Spencer Beswick

The importance of reproductive autonomy/freedom is also explored in Spencer Beswick’s article ‘“To Repulse the State from Our Uteri”: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power.’ As with many of the contributions in this volume, Beswick’s article enriches the dominant historical narrative by focusing on an individual or collective whose contributions might otherwise be overlooked. In this case, the focus is on how USA anarcha-feminists ‘mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level’ in the 1990s (Beswick, 2024). In contrast to the liberal feminist approach of petitioning the state for reforms, anarcha-feminists understood abortion restrictions as ‘a form of state violence’ and ‘the state itself as the ultimate patriarchal institution and the source of much of the violence they faced’ (90- 91). While reading this article, I was struck by how contemporary feminist discourse is rightly moving to understand abortion access in these terms, and how it would benefit the movement to revisit some of the praxis Beswick outlines here. Alternative understandings of abortion care emerging from feminist praxis that are also worth engaging and that have some parallels with anarcha-feminism include work on acompañamiento and self-managed abortion by Madeleine Belfrage (2023), Lucía Berro Pizzarossa and Rishita Nandagiri (2021), Deirdre Duffy, Cordelia Freeman and Sandra Rodríguez Castaña (2023), and Julia McReynolds-Pérez, Katrina Kimport, Chiara Bercu, Carolina Cisternas, Emily Wilkinson Salamea, Ruth Zurbriggen, and Heidi Moseson (2023).

Great paragraph on my article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri: Anarcha-feminism, Reproductive Freedom, and Dual Power," which explores how "anarcha-feminists mobilized to defend abortion clinics from the Far Right and taught themselves how to perform reproductive care at the grassroots level"

It "is an urgent and necessary contribution... [we] need critical scholarship to help us name and contest state violence, and to create alternative visions of the state, society, and the future... The collection also left me feeling hopeful – a rare feat for academic scholarship in dark times."

Great review of the special issue of @radhistreview.bsky.social on "Feminists Confront State Violence" by @resmyth.bsky.social, which includes my article "To Repulse the State from Our Uteri" (among many great pieces!). www.lectitopublishing.nl/Article/Deta...

Photo of two hippies at a protest in the 1960s holding a sign reading "bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."

If Donald Trump is the "Peace President," it brings to mind the old slogan from the protests against the Vietnam war: "bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity."

Michael Parenti: "Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a 'New Order' while serving the same old moneyed interests."

Yup, and it was much easier for many of them to pivot to supporting the invasion than to concede that Putin would do wrong and stupid things.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine four years ago, a coterie of voices on the left insisted that Putin would never invade because it would be wrong and stupid. For most, there has still been no reckoning with the core problems of their analysis that led to being so completely mistaken.

Cover of the pamphlet "Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12" by Peter Linebaugh

The Luddites were right and we've been lied to about them for over 200 years. Read the great historian Peter Linebaugh's account in "Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12" from @pmpress.bsky.social pmpress.org/index.php?l=...

Nietzsche: "To be sure, we need history . . . we need it for life and for action, not for the easy withdrawal from life and from action . . . We only wish to serve history to the extent that it serves life."

Marx: "If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some *other man than the worker.* If the worker's activity is a torment to him, to another it must be *delight* and his life's joy."

Remember when One Battle After Another came out and conservatives scoffed at the Hollywood fantasy of federal troops violently occupying a city against a scrappy "woke" resistance defending undocumented immigrants? Well, *gestures broadly.*

"Antifa are the real fascists" they repeat, as they send masked paramilitary forces door to door to terrorize and ethnically cleanse the nation.

I hope the seven House Democrats who voted to fund ICE this week are haunted by the shame for the rest of their lives.

Conservatives, you don't have to support masked federal agents executing people in the streets and going door to door terrorizing people in their homes. You know in your hearts it isn't right, and it's time to say it. It's not too late.

In the 1960s, the right called MLK a race-baiting communist who hated white people. After he was killed, they spent a few decades pointing to him as a model of protesting "the right way." Now, they're moving back to branding him as a race-baiting communist who hated white people.

"Antifa are the real fascists" they repeat, as they send masked paramilitary forces door to door to terrorize and ethnically cleanse the nation.

At Texas A&M you can no longer teach woke anti-Western ideology like ...*squints*... Plato.

So many people's lives are getting measurably so much worse because of health insurance costs skyrocketing. Republicans and centrist Dems have no real solution. It's such a perfect time to push Medicare for All, a hugely popular policy that would transform everyone's lives.

At this point, it's hard to see January 6th as anything but a 21st century Beer Hall Putsch. First as tragedy, then as farce.

The developing line on Venezuela in some online MAGA spaces is that this regime change effort will work because--unlike Iraq and Afghanistan--there are no Muslims there. Truly incredible justification of a new war by the "peace president," no notes.

Learning about the history of US imperialism in Latin America radically changed my understanding of our country. I think most Americans truly have no idea, in part because it is completely ignored or whitewashed in school. Violent regime change has been the norm for a long time.

Screenshot of a session in the program for the American Historical Association conference titled "Spaces and Places of Convergence in 20th-Century American Radicalism, featuring papers by Kenyon Zimmer, Nathan Cirian, and Spencer Beswick, chaired and with comment by Christina Heatherton.

Looking forward to the panel I'm on at the American Historical Association conference in January, "Spaces and Places of Convergence in 20th-Century American Radicalism"! I'll be talking about a series of anarchist gatherings in the 1980s that helped build a continental movement.

I don't know if you're talking to me or the world, but I have never used Spotify in my life lol

For sure. Me, I just buy music on Bandcamp.

I don't need Spotify wrapped to tell me that my top genre this year was, once again, White Dudes Yelling About Their Big Feelings.

When Eugene Debs met Emma Goldman:
"Debs expressed views which Emma Goldman found very much like her own. Finally she exclaimed, 'Why, Mr. Debs, you're an anarchist!' Debs then clasped her hand and said, 'Not Mister, but Comrade; won't you call me that?'"

Father's anger at girl's potentially fatal testosterone dose The child, who was 15 at the time, was given the prescription by the private GenderGP clinic after one online counselling session

He has lost contact with his daughter - he does not even know what she got in her GCSEs - and now that she is 18, he no longer gets court-ordered medical updates. In the final one he learnt that she was booked in for surgery imminently.

Now he drives over with birthday presents but is not allowed in. He remembers the last time he saw her, after she had started taking testosterone. Looking at his photographs, he remembers dropping her home: "When she said goodbye, her smile was the same girly shy smile she had as a little girl. Somewhere in there is my daughter."

You might think from the headline that this is a story about a trans kid suffering medical consequences from a large drug dose but nope! It is just an interview with an estranged father who is angry that his child happily transitioned.

archive.ph/Tmthz

Why in the world is Verizon texting me trying to get me to open a high yield savings account? Something seriously funky is going on with financial institutions in this country.

Howard Zinn: "Civilization has failed on two counts: it has perverted the natural resources of the earth, which have capacity to make our lives joyful, and also the natural resources of people, which have potential for genius and love."

Blatant extortion.