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Title: Anarkata
Author: Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas
Date: 19th October 2019
Language: en
Topics: black anarchism, anarkata
Source: https://anarkataastatement.wordpress.com/

Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas

Anarkata

What Is Anarkata?

“Anarkata” emerges as a response to the political alienation that has

been experienced by Black anarcho adjacent leftists who reject both the

whiteness of traditional anarchism and the authoritarianism of some

forms of Black nationalism.

21st century “Black Anarchism” as a concept has recently gained more

popularity as the works of Lucy Parsons, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, and

Kuwasi Balagoon, have become more widely disseminated on the internet

(and especially with the publication of the ‘Black Anarchism Reader’).

This increased attention and visibility has provided a degree of

validation to those of us who are Black radicals that share a common

belief in the need for decolonization and self-determination for Afrika

and the Diaspora, but who reject an uncritical investment in hierarchy,

centralization, and the State as the ways to achieve international Black

liberation.

We find Black Anarchism as a political tendency particularly attractive

because of its flexibility— how it draws from a number of revolutionary

frameworks—Black Marxism, Maoism, Pan Afrikanism, Black feminism, Queer

liberation—which makes it not just opposed to the Western and capitalist

forces oppressing Black people, but also the transmisic, heterosexist,

misogynistic, disablist, and human-centered forces working against us as

well. Most of us in “anarchic” Black radical movements, however, find

ourselves overlooked, and our politics get confused and dismissed as

synonymous with classical, European Anarchism—which is itself often

misunderstood by the non-anarchic world as largely an aesthetic and

utopian movement, perhaps where people in bandannas smash windows or

advocate an individualist liberty, a naive pacifism, or simply

uncoordinated destruction and “chaos.” It is within this milieu—of the

increased popularity and relevance of anarchism to Black revolution, and

the confusing or elusive nature of this relevance in the public

consciousness due to anarchist mythology—that some of us decided we

should develop our own name, to help demonstrate that we locate our

anarchic radicalism in our own history as Afrikan/Black people.

The struggle for Black self-determination has often articulated itself

through self-naming, whether naming independent parties or religious

institutions or choosing non-Anglo/non-European names. Inspired by that

tradition of self-naming, it was suggested we could use the term

‘Anarkata,’ to describe ourselves for ourselves within the revolutionary

canon. Short for ‘anarchic akata,’ the term is to be a reclamation of

the Yoruba word for ‘housecat’ or ‘wild animal’ (we thank Black Youth

Project for getting us thinking about this) that has been used to

describe Afrikans displaced in Amerikkka. Reclaiming a term that has

been on some accounts regarded as a slur and on other accounts is said

to be a way to conflate all Black/Afrikan folk with the Black Panther

Party was important here. Anarkata means for us that first and foremost

the prefix “anarch-“ (meaning ‘without unjust hierarchy’ or ‘without

rulers’) would be grounded in the political struggle of ‘Blackness’ as a

Pan-Afrikan (and Afrikan Diasporic) set of experiences and revolutionary

histories (anarch-akata) and not just in some universalized, unspecified

vision about absence of rule (anarch-ist). We would thus be defining

domination, subjugation, exploitation and resistance to them in light of

Black/Afrikan thought and struggle.

In this way, to be Anarkata is akin to something Ashanti Alston once

said, where our Blackness is “…not so much as an ethnic category but… 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. 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.” Anarkata politics seek to consolidate that

flexible culture of Black oppositionalism into a consciously

revolutionary, ethical and logical form—especially in response to 21st

century problems facing Black/Afrikan people globally such as climate

change, environmental racism and disablement, neocolonialism,

neofascism, Zionism, settler colonialism, militarized policing, mass

incarceration, etc. It is this process of synthesis, a synthesis of

Black radical oppositionalities along the lines of a Black

nonhierarchical critique (Anarkata synthesis), that is characteristic of

the Anarkata approach to Black liberation.

The following document is not to be a founding document for one

particular organization but is intended to be a jumping off point for

anarchic Black radicals to cohere our diverse thoughts together. The

authors have not written this to speak for all things in anarchic Black

revolution, but we write this as an invitation to us all to put our

heads and minds together. We hope that from this document a set of

conversations and relationships can spring by which Anarkatas can then

more effectively propagandize and produce a wave of literature that

reflects even more of our perspectives. We envision that what’s

proffered here get taken up, dissected, rewritten, expanded upon, and

challenged beyond here—that this be a living document. We hope that it

is used to better inform and enrich the local Black anarchist work

already taking place. Zines, videos, memes, lexicons, podcasts,

articles— we hope to see all of this and more generated around this

document so that the growing energy for and interest in anarchic Black

radical politics can be intensified and pushed further. Our hope is that

in coming together as Anarkatas we can then work more cohesively to make

our traditions, politics, praxes, and freedom visions accessible to

everyone.

Anarkata Tradition

“Anarkata” is inspired by the rich history of Black/Afrikan politics and

resistance stretching all the way back to pre-colonial times.

Nomadic African societies created non-hierarchical formations and

intercommunal villages.

Stateless Africans used decentralized methods to defy the reaches of

African empires.

Refugees of the Saharan and Atlantic slave trades migrated across

borders and territories to avoid capture.

Black captives in the gender segregated hold of slave ships foraged

queer relationships with one another.

Seventeenth Century Black pirates in the Atlantic sailed outside the

jurisdiction of the law and bled empire of its resources.

Slaves in the Americas fled from plantations and created their own

localized maroon communities in their quest for freedom.

Slave uprisings shook colonial society and constantly threatened the

white power structure.

Black trans people continued to transgress the colonial gender binaries

imposed by white colonizers.

Black/Afrikan spiritual leaders challenged the rigid colonial norms,

defying modern gender constructs and calling forth earliest attempts at

self- determination.

Many Black Africans resisted European colonization through decentralized

guerrilla warfare.

Black women as a whole gave rise to the modern feminist movements that

challenged white supremacist patriarchy.

Black trans women in particular single-handedly birthed the queer

liberation movements of the Twentieth Century.

Race riots caused widespread damage to white property and contested the

foundations of white power even in present day.

The Black tendency to defy rigidity, borders, hierarchy, and enclosure

are at the root of the Anarkata tradition.

Black feminism has provided the critical lens for Anarkatas to

understand how our oppressions as Black people intersect to leave some

at the margins and very bottom of hierarchy, teaching us to center the

overlooked and extremely vulnerable; Queer/trans liberation has taught

Anarkatas to re-envision the way we inhabit and understand our bodies as

Black people, beyond sexual and anatomical reductions forced onto us by

colonialism and capitalism, pushing us to understand how/why our bodies

should or could perform freer relations to one another and the planet;

the Black Panther Party inspires Anarkatas to organize around the

survival, political education, and self-defense of our communities at a

grassroots level, and to integrate a range of radical contributions into

our quests for self-determination.

Pan-Africanism connects Anarkata struggles for freedom to all members of

the African community including the diaspora, understanding Black

liberation outside the confines of national borders, and tying our

bodily freedom to the liberation of our entire homeland itself from the

snares of neocolonial/military-imperial rule. Afropessimism,

antihumanism, and related frameworks help Anarkatas to understand the

implications of our symbolic exclusion from the construct of humanity,

and the way this affects who we organize with/for—ultimately challenging

us to look beyond “humanity” as grounds for that which makes us as a

people and our struggle liberation valid. Disability justice calls

Anarkatas to recognize all our corporeal and cognitive makeup as valid

and whole, and to understand our lived needs as arising not because we

are failures but because oppressive socio-ecological contexts have

closed us out of access and therefore must be eradicated if we are to

live our full unique selves and do so autonomously. Prison abolition

teaches Anarkatas that we must destroy all forms of enclosure and tear

down the very material and imagined need of them in the first place—and

that we alone are the ultimate guarantors of our safety. Finally,

formations like the Street Trans Action Revolutionaries (STAR) or the

Black Liberation Army remind Anarkatas that freedom can only be taken

through grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and revolutionary struggle.

Together, these histories and ideological influences have given what it

means to be Anarkata its shape and form. They are what ground Anarkata

politics in both its anarchistic tendencies and within the diverse

catalog of Black radical traditions. Through countless moments of

defiance and flexibility our ancestors made a way for us to imagine an

anarchic radicalism that is unmistakably Black.

Anarkata Politics

Anarkatas believe that all hierarchies subject Black people to forms of

capture, captivity, and commodification. Due to the historical processes

of African enslavement that marked and transformed African bodies into

property, chattel, and non-human merchandise, Black people have a

particular vulnerability to captivity that is anchored by our bodies

being marked as inhuman. Because of this, Anarkatas believe that all

forces of oppression experienced by Black people including white

supremacy, ableism, cisheterosexism, capitalism, colonialism, humanism,

misogynoir, transmisogynoir, and patriarchy consists of hierarchical

layers of power that place Black people in continued positions of

vulnerability to capture, enslavement, and death under colonialism and

capitalism. They form borders that cage our Black bodies in overlapping

prisons of objectification. Because of this, Anarkatas seek to destroy

and abolish all forms of hierarchical oppression. Anarkatas understand

hierarchy as always subjecting Black people to these dangers.

Anarkatas say States are formalized hierarchical structures that

primarily benefit the ruling class and centralize power to protect the

ruling class’ material interests. The modern state was invented to

secure the material interests of Western empire through the notion of

modern “sovereignty” in the Treaty of Westphalia. States uphold the

economy of Black suffering, commodification, and Afrikan dispossession

engendered through slavery and colonialism and in so doing, enable the

capture, enslavement, and securance of Black people and lands as

property. The Westphalian nation state crystallizes these anti-Black and

colonial and capitalist functions of statism by ideologically centering

the “human” citizen subject as its main concern, while excluding Black

people and rendering us as enslavable under the state. States

consolidate the power that allow for our thingification to be possible,

and depend on the police to protect and enforce its hierarchies,

codifying anti-blackness in law. Anarkatas maintain that all states are

inherently anti-Black structures of governance, ultimately incapable in

bringing Black people toward full self-determination and autonomous

community formations. Whatever provision of protection from violence

that a state (especially a Westphalian one) may provide is limited in

the face of capital and white supremacy. Anarkatas therefore link

neither national liberation, autonomous community formation, nor

self-determination for Black people to the formation of a State, and

believe that all of these can and ultimately should be developed by the

community in non-State formations. Anarkatas are against the existence

of all states everywhere due to their inherent antiblackness and

dependency on centralized power, forms of enclosure, and property

securance. We see the formation of Black nation states as a

dysfunctional, counterrevolutionary means to achieve Black liberation

because they pose serious weaknesses and do not release Black/Afrikan

people from these initial vulnerabilities. However, we recognize the

unifying role of Black nationalism in anti-colonial movements and affirm

that the continuing debate around our way forward must be worked out

among ourselves without any interference from non-Black people.

Anarkatas say that capitalism is a fundamentally genocidal and ecocidal

system of accumulation that is European in origin. Capitalism corrupts

and co-opts people’s relationships to one another and the environment

through making our bodies and labor subject to the hands of the white,

able-bodied, Christian, cisheterosexual few. The profit-driven motives

of capitalism put it on a collision course with the people and the

planet. Anarkatas understand profit gain to be a mutation of our

relationships to one another and the environment because it monetizes

our basic needs. Under capitalism, open access to the very means of

survival (and the connections to the environment that this access

entails), is foreclosed to us: instead, it is mediated by

racialized/colonial class rule. It is a hierarchical arrangement that

renders our activity in the environment and relationships to one another

as now redefined by and subject to the logic of a ruling class and their

“rights” to “property.” Their property is secured by a State or

government apparatus and its armed forces. Under the hand of the state,

a small subset of people exercise material ownership over the natural

resources of the planet, and determine who has access to the material

means of survival.

The rest of us are placed in a position where we are forced to sell our

labor for a ‘wage’ because there is no other option allowed by the

ruling class and their government protections (i.e., there is no other

way to get direct access to our material needs without coming under the

fire of the State/armed forces who are here to hold down resources for

the most powerful). The purpose of this rigged set up, and the

theft/coercion of our labor, is to make every relationship in our

society about producing and selling commodities on a market. This market

allows for constant accumulation of resources and it flattens the value

of goods through an easily quantifiable medium of exchange (currency,

money). This process seeks to commodify everything from land to water,

to food and even air. Capitalist thought tends to portray this market

based in growth and gain seeking as good for the collective and as the

best economic system our species has to offer but its basis and starting

place is in an alienation of the masses from the material means of

survival, the earthly source of our power. And, in the end, it only

truly benefits the few.

Through slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and later globalization, the

forces of capital extended their reach upon the planet and partitioned

it into sectors of industrialization, development, and undevelopment.

This creates an inherently exploitative relationship between the

industrialized global north and the underdeveloped global south, which

is the highest expression of a systematic alienation of the people from

access to and open use of the material means of survival. Anarkatas

maintain that the lynchpin of the capitalist system is this continued

wholesale theft, exploitation, and intentional underdevelopment of the

Third World by the West. The peoples of the Third World are consumed and

torn apart by the ebb and flow of world markets, which force the

production of goods by non-white laborers for extremely low costs to the

capitalists. Third World countries are pressured further to be export

countries and trash dump countries, completely dependent on exports to

remain solvent, and vulnerable to the careless disposal of toxic waste

from First World corporations and militaries that are deposited onto

indigenous lands during the production process. Administrative puppets,

state corruption, and corporate collaboration caused by

hierarchical/authoritarian aspirations to power work to keep the people

destitute and dependent on this arrangement. Third World labor is

elicited by Western corporations at extremely low prices, which drive

their overseas activities in oil, mining, agricultural, manufacturing,

and other industries that benefit Western capitalist interests. Often

times, Third World laborers can’t even afford the goods they help to

produce, and the wages that they do earn are often redirected back to

the Western capitalists via globalized consumerism.

If under capitalism, the masses are forced to sell our labor to the

forces of production in order to survive, then Black people in

particular—especially the most marginal of us—are incorporated into the

capitalist economy not as laborers/workers in the proper sense, but as

commodities ourselves, held captive by the web of commerce.

Historically, the commodification of Black people’s bodies under

enslavement provided a source of free labor that enabled the process of

state/imperial property accumulation, giving rise to capitalism in the

first place. By way of slavery, capitalism rendered us as bodies that do

not own our labor and do not have a value assigned to our labor, which

prevents us from entering into the usual worker’s relationship of

exchange where we can barter our labor for our basic needs. Black labor

under the capitalist system is always inherently of no value, precisely

because of this historical relationship of enslavement. Black labor

under capitalism is instead folded into the means of production itself,

as another resource; free for anyone to exploit or plunder at little to

no cost to them. In having our labor folded into the position of

non-human Things, Black labor is taken captive as property of the

capitalists and colonizers for their material gain. The State protects

and grounds this arrangement of normative property relations and allows

for the accumulation and cooptation of Black toil—especially labor

exerted by the most marginal. This means Black labor in the Third and

Fourth Worlds; this means prison labor, domestic labor, sex work,

emotional labor, and other forms of Black labor that are elicited

largely from femes, prisoners, QTGNC people, and others in the Black

community. When Anarkatas speak of the ‘inhuman’ Black labor, which

white supremacist capitalism systematically devalues and makes readily

available to non-Black consumers, we are centering trans women’s

struggles, sex workers, domestic laborers, and prisoner struggles. These

represent the archetypal ‘Black’ laborer who often gets relegated to the

position of the ‘unthought’ and whose super-exploitation undergirds our

collective position as a commodity within the capitalist system. They

are on the front lines of the heightened State violence all Black people

face. This makes Black labor struggle beyond ‘proletarian’; it does not

properly occupy the position of the “proletariat” as conceived by Marx.

Under a capitalist system we are not only vulnerable to exploitation,

but also to ourselves being commodified and accumulated by the

anti-Black forces of capitalist/colonial production.

The commodification of our bodies and their incorporation into the means

of production both engender and stem from a structure of antiblackness

that undergirds the logics of white supremacist capitalism. When

Anarkatas speak of antiblackness we are referring to a process resting

on a human-non-human antagonism. By this we mean that antiblackness is a

expression of the violent, exploitative relationship between humans and

the rest of the non-human world, since the dehumanizing racialization of

Black people that has marked us as ‘inhuman’ is tied to the ongoing

colonial/capitalist violation of Afrika. The modern global system and

its mass ecocide rely on what Aimé Césaire called “thing-ification”.

During slavery and colonialism this process of thingification reduced

Afrikan people’s bodies to non-human objects. Antiblackness figures into

the thingification process by symbolically marking us as inhuman and

further enabling our conversion into property. Our skin is made to carry

this marker that signifies the non-human, the monstrous, and the

extinguishable. To quote Christina Sharpe: “Black people ejected from

the state become the national symbols for the ‘less-than-human’ being

condemned to death.”

Anarkatas connect Black struggle to environmental struggle because of

Black people’s bodies being symbolically alienated from the “Human”

(i.e., structures of civilization such as State citizenship that the

idea of “human” signifies) and treated as another natural resource to be

extracted and exploited for human (white) consumption. The violent

destruction of our bodies and exploitation of the land of our ancestors

is how modern Western/capitalist ecocide (“Anthropocene”) was born.

Black/Afrikan homelands had long since been encroached upon for the

purpose of enslavement, but with the advent of European colonialism and

the taking captive of land by Western imperial States, the capitalist

arrangement transformed slave labor into both a commodity and a tool to

produce more commodities for the market, built on constant growth and

environmental devastation. Both Black people and our homelands became

reduced to a technology of profit, a mere mechanism upon which European

class rule was propped up. As Linda Brent said in Incidents in the Life

if the Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, antiblackness meant enslaved

Afrikans are “no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton

they plant, or the horses they tend.” To this day, robbery of Afrikan

resources remains crucial to how global capitalism operates. Negated

from ‘humanity’ then, and exploited as and along with the dirt or cattle

or crops—all of which have needs which go unrecognized— Black struggle

becomes the “epitome” (as Annie Olaloku-Teriba says) of alienation and

exploitation. The destruction of Afrika and Afrikan people is vital to

the Euro-colonial system of vampirism, whose technologies need

materials, labor and other resources stolen from Afrika.

The “Human” emerges as a construct that becomes the face of

antiblackness, white supremacy, and environmental destruction. Anarkatas

recognize the centrality of an anti-black and ecocidal “Human” construct

developed in the modern world as inextricably tied to colonial,

hierarchical, cisheteropatriarchal and disabling constructs. Channeling

Sylvia Wynter, we learn that the Human is an invention of European

Renaissance and Enlightenment thought that aimed to qualify and

articulate the validity of Eurocolonial capitalism’s developing class

dominations and justify the imperial/colonial theft of indigenous land

and bodies. The human construct was built primarily on earlier

Euro-Christian biases against sexuality and the material world as

satanic, which the Church used to ideologically dehumanize European

laypeople. These were then re-applied to Afrikan people’s bodies and

lands so that such laypersons could justify “humanizing” themselves

through ‘mastery’ over the satanic (Afrikan/Black people’s bodies and

lands). In this instance, Blackness becomes an ‘opposing pole’ from

which the community of ‘Man’ as a subject and a citizen of the state

with ‘rights,’ manifested. The secularization of Western thought and the

rise of Western science introduced new ways of thinking about the Human,

indexing humanness through ‘biology’ and ‘genetics.’ The scientific

quest for humanness objectified both living and dead Afrikan people’s

body parts through brutal experimentation to classify the “human” from

the “inhuman.” The definitions which ensued then rendered ‘unnatural’ or

‘subhuman’ the realities of Black gender variance, disability, fatness,

alongside the more commonly known ‘phenotypic’ features such as hair

textures, skin colors, and nose shapes associated with Afrikan people.

The “Human” construct in the modern world continues to get deployed

against Black people and all other forms of life, with horrible

consequences for the lives of the most vulnerable Black

people—especially trans and disabled Black folks.

Anarkatas reject humanism and see our liberation as tied to the

liberation of all non-human entities (actual ‘Things’) that are

adversely affected by this alienating construct and the structures of

capitalism, colonialism, and Eurocentrism which ground it. Instead of

trying to prove our humanity and be seen as humans by the white power

structure, and instead of trying to ground our liberation in

humanization as a conceptual framework and aspiration we should work

towards, Anarkatas seek to abolish the Human construct as the center of

empowerment completely, and look towards new ways of understanding being

and personhood, and ultimately new ways by which we actively tend toward

our collective transformation. In the words of Calvin Warren “as long as

we continue to invest in the value structure that renders the human the

highest, most important being in the world, we will continue to plead

for recognition and acceptance.” Anarkatas seek to forage new modes of

being where one does not need to prove their “humanness” or evoke “human

rights” to be treated with value and dignity. Our personhood cannot be

captured or indexed by humanness, and our struggle is to step out into

new waters of selfhood and relation that leave this construct behind.

Calvin Warren continues: “either we will continue this degrading quest

for human rights and incorporation or we will take a leap of faith… and

reject the terms through which we organize our existence.”

Anarkatas maintain that Black people are assigned gender differently

from the “Human,” due to the historical process of enslavement and

thingification that marked us as inhuman. Taking cues from Hortense

Spillers, Anarkatas understand that when gender is assigned to Black

people, it is not in the “Human” sense and is akin to when a “thing”

(object or piece of property) is assigned a gender. The colonizing

process wipes clean any other ontology or way of being, including our

gender/sexual diversity, particularity, and autonomy that Afrikan people

historically had before Western invasion. They did this in order to

racialize—and thus dehumanize—us. In this process of redefinition and

racialization, Black people’s bodies are “ungendered”—rendered as an

abnormal canvas for the white patriarch to deposit a gender assignment

onto us. Therefore, Black people experience the process of gender

assignment as an anti-Black process grounded in histories of capture and

extreme forms of anti-Black violence. For this reason, Anarkata

understands gender as always being racialized, and racialization as

always gendered.

Anarkatas believe, however, that gender as a social construct can be a

powerful means of self-making and reclamation of bodily autonomy. In

this way, gender can be repurposed to defy the rigid confines of the

traditional, colonial gender binary. In the hands of patriarchal

capitalist society, however, gender is used to produce sexual

hierarchies based on a reductive vision of sexual anatomy (and genetics)

that violently assigns worth and divides labor among individuals. The

state assigns gender to people’s bodies without their consent, and

polices the borders of the gender binary and gender expression through

violence, law, infrastructure, and propaganda. Under this oppression,

Afrikan/Black people, especially trans women and all other non-men are

systematically exploited and subjected to endless abuses by those who

are called men.

Anarkatas emphasize that trans and gender nonconforming Black people are

those most affected by this colonial imposition of gender. In fact,

Black queer people are the primary target of its inception, especially

Black trans women, who are scapegoated as the quintessence or highest

example of presumed inhuman ‘negro depravity’ (as was said of Frances

Thompson after the brutal misogynoiristic Memphis Massacre of

1866)—which is taken from the Euro-Christian sexual biases inherited by

the “Human” construct. While precolonial Afrika was by no means a

monolith in terms of gender/sexual diversity, many of our ancestors had

ways of being that would today be rendered trans, gender non-conforming,

queer. Often times, spiritual leaders in Afrikan traditions were what

would today be considered queer, trans, gender nonconforming. Europeans

encountered this and so used religion to demonize transness, gender

nonconformity, and queerness in order to destroy cultural practices that

helped Afrikan people form community. This way, colonizers could

successfully impose a hierarchical redefinition of our people that

dislocate us from vital cultural and spiritual sites of strength, aiding

in their imperial capture of land and body. The gender construct emerges

as a binary under colonialism to clear away populations and help advance

Western capitalist interests in violating our lands and bodies and

reducing us all to mechanisms of profit.

It is important for Anarkatas to emphasize Moya Bailey’s concept of

‘misogynoir’ when understanding that modern gender is a

colonial/racialized imposition. If we look to Carl Linnaeus’

contributions to Western scientific ‘taxonomy’ as an example, we can

analyze the Linnaean categorization of the biosphere into different

kingdoms (plant and animal), phyla, classes, etc.—and we will find that

Linnaeus also developed racist ‘taxonomies’ for our species in

particular. In that process, he developed a dehumanizing classification

of Black/Afrikan people that relied on a gendered objectification of

those he marked as Afrikan women.

Furthermore, the hypersexualization of our bodies as Black people within

the gender-based tropes (i.e. the mammy, jezebel, angry/strong Black

woman/man) is an expression of the fact that misogynoir structures and

is central to the colonial ungendering process. That Black “gender”

cannot be dissociated from a construction of us as criminally,

abnormally, or predatorily hypersexual—whereas white “gender” is

considered normal—originates from slavery and demonstrates the violence

of the gender binary and its role in upholding carceral and colonial

control over us. Anarkatas maintain that Black womanhood is at the

center of this hypersexualized imposition of gender by which Afrikan

people have been racialized and dehumanized. Aside from Linneaus’ racist

taxonomies, we can also look to the violence against Sarah Baartman and

the objectification and animalizing of her people (Khoikhoi women) by

which so many misogynoirist tropes about Black women’s bodies and

sexualities have been created. It is these which have continued to be

used to justify racist/capitalist violence against Black people writ

large.

Anarkatas also take cues from Trudy of Gradient Lair’s addition to Moya

Bailey’s term by foregrounding transmisogynoir in how we understand what

violence structures and is at the heart of the colonial ungendering

process. Therefore, if Anarkatas say that gender is central to Black

dehumanization and racialization, and that the objectification of

Afrikan womanhood is at the center of that colonial ungendering process,

we also mean that transness and trans womanhood is the key to how we can

trace (and, as C. Riley Snorton called it “transect,”) this Black

women’s gender struggle most accurately and effectively. Saidiya Hartman

says that Black women’s labor makes apparent the gender-nonconformity of

Black community and struggle; and Spillers encourages Black resistance

to embrace the subversive power that the ungendering of Black women

signifies. Yet, we can and should start from Black transness and Black

gender variance when analyzing Black gendered violence, lest we fail to

confront colonial cisheterosexism in our analysis and center cis people.

Centering Black trans women here is vital to our analysis because trans

and gender nonconforming Black folk are the most isolated by the gender

binary. Again, the binary was imposed to enforce divide and rule through

hierarchy, to dehumanize and justify domination, and to dislocate us

from communities of resistance and QTGNC leadership. Through it, white

supremacy makes a criminalizing and demonizing spectre of Black trans

women—who become the target of Euro-Christian sexual biases that the

‘Human’ construct was originally measured against. Colonialism uses this

spectre as a fulcrum against Black liberation writ large.

The above stated is central to how Anarkatas understand masculinism

among Black men. Anarkatas say that in this milieu—where gender is

imposed by the colonizer, to racialize and dehumanize us and thus divide

us by isolating and demonizing and objectifying trans women, all to

secure imperial interests—Black people who are assigned to the status of

“men” get positioned to derive degrees of psychological and even

material benefit from being in proximity to white supremacy’s inherently

patriarchal, sexist, transphobic structure. This is true even if they

will never be considered properly “man” by the white patriarch and are

thus unable to hold the status of man in the “Human” sense of the word.

That position of Black men, as being “man yet not,” is expressly built

into the gender system to keep Black people oppressed as a whole through

divide and rule. Black men who align with this assignment of “manhood”

are intentionally conditioned to aspire toward the idealized “apex” of

that gender construct (which is tied to capitalism’s definitions of Man

such as the breadwinner and husband for example). And since white

humanism and capitalist oppression negate full participation in those

roles, masculine aspirations to be (white) (hu)men are, by design, the

single biggest internal problem/contradiction faced by our communities.

Because Black men then insist on reclaiming something that is constantly

refused to them. This produces queermisia and (trans)misogynoir, where

trans women in particular are marked as “treacherous” (as Trudy from

Gradient Lair points out) to Black cis men’s supposed right to power and

control under capitalism and the State, and threatening to their

masculinist values. Cis men become invested in a hierarchy that causes

them to continue to sabotage Black revolutionary struggle, defending the

fictions of masculinity and maleness while conflating humanness with

authority. In doing so, they expose all Black people to forms of

violence, abuse, and danger by buying into colonial transmisogynoir and

its uses instead of acting against it in solidarity with Black trans

women.

Institutionalized gender therefore limits the bodily autonomy of all

people because it is colonial in origin and invented as a means of

abetting the dehumanizing process of Afrikan racialization—and

justifying the taking captive our land and bodies. Yet, trans liberation

and gender autonomy upend the logics of racialized biological

“difference” that modern gender signifies, and pose a challenge to

forced sexual roles that capitalism requires for its exploitation of our

land and bodies. Decolonization means struggling for all of us as Black

people to have the autonomy to choose and define our own gender

expression for ourselves, change gender expressions at will, create new

genders or opt out of gender completely. Gender/sexual liberation within

the decolonization project also means the freedom to establish

alternative models of kinship and relating, and a recognition that our

capacity for altering our conditions and for building strong communities

is not determined by (values created around) our biology or sexual

ontology. The basis of humanism in this sense is rejected by Queer

Anarkatas. Queer, trans and gender non-conforming Black people are thus

reclaiming our Black bodies beyond the snares of slavery. And the

movements we lead is proof that Black people should quickly abandon

trying to reclaim the authority of white power’s fallacious appeals to

human biological “nature” that modern gender/sexual constructs uphold.

Such authority was only invented for the express purpose of domination,

Euro-cultural hegemony, and class rule.

Ableism is another hierarchy that is perpetuated by the state and used

on a structural level to mark the capitalist value of our bodies along

bases of physical and psychological capability. The production needs of

capitalism orient themselves around an idealized “abled” body, and

structurally accommodates this body (as “the worker” and “the citizen”),

using appeals to this body through propaganda in order to push forward

capitalism. The Western myth of meritocracy is an ablest piece of

propaganda that suggests hard work will be rewarded by capitalism, while

completely disregarding disabled individuals and rendering them as

disposable. Anarkata believes that, because Black people are rendered as

inhuman under white supremacy, and because our incorporation into

capitalism was through slavery, the value of our bodies are entirely

based on our labor output and use-value. Black people’s bodies have been

valued completely on the bases of labor output and under slavery has

been stretched to its absolute limits, maimed, and brutalized until our

bodies was no longer “able” and were disposed of.

The oppressive conditions of Black existence not only demanded (and

continue to demand) that Black people’s bodies be “able bodied” for the

purposes of white capitalist interests, but also strain disabled Black

bodies to the brink of destruction. The traumas of white terror were/are

often the very factors that produce disabilities in some Black people

and exacerbate preexisting conditions in others. Disabled Black people

experience ableism on a continuum of anti-Black violence, where State

mistreatment and paternalism toward us is a direct consequence of

slavery and infinitely tied to carceral formations across the colonial

world. In this milieu, disabled Black people are constantly read as

monstrosity, in need of being forcibly warehoused, deemed a negligible

drain on resources that should be neutralized. Black disabled people are

marked as damaged property while also being subjected to the extraneous

circumstances that come with living under white supremacist capitalism.

Racial dehumanization means Black disabilities are erased in the popular

imagination because we are regarded as one with other Things that

deserve to be structurally broken down and exploited.

The oppression of all Black people, the negation of Black humanity, and

how it engenders queerphobia, anti-fatness, human-centrism— is all

figured through disablism. When colonizers built a ‘scientific’

framework over the Euro-Christian biases they used to dehumanize us, the

brutal experiments practiced on our body parts, whether we were dead or

alive, in order to define the Human as a being ‘able’ to have rulership

within capitalism/the State, relied on disablist understandings of

Afrikan ‘difference.’ The notion of an ‘abled’ body and ‘abled’ mind was

constructed by colonial European understandings of what constitutes a

‘proper’ human body— and what kind of body is deserving of rights and

subjecthood. And that propriety is based in justifying colonialist

accumulation of resources and people as property—and thus defining who

has ‘right’ under the State to participate in class rule and capitalism.

Disablism is tied to Humanism because some lived, corporeal needs and

realities are pushed aside, demonized as unnatural or unholy and outside

of the fold of Man as a State subject. Colonizers objectified Afrikan

people’s bodies and marked us as criminally hypersexual in this

disablist schema. Colonizers deemed runaway slaves in pursuit of freedom

as ‘crazy’ in this disablist schema. Today, Afrikan ways of life are

marked as deviant from cognitive normativity, dismissed as merely

‘delusional.’ Black QTGNC people are often deemed ‘delusional’ for

taking autonomy over our own identities, ontology, and biology back from

oppressive society. Black girls get marked ‘fast’ as if they are all

inherently sexual and ‘abnormal’ in their (a)sexuality. Popular visions

of intelligence and sentience always exclude Black people, marking us as

unable to think or feel. This has adverse consequences for those of us

who have medical needs and disabilities—because these then get ignored,

especially for trans women. Most grotesquely, we find in the prisons an

overwhelming number of disabled people, whose needs are overlooked or

even made worse by the toxic and abusive carceral environment. All the

while, Black people are thought of as deserving the prison and its

violences for supposedly having an ‘insane’ nature that makes us

criminal. Disablism is central to upholding colonial arrogance over the

‘inhuman’ labor resource that white supremacy and antiblackness reduces

our people’s bodies to.

Anarkata maintains that disability justice is about the bodily autonomy

of our people outside of slavery and imperialism. Disability justice

says that our destitute conditions are not because something is innately

wrong with us and our bodies/minds, but because violent, hierarchical

structures force us out of our capacity to meet our needs. Anarkatas

affirm that we will never be free until all Black people, especially

disabled people, are free to practice bodily autonomy and meet our needs

with the full support of the Black community. Anarkatas push disability

justice because we know our support will and can come from us, not the

State. This support will recognize our whole persons and selves however

we are shaped or may change and work to affirm us, by us, for us. This

support will push us beyond subjection to the State and capitalism’s

reduction of us to an inhuman labor resource by calling us to reclaim

our full selves and struggle for our needs by our own hands. This

support is ecopolitical because in striving to meet our needs we will

then need restoration with our environment, in order to get the material

means of survival in that environment. And we will need to understand

our biology and neurology within the complexity that is the ecological

world, beyond reductions imposed by our class/colonial enemies.

Anarkatas say that disability justice is ultimately about people power

in its clearest sense, and see it as central to all of the political

positions we espouse here.

Our insistence on freedom for all Black people extends to all members of

the African diaspora and is explicitly pan-African in its vision. We

recognize that we are all connected due to the histories of colonialism,

the slave trade, and widescale migration (voluntary or otherwise) which

have dispersed people of African descent all across the globe. The

children of Africa have encountered anti-Black violence wherever we have

gone due to these collective histories that have influenced the ways in

which Black people’s bodies are read and how the Black symbolic appears

in hegemonic systems all over the world. We maintain that antiblackness

both precedes and exceeds the emergence of the West through forms such

as the presence of African slavery in the Arab world, the colonization

of Northern Africa by the Roman Empire, and ultimately the Abrahamic

religious ideology of Hamitism. But we recognize that it has been

redefined and consolidated through the Western emergence of white

supremacy and racial science. The catastrophic events of Atlantic

chattel slavery rendered the Black African a symbol of non-human

property under colonialism. This provided the material and ideological

foundations for the capitalist exploitation, imperialism, and

colonization of the African continent by the European powers. The

pillaging of the continent of Africa, using the “Motherland” as ‘the

belly’ of the modern world and a continental plantation have been done

for the material benefit of those in power. For this reason, we feel a

kinship with and seek to destroy Empire’s hold on the continent of

Africa and the people of the African diaspora world-wide. Unless all

Black people everywhere are liberated, and unless the African continent

is released from its bondage, none of us are free.

Finally, we take Anarkata politics to be relevant to Pan Afrikan

liberation—the liberation of Black peoples worldwide—in an age of

massive climate instability. If Black struggle and liberation of the

planet are intertwined, then environmental issues force us to center

Black/Afrikan people suffering under Western imperialism and

neocolonialism. We put Afrika at the center of the extractive processes

of capital that uphold global ecocide. Afrika must be emancipated and

those who are unjustly domesticated in the belly of the beast, in the

imperial core that is the First World capitalist parasite (which feeds

off of Afrika and the Third World), have a duty to fight against the

militarism and imperialism that have pushed the planet to disaster. All

of us must free ourselves of the ‘Anthropocene’—of the colonial

(hu)Man’s violent, capitalist transformation of the planet.

We recognize the unmatched ecological devastation of the planet as a

result of colonial systems that have a unique and disproportionate

impact on Black people of the Global South. We see the major role the

Amerikkkan military and Amerikkkan corporations have played in the

constant production and exploitation of this global Black vulnerability

to environmental death and destruction. We also see that climate

catastrophe is posing a challenge to westphalian Statehoods and borders

as a whole, intensifying migrations and threatening resources the world

over, and bringing with it increased risks of authoritarianism and

ethnonationalism. We thus envision a “green” movement that is firmly

anti-imperial and Pan Afrikan in its outlook and is grounded in Anarkata

politics. Starting from increased attention to environmental racism, and

the uneven impact of ecological hazards on Black people, our praxis

centers radical solutions which connect localized Black struggles to

that of Black people across all nations and borders, and which look to

solutions that unite us in reclamation and restoration of the

planet—connecting all the people to the earthly source of our power.

Anarkata Praxis

Anarkata praxis seeks to consolidate a revolutionary proposition around

already existing cultures of opposition in Black/Afrikan life. Anarkata

praxis strives to combat transmisogynoir, homophobia, and patriarchy

through prioritizing the voices and leadership of trans Black women and

non-men as crucial to the survival of our communities. Hierarchy anchors

the way that Black people can be held captive, making Black trans women

and other non-men exposed to more extreme vulnerabilities and violences.

They must be at the center of Anarkata struggle in the total liberation

of all Black people. Anarkatas understand Black trans women as being

positioned at the very bottom of the gender hierarchy and as a result

are subjected to large amounts of violence, while Black cis men are at

the top of the gender hierarchy in the Black community and experience

the most benefits relative to other members of the Black community.

Because of this, it is crucial and of utmost importance that Black trans

women and Black QTGNC people are broadly supported and cultivated as

leaders of revolution. By leadership, we mean respected and affirmed in

our capacity and skill to readily take initiative in matters concerning

Black liberation, including the drive to spread such capacity and skills

so as to spread leadership (ex: the ways Black Queer folk organically

intervene in houselessness by forming alternate homeplaces).

Anarkata praxis seeks to disrupt and undermine the gender hierarchy

where ever possible by decentering Black cis men from the focal point of

Black organizing spaces to uncover the violence affecting the most

marginalized of the Black community. Anarkatas prioritize organizing

work around issues directly affecting trans Black women and Black

non-men and inherently link it to all other issues affecting Black

people as a whole. Anarkata praxis is intentional about addressing,

unpacking, and dismantling (trans)misogynoir, homophobia, and patriarchy

as they crop up in our spaces and organizing. We defend the formation of

autonomous spaces that are exclusively for Black trans women, and/or

Black non-men. Anarkatas support and advance the mutual aid of Black

trans women, trans men, and Black gender non-conforming individuals via

food, money, skills, and other means. Given the prevalence of sexual

violence, assault, and murder visited on Black non-men, Anarkatas

believe that the survival of the most vulnerable in our community should

be secured at all costs and by any means necessary, including the use of

armed self-defense.

Anarkata praxis seeks to disrupt and undermine ableism through removing

abled bodies from the center of our analysis, affirming body positivity,

mental health awareness, and developing a Black culture of accommodation

for all bodies. Through praxis Anarkatas seek to undermine the

hierarchical value systems that assign worth based on ability and force

Black bodies to live up to the expectations of being strong abled-bodied

property. Anarkatas affirm the mutual aid of disabled individuals and

especially Black trans women, and Black gender non-conforming disabled

individuals. Anarkatas hope to erase the stigma of disability in the

Black community that was born of colonialism and bring awareness to how

both physical and mental disabilities exist within our communities and

affect our kinfolk. We maintain that Black people will never be free

until all members of our community are free and can exercise their

bodily autonomy, including through access to their corporeal and

cognitive needs.

A key component of Anarkata praxis involves organizing for our survival

through the use of mutual aid. We understand mutual aid as an African

method of collective support for our communities that Black people have

practiced since precolonial times. It involves the distribution of

money, food, water, services, skills, medical care, shelter, and other

necessities to those who require them. In the vein of STAR House or even

the Black Panther Party survival programs we believe that the immediate

material needs of our communities must be the foundation of any Black

organizing work. Our revolutionary potential and ability to fight

oppression is dependent on the health and safety of our communities. We

support the mutual aid of all Black people, especially disabled people,

trans women, and gender non-conforming Black people. Anarkatas

prioritize the mutual aid of poor and working class Black people and of

homeless Black people.

Anarkatas see Black mutual aid as directly undermining the state’s

social welfare programs which have always severely underserved Black

people, kept us in poverty, and fostered material dependence on the very

State which exploits us. Anarkata insists that we must support our own

communities and provide our own needs independent of the state.

Anarkata praxis affirms the self-defense of our communities by any means

necessary, including armed self-defense. Anarkatas see self-defense as

an integral part of our survival that involves protection from both

external and internal threats. The internal threats to the Black

community consist of homophobic and transphobic violence, sexual

violence, sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, gang violence,

and other predatory elements that prey on the most vulnerable in our

communities. These predatory elements are either dismissed as being

characteristic of the Black community, or even encouraged and enabled by

the State and police departments through purposeful negligence; what

Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls structural abandonment. Internal threats also

include Entreprenegroes, sell-outs, ‘Black capitalists’ and neocolonial

puppets and traitors who operate in the interests of white property and

white power, and who ultimately put their individual economic success

above the safety of everyone else, while claiming that their ruling

class aspirations will trickle down to the masses. Anarkatas say all

such predatory elements in our communities work in tandem with policing

to contain us in destitution and undermine local autonomy. Because we

cannot trust the police and the State to serve or protect us in this

regard, it is up to us to build out our capacity to deal with internal

threats ourselves in order to support the health and safety of our

communities. Black self-defense for these internal threats might include

“keep the peace” brigades, domestic violence intervention, communal

foster care, emergency shelter for abuse victims, localized emergency

response crews, martial arts classes, armed QTGNC brigades, freedom

schools that protect our kids from the school-to-prison pipeline, modern

underground railroads, and communal arms training. It is especially

crucial for Black QTGNC folx and other nonmen among us to be armed (if

they so choose) because they constitute the group most exposed to

internal violence in our communities. We want to emphasize that only

defense against these internal threats will enable us to adequately

defend against the police and all the other external forces that seek to

kill us. Any praxis which leaves these internal contradictions

unaddressed will never bring about liberation for the trans, disabled,

sex workers, homeless, migrants, and other super exploited members of

our community. Anarkatas say we must show up for our people ourselves.

We must be vigilant of law enforcement who occupy our communities as

well as the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, neo confederates, state militia,

mass shooters, and all other white vigilantes that seek nothing less

than our destruction and containment. Black self-defense for these

external threats involve a range of methods that might include police

watch groups, self-defense brigades, martial arts classes, and community

arms trainings. As the neo fascist climate continues to promote the rise

of white nationalisms, knowledge of the enemy is very important, and it

is imperative that we can identify the particular nuances of these

groups, who they are, and how they function. White vigilante groups are

not monolithic, and are not as unified as they appear to be. Each has

particular ideological differences and disagreements that can be

exploited by us to play these groupings against each other. This kind of

subterfuge is another aspect of Black self-defense that we support as

Anarkatas calling back to the Anansian role of the trickster. Subterfuge

could take the form of false flagging, fake news, false propagandizing,

misinformation, infiltration and other means. The building out of our

self-defense capacities coupled with subterfuge, can forestall and

redirect white supremacist violence away from our communities and back

towards our enemies.

Anarkata praxis affirms the use of extralegal activity as a means to

achieve Black liberation. Because law depends on and codifies the

anti-Black functions of property acquisition, Black criminality, and

white terror, Anarkata sees all significant revolutionary struggle for

Black liberation as inherently criminalized by the State. Where the law

functions to adjudicate matters concerning human subjects, we realize

that Blackness is always criminalized under the state precisely because

we are marked as inhuman and our bodies are always already outside of

the law regardless of whether we are being lawful or not. To be Black is

to have one’s very being, (one’s joys, hopes, peace, survival) outlawed

by the state. This outlawed status not only provided the legal grounding

for slavery, but is the legal impetus behind our bodies being targeted

for continued mass incarceration, harassment by law enforcement and

white citizens. It is the reason why the cops are so readily called on

Black people by white citizens, when no real reason exists. In being the

legal exclusion that is rendered lawless under white supremacy, we

cannot ever depend on the law to address our own injuries done to us,

and this is why the law is unavailable to us as a means to obtain

justice or achieve freedom. In the words of Calvin Warren the law

“recognizes the black only in its destruction, and this destruction is

required for legal intelligibility. Thus, something like black redress

is outside of the law’s jurisdiction to the extent that the aim of

redress is restorative, and restoring black being is not only

impossible, but antithetical to the law’s aim.” We understand the white

court of law as an illegitimate colonizing institution and reject it as

having legitimate jurisdiction over Black bodies. The fugitive nature of

Blackness, the inherent outlawing of our bodies by the state and our

positionality as being already outside of the law, gives rise to a Black

illegalism where extralegal activities to further our survival are

foregrounded. For Anarkatas, illegalism does not support all Black

criminal activity; only the kind that pushes forward revolutionary

struggle and promotes the continued survival of our communities.

In this same vein, alongside the emphasis on mutual aid, Anarkatas also

recognize theft as a logical response to the conditions of oppression

that the people will organically turn toward as a means not only to

secure the resources needed for our survival, but undermine the forces

of white supremacist capitalism. Since our people and resources have

been systematically plundered from the African continent by the West,

and since we will never legally gain the reparations that are owed to us

because the injury done to Black people is both illegible to the law and

cannot be properly calculated, Anarkatas say that Black people can and

should pursue every means to reclaim those reparations from white people

for the damages done from slavery and colonialism, including extralegal

activities. Anarkatas do not support stealing from our own people, and

certainly not from our most vulnerable community members. We also do not

support capitalist exploitation of our people by our own people’s hands,

which is also stealing from our community. We do however support the

looting, petty theft, and expropriation of large-scale corporations,

fortune 500 companies, state institutions, gentrifying storefronts, and

other colonizing industries. Moreover, Anarkatas defend the need for

militancy in our push for accessibility, including in the expropriation

of necessary medical supplies to support our Black elderly, Black

disabled, Black trans women, and all others in our community who need

them by any means necessary. The pursuit of reparations through

extralegal means, the expropriation of white institutions and the

redistribution of those resources to our communities is strong Anarkata

praxis.

Anarkatas see rioting to be an understandable response to the continued

racism, oppression, and exploitation Black people are subjected to under

the state—which the people will organically turn toward. For centuries,

it has been an expression of our discontent with the intolerable

conditions of Black life. Within that history, we have also observed

rioting as a means to both expropriate and redistribute resources to our

communities, and cause widespread damage to white property. We do not

support the looting or destruction of poor and working class Black

communities and advise against this. However, Anarkatas recognize that

rioting has been a technology used by our people in strategic ways to

forestall gentrification, destroy white property, dislocate occupying

forces in our communities, sabotage capitalist interests, sustain

revolutionary movements and redistribute resources to our communities.

We recognize that wherever it occurs, rioting is most revolutionary and

has the best praxis when used in these strategic ways. Anarkatas do not

condone riot shaming of our people, and instead see rioting as a

tradition of collective dissent belonging to the legacy of Black

resistance throughout our history.

Sabotage is another aspect of Anarkata praxis that is dynamic and useful

in a variety of ways to push forward Black liberation in our

communities. Since the days of slavery, Black people have been

conducting sabotage to resist the terms of our bondage, intentionally

undermine capitalist production, and conduct revolutionary struggle.

Sabotage encompasses a wide array of Black transgressive and extralegal

activities we might engage in, and can include anything from petty

theft, to massive worker strikes. It is a decentralized activity that

anyone can carry out at any time. There are five main categories of

sabotage relevant to Black liberation. Cyber sabotage involves the

intentional tampering of computer and network systems and hardware,

where communication sabotage involves the disruption of the flow of

information via correspondence, email, phone, and spreading of

misinformation. Industrial sabotage involves activities that disrupt the

flow of capitalist production and are conducted by workers and

consumers.

Infrastructural sabotage are any activities that disturb the material

systems and functions of institutions, structures, roadways, and

equipment. Finally, military sabotage is any activity done to disrupt

the police and military’s ability to act. The use of these methods of

sabotage done either independently or coordinated with other activities

are generally good praxis as long as they are conducted responsibly.

Anarkatas also understand the use of sabotage to be an inevitable

response to our oppression as people struggle to obtain resources,

protect our communities, undermine capitalism, resist law enforcement

and other occupying forces, and wage revolutionary struggle against the

oppressor.

Anarkatas believe that Black people have a right to fight for our

liberation through armed revolutionary struggle because the position we

are forced into as a people make armed conflict inevitable. So long as

the artifices of the white supremacist state continue to stand, Black

communities will always be antagonized by forms of white terror and

state violence. In the words of the Black Liberation Army “we must not

only build alternative social, economic, and political institutions, but

we must intentionally sabotage, overload, and destroy existing ruling

class institutions in the process”. The development of a Black armed

front is a logical and valid response aimed at abolishing the order of

oppression from our communities and carrying out the revolutionary

program of the people. We believe that differing political

circumstances, climate, geography, and local conditions will all

determine the character and shape of an armed movement in any given

locality, but that there should be a few key features. The armed front

should emanate from our people, be beholden to our people, and be

supported by our people. Such an armed front should be free of hierarchy

and honor the leadership and participation of women and nonmen who

desire to pick up arms and enter in the struggle. The toxic gun culture

that incubates in armed cadres should be actively abolished and replaced

with a culture of revolutionary love. The armed front should conduct its

activities underground in order to minimize counterinsurgency measures

and it should consist of small groups of fighters in order to minimize

infiltration. Small groupings of fighters also increase the speed,

flexibility and responsiveness of the front as a whole. Employing

guerrilla tactics, such groupings might wage revolution horizontally,

operating autonomously and collaborating with each other across

groupings without a centralized axis. Finally, its activities should not

be irresponsible lest it put our people in immediate danger. During the

later stages of revolutionary struggle, armed movements would be key in

liberating territories, establishing autonomous zones, and striking

decisive blows to the white power structure.

However, Anarkata is expressly against vanguardism and understands the

vanguard as counterrevolutionary in so far as it inhibits the

revolutionary potential of the people and fosters political dependency

on the vanguard. Likewise, we reject democratic centralism and see it as

an authoritarian manner of organizing designed to create leadership

hierarchies and chains of command within the cadre. Taking seriously the

lessons from Black nationalist and pan-Africanist groups in the past

such as the Black Panther Party, the African National Congress (ANC),

and the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), we see democratic centralism as

a means to consolidate power for high ranking members of the cadre and

forecloses the possibility of any further debate for those members of

the cadre that are excluded from the decision-making process. Absolute,

uncritical loyalty to the mandates of a political organization and its

leadership (even after a “democratic” decision-making process) is not

“principled” or “disciplined” but authoritarian and dangerous. As Black

anarchist Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin pointed out “democratic centralism poses

as a form of inner party democracy, but is really just a hierarchy by

which each member of a party is subordinate to a higher member”. We

believe that national committees, national leadership, and all other

centralized political formations are obsolete and only get in the way of

the necessary work that is done on the ground by local organizers

familiar with the specificities of their communities. Finally, we

understand centralized organization as always being a susceptible target

to attacks by the state. We believe that the centralized nature of Black

organizations in the past have contributed to those organizations being

easily compromised by counter insurgency measures.

Anarkatas take cues from our ancestor Ella Baker who said that “strong

people don’t need leaders,” and take the position that, rather than lead

the people, the purpose of a truly revolutionary organization is to be

of the people; to help people find their own strength, and empower the

people to lead themselves. Anarkatas are interested in helping develop

strong people, and by strength we also mean the recognition that

liberation for all Black people is realized in the ways we actively and

consciously advance the total freedom of one another, especially in

affirming and centering and defending trans women, disabled folx, and

the most marginal. The people must be made to understand, as Fanon said,

that we are our own magic hands—and that our success comes from the ways

we ride for each other, and not from top-down hierarchical authority

(especially if that authority is coming from cishets). Rather than

vanguardism, we believe in bringing all power to all the people—and not

their proxies. Anarkatas believe the people have the power to liberate

themselves and that revolution must come from below. Anarkatas believe

not in the absence of leadership, but that leadership should be organic,

contextual, situational, temporary, and aimed at nurturing the masses

and facilitating the masses towards fuller utilization of their own

power and potential. A huge part of this is the intentional

proliferation of leadership knowledge and skills. This gives space for

the inexperienced to develop leadership skills and principled rootedness

in the need to support the most vulnerable—which improves the collective

strength, responsiveness, mobility and flexibility of our people. For

us, the goal of revolution is to support our community in becoming a

well-informed, radicalized, autonomous, and self-sustaining mass.

To this end, Anarkatas consider the political education of our people as

tantamount to our growth and success because it not only plays a key

part in the political development of the people, but allows us to make

well-informed, principled and responsible decisions regarding our

liberation. It increases our ability to act on our own and in

collaboration with others regarding matters of liberation and provides a

foundation for doing so. Without political education, our efforts would

dissolve into baseless, unprincipled chaos. In this way, political

education provides the very conditions of possibility that support our

people in the use of our autonomy. We see political education as

consisting of two components: conscientization and radicalization.

Conscientization is a process that makes use of practical, theoretical,

and experiential knowledge to raise the consciousness level of people

(our understanding of the totality of the situation we are in, including

its origins and different iterations). Radicalization is the process

that uses practical, theoretical, and experiential knowledge to raise a

people’s capacity to act (our drive to fight and to organize against the

situation we are in, encompassing its ideological and structural

makeup). Together the processes of conscientization and radicalization

unlock the revolutionary potential of a people. Revolutionary potential

is the field of possibility where we fully realize our collective

strength, creativity, and capacity to act in the transformation of our

external and internal conditions. Anarkata maintains that the

conscientization and radicalization of our people through political

education will ensure that Black people realize our revolutionary

potential. We want to empower ourselves not only to lead (for)

ourselves, but to do so in a responsible and educated manner.

Anarkatas affirm the mobilization of mass movements when it is in

service to local organizing. Mobilizing is often an organic response to

outrage at our conditions of oppression and can garner momentum,

attention, and activity around a particular issue. Although mobilization

can be useful to agitate for immediate gains, it is even more effective

as a tool of conscientization and radicalization. It can be used to

spread revolutionary ideas and inspire our people to act. The means in

which mobilization provides opportunities for collective political

education is by far the most worthwhile aspect it offers us. It is used

well alongside insurgent activities and can gradually escalate political

conflict, aiding in the conscientization and radicalization process. In

this way, we see it as a powerful organizing instrument, one important

for building the kind of popular support and momentum that is needed to

support other activities. However, mobilization without the proper

channels of organized local activity to ground it, are largely

unsustainable, ineffective and susceptible to institutional cooptation.

Taking cues from Kwame Ture, all mobilization must be rooted in

genuinely radical organization that is relevant to the specific issues

Black people face across localities.

Anarkata’s approach to organization emphasizes localization,

decentralization, horizontalism, and flexibility. We understand

localization as the development of small, independent autonomous groups

that organize around local issues in their respective communities.

Decentralization is the cross collaboration of those local groupings who

come together to form an autonomous Anarkata network, but still operate

independently and freely associate with the network. Horizontalism is

the flattening out of hierarchical relationships across and within both

local and broader network levels, as well as the exchange of mutual aid

and resources across these levels—which includes the intentional

proliferation of leadership capacity and skills. Flexibility is the

process of figuring out when/how to erect or disband more or less rigid

organizational formations in response to different situations. Together,

these four allow us to minimize hierarchical power within our

organizations and promote the highest levels of autonomy and direct

democracy, and to keep our organized participation in movements

responsive to contextual needs.

Free association is the basis of Anarkata organizational frameworks,

which value the autonomy of both individuals and groups. Members of the

local group are free to choose how they might participate within the

group and local groups have the autonomy to decide how they interact and

participate within the network. Leadership arises within the group on a

contextual basis as is necessary, and when it does, that leadership is

beholden to the group as a whole and accountable to it. We understand

this approach to leadership as free initiative. Any member of the group

is free to take the initiative in any instance where it is necessary for

the group, including taking the lead or fulfilling a role or task. Once

the initiative is taken, the member is held responsible for it by the

group. Likewise, local groups exercise free initiative within the

Anarkata network and might take the lead on collaborative efforts across

local groupings or efforts that involve the network as a whole. Our use

of free association and free initiative are expressions of our emphasis

on autonomy and are the building blocks of Anarkata organizational

dynamics.

To What End? The End of the World

This world we have come to know, the world which was born out of the

destruction of Africa and the emergence of the Black, born of the

ungendering of our bodies and their transformation into property, birth

out of the free labor and sweat of our ancestors, as Frantz Fanon put

it, this Manichean world must finally come to an end.

It is a world divided into compartments, borders and partitions, where

the ordering principle is captivity and extreme forms violence.

It is a world of cisheterosexual domination, white supremacist

patriarchy, and ableist oppression.

It is a world of military occupations, multinational corporations,

prisons and modern-day plantations.

It is a world of universalized white symbolisms, theologies and

philosophies.

It is a world that is white, where Western imperialism and colonialism

have greatly extended the reach of the West with catastrophic results

for third world people and for the environment.

It is a world where capitalist extraction of resources and the pollution

left in its wake threaten to hurl us towards climate disaster.

This is the world we have inherited and the world in which we are

fighting to survive. What we are fighting for, (and to what end) is not

to make this world we inherited better, improve upon its structures, or

even to change it in a radical sense. Our end goal is to end it, that is

to say, its end is our beginning.

This world of modernity, the world that slavery, capitalism, and

colonialism built, rests on top of the material Earth, but is not of the

Earth. The world-making processes of capitalism, colonialism, and

imperialism have racialized, gendered, objectified and ravaged the

Earth, transforming it into the raw materials for capital itself. In

turn, capitalism has tried to naturalize its logics, claiming that the

violence and aggression at the center of its processes are governed by

the same laws as the natural world. The social Darwinist notion that the

Earth is governed by the “survival of the fittest” is another piece of

capitalist propaganda used to justify colonial exploitation by extending

and conflating the ordering principles of the world with that of the

environment. But we say the “Earth” and the “world” are two

fundamentally different things that are diametrically opposed: one is

exploited and degraded to fuel the continued existence of the other. The

Earth is a sustainable collection of interconnected ecosystems, the

world is an unsustainable mass of structures and institutions driven by

consumption and exploitation. The Earth is a living, breathing organism,

where the world is a social invention, a man-made parasite that feeds

upon the Earth and produces the human as its only subject at the center

of the world. Put differently, the popular sentiment that “the world is

cruel” is not a discourse on the Earth, but a reference to the world:

the world is that social invention which is constituted by abject

cruelty. Where modern environmental movements conflate the Earth and the

world, we say that the world antagonizes the Earth and argue that the

only means to stop the process of climate change which threatens to

destroy the Earth, is to liquidate the world and abolish it from our

future. In this way, what we mean by the end of the world is not the end

of our planet, but the end of that world which threatens to destroy our

planet.

From the moment our ancestors were stolen and incorporated into the

structure of white supremacist capitalism, the seeds were planted for

its eventual doom. For if the modern world is a social invention, then

it was born through the enslavement of the African and the pillaging of

the African continent. African slave labor is the foundation of the

modern world, which historically provided the conditions of possibility

for western capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and humanism. Blackness

built the world and continues to sustain it, but cannot be a part of it,

or have a proper place within it. The displacement of Blackness, this

exclusion from the world, this other-worldliness, is a key feature that

positions Black people as the agents of world destruction. For the end

of the human and the world that centers it cannot be brought about by

the (colonial) human itself; there is nothing about the (hu)Man that can

be revolutionary. That work belongs to an entirely different being, one

who has been scorned by the human and the world. Blackness is

apocalyptic: our very skin a sign of the apocalypse that is coming for

Western modernity. Whiteness fears and dreads this apocalypse perhaps

even more than the prospects of an ecological Armageddon, more than the

environmental disaster it finds itself still the privileged subject of.

For Blackness heralds the end of the white as a privileged subject

entirely. Blackness is the fertile ground on which the world stands, and

when we rise, so too will the world built upon us crumble.

Out of the ashes this apocalypse come countless Afro-futures waiting to

be; wondrous, speculative universes where Black people are free and push

the boundaries of what is possible. Perhaps there is a future where

Black people live on floating cities after the consequences of climate

change cause sea levels to rise. Or maybe we will live in atmospheric

cities high above the clouds caused by a nuclear winter. In a future

where the ozone layer is gone, perhaps we will live in subterranean

Afrikan villages. Or maybe we are nomadic tree-planters, terraforming

the Earth after its desertification. Imagine a future where there are

billions of genders, each with their own temple dedicated to them and

their own community of disciples. Imagine stargazing sisterhoods, time

traveling ancestors, and intergalactic maroon communities. Imagine

interstellar voyages aboard the Black Star space shuttle, or perhaps a

cosmic Harlem Renaissance. Imagine futures where the human has

disappeared and has made way for the emergence of a new being. Anarkata

asks us to dream of Black possibilities that have not yet been imagined.

From the end of the world comes new ways of being, new ways of living,

new visions of freedom.

But we don’t have to use our imaginations to dream up those futures; the

evidence of them can be seen in our struggle today. From the growing

concern for the most vulnerable in our communities, to the exchange of

mutual aid for our survival, to the political education of our people,

and the flexible responsiveness of our movements, the formations that

emerge in our communities and the small and large ways we take back

autonomy and kinship with the land, water, and soil—these are all

precursors to our Afro-future. Anarkata envisions Afro-futures where all

Black people are free to express their bodily autonomy, where Black

nonmen are honored and at the fore, where disabled Black people are

accommodated and validated. We foresee horizontal futures where

hierarchy is abolished, and collaboration occurs across people,

localities, and networks. We foresee the abolition of prisons and the

emergence of communal arbitration to settle disputes. We envision

autonomous localities that govern themselves through direct democracy,

critique, and consensus. We foresee futures where the people have access

to their needs and are not subject to bare survivalism, exploitation, or

intracommunal violence. We envision communal and liberatory education

for our children. And we envision a Black masses who have the political

education and leadership capacity to be autonomous. These futures are

not utopias where no problems exist, but they are futures in which our

adaptability to new problems are heightened by the strength and health

of our communities. It is up to us to build these futures and lay the

groundwork for them today. It is the Black revolutionary work of today

that will nurture the possibilities of an Afro-future tomorrow. In

giving a name to the contours of Anarkata, its tradition, politics, and

praxis, we hope to locate aspects of that expansive work that are

already being done in the total liberation of our people. This statement

hopes to encapsulate the range of ideas and approaches that have

animated the Anarkata Turn and bring them together into one document.

The document is merely an offering in that direction; a starting point,

or perhaps, a midway point in what might become the corpus of Anarkata

thought and politics. This document is also a work in progress: it is

living, grows, and is transformed as new insights around its contents

(and its missteps) are made and new approaches unearthed. It is a

document that enters into conversation with all those who identify with

its contents, and is improved upon by doing so. It is intended to be

just as flexible and collaborative as the movements we hope to build. We

invite the reader to use this document in whatever ways they might find

useful to push forward the project of Black liberation in their own

communities. Finally, this document is an expression of love: an undying

love for our people, love for our comrades, and a love of freedom. It is

this love that turns us towards Anarkata.