1. What is the history of Black Rose/Rosa Negra Anarchist Federation (BRRN)? When and how was it formed?
BRRN: BRRN was officially founded in 2013 and announced publicly in 2014 following several years of discussion and debate between existing regional anarchist communist organizations in the United States. This began with a series of invitational Class Struggle Anarchist Conferences (CSAC), a multi-year process of building relationships and sharing our organizing work which then resulted in what was called the rapprochement process, which was a formal series of debates and discussions by delegates from each group.Most organizations participating in conferences were new formations, though some, like Workers' Solidarity Alliance, had been around since the 1980s. For nearly everyone involved, the dissolution of Love & Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation (1993-1998) and the anti-globalization movement were fresh in memory. While participants drew a range of lessons from these events, most were in agreement that the substitution of loose networks for formal political organization was a dead end, as was the activist orientation to summit hopping protests rather than long-term deep organizing within social movements. Widespread pain and immiseration amid the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crisis-and popular upheavals such as Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring kicking off around the world-meant fertile ground for critiques of both capitalism and the state. The time was right for a renewed push for organized revolutionary anarchism.
Coming out of the 2010 CSAC meeting in Seattle, WA, a number of participating organizations established a framework to formalize the process for exploring unification. This included: Worker's Solidarity Alliance (National), Common Struggle/Lucha Común[Formerly known as North Eastern Federation of Anarchist Communists], Four Star Anarchist Organization (Chicago, IL), Miami Autonomy and Solidarity (Miami, FL), Wild Rose Collective (Iowa City, IA), Rochester Red & Black (Rochester, NY), First of May Anarchist Alliance (Upper Midwest), Amanecer (California), Common Action (Pacific Northwest), and Prairie Struggle (Canada).
By 2012, the question was called: was it now time to formalize the merger? At this point some organizations, such as Workers' Solidarity Alliance and First of May Anarchist Alliance, withdrew from the process. Along the way other organizations, such as Amanecer, Common Action, and Prairie Struggle dissolved, though many of their members would go on to join BRRN.
In November 2013, delegates from each participating organization met in Chicago for the founding convention of Black Rose/Rosa Negra. Early the following year the organization made its public debut.
2. In recent years BRRN has developed its program-'Turning the Tide'-which the organization describes as a 'living document'. Why has this become a focus for BRRN? Why call it a 'living document'?
BRRN: Having a shared program is essential for putting shared principles into practice. It's a reflection of our theoretical and tactical unity and a tool for collective responsibility that ensures that we are, as the Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) said, "rowing the boat in the same direction."
The effort we undertook to construct our program, beginning in 2021, profoundly reshaped BRRN as an organization. In our first 7 years we tended to place a large emphasis on ensuring ideological alignment within the organization, using our mostly unchanging 'points of unity' as a sort of checklist of political positions that we believed put everyone on the same page. This was not the case.
We now center our unity around the program, which guides our analysis, strategy, and tactics. But the program is not a static document, it is remade on a yearly basis through the required participation of every member, local, and committee in the organization. Its much more holistic vision and framework guide our collective work in all aspects of the organization. Moreover, through its maintenance we generate the kind of organic unity (instead of prescribed unity) necessary for a political organization to function. Indeed, we've come to realize that in the early years of Black Rose, though we referred to ourselves as a political organization, we were functionally closer to a network. We see now that a political organization without a program is like a sailor without a compass.
As to being a living document, there are aspects of our program, such as the structural analysis, that tend to have a longer shelf life but can change over time depending on our evolving understanding of these questions. Other aspects, like our conjunctural analysis and limited term strategy, are updated every year following discussion at our convention, so we are regularly trying to think about and examine how the conditions and political terrain are evolving.
3. BRRN is widely recognized as an especifista organization, though the organization's earlier public documents mention that it also draws on the "tradition of platformism." Is this still the case and If so, how? Further, is 'platformism' still a relevant framework 100 years after the publication of the document?
BRRN: Especifismo has had a major influence on our ideas and practice, especially given that it is a living tradition with more continuity than "platformism." Beyond the starting point of the need for political organization and social insertion (which conceptualizes the role of anarchists in mass movements), many of the key concepts of especifismo have also profoundly shaped our thinking. This includes the sectoral approach to organizing and the concepts of transversal issues/organizing, the social vector of anarchism, and that of popular power. While not exclusive or specific to especifismo, through its influence we've incorporated methods of conjunctural analysis and concepts such as actors of struggle and the mass, intermediate and political levels.
Platformism at its core emphasizes that anarchism is a revolutionary social movement forged in the flames of class struggle, as opposed to an abstract or utopian philosophy conceived by individual philosophers or intellectuals. It is precisely because the Platform emerges from the direct experience of the authors in a massive revolutionary struggle that its lessons are so valuable. For us, the organizational principles named by the Platform continue to be guiding reference points for our organization: the need for political organization based around theoretical and tactical unity, collective accountability, and federalism.
Though especifismo does not come from the experience of participation in a revolutionary upheaval on the scale of the Russian Revolution, it similarly grows out of the real experience of organizing within mass militant social movements (including under dictatorship) in Uruguay.
Ultimately, though platformism and especifismo are each marked in unique ways by the social and historical contexts that produced them, both recognize organizational dualism as a core tenet. Traceable to Bakunin's effort to build the Alliance for Socialist Democracy within the 1st International, organizational dualism asserts the need for two mutually reinforcing levels of organization: the revolutionary political organization and mass organizations.
4. How has BRRN changed throughout its 10+ years in existence? What obstacles has it faced?
BRRN: Despite the lengthy process of unification that led to BRRN's founding, it's clear to us that the organization came together without the level of tactical and strategic unity necessary to function as a serious political organization. Some of this was due to many of the above referenced concepts and frameworks not being known to us at the founding while other aspects we needed to learn through experience. In the early stages of building the organization, we tended to place far too much emphasis on hammering out political consensus and failing to construct a common strategic framework and set of tactics to enact our politics in the world. This produced a fragile prescribed unity rather than a durable organic unity, as mentioned earlier.
Because of this we faced growing internal disagreement on what direction the organization should take. Questions with seemingly self-evident answers, such as whether the organization should have a national strategic framework at all, became highly contentious. These contradictions fed into related internal disagreements over organizational culture-including competing conceptions of revolutionary feminism-combining with external pressures during the revolts and repression of the summer of 2020, ultimately leading to the departure of members from several locals.
Though painful and difficult, the debates before and after those departures spurred a process of radical reform inside BRRN. Part of this reform process was structural and cultural, aimed at more equitably distributing organizational work. However, the most significant efforts were aimed at finally constructing a shared analytical, strategic, and tactical framework. This is the process that produced our program and which has made us into a far more effective and coherent organization today
5. What areas of mass work are members of BRRN embedded in?
BRRN: BRRN takes a sectoral approach to organizing, meaning that we engage in areas of mass organizing where there are identifiable actors of struggle who are similarly located within a structure of domination or exploitation, who share a common set of conditions, and who have the capacity to exert organized leverage toward the end of extracting concessions from those who oversee or benefit from their exploitation. Examples include workers in the workplace, tenants in the apartment complex, students on the campus, etc. Significantly though we see this approach in contrast to isolated efforts that lack a social base, animated by moral outage and cycles of protest, or activism driven by NGOs.
Members of BRRN are most active in the labor and tenant/territorial sectors. In the labor sector our members work in the building trades, public service, K-12 education, higher education, healthcare, food service, and others. Our approach to labor organizing centers around building a militant minority on the shopfloor. Where unions already exist we organize within them to advance our principles around rank-and-file democracy, class struggle, militancy, and internationalism. Where unions don't exist we seek to organize the unorganized into official or unofficial unions. Ultimately, our aim is to build the confidence, militancy, and self-organization of workers through successive campaigns of direct action. In this way, we work to orient ourselves and our coworkers toward the long horizon of self-management and the abolition of class society.
In the tenant/territorial sector our members mainly organize within tenant unions or other experimental formations aimed at building power within discretely defined geographies like neighborhoods or even certain city blocks. We seek to help build and strengthen independent, member-driven tenant union formations, especially those that are associated with the Autonomous Tenant Union Network (ATUN).
6. What relations does BRRN maintain with other anarchist communist organizations around the world?
BRRN: BRRN has long maintained strong ties with organizations around the world and this is especially true when it comes to our relations with organizations and groups in South America. In fact, one of the first major efforts we undertook as an organization was to arrange a national US speaking tour for Chilean anarchists.
Over the years we've sent BRRN militants to strengthen our relationships with sibling organizations on nearly every continent, participated in international conferences such as ELAOPA (a semi-annual conference of autonomous and anarchist influenced social movements in Latin America), coordinated cross-border organizing campaigns, and raised solidarity funds for comrades in Sudan, Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, and elsewhere.
We recently participated in the founding of International Coordination of Organized Anarchism (ICOA) which brings together nearly two dozen especifista and platformist organizations around the globe. While the coordination is still in its early days, it represents a significant step forward for the international anarchist movement.
https://www.blackrosefed.org/platform-100-interviews-vol-1/#black-rose-anarchist-federation-federacion-anarquista-rosa-negra-usa
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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