Thread by @spencerbeswick

Smash the state and have a nice day! A poem from "Mob Action Against the State: Haymarket Remembered... an Anarchist Convention." This 1986 convention was a huge step forward for the rebirth of the US anarchist movement... #AnarchistHistory 🧵

This national convention, held on the 100 year anniversary of the Haymarket riot in Chicago, was the first in a series of annual anarchist conferences that helped re-establish anarchism as a national political movement.

Attendees came from a variety of anarchist organizations and tendencies, including Fifth Estate, the IWW, the Minneapolis Backroom Anarchist Books (which soon spawned the Revolutionary Anarchist Bowling League) and many small collectives from across the US and Canada.

Some participants in these annual conferences (Minneapolis 1987, Toronto 1988, San Francisco 1989) would go on to found the Mayday network, which became the Love and Rage Network in 1989 (and then the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation a few years later).

Others formed alternative national and regional networks, participated in Central America solidarity coalitions, organized infoshops, wrote zines, participated in Earth First!, helped build Anti-Racist Action, and were central to numerous other projects.

As the Soviet Union crumbled and neoliberal globalization remade the world, the US anarchist movement was reborn. This is some of the crucial pre-history of the explosion (supposedly out of nowhere) of anarchism on the streets of Seattle in 1999. #RadicalHistory