Love and Rage: Revolutionary Anarchism in the Late Twentieth Century
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This dissertation examines the post-1960s evolution of North American anarchism in order to rethink the role of the radical left during the neoliberal counterrevolution. I conducted oral history interviews across the United States, as well as archival research in the US, Germany, and the Netherlands, to investigate how anarchists responded to the new social terrain of the late twentieth century. The most significant US anarchist group of this era, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1989-1998), popularized a new vision of revolutionary anarchism that centered anti-racism and intersectional feminism. The dissertation uses Love and Rage’s story to tell a history of anarchism in the 1980s-1990s. I situate this history within the broader development of the left in this era, including Marxism’s decline, the rise of “new social movements,” and struggles against white supremacy, patriarchy, and fascism. Using a bottom-up approach enabled by oral history interviews and a transnational framework connecting Love and Rage with the Mexican Zapatistas and European radicals, I challenge the portrayal of this era as solely a period of retreat on the left. This methodology reveals the subterranean development of new forms of transnational social movements with shared commitments to intersectional anti-state politics rooted in but not reducible to class struggle. I ultimately argue that anarchism was revitalized because it provided compelling answers to new problems posed by the neoliberal counterrevolution: deindustrialization, right-wing backlash, and the demise of state socialism.
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Verhoeven, Claudia