"My name is Vermont, I do what I want!" The Vermont Family was a roving band of anarcho-punks that helped build connective tissue linking the dispersed US anarchist milieu in the late 1980s. A fun little 🧵 #AnarchistHistory #RadicalHistory 1/
The Family originally came together within the “Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament,” in which hundreds of people walked from Los Angeles to Washington, DC over the course of nine months in 1986. 2/
While many of the liberals dropped out or retreated to cars, a core group of anarchists coalesced to form a traveling “anarchy village” which grew from 15 to around 70 or 80 people. They ran the village through consensus and promoted anarchist politics within the march. 3/
After the march reached DC, the Family stayed together as a loose network of travelers, comrades, and friends. The name of the Vermont Family came from a sort of collective joke. One punk in the anarchy village shared a story he had heard about Vermont: 4/
Apparently it was written in the state constitution that in 1991, two hundred years after its founding, there would be a popular vote on whether the state would remain part of the country. Thus, a fantastical plan was hatched to convince anarchists to move to Vermont 5/
and push it to secede from the union. Shockingly, it turned out that Vermont had no such plan to put its status to a vote. But the moniker of Vermont stuck as both an inside joke and badge of identification, and many people in the crew adopted it as part of their action names. 6/
The Vermont Family stayed on the road until 1989. In their years of traveling, they played a crucial role thus far unacknowledged in the histories of the era: they helped establish the interpersonal connections that were necessary to build a continental network of anarchists. 7/
In the age of the internet, a former Vermonter later reflected, it is difficult to understand how an anarchist milieu could function in the 1980s. It required people to travel and make physical connections between far-flung local collectives and projects. 8/
Some of the Family traveled in an old bus while some hitchhiked; like a punk version of Ken Kesey’s Merry Band of Pranksters, the Family spread anarchy everywhere they went. A few of them even made their way to West Germany, 9/
where they lived in squats and participated in the larger, more militant movement there. They took what they learned back to the US, where they helped to popularize models from the German Autonomen: squatted social centers, infoshops, and black bloc tactics. 10/
When major actions or gatherings were planned in a US city, members of the Vermont crew would often show up months in advance, put down temporary roots, and help organize a bigger and better event. They also helped plan and organize a series of annual national convergences. 11/
The Crew stayed on the road until 1989, when a large number of them went to San Francisco to help organize the 1989 Anarchist Gathering. Finding fertile ground, many of them settled down for the long term in the Bay Area. 12/
They established several large collective houses that served as major hubs for both the local and national movement in the 1990s. Many of them remained active in Love and Rage, Anti-Racist Action, and other anarchist projects. 13/
I think we can learn a lot from the Vermont Family's approach to building capacity and connections in a joyful and militant fashion. 14/14
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