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-1970s.
A new generation of radicals—together with many ‘60s veterans—critiqued the failures of Marxism-Leninism and grappled with 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 party building and attempting to capture 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. This subterranean growth of US anarchism burst into view in the 1999 revolt against the World Trade Organization.
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.
@spencerbeswick It’s so true, and I’m old enough to have experienced the shockwave that was thrown up when more traditional ML-style activists first encountered ACT/UP, Critical Mass and similar sorts of leaderless, bottom-up formations. It was a grammar of organization they simply couldn’t parse, any more than cops or bureaucrats could.
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