The paramilitaries are still armed in our communities. We left because we are afraid that they will kill us like they did the others,” said Manuel Perez, a 28-year-old refugee who fled his village on December 28 with his family. As he spoke, five days after the brutal massacre of 45 indigenous refugees living in the village of Acteal by the paramilitary group “Mascaras Rojas,” the violence had not stopped. Over 3,500 campesinos had left their villages seeking refuge in the Zapatista autonomous muncicipality of Polhó.
In the weeks since the bloody masacre the Mexican state has responded to this crime, not by punishing those responsible, but by attacking the Zapatista communities. The massacre on December 22 is only ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) When people ask what Love and Rage is we usually offer an answer like “the Love and Rage Federation is made up of anarchist groups and individuals scattered across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. We publish two newspapers. We have engaged in such and such actions. And we share some basic politics which are ...” This sort of answer is never satisfactory. The Love and Rage Federation, like any political formation, can not be understood simply as a collection of groups and individuals, nor even in terms of our actions, or even our stated politics. The Love and Rage Federation is the product of its history. Understanding that history is the only way to understand why the Federation is the way it is and how it can move forward.
This h... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) WE ARE ENEMIES OF THE STATE. The State — the police, the army, the prisons, the courts, the various governmental bureaucracies, legislative and executive bodies — is the enforcer and regulator of authoritarian rule. These structures provide the means with which to maintain control in a class-divided society and enforce patriarchy, white supremacy, ecological destruction, and other forms of domination. The State is inherently authoritarian. It represents the interests of the rich against the poor. It is run by representatives — self-selected and sharing a similar ideology-ratified by the increasingly diminishing percentage of the population that bothers to vote. The State is not democratic, in the best sense of the word, bu... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) On April 10, 1998, Seventy-nine years to the day after the treacherous murder of General Emiliano Zapata, the community of Taniperlas hosted a celebration of the inauguration of the Autonomous Municipality of Ricardo Flores Magón. At 4:00 AM the next morning, roughly nine-hundred soldiers and police invaded Taniperlas, arresting six members of the community, three other Mexicans, and twelve foreigners. They also destroyed the auditorium constructed as a site for democratic assemblies and defaced a beautiful freshly-painted mural.
The raid on Ricardo Flores Magón has focused attention on a little appreciated aspect of the revolution that the Zapatista have been carrying out in the areas in which they have a significant base of... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) In the Spring 1996 issue of Workers Solidarity (journal of Ireland’s Workers Solidarity Movement) there is a review by Conor McLoughlin of Ken Loach’s excellent film on the Spanish Revolution, Land and Freedom. The review concludes that:
(T)he factors involved in the defeat of the revolution would take an article in themselves to explain, ranging from the military power of the fascists (and their outside aid) to the betrayals by the communists and social democrats, and this is not my purpose here. What is important is that the social revolution did not collapse due to any internal problems or flaws in human nature. It was defeated from without. Anarchism had not failed. Anarchists had proved that ideas which look good in th... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) The crowd of several hundred students stood silently, with their backs turned, as the provost of New York City’s Hunter College, Laura F. Strumingher, tried to convince them that her plan to gut the SEEK program was in their interests. Unconvinced, a chant of “Hands off SEEK!” rose up from the students. Blanc began to storm off, restrained only by her advisers, who had a better understanding of what this protest meant. One by one, organizers of the protest took the microphone and spelled out the implications of the plan, as Blanc sputtered “You’re being manipulated” to the students.
What was most exciting about the protest and the ensuing organizing activity is that it was all initiated by SEEK students ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Twice a day, every day, about 25 US-made Humvees carry about 175 nervous Mexican soldiers toting US-made M-16 automatic rifles and heavier weapons through the Zapatista village of La Realidad. La Realidad is the headquarters of the military leadership of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN). The troop convoys have become a fact of life for the residents of La Realidad, including the many refugees from the village of Guadalupe Tepayac who were driven from their homes by the Mexican Federal Army in February 1995. In early October the Federal Army soldiers built a new military encampment on the banks of the Rio Euseba on the other side of La Realidad. This new encampment is the latest stage in the military encirclement of the Zapatist... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
Love and Rage is at an impasse. A little over a year ago in San Diego, we inade some important decisions about the nature of the organization. For about five months, we maintained a high level of organization, most notably in confronting mobilizations of the racist right. Our membership grew more dramatically than even the most optimistic of us expected. And yet there is a deep sense in which we are justified in feeling we have made little progress. The organization seems to be in permanent shambles and lacking a clear direction.
This paper is an attempt to give a new and clear direction to Love and Rage. It has two main sections. The first section, “The Fix We’re In,” is an analysis of Love and Rage as an... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Talk of Peace... “If you want peace” the bumpersticker reads, “prepare for war.” The Mexican corollary to this bit of back-country wisdom seems to be “If you want war, make proposals for peace.” March was a month of peace proposals in Mexico with three major “peace initiatives” following in rapid succession. The first was from the newly-appointed Governor of Chiapas, Roberto Albores Guillen of the PRI (the Revolutionary Institutional Party that has ruled Mexico for 70 years). The second was from the right-wing PAN (National Action Party). And the third came from President Ernesto Zedillo, also of the PRI.
In spite of all the hype, none of these plans has even the remotest chance to bring peac... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Dear Love and Rage,
Noel Ignatiev’s attempt to defend his claim that white women can expect “that the state will protect them from strangers” demands a response. Noel replies to the evidence of the experience of “white” women on the Love and Rage Production Group to the contrary by asserting that by their apparent refusal “to be the property of any man” they have placed themselves beyond the shield of whiteness.
The main problem with Noel’s argument is really a simple matter of fact: women who in no way place themselves “beyond the shield of whiteness” cannot expect that the state will protect them from strangers unless by “strangers” Noel means Black men. In that cas... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) A slightly different version of this article, written by Chris Day, originally appeared in Love & Rage, June / July 1996. Some of the points in the article were controversial within the organization, as reflected by the fact that another L&R member, Wayne Price, wrote a letter in response to the article, which was printed in the next issue of the paper. The controversies in this article mirrored controversies over internal documents circulating at the same time. Despite the controversy, this piece is the best we have for laying out the historical tradition with which Love & Rage most closely identifies. The version of the article printed here was edited to incorporate the criticisms and comments made about the original article. ... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) By now the horrible truth of the 1994 US elections is old news. The Republican Party, increasingly under the leadership of the Christian Right, has won control of both houses of Congress and is aggressively pursuing its agenda. The Republicans have won control of many governorships and state legislatures as well. A 1984ish anti-immigrant ballot initiative won overwhelming approval in California.
There have been a number of attempts to interpret these results in ways that simply hide from the truth. The election results were not the result of some sort of mysterious anti-incumbency “mood” among the electorate. Not one major race saw the defeat of a Republican incumbent. Reading liberal commentaries on the elections is not unlike... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) Introduction
In this paper I attempt to stake out some of the questions that are going to confront Love and Rage after we resolve the immediate crisis precipitated by “What We Believe.” I look critically at the ten-year long project of building a serious revolutionary anarchist organization and try to identify the elements in anarchist theory and our initial conception of this project that might be responsible for our failure to achieve that objective. I then argue that in order to move forward, we need to stop identifying ourselves as within the anarchist tradition but rather view ourselves as something new that takes significant things — like anti-authoritarianism and anti-statism — from anarchism. I then look a... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.) First there was the waiting. The 1,111 Zapatista delegates to the Founding Congress of the FZLN (The Zapatista National Liberation Front) in Mexico City were supposed to arrive in San Cristobal de las Casas between two and five in the afternoon. A small crowd huddled under a tarp in the pouring rain to meet them in the cathedral square. Gradually the crowd grew. By eight o’clock the Zapatistas still had not arrived, but the rain had cleared and now about 2,000 people waited in the square. Music was playing from the stage; a few hot air balloons with “EZLN” painted on the side were released into the night sky, but still no Zapatistas.
Finally at ten o’clock, the Zapatistas entered the city of San Cristobal for the fi... (From: TheAnarchistLibrary.org.)