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A new take on nonviolence (designer: Markley Morris; courtesy of Markley Morris)
The most novel aspect of Mayday, though, was its organizing plan. Unlike any national demonstration before it, this action was to be created through a decentralized structure based on geographic regions. “This means no ‘National Organizers,’” the tactical manual explained, in contrast to all the big DC marches and rallies that had come before. “You do the organizing. This means no ‘movement generals’ making tactical decisions you have to carry out. Your region makes the tactical decisions within the discipline of nonviolent civil disobedience.”16
This approach reflected a major shift in activist temper over the previous two years or so: a growing disdain for national organizations, movement celebrities, and structured leadership, all of which were felt to stifle creativity and action. “Following the disintegration of SDS,” the radical magazine Liberation explained, “there were many in the movement who were thoroughly disillusioned with the whole idea of a national political structure. They came to feel that authentic radicalism must grow out of involvement in local or small-group activity, that it cannot flourish within a national organization.” The now-defunct SDS certainly came in for special scorn, along with the “movement heavies”—influential or hardline radical men—who so often represented the group to the media. But the criticism also extended to the national antiwar movement in its various organizational guises, which had “really well-known people who were on the letterhead and [acted as] spokes-people for the movement,” as Ed Hedemann of the War Resisters League put it.17
A pamphlet published by an anonymous group of West Coast activists not long before Mayday (and circulated among anarchists ever since) outlined an underlying critique of the very idea of a national or mass movement. Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives defined “the mass” as an intrinsically alienating and repressive structure of capitalist society, designed purely to facilitate consumption. Radicals who aspired to create a mass movement—like the Socialist Workers Party with its April 24 NPAC march and rally—were reproducing the very structure they should be challenging. “We don’t fight the mass (market) with a mass (movement),” the essay argued. “This form of struggle, no matter how radical its demands, never threatens the basic structure—the mass itself.” The antidote to mass society, the pamphlet declared, was a decentralized movement based on small, self-organized collectives.18
A related impulse toward decentralization characterized the radical identity-based movements that had emerged between 1966 and 1969—the multihued array of “power” movements (Black Power, Puerto Rican Power, Chicano Power, Yellow Power, Red Power), and the women’s and gay liberation movements. A central theme of each was the question of representation: who speaks for whom; who makes decisions, and in whose name. As Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their influential 1967 manifesto Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, “Black people must redefine themselves, and only they can do that. Throughout this country, vast segments of the black communities are beginning to recognize the need to assert their own definitions, to reclaim their history, their culture; to create their own sense of community and togetherness.” By 1971, identity-based movements were fixtures of the radical landscape, whose very existence challenged the idea of an overarching ‘capital-m’ Movement that could speak with one voice. A mass movement—or, to put it another way, a movement of masses—seemed to drown out difference in the name of unity, something that many activists could no longer accept.19
The radical women’s liberation movement made this challenge to mass or national organizing explicit. Its signature contribution to radical activism was the assertion that the personal is political, a proposition that was electrifying in its day. Building upon the New Left project of countering personal alienation by uncovering “the political, social, and economic sources of [one’s] private troubles” (to quote from the 1962 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS), the mostly white radical feminists of the late 1960s and early 1970s made consciousness-raising a centerpiece of their politics. This process of self-examination and collective discussion was best suited for small groups, which facilitated greater intimacy and internal democracy than large organizations. By the early 1970s, the small group was the predominant radical feminist form, characterized by “a conscious lack of formal structure, [and] an emphasis on participation by everyone,” in the words of organizer and theorist Jo Freeman. Though Mayday could hardly be termed a feminist initiative—there was a women’s tent and a women’s contingent, but the mobilization was planned and shaped by New Left men—the decentralized and radically democratic organizing principles of the women’s liberation movement helped shape the larger political climate that gave rise to the Mayday Tribe.20
The Mayday organizers proposed that everyone who wanted to help shut down the federal government organize themselves into “affinity groups.” Affinity groups are small assemblages of roughly five to fifteen people who take part in an action jointly, planning their participation collectively. Mayday was the first time they were used in a large-scale national demonstration in the United States, as well as the first time they were used in an explicitly nonviolent context. Affinity groups have been a recurring feature of many large protests since and a defining structure of a great deal of direct-action organizing. Movements with such wide-ranging concerns as nuclear power, US military intervention in Central America, environmental destruction, AIDS, and global trade agreements have organized their actions on the basis of affinity groups; they have been especially important to movements that have explicitly defined themselves as nonviolent. There’s an irony there, for these groups began as underground guerrilla cells, and entered US radical circles through the most violent segment of the white New Left.
The term dates back to Spain in the late 1920s and 1930s, when small bands of militants from the Iberian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.) undertook a series of guerrilla actions: first against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; next against real or suspected fascists during the Spanish Republic; and finally, against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. They called their underground cells “grupos de afinidad,” explained Murray Bookchin, the writer and social ecologist who first introduced the term to the United States, “because people were drawn together not by residence, not even by occupation, but on the basis of affinity: friendship, individual trust, background, history.” The groups reflected both anarchist ideals of free association and military needs for security. The stakes were tremendous: a small slip-up could lead to torture and death. Because affinity groups were small and formed only by people who knew each other well, they were difficult to infiltrate or uncover. Because the groups acted autonomously, with no central command, the discovery or destruction of one would not obliterate the underground altogether.21
The phrase and structure entered the New Left in the United States around 1967, when some in the movement were beginning to reject the philosophy of strict nonviolence and shifting, as the saying of the time went, “from protest to resistance.” Initially, that meant employing “mobile tactics” during demonstrations, notably the fall 1967 Stop the Draft Weeks in Oakland and New York. Sitting down and awaiting arrest increasingly seemed only to invite beatings from the police—and to accomplish little or nothing in the process; nonviolence had come to seem like passivity. Young militants began to experiment with more chaotic and aggressive measures: dragging mailboxes or automobiles into the streets to serve as temporary blockades; blocking traffic; remaining always in motion in order to create “disruptive confrontation.”22
To pull that off well, you needed some kind of agile, streetwise organization—something, perhaps, like “a street gang with an analysis.” That’s how Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers, the SDS chapter from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, defined the affinity group in a broadside published around 1968. The Motherfuckers, in their own words, were “flower children with thorns,” a fierce and disruptive group devoted to creating a “total break [from the present]: cultural, political, social, everything.” Ben Morea, the founder of the Motherfuckers, had learned about affinity groups from conversations and debates with Bookchin, who had done extensive research during the 1960s