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Ending a war: Inventing a movement: Mayday 1971
Radical Society, Dec 2002 by Kauffman, L A
The radical women's liberation movement challenged mass or national organizing even more directly. Its signature contribution to radical activism was the assertion that the personal is political, a proposition that was electrifying in its day. Building upon the New Left project of countering personal alienation by uncovering "the political, social, and economic sources of [one's] private troubles" (to quote from the 1963 Port Huron Statement, the founding document of SDS), radical feminists made consciousness-raising a centerpiece of their politics. This process of self-examination and collective discussion was best suited for small groups, which facilitated intimacy and internal democracy. By the early 1970s, the small group was the predominant radical feminist form, characterized by "a conscious lack of formal structure, [and] an emphasis on participation by everyone." Though there was very little direct feminist influence on Mayday-there was a women's tent and a women's contingent, but that was about it-the decentralized and radically democratic organizing principles of the women's liberation movement helped shape the larger political climate that gave rise to the Mayday Tribe.23
The Mayday organizers proposed that everyone who wanted to help shut down the federal government organize themselves into "affinity groups." Affinity groups are small assemblages of roughly five to fifteen people who take part in an action jointly, planning their participation collectively. Mayday was the first time they were used in a national demonstration in the United States, as well as the first time they were used in an explicitly nonviolent context. Ever since, affinity groups have been a defining feature of most direct action protests. Movements with such wide-ranging concerns as nuclear power, U.S. military intervention in Central America, environmental destruction, AIDS, and reproductive rights-not to mention the movement that shut down the World Trade Organization in late 1999-have organized themselves on the basis of affinity groups. The history of this practice, though, is little known. It's a history, moreover, that's steeped in irony, for these groups that have been so central to nonviolent activism in our time began as underground guerrilla cells, and entered American radical circles through the most violent segment of the New Left.
The term dates back to Spain in the late 1920s and 1930s, when small bands of militants from the Iberian Anarchist Federation (F.A.I.) undertook a series of guerrilla actions: first against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera; next against real or suspected fascists during the Spanish Republic; and finally, against the fascist regime of Francisco Franco during the sanguinary Spanish Civil War. They called their underground cells "grupos de afinidad," explains Murray Bookchin, the writer and social ecologist who first introduced the term to the United States, "because people were drawn together not by residence, not even by occupation, but on the basis of affinity: friendship, individual trust, background, history." The groups reflected both anarchist ideals of free association and military needs for security. The stakes were tremendous: a small slip-up could lead to torture and death. Because affinity groups were small and formed only by people who knew each other well, they were difficult to infiltrate or uncover. Because the groups acted autonomously, with no central command, the discovery or destruction of one would not obliterate the underground altogether.24
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