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Title: Love and Rage Now Author: Suzy Subways Language: en Topics: Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation Source: Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160613072557/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/23
In the 1990s, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation
helped build strong, radical groups like Anti-Racist Action and SLAM,
movements for queer liberation, reproductive freedom and more. Yet when
activists disrupted the WTO in Seattle, LnR had been dead for a year and
a half, leaving our mistakes to be repeated, our lessons forgotten.
That’s what spurred my old comrade Roy San Filippo to put together a
book of LnR’s writings, A New World in Our Hearts (AK Press, 2003).
Although 19 of the 20 pieces are by men — meaning vital insights from
women are missing — the book revives valuable debates cut short by LnR’s
split in 1998.
Love and Rage was always on the anarchist movement’s fringes. Yet we
ended up splitting on two questions that are hot topics among anarchists
today: whether anti-authoritarians can learn from other revolutionary
tendencies, and how racism relates to capitalism. Most of the writings
in New World deal with these two issues.
I was of the quiet majority in the middle on the first question. Solidly
an anarchist, I’d worked three years with excellent, principled
organizers of various communist and nationalist stripes for access to
education at CUNY. I’d learned a lot from them about strategizing for
revolution and building multi-racial, democratic participation while
engaging in a reform struggle. Chris Day (New York LnR) wrote “The
Historical Failure of Anarchism” after Marxists we worked with
challenged him on anarchism’s weaknesses. The feisty document put many
Love and Ragers on the defensive but inspired others to study
revolutionary history for ideas to move us beyond Bakunin.
It was an internal document by Jessica (New York LnR) that won me over
to “mass line” from Maoist theory. The Zapatistas called it mandar
obedeciendo — leading by obeying. Jessica gave examples from LnR’s
activism, explaining that we worked best when our politics responded to
the communities we worked with: “We cannot discount the ideas of the
people...only when we start from where the people are at, and struggle
with them to make the changes they want, can we put forward the ideas of
anarchist revolution with any effectiveness.” She also pointed out that
the LnR members most hostile to borrowing ideas from authoritarian
tendencies were not doing any activist work — which explained why they
offered no concrete solutions, only generalizations that our problems
could be solved “from within anarchism.”
Most Love and Ragers agreed that anarchism itself — having adopted
feminism, queer liberation and environmentalism — is multi-tendency. A
majority also supported the theory of white skin privilege, that the
white working class has real benefits under racism — as opposed to the
view that it’s been won over to capitalism by “petty and apparent”
privileges. Carolyn (New York LnR) wrote in 1998: “In Brooklyn, where I
grew up, there are numerous white working class neighborhoods filled
with homeowners right next to Black and Latino neighborhoods filled with
people living in public housing projects...every time a Black family
saves enough to buy a house in Canarsie, the house is firebombed within
the first week.”
What finally plowed LnR under was the quiet middle majority, those of us
who failed to save it. The final year’s Coordinating Committee never
met, flaking out completely, and LnR’s Working Groups — meant to be the
link between theory and practice, where we’d hash out our movement
strategies — never functioned well. In 1997, Justine (Minneapolis LnR)
wrote: “It’s crazy that Working Groups didn’t have time to meet at the
last conference. This should have been a priority over...the political
statement.” Spending all our energy on the two questions splitting us
apart meant we didn’t cultivate ideas for strategy that could have
brought us together. Most members outside New York decided the
ideological debates, and LnR itself, were irrelevant to their movement
work.
Jessica, Carolyn and Justine’s writings would have enriched New World,
but they were left out because — like most of the documents by LnR women
— they invoke details of our activism, references to other members’
statements and messy specifics. But any generalized theory can sound
great on paper — wouldn’t you rather hear about how it works out in
practice?
After the split, I helped start the Fire by Night Organizing Committee,
a tiny multi-tendency group. FbN’s long self-criticism of LnR, already
published as a pamphlet, has the book’s last word — but without the
Afterword explaining that FbN dissolved in 2000, acknowledging mistakes
it made in New York as an all-white group in a people of color-led
movement. Also missing are writings by two members who became
Marxist-Leninists that could have either won readers to their ideas or
shown that there may actually be a slippery slope to Stalinism.
Five of the 20 pieces are by Chris Day, which seems like a lot. Chris is
a committed activist and theoretical thinker — a valuable asset when
every revolutionary theory is either outdated or must be defended
against the crimes of its true believers. Yet he would have been hated
(by the same anarchists who read Malatesta) if he’d put out a book of
his own writing. New World is essential reading for anarchists willing
to grapple with the questions Chris and others raised, but unwilling to
leave anarchism behind just because it hasn’t answered those questions
yet. You can’t join Love and Rage now, but I recommend reading this book
and finding your own way to working collectively for revolution.
Former Love and Rage members are currently working on a range of
political projects and organizations. Here are some of them:
Bring the Ruckus (name is a work in progress) — www.agitatorindex.org
Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Marxist-Leninist — www.frso.org.
Freedom Road Socialist Organization/Left Refoundationist —
www.freedomroad.org
Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists- www.nefac.net