Anarchism, 1950-2000

ANARCHISM, 1950-2000. For more than 140 years, anarchism has had an unbroken presence in the United States. From its low point in the 1950s, the movement grew significantly if unevenly in the following decades. Following yet more ups and downs, anarchism achieved a small but noticeable mainstream presence, as practice and even more so as theory.

Modern anarchism, inherited from older movements, lacks a single or consensus definition, but is generally understood as opposition to capitalism and the State. Anarchists consistently countered discrimination based on identities such as gender and race and sought decentralized economic and decision-making structures founded in mutual aid. Politically, anarchism has been bordered on one side by Leninism and on the other by democratic socialism. However, anarchism has eluded easy description as a movement. Extremely decentralized, it remained small, with many factions, during the second half of the century.

By 1950, traditional forms of American anarchism had been living for decades on borrowed time. Elderly survivors of the pre-1920 era, their groups reduced in size from earlier high points, constituted largely a working-class, immigrant movement focused on class. Their interactions and journalism continued in Italian, Yiddish, German, Spanish, and Chinese languages. These survivors stayed as active as long they could, involved mostly in fundraising: for anarchist victims of repression, especially the survivors of the Spanish Civil War; to publish books by or about the great anarchist figures of the past, including editor Rudolf Rocker and poet David Edelshtott; and to keep their publications going. The Spanish-language Cultura Proletaria survived until in 1953; the Russian language Delo Truda-Probuzhdenie until 1963; the Italian language L’Adunata dei Refrattari until 1971; and the Yiddish language Fraye Arbeter Shtimme to 1977. The anarchist-inclined IWW organ, Hungarian-language Bermunkas, had expired in 1956 but left behind an important fund for future IWW-related educational work. The IWW itself, always inclined toward anarchism, held on. Gathering old-timers around its Chicago home office, extending itself to younger local bohemians, the little movement survived decades of relative isolation and even maintained The Industrial Worker until a younger set of activists could “discover” the Wobblies.

A newer and strikingly different anarchist movement or tendency had, meanwhile, already begun. Immediately after World War II, small but creative groups of intellectuals and artists distinguished themselves through cultural and quasi-political movements sympathetic to anarchist traditions.

A scattering of young people responded to the use of atomic weapons through a variety of cultural means. In the Bay Area, the early Beat Generation carried forward a anarchist sensibility in poetry and music, some of it heard on Pacifica Radio stations, above all the first station, KPFA in Berkeley. Poet Kenneth Rexroth, with a wide following on KPFA, personally formed a Libertarian Circle to spread anarchism, influencing the emerging Beat scene. Others included Gary Snyder (who espoused “Buddhist Anarchism”) and City Lights bookstore co-founder Lawrence Ferlingetti. Together with younger anarchists like Audrey Goodfriend, these elder statesmen and -women radicalized literature for the next generations and helped recalibrate US anarchism. Moving away from labor issues as such, the bohemian anarchists stressed antiwar sentiments, modernist poetry and prose, individualistic lifestyles, and everyday actions prefiguring anarchist goals. Thanks to the success of their efforts, anarchism reached rebellious middle-class youth across the country.

Anarchist activities seemed very different at the other end of the country, embracing some of the same Beat artists and idols but marked by instability and conflicting perspectives. Politics magazine, edited by Dwight Macdonald in New York, made a literary splash but after a few years closed shop, its prestigious contributors including Macdonald himself shifting rightward, toward Cold War liberalism. Other tendencies fractured or remained cut off from other activism.

Anarcho-syndicalist Sam Dolgoff, the major surviving English language traditionalist, formed the tiny Libertarian League in 1954, in a New York hall run by anarchist refugees from Franco’s Spain. Less rigid and more influential circles included Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker milieu and also the Living Theater, established by anarchists Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1951. The Living Theater evolved to be a key project in a more inchoate arts and intellectual scene that included avowed anarchists like John Cage and Paul Goodman. A small but highly influential circle of pacifists, including future peace leader David Dellinger, meanwhile created in 1954 Liberation magazine, which became an important force within the emerging civil rights and antiwar movements of the following decade.

By the early 1960s, anarchism revived slowly to become increasingly visible to outsiders by the mid-decade. A handful of anarcho-pacifists, brave enough to face Southern terror, promoted the tactic of non-resistance to the Civil Rights Movement. The Free Speech Movement on the UC-Berkeley campus incorporated anarchist idealism. Anarchists influenced the new Students for a Democratic Society more indirectly by emphasizing participatory democracy and an anti-authoritarian spirit. The rise of a broader New Left alongside the counterculture encouraged many young people to take up anarchist ideas, minus ideology or affiliation.

Several important if small radical groups based in the counterculture had strong anarchist elements. These included San Francisco’s Diggers and New York City’s Black Mask/Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers (BM/UATWMF), both formed in 1966. These groups gave away food and ran free stores, established crash pads, and used avant-garde theater techniques in public demonstrations. Before dissolving, BM/UATWMF, led by anarchist artist Ben Morea, advocated armed struggle in the occasional tabloid, Black Mask. Chicago’s Rebel Worker Group, including Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, combined anarchism with Situationism, surrealism, and Black Nationalism and helped attract youth to the aging IWW. The White Panthers and the Yippies, less ideological but expressing the spirit, inspired young people, as did the avowedly pacifist wing of the peace movement.

Yugoslavian immigrant Fredy Perlman, who published the short-lived Black and Red magazine, established the Print Co-Op in Detroit and wrote or translated an influential series of anarchist volumes. His many readers judged him the most influential anarchist-like figure who shared the sensibility of the New Left generation. While modestly making no claims to his own role, he also guided the physical production of Radical America, the New Left magazine closest to anarcho-syndicalist ideas in and around the SDS milieux. Fredy and Lorraine Perlman were also influenced by the Situationist criticisms of technology and bureaucracy. Fredy translated and published, initially as a special 1970 issue of Radical America, Guy Debord’s Situation of the Spectacle. This singularly influential book of French-based Situationism never left print, in edition after edition. The Fifth Estate newspaper, led by Peter Werbe but allied with Perlman in Detroit, reflected many of the same ideas.

Murray Bookchin, meanwhile, emerged as the most widely recognized single anarchist theorist of the era. A former Trotskyist who retained his factional inclinations even as he broke with Marxist ideas, Bookchin had already established himself as a distinguished ecological theorist. By the middle 1960s, he sought to fuse direct democracy and ecology with anarchism, publishing Anarchos from 1967 to 1972. Around himself, he gathered a small circle of devoted followers.

Bookchin and his supporters distributed his polemical anti-Leninist pamphlet Listen, Marxist! at the final SDS convention in 1969. Their faction, the Radical Decentralist Project, tracked rather too closely the voices of a past generation, more polemical than persuasive. The Leninist groupings, themselves lost in rhetoric, could nevertheless could point to the anti-colonial struggles in the global South, or to the Black Panthers, the Brown Berets, and other such back at home. Anarchists had nothing similar to offer. Former SDSers continued to find many attractive qualities in anarchism, but Bookchin and his followers seemed, to them, too narrow and dogmatic.

Anarchism had nevertheless entered a literary golden age. As the 1970s began, mainstream publishers and leftwing presses offered a plethora of new anarchist-influenced texts and reprinted many classics. Anarchism would never be predominant, but for young readers curious about traditions, books about and by Emma Goldman and Mikhail Bakunin seemed new and exciting. The writings of Murray Bookchin also gained influence, and Bookchin, moving from Brooklyn to Vermont, co-founded the Institute for Social Ecology in 1974. He also became involved with Clamshell Alliance and the mass, non-violent occupation of a nuclear plant construction site in 1977. In later years, he further elaborated his theories.

Bookchin shared the theoretical ground with others. French Situationism, bolstered by the 1980 founding of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, took on a new flavor when mixed with classic anarchist Max Stirner’s radical individualism. A San Francisco-based “pro-Situ” milieu, active in the 1970s, merged in the 1980s with anarchist circles. The veteran publication Fifth Estate looked increasingly toward varieties of anarcho-primitivism and rallied opposition to technology and civilization in general. Its most extreme theorist, John Zerzan, called for the abolition of agriculture and language. Large annual anarchist gatherings inspired by these ideas were held in the United States and Canada starting in Chicago in 1986. More than a thousand attended the final one in San Francisco in 1989. Even the highly individualist (or “ego”) current of anarchism, identified historically with Max Stirner and influenced by Karl Hess, re-emerged in the high days of Reaganism. Combining both pro- and anti-market tendencies, this impulse took on new life and antiwar energy around the new Libertarian Party, but faded after the Libertarians turned sharply rightward.

Propaganda circles blossomed anew. The IWW, more anarchist-minded and more cerebral among its new younger members, continued to expand and recede. Others in the same orbit lacked the Wobbly past and lore, but had similarly trajectories. The politically loose Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation congealed around 1972 and lasted until the late 1980s, alongside the smaller but more ideological, class struggle-oriented Anarchist Communist Federation. The explicitly anarcho-syndicalist Workers Solidarity Alliance (WSA) formed in 1984, partly from the defunct Anarchist Communist Federation. In 1986, IWW veteran Sam Dolgoff, active since the 1930s, helped found the Libertarian Labor Review (later the Anarcho-Syndicalist Review). A new wave of feminism meanwhile emerged, stressing non-hierarchical, collective structures and popularizing writers like Peggy Kornegger and publications like Siren and Anarcha-Feminist Notes. Other anarchist projects included Anarchist Black Cross. “Infoshops,” storefronts with anarchist literature that sometimes doubled as event space, flourished in many locations. Anarchist publishing houses, especially AK Press, picked up readers alongside a plethora of fresh anarchist tabloids. Hakim Bey’s concept of the “temporary autonomous zone” encouraged the formation of transient spaces outside of institutional control.

Toward the end of the century, anarchists found more ways to intervene in practical terms, mostly in groups with very loose structures. These included Food Not Bombs, which served free vegetarian food as an anti-militarist protest; Anti-Racist Action, a militant antifascist group that fought Nazi skinhead gangs; Reclaim the Streets, which used street parties to protest privatized urban space; Critical Mass, a mass bicycle ride for better alternative transportation access; “Copwatch,” where activists filmed the police; and the Animal Liberation Front, which used direct action to free laboratory animals. In 1990, Earth First!, whose tree-sits in the Pacific Northwest attracted mainstream support, collaborated with the IWW on Redwood Summer. This campaign organized timber workers and conducted old growth forest defense. Anarchists found themselves especially comfortable within movements emphasizing non-violent direct action, such as opposition to South African apartheid or to US intervention in Latin America, the AIDS advocacy group ACTUP! and later groups like Queer Nation and Lesbian Avengers.

The countercultural punk scene, by the late 1980s, spontaneously developed self-identified anarchist political forms. Punk helped drive the squatters movement in New York City, which occupied dozens of abandoned buildings on the Lower East Side and had a large influence on the 1988 anti-gentrification event known as the Tompkins Square Riot. Other impulses beginning in the 1980s blossomed in the 1990s. Anarchists gained significant support, for instance, from the punk movement’s new wave of political “d.i.y” (do-it-yourself) bands, including the Third Wave feminist Riot Grrrl movement.

The collapse of the Soviet Union offered anarchists a new opening within the Left. The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico also buoyed US anarchists, who saw it as a successful example of their political vision. Many attended the international Encuentros in Chiapas, Mexico.

Since the mid-twentieth century, movements of all kinds related to the environment, co-ops and communes, listener-sponsored radio stations, projects stressing neighborhood power and alternative technology and tended to draw upon anarchist ideas in various forms and degrees. These movements in part anticipated later mobilizations, most vividly Occupy Wall Street, anti-globalization, and antifascism. The flexibility and generational appeal of anarchism remained its promise for the future.

Cornell, Andy. Unruly Equality: U.S. Anarchism in the 20th Century. Berkeley” Univ. of California Press, 2016.

Hahne, Ron, and Ben Morea, eds. Black Mask & Up Against the Wall Motherfucker. Oakland: PM Press, 2011.

Hargis, Mike.“Notes on Anarchy in North America, 1940–1996, Part I,” Libertarian Labor Review #20 (Summer 1996) and “Notes on Anarchism in America, Part II,” Libertarian Labor Review #22 (Winter 1997–98).

Sunshine, Spencer. “Post-1960 U.S. Anarchism and Social Theory,” PhD dissertation, CUNY Graduate Center, 2013.