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Title: The Anarchism of Blackness
Author: Wayne Price
Date: November 28, 2018
Language: en
Topics: book review, black anarchism
Source: http://www.anarkismo.net/article/31213

Wayne Price

The Anarchism of Blackness

There are almost no books on anarchism and African-American liberation,

which makes this an exceptional work. In the last period of

radicalization (the “sixties”), very few radicals, African-American or

white, were anarchists or other types of libertarian socialist. Almost

all radicals were attracted by the apparent anti-imperialism of Mao, Ho

Chi Minh, and Castro, and the leaders of liberation struggles in Africa.

Therefore those who organized and theorized about revolutionary

African-American liberation were overwhelmingly Marxist-Leninists and/or

statist nationalists. If I had to think of someone who did not fit this

category, I would have to go back to the Black revolutionary, C.L.R.

James, who was a libertarian (autonomist) Marxist (James 1948).

(Anarchists were involved in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, but mainly

as anarchist-pacifists. They were perceived as nonrevolutionary

pacifists.)

After the height of this period, there were a number of African-American

militants who had been members of the Black Panthers and the Black

Liberation Army. When in prison a small number reconsidered their

politics and philosophies. Mostly unconnected to each other, they turned

to revolutionary anarchism. (See Black Rose Federation 2016.) Meanwhile,

there had been a general failure and conservatism of the “Communist”

states, from the Soviet Union to China to Vietnam and Cuba. Among those

who rejected the oppressive, racist, and exploitative status quo, there

was now a rejection of Marxism-Leninism. There was a revived interest in

the other revolutionary tradition, that of anarchism.

This short book is a product of the new period. It is an expansion of

the authors’ essay, “The Anarchism of Blackness.” They quote repeatedly

from one of the Black anarchists, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin (but,

surprisingly, not from any of the others). Their main point is that

African-Americans are not and cannot be fully merged into U.S. society,

a white supremacist state established as a colonial-settler society.

Black people remain essentially outside of and oppressed by this

society. Despite the end of legal Jim Crow, the passage of

anti-discrimination laws, and various forms of “affirmative action,”

African-Americans remain primarily on the bottom of society, among the

most oppressed and exploited parts of the population. Meanwhile there

are on-going attacks on whatever gains have been won (such as the right

to vote). Therefore the struggles of African-Americans, pushing upon

established order from below, continue to fundamentally threaten the

whole system of “law and order,” of established politics, and the normal

electoral alternatives. They point in a different direction altogether.

“We are Black because we are oppressed by the state; we are oppressed by

the state because we are Black.” (Samudzi & Anderson 2018; 9) “Black

people’s place in the fight against white supremacist capitalism is

unique since so much of structural violence entails anti-blackness…

Blackness is the anti-state just as the state is anti-Black… Black

Americans [are] a group of people upon whose suffering the state is

constructed…. Understanding the anarchistic condition of blackness and

the impossibility of its assimilation into the U.S. social contract,

however, could be empowering.” (112—113) This points to a goal of “a

complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists….” (3)

and “creating an alternate system of governance that is not based on

domination, hierarchy, and control.” (xvii)

This rejection of “assimilation” as a goal does not lead Samudzi and

Anderson to adopt Black nationalism. Partly because they believe that

“Black nationalism in the United States can sometimes entail these

quasi-settler claims to the land….” (25) This raises “the question of

the fate of the Native American communities in those states” (26) “We

are not settlers. But championing the creation of a Black majoritarian

nation-state, where the fate of Indigenous people is ambiguous at best,

is an idea rooted in settler logic.” (28) They also doubt that a

nationalist approach is adequate to deal with the dire threat of

world-wide environmental catastrophe caused by the system. And they

point out that the upholders of Black oppression are not only

European-Americans. “There are many politicians and state operatives of

color, Black and otherwise, working for white supremacy.” (13)

Samudzi and Anderson especially object to “Black nationalism’s frequent

exclusion of” Black and other women and LGBTQ people (70—71). “We must

also explicitly name different gendered and sexual identities within

blackness. Any truly liberatory politics must speak to the unique needs

and vulnerabilities of Black women and girls, especially Black queer and

transgender women and girls.” (68)

Others have rejected both total assimilation (“integration”) and Black

nationalism, such as C.L.R. James and Malcolm X in his last year.

Probably most African-Americans do not want to separate from the U.S.A.

They mostly want to win the democratic rights promised by the U.S.

tradition==but without giving up their Black identity and pride and

their special organizations (such as the Black church and communities).

However, under the great pressures and upheavals which might lead to a

revolution, it is possible that many African-Americans might come to

want their own separate country (whether with its own state or as an

anarchist community). If this should develop, surely anarchists should

support their right to have this if that is what they want. We believe

in freedom. This is not discussed in the book.

Samudzi and Anderson advocate “a truly intersectional framework and

multifaceted approach to Black liberation.” (28) “Our work to end the

deterioration of nature must be understood as a necessary and

inseparable component of a global anticapitalist movement.” (35) They

call for a more united U.S. Left. “There is not a unified Left in this

country…If we do not build that functionally cohesive Left…the rights of

all people oppressed by capitalist white supremacy will inevitably

continue to erode.” (17) But the book is weak in terms of how to build

that unified Left as part of a global anticapitalist movement--nor does

it distinguish between the statist, authoritarian, Left and a

libertarian, anti-statist, Left. They are undoubtedly right to raise a

pro-Black, pro-feminist, pro-LGBTQ, and pro-ecology orientation. (They

have a discussion of armed self-defense and gun control which I found

rather confused.) But how can these be integrated into an

“intersectional and multifaceted framework”?

African-American Liberation and Class

The weakest part of the book is its lack of analysis of why

African-Americans are oppressed, and what functions this oppression

performs for the system. This should lead to an analysis of the economic

role of white supremacy in producing a surplus of wealth to maintain the

ruling class, the corporations, the state, and all other capitalist

institutions—a surplus of wealth which is squeezed out of the working

population. They refer frequently to “capitalism” and sometimes to

“classism,” but do not see that the capitalist class system is a system

of exploitation, of draining wealth from working people.

Africans were not brought to the Americas in order for white people to

have someone to look down on. They were kidnapped and enslaved to become

a form of worker (chattel slaves). They were bought and sold on a market

so they could be used to produce commodities (tobacco, cotton, etc.) to

be sold on the world market.

With the end of slavery, African-Americans continued to be oppressed,

serving two functions. First, they were kept as a vulnerable group which

could be super-exploited. They were paid less than the rest of the

working class and given the worst jobs, therefore producing a large

amount of profit. Second, they were used to keep the working class as a

whole divided and weak, so long as the white workers accepted the

“psychological wages of whiteness,” namely feeling superior to someone.

While the white workers got some small benefits (more job security,

slightly better pay, etc.), they paid a high price in economic and

political weakness. (Their inability, to this day, to win universal

health care, unlike in every other Western imperialist country, is only

one example.) The hopeful aspect of this situation is that it is in the

immediate material interest of white workers to oppose racism—as well as

being morally right. This gives anti-racists something to appeal to.

On the second function of racism: In the 1800s, the great Black

abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, wrote about his experiences as a

rented-out slave on the Baltimore shipyards, surrounded by racist white

workers. While well aware of the difference between chattel slavery and

wage slavery, “Douglass keenly grasped the plight of the white poor. In

their ‘craftiness,’ wrote Douglass, urban slaveholders and shipyard

owners forged an ‘enmity of the poor, laboring white man against the

blacks,’ forcing an embittered scramble for diminished wages, and

rendering the white worker ‘as much a slave as the black slave himself.’

Both were ‘plundered and by the same plunderer.’ The ‘white slave’ and

the ‘black slave’ were both robbed, one by a single master, and the

other by the entire slave system. The slaveholding class exploited the

lethal tools of racism to convince the burgeoning immigrant poor, said

Douglass, that ‘slavery is the only power that can prevent the laboring

white man from falling to the level of the slave’s poverty and

degradation’.” (Blight 2018; 77) To this day, the “crafty” capitalists

continue this game of divide-and-conquer, between white workers and

African-American workers, and also among Latino, Asian, and immigrant

workers.

While not referring to this key aspect of capitalist racism, the authors

do discuss the relationship between the oppression of African-American

women and exploitative labor. There has been, and is, a “raced and

gendered labor extraction [in]…the functioning of capitalism…Black

women’s labor was central to the development of the capitalist state and

the American slaveocracy… Gendered anti-blackness formed the cornerstone

of Jim Crow modernity….” (71) African-American women faced a “triple

labor (domestic, industrial, and sexual…).” (72)

This is entirely true and very insightful. It is odd that the authors do

not further discuss the “raced labor extraction” from Black workers (of

all genders and orientations) which plays a central role in the “labor

extraction” from the entire, multiracial, multiethnic, multinational,

and multigenderred, working class. Historically, Black workers, female

and male, have played key roles in U.S. working class struggles, as well

as in broader African-American struggles. An intersectional working

class strategy should focus on this (which was the point of James 1948).

The Revolutionary Goal?

The book lacks a strategy for African-American liberation, beyond broad

insights. “People may ask for answers as though there are distinct

formulas… The solution to capitalism is anticapitalism. The solution to

white supremacy is the active rejection of it and the dual affirmation

of Indigenous sovereignty and Black humanity.” (114) This is not good

enough.

It is not clear whether their rejection of the U.S. state and white

supremacist capitalism implies a revolution to them. I do not mean a

popular insurrection as an immediate goal, but as a strategic

end-in-view, a guiding goal of eventually overturning the state and all

forms of oppression. “It is possible that a people’s liberation is a

perpetual project and must constantly be renewed and updated.” (114)

Samudzi and Anderson write of “a long struggle [in which] meaningful

steps toward liberation do not have to be dramatic.” (115) Fair enough,

but they do not speak of how to get to an eventual destruction of the

institutions of racist-sexist-antiecological-capitalism. A revolution

may be a “long struggle” but not “a perpetual project.”

It is not clear whether they are anarchists. I do not mean that I doubt

their sincerity, since I take them at their word. But they themselves

waffle on whether to call themselves anarchists. They took “anarchism”

out of the title of their book (from the original essay), and write, “We

may choose not to limit or misrepresent the diversity of our struggle by

explicitly naming ourselves as anarchists…”(66) Their values and

perspectives seem to be consistent with anarchism. They were clearly

influenced by Black anarchists. I do not raise this point to condemn

them—they may call themselves whatever they like. But this wishy-washy

attitude toward owning the “anarchist” label weakens their revolutionary

perspective. Similarly, while they repeatedly refer to “anticapitalism,”

they never write of “socialism” (let alone “communism”).

Conclusion

There are very few writings on anarchism and African-American

liberation, which makes this an interesting work. It clearly places

racial oppression at the center of U.S. society, interacting and

overlapping with all other forms of oppression and exploitation. It

insists that Black liberation will mean the destruction of the present

U.S. state and sexist-racist capitalism. Its main weaknesses are a lack

of a strategy and a failure to integrate a class analysis of capitalism

into its program and perspective. They fail to see the special role of

African-Americans in the working class and in the U.S. revolution.

References

Black Rose Federation (2016).

Black Anarchism: A Reader.

Blight, David W. (2018). Frederick Douglass; Prophet of Freedom. NY:

Simon & Schuster.

James, C.L.R. (1948).

The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the U.S.

Samudzi, Zoe, & Anderson, William C. (2018). As Black as Resistance;

Finding the Conditions for Liberation. Chico CA: AK Press.