Temporary Autonomous Zones: Anarchist Gatherings, 1988-2017

Lesley Wood, May 9, 2017

Abstract: Examining the programs of anarchist gatherings in the US and Canada since 1988, the paper finds that these have changed form, content and function. Building on a reconfigured tradition that places educational work as a main site of anarchist praxis, it finds that since the 1980s, anarchist gatherings have moved from an emphasis on building temporary autonomous zones of prefiguration, to more modest efforts of strategic skill building and exchange. The paper argues that one can explain these changes by locating these events in changing social and movement fields. It concludes by suggesting that such events need to be better understood by both activists and by social movement theorists.

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Like birds of a feather, activists gather together. But they do so in different ways. Obviously they protest en masse. Most social movements also hold meetings to decide on their strategy, policy and tactics. They do so at Congresses, conferences, federations, private meetings and public meetings. In the 1980s, however, some anarchist activists began to meet in ways that didn’t prioritize decision-making. Instead, they gathered to exchange ideas, publications, to build their skills, to learn about various issues and campaigns, to socialize and to experiment in and build new types of relationships. They have continued to do so since that time.

Social movement research has spent little time on such events, given as they fall outside of the framework of campaigning, protest or organizational work. However, such events are ‘eventful’ in that they can transform movement networks, identities and practices (Sewell, della Porta). As spaces where activists converge, they are important for diffusion, solidarity, learning, strategizing and networking that affect the shape, trajectory and capacity of movements. Anarchist gatherings since the 1980s built layers of ties between cities, movements and organizations and experimented with practices, modes of communication and theorizations. The changing form they take reflects the shifting fields and habituses that these anarchists inhabit. If one examines the form and content of these events, we see shifts in the way that anarchists define and enact the relationship between prefiguration and confrontation. We see shifts in how anarchists try to ‘build the new world in the shell of the old.”

Movement practices are shaped and reshaped by the relationships and logics of the social movement field, and how these fields are tied to broader social dynamics. This approach to understanding social practice draws on the relational work of Bourdieu, Nick Crossley and Charles Tilly. They show how practices are the result of struggles amongst different actors with different understandings (identities, habitus) for various forms of capital. Tilly’s work on social movement repertoires is well known, showing how the relational ties of ordinary people and between them and other actors and authorities alter social life and thus the practices of protesters. This relational realist research has shown how the changes to political, economic and social life led the march, rally, petition, delegation, mass meeting and special purpose association to become the standard protest repertoire (1995, etc). Tilly’s later work illustrates how these broader transformations of social life played out on the ties between collective actors and their collective identity. While most of these observations are done on the contentious claimsmaking activity of movements, this approach can also be used to examine the less visible work of meeting, playing and learning.

Any social movement field is shaped by the larger context. We know that any particular social movement interacts with other co-present movements in any time and place (Mische 2002, Krinsky 2008). Considering the totality of all movements operating in a particular time and place, McCarthy and Zald (1977) described a ‘social movement sector’. Nick Crossley (2003) used Bourdieu’s framework to animate the relationships between these different actors within this sector, describing it as a field of social movements. Both approaches recognize that the practices and logics of particular movements are influenced by their internal and cross movement interactions, through learning, competition and collaboration. Such a lens helps to explain why and how forms and practices of movements change through time. I’ll use this approach to examine the changing anarchist gatherings.

Contemporary Anarchism

Anarchism became visible as a strand of left wing European movements during the late 19th century. There was a debate within socialist movements over the importance of forming political parties and gaining state power in order to challenge capitalism. Anarchists argued that seizing the state would lead to the movement simply becoming the new oppressors. The movement spread internationally with European immigration, through migrating radicals, and through anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements. They formed organizations, institutions and publications.

Anarchists come in many flavours; from individualist, syndicalist, feminist to anarcho-communist. I will not attempt to outline the long history of the movement, but suffice it to say that until recently, its most visible period in the US and Canada was during the early part of the 20th century when it was associated with both syndicalist labour organizing, (Cornell 2016), direct action and institution building around cooperatives, communes, and popular education. By the 1930s, repression of anarchists was widespread and the movement declined. However as the wave of protest associated with the late 1960s declined, there was a revitalization of anarchist practices and identities of two streams. The first was influenced by both Gandhianism and Tolstoy, coming via the Quakers and emphasized non-violent civil disobedience and consensus decision-making. The second, revitalized the idea of propaganda by the deed with groups like the Weather Underground and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers and others emerged (Dixon 2014). As that wave of protest declined, anarchist affiliated activists dispersed and became less visible (Cornell 2016).

Then during the 1980s and 1990s, in a context of neoliberal globalization and its critiques of state power, and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, with subsequent uncertainty, decline and a reorganization of left wing socialist and communist movements -- anarchist movements began to gain momentum. These activists had networks of small groups built by the anti-nuclear movement, Central American solidarity movement, AIDS activism within ACT UP, feminist mobilizations, anti-fascist organizing, punk rock, Earth First! environmental direct action and Food Not Bombs chapters. Most of these projects didn’t define themselves explicitly or primarily as Anarchist. They were shaped as much by a largely white, counter-culture, as they were by ideology. Instead, anarchism had developed a small a. Graeber (2007) defines this contemporary ‘small a’ anarchism, “As a form of practice, an ethical system that rejects the seizure of state power, and, to the extent possible, any appeal to or entanglement in institutions of state power, and that relies instead on classical anarchist principles of self-organization, voluntary association, direct action, and mutual aid”. The centrality of a “form of practice”, with an ethical system as the center of an ideology, rather than a particular issue, or campaign makes clear one way that distinctive feature of contemporary anarchism. While state power is clearly identified as the central problem, it is not seen as the target of claims, instead, the move is to reject its authority altogether. Instead the goal is to build the capacity to replace it.

Prefiguration and Strategy

As Dixon (2014; 41) argues, this reconfigured anarchism emerged in the US and Canada anarchism in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to drawing on the broader anarchist tradition, it was deeply influenced by “the values-based actions of radical pacifists of the 1950s, the direct action and participatory democracy of [the US civil rights movement organization] Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the confrontational ethos of the New Left, and the transformative ideas and organizing practices of the women’s and gay liberation movements.” These different influences clustered through the organizing of the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s (ibid), ACT UP/AIDS Action Now of the 1980s and 1990s, and radical environmental direct action organizing of Earth First! . During this time, the models of direct action, affinity group organizing, spokescouncils, and consensus decision-making that became visible during the global justice movement became part of the anarchist repertoire and strategy/identity.

Radical pacifists and the feminists contributed to the habitus that gave an ethical value to prefiguration. The radical pacifists drew from both Gandhian non-violence and Quaker traditions, both of which highlighted civil disobedience and consensus decision making (Hayter 2016). Groups like Movement for a New Society, who were a bridge from these earlier movements to the anarchist movement encouraged ‘role playing.. listening exercises and trust games’ to increase awareness of group dynamics and challenge members to excide oppressive aspects of their traditional patterns of behavior (Cornell 2011, 25) The feminist movements of the 1970s showed how the ‘personal is political’, experimented with consciousness raising groups, and argued that interpersonal relationships needed to be enacted in just and liberatory ways for them to be ethical. These movements placed a great deal of weight on the ethical importance of ‘living your politics’. The crucial interventions by women of colour feminists around race, of lesbians, gays and queer folks around sexuality also integrated an at least rhetorical celebration of the importance of intersectional politics. Each of these influenced underscored the value of prefiguration for anarchist activists. As Uri Gordon (2008) notes, prefiguration is a core component of the political culture of anarchism. Prefigurative activities are often understood by organizers and participants as opportunities, as experiments in building different ways of doing things. These may include how decisions are made; how material resources are obtained; how people treat one another; how conflict is managed; what is discussed and how it is discussed. Activists developed tools that would facilitate this reflection in ways intended to build the group. Francesca Polletta writes about how anarcha-feminists in the anti-nuclear movement taught other participants “an array of rituals that they used to build an internal movement culture.’ These included monthly gatherings where activists shared meals, partied together, sleeping in shared spaces, and expressing non-sexual affection and free form dancing. These activities, she argues, were intended to ‘build relationships that could reach across ideological differences.” (Polletta 2002, 196) As Crossley (2003) notes, in such radical, prefigurative movements, reflexivity becomes politicized and amplified, directing attention towards the means, as well as the ends.

In North America, anarchist strategies for creating or prefiguring more just relations, have often been tied to some form of popular education or free school. Early efforts like the Francisco Ferrer Center built on Ferrer’s idea that schools established by church and state reproduced class relations and authoritarian values. Instead, anarchist ‘modern schools’ would stimulate curiosity and promote ‘libertarian and cooperative values that could help bring a new society into being. (Cornell 46) This emphasis on ‘free schools’, deschooling and alternative education continues to this day, with anarchist or anarchist inspired educational projects operating in dozens of cities and rural areas (Haworth 2012, Hern, Suissa 2010).

Prefigurative experiments are intended to allow the building of strong movements that can counter state power ethically and sustainably. However the emphasis on, ‘principles over plans’ can mean that explicit discussions of strategy can be framed as ‘unethical’ or problematic. The most enthusiastic proponents of prefiguration, spontaneity and freedom frame the inverse of these values as structure, organization and strategy. Dixon, in his study of anti-authoritarian movements, argues that anarchists worry that they may sacrifice their ‘core beliefs and values in order to win. ’ As a result, when this worry becomes pervasive, energy may be given more to the development of counter-cultures and counter-institutions, than towards thinking about how to affect the larger world (Shotwell, Dixon). This puzzle is one which is explored in the form and content of the three kinds of anarchist gatherings over the past thirty years.

Anarchist Gatherings

Anarchists have always gathered. The meetings of the First International of the International Working Man’s Association ended in a split between the “Collectivists” with Mikhail Bakunin and James Guillaume, and the Communists with Karl Marx. The collectivists or anarchists, held a Congress in Switzerland in 1872 that was attended by delegates from Italy, Spain, Belgium, the United States, France and Switzerland. These Congresses met regularly until 1877, bringing together anarcho-communists. Most of the gatherings of anarchists since that time, including the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers Association (1922-), the Anarchist International Conference (1958-); the International of Anarchist Federations (1968-) and most recently the European Anarkismo Coordination (2010-_) involved meetings of delegates to make decisions around particular positions, campaigns and alliances. These events sometimes included Canadian and US anarchists, but were rarely held in Canada nor the US, and brought together particular tendencies of the anarchist movement to decisions, build capacity and network.

In fact there were very few multi-tendency anarchist events in Canada or the US until the 1980s. According to Andy Cornell’s (2011) research on 20th century anarchism, other than some educational workshops, and summer camps there were only 1 or 2 anarchist conferences at the intentional communities associated with anarchist education, Stelton Colony, new Jersey in the mid 1920s, and one at the Mohegon colony in the 1930s.

In 1969 the anarchists who had been involved in the Students for a Democratic Society organized a gatherings in September 1969 in Black River Falls, Wisconsin. The goal was to create a new organization, but as Louise Crowley of Madison complained, “The essential process of getting acquainted of beginning to understand each others’ varied emphases and styles of revolutionary work, consumed nearly all the time allowed us.” (in Cornell 2011, 273)

Until 1986, there were no other multi-tendency, national or continental gatherings in the US or Canada, when the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket incident occurred. That opportunity launched a new style of anarchist gathering which was multi-tendency, relatively large, and combined skill building workshops, information sharing sessions on various campaigns, networking activities, a protest, cultural events, and the exchange of books, art and other materials. This model was replicated in 1987, 1988 and 1989 as continental gatherings, and in many other cities in the Americas and beyond as local and regional events.