💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ashanti-omowali-alston-black-anarchism.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:23:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
➡️ Next capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Black Anarchism Author: Ashanti Omowali Alston Date: 2003 Language: en Topics: black anarchism, creative intervention Source: Retrieved on 2007-07-01 from https://web.archive.org/web/20070701204541/http://www.anarchistpanther.net/node/17. Notes: Following is a transcript of a speech given at Hunter College, NYC, on October 24th, 2003, sponsored by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the Student Liberation Action Movement. Transcribed and introduced by Chuck Morse.
Many classical anarchists regarded anarchism as a body of elemental
truths that merely needed to be revealed to the world and believed
people would become anarchists once exposed to the irresistible logic of
the idea. This is one of the reasons they tended to be didactic.
Fortunately the lived practice of the anarchist movement is much richer
than that. Few “convert” in such a way: it is much more common for
people to embrace anarchism slowly, as they discover that it is relevant
to their lived experience and amenable to their own insights and
concerns.
The richness of the anarchist tradition lay precisely in the long
history of encounters between non-anarchist dissidents and the anarchist
framework that we inherited from the late 19^(th) and early 20^(th)
centuries. Anarchism has grown through such encounters and now confronts
social contradictions that were previously marginal to the movement. For
example, a century ago the struggle against patriarchy was a relatively
minor concern for most anarchists and yet it is now widely accepted as
an integral part of our struggle against domination.
It is only within the last 10 or 15 years that anarchists in North
America have begun to seriously explore what it means to develop an
anarchism that can both fight white supremacy and articulate a positive
vision of cultural diversity and cultural exchange. Comrades are working
hard to identify the historical referents of such a task, how our
movement must change to embrace it, and what a truly anti-racist
anarchism might look like.
The following piece by IAS board member Ashanti Alston explores some of
these questions. Alston, who was a member of the Black Panther Party and
the Black Liberation Army, describes his encounter(s) with anarchism
(which began while he was incarcerated for activities related to the
Black Liberation Army). He touches upon some of the limitations of older
visions of anarchism, the contemporary relevance of anarchism to black
people, and some of the principles necessary to build a new
revolutionary movement.
This is an edited transcript of a talk given by Alston on October
24^(th), 2003 at Hunter College in New York City. This event was
organized by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and co-sponsored by the
Student Liberation Action Movement of the City University of New York.
Chuck Morse
Although the Black Panther Party was very hierarchical, I learned a lot
from my experience in the organization. Above all, the Panthers
impressed upon me the need to learn from other peoples’ struggles. I
think I have done that and that is one of the reasons why I am an
anarchist today. After all, when old strategies don’t work, you need to
look for other ways of doing things to see if you can get yourself
unstuck and move forward again. In the Panthers we drew a lot from
nationalists, Marxist-Leninists, and others like them, but their
approaches to social change had significant problems and I delved into
anarchism to see if there are other ways to think about making a
revolution.
I learned about anarchism from letters and literature sent to me while
in various prisons around the country. At first I didn’t want to read
any of the material I received—it seemed like anarchism was just about
chaos and everybody doing their own thing—and for the longest time I
just ignored it. But there were times—when I was in segregation—that I
didn’t have anything else to read and, out of boredom, finally dug in
(despite everything I had heard about anarchism up to the time). I was
actually quite surprised to find analyses of peoples’ struggles,
peoples’ cultures, and peoples’ organizational formations—that made a
lot of sense to me.
These analyses helped me see important things about my experience in the
Panthers that had not been clear to me before. For example, I realized
that there was a problem with my love for people like Huey P. Newton,
Bobby Seal, and Eldridge Cleaver and the fact that I had put them on a
pedestal. After all, what does it say about you, if you allow someone to
set themselves up as your leader and make all your decisions for you?
What anarchism helped me see was that you, as an individual, should be
respected and that no one is important enough to do your thinking for
you. Even if we thought of Huey P. Newton or Eldridge Cleaver as the
baddest revolutionaries in the world, I should see myself as the baddest
revolutionary, just like them. Even if I am young, I have a brain. I can
think. I can make decisions.
I thought about all this while in prison and found myself saying, “Man,
we really set ourselves up in a way that was bound to create problems
and produce schisms. We were bound to follow programs without thinking.”
The history of the Black Panther Party, as great as it is, has those
skeletons. The smallest person on the totem pole was supposed to be a
worker and the one on the top was the one with the brains. But in prison
I learned that I could have made some of these decisions myself and that
people around me could have made these decisions themselves. Although I
appreciated everything that the leaders of the Black Panther Party did,
I began to see that we can do things differently and thus draw more
fully on our own potentials and move even further towards real
self-determination. Although it wasn’t easy at first, I stuck with the
anarchist material and found that I couldn’t put it down once it started
giving me insights. I wrote to people in Detroit and Canada who had been
sending me literature and asked them to send more.
However, none of what I received dealt with Black folks or Latinos.
Maybe there were occasional discussions of the Mexican revolution, but
nothing dealt with us, here, in the United States. There was an
overwhelming emphasis on those who became the anarchist founding
fathers—Bakunin, Kropotkin, and some others—but these European figures,
who were addressing European struggles, didn’t really speak to me.
I tried to figure out how this applies to me. I began to look at Black
history again, at African history, and at the histories and struggles of
other people of color. I found many examples of anarchist practices in
non-European societies, from the most ancient times to the present. This
was very important to me: I needed to know that it is not just European
people who can function in an anti-authoritarian way, but that we all
can.
I was encouraged by things I found in Africa—not so much by the ancient
forms that we call tribes—but by modern struggles that occurred in
Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. Even though they were
led by vanguardist organizations, I saw that people were building
radical, democratic communities on the ground. For the first time, in
these colonial situations, African peoples where creating what was the
Angolans called “popular power.” This popular power took a very
anti-authoritarian form: people were not only conducting their lives,
but also transforming them while fighting whatever foreign power was
oppressing them. However, in every one of these liberation struggles new
repressive structures were imposed as soon as people got close to
liberation: the leadership was obsessed with ideas of government, of
raising a standing army, of controlling the people when the oppressors
were expelled. Once the so-called victory was accomplished, the
people—who had fought for years against their oppressors—were disarmed
and instead of having real popular power, a new party was installed at
the helm of the state. So, there were no real revolutions or true
liberation in Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe because
they simply replaced a foreign oppressor with an indigenous oppressor.
So, here I am, in the United States fighting for Black liberation, and
wondering: how can we avoid situations like that? Anarchism gave me a
way to respond to this question by insisting that we put into place, as
we struggle now, structures of decision-making and doing things that
continually bring more people into the process, and not just let the
most “enlightened” folks make decisions for everyone else. The people
themselves have to create structures in which they articulate their own
voice and make their own decisions. I didn’t get that from other
ideologies: I got that from anarchism.
I also began to see, in practice, that anarchistic structures of
decision-making are possible. For example, at the protests against the
Republican National Convention in August 2000 I saw normally excluded
groups—people of color, women, and queers—participate actively in every
aspect of the mobilization. We did not allow small groups to make
decisions for others and although people had differences, they were seen
as good and beneficial. It was new for me, after my experience in the
Panthers, to be in a situation where people are not trying to be on the
same page and truely embraced the attempt to work out our sometimes
conflicting interests. This gave me some ideas about how anarchism can
be applied.
It also made me wonder: if it can be applied to the diverse groups at
the convention protest, could I, as a Black activist, apply these things
in the Black community?
Some of our ideas about who we are as a people hamper our struggles. For
example, the Black community is often considered a monolithic group, but
it is actually a community of communities with many different interests.
I think of being Black not so much as an ethnic category but as an
oppositional force or touchstone for looking at situations differently.
Black culture has always been oppositional and is all about finding ways
to creatively resist oppression here, in the most racist country in the
world. So, when I speak of a Black anarchism, it is not so tied to the
color of my skin but who I am as a person, as someone who can resist,
who can see differently when I am stuck, and thus live differently.
What is important to me about anarchism is its insistence that you
should never be stuck in old, obsolete approaches and always try to find
new ways of looking at things, feeling, and organizing. In my case, I
first applied anarchism in the early 1990s in a collective we created to
put out the Black Panther newspaper again. I was still a closet
anarchist at this point. I wasn’t ready yet to come out and declare
myself an anarchist, because I already knew what folks were going to say
and how they were going to look at me. Who would they see when I say
anarchist? They would see the white anarchists, with all the funny hair
etc, and say “how the heck are you going to hook up with that?”
There was a divide in this collective: on the one side there were older
comrades who were trying to reinvent the wheel and, on the other, myself
and a few others who were saying, “Let’s see what we can learn from the
Panther experience and build upon and improve it. We can’t do things the
same way.” We emphasized the importance of an anti-sexist perspective—an
old issue within the Panthers—but the other side was like, “I don’t want
to hear all that feminist stuff.” And we said, “That’s fine if you don’t
want to hear it, but we want the young folks to hear it, so they know
about some of the things that did not work in the Panthers, so they know
that we had some internal contradictions that we could not overcome.” We
tried to press the issue, but it became a battle and the discussions got
so difficult that a split occurred. As this point, I left the collective
and began working with anarchist and anti-authoritarian groups, who have
really been the only ones to consistently try to deal with these
dynamics thus far.
One of the most important lessons I also learned from anarchism is that
you need to look for the radical things that we already do and try to
encourage them. This is why I think there is so much potential for
anarchism in the Black community: so much of what we already do is
anarchistic and doesn’t involve the state, the police, or the
politicians. We look out for each other, we care for each other’s kids,
we go to the store for each other, we find ways to protect our
communities. Even churches still do things in a very communal way to
some extent. I learned that there are ways to be radical without always
passing out literature and telling people, “Here is the picture, if you
read this you will automatically follow our organization and join the
revolution.” For example, participation is a very important theme for
anarchism and it is also very important in the Back community. Consider
jazz: it is one of the best illustrations of an existing radical
practice because it assumes a participatory connection between the
individual and the collective and allows for the expression of who you
are, within a collective setting, based on the enjoyment and pleasure of
the music itself. Our communities can be the same way. We can bring
together all kinds of diverse perspectives to make music, to make
revolution.
How can we nurture every act of freedom? Whether it is with people on
the job or the folks that hang out on the corner, how can we plan and
work together? We need to learn from the different struggles around the
world that are not based on vanguards. There are examples in Bolivia.
There are the Zapatistas. There are groups in Senegal building social
centers. You really have to look at people who are trying to live and
not necessarily trying to come up with the most advanced ideas. We need
to de-emphasize the abstract and focus what is happening on the ground.
How can we bring all these different strands together? How can we bring
in the Rastas? How can we bring in the people on the west coast who are
still fighting the government strip-mining of indigenous land? How can
we bring together all of these peoples to begin to create a vision of
America that is for all of us?
Oppositional thinking and oppositional risks are necessary. I think that
is very important right now and one of the reasons why I think anarchism
has so much potential to help us move forward. It is not asking of us to
dogmatically adhere to the founders of the tradition, but to be open to
whatever increases our democratic participation, our creativity, and our
happiness.
We just had an Anarchist People of Color conference in Detroit on
October 3^(rd) to the 5^(th). One hundred thirty people came from all
over the country. It was great to just see ourselves and the interest of
people of color from around the United States in finding ways of
thinking outside of the norm. We saw that we could become that voice in
our communities that says, “Wait, maybe we don’t need to organize like
that. Wait, the way that you are treating people within the organization
is oppressive. Wait, what is your vision? Would you like to hear mine?”
There is a need for those kinds of voices within our different
communities. Not just our communities of color, but in every community
there is a need to stop advancing ready-made plans and to trust that
people can collectively figure out what to do with this world. I think
we have the opportunity to put aside what we thought would be the answer
and fight together to explore different visions of the future. We can
work on that. And there is no one answer: we’ve got to work it out as we
go.
Although we want to struggle, it is going to be very difficult because
of the problems that we have inherited from this empire. For example, I
saw some very hard, emotional struggles at the protests against the
Republican National Convention. But people stuck to it, even if they
broke down crying in the process. We are not going to get through some
of our internal dynamics that have kept us divided unless we are willing
to go through some really tough struggles. This is one of the other
reasons why I say there is no answer: we’ve just got to go through this.
Our struggles here in the United States affect everybody in the world.
People on the bottom are going to play a key role and the way we relate
to people on the bottom is going to be very important. Many of us are
privileged enough to be able to avoid some of the most difficult
challenges and we will need to give up some of this privilege in order
to build a new movement. The potential is there. We can still win—and
redefine what it means to win—but we have the opportunity to advance a
richer vision of freedom than we have ever had before. We have to be
willing to try.
As a Panther, and as someone who went underground as an urban guerrilla,
I have put my life on the line. I have watched my comrades die and spent
most of my adult life in prison. But I still believe that we can win.
Struggle is very tough and when you cross that line, you risk going to
jail, getting seriously hurt, killed, and watching your comrades getting
seriously hurt and killed. That is not a pretty picture, but that is
what happens when you fight an entrenched oppressor. We are struggling
and will make it rough for them, but struggle is also going to be rough
for us too.
This is why we have to find ways to love and support each other through
tough times. It is more than just believing that we can win: we need to
have structures in place that can carry us through when we feel like we
cannot go another step. I think we can move again if we can figure out
some of those things. This system has got to come down. It hurts us
every day and we can’t give up. We have to get there. We have to find
new ways.
Anarchism, if it means anything, means being open to whatever it takes
in thinking, living, and in our relationships—to live fully and win. In
some ways, I think they are both the same: living to the fullest is to
win. Of course we will and must clash with our oppressors and we need to
find good ways of doing it. Remember those on the bottom who are most
impacted by this. They might have different perspectives on how this
fight is supposed to go. If we can’t find ways for meeting face-to-face
to work that stuff out, old ghosts will re-appear and we will be back in
the same old situation that we have been in before.
You all can do this. You have the vision. You have the creativity. Do
not allow anyone to lock that down.