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"Anarchism is not a concept that can be locked up in a word like a gravestone. It is not a political theory. It is a way of conceiving life, and life...is not something final: it is a stake we must play day after day"- Alfredo M. Bonanno (Bonanno 1996)
For much of the 20th century, anarchism was "Marxism's poorer cousin, theoretically a bit flat-footed but making up for brains, perhaps, with passion and sincerity"(Graeber 2004). Though the anarchist movements had a few high points during the 20th century, such as Nestor Mahkno and the Ukrainian revolt (1916-1919), the uprising at Kronstadt (1921), the revolutionary actions of the Catalonian anarchists during the Spanish Civil War (1930-1936), and the Paris Uprising of '68, the presence of anarchism waned. Instead, following the success of the Bolshevik revolution, Marxist-Leninism became the dominant political ideology on the left. By the 1950s it seemed as though Anarchism was being relegated to the dustbin of history.
However, starting with the late 1960s, anarchist theories and tactics reemerged within the anti-war, women's, queer, and environmental movements. Anti-authoritarianism gave the New Left a way to revolt against parents, politicians, and orthodox Marxists. While at the same time, consensus decision-making, the affinity-group model, and the concept of direct action allowed the anti-nuclear and the environmental movements a way to put their beliefs into action (Epstein 1991). The widespread use of these tactics made many of the new social movements appear to be embracing a nascently anarchist politic(Melluci 1989). The connection between anarchism and the new social movements developed further throughout the 1970s and 80s with the anti-nuclear movement(Epstein 1991), the feminist movement(Ehrlich 2002; Hansen 2002), and the environmental movement(Abbey 1976; Manes 1990; Bookchin 1991; Hansen 2002), all garnering a vocal and active anarchist wing. The relationship between new social movements and anarchism was not one sided; anarchism was also radically altered by politics of the 1960s and 70s (Day 2005). For example, class interests lost their standing as being the essential component of politics while race, gender, sexual orientation, and environmental conditions took its place.
During the 1990s the United States saw an increase in anarchist activism. One of the most widespread anarchist entities that thrived during the 1990s was Food Not Bombs. Food Not Bombs is banner group that distributes free vegetarian meals as a means of practicing mutual aid, a central concept within Kropotkins' theory of anarchism. A handful of Clamshell Alliance activists originally formed Food Not Bombs in 1981 and former Abalone Alliance members, in 1988, started up the second chapter of the group in Berkeley, California. Food Not Bombs is now one of the most popular anarchist entities with over 200 chapters in the United States and 400, recognized chapters, existing on five continents. During the 1990s anarchist "organizations" (Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, Anarchist Black Cross, Crimethinc ex-Workers Collective, Direct Action Network), journals (Fifth Estate, Anarchy: A Journal of desire Armed, Earth First! Journal), squats (ABC No Rio, C-Squat), and infoshop/autonomous spaces (Arise, The Lucy Parsons Project) flourished. During this time period, Uri Gordon has argued that anarchism started to redefine itself and became "a recognizable social movement in its own right, with a scale, unity and diversity unseen since the 1930s" (Gordon 2005).
Even though anarchism appeared to be a growing political movement it received little attention by academics, media elite, politicians, or mainstream culture at all. In fact, most Americans first saw "an anarchist" in protest images from the World Trade Organization protest in Seattle. Discussing the anarchist presence in Seattle, Time Magazine on December 13, 1999 stated in a headline "Anarchists lead Seattle into Chaos." The article, which spent pages trying to understand the beliefs of the anarchist protests, ended up dismissing the entire movement as consisting of "thousands of mostly young activists populating hundreds of mostly tiny splinter groups espousing dozens of mostly socialist critiques of the capitalist machine." This small movement, according to Time and the rest of the mainstream press, was hypocritical, overly violent, and fringe. Yet, Time had to ask, "Is Anarchism the face of 21st century activism?" Not surprisingly their answer was "no."
It is important to state that the anarchism did not emerge out of the Seattle protests but that the anarchist presence in Seattle represented over a decade of grassroots organizing by anarchist activists throughout the country. The result of their organizing is the backbone of the contemporary anarchist movements; the 200 known chapters of Food Not Bombs in the United States; the countless community info-shops and collectively run squats; and the extensive direct action networks that now exist within most major US cities. What Seattle represented was the hard work, dedication, and advances that occurred among the anarchist milieu; it showed that anarchists could organize and radically disrupt politics as usual.
Though anarchist politics have been an important component of contemporary radical politics, academics have paid little attention to it. Confronting the lack of academic work on anarchist politics, David Graeber in his New Left Review, "The New Anarchists", states that, "It's hard to think of another time when there has been such a gulf between intellectuals and activists; between theorists of revolution and its practitioners" (Graeber 2002). In recent years a handful of academics, including Graeber himself, have narrowed this gulf.
Since 2001 a handful of academic articles (Day 2004; Smith 2007; Williams 2007), a few unpublished PhD dissertations (Gordon 2005; Robertson 2007), and a slew of books (Hardt and Negri 2000; Newman 2001; Call 2002; Graeber 2004; Olson 2004; Wark 2004; Carter 2005; Day 2005; Hardt and Negri 2005; Sepulveda 2005; Best and Nocella 2006; Sitrin 2006; Graeber 2007; Graeber 2008) have delved into questions central to contemporary anarchism. These activist/academics comprise what I call the "new anarchist academics."
One of the results from this new research on anarchism is the claim that the new anarchist movements are radically different from earlier conceptions of anarchism. According to Uri Gordon,
The contemporary anarchist movement is 'new' in the key sense that it does not form a continuity between the workers' and peasant' anarchists movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth century...rather it represents the revival o anarchists politics over the past decade in the intersection of several other movements, including radical ecology, feminism, black and indigenous liberation, anti-nuclear movements and, most recently, resistance to neoliberal capitalism and the 'global permanent war"(Gordon 2005).
In other words, anarchist academics are claiming that a new unique form of anarchism has come to fruition in the 1990s, one that combines the lessons from new social movements with a strong commitment to resist domination, hierarchy, and illegitimate authority. According to the new anarchist academics, the new varieties of anarchisms reject class as being central to their politics (Day 2005) and instead embrace the categories popularized by the new social movements (NSM)- gender, race, and sexual orientation (Day 2005; Gordon 2005). Most importantly, the new anarchist movements do not wait for a global social revolution but instead engage in pre-figurative politics by creating new institutions within the vestige of the current system.
Next, I will discuss the pressing questions that the dissertation will address, followed by a discussion of pertinent previous research, and a discussion of research methodology. The final section will provide a short time-line for the completion of the dissertation.
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