Notes on Anarchism in America, Part 2

Introduction

In the first installment of these notes (LLR, #20) I tried to give an sketch of the development of the anarchist movement from the second world war to the mid-1970s. This installment will deal with subsequent efforts to organize the movement. In future issues I will discuss the anarchist press and anarchist activism.

Organization

Organization in the anarchist movement in North America has always been an elusive proposition. Aside from the opposition of many anarchists to any type of organization above the level of the local group, collective or affinity group there have been the problems of organizational structure, of inclusiveness versus exclusiveness, of ideological unity versus pluralism, etc. In the post World War II era several attempts have been made to increase the organization and cooperation among anarchists and libertarian socialists. As noted in the last installment of these notes, in the 1950s the Libertarian League attempted to bring together anarchist-communists and syndicalists but was unsuccessful in breaking out of its New York base, aside from a scattering of contacts in places like Youngstown, Detroit and San Fracisco, and eventually dissolved itself in the mid-sixties. For a time in that decade SDS appeared to be an arena in which anarchist ideas were finding an echo. But as the Leninist current gained increasing sway in that organization anarchist ideas became increasingly marginalized, notwithstanding the attempts of the Radical Decentralization Project, led by Murray Bookchin, to create a conscious anarchist pole of regroupment. Those efforts were too late to forestall the demise of SDS which splintered into warring Marxist-Leninist sects in 1969 leaving the anarchists with the task of beginning to forge an independent anarchist movement.

The first attempt at anarchist organization in the post- SDS era was the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF), already discussed last time. But SRAF was not an organization as such but a correspondence network open to anyone who called themselves an anarchist. Perhaps 20 to 30 groups over the dozen years of SRAF's existence listed themselves on SRAF's rolls but they were so disparate in outlook that any kind of joint activity was virtually impossible. Individualists cohabited with communists who cohabited with capitalists who cohabited with yippies - an unstable mixture if there ever was one. But, for all its faults, SRAF did provide a point of contact for the myriad of anarchist groups and individuals throughout North America, providing each with the sense of being part of a wider "movement." It certainly provided that function for this author. It was through SRAF that the Maine Federation of Anarchists, as we called out little group of troublemakers, first made contact with anarchists outside of out little bailiwick of Orono, Maine, and were able to participate in some of the debates going on in the movement in the early seventies. So, in that sense, SRAF was not a wasted effort; but as the decade of the seventies grew older anarchists and libertarian socialists became increasingly desirous of a more ideologically coherent formation.

In 1975 a group in Seattle issued a manifesto, "Towards an Anti-Authoritarian Revolutionary Movement," which they hoped would work as the basis for a continent-wide revolutionary anarchist organization. However, the leftist tone of the manifesto, and its support for national liberation movements, failed to attract many anarchists and the initiative flopped.

In 1976 the League for Economic Democracy, a group with roots in the old Socialist Labor Party in San Pedro, California, began issuing their newsletter, Synthesis, making known their desire to bring about closer collaboration among anarchists and libertarian marxists. Early issues contained names and addresses of the far flung anarchist and libertarian socialist groups and individuals, with descriptions of their varying perspectives and activities. Many of these groups expressed a desire for greater organization and unity on the libertarian left. In the end, however LED's initiative did not bear fruit, although Philadelphia Solidarity, a group also with roots in the SLP which came under the influence of the ideas of Paul Cardan (a.k.a. Cornelius Castoriadis) and the British Solidarity group, decided to merge its newsletter with Synthesis. LED increasingly moved in the direction of social ecology, eventually changing its name to League for Ecological Democracy and linking up with the Green movement.

Also in 1976 a group of anarchists and libertarian marxists in Des Moines, Iowa, sponsored a "Continental Organizing and Communications Conference" with an eye towards forming a federation of anarchist and libertarian socialist groups. The hosts, however, made the tactical error of developing an agenda and position paper to present to the conference. Used to gatherings at which participants more-or-less spontaneously developed their own agenda, anarchists strenuously objected to what they considered to be the host's attempts to control what went on at the conference. The Marxist tone of the host's perspectives also alienated many participants. In the end, the conference, which attracted perhaps 100 or so participants, ended in failure.

However, the quest for organization went on. At the annual SRAF gathering, held in 1977 at Wildcat Mountain in Wisconsin, SRAF dissidents got together and formed the Anarchist Communist Tendency. Over the next several months participants in the ACT worked out a Basis of Affiliation and Basic Principles and in 1978 launched the Anarchist Communist Federation of North America.

Over the next three years the ACF was composed of groups in Regina, Sask., Toronto, Ont. (Toronto Anarchist Group), Hamilton, Ont. (Totally Eclipsed), Ann Arbor, MI (Nameless Anarchist Group), Chicago (Resurgence and Red and Black), Champaign-Urbana, IL (Resurgence and Prairie Anarchist League), New York City, NY (Libertarian Workers Group), Milwaukee, WI (Syndicalist Alliance), Evanston, IL (Mayday), Morgantown, WV (Rascal), Rochester, NY (Rochester Black Rose), San Francisco, CA (Bread and Roses), Jordan Station, Ont (Revolutionary Anarchist Group), Minneapolis, MN (Soil of Liberty Group), Madison, WI (No Limits Group), Ypsilanti, MI (Creative Urge), Portland, OR (Other Vices).

The principles which ACF espoused were based on the ideas of Peter Kropotkin and emphasized local autonomy accompanied by federal unity. The Federation was based on affinity groups of at least three individuals; individuals could not belong to the federation except as members of a group. This was to ensure that the federation would be a federation of groups and not a conglomeration of disparate individuals. Individuals who wished to join, however, could Participate by becoming a member-at-large of an existing group outside their locality until they could create their own local group.

The Federation tried to develop its politics through semiannual conferences where members discussed anarchist approaches to such issues as unionism, ecology, feminism, violence, nationalism and marxism. These discussions, and those that took place within the Federation's Internal Discussion Bulletin, were supposed to informed the practice of the local groups. Local groups were active in anti-nuke, feminist and labor struggles. The Federation's administrative functions (Internal Discussion Bulletin, external correspondence, treasury, etc.) were carried out by individual groups. As a Federation, the main activity, besides the semi-annual conferences, was the publication and distribution of pamphlets (including "Self-Management," "You Can't Blow Up a Social Relationship," "Anarcho-Syndicalists in the Russian Revolution") and a continental newspaper, the North American Anarchist.

The publication of the newspaper drew out some of the serious divisions which existed within the ACF, and within the anarchist movement as a whole. While all the groups that made up the ACT, and then the ACF, could agree on what was wrong with SRAF - the ease with which anyone who called themselves "anarchist" could affiliate - they did not resolve the problem. Although there was a process which a group had to go through before they could be accepted into the Federation the process did not prevent groups and individuals from joining who later turned out to be in fundamental disagreement with the basis of the organization. Disagreements over working within the trade unions versus building independent revolutionary unions, over centralism versus federalism, over "theory" versus "practice," pro-versus anti-technology, etc., led to increasingly acrimonious debates that virtually paralyzed the organization. Finally, in 1981, the Libertarian Workers Group of New York City withdrew from the Federation, followed closely by Bread and Roses of San Francisco, Toronto Anarchist Group and Totally Eclipsed of St. Catherines, Ontario. Some of the groups that remained in the Federation felt a bit betrayed by these defections, especially when the Canadian groups took the Federation's newspaper with them, changing its name to Strike!. The remaining groups, all within the U.S. Midwest, with the exception of the group in Regina, Saskatchewan, tried to maintain the Federation but dissolved it within a year.

The groups that disaffiliated from ACF, except for Bread and Roses, which disbanded, continued to cooperate for a number of years. The Libertarian Workers Group and the Strike! collectives sponsored a number of conferences over the next few years that culminated in the formation, first, of the journal Ideas and Action in 1982 and, then, of the Workers Solidarity Alliance in 1984, to which the Strike! collectives did not adhere as they were more councilist than anarcho-syndicalist in orientation. WSA affiliated with the International Workers Association, the anarcho-syndicalist international, immediately upon its formation (LWG had already been affiliated with IWA). A number of anarcho-syndicalists within the IWW, including those of us who would become the editors of this journal, issued a formal letter of protest to the IWA secretariat challenging the right of the WSA to claim to represent anarcho-syndicalism in the U.S. on the grounds that most anarcho-syndicalists were active in the IWW and that the WSA, although claiming the anarcho-syndicalist label, did not intend to build revolutionary unions in the here and now, believing it to be impossible.

WSA remained a tiny formation with its main strength, such as it was, in New York and San Francisco, picking up individual adherents in about a dozen other locales. Its major workplace effort seems to have been within the needle trades in New York in the mid-eighties where they attempted to setup a Needle Trades Workers Action Committee. They also floated an education workers network with the inadvertent aid of the IWW. WSA never really developed an industrial practice of its own and many WSAers carried out their revolutionary unionism through the IWW. International solidarity campaigns seem to have been their forte, helping form the short-lived Libertarian Aid to Latin American Workers and its publication, No Middle Ground, in the mid-eighties and publishing an Eastern European Bulletin to report on dissident movements in the so-called Communist countries. Most recently WSA has been raising funds for the Nigerian anarcho-syndicalist Awareness League.

The Strike! newspaper collective, for their part, continued to publish the paper and succeeded in gathering a network of support groups in a halfdozen, mainly Canadian, cities. It continued to focus on labor issues and advocate a more politically coherent anarchist organization. The paper, however, succumbed to lack of resources in 1986.

Resurgence, which was one of the major proponents of the ACF and stuck with it to the end, continued to be active in its local community within the anti-nuke and pro-choice movements, and nationally by affiliating with the Anarchist Association of the Americas (see below). Resurgence members also were very active within the IWW, helping to build the Rank and File Organizing Committee in an ultimately successful struggle to prevent a reformist clique (the Industrial Organizing Committee) from gaining control of the IWW's organizing resources. They were also instrumental in pushing for and getting the IWW to sponsor an International Libertarian Labor Conference in May 1986 to discuss ways to improve international communication and cooperation among the world's revolutionary unions. The conference brought together revolutionary unionists from England, France, South Africa, Sweden, Spain, and Poland as well as Wobblies from around the U.S. and Canada. In 1986 Resurgence members also participated in the launching of Libertarian Labor Review.

Regional Organizing

As ACF was self-destructing, others were initiating regional efforts to increase cooperation among anarchists. In New England a short-lived New England Anarchist Conference was organized in 1981 which brought over 150 anarchists, active primarily in the anti-nuke and ecology movements, together at its founding meeting. NEAC was very much influenced by the social ecology of Murray Bookchin and reflected this influence in the name they chose for their organ, Black and Green. NEAC proposed the community as the main arena for revolutionary agitation in opposition to the workplace and rejected a revolutionary role for the working class, as a class. NEAC faded away in short order.

Another effort at regional organization was the Anarchist Association of the Americas. AAA began as a more-or-less local federation of anarchist collectives in the Washington, D.C. area around 1981 and expanded to include groups in Maryland, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and even as far way as Illinois New York and Louisiana. AAA dissolved around 1986. They put out a fine newsletter called Emancipation and sponsored a couple of regional conferences attended by a little over 100 people.

The break up of ACF confirmed for many anarchists their belief in the folly of attempting to set up any kind of national or continental anarchist federation, but the desire for national/continental cooperation still existed. Between 1986 and 1989 four continental anarchist gatherings were held. The first, held in Chicago in 1986, the Haymarket International Anarchist Gathering, was organized by Chicago Anarchists United to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the general strike for the 8-hour day. The gathering attracted some 400 anarchists from all over North America, as well as a few comrades from Europe. Over the four days of the gathering there were workshops, cultural presentations, a banquet and several demonstrations, one of which resulted in a few broken windows and 38 arrests (on charges of "Mob Action Against the State").

While the number of participants was encouraging, the quality was not. There seemed to be a lack of knowledge of basic anarchist ideas and a surplus of unreflective "action." There were also a substantial number of counter-culturalists (or lifestylists) for whom adherence to vegetarianism or paganism was the proof of one's anarchism. There was not much interest in the working class or class struggle.

The numeric, if not political, success of the Chicago gathering led to others: in Minneapolis in 1987 (the Build the Movement Anarchist Gathering, attended by 250-300 people); in Toronto in 1988 (the Anarchist Survival Gathering, attended by 800); and, in San Francisco in 1989 (the Without Borders Anarchist Gathering, attended by more than 1,500).

Workshops at the gatherings reflected diverse areas of activism for the movement - publishing, sexism and racism, animal liberation, sabotage, anarcho-syndicalism, prisoner solidarity, revolutionary anarcho-communism, feminism and ecology. The controversies were also aired technology vs. anti-technology, violence vs. non-violence, anarchist participation in coalitions, national liberation movements, social ecology vs. deep ecology, paganism, and the participation of marxists at anarchist gatherings. Out of the gatherings a number of activist networks were established around prisoner support, anti-racist action, queer liberation, feminism, an anarchist labor network, etc.

There was also the obligatory "Day of Action," a chance for action junkies to "fuck shit up" and fight the cops. In Minneapolis it was a typical "War Chest Tour" to protest militarism; in Toronto the target was the United States Consulate following the downing of an Iranian airbus by U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf. At the San Francisco gathering in 1989 two separate actions took place: one held in Berkeley, ostensibly to protest homelessness, turned into the usual mini-riot while the other, held in San Francisco's financial district, was a peaceful attempt to make anarchism intelligible to working people. The mini-riot got the press.

San Francisco, the largest of the gatherings, also turned out to be the last Continental gathering until the "Active Resistance" Conference held in Chicago in August 1996 to counter the Democratic Party's National Convention.

One outcome of the gatherings, besides showing the "diversity" of the movement (some would say the incoherence), was a new attempt at forging a continental anarchist organization. During the gathering in Minneapolis members of the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League of Minneapolis, Heyday Anarchists of Chicago (a group that had split from Chicago Anarchists United after the 1986 gathering, the Revolutionary Socialist League (a Trotskyist group claiming to be moving towards anarchism), and some others, created a North American Anarchist Network, also known as the Mayday Network, to publish a newsletter and to develop joint projects.

One project was an anarchist contingent in a "Blockade the Pentagon" demonstration held in Washington, D.C., in October of 1988. The demo was sponsored by the Pledge of Resistance and the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador to protest U.S. intervention in Central America. For the occasion, the Network published a one-off newspaper entitled Rage! (printed by the RSL) which, among other things, advocated the use of mobile, disruptive tactics in the streets, and formation of Black Blocs at demonstrations in imitation of the European autonomen. The anarchist contingent numbering around 75 and joined by members of the leftist Progressive Student Network, utilized these tactics at the Pentagon to the consternation of the demonstration organizers. They also garnered some attention, mostly negative, from the left press, The Guardian newspaper in particular. Mayday also received some criticism from others in the anarchist movement who were wary of participating in a network with the RSL.

Love and Rage

The next step in the organizational process was the launching of a campaign to form a continental "revolutionary anarchist" newspaper spearheaded by the RSL. In the summer of 1989, in anticipation of the San Francisco Gathering, a pilot issue, entitled Writing on the Wall, was put together by folks in Chicago. At the gathering itself a workshop brought together people interested in the newspaper project. The project was viewed by its sponsors as a step on the road to building an organization, with local groups of newspaper supporters forming the base, The RSL's participation in the project led anarchists who were otherwise supportive of the idea of such a newspaper and organization to be suspicious. For these skeptics the possibility of individual marxist-leninist becoming anarchists was not out of the question, but a mass conversion as claimed by the RSL seemed highly unlikely. Suspicions were further aroused when the conference to actually launch the newspaper was held during the same weekend (November 24-25, 1989) and in the same venue (a church basement in Chicago) as the national conference of the RSL (at which the RSL formally dissolved itself). It looked to the skeptics like a typical Trotskyist entryist tactic.

At the conference itself, in which participation seemed to be by invitation only, over 50% of the 47 attendees were "ex"-RSL and their RABL and Heyday fellow travellers. Despite attempts to exclude them, members of the Resurgence group from Champaign, Illinois, and Some Chicago Anarchists (formerly Chicago Anarchists United) attended the meeting to see if the paper that issued from the conference would be a bonafide anarchist project. Over the objections of the dissidents the conference adopted a "Statement of Principles" which barely mentioned anarchism and its vision but instead regurgitated the usual laundry-list of leftist preoccupations: anti-racism, feminism, gay and lesbian liberation, youth movement, anti-imperialism, etc.; a document that was virtually indistinguishable from such statements in many other leftist publications, including the "ex"-RSL's.

In the months that immediately followed the foundation of Love and Rage, as the paper was called, the controversy raged in the anarchist press with arguments for and against appearing in Fifth Estate and Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. A small group of former project supporters-turned-oppositionists launched a short lived paper of their own called The Alarm. The content of the Love and Rage did not convince the skeptics of the paper's anarchist credentials with its lack of discussion of anarchist theory, except for the occasional article alluding to its obsolesence. In particular, L&R's embracing of national liberation movements in the name of anti-imperialism, despite their domination by marxist-leninist and nationalist ideology, made the group's claims to anarchism suspect in many eyes.

The Love and Rage network attracted some support, however; listing some 50 groups in the paper from all over the U.S., Canada, Mexico and even South America. How many of these could be considered actual "member" groups of the Love and Rage Network is hard to say. The L&R Network was a loose network of autonomous anarchist groups rather than a unified organization, despite the wishes of its principal founders.

In 1993 the core groups in New York, Minneapolis and the Bay Area tried to remedy this situation by pushing for a tighter federative structure at their continental gathering held in San Diego. As a result the network split nearly in two, with the advocates of continuing as a loose network leaving (some of these groups later formed the Network of Anarchist Collectives). Those remaining with L&R renamed themselves the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation with affiliated groups in Oakland, Mexico City, Milwaukee, Detroit, East Lansing, Minneapolis, Albuquerque, New York City, Hamilton, Merrifield, VA, and Adamant, Vermont. L&RRAF has been active in the Anti-Racist Action Network, in support work for the Mexican Zapatistas and in struggles against cutbacks and tuition hikes at City University of New York. The L&RRAF leadership has also been increasingly critical of the anarchist tradition, indicating a possible move away from anarchism and back towards marxism. This posture has raised some dissent among some of the rank-and-file.

While L&R was going through these changes the rest of the anarchist movement was gathering, regionally that is. That same summer, 1993, three regional gatherings took place. In Portland, Oregon, a gathering, actually more of a festival, entitled "A Holiday in Beirut," brought together a couple hundred anarchist youth, many of them so-called Crusties (seldom-washed street punks) who were ready for a riot, which they got when police tried to break up a concert.

A more serious gathering was held in Philadelphia attracting several hundred people from the mid-Atlantic region, but also from as far away as Chicago and New England. There were many workshops including labor organizing, pirate radio, computer networking, prison/legal, anarchism and black revolution and sexual relationships, as well as some quite irrelevant topics such as job-free living, magic and nudism. A gathering in Madison drew around 100 folks, mainly from Minneapolis/St. Paul and Chicago, and featured small group discussions focusing on community building, organizing strategies and using technology for communication. As an outcome of the Philly Gathering a new network, the Atlantic Anarchist Circle, was formed bringing together groups from Philadelphia to New York and beyond.

In this period a number of anarchist/anti-authoritarian centers (many of them called info-shops in imitation of the European movement) also began to emerge, including Long Haul Infoshop in Berkeley, Germinal/Che Cafe in San Diego, A-Space in Philadelphia, Emma Community Center in Minneapolis, Rosebud Common in Portland, Oregon, the Right to Existence in Paterson, New Jersey, 404 Willis Center in Detroit (followed after its demise by the Trumbull Theater Complex), and the Autonomous Zone Infoshop in Chicago. In the summer of 1994 many of these "alternative institutions" gathered in Detroit and agreed to publish a networking bulletin which they called (Dis)connection.

At a follow-up gathering held in Antioch, Ohio, in fall of 1995 a Network of Anarchist Collectives was formed with (Dis)connection as its "organ," which listed some 45 collectives and infoshops in its winter 1995 issue. The "strategy" of the NAC, if one could designate it as such, focused on the creation of alternative institutions as the base of an antiauthoritarian counter-community. NAC's main achievement so far has been the organization of the Active Resistance counter-convention in opposition to the Democratic Party Convention held in Chicago in August 1996. The counter-convention drew around 700 participants, many of whom actively took part in the many demonstrations that took place during the convention week.

One other attempt at national organization should be mentioned. This was the formation in November 1995 at a conference in Atlanta of the Anti-Authoritarian Network of Community Organizers. This was an initiative of African-American anarchist Lorenzo Komboa Ervin and comrades from the Black Fist Collective from Houston in an effort to connect anarchist activism with the poor. The network, however, seems to have been still-born.

In addition to the above attempts at forming a more or less ideologically based anarchist organization there have also been numerous efforts at creating issue based formations, such as The Survival Network, Food Not Bombs, Anarchist Black Cross, Anti-Racist Action, etc. But more on these at a later time.

Attempts to organize the anarchist movement over the past 20 years or so have not been too successful. Networks seem to be more popular than Federations, as they appear to represent a compromise between group autonomy and the desire for greater cooperation.