The Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation
I recently spent a couple of days at the Kate Sharpley Library researching an anarchist organization that existed from the early 1970s through the late 1980s: The Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF). The “research” didn’t get very far—as I realized it would take a lot more than two days to dig through all the material in the KSL archive—but it went far enough to make me realize there’s a wealth of interesting historical material hidden in the group’s publications.
The few sources I’ve found about the SRAF say that it was formed in 1972, though some of the material at the KSL was published earlier than that. In Part 2 of his “Notes on Anarchism in North America” (Libertarian Labor Review 22, Winter 1997), Mike Hargis gives a brief snapshot of the group:
“The first attempt at anarchist organization in the post-SDS era was the Social Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (SRAF)… But SRAF was not an organization as such but a correspondence network open to anyone who called themselves an anarchist. Perhaps 20 to 30 groups over the dozen years of SRAF’s existence listed themselves on SRAF’s rolls but they were so disparate in outlook that any kind of joint activity was virtually impossible. Individualists cohabited with communists who cohabited with capitalists who cohabited with yippies—an unstable mixture if there ever was one. But, for all its faults, SRAF did provide a point of contact for the myriad of anarchist groups and individuals throughout North America, providing each with the sense of being part of a wider ‘movement.’ It certainly provided that function for this author. It was through SRAF that the Maine Federation of Anarchists, as we called our little group of troublemakers, first made contact with anarchists outside of out little bailiwick of Orono, Maine, and were able to participate in some of the debates going on in the movement in the early seventies. So, in that sense, SRAF was not a wasted effort; but as the decade of the seventies grew older anarchists and libertarian socialists became increasingly desirous of a more ideologically coherent formation.”
The SRAF was essentially a loose-knit, “synthesist” network of groups and individuals across North America. At their annual conference in 1977, a bloc of “dissident” SRAFers formed the Anarchist Communist Tendency, which split from SRAF a year later to form the Anarchist Communist Federation (members of which went on to found the Workers’ Solidarity Alliance in 1984).
While I tend to be, uh, constitutionally indisposed to the chaos-factor inherent in groups like the SRAF, it is precisely their wild diversity that makes them such an interesting group to study. The fact that there were no rules regarding who could join, not to mention no ability for anyone to be expelled, meant that they put out a kaleidoscopic selection of publications. Their pamphlets included reprints ranging from Malatesta, Kropotkin, and Spooner to Maurice Brinton (of the London Solidarity Group) and Matzpen (an antizionist Israeli socialist group), as well as some apparently original material on topics like “Anarchist Organization” and “The Anarchist Solution to the Problem of Crime.” SRAF groups also published the magazine Black Star.
But the truly fascinating material is in their SRAF Bulletin for Anarchist Agitators. The content for each issue was sent in by federation members across the continent, and then gathered/mimeographed/stapled and sent back out in the form of a ten-to-fifteen-page magazine. The magazine included news and updates from various groups about what was going on in their region, short essays and analysis, as well as back-and-forth discussions and debates that would span numerous editions. The Bulletin was a sort of 1970s/1980s equivalent of today’s online listservs and discussion boards—with many of the same weakness, though it seemed to maintain a slightly higher quality…perhaps because people felt that they had weeks, rather than minutes, in which to compose their replies. And, quality aside, the Bulletin offers an amazing glimpse of what anarchists at the time were thinking about and doing: from self-proclaimed “freeks” living on rural communes to anarcho-syndicalists in the labor movement.
I hope to spend more time looking into the SRAF (and hopefully posting some snippets on this blog), though I’m pretty sure it’d be impossible to come up with a book project on the subject: right now, the material seems too all over the place to do anything but a straight facsimile reprint…which would require several volumes.
In the meantime, though, if you click on the image at the top of this post, you’ll see the first page of an early issue of the Bulletin. And the images below are from a four-page pamphlet of the SRAF’s 1972 founding (?) declaration.
If anyone has any more information, personal or otherwise, about the SRAF, please post it in the comment section of this blog or send it to me (charles-[at]-akpress.org).
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