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Title: Black Anarchism Author: Jon Bekken Date: Spring 2022 Language: en Topics: book review, Anarchist People of Color, anarchist movement, review, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review, Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #85, abolition Source: Scanned from Anarcho-Syndicalist Review #85, Spring, 2022, page 24ff Notes: A review of William C. Anderson, The Nation on No Map: Black Anarchism and Abolition. AK Press, 2022. Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution 4th edition. Pluto Press, 2021.
A number of books have recently been published exploring the relevance
of anarchist ideas to Black struggles, including As Black as Resistance,
Anarcho-Blackness and the books under review here.
William Anderson's The Nation on No Map is an often-poetic text, drawing
on a wide range of Black thinkers and activists that starts from the
notion that everywhere Black people remain stateless and unfree. But he
is also critical of an anarchist movement he sees as locked into
reactive cycles, lacking a creative vision capable of transforming our
world.
Ervin's Anarchism and the Black Revolution has gone through a few
editions over four decades, each of which added new material. It would
benefit from a brief discussion of these changes—his introduction does
discuss the history of the various editions, but not how the text (and
his ideas) have evolved. Tighter editing also would have helped. Leaving
aside a few references to the "International" Workers of the World
(rendered correctly elsewhere), at one point he says that there were no
Black anarchists in the 1960s and 1970s—clearly a bit of hyperbole, as
he is otherwise quite clear about Martin Sostre's role in introducing
him to the anarchist tradition. But there were others as well. ASR
recently published an article about Juanita Nelson, one of several Black
anarchist pacifists active in organizations such as Peacemakers.
Anarchists were also active in the civil rights movement and struggles
against police brutality. But Ervin's broader point that the movement
had become (and remains) too white, and too divorced from class
struggle, is certainly correct.
Ervin's introduction offers a sharp critique of the limits of the Black
Lives Movement, and a leadership he sees as more concerned with cozying
up to power than with "dismantling racial capitalism."
"Some activists propose an alternative to Black Lives Matter: community
control of the police. But I say lipstick on a pig shows us reformism
will not win and won't stop police murder of Black people." (21)
The long history of failed efforts to reform the police suggests that
even defunding is not enough. Instead, we need Black anti-fascism.
Both books point to the persistence of racism and oppression even in the
"socialist bloc" countries, and the need to dismantle the nation-state
and to bring an end to exploitation and oppression. Ervin discusses
mutual aid and solidarity economies as a transitional strategy as
communities build toward an anarcho-communist future where people
democratically determine their own needs and make the arrangements to
satisfy them.
Anderson suggests creating liberated zones or communes, an idea with a
long lineage in the Black revolutionary tradition:
"The important thing is rejecting the everyday realities of capitalism
in our day-to-day lives. This is something Black people are forced to do
by the intentional neglect inflicted upon us by the state....Our
experience tells us the commune must be stateless." (112-13)
The state is intrinsically white supremacist, Anderson notes, pointing
to the state's historic role not only in the U.S. but also through the
permanent state of war the state has imposed everywhere under its
dominion.
Anderson is sharply critical of those who look to a romanticized, mythic
past of African royalty or embrace their own toxic nationalism: "We have
to overcome the lies that nations and states are necessary and that
borders and citizenship serve Black people seeking liberation." (173)
But he also warns that mutual aid and even horizontalist organizing can
be co-opted. Ultimately, we must overthrow capitalism and the state.
"The U.S. state isn't killing us simply because it's white supremacist:
killing is part of the power granted to states, it's what states do.
It's what they are built for....We must not remain trapped on this map;
we must try to draw new lines to sketch out a life for ourselves that
their borders, their states, and their map cannot hold. Our task is to
shape a new society, a world we want to live in." (184-85)
Ervin offers more specifics, including building inner city communes to
build dual power and a culture of revolutionary solidarity, mutual aid
projects to ensure economic survival, organizing Black workers into
unions and rank-and-file caucuses, confronting the twin epidemics of
drugs and prisons, and organized self-defense units. Ervin calls for an
autonomous movement of peoples of color, based on federalism,
internationalism and mutual aid. We must become ungovernable, he
concludes, but in pursuit of liberation.