Tag: love and rage

Revolutionary Anti-Fascism: the Role of Anarchism in Anti-Racist Action

I have a new article out called “Revolutionary Anti-Fascism: the Role of Anarchism in Anti-Racist Action” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory.

“Centering the contributions of anarchism in our historical analysis reveals how ARA fought fascists but also provided a radical alternative to the Far Right’s war against the state. . . For Love and Rage and Anti-Racist Action, anti-fascism could not simply mean the defense of the liberal democratic state against fascism, but rather necessitated its revolutionary overthrow and the construction of a libertarian socialist society.”

The article draws from a chapter of my dissertation, which is called “Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century.”

I previously published a piece called “Living Communism: Theory & Practice of Autonomy & Attack” in Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. That article is in the latest print edition of the journal, which you can buy from the Institute for Anarchist Studies here or from AK Press here.

“We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98)

In the past two days, I successfully defended my dissertation (“Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century”) and had a new peer reviewed article published in the open access journal Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power. The article is titled “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98),” and it is part of a fantastic special issue called “Burning the Ballot: Feminism Meets Anarchy.”

Here is how the editors describe my article in their introduction to the special issue:

“As we draw towards the end of our special issue Spencer Beswick continues the discussion of anarcha-feminist contributions to struggles for abortion access, queer and trans liberation, and challenging all forms of oppression and domination within movement spaces themselves. Looking at the Love and Rage organization, and highlighting its contributions throughout the 1990s to keep the anarchist flame alive, Beswick shows the continued intersectional promise of anarcha-feminist politics against liberal forms of inclusion and continually furthering anti-racist and feminist concerns within broader anarchism. The wide ranging work of Love and Rage shows the necessity, but also the difficulties, in expanding intersectional work within movements that continues to resonate today.

In particular, Beswick details the efforts by Love and Rage to foreground and incorporate an explicit anti-racist feminist politics as the organization grew and developed by carefully considering the interventions of Women of Colour feminists and organizers. Importantly, the growing pains of the organization are highlighted, including a critical discussion of its own internal challenges with racism, patriarchy and male domination, and they serve as a reminder of the need for continued vigilance to confront systems of domination in all movement spaces. Externally, the militant contributions of Love and Rage to confronting anti-abortion reactionaries provide lessons and points of consideration for the movements of today. “Militant confrontation of Operation Rescue was a turning point in the development of a new anarchist feminism,” Beswick argues, “feminists went on the attack in order to defend women’s autonomy and build a new world. In their uncompromising struggle for reproductive freedom, anarchists helped build a fighting, revolutionary feminist movement.” By examining the contributions, complexities and contradictions within Love and Rage “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98)” charts the history of anarcha-feminist agitation and its enduring legacy, while revealing the continued work that needs to be done in the present.”

You can read the article for free here: “‘We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!’: Anarcha-Feminism in Love and Rage (1989-98).” Let me know what you think!

RAGE! Anarchist Militancy in Reagan’s America

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed radical slogans as they marched against President Ronald Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. Acting within a broad progressive coalition, RABL helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America.

They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America threatened to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the pilot edition of what became the Love and Rage anarchist newspaper was called simply RAGE! The newspaper, which they distributed at a major national action at the Pentagon in 1988, reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad, including the so-called war on drugs.

Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out from political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s-1970s—were dead and mainstream society seemingly offered little worth saving. Meanwhile, Reagan crushed the hopes of a better world in Central America by funding and training Guatemalan death squads, Nicaraguan Contras, and violent Salvadoran elites.

Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism (anti-state socialism) provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

“Anarchist Anti-Fascism” Podcast Essay

I have a new podcast essay out today titled “Anarchist Anti-Fascism” in the Anarchist Essays podcast from the Anarchism Research Group. It’s based on presentations I recently gave at the American Historical Association and the European Social Science History Conference, and draws on a longer piece from my dissertation.

“In this essay, Spencer Beswick argues that anarchist infrastructure, values, and tactics played a key role in the development of militant antifascism in the late twentieth century United States. He explores how anarchists in Anti-Racist Action (1987-2013) and Love and Rage (1989-1998) confronted fascists in the streets while also organizing radical movements that sought to address the root causes of the broader social crisis.”

You also find it on YouTube: Essay #55: Spencer Beswick, ‘Anarchist Anti-Fascism’

Lessons from the History of Chinese Anarchism

In 1995, Love and Rage militant Joel Olson wrote an article called “The History of Chinese Anarchism” that drew lessons from the defeat of anarchism and the ascendance of communism (Marxism-Leninism) in China in the 1920s.

Marxists sometimes present this transition as an inevitable evolution from the supposed adolescent phase of anarchism into the maturity of Marxism. Not so, says Olson; as in Europe, this “was not an ‘evolution’ but a political struggle—one that the anarchists lost” due to “the anarchists’ failure to come up with a revolutionary strategy that could build a mass movement without violating their principles of autonomy and freedom.”

The problem for the Chinese anarchists was their faith in the spontaneity of the masses—so long as they were properly educated in the “new morality” which would “bring out the ‘natural’ anarchist inclinations in people.” They did not believe in class struggle or movement building. Indeed, Olson explains that “their anti-political stance led them to be skeptical of any attempts at organizing larger than the local level. […] Most Chinese anarchists believed in an ‘organic’ revolution. They saw social change not as class struggle but in terms of alternative forms of social organization such as communes, study societies, and other free spaces that would replicate themselves, spreading anarchism and anarchist ideas throughout society until eventually the state and capitalism were overthrown.”

In the final section of the article, aptly titled “Learning the Lessons,” Olson argues that:

“Before anarchism can be viable it must be able to effectively organize a democratic political movement that is based on the idea that humans built this world and thus humans are the ones who will have to change it, not on some apolitical belief in the power of ‘spontaneous’ or ‘organic’ local actions to spread throughout a society. This has to be done not by abandoning politics, but by creating a new, participatory, nonhierarchical democratic politics. […] The task now is to make that democracy eminently political, and bridge the gap between democracy and organization.”

This captures the essence of what Love and Rage was attempting in this period: to create new forms of mass, democratic, participatory politics that would be grounded in anarchism but resolute in the search for mass politics beyond radical subcultures and alternative spaces.

The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it? (WaPo Article)

On the two year anniversary of the attempted Jan. 6 coup, I published a new piece on fascism, anti-fascism, and Anti-Racist Action in the Washington Post:

Two years after the failed Jan. 6, 2021, coup, the far right continues to escalate threats against marginalized groups and to our democratic system more broadly. The mass killing at Club Q in Colorado Springs, followed soon after by an attack on an electrical grid, which some suspect might have been motivated by a desire to disrupt a drag show in North Carolina, offer a grim foreshadowing of more violence to come. This is particularly worrying given Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s (R-Ga.) recent statement to the New York Young Republican Club that if she and Stephen K. Bannon had been in charge on Jan. 6, the mob “would have been armed” and “we would have won.”

This movement has many of the elements we recognize as fascism. Fascism is a far-right political approach that offers what the historian Robert Paxton calls “compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity” to people obsessed with perceived humiliation and social decline. Historically, fascist movements have taken the form of militant nationalist parties that turn against democracy in alliance with elements of the conservative elite. They engage in “redemptive violence” to pursue “goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” Although it may seem to have come out of nowhere, today’s American fascism has roots in a surge of far-right violence in the late 20th century. We have much to learn from the recent evolution of fascism — and from anti-fascist responses — to help understand far right violence today. . .

You can read the whole article in the Washington Post here: The Jan. 6 coup blared an alarm about rising fascism. Will we hear it?

Or you can read it without a paywall here at the Anchorage Daily News.

Prefiguration or Dual Power? Infoshops and Revolutionary Anarchism in the 1990s

I recorded my recent talk at the Anarchist Studies Conference and uploaded it to youtube, check it out!

“Spencer Beswick gives a short overview of the anarchist infoshop movement, including its historical roots in West German squats and rapid growth in the US in the 1990s. He also addresses critiques of the model, particularly from the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which argued that infoshops should be subordinated to the task of building a revolutionary movement and dual power structures. Love and Rage was inspired by the Zapatistas in Mexico, who they saw as a model and a vision of the future. Ultimately, the debates over infoshops reflected very real differences in revolutionary strategy and tactics that are relevant for today’s movements.

This talk was originally presented at the Anarchist Studies Network Conference in August 2022 on a panel called ‘Prefiguring the Future: Twentieth Century Anarchist Visions.'”

Bowling for Anarchy: The Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League

In the late 1980s, the Minneapolis-based Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) theorized and practiced what they called “revolutionary anarchism” and helped build an organized anarchist movement across North America. In “Bowling for Beginners: An Anarchist Primer,” RABL offers an initial definition of anarchism:

Anarchy is not chaos. Anarchy is the absence of imposed authority. Anarchy is a society that is built on the principles of respect, cooperation and solidarity. Anarchy is wimmin controlling their own bodies, workers controlling their own workplaces, youth controlling their own education and the celebration of cultural difference.

reprinted in Love and Rage, Aug 1990

RABL gives a short history of anarchism from the 1886 Haymarket Affair to contemporary squatters movements in order to demonstrate that successful movements all share a common thread of people taking power into their own hands and collectively struggling for a new world. RABL rejected the need for a revolutionary vanguard, arguing that “only the masses, completely involved and in absolute control, can make a real revolution.” In the end, “anarchism is about people empowering themselves to take control and to lead their own lives.”

But since those in power will not give it up without a fight, revolution is necessary. The basic point of unity for RABL was an agreement on the necessity of revolutionary action to reach a classless, stateless society. RABL brought together the most pro-organization and anti-imperialist anarchists in the Twin Cities—and eventually across the US—to advocate a combination of direct action and revolutionary organization.

True to their name, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League crew began referring to “going bowling” as a code for direct action, which could be anything from nighttime sabotage (gluing locks, spray painting, etc.) to acting as a militant bloc at a street demonstration. Many anarchists at the time practiced this sort of small-scale militancy, which could be organized in small affinity groups of friends. RABL’s intervention was to pair this individual and small-group direct action with a vision for a broad anarchist federation.

Anarchism could continue to exist forever on the margins of society in small groups, but if anarchists wanted to actually change the world, they needed to get organized and help build militant mass movements.

Despite their roots in a relatively small city, the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League played an outsized role in transforming US anarchism and organizing a national movement at the end of the 20th century…

This is the latest in my new series Fragments of an Anarchist Dissertation. Check out the last post here: RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

RAGE! Anarchism in the Late 1980s

“We have reached a breaking point” -Nikolas S., Rage! October 1988

“We must still know to direct our anger towards revolution.” -Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League, 1990

“Bowl a strike, not a spare—Revolution everywhere!” Members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League (RABL) chanted bowling-themed slogans as they marched against President Reagan’s threat to invade Nicaragua in 1988. RABL, acting in a broad progressive coalition, helped shut down major sections of downtown Minneapolis for three days in an outpouring of rebellion against the Reagan administration’s covert wars in Central America. They built barricades in the streets and occupied major intersections in the business district. Events reached a dramatic climax when a masked protester threw a bowling ball through the window of a military recruitment office. The crash of the broken glass marked the beginning of a new era of anarchist militancy in the United States. The rage of a generation of young people raised in Reagan’s America was threatening to explode.

Reflecting this mood, the first iteration of what became the Love and Rage newspaper was called simply RAGE! It reflected a growing anger at the Reagan administration’s wars at home and abroad. Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out from political life and raised in the alienation of the suburbs. Many of their parents lost their unionized factory jobs to neoliberal outsourcing or were kicked off welfare. They grappled with the reality of skyrocketing inequality, precarious jobs, and violent policing. The hopes of social democracy—not to mention the liberatory movements of the 1960s—were dead, and the mainstream world offered little of value to save. Young dissidents in the US found a new form of politics in punk mosh pits and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for dissidents of the new generation.

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts consisting of fragments from the dissertation writing process...

Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s [IGD Podcast Interview]

Suzy Subways and I were interviewed about anarcha-feminist abortion struggle for the latest It’s Going Down podcast! Check it out here: Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s.

Description:

“On this episode of the It’s Going Down podcast, we talk with both long-time anarchist organizer Suzy Subways and historian Spencer Beswick about how anarchists in the 1990s organized in the face of a deadly far-Right attack on abortion access across the so-called United States.

With the growth of both the above ground organization Operation Rescue, which mobilized thousands to shut down abortion clinics and the underground anti-abortion movement which targeted doctors and reproductive health offices with firebombings and assassinations, abortion access was under threat like never before. But while liberals stuck to legalistic attempts to sway the courts, anarchists, utilizing strategies and tactics from groups like Anti-Racist Action, brought a fresh perspective to the struggle and began to mobilize and build coalitions.

During our discussion we cover this history as well as what led to the passing of Roe v Wade; as Beswick argues that it was the creation of a mass, militant movement that centered bodily autonomy and freedom that forced the State to codify limited abortion rights into law. As the supreme court is poised to rule on striking down Roe v Wade, this history, and the lessons and questions that it raises, is needed now more than ever.”

More Info: We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom, Empty Hands History, and Claim No Easy Victories: An Anarchist Analysis of ARA and its Contributions to the Building of a Radical Anti-Racist Movement