Tag: Neoliberalism

Neoliberal Counterrevolution and Anarchist History

The New Right’s neoliberal counterrevolution dramatically reshaped American society. Neoliberal economics remade the system of production and decimated the labor movement, in part by recuperating struggles against the Fordist factory. This counterrevolution set the stage upon which much of the radical left moved towards anarchism in the late twentieth century.

Reactionary masculine individualism was reinscribed as the welfare system was attacked and the liberal wing of the women’s movement was absorbed into the capitalist system. Formal legal equality was granted to Black people while the radical wings of the civil rights and national liberation movements were violently repressed. The expansion of the prison system served both to contain the radical left and to address an economic crisis.

The shifting terrain of late twentieth century society produced a crisis for the left that destabilized Marxism-Leninism and gave rise to an anti-state socialist politics. The state launched an all-out assault on radical organizations and revolutionary fighters. From FBI infiltration and disruption to long term imprisonment and even outright assassination, the state reacted violently to the threat that it perceived from revolutionary forces. By the late 1970s, the state had essentially defeated the revolutionary wing of the New Left, from the Black Panthers to the Weather Underground.

Alongside this frontal assault, the changing nature of capitalist production and state power destabilized the analysis and program of the Marxist-Leninist left. Offshoring production to the global south decimated the industrial working-class base of the Old Left while repression disoriented the national liberation movements that had provided the locus of struggle for anti-imperialists in the long 1960s. Traditional approaches to organizing factory workers under the direction of a communist party no longer appeared viable to many militants.

Further, capturing the state no longer appeared to be a sufficient condition for building socialism—and was increasingly seen as undesirable in the first place, echoing the critique of the state formulated by earlier generations of anarchists in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The decline and fall of the Soviet Union, the capitalist turn of post-Maoist China, the “betrayal” of the French Socialist President François Mitterrand’s 1983 “turn to austerity,” the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in 1990, and the failure of national liberation movements to build socialism in the decolonizing world all contributed to a global re-evaluation of the state-centric mode of politics.

A new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and turned towards anarchism. Marxism-Leninism certainly did not disappear, but anarchism grew more quickly and recaptured the imagination of the radical left and broader social movements. This was driven both by the neoliberal counterrevolution’s decimation of the Marxist left and the development of new theory and practice in the anarchist movement.

After decades of subterranean development, the turn-of-the-century global justice/anti-globalization movement marked the renaissance of anarchist politics. Beyond the growing popularity of formal anarchist ideology and organizations, an anarchist ethos had spread across the radical left. As David Graeber put it in 2010, “for activists, ‘anarchist process’ has become synonymous with the basic principles of how one facilitates a meeting or organizes street actions.” This anarchist process includes consensus-based decision making, organizing in horizontal and non-hierarchical fashions, coalescing in networks and bottom-up federations rather than democratic centralist parties, and a commitment to direct action in many forms.

Ultimately, anarchism was reborn because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism in a way that Marxism-Leninism could not.

Read more in my article “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)” (email me at scb274@cornell.edu for a PDF).

New Publication: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s)”

My first peer reviewed journal article was recently published in the Anarchist Studies journal: “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).”

Here is the abstract:

After almost a century of Marxist predominance, how did anarchism develop from a marginal phenomenon into a force at the centre of the anti-globalisation movement? This article explores how anarchism was reborn in a counter-revolutionary age. Part one investigates how the New Right’s post-1960s counterrevolution defeated the New Left and remade US society, including by recuperating potentially liberatory elements of social movements. Part two examines how a new generation of radicals critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and popularised the anarchist analysis and principles that provided the foundation for the anti-globalisation movement. The article discusses five examples of the development of anarchist theory and practice: Black/New Afrikan Anarchism, anarcha-feminism, eco-anarchism, punk anarchism, and revolutionary social anarchism. Ultimately, the article argues that anarchism was revitalised in the late twentieth century because it provided compelling answers to the new problems posed by the neoliberal counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism.

From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-90s)

My article on the transformation and revitalization of anarchism in the late 20th century was recently accepted for publication in the Spring 2023 edition of the Anarchist Studies journal. Here is a sneak peak at the introduction:

Anarchism exploded into public view in the 1999 Battle of Seattle. While the media focused on the spectacle of the black bloc smashing windows, they largely overlooked the role of anarchism behind the scenes where activists organized themselves in affinity groups and made decisions by consensus. Although self-identified anarchists remained a minority within it, the anti-globalization movement became known for its embrace of “common sense” anarchist values and practices. Large segments of the movement operated along anarchist principles: decentralization, horizontal organizational structures, militant street demonstrations, rejection of the state and capitalism, and advocacy of both individual freedom and worker control of production. After almost a century of Marxist predominance, how did anarchism develop from a marginal phenomenon into a force at the center of the anti-globalization movement?

This article explores the subterranean development of American anarchism in the late twentieth century. As a reactionary counterrevolution remade society, the New Left was decimated by violent repression, and the Soviet Union collapsed, many on the radical left reevaluated the politics of the 1960s-70s. A new generation of radicals—together with many ‘60s veterans—critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and grappled with the fundamental changes in social, political, and economic life. As the ruling class embraced neoliberalism and repressive law and order politics, much of the left turned away from both party building and an orientation towards capturing state power. Their analysis of social changes and the failures of state socialism led many militants to reject the state, and the late twentieth century was marked by a spread of anarchist politics throughout the radical left.

Part one of this article analyzes the right-wing counterrevolution that defeated the radical currents of the “long 1960s.” Drawing on Corey Robin and Paulo Virno’s theories of conservatism and counterrevolution, I argue that we cannot see the New Right counterrevolution as a simple return to the past, but rather as the creation of a new social order that recuperated warped elements of the radicalism to which it reacted. In the United States, this took the form of neoliberal economics, masculine individualism articulated alongside a moral defense of the nuclear family, recuperation of elements of the feminist and civil rights movements, and a repressive law and order politics that embraced mass incarceration as a “fix” for both the radical left and the economic crisis.

In part two, I explore the evolution of the radical left in this period in order to understand the growing shift from Marxist to anarchist common sense. After analyzing the defeat of the Marxist-Leninist and national liberation movements of the long 1960s, I discuss five examples of the revitalization of anarchism and its underground development in a variety of movement spaces: the birth of Black/New Afrikan Anarchism from imprisoned ex-Black Panthers; the rise of anarcha-feminism in the women’s liberation movement; the growth of eco-anarchism; the role of punk in popularizing anarchism; and the foundation of nation-wide revolutionary social anarchist organizations like Love and Rage. Through these five cases—which each warrant an extended treatment beyond this article’s scope—I analyze a shift in the radical left towards an anarchistic politics which decenters and disavows the state in favor of grassroots dual power, direct self-determination, mutual aid, and non-hierarchical organization. This reorientation can only be understood by situating it in the context of the broad historical transformations of the post-1960s counterrevolution. I ultimately argue that anarchism was revitalized in the late twentieth century because it provided compelling, non-state-oriented answers to the new problems posed by the counterrevolution and the crisis of state socialism.

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.