Love & Rage Archive

This is a Members Handbook that was produced by the New York Love & Rage Local in August 1997.

I would say that this is the best single document to download to get a whole picture of Love & Rage. It is the only L&R publication that included an organizational history, the draft of L&R's political statement, and documents on L&R's structure all in one place.

This document, written by Chris Day about the pre-history and history of Love & Rage, appeared in the NY L&R Member Handbook.

When people ask what Love and Rage is we usually offer an answer like “the Love and Rage Federation is made up of anarchist groups and individuals scattered across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. We publish two newspapers. We have engaged in such and such actions. And we share some basic politics which are ...” This sort of answer is never satisfactory. The Love and Rage Federation, like any political formation, can not be understood simply as a collection of groups and individuals, nor even in terms of our actions, or even our stated politics. The Love and Rage Federation is the product of its history. Understanding that history is the only way to understand why the Federation is the way it is and how it can move forward.

This is the version of this article that appeared in the L&R Member Handbook produced by the New York Local in 1997.

(A slightly different version of this article, written by Chris Day, originally appeared in Love & Rage, June / July 1996. Some of the points in the article were controversial within the organization, as reflected by the fact that another L&R member, Wayne Price, wrote a letter in response to the article, which was printed in the next issue of the paper. The controversies in this article mirrored controversies over internal documents circulating at the same time. Despite the controversy, this piece is the best we have for laying out the historical tradition with which Love & Rage most closely identifies. The version of the article printed here was edited to incorporate the criticisms and comments made about the original article. -the editor)

This is the announcement of the end of Love & Rage that appeared in the final issue of the newspaper.

After more than 8 years of hard work, the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation voted to dissolve itself during a brief conference at Hunter College in New York City on Saturday, May 23, 1998. Some participants in the conference spent the rest of the weekend laying the foundation for a new provisional organization, the Fire By Night Organizing Committee. Members of the another faction at the conference also announced their intention to launch a journal and a new organization. Neither of those projects has a name yet.

By Christopher Day

Talk of Peace... “If you want peace” the bumpersticker reads, “prepare for war.” The Mexican corollary to this bit of back-country wisdom seems to be “If you want war, make proposals for peace.” March was a month of peace proposals in Mexico with three major “peace initiatives” following in rapid succession. The first was from the newly-appointed Governor of Chiapas, Roberto Albores Guillen of the PRI (the Revolutionary Institutional Party that has ruled Mexico for 70 years). The second was from the right-wing PAN (National Action Party). And the third came from President Ernesto Zedillo, also of the PRI.

By Suzy Subways

On January 14, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani attacked the City University of New York’s open admissions policy in his State of the City address, claiming that the University has no “standards.” Within weeks, several CUNY Trustees and college presidents made proposals to limit remedial education and impose stricter entrance requirements on students at CUNY’s 17 colleges. These proposals sparked a series of student and faculty protests, but barely three months passed before the Trustees voted on May 26 to end all remedial classes at the senior colleges.

CUNY’s open admissions policy was won by radical Black and Latino students in 1969, with a long struggle culminating in a student strike at City College that had tremendous support from the surrounding Harlem community. At the time, the student body of City College was 94% white; it was called the “pearl of Harlem.” To open the door to higher education to all New Yorkers, the open admissions policy guaranteed a place at CUNY for everyone who has graduated from high school or earned a G.E.D. Now the majority of CUNY students are people of color and many are single mothers, immigrants, and poor people.

By Christopher Day and Jessica Parsons

First there was the waiting. The 1,111 Zapatista delegates to the Founding Congress of the FZLN (The Zapatista National Liberation Front) in Mexico City were supposed to arrive in San Cristobal de las Casas between two and five in the afternoon. A small crowd huddled under a tarp in the pouring rain to meet them in the cathedral square. Gradually the crowd grew. By eight o’clock the Zapatistas still had not arrived, but the rain had cleared and now about 2,000 people waited in the square. Music was playing from the stage; a few hot air balloons with “EZLN” painted on the side were released into the night sky, but still no Zapatistas.

By K-Dog

For fifteen days this August 185,000 Teamsters shut down United Parcel Service, forcing the world’s largest package delivery company to concede to all the union’s major demands including wage increases, expansion of full-time job opportunities and union retention of the workers’ multi-million dollar pension plan.

The strike, which pitted the largest union in the US against its biggest employer, was the most significant labor struggle in decades. It was widely seen as an attempt by organized labor to become a major player in society again after decades of concessions to corporations, shrinking membership, and declining influence with the rulers.

By Laura W.

January 22, 1998 marks the 25th anniversary of legal abortion in the US. A quarter century after women won this basic right on paper, the ability to control our reproductive lives is not a reality for most women. Cutbacks on welfare, lack of child care, dead-end jobs, lack of healthy birth control alternatives, men that won’t use condoms, lack of health insurance, lack of access health services including abortion and prenatal care, harassment and violence at our clinics, in our homes and in the streets are just a few of the obstacles to this critical aspect of women’s freedom. In anticipation of January’s anniversary I look forward to an ongoing dialogue about how to take back this battle, reframe it in terms of women’s lives and health—and win.

By Keith Mitchell

On August 29, over 10,000 demonstrators closed down southern Brooklyn in support of Abner Louima who was allegedly assaulted in the basement of Brooklyn’s 70th precinct. Marchers packed the trains in the early morning hours on the way to the rally’s starting point. An eclectic bunch of nuns, priests, whites, Latinos, and African-Americans broke down the barriers that partition everyday life in New York’s transit system, and spoke of a common disgust of the details of the Louima case and the high level of police abuse under Mayor Giuliani.

Among the groups participating in the rally were the October 22 Coalition, Refuse and Resist, Forever In Struggle Together (FIST), and ACT-UP! Tim, an activist in ACT-UP!, expressed the common ground between different groups in the city in reaction to the police “Brutality is often times used against our community as a means of intimidating, especially those who begin to speak out.”