Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Sigmund Freud

remembered Morea. He was intrigued by the idea of “groups of like-minded people that weren’t public,” the sort of group that was “totally unknown to anyone else.” Embracing this clandestine structure, the Motherfuckers engaged in outrageous actions, which ranged from dumping garbage at New York’s Lincoln Center on its opening night (its construction having displaced a Puerto Rican neighborhood) to pelting then–Secretary of State Dean Rusk with bags of cow’s blood.²³

      The Motherfuckers’ conception of affinity groups partly mirrored their Spanish antecedents: “Relying on each other,” explained one leaflet, “the individuals in an affinity group increase their potential for action and decrease the dangers of isolation and/or infiltration. The necessity for these relationships should be obvious at this stage of our struggle.” But security was not their only purpose. The Motherfuckers viewed affinity groups in grander terms as well. “In the pre-revolutionary period,” they wrote, “affinity groups must assemble to project a revolutionary consciousness and to develop forms for particular struggles. In the revolutionary period itself they will emerge as armed cadres at the centers of conflict, and in the post-revolutionary period suggest forms for the new everyday life.”²⁴

      Morea and the Motherfuckers soon introduced the idea of affinity groups as teams for street combat to Weatherman, the faction of SDS that aspired to be a revolutionary fighting force and to “bring the war home” to the United States. It was during the October 1969 Days of Rage, perhaps Weatherman’s most notorious action, that affinity groups made their true US debut. Some three hundred of the group’s followers converged on Chicago, where they went on what might best be termed a rampage: battling cops, smashing windshields, running through the streets, and creating mayhem. Jeff Jones, one of the founders of Weatherman, explained that as early as 1967, militant members of SDS began debating whether to adopt more violent tactics during street protests. “We had that discussion over and over again,” he recalled in a 2000 interview, “and each demonstration that we went to became a little bit more militant, until it was in our heads to organize a demonstration that was entirely street fighting, which we did, in which affinity groups played a very important role.”²⁵

      All the participants in the Days of Rage were organized into the small groups, which Weatherman treated less like egalitarian collectives and more like military platoons. “There was a pretense made of contributions from everyone, but there was really a final yes or no from the top leadership. There would be a representative of the leadership in each affinity group,” recalled Judith Karpova of her time in Weatherman. As Shin’ya Ono described the group’s preparations on a Weatherman bus heading to Chicago for the Days of Rage, “In order to get to know each other and learn to move as a group, we divided ourselves into several affinity groups of six or seven persons each and did a couple of tasks together,” he wrote. “We discussed the functions of the affinity group, what running and fighting together meant, what leadership meant, and why leadership was absolutely necessary in a military situation.” Another account of Weather-style affinity-group organizing during that period by Motor City SDS similarly emphasized a paramilitary command structure: “The tactical leadership explains the plans using maps which they have drawn up, and our forces are divided into affinity groups. Each group sticks together, protects each of its members, acts as a fighting unit in case of confrontation, and functions as a work team.”²⁶

      The Days of Rage were widely viewed as a disaster. The tiny turnout was a fraction of what the Weather organizers had expected; the street fighting left most participants injured or jailed or both, with little or nothing to show for their bravado. When mainstream figures like former Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg denounced the actions as “vandalism and hooliganism without a program,” many on the left agreed. The tactics used, Dave Dellinger of the Chicago 7 later wrote, “proved counterproductive in terms of their results—injuries, military defeat, an unsatisfactory choice at the end of the action between long prison sentences or enforced [time] underground, and unnecessary alienation of a potentially sympathetic public.” Some months later, one anonymous Weather sympathizer calling herself “a daughter of the Amerikan Revolution” published an essay on affinity groups in a spring 1970 issue of the radical Berkeley Tribe, endorsing their use for armed struggle. “The term ‘affinity group’ means different things to different people,” she explained, “anything from a group of people that run together in a riot to a basic armed unit for the revolution, which is my conception of it.” But already by 1970, even some of those who had flirted with street violence were concluding that rioting and armed struggle were dead ends for the movement, relegating activists to a terrain in which they could always be overpowered by the police or the military, while undermining their moral authority in the process. Affinity groups had proven too useful in practical terms to be abandoned—“they are to many people’s minds both safer and more politically acceptable than the marshal system for organizing participants at a demonstration,” an organizing manual of the period explained—but their significance and function began to change. ²⁷

      “The reason it changed, and went from a violent to more of a nonviolent kind of thing,” said Jeff Jones, “is because violent street fighting played itself out kind of quickly. We took it to the max at the Days of Rage, and the price was too high, and everybody knew it.” By the time the Mayday Tribe put out its call to protest, the concept of affinity groups had begun to blend with the other small-group forms that were rapidly growing in countercultural popularity: collectives, communes, cooperatives, consciousness-raising groups. Perhaps there was still a slight frisson of clandestinity attached to the use of affinity groups, given the sense among many that “Mayday was sort of the above-ground Weatherpeople,” in the words of John Scagliotti, who worked as a full-time staffer in the DC office for the action. And certainly the impulse toward direct physical confrontation with authority would remain a recurring (and constantly debated) element of disruptive protest for decades to come. But on the whole, affinity groups were coming to be seen as more expedient and sociable than paramilitary or insurrectionary. “Affinity groups at Mayday,” remembered John Froines, another Chicago 7 defendant centrally involved in the action, “were both a tactical approach in terms of the street and also something more, connected to people’s linkages to one another.”²⁸

      That said, there was a haphazard quality to the Mayday organizing; a lot of the action was put together on the fly. “We had no organization, so we made a virtue out of our weakness, which was what guerrillas had always done,” Jerry Coffin explained. “If you’ve got no organization, what do you do? You create something where no organization is a virtue, and that was the whole affinity group thing we’d been promoting.” Much of the initial outreach was done in conjunction with the speaking tours of Rennie Davis and John Froines to campuses throughout the United States. Much of the rest was done by mail, thanks to a resourceful activist who had figured out a do-it-yourself way to reset postage meters. “There was the notion,” Froines recalled, “that people from University of Wisconsin or Florida State or Smith College or wherever would come, and they would have encampments of their own, and they would develop tactical approaches to what they were doing.”²⁹

      This decentralized structure, organizers hoped, would also help them avoid the legal entanglements they had faced after the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention protests. At first glance, Mayday might look “like an engraved invitation to a conspiracy trial,” as one activist told Time, but it would be virtually impossible for the government to pin responsibility on one or more individual organizers. Everyone was responsible. As one participant from Richmond College in Staten Island explained afterwards, “As affinity groups you have to make your own decisions and be fully responsible. You’re not simply following a leadership up at the head of a march … Rather than one conspiracy, it was thousands of conspiracies.”³⁰

      The lack of formal organization, however, tended to undermine the ideal of egalitarian participation as a result of what radical feminist Jo Freeman famously called “the tyranny of structurelessness,” in one of the most influential essays of the time. Drawing on her experiences in the women’s liberation movement, where collectives and consciousness-raising groups had flourished, Freeman described how the lack of formal structures and decision-making procedures—so democratic in intent and appearance—in fact allowed informal and unaccountable power dynamics to flourish.