Early on in my radical development I was drawn to the ideas of anarchism. However I eventually drifted away from it, dissatisfied with its theory, practice and history. One of the influential documents on this evolution in my thought was this one, After Winter Must Come Spring. I hadn’t read it in some time, but I found myself reading it again the other day, for a critical paper I writing on the international resonance of Zapatismo for all things for one of my Masters seminars of all things.
I had, to an extent, forgotten how important the insights of it were on my own development. I have now decided to make it, as well as Christopher Day’s The Historical Failure of Anarchism (the other doc that influenced my movement away from anarchism), reading for the recently launched Red Path Society that I am involved in. For now I am posting it in full here for everyone else.
[Note: the version below comes from the one published by the Freedom Road Socialist Organization]
Introduction
Friends and comrades,
It’s an honor to introduce this thoughtful and thought-provoking evaluation by people who were core members of one of the most promising revolutionary organizations in the US in the last quarter century, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation.
As a revolutionary socialist coming out of the new communist movement of the ’60s and ’70s, I can understand why many in the generation after us would search for analyses outside of the Marxist left. There were our premature and arrogant declarations of revolutionary leadership for the US and the ensuing sectarian battles. There was our head-in-the-sand approach to problems in actually existing socialist countries and parties. Many of our groups tried to unite white and black workers around economic issues and refused to see the central importance of the fight against institutional racism.Internally, many organizations were male-dominated hierarchical structures with explicitly anti-gay lines. So it’s not surprising to me that many younger activists today look to alternative traditions such as anarchism for answers on how to make revolution. Read the rest of this entry »