“Absorption of anarchism into the left” lmao from where? Itself? Like one of those twins people absorb in the womb? Anarchism has been part of the arc of the left for 200 years. This isn’t disputed by any reputable left wing historian, even anti-Anarchists. https://twitter.com/martymacmarty/status/1284379079521828864
I mean, before the rise of the USSR, anarchism was THE dominant form of leftism the world over—spanning Europe, to the entire colonial ‘periphery’, to the IWW & others in the US.
Even with the USSR’s rise, it more or less took until the Spanish Civil War for the anarchist movement to become more fractured & divided yet, anarchists played key roles in the revolutions in China, Korea, Cuba & nearly every other revolution aborted or completed.
Anarchism continued to play a large role in Latin American leftism, well into the 70s. After WWII, the waning of anarchism elsewhere was driven by the fact that it was brutally repressed in the US & Europe, & the USSR & PRC supported ML & Natlib groups in the Cold War.
But Anarchism’s influence didn’t die—the supposed end of anarchism was actually something else—indeed, in Europe, America, the Anglo States & Latin America, anarchism, as well Trotskyism, Leftcommunism, Libsoc & Social Democracy, all were absorbed into the rest of the left
I don’t mean the institutional left—obviously not the Democratic or other Neoliberal parties—and Eurocommunism is another chapter, but anarchism, & other anti authoritarian forms of leftism exerted immense influence even as their ‘official’ influenced faded for a while.
This culminated in the New Left, May ‘68, a rash of student & other movements in Latin America, and so on, but the world over a period of reaction began in the 70s, of which the complete arc only became apparent by 2007-2011 or so.
This wave of reaction brought us the subversion of the left, the institutionalization, recuperation & neoliberalization of where it wasn’t destroyed, the rise of reactionary movements like Neoconservatism, authoritarian developmentalism, Fundamentalism Islamism, and more.
This, as we know, culminated in the end of socialist & other projects in the Gloval South, the rise of authoritarian nationalism, the breaking of labor, Reaganism, The Washington Consensus, the end of Arab Nationalism & the eventual break up & collapse of the Soviet Bloc
In this period, from the 80s to 90s, leftism became more or less a joke—it’s not that it ever ceased to exist, it didn’t, but its influence on the broader culture, its large scale geopolitical components, and it’s supposed institutional affiliates had all moved on.
Thus we get New Labor,the Third Way,technocratic Silicon Valley California style ideology, ‘The End of History’,the triumph of capitalism, and the integration of socialist & Global South states into global capitalism. That is,however,only if you listen to the hegemonic narrative.
Because exactly at this moment, large scale tectonic shifts were occurring, and anarchism was on the upswing in the most seemingly unlikely of places (only superficially tho, as it actually makes sense).
Exhaustion with the three or four seeming alternatives—authoritarian developmentalism, neoliberal globalization, installed RW governments, classic style ML groups & ceaseless guerilla warfare—and with the dissolution of the USSR & decline of the PRC’s support, change was brewing
As such, movements inspired by, borrowing from, & adjacent to anarchism, libertarian socialism, autonomism, left communism,anti authoritarian Marxism—often organic & homegrown, arose everywhere globalization ravaged from Oaxaca to Wales, Palestine to Prague & Sao Paolo to Seattle
Concomitant with this was the process whereby left theorists, intellectuals, academics, pundits, scholars, and others, ranging from dubious to legitimate, theorized the new situation. Those that didn’t buy in/sell out to Market socialism or Neoliberalism, arrived at anarchism.
They either did so explicitly—and often suffered professional consequences for it—or did so implicitly, arriving at anarchist & other anti authoritarian Marxist ideas, but branding them as something else.
What’s more, entirely new fields of struggles arose, due to either new problems or new space for very old problems—anti/alter globalization, indigenous rights, anti prison activism, a new anti imperialism, postcolonial struggles, & new forms of environmentalism.
Indeed, a set of common realizations emerged:
1. Globalization had more or less ‘won’ but this provided new alternatives in the disruption of the circuits of global capitalism
2. Traditional left wing party, guerilla & conspiracy cells had become impractical
3. The main task at present was the disruption of hegemony as such, because only in that space could movements actually form
4. Attention must be paid to all the struggles & identities given short shrift before
5. A central, perhaps THE central crisis of capitalism, was ecology
these have now become standard on the left, the world over, especially in light of the anti globalization movements (Anti-WTO, Zapatistas, etc), 9/11 & the war on terror, anti-War, the 2007 financial crisis, & the 2011 movements from Arab Spring to Occupy.
It’s hard to trace a configuration of the contemporary left that didn’t cut their teeth in connection to the above—& not just in Europe, US, Anglo world, the Global North & Latin America, but all over—Mexico, Brazil, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Korea, Japan
Of course the degree to which varies substantially and I do not want to center or privilege America and it’s supposed exceptionalism, nor Europe for that matter, billions of lives of history occurred outside those places, but globalization has its effects indeed.
Now, as a result, though many of these people do not consider their ideas anarchist—or other adjacent ideologies—nor know the historical traces, the fact is that most of what people even think of *as* the left is marked by this.
This makes OPs argument hilarious, as if you look to the:
1. origins of the left, anarchism is present
2. ‘heroic’ years & every successful revolution, it is there
3. decline & recuperation of the left, anarchism is less present
4. resurgence of the left, it returns
Now, I am not one to encourage a correlation & causality fallacy, but the fact is that during years of left wing birth & success, anarchism & other anti authoritarian leftisms, are present, and in the years of revanchism, recuperation, & institutionalization it is not.
What’s more, there’s a slight temporal asynchrony—anarchism doesn’t appear *after* arcs 1, 2, & 4, but just *before* & continues through their main waves & it doesn’t fade/sublimate at the *end* of the 3, but right before it.
Thus, altho we still can’t yet fully infer anarchism’s causal role in bringing these about, we *can* conclude that anarchism’s rise isn’t caused BY or after the rest of the left generally.
What I mean is that, correlation & temporal asynchry aren’t enough to establish causality, as the same long term ultimate processes could have caused both, but we *do* know that anarchism isn’t some aberration appearing after, as a result of & then integrated in the left.
To examine causality requires a host of other analyses, but during the split of the 1st International, when anarchists were expelled, the dominant strains of leftism were anarchism, organic workers mvmts like Paris Commune, Labor militancy, utopian socialism, & social democracy
By the 1900s, nearly all of these, but social democracy, had been folded into anarchism, and anarchism existed alongside social democracy & the movements that would become MLs. However, the foundation of the FBI, immigrant quotas & Interpol were for fear of *anarchists*
By 1914, anarchists were considered THE central threat to capitalism, the state, civil society, imperial & colonial concerns, and the war machine. Even anti anarchist historians admit they were key in every major labor event & victory, spanning the globe.
Why is the Internationalé sung? Why is May Day memorialized? Why were Labor wars fought? From whence did the dogma of social peace & accommodationist reforms emerge? Why did Lenin feel the need to critique Anarchists, & also Left SRs & Nihilists so vehemently?
Why did the USSR consider it of such importance to absorb or dissolve anarchists as well as other factions like the Left SRs, various Bunds, the Nihilists etc—institutionalization & hegemony consolidation explains the Mensheviks but not the rest—?
States don’t cooperate to form police agencies that weaken sovereignty, capitalists don’t voluntarily collude at the expense of profits, & socialists don’t see the need to subvert non viable competitors—and thus, for at least the period of 1800-1918 we can conclude causality.
Which means that for at least 1 of our 4 arcs, we can more or less establish the causal role of anarchists & adjacent movements—and as this was the founding arc, the one that resulted in the rest of the other forms like SocDems & MLs I’d say that’s pretty important
What about for the ‘heroic’ years? The other successful revolutions? The unsuccessful revolutions? And the wave of radicalism, immediately following WWII?
If you deny the role of the Spanish Civil War in either world politics or the left, you’re delusional, as it had ramifications for the start & conduct of WWII, the Molotov Ribbentrop, etc, as well as being the single defining moment for the global left until long after WWII
If you deny the role of anarchists and those adjacent in this, and want to downplay their successes & potential victories, you’re more or less going against the dominant understandings of history, even by anti Anarchist historians on the Left & right.
So the question becomes whither Anarchism?, and what causal role did it play? And what if its role in what I’m calling the heroic years and later revolutions ?
Most obviously, any decline of anarchism can be attributed to the following:
1. Repression & subversion by the capitalist powers
2. The rise of the USSR, its client states & other ML revolutions
3. The losses in Spain etc & repression by socialists
4. Recuperation
5. Cold War
Nonetheless, we can, up until now, ascribe a *causal* role continuing through post 1918, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the war & partisan resistance against fascism, & the post War revolutions, including in the PRC, Korea & the Colonial revolts
So, what events were key here:
1. Repression, immigration, speech, organization bans & so on, of different types in both capitalist & socialist areas—criminal anarchy laws still exist
2. The ‘bad rep’ played up by official stories acquired by attentat or those like Sac&Van
3. The Spanish Civil War, the beginning of WWII & ‘The God that failed’—Namely:
A. Allies refuse to support Spain
B. The mass international support
C. The loss in part due to betrayal by the Soviets
D. Molotov Ribbentrop
E. Revelations, true or false, of Soviet conduct
In quick succession , then, anarchism becomes formative due to Spain, then is subverted & betrayed, then the previous patron turns coat for geopolitical reasons & conduct is revealed, & then seemingly the allies out of nowhere now fought fascism.
However incorrect parts of this were in reality, it’s the perceptions & policies that mattered, and those drove this a certain way. Then during and after WWII, several events occurred.
4. A. Allies treaty—between the capitalists & Soviets, commented on by Trotsky himself
B. The Holocaust
C. The apparent betrayal of partisans
D. The Post war & post colonial movements
5. These, however, can only be narrated in sync with other events, concerning the Cold War:
A. The resumption of hostility between Soviets & Capitalists
B. Revolutions in China & Korea
C. American projections as fighters for freedom & welcoming of some refugees
6. And here’s where this might seem controversial, but also the role of Zionism, the founding of the State of Israel, the USSR’s opposition, then fundamental & foundational support, & then their opposition again. While the US welcome Holocaust refugees & became biggest supporters
4, 5 & 6 can’t be considered apart, are distinct but related events, and they affected not only anarchism but the broader left, but to the rest of history as well, but there are key stories here.
One effect of WWII and the Holocaust in particular, was intellectual, social, theoretical, & so on—Namely, an entire generation of intellectuals, radicals, organizers, theorists, academics, scholars & scientists were obliterated— either murdered or moved to US etc
While this was not unique to Jews by any means, in some countries—like Germany, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia & to a lesser extent Italy, Greece, France, Russia, and UK, Jews constituted a plurality of intellectuals especially on the left
For example, in Germany, some academic disciplines were majority Jewish despite them being a minority in the country, and until later events, in both Germany & the USSR, Jews were overrepresented among left wing intellectuals & party members, in some cases majorities.
Where both Jewish & Non Jewish intellectuals, radicals, organizers, leftists, & theorists were not murdered, the majority fled, primarily to the US, but also the UK, France, Latin America, & somewhat the USSR.
And where Jewish intellectuals & leftists specifically were concerned the vast majority went to the US, followed by Palestine & the UK.
This meant during the war & for a decade after, those intellectuals of whatever type that weren’t murdered ended up in the US etc & became more sanguine to it, due to their experiences. For Jewish ones specifically this was especially acute & many turned to Zionism as well.
This, on its own, changed the face of leftism, but then later developments, such as solidification of the Cold War, the apparent US tolerance vs. Soviet intolerance & the USSR & then the left turning toward Arab Nationalism & against Zionism cemented this.
As I’ve narrated elsewhere, the USSR originally supported Israel & partition (even as Jewish Marxists did not), was responsible for it winning, but, also, people forget the massive overlap between Polish, French & German Communist Partisans & Spanish Civil War Vets & Palestine
Thus, among the most ardent & brightest leftists & communists—whether scholars & intellectuals, or organizers & militants, if they did not end up dead, ended up in the Arms of the US, under Eastern Europe censorship, or in Palestine & Zionism.
The face of communism & Marxism generally shifted to the Global South, to the ‘Third World’ and away from Europe, Anglos & Americas, but as I said, anarchists played very large & acknowldged roles in the Chinese & Korean revolutions as well as the later Cuban.
They also played a role in nearly every independence movement, anti colonial struggle, communist movements & revolutions that didn’t succeed in Central, Caribbean & South America, in substantial parts of the Middle East, SE Asia, South Asia, & to a lesser extent Africa.
Thus we can establish the causal role of anarchism in the left for well after a decade after WWII—up to 1959 or so, and the 1970s in Latin America, but we also have part of the story of its decline & transformation & that of the left generally.
The influence of anarchists on the left continued thru the Spanish Civil War cohort,thru intellectuals & thru the New Left. But the campism of the Cold War,the geographic reorientation of the left, & the previous recuperation meant it & others influence was primarily intellectual
Thus, anarchists, leftcoms, Trotskyist, anti authoritarian Marxists, anti fascists, ecologists, the Frankfurt School, was primarily cultural, social, aesthetic, tactical & intellectual & was opposed by the reactions against these (Neocons, communists turned anti communist etc).
For sources on this I recommend:
1. Marxism & the Jewish Question — Traverso
2. Vivarium— Mueller (this is on the broader intellectual history)
3. Helge Kragh’s histories of Cold War science
4. Cold Warriors by White
(Cont.)
5. A series of works—‘Leo Strauss & the Politics of Exile’—Sheppard. Drury’s controversial & half false work on Strauss & Neocons. The book ‘Why Read Arendt Today?’, and some others i can recommend
6. Work on the Spanish Civil War & Anarchism generally
—Hochschild’s ‘Spain in Our Hearts’, Thomas’ history of the war, Cornell’s ‘Unruly Equality’, Marshall’s ‘Demading the Impossible’, and others i can DM
7. ‘A Living Revolution’ by Horrox, Beinin’s ‘Was the Red Flag Flying There?’, Budeiri’s ‘The Palestine Communist Party’, and the work of Uri Gordon
8. Also this paper https://cyber.sci-hub.tw/MTAuMTE3Ny8wMDIyMDA5NDA3MDg0NTU1/rein2008.pdf
9. And this paper
A. https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=360003072099001014065013120097007030020038002020063091107104065123118086105027064096041107021103057003062065094113001119097123062047011062068118076068116081093019005040011084083023085120119026122118006124028112111097086102122083101031097065119088087&EXT=pdf

B. https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/august/german-jewish-inventors-081114.html
Jewish émigrés who fled Nazi Germany revolutionized U.S. science and technology, Stanford economist...

U.S. patents increased by 31 percent in fields common among Jewish scientists who fled Nazi Germany for America, according to Stanford economist Petra Moser.

https://cyber.sci-hub.tw/MTAuMTE3Ny8wMDIyMDA5NDA3MDg0NTU1/rein2008.pdf
Anarchism & anarchists, as well as other dissident communists like Trotskyists, Left Communists, anti authoritarian Marxists & various Frenchies & Italians were never far from either the New Left nor the reaction to it, & continued to play roles in them
However, as I said, the struggle shifted to the three worlds—first world Capitalist (US, Anglo, Europe, Japan/Korea, client states), second world Socialist (USSR & Soviet Bloc), Third World/non-aligned (India, Ethiopia, Egypt), & straddlers (Yugoslavia between all 3, PRC 2/3)
And besides the grand politics of the competing powers, the main form of was proxy struggles within all these other places. In Europe, parties became institutionalized, factionalized & Euro-ized.
In the Anglo Countries save the US, a particular monarchist & imperial labor socialism was present. In US the corporatist compact. In many Soviet satellites dissent & then repression.
While small Trotskyist groups continued to play a marginal role in all non AES countries, especially as entryists but their primary influence was intellectual & cultural and primarily outside of the Soviet Bloc.
Anarchists, Trots, LeftComs, autonomists & others had influence in Latin America until the 70s & Southern Europe well past that , the bulk of the left was Soviet aligned, Third World Nat’list, New Left Or Recuperated SocDems.
Aside from Third World Liberation, anti Colonialism & ML, by far the biggest was Maoism, which influenced the left everywhere but the Soviet Bloc (for the most part), & Maoism, as Mao acknowledged, also owes much to anarchism.
Outside of the contours of the big four (ML/Soviet Bloc, Third Worldism, Recuperated Left, SocDems) the New Left form—much of it just the rebranded Old Left—in Europe, Anglo States, US, Global North and Americas
Aside from the big 4, the big practical & theoretical influence was Maoism, but culturally, intellectually & organizationally it was also anarchism, Trotskyism, LeftComs, anti colonialism, Bohemian counrercultural sentiment, & rising radical identity movements
We can also say the Frankfurt school exerted influence, as Did art & literary movements like surrealism & the Beats. But after that the big influences were French philosophy, culture, practice, Italians, American left wing intellectuals, Anti War, Black Radicalism, & so on.
The big defining events besides first China, and Korea and then Cuba, as well as the conduct in Europe & anti colonial liberation were the Cold War, the 50s cultural change, invasion of Hungary, the post war boom, the Vietnam War, Prague Spring, May 68 and so on.
These are defining in that they were often the outcome of long arcs involved here as well as cause for further more. Their influence lingered through the 70s & waves rode & crashed, ossification set in the USSR, the Sino Soviet split happened & more.
Additionally, the Post War boom and international order had begun to crumble. Social movements became recuperated as cultural & party movements. People grew up & confused cynicism for maturity. And one after another revolution was subverted by imperial & sometimes Soviet power
Unable to buy off labor with imperial & colonial rents, with unbalanced trade, with rising industrial powers, with massive expenditures on war etc, with labor & social movements, & with the Oil embargo came the next phase.
While proxy wars, coups & repression were continuous , and while it threatened nuclear war at any time, the US & USSR’s relationship vis a vis each other had more or less stabilized—now fractures were occurring WITHIN each of the ‘worlds’
Riding on the backs of this, came the waves of reaction, the cries for social order, and so on, and Breton Woods collapsed, the dollar & petrodollar became dominant, finance was used to break the backs of managers & labor, as was direct repression & deregulation.
Thus formed the constellation of what came to be known as Neoliberalism, Financialization, Globalizstion, the Washington Consensus, Neoconservstism, Monetarism, the New Right, Islamic Fundamentalism, Multinationalism, the Petrodollar, Reaganism, and more.
From all sides this ripped the social order asunder, and the left went on the back burner—by this time, anarchism had already been edged out & lived on thru echoes & dreams—still present, but not much acknowledged & the left everywhere retreated.
This reached its height when by the 80s the whole world had more or less fallen into control of the 1st or 2nd factions, and right wing govts repressed everywhere.
The combination of this, Cold War expenditure, aid, oil shocks, subversion, capital exhaustion, ossification, Soviet institutional factional struggles, the Afghan war, internal dissent/reformism, & the Sino Soviet split culminated in the rapid fall of the Soviet Bloc.
1991 was the watershed year, altho Perestroika/Glasnost & the Soviet Afghan war dates to 79 in proposal & initiation, respectively—the former began in 85, and the latter ended in 89, which is also when pressures mounted at their highest peak.
The right had assumed control in almost every 1st & many 3rd world countries—whether as Right wing capitalism, Islamism meant to subvert Arab Nationalism & Islamic Socialism,To US installed dictators, to Neoliberal Labor Parties,to the RW & religious parties from France to Israel
I have hopefully successfully convinced you that anarchism played a causal role in the first 2.5 waves of leftism (more like several—origin, rise, victories, revolutions, global left, heroic year, post war, second wave of revolutions), then declining in prominence
Even during the period where it declined in prominence, it and adjacent ideologies exerted other kinds of powerful influences, some more subtle than others, including in brief sudden rise of new leftists, & taken down in the reaction against it
This means that anarchism & its adjacents played some role in the successes of the left in some places this period, but had already been pushed on the back burner, & while it exerted subtle influence can’t be held causally responsible for the pushback against the left.
It also can’t be blamed for the fall of the USSR, which some galaxy brained people claim (and shich anarchists & Trotskyists were among the first to predict, as well as the Sino Soviet split), but instead it germinated, exerting softly
Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, the seeming defeat & total recuperation/institutionalization Of the left, and the flow of capitalism into the former AES states & PRC, came a new era, one whose long arc contains our present (altho this May be its end—Owl of Minerva etc)
With the seeming discredited nature of other leftism, with seeming hegemony, with seeming end of History, with novel pressures, and without many continual lines, people were forced to adapt & innovate.
In light of this, the entire world over, but especially in Mexico, Central & Latin America, Central Asia & Middle East, and large parts of Africa & SE Asia, organic home grown left wing alternatives began to form.
Meanwhile, in the US, Europe, Anglo countries, etc, the left that wasn’t absorbed or destroyed, the descendants of the New Left, Amon students & academics & in light of novel struggles, new theorization began again.
The central questions were:
1. How does one fracture the Neoliberal hegemony to create space for the left?
2. What to do with globalization & the postcolonial world ?
3. How to analyze the collapse of the Soviet Bloc & ‘end of history’?
4. How to integrate both the idealistic—cultural, social, personal, aesthetic, artistic & intellectual, & material—race, gender, sexuality, identity, disability, prisons, environmental, indigenous, anti imperial, etc struggles w class & traditioal struggles to success for both?
5. How to deal with the vast changes in political economy which has severely altered the structure of production & exchange globally & changes the demographics, composition, position, and so on of labor, class & traditional boundsries?
6. What to do with the kinds of alliances of the New Left and/Or Maoism—students, intellectuals, lumpen, subalterns, peasants, etc with each other & workers, without falling into New Left traps or into Maoist tactics where they aren’t viable ?
7. What to do about the long-standing influence of professionals, skilled tradesmen, bureaucrats, labor aristocrats, & petty bourgeois on the left, esp institutional left, in most places outside the 2nd world (Cont)
7. (Cont) especially given the irony that while these forces played a large role in recuperation & institutionalization, from the populist right, to New Labor, to reactionary unions, etc, their positions have also been vastly eroded by capitalism & their own efforts
8. What to make of new technology, ICT, computation, biotech, space tech, as well as the military industrial complex, tech industry, the booms they caused & so on, if anything

This continued until the 00s when several new questions were rapidly added
9. What to do make of the War on Terror & Wars in Iraq, the rise of Neocons & Evangelicals & religious fundamentalists elsewhere, and the seeming division of the world into patriotic blocs & stultification of leftism into groups of kooks & weirdos
10. How to theorize the above, combined with the collapse of American security fantasies, the rapid turn against liberal democracy, the 2007 financial crisis & seeming invalidation of capitalism & then mass movements in response ?
We are still asking & answering these questions, or arguing for better or newer phrasings. Suffice it to say, anarchists played a role in the formulation, asking & answering to these questions and all the material components correlated thereof.
Indeed, this period of soul searching from, say, 72-2016 (divided into sub eras 72-80, 80-91, 91-01, 01-07, 07-11, 11-16) was a long slow burn of the rediscovery of anarchism & adjacent ideas, either independently & then analogized/allied, or by direct citation
Indeed, during this time the left fractured into several—old guard SocDems dreamers, recuperated bureaucratic Neoliberal, identity politics focused, third party irrelevance, conspiracy kooks, think tanks & professional activist grifts, or increasingly dated ML parties etc
And tho I’ve been charitable to Trots so far, they fall into the above group, but it was the anarchists, left communists, autonomists, anti authoritarian Marxists, organic intellectuals, ecological, indigenous & postcolonial struggles that remained vibrant & committed
Another path that is interesting in its own right but consigned to marginal influence were attempts to theorize new kinds of leftism—either market socialism, or new democracy, or participatory economy, or exile, or ‘theory’ as we’ve come to see it & so on.
I mention this path after the rest, because it overlaps in parts with the 3 or so above tendencies (the bulk of the left, marginal groups like Trots, and the new vibrant traditions), as well as having its own independent form.
Suffice it to say, while the Neoliberal hegemony intensified, little could be won, but what few victories were achieved, & more commonly, where the worst was prevented thru pushback, since the 80s, anarchists & others have been heavily involved.
This is true for everything from prisons to pollution, globalization to gay rights, and more. Ranging from various anti war, environmental, globalization, indigenous rights & uprising victories, to much smaller tales of resistance against the worst.
And there isn’t a single left wing tendency or group in the world today that hasn’t been affected by the thin vice between the broad right Ward spring, the Neoliberal hegemony & crisis, and, on the other hand, the push from the other side by anarchists etc.
Even contemporary ML & SocDem groups saw a massive resurgence due to the Iraq War & anti war movement, the anti globalization movement, & the upswing of movements from 07-11 thru Occupy & other events
Many defining moments of the left in America and elsewhere—Anti war, 07, Occupy, Pipeline protests, Indigenous rights, Indignatos, Zapatistas, the Arab Spring, Rojava, & the recent upsurge of the left—heavily involved, &/or are adjacent to &/or were initiated by anarchists etc
Thus, when a milquetoast SocDem complains about the integration of anarchists into the left, they do So riding the wave made in part or in some case totally possible by anarchists & their fellow travelers. Their ahistorical whining is laughable.
An over used metaphor for discussing left wing revolutions is Saturn eating his children. So called Saturnalia is often attributed the cause of decline of the left, most frequently erroneously, but here, ironically, it’s undoubtedly true.
The literature on the some 250 years of history I covered is too vast, and in some parts too unsettled to cover all at once. My thread is impressionistic & expansive, and any individual sub part can be subjected to endless scrutiny & debate.
If your goals are endless scrutiny & debate or scoring pot shots & owns, please do so on your own time. For my part, I tried to acknowledge & be charitable to competing interpretations & respectful to ideologies i normally disagree w (MLs, Trots, etc)
Such a practice sometimes ends up pleasing no one in trying to please everyone, but alas, for those interested in good faith discussion, my DMs are open.
But, to breach some sources that could be useful:
1. All of the sources I mentioned earlier, esp
A. Marshall’s ‘Demanding the Impossible,’
B. Cornell’s ‘Unruly Equality’
C. Jones’ ‘More Powerful than Dynamite’
2. the volumes
A. ‘No Gods No Masters No Peripheries’,
B. ‘Decolonizing Anarchism’ & ‘Unsettling the Commons’
C. & despite the controversy & discrediting of the author, Schmidt & Van Der Walt’s work on ‘Black Flame’ & ‘Cartography’ Stand up on an academic level. Pirate them
D. Eley’s ‘Forging Democracy’,
E. Graham’s ‘We Do Not Fear Anarchy’
F. The book ‘Immigrants Against the State’
G. The books ‘Anarchism in Latin America’, and Gittlitz’ ‘I want to Believe’, & various specialized histories of anarchism in Cuba, China, Korea, Egypt, Japan
H. Leonard & Gallagher’s ‘A Threat of First Magnitude’ and the work ‘Heavy Radicals’
I. Bray’s ‘Antifa Handbook’ & ‘Translating Anarchy’
J. Works by Avrich, Serge, Trotsky, Kotkin, Ellman, Zimmerman, D Cohen, Nove, Popov, Putnam, Figes & Mieville on the USSR (a wide selection, on a variety of topics, DM if you can’t find them. Some I recommend more (Kotkin, Cohen) than others (Figes Or Trotsky lol)
K. Thomas, Dolgoff, Mintz, Orwell, Fraser, Brenan, Ayrton, Hochschild, Bookchin & others have written histories of Spanish Civil War of carying scholarly & other import, some, suffice it to say, more equal than others lmao
L. Priestland, Pantsov, Davin, Dirlik, Popov have written various accounts of The PRC I liked
M. The book ‘Wobblies of the World’, & the book ‘Wobblies & Zapatistas’
N. Ward’s works on anarchy, Goodways ‘Anarchist Seeds’, and Cohn’ ‘Underground Passages’
O. The larger scale histories & theoretical works of Eric Hobbsbawm, David Harvey, Mike Davis, Benedict Anderson, James Scott, and others
P. Grubacic & OHearn on Life on the Peripheries, Ruivencamp & Hilton on commonsing, the work of Hardt & Negri
Q. I’m not really one to cite works like this usually, but Guerin, Zinn, Chomsky, Bookchin, Goldman, and Berkman all have books on histories of anarchism, that are friendly to new readers but I don’t think are particularly, yknow, good.
R. The Ecocentrists by Woodhouse, ‘Green is the New Red’ by Potter, Slow Violence by Nixon, Wastelanding by Voyles, ‘Social Ecology After Bookchin’ by Light, Klein’s This changes everything
S. M Testa on militant antifascism, Dupuis Deri on Black Blocs, Gelderloos on Nonviolence and on anarchism generally
T. I suppose some histories of the Neoliberal transition are needed—for these Id see P Mirowski, Y Varoufakis, Panitch & Gindin, D Harvey, M Davis, G Krippner, W Greider, and Graeber’s Debt
U. Graeber gets his own section, because of ‘Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology’, ‘Direct Action’, ‘Revolutions in Reverse’, ‘Utopia of Rules’, ‘Democracy Project’ and ‘Possibilities’ all of which cover large parts of sections I’ve used especially for modern anarchism
V. It wouldn’t be much if I didn’t include some counter narratives (altho the perspectives represented above are vast already), for that Id see M Parenti, C Parenti, D Losurdo, & the Marxist Left Review on Makhno
W. Also some counter counter narratives, if you can stomach them—Leszek Kolaokowski on Main Currents of Marxism, Isaac Deutchers books, Norman Naimark, Arthur Koestler, Anne Applebaum, & Jonathan Sperber—altho save Sperber & Kolakowski, my opinion on These is similar to MLs lol
Y. Contrast Sperber & Kolakowski with Sven Eric Liedman’s hagiography, sorry I mean biography of Marx. Also contrast the Enzo Traverso book I mentioned above, Postones work on Marx, and on antisemitism, and Hannah Arendts works on these as well.
Z. Is as convenient an ending point as any, bc at this point I’ve listed 10 years of readings, so in a kind of louche manner, im going to end w links to my other threads on this subject not bc i think they’re good but bc they also contain bibliographies
This thread covers much of the same issues but focuses on the intellectual ‘ theory’ aspects of anarchism. Note the thread breaks in the middle, but continues, and i mention further sources https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1282775943124258819?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1282775943124258819
The sources here And below are relevant https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094724633662771205?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094724633662771205
My linked super thread on sources on anarchism, including many—probably half—of the authors & sources i mentioned above (hence why i didn’t go thru the effort to link them twice lol) https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094011044106813442?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1094011044106813442
This is a thread on the intellectual history of neoliberalism https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1046822285074747392?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1046822285074747392
Both of this source thread is irrelevant but it contains several links to works on intellectual history, economics etc, as well as authors alike Graeber and Varoufakis that I mentioned in other contexts above https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1100871365756882948?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1100871365756882948
**above should say most not both

Anyway hopefully the relevance of these links is self evident https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1057009748426584064?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1057009748426584064
From this tweet down is a meta thread of threads linking to various things concerning anarchist praxis etc https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1015396728856596485?s=21 https://twitter.com/yungneocon/status/1015396728856596485
And uh, yeah, i basically don’t ever have to write another thread again cus that just about covers it
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