Spencer Beswick

@spencerbeswick.bsky.social

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Anarcho-Historian & Bookmonger at PM Press. Currently teaching at Cornell. I write about anarchism in the late 20th century.

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Robin Kelley interviewing a former member of the Communist-led Share Croppers Union in Alabama: "When I asked Mr. Johnson how the union succeeded in winning some of their demands, without the slightest hesitation he reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a 1/2

dog-eared copy of V. I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly on the bed next to me, and said, 'Right thar, theory and practice. That's how we did it. Theory and practice.'" From the preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Hammer and Hoe. 2/2

Howard Zinn: "History can untie our minds, our bodies, our disposition to move — to engage life rather than contemplating it as an outsider. It can do this by widening our view to include the silent voices of the past, so that we look behind the silence of the present."

"Smashing Whiteness" 🧵 "Our biggest obstacle is that Love and Rage is still culturally very white … Smashing this culture of whiteness is a major task in becoming the kind of truly inclusive organization we are committed to building." Thus argues a 1997 editorial 1/

that sparked controversy in the newspaper of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation. The editorial intervened in an ongoing debate: should the predominantly white federation attempt to become multi-racial or should it accept its whiteness 2/

and try to work in coalitions with people of color? These debates exposed the internal contradictions of Love and Rage (1989-1998), which was the most significant American anarchist organization of the late twentieth century. 3/

Love and Rage was embedded in the largely white punk world even as they attempted to move beyond it. Although punk had helped keep anarchism alive during the post-1960s neoliberal counterrevolution, particularly during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, members worried that punk’s 4/

white subcultural affinities excluded people of color and thus held back the federation’s revolutionary potential. Yet despite its contradictions and shortcomings, Love and Rage transformed the discourse and practice of anti-racism in the US anarchist movement. 5/

Influenced by a new generation of Black anarchists, they advocated militant anti-racism and "race traitor" politics that sought to abolish whiteness in order to build revolution. 6/6 Read more in DIY OR DIE!, available from PM Press pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

DIY OR DIE! Do-It-Yourself, Do-It-Together & Punk Anarchismpmpress.org Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau and Caroline KaltefleiterEssays on DIY's basis in action and doing, its emphasis on freedom of expression, its ties to material and cultural production, and its blurring of...

Part of what I find so compelling about Love and Rage is how they drew on multiple radical traditions to reimagine revolutionary anarchism in the 1990s. As I write in my chapter "Smashing Whiteness," Love and Rage rejected the colorblindness of classical American anarchism and 1/

drew on other political traditions for their racial politics. Following Black anarchists, they believed that white supremacy and capitalism were intertwined and that revolutionaries therefore needed to fight both at once. Another source of inspiration was 2/

the white anti-imperialists of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the Sojourner Truth Organization (STO). Drawing on their experience organizing in factories, members of STO argued that white people receive material benefits from their whiteness that discourage them from 3/

recognizing common interests with workers of color. This ‘white skin privilege’ must be addressed in order for white workers to contribute to the revolutionary movement. Noel Ignatiev, a co-founder of STO, went on to join Love and Rage and further theorize 4/

white race abolitionist politics in the journal Race Traitor. Love and Rage drew on this tradition alongside Black Anarchism to formulate revolutionary anarchist politics that centered the fight against white supremacy. 5/5 Read more in DIY OR DIE: pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Reply to

claude zachary

I think it's important to the "liberal base" of regular people, but agree with you re: the Democratic Party itself (and the "liberal elite"). And I think part of the left's task right now must be to make that divide clear and appeal to the disaffected liberals who are pissed at the Democratic Party.

I actually agree with liberals that the most important thing in this election is beating Trump in order to preserve what is left of American democracy and stave off fascism. That's why I'm so fucking pissed at the Democrats for insisting on running a senile corpse against Trump.

On punks & reproles 🧵 Love and Rage was shaped by its social base of reproletarianized white punks. In a 1994 position paper called ‘Love and Rage in the New World Order’, Chris Day argues that while most members were the children of the middle class, this did not necessarily 1/

reflect their economic reality. According to Day, they were undergoing a process of ‘reproletarianization’ driven by changes in the global capitalist system. Proletarianization is a Marxist concept used to describe the birth of the modern working class through primitive 2/

accumulation – separating peasants from land to turn them into wage laborers. Day adapts this concept to explain the effects of post-Fordist economic restructuring. Although white people in the United States had made a deal with capital to become ‘middle class’ in exchange for 3/

labor docility and anti-Blackness, this compact broke down in the late twentieth century as neoliberalism produced a generation of downwardly mobile youth. Reproles were what we today might call the precariat: a class defined by its inability to find steady, good paying jobs. 4/

They were predominantly white because of the particular historical interplay in the United States between race and class. Because of their reproletarianization, many young white people came to anarchism through the punk scene rather than the labor movement. 5/

As political theorist AK Thompson argues about a similar milieu within the anti-globalization movement, this race and class constellation produced a form of ontological politics that sought a new way of being in the world rather than solely changing the mode of production. 6/

This entailed a total rejection of the mainstream world and a commitment to radically reshaping everyday life. Unlike many people of color, these white rebels felt that they had no alternative cultural tradition to draw upon – indeed, their families were the beneficiaries of 7/

white supremacy. But the material benefits of white skin did not necessarily lead to happiness. Their white middle class experience was alienating in a particular way that produced a fear of not being truly ‘in’ the world. As Thompson puts it, these anxieties yielded the 8/

‘nervous injunctions regularly issued by the army of white middle class dissidents striving to really live.’ This type of politics was expressed as ‘dissidence’, which Thompson explains is a form of ‘cultivated distance’, a ‘state of being set apart from others by a sense that 9/

something feels wrong.’ Young dissidents found a natural home in the punk scene. Punk offered an intertwined radical lifestyle and politics that appealed to the everyday political orientation of white reproles. Subcultural identity was a way to live one’s politics as a total 10/

break from the prevailing order. It is no coincidence that anarchist punks drew heavily on the Situationists, who advocated a ‘revolution of everyday life’ – punks sought to live anarchism. But Thompson cautions that politics based on the particular ontological lack of white 11/

middle class existence do not have universal appeal – certainly not to an oppressed and exploited multi-racial working class. This problem lies at the core of the contradictions of whiteness and revolutionary politics for the white middle class. 12/

Read more in my chapter "Smashing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Punk Culture in the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-1998)" in the new edited volume DIY OR DIE! from Active Distribution, available now from PM Press 13/13 pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Reply to

Spencer Beswick

"know that then, but only then, will you live a full life, a sound life. ... The struggle for truth, for justice, for equality within the people—can you find a finer thing in life?" 3/3 Peter Kropotkin in "An Appeal to the Young" (1880)