Archive for category A Starting Place: Anarchism Explained

On Strategy:
Collective Ownership and the Self-Defense of our Communities
Leadership and a Distrust of the Privileged

Introduction
This is an essay I wrote in the spirit of creating dialogue in the movement. It is a critical look at where we’re at today, and where we need to be, while learning from our ancestors and those who came before us. It is a synthesis of my own personal experience, and the collective experience of companer@s organizing and struggling in our communities and different spaces. If we are serious in creating a different world and destroying this system then we need a program or strategy. We need to have a platform, and as revolutionary organizers we need to lay down the foundation for a revolutionary grassroots popular movement, because change happens through both spontaneous and planned action. This is an attempt to throw out ideas so they can be discussed and put to practice in society. Learning from the Zapatistas, “Caminando Preguntando,” or asking questions while walking, I hope to engage people with questions regarding revolutionary struggle in the U.S., laying down new models of organizing (inspired by horizontalist and anti-coloniaslist movements as well as our indigenous models), intersections of oppressions, creating a revolutionary program. So, how do we organize for intercommunalism, build the fighting capacity of the people, and create a culture of resistance?

We’re an Ulcer in the Belly of the Beast
In the United States the power structure that exists is complicated. To paraphrase bell hooks, it’s a white supremacist patriarchal imperialist system. This is our reality, and this is what the system of power is rooted in. Any real strategy for revolution has to be rooted in one’s own specific conditions. Since we live in the United States and anybody who calls themselves a revolutionary (or radical) has to seriously look at the situation here in the US. There is also the case that within different communities you have different conditions, and with different regions you have different conditions. We have to figure out how we can confront reality to change it, and rely on ourselves as oppressed peoples for that change — not on the state and not on a vanguard party who claims to know what’s in our interests.

So one cannot just talk about the class oppression but you have to look at the entire power relationships — and how they affect us and you have to adapt those things into your organizing and strategy for social change.

The development of capitalism in the U.S. was based on white Protestantism and the progress of the white male protestant merchants and landowners. Their values, standards and the culture of the rulers are dominant in this society. Their agenda is guided by this culture and the preservation of their rule. If you do not reflect the power structure of imperialism (which is white, capitalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist) you are subjugated by their rule. The power structure is set up to manipulate, control, exploit, imprison, murder, and even exterminate those who do not look like them.

Oppression in the U.S. is also complex. While there are organizations out there whose rhetoric doesn’t go beyond the “proletariat” (or working class) things are much more complex than that. The oppressed are those who are people of color, working class, women, queer people, and the youth as well. This is because of the power relationships that exist in this country. Where white males, through manifest destiny, sought to conquer and dominate this land. Throughout the history of this country, they have systematically killed, tortured, exploited, exterminated people who did not reflect their power structure, who stood in their way of expansion and more power, and posed a threat to their power and way of life.

The state is used to enforce their system of power and to keep it intact. The state is made up of the police, the courts, the prison system, their government, government agencies, and even their schools. So anybody that rises up or resists the power structure will be faced with repression and also will have to take on the enforcers of the state. Not only when people rise up, but also in their day-to-day life because in their communities’ they’re living in third world conditions, the state is used to maintain a culture of fear. They terrorize the people who live there, throw them in prison, and murder them. Historically, the state has been responsible for the extermination of indigenous people, the preservation of racial slavery, the theft of land and the colonization of people (in particular Mexico, Indigenous people, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii), the upholding of patriarchy (where women were and still are subjugated and seen as second class citizens — to be child bearers and servants to men), and denied the right for queer people to not only marry but to love whom they choose.

The question is how do we organize around all these different and distinct forms of oppression to challenge and change the power structure. How do we allow for autonomy and self-determination but still have a common plan and strategy for the liberation of the oppressed?

You say “Identity Politics” — We call it Self-Determination
What kind of organization and how does it look like?

I spoke briefly to how oppression exists in this society, but it is not that simple. There are very unique and specific forms of oppression but there is also intersection. Meaning that all these forms of oppression overlap and affect people in different ways. For example women of color have a different experience and different positions and/or demands than say white women, and working class people of color have a different experience than the white working class. In addition, people of color and women are systematically forced into a position of wage slavery — where they work the worst jobs if they can even find a job, for the worst pay, under the worst conditions — which includes immigrants of color). The “white working class” historically has been used to divide, and they have sold out, the most militant movements which were those of the people of color.

In the 60’s the idea was that we needed to break up into different camps (where white people organize white people, Black people, organize Black people, Chicanos organize Chicanos, Puerto Ricans organize Puerto Ricans) and when the revolution came we would all form a united front. I do not think it’s that simple, since I spoke to the intersection of our oppression — and our communities are diverse (especially with Black and Brown communities, in particular in Los Angeles). I do however think it is necessary for the oppressed communities to have autonomy (to have independence, to have self-determination – in terms of their organizing, their vision, their culture, their way of life, and their struggle for liberation). At this point it is important for the oppressed to rely on their own democratic organization to develop their own leadership skills, strategy, and give them practice and experience in self-organization. I feel that in a horizontalist revolutionary organization, you can have colonized people working side by side, but at the same time each nation (or people) will be creating their own autonomy (or independence) while they connect and build with other oppressed people.

Dogmatists and purists attack this position because they call it separatist or they say that to do this we’re creating divisions. In reality these divisions exist in society, let’s be realistic, and we have to directly challenge these oppressive social relationships not avoid them. Society and this power structure have alienated us, it systematically dominates us — we should not rely on this system for liberation. Revolution means changing the social relationships and power relationships that exist in this society that perpetuates oppression, and self-hatred. These social relationships are also carried over into our organizing or “the left” because we do not organize in a vacuum — we are influenced by the dominant culture of the powers that be. In “the left” we suffer from what Frantz Fanon called internalized oppression (where we recreate and reflect the same oppressive social relationships that exist under capitalism).

In the “left” there is also class-reductionism where all other forms of oppression are ignored except for class. Class reductionists would attack the autonomous movements of the oppressed and call them “identity politics” when the privileged leadership of these organizations get challenged and their quest for ruling over the oppressed is threatened.

I think this all comes from who’s leading and who is fighting to lead the movement. The politics of any organization will be influenced by who makes up the organization. If you have an organization where the majority of people are from a privileged background then your politics and the political positions of your organization will reflect the social position that is probably less genuine and more liberal. This relates to the left in general in the US today. The vanguard parties are led by people who have privileged positions in society, therefore there are going to want to gravitate to a leadership position and power — the privileged (white, upper middle class men, who have had the privilege and the time to dig into politics) are usually the ones leading and calling the shots within these vanguard parties and also hold this notion that they’re going to “liberate the oppressed” which is all rooted in their social position. A lot of these white folks suffer from the messiah complex. The same goes for anarchists, who in North America and in particular in the US are influenced by a white middle class male position because the political SCENE is made up of them — and the ones who dominate within the anarchist organizations (especially within a structureless environment) are those same people.

I think that the white comrades who want revolutionary change need to start organizing other radical white people and white communities, and the same goes for the middle class people. Instead of forming these vertical, white-leftist, charity organizations, lets build strategic alliances, and give the oppressed the space to organize themselves. It is important to choose a side in the low intensity war that is being waged on our communities, and the role for settler-colonialists is not to lead in our own liberation.

So how do we organize ourselves, build autonomy, become self-sufficient while at the same time challenge power and change those relationships? These are the main tasks to carry out as revolutionaries: to empower ourselves and oppressed communities, build the structures that give people a glimpse of how things can be different and how we can organize ourselves, build our fighting capacity, integrate ourselves within the communities and mass movements, and build a political and revolutionary base within these communities — and build the leadership skills, consciousness, and experience in collective struggle within these communities. Who are these privileged organizations to tell the oppressed how they should organize and struggle? We have much to learn from the “masses” as we have to teach the “masses.”

“Although we know the revolutionary project to defeat the system of capitalism and enslavement requires millions of other allies who will help us, we will decide the agenda, the timetable, and the tactics of obtaining freedom.”

The process of developing a praxis that is effective should be important, and we should always have as principle what works for us here while maintaining our autonomy and individual freedom — and adapting ideas and theories that help guide our organizing to our specific conditions.

The question should be put out there though, why organize amongst the oppressed — isn’t everybody oppressed in a way? Yes in a way this is true, but also there are different social positions within this system and people have different privileges. The politics of the oppressed will always be more genuine if they are involved first-hand in facilitating the process of their own liberation. Anytime you have the majority privileged folks in your organization — the politics of the organization will become watered down– because consciously or subconsciously they have more at stake — they have more to lose. I draw heavily from organizations like the Black Panther Party (where I disagree with their structure as well as other mistakes they made) who were one of the most serious organizations in the 60’s in terms of revolutionary praxis in their communities, building dual power, fighting for better positioning within the communities, political-and self defense training, and having an understanding/analysis of race and class politics (while seriously trying to deal with gender problems in the organization). They were an organization that was serious enough that it posed the biggest threat to the US government — so much that the state prioritized smashing them. There are many lessons to draw from that experience and learn from mistakes as well — but one thing that you can look at is that the organization was a form of self-organization of the oppressed (a top-down self-organization not a horizontal one though, which lead to the defeat of the organization) where the politics were adapted to their communities and were more genuine as well. This posed a huge threat to the power structure and the state. While we’re organizing for autonomy within communities there is a need to connect, communicate, coordinate and work along other communities for the same aims, platform, and/or demands. This is where federalism can help connect not only oppressed communities, but privileged allies who are organizing within their own communities to link up and build a revolutionary movement that has clear politics, common vision, and strategy.

Collective Ownership of our Organization and of our Communities
“When Bobby Seale and I came together to launch the Black Panther Party, we observed many groups. Most of them were so dedicated to rhetoric and artistic rituals that they had withdrawn from living in the 20th century. Sometimes their analyses were beautiful but they had no practical programs which would translate these understanding to the people…

“Any action which does not mobilize the community toward the goal is not revolutionary action. The action might be a marvelous statement of courage, but if it does not mobilize the people toward the goal of a higher manifestation of freedom it is not making a political statement and could even be counterrevolutionary.”

Any organization or revolutionary movement in order to succeed has to be owned collectively by those who are involved in that revolutionary organization and movement. By that I mean, people are part of decision making, planning, and have the say so in what gets done.

A way for communities to build their self-organization is through independent community councils, where community members can meet with each other, and organize around issues that are directly affecting them in their community while (through a federation) building solidarity and working towards the same goals with other communities, and regions nationally and internationally.

The federation would be one that is specifically revolutionary — this of course is hard to do (because realistically just because people come from oppressed communities does not mean they are revolutionary — there a lot of backward ideas that exist within these communities). It’s important for the revolutionary organization to be integrated into the community and develop collective leadership and collective ownership from within the community itself (the organizers would have to not only be familiar with the community but would have to come from within that community). There will always be people who become politicized at different times for different reasons (sometimes because they’re forced by history to step up and resist as in the Los Angeles High School Walk Outs that happened recently March 2006), the role of those people is not to form a new ruling elite within these communities but to organize, raise consciousness, and most importantly DEMOCRATIZE KNOWLEDGE to bridge the gaps as much as possible in understanding and organizing experience. The federation, as a specifically revolutionary organization, with clear principles, politics, vision and strategy (where these things are dynamic and will change through the experimentation of the organization or victories and failures) — can work within popular movements.

The federation model to connect regions, communities and entire nations of peoples is one that comes from indigenous people. From the Iroquois to the Inca. Even though our ancestors suffered military defeats, there model of organizing our peoples is more effective than the European nation-state in creating a horizontalist structure for autonomous communities and regions as well as allowing people to have self-determination. The councils and regions unite for a common purpose, goal, and vision.

Realistically revolution will not happen through a vanguard party. It will happen through the movement of millions of people. This has been the case in any popular social movement that has been successful anywhere — the problem has been that the popular movements become co-opted by different interests that do not reflect those of the people in the long run (as in bourgeois nationalists, authoritarian socialists, fascists etc.). The role of the federation shouldn’t be to try to place itself in front of the popular struggles, but have some influence within them, to raise consciousness, support, and help in the process of developing other revolutionary organizers for the long-term struggle or the overall liberation process.

The community councils are a way where people can build dual power, basically build the structures and people’s institutions that would replace this system and power structure within their communities. They would organize to rely on themselves for their needs (and eventually stop relying on the state — the police especially because they act as an occupying army in our communities). People might look at this and say that why do this — why not just fight to get state power? This is power — it’s a collective distribution of power to those who run the communities — we’re cutting out the middle men (the state as in the police, their courts, their schools, and other agencies that make us dependent on them). In a way we’re retaking the communities (which include the place where we work, associate, and go to school) — which is where we live, and we could run ourselves anyway.

The struggle for our liberation as colonized people also has to be deeply rooted in the struggle for land. This system and this way of life have disconnected many of our indigenous sisters and brothers from the land. For a free and independent people land is necessary for the survival of the people. To decolonize ourselves we must connect back to the land, collectivize it, and learn to live off of it. Only then will we be truly self-sustainable. To paraphrase Malcolm X, “All revolutions are struggles for land.” In fact this expansionist white settler-colonialist system stole all of the land that is considered America today, and continues to suppress any liberation struggle from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Occupied Mexico (Aztlan), the Republic of New Africa (The South), the North East, and so on. The truth is, white settlers have no roots in this hemisphere, and the only way they can survive here is by a massive police and military, in other words the state apparatus. The people of this hemisphere will never be free until we destroy this system founded on white-settler colonialism and all of those who defend it.

This is a strategy for social change, where communities are organizing themselves and building a base for the struggle — and an example of how we can organize ourselves, associate freely, and live according the basic principles of human rights — including “to each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” This is real communism in practice.

Where anti-authoritarian socialists disagree with Marxist-Leninists is in the transitional state (where the vanguard party will lead the “masses” through a stage where they have ultimate power — into finally a stateless society where them along with the state will magically disappear and they would give up their rule). The underlying structure, and power relations that existed in the Soviet Union, and China set the stage for capitalism to not only be implemented but with a much more oppressive and repressive state.

In China, anarchists discussed the idea of social transformation, and the challenging of what was oppressive in the traditional Chinese culture, which Mao learned from and the Cultural Revolution was waged by students and peasants in China, but because of the power dynamics — the revolution did not succeed. When Mao died in the mid-70’s, the four other members of the central committee were put in prison — the people were not empowered enough to distinguish between the different factions that were fighting for power, and afterwards the most feudal and oppressive social relationships returned to China. This would not have happened if there were different power relationships and power was distributed — and the masses of oppressed people (the peasants, working class, women, oppressed nationalities) had real ownership of the struggle and were leading.
Self-Defense and Revolutionary Struggle
“Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealist fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!”

In the US we have what we call a low intensity war against poor people of color, women and queer people, in particular, but against all people in general. The government is attempting to move society in a more right wing fascist direction today, but since its inception they have been killing, terrorizing, imprisoning, and exploiting anybody who did not represent the power structure. Overall they are killing oppressed people everyday and they have been doing it for over 500 years. Not only that, they are destroying the planet that gives us life, which we need to live — all in their endless pursuit of profit and power. Since this country was founded on expansion and imperialism oppressed communities have always been a semi-colony or neo-colony. This is because they have historically and systematically (day to day from day one) have been kept in third-world conditions here inside the empire itself, within the richest country in the world. People from these communities face unemployment, instability in their living situation, homelessness, prisons, drugs, police brutality, gentrification, poor education, and the list can go on and on. In Los Angles in particular, which I can speak of from my own experience, we can see this in communities like Pico Union, Watts, Compton, South Central, East Los Angeles, and in other parts of this country we can see this in communities like Oakland, Fresno, New Orleans, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and so on.

It is important to realize that there is a low intensity war being waged against the oppressed and has been going on and it is intensifying here. It is important to get into the question of revolutionary struggle and what that means.

I personally feel that the revolutionary struggle in order to succeed would have to be made up by a multi-faceted approach and through different tactics and a strategy (that is being developed through our experience). The community councils will not win out on their own, especially if we’re concentrated in urban areas and have no support and allies from white radicals and revolutionaries and the middle class and other privileged sectors. Also from the forgotten rural communities where people are also isolated.

As we do this we have to build our fighting potential within our own communities and among ourselves. There’s also the real case of the state coming down on us and trying to destroy what we’re creating in our communities. It is a threat to them to create autonomous communities within their state. So what then, do we not fight back? It is important that the fighting strength of the people is raised by self-defense training and programs in the community while at the same time we are organizing around the issues that are affecting us. So we survive, but at the same time we fight, and we fight for the survival of our autonomous communities and our community programs.

I have a lot of unity with George Jackson’s (of the Black Panther Party) strategy. Where you build dual power within your community (he called this the Black Commune), at the same time while you’re gaining popular support within these communities, you’re preparing and training to defend yourself from the state — because most likely they will try to smash us. Through the collective experiences of struggle of the people within the communities they would support each other and carry out a social revolution — and this will probably turn into a civil war between the state along the enforcers and supporters of this system and the popular movements, and the federation of revolutionary community councils. So, there is a need to have two wings: one that organizes the community programs and popular support and the other that is hidden from the eyes of the state that builds the fighting capacity and fighting potential of the revolutionary organization and the community itself. At first the second wing does not have to be large, and can be broken into decentralized cells of 3 to 5 people (who know and trust each other), training and taking direct action against the state (while raising the level of combativity it is important that we do not allow that these forces attack our people, our communities, and/or smash our foundation).

The idea of an armed people was also put to practice by anarchists in the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution through people’s militias — where they elected their own officers, who defended and were made up of people from the community councils. One of the organizers from that period was Nestor Makhno. At the end they suffered betrayal and a military defeat by the Red Army. I have a lot of unity with this model for organizing a defense for our liberated spaces.

In any military aspect of organizing there’s a need for expertise (as in people who have experience and training in military strategy and other aspects needed for self defense), in Chiapas the EZLN makes up the military component of their autonomous communities, and the army is under direct control of the bodies of community decision making. Another example where military expertise was important was in the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. Geronimo Pratt had experience in the military and even was a Vietnam War veteran. He was able to train other panthers in what he knew, as a result, the Los Angeles office on 41st and Central was barricaded with sand bags and all of their members were trained. When the police attempted to attack their office, the Panthers were able to hold them off, with the help and the support of the community. If it wasn’t for that expertise they would have all been killed by the LAPD. I think learning from all these different models is important.

Our movement has not yet reach the military stage yet, but that does not mean we should not discuss this question seriously or leave our guard down. Armed struggle, as in non-violence, is a tactic in an overall strategy for systemic change. We not only have to look at it when it comes to self-defense (which is the ultimate reason for people’s militias and a democratic military structure) but that armed struggle in opposition to US imperialism is justified not only because they are killing us on a day to day basis here (and it is a struggle for our survival — as oppressed people in particular and humanity in general), they are also killing millions more around the world through its military and its “free” market.

At the same time we should not uphold and romanticize the culture of violence or the culture of the gun, but see it as a tactic to within the overall revolutionary movement. On the other hand oppressed communities will decide ultimately what kind of tactics they would take up and carry out. To paraphrase Ward Churchill, “its chauvinistic for someone who is privileged in America to be telling colonized people how they should be fighting for their liberation.”
On Leadership and Creating a Culture of Resistance
In terms of leadership, I feel that the best way to lead is through example. If your organization is truly integrated with the people — and you’re sincere in the revolutionary process, you’re building solid relationships, building a base united in tactics and strategy, and building real structures that will replace this system (people’s institutions) — then people will join the movement and revolutionary organization. Illegitimate authority is people imposing themselves and self-appointing themselves as the leadership — who act as representatives for the rulers of this political, economic and social system.

There’s also a need for specifically revolutionary organization to provide the individual development of organizers and raise the level of consciousness through different forms of education (in particular popular education). Creating a culture of resistance means creating an atmosphere in society where new ideas and new forms of relating to each other are being discussed and practiced and is not hidden from people. Doing this will challenge many people to change themselves in the process of changing the world.

Creating a culture of resistance does not mean creating counter culture that is isolated from people. It means creating something new, while integrating ideas to people’s history and experiences. Many anarchists do not have an understanding of the importance of adapting the ideas of anarchism to culture and specific conditions — again because of their position in society and because “European anarchists historically have opposed the association of culture and anarchism.” They want to make anarchism out to be something that was just discovered by our “founding fathers” Bakunin and Kropotkin, when in reality all of these socialists studied indigenous cultures who practiced communism without calling themselves communists, when the most successful revolutions and the most successful anarchists have been the ones that are able to adapt their ideas and integrate them to the indigenous cultures. While claiming that “traditional anarchism” is one thing and not really analyzing how not only things have changed, but why is it that the anarchist scene is dominated by privileged people. Anarchists or other organizations that do not take these politics seriously or don’t want to develop an analysis on these questions, I consider no more than a historical re-enactment society and club (trying to relive history). I do not take them seriously; I see them as bourgeois and liberal anarchists who intend to make these ideas inaccessible to the oppressed today. However, that does not rule out the possibility for people to develop and grow through their own trials and failures, which I am hopeful for.

In terms of building a culture of resistance there is a lot to learn from the Chinese anarchists. Mao Tse-Tung co-opted principles and ideas from the Chinese Anarchists. They promoted popular education — where they broke down complex theories for peasants (of course we have to do it where we don’t patronize people). To do this is much harder than to just regurgitate what you’ve read in a book. You need a real grasp an understanding of our vision, our strategy and our program. This is much harder than to just spit out dates and numbers to people — and just repeat what you’ve read somewhere.

“It was anarchists who first pointed to the crucial role that the peasants must play in any serious revolutionary attempt in China, and Anarchists were the first to engage in any serious attempts to organize the peasants.”

Chinese students studying in Tokyo formed a group that rooted its anarchism in political traditions native to Asia and advocated a peasant-based society built around democratically run villages organized into a free federation for mutual aid and defense.

There were some problems with a different Chinese anarchist group that studied in Paris which was influenced by European anarchism. This group took a traditional obscure anarchist position on the nation-state and that there wasn’t a need to integrate your politics to your specific conditions and the culture locally:

“While consistent with the stance of the global Anarchist movement at the time, this position elicits mixed responses from modern Anarchists, many of whom see revolutionary potential in the struggles of oppressed ethnic and racial groups. In terms of the Revolutionary project in China, Ward Churchill cites the declarations of support for ethnic self-determination for China’s ethnic minorities which the Communist movement made as key to winning their movement the support of those groups; which was to prove decisive during the later civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalists.”

“It is ironic that the Anarchist movement, which is based on the idea of local political and economic self-determination – and thus fulfills the autonomist aspirations of those groups – was unable to articulate to minority communities how their desire for self-determination would be realized within the context of an Anarchist society.”
Distrust for those with Privilege
“As far as I’m concerned the only reasonable conclusion would be to first realize the enemy, realize the plan, and then when something happens in the black colony-when we’re attacked or ambushed in the black colony-then the white revolutionary students and intellectuals and all the other whites who support the colony should respond by defending us, by attacking the enemy in their community…

“As far as our party is concerned, the Black Panther Party is an all black party, because we feel as Malcolm X felt that there can be no black-white unity until there first is black unity. We have a problem in the black colony that is particular to the colony, but we’re willing to accept aid from the mother country as long as the mother country [white] radicals realize that we have, as Eldridge Cleaver says in “Soul on Ice”, a mind of our own. We’ve regained our mind that was taken away from us and we will decide the political as well as the practical stand that we’ll take. We’ll make the theory and we’ll carry out the practice. It’s the duty of the white revolutionary to aid us in this.”

In oppressed communities there is what I feel is healthy distrust for people who they see reflect the power structure or their direct oppressor. People of color distrust white people, women distrust men, and workers distrust middle management. Whether this comes from a place of consciousness or not it is something that has been built based on our own experiences. That is real, personally every authority figure I have dealt with has been white (and have had other forms of privilege as well). So this is ingrained in the psychology of colonized and oppressed people that we have to follow the white male capitalist authorities. This distrust is seen by oppressed people as a means for their own survival as well.

So how can we work together? I feel that people who have a privileged position in society have to gain the trust of the oppressed communities. They have to prove themselves through their actions not just their words that they are in solidarity and they are real allies. What has been my experience is that some sincere white middle class person has done things that have unconsciously been racist. As in this one case, an ex friend was picking me up, from my neighborhood in Boyle Heights — and she wanted to get some liquor. She was coming from Westwood, so she tells me “I should just get it over there, usually they have liquor stores in the `bad’ areas.” So I called her out on it because she was basically suggesting that Westwood is the “good” area and where I live in my community is the “bad” area. Finally she got defensive and called me a reverse racist — not understanding that racism is institutionalized and has to do with power and white supremacy (things have been cleared up since then).

I do not have the position that white people or privileged people are born evil or are devils — they are socialized. The problem is the system of capitalism and these fucked up social relationships. Realistically though, this socialization of people is something that is real and that is ingrained in the psyche of the privileged. There are feelings of superiority and hostility towards people of color that is deeply ingrained into the minds of white people. With that white males have a self-imposed right to power. The same goes with middle class people of color and sell-outs.

It has also been our experience in anarchist organizations, working with privileged white middle class activists — that when every time the situation becomes real for them, where the state comes down on the organization they pull out, or they do things which have repercussions within oppressed communities without having to suffer the consequences for their actions — but people of color, working class and women do. Before they leave they had tried to position themselves in the leadership which comes from the socialization of white males (or middle class/upper middle class people) to lead in society in general. White upper-middle class men need to take responsibility and challenge their privilege– not just in words but through their actions and their conscious participation and organizing other privileged people to do the same. Their role is to be in solidarity with the oppressed — not to lead their struggles.

Through a federation we can organize with each other and have autonomy as well — the responsibility falls on each other to organize within our own communities and support each other in fighting for liberation. These questions are huge and we need to dig into them more — as in building a real movement for systemic change — and the role that revolutionary anarchists and anti-authoritarians can play in adding a revolutionary platform for the popular movement and organizations in our communities.

Joaquin Cienfuegos
(Member of the Guerrilla Chapter of Cop Watch Los Angeles and the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities)

joaquincienfuegos.blogspot.com

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By Roger White

I should be clear up front. I’m not a nationalist. Nor am I a tribalist, nor an internationalist, nor a municipalist. Peoples from all over the globe have been figuring out how to organize themselves into various collectives long before I came onto the scene and no one in any of these groups has ever bothered to ask me what I thought about their decisions. I won’t hold my breath.

I do believe in free association and federalism because they usually represent the most non-coercive avenues for people to develop ways to live together in self-determined freedom and community. Anarchists have traditionally been particularly hostile to nations and have often attributed the worst crimes of states to them. This rejection of nations and their struggles for self- rule (nationalism) may not be the same as the anarchist demand for no rule, but getting free from foreign domination is a step in the right direction. This is one reason why anti- authoritarians (including anarchists) have generally supported anti- imperialist movements regardless of their nationalist aspirations.

The rejection of nationalism by many North American anarchists is often an expression of a colonial mindset that requires all of the peoples of the world fighting for liberation to define their social selves in relation to the class war. In this war there are two classes- the workers and the ruling class. The downtrodden of the world are to see themselves as workers. For this identity shift we gain the solidarity of the class war anarchists.

Other anarchists who don’t subscribe to industrial age class war dogma simply would like to see anarchists cut their ties to the left completely. This severance would presumably free them of all of the political baggage that solidarity with revolutionary nationalists and indigenous autonomist struggles attract. The two above interpretations of the international role and responsibility of the anarchist movement with respect to the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism are not the ideas of an anti-state fringe. They represent the two strongest tendencies in the North American scene.

Not all nations are states. In fact there are about 1600 nations in existence today (about eight times the number of states in the world). And as Sylvia Walby points out in her essay “The Myth of the Nation-State,” “Nation-states are actually very rare as existing social and political forms…there are many states, but very few nation-states. The notion that there have been neatly bounded societies …is inadequate.” (Sylvia Walby, The Myth of the Nation- State: theorizing society and polities in a global era. British Sociological Association, August 2003). There are many different types of states- theocratic-states (the Vatican, Iran), city-states (Singapore, Luxemburg), familial states (Saudi Arabia) tribal- states (Israel), multinational states (Canada, Spain) and super-states (the United Nations). Each type of state has been implicated in crimes against various peoples over their histories. Since the European enlightenment these various social groupings that states have succeeded in attaching themselves to have been understood by the left as backward and atavistic. They argue that peoples of the world should transcend things like families, clans, tribes, and nations and embrace “universal” principals of human identity. In truth, many of the social ideals that the left has asserted as universal are culturally situated in 19th century Europe.

The Politics of Arrogance

It’s regular for North American anarchists to use their political label as a synonym for anti-authoritarian; although one is a term referring to a specific social and political movement born in the 1800’s in Europe and the other is a broad description of a political tendency that has reared its head in some form in just about every society over the last few centuries. A mainstream definition of authoritarian describes someone who favors “blind submission to authority; of relating to, favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people.” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=authoritarian&x=0&y=0)

Now certainly anarchists are not the only folks on the world scene who are against the “blind submission to authority” and the “concentration of power” in an unaccountable leader. But this easy inter-changeability is an effect of a larger attitudinal cause. The attitude being that non-white legacies of struggle and our histories of stateless, communal modes of existence are at best, irrelevancies to the current struggles against state/ corporate domination or, at worst, an obstacle to be swept aside.

This attitude pervades the intellectual history of all the major European political traditions- not just anarchism. But if those of us who identify with the historical movement for non-hierarchical, free and non- coercive social relations don’t begin to fundamentally rethink the way we understand our struggle both internally and externally, we will lose international allies and continue to alienate ones closer to home.

A different way of understanding anarchism in relation to the centuries-old struggle against arbitrary power is to view it as the newest member of a global family that includes numerous historical and present day communal societies and struggles against authority. The village communalism of the Ibo, and First Nations like the Zuni and the Hopi are a part of the family. The indigenous autonomist movements for self determination going on today in West Papua and Chiapas, Mexico with the EZLN are a part of the family. The international prison abolitionist movement, perhaps to most coordinated attack on the state’s monopoly of the administration of justice, has deep anti-authoritarian currents, just as the numerous stateless hunter and gatherer bands, clans, and nomadic tribes that have managed to survive centuries without armies, flags, or money systems do.

Anarchist movements have also played a part in the fight against authority. Some valiant, if rather short-lived, episodes include the Spanish CNT and FAI battles during the 1930’s and the Paris Commune 50 years earlier. The full record shows that North American anarchists haven’t had much experience in maintaining long-term stateless, social formations. But they have produced theory and “analysis”- plenty of it. And it’s this busy intellectualism that has scorned and turned its nose up at our national struggles for liberation as “statist” and “reformist” while demanding that global south anti-authoritarians adopt anarchism’s workerist mantle or conform to some romantic notion of how pre-agricultural peoples lived. To help put this in context it’s important to look at the universalist underpinnings of the traditional anarchist worldview and how its adherents understand their movement in relation to other struggles around the non- European world.

Colonial Universalism

To many, a critique of universalism on the left will seem like an anachronism. After all, if post-modern social philosophy has had any discernable political thrust, it’s been in opposition to foundationalist claims and totalizing theories of human nature, relations, and power. But despite the last six decades of post-world war II thinking and action against universalism, there are still plenty of stubborn anarchists who refuse to let go of the most Euro-centric aspects of historical materialism.

Marx’s critique of capitalism has had an influence way beyond those who choose to identify themselves as marxists. On the left, it has encouraged analysis that puts the class struggle at the center of the historical stage. Before the identity movements of the late 60’s this analysis would regularly portray racism and other historical oppressions as subalterns of class oppression. But after these movements began to challenge some of the dogmas of class struggle orthodoxy some accommodations were made.

Progressives embraced multiculturalism even as they focused most of their attention towards corporate globalism and the international institutions that protect them. Marxists supported revolutionary nationalism, arguing that the modern vanguard is the black and brown working class. Even liberals argued for a cultural pluralism that made limited accommodations for social, cultural and religious differences while clinging to the last vestiges of the welfare state. Anarchists have largely rejected such left-of-center developments in response to the legacy of white supremacy and cultural imperialism, but have failed to develop their own. The default has been a rigid century and a half-old economic determinism that even some marxists have abandoned.

The embrace of universalism by anarchists has had a significant impact on their analysis of important issues and events. The interpretation of imperialism as an economically driven regime of capital and the view of nationalism as inherently retrograde and divisive owes a lot to the internal logic of universalism. If imperialism has as much to do with cultural hegemony or geo-political dominance as the capitalist market expansion and raw material exploitation of private business, then maybe an international workers revolution may not come first or be the most fundamental task before all the world’s oppressed. If nations and national liberation movements are not necessarily the statist antithesis of internationalism but represent just another social grouping of peoples with a common land, culture, and language, some of whom are willing to fight to maintain their ways of life, then maybe anarchists need to rethink their opposition to nationalism.

European universalism has never truly been about the recognition of our common humanity. In practice it’s been about forcing the particular norms, prejudices and ideals of white, Christian cultures on the rest of the peoples of the earth, sometimes through economic domination, sometimes through cultural imperialism, sometimes through force.

Christendom used appeals to universalism as a justification for crusades and the persecution of “non believers” and native populations practicing their traditional religions in various parts of the world. For left internationalists, universalism provided a nice humanitarian cover for a massive social engineering project that sought to strip the masses of their national and communal identities in exchange for a workerist one because, as Murry Bookchin put it, there was a “need to achieve universality in order to abolish class society.” (Murry Bookchin. “Nationalism and the ‘National Question’” www.democracynature.org/dn/vol2/bookchin_nationalism.htm March 1993 P.1).

Under this view the universality and primacy of the class struggle is a strategic necessity for the overthrow of the capitalist order. It’s not a conclusion that comes out of the study and analysis of the history, situation and cultures of all peoples. At this stage, anarchists, autonomists, abolitionists and anti-authoritarians of color can not afford to be swept up by theories that have never bothered to view non-white peoples as historical subjects. We are not mere props in the political stagecraft of white leftists.

Political universalism is part of the philosophical residue of Anglo-European colonialism. Today we witness this in the attempts of the U.S. to impose democracy in the Middle East and other parts of the world. One of the problems with this view is that it “offers a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant cultural are held to be true for all humanity” and is a “crucial feature of imperial hegemony because its assumption of a common humanity underlies [an] imperial discourse for the advancement or improvement of the colonized, goals that mask the extensive… exploitation of the colony.” (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin. Post Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge New York, NY 2000).

So when the anarchists behind the FAQ web-site project declare that anarchists “oppose nationalism in all its forms as harmful to the interests of those who make up a given nation and their cultural identities,” (Are Anarchist Against Nationalism? The Anarchist FAQ. Alternative Media Project. www.infoshop.org/faq/secD6.html) we recognize that the blatant condescension imbued in those sentiments are a reflection of the conviction that they know what’s best for the colonized, not the colonized themselves.

No War But The Class War

Ever since Antonio Gramsci’s writings on marxism in the 20’s and 30’s the left has been re-thinking the role of the worker in revolutionary practice. He argued that cultural hegemony was the key to class subordination and that in order to change economic and political structures we had to take over the institutions that transmit culture- the schools, the church, the media, etc. This shift from the economic determinism of orthodox marxism to the identitarian pluralism of what some call “cultural marxism” lead a shift in emphasis away from the worker towards a broader group of the marginalized that included women, racial and sexual minorities and outlaws.

This thinking had little effect on the way marxist organizations and regimes have operated over the last 90 years. Groups like the Spartacist League in the U.S. have spent decades trashing black nationalism and feminism as ‘petty bourgeois’ and ’separatist’ and claiming that their class analysis of racism, sexism, and other social systems of hierarchy (as by- products or divide and conquer tactics of capitalism) is more relevant to people of color and women than our own studies of how white supremacy and patriarchy have maintained systems of domination over us. Many Marxists groups have had an even worse record on LGBT liberation.

Khrushchev’s imperial attitude towards Mao’s peasant-led cultural revolution in China reflected, in part, his inability to make common cause with an Asian leader with the audacity to question the dogmas of soviet communism. As the U.K. Guardian noted a few years back “Mao deeply resented the Soviet assumption of superiority towards China, which he described as the unacceptable behaviour of “a father towards his son.” (John Gittings, The day Khrushchev and Chairman Mao saw red Spitting images mark the end of the Sino-Soviet alliance. The Guardian (UK) 27 November 2001). Its been argued by anarchists like Murray Bookchin that the Marxist support for nationalist movements is strategic not ideological. In this instance we can attribute the failure of the two most powerful and populous communist countries on the globe to unite against the capitalist world in large part to a colonialist mentality that couldn’t accept non-white regimes who strayed too far from the European materialist intellectual plantation- strategy be damned.

The most organized elements of North American anarchism today are class war based and anti- nationalist. The Northeast Federation of Anarcho- Communists state “anarchists oppose the idea of nationalism” and instead “believe in waging a class war.” (Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists. nefac.northernhacking.org/newswire/display_any/94 November 2002). The Workers Solidarity Alliance equates nationalism with “the idea that somehow both the rich and poor can be wrapped in the same flag and thus have the same interests…” (Against the Madness. Workers Solidarity Alliance. flag.blackened.net/revolt/issues/war/afghan/statements/wsa_se01.html.) Of course class war anarchists attempt to wrap the victims of colonial imperialism and the beneficiaries of it together in the same black flag as if the two have the same interests. As it turns out, it’s just as hard for whites to give up imperial race privilege as it is for rich people to give up class privilege.

Rather than acknowledging the importance of class stratification along side other societal hierarchies and recognizing that each of them are potentially as repressive and exploitative as the other depending on the social context, class war anarchists have adopted a hierarchy of oppressions that makes the class war the primary struggle and the worker the primary agent of that struggle. The popular slogan “no war but the class war” masks a deep historical truth over which many white leftists are still in denial. White elites and their dupes, pawns, agents and allies have been waging a race war on peoples of color for centuries. When people of color who share a common culture, language and land decide it’s time to make defending ourselves a priority, we’re told by anarchists that they “never call for the victory of the dominated country over the imperialist. Instead we call for a victory of the workers (and peasants) of that country against both home and foreign exploiters (in effect, ‘no war but the class war’)” Are Anarchist Against Nationalism? (The Anarchist FAQ. Alternative Media Project. www.infoshop.org/faq/secD6.html)

If communities of color can’t count on anarchists to do more than merely recognize their ‘right’ to defend themselves against white imperialism, then perhaps all anarchists can expect from communities of color is the recognition that they have a right to protest against the IMF every time they meet. If the price of solidarity is that we abandon our communal identities and accept one created for us by some left-wing Euro- elites over 150 years ago, then the hope of developing closer alliances with other movements against authority around the globe is doomed.

Anti-imperialist anti-nationalism

Many anarchists have recognized that opposition to native or national self- determination against Euro- Anglo colonial domination is a betrayal of their anti- authoritarian principals and commitment to anti- racism. This is why despite all the finger wagging that goes on by the scribe defenders of the anarchist faith about global south movements not being anarchist enough, there is a long history of anarchist solidarity with nationalist movements for self rule. Lucien van der Walt, a South African anarchist activist, details the many national struggles anarchists have been involved in his essay “Towards a History of Anarchist Anti- Imperialism.” He mentioned how groups like the Anarchist Group of Indigenous Algerians, the Mexican Liberal Party and other anti- imperialist anarchists “paid in blood for [their] opposition to imperial domination and control.” (Van der Walt, Lucien. Towards a History of Anarchist Anti-Imperialism. Northeast Federation of Anarcho-Communists. nefac.net/node/261).

The movements and organizations he wrote about were by-and-large made up of activists of color working in their own struggles for both social revolution and national liberation. What these activists didn’t do was refuse to fight along side nationalists because they believed that the class war was the most important or only fight worth engaging in. They didn’t try to convince their people that getting rid of the factory bosses, of whom their were relatively few, was a bigger priority than getting rid of the colonial administrators who controlled where they could go and when they could go there, how or whether they could practice their faith, and what they could produce on their own land, among other things. They didn’t spend time trying to foment hatred between urban workers (who represented a relatively privileged class in many of these countries) and the middle classes in an effort to polarize their nation into a class war. They knew that the colonial masters controlled both groups and would only use internal divisions to solidify their own domination. They instead worked to educate the masses about how class also contributed to their oppression and how national liberation wouldn’t necessarily address those issues.

National liberation struggles don’t end when the imperialists decide that economic control and the threat of military intervention are more effective means of domination than army bases and colonial governments on native soil. They continue through early independence when the imperialist powers are busy stabilizing their puppet regimes, and corporate markets. It continues through the imposition of neo-liberal economic pressures and dictates from organizations like the IMF, World Bank, and the World Trade Organization along with a host of regional outfits and private organized interests. And if and when those mechanisms aren’t enough, the Security Council or the U.S. military will step in. International solidarity is not about committing to a process. It’s about committing to a people and their struggle for liberation. This commitment means viewing solidarity not as a reward for doctrinal compliance among the colonized but as a discourse betweens peoples and across cultures about how we all can live, not in some imposed western ideal of freedom and equality but in a self- determined freedom where different people decide for themselves how they will arrange their affairs. This doesn’t mean that anarchists always must agree and when we don’t we should support voices in those societies who are committed to the visions most like our own.

The nation and the state

It’s not that anarchists have always been closed to nationalist arguments or have never questioned class war fundamentalism. Hakim Bey in his book Millennium suggests that anarchists align their struggles against authority with anti- colonial and nationalist movements around the globe.(See his chapter “Notes on Nationalism” Hakim Bey Millennium Autonomedia & Garden of Delight. 1996). Bob Black has rightly observed that the anarchist ideal of the worker revolutionary in syndicalism is more popular among college professors than with workers in North America. (Bob Black. Anarchy after Leftism. Cal Press 1997 p. 149) Even Bookchin in his 1971 essay “Listen Marxist” offered a devastating critique of class war fundamentalism and argued that “Marx’s emphasis on the industrial proletariat as the ‘agent’ of revolutionary change, and his ‘class analysis’ in explaining the transition from a class to a classless society” are “false in the context of our time.” (Murray Bookchin. Post Scarcity Anarchism. Ramparts Press 1971 p.211). The problem is that these writers and others either hide in the safe shadow of critique where they debunk but don’t bother to offer alternatives (Black) or come up with alternatives just as colonial as the universal worker (Bookchin gives us the universal citizen).

But there’s an even bigger problem. Not only do these critics and theorists fail to offer non-colonial alternatives, they actually find time to dismiss efforts among activists of color and anarcho- feminists who dare to work for liberation from domination from our own self identities. Black dismisses anarcho- feminism as “separatist in tendency” and “oriented more toward statist feminism than anarchism.” (Black, p.150). Bookchin in his essay Nationalism and the National Question lamented that the New Left in the 60’s embraced “the particularism into which racial politics had degenerated instead of the potential universalism (read European) of a humanitas…the New Left placed blacks, colonial peoples, and even totalitarian colonial nations on the top of its theoretical pyramid, endowing them with a commanding or ‘hegemonic’ position in relation to whites, Euro-Americans, and bourgeois- democratic nations.” He adds, “In the 1970’s this particularistic strategy was adopted by certain feminists…” (Bookchin. Nationalism and the National Question P. 11)

Bookchin’s assertion that blacks and “colonial peoples” occupied the top of some theoretical new left pyramid is reminiscent of the stereotypical poor white in the U.S. who’s convinced that blacks get all the breaks and the reason for their own condition has more to do with affirmative action than with the system of corporate feudalism that they’re the victims of. To the extent that any white radicals on the new left in the early 70’s paid more attention to what black, brown, red and yellow revolutionaries we’re saying than intellectuals like Bookchin, it was because they realized that the prime victims and biggest targets of state/ capitalist repression and exploitation around the world were in communities of color and their voices needed to be taken seriously.

Given the lack of clearly articulated alternatives, it’s not hard to understand why many white anarchists cling to this narrow conception of workers revolution. They feel that nationalism is in opposition to their work because historically its Euro- and Anglo- manifestations have been so closely tied to imperialism, and racism that, for them, it’s not a revolutionary option. But the categorical rejection of all nationalisms due to their perceived hostility to class revolution is not a necessary conclusion of anarchist intellectual history.

Bakunin

For most of Bakunin’s political life he could be described as a pan- Slavic revolutionary nationalist and an anarchist. He didn’t believe that his anti-imperialism and his anarchism were in conflict. He felt “strong sympathy for any national uprising against any form of oppression” declaring that “no one is entitled to impose its costume, its customs, its language and its laws.” (Cited in D. Guerin, 1970, Anarchism, Monthly Review, p. 68) Bakunin was not agnostic on the issue of self-determination. He clearly supported peoples who were fighting for it.

Not only did Bakunin support self- determination, he recognized the distinction between a nation and the state. “The state is not the fatherland, it is the abstraction…of the fatherland. The common people of all countries deeply love their fatherland, but that is a natural real love. The patriotism of the people is not just an idea, it is a fact; but political patriotism, love of the state, is not the faithful expression of that fact…” (“The Political Philosophy of Bakunin” Edited by G.P. Maximoff. The Free Press New York 1953 P.324). Nationalism is not the worship of the state, because it refers to a people and the love that they have for their land, their cultural and their language.

This was before the era of ‘diversity’ so Bakunin didn’t see anything in the commitment people had to the preservation of their national culture to celebrate. But he was smart enough to know that being anti- national was pointless. “Therefore we bow before tradition, before history, or rather, we recognize them, not because they appear to us as abstract barriers raised meta- physically, juridical and politically…but only because they have actually passed into the flesh and blood, into the real thoughts and the will of populations.” (ibid.).

What Bakunin objected to was the principal of nationality because he felt that it wasn’t universal. He gradually became more intolerant of national struggles against colonialism because he saw how these movements inspired national chauvinism and hatred across Europe. His growing internationalism and commitment to workers solidarity put distance between him and national liberation advocates towards the end of his public life. “There is nothing more absurd and at the same time more harmful, more deadly, for the people to uphold the fictitious principal of nationality as the ideal of all the people’s aspirations, nationality is not a universal human principal.” (Maximoff P.325). It’s important to remember that Bakunin’s critique of nationalism was within the context of intra-European conflicts.

True internationalism is not anti-nationalist. It is a constructive ideal that seeks to create mutual respect, solidarity, and alliances among nations. To the extent that class elites attempt to use race, religion, gender, immigrant status, sexuality, age, or disability to divide the people in the name of the nation, anarchists should stand against it. But there are many nationalist struggles that are about self determination and human dignity, not division. The Palestinian struggle comes to mind along with the anti- colonial movement in Puerto Rico. Anarchists may fairly critique the statist elements in these movements. But the across the board opposition to the national unity of people of color in our struggle against imperialism renders many anarchists incapable of supporting even non-state, indigenous movements for autonomy in places like Chiapas, Mexico, or the Tamil struggle for autonomy in Sri Lanka.

Rocker

If there was some level of ambiguity around the relationship between anarchism and nationalism in the 19th century, that ambiguity ended with Rudolf Rocker’s opus Nationalism and Culture. Written in the 1930’s, the book highlighted the role that nationalist appeals were playing in solidifying domestic support for European fascist imperialism abroad and racial hatred at home. It also challenged the mythology of nationhood as an organic social grouping. He wrote “the nation is not the cause, but the result of the state. It is the state that creates the nation, not the nation the state.” (Rudolph Rocker. “Nationalism and Culture” Black Rose Books 1998 (Reprint) Original 1937 P. 200)

The nation is a construction. And political leaders who resort to blood and soil tales of national origins do so because their reactionary nationalism is rooted in appeals to racism and imperialism and therefore needs a biological- land tie. But the fact that nations are developed by human action does not somehow invalidate their authenticity. Tribes are also human constructions, as are families, bands, etc… The only way to judge the usefulness of different social groupings is by observing their longevity and their tendency to support the type of lasting bonds between people that make human survival and growth possible. Families, and ethnical based tribes have survived the three most significant revolutions in human history- agriculture, industry, and the information age. Nations are a newer development. Only time will tell whether this construct will survive globalization and what some call ‘the new world order.’

For Rocker the free-city of Europe’s middle ages represented “that great epoch…of federalism whereby European culture was preserved from total submersion and the political influence of the arising royalty was for a long time confined to the non- urban country.” (Rocker P.2). He compared this age to the rise of the monarchical nation- state and claimed that among the medieval, European men of the free- cities “there never existed…those rigid, insurmountable barriers which arose with the appearance of the national states in Europe.” (Rocker P.3).

Rocker’s comparison of the golden age of autonomous, federated medieval cities to the rise of the nation wasn’t very useful. This is because the two are different in kind. The city is a geographic designation, like a province, or a country, or a county. A nation is a human designation- like a family, a tribe, or a gang.. This distinction is important because it sharpens the dilemma that anarchists of color find themselves in when we’re sorting through our politics. Since Rocker slammed the door shut on nationalism, non-white anarchists have been told to choose between our nation (or people) and our social philosophy. This choice is much more profound and, in the end, unnecessary, than whether we think cities are better units of social organization than counties. This choice has also led some to abandon anarchism.

Perhaps the most illustrative passage in Rocker’s book on the colonial character of universalism and its role in the construction of anti-nationalism can be found in his description of the social glue that tied medieval man together. “Medieval man felt himself to be bound up with a single, uniform culture…It was the community of Christendom which included all the scattered units of the Christian world and spiritually unified them.” (Ibid.). Fair enough. But now for the kicker. “Church and empire likewise had root in this universal idea…For pope and emperor Christianity was the necessary ideological basis for the realization of a new world dominion…For medieval man it was the symbol of a great spiritual community…” but “while the Christian idea united them, the idea of the nation separated and organized them into antagonistic camps.” (Ibid.).

What Rocker leaves out are the crusades, the inquisitions, the witch burnings, the Jewish pogroms, the slaughter of pagans. And that’s only in Europe. By the late medieval period the conquistadors were in Central and South America committing genocide against the heathen indigenous populations in the name of Christianity. The Church may have had a unifying effect for some Europeans, but this unity was achieved with the blood of millions both inside and outside of the continent. I’ll take the divisions of the nation over the “unity” of the Christian Church any day.

For all its limitations, Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture was a mammoth effort and clearly a classic of anarchist literature. More than any other book, it detailed the connections between reactionary nationalism and racism and made clear how the state used both to enhance its power over the masses. While his sweeping dismissal of all nationalism is regrettable, it is at least politically understandable within the context of the rise of Euro-fascism in the 1930’s. What’s harder to reconcile are post-world war II anarchists who have witnessed the anti-colonial movements in the global south and still maintain that national movements for liberation against colonialism are “the same” as the imperial nationalist movements of Europe in the last two centuries.

Colonial Contemporaries

Murry Bookchin addressed himself specifically to anarchist universalism within the context of the ‘national question’ in 1993. After echoing Rocker’s idyllic view of the free cities of medieval Europe, he warned “the great role assigned to reason by the enlightenment may well be in grave doubt” if we forget that “our true social affinities are based on citizenship, equality and a universalistic sense of a common humanity.” (Bookchin, “Nationalism and the National Question” P. 11)

Are ‘our’ true affinities based on citizenship? I’m not sure that the tens of millions of non- citizens in the U.S. who, due to their status as undocumented immigrants, would agree. In fact, citizenship has historically been a construction of property owners as a way to exercise privilege and power over poor migrants, and religious and racial minorities. This has been true from Roman times to present day America. And affinities based on a “universalistic sense of a common humanity” sound good, but who gets to define what that common humanity is? The First International (an almost exclusively European affair)? Or maybe a bunch of Institute for Social Ecology graduates?

The underlying issue is not the lack of diversity of various left circles and movements that purport to represent universal principals. It’s the very supposition that any single movement or political ideal could represent any meaningful global consensus on how communities should arrange their social institutions. Anarchists have their ideas and should work in their communities to, among other things, demonstrate that those ideas can work in the real world for other peoples around the globe. Some success in this endeavor should be a prerequisite for international anarchist criticism of national liberation and indigenous struggles against western imperialism.

In the essay Bookchin evokes fondly the lyrics of the socialist anthem the Internationale — “Tis the final conflict!”– and longs for the “sense of universalistic commitment” that those words embodied. (Ibid.) Forgive me for not being two inspired by the image of Bookchin and a group of his old left New York buddies, hunched over in a semi- circle ready to bust a note. But he goes into attack mode when he picks up where Rocker left off and applies his across-the-board rejection of nationalism to the colonial struggles of Africa, Asia, and the Americas of the 1950’s and 60’s. Bookchin mocked the national liberation movements of the period through his sophomoric use of quotes in describing their “attempts to achieve ‘autonomy’ from imperialism…even at the expense of a popular democracy in the colonized world.” (Bookchin, “Nationalism and the National Question” P. 10)

Bookchin doesn’t bother to identify one colonial popular democracy (a contradiction in terms) that was overthrown by nationalists or native movements in the quest for autonomy. He doesn’t because none existed. But that’s alright…we all know that darkies are always better off under white rule. Bookchin’s larger point is that the nice, idealistic, white kids in the new left got duped and intimidated into supporting authoritarian national liberation movements by the usual assortment of black national revolutionary thugs, solemn and sympathetic Native Americans fighting to hang on to their land, Latino political gangs lurking in the barrio, and other stereotypical ghosts of 1960’s radical mythology. It’s astonishing that at this late date Bookchin would still be walking around blaming black revolutionary nationalists and Asian Maoists for the decline of the new left and the rise of ‘micro nationalism.’ It’s always easier to blame others than it is to look in the mirror.

‘Post Left’ Colonialism

There seems to be a developing split between anarchist journal writers and activists on the national question. To their credit, lots of anarchists have participated in anti-imperialist struggles with respect for the people with whom they’ve struggled. Currently, anarchist organizers and cultural workers in North America are increasingly throwing off the shackles of dogma and are doing solidarity work with national and autonomous movements against colonialism. But as this divergence has taken place, the colonial anarchists have become even more desperate in their attempt to hang on to the tradition. And on this front the attempt to protect colonial anarchy has been led not by the class war anarchists, but by a loosely knit network of green and primitivist intellectuals who argue that anarchists should cut their lingering ties to the left altogether.

A 1993 screed by Fredy Perlman that appeared in Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed asserts that the fascist nationalism of Europe in the 1930’s and 40’s “could now be applied to Africans as well as Navahos, Apaches as well as Palestinians. The borrowings from Mussolini, Hitler, and the Zionists are judiciously covered up, because Mussolini and Hitler failed to hold on to their seized power…” (Fredy Perlman, “The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed. #37, Summer 1993).

This appeared in the same journal that did a four-part series called ‘Post- Left Anarchy’ in the fall of 1999 in which Lawrence Jarach reprimanded anarchists who dared to show solidarity with the EZLN for their “uncritical support.” “The name of the organization should be enough to cause anarchists to pause” (Zapatista National Liberation Army) because “national liberation has never been part of the anarchist agenda…The EZLN, for all its revolutionary posturing, is a broad based democratic movement for progressive social change within the fabric of the Mexican state.” (Lawerence Jarach, “Don’t let the Left (overs) Ruin Your Appetite” Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed #48, Fall- Winter 1999-2000). How do you even engage with people about colonialism who treat “Africans” as some sort of Hitler-inspired nationalist monolith or who claim that indigenous autonomists who have successfully sustained a decade-old uprising through disciplined armed struggle are basically revolutionary poseurs? Generally, you don’t.

But in the Spring 2002 issue of Green Anarchy a Zapatista did. It was a response to an article that appeared in the paper a few months earlier entitled “The EZLN is NOT Anarchist.” The article labels the EZLN as “fundamentally reformist” not working towards anything “that could not be provided for by capitalism.” (Green Anarchy. The EZLN is NOT Anarchist. #6 Summer 2001). The piece went on to instruct anarchists to find ways to “intervene in a way that is fitting with one’s aims, in a way that moves one’s revolutionary anarchist project forward.” (Green Anarchy. A Zapatista Response to The EZLN is NOT Anarchist #8 Spring 2002 P. 3 greenanarchy.org/zine/GA08/zapatistaresponse.php)

The Zapatista responded “It would be difficult for us to design a more concise list of colonial words and attitudes than those used in this sentence. “Intervene?” “moves one’s ‘project’ forward?” Mexicans have a very well developed understanding of what ‘intervention’ entails.” (Green Anarchy P. 4) He ended with this, “Colonialism is one of the many enemies we are fighting in this world and so long as North Americans reinforce colonial thought patterns in their ‘revolutionary’ struggles, they will never be on the side of any anti- colonial struggle anywhere. We in the Zapatista struggle have never asked anyone for unflinching, uncritical support. What we have asked the world to do is respect the historical context we are in and think about the actions we do to pull ourselves from under the boots of oppression.” (Ibid.).

If and when North American anarchists learn how to do this with all of the struggles against colonial and neo-colonial domination around the globe- whether they’re nationalist or go under some other label, then we’ll be welcomed into a much larger and richer international tradition of people’s struggles against domination. This is where we belong.

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By Tom Lane
December 23, 1996

Introduction

Though Chomsky has written a considerable amount about anarchism in the past three decades, people often ask him for a more tangible, detailed vision of social change. His political analysis never fails to instill outrage and anger with the way the world works, but many readers are left uncertain about what exactly Chomsky would do to change it. Perhaps because they regard his analytical work with such respect, they anticipate he will lay out his goals and strategy with similar precision and clarity, only to be disappointed with his generalized statements of libertarian socialist values. Or perhaps many look to a great intellectual to provide a “master plan” for them to follow step-by-step into a bright shining future.

Yet Chomsky shys away from such pronouncements. He cautions that it is difficult to predict what particular forms a more just social organization will take, or even to know for sure what alternatives to the current system are ideal. Only experience can show us the best answers to these questions, he says. What should guide us along the way are a general set of principles which will underly whatever specific forms our future society will take. For Chomsky, those principles arise from the historical trend of thought and action known as anarchism.

Chomsky warns that little can be said about anarchism on a very general level. “I haven’t tried to write anything systematic about these topics, nor do I know of anything by others that I could recommend,” he wrote to me in reply to a set of questions on the subject. He’s written here and there about it, notably in the recent Powers and Prospects, but there just isn’t a lot to say in general terms. “The interest lies in the applications,” he thinks, “but these are specific to time and place.

“In Latin America,” Chomsky says, “I talked about many of these topics, and far more important, learned about them from people who are actually doing things, a good deal of which had an anarchist flavor. Also had a chance to meet with lively and interesting groups of anarchists, from Buenos Aires to Belem at the mouth of the Amazon (the latter I didn’t know about at all — amazing where our friends show up). But the discussions were much more focused and specific than I often see here; and rightly, I think.”

As such, Chomsky’s responses to these questions are general and terse. However, as a brief introduction to some of his thoughts on anarchism, perhaps they may inspire the reader to pursue other writings on the subject (a list appears at the end of the questions), and more importantly, to develop the concept of anarchism through the process of working for a more free and democratic society.

Tom Lane

Answers from Chomsky to eight questions on anarchism

General comment on all the questions:

No one owns the term “anarchism.” It is used for a wide range of different currents of thought and action, varying widely. There are many self-styled anarchists who insist, often with great passion, that theirs is the only right way, and that others do not merit the term (and maybe are criminals of one or another sort). A look at the contemporary anarchist literature, particularly in the West and in intellectual circles (they may not like the term), will quickly show that a large part of it is denunciation of others for their deviations, rather as in the Marxist-Leninist sectarian literature. The ratio of such material to constructive work is depressingly high.

Personally, I have no confidence in my own views about the “right way,” and am unimpressed with the confident pronouncements of others, including good friends. I feel that far too little is understood to be able to say very much with any confidence. We can try to formulate our long-term visions, our goals, our ideals; and we can (and should) dedicate ourselves to working on issues of human significance. But the gap between the two is often considerable, and I rarely see any way to bridge it except at a very vague and general level. These qualities of mine (perhaps defects, perhaps not) will show up in the (very brief) responses I will make to your questions.

1. What are the intellectual roots of anarchist thought, and what movements have developed and animated it throughout history?

The currents of anarchist thought that interest me (there are many) have their roots, I think, in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and even trace back in interesting ways to the scientific revolution of the 17th century, including aspects that are often considered reactionary, like Cartesian rationalism. There’s literature on the topic (historian of ideas Harry Bracken, for one; I’ve written about it too). Won’t try to recapitulate here, except to say that I tend to agree with the important anarchosyndicalist writer and activist Rudolf Rocker that classical liberal ideas were wrecked on the shoals of industrial capitalism, never to recover (I’m referring to Rocker in the 1930s; decades later, he thought differently). The ideas have been reinvented continually; in my opinion, because they reflect real human needs and perceptions. The Spanish Civil War is perhaps the most important case, though we should recall that the anarchist revolution that swept over a good part of Spain in 1936, taking various forms, was not a spontaneous upsurge, but had been prepared in many decades of education, organization, struggle, defeat, and sometimes victories. It was very significant. Sufficiently so as to call down the wrath of every major power system: Stalinism, fascism, western liberalism, most intellectual currents and their doctrinal institutions — all combined to condemn and destroy the anarchist revolution, as they did; a sign of its significance, in my opinion.

2. Critics complain that anarchism is “formless, utopian.” You counter that each stage of history has its own forms of authority and oppression which must be challenged, therefore no fixed doctrine can apply. In your opinion, what specific realization of anarchism is appropriate in this epoch?

I tend to agree that anarchism is formless and utopian, though hardly more so than the inane doctrines of neoliberalism, Marxism-Leninism, and other ideologies that have appealed to the powerful and their intellectual servants over the years, for reasons that are all too easy to explain. The reason for the general formlessness and intellectual vacuity (often disguised in big words, but that is again in the self-interest of intellectuals) is that we do not understand very much about complex systems, such as human societies; and have only intuitions of limited validity as to the ways they should be reshaped and constructed.

Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, then the institutions they defend should be considered illegitimate. How one should react to illegitimate authority depends on circumstances and conditions: there are no formulas.

In the present period, the issues arise across the board, as they commonly do: from personal relations in the family and elsewhere, to the international political/economic order. And anarchist ideas — challenging authority and insisting that it justify itself — are appropriate at all levels.

3. What sort of conception of human nature is anarchism predicated on? Would people have less incentive to work in an egalitarian society? Would an absence of government allow the strong to dominate the weak? Would democratic decision-making result in excessive conflict, indecision and “mob rule”?

As I understand the term “anarchism,” it is based on the hope (in our state of ignorance, we cannot go beyond that) that core elements of human nature include sentiments of solidarity, mutual support, sympathy, concern for others, and so on.

Would people work less in an egalitarian society? Yes, insofar as they are driven to work by the need for survival; or by material reward, a kind of pathology, I believe, like the kind of pathology that leads some to take pleasure from torturing others. Those who find reasonable the classical liberal doctrine that the impulse to engage in creative work is at the core of human nature — something we see constantly, I think, from children to the elderly, when circumstances allow — will be very suspicious of these doctrines, which are highly serviceable to power and authority, but seem to have no other merits.

Would an absence of government allow the strong to dominate the weak? We don’t know. If so, then forms of social organization would have to be constructed — there are many possibilities — to overcome this crime.

What would be the consequences of democratic decision-making? The answers are unknown. We would have to learn by trial. Let’s try it and find out.

4. Anarchism is sometimes called libertarian socialism — How does it differ from other ideologies that are often associated with socialism, such as Leninism?

Leninist doctrine holds that a vanguard Party should assume state power and drive the population to economic development, and, by some miracle that is unexplained, to freedom and justice. It is an ideology that naturally appeals greatly to the radical intelligentsia, to whom it affords a justification for their role as state managers. I can’t see any reason — either in logic or history — to take it seriously. Libertarian socialism (including a substantial mainstream of Marxism) dismissed all of this with contempt, quite rightly.

5. Many “anarcho-capitalists” claim that anarchism means the freedom to do what you want with your property and engage in free contract with others. Is capitalism in any way compatible with anarchism as you see it?

Anarcho-capitalism, in my opinion, is a doctrinal system which, if ever implemented, would lead to forms of tyranny and oppression that have few counterparts in human history. There isn’t the slightest possibility that its (in my view, horrendous) ideas would be implemented, because they would quickly destroy any society that made this colossal error. The idea of “free contract” between the potentate and his starving subject is a sick joke, perhaps worth some moments in an academic seminar exploring the consequences of (in my view, absurd) ideas, but nowhere else.

I should add, however, that I find myself in substantial agreement with people who consider themselves anarcho-capitalists on a whole range of issues; and for some years, was able to write only in their journals. And I also admire their commitment to rationality — which is rare — though I do not think they see the consequences of the doctrines they espouse, or their profound moral failings.

6. How do anarchist principles apply to education? Are grades, requirements and exams good things? What sort of environment is most conducive to free thought and intellectual development?

My feeling, based in part on personal experience in this case, is that a decent education should seek to provide a thread along which a person will travel in his or her own way; good teaching is more a matter of providing water for a plant, to enable it to grow under its own powers, than of filling a vessel with water (highly unoriginal thoughts I should add, paraphrased from writings of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism). These are general principles, which I think are generally valid. How they apply in particular circumstances has to be evaluated case by case, with due humility, and recognition of how little we really understand.

7. Depict, if you can, how an ideal anarchist society would function day-to-day. What sorts of economic and political institutions would exist, and how would they function? Would we have money? Would we shop in stores? Would we own our own homes? Would we have laws? How would we prevent crime?

I wouldn’t dream of trying to do this. These are matters about which we have to learn, by struggle and experiment.

8. What are the prospects for realizing anarchism in our society? What steps should we take?

Prospects for freedom and justice are limitless. The steps we should take depend on what we are trying to achieve. There are, and can be, no general answers. The questions are wrongly put. I am reminded of a nice slogan of the rural workers’ movement in Brazil (from which I have just returned): they say that they must expand the floor of the cage, until the point when they can break the bars. At times, that even requires defense of the cage against even worse predators outside: defense of illegitimate state power against predatory private tyranny in the United States today, for example, a point that should be obvious to any person committed to justice and freedom — anyone, for example, who thinks that children should have food to eat — but that seems difficult for many people who regard themselves as libertarians and anarchists to comprehend. That is one of the self-destructive and irrational impulses of decent people who consider themselves to be on the left, in my opinion, separating them in practice from the lives and legitimate aspirations of suffering people.

So it seems to me. I’m happy to discuss the point, and listen to counter-argument, but only in a context that allows us to go beyond shouting of slogans — which, I’m afraid, excludes a good deal of what passes for debate on the left, more’s the pity.

Noam

In another letter, Chomsky offered this expansion on his thoughts regarding a future society:

About a future society, I…may be repeating, but it’s something I’ve been concerned with every since I was a kid. I recall, about 1940, reading Diego Abad de Santillan’s interesting book After the Revolution, criticizing his anarchist comrades and sketching in some detail how an anarchosyndicalist Spain would work (these are >50 year old memories, so don’t take it too literally). My feeling then was that it looked good, but do we understand enough to answer questions about a society in such detail? Over the years, naturally I’ve learned more, but it has only deepened my skepticism about whether we understand enough. In recent years, I’ve discussed this a good deal with Mike Albert, who has been encouraging me to spell out in detail how I think society should work, or at least react to his “participatory democracy” conception. I’ve backed off, in both cases, for the same reasons. It seems to me that answers to most such questions have to be learned by experiment. Take markets (to the extent that they could function in any viable society — limited, if the historical record is any guide, not to speak of logic). I understand well enough what’s wrong with them, but that’s not sufficient to demonstrate that a system that eliminates market operations is preferable; simply a point of logic, and I don’t think we know the answer. Same with everything else.

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Anarchism is the political belief that society should have no government, laws, police, or other authority, but should be a free association of all its members. William Godwin, an important anarchist philosopher in Britain during the late 18th century, believed that the “euthanasia of government” would be achieved through “individual moral reformation”.

In the United States the two most significant figures in the anarchist movement were William Greene and Benjamin Tucker. In journals such as The Word and Liberty, they published the work of European anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin, Michael Bakunin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Leo Tolstoy. At this time anarchism was essentially a pacifist movement.

Several leading anarchists in Europe, including Johann Most and Emma Goldman, emigrated to the United States. They both argued that it was acceptable to use violence to overthrow capitalism.

Anarchists were blamed for the Haymarket Bombing in Chicago on 4th May, 1886. The authorities were unable to identify the person who threw the bomb but a group of anarchists, Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fisher, Louis Lingg and George Engel, who helped organized the meeting, were sentenced to death for “conspiracy to murder”.

In 1892 the Russian anarchist, Alexander Berkman, attempted to murder William Frick. Another immigrant, Gaetano Bresci, returned to Italy and assassinated King Umberto. Soon afterwards, another anarchist Leon Czolgosz, assassinated President William McKinley.

In January 1916 a group of anarchists began publishing the journal Blast. Alexander Berkman became editor and contributors included Emma Goldman, Mary Heaton Vorse and Robert Minor.

During the Red Scare in 1919 a large number of anarchists, including Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Mollie Steimer were deported from the United States. Some historians have argued that Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian immigrants found guilty of murder, were both executed in 1927 for their anarchist beliefs.

In the early part of the 20th century the anarchist movement in Spain was the strongest in Europe. The main support came from the industrial workers of Barcelona and in 1911 activists formed the anarcho-syndicalist trade union, the National Confederation of Trabajo (CNT).

In the first few weeks of the Spanish Civil War an estimated 100,000 men joined Anarcho-Syndicalists militias. Anarchists also established the Iron Column, many of whose 3,000 members were former prisoners. In Guadalajara, Cipriano Mera, leader of the CNT construction workers in Madrid, formed the Rosal Column. The most important anarchist leader of this period was Buenaventura Durruti who was killed while fighting in Madrid on 20th November 1936. Durruti’s supporters in the CNT claimed that he had been murdered by members of the Communist Party (PCE).

In September 1936, President Manuel Azaña appointed the left-wing socialist, Francisco Largo Caballero as prime minister. Largo Caballero also took over the important role of war minister. Largo Caballero brought into his government four anarchist leaders, Juan Garcia Oliver (Justice), Juan López (Commerce), Federica Montseny (Health) and Juan Peiró (Industry). Montseny was the first woman in Spanish history to be a cabinet minister. Over the next few months Montseny accomplished a series of reforms that included the introduction of sex education, family planning and the legalization of abortion.

(1) Mikhail Bakunin and Sergi Nechayev, Catechism of a Revolutionist (1869)

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion – the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose – to destroy it.

He despises public opinion. He hates and despises the social morality of his time, its motives and manifestations. Everything which promotes the success of the revolution is moral, everything which hinders it is immoral. The nature of the true revolutionist excludes all romanticism, all tenderness, all ecstasy, all love.

(2) Mikhail Bakunin, Marxism, Freedom and the State (1871)

I am a passionate seeker after Truth and a not less passionate enemy of the malignant fictions used by the “Party of Order”, the official representatives of all turpitudes, religious, metaphysical, political, judicial, economic, and social, present and past, to brutalise and enslave the world; I am a fanatical lover of Liberty; considering it as the only medium in which can develop intelligence, dignity, and the happiness of man; not official “Liberty”, licensed, measured and regulated by the State, a falsehood representing the privileges of a few resting on the slavery of everybody else; not the individual liberty, selfish, mean, and fictitious advanced by the school of Rousseau and all other schools of bourgeois Liberalism, which considers the rights of the individual as limited by the rights of the State, and therefore necessarily results in the reduction of the rights of the individual to zero.

No, I mean the only liberty which is truly worthy of the name, the liberty which consists in the full development of all the material, intellectual and moral powers which are to be found as faculties latent in everybody, the liberty which recognises no other restrictions than those which are traced for us by the laws of our own nature; so that properly speaking there are no restrictions, since these laws are not imposed on us by some outside legislator, beside us or above us; they are immanent in us, inherent, constituting the very basis of our being, material as well as intellectual and moral; instead, therefore, of finding them a limit, we must consider them as the real conditions and effective reason for our liberty.

(3) Statement issued at an Anarchist Congress at Pittsburgh (1883)

All laws are directed against the working people. Even the school serves only the purpose of furnishing the offspring of the wealthy with those qualities necessary to uphold their class domination. The children of the poor get scarcely a formal elementary training, and this, too, is mainly directed to such branches as tend to producing prejudices, arrogance, and servility; in short, want of sense. The Church finally seeks to make complete idiots out of the mass and to make them forego the paradise on earth by promising a fictitious heaven. The capitalist press, on the other hand, takes care of the confusion of spirits in public life. The workers can therefore expect no help from any capitalistic party in their struggle against the existing system. They must achieve their liberation by their own efforts. As in former times, a privileged class never surrenders its tyranny, neither can it be expected that the capitalists of this age will give up their rulership without being forced to do it.

(4) Michael Schwab, speech at his trial for the Haymarket Bombing (September, 1887)

According to our vocabulary Anarchy is a state of society in which the only government is reason; a state of society in which all human beings do right for the simple reason that it is right, and hate wrong because it is wrong. In such a society no compulsion will be necessary. Anarchy is a dream, but only in the present. It is entirely wrong to use the word Anarchy as synonymous with violence. Violence is something, and Anarchy is another. In the present state of society violence is used on all sides, and therefore we advocated the use of violence against violence, but against violence only as a necessary means of defense.

(5) George Engel, speech at his trial (September, 1887)

Anarchism and Socialism are, according to my opinion, as like as one egg is to another. Only the tactics are different. Therefore, I say to the working classes, do not believe any longer in the ballot-box and in those ways and means that are open to you; but rather think about ways and means when the time comes, when the burden of the people becomes intolerable. And that is our crime. Because we have named to the people the ways and means by which they could free themselves in the fight against Capitalism, by reason of that, Anarchism is hated and persecuted in every state.

(6) Samuel Jones, the successful businessman and four-term mayor of Toledo, Ohio, was one of the first to try and introduce socialist ideas to local government. In his article, The New Patriotism: A Golden-Rule Government for Cities, he quoted Henry Demarest Lloyd on the subject of anarchy.

The ethics of the wild beast, the survival of the strongest, shrewdest, and meanest, have been the inspiration of our materialistic lives during the last quarter or half century. The fact in our national history has brought us today face to face with the inevitable result. We have cities in which a few are wealthy, a few are in what may be called comfortable circumstances, vast numbers are propertyless, and thousands are in pauperism and crime. Certainly, no reasonable person will contend that this is the goal that we have been struggling for; that the inequalities that characterize our rich and poor represent the idea that the founders of this republic saw when they wrote that “All men are created equal.”

The competitive idea at present dominant is most of our political and business life is, of course, the seed root of all the trouble. The people are beginning to understand that we have been pursuing a policy of plundering ourselves, that in the foolish scramble to make individuals rich we have been making all poor. “For a hundred years or so,” says Henry Demarest Lloyd, “our economic theory has been one of industrial government by the self-interest of the individual; political government by the self-interest of the individual we call anarchy.” It is one of the paradoxes of public opinion that the people of America, least tolerant of this theory of anarchy in political government, lead in practicing it in industry.

(7) Lyman Abbott, The Cause and Cure of Anarchism (Outlook, 22nd February, 1902)

Anarchism is defined by E. V. Zenker as: “the perfect, unfettered self-government of the individual, and consequently the absence of any kind of external government.” It rests upon the doctrine that no man has a right to control by force the action of any other man. Anarchism is defended on historic grounds: the evils are recited which have been wrought in human history by the employment of force compelling obedience by one will to another will, as they are seen in political and religious despotism and in the subjugation of women.

Anarchism is defended on religious grounds. Jesus Christ is cited as the first of anarchists; for did he not say, “Resist not evil: if one take away thy coat, give him thy cloak also; and if one smite thee upon the one cheek, turn to him the other also? What is this, we are asked, but a denial of the right to use force even in defense of one’s simplest and plainest rights?

Socialism, which is curiously confounded by the indiscriminating with anarchism, is its exact opposite. Anarchy is the doctrine that there should be no government control; socialism is the doctrine that the government should control everything.

The place in which to attack anarchism is where the offences grow which alone make anarchism possible. Let us secure the just, speedy, and impartial administration of law; let us elect legislators who seek honestly to conform human legislation to the divine laws of the social order, without fear or favour. The way to counteract hostility to law is to make laws which deserve to be respected.

(8) H. G. Wells, New Worlds for Old (1908)

That Anarchist world, I admit, is our dream; we do believe – well, I, at any rate, believe this present world, this planet, will some day bear a race beyond our most exalted and temerarious dreams, a race begotten of our wills and the substance of our bodies, a race, so I have said it, ‘who will stand upon the earth as one stands upon a footstool, and laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars,’ but the way to that is through education and discipline and law. Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.

(9) Alice Hamilton, Exploring the Dangerous Trades (1943)

Prince Peter Kropotkin was one of the most lovable persons I have ever met. He was a typical revolutionist of the early Russian type, an aristocrat who threw himself into the movement for emancipation of the masses out of a passionate love for his fellow man, and a longing for justice.

He stayed some time with us at Hull House, and we all came to love him, not only we who lived under the same roof but the crowds of Russian refugees who came to see him. No matter how down-and-out, how squalid even, a caller would be., Prince Kropotkin would give him a joyful welcome and kiss him on both cheeks.

It was most unfortunate that his visit to us came just a short time before the assassination of McKinley. That event woke up the dormant terror of anarchists which always lay close under the surface of Chicago’s thinking and feeling, ever since the Haymarket riot. It was known that Czolgosz, the assassin, had been in Chicago at the time when both Emma Goldman and Kropotkin were there, and a rumor started that he had met them and the plot had been of their making – Czolgosz had been their tool. Then the story came to involve Hull House, which had been the scene of these secret, murderous meetings.

(10) Charles Fickert, during the trial of Tom Mooney (January 1917)

This defendant and his fellow-anarchists, in the time of peace, murdered ten men and women because these anarchists were bent on destroying the very government which Lincoln preserved and defended. The question which concerns you, gentlemen, here, as well as every other citizen of this great republic, is either to destroy anarchy or the anarchists will destroy the State.

If the moral fibre of the people of this nation has been so weakened; if the seeds of anarchy have been so implanted in the body politic that we refuse or neglect to defend our citizens at home or abroad; when helpless women and children can be ruthlessly slain on the streets of our city, and those who murder them go unpunished, because those who have been sworn to enforce the laws have tailed through neglect or fear to do their duty – we can then say farewell to the greatness of our nation; our boasted civilization is then only a self-delusion resting on the edge of a political abyss.

(11) Molly Steimer, speech made in court during her trial under the Espionage Act (October, 1918)

Anarchism is a new social order where no group shall be governed by another group of people. Individual freedom shall prevail in the full sense of the word. Private ownership shall be abolished. Every person shall have an equal opportunity to develop himself well, both mentally and physically. We shall not have to struggle for our daily existence as we do now. No one shall live on the product of others. Every person shall produce as much as he can, and enjoy as much as he needs – receive according to his need. Instead of striving to get money, we shall strive towards education, towards knowledge.

While at present the people of the world are divided into various groups, calling themselves nations, while one nation defies another – in most cases considers the others as competitive – we, the workers of the world, shall stretch out our hands towards each other with brotherly love. To the fulfillment of this idea I shall devote all my energy, and, if necessary, render my life for it.

(12) Cyril Connolly, New Statesman (21st November 1936)

It is in Barcelona that the full force of the anarchist revolution becomes apparent. Their initials, CNT and FAI, are everywhere. They have taken over all the hotels, restaurants, cafes, trains, taxis, and means of communication, as well as all theatres, cinemas, and places of amusement. Their first act was to abolish the tip as being incompatible with the dignity of those who receive it, and to attempt to give one is the only act, short of making the Fascist salute, that a foreigner can be disliked for.

Spanish anarchism is a doctrine which has gone through three stages. The first was the conception of pure anarchy which grew out of the writings of Rousseau, Proudhon, Godwin, and to a lesser extent, Diderot and Tolstoy. The essence of this anarchist faith is that there exists in mankind a natural trend towards nobility and dignity; human relations based on a love of liberty combined with a desire to help each other (as shown for instance in the mutual generosity of the poor in slum districts in cases of sickness and distress) should in themselves be enough, given education and the right economic conditions, to provide a working basis for people to live on; State interference, armies, property, would be as superfluous as they were to the early Christians. The anarchist paradise would be one in which the instincts towards freedom, justice, intelligence and “bondad” in the human race develop gradually to the exclusion of all thoughts of personal gain, envy, and malice. But there exist two stumbling blocks to this ideal – the desire to make money and the desire to acquire power. Everybody who makes money or acquires power, according to the anarchists, does so to the detriment of himself and at the expense of other people, and as long as these instincts are allowed free run there will always be war, tyranny, and exploitation. Power and money must therefore be abolished altogether. At this point the second stage of anarchism begins, that which arises from the thought of Bakunin, the contemporary of Marx. He added the rider that the only way to abolish power and money was by direct action on the bourgeoisie in whom these instincts were incurably ingrained, and who took advantage of all liberal legislation, all concessions from the workers, to get more power and more money for themselves. “The rich will do everything for the poor but get off their backs,” Tolstoy has said. “Then they must be blown off,” might have been Bakunin’s corollary. From this time (the Eighties) dates militant anarchism with its crimes of violence and assassination. In most of its strongholds, Italy, Germany, Russia, it was either destroyed by Fascism or absorbed by Communism, which has usually seemed more practical, realisable, and adaptable to industrial countries; but in Spain the innate love of individual freedom, a personal dignity of the people, made them prefer it to Russian Communism, and the persecution which it underwent was never sufficient to blot it out.

Finally, in the last few years it has gone through a third transformation; in spite of its mystical appeal to the heart anarchism has always been an elastic and adaptable faith, and looking round for a suitable machinery to replace State centralisation it found syndicalism, to which it is now united. Syndicalism is a system of vertical rather than horizontal Trade Unions, by which, for instance, all the workers on this paper, editors, reviewers, printers and distributors, would delegate members to a syndicate which would negotiate with other syndicates for the housing, feeding, amusements, etc., of all the body. This anarcho-syndicalism through its organ, the CNT, has been able to get control of all the industries and agriculture of Catalonia and much of that in Andalusia, Valencia and Murcia, forming a more or less solid block from Malaga to the French frontier with considerable power also in the Asturias and Madrid. The executive militant spearhead of the body is the Federacion Anarquistica Iberica, usually pronounced as one word, FAI, which partly owing to acts of terrorism, partly to its former illegality, is clothed in mystery today. It is almost impossible to find out who and how many belong to it.

The ideal of the CNT and the FAI is libertarian Communism, a Spain in which the work and wealth is shared by all, about three hours’ work a day being enough to entitle anyone to sufficient food, clothing, education, amusement, transport, and medical attention. It differs from Communism because there must be no centralisation, no bureaucracy, and no leaders; if somebody does not want to do something, the anarchists argue, no good will come of making them do it. They point to Stalin’s dictatorship as an example of the evils inherent in Communism. The danger of anarchism, one might argue, is that it has become such a revolutionary weapon that it may never know what to do with the golden age when it has it, and may exhaust itself in a perpetual series of counter-revolutions. Yet it should be an ideal not unsympathetic to the English, who have always honoured freedom and individual eccentricity and whose liberalism and whiggery might well have turned to something very similar had they been harassed for centuries, like the Spanish proletariat, by absolute monarchs, militant clergy, army dictatorships and absentee landlords.

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By Cindy Milstein

For many, a “new anarchism” seemed to have been birthed amid the cold rain and toxic fog that greeted the November 1999 World Trade Organization protest. Yet rather than the bastard child of an emergent social movement, this radical politics of resistance and reconstruction had been transforming itself for decades. Seattle’s direct action only succeeded in making it visible again. Anarchism, for its part, supplied a compelling praxis for this historical moment. And in so doing, it not only helped shape the present anti-capitalist movement; it also illuminated principles of freedom that could potentially displace the hegemony of representative democracy and capitalism.

From its nineteenth-century beginnings on, anarchism has always held out a set of ethical notions that it contends best approximates a free society. In the parlance of his period, Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta (1853-1932) long ago described anarchism as “a form of social life in which men live as brothers, where nobody is in a position to oppress or exploit anyone else, and in which all the means to achieve maximum moral and material development are available to everyone.” This pithy definition still captures anarchism’s overarching aims. Nevertheless, this libertarian form of socialism may well have been ahead of its day in advocating a world of transnational and multidimensional identities, in struggling for a qualitative humanism based on cooperation and differentiation. It is only in the context of globalization that anarchism may finally be able to speak to the times and thus peoples’ hopes. Whether it can fulfill its own aspirations remains to be seen.

The Vision Made Invisible

While the forms of organization and values advanced by anarchists can be found in embryo around the world in many different eras, anarchism’s debut as a distinct philosophy was in mid-nineteenth-century Europe. The English “philosopher of freedom” William Godwin was the first Enlightenment thinker to scribe a sustained theory of a society without states in his 1793 An Inquiry concerning Political Justice, but it wasn’t until Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote “society seeks order in anarchy” in his 1840 What Is Property? that the term “anarchism” slowly began to congeal over the next several decades around a recognizable core of principles. Godwin’s political theory didn’t live up to the liberatory character of his cultural sentiments; and Proudhon should be roundly condemned on many fronts, from his failure to contend with capitalism’s inherent logic to his patriarchal and anti-Semitic beliefs. It would in fact take others, from the Russian aristocrat Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) to the German Jewish intellectual Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) and many prominent as well as lesser-known radicals, to fill out a more pleasing portrait of classical anarchism: a utopian political philosophy decrying all forms of imposed authority or coercion.

As socialists, anarchists were particularly concerned with capitalism, which during the Industrial Revolution was causing suffering on a hitherto-unimaginable scale. Anarchists primarily pinned their hopes for transforming social relations on workers, utilizing economic categories ranging from class struggle to an end to private property. All those on the revolutionary Left agreed that capitalism couldn’t be reformed; it must instead be abolished. But unlike other socialists, anarchists felt that the state was just as complicit in enslaving humanity, and so one couldn’t employ statecraft—even in a transitional manner—to move from capitalism to socialism. A classless yet still statist society, anarchists argued, would still constitute a world marked for most by domination. As anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker proclaimed in 1938, “Socialism will be free, or it will not be at all.” For this reason and others, anarchism evolved out of socialism to indicate an opposition not just to capitalism but also states and other compulsory, interlinked institutions, such as organized religion, mandatory schooling, militarism, and marriage. Thus it is said of anarchism in the most general sense that “all anarchists are socialists, but not all socialists are anarchists.”

This statement could also be seen as relating to questions of strategy. Many socialists, at least the radical ones, were not adverse to the withering away of the state,” it was just a matter of when and how. For anarchists, a “dictatorship of the proletariat” steering the state until it withered couldn’t be counted on to actually push that process along. Instead of top-down social organization, anarchists championed various types of horizontal models that could prefigure the good society in the present. That is, anarchists maintained that people could attempt to build the new world in the shell of the old through self-organization rather than passively waiting until some post-revolutionary period. Hence anarchism’s emphasis on praxis. Anarchist alternatives were grounded in such key concepts as voluntary association, personal and social freedom, confederated yet decentralized communities, equality of conditions, human solidarity, and spontaneity. As the European invention known as anarchism traveled via intellectual and agitator circuits to everywhere from the United States and China to Latin America and Africa, anarchists experimented with everything from communal living, federations, and free schools to workers’ councils, local currencies, and mutual aid societies.

Anarchism was part of a fairly large internationalist Left from the 1880s through the Red Scare of the 1920s and Spanish Revolution of the 1930s. Then, discredited, disenchanted, or killed, anarchists seemed to disappear, and with them, the philosophy itself. After World War II and the defeat of Nazism, it appeared the two political choices were democracy” (free market capitalism) or “communism” (state capitalism). Lost in this equation, among other things, was the questioning of authority and concurrent assertion of utopia posed by anarchism.

Reemergence as Convergence
The distant nineteenth-century is, of course, formative for anarchism’s reinvention. But the dilemmas and openings of that time—for instance, the rise of liberalism, colonialism, and industrial production—are far removed from those of the twenty-first century. Beyond this, classical anarchism leaves a lot to be desired: its naivete concerning human nature as basically good, say, or its aversion to any political replacement for statist governments. When anarchism began to be rediscovered in the 1950s by leftists searching for an alternative to orthodox marxism, it therefore tried hard to remake itself. Anarchist thinkers grappled with new concerns from conspicuous consumption to urbanization; new possibilities such as feminism and cultural liberation; and old ghosts of its own from a workerist orientation to authoritarian, even terroristic tactics. The renewed anarchism that finally emerged was, in fact, a convergence of various postwar anti-authoritarian impulses. Though the libertarian sensibility of the 1960s and New Left is foundational, five phenomena are especially crucial to the praxis made (in)famous in Seattle.

First, there is the Situationist International (1962-1972), a small group of intellectuals and avant-garde artists who attempted to describe a changing capitalism. According to the Situationists, the alienation basic to capitalist production that Marx had observed now filled every crevice; people were alienated not only from the goods they produced but their own lives, their own desires. The commodity form had colonized the previously separate sphere of daily life. As SI Guy Debord quipped, modern capitalism forged “a society of the spectacle” or consumer society that promised satisfaction yet never delivered, with us as passive spectators. The Situationists advocated playful disruptions of the everyday, from media to cityscapes, in order to shatter the spectacle via imagination and replace drudgery with pleasure. During the May 1968 near-revolution in Paris, SI slogans as graffiti such as “Live without dead time! Enjoy without restraint” were ubiquitous. Ironically, even though the Situationists were critical of anarchists, anarchists lifted from the Situationists’ critique, especially the preoccupation with cultural alterations.

From the 1970s on, the interdisciplinary works of theorist Murray Bookchin also helped transform anarchism into a modern political philosophy. Bridging the Old and New Left, Bookchin did more than anyone to widen anarchism’s anti-capitalism/anti-statism to a critique of hierarchy per se. He also brought ecology as a concern to anarchism by connecting it to domination. As he put it, “The ecological crisis is a social crisis.” Bookchin emphasized the possibility nascent in the present of an ecological and post-scarcity society, in which the rational use of technology could free humanity to fulfill its potentiality in harmony with the natural world. Most significantly, he drew out the institutional replacement for the state hinted at in nineteenth-century anarchism: directly democratic self-government, or in his own language, libertarian municipalism. Bookchin’s writings pointed to the city or neighborhood as the site of struggle, radicalization, dual power, and finally revolution, with confederations of free citizens’ assemblies replacing state and capital. They also inspired a radical ecology movement, experiments in anarchist federations such as the Youth Greens, and a new generation of anarchist intellectuals.

Bookchin’s unearthing of the affinity group model in his research on the Spanish anarchists, sketched in his Post-Scarcity Anarchism (1971), was influential to the anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the United States. Emerging from the rural counterculture in New England and then on the West Coast—a counterculture that included radical pacifists of both anarchist and religious persuasions—the anti-nuke movement used civil disobedience, but infused it with an anarchist and feminist sensibility: a rejection of all hierarchy, a preference for directly democratic process, a stress on spontaneity and creativity. Varying levels of nonviolent confrontation at nuclear power plants, from blockades to occupations, along with the use of pageantry, puppets, and jail solidarity were determined on in affinity groups and spokescouncils. Quaker activists, not anarchists, added consensus to the blend with mixed results (false unity, for instance). Notwithstanding the difficulty of moving beyond a single issue and what became an insular community, the tactics and organizational form of the U.S. as well as international anti-nuclear movement were soon picked up by the peace, women’s, gay and lesbian, radical ecology, and anti-intervention movements.

Beginning in the 1980s, the West German Autonomen made a mark on anarchism as well. Viewing European New Leftists as discredited, though affected by their critique of authoritarianism on the Left (Soviet-style “communism”) and Right (“democratic” capitalism), the Autonomen rejected everything from the existing system to ideological labels, including that of anarchism. As a spontaneous, decentralized network of anti-authoritarian revolutionaries, they were autonomous from political parties and trade unions; they also attempted to be autonomous from structures and attitudes imposed from “outside.” This entailed a twofold strategy. First, to create liberated, communal free spaces such as squats in which to make their own lives. And second, to utilize militant confrontation both to defend their counterculture and take the offensive against what they saw as repressive, even fascistic elements. The deployment of a masked black bloc—for one, at a 1988 demonstration in Berlin during an International Monetary Fund/World Bank meeting—autonomous neighborhoods and “info-stores,” and street battles with police and neo-Nazis became emblematic of the Autonomen. Anarchists felt an affinity and imported the trappings of autonomous politics into their own, thereby linking and modifying the two in the process.

Last but not least, the dramatic 1 January 1994 appearance of the Zapatistas on the world stage to contest the North American Free Trade Agreement keyed anarchists into the importance of globalization as a contemporary concern of often life-and-death proportions. A decade in the making through the grassroots efforts of some thirty indigenous communities in southern Mexico, and intentionally tied to struggles elsewhere, the uprising illustrated the power of solidarity. The Zapatistas’ bold takeover of villages in Chiapas also re-ignited the notion that resistance was possible, in poor and rich regions alike. If you ask what we want, we will unashamedly answer: ‘To open a crack in history,’” Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos declared. “We’ll build another world. . . . Democracy! Freedom! Justice!” For anarchists, the Zapatistas’ inventive blend of high-tech such as the Internet and low-tech such as jungle encuentros, principled communiques and practical gains, and the attempt to reclaim popular power through autonomous municipalities was especially electrifying—the concurrent appeals to the Mexican state less so. Still, anarchists flocked to Chiapas to support this rebellion, carrying home lessons to apply to a global anti-capitalist movement that a refashioned anarchism would shortly help initiate.

More Than the Sum of Its Parts

Such strands of resistance, themselves pulling from earlier moments, are interwoven into the fabric of contemporary anarchism. From the Situationists, anarchism embraced the critique of alienation and consumer society, and faith in imagination; from Bookchin, the connection between anti-capitalism, direct democracy, ecology, and post-scarcity; from the anti-nuke movement, the stress on with affinity groups and spokescouncils as well as nonviolent direct action; from the Autonomen, militant confrontation, the black bloc strategy, and an expansive do-it-yourself emphasis; and from the Zapatistas, the power of the Internet, cross-cultural solidarity, and “globalization” for transnational resistance. But the anarchism that received notoriety in November 1999 is more than the sum of these parts. It is the only political philosophy today aspiring to balance a variety of social change agents and strategies—or ultimately, a “diversity of tactics,” visions, and people—with universalistic notions of participatory freedom outside all imposed institutions and behaviors.

For months before Seattle, anarchists worked diligently behind the scenes to set the tenor of the direct action that would stun the world. As the key initiators and organizers, even if not recognized as such, anarchists had been able to structure the demonstration along libertarian principles. Like numerous other direct actions shaped largely by anarchists, such as the 1970s’ anti-nuke protests and 1989 Wall Street action, Seattle’s too would have gone unremarked if not for its success in shutting down the WTO in tandem with a vicious police response. Anarchists and anarchism were suddenly thrust into the limelight. What had always been a minoritarian voice of conscience within the Left suddenly got a majoritarian public hearing. In turn, anarchism’s philosophy became both cutting edge and normative for a powerful new global social movement.

This is not to say that anarchism or anarchists alone are responsible for the movement(s) contesting globalization’s brutal side, that such a movement(s) started in Seattle, or even that the goal is to turn everyone into anarchists. Like the Zapatistas, anarchists humbly understand themselves (at least in theory) as acting in concert with the multiple struggles for freedom waged over time by a variety of anti-authoritarians. Nonetheless, perhaps because they did it on the dominant superpower’s own turf, anarchists were able to firmly establish a form of resistance that actually prefigures a joyful politics of, by, and for all the people of a globalizing humanity. And as such, to lay down the flexible contours of an empowering movement while unexpectedly elevating anarchism to its avant-garde.

This means that anarchism’s principles along with its culture and forms of organization are, for the first time, at the forefront rather than margins of a transnational social movement. In the broadest sense, anarchism has brought a unique, inseparable bundle of qualities to this movement: an openly revolutionary stance, colored by an eminently ethical orientation, made out-of-the-ordinary by a playful though directly democratic utopianism.

The Anarchist Moment

But still, why anarchism?

Because anarchism has set the terms of the debate. Its emphasis on social revolution coupled with transparency has meant that anarchists haven’t been afraid to name the concrete concern masked by the term globalization”: that is, capitalist society. Once Seattle’s type of direct action became a benchmark, though, anarchists received a tacit green light from most other activists to design similar protests, and so “carnivals against capitalism” became commonplace. For example, when people “converged” together at mass actions, they now did so under an anti-capitalist banner—one held up by anarchists, who compellingly carried it to the symbolic heart of each contestation. Since this made tangible what was most disturbing to many about globalization, numerous people were radicalized by or at least became sympathetic to a focus on the market economy. While still considered subversive, it has thus become more acceptable to speak of capitalism and even explicitly identify as an anti-capitalist. “Anti-capitalism,” however, now frequently implies an anti-authoritarian perspective. And vice versa, an anarchistic outlook now permeates anti-capitalist work.

But still, why now?

Because globalization makes anarchism’s aspirations increasingly apropos. Far from being anti-globalization per se, anarchists have long dreamed of the world without borders made potentially feasible by the transformations now underway. Indeed, the means utilized by globalization are quite amenable to anarchist values, such as decentralization and integration, elastic identities and the shattering of binaries, creative borrowings and cooperation, mobility, hybridity, and openness. Most strikingly, globalization is structurally undermining of the centrality of states.

In his day, Karl Marx foresaw the rising hegemony of capitalism and its cancerous ability to (re)structure all social relations in its own contorted image. Yet for Marx, this also hailed a certain promise. Freedom and domination were both bound up in the developmental logic that was and unfortunately still is capitalism. It was up to the right social actors, given the right conditions, to “make history,” that is, to make revolution and achieve communism in its best, most general sense. Much of what Marx unmasked holds true to the present; much more has become evident, sadly so, to the point where there is almost no outside anymore to the capitalism that manufactures society as well as self. The heroic project of Marx and multiple socialistic others to abolish capitalism remains more poignant than ever, as does the need for a revolutionary movement to do so. Hence, the power of anti-capitalism.”

Anarchism has traditionally foreseen another potentially hegemonic development that Marx ignored: statecraft. But unlike capitalism, it took statism many more decades to gain the same naturalistic status as the market economy, and so anarchism’s critique, while correct, held less of an imperative for most radicals. In an ironic twist for statists and anarchists alike, just as U.S.-style representative democracy has finally achieved hegemony as the singular “legitimate” form of governance, globalization has begun its work of lessening the power of states. Thinking outside the statist box now both makes sense and is fast becoming a reality, offering anarchism the relevance it has long desired. The relatively widespread embracement in and outside anti-authoritarian Left circles of anarchist experiments in directly democratic organization, confederation, and mutual aid evidences how fitting such forms are to today’s decreasingly statist, increasingly interdependent world. They tentatively prefigure, in fact, the self-governance institutions that anarchism envisions under a humane version of the present social transformation.

In this globalizing world, though, “nonstatist” can mean everything from supranational institutions governed by business elites and international NGOs to world courts and regional trade zones to networks of free-floating individuals willing to employ terror tactics. On the one hand, then, as state-based geopolitics loses ground to a more diffuse though cruel nonstatist one, anarchism’s critique could quickly become irrelevant. On the other hand, just as marxism had to be rethought in the mid-twentieth century in light of state socialism’s failure to achieve human emancipation—resulting, for one, in the Frankfurt school’s uncovering of new forms of domination—anarchism must be retheorized in response to the turn toward nonstatism that bodes both scary reconfigurations of political monopolies as well as possible openings for an ethical alternative. The practice of today’s anarchism has, in essence, skipped ahead of its philosophy and social critique. Both need to catch up if an anti-authoritarian politics is to become more than a historical footnote about a missed moment.

Still, as the only political tradition that has consistently grappled with the tension between the individual and society, contemporary anarchism has valiantly tried to meld the universalistic aims of the Left and its expansive understanding of freedom with the particularistic goals of the new social movements in areas such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and ableism. The extraordinary human mix that appeared on the streets of Seattle could find “unity in diversity” precisely because anarchists attempted to put this theoretical merger into practice. The affinity group/spokescouncil model, for instance, allowed hundreds of disparate concerns to also find an intimate connectivity. Globalization has facilitated this by making the world smaller every day, bringing the macro and micro into closer contact. Under capitalism, homogeneity and heterogenity will always be linked at the expensive of both the community and self. The substantive inclusiveness tenuously achieved by anarchistic organizing suggests a structural framework that could serve first as a revolutionary dual power, then later as the basis for “a world where many worlds fit,” as the Zapatistas demand. Hence, the power of “anarchism” for anti-capitalist resistance.

We may not win this time around; everything from the rise of a politicized fundamentalism and the post-September 11 “war on terrorism” to seemingly insolvable tragedies like the Middle East indicate the gravity and near impossibility of our task. Everyone from global policing agencies to the authoritarian Left will try to thwart our efforts. But the project of the present anti-capitalist movement, and anarchism’s strong suit in general, is to provide a guiding light, even if we aren’t the ones to finally bask in it.

In 1919, anarchists held power in Munich for one week during the course of the German Revolution and hurriedly initiated all sorts of imaginative projects to empower society at large. Yet Gustav Landauer knew that the best they could do was to construct a model for future generations: “Though it is possible that our lives may be short, I have the desire, and this you share with me, that we leave behind lasting effects . . . so that we may hope, when authoritarianism returns, perspicuous circles will say that we did not make a bad beginning, and that it would not have been a bad thing if we had been permitted to continue our work.” Landauer was trampled to death in a wave of right-wing reaction soon after, and fourteen years later the Nazis came to power. Still, the grand experiments of the past aimed at a free and self-governing society have not been extinguished—they have reemerged in the anarchistic strains charted here and, most promisingly, the current contest against capitalism fought along anti-authoritarian lines.

Not a bad beginning to the twenty-first century.

This essay is from the book Anti-Capitalism: A Field Guide to the Global Justice Movement, ed. Rachel Neumann and Andy Hsiao (New York: New Press, spring 2003).

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By RACE (Revolutionary Anti-Authoritarians of Color)

Critical Race Theory starts by asking the same questions about race, racism and power that a myriad of academic disciplines and activists have pondered for the past century. It draws upon critical legal studies and radical feminism in the formation of its approach. While it is primarily concerned with the legal arena, it is activist in nature and has come to include political science, education, American and ethnic studies and more.

There is an entire trajectory represented by Critical Race Theory (CRT) that is far beyond the scope of either an introduction or a pamphlet. This means that we have made choices, both in which concepts we are choosing to highlight, and in what conclusions we are choosing to share in relation to the theory. Our choices reflect our personal stories, our cultural histories, and our history within RACE (the organization). We are choosing to share our positive experience with CRT (to date) as a way to inspire an anarchist theory of race, and to challenge the assumptions that we necessarily share a single vision of liberation, struggle, or oppression.

The simplest place to begin is by orienting ourselves around what we consider a primary concern of the CRT thinkers (or Crits as they are called), essentialism. If essentialism is, as they define it, the search for the unique essence of a group, then examples of essentialism are rampant throughout our society. Whether it is the ‘profiling’ by the police or Michael Moore’s depiction of working class America, essentialism is usually experienced as the political convenience of the dominant society in categorizing aspects of the rest of society. The crits take this further and state “Essentialism has a political dimension… (T)he goals of a ‘unified’ group may not reflect exactly those of certain factions within it, yet the larger group benefits from their participation because of the increased numbers they bring… But what about the voices that do not fit into one category of oppression?”

Another concern of the Crits — appropriate for an understanding of the composition of social change — is the concept of interest convergence. This is the thesis that judicial progress only occurs when it suits the interest of dominant forces in society. Racial justice in the United States can be seen then as contingent on the generosity and magnanimity of white (or majoritarian) society. Derrick Bell makes this argument most pointedly in his review of Brown vs. Board of Education, making the claim that segregated schools served a malignant purpose for American foreign policy during the Cold War so that changing segregation was therefore an acceptable reform for dominant society.

Finally, CRT has had a running commentary on the phenomena of rights within jurisprudence that is worth examining. “Rights are almost always procedural (for example, to fair process) rather than substantive (for example, to food, housing, or education)… (R)ights are almost always cut back when they conflict with the interests of the powerful… (R)ights are said to be alienating. They separate people from each other… rather than encouraging them to form close, respectful communities… The group whom they supposedly benefit always greets cases like Brown with great celebration. But after the celebration dies down the great victory is quietly cut back by narrow interpretation, administrative obstruction, or delay.”

This leads to an analysis of the victories of the Civil Rights Movement being, not a righting of wrongs, but a political convenience that very well may have served white society (being a possible description of dominant society) more than those who claimed victory. This is an entirely separate, but parallel, understanding to the perspective that says that the ‘victory’ was only possible in the context of the more radical aspirations of some being crushed by assassination, prison, and the process of assimilation. If the successes of the Civil Rights Movement have been primarily felt by those who had political power prior to the movement, it has not prevented new politicians from arising as a consequence. The result is that these politicians use the compromised arguments that resulted in the CRM to work for social change today. The bar has been lowered.

The aspect of Critical Race Theory that sets it apart from a merely academic pursuit of an idealized justice (as difficult to actually find as to catch a fox by its tail) is its practical implications within legal scholarship. While that practice does not particularly inspire us as anarchists, the application of these critiques in the real world does. As a project we would set ourselves to articulate a necessarily anarchist theory of race with the motivation that such a clarity would encourage our actions along lines we actually found inspiring and not just due to the tradition of the Civil Rights Movement or the Black Panther Party. Which brings us to another concept of CRT, intersectionality, the examination of race, sex, class, national origin, and sexual orientation and the elevation of their interplay as separate and connecting disadvantaging factors. We (as in the contributors to this pamphlet) do not experience reality as one type of oppression, as one type of dominance. It is the intersection of our multiple oppressions and our process of figuring out how to survive in the face of those who would simplify our experience in the name of a false unity, which serves them, that drives the narrative of our lives.

FAQ

1) What is the relevance of theory when we are trying to build a movement?

This is a false dichotomy and serves to validate one form of transformative action while invalidating others. We have fundamental concerns with ‘movement-building politics because our experience is that they are mired in a partisan, reformist, and political-in-a-bad-way tradition. However we also recognize the passion of many movement builders and the strategic possibilities in their efforts towards social change. If our goal is the transformation of society then we must work with people that have different views. What that looks like is far more complicated than trite calls to unity or for respecting differences, especially if it is in the name of ‘the movement’.

2) How can we take Critical Race Theory and get something tangible and concrete out of it?

That is the project that we are interested in. The cooption of Civil Rights rhetoric by mainstream politicians and by the left has denatured it of its socially transformative powers. We have respect for that history, but recognize that in this time the political and cultural conditions have changed. We have to be challenging old ideas and moving on. CRT does both and informs our anarchist politic with a racial analysis that it has, to date, sorely lacked.

3) What’s wrong with essentialism? If not essentialism then what?

Essentialism requires a search for the right unit for social analysis and change. Oppressed people have the fact that they are oppressed in common but the forms of that oppression vary from group to group. Thus, the political needs and strategies of social groups will differ. Liberals ignore problems of intersectionality and search for universals. An alternative to essentialism is that there is no such thing as inherent characteristics. No person has an easily stated identity; everyone has conflicting, overlapping identities and allegiances. We do not believe that all non-white people should compromise their differences and form a united front.

Critical Race Theory Glossary

Both this glossary and article would not have been possible without the book Critical Race Theory – an introduction” by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic.

Bicultural education: Pedagogical approach that encourages retention of a child’s original or family culture

Binary Paradigm of race: Pattern of framing race issues in terms of two categories, such as black and white

Biological view of race: Once popular view that humanity is divided into four or five major groups, corresponding to objective and real physical differences

Call to context: Belief that social relations and truth require close attention to history, particularity, and experience

Color imagery: Words, texts, and television images that associate skin color with traits such as innocence, criminality, or physical beauty

Countermajoritarianism: View that the court system is free to strike down laws enacted by the majority that are unfair to minority groups

Counter-storytelling: Writing that aims to cast doubt on the validity of accepted premises or myths, especially ones held by the majority

Critical legal studies: Legal movement that challenged liberalism from the Left, denying that law was neutral, that every case had a single correct answer, and that rights were of vital importance

Critique of rights: Critical legal studies position that rights are alienating, ephemeral, and much less useful than most people think

Deconstructionism: Intellectual approach that targets traditional interpretations of terms, concepts, and practices, showing that they contain unsuspected meanings or internal contradictions

Determinism: View that individuals and culture are products of particular forces, such as economics, biology, or the search for high status

Differential racialization: process by which racial and ethnic groups are viewed and treated differently by, mainstream society

Discourse: Formal, extensive, oral or written treatment of a subject; the way we speak about something

Empathetic fallacy: Mistaken belief that sweeping social form can be accomplished through speech and incremental victories within the system

Essentialism: search for the unique essence of a group

Eurocentricism: tendency to interpret the world in terms of European values and perspectives and the belief that they are superior

Exceptionalism: belief that a particular group’s history justifies treating it as unique

False consciousness: phenomenon in which oppressed people internalize and identify with attitudes and ideology of the controlling class

Hegemony: Domination by the ruling class, and unconscious acceptance of that state of affairs

Hypodescent: “One-drop rule” that holds that anyone with any degree of discernible African ancestry is black

Immigrant analogy: belief that racialized minority groups, especially Latinos/as and Asians, will follow the same path of assimilation as white European ethnics

Indeterminancy: idea that legal reasoning rarely, if ever, has one right answer and that politics and social pressures on judged influence outcomes

Interest convergence: Thesis pioneered by Derrick Bell that the majority group tolerates advances for racial justice only when it suits its interest to do so

Intersectionality: Belief that individuals and classes often have shared or overlapping interests or traits

Legal realism: Early-twentieth-century forerunner of critical legal studies, which disavowed mechanical jurisprudence in favor of social science, politics, and policy judgment

Legal storytelling: Scholarship that focuses on the theory or practice of unearthing and replacing underlying rhetorical structures of the current social order, insofar as these are unfair to disenfranchised groups

Legitimacy: Quality of an instruction, such as law, which is viewed as justified and worthy of respect

Liberalism: Political philosophy that holds that the purpose of government is to maximize liberty; in civil rights, the view that law should enforce formal equality in treatment

Merit: Individual worthiness; critical race scholars question the view that people may be ranked by merit and that distribution of benefits is rational and just.

Microaggression: Stunning small encounter with racism, usually unnoticed by members of the majority race.

Model minority myth: Idea that Asian Americans are hard-working, intelligent, and successful and that other groups should emulate them.

Multiple consciousness: Ability of people of color to perceive something in two or more ways, for example as a way a member of his or her group would see it and as a white would.

Normative: Of, pertaining to, or based on a norm, especially one regarded as broad or universal.

Nuance theory: View that one may determine the essential qualities of a group such as women, and that difference from that essential core may be treated as slight variations or shades of difference.

Paradigm: Reigning system of belief in a discipline that controls what is seen as possible, relevant, and valid.

Perspectavalism: Belief that a person’s or group’s position or standpoint greatly influences how they see truth and reality.

Principle of involuntary sacrifice: The notion that costs of civil rights advances are always placed on blacks or low-income whites.

Property interest in whiteness: Idea that white skin and identity are economically valuable.

Racial fraud & box checking: Action on the part of a non-minority person, or one with a very slight connection with a minority group, to gain the benefit of minority status, as with affirmative action.

Racial realism: View that racial progress is sporadic and that people of color are doomed to experience only infrequent peaks followed by regression.

Reconstruction: Period when society is attempting to redress racial wrongs consistently and in thoroughgoing fashion.

Restrictive covenant: Legally enforceable limitation on land use or occupancy, often created by the original owner or developer of neighborhoods.

Reverse discrimination: Discrimination aimed at the majority group.

Revisionist: View of history or an event that challenges the accepted one.

Stock stories: Tales that a people commonly subscribe to and use to explain their social reality; for example, that African Americans who try hard will be accepted and succeed.

Structural determinism: Concept that a mode of thought or widely shared practice determines significant social outcomes, usually without our conscious knowledge.

Transparency phenomenon: Ability of whiteness to disguise itself and become invisible.

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By Chris Crass

When thinking about organizing, about the possibilities for movement building, about the potential of challenging injustice and fundamentally altering the relationships of power in this society – my mind turns to the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. More specifically, my attention focuses in on Ella Baker and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee who initiated some of the most exciting work that I’ve ever come across. Today, when I read and hear so many debates, dialogues, and discussions about movement building and “Where do we go from here?”, I again look to the insights and inspiration of Ms. Baker and SNCC.

The Black liberation struggle and movements for Civil Rights have shaped the history of the United States. From slave revolts to Ida B. Wells international anti-lynching campaign, to the 50,000 women in the National Association of Colored Women at the beginning of the century, to the struggle today against the prison industrial complex: these legacies of resistance are at the heart of liberation struggles in this country. For white organizers, it is key to study these legacies from the understanding that when people of color oppose racism they are also re-affirming their humanity. In a social order built on white supremacy, people of color organizing for justice and dignity challenges the very foundation of this society. This is why struggles against racism have repeatedly been catalysts for revolutionary social change. The challenge for me, as a white organizer, is to apply the insights and inspiration from these legacies to the work that I’m currently engaged in. The mass actions against global capitalism in the last two years have heavily influenced the local work that I’m involved with.

The mass mobilizations in North America opposing corporate power and global capitalism – including Seattle, Washington DC, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and in Quebec – have opened up important conversations about strategy, about racism in white progressive movements and the goals of organizing. While these mass actions are connected to a history of resistance over 500 years old, they have served this generation, particularly white activists, as a catalyst for both organizing and reflection on that organizing. In particular, they have created openings for broader movement debate and dialogue. Writings by radicals of color critiquing the whiteness of these actions and the ways in which racism operates within social change movements have presented clear challenges to white radicals working for social change. These challenges and the issues that they bring up are opportunities for growth and learning that white radicals have a responsibility to take seriously and engage with. The questions, possibilities and challenges coming out of the mass mobilizations become concrete when they are connected to the day-today work that makes the mass actions possible.

The critique developed by Elizabeth Betita Martinez in her essay, “Where was the Color in Seattle?” needs to be examined for what lessons it has for organizers involved with Food Not Bombs and anti-poverty organizing, Earth First! and environmental action, union organizing and economic justice, alternative media like micro powered radio, Independent Media Centers and activist ‘zines everywhere, working for immigrant rights and housing, teaching in public schools and free skools, running community gardening and radical art programs, Reclaiming the Streets, working to dismantle the prison industrial complex and support political prisoners, and so on. When the critical analysis and lessons developed out of the mass mobilizations are applied to the local work that we, as white radicals are doing, then new possibilities and potential is found.

While there are numerous challenges and complex questions to be struggling with, the goal of this essay is to look at issues of organizing, power and leadership in relationship to anarchist practice. Anarchism as a political theory and organizing strategy has been overwhelmingly white and therefore influenced and shaped by white privilege. White privilege is the flipside of racial oppression and each must be challenged in the struggle against white supremacy. Additionally, the voices dominating anarchist movement for well over 100 years have been male and this too has shaped much of anarchist thought and action.

This essay argues that anarchists need to follow the advice of Pauline Hwang, an organizer with Colours of Resistance, who writes, “Organize from the bottom up, and follow the lead of women and people of colour who are organizing at the grassroots level.” With that in mind, there are three immediate challenges which present themselves to white activists generally and white anarchists in particular: understanding and dismantling privilege and oppression based on race, class and gender; critically examining our understandings of power; and rethinking our conception of leadership. With those challenges before us, let us now look to some of the most dynamic organizers of the twentieth century for both insights and inspiration in doing this work.

Ella Baker, Community Organizing and Participatory Democracy

Ella Baker, who was born in North Carolina in 1905, was politicized and radicalized by the poverty of the Great Depression. She participated in self-help programs throughout the 30s and developed an understanding and respect for the process by which people take control over their own lives while also protesting injustices.

In the late 1930s, Baker became a field organizer for the NAACP. She would travel throughout the South and lecture, network and organize with any one person or group of people she could find. She would stay with local branches and help organize membership drives. She would assist local groups that were having either internal or external problems. However, her overall goal of organizing was to bring the NAACP to the grassroots. As an organizer, Baker believed very strongly in the abilities and the knowledge of local people to address their own issues. She believed that the national organization should serve as a system of support to offer assistance and resources to local campaigns and projects. She believed that organizations needed to serve the grassroots that made the organization strong.

In the early 1940’s she became the assistant field secretary for the NAACP and by 1943, she was named the national director of branches. Baker describes her years of organizing with the NAACP and what she tried to accomplish as follows: “My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run, they themselves are the only protection they have against violence and injustice. If they only had ten members in the NAACP at any given point, those ten members could be in touch with twenty-five members in the next little town, with fifty in the next and throughout the state as a result of the organization of state conferences and they, or course, could be linked up with the national. People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but themselves”.

Baker’s organizational style actively worked to keep people informed and empowered, with the goal of people organizing themselves. Baker argued that strong people do not need a strong leader; rather they need an organization that can provide mutual aid and solidarity. Those views on organizing were very different then those of the national NAACP. In fact, Baker became critical of the national NAACP’s failure to support the development of self-sufficient local groups, as it failed to help “local leaders develop their own leadership potential”. In response to the unsupportive stance of the national NAACP, Baker began organizing regional gatherings to bring people together and help develop local leadership and organizing skills.

Baker worked to organize and support regional gatherings to both develop people’s skills and build communities of support and resistance. This is an example of Baker’s commitment to bottom up organizing that values the work of developing relationships between people and building trust, respect and power on a grassroots level. She believed in participatory democracy, not just in theory or on paper, but in the messy and complex world of practice: where mistakes are made, decision-making is tough, and the process of growth is slow.

In her essay, “Ella Baker and the Origins of ‘Participatory Democracy’”, Carol Mueller breaks down Ella’s conception of participatory democracy into three parts: (1) an appeal for grassroots involvement of people throughout society in the decisions that control their lives; (2) the minimization of hierarchy and the associated emphasis on expertise and professionalism as a basis for leadership; and (3) a call for direct action as an answer to fear, alienation and intellectual detachment.

The call for direct action was one of Baker’s main strategies for creating meaningful social change. She argued that it is the people themselves who create change; that not only does direct action challenge injustice in society, but that ultimately individuals confront the oppression in their own heads and begin the process of self-transformation and self-actualization.

She also believed that as people organize, they will learn from their mistakes and successes and become stronger people in the process: people who believe in themselves and feel a sense of their own power to affect the world around them and make history. If there was a shortage of food due to economic injustice, she would help people to provide food for themselves but she would also help organize folks to protest the economic conditions that deny people food. If the school system isn’t providing a satisfactory education, then the community must come together to demand changes and to also provide alternatives ways of learning (i.e. after school programs, study groups, tutoring programs, free schools, homeschooling, etc.). For Baker, direct action was about achieving immediate goals, but it was also deeply connected to developing a sense of power in the people involved. It is this sense of power that would change people far beyond winning the immediate goals and help build a sustainable movement with long-term commitment and vision. It would also hopefully impact people’s perceptions of themselves in relationship to the world and open up greater possibilities for happiness and satisfaction.

Ms. Baker had an innovative understanding of leadership, an idea which she thought of in multiple ways: as facilitator, creating processes and methods for others to express themselves and make decisions; as coordinator, creating events, situations and dynamics that build and strengthen collective efforts; and as teacher/educator, working with others to develop their own sense of power, capacity to organize and analyze, visions of liberation and ability to act in the world for justice. Ella believed that good leadership created opportunities for others to realize and expand their own talents, skills and potential to be leaders themselves. This did not mean that she didn’t challenge people or struggle with people over political questions and strategies. Rather, this meant that she struggled with people over these questions to help develop principled and strategic leadership capable of organizing for social transformation.

Baker described good leadership as group-centered leadership. Group-centered leadership means that leaders form in groups and are committed to building collective power and struggling for collective goals. This is different than leader-centered groups, in which the group is dedicated to the goals and power of that leader.

Baker’s commitment to participatory democracy led her to resign as the national director of branches of the NAACP in 1946. She moved to New York to care for her niece and became the local branch director and immediately began the process of taking the organization to the grassroots; out of the offices and into the streets.

After the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education verdict declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, Baker and the local branch started campaigning against segregation in the New York school system. Additionally, after the court decision, Baker and several other organizers formed the group In Friendship, which provided financial assistance to local leaders in the South who were suffering reprisals for their organizing. In Friendship believed that the time had come for a mass mobilization against the legally sanctioned racial apartheid of Jim Crow society in the South. When the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign generated local mass participation, national support and international media, In Friendship thought they might have found the spark that they were looking for. The group established contact with the Montgomery Improvement Association who was leading the campaign and began taking notes as well as offering support and advice.

Once the campaign came to an end in 1956, with a major victory against segregation on the city buses, In Friendship put forward a proposal to the local leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Ella Baker, Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levinson approached Dr. King with the idea of an organizational structure to help network and build a Southern movement against segregation. They believed that Montgomery had shown that “the center of gravity had shifted from the courts to community action” and that now was the time to strike. In 1957, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was founded. The SCLC was intended to be a network of local leaders and communities coordinating their actions and providing assistance to one another. The SCLC was also formed around the strategy of getting more clergy members to involve themselves and their church communities in the Civil Rights struggle. SCLC started with sixty-five affiliates throughout the South. The leader of the SCLC was Martin Luther King, Jr., but it was Ella Baker who opened and ran the group’s office in Atlanta, and she used her connections throughout the South to lay the groundwork for the organization. The two principal strategies of SCLC, laid out at the group’s founding conference, were building voter power in the Black community and mass direct action against segregation. Baker spent two and a half years as the acting executive director of SCLC. She ran the Atlanta office and traveled throughout the South building support for the organization. The first project was the Crusade for Citizenship, which aimed at doubling the number of Black votes in the South within a year. With hardly any resources and little support from the other leaders of SCLC, over thirteen thousand people came together in over 22 cities to plan and initiate the campaign.

During her two and half years of organizing with SCLC, her relationship with the leadership began to wane. While Ella continued her work building a bottom up, grassroots powered organization, others in SCLC consolidated their adherence to the strategy of the charismatic leader-centered group style that formed around King. In addition to this, she was never officially made the executive director during her tenure as ‘acting’ executive director. Baker said that she was never made official because she was neither a minister nor a man. The failure to recognize and respect women’s leadership was a major weakness in the SCLC and in other formations of the Civil Rights movement.

Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and the Organizing Tradition

In 1960, a massive resurgence of Civil Rights activism and direct action took place amongst students who initiated the sit-in movement, which swept through the South like wildfire. Thousands of students participated in desegregation actions in which Black and some white students would sit at segregated lunch counters requesting to be served and refusing to leave. The sit-ins were dramatic; they brought the tensions of racial apartheid to the surface and often ended with white violence against the sit-in protesters. The sit-in movement erupted out of previously existing autonomous groups and/or networks that had been forming. They were largely uncoordinated beyond the local level and there were no visible public leaders – it was a self-organized movement. Within a year and a half sit-ins had taken place in over one hundred cities in twenty states and involved an estimated seventy thousand demonstrators with three thousand six hundred arrests. Ella Baker immediately realized the potential of this newly developing student movement and went to work organizing a conference to be held in Raleigh, North Carolina in April of 1960.

The conference brought together student activists and organizers from around the South who had participated in the sit-in movement. There were two hundred delegates out of which one hundred twenty were student activists representing fifty-six colleges and high schools from twelve Southern states and the District of Columbia. As the conference was organized by Baker and she was the acting executive director of SCLC, the leadership of SCLC hoped that the students would become a youth wing of the adult organization. However, Baker, who delivered one of the key-note speeches at the conference, urged the students to remain autonomous, form their own organization and set their own goals that would reflect their militancy and passion for social change.

The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was born out of the Raleigh conference. SNCC (pronounced Snick) was run by the students themselves along with two adult advisors: Ella Baker and Howard Zinn. It would become one of the most important organizations of the 60s. They played a major role in the Freedom Rides, another direct action tactic that dramatically protested segregation. It’s organizers started the “jail no bail” strategy of filling the jails and refusing to pay bail until segregation was ended. SNCC also played a principle role in Freedom Summer in Mississippi. That campaign followed their strategy of grassroots community organizing that took them into some of the most formidable areas of the South.

Ella Baker has been referred to as both the mid-wife who helped deliver SNCC and the founder who helped articulate the base principles from which the group developed. For instance, SNCC was committed to group-centered leadership, to mass direct action, to organizing in the tradition of developing people’s capacity to work on their own behalf, and to community building that was participatory and involved local people in decision-making with the goal of developing local leaders. In looking to the lessons of Ella Baker’s organizing strategies, it is useful to look at SNCC to see how these concepts were experimented with and applied. From the examples of SNCC, we can draw both insights and inspiration for the work that we are doing today.

Charles Payne writes in his book, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: “SNCC may have the firmest claim to being called the borning organization [as in inspiring and helping shape other organizations]. SNCC initiated the mass-based, disruptive political style we associate with the sixties, and it provided philosophical and organizational models and hands-on training for people who would become leaders in the student power movement, anti-war movement, and the feminist movement. SNCC forced the civil rights movement to enter the most dangerous areas of the South. It pioneered the idea of young people ‘dropping out’ for a year or two to work for social change. It pushed the proposition that merely bettering the living conditions of the oppressed was insufficient; that has to be done in conjunction with giving those people a voice in the decisions that shape their lives. As SNCC learned to see beyond the lunch counter, the increasingly radical philosophies that emerged within the organization directly and indirectly encouraged a generation of scholars and activists to reconsider the ways that social inequality is generated and sustained.”

One model of organizing in SNCC was the Freedom School used in Mississippi. The Freedom Schools prioritized political education informed by daily reality to connect day-to-day experiences with an institutional analysis. The Freedom Schools focused on building leadership and training organizers. SNCC envisioned the schools to operate as “parallel institutions” or what many anarchists refer to today as “counter-institutions”. Charlie Cobb, who first proposed the creation of the Freedom Schools said that the schools were to be “an educational experience for students which will make it possible for them to challenge the myths of our society, to perceive more clearly its realities and to find alternatives and ultimately, new directions for action”. Curriculum at the schools ranged from “Introducing the Power Structure”, to critiques of materialism in “Material Things and Soul Things”. There were classes on non-violence and direct action as well as classes on economics and how the power structure manipulates the fears of poor whites. The lessons learned from the Freedom Schools can help us to envision programs that educate as well as train people to take action.

Ella Baker devoted her time, energy and wisdom to SNCC, which came to embody those principles of participatory democracy and grassroots community organizing that she had helped to develop throughout her lifetime as a radical organizer. Both Baker and SNCC struggled to create collective leadership, to engage in activism that empowered others to become active, to generate change from the bottom up and to experiment with expanding democratic decision making into everyday life.

The history and experiences of SNCC offer much to organizers today, in terms of how we go about our work and how we envision our goals. One organizer from SNCC, Bob Zellner, described being an organizer as similar to a juggling act, “Organizers had to be morale boosters, teachers, welfare agents, transportation coordinators, canvassers, public speakers, negotiators, lawyers, all while communicating with people who range from illiterate sharecroppers to well-off professionals and while enduring harassment from agents of the law and listening with one ear for threats of violence. Exciting days and major victories are rare”. Ella Baker described community organizing as ’spade work’, as in the hard work gardening when you prepare the soil for seeds for the next season. It is hard work, but it is what makes it possible for the garden to grow.

Charles Payne warns us repeatedly to look at the everyday work that builds movements and creates social change and to draw from those experiences in order to learn the lessons for our work today. He writes, “Overemphasizing the movement’s more dramatic features, we undervalue the patient and sustained effort, the slow, respectful work, that made the dramatic moments possible”.

From here, he develops an analysis of how sexism operates in organizing efforts. He explores why it is that in most histories of social movements, the profound impact of women is rarely mentioned. In the Civil Rights movements it was women and young people who were the backbone of the struggle. On this Payne writes, “We know beyond dispute that women were frequently the dominant force in the movement. Their historical invisibility is perhaps the most compelling example of the way our shared images of the movement distort and confuse the historical reality. There is a parallel with the way in which we typically fail to see women’s work in other spheres. Arlene Daniels, among others, has noted that what we socially define as ‘work’ are those activities that are public rather than private and those activities for which we get paid. In the same way, the tendency in the popular imagination and in much scholarship has been to reduce the movement to stirring speeches – given by men – and dramatic demonstrations – led by men. The everyday maintenance of the movement, women’s work, overwhelmingly, is effectively devalued, sinking beneath the level of our sight”.

As organizers today, it is crucial that we look at our own work and consider what activities we place value on. How do we treat the people making the grand speeches and leading the rallies? And how do we treat the people making the phone calls, facilitating the meetings, distributing the flyers, raising money, taking time out to listen to the troubles of other organizers, coordinating child-care, cooking all day, patiently answering dozens of questions from new volunteers or potential supporters, or working really hard to make other people in the group or project feel listened to, respected, heard, valued and supported?

Whose names do we remember and whose work do we praise? As organizers we are not just putting together actions; we are helping to build community, helping to build supportive and loving relationships between people, helping to sustain and nourish alternative values of cooperation and liberation in this fiercely competitive and individualistic society.

This was the strength of Ella Baker’s work, a strength that I think we can learn enormously from: her attention to group development. Ella Baker stressed the need to not only politicize and mobilize people, but to consciously develop people’s capacities to be organizers and leaders in the long haul struggle for a better world. While “each one teach one” strategies and training people in the skills of organizing don’t grab headlines in the media, it is this work that builds movement and develops a community of empowerment, solidarity and support that we need in order to transform society. Ella Baker’s legacy is one that both inspires and informs our day-to-day efforts. The challenge before us is to make sense of her legacy in relationship to our work today.

resisting Privilege, re-defining Power and re-thinking Leadership

At the beginning of this essay I mentioned three immediate challenges which present themselves to white activists generally and white anarchists in particular and they were: understanding and dismantling privilege and oppression based on race, class and gender; critically examining our understandings of power; and rethinking our conception of leadership. As a white anarchist, I want to embrace the complexity of these issues, to acknowledge that there are no clear answers, but rather good questions that can challenge us to go further, to break out of what is comfortable and static so that we can open up new possibilities.

First, the challenge of understanding and dismantling privilege and oppression based on race, class and gender. When talking about privilege and how it relates to one’s life, it is important to stay focused on the goal of such reflection. It isn’t about guilt or confessing to one’s sins. Rather , it is about placing oneself in the matrix of domination that shapes our society. Recognizing the complex nature of where one is placed allows for sharper insights into how your position influences you and how you can take part in dismantling the structures of domination altogether. It is also important to recognize how one’s place in society shifts and takes on new meaning in different situations, which pushes us to be more and more aware of these dynamics.

For example, white privilege impacts the ways that white radicals conceive of politics and organizing. I’ve been socialized most of my life to speak my mind, to take my opinions and thoughts seriously. Teachers, parents and adults have looked at kids like me as the “future of this country”. Pictures of people who looked like me (white, male and ‘assuredly’ heterosexual) filled the history books, were the important people on the walls and were celebrated as the smartest and brightest of those who have ever lived. Much of my initial politics was based on rejecting this middle class culture, rejecting this role of being among the “future leaders of this great country”. I had the material privilege to do this comfortably, in terms of money and my parents house. I say all of this, not because I feel the need to express some sort of guilt, but rather to place myself in both history and society. In this way, I can analyze how my privilege, my location in the matrix, impacts my view of the world, my understanding of myself and my conception of organizing, resistance and liberation.

My anarchist politics were firmly rooted in a politics of rejection, a refusal to participate in a society based on exploitation, oppression and massive destruction of the environment, animals and people. My politics were summed up by saying, “Fuck all authority”. Anarchism is indeed a much more complex body of theory and practice, but this anti-power politic, largely based on rejection, has been a strong undercurrent in anarchist thought – certainly in mine. Much of anarchist thought on issues of power, leadership and organization has been informed by both a brilliant critique of how power operates and of white privilege. One of the most important contributions of anarchist politics has been the analysis of power inequalities and the visions of egalitarian social relationships. One of the biggest shortcomings of anarchism has been, How do we get from here to there? White privilege has been one of the major barriers for anarchists struggling with this question.

The understanding of both power and leadership held by most anarchists has maintained inequalities both within anarchist circles and in our relationships with others. In our rejection of both power and leadership, we frequently work in or create organizations that are breeding grounds for informal hierarchies often defined by race, class and gender. We have frequently also argued for a complete rejection of organization altogether, advocating for spontaneous revolt, which again breeds informal hierarchies with no means of challenging this behavior. Given this situation, anarchism is one of the most white, often male dominated political movements in the United States today. Admitting the realities of white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism, I am not trying to isolate the anarchist movement, but rather to argue that we need to examine where we are at if we are to seriously think about where we want to go. As a movement we also need to look to the writings and organizing of anarchists of color, women and queer anarchists for thoughts and leadership about what direction we are already going in and should be going in.

One of the most significant aspects of anarchism is the argument that the ends do not justify the means of organizing. This has generally been thought of in terms of the tactics and organizational structure one uses. While there is a strong tendency in anarchism to lay out a very simplistic, dualistic framework of good/bad, right/wrong to think about these issues, there is also a large body of theory and practice coming overwhelming from anarchists and anti-authoritarians who are women, people of color and/or queer. The multiple roles of the state, the ways that power operates, processes for empowerment and self-determination, what group development and collective action looks like and how this informs our organizing are all issues being developed. This is not to say that everything a radical of color or white queer says is brilliant, useful or right , or that nothing a white, hetero, male says is of value. Rather, I’m saying that the voices marginalized in larger society are often marginalized in radical movements and that anarchists who champion egalitarianism have a responsibility to do much better then this. Furthermore, marginalized voices are often the most radical and realistic about social change.

Defining anarchism as being in opposition to not only capitalism and the state, but also to white supremacy, patriarchy and heterosexism is a move in this direction.. The next step would be to figure out exactly what that shift in thinking means for the ways that we view and act in the world.

How anarchists talk about power is a big issue. For example, the anarchist punk band Crass put forward a slogan that has been widely used and highly popular, “Destroy Power, Not People”. The Black Panther Party put forward a slogan that has also been widely used and highly popular, “All Power to the People”. It is not inconsequential that the band Crass was all white people. While both of these slogans utilize the word ‘Power’, are they both using the word to mean the same thing? Crass talked about oppressive power: the power of the state to go to war, the power of capitalism to devastate the planet and exploit people. The Black Panther Party talked about power in terms of self-determination. The first demand of the Black Panthers 10 point Party platform was, “1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black community. We believe that Black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.” The Black Panthers, Ella Baker, SNCC and many, many others (including many anarchists), have argued that the people are the source of power and that we must organize to build collective power to dismantle oppressive power. It is also useful to distinguish between power over others and power with others.

While this may sound like a debate over semantics, it is actually a debate about the ways that anarchists think about the world and the ways that we act in the world. It is also about the ways that white privilege and male privilege have influenced anarchist politics – to speak of anti-power rather than building power. This goes deep. Look at, for instance, white anarchist men who say that there are no ‘power dynamics’ within their organizations because no one has or wants power. Or worse still, look at white anarchist men who say that there are no power dynamics because they don’t believe in organization anyway and everyone should just ‘act’. These ideas must be challenged, as they fail to see the complex reality of race, class and gender, or how power and privilege operate on multiple levels. This must be challenged because while white anarchist men might reject power and denounce privilege in theory, we all still live in a society that grants and denies power and privilege on the basis of race, class and gender. This is why white male anarchists repeatedly say things like, “if women aren’t being heard, they should just speak up”, or “I’m not the leader, I’m just always doing everything because no one else knows how” ( I can’t even begin to count how many times I’ve said something like this over the years).

Helen Luu, an organizer with Colours of Resistance, frames the issue of white privilege as following, “Genuine anti-racist work involves building alliances and working in solidarity with people of colour; it means understanding the ways that unequal power relations manifests itself in all settings (including activist ones) and how it works to oppress some while privileging others; it means looking to people of colour as leaders, and not as mere tokens in order to prove how ‘anti-racist’ your group is (“We’re not racist! Look, we have two Asians in our group!”). It means a whole lot more too, but above all, it means being dedicated to proactively and consciously working to bring down the structure of white supremacy and privilege.”

Towards a theory and practice of anti-authoritarian leadership

In her ground-breaking book, Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins writes, “Black women have not conceptualized our quest for empowerment as one of replacing elite white male authorities with ourselves as benevolent Black female ones. Instead, African American women have overtly rejected theories of power based on domination in order to embrace an alternative vision of power based on a humanist vision of self-actualization, self-definition, and self-determination.” This understanding of power, in conjunction with a critical analysis of how oppressive power operates is a solid foundation for our work.

Organizing is about building collective power. In the process of building collective power it is also about developing the power that each of us has to act and engage with the world. The ways that anarchists conceptualize issues of power and politics plays out in the ways that we conceptualize organizing.

Ella Baker talked about and worked from a model of group leadership, of developing the capacities of each person to be a leader to participate in the shaping and making of decisions. She also paid great attention to developing the capacities of people to be organizers, to create a movement based on participation and empowerment. Traditionally, the idea of leadership is based on one person making all of the decisions in an authoritarian manner; a model in which people follow others, often times blindly. Anarchists have been rightfully critical of this model, but our thinking needs to be more complex then this. Furthermore, anarchists are not alone in thinking about these issues. Ella Baker and SNCC, among many others historically, present an approach to organizing concretely struggles with the question of getting from here to there.

Baker’s model of organizing and leadership is firmly rooted in a politics of empowerment. She believed that a movement fighting for social transformation must also be transforming the individuals involved. She believed that people grew and developed through collective work to challenge oppression. She wasn’t just talking about the ways that people see the world, but also the place they see themselves in the world; from being acted upon by forces of oppression, to acting in the world for social justice. This shift involves learning politics and skills, but also a sense of self and being prepared to act. A leader or organizer in the spirit of Ella Baker is one who actively encourages other people’s participation, who works with others to develop skills, confidence, analysis and ability to take action for the long haul. Leadership in the spirit of Ella Baker and SNCC means not prioritizing the ends over the means, because the means lead you to the ends. While they were not anarchists, the theory and practice they developed for egalitarian organizing was far more sophisticated then what most anarchists are working with.

The challenge also for a mostly white movement, is how to bring people together to not only fight against oppression, but to also dismantle their privileges. This is a major reason why we need to develop understandings of organizing and leadership. How do we support and encourage self-organization, while also being committed to dismantling white supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, capitalism and the state? As a mostly white movement, that means we are mostly speaking to white people, and when white people have spontaneously demonstrated their rage it has usually been directed at communities of color ( from lynchings, to rape, to burning down whole towns, to voting overwhelmingly against immigrant rights and affirmative action). White radicals have a responsibility to play leadership roles in challenging white supremacy in white society.

A theory and practice of anti-authoritarian leadership is a subject full of contradictions, tensions, questions, discomforts, confusion, and uncertainties and that’s what I like about it. Being honest about contradictions opens up possibilities for understanding, where denial does not. Furthermore, tensions can be a creative force to develop something new, something uncharted, as oppose to strict guidelines that contain and restrict. By tensions I mean looking at what exists between the binary or dualistic frameworks; the gray areas, the both/and rather than the either/or, where one is multiple. For example, the tension is what exists in the middle, if on one side you had leader and the other side was follower. What exists between these two concepts? What does it mean to be, all at once, a follower, a leader, an individual, a participant in a collective process, someone who is privileged on the basis of race, but oppressed on the basis of gender, someone who has experience and wisdom to share with the group, and also wants to encourage broad participation in discussions, to know that at all times one can be both oppositional to and complicit with oppression? When all of these different positions and ideas are recognized, rather than denied, then something more creative and dynamic can be developed. I am not wedded to the word leadership, rather I am interested in struggling with the tools and concepts of leadership in relationship to being an anarchist. Anarchists need more tools, more concepts to use in our day-to-day work. In looking for insights and inspiration on organizing that priorities egalitarian practices, I have looked to liberation struggles from communities of color. Many of these struggles are lead by women of color, who are producing many of the most radical and hopeful strategies for social transformation out there.

With that in mind, we should heed the advice of anarchist organizer, Gabriel Sayegh. Sayegh writes in his essay, “Redefining Success: White Contradictions in the Anti-Globalization Movement”, “We [white activists] must become active, effective listeners if we are serious about being part of a movement. We must be willing to challenge our selves- our behaviors, actions, and thinking- as much as we are willing to challenge the global institutions of capitalism. This is a difficult task indeed. We can find direction by examining what radical people of color have been doing for centuries-organizing a movement for liberation.”

We must be willing to struggle over these complex and difficult questions of theory and practice, but we must do so as we engage in our day-to-day work to transform ourselves in the process of transforming this society. Facing the complexity of reality is one of the most radical acts we can take.

Recommended reading on the Civil Rights movement and organizing:

* Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment by Patricia Hill Collins. Routledge,1990.
* I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: the Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne. University of California Press, 1995.
* When and Where I Enter: the Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America by Paula Giddings. Quill, 1984.
* Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by David J. Garrow. Vintage, 1988.
* Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers 1941-1965 edited by Vicki L. Crawford, Jacqueline Anne Rouse, and Barbara Woods.

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By Suzanne Lipsky

An important result of the black caucuses and black workshops in Re-evaluation Counseling has been revealing the nature of internalized oppression and the creation of effective techniques for eliminating this major obstacle to our liberation from our midst. Although the ways in which each of us experiences internalized oppression are unique (for each person is individually oppressed), there is no doubt that each one of us has been profoundly hurt by this particular manifestation of oppression. No black person in this society has been spared.

Internalized racism has been the primary means by which we have been forced to perpetuate and “agree” to our own oppression. It has been a major factor preventing us, as black people, from realizing and putting into action the tremendous intelligence and power which in reality we possess. On a personal level it has been a major ingredient in the distressful and unworkable relationships which we so often have with each other. It has proved to be the fatal stumbling block of every promising and potentially powerful black liberation effort that has failed in the past. Patterns of internalized oppression severely limit the effectiveness of every existing black group.

This has been a problem that no one has been able to solve and over which many have despaired. Some patterns of internalized racism have become so familiar that we, ourselves, accept them as part of our “black culture.” We attribute them to “the way we are.”

It is a breakthrough of major importance that black Co-Counselors and their allies in RC have come up with a clear theoretical understanding of this phenomenon and, more importantly, dependably effective techniques which can completely rid us of this terrible obstacle to our individual emergence and our group liberation. This has never before been achieved. The recognition of internalized oppression is of tremendous significance and can be effectively communicated to black people in the world outside of Re-evaluation Counseling.

WHAT IS INTERNALIZED OPPRESSION?

We know that every hurt or mistreatment, if not discharged (healed), will create a distress pattern (some form of rigid, destructive, or ineffective feeling and behavior) in the victim of this mistreatment. This distress pattern, when restimulated, will tend to push the victim through a re-enactment of the original distress experience either with someone else in the victim role or, when this is not possible, with the original victim being the object of her/his distress pattern.

Racism is a form of oppression that has been systematically initiated, encouraged, and powerfully enforced by the distress patterns of individual members of the majority culture and their institutions. Black people have been the victims, the primary victims in the country, of every form of abuse, invalidation, oppression, and exploitation.

This mistreatment has installed heavy chronic distress patterns upon us as a people and as individuals. We are in no way to blame for the initiation and installation of these patterns. It is clear that historically we have been denied the conditions necessary (for example, the safety) to discharge this distress. It is also evident that from the days of slavery to the present, we have not been in any position to re-enact these patterns upon our oppressors.

The result has been that these distress patterns, created by oppression and racism from the outside, have been played out in the only two places it has seemed “safe” to do so. First, upon members of our own group – particularly upon those over whom we have some degree of power or control, our children. Second, upon ourselves through all manner of self-invalidation, self-doubt, isolation, fear, feelings of powerlessness, and despair.

It is important to keep in mind that some of the patterned behaviors that we frequently recognize within black cultures were originally developed to keep us alive. They originally had a definite survival value. They are a testimony to the strength, inventiveness, and determination of our people – our refusal to give up as a people. Even “today” chronic patterns can have “get-us-by” survival value. Today, many of these responses to mistreatment have become embedded in our culture, but they no longer serve a useful function. Instead, these so-called “elements of black culture” operate to lock us into our roles as victims of oppression.

Internalized oppression is this turning upon ourselves, upon our families, and upon our own people the distress patterns that result from the racism and oppression of the majority society. As part of our liberation work, we know that we must seek out and direct the attention of ourselves and the world to the strength, intelligence, greatness, power, and success of our people and our culture. We must also constantly seek and root out those features of our present cultures that have been imposed by responses to racism and that keep us trapped in that oppression today.

HOW DOES INTERNALIZED RACISM AFFECT US? WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

Patterns of internalized racism get played out in dozens of unique ways in each individual. But we have come to recognize that there are certain forms of internalized oppression that are widely experienced by black people in our society. Some forms of these distress patterns are so universal throughout our black sub-culture that they are mistaken for a “true” part of our culture.

These destructive and hurtful behaviors and feelings are not part of our real culture. They are not part of the nature of black people. They are simply chronic patterns (the kind that play all the time and are mistaken for reality) resulting from systematic and institutionalized mistreatment.

Understanding this gives us the safety to undertake the job of identifying all forms of internalized oppression in ourselves and other oppressed peoples. We recognize these as our enemy, as chronic patterns that prevent our liberation. We subject each example we find to discharge and re-evaluation.

What are some of the ways patterns of internalized racism operate among us?

These are some, but by no means all, of the common manifestations of internalized racism among black people. It is probable that each black person in the United States has experienced at least one of these distress patterns but always in some individual, unique way. Each of us has been individually oppressed and participated in internalizing and experiencing this oppression in individual ways.

Although the effects of these patterns have been devastating to our people, we need not despair. We have achieved a major beginning victory against them. We have realized that these terrible feelings and the destructive behaviors that result from them are only patterns – patterns of distress imposed on us from the outside! We know that these can be destroyed by systematic and committed discharge and re-evaluation. These destructive patterns can be replaced by a reality of rationality, love, power, and unity among all blacks and all oppressed peoples.

The perpetuation of internalized distress patterns is the only thing that stands in the way of our coming together and taking the lead in ending all racism, oppression, and exploitation. Knowing this can be done, only patterns of despair and powerlessness stand in the way of our acting on this certain knowledge.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

We possess, right now, the knowledge, the tools, and the power to attack and eliminate patterns of internalized racism from among ourselves and in the wide world. I am sure that nothing will contribute more significantly to our individual re-emergence nor to black liberation than our firm commitment to this project.

It appears, in fact, that at some point black Co-Counselors must address internalized oppression. Those who have begun to address their counseling to these areas have found that profound and positive changes have taken place in many areas of their personal and group life – even areas that do not, at first, seem related to internalized racism. These people have reported success in making significant changes in relationships, parenting, the workplace, and organizations in which they participate.

Where internalized oppression has not been tackled, individual Co-Counselors have often found themselves blocked or slowed in their counseling; black or Third World classes have been unable to meet the needs of the participants and have dissolved; support groups have floundered and workshops have sometimes “exploded.”

We need to refine our theory with regard to internalized oppression. We need to fully commit ourselves to a firm policy against all forms of internalized racism – and we need to further develop effective counseling techniques to discharge all patterns of internalized oppression.

I propose that as black Co-Counselors we commit ourselves to this project and that, periodically, we assess our progress; update our theory, policy, and goals; and plan actions appropriate to that point in our liberation effort.

I propose that we commit ourselves to the following six-point program:

Let us agree to stop being the victims of internalized racism. Let us see it for what it is – nothing more than a distress pattern worn by a victim who feels powerless. There is nothing wrong with any human being (including you) except the effects of mistreatment. These can be changed now by you and your allies.

(originally appeared in the RC journal Black Re-emergence No. 2)

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By Lorenzo Komboa Ervin

Historically, there have been three major forms of socialism — Libertarian Socialism (Anarchism), Authoritarian Socialism (Marxist Communism), and Democratic Socialism (electoral social democracy). The non-Anarchist Left has echoed the bourgeoisie’s portrayal of Anarchism as an ideology of chaos and lunacy. But Anarchism, and especially Anarchist-Communism, has nothing in common with this image. It is false and made up by it’s ideological opponents, the Marxist-Leninists.

It is very difficult for the Marxist-Leninists to make an objective criticism of Anarchism as such, because by its very nature it undermines all suppositions basic to Marxism. If Marxism and Leninism (its variant which emerged during the Russian Revolution) is held out to be the working class philosophy and the proletariat cannot owe its emancipation to anyone but the Communist Party, it is hard to go back on it and say that the working class is not yet ready to dispense with authority over it. Lenin came up with the idea of the transitional State, which would ‘wither away’ over time, to go along with Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The Anarchists expose this line as counter-revolutionary and sheer power-grabbing, and over 75 years of Marxist-Leninist practice have proven us right. These so-called Socialist States produced by Marxist-Leninist doctrine have only produced Stalinist police states, where workers have no rights, and a new ruling class of technocrats and party politicians have emerged, and the class differential between those the State favored over those it didn’t created widespread deprivation among the masses and another class struggle. But instead of meeting such criticisms head on, they have concentrated their attacks not on the doctrine of Anarchism, but on particular Anarchist historical figures, especially Bakunin (Marx’s main opponent in the First International).

Anarchists are social revolutionaries who seek a stateless, classless, voluntary, cooperative federation of decentralized communities based upon social ownership, individual liberty and autonomous self-management of social and economic life.

The Anarchists differ with the Marxist-Leninists in many areas, but especially in organization building. They differ from the authoritarian socialists in primarily three way: they reject the Marxist-Leninist notions of the vanguard party, democratic centralism, and the dictatorship of the proletariat, and Anarchists have alternatives for each of them. The problem is that almost the entire Left (including some Anarchists) is completely unaware of Anarchism’s tangible structural alternatives of the catalyst group, Anarchist consensus, and the mass commune.

The Anarchist alternative to the vanguard party is the catalyst group. The catalyst group is merely an Anarchist-Communist federation of affinity groups in action. The catalyst group, or revolutionary anarchist federation, would meet on a regular basis or only when necessary, depending on the wishes of the membership and the urgency of social conditions. It would be made up of representatives from the affinity group (or the affinity group itself), with full voting rights, privileges, and responsibilities. It would both set policies and future actions to be performed. It would produce both Anarchist-Communist theory and social practice. It believes in the class struggle and the necessity to overthrow Capitalist rule. It organizes in the communities and workplaces. It is democratic and has no authority figures like a party boss or central committee.

In order to make a revolution, large-scale, coordinated movements are necessary, and their formation is in no way counter to Anarchism. What Anarchists are opposed to is hierarchical, power-tripping leadership which suppresses the creative urge of the bulk of those involved, and forces an agenda down their throats. Members of such groups are mere servants and worshippers of the party leadership. But although Anarchists reject this type of domineering leadership, they do recognize that some people are more experienced, articulate, or skilled than others, and these people will play leadership action roles. These persons are not authority figures, and can be removed at the will of the body. There is also a conscious attempt to routinely rotate responsibility and to pass on these skills to each other, especially to women and people of color, who would ordinarily not get the chance. The experience of these persons, who are usually veteran activists or better qualified than most at the moment, can help form and drive forward movements, and even help to crystallize the potential for revolutionary change in the popular movement. What they cannot do is take over the initiative of the movement itself. The members of these groups reject hierarchical positions (anyone having more official authority than others), and unlike the Marxist-Leninist vanguard parties, the Anarchist groups won’t be allowed to perpetuate their leadership through a dictatorship after the revolution. Instead, the catalyst group itself will be dissolved and its members, when they are ready, will be absorbed into the new society’s collective decision-making process. Therefore, these Anarchists are not leaders, but merely advisors and organizers for a mass movement.

What we don’t want or need is a group of authoritarians leading the working class, then establishing themselves as a centralized decision-making command. Instead of “withering away”, Marxist-Leninist States have perpetuated authoritarian institutions (the secret police, labor bosses, and the Communist Party) to maintain their power. The apparent effectiveness of such organizations masks the way that revolutionaries who pattern themselves after Capitalist institutions become absorbed by bourgeois values, and completely isolated from the real needs and desires of ordinary people.

The reluctance of Marxist-Leninists to accept revolutionary social change is, however, above all seen in Lenin’s conception of the party. It is a prescription to nakedly seize power and put it in the hands of the Communist Party. The party that Leninists create today, they believe, should become the [only] Party of the Proletariat in which that class could organize and seize power. In practice, however, this meant personal and party dictatorship, which they felt gave them the right and duty to wipe out all other parties and political ideologies. Both Lenin (along with Trotsky) and Stalin killed millions of workers and peasants, their Left-wing ideological opponents, and even members of their own Bolshevik Party. This bloody and treacherous history is why there is so much rivalry and hostility between Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist parties today, and it is why the “worker’s states”, whether in Cuba, China, Vietnam, or Korea, are such oppressive bureaucracies over their people. It is also why most of the Eastern European Stalinist countries had their governments overthrown by the petty bourgeoisie and ordinary citizens in the 1980’s. Maybe we are witnessing the eclipse of State communism entirely, since they have nothing new to say and will never get those governments back again.

While Anarchist groups reach decisions through Anarchist consensus, the Marxist-Leninists organize through so-called democratic centralism. Democratic centralism poses as a form of inner party democracy, but it is really just a hierarchy by which each member of a party — ultimately of a society — is subordinate to a higher member until one reaches the all-powerful party central committee and its Chairman. This is a totally undemocratic procedure, which puts the leadership above criticism, even if it is not above reproach. It is a bankrupt, corrupt method of internal operations for a political organization. You have no voice in such a party, and must be afraid to say any unflattering comments to or about the leaders.

In Anarchist groups, proposals are talked about by members (none of whom have authority over another), dissenting minorities are respected, and each individual’s participation is voluntary. Everyone has the right to agree or disagree over policy and actions, and everyone’s ideas are given equal weight and consideration. No decision may be made until each individual member or affiliated group that will be affected by that decision has had a chance to express their opinion on the issue. Individual members and affiliated groups retain the option to refuse support to specific federation activities. In true democratic fashion, decisions for the federation as a whole must be made by a majority of its members.

In most cases, there is no real need for formal meetings for the making of decisions, what is needed is coordination of the actions of the group. Of course, there are times when a decision has to be made, and sometimes very quickly. This will be rare, but sometimes it is unavoidable. The consensus, in that case, would then have to be among a much smaller circle than the general membership of hundreds or thousands. But ordinarily all that is needed is an exchange of information and trust among parties, and a decision reaffirming the original decision will be reached, if an emergency decision had to be made. Of course, during the discussion, there will be an endeavor to clarify any major differences and explore alternative courses of action. And their will be an attempt to arrive at a mutually agreed upon consensus between conflicting views. As always, if there should be an impasse or dissatisfaction with the consensus, a vote would be taken, and with two-thirds majority, the matter would be accepted, rejected, or rescinded.

This is totally contrary to the practice of Marxist-Leninist parties where the Central Committee unilaterally sets policy for the entire organization, and arbitrary authority reigns. Anarchists reject centralization of authority and the concept of the Central Committee. All groups are free associations formed out of a common need, not revolutionaries disciplined by fear of authority. When the size of the working groups (which could be formed around labor, fundraising, anti-racism, women’s rights, food and housing, etc.) becomes cumbersome, the organizations can be decentralized into two or more autonomous organizations, still united in one large federation. This enables the group to expand limitlessly while maintaining its anarchic form of decentralized self-management. It is (sort of) like the scientific theory of the biological cell, dividing and re-dividing, but in a political sense.

However, Anarchist groups aren’t necessarily organized loosely; Anarchism is flexible and structure can be practically non-existent or very tight, depending on the type of organization demanded by the social conditions being faced. For instance, organization would tighten during military operations or heightened political repression.

Anarchist-Communists reject the Marxist-Leninist concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and a so-called “worker’s state,” in favor of a mass commune. Unlike members of Leninist parties, whose daily lives are generally similar to present bourgeoisie lifestyles, Anarchist organizational structures and lifestyles, through communal living arrangements, affinity groups, squatting, etc., attempt to reflect the liberated society of the future. Anarchists built all kinds of communes and collectives during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930’s, but they were crushed by the fascists and the Communists. Since the Marxist-Leninists don’t build cooperative structures (the nucleus of the new society) they can only see the world in bourgeois political terms. They want to seize State power and institute their own dictatorship over the people and the workers, instead of crushing State power and replacing it with a free, cooperative society. They insist that the party represents the proletariat, and that there is no need for them to organize themselves outside of the party. Yet, even in the former Soviet Union, the Communist Party membership only represented five percent of the population. This is elitism of the worst sort, and even makes the Capitalist parties look democratic by comparison.

What the Communist Party was intended to represent in terms of worker’s power is never made clear, but in true 1984 doublethink fashion, the results are 75 years of political repression and State slavery, instead of an era of glorious Communist rule. They must be held accountable politically for these crimes against the people, and we must reject their revolutionary political theory and practice. They have slandered the names of Socialism and Communism.

We reject the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is unbridled oppression, and the Marxist-Leninists and Stalinists must be made to answer for it. Millions have been murdered by Stalin in the name of fighting an internal class war, and millions more were murdered in China, Poland, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and other countries by Communist movements which followed Stalin’s prescription for revolutionary terror. We reject State communism as the worst aberration and tyranny. We can do better than this with the mass commune.

The Anarchist mass commune (sometimes called the Worker’s Council, although their are some differences) is a national, continental, or transitional federation of economic and political cooperatives and regional communal formations. Anarchists look to a world and a society in which real decision-making involves everyone who is involved with it — a mass commune — not a few discipline freaks pulling the strings on a so-called proletarian dictatorship. Any and all dictatorship is bad, it has no redeeming social features, yet that is what the Leninists tell us will protect us from counter-revolution. While Marxist-Leninists claim that this dictatorship is necessary in order to crush any bourgeois counter-revolutions led by the Capitalist class or right-wing reactionaries. Anarchists feel that this is itself part of the Marxist school of falsification. A centralized apparatus, such as a state, is a much easier target for opponents of the revolution than is an array of decentralized communes. And these communes would remain armed and prepared to defend the revolution against anyone who militarily moves against it. The key is to mobilize the people into defense guards, militias, and other military preparedness units.

The position by the Leninists of the necessity for a dictatorship to protect the revolution was not proven in the Civil War which followed the Russian Revolution; in fact, without the support of the Anarchists and other Left-wing forces, along with the Russian people, the Bolshevik government would have been defeated. And then true to any dictatorship, it turned around and wiped out the Russian and Ukrainian Anarchist movements, along with their Left-wing opponents like the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, and even ideological opponents in the Bolshevik Party were imprisoned and put to death. Millions of Russian citizens were killed by Lenin and Trotsky right after the Civil War, when they were consolidating State power, which preceded Stalin’s bloody rule. The lesson is that we should not be tricked into surrendering the grassroots people’s power to dictators who pose as our friends and leaders.

We don’t need the Marxist-Leninists’ solutions, they are dangerous and deluding. There is another way, but to much of the Left and to many ordinary people, the choice has appeared to be Anarchic chaos or the Marxist Communist parties, however dogmatic and dictatorial. This is primarily the result of misunderstanding and propaganda. Anarchism, as an ideology, provides feasible organizational structures, as well as valid alternative revolutionary theory, which, if utilized, could be the basis for organization just as solid as the Marxist-Leninist (or even more so) only these organizations will be egalitarian and really for the benefit of the people, rather than the Communist leaders.

Anarchism is not confined to the ideas of a single theoretician, and it allows individual creativity to develop in collective groupings, instead of the characteristic dogmatism of the Marxist-Leninists. Therefore, not being cultist, it encourages a great deal of innovation and experimentation, prompting its adherents to respond realistically to contemporary conditions. It is the concept of making ideology fit the demands of life, rather than trying to make life fit the demands of ideology.

Therefore, Anarchists build organizations in order to build a new world, not perpetuate domination over the masses of people. We must build an organized, coordinated international movement aimed at transforming the globe into a mass commune. Such would be a great overleap in human evolution and a gigantic revolutionary stride. It would change the world as we know it and end the special problems long plaguing humankind. It would be a new era of freedom and fulfillment.

LET’S GET ON WITH IT, WE’VE GOT A WORLD TO WIN!

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By Kuwasi Balagoon

Of all ideologies, anarchy is the one that addresses liberty and equalitarian relations in a realistic and ultimate fashion. It is consistent with each individual having an opportunity to live a complete and total 1ife, With anarchy, the society as a whole not only maintains itself at an equal expense to all, but progresses in a creative process unhindered by any class, caste or party. This is because the goals of anarchy don’t include replacing one ruling class with another, neither in the guise of a fairer boss or as a party. This is key because this is what separates anarchist revolutionaries from Maoist, socialist and nationalist revolutionaries who from the onset do not embrace complete revolution. They cannot envision a truly free and equalitarian society and must to some extent embrace the socialization process that makes exploitation and oppression possible and prevalent in the first place.

When I first became a revolutionary and accepted the doctrine of nationalism as a response to genocide practiced by the United States government, I knew as I do now that the only way to end the evil practices of the US was to crush the government and the ruling class that shielded itself through that government was through protracted guerrilla warfare.

Armed with that knowledge, I set out the initial organizing of the Black Panther Party until the state’s escalation of the war against the Black people that was begun with the invasion of Africa to capture slaves made it clear to me that to survive and contribute I would have to go underground and literally fight.

Once captured for armed robbery, I had the opportunity to see the weakness of the movement and put the state’s offensive in perspective. First, the state rounded up all the organizers pointed out to it by agents who had infiltrated the party as soon as it had begun organizing in N.Y. It charged these people with conspiracy and demanded bails so high that the party turned away from its purposes of liberation of the black colony to fund raising. At that point, leadership was imported rather than developed locally and the situation deteriorated quickly and sharply. Those who were bailed out were those chosen by the leadership, regardless of the wishes of the rank and file or fellow prisoners of war, or regardless of the relatively low bail of at least one proven comrade.

Under their leadership, “political consequences” (attacks) against occupation forces ceased altogether. Only a Fraction of the money collected for the Purpose of bail went towards bail. The leaders began to live high off the hog while the rank and file sold papers, were filtered out leaving behind so many robots who wouldn’t challenge policy until those in jail publicly denounced the leadership.

How could a few jerks divert so much purpose and energy for so long? How could they neutralize the courage and intellect of the cadre? The answers to these questions are that the cadre accepted their leadership and accepted their command regardless of what their intellect had or had not made clear to them. The true democratic process which they were willing to die for, for the sake of their children, they would not claim for themselves.

These are the same reasons that the people’s Republic of China supported UNITA and the reactionary South African government in Angola; that the war continued in Southeast Asia after the Americans had done the bird; why the Soviet Union, the product of the first Socialist revolution is not providing the argument that it should and could through being a model

This is not to say that the people of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Zimbabwe or Cuba aren’t better off Because of the struggles they endured. It is to say that the only way to make a dictatorship of the proletariat Is to elevate everyone to being proletariat and deflate all the advantages of power that translate into the wills of a few dictating to the majority the possibility must be prevented of any individual or group of individuals being able to enforce their wills over any other individual’s private life Or to extract social consequences for behavior preferences or ideas.

Only an anarchist revolution has on its agenda to deal with these goals. This Would seem to galvanize the working class, déclassé intellectuals, colonized third world nations and some members of the petty bourgeois and alright bourgeoise. But this is not the case.

That China, North Korea, Vietnam, and Mozambique would build round a Marxist ideology to drive out invaders and rebuild feudal economies in the midst of western imperialisms designs and efforts to reinvade and recolonize is a point that can be argued in the light of the international situation it is one thing that they don’t back the will of the people as much as they chose allies in the East- West wars fought on the ground of the non-white colonies. It is another thing that Anarchy ceases to inflame or take the lead in combating fascism and imperialism here in North America with the history of the Wobblies, the western federation of minors and other groups who have made their mark on history. It is a denial of our historic task, the betrayal of Anarchists who died resisting tyranny in the past, malingering in the face of horrible conditions. It is the theft of an option to the next generation and forfeiture of our own lives through faint hearts.

We permit people of other ideologies to define Anarchy rather than bring our views to the masses and provide models to show the contrary. We permit corporations to not only lay off workers and to threaten the balance of workers while cutting their salaries, but to poison the air and water to boot. We permit the police, Klan and Nazis to terrorize whatever sector of the population they wish without repaying them back in any kind. In short, by not engaging in mass organizing and delivering war to the oppressors we become Anarchists in name only.

Because Marxists and nationalists ain’t doing this to a large extent doesn’t make it any less a shame. Our inactivity creates a void that this police state with its reactionary press and definite goals are filling. The parts of people’s lives supposedly touched by mass organizing and revolutionary inspiration that sheds a light that encourages them to unveil a new day, instead are being manipulated by conditions of which apathy is no less a part than poisonous uncontested reactionary propaganda. To those who believe in a centralized party with a program for the masses this might mean whatever their subjective analysis permits. But to us who truly believe in the masses and believe that they should have their lives in their hands and know that freedom is a habit, this can only mean that we have far to go.

In the aftermath of the Overtown rebellion, the Cubam community conceded as lost souls by Castro came out clearly in support of the Black colony. And predictably the Ku Klux Klan, through an Honorary FBI agent Bill Wilkenson, made no bones about supporting the rights of businesses and the business of imperialism. Third World colonies throughout the United States face genocide and it is time for anarchists to join the oppressed combat against the oppressors. We must support in words and actions, self-determination, and self-defense for third world peoples.

It is beside the point whether Black, Puerto Rican, Native American and Chicano-Mexicano people endorse nationalism as a vehicle for self-determination or agree with anarchism as being the only road to self-determination. As revolutionaries we must support the will of the masses. It is not only racism but compliance with the enemy to stand outside of the social arena and permit America to continue to practice genocide against the third world captive colonies because although they resist, they don’t agree with us. If we truly know that Anarchy is the best way of life for all people, we must promote it, defend it and know that the people who are as smart as we are will accept it. To expect people-to accept this, while they are being wiped out as a nation without allies ready to put out on the line what they already have on the line is crazy.

Where we live and work, we must Not only escalate discussion and study Groups, we must also organize on the ground level. The landlords must be contested through rent strikes and rather than develop strategies to pay the rent, we should develop strategies to take the buildings. We must not only recognize the squatters movement for what it is, but support and embrace it. Set up communes in abandoned buildings, sell scrap cars and aluminum cans. Turn vacant lots into gardens. When our children grow out of clothes, we should have places where we can take them, clearly marked anarchist clothing exchanges and have no bones about looking for clothing there first. And of course we should relearn how to preserve food; we must learn construction and ways to take back our lives, help each other move and stay in shape.

Let’s keep the American and Canadian flags flying at half mast… I refuse to believe that Direct Action has been captured.

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By Jason Adams

“The future of anarchism must be appraised within a global context; any attempt to localize it is bound to yield a distorted outcome. The obstacles to anarchism are, in the main, global; only their specifics are determined by local circumstances.”
- Sam Mbah

“To the reactionists of today we are revolutionists, but to the revolutionists of tomorrow our acts will have been those of conservatives”
- Ricardo Flores Magon

Introduction

The purpose of this paper is to help anarchist / anti-authoritarian movements active today to reconceptualize the history and theory of first-wave anarchism on the global level, and to reconsider its relevance to the continuing anarchist project. In order to truly understand the full complexity and interconnectedness of anarchism as a worldwide movement however, a specific focus on the uniqueness and agency of movements amongst the “people without history” is a deeply needed change. This is because the historiography of anarchism has focused almost entirely on these movements as they have pertained to the peoples of the West and the North, while movements amongst the peoples of the East and the South have been widely neglected. As a result, the appearance has been that anarchist movements have arisen primarily within the context of the more privileged countries. Ironically, the truth is that anarchism has primarily been a movement of the most exploited regions and peoples of the world. That most available anarchist literature does not tell this history speaks not to a necessarily malicious disregard of non-Western anarchist movements but rather to the fact that even in the context of radical publishing, centuries of engrained eurocentrism has not really been overcome. This has been changing to an extent however, as there here have been several attempts in just the past decade to re-examine this history in detail in specific non-Western countries and regions, with works such as Arif Dirlik’s Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, Sam Mbah’s African Anarchism and Frank Fernandez’ Cuban Anarchism. It is within the footsteps of this recent tradition that this paper treads further into the relatively new ground of systematically assessing, comparing and synthesizing the findings of all of these studies combined with orginal investigation in order to develop a more wholly global understanding of anarchism and its history.

To begin our inquiry we first must make clear what it is that is actually meant by the term “Western anarchism.” Going back to the debates within the First International, it quickly becomes apparent that this term is a misnomer, as it is actually the opposite case that is true; anarchism has always been derived more of the East / South than of the West / North. As Edward Krebs has noted “Marx (and Engels) saw Russianness in Bakunin’s ideas and behavior” while “Bakunin expressed his fears that the social revolution would become characterized by ‘pan-Germanism’ and ‘statism.’” This debate has led some to characterize it as largely between Western and Eastern versions of socialism; one marked by a fundamental commitment to order and the other marked by a fundamental commitment to freedom (1998, p. 19). So in this sense anarchism can be understood as an “Eastern” understanding of socialism, rather than as a fully Western tradition in the usual sense of the term. At the same time it should be remembered that there also developed an extremely contentious North / South split between the more highly developed nations of England and Germany and the less developed semi-peripheral nations of Spain, Italy and others. This split was based on differences of material reality but developed largely along ideological lines, with the northern Anglo-Saxon nations siding primarily with Karl Marx and the southern Latin nations siding with Mikhail Bakunin (Mbah, p. 20). So in both the East / West and the North / South sense, anarchism has often been the theory of choice for the most oppressed peoples; particularly in those societies whose primarily feudal nature writes them out of historical agency in the Marxist understanding of the world. This may explain a good deal of why anarchism became so popular throughout Latin America, and why immigrating anarchists from the Latin nations of Europe were so well received in country after country that they visited, attempting to spread the anarchist vision.

So by employing the label “Western” I am not referring to the actual history of anarchism but rather to the way in which anarchism has been constructed through the multiple lenses of Marxism, capitalism, eurocentrism and colonialism to be understood as such. This distorted, decontextualized and ahistoric anarchism with which we have now become familiar was constructed primarily by academics writing within the context of the core countries of the West: England, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Canada, United States, Australia and New Zealand. Since there was virtually no real subversion of the eurocentric understanding of anarchism until the 1990s, the vast majority of literature available that purports to deliver an “overview” of anarchism is written in such a way that one is led to believe that anarchism has existed solely within this context, and rarely, if ever, outside of it. Therefore, the anarchism that becomes widely known is that which has come to be identified with the West, despite its origins in the East; Kropotkin, Bakunin, Godwin, Stirner, and Goldman in first wave anarchism: Meltzer, Chomsky, Zerzan, and Bookchin in second and third wave anarchism. Rarely are such seminal first wave figures as Shifu, Atabekian, Magon, Shuzo, or Glasse even mentioned; a similar fate is meted out for such second and third wave figures such as Narayan, Mbah, and Fernandez — all of non-Western origin. This construction of anarchism as Western has unfortunately led to an unintentional eurocentrism that has permeated the writings of many second and third wave theorists and writers. Their work then becomes the standard-bearer of what anarchism actually means to most people, as it is printed and reprinted, sold and resold perennially at anarchist bookfairs, infoshops, bookstores and other places, as it is quoted and analyzed, compared and debated in reading circles, academic papers, at socials, parties, demonstrations, meetings and on picketlines. Clearly, there has been a great deal of reverence in second and third wave anarchist movements for this “Western anarchism” — the result has been that much of anarchism has moved from being a popular tradition amongst the most exploited in societies the world over to being little more than a loose combination of an academic curiosity for elite Western academics and a short-lived rebellious phase of youth that is seen as something that is eventually, and universally, outgrown.

This paper demonstrates an alternative understanding in the hope that this fate can be overcome; that anarchism, in the first quarter of the 20th century, was the largest antisystemic movement in almost all parts of the world, not just in the West. Upon considering that over three quarters of the global population is situated outside of the West, it quickly becomes clear that anarchism actually claimed the greatest number of adherents outside of the West rather than within it as well. Therefore, it is fair to say that not only has anarchism been a globally significant movement from its very inception, it has also been a primarily non-Western movement from its inception as well. This basic fact was reconfirmed with the rise of second wave anarchism, spanning from the late 1960s and on into the early 1970s in India, Argentina, Mexico, and South Africa (Joll, 1971, pg. 171). In turn, third wave anarchism, which has risen to popularity from the late 1990s to the present, also reconfirms this in resurgent movements in Brazil, Argentina, Korea, Nigeria and elsewhere. The relevance of this particular essay, however, is to critically reexamine the first global wave of anarchism in order to enable anarchists to think more holistically and effectively about the relevance of the past and its long-term effect on the present. This attempt to critique the narrow vision of “Western anarchism” should of course result in a more accurate understanding of the significance and potentiality of second and third wave anarchism in both the present and the future as well. Indeed, it was a similar motivation that drove the critique of Leninism / Stalinism that came out in the wake of the largely anarchist inspired events of May 1968, as well as the critique of Maoism that came in the wake of the Democracy Movement of the late 1970’s in China; both of which contributed greatly to the development of second and third wave anarchism worldwide.

In working to critique our understanding of the past though, there are several points that should be kept in mind at all times. A cursory reading into the contextual history surrounding these waves of anarchism could easily seem be to unearthing several “historical stages.” For instance one might get the impression that first wave anarchism universally fell into decline worldwide with the rise of the Bolsheviks, or that the decline of state socialism since 1989 has been the “lynchpin” that brought anarchism back in its third wave. While both statements are indeed true to a certain extent, the temptation to systematize and essentialize global social movements in order to make them easier to digest is one that should be undertaken with great care and discrimination; indeed, often it is a step that should not be undertaken at all. The reason is that one cannot ever fully understand the nuance and complexity of the thousands of social movements that have pulsed through non-Western societies through the lens of any singular overarching theory; even seemingly small factors of social difference can render them worthless. For instance, while anarchism declined in much of the world after the October Revolution of 1917, in large sections of the planet this was precisely the point at which anarchism rose to a level of unprecedented popularity. In these countries this was largely due to the saturation of anarchist-oriented periodicals in a particular local language — which meant of course that anarchism became the major filter for general alternative understandings of the nature of events in the world. In other words a rather minor variation in language and social conditions from one region of the world to the next rendered any broad statement on the global significance of Lenin’s rise to power completely indefensible. Or, for instance, if one was to posit that primitive communism “inevitably” has given way to feudalism, followed lockstep by capitalism, socialism and finally communism, that person would be rendering the entire history of hybrid African socialisms non-existent. These attempts at constructing universal laws in the understanding of history are the sorts of things that need to be deliberately avoided in order to understand the significance of difference in the creation of the whole. Indeed, as Theodore Adorno has shown in Negative Dialectics, it is only through negation and difference that one can conceive of the historical process in its entirety (Held, 1980, p. 205).

So, while the world has been connected on the global level for several centuries now, and there are many patterns that seem to present themselves as a result, it is important to remember that this connection has also been entirely uneven, chaotic and unpredictable. As a result, what is true for one particular region is not true for another, and what is true for a particular country within a particular region is often not true for a sub-region lying within it. Therefore universal declarations about history tend to crumble quite easily when put to the test of criticism. This critique becomes especially simple amongst the representatives of the worst of such deterministic thinking. For instance, as Sam Mbah has pointed out, many Marxist-oriented academics have even gone to such an extent as to argue that colonialism can be understood as being a “good” thing as it has allowed all parts of the world to reach the capitalist “stage” of history, a “necessary” precondition of course, to the dictatorship of the proletariat. In order to avoid this sort of univeralistic absurdity, I have chosen to focus in this paper not just on the positivism of sameness and homogeneity between disparate regions, but equally so on negation, heterogeneity and difference. That is, I attempt to discover that which makes the anarchisms of various non-Western countries, regions and subregions unique, with an eye as well to what aspects they may have in common and how they have been interconnected. It is my hope that in this choice I will have made a greater contribution to the future of the global anarchist project by consciously choosing not to define the histories of non-Western societies for them. Instead I let the individual histories speak for themselves, drawing connections where they actually exist, while allowing contradictions to arise freely as they must. I do this deliberately, as this is the approach of one who would be an ally.

Despite my decision to avoid adopting any one overarching theory, I have decided to focus primarily on one particular time period; from the late 19th Century up until the end of the first quarter of the 20th Century. While second and third wave anarchists typically describe this time period as the being the domain of what they call “classical” anarchism I argue that anarchism has always been a decentered and diverse tradition. Rather than essentializing an entire time period as being of one persuasion or another I choose to focus instead on the primacy of contradiction and difference, using the “wave” concept as a means of understanding the wax and wane in the global spread of anarchisms rather than as a way of defining the nature of the anarchisms themselves. While this would seem to put a temporal framework over the development of a historical ideological current that is not necessarily bound by such frames, my approach in this regard is not related to the pursuit of temporal frameworks but rather to the refutation and deconstruction of the concept of “classical” anarchism as a homogenous body of thought that can be located in a specific time and place. This is because I believe that this notion of classical anarchism plays a key role in the construction of the concept of Western anarchism, as it is in the context of the West that this conception has developed and it is never in reference to non-Western anarchism that such terminology is used. Ironically, by focusing on a particular time period, I actually am attempting to deconstruct the false dichotomy of “classical” vs. “postmodern” currents of anarchism in order to show that such temporal understandings of the “progressive” development of anarchist currents are ultimately flawed. This is because they do not recognize anywhere near the full spectrum of thought that has existed on the global level in the history of anarchist ideas; nor do they recognize the direct connections between early ideas and more recent ideas.

If “Western anarchism” is a eurocentric construction, then of course, “non-Western” must also be somewhat problematic. By employing it, I do not mean to give the impression that non-Western societies can or should be seen as some homogenous singular “world” in any sense. Nor am I implying that within the West itself there are not peoples who are originally or ancestrally of non-Western societies or that these peoples have never engaged in anarchist activity. Indeed, a more complete study of non-Western anarchisms would investigate additionally the history of anarchism amongst indigenous peoples and people of color within the borders of Western countries. However, I do make a particular point to focus on the considerable impact global migrations and the resultant ideological hybridity has had on the development of anarchism – some of this has even been within the borders of the Western countries, notably Paris and San Francisco. Another criticism that I anticipate is my inclusion of Latin America in the context of this study and what exactly the term “the West” is supposed to mean here. To this question I reply that by including Latin America I am denying that the region can be understood as being wholly a part of “the West” simply because much of the region’s populations identify strongly with the colonist culture – or perhaps it could be said that it is the colonist culture that identifies them. Rather, in the tradition of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla, I recognize the “deep” indigenous context that these largely mestizo societies were born within and the lasting impact this has had, and continues to have on these societies. In this way, Latin America can indeed be seen as being part of the context of non-Western societies. For the purposes of this study, which is to attempt to piece together a history of anarchism in those countries in which it has been largely ignored, I would define the term “the West” as essentially being comprised of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. These regions and nation-states are grouped together because they have represented the heart of world domination from the late 15th Century to the present, both in opposition to the self-determination of the rest of the world, and in opposition to the self-determination of indigenous peoples, people of color and working class people within their own borders.

All nation-states in the world are today hybrids of both Western and non-Western as the phenomenon of globalization has enforced the hegemony of the neo-liberal capitalist project the world over. This is not just a result of the force of arms: it is also because non-Western countries largely responded to encroaching domination by the Western world by both emulating it and by adopting its basic values and ideas. But what the West never counted on was that by promoting and enforcing “modernization” through the Social Darwinist cocktail of neo-liberalism, colonialism, industrialization and capitalism, they were also indirectly legitimizing the anti-Social Darwinist versions of modernization, that is to say, the socialist and anarchist projects. However, as Turkish anarchists have recently pointed out, non-Western “socialism” often fell in line with the modernization project, even allowing neo-liberal capitalist Structural Adjustment Programs. In contrast, they have pointed out that “anarchism was born of the Western and modern world, yet at the same time it was a denial of these things…anarchism was a denial of modernity and Western domination” (Baku, 2001). So throughout the world, many non-Western peoples saw their governments bowing to the pressures of the West and took the only options that came within that modernist package which seemed to offer either a modicum of liberty or equality, anarchism or socialism. In this way, it can be said that the modernist project was turned inside out and against itself by those it would intend to victimize and place under its control. This inside-out modernism (or anti-modernism) was spread through the global migration of anarchists and anarchist ideas, more often than not a result of forced exile. Erricco Malatesta for instance, helped to spread anarchist communism from countries a far apart as Lebanon and Brazil, and Egypt and Cuba. Kotoku Shusui almost single-handedly delivered anarchist syndicalism to Japan after spending time organizing with the American IWW in San Francisco in 1906. And Kartar Singh Sarabha became a major influence influence on the Indian anarchist Bhagat Singh after organizing Indian workers in San Francisco in 1912.

Throughout this work, which will consider anarchism in its Asian, African, Latin American and Middle Eastern regional contexts, there are three primary areas of investigation that we are interested in. The first of these is a consideration of what specifically local social conditions lead to the rise of anarchism as an ideology and how these conditions shaped its growth into a uniquely hybrid manifestation of the world anarchist movement. The second is to map and to analyze the influence of the migrations and inmigrations of peoples and ideologies and how these differing social contexts influenced each other through a hybrid exchange. The last area of investigation, which is contained in the conclusion, is to assess which unique aspects of first wave non-Western anarchisms carried over into second wave anarchism, as well as to consider what valuable aspects of first and second wave anarchism have to the continuing anarchist project, now in its third wave.

Asian Anarchism: China, Korea, Japan & India

In order to begin to challenge the predominant Eurocentric understanding of anarchism and its history, one should begin first with the most populated continent on the planet, Asia. With over half of the global population, to ignore the volatile political history of the region is to engage in the worst sort of eurocentrism; this is of course, not to mention the shallow and warped understanding of anarchism that one then arrives at as a result. Throughout many parts of Asia, anarchism was the primary radical left movement in the first quarter of the 20th Century. This should be considered quite significant to the anarchist project because within the global context China is by far the most populated country with a population of over 1.2 billion people. India comes in second in population at just over 1 billion. The two countries hold over 1/5 of the world’s population respectively, and in each, anarchist thought has risen to a level of political importance unparalleled in the other smaller nation-states within Asia. In terms of population share alone, these facts make a rethinking of the global context extremely valuable, and this is why I begin here. Within the continent, we will begin first with China then move on to the other countries of East Asia, and then I will proceed to India.

There were multiple locally specific reasons why anarchism gained such widespread popularity in China. Many have pointed out the “limited government” (wuwei) element in traditional Chinese thought, ranging the gamut from Taoism to Buddhism to Confucianism. In line with this view, Peter Zarrow claims in Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture that anarchism was “created out of the ruins of Neo-Confucian discourse.” Building on this belief, he goes on to trace the connections between Taoist ideas of “order without coercion” and the later emergence of anarchism (1990, p. 5). While there certainly is some truth to Zarrow’s claims, what must be deliberately avoided is any overfocus on the “anarchistic” elements contained within Chinese traditional thought to the detriment of an understanding of the important role played by global migration and by colonialism itself. As Arif Dirlik has remarked, an overfocus on traditional thought can also be said to be somewhat Orientalist, as it attributes “everything new in China to Chinese tradition…another way of saying that there is never anything significantly new in China.” Alternatively, Dirlik posits that “the Chinese past is being read in new ways with the help of anarchism, and conversely there is a rereading of anarchism through Taoist and Buddhist ideas” (1997). In other words the development and spread of ideas is never a completely one-way process, it is always an exchange.

In any case, this is just one part; another major reason was that practically no Marxist theoretical works had been translated into Chinese until around 1921, and even then a movement based around it failed to materialize until around the end of the decade. As a result, anarchism enjoyed a nearly universal hegemony over the movement from 1905-1930, thereby serving as a sort of filter for developments in the worldwide radical movements. Even Russia’s October Revolution of 1918 was claimed as an “anarchist revolution” as a result, though this distortion did not last. So unlike in the rest of the world, the anarchist movement in China did not fall with rise of the Bolshevik victory in Russia, but instead rose in popularity along with it (Dirlik, 1991, p. 2).

In China, anarchism arrived at the apex of its popularity during the “Chinese Enlightenment,” also known as the New Culture Movement. It was through the conduit of influential Western ideas of liberalism, scientism and progress that anarchism was able to gain a foothold. And ironically, it was from the new realization of China as a nation-state in a decentered, cosmopolitan world of nation-states, rather than as the center of all culture, that brought about the rise of an ideology that called for the abolition of the nation-state (p. 3).

The concept of “cultural revolution,” which is the very definition of variance between Chinese socialism and that of the rest of the socialist movement, can be traced directly back to this heavily anarchistic “New Culture” period when Mao himself was a member of the anarchist People’s Voice Society and enthusiastically endorsed the thinking of the important anarchist leader Shifu amongst others (Dirlik, p. 195; Krebs, p. 158). Of course, the anarchist conception of cultural revolution varied greatly from the Cultural Revolution which Mao actually put into practice, as by then he had been thoroughly convinced of the need for centralized, absolute authority after extensive contact with the Comintern. It is from the anarchist movement of this period that most of the later leaders of the Chinese Communist Party would later emerge.

When speaking of “Chinese anarchism” one might be tempted to think of it as simply that which developed within the actual borders of the country. But to do so would be to disregard the important influence migration has had on the movement, which was quite internationalist in scope. On the mainland, Chinese anarchist activity was concentrated primarily in the Guangzhou region of southern China, as well as in Beijing. In Guangzhou, Shifu was the most active and influential of the anarchists, helping to organize some of the first unions in the country. Students from Guangzhou formed the Truth Society, the first anarchist organization in the city of Beijing amongst many other projects. But like other nation-states around the world at this time, China was quickly becoming a more dynamic, diverse nation marked deeply by the repeated invasions of foreign powers as well as by the global migrations of it’s own peoples. Anarchists lived and organized in Chinese communities the world over, including Japan, France, the Philippines, Singapore, Canada and the United States; of these, the two most significant locations were the diaspora communities in Tokyo and Paris.

Of the two, the Paris anarchists were ultimately the more influential on a global level. Heavily influenced by their European surroundings (as well as whatever other personal reasons brought them there), they came to see much of China as backwards, rejecting most aspects of traditional culture. Turning towards modernism as the answer to China’s problems, they embraced what they saw as the universal power of science, embodied largely in the ideas of Kropotkin. In this spirit, Li Shizeng and Wu Zhihui formed an organization with a strong internationalist bent, called “the World Society” in 1906 (Dirlik p. 15). In contrast the Chinese anarchists in Tokyo were such as Liu Shipei were blatantly anti-modernist, embracing traditional Chinese thought and customs. Living in a different social context, for many different reasons, they were far more heavily influenced by anarchism as it had developed in Japan; which brings us of course, to the question of Japanese anarchism.

As in China, the October Revolution in Japan did not carry the same downward impact on the movement as it had in so many other parts of the world. In fact, the period immediately following 1917 became the apex of Japanese anarchism in terms of actual numbers and influence (Crump, p. xvi). Anarchism in Japan was quite diverse, but from amongst the broad array of anarchisms were two major tendencies; the class struggle ideals of anarchist syndicalism, promoted by figures such as Kotoku Shusui and Osugi Sakae, and the somewhat broader tendency of “”pure anarchism” promoted by activists like Hatta Shuzo. Both tendencies attracted a sizeable number of adherents, and both had their heyday at different points in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The anarchist-syndicalists followed in the footsteps of the Bakuninist tradition of collectivism, which was largely based on exchange relations: to each an amount equal to their contribution to the greater collective. In addition, the syndicalists were largely concerned with the day-to-day struggles of the working class, reasoning that the larger goal of revolution had to be put off until they had reached a significant degree of organization. After the revolution, the revolutionary subjects would retain their identities as “workers” as they had been before the revolution. The most prevalent embodiment of this tendency was the All-Japan Libertarian Federation of Labour Unions (Zenkoku Jiren), an important anarchist-syndicalist federation of labor unions founded in 1926 that boasted over 16,000 members (Crump, p. 97).

In 1903 Kotoku Shusui resigned from his job as a journalist in Tokyo when it announced its support for the Russo-Japanese war and the occupation of Korea. He went on from there to start the anti-war Common People’s Newspaper (Heimin Shinbun) for which he would soon be imprisoned. While in jail, he made contact with anarchists in San Francisco, and became more and more intrigued by anarchist theory. After getting out of jail, Shusui moved to San Francisco, organized with members of the IWW, and returned to Japan with the intellectual and practical seeds of syndicalism. This development would soon influence figures such as Osugi Sakae and lead to the formation of Zenkoku Jiren (Crump, p. 22).

In contrast, the pure anarchists were more similar to anarchist communists in the tradition of Kropotkin, combined with a strong anti-modernist, pro-traditionalist bent. As a group they were embodied largely in the militant organization the Black Youth League (Kokuren). Historically, the mid-19th Century “agricultural communist anarchist” theorist Ando Shoeki is considered by many to have been their primary philosophical predecessor. The pure anarchist critique of anarchist syndicalism was focused largely on the syndicalist preservation of a division of labor in the administration of the post-revolutionary society. This division of labor meant that specialization would still be a major feature of society that would lead to a view that focused inwardly on particular industries rather than blending the intellectual and the worker. The pure anarchists also sought to abolish exchange relations in favor of the maxim from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. In a sense, they can be seen as attempting to develop a more uniquely Japanese interpretation of anarchism. For instance, they questioned the relevance of syndicalism to a society that was still largely peasant-based and had a relatively small industrial working class (Crump, p. 7).

Despite the variance between syndicalist and pure anarchisms, in general the one thing they had in common was that all Japanese interpretations of anarchism were hybrid theories, made relevant for the local situation. That situation was an extremely repressive one; meetings were broken up, demonstrations suppressed and anarchist publications banned on a regular basis throughout the life of first wave anarchism. The Red Flags incident of 1908 is a good example of this, when dozens of anarchists celebrating the release of political prisoner Koken Yamaguchi were brutally attacked and arrested simply for displaying the red flag. Translation and publication of anarchist texts were often done secretly in order to avoid repression, as was Kotoku’s translation of Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread. Another aspect of unique local conditions was that texts that described Western realities had to be made relevant to the local population. For instance, in the widely available Japanese translation of Kropotkin’s Collected Works, the European “commune” was transformed into a traditional Japanese farming village (Crump, p. xiii). But this process also occurred partially through the conduit of Western anarchists, and through the migration and inmigration of people and ideas. This is of course, is the way in which these essays became translated into Japanese. Kropotkin corresponded directly with Kotoku several times and agreed to allow him to translate several of his major works, while his travels to San Francisco resulted in dramatic changes in Japan’s anarchist movement as well. So this global connection of anarchists was extremely important, but as I have demonstrated, it was made relevant to people on the local level.

Another local condition that shaped the development of East Asian anarchism was that Japan had its own “Monroe Doctrine” of sorts over most of region. As has often been the case elsewhere, Japanese anarchists used their relative degree of privilege as a means to spread anarchism throughout the region. These efforts throughout Asia led to the formation of the Eastern Anarchist Federation, which included anarchists from China, Vietnam, Taiwan and Japan. This is in fact, how anarchism first reached Korea after Japan’s 1894 invasion in order to “protect” it from China. Korean migrants living in Tokyo came under the influence of Japanese anarchism and engaged heartily in the anti-imperialist movement. As a result, over 6,000 were rounded up after incredulously being blamed by the authoritarian Japanese state for Tokyo’s 1923 earthquake. They were beaten, jailed, and two were even sentenced to death along with their Japanese comrades in the “High Treason Case” (MacSimion, 1991). Later, during the 1919 independence struggle, in which anarchists were prominent, refugees migrated into China, which was at the height of anarchist influence as a result of the New Culture movement. At the same time, Japanese anarchists at the time continued their solidarity work with the Korean liberation movement.

By 1924, the Korean Anarchist Communist Federation (KACF) in China had formed with an explicitly anti-imperialist focus and helped to organize explicitly anarchist labor unions as well. At the same time, anarchist tendencies were developing within Korea itself. For instance the Revolutionists League is recorded to have organized around this time and to have maintained extensive communications with the Black Youth League in Tokyo. By 1929, their activity had materialized fully in Korea itself, primarily around the urban centers of Seoul, Pyonyang and Taegu. The apex of Korean anarchism however came later that same year outside the actual borders of the country, in Manchuria. Over two million Korean immigrants lived within Manchuria at the time when the KACF declared the Shinmin province autonomous and under the administration of the Korean People’s Association. The decentralized, federative structure the association adopted consisted of village councils, district councils and area councils, all of which operated in a cooperative manner to deal with agriculture, education, finance and other vital issues. KACF sections in China, Korea, Japan and elsewhere devoted all their energies towards the success of the Shinmin Rebellion, most of them actually relocating there. Dealing simultaneously with Stalinist Russia’s attempts to overthrow the Shinmin autonomous region and Japan’s imperialist attempts to claim the region for itself, Korean anarchists by 1931 had been crushed (MacSimion, 1991).

Throughout East Asia, anarchists demonstrated a strong commitment to internationalism, supporting each other and reinforcing each other’s movements rather than thinking simply in terms of their own nation-states. The “nationalism” of Chinese and Korean anarchists can thus be seen as a form of anarchist internationalism dressed up in nationalist clothing for political convenience. In both of these countries, the anarchist movement sought to reinforce nationalist struggles insofar as they cast off imperial domination; but they were decidedly internationalist in that the long term goal was to abolish both the Chinese and Korean nation-state systems as well. The same can be said for Japanese anarchists who lent their solidarity to the anti-imperialist movements in Japan, Korea and other parts of East Asia. As noted earlier, the rise of the Eastern Anarchist Federation and its paper “The East” (Dong Bang) is testament to the global nature and focus of anarchism during the early 20th century.

Though India is located on the Western border of China, connection and communication between the anarchisms of both are relatively unknown since in India anarchism never really took on much of a formally named “anarchist” nature. In India, the relevance of anarchism is primarily in the deep influence major aspects of it had on important movements for national and social liberation. In order to understand the development of the heavily anarchistic Satyagraha movement in India, one must first consider the objective local conditions in which it developed. India is the second most populated country in the world, weighing in at over 1 billion people. Going back into ancient Hindu thought, one can indeed find predecessors to the concept of a stateless society; the Satya Yuga for instance, is essentially a description of a possible anarchist society in which people govern themselves based on the un