped American anarchism? Third, what lessons can we learn from this history?

My dissertation is an intellectual and social history of contemporary American anarchism. From preliminary research, I argue that social anarchism—organized socialist anarchism, as opposed to individualism—was central to the revitalization of the anti-state left through the development of intersectional anti-authoritarian politics. Social anarchism provided a meeting point for feminist, anti-racist, anti-state, and anti-capitalist traditions which together produced a revolutionary intersectional politics for the twenty-first century. In the 1970s, social ecologists like Murray Bookchin critiqued all forms of hierarchy, anarcha-feminists such as Ithaca’s Tiamat collective challenged masculinist class-essentialism, and ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston and Kuwasi Balagoon theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism. In the 1980s-90s, these currents converged in organizations like the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, Anti-Racist Action, and the Black Autonomy Federation. My research critically evaluates their theory and practice in order to understand the development of intersectional social anarchism.

My work contributes to three primary academic and activist conversations. First, it encourages historians of the left to more fully engage anarchism, which has been viewed as Marxism’s immature sibling despite its growing importance. My research historicizes how anarchists have shaped the strategy and tactics of left-wing social movements to the point that horizontal, leaderless forms of organization have become dominant in social struggle from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. Second, I contribute to the literature on intersectionality by exploring Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, and white “race traitor” politics, which offer much to today’s identity politics debates. Third, my research strengthens the anarchist movement’s historical self-knowledge by framing conversations around organizational form and emphasizing post-1960s continuity. Could privileging continuities alongside ruptures offer insight into practicing anti-capitalist politics in periods of low mobilization? I explore the anarchist movement’s successes and failures during a counter-revolutionary era to offer lessons for a time of resurgent global fascism.

From Mutual Aid to Counter-Institutions: Revisiting scott crow

Mutual aid networks have rapidly spread across the United States in response to the coronavirus crisis. While mainstream media outlets have approached this with some confusion, this is nothing new for anarchists: mutual aid is the bread and (vegan) butter of anarchist theory and practice. Following the post in which I compiled a reading list on Disaster, Coronavirus, and Mutual Aid, I found it useful to revisit scott crow’s excellent book on the anarchist response to Hurricane Katrina, Black Flags and Windmills: Hope, Anarchy, and the Common Ground Collective (2011). scott crow’s book is a gripping, eminently useful account of mutual aid that also points beyond the immediate responses to disaster. How can we transform mutual aid networks into permanent institutions with transformative capacity? crow encourages us to embrace our “emergency hearts” and act in a spirit of love and solidarity to meet people’s needs now while planting seeds in the concrete that can blossom into broader autonomous infrastructure and counter-institutions.

Black Flags and Windmills tells the story of the Common Ground Collective, a mutual aid organization formed in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans. As we know, the state cared far more about establishing military order than it did about helping people, particularly poor Black people. crow rightly insists that the real disaster was the long history of oppression and exploitation of the poor Black community in New Orleans. In response to the state’s inaction, the Common Ground Collective was established by Malik Rahim (a former Black Panther), scott crow, Sharon Johnson, and others to provide food, shelter, medical aid, and other necessities. Common Ground successfully organized to save lives and rebuild destroyed neighborhoods—not only without the help of the state, but indeed in spite of the efforts of the state and white racist vigilantes to disrupt their organizing. For anyone interested in this experience and its political implications, Black Flags and Windmills has so much to offer, from practical organizational knowledge to theoretical background. I can’t recommend it enough, especially in these times.

crow encourages us to think about turning mutual aid networks into durable autonomous infrastructure. “Could street medics and their temporary first aid stations become a permanent clinic or hospital? Could groups who served food once a week set up long-standing free kitchens? Would we be able through alternative media […] to tell the deeper untold stories that countered mass-media sensationalized hype?” (66). This seems crucial to moving from networks of limited mutual aid to actually establishing anti-capitalist alternative infrastructure that can support life long-term. crow’s reflections upon his experience in New Orleans showed him that “movements need infrastructure and counter-institutions if we want people to stay engaged. If we want people to leave the destructive capitalist system, we have to create something better” (168). This led him to help create a network of cooperatives and mutual aid projects in Austin. Could we similarly pivot in the coming months from mutual aid networks to counter-institutions and infrastructure? One could certainly imagine local food systems deepening in strength, neighborhood networks transitioning to grassroots organizing, and online organizing becoming real-world activity.

Apart from mutual aid, crow’s discussion of his political influences is fascinating and very helpful. He identifies three main movements that inform his work: anarchism (largely from Spain), the Black Panthers, and the Zapatistas. These three influences lead him to approach political work undogmatically, and he takes some of the best parts from each. He emphasizes the kind of anarchism that I can most identify with, which is based in building autonomy and direct alternatives to capitalism. From the Black Panthers, he emphasizes self-defense, survival programs, and political education. His entire approach is shaped by the Zapatistas, who he says created a “living revolution” which “chang[es] people’s lives now and after the revolution” (83). The Zapatistas’ “anarchism that is not anarchism” provides perhaps the best path forward for serious anti-state and anti-capitalist political work, acting as what crow calls “a living synthesis of two disparate methods for liberation: the Black Panther Party’s integrated programs and the open-ended horizontal practices of anarchism” (83).

This was realized, however imperfectly, in the Common Ground Collective, which crow says was “closer to the Zapatista model, with a base decision-making body that consulted and accepted some leadership from the various communities we were in” (136). What more do the Zapatistas, the Black Panthers, and undogmatic anarchism have to offer to our own practice of mutual aid today? In moments of respite, we can reflect on the political implications of this crisis and orient ourselves towards the radical possibilities of mutual aid networks.

In response to the continuing disaster we live in and the greater ones we see coming in the future, Black Flags and Windmills provides hope. In response to these disasters and crises, crow reminds us that “another beautiful and flourishing tendency has been revealed: the efforts of decentralized responses to disasters, both ecological and economic, rooted in anarchist-inspired solidarity, direct action, and mutual aid. These emerging tendencies are offering rudimentary, but viable alternatives to the continuing crisis wrought by climate change and capitalism’s effects on communities in direct response and in rebuilding pieces from below” (178). If we all embrace our “emergency hearts” and help to cultivate seeds in the cracks of the system, perhaps we will not only survive the coming disasters but actively use them to help create another world.