Posts Tagged Onward: Selected Articles

By Matt Meyer

The words “terrorism” and “justice” have been bandied about loosely since Sept. 11, with few pundits of the left or right adequately or honestly defining what they mean. The old truism, that the terrorists are always the ones with the less advanced weaponry while superpower acts of aggression and intervention cause the real terror for most citizens of the world simply did not suffice at the moment when those passenger planes made their horrific impact. The building of the U.S. empire has meant tragedy not triumph for most of the people of the globe, with the recent Supreme Court election of George W. Bush simply a crowning achievement of U.S.-style democracy-in-practice.

A calculated and intentional murder of thousands of people seems a clear enough definition of a terrorist act. Yet throughout U.S. history, the word has more often been applied to those most rebellious to imperial politics, regardless of the tactics, strategies or effects of the perpetrators. It was therefore not surprising that the link would be made – as civil libertarian Nat Hentoff proclaimed in the allegedly progressive Village Voice, between the “holy fanatics” of Al Queda and the “murderous fringe” of the Weather Underground Organization and other organizations from the radical movements of the 1960s and 70s. Never mind that in it’s eight years of existence, the WUO conducted over twenty bombings against U.S. government military and corporate targets (including the U.S. Capitol and the New York State Prison Headquarters after the massacre at Attica) without inflicting one civilian casualty. Never mind that, as some Black Panthers were turning to acts of violence, the U.S. government had embarked upon a now-admittedly illegal campaign of assassination of Black leaders. Never mind that the “terrorists” of the Puerto Rican Armed Forces of National Liberation and Macheteros were similarly oriented toward symbolic and non-lethal acts. Never mind that the leaders of the terrorist-branded American Indian Movement were largely caught up in acts of self defense, protecting their federally-recognized but FBI-invaded lands. The majority of the current U.S. political prisoners, most in jail for 30-to-70 year sentences having already served twenty plus years behind bars, are those deemed terrorist by the most powerful and militarized of nation-states. Yet they are denied even the concession of official political prisoners status.

On the afternoon of Sept. 11, U.S. political prisoners from throughout the federal system were placed in isolated Security Housing Units, unable to contact or communicate with their lawyers, to make or receive phone calls, to receive or send mail. Among those placed in segregation were Carlos Alberto Torres, convicted of the thought crime of “seditious conspiracy;” Marilyn Buck, an outspoken white anti-racist and anti-imperialist; Sundiata Acoli of the Black liberation movement; and peace activist Phillip Berrigan. And while Berrigan is the only pacifist amongst this group, their commonalities – staunch and radical opposition to U.S. injustices – were enough to secure their fate. The logic behind their newly intensified lock-down status was purely punitive; all had been in jail long before the recent tragedies, and all had long disavowed the tactics of true terrorism that Americans only now had become all too acquainted with.

We all should take this moment to commit ourselves to understanding and putting an end to all forms of terrorism. Anti-Vietnam War activist David Gilbert, recently reflecting upon his own experiences in the WUO from his cell at Attica Correctional Facility, noted that every action they took responsibility for – ranging from protests of U.S. policies in Southeast Asia, to condemnations of U.S. racist violence against domestic national liberation movements, to property destruction in reaction to the Sept. 11, 1973 overthrow and murder of democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – was accompanied by a clear communiqué articulating the political issues involved. Openly critical of WUO’s many errors, including their romanticization of military means, Gilbert noted that “while there were never guarantees, we placed the highest priority on avoiding civilian casualties, and fortunately succeeded.” It seems clear, even in middle America, that the current drive of the U.S. government is guaranteed to have the opposite effect. The War Resisters League national staff, writing eloquently from their lower Manhattan offices just hours after the 9 a.m. plane crashes – as the WTC was burning just several miles away – suggested that “for the Bush administration to talk of spending billions on Star Wars is clearly the sham it was from the beginning, when terrorism can so easily strike through more routine means. We urge Congress and George Bush that whatever response or policy the U.S. develops it will be clear that this nation will no longer accept any policy by any nation that targets civilians. This would mean an end to sanctions on Iraq, which have caused the deaths of over a million civilians. It would mean not only a condemnation of terrorism by the Palestinians but also the policy of assassination of the Palestinian leadership by Israel, and the ruthless repression of the Palestinian people and the continuing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.” We should unite in accepting international standards on the sanctity of human life.

On Sept. 12, various jails throughout the U.S. Bureau of Prisons began rounding up inmates of Middle Eastern descent, placing them in solitary confinement, and, at one prison in Florida, telling them that in a state of war “they would be the first to be exterminated.” No doubt a streak of neo-fascism is alive and well within the U.S., represented unabashedly within the prison system. New York’s Black newspaper The Daily Challenge, under the banner “Terrorism Begins At Home,” headlined an article one week after the WTC bombings on the lack of “comprehensive government operations” against the Ku Klux Klan and other far-right groups. One is forced to wonder if there is any possibility of fairness in the upcoming trial of Muslim cleric Imam Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a man considered by most legal observers to be the victim of a long-standing government conspiracy, who has the distinction – in addition to his theology – of being one of the most influential leaders of the 1960s Black Power movement (when his name was H. Rap Brown). On the other hand, it should also be made clear that, as spontaneous hate crimes against Arab Americans and Muslims is on the rise, so to is a slightly encouraging level of official denouncements against this mob mentality. In an ironic challenge for U.S. progressives, there has rarely been a time of such unchallenged bipartisan governmental acceptance of the necessity of war and, at the same time, governmental condemnation of racism and anti-Arab violence.

This may ultimately serve as cold comfort at a time when everyone’s basic freedoms are at risk. Writing about the horrendous record of civil rights abuses during war-time, Congressman John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, commented in The Washington Post that: “History has taught us that we should not use the threat of violence as an excuse to suppress legitimate constitutional rights and liberties.” Nevertheless, recommendations of the Bush administration call for a broad increase of police discretionary powers – including racial profiling, wire-tapping, and search and seizure rights – ensuring that both the military and the prison industrial complexes will profit in the coming period. Naming Pennsylvania’s Governor Tom Ridge to the new cabinet-level position of Chief of Homeland Security is certainly not a good sign, as Ridge has established himself as a zealous supporter of “aggressive” policing policies and of the death penalty. It is hardly surprising that Ridge’s chief target until now has been noted death row journalist and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal. That my city and country is, as our national anthem claims, the “home of the brave” was substantiated countless of times in the days and weeks following Sept. 11. Whether we are to become, given these histories and obstacles, the “land of the free” remains very much still to be seen.

As talks of unity have become a staple of our daily news broadcasts, anti-war advocates must also ask: How are we now to build a united movement, to secure for the world “infinite justice?” At a time in the U.S. when progressive organizations were beginning to make vital connections between the evils of militarism, racism and the class divide, when the peace, anti-imperialist and workers’ struggles had only occasional intersections and communication, the war we are faced with may have a unifying effect. It may also, however, serve to derail and divide the transnational coalitions necessary to bring about true and lasting change. The U.S. government has committed itself to not only enter a new phase of fighting overseas, but to maintain and intensify its own past wars at home. The U.S. political prisoners, leaders of their communities and nations, champions of the struggles of the 1960s and 70s, require support and unconditional release. Our country can hardly unite or truthfully comprehend the nature of terrorism, unless these freedom fighters are allowed to be free. Perhaps, more significantly, if progressives forget those behind bars, in an effort simply to react to the latest war-mongering, we will surely be forced to repeat history itself, with an ever-growing number of political prisoners in our midst. It is time for us to think and act strategically, to mature as a movement.

In the days following Sept. 11, I realized that my son, Michael Del – who just turned fifteen months – was almost exactly the same age I was when John F. Kennedy was shot. I have been thankful that he is not quite old enough to be troubled by the television images; no nightmares cloud his evenings as they do most of our days. After working for many years on many different causes, I have come to know and respect the insights and leadership of Sundiata, of David Gilbert and Marilyn Buck, of Leonard and Mumia and Phil and the entire Puerto Rican anti-colonial movement. I cannot imagine Michael Del growing up in a society where these visionaries and lovers of life are not around and about, helping in our quests for an end to terrorism and violence.

I cannot imagine building a successful campaign for justice and peace without understanding their contributions, and the lessons we must learn from the experiences that they continue to live. As I take a new train to work, over the Manhattan Bridge – my regular train now closed – I look across to the city approaching as eerie quiet fills the subway car. I can barely imagine those two towers gone, though their absence screams out to us in a smoldering void. This is the void faced by a movement that has yet to reconcile with its own past. It hangs heavy on my heart; it is time to rebuild.

Matt Meyer, Multicultural Coordinator of New York City’s Alternative High Schools and Programs, is co-convener of War Resisters International Africa Working Group and co-author of Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan-Africanist Insights in Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation. A member of the Resistance in Brooklyn (RnB) collective, he has worked for amnesty for U.S. political prisoners for over ten years. He also serves as national co-chair of the newly merged union of U.S. peace studies organizations and can be contacted at subscribe to my RSS feed!

By Ernesto Aguilar

Kendall Clark is a writer living in Dallas, Texas. He is the founder and editor of Monkeyfist.com, a journal of progressive politics, technology, and culture. He is reachable at kendall@monkeyfist.com.

Can you give a little history behind your article, “The Global Privileges of Whiteness,” and whiteprivilege.com?

Whiteprivilege.com came out of Monkeyfist, the “virtual collective” I’m a member of. The collective’s primary effort is publishing Monkeyfist.com, an independent, non-doctrinal, leftist news and commentary site; we focus on politics and technology and culture.

Most of the members of the collective are either working or hobbyist computer programmers or technologists of some sort. Our backgrounds and the Internet allow us to work together closely, despite the geographic obstacles.

One of the goals of Monkeyfist.com is to fuse our sense of non-doctrinal leftist politics and what are called, in the university, the politics of identity, especially race and gender.

Out of this general concern and specific conversations we were having at the end of 2000, we realized that the domain “whiteprivilege” was available. So at the very end of 2000, I registered it with the initial idea simply of safeguarding it. We didn’t know at that time what to do with it, but we didn’t want such a good domain to be taken by some white supremacist group.

Finally, we decided that we should develop the domain into a public resource for antiracist education and activism, and that’s what we’ve been doing for the past few months.

As for that essay, I have been trying for the past 18 months or so to focus my political writing on a few issues, one of which is antiracism. I became very interested in the World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) as soon as I heard about it. I wanted to attend WCAR in Durban, but without the backing of the kind of media outlet the WCAR organizers would recognize, I knew I probably couldn’t get press credentials, and I wasn’t sure I could go in any other way, since I’m not affiliated with an NGO.

The origin of the essay was an accident actually; I received over the course of probably three days, several email messages which suggested a piece about the American and British (along with other European “ex”-colonial states) efforts to subvert the WCAR agenda. At the same time I had been reading the work of several African American analytic philosophers who work on race and racism — Bernard Boxill, Charles Mills, Lucius T. Outlaw — as well as an earlier tradition of important black thinkers — Du Bois and Fanon and CLR James. So I was trying to apply good theoretical work on race and racism to a concrete political situation. The piece came together in a way that made me think it was worth showing to other people.

What were the most important lessons you learned from those writers you just mentioned, as they relate to your piece?

The most important lesson I learned is that racism and Empire (and I specifically mean empires of the West, of Europe and America; I don’t know enough about the rest of the world to know if the same kind of relation existed there) are closely linked; that, one might say, they are manifestations of the same political-economic impulse. This is an idea that I find, in different ways, in the work of Du Bois, of Fanon, and of James. As I say in the piece, I had grown accustomed to the — perhaps standard progressive — view that racism, as a problem of the domestic social structure of the U.S., and racist foreign policy were more or less independent social phenomena. I now think of that view as simply wrong. One of the things that changed my mind was seeing how the US and UK attacked the WCAR — seeing the specific arguments which were used.

I think you raised an excellent point here in that the standard progressive view you’re talking about misses the boat in several respects. There tends to be a tendency to look at extremist elements like the Ku Klux Klan and white-power movements as the hardcore side of racial politics and the overt and covert actions of politicians here and abroad as the soft side of that. If you look at it historically, I tend to believe it could well be the other way around. Could you speak on that, and maybe break down a bit more where you’re coming from, specifically how the arguments used at WCAR relate historically to Empire?

I’ve tried to incorporate an argument of Bernard Boxill’s, a very important African American philosopher at the University of North Carolina, into my antiracist politics. In his “Introduction” to a collection of essays he edited called *Race and Racism*, Boxill considers the origin of the idea of race, which is important because without the biological idea of race you don’t, historically, get the European practice of racism or the ideology of racial supremacy (i.e., what we call today an ideology of White supremacy), or, at least, it would have been very different in ways that are hard to guess at; and, in our time, when biological racisms are in some sense waning, cultural racisms are growing, and the idea of race is changing too.

As Boxill says, of those who think the idea of race is a relatively recent creation, everyone agrees that it came from Europe. The chief question is whether the idea of race — and hence an ideology of European supremacy and practices of racism — was developed as a justification for practices of slavery, upon which colonial Empire was totally dependent, or whether the idea of race existed antecedently and only came to be used to justify Empire after, as it were, the fact. Boxill, by a very interesting argument, concludes that Europeans needed the idea of race to explain the physical differences they observed when they met Africans, for example, which took place before the widespread practice of slavery and before that practice needed some, however flimsy, justification.

Why is this important now? After all, Boxill may in fact be wrong, as this is a very complex question. It’s important because Boxill’s argument shows that the idea of biological race was a more or less morally neutral and yet corrupting idea. Following Rousseau, Boxill argues in effect that some ideas — private property is another one — are not themselves morally suspect, but that they can be morally corrupting. The idea of biological race is one such idea.

I say all of this to say that the historical connections between Empire and race are complicated, they may be a mixture of necessary and contingent factors, but that Empire has always already used the (once morally neutral) idea of biological race to justify its exploitations, its depredations. As an antiracist, what this puts me in mind of more than anything else is to be on guard for morally neutral yet corrupting ideas that are floating around in *our* heads today, particularly as the mode of the dominant racism changes from biological to cultural.

Foreign and domestic exploitation, upon which Empire depends, are justified by the same supremacist ideology; they are created, maintained, and extended by the same racist practice. I tried to give some examples of this linkage in the essay you’ve referred to; briefly let me reiterate: all of the examples, colonial and domestic, of racism and supremacist ideology I point to are displays which are intended to justify or extend or strengthen some aspect of White privilege, that is, material and cultural and political privilege. Whether protecting global hegemony, corporate profits at home or abroad, or reinforcing White people’s sense of entitlement about victimhood, and thus denying their responsibility for repairing historical harms, both domestic and colonial (I aritifically separate these two, “domestic” from “colonial”, but the point right through here is that the way Empire regards people of color on the periphery, at its margins, and the way it regards them at the center is a function of the same systematic oppression; that for people of color there is no margin, no periphery, of Empire because *as* people of color there is no systematic difference in their status throughout Empire, even if the ways in which systematic oppression is expressed locally always map onto what is locally possible or impossible), White privilege defends and protects and reinforces and, where it can, extends itself.

To take one fitting example: on the day that I write this — 4 December — in 1969, Chicago police forces (under the direction of the Cook County States Attorney) assassinated Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark as they slept in their beds. That the State would so brazenly assassinate citizens is inextricably tied to their having been *black* citizens; that the State would murder domestic opposition as easily as it would murder opposition “in the colonies” is inextricably tied to ideology and racist practice. And today the US government detains several hundred Araby persons, just as it promises to subject them to the same State apparatus, the secret military tribunal, as it will subject foreign non-citizens.

The more race and racism change, the more White privilege stays the same.

Do you think the lessons of Empire as they’re passed down to its subjects — or, more accurately, the distortion of history — plays a role in how people view or do not view white privilege in society?

If I understand your question properly, I can only say that as historical creatures all the way down, history always matters to and in and for us. We write history and history writes us.

One of the points I have repeated in my works is that while oppressive social systems are often able to crush people utterly, as social systems they have to obey certain law-like social regularities. One of these is that the ideal way to justify or maintain a system of oppression is to make it socially invisible, to make it unquestioned and unquestionable. If you can convince your class equals, all of whom are White, that Africans are a race of natural slaves, then you can probably convince them to acquiesce to or join your efforts to enslave Africans. If you can convince the middle and lumpen class of Whites that Africans are natural slaves, they will hate and police and enforce and rape and accuse and lynch and profit. But if you can convince the African slaves themselves that they are a race of natural slaves, they will certainly be less likely to question their state than they otherwise would be. Convincing a person that she is a natural slave is difficult, but worth the effort if it succeeds. We are never, one might say, more entrapped as by invisible bonds.

So the teaching and the writing of history — which is always already a mechanism by which State and Empire seeks to justify itself (and right through here I only take myself to be repeating what I’ve understood Howard Zinn to mean) — are highly ideological enterprises, like all teaching and writing. Even still, racism and slavery and White privilege have left an ugly scar, a trace, on history — a trace that many are all too willing to erase.

But the historical trace is not all. Oppression writes itself, as if on a text, in the living and lived experience of oppressed peoples, onto their very bodies. (So: archaeologist’s study slave quarters and encampments, and the human remains found therein, in part by noting the extreme distortions and abuses that are to be read off the bones of slaves, who were worked *literally* to death; under decades of *extreme* labor, bones do not grow properly, they splinter and torque and fracture. And the bones of the children form improperly under the twin masters of malnourishment and early labor.) And so the trace of oppression must be erased from history and the living voice of the oppressed must be silenced today.

At this point it is customary to be dismissed as a left-wing lunatic, of course. But liberals and right-wingers are very clear too that the teaching and writing of history is a site of ideological struggle. Just last week Lynn Cheney, a wizened old right-wing culture warrior, and wife of the Vice President, said: “If there were one aspect of schooling from kindergarten through college to which I would give added emphasis today, it would be American history” in order to “know the ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built.”

What Cheney says has the *form* of truth but not its substance; more American history would help people understand the world better, it would make them better citizens. I fully support schools in the U.S. teaching more about African cultures and history; American imperialism in places like Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, and so on; the long course of White domestic terrorism; of the political (which is to say sexual and class) economy of lynching; the perpetuation of oppressively racist social structures since 1965, and so on.

How have you witnessed white privilege issues in progressive movements, as in examples of that, and how do you feel activists can best challenge those?

I’ve only been doing political activism explicitly for about three years, so I don’t have a very extensive history, and most of that work has been as a writer and publisher. I’m not really a street organizer, though that work is crucially important.

However, in a relatively short time, I’ve seen displays of White privilege repeatedly among progressives. I live in Dallas, and I was pretty heavily involved with the Green Party in Dallas and in Texas during Nader’s campaign. Starting with Nader, I was very disappointed that he didn’t run more explicitly, more visibly in solidarity with black folks; he took way too long to meet with Al Sharpton, for example.

I served on the national Green Party platform committee and as an alternate delegate to the national convention in Denver that nominated Nader. I was generally disappointed with how *White* the Green Party is nationally; I’d assumed that the Texas party was aberrant in that regard. I don’t mean so much demographically, though that’s important and the GP is overwhelmingly White in that sense. I was more surprised to find a general lack of a real, critical antiracist politics.

For example, I was dismayed to hear fellow members of the platform committee speak very ignorantly about the reparations plank in the platform. While it passed, narrowly, some of the comments from White members were stupid and ignorant. I remember getting the impression that reparations wasn’t something the GP was particularly committed. Yes, there is a reparations plank in the Green Party national platform; but I doubt in 1 in 50 Greens nationally can speak about the issue in a way that gets beyond caricature and cartoon.

Some of the most egregious displays, not merely of White privilege, but of explicit racism, however, occurred in local Green Party groups. I saw Greens choosing to ignore use of racist epithets from members. When I protested it became very clear that a radical antiracist politics simply was not possible among the Greens. I couldn’t be involved with a progressive group that isn’t antiracist, and I quit. (I do want to say that while I have heard some indication that this is a widespread problem, I don’t know that for a fact; it’s possible that Greens in other states or cities are radically antiracist. I’ve never seen any indication of that, however.)

On a broader scale, that the largest progressive media outlets show very little interest in antiracist essays, commentary, and material is very problematic. The view seems to be that antiracism is a kind of boutique, or specialty interest, item of progressive politics, and that while it might be a subject of the odd once-a-year issue, it’s not an ongoing or very deeply held concern. Antiracist, white privilege stuff is fine for Race Traitor journal, but it needs to stay in its ghetto.

I would sum my experience by saying that, despite the exceptions, many White progressives have merely a verbal commitment — they will more or less say the right words at the right time — to working with people of color seeking liberation. But that’s as far as it ever goes. In the end, I’ve heard far too often, “it’s all about class anyway”, which really just serves to dismiss explicitly racist forms of oppression. Unfortunately, too many White progressives are simply callous or woefully ignorant about these issues.

As for how activists can challenge white privilege in progressive circles, it depends on which activists you mean. I won’t presume to tell people of color how to do that work; they know better than I do. As for White activists, I can only pass on the excellent advice passed to me by Bijan Parsia, one of the members of the Monkeyfist Collective, who was echoing Malcolm X: White activists should work on White people. Speak up when you see privilege being deployed or defended or extended. Just refuse it clearly and forcefully. But be prepared to make hard decisions when you do so.

There’s also a more general point to be made: when a White person tries to challenge racism and White privilege, there’s always the possibility that she will get it wrong. As James Baldwin says in *The Fire Next Time*, White racism distorts White people. It certainly secures for us a world of privilege and power, but it also distorts us socially. One of the privileges of being White is to be totally ignorant of your privilege and to be totally deficient in detecting displays of that privilege and of the racism which secures it.

The flip side is equally true, I think. People of color tend to be good at detecting racism and privilege, as a matter of social skill. It is in their best interests to be good at detecting it. I think it’s clear, then, that we do not come into social settings with equivalent social skills: given any particular social setting in which someone is making a claim about racism or White privilege, there are good reasons to believe that White folks are wrong and people of color are right. Of course, no one is absolutely fallible or infallible, so initial judgments must always be revisable in light of evidence and experience.

I can put this point in a different way: history matters. None of us comes to any social context having gotten totally free of our history, our racial (or gender or class…) identity, and none of us has ever fully escaped the social conditions that shape and form us. Given the way the world is, I am very mistrustful of White analyses of racism and privilege (including my own), and I tend to give priority to the claims and analyses of people of color, since they are the ones in whose best interest it is to be *very good* at understanding these issues. Mismarking racism and privilege has a social cost. But allowing racism and privilege to go unchallenged has a social cost too. The costs of the latter far outweigh the costs of the former.

White activists need to be more willing, where and when appropriate, to advance the agenda and interests of people of color and their organizations. (Of course the judgments that lie behind ‘where and when appropriate’ are one thing we Whites need to interrogate about ourselves!) One of the constant, hopeless refrains I heard repeatedly from Greens is that “we” needed to find “more people of color” to “join our party” — a sick social parasitism. Too few White progressives are willing to put themselves and their resources at the service of solidarity with people of color, which often means, as far as is possible and appropriate, adopting and working on the agendas of people of color and their organizations. This is complicated stuff, of course, and my general advice isn’t very helpful in specific cases. But the parasitism is unacceptable.

This is not uncommon within radical movements as well. Typically, what I’ve seen is a passive form of that, where organizing continues and anarchists, for example, hope that, by virtue of their activity, people of color will join up with them rather than understanding there’s a lot of exploitative and patronizing history between predominantly white movements and people of color. Or, similar to what you’ve stated, finding a few Brown or Black faces to join rather than doing the base work needed to truly be egalitarian.

Instead of using the fact that a group is all-White, which isn’t necessarily and always inappropriate, groups almost always try to protect themselves with this kind of token parasitism.

If you are White, have or are trying to acquire a radical antiracist consciousness and agenda, and you find yourself in an all-White political group, progressive or radical or even liberal, you have two options: 1) quit and find a group that isn’t all-White or 2) go to work on them! I think White people who have reached some measure of antiracist consciousness have a moral and political obligation to raise the consciousness of the White people around them. Groups that are all-White offer a chance to do just that. Turn the group into the all-White caucus of an as of yet unformed new group, toward which you are working. In other words, don’t quit until you’ve *tried* to radicalize your fellow Whites with the truth. There will either come a point where quitting (or getting thrown out) is appropriate or you may have some success.

I’d rather see an all-White group get radicalized, break up or seek out other groups to ally themselves with, than to avoid dealing with these issues by becoming parasites on a few people of color.

Would it be fair, from your experience with the Greens, to call the type of behavior you saw typical of the organization, engrained enough in people that they didn’t notice it, or something else?

I have to make a few distinctions to answer this accurately. In the *parts* of the Association of State Green Parties (which has now been renamed and is certified by the FEC as a national political party and will get federal matching funds for 2004 federal election cycle) I am most familiar with, yes, I think it’s deeply ingrained. However, there are large parts of the ASGP that I’m not as familiar with, so I don’t know about them. I can say that I didn’t see any way to pursue an antiracist politics by remaining a part of the Green Party in the US.

What are potentially unconscious displays of privilege that people usually miss? And what do you think is the key to changing those behaviors?

The biggest display of White privilege is ignorance of privilege! Not too surprising when you think about what a system of social privilege is designed to accomplish. This ignorance extends in many directions too. I’m continually amazed at how ignorant White people are of the culture and struggle and history of, for example, African Americans. Not having to deal with ugly truths is *very* privileging. Having a White suburban world view must be very comforting, especially as bombs fall daily in Afghanistan.

As for changing behavior, there are two ways: all at once or gradually. The first is the great hope of revolution. But I find I can say very little that isn’t platitudinous about revolution in the short term. As for gradual change of behavior, that is something we can very modestly accomplish by getting in the face of White people we encounter, educating and challenging their utterly inadequate view of the world.

One frustration I’ve expressed and share with others may be the futility in challenging progressive people, particularly progressive white people, around white privilege mostly because it turns into a defensive exercise no matter how it’s phrased.

Can challenging white privilege, in your opinion, do any good for the many progressive white folks — most of whom seem to not be willing to hear it or accept any responsibility for change – who may have read all sorts of texts but are blind to how issues of race and power are played out in their work? And, if it’s not completely useless, how can that best be done?

I recognize that sense of futility. I’ve had it, though of course in a different way since I, as a White man, can choose to stop being an antiracist, while people of color can’t stop being people of color. I can easily try to “pass as a White Democrat”, so to speak.

But I do recognize the frustration. It seems of a piece with a general sense of frustration among progressives in the U.S. It’s simply a fact — and one of those big historical facts that are really hard to change — that the U.S. is a White Empire. Period. It’s the way the country works, irrespective of demographics. I don’t have any idea how to change that in the short term. There’s no easy or quick or obvious way around it.

I think we should expect, then, that our attempts to change political and social structures are going to mostly fail. That, to put it bluntly, sucks. And it’s very disheartening. But I keep asking myself: what is the alternative? To quit? We can’t do that.

So we have to keep struggling, but realistically. One thing I did after leaving the Greens was to concentrate on a smaller scale. I’ve tried to stay in some kind of dialogue with a White progressive, patiently educating and explaining to them what it means to be antiracist, how to try to do this kind of work, what solidarity across racial divisions can mean, what it feels like, and so on.

Having helped a few people overcome their racial blindness, I know that it can be done. It isn’t easy, but it’s possible. I remain hopeful that such interventions can take place, though you’re right that it often fails. One thing about moral obligation: it doesn’t disappear if what it enjoins us to do is *hard*, only if it’s *impossible*. Challenging White privilege isn’t impossible, it’s just hard. But so is everything worth achieving. (Plus there’s something to be said for the value of challenging White folks per se, even if you don’t see visible changes in the short term. Sometimes changes come when we have moved out of sight.)

One thing you and I have discussed in the past is some white folks’ concerns about working-class Black and Latino neighborhoods — working in solidarity with these communities, which often entails going there; having radical/anarchist events in coordination with those communities; organizing spaces involving the communities — and the sometimes bizarre reasoning we get about ‘distance,’ ‘hard-to-find locations’ or ‘image.’ How prevalent is that sort of attitude and how does one best confront it?

Yeah, this is the White progressive version of the same kind of supremacist ideology that fueled White flight, starting in the 70s. Only there the code words were “property values” and “home equity” and “safe schools” — code for the basic segregationist impulse that runs throughout the whole history of White American culture.

I can’t really speak to the prevalence of the attitude, given my own limited experience. But if my experience is at all generalizable, and if I’m right in seeing a connection to the White flight impulse, it may well be very prevalent. The segregationist impulse that fuels White flight is nearly universal in the U.S. I am neither a geographer nor urban planner, but it seems clear that this segregationist impulse is *the* most significant demographic factor in the U.S. in the post-WWII period. The literal *shape* of every major U.S. city and population center is a reflection of this segregationist impulse; White people will do almost anything to avoid living with people of color. (By the bye, Ani DiFranco has a great song on her new album about this.)

It should come as no surprise, then, that the same kind of impulse exists among progressives and radicals. It’s not likely as vehement or virulent or widespread, but it’s there.

As for confronting it, again, it depends on who is doing the confrontation and what the setting is. One thing that can be done is to subject these coded representations of White privilege and White supremacy to the same kind of critical analysis that leftist and anti-authoritarian people know how to do when it comes to foreign policy and the like. And to do such analysis publicly. That is, one way to oppose it is to raise the social costs of its use. Make it difficult, even embarassing for Whites to rely on code words. If they have to say what they mean clearly, it’s harder for them to do so, which is good, and it generally has less appeal to others.

The other difficult aspect of this problem is when well-meaning White progressives try to organize in a working class neighborhood, only to practice Old School Activism. Whether they are people of color or working class White, it’s still obnoxious, but obnoxious in a different way, to different degrees. The Old School Activist says something like, “Hi, I’m White and radical and I’m here to organize you now.” It’s a paternalistic attitude which is unhelpful and demeaning. It’s also deeply reactionary. On the other hand, in an effort to avoid committing that sin, I’ve seen White activists go to the other extreme, putting themselves into a nasty double bind: “In order to avoid being paternalistic, I’ll just go silent and wait for them to come to me.”

Again, I’m not sure there are any principles that I can cite which solve this problem, independent of situation and context. One practical thing that seems to help is to make sure the activist organization, which wants to be in solidarity with the poor, is itself well-integrated, that is, to make sure it’s not White company, i.e., an all-White organization. Again, if you find that you are an antiracist White in an all-White organization, *resist and refuse* any effort on the group’s part to start organizing in the neighborhoods of people of color. Your group isn’t ready for that and will just make a mess.

If your group, however, is mixed, both in its formal and informal leadership and group membership, and in the range of issues and concerns it addresses, chances are better that it will be able to work with the community more productively, without being paternalistic or paralyzed by the fear of being paternalistic (which are unequal harms, of course; better to do nothing than to cause harm).

I don’t want to be totally cautionary, however; there are many healthy radical groups for which there are many opportunities. In Texas, for example, there’s a fight to be joined in seeking amnesty for undocumented workers. And nationally there are chapters of N’COBRA and the Black Radical Congress with which to work on gaining reparations for slavery, U.S. apartheid, and so on.

How do you think gender and class intersect white privilege and in what ways?

In both complicated and simple ways. Most of the problems White progressives have with racism are present with regard to sexism too, though I tend — perhaps foolishly, though — to think that in general progressives do a bit better about the issue of sexism. But that’s as much a guess as a well-grounded belief. I was involved in the protest efforts at the RNC in Philly in 2000, which led me to write about how good it was to see so many women — though, to be clear, they were mostly, but not entirely, young White women — involved in planning and engaging in the protests in very significant ways. In other words, those protests would simply have not been possible without the leadership and struggle of many women. (That’s always been true, of course. But women in Philly were making decisions and plans and making things happen, and the various kinds of jobs that needed doing were not gender-segregated.)

But of course for every story I can tell like that, someone can tell a story about sexual predation among progressive movements. And there remains a large institutional and movement gap between the American Left and radical feminist groups in America. And parts of the Left still defend porn. So it’s a mixture of good and bad.

One thing that the Monkeyfist Collective is doing to respond to this situation is publishing “Maleprivilege.com”, which we intend to do for profeminist antisexism the same thing we’re trying to do with Whiteprivilege: namely, create a public resource for profeminist, antisexist activists. This time we’re doing it in conjunction with some long-time radical feminist activists, particularly Nikki Craft, one of the important founders, along with Andrea Dworkin, Kathernine MacKinnon and others, of the antipornography movement in the US.

We’re very excited about that and the site should be public in the next few weeks.

Are there books you recommend to people on these topics or groups whose analysis is helpful in understanding this issue?

Yes, there are many. One of the goals of Whiteprivilege.com is to point out and point to these kinds of things. Anyone with Web access can visit the site and find links to good essays, sites, and the like. We have a list of about 30 or so very good books as well. Since you asked about the intersection of gender and race, I want to mention two books I’ve learned a great deal from: Marilyn Frye’s *The Politics of Reality*, which is simply a top-notch radical feminist analysis of oppression, sexism, and racism. It’s jargon free and suitable for use in reading groups. If I had to recommend just one book, that one is on the short list. The other book I’ve been reading recently is J. Sakai’s *Settlers: Mythology of the Proletariat*, a challenging book which offers a radically different view of U.S. history than is conventional. I don’t agree with all of it, but if you can find a copy, it’s worth reading.

Originally appeared in Onward, 2001.

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By Eugene Koveos

(A note to the reader: though this is the least of its tragedies, it is worth noting that living in New York City during Sept. 11 and its aftermath has taken a toll on my writing. It would be dishonest and censoring to hide the disruption that has found its way to me so much less so than others. As such, the traditional essay-style analysis is disrupted by decidedly playful attempts to imagine in (semi-) practical, pragmatic ways that I hope are helpful in promoting critical dialogue as the struggle carries on. They are deliberately challenging, possible and hopeful.)

“Perhaps in these less than militant times we need to imagine the possibilities of resistance anew; for what we cannot imagine will never happen.”

- bell hooks, “A Call For Militant Resistance,” Yearning

The discussions at the Global People Summit in New York City, organized to coincide with local protests against the World Trade Organization’s meeting in Qatar, spoke to the massive reassessment in the anti-capitalist globalization movement since Sept. 11. The transformation of what was going to be a massive protest against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank into a march against racism and war, ignored by most of the business press, is representative of the shifts that movements in the US have undergone in the face of a changed landscape. The interrelated phenomenon of resurgent nationalism, heightened nativist/white supremacist attack, the proliferation of police and state powers, and, of course, state war have amounted to a general feeling that we are back on the defensive.

As Institute for Social Ecology faculty member Cindy Milstein said at the People’s Summit, the anti-capitalist globalization movement and interrelated anarchist movement find themselves in a space not only of silence, but possibility. She encouraged anti-authoritarians to take this time to understand what is happening.

In this time, many of our weaknesses and strengths have been made more visible. If our movement is to have any integrity, we will examine, imagine and reconfigure. There is no destiny that says that we cannot or will not emerge stronger and more effective than ever. Milstein noted the importance of proposing seemingly utopian notions during this time of horror and bloodshed; there is great importance in engaging in creative imagining of what is possible of our movements as well. Times of crises can birth radical change for movements as much as anything else. We have been disrupted; we must take this opportunity to re-form ourselves.

***

With all its problems, the very existence of a global movement against capitalist globalization has been an astounding and hopeful achievement. The tragedy and horror of what has taken place in and since September does not and cannot erase this, no matter what happens. Not to honor the development of this movement would be an arrogance unworthy of the movement’s participants across the world as well as an incomplete reassessment. However, we must honor the existence of this movement in the only way appropriate and respectful: by challenging dominating power within the movement, by organizing more effectively, by increasing accountability to each other, by generally making ourselves live up to our yearnings.

Those of us seeking to dismantle oppressive, dominating and hierarchical power within the anti-capitalist globalization and anarchist movement must take this opportunity of reassessment to continue to voice our critiques and do so even louder. Central to any reassessment must be power dynamics within the movement. We have a wealth of meaningful critique – from Elizabeth ‘Betita’ Martinez to Barbara Smith to Jaggi Singh and more – and a wealth of resources – from marginal voices of movements past to the Colours of Resistance group (www.tao.ca/~colours) to our comrades in various anti-racist, feminist, queer, anti-capitalist struggles and others. How can we push our critiques to the forefront in new ways? Perhaps it is time for heightened direct action and disruption in the interests of meaningful dialogue and change within our movement such as many feminists of color have engaged in throughout history? What could this look like? How could we organize it?

Imagine: Dissident anarchists in the U.S. organize a conference entitled Anarchist Movement: Overthrow Yourself. Making use of the vast array of communications between anarchists, the conference is organized so that nearly every anarchist in the U.S. attends – the sheer numbers alone are inspiring. The purpose of the conference is to challenge the anarchist movement to live up to its own ideals, to understand and work toward dismantling oppression, domination and hierarchy within the anarchist movement. The first portion is dedicated to attempting to grasp how power operates within the movement as part of a global context of white supremacy, patriarchal and binary gender norms, capitalism and so on. The conference is long, painful and joyful as a transformed anarchism emerges. As they left the conference, the overwhelming majority of anarchists say they feel, for the first time, genuine solidarity in the anarchist movement. And they all stress: this is only the beginning.

***

The constant calls to continue the globalization movement highlight the anxiety that our movement will disappear through the sort of state action that ate away at the anarchist movement during World War I. However, the fear that the US section of the anti-capitalist globalization movement could soon dissolve post-9/11 does not come from the state action alone. It comes from the potential of the voluntary disassociation of people involved. If people abandon the movement, we must ask ourselves: why? While perhaps we have found, in the umbrella of globalization, a key issue around which to organize formerly (seemingly) disparate democratic challenges to oppressive power, there has also been constant questioning of how we organize.

Some members of the movement find themselves isolated from, and alienating to, people around them not involved in the movement. Now more than ever the lack of connection to the communities in which some of us live is visible and painful. Perhaps we will never again be able to afford summit-hopping without mass local support, perhaps we will all be forced to localize our organizing as some have already done. Despair and isolation are not inevitable results of post-September events; they have everything to do with how we have and have not organized.

How can we re-imagine and reconfigure our organizing? Could the community organizing models of Rules For Radicals author Saul Alinksy be re-imagined to further globalization struggle and create democratic, empowering structures? How can anarchists organize around the needs and pressing issues of myriad communities? Could we extend Alinsky-style organizing outside of its traditional low-income context to suburbs? How about high schools? How could anarchist answers to such issues as universal health care (certainly the struggles of DC General Hospital offer us hopeful possibilities), the rollback on civil liberties, cuts in welfare, attacks on accessible higher education be further articulated and enacted now?

Whatever hegemonic hold the U.S. and North American movements have over the globalization movement, enacting some of the very power relationships it claims to oppose, these sectors are not the whole of the anti-capitalist globalization movement. Thanks to visible organizing outside of North America, and clever slogans like “It didn’t start in Seattle and it won’t end in (enter location of contemporary protest),” most of us recognize that.

But if the U.S./ North American sectors of the movement died, what would we leave in our collective will? It is possible that, for example, direct democracy may become the norm for future social movements. Anti-capitalism has come once again to popular oppositional politics. Much of the emerging next generation of radical academics have cut their teeth on globalization protests. And a specter is once again haunting authoritarianism on the Left and Right – the specter of anarchism.

What possibilities can be drawn from current and potential situations? Imagine: As the U.S./North American hegemony over the movement against capitalist globalization subsides in the post-911 world, “Global Solidarity Collectives” spring up across North America. These collectives focus upon education and action in solidarity with struggles around the world, keeping the globalization struggle in the U.S. global based upon the values of mutual aid. Certain individuals within the group focus on particular regions or nations, participating in movement list-serves elsewhere in the globe, maintaining contact with activists and keeping folks updated. The accumulated result is a fury of truly global movement. While U.S./North American globalization activists may not have had mass mobilizations comparable to Seattle or Quebec to support, say, auto workers occupying factories in Daewoo or Brazilian farmers blocking roads against IMF debt in the past, they now bring to life the old IWW slogan “An Injury to One is an Injury to All.” The movement becomes global, even in North America.

***

The occupation of Palestine has become an “issue” that US radicals, many of whom have avoided due to its “complexity,” can no longer be ignored. Herein lies possibility as well. We have never asked for “uncomplicated” questions; we have asked for a liberating justice for all. The insightful work of the late Eqbal Ahmad, of Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, among many, offers those of us critical of nationalism and supportive of anti-colonial struggle meaningful guidance. United States anarchists and the anti-capitalist globalization movement must find ways to talk about the complexities of nationalism, particularly anti-imperialist and anti-colonial nationalisms. We cannot engage in uncritical (imperial?) denunciations of nationalisms ignorant of context and meaning.

We must be able to articulate what it is about the way nationalism operates we oppose (the privileging of certain voices/lives over others, essentialism, dominating consolidations of power) while finding ways to extend effective solidarity to anti-imperialist movements across the globe. Dogmatic authoritarian Marxists are certainly ridiculous quoting Lenin or Mao as if they were self-evidently applicable for all situations (“Just add Lenin!”). But if we as anarchists cannot put forth critiques of nationalism beyond Emma Goldman’s – bound in the context of the turn of the century – we find ourselves mired in a related arrogance and utter irrelevance to which our locations as North Americans is central. Contemporary feminist and anti-racist texts such as Nira Yuval-Davis’s Gender and Nation (SAGE Publications, 1997), as well as classical anarchist texts, offer us multiple, interrelated grounds upon which to meaningfully argue against nationalism in the context of struggling for a world of global mutual aid, stateless socialism, and democracy. We must imagine new ways to engage with anti-colonial nationalisms, new ways of communicating why we oppose nationalism.

Imagine: Anarchists in the U.S. create alliances with Palestinian medical-aid and worker-aid funds, described as “almost anarcho-syndicalist” by Edward Said (Democracy NOW!, Dec. 29, 2000). Through the creation of these alliances anarchists learn much and a critical dialogue between comrades is established across national boundaries. Friendships fostered through this campaign prove especially productive when Palestinian revolutionaries tour the U.S. with U.S. anarchists educating and organizing in support of Palestinian struggles. Contemporary Jewish US anarchists, continuing the vast history of active Jewish, anarchist resistance across the globe, are at the forefront of this and provide a link between Jewish progressives and Palestinian freedom fighters. Groups such as NYC’s Jews Against the Occupation (www.angelcities.com/members/jato) grow and further links are made between fighting capitalist globalization, imperialism, racism and anti-Semitism. New and effective chapters in the histories of both Palestinian struggle and Jewish anarchism are born, hand in hand.

Further, as critiques of the relationship between the privileging of certain voices and nationalism present themselves, we must look at the ways even anti-nationalist movements such as the anarchist movement can reproduce and enact related phenomenon. For example, the last time I saw so much enthusiastic flag-waving was in the Black Bloc. Have we, too, not created a sort of “nation,” in which symbols such as flags represent an “imagined community” that often privileges white, middle-class, men in its name? Not that the nationalisms in the interests of the United States and the “nationalisms” in the interests of the U.S. anarchist movement are the same, but they are related and have similar effects in different yet contingent contexts. Similarly, the potentially democratizing meanings of their symbols may undo them. The potential meanings of the red, white and blue flag as democracy sometimes leads people to oppose nationalism (even the state and capitalism) when the contradictions of U.S. nationalisms are highlighted. Could the black of the red and black flag, proposing to represent the possibility of freedom from all illegitimate authority, inspire U.S. anarchists to fight against the illegitimate authority of privilege within the anarchist movement? How can we use the current focus on nationalism to transform our movement?

***

There are as many possibilities to be found, as many potential scenarios, as we could think of. In reassessing, finding possibilities and imagining, the movement against capitalist globalization and the anarchist movement in the U.S. must recapture the spirit of possibility we found after Seattle. When thinking about movement in the post 9/11 world, there is no reason that this hope should leave us. To repeat ad naseum, there is no inevitability that our movement will die, shrink, lessen in any way. The future has not yet been written. As the rich and powerful pledge to fight their war “on every front,” so we must dedicate ourselves, over and over, to fighting the war against oppression on every front. In order to be successful, movement against oppression, domination and hierarchy must be waged on every front – in our personal lives, in the streets, in our workplaces, in our communities, and certainly within our movements. The hope within our reassessment is an act of war. The possibilities we find are potential battle plans.

The power we hold transform the foundations of the lives we live toward a better world may not be infinite, but it is undeniably amazing. To concede our power and ignore the necessity of reassessment, the possibilities we find and what we imagine in the face of heightened white supremacist attack, state war and whatever other shifts are in store, is to hand our lives over. To pervert a quote from Richard Nixon, the state cannot destroy the possibilities of a new world; only we can do that. Even after Sept. 11.

Special thanks to Cindy Milstein, Professor Jyotsna Uppal, Nicole Solomon and Christina Hobbs. Cindy Milstein’s speech is available online at www.democracynow.org, Nov. 15, 2001.

Eugene Koveos is a student of Labor Studies in Queens CUNY. Originally appeared in Onward, 2001.

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By Robert Augman

In our long-term struggles for a free society, our present organizing must reflect our long-term vision. Not only must it reflect such vision, it must also be our vehicle for moving us closer to such vision. As anarchists, our goal of a self-governed society, where we can directly organize social life from the bottom-up according to ethical criteria, must be at the heart of our efforts. But in the current context where all forms of social struggle are co-opted or defeated by the state and capitalism, we face the difficult task of building a movement that takes us toward our long-term vision. Many people around the world are struggling to fight off exploitation and oppression. But the project of “building the new society in the shell of the old” must be a major part of our efforts if we are to truly transcend hierarchical society. This task is a challenging one for organizers across the globe.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) has been getting a lot of attention from the anarchist movement as of late. And rightly so, because OCAP, a 14 year-old direct action organization, has used a popular and confrontational approach in fighting extremities of capitalist exploitation. And they have been largely successful!

OCAP was born from anti-poverty activism in the late 1980’s and came into a formal organization in 1990. Due to the earlier movement’s success in forcing changes through popular mobilization and direct-confrontation, OCAP made that strategy its basis and chose not to engage in consultation and compromise with those in power. It commits itself to mobilizing poor and homeless people to fight back through militant, direct action. OCAP developed what they call “direct action casework.” They mobilize people to fill welfare offices, build tent cities, stop deportations, prevent evictions, compel employers to pay wages they owe, take over empty buildings to open them for housing, and stand up against police violence. OCAP mobilizes those effected by state and capitalist oppression in the struggle against it, and uses direct confrontation as their main tactic. It’s no wonder anarchists are organizing in OCAP, talking about OCAP, and learning from OCAP. As a successful grassroots, direct-action force for social change, they provide concrete ways for making change in our everyday lives. And while the anarchist movement has been quite successful in winning the battle of ideas on the Left in the last couple years, there remains the need to make our movement more tangibly meaningful on the local front. As OCAP has shown, by winning actual gains, our movement opens up to the needs of our communities and the possibility of building a broader movement emerges that can put its politics on the ground and take steps forward.

In his article Fighting to Win: Anarchists and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (The Northeastern Anarchist, Spring/Summer 2002 issue), OCAP member and Northeastern Federation of Anarcho-Communists supporter Jeff Shantz spells out the relevance of OCAP to the anarchist movement. Shantz says OCAP and anarchists share an anti-capitalist perspective as well as a direct action strategy. While anarchists and OCAP share these characteristics, it is the way in which such politics and strategies are constituted in our organizing that determines whether or not we are moving closer to our long-term vision.

One way that OCAP puts an anti-capitalist politics and a direct action, confrontational strategy into play is their struggles around housing issues. For example, they help secure housing for people who need it by taking direct action to reclaim unused buildings and turn them into livable places.

By pointing to the utter failure of state and capitalist institutions to provide housing for people who need it, these actions help illustrate the unethical nature of the state and capitalism. By mobilizing those effected to take direct action themselves, rather than begging the system for change, OCAP plays an important role in radicalizing and empowering those most effected by class oppression to utilize cooperative means in securing necessities of life. And by pushing beyond the particular action toward a broader vision of a world where people come together freely to act cooperatively to provide housing (and everything else) for everyone who needs it, OCAP plays an important role in popularizing the call for a free society. The state’s reaction of using police force to evict the squatters shows the state as a coldly unethical and uncaring institution that would rather provide jail cells than homes. By mobilizing wide sections of society into action, OCAP builds a broad movement that is essential to our social goals of a popular revolution from below.

As successful as OCAP has been in their housing takeovers and other actions, they have had to accept a lot of compromises. They’ve had to accept what the state and capitalist institutions offer them. As many of us have, OCAP has had to compromise their long-term vision of a free society in the day-to-day work they do of winning minor but necessary reforms. Instead of creating a new way forward, such victories are absorbed by the institutions we’re fighting against. And in the end the state and capitalism receive recognition for our hard work and legitimize their existence by showing their responsiveness and adaptability to the needs of the people. They remain strong and our movement’s power and utility are dissolved. It’s back to business as usual until we mobilize again.

In this way, direct action serves to change policy not power. It serves as an alternative style of organizing for those fed up with statist means. A direct action strategy and anti-capitalist politics ends up building the welfare state rather than a free society. Because we abhor this contradiction, we paint anti-capitalist rhetoric over our actions to spell out to the public what they were meant to convey. This use of direct action, as necessary as it may be in softening the blow of capitalist oppression, does not lead us toward our long-term vision of a free society. But direct action holds the principle of direct democracy. It illustrates this when people get directly involved in issues or policies that effect their lives – when they stop an eviction or deportation, stand up to police violence, or reclaim housing. But to push direct action beyond an illustrative tool that shows direct democracy, to become a vehicle for building direct democracy is how we must direct our energies if we want to actualize our long-term vision. This means transforming not only the way our actions are structured, but transforming the power structures that determine what society looks like. Reforms can certainly play a key role in reaching our goals, just as popular mobilizations from the grassroots can. The project of transforming power must be at the heart of our efforts. The anarchist idea must become realized in the anarchist struggle.

Instead of handing our victories over to the institutions we ultimately seek to eliminate, we have to put our effort into strategies that will allow us to weaken such institutions, and build alternatives to them that can become our own and can grow to ultimately challenge the very existence of the state and capitalism altogether, taking us into a new historical era that can lead us toward a free society. By pointing this out we are asking “what forms of organizing will allow us to fight injustice and exploitation while simultaneously build a free society?”

A free society rests not only on the elimination of the state and capitalism but also on the introduction of egalitarian forms of organizing society. If we oppose the current model of organization where social, political, and economic decisions are made at tiers above us according to capitalist principles, what do we propose in their place? What institutions can give form to a free society? What forms allow communities to be self-governing? Direct democracy allows all community members the freedom to participate in deciding the fate of our communities. By coming together in community assemblies we are able to make decisions in a face-to-face way and in a collective manner. We create a space whereby self-government can take form. This eliminates the need for professional politicians and bureaucratic apparatuses that serve the interests of capitalism and domination. In popular assemblies, all community concerns can be addressed in an open and democratic way. Policies on all aspects of social life – including housing issues – can be organized in a way congruent with our ethics of mutual aid and solidarity. These assemblies constitute a new political sphere where politics is a part of a rich community life.

But communities do not exist on their own. They play an interrelated role on all the communities around them. Therefore, direct democracy must go hand in hand with a confederal structure whereby mandated, recallable, and rotated delegates take community policies up to a confederal level to coordinate the decisions made at the community level. This vision of popular self-government enables all people to decide on the issues that effect their lives, rather than being subordinated to market forces, professional politicians, and other forms of hierarchical control.

This long-term goal of a self-governing society must be made from our present reality. If we really want to get there, we must ask ourselves: what are sufficient strategies for moving forward?

Because we do not believe that the free society is right around the corner, we have to use strategies that gain us victories that we can build on incrementally. It is not enough to build only in numbers and to reclaim the streets like we do in mass actions, hoping one day we’ll have the whole world on the streets and that institutions of domination will just disappear. A sufficient strategy must create new forms of self-government that can challenge institutional forms of hierarchy and domination.

New institutions that allow popular power to take form at the community level, where we can begin challenging the state and capitalist institutions themselves with a counterpower of our own, is a necessary component of taking us beyond our current situation. This popular power can exist in the abstract world, but must be institutionalized into tangible forms which do not disappear after an action. These popular institutions will be our vehicle to build on, ones we can give more and more power, resources, legitimacy, and radical direction to as we go. This allows us to put our long-term political vision into a tangible organizing form in the present. And it provides a way to move beyond our own organizations and begin organizing society as a whole. It opens up the door for a truly democratic movement to emerge to challenge state and capitalist institutions in concrete and visible ways.

As anarchists, we know that the housing crisis can not be solved without the elimination of the state and capitalism. Our organizing should reflect that, not simply by saying so but by doing so. To truly solve the housing crisis, our strategies must go beyond winning housing (concessions the state and capitalist institutions can afford) and seek to loosen the state and capitalism’s grip on housing by creating new forms of power from the bottom-up that are open, democratic, and egalitarian and that can be guided by ethical concerns. Such a form of popular power can begin to determine housing issues for ourselves. But it is essential that we work to build such popular institutions where communities can take an active role in the struggle.

While it is possible for relatively small organizations to take direct action by reclaiming buildings and turning them into housing units, such power remains hidden inside the particular organization and remains unaccountable to the broader community. By opening up assemblies where whole communities can take direct action, we open up a new arena of power, one that is inclusive to all the members of our communities. We begin to build an anarchist community struggle beyond the anarchist organizations. By functioning in such a way, and by making policy that addresses community issues and enriches community life, we begin to constitute a moral power in conflict with the dominant power of state and capitalism. This allows us a starting point where we can build a broader, inclusive movement that can be self-directed – addressing food, land use, health, ecology, and every other concern of our communities in an ethical and egalitarian way.

This movement will be ignored, ridiculed, and attacked by the hierarchical institutions because it constitutes a real moral and practical threat to the elitist and exclusive nature of the hierarchical institutions. This should be a tension that emerges into a dual power situation where the forms of popular self-government try to enlarge their influence and legitimacy over the right to govern. We must not shy away from the conflict with the hierarchical institutions, nor allow our popular institutions to be incorporated into hierarchical society. Our goals are at odds with hierarchy, and it must make such conflict clear and visible. It must hollow out hierarchical institutions of their power, legitimacy, and resources by bringing it over to our popular institutions. Such a dual power seeks to eliminate hierarchical power by replacing it with popular power. This can lay the groundwork for the long struggle of building a free society. Without such an arena where communities can construct a new way of organizing our lives together, we allow our victories to be taken from us and incorporated into state and capitalist frameworks, and we miss the chance to move past the current state of hierarchy and domination that rule our lives.

The long-term vision of a free society is a popularly self-governed one. To get there we must put our political vision into a strategy that moves us toward it. Because our vision includes liberatory forms of popular self-government, our strategies must try and build such institutions today.

These institutions can allow us a starting point for reclaiming power by making decisions about our communities ourselves. By doing this, we will pull power away from the hierarchical institutions of the state and capitalism, and create a new form of social organization. By empowering these institutions, we expand our role in determining the fate of our lives, our communities, and the world we live in. But unless we take on the project of building new forms of self-government, our victories will continue to be eaten up by the state and capitalism, and our efforts will serve only to make capitalism and the state more humane. If we want to work towards a world where humanity is able to self-direct itself toward ever-greater degrees of freedom and cooperation, we must take the right steps today in getting there.

Robert Augman is coeditor of Onward Anarchist Newspaper. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Chris Crass

Max Elbaum is a longtime activist and author of Revolution in the Air, crucial reading for all of us who want to build movement for collective liberation. Elbaum uses his experience, knowledge, research and passion for social change to give us a critical examination of the New Communist Movement of the 60s-80s. Looking at the political discussions, debates and organizing of the time, he gives us a detailed list of lessons drawing from the mistakes and the successes. As an anarchist who believes that neither anarchism nor Marxism hold the exclusive rights to the truth, I think we can move forward if we have the courage to look at our movements honestly, evaluate and strategize accordingly. Elbaum’s book is a useful tool to help us get there.

Chris: What were the motivations and goals for writing Revolution in the Air?

Max: In the mid-1990s I was at CrossRoads Magazine. I was spending a lot of time interacting with veterans of the different left currents out of the 1960s and 70s, taking a fresh look at the paths we had taken. I was also getting to know many activists from the generation that swung into motion beginning with protests against the Gulf War. In the course of those conversations I was struck by the absence of any detailed written history of one of the main 1960s-generated left trends, the thousands of people who turned to Third World-oriented versions of Marxism and, within that, the contingent that tried to build new revolutionary parties. The main goal of Revolution in the Air is to fill in that missing piece. It’s to provide a basic roadmap of this section of the movement, what the folks in it thought, what they did, how their work played out between 1968 and the 1989-92. Hopefully this will allow a much larger set of people, both veterans and new generation activists, to enter the conversation about what lessons can be drawn from this experience. In the book I offer my own interpretations of what those lessons are. But that’s really a secondary point of the volume. The main thing is to provide the raw material for a broader discussion, and hopefully stimulate other folks to write about parts of that experience I missed or present their alternative interpretations. And especially to help construct a political bridge between older and younger activists. During the 1960s, the relationships between older and younger radicals were extremely conflictive and often very unhealthy. It’s a major goal of mine to try to avoid duplicating that costly problem as a new generation takes center-stage today.

Chris: What is your political background and where do you fit into the history you document in the book?

Max: Like so many of us sixties kids, I was appalled by the gap between what I had been taught in school about this country history and supposedly democratic ideals vs. what was actually going on around me. Segregation, police dogs attacking peaceful civil rights protesters, military interventions in the Dominican Republic and Vietnam. I became alienated from what I saw as a general pattern of social hypocrisy and lies. By 1965-66 when was 18-19, I considered myself some kind of radical, in 1967 I went to my first meeting of Students for a Democratic Society, in spring 1968, shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, I decided that working for revolution would be my life’s central thread. From then through the mid-1970s, in Madison and Milwaukee Wisconsin and then San Francisco, I was involved in antiwar organizing, a hospital worker unionization campaign, radical educational work, all within the general milieu of activists who were inspired mainly by that era’s “two, three, many Vietnams.” In 1976 I was a founder of a one of the “second wave” new communist groups, the Line of March (soon referred to by our rivals as “March in Line”). Line of March disbanded in 1989 after a collective, two-year self-critique of vanguardisim and ultra-leftism. We turned over the group’s remaining resources to help start CrossRoads, a magazine of left dialogue. I was managing editor of CrossRoads from 1990 until 1995, when I resigned to start working on Revolution in the Air. I completed the final revisions in the manuscript the week before 9-11. Since then, I helped launch and serve as one of the editors of War Times, a nationwide, free bilingual antiwar paper.

Chris: As an anarchist coming of political age in the early 90s, the people who called themselves communist party builders were the Revolutionary Communist Party, Workers World Party and the Sparticist League. To me Leninist Vanguardists were themselves the best argument against that set of politics. Your book does an excellent job of describing why so many radical organizers looked to Marxist-Leninist politics in the late 60s. What lessons do you see from Leninism and Vanguardist politics for today’s generation of radicals?

Max: Thousands from my generation were drawn to the versions of Leninism then espoused by the Communist Parties in China, Cuba, Vietnam and other Third World countries because they foregrounded the struggles that were animating our passion for revolutionary change. They put opposition to racism and imperialist war at the center of analysis. They riveted attention on the intersection of economic exploitation and racial oppression, pointing us toward building a base in the most disadvantaged sections of the working class. They promised a break with Eurocentric models of social change and offered a framework for building a multiracial movement and breaking down segregation within the left. Leninism seemed to offer a mechanism to build grassroots-based, participatory organizations, with accountable leadership and able to resist state repression and infiltration. In the 60s many of us had become frustrated with chaotic organizations which ended up being led by media-selected or self-appointed individuals, mostly from privileged backgrounds, not accountable to the rank and file and not able to deal with sophisticated police infiltration. And Leninism inspired us to study history and political economy, to push ourselves to take broad responsibility for all dimensions of the class struggle, to set our sights on influencing millions and not be satisfied with self-marginalization in a small corner of the society. Of course, every left framework, not just Leninism, has its more flexible and creative vs. its more rigid and dogmatic versions. In the late 60s and early 70s, when we were immersed in a vibrant mass movement – and at brief moments in some groups for the next two decades – the more flexible variants of Leninism predominated. But over time, the general trajectory was for the formulaic and hierarchical side of the Leninist tradition to come to the fore. Groups that began with an audacious, creative spirit drifted toward what my book terms a “quest for orthodoxy” in which the focus was not on the real world around us but on scared texts. Early on most NCM groups asserted that a leadership role in popular movements had to be earned through hard work in day-to-day struggles; later they fell into thinking that they were automatically destined for vanguard leadership because they held a certain ideology. Organizations that once had a dynamic, give-and-take interaction with popular movements – and internally – hardened into sects that issued prescriptions instead of facilitating workers’ self-organization. The challenge as I see it is to disentangle the positive from the negative sides of that Third World Leninist experience. And to bring the positives to the table where folks from other traditions are all trying to create viable revolutionary frameworks and strategies for the 21st century.

Chris: Your book offers an evenhanded look at the NCM. You detail the successes without romanticing and critically examine the mistakes without self-flagellation. What were some of those successes and mistakes?

Max: The New Communist Movement was the most racially diverse radical tendency coming out of the 1960s. Its core activists succeeded for a decade or more in rooting themselves in industrial jobs, working class and people of color communities. NCM cadre were central to many of the sharpest anti-racist and labor struggles of the 1970s and 80s, spearheading the nationwide campaign against the Supreme Court’s initial attempts to roll back affirmative action (the Bakke case), leading battles of cannery workers, mineworkers, and auto workers; anchoring solidarity efforts with Chile, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines and more. NCM cadre learned a tremendous amount in these fights, and many remain key fighters and leaders in social movements today, especially in labor (both the “official” trade union movement and “unofficial” forms such as workers centers) and communities of color, the constituencies in which the NCM concentrated its efforts. But the movement failed in its goal of constructing a mass-based revolutionary advance guard. In part this was due to factors beyond the movement’s control – a key part of my book is the effort to sort through how much of what happened in the 1970s left was due to broad historical and economic factors over which the movement had no control and how much was due to its own strengths and weaknesses. But even given unfavorable historical conditions, the movement made a host of blunders that hurt rather than helped the mass movements and its own development. Nasty infighting and sectarian stances toward potential allies, instances where groups tried to take over – and ended up destroying – vital mass organizations. The development of top-down internal structures and a quest for monolithic unity – this produced a lot of bitterness among members who made big personal sacrifices for the revolutionary cause. And the NCM groups which dominated the movements early years had a terribly backward stance toward feminism and the then-exploding gay and lesbian movement. The movement was afflicted with a one-sided perspective on the process of revolutionary change in general; coming of age at a time when actual revolutionary assaults on the state seemed possible not too far down the road, we were riveted on the question of how to assemble enough of a base and strong enough organizations to accomplish that. We gave lip service but not real priority to a long haul perspective that emphasized the importance of initiative from below at every stage.

Chris: From your experience, how can people debate and struggle with each other about political vision, strategic planning and organizing in healthy ways that prioritize movement building?

Max: Virtually every radical trend says somewhere in its doctrine that change is made by “the masses in their millions,” that revolutionaries need to be accountable to popular constituencies, that it’s a long haul. But especially at times when progressive movements do not exist on a millions-strong scale, and given that activists necessarily spend a lot of their time interacting in coalitions or meetings with one another, there’s a strong pull toward forgetting that. And of course we take (and should take) our views and our organizations seriously. But again, there are pressures to forget the context within which we operate, and we can become prone to weighing our differences with others on the left far out of proportion to where they fit in the long-term struggle of millions. Plus, because many battles truly are urgent, we can tangibly feel the stakes in whether a decision about how to proceed goes one way or another. So it’s a constant challenge to retain our sense of proportion and respect for others we disagree with. Meeting that challenge isn’t helped by adopting frameworks – from whichever radical tradition – that imply there is only one way to do everything, only one true revolutionary pedigree, and that every difference of opinion represents the influence of the enemy class within our own ranks. I don’t think there will ever be a time when radical movements can be free of all sectarianism and internal battling – what to one person is sectarianism to another is a matter of principle. But I sense a widespread hunger among activists from all generations to do a lot better today than much of the left has done in the past.

Chris: Your book doesn’t spend much time looking at the groups out of the 1960s that adopted the model of being white anti-racist solidarity organizations working mostly with nationalists of color in the US and around the world. You also write that the NCM took a principled stand against the strategy of white people organizing white people against racism in exclusively white groups. As someone who organizes with white activists to challenge white supremacy, I’d like to hear your thinking about this.

Max: I don’t write much about those groups mainly because my book is focused on one particular trend, which in part was defined by its commitment to building multiracial, multinational communist organizations.

While I touch on other currents, including the ones you mention here, I don’t try – nor am I equipped – to make the same kind of extended analysis of them that I make of the NCM. On the substance of the important issue you raise, my experience has been mainly positive with the groups today whose focus is on challenging white supremacy among whites. I’m very encouraged to see forms like the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, the Heads Up Collective [white anti-war, anti-racist solidarity group] and others not just recognize that whites have a special responsibility to challenge racism among other whites, but actually try to put that into practice via educational work and participation in anti-racist and other campaigns. At least on some points, however, it seems to me there are differences between the way these groups approach this issue today and the perspective advocated by some of the main groups that seemingly had a similar approach in the 70s and early 80s. During those years, different NCM groups – multiracial with anywhere from 10-20 percent to 60-80 percent of members and leaders of color – along with other multiracial socialist groups were in the thick of the most crucial anti-racist battles. Meanwhile white advocates of the “whites-organize-whites” model generally fell into one of two camps. First, there were groups who put in their programs that they “supported independent organizations of people of color” and then went about their business organizing whites giving little or no practical attention to actual anti-racist struggles. These folks were invariably on the sidelines of the fight against racism no matter how many times support for self-determination was written into their points of unity. Second, there were white activists who argued that the only legitimate revolutionary model was for groups to organize on racially exclusive lines with the all-white groups actively supporting the all people of color groups. The white folks who went this route made many contributions to concrete campaigns. But their model simultaneously invisibilized all the revolutionary minded folks of color who were members or leaders of multiracial revolutionary organizations. These leaders of color were considered “less revolutionary” but, since the white folks who advocated this model were reluctant to say that up front, they simply acted as if these activists of color did not exist. Thus, though whites pursuing this model were often the first to say they supported Third World self-determination, in practice they did more picking and choosing of which activists of color “really” (to them) represented communities of color than even many liberals. And on another level, again, that was a period when revolutionary groups were seriously trying to sink roots in exploited constituencies – organizing bus drivers, nurse’s aides, building a base in a particular poor neighborhood and so on. And when you started work in those constituencies with a left politics that included a powerful anti-racist component, you immediately started making connections with folks of color and the most democratic-minded and anti-racist whites. What did it mean if your message to the white folks you met was “happy to meet you, come join our group, we want you to become a leader” but your message to bus drivers or nurse’s aides or poor folks of color was “we support you but we don’t want you to join our group, go find some other group made up only of folks of your racial background to join”? That kind of perspective led to many unsavory situations and did not attract the majority of the folks of any color or nationality who were most committed to building a durable movement against white supremacy. Most of the NCM, in contrast, argued that there was a place for multiracial revolutionary organizations as well as autonomous/independent revolutionary organizations of folks of color or of particular oppressed racial or nationality groups, that white revolutionaries had special responsibilities to challenge racism among whites, and that groups made up exclusively of whites, while they would inevitably arise in a heavily segregated society, should take up the fight against racism and if they did, it would push them and should push them toward breaking down their all-white character. I could be wrong, but most of the groups I see today that work with white activists to challenge white supremacy, don’t promote the “whites-organize-whites” “folks of color organize folks of color” as an exclusive model. Rather, you seem to have very commendable antennae as to what kinds of problems and shortcomings tend to crop up in all-white groups, and you’ve found some creative ways to address them.

Chris: Finally, you use the term anarchist in several places throughout the book. When you use that term, it reads as though a lot of assumptions have already been made about it politically: anarchism as naive and clueless. While an evenhanded analysis of anarchism would certainly show significant historical mistakes, political and strategic weaknesses, and disastrous failures, there is more to it then that. While not trying to win you over, I ask with the deeper question of how do we work together to build anti-racist, multiracial, feminist, queer and trans liberationist, anti-capitalist movements for collective liberation?

Max: We’re all products of our particular historical time and place. As one of your earlier questions noted, what Leninism means to much of your generation is largely shaped by your experience with some of the groups that today self-identify as Leninist. Likewise, my initial views about anarchism were shaped by the particular circles and groups who were the most prominent advocates of anarchism in the late 1960s and 70s. By and large, and recognizing some exceptions, these were not nearly as immersed in grassroots-based mass struggles as that period’s Marxists; they tended to advocate and carry out small-group actions divorced from popular struggles; they were virtually all white and rooted in the more privileged layers of the socioeconomic structure. They were often indifferent or unfriendly to the revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America that were such an inspiration to my generation. So, while I had read some books and developed a certain appreciation for some of anarchism’s insights and its valiant role in other situations, I didn’t spend a great deal of time delving into what this tradition had to offer. In the last few years, as I’ve had more and more contact with today’s anarchist movement, I’m getting a much better appreciation for the pluses that anarchism can bring to the table. I find much of what comes from today’s anarchist movement to be a breath of fresh air. To the extent I see manifestations of the kind of problems I described just above, I differ with the sections of the anarchist movement who seem to represent those perspectives. But overall my ideas about anarchism are changing as I have more contact with actual anarchists on the ground. Unfortunately for me and for my book, most of that contact face-to-face has come since I turned in those final revisions. I would have handled those passages differently, and my book would have been improved, Chris, if for instance I had the kind of relationship with you two years ago that I am fortunate to have now. Well, politics among other things is a lifelong learning process, and for me anyway better late than never. Not that I feel it isn’t important to accelerate the learning process we are all going through. To the contrary, the dangers facing this small planet and all the people in it are if anything greater than ever, and it behooves all of us to strain every nerve to try to build that movement for collective liberation as rapidly and effectively as possible. The story I try to tell in my book is about what tens of thousands of young activists from my generation thought and did based on that same motivation. We made a difference on a number of issues, but misassessing the historical moment, adopting overly rigid models, and descending into sectarian intolerance, we accomplished far less than we could have. All of us are in a new century now, every part of the left comes out of the old one with both achievements and shortcomings on our balance sheets. And even beyond all that, new conditions demand something that is more than just the sum of even the best of our previous insights. I believe anarchists and socialists, Greens and Leninists, revolutionary nationalists and Marxists, feminists, queer liberationists, folks whose activism stems from a spiritual or religious place and many others, all have something to contribute to a revitalized fight for what Robin Kelley in his wonderful new book has called our Freedom Dreams. And the stakes are too great for all of us not to open our ears and do our best to listen to others as well as toss our own perspectives into the pot.

Chris Crass has been a social justice organizer for the past 13 years. He works with the Anti-Racism for Global Justice project of the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop. Max Elbaum can be contacted at info@revolutionintheair.com. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Cindy Milstein

That which is avant-garde has always transgressed the boundaries of what is considered decent. Yet after the “shock of the new” has worn off, what was once widely perceived as subversive is often viewed by many as socially acceptable if not desirable. Anarchism, ever bohemian due to its utopian edge–even if anarchists see their principles as eminently applicable to the vast majority of peoples’ lives–continually throws itself against the next brick wall as soon as the previous one comes tumbling down. At least to date, then, the praxis of anarchism has voluntarily loitered at the border regions of society, remaining outrageous, but seeing with every new frontier a sense of possibility.

For anarchists and other radicals, this can at times form the backdrop for a productive production. From the 1950s onward, new types of social movements challenged lines etched by everything from colonialism and racism to patriarchy and heterosexism. The uncertainty created by such border crossings has frequently been generative not just of civil unrest and the casting off of old masters but more expansive articulations of liberation. For example, by various movements pressing against the limits of what it means to love or be sexual, “sexuality” as a category was enlarged to include gays and lesbians, then stretched to embrace bisexuals and later transsexuals, and recently further pried open by the contestation of “gender” as a binary concept. Even if heterosexism is far from eradicated, many peoples’ lived experience has improved; even if still confining, more social space has been created for greater self-determination around intimate issues such as partnerings, sensuality, and kinship.

Then too, creative borrowings across borders is a defining feature of the contemporary anti-capitalist movement. The phrase “Our resistance is as transnational as capital” has itself become transnational–a copyright-free good to be used by all. Indeed, a clever idea at one demonstration or an innovative organizing strategy whisks around the world, to be playfully altered in an array of diverse locales and then reinvented elsewhere. There are now a rainbow of blocs at protests; home-made shields at direct actions are crafted out of materials ranging from inner tubes to giant shellacked photos of global youth; and encuentros have beget consultas have beget grassroots social forums, if an exact lineage can even be traced. In this mutualistic economy of the imagination, we gladly share our ideas for globalizing freedom without need of trade agreements, without asking for bills of sales, national identification cards, or passports. And so it is that we cobble together a movement of movements without borders, all the while asserting that “another world is under construction,” as activists did at a recent gathering before the Europe without Capital mobilization in Barcelona.

But whether figurative or literal, borders are places of displacement, marking out danger and potentiality in equal measure. For many, they signify trauma; a better life often isn’t waiting on the other side. And more than ever, border crossings both geographic and cultural, material and emotional, are becoming compulsory points of no return for millions due to forces beyond their control.

The legacy of the anti-authoritarian Left could theoretically offer a framework to boldly approach and contest the legitimacy of the new, confusing divides being erected on a plethora of fronts. It could help ease the passage for those forced into migration and indicate a sense of home ahead. Anarchists, however, seem more comfortable causing disruptions at the old, familiar checkpoints–those guarding, say, culture or forms of resistance. Not that such disruptions aren’t necessary, especially dynamic ones; the best of radical artists retool when their creations become toothless. Still, the taboos and truisms of what is understood as “anarchism” unfortunately stand sentinel at the gates of our own promise to be much more relevant to many more people, in many more arenas. This would entail the discomfort of trudging through those barriers we’ve so far largely ignored.

Such dis-ease with one’s place in the world isn’t necessarily a matter of choice. The tragedy being writ large on the global stage has broken down the boundaries between those who are displaced, the displacers, and those with a miniscule space of their own. All perform overlapping, frequently destructive if not deadly roles, and it is less and less clear who to applaud and who to boo in the improvisation titled “Globalization.” For like the migration of transnational resistance, the much larger migration of peoples and commodities (and people as commodities) across all sorts of uncharted territories has in certain ways unhoused us all.

The current battle over national borders–the effort to maintain an increasingly elusive and illusory national identity–is one case in point. Here, the displaced and the displacers, and those effected by both, all wrestle to define who has a right to a home in the alleged homeland. Whether fought with rocks or bullets, suicide bombers or ballot boxes, this is less a turf fight between or within states than it is about who belongs to “my people.” It is a struggle over who counts as “us” versus “them” based on various and variously contrived criteria of authenticity such as race, religion, or historical injustices. It is a war without winners that alleges, like George W., that there are those who do good (us) and those who do evil (them), and no coexistence between such opposites is possible.

Yet the very act of naming these dualisms–never neatly contained to begin with–indicates that they are at risk of dissolving altogether. The displacements, hybridities, and interdependencies that globalization is making apparent, if not exacerbating, are eroding what meager ground was left for such bipolar thinking. That could offer hope for transnational identities, a qualitative humanism based equally on solidarity and differentiation. But in a world that affords little security for much of humanity, holding fast to one’s “people,” however fraught with contradictions, at least supplies the veneer of home. Such is the foundation, for example, of a nouveau fascism that transgresses the contours of Nazism. Suddenly, it’s “rad to be trad” in the Netherlands, where culturally liberatory sexuality bonds with politically racist ideology in a refashioned far Right.

The parameters of today’s barbarism must be recognized in order to be fought, and that entails addressing its own barrier-breaking logic; how, for one, it feeds on many peoples’ genuine concern over the loss of community and individuality–such that in the Netherlands at least, the xenophobe can be queer. Countering such an ugly avant-garde before its notions become normative requires that we too straddle previously noncontiguous spaces. For instance, in a United States permeated by racism, perhaps anarchism’s antistatism should openly grapple with the necessity of certain forms of national identity as meaningful though not sufficient to people of color in their struggle for freedom (or as Ashanti Alston argues in the spring 2002 Onward, “Beyond nationalism, but not without it”). Attempting such thorny trespasses might just determine whether we continue to play in the refuse of capitalist society, always at its fringes, or can instead offer a semblance of refuge to those made vulnerable at its many points of migrations.

Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By wispy cockles

The most crucial questions facing the North American anarchist movement concern its relevance to people who do not identify as anarchists. Will our movement become even more insular and self-absorbed or will it become more diverse and broadly based in contemporary society? Will anarchism be a dynamic political philosophy able to adapt to different people’s conditions, needs and desires, or will it build more ivory towers occupied by fewer and increasingly detached ideologues? Answers to these questions with actions and words will determine whether anarchists will be a revolutionary force for social change or just a marginal collection of individuals that don’t threaten to make the system obsolete. Unfortunately, most people in this society don’t have the time or the inspired spirit to struggle for some abstract utopian ideal. Their time is mainly spent trading their labor to survive and to aquire a few of the material luxuries that mark success in North American society. I believe most people will be willing to fight for tangible changes in the present. Moreover, most citizens will be inspired by their ability to win struggles against capital and the state collectively. Small victories can help revolutionary struggle to go the distance.

As a movement, anarchists are almost exclusively associated with actions that, while daring and brave, are mainly intended for propaganda purposes. We are skilled at making bold statements against the system. We’re quite adept at making a scene and manipulating it to be a soapbox for our opinions, but we’re not so good at initiating, organizing and partaking in struggles that win tangible concessions for our communities.

Black bloc tactics at mass demos are an example of our tendency to make statements rather than victories. Corporate property is destroyed, press statements are issued and the capitalists suffer relatively minor damage. I am supportive of black bloc-style militancy, but for most working people, students and other citizens who might have a problem with the current system, nothing changes when these tactics are used at mass demos. Many people might be sympathetic, but they likely remain uninspired to join in the struggle for a classless, directly democratic society if they don’t see how it’s going to benefit them.

As an anarchist movement, we need to get our act together and apply our current dedication and militancy toward changing people’s lives in the present. Black bloc tactics can be used to stop people from being evicted or deported. Mass mobilizations could be crucial to beat back anti-poor and racist policies in the cities in which they take place. Anarchism can become synonymous with an organizing culture that wins victories against state and capital rather than, as is often the case, being seen as a self-indulgent and self-absorbed counterculture.

Anarchism as a political philosophy is based on a rigorous set of principles and ethics. While many politicos of different stripes may claim that the ‘ends justify the means’ and pursue their goals in the most opportune of ways, anarchists, by and large, strive to practice ‘a prefigurative politic’ where means and ends are seen as simultaneous. In other words, ‘You reap what you sow.’ While this principle is beautiful in its commonsense appeal, it provides a distinct set of challenges for anarchists who wish to create substantive social change in the present rather than just propagandizing for the revolution or the utopia. What is a small collective of anarchists to do when they want to get homeless shelter policies changed so people don’t freeze to death in the winter cold? How are the anarchists concerned with the AIDS crisis in South Africa to go about making essential medications accessible without compromising their anti-reformist principles? We must figure out how to effect change in the present toward a revolutionary ends.

A STRATEGY OF UNREFORMABLE REFORM

Many radical groups fight for reforms the system can’t provide without collapsing. The revolutionary potential of this tendency needs to be encouraged and explored. When we or other movements call for food to be supplied to everyone at no cost or an end to poverty or housing for everyone, we are calling for unreformable reforms. This strategy has a potential to not only provide people with some of the better things in life, but also to illustrate the problems, limits and inadequacies of capitalism and the state in their totality. An unreformable reform such as calling for universal housing is both something the system can’t provide and something people think they should have.

When others join in the fight against specific injustices of capitalism, these struggles can act as a sort of analytical flashlight. When people are, for instance, actively fighting to end poverty, they might begin to see for themselves the limits in capitalism’s ability to deal with that problem specifically, and then draw lessons from that experience about capitlaism’s inability to provide for people’s needs and desires in general. While being explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian, we must engage in struggles that concretely illustrate the inadequacies, limits and horrors of the capitalist market place and make life more bearable for people under the current system. That’s what solidarity is all about.

We should maintain our explicit anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian positions while attacking specific aspects of capitalism in a sustained and dedicated manner. We should take an area of focus that affects people’s lives on a massive scale. Say we start a campaign or an organization that says everyone should have a home, like DC’s Homes Not Jails. This idea runs so contrary to the logic of the real estate market that capitalism cannot accommodate such a reform. To do so would annihilate landlords, real estate brokers and many other major players in the system. But to many people it makes sense: ‘yeah, everybody should have a home. Nobody should be sleeping on the streets.’ In the process of struggling for universal housing, a movement could simultaneously illustrate the limitations of capitalism to provide for people’s needs and as well stop people from being evicted, get cheap or no cost housing for many folks.

Engaging in these specific struggles for unreformable reform is consistent with our anti-vangaurdist politics. Instead of propagandizing against the system because we have all the answers and the masses need to be told what is wrong with the system, we create situations of struggle that allow people in this society to see for themselves what is wrong with the system and draw their own lessons and analysis from their experience.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty fights for an unreformable reform and wins many gains in the process. Poverty is a key aspect to capitalism; it cannot be done away with while the system is still in place, as it is capital’s lifeblood. OCAP is a broad-based, explicitly anti-capitalist coalition of workers, students, First Nations people, homeless folks and the poor in general. On Oct. 16, 2001, OCAP successfully organized an action the shut down much of Toronto’s financial district. This action was the culmination of a campaign against the conservative anti-poor policies of Ontario’s Premier Mike Harris. The day of this action, Harris resigned due to “personal matters.” Many believe it was OCAP and an OCAP related coalition called the Ontario Common Front that drove him out of office.

Clamor writer Kari Lyderson said winning tangible victories has been OCAP’s goal since it started in 1990. “For example: a typical community organization will fight an eviction, a case of discrimination or harassment on the job, an illegal firing or pending deportation, by filing paperwork, appealing to local politicians, letting the media and the public know about the situation, and possibly holding protests or information pickets. OCAP also uses these tactics, but if they are not successful, they are prepared to take it to another level. This is where ‘direct action casework’ comes in, where OCAP members physically prevent authorities from evicting or deporting a person or turning off their gas, or where they take concrete action that is too creative, destructive, or persuasive to be ignored.”

OCAP uses some militant tactics to fight against the continued oppression of many people in Canadian society. Over the years, they have confronted officers who have beat up homeless people, taken over empty hospitals to get more homeless shelters, and opened squats in buildings owned by slumlords. OCAP organizer John Clarke has claimed that these actions have a 98 to 99 percent success rate, because the state and corporate bureaucracies just don’t know how to handle the militant response to their anti-poor policies. OCAP’s example of successfully fusing community organizing with militant direct action tactics is an example anarchists should look toward. If we could build a movement of explicitly anarchist or explicitly anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist organizations that stopped people from getting evicted, from getting deported, that won people better wages and shorter working hours, we would see a general change in the public’s attitude toward us and toward political life in general. If people saw in their everyday lives that it was possible to win substantive change through organizing and militant direct action, they might well throw themselves into fighting the status quo and making radical social change. Victories, no matter how small, are the foundation of revolutionary struggle. Defeat and martyrdom keep us looking behind rather than moving forward toward our goals.

USING REFORM AS A REVOLUTIONARY TACTIC

While fighting for unreformable reforms could be one, but not the only, framework to win concessions and advance a revolutionary movement, there’s a second aspect to it I call tactical reform. A tactical reform is simply using reform as a tactic but not as a strategy of reformism. As a tactic, we can use reform to fight for concessions that directly provide for our needs, such as food, housing, access to abortion and the like. Reformist methods fight for things that, in theory, will make peoples lives better indirectly by ‘fine tuning’ the system. Reformism is not simply a method of fighting to make people’s lives more bearable by prying concessions from those in power. It creates an investment in the system by attempting to alter policies so the system will work better for the people in the long run. One example of reformism is the fight for campaign finance reform, which in theory will cleanse the political system of corporate interest. The theory behind campaign finance reform puts its faith in the idea that if corruption through campaign contributions is eliminated that the benefits will somehow trickle down to the people. It puts its faith that, given the right amount of reform, the system can work for the people. It is indirect. Tactical reform, on the other hand, is direct and should be employed alongside a stance that the system cannot work, that people must take back from the state and capital what is rightfully theirs. We can keep our strategy non-reformist by only fighting for reforms that provide directly for people’s needs. In a sense, tactical reform is people taking power back for themselves in pieces. When people win housing for themselves or better wages or other necessities, they are taking power away from the powerful and claiming it as their own. When people win the freedom to self-determine what goes on in their neighborhood by direct democracy, or to have an active and direct say in the policies of their place of work, they are winning victories that fulfill their social desire to self-mange themselves. Such victories can provide the sustenance and fuel that might one-day lead people to take the whole pie, not just the crumbs. People are genuinely inspired to fight when they can win concessions that make their lives better and more fulfilling in the present. OCAP’s motto says it all: ‘Fight To Win.’

Revolutions are not entirely spontaneous, and as much as we might like, we won’t awaken one day and find capitalist social, economic and political relationships vanquished. We must build strategic paths out of the woods we are currently lost within. We begin doing so by hacking away at the thickets and obstructions in our path, In other words by dealing with immediate and specific social problems and winning collective victories. To tell the people we struggle alongside that revolution is right over the horizon and to not assist in forming a practical strategy for getting there is completely irresponsible. People won’t walk toward a utopia when they see no realistic way to get there. Why should they believe it exists at all?

wispy cockles lives in Richmond, VA where he organizes with the Better Days collective. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Howard J. Ehrlich

An anti-war movement is not by itself a movement toward peace. Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a process, not an event. It is a mode of organizing and a way of life. War is an event; it ends with a truce, a surrender or a defeat. Protesting the war or such activities as the breach of disarmament treaties, the storage of nuclear and chemical weaponry, the use of depleted uranium artillery, sowing land mines, or other forms of militarism amounts to treating symptoms. It will help in reducing or preventing much suffering and physical damage, but it does not necessarily move us forward. In fact, the side effects of the “war against terrorism” have already weakened and will continue to weaken the libertarian strands of the fabric of American society.

An antiwar movement is an activist and oppositional movement. Its motive force is reformist: to stop the war. While its tactics may include civil disobedience and direct action, antiwar coalitions are seldom directed at fundamental social changes. Large coalitions are often good at creating spectacles, rallies and demonstrations, and other transient forms of protest. They tend to be poor at recruiting since they often have a small, hierarchical base. People come and go to its activities, sometimes staying on but more often becoming isolated or burning out. Generally, they are “staffed” by career activists who are paid by some larger organization to be politically involved, by members of small revolutionary groups which may be coalition members, or by people whose socioeconomic status allows them the time to do movement work. They may be students, declassed and marginal individuals, or people supported by others. Their common threads are, of course, their revulsion to the war, their humanitarianism, and their discretionary time.

Antiwar coalitions have no theory of society or social change. Their “membership” is typically mired in a liberal capitalism and sometimes a vaguely democratic socialism. To the extent that they do articulate a theory of change it is a fuzzy meliorism, that is, a belief that the world is getting better with the help of good people acting together. They see electoral politics as the major mechanism for this betterment.

The “mission statements” of coalitions are righteous, calling for an end to the war, aid to its victims, opposing political repression and ethnoviolence, and endorsing a vaguely articulated demand for social justice. Typically their demands are not only beyond their own power, but are often beyond the intellectual grasp or imagination of those in power.

Coalitions tend to endorse nonviolence in their tactics of protest, though not necessarily as a philosophical tenet of their mission statement. Given the philosophical ambiguity of “violence” and “nonviolence,” serious political disagreements about the meaning of “direct action” and “civil disobedience,” and their relation to nonviolence, movement organizers often stretch for the lowest denominator in order to hold a coalition together, creating an obvious, basic tension in the organizing of protests.

The overarching problem of the peace movement – if not American politics – is the failure to move beyond what is to what could be. It is most of all a failure of imagination. But it is also indicative of an underlying fear of change.

This is a popular war, and most people, including many who have been generally appalled by war, see this one as unavoidable if not “just.” Its acceptance is built upon the more sordid dimensions of American national character: authoritarianism, individualism, anti-intellectualism, patriarchy and ethnocentrism. It has led to a closed-mindedness and level of political ignorance that makes organizing more difficult and weakens any commitment to democracy.

On the way to peace, we have four critical tasks. We need to increase the density of symbols of opposition. Through demonstrations and vigils, handouts and graffiti, through independent media centers and infoshops, fundraisers and socials, through wearing buttons and talking it up, by civil disobedience and direct action – through every means in redundance – we need to display to people everywhere that there is a dedicated opposition to the present policies of war. The challenge in doing so is to not repeat the same actions again and again, and to not lose sight of our basic goal of political education.

On the way to peace we need to delegitimize authority. The glue holding society together is part predictability – the belief that people and the world in its everyday operation are understandable and more or less repetitive. Another part is the belief system that rationalizes the state as being just. The sense that justice will prevail, that this is a just society, is critical to the suppression of revolutionary ideas.

Bureaucracy is the organizational form for masking injustice; the mass media of education and entertainment are the primary forms for the idealization of the society as just; and the spectacle of caring leaders and the deserving rich puts a human face on breeches of the predictable and the just. Institutional religion soothes the victims of injustice and deflects their needs through ritual and the pursuit of an afterlife. These are our targets, that is, the authorities and representatives of these institutions of pacification. Their mission, in this war on terrorism, is to convince the public that the war is just, that the sacrifice of civil liberties is part of that pursuit of justice, and that we can trust them to do what is in our best interest. Our mission is to deflate their authority by convincing the public that they are not honest or competent, and that their motivations are directed to the accumulation of wealth for the wealthy and power for the powerful.

On the way to peace, we need to oppose capitalism. As a political economic system, capitalism requires the concentration of power to protect itself and its markets. It requires, too, the constant expansion of its markets and its profits. Capitalism protects itself through the co-optation of alternatives and through violence.

The battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda is in no small part a struggle for control of the oil and gas reserves around the Caspian Sea basin. This battle for resources also entails a battle for the maintenance and expansion of U.S. bases in Central Asia and the Middle East to protect the flow of oil and to maintain military dominance. It is also a war, like all wars, that enriches the military and defense contractors and those who profit from the weapons trade. An anticapitalist program for the peace movement would include: ending the arms trade, halting the new Star Wars program, agreeing to the elimination of nuclear weapons and chemical-biological weapons, the end to land mine production, and the conversion of war industries to production which met human needs.

Finally, the anticapitalist peace movement must have a clear economic program. This would include the building of alternative institutions such as food co-ops, infoshops, local exchange and trading systems, co-housing and communal housing arrangements. A peace movement must also be a movement for worker-community ownership and control. This is a central direction for a noncapitalist economics.

On the way to peace, we need to reinvent anarchy. The anarchist moment exists within antiwar coalitions particularly with regard to decision-making and group process. The components of that process include diffusing the concentration of power within the group; maximizing individual participation; decision-making by consensus or other non-hierarchical process; deflating elitism – sexism, racism, ageism and all other forms of authoritarianism; and a program of education.

Anarchists share much in common with Marxists and Liberals with regard to a critique of this war and the institutions of society. One serious point of departure, which is central to a peace movement and absent from the antiwar movements, is the utopianism in anarchist thought. The antiwar movement calls for an end to the barbarism and for the beginning of a new society.

Building a movement requires, particularly, that there be attainable goals. The peace movement needs to have a sketch of a peaceable society. Without it, it is just an oppositional movement with no necessary life beyond its points of opposition. A sketch is a sketch, but it does give us a sense of direction. We need to ask ourselves what a good society would look like. What would it take to move from here to there?

There is, of course, a next step – a leap. And here we separate many, certainly the utopians from the “realists.” It is a step from sketch to performance. Is what we are doing now leading us to a good society? Do we have the courage and the imagination to act as if we were engaged in that new society? If we do, we will discover that there is no way to peace. As radical activist A.J. Muste put it, “peace is the way.”

Howard J. Ehrlich is the editor of Social Anarchism. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By David Gilbert

Dear Dan,

Well, you did it once again: another lovely ONWARD. I can’t even keep my superlatives flowing at the pace you do issue after issue. Can’t give you the detailed response the issue merits, but here are some off-the-cuff thoughts.

Great that you did a piece on John Brown (“Refusing To Surrender: John Brown and White Anti-Racist Struggle” in ONWARD vol. 2 iss. 4). Definitely the most relevant historical e.g. for white radicals. I really should re-read your piece, because it was complex, but here are quick thoughts. I applaud that you started with and emphasized Kansas. All the standard history makes Harper’s Ferry the story. But Kansas is even a better e.g. because he actually led/ developed a civil war among whites around racism, although we might not be able to endorse every action. Also, it was strategically key. If Kansas had become a slave state, the slavocracy would have controlled the federal government. Then, at best, the North would have seceded from the South or, alternatively, accommodated to slavery. So, right on for your emphasis on Kansas.

The other thing I loved is that you were willing to be critical. Brown is our best e.g. (and more advanced than you or I) but nonetheless not mechanically applicable in every way to today and had some problems even for then. I remember thinking that Butch Lee’s Jailbreak Out of History was kind of ahistorical in how it criticized Brown, but don’t really remember the specifics. Also W.E.B. DuBois had a much more favorable (and probably overly generous) interpretation of JB’s strategy at Harper’s Ferry than what you present. But whatever uncertainty I have over some of the particulars, it’s more important that you were willing to criticize, and I completely agree with your main criticism that he should have done more to follow Black leadership. Also, while I don’t know the history of this well enough, undoubtedly major shortcomings re: sexism.

Your intro was a bit too self-conscious re: focusing on a leading e.g. for whites. The Malcolm X quote explains the validity and relevance of doing so very eloquently. On the other hand, you make the mistake, near the beginning of referring to the “largely pacifist” abolition movement, thus letting white abolitionists define the whole. Many Black freemen took up arms to prevent re-capture of fugitive slaves, and of course Harriet Tubman was armed. You could be less self-conscious about a focus on/for whites, but more aware that whites didn’t define abolition movement as a whole.

Overall, great job in focus on the best historical e.g. and still making useful criticisms to help draw relevant lessons. The rest of the issue was also excellent. I like your having so much on both Argentina and Palestine. All in all, ONWARD has made me more open to re-looking at anarchism. My 1960s experience with it among whites in the U.S. was as a rationalization for the ultra-individualism so deep in U.S. culture – a trend Krysti Guest criticizes so clearly in her article (“Feminism and Anarchism: Toward a Politics of Engagement” in ONWARD vol. 2 iss. 4).

A simultaneously great strength and weakness of this issue are the articles on nationalism. Your serious consideration was a big step forward from the anarchist tendency to evaluate issues solely along the axis of relationship to the state – but the two theoretical pieces were still marred by not getting much beyond that one dimension. There was some recognition but not nearly enough comprehension of the central and qualitative difference between oppressor and oppressed nations. That doesn’t make all nationalism in the latter progressive, but it makes a tremendous difference in the context and terms. In this regard, it’s great that you had Ashanti’s piece, which is powerful in giving a sense of the issue from within the oppressed Black nation. The theoretical pieces need to catch up. Hearn’s piece, in particular, failed to grasp the history and realities of imperialism. He kind of equates secession with self-determination and if anything, is even more favorable to the former because it is smaller scale. Fomenting secessionist break-ups has been perhaps imperialism’s most potent tactic against national liberation and has led to heartbreaking bloodshed and to total disaster and devastation in Third World countries and keeping the people there in a state of permanent agony. So facilely embracing secession is, in effect, a cavalier dismissal of imperialism’s horrid oppression of the Third World.

The difference between national liberation and secession is fairly complicated – so I won’t try to define that here, but will indicate two missing key components for a serious treatment of the issues. 1. The purely subjective definitions of nation are a problem. Admittedly, an “objective” definition isn’t that clear-cut. But given that imperialism was all about the plunder and consequent economic crippling of the Third World, the definition has to consider what coherent territory and organizational forms are needed to develop the productive forces on the terms of and for the benefit of the people. On that basis, one would also want to look at what it takes to achieve what Amilcar Cabral referred to as a people’s reclaiming of the ability to make their own history. These considerations are not all that goes into a more objective and historical definition, but are key aspects missing here. 2. On that basis, sorting these things out requires thorough historical study of an area – pre-imperialism, how it was shaped by imperialism, the consciousness and organization formed in the resistance to imperialism. So, while the two theoretical articles were a welcome advance in considering the issue, I still found them to be another painful e.g. of white radicals putting forth grand political schematics without much sense of the nature of imperialism and the liberation struggles against it. Including Ashanti’s piece was definitely a redeeming factor here.

Right now, Israel’s invasion of Palestinian cities and towns has been especially gruesome. In the U.S. media and political discourse, it is always the Palestinians who are the aggressors and terrorists. Two colossal facts, at the base of the whole problem, are routinely elided over: 1. It is Israel who occupies Palestine; 2. Israelis have killed many times more Palestinian civilians than vice versa. It’s very hard to see any positive ways out at this point.

I heard the April 20 demos in D.C. were strong and that support for Palestine was a central demand, so that is encouraging. All we can do is keep love for people in our hearts and keep moving forward. I’m OK. This place can really drive you crazy – but hopefully I’m not all the way there (yet, smile). I keep plugging away on my book project and continue to have a lot of good visits.

Solidarity,

David Gilbert
83A6158
PO Box 149
Attica, NY 14011-0149

Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Matt Hearn

Speaking about anarchism and nationalist self-determination is a perilous prospect. In one sense, nationalism has always been anathema to anarchists. The idea of nationalism is in direct contradiction to traditionally reified anarchist ideas of voluntary association and autonomous communities. Yet compelling self-determination movements across the world continue to challenge anarchist notions of affiliation, loyalty and governance. It is critical for contemporary anarchists to confront these challenge thrusts.

Anarchists have to recognize national self-determination movements as fundamental to creating a socially ecological society and reversing the centralized colonial domination that smears every part of the globe. Self-determination has to make up one layer of a directly democratic vision for social reconstruction. In practice and theory, the contradictions of national self-determination movements and their implications for radical thought have been largely and notably ignored. Anarchists have always been opposed to nationalism, or at least the manufactured patriotic defense of arbitrarily defined states, and the seemingly inherent nationalist urges toward domination, imperialism and colonialism. There are, however, many struggles for self-determination, usually by one distinct nation against the colonization of an imperialist state that should elicit anarchist support. It is possible that self-determination, even resting at root on national affiliation, may well provide the legitimate and useful basis for radically decentralized communities.

This is difficult and emotional territory. Secessionist movements have frequently dissolved into bloodbaths of nationalism. The dystopias in Bosnia, Serbia, Burundi, Rwanda, El Salvador, Punjab and elsewhere, each unique, represent some of the worst possible formulations of nationalism. These scenarios are the absolute negation of self-determination by colonialist aggression. Demands for self-determination are not reprehensible; it is centralized authorities’ responses that are the catalyst for warfare.

It is reasonable to support self-determination across the board, to say that all struggles for self-governance are “good,” and also to abhor and denounce every spot where those movements descend into inhumanity and imperialism.

Anarchist opposition to state domination must support self-determination for native indigenous nations everywhere, and for all other independence struggles. These sites represent profound opposition to contemporary statism and significantly increase the potential for radically decentralist ideals to take hold. As other have argued, many autonomists and nationalists want to destroy state power, not capture it for themselves.

Typifying so much of contemporary radical discourse, the terminology around self-determination has become so plasticized that many of the central ideas have become confused and confusing. It is absolutely critical though, to distinguish between patriotism and nationalism, states and nations. American writer Michael Zwerin defined a nation as “an organic social and economic unit with common territory, history and language. A collection of cousins. States have been superimposed over nations. State boundaries often divide nations: Basque, Lapp and Mohawk nations for example. States are often comprised of more than one nation: Alsace, Corsica, Brittany and Occitania in France.”

This is an axiomatic difference. Self-determination and the love of place is a fundamentally different stance than patriotism and statism. Nations are comprehensible historically and culturally, drawn together by collectively created meanings. States are superimposed, manufactured entities, with coarse elite economic determinism as their rationale.

Supporting self-determination in no way suggests that secessionist movements should be exempted from rigorous anarchist and egalitarian analysis. It is especially incumbent upon anti-authoritarians to name, very specifically, the adversaries of an ecological society and to articulate a liberatory praxis, while at the same time recognizing that the undermining of statism by historically and culturally unique peoples represents important radical opportunities.

Whether it be in Quebec, Puerto Rico, Northern Ireland, Tibet, Chiapas, Hawaii or for the Nisga’a, Innu, Mohawks, Misquito, Catalonians or Basques, the possibility of a directly democratic, ecological society emerging from within independence movements is much greater than if these homelands are colonized and disfigured by imperialist domination. It is important to hold a position that self-determination is critical everywhere, but that the resulting entities themselves cannot recede into parochial aggression or colonialism, and must be subject to the same scrutiny as any other governance. Thus, I support Quebec independence from Canadian colonization fully, and I equally support the right of indigenous peoples within that province to an equal standard of self-determination as well.

Secessionist movements represent one, not the only, assault on monopoly capitalism and statism. Self-determination is not enough in and of itself. It is not enough to support independence movements carte blanche. Each scenario needs to be analyzed specifically, using egalitarian, directly democratic and decentralist criteria. However, an ecological society is much more likely to emerge from within small, comprehensible and historically coherent nations such as the Basque, than in sprawling, manufactured states like Canada.

There is the possibility that any given secessionist movement will lead to the simple re-centralization of power, that independence in practice means a cheap reconfiguration of centralist control, only in new hands. Further, secession might create a whole new series of bureaucracies, each with their own little fiefdoms and manipulative mechanisms, moving control further again from local interests.

The promise of self-determination, though, is that with the dissolution of colonialist control, and the chances of reducing bureaucracy and creating a direct democracy are significantly greater.

I am advocating for a land and place-based community of communities. An ecological world can only be achieved when people organize themselves into small-scale, locally self-reliant communities. In many cases, that goal seems, at least at face value, congruent with secessionist claims. In the places where independence means re-centralization and the colonialist mentality on a smaller scale, anarchists will oppose them with the same clarity as they critique current states.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

The attempt to bring together the philosophical ideals of anarchism with the political imperatives of self-determination is awkward, despite a certain amount of evidence suggesting the two are well suited for one another.

A developed anarchism has to assume self-determination for historically organic nations. Anarchism necessarily includes self-determination, but the reverse is not true. While it is reasonable to assert that smaller political entities based on organic nationhood might offer genuine opportunities for the establishment of a direct democracy, it is by no means a given. Nationalist movements come in every flavor, and each self-determination movement has to be subjected to similar rigorous examination as the contemporary nation-state.

Whether it is a military guerrilla revolution, a constitution and referendum-based secession, or protracted treaty negotiations, there are innumerable ways to begin breaking down artificially defined and defended nation-states. States like Mexico and Canada have colonized so many real nations, and become self-anointed trustees over so many organic affiliations of people, that each situation demands a unique and specific response. This is not blanket support for nationalism, but a counterposing of historically and culturally organic nations and a call for self-determination against artificially imposed states.

As secessionist movements foment in literally every corner of the globe, it is a critical distinction to make, especially for anarchists. These movements can go hand-in-hand with and ultimately support a complementary decentralization, and clearly, the creation of local community control mimics at another level the radically democratic potential of self-determination and the recovery of popular power.

Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Michael Staudenmaier

The world context that has developed since the events of Sept. 11 has heightened the urgency of anarchist attempts to understand nationalism. If we are to retain the momentum of an anarchist movement that was advancing in important ways, we must understand the new situation we operate within

There are two main criticisms of current anarchist views on nationalism, and both are important in this new world of anthrax letters and Afghan refugees. The first, encountered mainly in conversation with older comrades, is that our worldview is stuck in the past, in a time when Marxist-influenced national liberation movements were ascendant, or at least held some lingering viability in places like El Salvador or Peru. That time is over, with most such movements reabsorbed by capital (as in El Salvador) or physically eliminated (as in Peru). The important question, then, is: what does nationalism mean in a world where revolutionary movements are more likely to look like Al-Qaeda or the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan?

The second criticism laments a lack of precision in defining terms. While we offer occasional catch-phrases or brief descriptions, we rarely give a precise definition of any of the major terms used: nation, state, class, nationalism, national identity, race and so forth. This vagueness has several negative effects: it makes our line of argument difficult to discern and analyze; it allows critics to be similarly unclear in their responses; and it hinders the overall aim of advancing the quality of discussion of nationalism, leaving the participants mired in much the same fog as before.

With these two criticisms in mind, and with the post-Sept. 11 context as a framework, below are a series of definitions, which may clarify some of the positions I and other anarchists have previously staked out. These definitions represent an attempt to describe a framework for future anarchist discussion, not to defend a particular “line,” either pro- or anti-nationalist, within that framework.

NATION

In the days after Sept. 11, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was widely quoted in the media calling for “ending nations” that support terrorism. Despite Wolfowitz’s leading position among the hawks in the Bush administration, it is almost certain that, as he maintained, he was misquoted. Wolfowitz claimed almost immediately that he had called for “ending nations’ support for terrorism,” the apostrophe indicating an end to the support, not the nations. The United States has a long history of genocide, possibly extended this past winter as several million Afghans risked starvation because of U.S. intervention, but no one in the U.S. government in the last half-century has publicly articulated genocide as strategy. The administration’s stated objective is the destruction of the Taliban, and no one would call the Taliban a nation.

The Taliban is an organization, and it administered a state, but these factors make it too narrow a construct to be considered a nation. As Kofi Annan put it in 1998, “in a country of 20 million people, 50,000 armed men are holding the whole population hostage” (Rashid, p. 78). But do these 20 million Afghans constitute a nation? How about the 8 million Pashtuns who make up the largest single language group?

Afghanistan, like many other contemporary nation-states, was cobbled together by European imperial powers with little regard for demographics or geography. In all such cases, the origin of nationhood is historical, not mystical, god-given or “natural.” Panama, for instance, exists partly because the U.S. manufactured its secession from Colombia to advance the canal’s construction. Similarly, Afghanistan originated in nineteenth century battles between Russia and Great Britain, and through the arbitrary departmental divisions of British India. It contains large numbers of five very different populations (Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras and Turkmen), four of which exist in similar or larger numbers in other nation-states.

But to conclude from this that Afghanistan is not a nation would be premature, since the top-down action of imperial powers is only part of the story. It provides the conditions for a common lived experience that can facilitate bottom-up activity as well, as in Panama, where a century of popular struggle against U.S. control of the canal forged a nation incontestably distinct from Colombia. To deny the importance of such self-actualization is inconsistent with any anarchist worldview that recognizes and valorizes class- or community-based self-activity.

The various Afghan populations are in turn made up of various smaller communities – villages, clans, religious and occupational groupings, and so on – that overlap and diverge in various ways. To the extent that they share a perception of a common history and lived experience such communities become bound together. This connection cannot be quantified or given percentages, and the process happens on a continuum rather than in a black and white framework.

In Afghanistan, 300 years of disputes over territory and resources ought not be seen as a passive population acted upon from without (by the British, Russians, Persians, Pakistanis, etc.). Our understanding of nations must change in a way that reflects the complex reality of history. Centuries of anti-colonial struggles had undeniably produced an Afghan nation by the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979, moving the community of communities well down the continuum toward common history and lived experience, linguistic and tribal barriers notwithstanding. The development of the Loya Jirga (a conference of tribal elders from across Afghanistan) is the best evidence of this.

But nations are not static. The civil war that erupted after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 shattered the perception of commonality that held the Afghan nation together. The rise of the Taliban has furthered the idea of a Pashtun nation, while the former Soviet Republics have given inspiration to the national aspirations of Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen. As Ahmed Rashid points out, even these identities may be fracturing back into the communities that make them up. “Rather than a national identity or kinship-tribal-based identities, territorial regional identities have become paramount. Afghans no longer call themselves just Afghans or even Pashtuns and Tajiks, but Kandaharis, Panjshiris, Heratis, Kabulis or Jowzjanis. Fragmentation is both vertical and horizontal and cuts across ethnicity to encompass a single valley or town. The Pashtun tribal structure has been destroyed by the loss of common tribal property and grazing grounds, and by war and flight. The non-Pashtun identify their survival with individual warrior leaders and the valley of their birth” (Rashid, p. 208). This process of national disintegration was made easier by the diversity of languages and religious traditions, but in principle it is possible anywhere.

From this context we can define a nation as a community of communities, manifested in perceptions of shared identity and experience, possibly including culture, language, ancestry, land and various intangibles, with said perceptions being the result of the interaction of popular self-activity and external historical forces.

Thus, there was once (and may someday develop again) an Afghan nation, but currently the territory of Afghanistan is home to a number of smaller, unstable nations, most of which exist in geographic space inside and outside the official borders.

NATIONALISM

Many commentators have noted the unusual content of the social and political program advanced by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Its immediate demands are mostly reformist: removal of U.S. troops from the Arabian peninsula, ending sanctions against Iraq, an independent Palestinian state (this last demand has multiple versions, the more extreme of which call for the complete expulsion of all Jews from Palestine). It does not overtly call for domestic revolution in any Muslim country, although it is open to this possibility as one acceptable way to obtain the aforementioned objectives.

This stands in stark contrast with most traditional models of terrorist action, which, as some anarchists have noted, revolved around revolutionary organizations and their attempts to create newly independent nation-states in the third world. This model told us nothing about state terrorism and lacked an analysis of pro-state paramilitary terrorism, organized patriarchal violence, white supremacist terrorism and so on.

But whatever value it once had dissipated with the national liberation movements it described. In their place we find Al-Qaeda, a multicultural, internationalist veterans’ organization, with members from dozens of countries. Bin Laden utilizes a number of motivating factors to mobilize his followers, from anti-imperialism to Islamic fundamentalism, but national identity is not among them. In this context, it makes no sense to describe Al-Qaeda as a nationalist organization, regardless of bin Laden’s personal interest in the liberation of his homeland (the Arabian peninsula) from the clutches of the U.S. military.

By contrast, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan articulates a nationalist program, though they avoid describing it as such. Beginning with its name, RAWA represents an effort to restore the Afghan nation; they are not Pashtun women or Uzbek women, nor are they women of Central Asia. More important, however, is the content of its politics. Since its founding in 1977, the organization has developed a forward looking program demanding social gains for women, children and other disenfranchized sectors of the population, all in the framework of a democratic, secular society. It has consistently opposed foreign imperial interests, local warlordism, reactionary elements of Afghan tradition and emergent Islamic fundamentalism. RAWA prioritizes direct action, attempting to implement in practice the social gains it struggles for – schools and health clinics for women and children being the most prominent examples.

This is a program most anarchists would cautiously support, and there is no obvious nationalist component. This nationalism is seen more in the motivating factors used by RAWA to mobilize broad sectors of the Afghan population. As the name indicates, RAWA seeks to mobilize across language and tribal barriers, and this appears to be reflected in the composition of the membership. The oppositional aspects of its program (against U.S. bombing, the Northern Alliance, etc.) are tied to an appeal for the independence and cohesion of Afghanistan. The organization’s statement condemning the U.S. air strikes of October 2001 makes this explicit: “We believe that once there is no foreign interference, especially of a fundamentalist type, all ethnic groups of all religions, with no regard to the devilish designs of the fundamentalists, will prove their solidarity for achieving the most sacred national interests for the sake of a proud and free Afghanistan.” (RAWA website)

RAWA opposes the Northern Alliance partly because of the latter’s reactionary social program, and partly because the exclusively Tajik and Uzbek make-up of the leadership threatens the future existence of Afghanistan as such. Its tactical support for the return of King Mohammed Zahir Shah (within the strictures of a democratic constitution) indicates RAWA’s desire to reconstruct Afghanistan on a national model, with Zahir seen as the only figure capable of forging any immediate unity among the many populations within its borders. The nationalist character of RAWA’s program becomes more clear when discussing its strategy.

The contrast between Al-Qaeda and RAWA, both of which have been thrust into the spotlight since Sept. 11 after years in obscurity, leads us to a more precise definition of nationalism: nationalism describes any ideology based on utilizing national identity in the service of one or more of several political struggles, including social revolution, state-building, improvement of social services, genocide and so on. Further, we can see that what distinguishes various types of nationalism is this choice of struggle, rather than the historical status (oppressed or otherwise) of the national identity thus utilized.

In this context, it is clear that anarchists oppose Al-Qaeda because of its reactionary program and terrorist methods, not because it is nationalist; if anything, the rejection of nation-states as an organizational paradigm is perhaps the only thing it has in common with anarchists. At the same time, many anarchists have lent tentative support to RAWA, partly because of its reliance on tactics of direct action, partly because we support the basic outlines of the particular struggle it connects to a nationalist method. The limits of this support have less to do with simple anti-nationalism than with RAWA’s reformist approach to statism, exemplified in their backing of a constitutional monarchy.

NATIONAL IDENTITY

By contrasting responses to Sept. 11 in the United States and Puerto Rico we can begin to define national identity. The reaction in the U.S. is well known: patriotism and “national unity” skyrocketed, with the flag as the essential visual aid. Anti-immigrant sentiment led to racist attacks, the arrest without charges of hundreds of foreign nationals and the tightening of border controls. It has become painfully clear that the “nation” people are rallying to is white, multicultural protestations and interfaith prayer services notwithstanding. This is nationalism in the service of white supremacy and the continued military might of the world’s only superpower. As my brother Peter argued in an assessment of Sept. 11 written for some European comrades, people behaved “as if national identity could offer solace in the face of tragedy.”

Less widely appreciated is the response to Sept. 11 in Puerto Rico. New York has almost as many Puerto Ricans as San Juan, and the preliminary figures, according to the island’s leading daily paper, El Nuevo Dia, were that 800 or more had been killed in the World Trade Center. Given the response in the United States, two different outcomes might have seemed likely after such a massive tragedy: an upsurge in Puerto Rican nationalism, or perhaps more likely, a spike in pro-Statehood (anti-independentista, pro-U.S.) sentiment. Strangely, neither has occurred.

The first can be dispensed with easily enough: no one in Puerto Rico or the United States thought the attack on the World Trade Center was aimed at Puerto Ricans. Thus, the aggrieved patriotism witnessed in the U.S. was unlikely to be paralleled in Puerto Rico.

Statehooders, however, could have been expected to gain. Because the Statehood position is that Puerto Ricans are really “Americans” (that is, U.S. nationals) first and foremost, the attack on the World Trade Center could be expected to cement that combination identity. Just as Puerto Ricans died “for their country” (the U.S.) in every war of the twentieth century, so they have now died in what is increasingly regarded as the first war of the twenty-first. Why didn’t this position resonate more with Puerto Ricans facing the same tragedy that produced such war-mongering jingoism in the U.S.?

The struggle around the island of Vieques provides a partial explanation. For several years, popular efforts have grown to evict the U.S. Navy from the small outlying island whose land and population have been decimated by decades of bombing practice. By the November 2000 elections, widespread opposition to the bombing of Vieques helped oust the Statehood governor, and the support for direct action against the Navy – especially land occupations on the bombing range – had become overwhelming across the main island. The movement encompassed every sector of society in a classic popular front. One of the results was a broad-based anti-militarism unlike anything seen in the U.S. in recent memory.

This skepticism of the U.S. military seems to have muted any fervor for an armed response to Sept. 11. Simultaneously, the popular front has diminished the ability of the Statehooders (already weakened by their two-faced approach to Vieques, pledging support to the popular front while negotiating extensions of the bombing with the Navy) to mobilize whatever pro-U.S. sentiment might otherwise have emerged in the aftermath. It seems Puerto Ricans have rejected the all-too-common logic of national pride as a response to tragedy.

The key here is the self-identification of the people of Puerto Rico, who have never been comfortable with their absorption into the U.S., a minority of hardcore Statehooders notwithstanding. Nationalism of whatever sort can only mobilize people who actively share the subjectivity of national identity. This mobilization, on behalf of white supremacist nationalism, was simple in the United States, but futile in Puerto Rico.

Using this example we can formulate a definition of national identity as the subjective experience of the perception of shared identity that makes up the nation, manifested as attachment to and love of one’s nation, and the prioritization of that community of communities over all others. This subjective definition should take precedence over any merely descriptive definition, in which one’s national identity can be identified by outsiders in some objective fashion.

FROM DEFINITION TO ACTION

Hopefully these definitions will clarify the framework within which anarchist discussions of nationalism take place. At the very least, they may advance a basic anarchist understanding of the new world emerging since Sept. 11, 2001. Other definitions are surely needed for the conversation to get much further: state, race, class and others all require more precision. The trick is to transform clarity into practice, to utilize our developing analysis in the day to day work of anarchist organizing. As a smart young man (who eventually became an indigent refugee) once argued, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”

Bibliography

A. Rashid, Taliban, Yale University Press, 2001.

M. Staudenmiaer, “What Good Are Nations?” Arsenal #3, Spring 2001

J. Bekken, “Nationalism or Freedom?” Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #39, Summer 2001.

RAWA website, rawa.fancymarketing.net/us-strikes.htm

P. Staudenmaier, “The Hijacking of History” Direkte Demokrati no. 13, Nov. 2001 (Norway)

Michael Staudenmaier is a long time anarchist living in Chicago. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Ben Grosscup and Doyle

Revolutionary means that we are in this to win. But certain ways of thinking within anarchism are preventing us from building a coherent and strategic revolutionary movement and thereby winning a social revolution.

Part of the problem is thinking in false dichotomies. This way of thinking mistakenly sees two things that are really mutually necessary, as mutually exclusive. When we look around us, we find a world built on false dichotomies.

Many of us were turned on to radical politics by taking up an issue of special importance to us. It may have taken a revolution in our own thinking to see the connections between our own struggle and that of others. One of the most enduring images from the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization is that of “Teamsters and Turtles.” The years of organizing and exchange between once disparate movements culminated on that beautiful November morning with many people transcending single issue thinking and moving toward a broader anti-corporate, and even anti-capitalist analysis. Many people are overcoming false dichotomies like ‘labor vs. environment.’ We win the most profound victories when we do this. It’s not just deforestation, and it’s not just sweatshops; its all that and more. People everywhere are looking at politics more holistically and joining together on the streets. Applying holistic thinking to our anarchist organizing is essential to overcoming false dichotomies, which are holding us back from creating a broad-based revolutionary movement.

PRACTICE VS. THEORY

Theory gets a bad rap these days. No wonder! Most places that “do theory” are insulated academic environments and corporate think tanks. Revolutionary theory is often associated with Marxist ideologues who promote party politics and state socialism. Even anarchist theory is often discussed in ways that are inaccessible, and full of jargon. This can seem intimidating and disconnected from the daily struggles of most people. In a society so deeply beholden to directives of capital, there is little space to talk critically about important theoretical topics such as political philosophy, revolutionary history, and theory of education. A combination of these factors leads many people to focus primarily on practice (what they do on a daily basis) while ignoring theory (reasoning what is the best way to go about these daily doings.)

Regrettably, the development of the black bloc in North America has reflected this trend. Instead of being a name for a set of tactics to resist police brutality at street demonstrations, “black bloc” has become an entity unto itself. It has taken on an entire subculture, persona, and a host of culturally specific no-no’s (like engaging in popular culture or eating a hamburger). By definition there are no official leaders of the black bloc. There is no official organization that makes black blocs show up at demonstrations. However, in the minds of many who see and participate in black blocs, anti-authoritarian beliefs and militant action have become inseparable. In many anarchist circles today, one is not accepted as sufficiently revolutionary without proper black attire, knowledge of jargon and, in particularly awful cases, whether the person is a young white male. These trends make anti-authoritarianism morph from a coherent set of ideas, accessible and applicable to people of all different backgrounds, to a small and even parochial sub-culture that, despite talk of “diversity of tactics,” embraces narrow and even predictable means of resistance (dressing in black, acting anonymously, organizing in affinity groups, engaging cops in street battles, etc.). Some activists see militant action as the most revolutionary tactic possible and therefore good. But there is no such thing as a revolutionary tactic. Revolution is a strategic process marked by decisive moments of confrontation with powerful elites and the development of counter structures that empower people to make decisions about their lives and meet community needs.

To know what is appropriate at what time in a revolutionary struggle, we need to think rationally about changing contexts so our movement can grow and evolve dynamically. We need well thought out ideas and means of implementing them everywhere.

SPONTANEITY VS. INSTITUTIONALIZATION

Many anarchists favorably equate spontaneity with autonomy, personal freedom and free association; some of the foundations of anarchism. Ultimately, we want to be free to make decisions about our lives without an imposing system of command and control from above. Other anarchists, however, associate institutionalization with “gray suits, bureaucracy, dogma, hierarchy.” Indeed, the institutions most people in this society experience most directly include school, work places, and religious institutions. For many, these experiences are deeply demoralizing because they totally contradict the desire for spontaneity. Some conclude that they don’t want any institutions.

An institution is a lasting organization of stable relationships with a specific purpose. The question is not, “Institution or not?” Rather, “What kind of institutions?” People often resist building institutions with theoretical foundations and long-term programs, favoring episodic, spontaneous, moments of glory on the front lines and in their personal lives. We want institutions with solid anti-authoritarian theoretical foundations committed to putting these ideas into practice, engendering spontaneity as part of a larger project of liberation. Creating good institutions does not mean compromising anti-authoritarian politics; it means committing to them. It means creating community-based revolutionary infrastructure that makes this movement relevant to our neighbors in between mass mobilizations. It means creating lasting systems of self-governance and community decision-making that mirror the free society we want to build.

The beginnings of this work have been extraordinary. The spokescouncil organizing model, for example, has been essential to giving this movement a directly democratic and decentralized structure. These moments show us that what we want – what this world needs – is attainable. We can do it! Most exciting is that these structures are beginning to empower many people. We should strive to make the movement so inclusive and general that huge numbers of people feel empowered and connected. These decision-making bodies should be strongly anti-authoritarian so that no individual, organization or political party can take them over for a particular interest. They must be stable enough so decisions are resolved by equally empowered people debating together.

Creating revolutionary infrastructure (affinity groups, community gardens, free schools, cultural centers, unions, counter community meetings, etc.) is not about making insular lifestyle hide-aways. Revolutionary infrastructure is the complex and diverse web of connections that is intricately connected to and a critical part of the larger political movement and revolutionary project.

SECURITY CULTURE VS. ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSPARENCY

We have to organize in ways that resist federal surveillance and try our darndest not to allow the State to throw us in jail for trying to build a free society. But the security culture we adopt often takes on a life of its own, turning into a barrier to democratic sharing of vital information.

In the name of “security concerns” at the Quebec 2001 2001 and actions against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the place of the spokes council was not announced until the last minute. One had to already be privy to the organizer’s communications network to find out where the meeting was. This prevented many out-of-town people, and probably local people, from finding the meeting where the action plan was discussed. The next day many people were not aware that if they did not want to be in a militant “red” zone, they should not be in the non-violent direct-action oriented “yellow” zone. It was an amazing, spontaneous, wonderful historic moment when the red zone emerged out of the yellow zone to tear down the fence. The only problem was some people were not prepared to be in the thick of the police violence that followed. There were people who didn’t realize what they were getting themselves into by being in the yellow zone.

If we want to embrace a “diversity of tactics,” there needs to be a way for people on all levels of the “traffic-light spectrum” to feel empowered in their participation. That’s part of what resisting is about – feeling like you are taking control of your life and making decisions with other people to reclaim collective power. When some activists deny important information, which may be critical to making informed decisions about how to best contribute to the movement or action, organizations can fall apart, leaving participants with a bitter, disempowering and anti-democratic feeling.

There is a fine line between security concerns and making sure everyone has the information they need to make informed decisions. Security culture tries to stay one step ahead of the authorities, but we’ve also got to be in-step with each other. If information is sensitive, the process of releasing it should still be transparent. This challenge requires creative and innovative strategy.

We are faced with a seemingly impossible task: transforming the fundamental institutional structure of society. Our vision for the future should inform how we organize in the present. Theory informs practice, vision informs strategy. As we organize, we should hold each other mutually responsible that our movement be rooted in direct democracy, inclusiveness and an ethical framework. In times of political repression, we must keep our eyes on the bigger picture and act in solidarity with one another in the struggle of the present. Now more than ever, we must demand the impossible – not only of our world, but also of ourselves.

Doyle is studying critical pedagogy and is a community activist in Vermont. Ben is studying food politics at the Institute for Social Ecology. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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By Dan Berger

A note to the reader: Framing the language in this article has been rather difficult. While intended for anyone interested in John Brown and anti-racist struggle, as a white anti-racist writing about another white anti-racist, I feel this article has particular relevance and importance to other whites interested in dismantling white supremacy. A desire to both place myself in the article as a white person and draw the attention of other whites to key strategic issues led me to use exclusive words like ‘we’ or ‘us.’ While John Brown’s legacy needs to be studied by all struggling against white supremacy – and this article is an attempt to add to that study and dialogue – whites especially need to pay attention. As such, my goal is for white anti-racists to think more tactically and strategically in the struggle against white supremacy; my goal is not to marginalize or alienate readers of color. I hope I have succeeded.

From 1800 until his execution for treason by the Commonwealth of Virginia in 1859, John Brown lived white anti-racist struggle. A threat to the institutions of slavery and white supremacy, Brown’s militant acts against United States racism terrified the white power structure and continue to frighten it. While highlighting his life and deeds helps us understand our history and shape our activism, his shortcomings must also inform our organizing. Only by critically viewing history – not romanticizing or dismissing it – can we hope to learn from it.

Through his work defending abolitionists, Brown provided direct physical support to Blacks and whites confronting the slave system. His belief in armed struggle distanced him from many in the largely pacifist abolitionist movement. Yet when under attack, Brown was the first person anti-slavery forces turned to. His belief in the humanity of Black people also set him apart from many whites in the patronizingly racist abolitionist movement. While exemplary of the time for principled, militant and direct action against slavery, Brown lacked a cohesive strategy for waging offensive struggle and, above all, lacked a comprehensive revolutionary analysis. These shortcomings led to his death, and could mean a similar fate for modern white anti-racists if repeated.

DEFENDING ABOLITIONISTS

In the mid-1850s, turmoil over slavery in the United States was especially pronounced in Kansas, where pro-slavery settlers from Missouri were terrorizing the predominantly pacifist anti-slavery settlers. When border ruffians, as the pro-slavery forces were called, rigged elections determining whether Kansas would be a slave state and killed several anti-slavery settlers in 1856, Brown and four others killed five key border ruffians, including a judge.

The abolitionist movement in Kansas split: some supported Brown, and went so far as to pick up arms. Some distanced themselves from him, even becoming pro-slavery, calling into question their original commitment to abolitionism. Kansas became engulfed in a civil war, during which many communities asked Brown and his well-trained, small army to protect them. But Brown was clear on the purpose of his armed struggle; it wasn’t a vigilante group, it was an abolitionist movement army. He only gave protection to those communities who engaged in anti-slavery work. The war climaxed at Osawatomie in August 1856 where, vastly outnumbered, Brown’s troops defeated the pro-slavery forces in Kansas. This time period in Brown’s life is especially exemplary of the ways in which Brown tactically knew how to polarize people through political action.

Osawatomie is perhaps Brown’s greatest military victory, but he had previously responded to the expansion of the slave system. After the 1850 passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, allowing slave owners and others to seize and re-enslave alleged runaway slaves – a law with tremendous impact on all Black people in the United States – Brown helped organize the League of Gileadites, a self-defense group, in Springfield, Mass. The league’s principles, written by Brown, display his firm belief in solidarity and the need for non-cooperation with the ruthless state or white vigilantes, saying, “stand by one another and by your friends, while a drop of blood remains, and be hanged if you must but tell no tales out of school. Make no confession. Union is strength.”

Beyond coordinating and carrying out armed responses, Brown and his family served as catalysts for principled and radical action in a movement tempered by reformism and racism. Brown toured the country on speaking tours raising money for arms and other supplies to defend abolitionists, the anti-slavery settlers in Kansas and to go on the offensive. Moving to Kansas to help the abolitionist struggle there, the Brown family helped lead the challenge to the more moderate abolitionists who thought appeals to Congress and slave-owners – using the racist platform that slavery should be abolished because it hurt white labor – sufficed.

While the movement to abolish slavery had many white members, it was not united around a need for Black liberation, nor was it even founded on the principle of Black humanity. Many abolitionist societies excluded African and African American participation, and abolitionism was rooted more in white paternalism than anything else. In such a climate, Brown’s ideas for an independent, armed Black nation were indeed radical. To push the movement forward, Brown knew it was time to get beyond defensive actions. It can be argued that this represents the foundational start of organized white anti-racism in the United States.

GOING ON THE OFFENSIVE: THE RAID ON HARPER’S FERRY

A month after the battle in Kansas, Brown began touring and meeting with leading abolitionists to plan an offensive attack against the institution of slavery. Building off the growing momentum of radical abolitionism – from slave escapes to slave rebellions and beyond – Brown and his compatriots picked the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia, now West Virginia, as the first site of their insurrection.

After years of planning, on Oct. 17, 1859, with 10,000 pikes and the latest in rifle technology, 15 whites and five Blacks – mostly in their 20s, with military experience and, like Brown, religious – easily captured the town of Harper’s Ferry with little bloodshed. In a symbolic gesture of the revolutionary shift of power of which they were attempting, Brown’s band took a sword from George Washington’s grandson that was given to Washington by Frederick the Great and bestowed it upon one of the Black freedom fighters. This raid of a federal arsenal in the South, an effort to start a slave insurrection to destroy slavery and lead to Black sovereignty, had several strategic goals: to strike at slave owners and draw slaves into the rebellion; to deny rifles to the slaveocracy; to heighten the national debate around slavery; and to inspire the abolitionist movement in spite of its pacifist and reformist leanings.

While key strategic thinking was used in planning the raid, a lack of a clear sense of tactical possibilities and priorities squashed the raid. The group took several hostages, and Brown wavered between the war to arm slaves and his naïve hope to negotiate peacefully with the slaveocracy. In the end, he put more value on the hostages than on his own group, and federal troops – led by Robert E. Lee, the eventual commander of the Confederate Army – captured or killed most of Brown’s band, including several of his sons.

Though hindsight is always 20/20 on issues of strategy and tactics, it is fair to say that, beyond killing him and most of the people in his group, Brown’s mistake – rooted partially in his conception of Christianity, which highly regarded sacrifice and dramatic witness – was a setback for the movement. As Butch Lee says in Jailbreak out of History, her important re-biography of Harriet Tubman, the United States was heading toward war, but the tone of that war was not yet fully determined. Instead of helping build a war with Black liberation as its central goal, the failed raid helped spark a civil war over the preservation of the white nation. In the Civil War, abolition was grudgingly and sluggishly given only as a weapon against the south. While Black revolutionaries continued to fight for their liberation, their numbers were smaller and they had fewer weapons and liberated territory than they would have had Brown succeeded.

Despite the raid’s military failure, radicals throughout the world recognized its significance. The abolitionist movement that fed and sheltered Brown on his speaking tours pulled together after his arrest at Harper’s Ferry. Blueprints of the jail where he was held were printed in northern newspapers to encourage rescue attempts. An armed force including 100 European socialists planned a rescue, but Brown discouraged it due to the security under which he was held.

Black women provided direct material aid for the families of fallen fighters by raising money for them, and Black people were the main organizers of ‘Martyr Day’ activities in 12 cities on the day Brown was hanged. Events included everything from tolling church bells to businesses closing, from the poisoning of three of the jurors that convicted Brown to the torching of three Virginia plantations.

Given the movement’s response to the raid, it was not a total failure. Representing a more radical tenet of the abolitionist movement, Brown understood quite well that revolution is a process; he said even if the revolt was not militarily successful, it would still be a success in further sparking abolitionist movement. Though it didn’t bring the movement to a new, radical position as hoped, the raid made many abolitionists rethink their views on pacifism. Brown’s raid, like other anti-slavery revolts, gained much publicity, and the image of whites engaged in armed struggle against slavery and white supremacy still terrifies the system. Recognizing the ways in which the raid succeeded helps us counter revisionist history and helps us better analyze our actions. Even when we are not as successful as planned, our work can still be important steps in movement building.

While succeeding in several key aspects, the raid was still hindered by Brown’s racism, patriarchy, patriotism, lack of democracy and Christian fervor.

TOWARD HOLISTIC PRAXIS: A CRITIQUE OF BROWN

Speaking about 150 years after Harper’s Ferry, Malcolm X used Brown’s actions as a litmus test when discussing anti-racist whites. “If a white person wants to help our cause,” Malcolm said, “ask him what he thinks of John Brown. Do you know what John Brown did? He went to war.” Anti-racist whites must go to war against racism – not necessarily through armed struggle, but through their daily life. As white anti-racist feminist Becky Thompson notes in the title of her book on white anti-racism, it is both “a promise and a way of life.” Our war against racism must be multi-faceted: from challenging racist comments to the ways we organize, from our reading selection to being able to provide physical and material aid to people of color. This comes with a holistic politics, one that recognizes the multitude of barriers to freedom and works toward a comprehensive vision.

While Brown was a visionary in anti-racist politics regarding Africans and African Americans, this was not matched with gender consciousness or even a deep understanding on the founding and role of the United States. After meeting Harriet Tubman, Brown was so impressed that, when telling his son of the meeting, Brown described her as “the most man” Brown had ever met.

“Important affairs were manly affairs to him,” Lee says in discussing Brown and Tubman’s relationship. Lee says Brown forbade female participation in the raid and forbade men knowledgeable of the raid to share information with their wives. His misogynistic distrust of women was coupled with patriarchal blinders on the myriad of ways in which women participated in anti-racist struggle, including the planning of Harper’s Ferry. Two of Brown’s daughters were very involved in the planning process, living in Harper’s Ferry for a long time prior to the raid. Having traveled the area extensively when leading slave escapes, Tubman was knowledgeable of the area, and her strategic thinking would have been of immeasurable importance in planning and executing the raid. While illness prevented Tubman from being the only woman to participate in the armed front of the raid, Lee says her priorities lay in leading armed struggle against slavery in her own right. She was not waiting for white people to lead the struggle – she had been actively fighting white supremacy all of her life.

Even though he represented a more radical wing of the abolitionist movement, Brown still failed to challenge state power or the existence of the United States. He supported the creation of an independent Black nation, but failed to incorporate within that a belief in the need to destroy the United States. A parasitic, settler state such as the United States – which, besides African chattel slavery, was founded on genocide of the indigenous, colonization of Mexico and patriarchal social relations, all of which Brown did not recognize or challenge – needs to be destroyed. A truly independent, sovereign and free Black nation cannot exist alongside a settler empire that rests on Black oppression.

Though Brown and other men drafted a “Provisional Constitution of the Oppressed People of the United States” that called for a sovereign Black nation, suffrage regardless of sex and encouraged all women to arm themselves, Brown’s patriarchy and loyalty to the United States made the actualization of this impossible. Saying he intended to gain freedom for Black men like the American Revolution had done for white men, Brown defended the use of the United States flag as the flag for the new nation. The rebellion’s loyalty, Lee says, was with the United States, as Brown sought to “amend and reform” the U.S. constitution rather than overthrow and replace the United States itself. If we are to achieve freedom, our goal must be the destruction of the United States as we know it, not its amending and reformation.

White anti-racist politics must also be universally and consistently anti-racist; it is not up to us to choose which people of color to listen to or support. Brown’s militancy in fighting for abolition and Black liberation – albeit in a patriarchal, patriotic manner – was not matched with principled solidarity for Native, Chicano and Asian people within U.S. borders. The fact that slavery was more at the forefront of public discussion at the time merits its priority, but it also begs the question of genocide, colonization, forced servitude and the public invisibility of non-Black people of color.

Further, while studying the life and legacy of Brown is instructive for anti-racists – particularly white ones – the study of white revolutionaries must not overshadow the study of revolutionaries of color. Radical discourse among anti-racists on the role of whites in anti-racist struggle has largely consensed that white people should be organizing other whites against racism following the leadership of people of color. Yet this was not the case with Brown: while the group he led at Harper’s Ferry was predominantly white, there were several Black people involved, and little is written or studied about them. (Osborne Anderson’s autobiography, A Voice From Harper’s Ferry, the only body of work written by a Black participant in the raid, is also one of the few works dedicated to Black members of the raid.)

While he had principled anti-racist relations with and took guidance from many of the Black radicals of the time – Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delaney and others – Brown was very much the leader of the groups in which he participated. The lack of democratic structure combined with internal racial hierarchy and patriarchal standards for participation contributed to the failure of Harper’s Ferry and is something anti-racists must not replicate.

To highlight Brown runs the risk of exceptionalizing him as “the good white,” perpetuating the culture of white supremacy. Brown was heavily influenced by the slave revolts, attempted or carried out, by people like Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser and Denmark Vesey, yet more dialogue focuses around Brown then any of these three Black revolutionaries. Vital as studying the processes by which people with privilege fight against their privilege is, the focus of revolutionary anti-racism must remain on revolutionaries of color: their words, actions and influences. The words and actions of self-proclaimed anti-racist whites on racism cannot take sole precedence.

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

Brown remains relevant to white anti-racists because he struggled against racism to his very death. But in studying him, the changing ways in which white supremacy operates must be taken into account. Raiding a federal arsenal to seize weapons is neither possible nor strategic at this time. Many of the problems within the abolitionist movement, however, are alive and well. From white appeals to ‘anti-racism’ for the benefit of white labor to the tokenizing and patronizing view of Third World peoples, reclaiming Brown’s militancy can be a powerful antidote to modern white imperial power within the left.

The power of Brown’s militancy lay not just in his armed deeds, but in making anti-racism a foundation of his being. Brown’s militancy must be applied to all aspects of life and struggle – as militant feminists, as militant anti-capitalists and as militant anti-Americanists; as militant organizers, as militant thinkers and as militant freedom fighters. We must apply that militancy, the willingness to take time, energy and risks – after all, many people do not have the privilege of choosing whether to be militant – in our struggle against hierarchy and for a free society. This happens through praxis, the synthesis of thought and action, not rhetoric. Giving lip service to anti-racism without prioritizing and implementing it is not militant, regardless of the tactics used.

By critically reclaiming Brown, we can acknowledge his faults and celebrate his success. We can counter the dominant historiography that makes Brown and white anti-racism appear to be “crazy.” This pathologizing process is yet another way white supremacy appeals to white people. A critical reclaiming of Brown counteracts this historical revisionism, but the critical analysis is key. From Brown’s achievements and mistakes we learn the necessity to wage militant, principled anti-racist struggle on all fronts. From welfare cutbacks to civil liberties attacks, from border militarization to race-based incarceration, from environmental racism to affirmative action, from education to health care, from colonization to gentrification, there are many sources of struggle. Radicals, especially white ones, must combine a revolutionary vision with a radical analysis and liberatory strategy. It is our job to pick up where John Brown left off.

Special thanks to Eugene Koveos, Heather LaCapria, Matt Meyer and Nicole Solomon for their comments on this article. Dan Berger is a student at the University of Florida, an organizer with the Colors of Resistance collective (part of the Colours of Resistance network) and co-editor of ONWARD. Originally appeared in Onward, 2002.

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