Andrew Cornell

As in other parts of the world, anarchists, socialists and Marxists based in the USA have frequently influenced and borrowed from one another over the past century and a half of struggles. More research into these lines of influence is certainly called for. However, any thorough investigation of the cross-pollination of radical traditions in the USA must also consider the many ways in which the autonomous freedom struggles of people of color have co-mingled with European-origin traditions such as Marxism and anarchism. In fact, I would suggest that it has frequently been on the terrain of campaigns opposed to white supremacy and colonialism that anarchists, socialists and Marxists have found common ground to collaborate and to develop synthetic theoretical and tactical paradigms.

In this essay, I consider the historical lineage of two tactical approaches to mass action frequently deployed by anarchist activists in the USA since the infamous anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations of 1999: 1) consensus-driven nonviolent direct action, and 2) black bloc property destruction. Searching for the origins of these tactics leads us back to moments in the mid-twentieth century when support for African American freedom struggles by US anarchists brought them into conversation with three distinct forms of socialist politics. First, mass nonviolent blockading at economic summit protests — and the idea that the methods of planning and carrying out such actions exemplify the movement’s ideology and vision — can be traced to the use of civil disobedience tactics by opponents of racial segregation in the 1940s and 1950s. In the years following the Second World War, anarchists and democratic socialists collaborated to forge a politics of ‘revolutionary nonviolence’ that significantly influenced the tactical and organizational orientation of this early phase of the civil rights movement in the southern USA.

Second, the practice of challenging police authority and trashing commercial centers, often in anonymous ‘black blocs,’ owes inspiration to the example of black urban insurrections which broke out across the USA between 1964 and 1967. In the mid-1960s, a cohort of young US anarchists looked to the heterodox Marxism of the Facing Reality group, led by figures such as C.L.R. James, to help make sense of and defend the political significance of these ‘race riots.’ Shortly thereafter, the embrace of ‘Third World Marxism’ by many national liberation movements, inside and outside the USA, inspired influential counter-cultural anarchists to again embrace insurrectionary tactics in the late 1960s. Though they have been reworked by a variety of radical formations in the intervening decades, the tactical logics of nonviolent direct action and trashing popularized by mid-century anti-racist insurgencies continue to deeply inform the strategic perspectives of many contemporary North American anarchists.

Anarchism, civil rights and nonviolent direct action

Between the First and Second World Wars, US anarchism had largely cleaved into a syndicalist wing influenced by the journals Vanguard and Il Martello (The Hammer), and an insurrectionist wing represented by the newspapers Man! and L’Adunata dei Refretarri (The Summoning of the Unruly). Both factions shared the traditional anarchist view of the political state and capitalist class relations as the primary sources of oppression in the modern world, but they disagreed over tactics and issues of organization, especially whether labor unions had the potential to serve as emancipatory forces in the modern world.[662] Despite these differences, US anarchists remained fiercely anti-Communist and viewed members of the Socialist Party as reformists who had accommodated themselves to New Deal liberalism. The outbreak of the Second World War delivered a sharp blow to both tendencies, but out of this final dénouement of the ‘classical’ anarchism a new form arose that adopted pacifism, cultural revolution and prefigurative community-building as its strategic touchstones. A small, but intellectually vital, radical milieu developed during the war, based in large measure on formative encounters between anarchist and Gandhian war resisters. Anarchists and socialists of this milieu later collaborated to contribute important ideas and resources to the struggle for African American civil rights, and their theories of political power and strategies for social change were transformed in the process.

The flowering of anarchist pacifism

In 1942 a half-dozen young anarchists from New York City who had been mentored by the syndicalist Vanguard Group, launched a new newspaper, Why?. Whereas the eminent German émigré anarchist Rudolf Rocker had persuaded most of the Vanguard Group to endorse the Allies, Why? soon adopted an anti-war stance and later began questioning the possibility of bringing about an anarchist society through a violent seizure of the means of production. The editors were first influenced by the positions taken by L’Adunata die Refratari and the British anarchist newspaper War Commentary, both of which denounced the sincerity of the Allies anti-Fascist intentions and called for workers in England, Italy and elsewhere to turn the crisis conditions of the war to revolutionary ends, as the Russians had done in 1917.[663] However, the Why? Group progressed towards a radical pacifism under the influence of Bart de Ligt, a Dutch anarchist who chaired the War Resisters International and collaborated with Mahatma Gandhi. De Ligt’s 1937 treatise, The Conquest of Violence, argued that ‘the underlying cause of modern war is the character itself of modern society […] Our society is violent just as fog is wet.’ Therefore, a far-reaching social revolution was required, but means were of the essence. ‘The more violence,’ he claimed, ‘the less revolution.’[664]

Why?’s position on the war was more than a question of editorial line for the young men of the group; it directly affected their decisions about how to respond to the draft. In 1943, David Thoreau Wieck, who contributed to Why? while studying philosophy at Columbia University, was sentenced to three years at Danbury Prison after he refused to enlist.[665] Why? editors David Koven and Cliff Bennett also served time for their anti-war beliefs and draft resistance. The incarceration of anarchist draft resisters during the Second World War proved fortuitous for the future direction of the movement in the USA.

Anarchists were among the nearly 6,000 conscientious objectors (COs) and war resisters imprisoned during the Second World War. Historian James Tracy explains that, ‘Of these, 4,300 were Jehovah’s Witnesses with little or no political agenda. […] The remaining seventeen hundred, however, constituted the most militant distinct group of pacifists in the country.’[666] Many COs were affiliated with the country’s leading pacifist organizations, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the War Resisters League (WRL). During the depression years of the 1930s, the FOR had broadened its agenda to combat racial and economic inequality under the guidance of its socialist chairman, A.J. Muste, who, like other members, was inspired by Gandhi’s campaigns of nonviolent direct action in India.[667] Shortly after Wieck arrived, 18 Danbury COs, all of them white, launched a successful strike against racial segregation in the prison. Wieck took part in the four-month strike — refusing to work, to take his allotted time in the prison yard, or to eat meals in the segregated cafeteria. Through the strike he befriended other radical inmates, such as Jim Peck and Ralph DiGia. The Danbury strike set off a wave of similar actions in prisons and CO camps across the country, including strikes led by African American pacifists Bill Sutherland and Bayard Rustin in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania and Ashland, Kentucky, respectively. The COs experimented with Gandhian techniques such as hunger strikes and passive resistance, winning considerable media attention and support from pacifists and black political organizations outside the prisons. Besides successfully desegregating and liberalizing the polices of federal penitentiaries, the wave of nonviolent direct action united participants and prompted them to discuss the potential for a broad movement of ‘revolutionary nonviolence’ against war, racism and economic inequality in the USA.[668]

Imprisonment also led the dissenters to modify their beliefs. Wieck later wrote, ‘I did not go to prison as a pacifist but rather as an objector to war and conscription. It was in prison that I learned the methods of nonviolence.’ Afterwards, he considered himself an ‘anarchist-pacifist.’[669] In turn, the influence of anarchist prisoners such as Wieck and Lowell Naeve helped move other pacifist war resisters, including DiGia, Sutherland, David Dellinger, Roy Finch and Igal Roodenko in the direction of anarchism. David Dellinger, who would later become a leading light of the New Left, kept up a lively correspondence with Holley Cantine, editor of the anarchist-pacifist journal Retort.[670] In letters from prison, he voiced his growing skepticism about the methods of the Socialist Party, to which he belonged. Dellinger was impressed with Cantine’s assertion that revolutionaries should seek to model in the institutions they create, and in their daily lives, the type of social relations they are fighting to promote in the world at large. The imprisoned pacifist suggested that a revolutionary organization’s ‘full-time workers should be men who have left their other work for 6 months, a year, or so, and will return to it again.’ Not only would this avoid ‘some of the problems of a centralized “leadership” […] but others would be developed who are now kept undeveloped or are alienated.’[671] After receiving his release date, Dellinger wrote to Cantine that he was eager to meet in person so that they might discuss in more detail ‘the kind of left-wing libertarian socialist movement in which we are both interested.’ As his biographer Andrew Hunt asserts, ‘once a Christian socialist, Dellinger had evolved into a secular anarchist in Lewisburg.’[672]

Anarchists and socialists become nonviolent revolutionaries

Most of the militant war resisters were released in the months surrounding the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the USA. Horrified by the scale of callous violence unleashed by the bomb, they expected a mass movement to arise in opposition to its use. In the August 1945 issue of Politics, which maintained close ties to Why? and Retort, editor Dwight MacDonald argued that the USA’s willingness to use atomic weapons meant, simply, ‘We must “get” the modern national state, before it “gets” us.’[673] MacDonald began his political career in the Trotskyist movement and was later considered a major figure among the ‘New York Intellectuals.’ The war and the bomb, however, had pushed him into the anarchist-pacifist camp.[674] Many former-COs concurred with MacDonald’s anti-statism, as well as his assertion that to prevent another war, the entire society, structured in violence as it was, had to be transformed.

One key to such a transformation, they agreed, was continuing the fight against segregation and other manifestations of white supremacy. As early as 1942, the socialist radical pacifists Bayard Rustin, George Houser and James Farmer had launched the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to put Gandhian techniques into play to combat the segregation of restaurants, swimming pools and other public facilities. In 1947, CORE organized a Journey of Reconciliation, in which an interracial team of volunteers — including Rustin, the anarchist Igal Roodenko and Wieck’s cellmate Jim Peck — traveled by bus through southern states to test compliance with a 1946 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in interstate transportation facilities. Some of the riders faced beatings and were sentenced to work on the chaingang for their breach of racial protocol, but their treatment was much less severe than that encountered by participants in CORE’s iconic 1961 Freedom Rides, modeled on the 1947 trip.[675]

After their release, former-COs such as Dellinger, DiGia and Sutherland also launched the Committee for Nonviolent Revolution (CNVR). Two years later, in 1948, they regrouped with additional radical pacifists such as Muste and MacDonald, changing their name to Peacemakers.[676] In the late 1940s, many radical pacifists continued to maintain membership in the Socialist Party. Differences between anarchists and socialists involved with CNVR and Peacemakers were subsumed under the mantle of an emerging politics of revolutionary nonviolence. The abstract question of whether a stateless society was possible, and what it would look like, took a back seat. However, members of both groups determined that ‘decentralized democratic socialism,’ a version of worker self-management, was their economic ideal and agreed that direct action, rather than electoral campaigns, should be the primary means used to force a fundamental transformation of the modern war-making nation-state. Peacemakers also sought to synthesize socialist and anarchist models of organization: the group structured itself as a network of small cells that elected a steering committee, but operated autonomously from one another in pursuit of the organization’s defined goals. Sympathizers were encouraged to join and participate as small groups, rather than as individuals. As historian Scott Bennett writes, Peacemakers believed this form of organization ‘could challenge and eventually replace centralized, hierarchical institutions.’[677] Peacemakers, then, appears to be the first organization in the USA in which anarchists adopted the consensus method of decision making — a process promoted by Quakers, such as Bayard Rustin, involved in the organization.

In 1947 the militant pacifists gained control of the executive board of the War Resisters League, seating Dellinger, MacDonald, Roy Finch, Roy Kepler and other anarchists, with hopes of transforming its 10,000 person membership into nonviolent revolutionaries. Although they found only modest support for their far-reaching program during the repressive McCarthy era, their presence made possible a fortuitous development in the civil rights struggle. In 1951, Rustin was fired from the staff of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and nearly drummed out of the movement, when he was arrested for having sex with two other men in the back of a parked car. Instead of accepting his resignation from the War Resisters League, the anarchists sitting on the executive board voted to hire Rustin as the organization’s fulltime program director. In that capacity he would serve as a leading adviser on nonviolent strategy to Martin Luther King, Jr. and other southern civil rights leaders as the struggle expanded at the end of 1955.[678]

Revolutionary nonviolence and the black freedom struggle

Despite the importance of decades of previous struggles, the 1955–1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott is often seen as marking the beginning of a new and heroic phase of the black freedom movement in the USA. Provoked by the arrest of the activist Rosa Parks, the successful year-long boycott grew to include thousands of participants and launched into national prominence the campaign’s young spokesperson, Martin Luther King, Jr. Since the 1920s, many African Americans had drawn inspiration from the Indian decolonization struggle lead by Mahatma Gandhi, who was himself influenced by the anarchists Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy and Bart de Ligt. King first learned of Gandhi’s methods from talks delivered by Howard University president Mordecai Johnson and Peacemakers member A.J. Muste at Crosier Seminary in 1949 and 1950. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott, experienced nonviolent revolutionaries — most notably Rustin — helped King translate Gandhian principles into a strategic plan of civil disobedience geared to the conditions of the US south.[679]

Concurrent with the launch of the bus boycott, Dellinger, Muste, Finch and Rustin collaborated to found Liberation magazine, which promoted their brand of libertarian socialist and pacifist politics. In its first editorial, the editors noted that:

We do not conceive the problem of revolution or the building of a better society as one of accumulating power, whether by legislative or other methods, to ‘capture the state,’ and then, presumably, to transform society and human beings as well. The national, sovereign, militarized and bureaucratic State and bureaucratic collectivist economy are themselves evils to be avoided or abolished.[680]

Liberation quickly became an important platform for participants in the civil rights movement to debate strategy. King contributed articles regularly, as did officials of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and advocates of armed self-defense, such as Robert F. Williams. Anarchists such as Wieck, Dellinger and Paul Goodman wrote frequently for the publication, encouraging the movement to adopt strategies that relied on popular resistance rather than legal maneuvering or the military might of the federal government.

In 1962, the governor of Mississippi attempted to block the black activist James Meredith from enrolling at the all-white state university. Pressured to respond, President John F. Kennedy deployed federal marshals to ensure Meredith’s entrance. Dellinger and Rustin criticized Kennedy’s true motives and claimed the incident as a missed opportunity for the movement. They coauthored an essay which concluded, ‘The temptation for shortsighted men and women of good will is to rely on the Federal government to take up the slack created by their own failure to act responsibly and in social solidarity. But in the long run the Federal government must act in accord with its own nature, which is that of a highly centralized political, military, industrial and financial bureaucracy.’[681] Dellinger had earlier written in Liberation, ‘The power of the government is not the integrating power of love but the disintegrating power of guns and prisons.’[682]

Much preferable to the deployment of troops, according to the editors of Liberation, was the strategy of direct resistance to racism by ordinary people emblematized by the student sit-in movement that had erupted in February 1960. The movement began as a local action when four black college students asked for service and refused to move from the segregated lunch counter of a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s department store. The protests spread and by June an estimated 50,000 students had joined the fray in more than 100 towns throughout the southern states.[683] As a contributor to the anarchist journal Views and Comments wrote at the time, the student sit-ins demonstrated ‘how a genuine people’s movement arose spontaneously, produced its own organization, devised its own tactics and inspired everyone to participate creatively and valiantly in a common cause.’ Instead of counseling reliance on a great leader, ‘it arouses people from apathy and restores their belief in their own power.’[684]

Direct action, participatory democracy and New-Left anarchism

In 1960 the experienced anti-racist organizer Ella Baker helped the student sit-in leaders develop a political organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which modeled anarchist principles in its means of operation, though members never self-identified as anarchists. In its early years, SNCC distinguished itself from existing civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and King’s Southern Christian Leadership Convention by its dedication to the use of nonviolent direct action and through its efforts to invent egalitarian forms of organization, participatory decision-making processes, and what Baker termed ‘group-centered leadership.’ Baker concurred with Dellinger’s remarks to Cantine that the mark of a good leader was his or her ability to share responsibility and develop leadership capacities in others. ‘Strong people,’ Baker claimed, ‘don’t need strong leaders.’[685]

The historian Clayborne Carson explains that early SNCC activists ‘strongly opposed any hierarchy of authority such as existed in other civil rights organizations.’[686] Instead of carrying out a program designed by a few leaders, SNCC members collectively engaged in long discussions in which those not used to speaking up were supported and gently urged to participate alongside the more loquacious. The organization attempted to reach consensus on major program and strategy decisions — a technique introduced by participants such as James Lawson, who were affiliated with CORE and influenced by Peacemakers.[687]

As SNCC shifted its energies from direct action against segregation to organizing poor black men and women to register to vote, staff members such as Bob Moses sought ways to extend the process of perpetual leadership development beyond the organization itself to all the people SNCC staff members worked with in voter registration efforts. In this way, SNCC developed in its day-to-day organizing work an ideal of participatory democracy that demanded ordinary people be able to make the decisions that affect their lives. SNCC organizers mobilized the poorest and least educated African Americans to demand rights from an exclusionary racial state. However, their method of building the capacities of local people to direct their own organizations in pursuit of political and economic self-determination belied an increasingly radical vision that, at least implicitly, had much in common with the various forms of direct democracy and libertarian socialism discussed throughout this book. The anarchist precepts of direct action, decentralized organization and belief in the leadership capabilities of ordinary people, formed one significant and overlooked, but not overriding, current within the larger wellspring of religious and political traditions that shaped the black freedom movement.

The influence cut in both directions. The black freedom movement, and especially SNCC, came to serve as a new historic example of a successful mass movement that functioned in accordance with anarchist principles. Civil rights struggles also helped to break down traditional anarchist ideas about the primacy of class oppression and the revolutionary primacy of the working class. Recognizing the power of African Americans to create fundamental social changes by organizing around both racial and class identity, was an important step in anarchists grasping the centrality of ‘race’ as a social phenomenon that fundamentally structures social inequalities and everyday life. This recognition helped them to theoretically expand the object of their critique and opposition from capitalism and ‘the state’ to all forms of social domination.

The anti-racist campaigns of the 1940, 1950s and 1960s form a clear point of embarkation for the political sensibility that combines nonviolent direct action, non-hierarchical forms of organizing, and consensus-based decisionmaking, which contemporary anarchists continue to celebrate as central to their particular political vision. These methods, as well as the ideal of participatory democracy, were championed throughout the 1960s and early 1970s by Students for a Democratic Society and the early women’s liberation movement.[688] In the 1970s and 1980s groups heavily influenced by anarchism, such as Movement for a New Society and the Clamshell Alliance, carried the tradition forward in movements against nuclear power plants, US intervention in Central America, and environmental destruction.[689] Experienced organizers from these campaigns, such as Starhawk and David Solnit, played central roles in planning and training participants in the mass demonstrations and blockades that shut down central Seattle during the World Trade Organization meetings in 1999 and re-energized the anarchist movement in the USA.[690] In turn, veterans of the global justice movement carried the tradition forward to the Occupy Wall Street encampments of 2011–2012.

Beats, counter-culture and urban insurrection

Black blocs, like nonviolent direct action and consensus, claim a relatively long lineage within the anarchist tradition. Their use can be traced to the autonomous movements of Italy, Germany and other European countries, spanning the late-1970s to the 1990s, many of which maintained deep ties to the international anarchist-punk community and other radical youth counter-cultures.[691] These movements were themselves significantly influenced by the North American counter-culture of the 1960s, however, and that counter-culture was, at its core, structured around the appreciation and appropriation of African American hip culture and, later, the celebration by white youth of forms of Marxist-inspired African, Latin American and Asian political militancy.[692] To unpack this complex lineage, it is useful to first examine the reciprocal influence of mid-century anarchist-pacifism and the writers of the Beat Generation, and to then consider the ways a variety of additional radical intellectual and political currents — especially expressions of black radicalism — contributed to the explosive growth of a heavily anarchistic youth counter-culture by 1967.

Anarchism, jazz and the Beat generation

The anarchist-pacifists of Liberation magazine and the campaigns of SNCC comprise one current through which libertarian socialist ideas were transmitted to members of Students for a Democratic Society and other New Leftists. However, anarchist ideas, themes and strategies were also promoted in the 1960s by small circles of writers, activists and cultural producers that include Chicago’s Rebel Worker Group, New York’s Black Mask, the Diggers of San Francisco, and the Detroit radical milieu surrounding the Fifth Estate newspaper, the White Panther Party, and the political rock group The MC5. Although collectively these formations were instrumental in developing the style of politics that historian Toby Boraman has termed ‘carnival anarchism,’ none claimed purely anarchist origins or desired to promote themselves as such.[693] Instead, they integrated elements of anarchosyndicalism, anti-vanguardist Marxism, the European avant-garde tradition, African American resistance cultures, and emergent forms of Third World Marxism into a novel form of cultural radicalism first nourished by the Beat subculture.

Beat writers such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg provided an entry point to radical politics for many young adults across the USA in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, credited with launching the Beats onto an international stage, was built in large measure by anarchist-pacifists, including many Second World War draft resisters, who formed a Libertarian Circle and a poetry forum there as early as 1946.[694] Drawing on Zen Buddhism, the Jewish mysticism of Martin Buber, and an emerging ecological consciousness, San Francisco anarchists such as Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Duncan focused on creating art and a community of like-minded dissenters, while counseling disengagement from the world of the A-Bomb and mass consumer culture.[695] Ironically, the obscenity trial against Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ and the commercial success of Kerouac’s On the Road spread these ideas beyond the coastal cities to nearly every high school in North America.

In the working-class Chicago suburb of Maywood, Illinois, high school sophomore Franklin Rosemont learned of Jack Kerouac from a magazine article at the dentist’s office in 1958. After devouring On the Road and The Dharma Bums (Kerouac’s ode to Gary Snyder and the other Bay Area anarchist poets), Rosemont and his friends launched a high-school literary magazine, The Lantern, which earned them reputations as communists and beatniks. Rosemont preferred to think of his multiracial circle as ‘high school hipsters.’ He recalled that although The Lantern community was supportive of the civil rights movement, ‘only with my discovery of the Beat poets, did I begin to appreciate the vitality and richness of African-American culture, and particularly jazz.’[696] Appreciation of jazz was concomitant to the Beat lifestyle, as bebop musicians provided a towering example of disdain for white bourgeois culture, and their music seemed to incarnate the anti-rationalist impulse behind Beat dissent. As literary scholar Scott Saul notes, ‘The hipster was in some sense the civil rights movement’s less charitable double, the face of a defiance that did not unconditionally turn the other cheek. He plugged into long-running debates in the black community about whether social protest should take direct or more evasive forms, whether it should be easily legible in its aims or should adopt the slyness of the trickster.’[697]

The Beats also lead Rosemont to explore the French surrealists — cultural revolutionaries who, beginning in the 1920s, had declared their support for decolonization struggles and argued that revolutionaries must seek to create a world in which life is lived intensely and ecstatically, in pursuit of the sublime and the marvelous. With the discovery of surrealism, Rosemont felt that he had found a set of ideas that tied together his love of poetry, jazz and his growing interest in radical politics. ‘As early as the 1950s,’ he later claimed, ‘some of us recognized the new jazz as the auditory equivalent of surrealism in painting […] Our most extravagant revolutionary dreams were summed up, renewed and expanded in the untrammeled loveliness’ of the music of John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk and Archie Shepp.[698] These connections helped cement a conception of musical counter-culture as an expression and method of revolutionary politics, which was expanded upon later in the decade by The MC5, and extends through the anarcho-punk scene to the present.[699]

Workerism, rock ’n’ roll and urban insurrection

Poetry and revolution also absorbed students at Chicago’s Roosevelt College such as Tor Faegre, Robert and Judy Green and Penelope Bartik (soon to be Penelope Rosemont). These young poets and students, most from workingclass backgrounds, met aging members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) at the union’s General Headquarters, became members, and proceeded to organize migrant farm workers in southwest Michigan. In 1964 they used the IWW mimeograph machine to launch a journal, The Rebel Worker, which broke new ground by pairing traditional workerist politics with considerations of the revolutionary potential of art and popular culture. The young Rebel Workers learned about revolutionary unionism from long-time IWW members like Ferd Thompson, but their growing analysis of capitalism and unionism also benefitted from friendly interactions with the Detroit-based heterodox Marxist organization Facing Reality, and the British libertarian socialist organization Solidarity. As described by Christian Høgsbjerg in this volume, Facing Reality was an organizational offshoot of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, a dissident caucus within the US Trotskyist movement during the 1930s and 1940s, grouped around the Trinidadian Marxist C.L.R. James, the Russian-American theorist Raya Dunayevskaya, and the Chinese-American philosopher Grace Lee.[700] The Johnson-Forest Tendency exchanged ideas with the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, which had likewise broken with Trotskyism in the 1940s.[701] In the aftermath of the Hungarian uprising of 1956, James, Lee and one of Socialisme ou Barbarie’s leading intellects, Cornelius Castoriadis, coauthored a treatise on anti-Stalinist and non-vanguardist Marxism, Facing Reality, from which the US group drew its name.[702] In the 1960s Castoriadis was the strongest influence on the political positions of the British group Solidarity, which translated, reprinted and commented on many of his articles.[703] Each of these organizations developed a criticism of ‘democratic centralist’ vanguard revolutionary parties, argued that labor unions had become incorporated into the postwar capitalist production system, and promoted forms of worker self-management and council democracy.[704] This constellation of mid-century libertarian socialists would deeply inform the ideas of the Situationist International (SI) and the Italian traditions of operaismo and autonomist Marxism.

The influence of Facing Reality and Solidarity was apparent in Rebel Worker articles critical of the role mainstream union officials played in policing workers’ shop floor resistance. However, the group also celebrated diverse forms of resistance that they saw cropping up outside the factory gates. The journal featured articles such as Franklin Rosemont’s ‘Mods, Rockers, and the Revolution,’ which defended rock and roll music as an expression of working-class youth’s ‘refusal to submit to routinized, bureaucratic pressures.’[705] The Chicago radicals also kept expressions of African American resistance to white supremacy sharply in view. July 1964 saw the first of a series of massive riots in the black ghettos of northern and western cities, usually touched off by incidents of police brutality, but expressive of the generalized hostility of communities suffering from segregation, discrimination and unemployment. The Rebel Worker published a first-hand account of the ‘Harlem insurrection’ of 1964, and hailed the similar rebellion that broke out in Chicago two years later. Drawing again on the analysis provided by James, Castoriadis and their collaborators, Rosemont noted, ‘Just as our labor perspective focused not on “leaders” but on “actions by the workers themselves, in or out of the unions” so too we identified ourselves strongly with the masses of black proletarian youth who outgrew the increasingly conservative older civil-rights groups and took up direct action in the streets.’[706]

Art, anti-imperialist armed struggle and anarchism

The editors of the Rebel Worker recognized as political compatriots the small group of New York artists who produced the magazine Black Mask. Black Mask was founded by Ben Morea, a working-class Italian-American painter and agitator who developed his anarchist politics in a trajectory similar to that of Franklin Rosemont. Morea grew up in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, home to Thelonious Monk and other leading bebop jazz musicians. He immersed himself in the jazz community until he picked up a heroin habit and was arrested for possession. In a prison art therapy class, he determined to take his life in a different direction. Still, he appreciated the instinct for rebellion that the jazz scene had imbued in him. ‘Culturally, it was subversive,’ Morea asserted:

The dominant culture, which I’ve never been comfortable with, could not understand jazz. It was a subculture. And so I gravitated towards subcultures. The beatniks picked up on all of that. After I quit heroin, I was about 18, I already had this subcultural context, so I struck a friendship with a lot of beatniks. Especially, first, The Living Theater. Judith Malina and Julian Beck — they’re the ones that put the name to the way I felt, [and gave me] the term anarchist.[707]

Malina and Beck had become anarchists in the late 1940s after attending discussions held by the Why? Group and protesting cold war air-raid drills with anarchist-pacifists from the War Resisters League and other organizations.[708] Their Brechtian theater troupe served as an important connective tissue linking young beatniks to older New York City anarchists. Over the next few years, Morea attended meetings of a small group of old-line anarchosyndicalists known as the Libertarian League, as well as the ‘Anarchos’ study group formed by ecology-oriented anarchist Murray Bookchin in the early 1960s. Meanwhile he exhaustively studied the European avant-garde art tradition, including the Dada, Surrealist and Futurist movements. While the black jazz scene of the late 1950s served as a point of entry to New York’s bohemian anarchist community, the explicitly political and increasingly militant black freedom movement became a key reference point and source of inspiration for Morea and his friends by the mid-1960s.

In the spring of 1965, SNCC did away with its decentralized structure and practice of consensus decision-making. Declaring the need for ‘black power’ the next year, the organization also shed its commitment to nonviolence and an interracial staff.[709] These shifts marked a response to the violent intransigence of southern racists and the federal government’s unwillingness to defend and support civil rights organizers. Seeking an adequate response to such conditions, SNCC leaders such as James Foreman, Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown increasingly looked for guidance to national liberation struggles in Africa, Asia and Latin America.[710] From writers such as Franz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh, they ingested a ‘Third World Marxist’ politics that counseled tighter forms of organization, strong leadership and, eventually, the pursuit of a strategy of armed struggle. Third World Marxist theorists shared the commitment to abolish capitalism with orthodox Marxist-Leninists, but they focused greater attention on the means by which the system of imperialism politically subjugated and derived massive profits from ‘oppressed nations,’ overwhelmingly peoples of color, around the world. Strategically, Third World Marxists focused less on the spread of radical unionism among industrial workers, and promoted modes of armed struggle that could simultaneously achieve the national liberation of formerly colonized territories and institute forms of state socialism.[711]

While some older anarchists, such as Wieck and Finch, were highly critical of these developments, many in the new generation welcomed the victories of insurgents such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as harbingers of an international revolutionary upsurge. They saw the growing militancy among African American activists, who looked to these models, as entirely justified. In 1966, Morea and his friend Ron Hahne launched a four-page broadsheet devoted to avant-garde art and radical politics titled Black Mask. For Morea, the name had a number of resonances: ‘There was a book written by Franz Fanon, Black Faces, White Masks. Well, I always thought, “white faces, black masks.” I was also friends with the black nationalists, and some of them used an African mask as a symbol. The color black was an anarchist symbol, but the mask fit the art side more, say, than Black Flag. So it was all of these things, but Franz Fanon was a big part of it.’[712] For Morea, the promotion of novel and authentic expressions of rebellion that had traction in the contemporary world took precedence over notions of theoretical purity and analytical consistency.

From the beginning Black Mask declared its support for the emergent forms of black radicalism. ‘A new spirit is rising. Like the streets of Watts we burn with revolution […] The guerrilla, the blacks, the men of the future, we are all at your heels,’ read an early statement. The magazine’s first issue also reprinted a flier from the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, the SNCC-organized project that was the first to adopt the Black Panther as its symbol.[713]

In February 1967, Black Mask contributors and their friends literalized the publication’s name when they marched through New York City’s financial district donned completely in black, wearing black ski masks, and carrying skulls on poles and a sign that read ‘Wall Street is War Street.’ This stark and provocative demonstration against the war in Vietnam appears to have been the first recorded deployment of the black bloc esthetic. Like the Rebel Worker group, the Black Mask editors communicated, visited and traded publications with creative and militant radicals from around the world, including French situationists, Dutch Provos and the Zengakuren of Japan.[714]

In 1967, Morea and Hahne collaborated with other artists on New York City’s Lower East Side to organize an ‘Angry Arts’ week. Police arrested participants at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Easter Sunday as they unveiled posters denouncing the cardinal’s endorsement of the Vietnam War. In the aftermath of Angry Arts week, the Black Mask ‘family’ grew to include 10 to 15 core members, primarily white and male, including Osha Neumann, the stepson of the celebrated critical theorist Herbert Marcuse. Early in 1968, the group organized a theatrical demonstration in front of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, signing an explanatory leaflet, ‘Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker.’ The line was drawn from a poem penned by black nationalist LeRoi Jones during ‘race riots’ that had convulsed Newark, NJ the previous year.[715] The name stuck and the group remade itself accordingly.

Jones had contemptuously declared:

[…] you can’t steal nothin from a whiteman, he’s already stole it he owes you anything you want, even his life. All the stores will open if you will say the magic words. The magic words are: Up against the wall mother fucker this is a stick up.[716]

The uncompromising position of Jones and other black militants appealed to Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers (UAWMF). Calling themselves an ‘anarchist street gang’ or, alternatively, ‘a street gang with an analysis,’ UAWMF organized hippies, drop-outs, bums and Puerto Rican youth on the Lower East Side, created a free store, squatted empty buildings and regularly instigated small scale riots and brawls with the police. The group’s basic strategy was to push members of the white counter-culture to increase the level of their confrontation with institutions of authority, as a means of forging another ‘front’ in the struggles being waged by oppressed racial groups in the USA and anti-colonial forces in southeast Asia, Africa and Latin America. Morea proudly recalled, ‘We stormed the entrance to the Pentagon — the only people in history to actually penetrate into the building. And we cut the fences at Woodstock. So here you’ve got this hippie cultural [thing], and this [other thing]. And that was us.’[717] As Neumann put it, ‘We advocated a politics of rage and tribal bonding, “flower power with thorns.”’[718]

Both the Rebel Worker group and Black Mask/UAWMF were relatively shortlived formations. By 1967 members of the Rebel Worker group shifted their focus elsewhere. Penelope Rosemont joined the national staff of Students for a Democratic Society, while working with Franklin and others to develop a greater surrealist presence in the USA. The core members of UAWMF left New York City in 1971 to escape the escalating cycle of incarceration and violent protest they found themselves increasingly trapped in, dissolving soon afterwards. However, groups of radicals with similar influences, but slightly different patterns of development, such as the White Panther Party in Michigan and a variety of pro-situationist groups in California, bridged the gap between the counter-culture of the 1960s and the US anarchist movement in 1970s and 1980s.[719]

In summary, the Beat subculture of the late 1950s inured many young white North Americans to ‘hip’ jazz culture, which helped convince them of the desirability and possibility of cultural revolution, prompting some to embrace anarchism. They grew up watching and reading about the early, predominantly nonviolent, phase of the black freedom movement. But as black anger in response to white reactionary violence lead to urban ‘race riots,’ and the influence of national liberation movements gave rise to the black power movement, some anarchists grew to identify people of color willing to engage in property destruction and political violence as a radical vanguard worthy of emulation. This lead to an ideologically messy, heterodox politics that sought to combine anti-authoritarian cultural revolution with Third World Marxist-inspired armed struggle. Although pacifism predominated among anarchists in the USA between 1940 and 1965, that commitment was challenged and abandoned over the next five years. While the nonviolence of Gandhi and black southerners inspired the anarchist-pacifism of the early period, the rioting and turn to armed self-defense by African Americans (and, later, groups such as the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the American Indian Movement) in the northern and western USA revived the insurrectionist current in US anarchism by the end of the 1960s.

Through the circulation of people, publications and struggles between North America and Europe, this new sensibility mutated and multiplied over the following decades, even after the struggles against white supremacy and colonialism that had provided a key impetus had subsided. The avant-garde critique of the banality of everyday life, urban street fighting and the demand for self-management and worker’s councils fuzed indelibly in Paris during the events of May ’68, giving the situationists an international cache still far from being exhausted.[720] Heatwave – a British counterpart to The Rebel Worker – and the UK section of the SI were succeeded by King Mob, which, indebted to Black Mask/UAWMF, sought to practice an ‘active nihilism’ in early 1970s England.[721] They proved influential to the first wave of British punk. In 1977, what has become known as the ‘autonomist Marxist’ tradition emerged in Italy through a convergence of counter-cultural groups, such as the Metropolitan Indians (the influence of decolonial politics evident even in their name) and workerist organizations influenced by the Johnson-Forest/Socialisme ou Barbarie/Solidarity tradition.[722] Each of these strands of political radicalism fed into the international anarchist-punk movement of the 1980s and 1990s, which solidified sartorial youth cultures of resistance, pranks, squatting and militant street demonstrations using the black bloc tactic as defining elements of contemporary anarchism around the globe. Despite the circuitous way in which black bloc tactics developed, some contemporary anarchists and autonomists continue to defend the practice of political trashing in small, loosely organized groups by pointing to the semi-spontaneous uprisings of racialised urban communities as models of radical activity worthy of emulation. The widely circulated pamphlet The Coming Insurrection, for example, suggests radical intellectuals should take tactical and organizational inspiration from the French banlieue riots of the mid-2000s.[723]

Conclusion

The anarchist-pacifists of the 1940s and 1950s and the cultural revolutionists of 1960s both marked fundamental departures from the traditional, class struggle based anarchism that existed in the USA prior to the Second World War. They contributed overlapping, often contradictory, anti-authoritarian sensibilities to radical social struggles in the final decades of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first. Clearly, it is impossible to fully trace and evaluate the complex pathways upon which anarchism has developed in the past half-century in a brief essay such as this. I have tried, instead, to hold a magnifying glass up to two particular moments in this history, and to then locate those moments within the broader pattern of development. What that level of magnification reveals, I hope, is the pervasive influence of a complex variety of socialisms and Marxisms, as well as many forms of people of color-initiated struggles against white supremacy, on the political analyzes, visions and strategies of contemporary anarchist movements. It likewise indicates ways that anarchist ideas and efforts have informed and bolstered black freedom struggles and other anti-racist movements. Such an analysis helps elucidate historical precedents — and therefore provides a tool for evaluating the transformative potential and possible pitfalls — of a variety of efforts aimed at reinventing the struggle for a free and equal, or libertarian socialist, world today.