Spencer Beswick on Nostr: Final paragraph of my dissertation: This dissertation has taken Love and Rage ...
Final paragraph of my dissertation:
This dissertation has taken Love and Rage seriously as political actors who made significant contributions to the anarchist movement and the broader left during the collapse of state socialism and the ascendance of neoliberal globalization. They did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism, stopping the war machine, or abolishing prisons. But then again, this is perhaps not a fair metric. The United States never approached anything close to a revolutionary situation in the 1990s, despite moments of generalized rebellion such as the national response to the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.
What Love and Rage did accomplish within the significant constraints of the era was to build the foundations for a fighting anarchist movement, make crucial practical and strategic interventions within social movements—particularly connecting anti-racism and feminism with anarchism—and achieve a series of smaller and more situated victories: preventing the Ku Klux Klan from holding rallies, defending abortion clinics, spreading knowledge of the Zapatistas after their 1994 insurrection, and so on.
In the end, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Love and Rage as an organization was the simple fact of its existence. For close to a decade, a relatively small group of people managed to regularly publish a widely distributed anarchist newspaper, hold annual conferences, and build a continental organization. This was a major step forward for the anarchist movement; indeed, nothing at this scale had been accomplished in decades. By the turn of the twenty-first century, anarchism was once more a driving force on the radical left—in no small part due to Love and Rage.
#anarchism #history
This dissertation has taken Love and Rage seriously as political actors who made significant contributions to the anarchist movement and the broader left during the collapse of state socialism and the ascendance of neoliberal globalization. They did not succeed in overthrowing capitalism, stopping the war machine, or abolishing prisons. But then again, this is perhaps not a fair metric. The United States never approached anything close to a revolutionary situation in the 1990s, despite moments of generalized rebellion such as the national response to the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles.
What Love and Rage did accomplish within the significant constraints of the era was to build the foundations for a fighting anarchist movement, make crucial practical and strategic interventions within social movements—particularly connecting anti-racism and feminism with anarchism—and achieve a series of smaller and more situated victories: preventing the Ku Klux Klan from holding rallies, defending abortion clinics, spreading knowledge of the Zapatistas after their 1994 insurrection, and so on.
In the end, perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Love and Rage as an organization was the simple fact of its existence. For close to a decade, a relatively small group of people managed to regularly publish a widely distributed anarchist newspaper, hold annual conferences, and build a continental organization. This was a major step forward for the anarchist movement; indeed, nothing at this scale had been accomplished in decades. By the turn of the twenty-first century, anarchism was once more a driving force on the radical left—in no small part due to Love and Rage.
#anarchism #history