Today's Topics:
1. Britain, Class War: OCTOBER 20th will see the biggest demo
in London since the poll tax riot. (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. France, Alternative Libertaire AL #287 - Edito: The mud (fr,
it, pt)[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. Chile, izquierda libertaria - Declaration: Libertarian Left
and the new strategic phase -- To the people of Chile, -- To the
social fighters, -- To the organizations of the left, (ca, it)
[machine translation] (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
4. US, blackrosefed: BETWEEN INFOSHOPS AND INSURRECTION: U.S.
ANARCHISM, MOVEMENT BUILDING, AND THE RACIAL ORDER
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
5. Slovania, Coordinamento Libertario Isontino: Wars today,
wars yesterday: no holiday for the massacre! (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
6. Greece, liberta salonica: We do not fight for the interests
of our bosses Microphone [machine translation]
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
CLASS WAR will ensure that the expected half a million will get a chance to express their
anger with the whole system rather than die of torpor from the a-b march and soporific
speakers - and in particular get to visit BREXIT CENTRAL at 55 TUFTON ST.
At 4pm we will gather at south west corner of parliament square and at 4.30 move off to
Tufton Street - steve bannon's first port of call in London, home of Cambridge analytica,
taxpayers alliance, Spiked and all manner of right wing dross...
Don't go home without visiting the Brexiteers in their lair - only 600 yards from the
square - it may be the only chance you get.
------------------------------
Message: 2
Mud is always formed by sedimentation. For years, racist public policies, safe speeches
and the development of the gutter press have gradually fueled the progress of the far
right. This one, in a real cultural struggle, imposed and diffused its grids of readings.
Some, on the left, thought they could seize certain themes, like that of economic
nationalism or that of " controlled immigration ", thinking to cut the grass under the
foot of the fachos. But to want to rely on the mud we just sink in. ---- This cultural
struggle is a fight to the death. It manufactures the acceptability of the ignoble. In
fact, in a large part of the major powers and European countries, the extreme right is in
power, alone or integrated into coalitions. And in most other countries political
recompositions are emerging between an extreme right and various political forces of the
right or more heterogeneous, like the 5-star movement in Italy.
But it is not said that in the future, in the likely context of a situation of political
and institutional instability, as exists in the majority of liberal democracies, the
extreme right does not become a last resort for maintain the stability of bourgeois power.
Libertarian Alternative, October 2, 2018
http://www.alternativelibertaire.org/?Edito-La-boue
------------------------------
Message: 3
Our party is the heir of a political project with more than 15 years of experience. In
this time, we have traveled a path of responsibility and historical commitment. ----
Rooted in the popular movement, we gave our first reflections on an incipient
rearticulation of the forces of the left. At that time, the libertarians focused our
efforts on the deployment of social organizations that resisted the consolidation of the
neoliberal transition pact. The street became our space of dispute and political action
through which we began to walk a path of consolidation and growth that allowed us to be
protagonists in the struggle processes that raised the different expressions of our
people. ---- In this context, we took the strategic decision to influence the different
expressions of the popular movement playing an amplifying role and catalyst of the
libertarian ideas, convinced of its usefulness for the strengthening and advance of the
popular struggles.
We learned then that the model had a vest of institutional strength that to dismantle it
required going beyond the pressure and social mobilization. It was necessary to break the
political devices that impeded the people from influencing decision-making. This
characterization allowed us to articulate a strategy of dispute that we call Democratic
Rupture and that, with a specific repertoire of actions, draws up a road map so that our
political action enables the people to be successful in their demands.
For this reason, we consider it necessary to make an adjustment to our political tactics
that led us to define that, in addition to the line of direct mass action, a line of
institutional intervention was necessary that contemplated participation in the dispute
over political institutions. During this process of reflection we have actively insisted
in the bosom of the popular and union movements, deepening their political radicalism and
betting on deepening in their democratic forms of organization.
Likewise, our project acquired a new organic physiognomy that we call Libertarian Left
that assumed the iron conviction, that to end neoliberalism in Chile and the construction
of socialism, required a coordinated and synchronized intervention between the
institutional deployment and social mobilization.
Against this background, we face the municipal electoral process in a good way. Nóveles in
this task, and with more bets than certainties, we began the consolidation of a project of
popular co-legislation, linking the social movements in which we militated with those
institutional expressions.
The historical moment in which these experiences are developed is the crisis of the
duopoly and the emergence of the Frente Amplio (coalition of which we form a foundational
part) that was erected as the political attempt to convey the different expressions of
struggle that had been developing throughout Of the territory.
Libertarians and we have witnessed the growth and strengthening of the left that, from the
Broad Front, is committed to overcoming neoliberalism in orientation and socialist
vocation. This growth imposed on us the historical need for unity. For this reason, two
years ago, we incorporated into our political definitions the need for the political
convergence of the left.
We have argued that this can not be a fusion of acronyms but, on the contrary, the meeting
of the left parties should respond to a common horizon and a will to collective action.
Together with sister forces of struggle, we began a process of dialogues, discussions and
agreements on the need to consolidate a common party, and after months of discussion, our
party has taken the decision to put its militant will at the service of the construction
of a new political reference for our country together with the Autonomist Movement, New
Democracy, Socialism and Freedom and other forces that join this effort.
This decision contemplates the transition to a new strategic phase in which the
libertarians reaffirm our commitment to socialism, feminism and freedom. Therefore, not
wanting to be the final point to this historical consolidation, but a moment in the
disposition of all those expressions of the revolutionary left that are willing to build
common will.
At a time when the right wing of the continent overcame its regroupment phase and has
taken the offensive, gaining control of several governments of the region in its different
versions, the feminist and socialist left revives the historical necessity of the deepest
and broadest unity that let stop this new conservative advance.
For this reason, we have the conviction that only the construction of the Socialist and
Feminist Homeland will allow us to overcome poverty and inequality; that only democratic
radicalism will decentralize power and transfer political protagonism to the people and
their organized expressions; that only feminism can lead to overcoming the oppression and
historical exploitation of women and that only the unity of the left will allow us to
reach a new historical stage in which these revolutionary ideas of social transformation
acquire real possibilities of concretization.
There is no other way to unity than to weave the conditions that make it possible. Today
we are taking a key step in this direction. Because as the Colombian revolutionary Camilo
Torres said, "let us agree on what unites us and dispense with what divides us".
The Libertarian Left enters fully into a process of convergence, and our political project
will be the protagonist.
Put up and fighting!
overcome
Left Libertarian
Chile - October 2018
http://www.izquierdalibertaria.cl/declaracion-izquierda-libertaria-y-la-nueva-fase-estrategica/
------------------------------
Message: 4
This now classic essay by the late Joel Olson (1967-2012) reflects on the state of US
anarchist milieu from the 1990's through the 2000's. Olson was a long time anarchist
writer, organizer, political theorist and veteran of both Love & Rage Anarchist Federation
and the anarchist influenced Bring the Ruckus organization. A major focus of his writing
and work was a focus on the central role of race and white supremacy in shaping the US
political order (See Abolition Of White Democracy). ---- Since the publishing of this
piece in 2009 much of the left, anarchist movement included, and the political landscape
on which they stand has been reshaped by events such as Occupy, the Ferguson uprising, the
Bernie Sanders campaign and more recently by election of Trump. One important and positive
development worth noting that relate to the arguments raised by Olson is the widespread
adoption of abolitionist politics on the left, which often explicitly references the
struggle against slavery and the period of reconstruction which followed.
Here are the key takeaways of the article that remain relevant lessons for the left and
anarchism today:
Critiques of power that conflate all structures and oppression as equal on moral grounds
lack an understanding of how particular structures and oppressions shape and function in
each society.
Our approach to revolutionary change requires a strategy of how to get to revolution and
this starts with understanding the conditions and history of the US - specifically the
central roles of race, white supremacy and colonialism.
Two mistakes made by the anarchist movement of 2000's (and still by many in the present)
are a focus on insular spaces and projects oriented towards other activists and the narrow
focus on street rebellions and spontaneous upheaval without seeing these within a larger
context of movements and building power.
"Social movements are central to radical change" and without a strategy to build them,
revolutionary change is not possible.
Between Infoshops and Insurrection: U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order
By Joel Olson
Anarchism has always had a hard time dealing with race. In its classical era from the time
of Proudhon in the 1840s to Goldman in the 1930s, it sought to inspire the working class
to rise up against the church, the state, and capitalism. This focus on "god, government,
and gold" was revolutionary, but it didn't quite know how to confront the racial order in
the United States. Most U.S. anarchist organizations and activists opposed racism in
principle, but they tended to assume that it was a byproduct of class exploitation. That
is, they thought that racism was a tool the bosses used to divide the working class, a
tool that would disappear once capitalism was abolished. They appealed for racial unity
against the bosses but they never analyzed white supremacy as a relatively autonomous form
of power in its own right.
Unfortunately, contemporary anarchism (which dates roughly from Bookchin to Zerzan) has
not done much better. It has expanded the classical era's critique of class domination to
a critique of hierarchy and all forms of oppression, including race. Yet with a few
exceptions, the contemporary American anarchist scene still has not analyzed race as a
form of power in its own right, or as a potential source of solidarity. As a consequence,
anarchism remains a largely white ideology in the U.S.
Despite this troublesome tradition, I argue that anarchist theory has the intellectual
resources to develop a powerful theory of racial oppression as well as strategies to fight
it, but first it must confront two obstacles placed in front of it by the contemporary
American anarchist scene. First, it must overcome an analysis of white supremacy that
understands racism as but one "hierarchy" among others. Racial oppression is not simply
one of many forms of domination; it has played a central role in the development of
capitalism in the United States. As a result, struggles against racial oppression have a
strategic centrality that other struggles lack.
Second, it must reject the current U.S. anarchist scene's "infoshops or insurrection"
approach to politics and instead focus on movement building. Organizing working class
movements, which was so central to the classical anarchist tradition, has given way to
creating "autonomous zones" like infoshops, art spaces, affinity groups, and collectives
on the one hand, and glorifying protests, riots, and sabotage on the other. But in the
infoshops and insurrection approaches, the vital work of building movements falls through
the middle.
In a class society, politics is fundamentally a struggle for hegemony, or a struggle to
define what Antonio Gramsci calls the "common sense" of a society. In the United States,
white supremacy has been the central means of maintaining capitalism as "common sense."
Building mass movements against the racial order, then, is the way in which a new
hegemony, an "anarchist common sense," can be created. But in building that common sense,
I argue that contemporary American anarchism should look less toward Europe and more
toward the struggles of peoples of color in their own back yard for historical lessons and
inspiration.
Hierarchy, Hegemony, and White Supremacy
The intellectual framework of most of contemporary American anarchism rests on a critique
of hierarchy. Murray Bookchin, perhaps the most important theorist of the concept, defines
hierarchy as "a complex system of command and obedience in which elites enjoy varying
degrees of control over their subordinates" (Bookchin 1982, 4). Capitalism, organized
religion, and the state are important forms of hierarchy, but the concept includes other
relations of domination such as of "the young by the old, of women by men, of one ethnic
group by another, of ‘masses' by bureaucrats, ... of countryside by town, and in a more
subtle psychological sense, of body by mind, of spirit by a shallow instrumental
rationality, and of nature by society and technology" (4). Hierarchy pervades our social
relations and reaches into our psyche, thereby "percolating into virtually every realm of
experience" (63). The critique of hierarchy, Bookchin argues, is more expansive and
radical than the Marxist critique of capitalism or the classical anarchist critique of the
state because it "poses the need to alter every thread of the social fabric, including the
way we experience reality, before we can truly live in harmony with each other and with
the natural world" (Bookchin 1986, 22-23).
This analysis of hierarchy broadened contemporary anarchism into a critique of all forms
of oppression, including capitalism, the state, organized religion, patriarchy,
heterosexism, anthropocentrism, racism, and more. The political task of contemporary
anarchism, then, is to attack all forms of oppression, not just a "main" one like
capitalism or the state, because without an attack on hierarchy itself, other forms of
oppression will not necessarily wither away after the "main" one has been destroyed.[1]
This critique of what is sometimes called "class reductionism" is powerful, for while
patriarchy is surely connected to capitalism, for example, it can hardly be reduced to it.
Despite this advantage, however, the anarchist critique of all forms of oppression fails
to distinguish among those forms of oppression that have been more significant than others
to the structuring of U.S. society. In other words, the critique of hierarchy in general
lacks the ability to explain how various forms of hierarchy are themselves hierarchically
organized. It correctly insists that no one form of oppression is morally "worse" than
another. But this does not mean that all forms of oppression play an equal role in shaping
the social structure. The American state, for example, was not built on animal cruelty or
child abuse, however pervasive and heinous these forms of domination are. Rather, as I
will argue below, it was built on white supremacy, which has shaped nearly every other
form of oppression in the United States, including class, gender, religion, and the state
(and animal cruelty and child abuse). Understanding white supremacy should therefore be
central to any American anarchist theory, and developing political programs to fight it
should be a central component of anarchist strategy, even if racism is not morally "more
evil" than another forms of oppression.
The critique of hierarchy, in other words, confuses a moral condemnation of all forms of
oppression with a political and strategic analysis of how power functions in the United
States. It resists the notion that in certain historical contexts, certain forms of
hierarchy play a more central role in shaping society than do others. It assumes that
because all forms of oppression are evil and interconnected that fighting any form of
oppression will have the same revolutionary impact. For this reason, it assumes that there
is no more need to fight racial discrimination than, say, vivisection, since both are
equally evil and interconnected forms of domination.
But as the great theorist W.E.B. Du Bois shows in his classic Black Reconstruction, the
primary reason for the failure of the development of a significant anti-capitalist
movement in the United States is white supremacy. Rather than uniting with Black workers
to overthrow the ruling class and build a new society, as classical anarchist and
communist theory predicts, white workers throughout American history have chosen to side
with capital. Through a tacit but nonetheless real agreement, the white working class
ensures the continuous and relatively undisturbed accumulation of capital by policing the
rest of the working class rather than uniting with it. In exchange, white workers receive
racial privileges, largely paid for by capitalists and guaranteed by the democratic
political system. Du Bois calls these privileges "the public and psychological wages" of
whiteness:
"It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage,
were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given
public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely
with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools.
The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes,
treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public
officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great
effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them." (Pp. 700-701)
At the time of the publication of Black Reconstruction in 1935, these "wages" included the
right to vote, exclusive access to the best jobs, an expectation of higher wages and
better benefits, the capacity to sit on juries, the right to enjoy public accommodations,
and the right to consider oneself the equal of any other. Today they include, in part, the
right to the lowest mortgage rates, the right to decent treatment by the police, the right
to feel relatively immune from criminal prosecution, the right to assumes one's success is
due entirely to one's own effort, the right to declare that institutionalized racial
discrimination is over, and the right to be a full citizen in a liberal democratic state.
These wages undermine class-consciousness among those who receive them because they create
an interest in and expectation of favored treatment within the capitalist system rather
than outside of it.
The racial order in the United States, then, is essentially a cross-class alliance between
capital and one section of the working class. (I make this argument in detail in my book
The Abolition of White Democracy). The group that makes up this alliance is defined as
"white." It acts like a club: its members enjoy certain privileges, so that the poorest,
most wretched members share, in certain respects, a status higher than that of the most
esteemed persons excluded from it (Ignatiev and Garvey 1996). Membership in the white
"club" is dynamic and determined by existing membership. Richard Wright once said,
"Negroes are Negroes because they are treated like Negroes" (Wright 1957, 148). Similarly,
whites are whites because they are treated like whites. The treatment one receives in a
racial order defines one's race rather than the other way around: you are not privileged
because you are white; you are white because you are privileged. Slaves and their
descendants have typically been the antithesis of this club, but various other groups have
occupied the subordinate position in the racial binary, including Native Americans,
Latinos/as, Chinese Americans, and others. Some, such as Irish and Jewish immigrants,
started out in the subordinate category but over time successfully became white (Ignatiev
1995, Brodkin 1999). Others, such as Mexican American elites in California in the
nineteenth century, started out as white but lost their superior status and were thrown
into the not-white group (Almaguer 1994).
This system of racial oppression has been central to the maintenance of capitalist
hegemony in the United States. If, as Marx and Engels argue in The Communist Manifesto,
capitalism tends to bring workers together by teaching them how to cooperate, and if this
cooperation has revolutionary tendencies ("what the bourgeoisie produces, above all, are
its own gravediggers"), then capitalists need to break up the very cooperation that their
system of production creates.[2]Now, different societies have developed different ways of
disrupting class solidarity, often by giving advantage to one set of workers over others.
Perhaps in Turkey it's through the subordination of the Kurds, perhaps in Saudi Arabia
it's through the subordination of women, perhaps in Bolivia it's through the subordination
of the indigenous population, perhaps in Western Europe it's through social democracy. In
the United States, it has been through the racial order. The wages of whiteness have
undermined the solidarity that the working class otherwise develops daily in its
activities. It has fundamentally shaped other hierarchies, such as gender, ethnicity,
sexuality, and religion, refracting them through its prism. In so doing, it has
contributed to making capitalism seem like "common sense," even to many workers
(particularly white ones) who stumble under its burdens.
The racial order, then, is not merely one form of hierarchy among others. It is a form of
hierarchy that shapes and organizes the others in order to ensure capitalist accumulation.
Morally, it is not more evil than other forms of domination, but politically it has played
a more central role in organizing American society. Strategically speaking, then, one
would think that it would be a central target of American anarchist analysis and strategy.
Curiously, though, this has not been the case.
Between Infoshops and Insurrection
It is surprising how little thought the contemporary American anarchist scene has given to
strategy. Broadly speaking, it upholds two loose models that it presents as strategies and
repeats over and over with little self-reflection or criticism. I call these models
infoshops and insurrection.
An infoshop is a space where people can learn about radical ideas, where radicals can meet
other radicals, and where political work (such as meetings, public forums, fundraisers,
etc.) can get done. In the infoshop strategy, infoshops and other "autonomous zones" model
the free society. Building "free spaces" inspires others to spontaneously create their
own, spreading "counterinstitutions" throughout society to the point where they become so
numerous that they overwhelm the powers that be. The very creation of anarchist free
spaces has revolutionary implications, their proponents argue, because it can lead to the
"organic" (i.e. spontaneous, undirected, nonhierarchical) spreading of such spaces
throughout society in a way that eventually challenges the state.
An insurrection is the armed uprising of the people. According to the insurrection
strategy, anarchists acting in affinity groups or other small informal organizations can
engage in actions that encourage spontaneous uprisings in various sectors of society. As
localized insurrections grow and spread, they combine into a full-scale revolution that
overthrows the state and capital and makes possible the creation of a free society.[3]
Infoshops serve very important functions and any movement needs such spaces. Likewise,
insurrection is a focal event in any revolution, for it turns the patient organizing of
the movement and the boiling anger of the people into an explosive confrontation with the
state. The problem is when infoshops and insurrection get taken as revolutionary
strategies in themselves rather than as part of a broader revolutionary movement. In the
infoshops model, autonomous spaces become the movement rather than serving it. In the
insurrection model, spontaneous upheaval replaces the movement by equating insurrection
with revolution rather than seeing it as but one part of the revolutionary process. The
infoshops and insurrection models, in other words, both misunderstand the process of
social transformation. Radical change may be initiated by spontaneous revolts that are
supported by subterranean free spaces, but these revolts are almost always the product of
movement building.
Social movements are central to radical change. The classical anarchists understood this,
for they were very concerned to build working class movements, such as Bakunin's
participation in the International Working Men's Association, Berkman and Goldman's
support for striking workers, Lucy Parson's work in the International Working People's
Association, and the Wobblies' call for "One Big Union." To be sure, they also built free
spaces and engaged in "propaganda by the deed," but these were not their sole or even
dominant activities. They did them in order to build the anarchist movement, not as a
substitute for movement building.
Yet surprisingly much of the contemporary anarchist scene has abandoned movement building.
In fact, the infoshops and insurrection models both seem to be designed, in part, to avoid
the slow, difficult, but absolutely necessary work of building mass movements. Indeed,
anarchist publications like Green Anarchy are explicit about this, deriding movement
building as inherently authoritarian.
A revolution is not an infoshop, or an insurrection, or creating a temporary autonomous
zone, or engaging in sabotage; it cannot be so easy, so "organic," so absent of political
struggle. A revolution is an actual historical event whereby one class overthrows another
and (in the anarchist ideal) thereby makes it possible to abolish all forms of oppression.
Such revolutions are the product of mass movements: a large group of people organized in
struggle against the state and/or other institutions of power to achieve their ends. When
movements become powerful enough, when they sufficiently weaken elites, and when fortune
is on their side, they lead to an insurrection, and then perhaps a revolution. Yet in much
of the anarchist scene today, building free spaces and/or creating disorder are regarded
as the movement itself rather than components of one. Neither the infoshops nor
insurrection models build movements that can express the organized power of the working
class. Thus, the necessary, difficult, slow, and inspiring process of building movements
falls through the cracks between sabotage and the autonomous zone.
The strategy of building autonomous zones or engaging in direct action with small affinity
groups that are divorced from social movements assumes that radicals can start the
revolution. But revolutionaries don't make revolutions. Millions of ordinary and oppressed
people do. Anarchist theory and practice today provides little sense of how these people
are going to be part of the process, other than to create their own "free spaces" or to
spontaneously join the festivals of upheaval. Ironically, then, the infoshops and
insurrection approaches lead many anarchists to take an elitist approach to politics, one
in which anarchists "show the way" for the people to follow, never realizing that
throughout history, revolutionaries (including anarchists) have always been trying to
catch up to the people, not the other way around.
Movement Building and the Racial Order
Which brings us back to the racial order. The abandonment of movement building by the bulk
of the contemporary American anarchist scene has led it to ignore the most important and
radical political tradition in the United States: the Black freedom movements against
slavery, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression.
The intellectual tradition of American anarchism has always looked more toward Europe(and
sometimes Mexico) than the United States. American anarchists know more about the Paris
Commune, the Kronstadt rebellion, the Mexican Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, Paris
1968, the German Autonomen, and the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas than they do about the
abolitionist movement, Reconstruction, the Sharecroppers Union, the civil rights movement,
or the Black/Brown/Red power movements. It's not that American anarchists and history are
ignored-Haymarket, Berkman, Parsons, de Cleyre, Goldman, Bookchin, and Zerzan all have
their place in the anarchist pantheon-but these persons and events are curiously detached
from an understanding of the social conditions that produced them, especially the racial
order that has dominated U.S. history. (One consequence of this European focus, I suspect,
is that it has contributed to the predominantly white demographic of the contemporary
anarchist scene.)
The ignorance of Black freedom movements is so profound that even anarchistic tendencies
within them get ignored. Nat Turner led a slave uprising in 1831 that killed over fifty
whites and struck terror throughout the South; it should clearly count as one of the most
important insurrections in American history. Historians often describe William Lloyd
Garrison, a leader of the abolitionist movement, as a "Christian Anarchist" (e.g. Perry
1973), yet he is almost never included in anarchist-produced histories. The Black-led
Reconstruction government in South Carolina from 1868-1874, which Du Bois dubbed the
"South Carolina Commune," did far more toward building socialism than the Paris Commune in
1871 ever did. Ella Baker's anti-authoritarian critique of Martin Luther King Jr.
encouraged young civil rights workers to create their own autonomous and directly
democratic organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), arguably
the most important direct action civil rights group. Further, the racial consciousness
produced by these struggles has often been broader, radical, and international than the
consciousness produced by other U.S. struggles, even if it describes itself as
"nationalist" (See Robin Kelley's great book Freedom Dreams for more on this). Yet these
persons and events curiously form no part of the anarchist scene's historical tradition.[4]
In sum, the Black freedom struggles have been the most revolutionary tradition in American
history yet the anarchist scene is all but unaware of it. I suggest that there is more to
learn about anarchism in the U.S. from Harriet Tubman, Abby Kelley, Nate Shaw, Malcolm X,
W.E.B. Du Bois, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Forman, Angela Davis and Assata Shakur
than from Proudhoun, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Berkman or Goldman. There is more to learn from
abolitionism than Haymarket, more from Reconstruction than the Spanish Civil War, more
from the current social conditions of Black America than the global South. To see this,
however, requires modifying the critique of hierarchy so that it can explain how forms of
domination are themselves organized. It requires abandoning the infoshops and insurrection
models for a commitment to building movements. It requires looking to Mississippi and New
Orleans more than Russia or Paris.
This is not to say that American anarchism has been completely silent on race. The
anarchist critique of white supremacy began in the 1980s and ‘90s, with the work of Black
anarchists such as Kuwasi Balagoon and Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, the journal Race Traitor
(which was sympathetic to the anarchist scene and did much to develop it intellectually
regarding race), and anarchist organizations such as Love and Rage, Black Autonomy,
Anarchist People of Color, and the anarchist-influenced Bring the Ruckus. Not
coincidentally, these organizations also tend or tended to emphasize movement building
rather than infoshops or insurrection. It is this tradition that influences my analysis
here. But it is hardly a dominant perspective in the anarchist scene today.
After the Berlin Wall
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
many anarchists were confident that anarchism would fill the void left by state communism
and once again become the dominant ideological challenge to liberalism like it was before
the Russian Revolution. This confidence, even exuberance, was on display throughout the
U.S. anarchist scene in publications such as Anarchy, Fifth Estate, and Profane Existence;
in the creation of new organizations such as the Network of Anarchist Collectives; and in
the burst of anarchist infoshops opening up in Chicago, Minneapolis, San Francisco, D.C.,
New York, and elsewhere.
It was an exciting time. Yet anarchism never filled the void. It never captured the hearts
and minds of ordinary people. A similar optimism followed the uprising in Seattle in 1999.
Anarchists again confidently predicted the emergence of a new, powerful movement. Yet once
again, it didn't happen. Today anarchism in the U.S. is in about the same place it was in
1989: a static ideology and a loose scene of largely white twenty-somethings, kept
together by occasional gatherings, short-lived collectives, the underground music scene,
and a handful of magazines and websites.
What went wrong in 1989 and 1999? Why hasn't anarchism filled the void left by the
collapse of communism? Why hasn't anarchism grown as a movement and a philosophy? Most of
the answer, no doubt, lies in the fact that anarchists grossly underestimated the power of
capitalism and liberalism. All socialist ideologies lost popularity with the fall of the
Soviet Union, since there no longer seemed to be a viable, "actually existing" alternative
to capitalism. Capitalism and liberalism appeared invincible and the world system seemed
to be at "the end of history." September 11, 2001, brought a new antagonist to global
capital - religious fundamentalism - but it hardly represents a libertarian alternative.
World events, in other words, smothered libertarian socialism between neoliberalism and
fundamentalism.
But part of the problem, I have suggested, lies with anarchism itself. The failure to
develop a theory of U.S. history that recognizes the centrality of racial oppression,
combined with a related failure to concentrate on building mass movements, has contributed
to anarchism's continued marginalization.
But what if this was to change? What if American anarchists went from building infoshops
and plotting insurrections to building movements, particularly movements against the
racial order? (They could still build free spaces and encourage insurrection, of course,
but these efforts would be part of a broader strategy rather than strategies in
themselves.) What if anarchists, instead of concentrating on creating "autonomous zones"
on the U.S.-Mexico border, as some have tried to do, worked to build movements in
resistance to anti-immigrant laws?
What if anarchists, instead of planning (largely ineffective) clandestine direct actions
with small affinity groups, worked to build movements against the police, who are at the
forefront of maintaining the color line? What if anarchists, in addition to supporting
jailed comrades, worked with family members of incarcerated people to organize against
prisons? What if anarchists stopped settling for autonomous zones and furtive direct
actions and focused on undermining the cross-class alliance and on changing the "common
sense" of this society?
The scene might just build a movement.
If you enjoyed this article we recommend these pieces discussing dual power and social
movement strategy: "Active Revolution: Organizing, Base Building and Dual Power" and
"Building Power and Advancing: For Reforms, Not Reformism"
Works Cited
Almaguer, T. (1994) Racial Fault Lines: The historical origins of white supremacy in
California, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bookchin, M. (1982) The Ecology of Freedom: The emergence and dissolution of hierarchy,
Palo Alto: Cheshire.
--- (1986) The Modern Crisis, Philadelphia: New Society.
Brodkin, K. (1999) How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America,
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Du Bois, W.E.B. (1992) Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, New York: Atheneum.
Forman, J. (1985) The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Seattle: University of Washington
Press.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, New York: International.
Ignatiev, N. (1995) How the Irish Became White, New York: Routledge.
Ignatiev, N. and J. Garvey (1996) Race Traitor, New York: Routledge. (online journal
content here)
Lowndes, Joe (1995) ‘The life of an anarchist labor organizer,' Free Society, Vol. 2, No.
4, 1994.
Kelley, R. (2002) Freedom Dreams: the Black Radical Tradition, Boston: Beacon.
Olson, J. (2004) The Abolition of White Democracy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Perry, L. (1973) Radical Abolitionism: Anarchy and the government of God in antislavery
thought, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Roediger, D. (1986) ‘Strange Legacies: The Black International and Black America,' in
Roediger, D. and F. Rosemont (eds.), Haymarket Scrapbook, Chicago: Kerr.
Thomas, P. (1980) Karl Marx and the Anarchists, London: Routledge.
Wright, R. (1957) White Man, Listen! Garden City: Doubleday.
Footnotes
The footnotes for this article have been updated with current links where available -Ed.
1. The critique of hierarchy and "all forms of oppression" is so pervasive in North
American anarchist thought that a supporting quote here hardly seems adequate. These two
examples are representative: 1) "We actively struggle against all forms of oppression and
domination, including patriarchy, racism, anthropocentrism and heterosexism. We recognize
and actively work against these systems of oppression that co-exist with capitalism, as
well as against the ecocide of the planet" from "Principles of the Anti-Capitalist Network
of Montreal," 2007; and 2) "We stand against all forms of oppression: imperialism,
capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, fascism,
heterosexism/homophobia/transphobia and the domination of human over human & human over
all living things including mother earth" from Mission Statement, Revolutionary Autonomous
Communities, Los Angeles, 2007. This perspective is also evident in the definitions of
anarchism provided in numerous Anarchist FAQ sites. For examples, see "An Anarchist FAQ
Page, version 12.2,"[Cited version no longer available, more current version available
here. -Ed]; "Anarchist Communism: An Introduction," Anarchist FAQ," and "Anarchy" at the
Green Anarchist Info Shop[Text no longer available. -Ed].
2. For those who believe that the Manifesto is not an appropriately "anarchist" source to
cite here, I remind them that Bakunin translated the Manifesto into Russian and worked on
a translation of Capital. For more on the complicated relationship between anarchism and
Marx see Paul Thomas's interesting book, Karl Marx and the Anarchists.
3. For examples of insurrectionary anarchism, see the magazines Willful Disobedience and
Killing King Abacus.
4. Lucy Parsons and the Black Panthers tend to be the main links between Black struggles
and American anarchists' historical sense. Parsons, a militant anarchist organizer in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and possibly a former slave, is a problematic
connection to the Black tradition because although she fought lynching and racial
discrimination, she was not part of the Black community and often denied her Black
identity. (She was married to a white man, Albert Parsons, so this denial may in part have
been to evade anti-miscegenation laws. See Lowndes 1995 and Roediger 1986.)
Many anarchists fetishize the Panthers because they seem to fit both the infoshops and
insurrection models (i.e. men and women with guns serving breakfast to Black children),
but this position tends to idealize the Panthers rather than critically evaluate and
integrate their experience into the anarchist tradition.
http://blackrosefed.org/between-infoshops-and-insurrection-olson/
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Message: 5
Against nationalist rhetoric, we recall deserters, rebels, shotguns ---- Restart
anti-militarism ---- The Libertarian Coordination Committee of the Region of Friuli
Venezia Giulia is organizing two important events concerning counter-militarism between
October and November. ---- The event will be the answer to the "Day of National Unity and
the Armed Forces" on November 4th, as it was founded by Fascism (1919) in order to glorify
the victory of Italy over Austria-Hungary. ---- The chosen place for both events is
Gorizia, because the city that suffered the most damage due to the war, and due to this,
placed on its territory numerous monuments, among which is a monument to the Italian
soldiers in Sredipolje (Redipuglia). ---- We reject our association with the assembly of
nationalist groups that celebrate the centenary of the victory in the First World War.
We prefer to recall the memory of those people who wanted to prevent this butchery from
slaughtering, who resisted the sacrifice for the earnings and fanatisms of others and who,
with craving for peace and bread, were thus at risk of prison and deportation
infoactionfvg@inventati.org
------------------------------
Message: 6
solidarity gathering for total deniers: Saturday 13/10, 12:00, Aristotle with Egnatia ----
At the moment, global capitalism is experiencing another structural crisis of
over-accumulation, which emerges clearly from its inherent internal contradictions. A
fundamental feature of capitalism is the accumulation of profit through the exploitation
of human labor and nature. Expansion and reproduction of capital is a necessary condition
for the perpetuation of capitalism. States as well as capital are expansive, with each one
wanting to expand its radius of power and influence. In order to survive in market
competition, capital needs to spread and find international investment paths. The most
direct way to achieve this is war.
As the weather passes and the rivalries between states - and especially the major powers -
are becoming more and more intense, the possibility of a war of enlarged dimensions is
quite large. After all, a war of local dimensions is being carried out, and even close to
us - we see the bombing of the United States, Britain, France, Russia and the Assad regime
in Syria every day. The big wage of the war is the control of rich energy sources mainly
in the Middle East and the wider eastern Mediterranean. The "big players" on the energy
control board are the states that are high on the pyramid of the imperialist hierarchy
like the US and Russia. Of course, regional imperialist powers (Israel, Turkey, Iran, the
powerful EU countries) play a minor but important role in this game, but having managed to
gain relatively high negotiating power in the face of superpowers. Greece wishing to prove
that it is a "pillar of stability and peace" in the Eastern Mediterranean invested in
making international alliances in the US. However, the chances of engaging the Greek state
in a war with the Turkish are well founded. In recent months, we have witnessed
competition between the two countries for the prevalence of each other on energy sources
in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs, airspace, coconuts, and
so on are just a few of the reasons for a conflict and, by extension, a national war. But
for us, this kind of war means something very specific: it means war for the interests of
our bosses. Greece wishing to prove that it is a "pillar of stability and peace" in the
Eastern Mediterranean invested in making international alliances in the US. However, the
chances of engaging the Greek state in a war with the Turkish are well founded. In recent
months, we have witnessed competition between the two countries for the prevalence of each
other on energy sources in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs,
airspace, coconuts, and so on are just a few of the reasons for a conflict and, by
extension, a national war. But for us, this kind of war means something very specific: it
means war for the interests of our bosses. Greece wishing to prove that it is a "pillar of
stability and peace" in the Eastern Mediterranean invested in making international
alliances in the US. However, the chances of engaging the Greek state in a war with the
Turkish are well founded. In recent months, we have witnessed competition between the two
countries for the prevalence of each other on energy sources in the Aegean and the Eastern
Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs, airspace, coconuts, and so on are just a few of the
reasons for a conflict and, by extension, a national war. But for us, this kind of war
means something very specific: it means war for the interests of our bosses. In recent
months, we have witnessed competition between the two countries for the prevalence of each
other on energy sources in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs,
airspace, coconuts, and so on are just a few of the reasons for a conflict and, by
extension, a national war. But for us, this kind of war means something very specific: it
means war for the interests of our bosses. In recent months, we have witnessed competition
between the two countries for the prevalence of each other on energy sources in the Aegean
and the Eastern Mediterranean. Marine plots, EEZs, airspace, coconuts, and so on are just
a few of the reasons for a conflict and, by extension, a national war. But for us, this
kind of war means something very specific: it means war for the interests of our bosses.
At a time when war plans are dwindling and are slowly approaching the "West" itself (eg
Ukraine), all oppressed and exploited are those who are destined to become northerners in
the canons of the sovereigns. War is a passage to capital so that it can emerge from the
structural crisis of over-accumulation that capitalism itself gave birth, destroying
stable and variable capital - through production and workers - creating new markets with
business opportunities of excessive profitability, so that capitalists can exploit raw
materials and workers in utterly derogatory and degrading terms so that capital can be
reconstructed and developed after a long period of destruction, staring on the corpses of
the international proletariat.
As anarchists we will not fight for the bosses. We are not going to turn arms barrels to
our class brothers, from which they are only separated us artificially from top border
lines, nations and religions, in order to reinforce the disorientation of the underpowered
political oppression and economic exploitation that exist and divide themselves among
themselves rather than the community of their material interests. The only war we are
involved in is the endless social and class war,
To express this, their explicit refusal to fight for the interests of their bosses and
their explicit aversion to the idea of picking up a weapon against any oppressed, any
nationality, many comrades all over Greece and all over the world have decide to follow
the path of total refusal to serve (not serving in the army in any "alternative way").
This decision bothers every state mechanism around the world as it challenges the basis on
which its own existence rests: the "people" rallying around a national idea - always to
cover up the class exploitation. Against this ideology that all he does is serve the
interests of capital, we answer that there are no Greeks or foreigners. There are only
proletarians,
AGAINST WAR AND IMPERIALISM
NO WAR BETWEEN THE EMPLOYEES - NO PEACE BETWEEN TAXES
NO GOAL TO TOTAL STRUGGLE NEIGHBORS
MICROPHONES / SOLIDARITY CONCERT:
SATURDAY 13/10
12:00, Aristotle with Egnatia
Eleftherial Initiative of Thessaloniki - member of the Anarchist Federation
lib_thess@hotmail.com
http://www.libertasalonica.wordpress.com
https://libertasalonica.wordpress.com/2018/10/10
------------------------------
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