What, exactly, is anarchism? Many anarchists resist embracing a solid definition, and their ideologies spill into other movements, such as antifa.
The Department of Justice declared Portland an “anarchist jurisdiction” on Sept. 21, and if you take a walk downtown, rampant graffiti depicting the notorious circle-A symbol appears to confirm the label.
But Portland historians show the movement deserves deeper context, and modern anarchists say the label is just another way to dismiss an ideology they claim, at its core, is mostly about community empowerment.
“It seems to have come from a fundamental lack of understanding of what anarchists are,” said Eli, a member of the Neighborhood Anarchist Collective in Eugene.
Street Roots granted Eli anonymity for this story after he explained that carrying the title “anarchist” comes with the threat of right-wing violence.
“It’s just them (the DOJ) trying to build up a bad name through bad press, and then associate specific areas with that name that they’ve created,” Eli said.
Britannica defines anarchism as a “cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary.”
But the Neighborhood Anarchist Collective, or NAC, is tame compared to connotations of their namesake. Eli explained that their primary role is putting together “share fairs,” where people in the community donate clothes, food and supplies to each other, free of charge.
The NAC resembles a co-op more than a political state, but the United States government still identifies anarchism as a threat and condemns cities that tolerate it.
The DOJ declared New York, Seattle and Portland “anarchist jurisdictions” based on four main criteria: when a jurisdiction forbids police intervention amid widespread violence, when a jurisdiction removes police from an area or structure without tactical reasoning, when a jurisdiction refuses aid from federal law enforcement or when a jurisdiction defunds its police department.
The press release specifically noted Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler’s refusal of federal law enforcement agents amid 100 days of “vandalism, chaos and even killing” as additional reasoning for labeling the city “anarchist.”
But Portland’s ongoing protests are far from being uniformly anarchist.
On Nov. 4, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported , while covering post-election protests, that when a Black Lives Matter group met an anarchist group near Portland’s riverfront, they refused to join. While the anarchists broke windows and chanted, “We don’t need permission to do anything,” Black Lives Matter organizers said they wanted to remain peaceful, to focus on vote counting and other election-related issues.
While anarchists generally agree in opposing hierarchy, the greater movement is not uniform, and finding a concrete definition among them is challenging.
“A lot of the people, for instance, have some kind of collectivist ideas, they have an idea that people can share resources,” Eli explained. “These are different kinds of currents within (anarchism), but none of those are things that we offer up as definitions.”
The self-proclaimed anarchist also noted that the history of anarchism is much different than what most people associate with the term. It manifests in unions and co-ops more than militias and Molotov cocktails, as Portland’s anarchist history shows.
••• In mid-1800s Oregon, settlers consistently arrived at the Willamette River, carrying the promise of a fertile utopia with opportunity for low-level work as lumberjacks, longshoremen and other blue-collar jobs. But as industrialization kept hours long and wages low, unrest sparked from the underground.
According to Alecia Jay Giombolini’s master's thesis for Portland State University, “Anarchism on the Willamette,” a group of anarchists in Portland started Firebrand in 1895, a radical newspaper designed as a platform for leftist ideas.
The paper’s founders had a “libertarian interpretation” of the American West and envisioned a “natural anarchist society” based on freedom and self-reliance.
In the thesis, Giombolini writes that combining radical-anarchist equality with their interpretation of Marxist Communism, the Firebranders saw potential for Portland to exist as an anarcho-agrarian state, which they felt embodied Thomas Jefferson’s visions of freedom.
But what they saw in 1800s Portland was massive inequality.
Giombolini’s research describes how poverty and homelessness were widespread in the city, and the Firebranders felt like the state’s cheap land and environmental resources were being squandered by capitalism.
According to Joe Streckert, a Portland-based historian and journalist, Portland was essentially an oligarchy, where a few wealthy people had control over the city’s political and economic spheres.
Due to the unrest and a general interest in labor rights, the Firebrand publication gained notable traction in Portland’s blue-collar community. But despite its popularity, a lawsuit against sending explicit content through the mail caused its discontinuation, according to The Oregon Encyclopedia .
Anarchism, however, continued to thrive in pockets of the Pacific Northwest.
••• One of the most prominent examples of an anarchist community in action was Home, Wash., where a group of progressives created an alternative anarchist lifestyle for themselves in the early 20th century.
Justin Wadland, author of “Trying Home: The Rise and Fall of an Anarchist Utopia on Puget Sound,” spoke to Street Roots about the history of this community, and how it set the stage for other anarchist movements in the region.
Around 1901, members of multiple disbanded communes around Puget Sound established Home as an anarchist commune, where people lived without hierarchy and in cooperation with each other.
Labor movements fighting for better working conditions were prevalent at the time, and anarchism had entered the political conversation following President William McKinley’s assassination by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz in 1901, but Wadland says Home, Wash., was somewhat removed from these happenings.
“It was like they were trying to carve out a little place where people could continue to live an agrarian lifestyle,” Wadland said.
To join the commune, you purchased land, usually two acres, and joined a mutual association, where the town was governed by a board of members.
“I think the thing that you got from living at Home was just a measure of freedom and lack of judgment,” the author explained.
The commune eventually attracted big-name writer and speaker Emma Goldman, who was more connected to the broader anarchist movement happening in the 20th century, to come talk to the community.
Goldman defined anarchy as “the philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary.”
The speaker and dissident brought Home into the nationwide consciousness surrounding leftism, and, according to Giombolini, claimed its southern neighbor, Portland, was the true birthplace of American anarchism.
Home’s anarchist community was eventually disbanded after a series of lawsuits brought on by neighboring communities.
According to Wadland, many of these suits were for things like nude bathing in the bay, which is just one way the community resisted the norms of its time, and another example of what was considered a step too far for the establishment to tolerate.
••• Anarchism kept a popular following in Portland throughout the 20th century, and many nonconformist groups adopted the notorious circle-A symbol that came to identify it. Today, Oregon’s largest city bears the symbol in the form of graffiti in its most contentious protest sites.
Far-left groups like The Pacific Northwest Youth Liberation Front and the Seattle Black Anarcho Coalition use anarchist imagery and language in their calls to action on Twitter, and they align with the anti-fascist dogma, or antifa, which has led to some conflation between the two movements.
Eli, of NAC, explained that most fail to understand the terminology at all.
“Antifa and black bloc are tactics,” the Eugene-based anarchist said, referring to groups that sport black clothes and show up at far-right rallies to counterprotest. “Antifa groups typically believe that directly confronting fascists in your community is one of the best ways to kind of keep them off balance and prevent them from organizing.”
Eli also said that anarchism embodies so many different ideologies that it’s hard to draw a clear line between them, antifa and black bloc. NAC’s goal remains set on getting community members involved in share fairs and other mutual aid events, as well as resisting fascism, but does not perfectly sync with antifa.
Joe Streckert explained that modern leftists and anarchists are much more focused on inclusion and tolerance toward minority groups than the generations before them.
“(Twentieth century leftists) were really radical when it came to labor relations and smashing capitalism, (but) less radical when it came to race and gender stuff,” Streckert said.
But even with a few clarifying distinctions from historical leftism, modern antifascists and anarchists, most resist defaulting to a solid definition.
According to Eli, the Neighborhood Anarchists are too focused on being accessible to everyone in their community to participate in any tactics or definitions that risk putting them in a box.
Portland remains an “anarchist jurisdiction” in the eyes of the DOJ, and protest groups that participated in the recent Red House Eviction Defense demonstration utilized the circle-A symbol in many of their photographs and graffiti. Some protesters have embraced the title and use it as their location marker for social media .
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