spencerbeswick

spencerbeswick, 1 month ago to random

Invisible Committee: "Every declared commune calls a new geography into existence around it, and sometimes even at a distance from it. Where there had only been a uniform territory, a plain where everything was interchangeable, in the greyness of generalized equivalence, it raises up a chain of mountains, a whole variegated relief with passes, peaks, incredible pathways between friendly things, and forbidding precipitous terrain between enemy things. Nothing is simple anymore, or is simple in a different way. Every commune creates a political territory that extends out and ramifies as it grows."

spencerbeswick, 1 month ago to anarchism

Kuwasi Balagoon, one of the key theorists/practitioners of New Afrikan Anarchism: "Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion.

It is consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete and total life. With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains itself at an equal expense to all, but progresses in a creative process unhindered by any class, caste or party.

This is because the goals of anarchy don't include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution.

They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place."

From "Anarchy Can't Fight Alone" https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kuwasi-balagoon-anarchy-can-t-fight-alone

#anarchism #anarchy #BlackAnarchism #history

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to anarchism

Emma Goldman: "Poor human nature, what horrible crimes have been committed in thy name! The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weaknesses of human nature.

Yet, how can any one speak of it today, with every soul in a prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless.

Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?

Freedom, expansion, opportunity, and, above all, peace and repose, alone can teach us the real dominant factors of human nature and all its wonderful possibilities."

Emma Goldman in "Anarchism: What It Really Stands For" (1910)

#anarchism #history #human #nature

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Abdullah Öcalan: "The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development.

Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people. Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation. Democratic confederalism is based on grassroots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities. Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies. For limited space of time they are both mouthpiece and executive institution. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local grassroots institutions."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to anarchism

Anarchists against the first Gulf War

After Earth Day Wall Street, the next major action that Love and Rage helped plan was an anarchist black bloc contingent at a demonstration in Washington DC against the 1991 Gulf War.

The failure of the peace movement to prevent the Gulf War was one of the defining moments of the early 1990s for the left. The war was over quickly, won by the overwhelming strength of the US military brought to bear on Iraqi troops. This victory was widely interpreted as “kicking the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’” and bringing back faith in the ability of the US to exert its military force across the world. It commenced a decade of US strength: here was the military might of ascendant corporate globalization.

A small but determined peace movement resisted the war from beginning to end. But with the left in a historical nadir following the defeats of the 1980s, the movement was not able to muster a significant force or convince even a sizable minority of the US public that the war was unjust—let alone influence government policy. Anarchists stepped boldly into the vacuum left by the mainstream left.

Building off the “Pledge of Resistance” to war in Central America, they organized local actions in opposition to the war and came together in an anarchist contingent at a national demonstration in DC. Love and Rage’ Editorial Council issued a call for a black bloc at a major January 26th demonstration against the war in DC. Black bloc tactics (dressing in all black and marching as a unified bloc) are meant to conceal identities and enable more militant collective action at demonstrations. It was first used by squatters and autonomous movements in West Germany in the 1980s and spread to the US by the end of the 1980s.

Although anarchists had begun using black bloc tactics at small demonstrations over the previous few years, including at Earth Day Wall Street a year back, the 1991 Gulf War demonstration marked the real birth of the black bloc as a national phenomenon in the US. While the actual black bloc at the march was agreed by participants to be somewhat disappointing, it put Love and Rage on the map as a national force.

The resistance to the 1991 Gulf War saw anarchism come into its own as a coordinated national movement, with Love and Rage playing a key role. In retrospect, however, it was a pyrrhic victory; anarchism picked up many lifeboats from the sinking ship of the Marxist left, but the ship sank nonetheless—and anarchists were not yet in a position to rebuild it on their own terms.

Although anarchists contributed significantly to the movement against the Gulf War, the broader left emerged from the struggle disoriented and on its back foot. Anarchists came out of the struggle against the war even more determined to build their own strength and capacity.

#anarchism #history #war #peace

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

James C. Scott on the importance of "anarchist calisthenics."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Murray Bookchin: "What compels me to fight this society is, of course, outrage over injustice, a love of freedom, and a feeling of responsibility for perpetuating and enlarging the human spirit - its beauty, creativity, and latent capacity to improve the world. I do not care to come to terms with an irrational society that corrodes all that is valuable in humanity, that eats away at all that is beautiful and noble in the human experience.

Capitalism devours us. At the molecular level of everyday life, it changes us for the worse, and it compels people to make extremely unsavoury rationalisations for why they believe things they know - or at least they once knew - are false and for doing things that are trivialising and dehumanising.

When we struggle against capitalism, we are really struggling against our own dehumanisation, and once we become fully cognisant of that, then the danger of surrender to the system reinforces our resistance. As revolutionaries, we are fighting not only for a better society but for our very humanity."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Mark Fisher: "Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? The 'mental health plague' in capitalist societies would suggest that, instead of being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional, and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to socialism

Can't stop thinking about a project I've had on the backburner for a while: "Socialism in One City? Municipal Socialism in Burlington and Ithaca," on the rebirth of municipal socialist politics in the 1980s-1990s. Much to learn, both positive and negative, from the history.

In Burlington, of course, you have Mayor Bernie Sanders in the 1980s. The story focuses on the tension between grassroots democratic forces (including Bookchin & the Greens) vs the official socialists in office, with the battle around setting the terms of socialist democracy.

In Ithaca, you have the lesser known example of DSA member and red diaper baby Benjamin Nichols, who built a broad progressive coalition thru which he won 3 mayoral terms in the 1990s. He took on Cornell & transformed municipal politics, but ended up alienating his coalition.

I think we desperately need to recover and learn from these kinds of histories of municipal radicalism, and compare them to contemporary projects like Cooperation Jackson and municipal DSA electoralism.

I am convinced, following Murray Bookchin, that the city (especially the small, livable city that enables face-to-face human community) is the setting for radical democratic politics. Reclaiming the city is the basis for a truly democratic and eco-socialist society.

#socialism #history

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to anarchism

“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 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.

Promised a “new morning in America,” a generation of disaffected young people found themselves shut out of 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. The 1980s was the decade of the triumph of American capitalism against both the left-wing idealism of the 1960s at home and the “Evil Empire” of Soviet Communism abroad. The New Right remade American society in its image, spreading suburbia and waging war on what it called the liberal “nanny state.”

But dissidents emerged out of the cracks of the new society. A new generation growing up in Reagan’s America turned to anarchism. Young people found a new form of politics in mosh pits at punk shows and street fights against fascists and police. Anarchism provided a political home and a strategic program for rebels of the new generation.

#anarchism #Reagan #1980s #bowling #revolution #protest #history

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to anarchism

Eco-anarchism in the late 20th century

The core of the radical environmental movement that developed in the 1960s-1990s largely embraced anarchist thought and practice. Radical environmentalists criticized Marxists for their support of rampant industrialization and their propensity to delay environmental action until “after the revolution.” Eco-anarchists like the Earth First!er Judi Bari argued that the environmentally destructive practices of socialist countries reflected both a failure of Marxism and the fact that all states privilege economic growth and stability above the health of the environment.

The theorization of eco-anarchism was a central component of the broader attempt to revise anarchist politics for the new era. Anarchism’s ecological focus also expanded its appeal to a new generation of environmental activists who saw the pressing need for radical change. As Marxists downplayed the importance of environmental struggle and even championed the industrial policy of socialist states, anarchists began to fight back against the catastrophic damage being done to the earth.

A variety of anarchist positions competed for leadership of the radical environmental movement. Beginning in the 1960s, Murray Bookchin theorized social ecology as a synthesis of social anarchism with ecological thought and advocated for decentralized political action to build an ecological society. Opposed to Bookchin’s social ecology was an ecologically motivated “anarcho-primitivism,” centered around the Fifth Estate newspaper, which went beyond the New Left’s anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism to critique industrial civilization itself. Both tendencies were influential in the anti-nuclear movement, as was anarcha-feminism. Later organizations like Earth First! and the Earth Liberation Front would take up aspects of the critique of industrial civilization in their growing commitment to Deep Ecology.

Many anarchists also embraced veganism and animal liberation in this era, in part for environmental reasons, and went on to develop an intersectional vision of “total liberation.” The eco-anarchist tendency took center stage in the 1990s in the actions of the Earth Liberation Front as well as the much-celebrated alliance of “Teamsters and Turtles” in the 1999 Seattle demonstration against the World Trade Organization. Anarchism’s ecological focus helps explain its increasing appeal in an era of growing environmental consciousness.

#anarchism #ecology #environment #environmentalism #socialism #vegan #history

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Ursula K. Le Guin: "We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

When you learn about the history of immigration in the US, what sticks out most is that every new wave of immigrants is initially demonized for having an "incompatible" culture, "stealing" jobs, and "refusing to assimilate." Every single time this is proven to be untrue.

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to anarchism

Post-1960s anarchism

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.

#anarchism #marxism #communism #history

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Emma Goldman: "The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Happy International Women's Day to the "most bloodthirsty of agitators," the "she-dogs of anarchy."

spencerbeswick, 2 months ago to random

Maria Mies: "The feminist project is basically an anarchist movement which does not want to replace one (male) power elite by another (female) power elite, but which wants to build up a non-hierarchical, non-centralised society where no elite lives off exploitation and dominance over others."

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to random

Emma Goldman: “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things. Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.”

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to random

On violence

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to anarchism

In the 1970s a growing current within the women’s liberation movement began to embrace a conscious anarchist orientation. These activists rejected the liberal turn of the mainstream wing of the movement as well as the state socialism of Marxist feminists.

Small groups of women “rediscovered” Emma Goldman and began to theorize a synthesis of feminist and anarchist politics. The feminist historian Julia Tanenbaum explains that “most anarcha-feminists were initially radicalized by the political and cultural milieu of the antiwar movement, but it was their experiences in the women’s liberation movement combined with the influence of Emma Goldman that led them to develop anarcha-feminism as a strategy.”

Although self-identified anarchists formed only a relatively small portion of the women’s liberation movement, their political impact stretched far beyond their small groups and publications. The feminist movement generally practiced what Helen Ellenbogen called an “intuitive anarchism”: they organized in decentralized groups, rejected hierarchy, and embraced horizontal notions of sisterhood. Anarcha-feminists built on the classic anarchist principle that the state is an institution of hierarchy and domination.

A crucial innovation of anarcha-feminists within the 1960s–1970s women’s liberation movement was their analysis of the patriarchal nature of state power. As Arlene Wilson of the Chicago Anarcho-Feminists put it in a manifesto published in the Siren newsletter in 1971, “The intelligence of womankind has at last been brought to bear on such oppressive male inventions as the church and the legal family; it must now be brought to reevaluate the ultimate stronghold of male domination, the State” which she describes as “rule by gangs of armed males.”

Indeed, the manifesto declares that “we believe that a Woman’s Revolutionary Movement must not mimic, but destroy, all vestiges of the male-dominated power structure, the State itself.” [...] The state was inherently patriarchal because it replicated the paternal rule of the father over society. As Love and Rage later put it in its 1997 “Draft Political Statement,” patriarchy “operates as a foundation of state power, used to justify a paternalistic relationship between the rulers and the ruled.”

The state reproduces at a higher scale the father’s rule over the family, which is “disguised as protection and support” but is “often enforced through violence and sexual terrorism.” Thus the state could only be the enemy of all women. Simply electing women to the top of the government could never change the basic patriarchal structure of its hierarchical power.

Read more in my recent article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power" in Radical History Review https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article/2024/148/90/384729/To-Repulse-the-State-from-Our-Uteri-Anarcha?guestAccessKey=7806bc55-d93d-4b68-ac99-8c9b089b52ef

#anarchism #feminism #anarchafeminism #patriarchy #history #abortion #socialism

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to books

"Sixteen employees recently signed union-authorization cards and joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), aka The Wobblies, the legendary union that battled capitalism, corporations and the robber barons in the early 20th century"

https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/02/joe-hill-finally-comes-to-san-franciscos-city-lights/

#books #union #IWW #anarchism #capitalism

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to anarchism

Anarcha-feminists went on the offensive in the fight for reproductive freedom in the 1990s.

Women in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989–98), the leading US anarchist organization of the period, advanced sharp critiques of the liberal abortion strategy that had ceded so much ground to the Right.

Anarchists offered radical alternatives for women to take back control of their lives and bodies. Rather than petition the state for reforms, they mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level.

They maintained that abortion restrictions were a form of state violence, especially as they corresponded with the structural violence of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Anarchists argued that feminists must oppose the state itself as the ultimate patriarchal institution and the source of much of the violence they faced.

Thus, rather than the slogan “We’re prochoice and we vote,” anarchists often marched behind a banner reading “We’re prochoice and we riot!”

Read more in my new article "'To Repulse the State from Our Uteri': Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power" in Radical History Review https://read.dukeupress.edu/radical-history-review/article/2024/148/90/384729/To-Repulse-the-State-from-Our-Uteri-Anarcha?guestAccessKey=7806bc55-d93d-4b68-ac99-8c9b089b52ef

#anarchism #feminism #anarchafeminism #abortion #history #roevwade #revolution

spencerbeswick, 3 months ago to anarchism

I know publishing articles in It's Going Down is counterproductive to any academic career I want, but I am proud to publish with them. Unlike most academic publishing, their articles come out of (and promote) movement work and are meant to be directly useful in radical struggles.

I think that @igd_news has prompted me to produce some of my best writing:

1. “We’re Pro-Choice and We Riot!”: How Anarcha-Feminists Built Dual Power in Struggles for Reproductive Freedom

"A historical look at how anarchists in the 1990s mobilized against attacks on reproductive freedom and autonomy by taking direct action and building autonomous infrastructure" https://itsgoingdown.org/pro-choice-riot-history-anarcha-feminists/

2. Fighting Fascism from the Age of Reagan to the Present

"A look at the rise of Anti-Racist Action and the anarchist movement in the 1980s and 90s and the lessons that it leaves us with today, in a post-January 6th world" https://itsgoingdown.org/fighting-fascism-reagan-to-present/

3. “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We Hate the Government!”: Queer Anarchism Against All Domination

"Anarchist historian Spencer Beswick looks back on the intersection of queerness and anarchism within the past 40 years" https://itsgoingdown.org/were-here-were-queer-and-we-hate-the-government-queer-anarchism-against-all-domination/

4. Podcast interview: Lessons From the Fight to Protect Abortion Clinics in the 1990s: A Discussion

"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." https://itsgoingdown.org/clinic-defense-1990s-abortion/

Anyway, just thinking about how important movement-based institutions/infrastructure like It's Going Down are. I really appreciate the work they do. And I guess that's why they've been banned by the free-speech lovers at Twitter/Facebook/Instagram.

#anarchism #abolition #revolution #abortion #queer #history

spencerbeswick, 4 months ago to anarchism

Fun fact of the day: Ella Baker assigned Kropotkin's book Mutual Aid in the class she taught "The Consumer: His Problems and Their Remedies" in 1937. This was connected to the Young Negroes' Cooperative League (1930-37) that she ran with George Schuyler, who was then an anarchist.

They called for a Black cooperative commonwealth in which Baker said that "the soil and all of its resources will be reclaimed by its rightful owners—the working masses of the world."

Found in Irvin Hunt's fantastic article "Planned Failure: George Schuyler, Ella Baker, and the Young Negroes' Cooperative League" (2020) (DM me for a PDF) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/776408

#anarchism #blackhistory #anarchisthistory #mutualaid

spencerbeswick, 4 months ago to anarchism

David Graeber: "At their very simplest, anarchist beliefs turn on to two elementary assumptions. The first is that human beings are, under ordinary circumstances, about as reasonable and decent as they are allowed to be, and can organize themselves and their communities without needing to be told how. The second is that power corrupts. Most of all, anarchism is just a matter of having the courage to take the simple principles of common decency that we all live by, and to follow them through to their logical conclusions."

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-may-surprise-you

#anarchism