Research

Article from here:

Names to look into: Luigi Galleani, Amédée Dunois,

In Bulgaria, the FAKB led relevant experiences that involved urban and rural unionism, cooperatives, guerrillas and youth organization: “the FAKB consisted of syndicalist, guerrilla, professional and youth sections which diversified themselves throughout Bulgarian society”. It also helped found and strengthen organizations such as the Bulgarian Federation of Anarchist Students (BONSF); an anarchist federation of artists, writers, intellectuals, doctors and engineers, and the Federation of Anarchist Youth (FAM), which had a presence in cities, towns and all the big schools.

Between 1941 and 1944, an anarchist guerrilla group fought fascism and allied with the Patriotic Front in organizing the insurrection of September 1944 against the Nazi occupation. Meanwhile, with the Red Army replacing the Germans as an occupying force, an alliance was established between the right and the left — called the “red-orange-brown alliance”—who brutally repressed the anarchists. The workers were forced to join a single union, linked to the state, in a policy clearly inspired by Mussolini, and in 1945, at a FAKB congress in Sofia, the communist militia arrested the ninety delegates present, which did not prevent the FAKB newspaper, Rabotnicheska Misl, from reaching a circulation of sixty thousand copies per issue that year. At the end of the 1940s, “hundreds had been executed and about 1,000 FAKB members sent to concentration camps where the torture, ill treatment and starvation of veteran (but non-communist) anti-fascists [...] was almost routine”. Thus ended the experience of the FAKB, which began in 1919.

This bit just reminds me of when I lived in Italy and complained about how the only unions I could work with were part of the state machine and did little more than make enough noise to keep people placated. And that was in 2017-2019.

Quotes from the named essay in Queering Anarchism:

My doctoral thesis centered on how middle-class young residents of Tehran, Iran, experience themselves as citizens and consumers in relation to theocracy, democracy, and neoliberalism within their practices of using satellite television and the internet. It is very curious to me now that I was influenced by so many theories that were themselves influenced by anarchist ways of thinking without the word “anarchism” every really being uttered. This reveals a lot, I think, about our education and wider social systems in the United States and their ignorance and anxieties about approaching anarchism. There is so much work clearly derived from and aligned with anarchist approaches that does not call itself that.

I like this in that it shows that there are a lot of actions that are anarchic in their structure but not necessarily called anarchist. However, I think the direction that is understood is... odd? Yes, anarchism isn't discussed in US schools (or, honestly, in anyone's school systems). But I think the better lesson to take from this is that there are a lot of behaviours that can be anarchic and not everyone needs to call themselves an anarchist.

From the beginning, I approached anarchism with a good deal of skepticism, especially in the ways that anarchist scholars until recently unproblematically talked about (human) nature in essential terms.

This is hilarious to me because so many other scholars did this exact same thing? Like, across the whole political spectrum. This is so common. Why be skeptical of it only in regards to anarchism? Anyway.

Groups to keep names of: - Anarchist Social Theory Club (ATSC) at Mary Washington College (now University of Mary Washington); - Richmond Indymedia; - Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS); - Richmond Queer Space Project (RQSP); - Queer Paradise.

Within the academic world, anarchist perspectives have recently inspired and been inspired by a variety of radical theoretical frameworks, including queer theory, feminism, critical race theory, and radical environmentalism.

Just... even if this isn't the purpose of this person's essay, the attempts to constantly frame anarchism within academic contexts is infuriating. Anarchism was not meant for academia; it doesn't even fit within that structure, which is hierarchical to its core. Academia seeks to shove things into boxes, and anarchism seeks to bust out of them.

The two are just... not really compatible, as everything stands then and now.

Prefigurative politics demands that activists adhere as much as possible to the world they would like to see in how they live and act in the world today. As such, it presupposes equality and imagines a collective subject of resistance, rather than arguing for individual rights that can be added into the existing statist status quo. The processes of politics are as important as the result, involving the employment of non-hierarchical, participatory, and consensus-based models of action. The result is a dynamic vision of utopia as an ongoing process, rather than as a goal that can be achieved through granting individual rights.

My biggest gripe with this is 'activists'. This implies that all people who are working towards prefigurative politics are activists, and that's... what is the point? Activism is a necessary tool, but why are we clinging to the title of activist? For what purpose?

Besides, people who do not see themselves as activists engage in prefiguration all the time through the development of community spaces and within their own families. They just hope that their prefiguration can somehow impact the world (and anarchists particularly believe it to be a positive method -- this is something that I strongly agree with).

Even people who are not anarchists tend towards prefiguration in spaces that are still hierarchical. Sometimes it's positive (as in building the school community you want to see that decreases or removes punitive punishments); sometimes it's negative (perpetuating hierarchy without working against it).

Re: The RQSP

Queer Paradise reemerged in November 2002 as a leased office space in a location just a few blocks away from the first space. From the beginning, there were conflicts and concerns about the extent to which this space had the effect of de-radicalizing the group. Some members considered this new kind of space to be very conventional and un-queer, but it was ultimately consensually agreed to largely because it would be a more publicly visible space that might be more accessible and safe for new potential members.

Previously it had been in a "large warehouse," which enabled them to design it as necessary and depending on who was there.

There were other ways in which a de-radicalization of the project was happening in this moment, for example in the change of RQSP from an underground to a nonprofit organization. While group members actively tried to maintain the nature of the organization, any official state-sanctioned organization must adhere to certain rules, including having a hierarchical power structure.

The first mission statement identified the goals of the RQSP as: - To provide a space to promote community among queer-identified people and encourage queer activity in Richmond. - To provide free meeting space for queer-positive groups who work to challenge heterosexism, sexism, ableism, racism, and classism. - To educate on queer and related issues through pamphlets, speakers, conferences, queer cultural activities, and a lending library.

The new, more generalized mission statement associated with the second space was: “The Richmond Queer Space Project maintains a queer-friendly space and resource center, promotes queer culture in Richmond, and links queer experience to the wide spectrum of social justice work.”

The state’s largest mainstream LGBT rights organization, Equality Virginia, had organized a rally and was set to have its members and allies speak on behalf of gay marriage rights, and the members of RQSP spent a considerable amount of time and energy debating whether and how to be involved. Ten members were set to deliver a strong anti-marriage statement, but other members of the collective did not want to antagonize the mainstream LGBT movement in the presence of the larger threat of the bill. They rewrote the speech in a way that could establish a temporary ground of affinity with the LGBT marriage movement, while at the same time including the collective’s own beliefs of marriage as a normalizing institution.

This is something that I'm so tired of. Why are we giving up (or obscuring) our values for the sake of these people, especially when those organisations are more likely controlling the narrative rather than expressing the views of the majority.

Participation in this event provided opportunities for building connections, by establishing temporary ground while broadcasting a critique of marriage and state control, but it also led to the most severe conflict, ultimately leading to the demise of the group. Some members ended up feeling betrayed about the conciliatory tone of the speech, criticizing it as a form of assimilation politics, and ended up forming a separatist “queer posse” within RQSP. The members who had supported rewriting of the speech were also left with ill feelings about the queer separatists, expressing that their actions were divisive, lacked an ethics of care, and were overly dismissive of the concerns of the LGBT activists. Basically, what ensued was a divisive form of identity politics, of who was queerer than whom, within a project that was consciously attempting to be opposed to identity-based political divisiveness.

Here is a perspective that very frequently people who are willing to be conciliatory often neglect: Why is it that the so-called mainstream cannot find ways to include people beyond themselves? Why is it that they create an environment that is hostile to people, even people who might ally with them? This is something I'd genuinely like to understand because it seems like the same old story on repeat at this point; the so-called "fringe" must acquiesce to the needs of "the many" while "the many" does nothing but leave us out, demanding that we assimilate, as if we're forcing them to do something beyond "support liberation of all people."

It doesn't make sense, and it honestly never will.

The split also represented a breakdown in processes of consensus building. The processes of consensus building around participation in this event were time-and-energy-draining, and ultimately unsuccessful. I think this brings up an important question of whether consensus-modeled groups should always have agreement as their goal. Perhaps the irreparable fracture that developed during this moment could have been avoided if members could have agreed to a temporary ideological separation, with the idea that RQSP did not need to have a singular ideological vision.

Perhaps. This is something to consider.

Age appeared as a divisive issue. One of my interviewees, an older male member of the collective at thirtysomething, argued that the younger members tended to be more narrowly focused on using RQSP as a platform for carrying out queer activist projects, that the older members were more focused on creating a space and a community, and that those in between often felt stretched in both directions. I think that age is an important, underrepresented source of conflict in anarchist politics, and particularly so in the United States where the scale of the movement is so small and discontinuous through time that there aren’t the same kinds of cross-generational ties there can be in other radical activist cultures.

This is so entirely true, and I think it forgets to underscore why age (even seemingly small gaps) are so important to understand.

And a lot of it kind of comes from an assumption, I think, when we're younger that we need to be seen doing something. Except we don't. Yes, we need to be doing something, but it definitely doesn't have to be hyper-visible. It can sometimes be quiet.

It's not that all young people do this (I didn't), but this stereotype continues to proliferate. And it's not surprising that a lot of the "I want to build community" folks are mostly 30+ or burnt out young people.

Race and racism, also, were important issues, as RQSP consisted primarily of white radicals and Queer Paradise was situated within a Richmond neighborhood that was the product of long-term segregation. The neighborhood consisted mostly of a combination of long- term poor African-American and affluent gentrifying white and African-American residents. The tensions from these changes made RQSP members feel at times like white colonists and at other times totally excluded from the narrative of urban decline and renewal in the neighborhood.

Lastly, there were important issues having to do with scale and the limits of radical activism in a small, relatively conservative southern city like Richmond. During its existence, RQSP had as few as ten and as many as about thirty members. For those in the collective who were seeking to make the space more accessible, it was shocking that the group didn’t grow beyond that. A trans-identified member of the collective told me that he had recently wanted to start a chapter of Gay Shame in Richmond, but given the small size of the mainstream visible gay community in Richmond, it seemed wrong to start an organization that would serve to critique it. Such a statement, I think, has important implications on the nature and extent of radical queer politics possible in certain kinds of places.

A question I have, when combined with the aforementioned feeling of betrayal and the conciliatory nature toward the supposed mainstream group, did they realise that they were building a space where criticism couldn't happen?

Because if you start silencing yourself as a result to "play nice" with a supposed mainstream group (and I'm starting to doubt they ever were the true mainstream for queer people), you run the risk of silencing yourself in-house and silencing your members.

The long-term sustainability and dynamism of our movements and spaces depend on admitting our limitations and learning from the critical gap between the ideals and enactment of our projects.

I agree with the sentiment, and it's also what fuels the questions I keep asking about conciliatory gestures with incremental political groups.