Tag: Movement History

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.

“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.”)

Anarchist Oral History Project: Seeking Interviews

Have you been involved in anarchist projects or organizations in the United States from the 1970s-2000s? We would like to interview you for an Anarchist Oral History Project!

Spencer Beswick (he/him) is a PhD candidate writing his dissertation on the history of US anarchism in the late 20th century, with a particular focus on Love and Rage. Spencer has been active in anarchist and other left projects for the past decade, beginning with participation in Occupy Boston and currently consisting of helping to run a Marxist reading group and socialist night school where he lives in Ithaca, NY.

Connected to his dissertation research, Spencer is involved with a broader Anarchist Oral History Project seeking to interview a wide swathe of movement participants from the 1960s to today. He is looking to interview anyone involved in anarchist projects and organizations in the late 20th and early 21st century, particularly (but certainly not limited to) Love and Rage and associated groups like Anti-Racist Action. Spencer is located in NYC for Fall 2021 and will be traveling for research and interviews in 2022. You can reach him at spencerbeswick@gmail.com or emptyhands@protonmail.com.

The Grounded Intellectual: Articulating Self-Knowledge from Within the Movement

As a PhD student working on movement history, I think constantly about how to best use my position within the academy. It is easy to get sucked into the logics of the academic world, no matter our political commitments. How do we prevent this? How can we relate to movements outside the academy in a way that both strengthens them and transforms our own subjectivity? It seems key to me to remain grounded within movement spaces. We must function as part of movements—certainly with our own particular knowledge and tools to contribute, but as part of the movement and thus helping to articulate self-knowledge from within.

I recently read Raúl Zibechi’s excellent book Territories in Resistance and I appreciate how he frames this process:

“We strengthen and expand social movements by understanding the meaning of the actual social practices, of the ‘historical movement that is unfolding before our eyes’ (Marx). Understanding is a creative act […] But the process of understanding is a form of action; one understands only what one lives. Hence we can only understand the meaning of social practices in and with them—from within. […] In Argentina, Colectivo Situaciones and the MTD Solano have developed the concept of ‘the militant researcher.’ This is being part of the social movement—not just integrating into the organization, but participating in the disengagement or place shifting that the whole movement pursues, an act of moving-oneself that captures and reconfigures.”

In the words of the Italian Autonomist Marxist Raniero Panzieri, “analysis becomes complete only through participation in struggles.”

When I was involved with Food Not Bombs and the Antidote Infoshop, I felt that my studies and my political activity were each part of a connected whole. I shared my research with my non-academic (but equally intellectually committed) comrades, who in turn kept me grounded and pointed in the right direction. Without this anchor, my research process feels adrift. I feel an urgent need to rediscover a radical intellectual community on the border between academia and movement spaces, dedicated to consciously articulating self-knowledge from within the movement.

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.