Update 2 files - /Abraham Guillen.md - /Anarcha-Feminist Theory, Organization and Action 1970-1978.md

« *Quand j'ai publié « Stratégie de guérilla urbaine », les « Tupamaros » ont vu une lumière, puisque je disais que les « forêts de ciment sont plus sûres que les forêts d'arbres* » ; [interview d’Abraham Guillén en 1978](https://alterautogestion.blogspot.com/2012/07/entretien-avec-abraham-guillen.html).

Un autre de ses textes, où il développe plus le caractère militaire d’une guérilla et dont le propos est moins abordé ici, [*Dialectique de la Guérilla*](https://le-cafe-anarchiste.info/la-dialectique-de-la-guerre-abraham-guillen/), a été traduit en français.

To feminists familiar with anarchism, the connections between both radical feminist and anarchist theory and practice were obvious. Anarchist feminism was essentially a step in self-conscious theoretical development, and anarcha-feminists believed that an explicit anarchist analysis, and knowledge of the history of anarchists who faced similar structural and theoretical obstacles, would help women overcome the coercion of elites and create groups structured to be accountable to their members but not hierarchical.10 They built an independent women’s movement and a feminist critique of anarchism, along with an anarchist critique of feminism. To anarcha-feminists, the women’s movement represented a new potential for anarchist revolution, for a movement to confront forms of domination and hierarchy, personal and political. Unlike Goldman, Voltaraine De Cleyre, the members of Mujeres Libres, and countless other female anarchists concerned with the status of women in the 19th and early 20th century, they became feminists before they became anarchists. Anarcha-feminists eventually merged into the anti-nuclear movement by the end of 1978, but not before contributing to crucial movement debates among both anarchists and feminists, building egalitarian, leaderless, and empowering alternative institutions, and altering US anarchism in theory and practice.

The term “anarchist-feminist,” later used interchangeably with anarcho-feminism and anarcha-feminism, first appeared in an August 1970 issue of the Berkeley-based movement newspaper, *It Ain’t Me Babe*. The newspaper published an editorial calling for “feminist anarchist revolution” next to an article about Emma Goldman. The collective did not synthesize a theory of anarcha-feminism, but rather explained how their anarchist beliefs related to the organizational structure of the paper, which they designed as an affinity group to encourage autonomy and discourage “power relationships or leader follower patterns.”11*It Ain’t Me Babe* exemplified the “intuitive anarchism” of the early women’s liberation movement. It’s masthead read “end all hierarchies” and the paper contained articles like Ellen Leo’s “Power Trips,” which exemplified the radical feminist tendency to oppose all forms of domination. Leo wrote in 1970, “The oppression of women is not an isolated phenomenon. It is but one of the many forms of domination in this society. It is a basic belief that one person or group of people has the right to subjugate, rule and boss others.”12 Like anarchists, these feminists connected the oppression of women to a larger phenomenon of domination. Beginning in 1968 and growing in strength until 1972, radical feminism was anything but monolithic and many participants differed greatly in regards to their views on sexuality, the family, the state, organizational structure, and the inclusion of transgender women in the movement.

Most anarcha-feminists were initially radicalized by the political and cultural milieu of the anti-war movement, but it was their experiences in the women’s liberation movement combined with the influence of Emma Goldman that led them to develop anarcha-feminism as a strategy. As feminists struggled to reclaim women’s history, Goldman became a feminist icon due to her advocacy of birth control, free love, and personal freedom. In 1971 radical feminist novelist and historian Alix Kates Shulman wrote, “Emma Goldman’s name has re-emerged from obscurity to become a veritable password of radical feminism. Her works rose from the limbo of being out of print to…being available in paperback. Her face began appearing on T-shirts, her name on posters, her words on banners.”13 Goldman criticized the bourgeois feminist movement and its goal of suffrage, which led many women to criticize her as a “man’s woman.” However, Shulman and many others argued that Goldman was a radical feminist worthy of recognition because she stressed the oppression of women as women by the institutions of the patriarchal family and puritan morality, as well as religion and the state.14 As anarcha-feminist Cathy Levine wrote in 1974, “The style, the audacity of Emma Goldman, has been touted by women who do not regard themselves as anarchists… because Emma was so right-on…. It is no accident, either, that the anarchist Red Terror named Emma was also an advocate and practitioner of free-love; she was an affront to more capitalist shackles than any of her Marxist contemporaries.”15 Feminists honored Goldman’s ideas and legacy by opening an Emma Goldman Clinic for Women in Iowa in 1973, publishing new volumes of her work, naming their theater troupes after her, and writing screenplays, operas, and stage plays about her life. 16 In 1970, the women’s liberation periodical Off Our Backs dedicated an issue to Goldman with her image on the cover. Despite this, Betsy Auleta and Bobbie Goldstone’s article about Goldman’s life discussed what they perceived as her faults (her opposition to suffrage and disconnect from much of the women’s movement) because she had become a “super-heroine” in the movement. 17

<img src="media/images/anafem/anafem2.jpg" class="float-left" style="background-color: transparent"> Goldman encouraged women to make connections between radical feminism and anarchism, and her writings often served as radical feminists’ introduction to anarchism or the impetus for them to make connections between anarchism and feminism. To many anarcha-feminists this theory represented both a critique of the sexism of the male New Left, including its anarchist members, as well as a critique of socialist and liberal feminism. Despite this intuitive anarchism, attempts by early anarcha-feminists to develop an anarchist analysis within many radical feminist collectives felt silenced, while women in the anarchist movement, where misogyny ruled as much as in the rest of the New Left, also felt alienated. Anarcho-feminist attempts to elucidate connections between feminism and anarchism, like those of Arlene Meyers and Evan Paxton, were often met with intimidation and censorship in mixed groups. These conditions created the possibility for an independent anarcha-feminist movement, but first, anarcha-feminists would have to communicate and develop their theories.

Early anarcha-feminist theory and debate emerged through Siren newsletter. The first issue, produced as a journal in 1971, contained “Who We Are: The Anarcho-Feminist Manifesto,” written by Arlene Wilson, a member of the Chicago Anarcho-Feminist Collective.18 The manifesto focused on differentiating anarcha-feminism from socialist feminism through a critique of the state: “The intelligence of womankind has at last been brought to bear on such oppressive male inventions as the church and the legal family; it must now be brought to re-evaluate the ultimate stronghold of male domination, the State.”19

Issue 8 of Siren also contained “Blood of the Flower,” a statement written by Marian Leighton and Cathy Levine, members of the Cambridge based Black Rose Anarcho-Feminist collective.26 Unlike Wilson, Leighton and Levine reject not only socialist feminism’s analysis of the state, but its tactics and the idea of movement building altogether. To them, “movements,” as represented by the male Left and its ideas of a vanguard, separated politics from personal dreams of liberation until women abandoned their dreams or dropped out of the movement altogether. Instead, they advocated leaderless affinity groups in which each member could act as an individual, and presented this anarchist form of organization as the alternative to hierarchical movement politics practiced by socialist feminists and liberal feminists. The small leaderless affinity group allows members to participate “on an equal level of power” without leadership determining the direction of the movement.27 They wrote, “Organizing women, in the New Left and Marxist left, is viewed as amassing troops for the Revolution. But we affirm that each woman joining in struggle is the Revolution.”28 This anarcha-feminist vision, almost similar to the cell-like structure of earlier insurrectionary anarchist groups, emphasized valuing individual contributions in small groups instead of building the large, often authoritarian, and impersonal “revolutionary armies” that many New Leftists and socialist feminists envisioned. To achieve this, anarcha-feminists would build their movement through small affinity groups and participating in various feminist and anarchist counter-institutions.

<img src="media/images/anafem/anafem3.jpg" class="float-left" style="background-color: transparent" width="200">Anarcha-feminists also formed study groups, which, like the CR groups, also acted as affinity groups, and formed and dissolved quickly. Many groups were located in university towns, partially due to the success of AnarchoFeminist Network Notes as a communications network, which allowed activists to communicate and organize outside of major urban areas. Collectives were often small, flexible, and project based. Because they required intimacy and small size, when groups became too large, as the Des Moines and Cambridge based Black Rose Anarcho-Feminists did, they split into multiple study and action groups.29 These groups also acted as affinity groups that collectively participated in action around various local and national issues, from the local food coop to international political prisoner support to the lesbian movement to ecology struggles and the anti-nuclear movement.30

The collective Tiamat originated in Ithaca, New York in 1975 and dissolved in 1978. Their name originated from the tale of a goddess of chaos and creation, feared by men but worshiped by women.31 The collective read anarchist theory together, shared ideas, and put out an issue of the newsletter Anarcha-Feminist Notes in 1977. According to former member Elaine Leeder’s reflections, the collective members participated in political activities ranging from protesting the building of a local shopping mall to raising money for a day care center for political dissidents in Chile. Furthermore, Leeder argued that the collective was a functioning “anarchistic society”: “We are leaderless, non-hierarchical… and always ready to change. We live self-management, learn what it is together…and support each other.” 32 Tiamat supported Leeder’s interest in the mental health liberation movement and her successful effort to stop the introduction of electro-shock therapy at a local mental hospital.33

Prior to Tiamat’s dissolution, it sponsored an Anarcha-Feminist Conference in June 1978 that attracted women from London, Italy, Toronto, and several US cities.38 In an idyllic location in Ithaca, women attended three days of workshops on topics such as anarcha-feminism and unions, self-liberation as social change, the ecology movement and anarcha-feminism, women and violence, building the anarcha-feminist network, matriarchy and feminist spirituality, beards and body hair, combatting racism, and anarcha-feminism and class.39 The conference’s theme was “Anarcha-Feminism: Growing Stronger,” which referenced the growth of anarcha-feminist theory and action since its inception. A packet given to conference attendees contained an essay called Tribes by Martha Courtot, which echoed conference goers’ feelings about building anarcha-feminist community. “We tell you this: we are doing the impossible. We are teaching ourselves to be human. When we are finished, the strands which connect us will be unbreakable; already we are stronger than we ever have been.”40 Unlike purely cultural feminism, anarcha-feminists connected this strength and community to a larger fight against domination. Both their personal lives and organizing efforts in mixed movements like the ecology movement were important parts of their politics.

Historian Barbara Ryan argues that the “small group sector” of the feminist movement virtually disappeared by the mid ‘70s, due to ideological and practical conflicts within the movement and the influence of liberal feminists, who advocated larger structured organizations.41 However this frequent narrative, which emphasizes the fast rise and fall of small CR groups, negates the crucial contributions of anarcha-feminists, who continued to organize within small, decentralized, and leaderless feminist collectives throughout the 1970s. Radical feminists extended the CR group’s anarchistic structure to a variety of other projects, such as domestic violence shelters, living collectives, and periodicals, many of which continued to support women through the late 1970s and into the 1980s. According to Helen Ellenbogen’s 1977 review of anarcha-feminist groups, many of these collectives were not explicitly anarchist but “intuitively anarchist,” such as the grassroots domestic violence shelters in Cambridge and Los Angeles where anarcha-feminists worked and observed practices like discouraging women from calling the police to deal with abusive males.42 Ellenbogen remarks on how anarcha-feminists joined women’s health clinics in Los Angeles, Seattle, and Boston, which resisted cooperation with the state and utilized collective process.43 In a 1972 article in Siren, Los Angeles anarcha-feminist Evan Paxton explained the anarcha-feminist principles of these self-help clinics, including the one where she worked. Clinics gave “women the confidence and knowledge to take care of their own bodies, which is essential in the struggle for self control.”44 Women’s health clinics helped women avoid the paternalism of (usually male) doctors and gain self-control.45

The self-described gay anarcho-feminist printer Come! Unity Press explicitly connected their political philosophy to their organizational structure. Founded in 1972, the press published Anarchism: The Feminist Connection, feminist writings of Emma Goldman, an issue of Anarcho-Feminist Notes, and other classic anarchist writings, like the speeches of Sacco and Vanzetti.51 Notably, they allowed members to decide for themselves how much they could afford to pay for the use of their printing facilities, which exemplified their anarcha-feminist philosophy of “survival by sharing.” The women of the press wrote in 1976, “As anarcho-feminists we want to end all forms of domination. Money is a…tool of power. It is a means of enforcing racism, sexism, or starvation and control over basic survival.”52 In a 1976 article critiquing “feminist businesses” in The Second Wave, Peggy Kornegger praised this model, and wrote that the press’ “‘survival by sharing’…certainly demonstrates if nothing else, that there are ways of confronting capitalism that don’t involve either power or control—and that work!”53 This alternative economic model helped the feminist movement, and its own members, survive.

Anarcha-feminists also worked within the larger anarchist movement, attending anarchist conferences and confronting sexism in mixed groups. Anarcha-feminists attended the Anarchs of New York sponsored Live and Let Live Festival in April 1974. Anarcha-feminist groups like the New York Anarcho-Feminists and Come! Unity Press participated along with several hundred other conference goers, and the final schedule included four anarcha-feminist workshops amongst many other unscheduled lesbian and anarcha-feminist discussions and meet-ups. The feminist periodical Off Our Backs included a report on the conference written by two anarcha-feminists, Mecca Reliance and Jean Horan.54 Reliance, who attended both mixed and impromptu women-only workshops on anarcha-feminism, wrote that the mixed workshop was uninteresting and focused on the abolition of the nuclear family, apparently the only comfortable topic for the many male attendees, while the women-only workshop was energetic and facilitated a focus on organization and internal process.55 This mirrored one impetus towards separatism in the radical feminist movement: male dominated meetings in the New Left led women to censor their thoughts and long for an environment where they could speak freely and determine their own agenda.56Anarcha-feminists also attended the 1975 Midwest Anarchist Conference, and experienced several incidents of sexism, such as a man trying to take a hammer away from Karen Johnson, assuming that she could not use it because of her gender. However, the man eventually accepted her and other women’s criticism of his actions.57

Anarcha-feminists experienced sexism in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) meetings, and conflicts over sexism in anarchist periodicals like the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation Bulletin and The Match confirmed that many male anarchists shared the sexist attitudes of their Marxist counterparts.58 These attitudes encouraged separatism, but some anarcha-feminists worked in mixed collectives. Grant Purdy, a member of the Des Moines anarcha-feminist The New World Collective, which existed from 1973-76, wrote an article about her group’s experience in a mixed anarchist group called the Redwing Workers Organization (RWO) in the Spring 1977 issue of Anarcha-Feminist Notes.59 RWO focused on healthcare organizing, but the women in the group pushed feminist perspectives and led the group to treat personal struggles as political ones.60 She argued that despite frustrations, women could thrive in mixed groups if they created separate women’s groups outside of the larger organization, as the Des Moines women did. Women in mixed anarchist organizations taught male anarchists about their own misogyny and learned new skills from their comrades.61 However, for anarcha-feminists like Purdy, “involvement with men has always been conditional. Men are clear that they are not a priority for us over other women.”62 These separate women’s support groups and their presence at conferences illustrate how anarcha-feminists brought their ideas and organizational styles to the male anarchist movement as the radical feminist movement declined.

From the beginning of the movement. anarcha-feminists differentiated socialist feminists and their theories from the traditional male socialist Left. In a 1971 article in the first issue of Siren, Arlene Wilson’s Chicago-based anarcha-feminist group emphasized that anarcho-feminists “are all socialists” and “refuse to give up this pre-Marxist term,” and continued, “We love our Marxist sisters…and have no interest in disassociating ourselves from their constructive struggles.” In 1974 Black Rose anarcha-feminist Marian Leighton commented that socialist feminist literature is not “narrowly dogmatic or opportunistic”63 like that of traditional male Marxists. Rather, it could be included in anarcha-feminist analysis. Anarcha-feminist film maker Lizzie Borden argued in a 1977 article in feminist art journal Heresies that Marxist women like Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollantai, and Angelica Balabanoff came closer to anarchism in their opposition to bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and the subversion of the revolution by the Bolsheviks than their male comrades.64 However, like Leighton, she emphasized that these anarchistic tendencies stemmed from socialization and lack of access to power, not simple essentialist understandings of gender. As Carol Ehrlich wrote in her 1977 article Socialism, Anarchism, and Feminism, which appealed to socialist and radical feminists to embrace anarchism, “Women of all classes, races, and life circumstances have been on the receiving end of domination too long to want to exchange one set of masters for another.”65 Leighton, Kronneger, and Ehrlich argued the defining distinction between radical feminism and anarcha-feminism was largely a step in self-conscious theoretical development.66 Thus, it was feminists’ unfamiliarity with anarchism that led them to embrace Marxism, although their ideology, “skeptical of any social theory that comes with a built-in set of leaders and followers” held more in common with anarchism.67

Anarcha-feminists combined aspects of radical, cultural, and socialist feminism, but added a critique of domination itself. Unlike socialist feminists they saw non-hierarchical structures as “essential to feminist practice.”80 Both radical and anarchist feminists dedicated themselves to building prefigurative institutions, a task socialist feminists did not always see as a vital part of their revolutionary program.81 While cultural feminists often rejected “male theory” and their roots in the New Left in favor of a de-politicized approach to feminism, anarcha-feminists combined emphasis on building a women’s culture with a strong theoretical perspective and class-consciousness. Constantly learning from other feminists and adjusting anarcha-feminist theory accordingly, rather than dogmatism, was a crucial feature of anarcha-feminism and part of the reason anarcha-feminists participated in such a variety of movements. Su Negrin wrote that “no political umbrella can cover all my needs” while Kornegger argued that it was crucial to break down barriers between feminists. As she wrote in 1976, “Although I call myself an anarcha-feminist, this definition can easily include socialism, communism, cultural feminism, lesbian separatism, or any of a dozen other political labels.”82 Anarcha-feminists learned from women in other parts of the feminist movement, despite their disagreements.

The movement’s debate over structure and leadership gave the new anarcha-feminist position relevance and strategic value. An anarchistic commitment to equality and friendship structured feminist political organizations and fostered egalitarianism and respect, and reinforced mutual knowledge and trust, but when groups became clique-like and elites emerged, feminists utilized various structural methods to ensure equality.83 Radical feminist groups utilized lot systems to distribute tasks in an egalitarian manner, disc systems that ensured equal speaking time by distributing an equal amount of discs to members at the beginning of the meeting and instructing them to give one up each time they spoke, and collective decision-making through consensus or other means.84 They viewed women’s capacities as equal but stymied by their socialization, and empowered thousands of women to write, speak in public, talk to the press, chair a meeting, and make decisions for the first time.85

Historically, anarchists grappled with the same questions of structure, organization, and prefiguration feminists were debating. These examples of political education and fluid structures that rotated tasks and leadership would help feminists watch for elites without resorting to voting or hierarchical models of organization.

As the anti-nuclear movement emerged and gained strength through the Seabrook nuclear power plant occupation, and later the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown incident, anarcha-feminists shifted their activity to large mixed-gender coalitions of affinity groups.104 Many anarcha-feminists who attended the 1978 Anarcha-Feminism: Growing Stronger conference sponsored by TIAMAT met up at the Seabrook anti-nuclear demonstrations, which attracted thousands to participate in non-violent civil disobedience to occupy the plant.105 Tellingly, when Tiamat eventually dissolved, members joined a women’s anti-nuclear affinity group, the Lesbian Alliance, and others worked with a mixed group on ecology issues.106Although they usually participated in women-only affinity groups, they interacted with men and authoritarian male politics in the larger movement. Anarcha-feminists also formed collectives in universities like Hunter College, Cornell, and Wesleyan.107 Often influenced by the writings of Murray Bookchin, who advocated political study groups, these affinity groups became the primary organizational model of the anti-nuclear direct action movement just as the similarly structured small group was the organizational model of the radical feminist movement.108