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Title: This Is Anarchy Author: CrimethInc., Anonymous Date: June 9th, 2020 Language: en Topics: Black Lives Matter, black anarchism, USA, uprising, CrimethInc. Source: https://crimethinc.com/2020/06/09/this-is-anarchy-eight-ways-the-black-lives-matter-and-justice-for-george-floyd-uprisings-reflect-anarchist-ideas-in-action
Since Minneapolis police brutally murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020,
demonstrations have exploded across the US and the world. Millions of
people have taken to the streets to demand justice for George Floyd and
Breonna Taylor and an end to police violence and terror, underscoring
the need to eradicate systemic racism by radically transforming our
society. Within 24 hours of the explosion of protest, the President of
the United States claimed that anarchists and anti-fascists were
responsible for the unrest that has occurred in cities across the
country.
This move to blame anarchists and “antifa” is intended to discredit
these popular uprisings while demonizing and isolating the participants.
Yet the ways that the prevailing order has failed almost all of us are
clearer than ever. Outrage and protest have spread far beyond any
particular ideology or group. As tens of thousands fill the streets of
scores of cities, it is obvious that anarchists are not responsible for
organizing these demonstrations. The demonstrations and the unrest
accompanying them represent an organic response to a widely felt need.
At the same time, this organic groundswell of momentum, based in
reproducible tactics that anyone can employ, embodies anarchist models
for social change. Many of the practices and principles that have been
fundamental to this movement have long been mainstays of anarchist
organizing.
Here, we explore the anarchist roots of eight principles that have been
essential to the success of the Black Lives Matter and Justice for
George Floyd demonstrations, seeking to center Black initiatives that
reflect anti-authoritarian values. For background on Black anarchism
specifically, we recommend Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Anarchism and the
Black Revolution or the more recent Anarkata Statement.
One of the many things that politicians aim to obscure by insisting that
“outside agitators” are responsible for the uprising that began in
Minneapolis is that oppressed communities in the United States are
already occupied and exploited by outsiders. This began with the
colonization of North America by European settlers, the original
“outside agitators,” and continues today with the ownership of most of
the real estate and businesses in Black, indigenous, and immigrant
neighborhoods by non-residents with few ties to those communities—not to
mention the policing of these neighborhoods by officers like Derek
Chauvin who commute to the districts they terrorize.
In opposition to these ongoing occupations, anarchists call for
self-determination, arguing that individuals and communities should
control their own bodies and living conditions and determine their own
destinies rather than live under the imposition of state power, which is
designed to serve the urges of a privileged few rather than the needs of
the many. As the horrific murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor
show, reclaiming control over public space from the police forces that
hold Black communities hostage is an essential step towards
self-determination.
Likewise, anarchists believe that those who are directly affected by a
situation should be the ones to decide how to respond to it. In taking
the initiative to respond to the murder of George Floyd themselves on
their own terms rather than deferring to “community leaders” or
petitioning the government for redress, the people of Minneapolis made
their demand for autonomy crystal clear.
On the streets of their neighborhoods, in their schools and workplaces,
ordinary people in revolt are finding support from anarchists in their
efforts to attain genuine self-determination for their communities.
“We need to use the greatest power that we have, which is control over
our bodies, control of our labor, to make the situation ungovernable and
untenable in the United States, and to do it in an organized systemic
fashion.”
-Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson
Contrary to the propaganda of right-wing conspiracy theorists, there has
been no single force, organization, or ideology guiding these protests.
Demonstrations for justice and against police violence have taken place
in all 50 states and nearly 50 other countries over the past week
without any central coordination whatsoever.
In contrast to top-down, centralized efforts, this flourishing of
grassroots initiatives characterizes the anarchist approach to social
change. Like the Occupy Movement, which anarchist activists and tactics
helped to launch, local manifestations can take different forms
according to context while amplifying the overall message. Horizontal
links between participants allow for flexibility, keeping it easy for
new people to get involved as they see fit. This model has won historic
victories—for example, the mobilization against the summit of the World
Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999, during which anarchists and
others outwitted police through a networked structure of autonomous
affinity groups that worked together to shut down the city.
Today, Black Lives Matter activists are also employing a decentralized
approach, permitting the movement to spread organically and ensuring
that it cannot be contained or coopted.
As proponents of equality, anarchists oppose white supremacy and
fascism. Those on the receiving end of colonial violence have always
defended themselves against racist violence; anarchists believe in
taking action in solidarity even when they themselves are not the
targets. In one of the earliest expressions of anarchism in the United
States, the prominent American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
linked his rejection of the institutions of government and property to
his opposition to the institution of slavery. In the 1980s and 1990s,
anarchists across North America formed Anti-Racist Action chapters to
fight against neo-Nazi organizing. Today’s so-called “antifa” groups are
part of this longstanding tradition of defending communities against
racist and fascist violence. Historically, anarchist organizing
spearheaded by Black people and other people of color has played a
critical role in pushing broader social movements to challenge systemic
racism. From Ferguson to Charlottesville and in Minneapolis today,
anarchists of all ethnicities have been on the front lines of efforts to
prevent neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and other white supremacists from
harming people.
The efforts of President Trump, Attorney General Barr, and the
right-wing media to declare “antifa” a terrorist organization are a
transparent ploy to undermine this popular uprising and distract its
supporters. The Ku Klux Klan, the deadliest terrorist organization in US
history, receives no such condemnation—nor do the groups that
radicalized the racist who murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesville,
nor the white supremacist gang whose symbol a NYPD officer flashed last
week at a Black Lives Matter protest. Trump’s government brands those
who oppose white supremacy and fascism “terrorists,” despite the fact
that—unlike the bigots they oppose—they have yet to be responsible for a
single person’s death.
Mutual aid is a practice of reciprocal care through which participants
in a network make sure that everyone’s needs are met. It is neither a
tit-for-tat exchange nor the sort of one-way assistance that a charity
organization offers, but a free interchange of assistance and resources.
Anarchists believe that communities can meet their needs through mutual
aid rather than cutthroat competition for profit.
As the COVID-19 crisis unfolded, communities across the US recognized
the need to organize to meet urgent needs collectively. Because
anarchists took the initiative in these efforts from the beginning, they
came to be known under the banner of mutual aid. Subsequently, even
progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on
Americans to form mutual aid initiatives.
The term was originally popularized by the Russian anarchist Peter
Kropotkin and spread through international anarchist networks.
Kropotkin, a naturalist and biologist, argued in Mutual Aid: A Factor of
Evolution (1902) that it is reciprocity and cooperation, not
bloodthirsty competition, that enables species from the smallest
microorganisms to human societies to survive and thrive. This challenged
the Social Darwinist dogma of “survival of the fittest” that business
elites used to justify the exploitation and inequality that accompanied
the expansion of global capitalism in the nineteenth century. Kropotkin
made a scientific and philosophical case for reorganizing society
according to the principles of mutual aid, which he described as “the
close dependency of every one’s happiness upon the happiness of all” and
“the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to
consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”
Since Kropotkin’s day, anarchists have consistently put this principle
into practice via efforts like Food Not Bombs, Really Really Free
Markets, community bail and bond funds, the Common Ground Collective’s
work after Hurricane Katrina, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, and other
projects.
Today, COVID-19 relief volunteers and supporters of the Justice for
George Floyd protests collaborate to offer free medical care, water,
food, and supplies on the streets of Minneapolis, Washington, DC, and
around the United States. These efforts draw on the anarchist principle
to each according to need, from each according to ability.
It’s no surprise that COVID-19 relief and protest support efforts are
intersecting. Due to the racialized disparities in wealth, health care
access, and workplace vulnerability, people of color and Black people in
particular have suffered disproportionately during the pandemic.
Fighting for the principle that Black lives matter means confronting not
only police violence but also all the other systems of oppression that
have kept so many Black communities impoverished. These community
initiatives reflect the anarchist idea that everyone’s health and
freedom are interlinked and can best be preserved through solidarity.
As hundreds of thousands of people have poured into the streets, defying
police orders and curfews, over 10,000 protestors have been arrested and
many injured by police or right-wing vigilantes. Despite this, the
movement has continued to grow, thanks in part to emerging social
movement infrastructure including collectives providing health and
medical support, pro-bono legal assistance, bail funds, and other forms
of solidarity. Anarchists have participated on the front lines of these
efforts, leveraging longstanding infrastructure and drawing on decades
of experience.
Participating in the worldwide protest network journalists dubbed the
“anti-globalization” movement in the 1990s, anarchists took an active
role in organizing collective infrastructure for medical, legal, and
logistical support at large protests. Bail funds, activist lawyers,
street medics, and communication teams played a critical role in
mobilizations like the one against the World Trade Organization summit
in Seattle. Since then, anarchists have honed their skills in mass
mobilizations against government and corporate gatherings from the
Republican and Democratic National Conventions from 2000 onwards to the
G20 Summit in Pittsburgh in 2009 and Donald Trump’s inauguration in
2017. Organizing horizontally in volunteer networks, building
relationships between local and national organizers, and drawing on
solidarity and mutual aid to provide resources to participants, they
have repeatedly empowered ordinary people to exert an outsize influence
on historic events.
We see the legacy of these successes in the emerging legal and medical
infrastructures supporting the Justice for George Floyd protests. For
example, the Northstar Health Collective in Minneapolis, which provided
critical support for the protests, was founded by anarchists during the
mobilization against the 2008 Republican National Convention.
In a decentralized movement, how can various groups employing different
strategies coordinate to minimize the likelihood of conflict? How can
they ensure that their efforts are not vulnerable to the
divide-and-conquer strategies of the state and conservative media
interests? For decades, anarchists have experimented with answers to
these questions.
When the Republican National Convention took place in Minnesota in 2008,
a coalition of protest groups involving many anarchists agreed upon the
“St. Paul Principles,” inspired by similar points of unity used in mass
organizing efforts anchored by anarchists in major cities in Canada and
the US over the preceding years. Models like this assist people of
diverse ideologies and priorities in supporting rather than hindering
each other’s efforts.
The Justice for George Floyd protests are so diverse and incorporate so
many different approaches that by no means all participants adhere to
this framework. But many of the most prominent voices are insisting on a
similar approach to prevent the movement from being divided. This
embrace of a diversity of tactics reflects the core anarchist value of
autonomy.
Anarchists reject focusing on petitioning for top-down reforms in favor
of seeking solutions that attack social problems at their roots. Reforms
can be a step towards fundamental change, but anarchists argue that we
should begin from an analysis of the root causes of social ills and a
holistic understanding of the systems that both ensure disparities and
benefit from them.
So far, none of the reforms that politicians propose, such as civilian
review boards or body cameras, have served to diminish police violence
on a nationwide level. Neither have legal responses, such as bringing
lawsuits or charges against officers, nor electoral solutions like
lobbying or voting in new politicians. Despite reform efforts following
the rebellion in Ferguson in 2014, the number of police killings
annually in the US actually increased between 2015 and 2019.
Today, for the first time, mainstream discourse is acknowledging the
possibility of defunding police departments or abolishing them
altogether. Anarchists join Black feminists and prison abolitionists in
insisting that cosmetic reforms will not solve the underlying issues of
power, racism, and exploitation that drive state violence. Anarchists
have been targets of police and state violence for over a century, from
the Haymarket martyrs to the Anarchist Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids,
and the J20 case. These experiences inform the anarchist vision of a
world entirely free of police and the exploitation they perpetuate.
“The unjust institutions which work so much misery and suffering to the
masses have their root in governments, and owe their whole existence to
the power derived from government, we cannot help but believe that were
every law, every title deed, every court, and every police officer or
soldier abolished tomorrow with one sweep, we would be better off than
now.”
-Lucy Parsons, The Principles of Anarchism
The slogan “Black Lives Matter” has radical implications. To assert that
human life is more important than preserving state control or protecting
corporate property poses a profound challenge to today’s political and
economic order. This implies a fundamentally different ethics than the
logic of the state.
As the COVID-19 crisis has shown, business as usual can be deadly.
Alongside environmental destruction, workplace accidents, massive
consumer debt, and the waste of human potential that characterizes the
capitalist economy, the pandemic is adding another layer of tragedy to
the costs of valuing profit over people. Many workers, forced to return
to their jobs by politically motivated reopening efforts, are being
punished by their employers for attempting to protect their health. All
of this, on top of the pervasive police violence that sparked the Floyd
protests, suggests how little the powerful value the lives of everyday
people.
Anarchists join the Black Lives Matter movement in promoting a different
conception of value. Insisting on the value of Black lives means
challenging the institutions that prioritize profit and control over
them—the police as well as the politicians protecting them, exploitative
employers, polluters, profiteers, and many others. This means taking a
stand against capitalism as well as police. From the Industrial Workers
of the World, a union that challenges the wage system itself, to the
mutual aid networks that put gift economies into practice, anarchists
consistently strive to foster a world of cooperation beyond the market.
The Movement for Black Lives, too, outlines that they are explictly
anti-capitalist in their organizing principles. Valuing Black lives
requires profoundly transforming the economic system.
Many voices both inside and out of the protests are joining the chorus
demanding that human life must take precedence over property. Even
business owners who have experienced looting or fires in the course of
the protests have spoken up to insist that the focus should remain on
the core issues of anti-Black violence, policing, and social justice.
This points the way toward an ethics of solidarity that characterizes
anarchist approaches to social transformation.
President Trump is wrong. It’s not “anarchists” who are responsible for
the courageous militant actions we’ve seen in the streets—though
anarchists of many ethnicities have participated. Above all, it has been
Black and brown youth and other marginalized people whose bravery and
determination have compelled the entire world to take notice. As we’ve
seen, there are significant overlaps between the values and strategies
of anarchist movements and of Black Lives Matter and other anti-police
and liberation struggles. While anarchists should not displace other
participants’ ways of describing their activities to claim these as
examples of anarchist ideology, these resonances are the basis for
mutual exchange and solidarity in the process of building multi-racial
movements for liberation.
Anarchists believe that it is worth fighting to create a society based
on mutual aid, autonomy, equality, freedom, and solidarity. For any
movement to be effective, the participants must identify what it will
take to change things. The courageous response to the murder of George
Floyd showed the effectiveness of uncompromising direct action—not only
to raise the social costs of injustice, but also to make it possible to
imagine another world. After the burning of the third precinct in
Minneapolis demonstrated that ordinary people can defeat the police in
open conflict, defunding and abolishing the police became thinkable on
the scale of nationwide public discourse.
In Minneapolis and then in Louisville, Los Angeles, New York City, and
around the world, Black, brown, and other marginalized people have
converged to shut down business as usual. Anarchists have participated,
contributing experience with resistance tactics, infrastructures that
offer support to all in need, and visions of a world in which the
institutions that killed George Floyd and so many others would not
exist. Ideas and approaches that resonate with anarchist values can be
seen in action throughout these protests, regardless of whether those
who employ them give them political labels.
These values and practices, which transcend any single ideology or
tradition, can be the basis for people to come together across lines of
difference as they confront state power in the streets. The indigenous
anarchist collective Indigenous Action and others have argued that
modern movements need “accomplices not allies”—people dedicated to
sharing risks and taking direct action together, motivated by a vision
of collective liberation rather than guilt, duty, or prestige. The
Justice for George Floyd protests have demonstrated the effectiveness of
multiracial, decentralized, grassroots efforts. Informed by a
horizontal, participatory ethos that rejects police violence as well as
every other form of state coercion, anarchists insist that everyone has
a role to play in the process of getting free.
One of the most central messages from anarchist organizing over the past
decades—including struggles for refugee and migrant solidarity, queer
liberation, prison abolition and beyond—is that each of us can only be
free when all of us are free. Ashanti Alston, an anarchist activist,
speaker, and writer, has articulated this beautifully. As a former
member of the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army and a
former political prisoner, Alston has had plenty of experience
confronting state violence. Informed by the Zapatista uprising in
Chiapas, his vision of collective liberation reflects an anarchist ethos
shared across many movements and communities, echoing forward to inspire
our efforts today:
“We have to figure out how to create a world where it’s possible for all
different people to be who they are, to have a world where everyone
fits.”