Archive for category Ideas

By Open Society for the Lottery’s End

The Revolution is Just an Old Saying

We are conscious of the need for a social revolution. Everywhere the degradation seems to deepen as our distance from our relation to it widens. We are conscious of the need to engage seriously in a war of appropriation against a society of dispossession, withdrawal, and exhaustion. As with any goal of social transformation, the process of anarchist revolution requires an understanding of the social context we live in, the barriers against class solidarity, and our strategy for getting what we want.

We believe in the possibility of revolution because we have tasted it in brief moments of revolt. Yet in these moments we expect defeat because defeat has always, eventually, greeted us in the end. If we believe in the possibility of revolution –and many have put their faith in the present state of defeat –then why do the same strategies of anarchist action persist? There is obviously a problem with insufficient qualitative and quantitative capacities. Then there is also the pervasive cynical demolition of subversive imagination. What cannot be imagined of us can never exist.

If it is revolution we want, then how do we initiate, organize, and participate in revolutions? I do not mean revolution as one event. It is a process in motion, a spreading defiance of domination, the revival of mutual aid and cooperation, and the use of our subversive capacity to refuse instead of reproduce this society.

The counter-summit is fresh in our memory. Its perceived defeats are studied and its self-affirmed victories are celebrated. It seems to be our only reference point for mass action anymore. Thousands of police greet us and then beat us in planned engagements. This strategy towards anarchy-in-action has yielded few lasting ruptures and plenty more cycles of limited advance and permanent retreat. The present course of activity conceals within it unrealized potentials. What is our potential for revolutionary subversion? What is our capacity for revolt?

Towards the mutuality of autonomous struggles, A disclaimer for those sensitive to critique

Critique is never meant to degrade or weaken the projects of comrades who share our dream of revolution. We are no specialists of critique; no one is. Likewise, we expect our comrades to exert a similar effort towards critically reflecting on our own projects. If anything, revolutionary critique strengthens methods and approaches to social struggles, always with the aim of becoming movements of self-organized uncontrollability. It is with this in mind that pertinent questions must be raised of the renewed enthusiasm for the counter-summit.

A Less Congratulatory Look at Seattle, 1999

It would be foolish for us to deny the effects of direct action and counter-demonstrations at the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in 1999. It has become a reference point for the revival in anarchist ideas and action in the U.S. In the aftermath, what did this movement lead to? While the institutions of global finance and exploitation suffered a crisis in pushing through some of its projects, the anti-capitalist movement chased the same formula for action. And it comes as little surprise considering its logic. The movement’s focus remained on organizing opposition to the economic and political summits of the social order. Yet the WTO is simply part of the capitalist process that has been developing globally for hundreds of years. Capital seeks constant expansion. Its largest projects in no way diminish its established daily project of exploitation and reproduction. The further we get away from locating struggle in our daily lives, the less we can sustain the expansion of the revolutionary project. Capital has proven itself effective in its expansion. Have we?

Some will point to what Seattle represented in terms of a revival in radical opposition to capital. This is undeniable. They could also point to the failures of the negotiations of the WTO, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank as telling signs of a powerful movement. It was powerful, yes, but what kind of power and towards what end? What we hear less about is the failure of the anti-globalization movement to mount broader and more subversive campaigns against an already global capitalism after the chaos in Seattle. The element of surprise is long lost. The strategy of counter-summits largely failed to expand the subversive capacity of anarchists, though it did increase the establishment of black blocs and infoshops as the cornerstones of our progress. The summit remained a point of reference for many single issues within divided capitalist life and a way of acting against domination far from that which is experienced immediately. The attack mounted against the summit was thus confined to a removal from everyday space and daily struggles.

Why would we have any desire to recreate the Seattle WTO riots? The chaos of Seattle happened nearly a decade ago. Today the city’s developers and politicians market a “green” city organized for rich liberals. Let’s not forget the scum Billionaire Gates and many others like him. The legacy of the Seattle WTO thus expresses itself as another historical footnote in a place that has extinguished its memory by necessity. Nothing changes that cannot be sustained. What cannot be sustained dissipates and disappears in time. Capital sinks its insatiable teeth again and again. Even before the smashed windows are replaced, everyone goes back to work. Of course, we were affected by the affirmation of uncontrollable rage in Seattle, but our rage needs directions if we are to win something more substantial than photo-essays and street tactic studies.

The Reemergence of Conventional Approaches

An energy is building once again for the counter-convention. Nearly a decade after the spark of the Seattle WTO revolts of 1999 and the following years of movement in favor of counter-demonstrations, some analyses are left unexplored. The effective culmination of the anti-globalization has dissipated, lost to practical amnesia and its ineffectual responses to alienated daily life. In the years following what was seen as a critical juncture, the movement for autonomy grew, then stagnated, recessed, and burnt out. The traps of activism and its logic of life-as-issues missed necessary self-critiques. It is this spirit of critique we hope to contribute to, not as a means of being divisive but in hopes of developing revolutionary strategies outside of spectacular dead ends and the limitations of militancy. If we want anarchy, shouldn’t we prepare more lasting foundations for it rather than replicate a dissipating chaos? Chaos erupts with or without us. Organized riots rarely compare to the destruction of riots unplanned.

The figureheads, capitalist puppet masters, servants and representatives of political rule meet again; Democrat and Republican, loyal and servile, all being equally detestable and overwhelmingly effective in ruling life inside and outside of their borders. Our hatred towards their social order demands directions, strategies, ideas, and plans of action. Our love for anarchy demands more reflection and insight. Already we sense that the show of force, the development of organization in street battle, and the joy of destruction seen in the summer of June 2007 in Germany against the Group of Eight (G8) has invigorated feelings of great possibility in opposing the social order.

And yet fundamental questions and critiques, those already put forth and those attained through critical analysis, are being neutralized. Their neutralization takes the same discourses: a pondering of spectacles, organized militancy, financial costs, the brief disruptions of normality, the limited and tenuous controlling of terrains. A wider critique of the counter-summit is denied by rationalizing the directions already taken; it’s as if the path itself leads us on its own way. Do we envision these struggles leading towards social revolutions? The question frames our approach to strategy. An obsession still holds power within the implied need to demonstrate in the streets at all. Street tactics, radical infrastructure for brief periods of revolt, and organizing reaction to the social order’s spectacular events dominate the discussion. For those with active criticism, it is a chance to unleash a little bit of hell when the opportunity presents itself. It’s direct action in practice, a practice of our principles that we carry with us everywhere. It is both the means and end of our anarchist principles but it is not a strategy for revolution. Revolution needs widespread participation.

When do we discuss our current capacity for revolt, its limitations, and its expansion?

What We Do There

In Denver and St. Paul the lapdogs of order arrest us in mass because they risk nothing to do so. Even the media, that vehicle for unquestioned relations of mediation, became a state target. There were no wildcat strikers demanding our comrades’ release, no barricades on the highways, no nights filled with a hundred acts of retribution. In Pittsburgh some rebels attacked banks under the cover of night in solidarity with those facing repression. Why were these actions of solidarity the exception? We must ask ourselves how we are still so few without receding into the corpses of cynicism and self-fulfilling defeat. We are anarchists because we believe in people’s capacity and desire to revolt. How is it our class continues to eat shit in the social war? Never has the state exerted more control over us. Never before has our class appeared more atomized, defenseless, and subjugated. And yet revolutionaries who fear new strategy and direction will forever make claim to something of the past.

At the counter-demonstration, we bring conflict to the passivity of mass demonstrations but are cornered, rounded up, and ground through the legal system for it. We are weeds that cannot grow; mice running through the maze. Our movements are studied; our repression is fine-tuned for success. Repression takes the upper hand when it controls our capacity in these situations. It wins against a force with little capacity or numbers for countering the force of a militarized city or for taking back territory from the rule of property.

Today we demonstrate the message of uncontrollable chaos. This chaos liberates space from control but through the media lens, it creates spectacles for passive audiences. In the theater of media spectacles, no one needs to move or be moved. A riot sells the evening news just as well as catastrophic flooding. The independent journalist documents the repression only to find that it is no longer new news but merely another document in a large catalogue of the state going unchallenged. Our message is that we are small and our ability for social war limited. Our message to anyone that we do not communicate to ourselves is a message someone else dictates. We cannot deny the influence of the media on our movements. We depend on it for information of events. Hidden within the images and news reports of revolt lies a relationship of mediation, of passivity, of distortion. We do not escape this mediated divide between actor and audience.

There is no message in the media that causes any politician to tremble. City blocks filled with demonstrators marching on designated parade routes, surrounded by thousands of armed cops, means something mostly to us: we are not alone. It only takes a few individuals to make transformation possible. What transformation is it that we seek? When the project of countering the political convention ends, as it does with the end of the convention, this project of transformation ends. It does not disappear; it disperses. The radical infrastructure that remains is now free to be used, but for what, another counter-convention?

Effective opposition to politics finds its expression through the widespread realization of power and the organization of initiatives for refusal and mutual aid. Mass refusal of politics will take its most effective form in relations of active solidarity. As bonds of solidarity grow, so does our network of revolt, so does our social base. Solidarity is a relation of shared autonomous power and mutuality. In solidarity we find the essence of revolt against domination. None of us can carry a revolution through by ourselves nor do we wish to. Revolution will transform our relations with everyone. The stronger our relationships of autonomy and mutuality, the more people will wish to participate, the greater our victories multiply. The state succeeds today through generalized alienation, passivity, and internal class division. Today we build relations of intimacy, trust, direct action, and class solidarity. We cannot wait for this essential practice. We must develop it today.

Building Diminished Capacities

If a political convention provides an opportunity to do things that cannot be done on a day-to-day basis, how does a revolutionary trajectory ever unfold under this circumstance? If anti-political forces demonstrate a show of force, towards what end does this take us and how does it build longer revolutionary strategies? If these mass mobilizations inspire renewed energy, what is this energy used for and how does a counter-convention demonstrate avenues in which this energy can build momentum outside of these demonstrations? Why do we find it easier to act with a mass of radicals from far away places at a counter-summit, than to form the basis for revolt amongst our co-workers, neighbors, and friends at home? Our work will take greater effort than organizing intermittent demonstrations.

How will the organizational skills that developed from attacking and blockading the conventions be useful to those that return home? In what way can we assume this will strengthen one’s own local projects? The political control of daily life needs no convention center to function. It is bound up in a generalized conformity to the laws of rulers and the calendar of exploitation. The police are effective at control as the sanctity of obedience goes unbroken. Repression succeeds in containing the floods of rage. Subversion comes from those who refuse their role in this relationship. Any real talk of becoming a threat to the foundation of capitalist society must include the subversion of daily reproduction, the development of revolutionary relations of mutuality and autonomy, and the taking of territories.

We return home to unaffected social conditions. Those of us who never made it pat ourselves on the back for avoiding tear gas and mass arrests. We nonetheless must confront the same question: how does our opposition to politics affect revolution in our daily environment? Our significance in one locality should never be understated. Capitalist life exists everywhere outside the security cordons of the palace steps.

Questions remain. If we are working to make another world possible, how can we create this world without applying ourselves vitally in the space and time of daily life? Certainly, there is no way to deny the skill-development and revolutionary joy of fighting police, attacking city structures, freeing movement within territory, and organized autonomy. The difficulty lies not in developing our struggle through these moments of planned revolt but of how our revolt can take on revolutionary directions by spreading and evolving into movements that can develop, grow, defend, and sustain themselves. The counter-convention is worthy of critique only by its failure in building our capacities for anything other than street battle and limited blockades. At home, in work, at the store, in the neighborhood, there is a crisis of social relations that is far more detrimental to revolution. Social relations that replicate alienation bridge no barriers between the mutuality of social needs, desires, and struggles. In the aftermath, we count our successes and our losses. It’s hard to fight battles we don’t have the capacity to win. The crisis of inter-personal alienation breeds itself endlessly in the terrain of social relationships and thus fragments class potentialities. Divided we kneel, divided we fall.

So our question then is, how does the effort, organization, and strategy that constitutes the counter-demonstration contribute to revolutionary goals like building the capacity of an autonomous social base? We prepare for street war without standing a chance at holding the smallest of territories. We have no actual networks in place to respond to repression. In St. Paul the state attacked our infrastructures pre-emptively with little recourse of our own. Some complained of the repression once again in the language of rights withdrawn, as if the state should be expected to do anything otherwise. Likewise, we must admit the failure of the Seattle police to prepare effectively to prevent the WTO riots in 1999. Years afterwards, they greet the most pacified of demonstrations with corridors of patrol cars, motorcycles, and bike police. The state learns quickly from the rules of routine engagement. They learned from their weaknesses and went on to teach other cities’ police units in the art of street repression. What did we learn from Seattle? New strategizing in street confrontation has given us little advantage in street battles: the police largely plan to contain organized chaos. New strategies for counter-summits didn’t avert the burn out of the past decade. The police control the territory of the city. What do we control?

Not everyone can be a militant, but anyone can exert some kind of resistance and solidarity depending on their inclinations and capabilities. The further we develop networks that are capable of initiating struggle, the greater our subversion of passivity can grow. We shouldn’t be afraid to make plans for revolution.

Another Protest Is Possible, But What Else?

The only thing we can demonstrate to our rulers now is our continued inability to impede their running of our daily lives. Concessions appease those who have always looked for appeasement—aspiring politicians, leftists, NGO professionals and single-issue activists. We see them on the streets with us, deluded and chasing fantasies of various brands of justice. When they appeal for a demonstration of democratic dissent, we respond with the riot. The tactics of one vie for legitimacy over the other. And still, even a demonstration of uncontrollability is a planned reaction to controlled events. Thousands of militarized police, weapons of crowd control, and structures for mass detention are developed early on and adjusted accordingly as their surveillance of “threats” become better informed over time. The element of surprise is by nature limited in these encounters.

Calm is restored when everyone goes home. Calm is the city we return to while our dream of burning barricades still smolders in the folds of memory and imagination. The calm truces of a false social peace are what still win in every place where normality is left unshaken.

And when the spectacles of politicians and capitalists fail to run smoothly, as they have in Seattle or Rostock or St. Paul, these people will enjoy their luxury accommodations and go home. Afterwards, just as before, they plan their partnerships and contentions for power in closed meetings, alongside all the decisions and negotiations constantly made by statesman and capitalists, without us, whenever it suits them. When daily life remains confined to the same activity and structures they’ve built, their power maintains the initiative within the social war. The failure or debilitation of international economic negotiations or agreements is a victory in some sense. In other senses, it merely indicates resistance to the acceleration of exploitation and our opposition to the monopolies that wish to compete for the greatest share of the wealth. Capitalist exploitation preceded the WTO, World Bank, and IMF. We mount an attack on the meetings of politicians while the gears of the factories and workplaces continue to turn and the arteries of commodity distribution –the highways, airports, and rail lines –remain undisrupted. Without widespread revolutionary activity, some of their most ruthless initiatives might be shelved, but can we even sustain this effort? And is it the most effective way of challenging capital or politics?

There is lots of talk about tactics and repression. These are the details of battle. Less heard is a fundamental examination of how it contributes to our revolutionary aims. Attacks on the palaces, convention centers, and sacred spaces they conspire in will feel like war but the war is waged everywhere, all the time. One city, for a few days, seems like a small place and short time to set our sights on. We want to level the city but instead smash a few of its windows. How can sabotage spread throughout the social terrain?

We have always extended our solidarity to those who have chosen conflict over passivity, dignified struggle over indifference. The combatants who turned parts of St. Paul into a battleground existed in a moment of uncontrollable rebellion. Our extension of solidarity however must also extend itself through practical analysis.

Learning Something New from History, Re-Imagining Possibilities

Every day we feel the rulers’ decisions with immediacy. Daily life is the only reality we must ultimately contend with. It is in the established movements of every day that the system is reproduced, strengthened, and maintained. It is also in the spaces of daily life, and what activity takes place here, that possibly takes concrete form. If the counter-summit presents an opportunity to appreciate “strength in numbers,” why are we not building a far more qualitative, widespread, and lasting social base in the places we inhabit daily? Networks of autonomy grow in power as they spread. It will start small, as we are now, and expand as we become more effective at building bonds of solidarity and mutual aid with our class. The autonomous social base gives us the ability to mount real campaigns against capital and its servants. We can’t simply hope for better revolutionary conditions for revolt. We will have to be the condition. Faced with the reality of alienation, our capacities grow as we confront the atomization and competition within our class.

Resistance must affect daily social reproduction or it will not sustain or expand its revolutionary potency. Again, where do we go from here? Autonomy must expand in the spaces and relations of daily life. These relations then strengthen the capacity of networks of autonomy to spread, carry out initiatives, and begin to take territory. If we are serious about anarchy, our strategizing for an anarchist revolution must also be taken seriously.

It would be helpful for us to change our assumptions that our numbers are too small and thus our capacities too little for creating situations of subversion outside of demonstrations and counter-summits. Beware those who applaud failing strategies by masking their effects and embellishing their victories. We still assume that organizing amongst conscious revolutionaries is more effective, or implied to be easier, than others in our vicinities, consciously radical or not. How we spatially organize our resistance determines in part the degree to which we can sustain our projects. Bonds nourished amongst revolutionaries are useful for us in developing theoretical and practical skills, networks, and mutual trust. This is not our only aim. Bonds nourished by daily interactions amongst our class opens potentials that are not confined to a milieu. Expansive transformation ends when we do. The further we communicate, through words and deeds, the further our projects can transform possibilities into realities.

The only adventure is the one not yet taken. The past must remain there; the present must open up. More experimentation and imagination in projects rooted in daily life and localized proximity can open a world of possibility still left unexplored. Relationships are the basic unit of expansive revolutionary social transformation. As our relations transform and expand, the development of social bases will strengthen projects in both the short and long term. We have no interest in building false community. We want to project ourselves into autonomous communes and networks of solidarity. We want to live anarchy! The possibilities are everywhere and for everyone. It’ll take new directions of struggle to further this insurrection.

Let no revolutionary imagination extinguish itself in the footsteps of the past! There is a storm gathering ahead. We can feel it because we are it. Comrades, gather your strength and daring, revolution extends itself with you!

Solidarity to those in Denver and St. Paul! Their repression further incites the uncontrollability of our attack!

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By Noam Chomsky

The simultaneous unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unraveling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti- fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working- poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN- hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

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A snippet of Tech on elections:

How do you feel about these elections?

None of these people will change the dynamic of the way America is set up. I think that at the end of the day that there are a lot of people that are looking for Barack Obama to change things and I think that there are things he will be able to change, but not things he’ll be able to stop. Like people will say, “Stop the war.” But I think he’ll be able to change the war but I don’t think he’ll be able to stop the war. I think that he can do great amount of stuff for the social programs that exist in this country but it’s a whole other story when it comes to the amount of stuff that has to be done in terms of our interests overseas.

Are folks focusing too much on electoral politics when they’re trying to get change in this country?

It sounds horrible but people really only really respect harsh and tough change, you know what I mean?

What do you mean?

Every ounce of being we’ve ever had came from people fighting over it. For example, what made the fact that Greece was a part of the Roman Empire legitimate? Or that Egypt was part of it, or the southern part of England part of it. Was it some divine right or right of conquest? What makes the northern part of Mexico now California, New Mexico, Arizona? And the Roman Empire existed 6 or 700 years, Byzantine Empire even longer. So really when we think about it, in the span of things we as a nation barely got our feet wet in terms of what we have accomplished in terms of manipulating the form of government in bettering it.

I think as our democracy evolves, it’s going evolve in one way or another. It’s going to have to become even more of respectful of civil liberties because that’s what democracy is all about. It’s about creating these institutions that protect the civil liberties of the people. Otherwise all we’re really doing is voting 25 times every century and we feel more secure.

If you want to get to the deeper question of it, I think it’s all about control. If we really believe in God, then the mind of God must contain every possibility for every single outcome based on the smallest random choice we make in life that increases exponentially throughout our lives. So really did we have a choice in making our destiny? And I think that’s the issue with man—the control we don’t have. We overcompensate by trying to conquer other people and our women. Try to overcompensate for the inescapable fact that we can’t conquer ourselves.

So I think that plays about a microcosm in local politics and presidential politics too. People want a candidate that is going to see things from their religious point of view, their economical point of view. It was your choice to not to get an abortion, but you want to have control so no other person gets an abortion. You forget you were an immigrant once upon a time in America.

When you talk about person being a “redneck”—a lot of people that came to this country were white were slaves. They didn’t call them slaves they called them indentured servants. But they were indentured 7 years to their masters. They were even cross bred with African slaves to create, quote-unquote “mulattoes” because those were more expensive to sell and you’d get more profit. But if you think about it, these white people toiled in the fields all day and since white people don’t tan too well when they took of their shirt, what did they have? A “red neck.” And that meant you were a poor, white sharecropping farmer. These insults are based upon your social status in society.

So that’s what we dealing with right now, the inability for us to go back in time and look at what creates the image of what we are today as Americans, as whatever race we choose to identify with, and as people with a particular political agenda in the upcoming election.

Via Zentronix

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Leadership and a Distrust for Privilege

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.

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-colonialist s 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 South Central Chapter of Cop Watch Los Angeles and the Revolutionary Autonomous Communities)

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By Malik Russell

As we have seen, the expansion of the prison industrial complex and mass incarceration began during a period of mass unrest, urban rebellion, and Black political challenges to the status-quo. The masses of disgruntled poor Blacks who might appear on the front lines of protests and demands for equality were gradually being steered into prisons at higher and higher numbers peaking during the 1990’s and pushing the number of imprisoned into the stratosphere.

Not only did mass incarceration suction off young and angry masses of Blacks off the street and into prisons, it coincides as Western and Wilde point out with the deindustrialization of the United States economy.

“The decline of manufacturing industry employment in the Midwest and the northeast coupled to the exodus of the middle class and working class blacks from inner cities produced pockets of severe unemployment in poor urban neighborhoods. From 1969 to 1979, central cities recorded enormous declines in manufacturing and blue collar employment. New York, for example, lost 170,000 blue collar jobs through the 1970s, another 120,000 jobs were shed in Chicago, and blue collar employment in Detroit fell by 90,000 jobs (Kasarda 1989, 29).”

This remains a key aspect of the ways in which the Black community has been destabilized and how expansion of the criminal justice and prison industrial complex have served as a shield disguising the true impact of the use of mechanisms of social control as well as the failure of society to provide sustainable employment for Black communities.

Accordingly, adds Western and Wildeman “For young men in metropolitan areas, employment rates fell by 30 percent among black high school dropouts and nearly 20 percent among black high school graduates. Job loss was only a third as large among young non-college whites (Bound and Holzer 1993, 390).”

Generally the numbers of unemployed in the Black community are often skewered to reflect a more positive but less accurate picture of the ways in members of the Black community are generally ostracized from economic opportunity.

“In measuring employment or wages, the predominantly low-skill and minority men locked up in prisons and jails are not included in the standard labor force,” writes Western in a previous article on Black economic progress. “Thus imprisonment effectively conceals economic inequality by excluding large numbers of poor men fro official accounts of the labor market.”

Western looks at the employment rate which measures the percentage of a population actually employed. In general the employment rate for Black people is always higher than for Whites and often double in regards to Black men compared to White men. When you include those imprisoned as part of the equation you getter a better since of the inequality. If we look at the rate of employment for Black high school dropouts in 1999, there was a 21 percentage point difference in true employment. When you look at the actual employment rate for all black men including those incarcerated it stood at 66.7% compared to the listed rate of 72.1% in 1999. When you look at high school dropouts age 22-30 the employment rate was listed at 50.9% while the true rate was 29.9% of Black men in that age group actually having a job.

One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars.

In a sense massive unemployment in the Black community has been addressed by criminalizing certain behaviors and incarcerating masses of young people who have subpar educational attainment, few marketable skills, and little to any access to meaningful work.

This process of utilizing prisons as the key means of social control for Black communities has numerous and related negative impacts on the community. For one it limits the number of available men able to marry and support families, secondly it limits the number of possible young radicals upset with the system necessary to create a critical mass, and thirdly it creates whole groups of mainly young men with no marketable skills, social stigma and no access to sustainable employment or the ability to become involved politically based on a felon conviction. When all the components are compared together it creates what is essentially a perpetual underclass population within the Black Community.
In addition to the continual destabilization of Black families economically through unemployment of young men and socially through high levels of imprisonment, this whole process of removing huge populations from key areas has additional consequences that fuel community instability and make them unsafe.

Ironically, one would assume that the high crime areas where a good majority of individuals are funneled into prisons from would become safer, but this does not tend to be the case. Todd Clear of John Jay College of Criminal Justice argues that “we find that low levels of incarceration seem to benefit a neighborhood’s public safety. But when incarceration reaches a certain level in an area that already struggles for assets, the effects of the imprisonment undermine the building blocks of social order.”

There are many neighborhoods in urban communities that supply large numbers of the prison population. Practically “million-dollar blocks” where states and counties spend millions of dollars to incarcerate individuals but relatively few dollars on the front end to provide services or employment. In a 2004 story in the Village Voice it noted that in Brooklyn, New York alone there were “35 blocks that fit this category—ones where so many residents were sent to state prison that the total cost of their incarceration will be more than $1 million.”

So, in many instances it is not a question of money being spent-the money is being spent, it’s more a question of priorities. There should and must be a political will to provide monies for employment and education as opposed to incarceration. Dealing with social inequality by writing off entire populations of communities destined for prison and perpetual second class citizenship, unless they are lucky enough to make it off the plantation holds dire consequences for those communities and the nation at large.

According to a policy brief “Ganging Up on Communities: Putting Gang Crime in Context” by the Justice Policy Institute, “The gangs are centralized in neighborhoods within the city, specifically those are struggling economically.”

They point to a study on Los Angeles published in the Journal of Trauma: Injury, Infection and Critical Care that examined the relationship between gang-related homicides in the community based on eight socio-economic factors and the “strongest correlations with gang violence were employment and income.” They noted that “In communities where the unemployment rates were between 14%-16%, there were 15 times as many gang homicides as neighborhoods where the unemployment rate was 4% to 7%.

Having the option of employment has served as the keystone requirement in terms of socio-economic progress in this nation. It precludes higher education and even political access, because you can have both without the ability to secure employment and support a family. Without the ability to work and support a family what future can one surrounded by poverty aspire to? When we add in a major shift in the US economy away from manufacturing to a more service economy and the disappearance of those traditional sectors of employment for those without college degrees-we start to get an idea of the implications for the Black community and poor peoples as a whole. In previous times, ethnic groups tended to age out of gangs and matriculated into the manufacturing sector, married, and become stable. Black communities have not experienced this as an option.

We know historically that the prison industrial complex represents the intertwining mechanisms of social control that are designed to maintain the social order. This was the job it was created for and continually finds new ways to perform. If we are serious about addressing social issues within the Black community, we must begin to look at ways of dismantling a system of crime and punishment that justifies incarceration as the key and often final solution to addressing social inequities.

A journalist and regular contributor to the Black Press, Malik Russell is the former communications director with the Justice Policy Institute and communications coordinator for Critical Resistance’s 10th Anniversary Conference-CR10. The views expressed in this series are his and not necessarily those of any organization.

Via Voxunion

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There is no such thing as “race”.

Emancipation must happen along ethnic lines because it is by virture of ethnicity that Indigenous people have so long been persecuted.

Emancipation by virtue of and for ethnicity must be the reason our struggle goes forward—the reason we have a struggle at all is because we are Indigenous and the reason Indigenous people are the most persecuted people on our home, the Earth, is solely because we are Indigenous and our ways of life are under attack by westerners.

Western ideology began in the “west” that is, European seats of “civilization” and is historically raced (that is, white), but today westernism is not just about skin, it is about mind.

Culture is a state of mind, after all.

It is a war of cosmology not simply ideology.

The line, the division, is there not because we have created it….it is there because the oppressor created it and we are simply responding to his threat to our very lives and lifeways as any reasonable living being would do to an external threat to their lives.

Wolves do not go out and hunt whites to the point of extinction; it is the other way around.

When a wolf attacks a human being it is because of an extreme circumstance…illness, hunger, encroachment, or because the wolf is cornered.

When a whiteman attacks a wolf it is out of fear, hatred, greed, ego, sport. When a whiteman seeks to eliminate wolves, they justify their fear and hatred of the wolf by calling them inherently evil, wild, untamed, an unforgivable threat, vermin.

When a wolf fights back against a whiteman, the whiteman calls them dangerous and a threat to human (read: white) life. And then they destroy them, utterly, finding justification in their genocide by virtue only because they are human/white/western.

For Indigenous people, what other reason is there for our struggle but for who we are? Like the wolf, we have been targeted for our “danger potential”—for as un-western as we are, that is how much of a potential danger we are to the whiteman.

To him we are savage and wild, strange and primitive; the westerner fears the “wildness” of “nature” because somewhere in his modern mind he understands that he really has no control over it….he likes and respects only that which he can potentially control.

The only good Injun is a dead Injun…(read: controlled)

The only good wolf is in a zoo or tagged and in the sights of a high-powered rifle…(read: controlled).

A dead injun doesnt have to be a stinking rotting carcass to be dead.

All s/he has to do is be divorced from his/her own history as an Indigenous person no longer discrete from his/her colonizer’s identity or his/her colonizer’s chosen identity for her/him.

All she/he has to do is believe the colonizer’s lie about the “past” being an abstract, dusty old, concept that has nothing to do with today, right now, this second.

White government and white society, (the culture in canada that has birthed the machinations of our oppression is European/white regardless of the color of the faces that sustain and maintain it today) are our enemy because they are rooted in a value system that is the exact anti-thesis of Indigenous value systems and which is inherently poisonous to an Indigenous traditional life system and living it.

Indigenous (Cree) ways value egalitarian balance (all life is sacred).
Western ways value inequitable hierarchies (white males are the most sacred, then white females; animals and plants are sacred only inasmuch as they benefit white males; Cree are anachronistic savages)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value humility and interrelatedness (we are all related afterall and we are only a small part of all of the creation of the Mystery)
Western ways value arrogance and compartmentalization (white male is god on earth; rigid ultra-binary ways of thinking…binariness not solely to contrast ideas, but the ONLY WAY REALITY IS MANIFEST)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value sharing and community wealth (our bands are comprised of blood relationships; greed is seen as destructive and negative. if i eat you eat, food is always given)
Western ways value greed and individual wealth (oil companies….donald trump….the hiltons….need i say more?)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value all beings as important in and of themselves (ie, we dont have to understand it, or exploit it, or even know of its existence for it to be important and sacred)
Western ways value things only inasmuch as these things can give them something or make them wealthy (often you hear scientists other people say things about animals and plants like: we should save them because of their potential in improving human life. very anthropocentrist)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value difference and individualism (most marked in traditional attitudes about homosexuality, “deformities”, medical conditions like epilepsy for example)
Western ways value conformity and self-centeredness (group think…more room in Cree culture to not conform to “popular ideas”. all about vanity and self in western world. the western world behaves as though aging is a disease!!!)

Indigenous (Cree) ways value community (before the thought-virus infected our communities, Cree embraced the idea of adoption and intermarriage with others not Cree—now they are afraid of it because of white ideas of “racial purity”. in traditional ways, we even adopted and married into our enemy tribes. we lived, fought for and died for our tribal community owing our first allegiance to our people, but we also had a great tradition of hospitality and strangers did not frighten us; we even accepted whites as full members into our communities).

Western ways value xenophobia (based in ideas of class, race, sex)

Indigenous (Cree) ways philosophized interconnectedness (we are all related)
Western ways philosophized a false dichotomy (we are separate “races”)

Indigenous (Cree) spirituality embraces all of creation and the Mystery (that all is sacred, that we are only a small part of creation not its masters, but its sibling, its relation, its dependent)
Western spirituality embraces only that part of creation made specifically for man and sees god as an anthropomorphic extension of himself (the bible teaches him that the earth was made for him and so were all the animals and plants and even woman was made for man; that man was made in the image of god: a white man)

There is no hell for Indigenous people and our spirituality is based on a deep love and respect for all of life.
The westerner is motivated by fear of hell, shame and a punitive man-god.

It is important to aspire toward an ideal and peaceful way to reconcile these two systems and traditional tribal definitions of respect must always be at the core of any Indigenous resistance…but there can be little compromise between the two spheres. This is because of the nature of white culture which is also called western culture.

Whiteness and its curse is a reality that needs to be addressed. White liberal guilt would have us deny our reality as oppressed peoples and construct a liberation movement that dismisses the history of European culture, westernism (social parasitism), as an inherently destructive culture.

It would have us approach our liberation not from a place of an historically racialized peoples who have been thus oppressed by virtue of this imagined racial category, but simply as human beings struggling against an unjust system based not in race, but economics.

That is only part of the story and the deracination of our struggle serves only to alleviate white guilt and privilege.

White culture is parasitic and amnesiatic at its heart. It is shallow and destructive; it is like a very powerful and undisciplined child who has been taught little respect for things and people outside of itself and its own understanding.

As it always is, there are good people of European ethnicity caught within the white cultural system who do not agree with it and do not know how to resist or challenge it; they don’t have a template or model for resistance. They have no ideological or philosophical model comparable with Indigenous modes of thought regarding egalitarianism and interconnectedness to guide them…they are struggling to internalize ideas of equity based in humanity not in sex, race or class.

For centuries they have been trained to accept the racist white power paradigm as a mystical reality from which there is no escape and no alternative.

The lie of manifest destiny and the so-called white man’s burden has been drilled into them before they are even able to walk.

The story of whiteness is so deeply embedded that few people can even think of “god” without picturing an old white man in white robes up in a white cloudy heaven.

The greed ethic is so deeply embedded in white culture that no one questions how the things they can buy are created and upon whose backs….while the reality is that these things are more than likely created by underpaid and underfed Indigenous people in “third world” regions.

In all things there must be balance.

Our struggle is not just material comfort…..to have a “piece of the pie” as so many Indigenous people keep saying.

That “pie” they so desperately want a slice of contains the bones of their Ancestors.

What insanity is it when an Indigenous person regards the land as a piece of pie exactly like a white man does?

It is called psychological colonization.

This struggle of ours goes beyond material comfort—we have starved before, we have lost family and friends in battle before, we have come close to leaving the earth forever before…..but never before have we ever faced the battle of losing our identity as Indigenous people!!!!!!!!!!

Through all the previous hardships we have stayed Indigenous and stayed true to the values and cultural philosophies of our Ancestral ways.

But today, now, our greatest struggle has yet to be fought and it is not one of material comfort, not one to “get a piece of the pie”.

It is to remain Indigenous in our thoughts, our hearts, our spirits, our minds, and our behaviors.

The lies of the colonizer are deep and clever: today it is all about “economic development” and “economic viability” everyone wants a casino and nobody cares enough to stop and really think about what that means. casinos….the epitome of white greed and western materialistic parasitism.

Some people say that there is nothing wrong with casinos because tribes have a tradition of gambling. Sure. Okay. These same tribes also more than likely have an ethic about not being greedy too.

Adopting western culture’s economic system is the next fastest way (if not the fastest) to become assimilated entirely (i.e. to become westernized) and to be well on your way to being a weekend warrior and STILL not have true sovereignty or self-determination….you will just get locked into that economic system like every single other group of human beings on planet earth….yeah you’ll have money, but you’ll still be a slave to the oppressor and still be colonized.

My Ancestors did not die and do all that they had to do to survive and ensure some kind of future for their descendants to have them be idiotic morons and sell out in the end just so they could drive a bloody SUV or have a bunch of white blood money to call their own.

My Ancestors did not, anyway.

Via Nehi Katawasisiw

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Over a year ago, a group of anarchists hoping to initiate nationwide anti-authoritarian organizing against the DNC and RNC formed a project called Unconventional Action. Their vision of catalyzing organizing on the local level to promote coordinated resistance to the conventions yielded success, as over 20 different collectives in various cities and regions took on the UA banner and began preparations for plugging into the convention protests. The informal network of UA groups from coast to coast, working in conjunction with local projects and organizers in Denver and the Twin Cities, successfully mobilized hundreds of anarchists to attend the DNC and RNC protests. Now that the conventions have come and gone, let’s continue to build on the infrastructure we’ve created for this single event. Rather than simply letting that energy and organization evaporate with the conventions done and gone, what sorts of uses can we create for these active, interconnected nodes of direct action-oriented radicals?

Anarchist organizing in the post-Bush political situation

If Obama becomes president, many anarchists and other radicals predict, the euphoria on the part of liberals and progressives will quickly give way to disillusionment as the shining star of the Democrats fails to follow through on his empty promises of hope and change. It’s extremely unlikely that an Obama administration will end the occupation in Iraq, threats against Iran, police repression, anti-immigrant crackdowns, escalating poverty, oil dependence, or any of the other crises facing the US; given this, how will the country respond? One possibility is that the vast liberal/progressive base of Obama’s campaign and the new Democratic Party followers will find themselves disaffected from the two-party path and open to new, increasingly radical directions. In this case, anarchists should be ready to seize the moment with consistent, visible, exciting actions and propaganda, and provide accessible points of entry for people to become involved in anti-political organizing and direct action. On the other hand, another possibility is that large sectors of the US population will respond to the failure of the hope/change rhetoric by moving in a more overtly fascist direction (supporting heavily authoritarian leadership, accelerating imprisonment and police repression, intensified scapegoating of immigrants, etc). In this instance, a solidly functioning network of communication and action will be crucial to anarchist self-defense, to oppose right-wing reaction from the community level and promoting anti-authoritarian analyses of the situation.

It’s also possible that McCain will become president, in which case two distinct trends may emerge with possibilities for anarchists. For one, military involvement abroad and border militarization at home will likely increase even more swiftly, along with social conservative attacks on reproductive rights and queer and transgender people. In all of these areas, direct action will be crucially necessary to stem the tide of militarism and oppression, and the haphazard, disconnected, and sporadic undertakings of these past years won’t be enough. Also, the massive grassroots swell behind Obama will find their hopes frustrated, and many will seek new political outlets for their disappointment. Anarchists demonstrating alternatives in practice to the electoral system can provide a path for this energy away from the two-party black hole and towards direct action.

In any of these scenarios, anarchists in the US will need ways to effectively mobilize ourselves to respond to the political situation. In recent years, the fantastic variety of projects, networks, actions, and culture that constitutes anarchism in the US rarely comes together in a coordinated way except around specific mass mobilizations. This can result in an effective but woefully brief fighting force that coalesces sporadically at the expense of local organizing and projects, and at great cost in terms of time and resources invested with little lasting momentum beyond the mobilization in question. How can we harness the collective power that we have, but in a way that sustains rather than depletes it and expands beyond mass mobilizations to everyday and local resistance?

What we’re proposing is to use the infrastructure we’ve created through these Unconventional Action chapters in different cities and regions, and expand them into a network that can plan, coordinate, and carry out anarchist action and resistance on a variety of fronts.

As we see it, here are some of the potential strengths of using the foundation of Unconventional Action organizing to create a national anarchist action network:

It already exists. UA collectives exist in over 20 cities and regions around the country, and with the context for them already established, can be easily founded anywhere. The UA framework has successfully mobilized people to attend the protests, to create and circulate propaganda, to gather and disseminate information, to initiate and carry out local organizing and solidarity actions, and more. Since we’ve seen that this loose network of collectives in different places works effectively, it is the most promising starting point for national and regional anarchist organizing.

Seize the post-convention momentum, with an eye towards the future. As a first step, this emerging UA network can take on organizing election day and inauguration day actions. For November 4th, UA collectives can offer each other strategies, talking points, messages, propaganda, and our collective wisdom; conversations between chapters could produce a few themes or tactical innovations to make our efforts coherent. Unlike previous election years, in which either scattered acts of consciousness-raising or resistance went unnoticed in their isolation, or focused solely on the elections without connection to previous or subsequent actions (i.e. the Don’t Just Vote campaign), actions from a UA network will allow us to make connections between resistance against the conventions, the elections, the inauguration, and more. Coordinating actions by UA chapters and through UA networks has the triple advantage of tapping into an existing, effective network [increasing participation]; having an explicitly anarchist/anti-authoritarian “brand” [making our perspectives clear and avoiding simply having to participate in liberal or communist front-group actions]; and using the common UA theme to link them [building coherent connections in the media and public consciousness around the interconnectedness of anarchist resistance to politics, capitalism, and all systems of oppression]. After the election and dialogue about whether a national mobilization in DC or coordinated local actions makes the most sense, we can apply the same reasoning to the inauguration on January 20th. Looking even further ahead, we can anticipate immigrant and worker solidarity actions on May 1st; resistance to police brutality on the US day of action October 22nd and/or the Canadian date, March 15th; opposition to the occupation of Iraq on March 20th, the war’s anniversary; and other coordinated days of action that we can decide regionally and nationally. These coordinated days can combine with our own locally-focused organizing to create vibrant, active, and nationally linked momentum of anarchist resistance in the US.

Organization for specific action, not for organization’s sake. By basing the foundation of regional and national anarchist networking in an existing web of interconnected nodes that came together for a specific purpose, we can avoid the pitfalls that come from attempting to create an artificial organizational structure for a general purpose anticipating future actions. Learning from the mistakes of regional efforts such as the Southeast Anarchist Network, where such an artificial framework for general purposes never got off the ground in spite of considerable enthusiasm, we can ensure that the network always has a basis in shared actions, and that organizational structure can be adopted or scrapped on an ad-hoc basis as necessity demands. Anarchists and others will join or found collectives for the UA network out of a desire to work on a specific action or campaign, so it won’t get abstract and overly formal.

Accessible points of entry beyond the cookie-cutter projects. One part of the stagnation of anarchist resistance over the past years is that of the “cookie-cutter” project. Many types of common community anarchist projects – Food not Bombs, Indymedia, etc – that once held fresh and vital roles as a part of broader anarchist resistance often now provide the only local entry points into anarchist action, and become bogged down in inertia and internal politics. Because they frequently exist in isolation both within communities (detached from other radical projects in the same area) and between communities (little or no regional and national discussion, gathering, or organizing amongst different chapters), these groups often putter along without genuinely engaging participants, threatening the status quo, or assessing how to build towards long-term success. Local UA chapters can avoid this stagnation by staying rooted in organizing for particular actions (election day, the inauguration, and beyond), with the energizing effect and multiplied support and resources of a national network behind them. At the same time, chapters can provide an entry point for new anarchists and radicals, pathways into various projects and a catalyst for broad, integrated anarchist resistance.

Harmony through diversity. UA collectives are not homogenous or uniform. Not all are comprised solely of self-described anarchists; some focused exclusively on the convention organizing, while others organized a variety of events around different themes; their sizes, styles, and methods of functioning varied greatly. This is one of the network’s strengths, and can continue to be as it expands past the specific focus of the conventions. Continuing and new UA groups can range from tight-knit anarchist collectives who undertake numerous specific local projects together, to a loose coalition of radicals who agree to come together to organize non-hierarchically around particular events or issues in a broad region. Some collectives take the name “UA-city/region,” while others have entirely different names; ultimately what’s important isn’t the title but the commitment to forming a tight-knit network of mutual aid, solidarity, and coordinated action. We don’t need to strive for unity and identical ideological lines, but for harmony and mutual interests, goals, and tactics. The conventions showed that we can do this, so let’s take it further.

Connect capitalism, the state, and oppression coherently through harmonized anarchist resistance. When the UA network takes on coordinated active resistance not just to the political conventions, but diverse manifestations of the oppressive power of capitalism and the state, we will demonstrate concretely the links between these struggles. For example, currently anarchists who search for a visible militant response to a police murder in one city or an ecologically destructive building project in another have few ways of tapping into our collective power other than resorting to an empty “call to action” posted on Infoshop or Indymedia. What if instead we could count on a national network to turn out solidarity actions in 20 different cities under a common UA theme? Our power to respond as anarchists would expand exponentially, and the coherence of our critique of all power and domination would increase along with it, as people witness UA resistance to various manifestations of domination culture. It will take consistent and coordinated anarchist action to begin to demonstrate anarchism and direct action as viable alternatives to government and voting, and a network rooted in UA organizing can build our capacity to deliver it.

Decentralization with coordination. Because UA chapters take diverse forms, and since regional and national networking need only involve as much formality as the moment demands, there’s no risk of creating some central anarchist directive whose commands we’ll slavishly obey, or risk excommunication from anarchist circles. As St. Paul showed, our decentralization is one of our strengths: pre-emptive arrests of the Welcoming Committee “leaders” couldn’t stop four days of actions from different groups and individuals. But in the absence of effective coordination, our power and effectiveness remains a fraction of what it could be. Based off of the model of different UA collectives tackling different sectors, actions, and tasks, we can extend this decentralized but coordinated approach to a wide variety of campaigns and days of action across the country using the UA network.

Capitalizing on renewed anarchist visibility. One success of the convention protests is renewed anarchist visibility: journalists, politicians, and pundits across the country used the terms “anarchist” and “anarchism” consistently in association with radical or “violent” protestors, to an extent unprecedented in recent history. So now that anarchists have entered the popular consciousness as the militant opposition to the political order, it’s up to us to continue that process by showing more and more examples of anarchist action as a viable alternative to the futility of politics. An expanded UA network can provide the basis for consistent coordinated anarchist action that can keep up that visibility, demonstrating alternatives to the two-party dead end that will come increasingly under scrutiny as disillusionment with Obama intensifies.

The consulta model works. Regionally and nationally, Unconventional Action chapters organized consultas to share information and skills, develop links between cities and regions, and make decisions about strategies and planning actions. From these gatherings emerged concrete plans for actions such as the blockades strategy and the map of sectors, as well as new and strengthened links between collectives and individuals and also broadened bases of skills and knowledge. We can continue this model of consultas on a regular or infrequent basis, as we plan for future coordinated actions, set themes for giving coherence to local projects and campaigns, and continue to teach each other skills and analysis. Of course, for a decentralized network to work, local collectives shouldn’t be dependent on consultas to authorize their actions or set their priorities for them. Instead, consultas can convene only as they’re needed to address issues of collective concern.

Now is the time. With a national network of anarchists organizing diverse local projects and actions under a common theme, we can offer an accessible route for disaffected ex-Obamaites to tap into resistance to politics and capitalism. At the same time, we can offer cohesive resistance to any right-wing backlash, with a network for efficient communication and to mobilize support and coordinated action. There hasn’t been any national anarchist organizing network beyond event-specific coordination since the Love and Rage Federation, which disintegrated before Seattle. Building off of the UA framework, we can create the strongest foundation for collective anarchist resistance that has existed for a very long time.

Conclusion – Where do we go from here?

To summarize, we believe that the network of Unconventional Action collectives contains the seed of a vibrant, nationwide, decentralized network for anarchist action and resistance. It currently exists and has demonstrated its capacity, and its concrete purpose and orientation towards action avoids the pitfalls of organization for its own sake and the staleness of cookie-cutter projects. We can take advantage of the diversity of different UA chapters to create a decentralized but coordinated framework for anarchist resistance, using the successful consulta model to move forward collectively. Our actions through the network can capitalize on renewed anarchist visibility and demonstrate clear links between capitalism, politics, and oppression, advancing anarchist analysis and providing crucial accessible points of entry. Using this network, we can use the momentum from the conventions to flow into election day, inauguration, and more actions, and effectively respond to this pivotal moment of political change in the US.

So how can we make this vision into a reality? We propose that over the next two months, local UA collectives meet, debrief their experiences at the convention, and set local priorities for action based on their own local circumstances and capacities. One of the key functions of the UA network can be to support the initiatives of local collectives, so at home with our crews we can focus on planning creative new directions for action and assessing how a broader network can support us in those. On regional and national levels, we can direct our efforts towards prisoner and legal support from the conventions and continuing the conversations about the future. Specifically, we can discuss possibilities for coordinated election day actions on November 4th: what themes should we focus on? What kinds of writing, propaganda, and information should we share and distribute? How can we link together our actions in different areas? What are our goals, targets, and tactics? And in the aftermath of the election, we should immediately begin discussing plans for responding to the inauguration. Should we collectively mobilize in Washington, or focus on local action? Depending on who’s elected, what themes are most important to emphasize? Over the winter, different UA chapters can consider hosting regional consultas to plan for these days of action and discuss possibilities for the future. Above all, let’s keep talking, planning, and resisting, with an eye towards building our capacity to fuck their shit up and create other worlds.

This statement was created through the collaboration of members from UA collectives in several cities. You can reach us at unconventionalfutures@riseup.net.

Via Infoshop

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By Stuart Hainsworth

A look at Gramsci’s theory on governing bodies, their ability to control the masses, and the means employed to do so.

Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is born from the basic idea that government and state cannot enforce control over any particular class or structure unless other, more intellectual methods are entailed. The reason and motive behind the concept has been noted to be the way society is structured and exists on a power and class base. Gramsci defined the State as coercion combined with hegemony and according to Gramsci hegemony is political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority or consensus as distinguished from armed force. A ruling class forms and maintains its hegemony in civil society, i.e. by creating cultural and political consensus through unions, political parties, schools, media, the church, and other voluntary associations where hegemony is exercised by a ruling class over allied classes and social groups. Gramsci argues in his Prison Notebooks (which were written whilst he was incarcerated by Mussolini in Fascist Italy) that the way society is controlled and manipulated is of direct consequence of the practice of a ‘false consciousness’ and the creation of values and life choices that are to be followed. Gramsci argues that the system of hegemony can be classified as “social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of the Workers State.” It is this process which Gramsci refers to when he tries to explain the way in which organisation of people, media and information controls the thought and actions to create a state of domination though the creation of dominant ideologies. Another aspect of the theory of hegemony includes the economic determination and intellectual and moral leadership, which degenerates into a domination and consensual managing of life choices. The media has a central role in this theory and the practice of the process has become more and more to the fore in study of the way the ideological media are at the centre of the struggle for consumers’ minds and central views. The role of the media has to be taken into account within the context of the theory of hegemony due to the value of the media and the public-imposed powers it yields. Communication from government, between and inside classes, is now controlled by the media and any text consumed by the state has to be considered to be potentially open to the practice of manipulation and therefore, the process of hegemony.

It could be argued that the media exists as a vehicle and tool for consumerism to grow and for society to engage in the current purchase-dominated way. If people are not consumers then they may be considered by some areas of society to be outcasts and different from the ‘norm.’ It is this state of affairs where the media can be key to influencing the people it informs and instilling the thought that one must be a consumer and if not then at least aspire to be. Gramsci may argue that the way in which the media operates could equate to what he envisaged when he talked about a ‘class struggle’ and the creation of values that others must follow. It is this situation where the ideological role of the media can be seen to influence the way in which people can decode and read advertisements, features, television programmes and any text which may hold a hidden meaning, therefore creating the possibility for media to become very powerful in terms of ideological control and leadership. It could be said that the media has become the dominant class in a Western society full of semiotic and hegemonic traits. No longer can the world be seen through one’s own single apathetic eye. Cultural Theory author Andrew Edgar states: “Due to the rise of trade unions and other pressure groups, the expansion of civil rights (including the right to vote), and higher levels of educational achievement, rule must be based in consent. The intellectuals sympathetic to the ruling class will therefore work to present the ideas and justifications of the class’s domination coherently and persuasively. This work will inform the persuasion of ideas through such institutions as the mass media, the church, school and family.” Recently, the proliferation and exploitation of press and interactive media has led to the creation of super media existence, threatening the objective viewpoints society relies upon to keep an ‘open’ state if one were ever to exist. Gramsci was mainly concerned with the determinism within the state of Italy in the early part of the 20th Century. He saw the potential for manipulation and the practice of domination growing in Mussolini Italy. Within the current theoretical climate, the theory has been adapted to include the theory of ‘consent.’ This allows the scope for many theorists to argue that the way society is now run, with the increasing emphasis on education, makes the leadership and decision making process less easy to quantify. The theory of consent exists to try and explain the way in which government policy, legislation and international policy are made and enforced.

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The talk was recorded at a Dublin Workers Solidarity Movement meeting at the end of August, there is about 35 minutes of talk and then 25 minutes of questions, discussion and response.

Via Anarchist Writers

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by Chris Carlsson
by Orion Magazine

Even while capitalism continues its inexorable push to corral every square inch of the globe into its logic of money and markets, new practices are emerging that redefine politics and open up spaces of unpredictability. Instead of traditional political forms like unions or parties, people are coming together in practical projects, from urban gardening in vacant lots to the suddenly ubiquitous do-it-yourself bike shops. More and more people, recognizing the degradation inherent in business relations, are creating networks of activity that refuse the measurement of money. They depend instead on sharing skills and technological know-how within new communities, such as the biofuels co-ops that have proliferated in many cities. Networks have grown, thanks to the spread of the Internet and other telecommunications techologies, and new kinds of “families” based on shared values, alternative living arrangements, and non-economic relationships are growing within the old society.

Collectively, I call these projects “Nowtopia.” Rarely do the individual participants conceive of them in political terms; day-to-day issues about how we live, what we do, how we define and meet our needs tend to be understood as outside politics. But all Nowtopian activities are profoundly political.

The Nowtopian movement embodies a growing minority seeking emancipation from the treadmill of consumerism and overwork. Acting locally in the face of unfolding global catastrophes, friends and neighbors are redesigning many of the crucial technological foundations of modern life, like food and transportation. These redesigns are worked out through garage and backyard research-and-development programs among friends using the detritus of modern life. Our contemporary commons takes the shape of discarded bicycles and leftover deep-fryer oil, of vacant lots and open bandwidth. “Really, really free markets,” anti-commodities, and free services are imaginative products of an anti-economy provisionally under construction by freely cooperative and inventive people. They aren’t waiting for an institutional change from on high but are building the new world in the shell of the old.

These practices require sharing and mutual aid and constitute the beginnings of new kinds of communities. Because these people are engaged in creative appropriation of technologies to purposes of their own design and choice, these activities embody the (partial) transcendence of the wage-labor prison by workers who have better things to do than their jobs. They are tinkerers working in the waste streams and open spaces of late capitalism, conjuring new practices while redefining life’s purpose.

Efforts to create islands of utopia have always flourished on the margins of capitalist society, but never to the extent that a radically different way of living has been able to supplant market society’s daily life. Nowtopians, and anyone determined to free themselves from the constraints of economically defined life, face the same historic limits that have beset all previous efforts to escape. Can the emerging patterns resist the co-optation and reintegration that have absorbed past self-emancipatory movements? The new apparatus of global production helps speed up the extension of market society, but it inevitably also speeds the spread of social opposition, the sharing of experiments and alternatives. Our moment in history is at least as exhilarating as it is daunting.

Via Infoshop

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By: Kevin Alberto Sabio

Many get confused when they hear the following terms being used as far as political ideology is concerned; Black Power/Nationalism,Pan Africanism, Afrocentrism, African Internationalism. Those that are uninitiated may feel that these ideologies are threatening and racist in some way, while others who follow those particular ideologies may feel that they are limiting, or are opposed to each other. In reality, it’s all just semantics. They’re all interchangeable with each other, and basically call for the same solution;unity, power, and respect for the people of African descent. Here on Blacktino.net, I will try to clear up some of the misconceptions about these ideologies, and hope to motivate my fellow Afro Latinos to join the cause. Because of recent conflicts that I’ve gotten into with online trolls, both on other websites, and here on Blacktinos.net, Ifelt it nessary to delve into this subject, and let it be known how these ideologies impact ALL African descended people.

Some may see Black Power/Nationalism as a strickly African American political manifestation, only concerning itself with African American issues. That is simply untrue. As thoroughly outlined in the Stokely Carmicheal/Charles Hamilton book,”Black Power”, this stance calls for power to All Black People; not just African Americans. Seeing as how Stokely Carmicheal/Kwame Toure was of Afro Caribbean descent, I would HIGHLY doubt that he would call for a political ideology that wouldn’t encompass or benefit people of his own national/regional background. That work was followed up by the ancestor Dr. Amos Wilson in his seminal work,”Blusprint for the Black Power”. In theis heavily detailed dossier(almost 900 pages), He goes in -deph with his analysis of Black Power as a viable political concept, and the steps needed to be taken to make Black Power a reality and living entity. Wilson breaks down what power is, how it can be used(and misused), and how people can obtain power politically, economically, culturally, educationally, physically, and even spiritually to a certain extent. Demographically speaking, the African population in the United States(in total)has the size and capacity to become it’s own self-sustanining nation-state, and would only be able to survive in the long run unless it begins to see itself as a nation within a nation. The African descended population in America can be seen as a catalyst for a strong nation state and provide empowerment, not only for themselves, but for a unified African Diaspora in both the political arena and economically.

This leads me to Pan Africanism. The greatest example of Pan Africanism was the work of the honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey, and his Universal NeGRO Improvement Association. Having traveled across the globe at a young age, Garvey saw how Aficans/ Africans Descendents were treated throughtout the world. We were continuously on the bottom of the social ladder, and were suffering socially, economically, and politically. Garvey created the very first chapter of the UNIA in 1914 in his home country of Jamaica.The organization was to be a fully functioning government made to represent for all African people across the world.Chapters and divisions were set up ALL OVER the globe throughout the caribbean, and the United States, on the continent of Africa herself, and even in LATIN AMERICA. Even after his (illegal)explusion and deportation form the United States, Garvey still had an impact, influencing many of the continental African leaders who were to one day govern their countries into independance, such as Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, Jomo Kenyatta, and Julius Nyerre. His work and ideology is thoroughly outlined in the books “Race First”, written by Tony Martin, and also ” The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Vol I-III”, edited by Amy Jacques Garvey. Dr. Wilson even covers Garvey and his work in his own book, citing the economic and political success of the UNIA, and the blueprint that was left for a means of international trade and commerce throughtout the African Diaspora.

Afrocentrism has been considered the most controversial of these ideologies, considering that it takes on the system that we live in head on. It has caused many debates and mudslinging in academic circles, with the mainstream institutions denouncing it, not only in academia , but also on their campuses. In his seminal work “Afrocentricity”, Dr. Molefe K. Asante outlines what Afrocentrim is, and why it’s necessary. The only thing that causes afrocentrim to be considered controversial (at least to the Powers that Be and their neo-colonialist supporters) is the primacy of Africa in it’s ideology. All things African are considered primary in thought, culture, education and mode of living. We are not not taught about our history and/or culture in mainstream society, or in mainstream educational system. To go against the status quo is almost considered blasphemy, and makes one into an outcast unless you confirm in the end. Why not be free embrace this part of our history and culture? Why should we be denied a part of ourselves just to fit into the so called mainstream? as it is, we exist in an oppressive,white supremacist system. We are still suffering the effects of colonialism and slavery. Think I’m wrong? ask yourselves these questions, as posed to Dr. Wilson about the effects of slavery and colonialism on society today:

What language do you speakin?
What clothes do you wear?
What religion/spiritual belief do you practice?
what foods do you eat?

Is this what your ancestors were doing in the past,or were any of these imposed upon them?
Makes you think for second, doesn’t it? There are a few other authors that i could recommend concerning the ideology of Afrocentrism, but my library is inaccessible to me at the time of this writing, so I am unable to give you the titles. I would suggest researching certain authors and scholars such as Dr. Na’im Akbar, Haki Matubhuti, Dr. Maulauna Karenga, Dr. Jawanzaa Kunjufu, Dr. Marcia Sutherland, Wilson Jerimah Moses, Ivan Yan Sertima, Punoko Rashidi, Thomas Parham, Cyrus H. Gordan, and Robin Walker.

Afro Latinos

Now after having gone through all of that… what does any of this have to do with Afro Latinos? Everything. They are Africans, whether they admit it or not. This is not to in=mpose any political belief on them, it’s just fact. Don’t believe me? Do some historical research. One of my favorites is researching the work Of Dr. Eric Williams in his titles, “The Negro in the Caribbean”, and “Documents of West Indian History”. You can also try Richard Price’s “Maroon Societies”, as he discusses those Africans who were forcefully brought to these shores, and were able to escape from their enslavement, and create their own societies. The story of Yanga from Mexico comes to mind, as well as the Maroons from Jamaica lead by Queen Nanny. You also have the work of Dr. Arlene Torres in her book titled, Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean”, There’s also other research available such as, patrick J. Carroll’s, Blacks in Colonial Vera Cruz”, Benga-In Nunez’s “Dictionary of Afro-Latin American Civilization”, Minority Rights Group’s “No Longer Invisible: Afro- Latin Americans Today”, Pedro Perez Sarduy’s, ” Afro-Cuba Voices: On Race and Identity
in Contemporary Cuba”. I would als encourge the readings of articles written by such writers as Carlos Cooks, Karen Juanita Carrilloo, and the works of Prof. Victor Vega, and Dr. Marta Moreno-Vega. there are also other websites to peruse to get more information about Afro Latinos and our connection to the Afrikan Diaspora, such as AfroCuba Web.com, Afropresencia.com and AfroLatinoproject.org.With the jacking of ancestral Afro Latino lands by the respective Latin American governments, our unity within the African Diaspora is not only necessary, but essential. We cannot survive soley on our own. We are a part of the unified Black?African World.

Of coure,according to my troll on Blacktino.netI have my head up my ass, so what do i know? I guess the works by the authors mentioned above negates Everything that’s supposedly known about the subject, the world according to him. But supposedly he’s an expert, and I’m just a peon with a big mouth.Of course, there are so so many other scholars and activists,and other works works that I could mention to refute this Internet Tough Guy, but I think that this article would suffice.. Besides, that would take too long,and I have better things to do.. Idon’t call myself an activist for nothing.

Uhuru Sase, Y paz.

Via Assata Speaks

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Fair Weather Vegan makes a provocative and accurate point about the politics and white privilege inherent in television programming, such as the basic-cable channel Animal Planet:

All the ‘Animal Cop’-style programs present owners who are mostly poor, and many of them are black or Hispanic, and this is never addressed or considered as a possible mitigating factor, or as some sort of structural problem which might be ameliorated in order to help the treatment of animals. The problem is presented as one of individual pathology, no matter what the situation. Needless to say almost all the ASPCA officers and vets portrayed, the population of professionals which ‘deal with’ these personal responsibility lapses, are white. The one exception is Detroit, and although some of the officers and staff are black, an even larger percentage of the offender population is also black and receives the same type of narrative treatment (They shoot dogs! Those barbarians!). The issue only gets more stark as Animal Planet films internationally, where one would think it would be difficult to avoid some sort of diversity. Yet there is not a single one of its international wildlife shows, that I know of, that focuses on a protagonist of color. Be s/he scientist, preservationist, vet, or volunteer, s/he is almost always a young, conventionally attractive white person, except in rare cases when she is an eccentric older white living in Africa, or, more rarely, South America or Asia. The message is always the same: whites save animals. Natives threaten animals, or at the very most provide manual labor for whites in their efforts to save animals. The network is particularly tone-deaf in the matter of Chimp Eden, which is set in South Africa for heaven’s sake, and yet the sanctuary staff’s racial makeup or history is not considered worth noting.

Not to get too hung up on mainstream-media ocean of crap, but Entertainment Weekly recently posted a piece on television and whiteness that should be read.

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Greetings my friends and relatives,

First of all, I can’t express to you near as much as I’d like to. The sincere appreciation I have that you would gather together remembering all the political prisoners, hostages and myself the way you have.

Gatherings like this are extremely important because it reminds people of the sacrifices that are made daily through out the world for freedom, justice, and a clean and sane environment for our future generations. The powers that exploit our resources and people will always be there, generation after generation.

And the creator will always call upon people to stand against that exploitation. Even if the creator does not call. Any just man or woman, with any semblance of justice, be it spiritual, social or environmental, He will find cause to take issue with those enemies of humanity and nature.

One of the reasons I am so appreciative is because I want you to know, from where I stand the gatherings that you do mean so very, very much to the other political prisoners, other hostages and myself. It is an extreme importance that political prisoners and hostages not be forgotten. Not necessarily for the sake of the prisoners and hostages themselves, but for the sake of future generations. To appreciate and protect and jealously guard the freedoms they possess; that was paid for with someone’s life. I think the most difficult times for a political prisoner or hostage, is when people start to forget what their sacrifice was about, when people become complacent because of some economic level they have attained, and forget the sacrifices that were made and the danger of them losing those gains is imminent. And I know from personal experience, the joy I feel when I receive letters of appreciations or visitors and that is second to the joy I feel when I know that my efforts were not in vain. And there are young people taking up the cause and responsibility of regaining our lost freedoms and resources.

I dearly miss the touch of friends, I dearly miss walking through a forest or across a meadow or even through the traffic of a busy street, or feeling the wind blowing against my skin, directly, rather than a window or some chain link fence.

But with all this, I can’t express to you how at a great loss I would feel if the reason and cause of the many political prisoners and hostages throughout the world was forgotten. Swept aside, because people become too comfortable with their status quo.

I have been here for 33 years that is more than half of my life. I would give almost anything to go home. But I won’t give up.

I would give almost anything to be with my family. But I won’t be quiet.

I would give almost anything to say goodbye to this place, but I won’t say goodbye to my beliefs and our struggle.

I would give almost anything to walk out this door and never return. But I will never walk away from the love of my people.

When I think of the things that I hear and see in the media, about how many different special interest groups, speak of various subjects, like the right to live, or pro-life, I can’t help but think of the children around the world who never get a chance to live because of the exploitation of their resources of their country and their people.

All of the destruction that is taking place here and abroad is a direct result of people, special interest groups, whose interest is primarily wealth and taking more than they need.

The religious people, or should I say the spiritual people of America, and anywhere else for that matter, should seek to aggressively band together to stop the unjust wars that truly impact primarily the common man, the common man, who in his village or farm, city or anywhere else, is destroyed by bombs from the various governments. Governments who in the name of nationalism and patriotism seek to gain political power and control over someone else’s resource and political system. They should actively band together and identify the things they have in common rather than dwelling on their differences. Perhaps I am rambling too much in my statement, after 33 years in prison and 63 years upon this earth, much of this time spent thinking, praying, analyzing, and mediating, on the information that I gather from various forms of writings, books and observations, I somehow feel I have a little bit of a right, to say what I think and feel.

I love you all and I am so honored that I would be invited to make a statement to you. And if I could hug each one of you individually, I guarantee you would damn well be hugged!

I have never given up in my struggle for freedom.

Freedom is a natural inclination of all living creatures up on the earth. Even a newborn will struggle when held too tightly.

I deeply regret being in prison I deeply regret losing family members while in here, I deeply regret all the wonderful things in life that I have missed, but I will never regret standing up for my people for as long as I can draw my breath. My heart is with them always, and my heart is with you today.

So long for now; I will remember you in my prayers and until next time.

Keep the faith.

Your relative always

In the spirit of crazy horse,
Leonard Peltier

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“It seems that, as an excuse for rejecting things African, many of our people pretend that they can’t connect with continental Africa and Africans because, ‘Africans sold us into slavery.’ Without going into the psychosis of self-hatred for those clinging to this excuse, I pose this question: ‘Why did Europeans have to kill so many Africans, have wars with Africans, and always arrive in Africa armed to the teeth?’ If Africans were simply ‘for sale,’ then it seems likely that the European would have only needed to back his ship up to the African coast, pay the African ’slave merchants’ a few pounds, load up the slaves, and sail off to the Americas. Why kill anyone?”

E. Jerome Johnson
7 Steps Toward Black Reemergence

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