The AK Press Collective
THE MOST ENDURING ANARCHIST RESOURCES ARE THE ONES that withstand the test of time—the ones that continuously change hands, that travel from place to place, across the boundaries of geography and history, that grow and develop a little every time they come into contact with a new generation of readers and writers. Quiet Rumours is one of those resources. Originally published as a collection of pamphlets printed in the late '70s by the Black Bear collective, this volume you hold in your hands today is the third incarnation of Quiet Rumours, and like its two progenitors, it preserves the original, while adding to it, and updating it for a new generation of anarchist readers and writers.
This book is the product of four different anarchist publishing projects. Black Bear was a London-based anarchist feminist group responsible for the six pamphlets that made up the first edition of this book. Typeset and printed, and in some cases written, by Black Bear throughout the 1970s, those pamphlets—essays numbered 1, 2, 3 and 6, 7, 8 in this edition—spoke to the important overlap at the intersection of anarchism and the women's liberation movement, an overlap that would, over time, begin to form itself into what we now call anarcha-feminism.
Though Black Bear itself would largely disband by the end of the decade, in favor of directing collective energy to the increasing pressures of the anti-nuke movement in the UK, the pamphlets continued to find their way into movement circles. In 1984, the Dark Star collective, a group of anarchist booksellers working in collaboration with Rebel Press, decided that the demand was great enough to issue a collection of the six pamphlets in book form—the original Quiet Rumours anthology.
In 2002, Dark Star collaborated with the AK Press collective to release an updated and expanded Quiet Rumours, pairing the six original Black Bear pamphlets with Dark Star's own “Untying the Knot” pamphlet, which printed Jo Freeman's infamous "Tyranny of Structurelessness" together with Cathy Levine's pointed response, “The Tyranny of Tyranny.” Though these texts grew out of the women's liberation movement and are, in some ways, contradictory to anarchist principles and practice, Dark Star argued that the women's movement had provided an important and concrete glimpse into the revolutionary politics of equality that ultimately defines the anarchist vision of society. The debate over how to organize (rather than why) that “Untying the Knot” confronted is as critically important today as it was in 1984, even as the terms and the stakes have changed.
Thus, as has now become a tradition, the third edition of Quiet Rumours has grown in size, and includes three new essays that reflect a small portion of the contemporary conversations and investigations of the anarchist movement. What does it mean to talk about feminism in a social and political context that has begun—finally—to question the logic of the gender binary? In the ten years since the second edition of this book appeared, the struggle for queer and trans rights has taken center ring in the fight for the right to claim our own identities in the ways that seem most fitting to us as individuals. What does it mean to queer feminism? What do we do when these concepts intersect, and intertwine, as has happened more and more over the course of the past decade of anarchist activism and development in the English-speaking world? In their contributions to the third edition of this collection (essays number 4 and 5 in this edition), Sally Darity (editor and creator of the Anarcha Library) and J. Rogue and Abbey Volcano (editors of the AK Press collection Queering Anarchism) explore these new intersections of identity, pointing toward a new anarchist intersectionality that stands before us.
At the same time, while anarcha-feminism may have shifted and changed over the years since this book was originally compiled and published, the concept remains a vital one, as Dublin's Revolutionary Anarcha-Feminist Group points out in their contribution to this volume. “Our struggle,” they write, “needs to be fought alongside the struggle against other forms of oppression, not treated as an afterthought or as a distraction.” The re-publication of this volume speaks to that need, celebrates how far we have come as a movement, and points toward the years of struggle yet to come. It is our hope that future generations of anarchist, of feminists, of queer-liberation organizers, of racial justice activists, and of young folks around the world will add their own stories and strategies to the essays collected here, continuing to grow this book as a critical and lasting movement resource. For our part, we are proud to have been a part of the life of this important project.
AK Press Collective
September 2012