My name is Chuck Morse. I was born in 1969 and raised in Poughkeepsie, New York. I presently live in New York City with my companion and our three pets.
I am a utopian of the extreme variety. I have devoted most of my life to trying to help build a social movement capable of abolishing injustice, exploitation, and hierarchy. In other words, I am an anarchist. I embraced this commitment in 1982 and it has been a constant for me since then.
Although my activism has taken different forms as I have grown and the world has changed, some priorities have remained consistent. I will list three below in order to share a bit about my values and history.
Vision Development
I have always believed that the battle for ideas takes precedence over all others and, for that reason, have applied most of my political energies to literary and educational projects.
For instance, I founded the Institute for Anarchist Studies (IAS) in 1996 and directed it for many years. The IAS is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the development of anti-authoritarian scholarship. It does this primarily by giving grants to radical writers, but also through other means (we gave out $8000 in grants annually when I was involved with the IAS). I co-edited Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, the organization’s publication, and edited The New Formulation: An Anti-Authoritarian Review of Books, which was initially independent of the IAS but later became one of its projects. I left the IAS in 2005 after growing increasingly skeptical about its viability, but I am proud of its accomplishments during my tenure.
I was also involved in the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE) for more than a decade and a half. The ISE was a radical environmental school in Central Vermont co-founded by Murray Bookchin and Dan Chodorkoff in 1972. I interned at the school in the spring of 1989 and worked with it in various capacities thereafter until its closure in 2005. In addition to being an intern, I was student, a staff person, a board member, and on the ISE faculty. I taught a class on dialectical philosophy–Hegel, Marx, and Bookchin specifically–during its “Continuing Studies” program for more than a few years.
I also have attempted to make a contribution through my own writings, translations, and interviews.
Anti-colonial
I have long held that neo-colonialism and white supremacy should be among the anarchist movement’s central concerns. I have tried to encourage this in several (albeit very modest) ways.
For instance, I conducted a series of interviews with radical scholars on non-western traditions of resistance for Perspectives on Anarchist Theory. The interviews were an effort to influence the anarchist movement in general and the political culture of the Institute for Anarchist Studies in particular. I have also tried to confront the quasi-colonial relationship between the United States (my country of origin) and Latin America. Toward this end, I became fluent in Spanish—I lived in Mexico City between 2001 and 2003—and have built relationships with Latin America radicals at home and abroad. For example, I created the Latin America Anarchist Archives Project with the Biblioteca Popular José Ingenieros and the Federación Libertaria Argentina (both of Buenos Aires). I am also an active translator. I have focused my translation efforts on literature from the Latin American revolutionary left. I have translated material from Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Chile (as well as a large book about the Spanish anarchist Buenaventura Durruti). Likewise, I have endeavored to create an informal network of radical translators.
Counter-institutions
Finally, I am a strong advocate of anarchist institutions (or “counter-institutions,” as they are often called). They provide a service (e.g., food, information, housing, etc), but do so in a self-consciously oppositional way. This helps newcomers integrate themselves into the movement and also seeds society with small centers of resistance.
For example, in 1985 I volunteered at Bound Together Books, an anarchist bookstore in San Francisco (and one of the oldest continuously operating anarchist bookstores in the country). I started and lived in a squat in Poughkeepsie in 1987. In the early 1990s, I devoted a year to holding down the administrative wing of the Left Green Network, a (now defunct) North American organization dedicated to bringing an environmental perspective to the revolutionary left and a revolutionary perspective to the environmental moment. In the early 1990s, I was a volunteer at Blackout Books, New York City’s (former) anarchist bookshop. And, as noted, I founded the Institute for Anarchist Studies and worked with the Institute for Social Ecology.
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Of course, the anarchist movement does not encompass the entirety of my life, but it has been and will be an anchor for me. I hope to give more of myself to the movement in the future. I will doubtlessly offer much less than I should, but I will be proud of whatever small contributions I can make.