Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation | |
Formation | 1993 |
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Dissolved | 1998 |
Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation was an anarchist organization active in North America from 1993 to 1998. Their politics emphasized intersectional anarchist communism across multiple currents including anti-racism, anti-capitalism, and feminism. Love and Rage was influential for other American grassroots social movements in the 1990s.
Following the 1986 centennial of the Haymarket affair, anarchists began hosting annual gatherings across North America. In 1989, this group formed an anarchist newspaper, Love and Rage, that became an informal network and, in 1993, an anarchist federation (Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation [1] ) with membership. With chapters across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, it was the region's most prominent revolutionary anarchist group of the period. [2] Love and Rage's major chapters were in New York City, Minneapolis, and Mexico City. At its peak, it had around 200 members, with a smaller group was responsible for its core activity. [3]
The group sought to re-establish revolutionary anarchism for the 21st century as intersectional anarchist communism [2] based in coherent strategy and organizations. This contrasted the main anarchist publications, which were anti-organizations and individualist in nature. Love and Rage sought a sought to establish a prefigurative "dual power" in which anarchists build grassroots, non-hierarchical institutions in parallel to traditional power structures to one day undo state and capitalist power structures. [4]
Love and Rage's politics were based in anarchist modifications to the 1960s white anti-imperialist movements. Their newspaper opened each issue with a statement in support of replacing authoritarian social relations with cooperation, solidarity, and mutual aid. They support queer and youth liberation, anti-fascism, and feminism. They oppose the state, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Love and Rage supported national liberation movements, unlike other anti-statist organizations. The group's members, who were mostly white, also sought to abolish whiteness and undo white privilege. [2]
In 1994, Love and Rage established three working groups: anti-fascism, anti-prisons, and Zapatista movement solidarity. [5]
The Love and Rage newspaper printed 10,000 copies bimonthly. [3]
Love and Rage was one of several social anarchist organizations in its era, alongside Anti-Racist Action and the Black Autonomy Federation. [4] Many Love and Rage members came from the Revolutionary Socialist League, another anarchist organization that had turned from Trotskyism in the 1980s. [2]
Sectarianism over the anarchist tradition led to the group's dissolution [6] in 1998. [2]
Love and Rage was the most prominent American anarchist organization of its time. [3] Its level of strategic organization and reach of its newspaper gave it considerable influence among its American social movement contemporaries, including the Anti-Racist Action and the 1990s feminist movements. [3] [7] The group and other revolutionary social anarchist organizations contributed to the re-establishment of the American left with intersectional politics across multiple traditions (anti-racism, anti-capitalism, anti-state, and feminist). [4]
The phrase "Love and Rage", popularized by the group, also had an undercurrent in the American punk rock band lyrics of Mischief Brew and Green Day. [8]
Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that is against all forms of authority and seeks to abolish the institutions it claims maintain unnecessary coercion and hierarchy, typically including the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state with stateless societies and voluntary free associations. As a historically left-wing movement, this reading of anarchism is placed on the farthest left of the political spectrum, usually described as the libertarian wing of the socialist movement.
Libertarian socialism is an anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist political current that emphasises self-governance and workers' self-management. It is contrasted from other forms of socialism by its rejection of state ownership and from other forms of libertarianism by its rejection of private property. Broadly defined, it includes schools of both anarchism and Marxism, as well as other tendencies that oppose the state and capitalism.
Anarcho-pacifism, also referred to as anarchist pacifism and pacifist anarchism, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates for the use of peaceful, non-violent forms of resistance in the struggle for social change. Anarcho-pacifism rejects the principle of violence which is seen as a form of power and therefore as contradictory to key anarchist ideals such as the rejection of hierarchy and dominance. Many anarcho-pacifists are also Christian anarchists, who reject war and the use of violence.
Anarcha-feminism, also known as anarchist feminism or anarcho-feminism, is a system of analysis which combines the principles and power analysis of anarchist theory with feminism. It closely resembles intersectional feminism. Anarcha-feminism generally posits that patriarchy and traditional gender roles as manifestations of involuntary coercive hierarchy should be replaced by decentralized free association. Anarcha-feminists believe that the struggle against patriarchy is an essential part of class conflict and the anarchist struggle against the state and capitalism. In essence, the philosophy sees anarchist struggle as a necessary component of feminist struggle and vice versa. L. Susan Brown claims that "as anarchism is a political philosophy that opposes all relationships of power, it is inherently feminist".
Anti-Racist Action (ARA), also known as the Anti-Racist Action Network, is a decentralized network of militant far-left political cells in the United States and Canada. The ARA network originated in the late 1980s to engage in direct action and doxxing against rival political organizations on the hard right to dissuade them from further involvement in political activities. Anti-Racist Action described such groups as racist or fascist, or both. Most ARA members have been anarchists, but some have been Trotskyists and Maoists.
The Revolutionary Socialist League (RSL) was a Trotskyist group in the United States established in 1973 and disbanded in 1989.
According to different scholars, the history of anarchism either goes back to ancient and prehistoric ideologies and social structures, or begins in the 19th century as a formal movement. As scholars and anarchist philosophers have held a range of views on what anarchism means, it is difficult to outline its history unambiguously. Some feel anarchism is a distinct, well-defined movement stemming from 19th-century class conflict, while others identify anarchist traits long before the earliest civilisations existed.
Anarchism in the United States began in the mid-19th century and started to grow in influence as it entered the American labor movements, growing an anarcho-communist current as well as gaining notoriety for violent propaganda of the deed and campaigning for diverse social reforms in the early 20th century. By around the start of the 20th century, the heyday of individualist anarchism had passed and anarcho-communism and other social anarchist currents emerged as the dominant anarchist tendency.
Black anarchism, also known as New Afrikan anarchism or Panther anarchism, is an anti-authoritarian and anti-racist current of the Black power movement and anarchism in the United States. It is characterized by its intersectional analysis of different forms of oppression, its skepticism of both authoritarian socialism and Eurocentric anarchism, and its advocacy of community organizing, armed self-defense and revolutionary black nationalism.
National-anarchism is a radical right-wing nationalist ideology which advocates racial separatism, racial nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and racial purity. National-anarchists syncretize ethnic nationalism with philosophical anarchism, mainly in their support for a stateless society, while rejecting anarchist social philosophy. The main ideological innovation of national-anarchism is its anti-state palingenetic ultranationalism. National-anarchists advocate homogeneous communities in place of the nation state. National-anarchists claim that those of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes while striving to be politically horizontal, economically non-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.
Anarchism and nationalism both emerged in Europe following the French Revolution of 1789 and have a long and durable relationship going back at least to Mikhail Bakunin and his involvement with the pan-Slavic movement prior to his conversion to anarchism. There has been a long history of anarchist involvement with nationalism all over the world as well as with internationalism.
Anarchism in Mexico, the anarchist movement in Mexico, extends from Plotino Rhodakanaty's organization of peasant workers in the 1890s, to Ricardo Flores Magón's activism prior to the Mexican Revolution, to the punk subcultures of the 1990s.
Post-colonial anarchism is a term used to describe anarchism in an anti-imperialist framework. Whereas traditional anarchism arose from industrialized Western nations—and thus sees history from their perspective—post-colonial anarchism approaches the same principles of anarchism from the perspective of colonized peoples. It is highly critical of the contributions of the established anarchist movement, and seeks to add what it sees as a unique and important perspective. The tendency is strongly influenced by indigenism, anti-state forms of nationalism, and anarchism among ethnic minorities, among other sources.
Contemporary anarchism within the history of anarchism is the period of the anarchist movement continuing from the end of World War II and into the present. Since the last third of the 20th century, anarchists have been involved in anti-globalisation, peace, squatter and student protest movements. Anarchists have participated in armed revolutions such as in those that created the Makhnovshchina and Revolutionary Catalonia, and anarchist political organizations such as the International Workers' Association and the Industrial Workers of the World have existed since the 20th century. Within contemporary anarchism, the anti-capitalism of classical anarchism has remained prominent.
Total liberation, also referred to as total liberation ecology or veganarchism, is a political philosophy and movement that combines anarchism with a commitment to animal and earth liberation. Whilst more traditional approaches to anarchism have often focused primarily on opposing the state and capitalism, total liberation is additionally concerned with opposing all additional forms of human oppression as well as the oppression of other animals and ecosystems. Proponents of total liberation typically espouse a holistic and intersectional approach aimed at using direct action to dismantle all forms of domination and hierarchy, common examples of which include the state, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, disablism, ageism, speciesism, and ecological domination.
Major anarchist thinkers, past and present, have generally supported women's equality. Free love advocates sometimes traced their roots back to Josiah Warren and to experimental communities, viewing sexual freedom as an expression of an individual's self-ownership. Free love particularly stressed women's rights. In New York's Greenwich Village, "bohemian" feminists and socialists advocated self-realisation and pleasure for both men and women. In Europe and North America, the free love movement combined ideas revived from utopian socialism with anarchism and feminism to attack the "hypocritical" sexual morality of the Victorian era.
Queer anarchism, or anarcha-queer, is an anarchist school of thought that advocates anarchism and social revolution as a means of queer liberation and abolition of hierarchies such as homophobia, lesbophobia, transmisogyny, biphobia, transphobia, aphobia, heteronormativity, patriarchy, and the gender binary.
Insurrectionary anarchism is a revolutionary theory and tendency within the anarchist movement that emphasizes insurrection as a revolutionary practice. It is critical of formal organizations such as labor unions and federations that are based on a political program and periodic congresses. Instead, insurrectionary anarchists advocate informal organization and small affinity group based organization. Insurrectionary anarchists put value in attack, permanent class conflict and a refusal to negotiate or compromise with class enemies.
Anarchism in Paraguay has held influence among the urban and rural working classes since the end of the 19th century. Its main figure was the writer and journalist Rafael Barrett.