Part of Muntjac Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency
“The discourses of nation and people are saturated with racial connotations. Attempts to constitute the poor or working class as a class across racial lines are thus disrupted. This problem will have to be acknowledged directly if socialists are to move beyond puzzling over why black Britons (who as a disproportionately underprivileged group, ought to be their stalwart supporters) remain suspicious and distant from the political institutions of the working-class movement.” – Gilroy.
I’d like to start off with a little bit about what Anarchism means. This might be preaching to the choir a little, but bear with me as this was essential in getting my thoughts down on paper and dealing with the subject matter at hand.
Anarchism is a strand of philosophy and method of social organisation that eschews all methods of domination and exploitation in its implementation and in its results. Means AND ends, baby. Now this definition might seem a bit unwieldy, but that shouldn’t be a problem, there are anarchists from the past who were much better at defining it than myself. For example, everyone’s favourite Italian stallion, Errico Malatesta defined anarchism in his 1899 article Toward Anarchism, thus: “Anarchism is the abolition of exploitation and oppression of man by man, that is, the abolition of private property and government; Anarchism is the destruction of misery, of superstitions, of hatred.
Therefore, every blow given to the institutions of private property and to the government, every exaltation of the conscience of man, every disruption of the present conditions, every lie unmasked, every part of human activity taken away from the control of the authorities, every augmentation of the spirit of solidarity and initiative, is a step towards Anarchism.” Satisfied? If not, here’s a take from the Lithuanian-born bad gyal, Emma Goldman from her 1910 book, Anarchism: What It Really Stands For: “ANARCHISM:–The philosophy of a new social order based on liberty unrestricted by man-made law; the theory that all forms of government rest on violence, and are therefore wrong and harmful, as well as unnecessary. The new social order rests, of course, on the materialistic basis of life; but while all Anarchists agree that the main evil today is an economic one, they maintain that the solution of that evil can be brought about only through the consideration of every phase of life,– individual, as well as the collective; the internal, as well as the external phases.”
As we can see from the definitions listed above, those from an Italian, a Lithuanian and a Brit, the ideology is distinctly European, but the modes of living and the tactics employed to implement this philosophy is not completely alien to Africa or the diaspora. Before the advent of the Capitalist mode of exploitation in the global South, many African Societies practiced a form of egalitarian communalism, which though not anarcho-communist outright, was distrustful of power and vested leadership in a few, which shared resources each according to his need from each according to his ability and which protected the minorities without deferring to them as a coercive influence. These societies were not perfect by any means, including some with the treatment of women, but they were much freer if less economically productive than the Capitalist mode of production, which force Africa and the Global South into the role of resource mule, consistently exploited, with the accompanying misery of millions.
One of the models of egalitarian society were the Igbo people of what is now South Eastern Nigeria. Igbo social and political structure, except in the rarest of exceptions, was mostly semi-autonomous, with no King or Priest using violence to exert hierarchical control over the rest of the polity. Villages and towns were ruled completely by the people who lived in them and no one else. Expertise was prized, and this made many men famous in their village or town, but they did not become princes in the Feudal sense and often carried out special duties bestowed on them by all the members of the community. There were women’s councils that ruled specifically on women’s issues and, in a manner common of Africans, Feudal or Egalitarian, the land did not belong to any one person, but was held in common and used by all according to need.
It was not only the Igbo in West Africa that practiced communalism. Sam Mbah and I.E. Igariwey in their necessary book African Anarchism list no less than twenty-eight different ethnic groups across the length and breadth of the continent that were or are stateless societies, their population a whopping 200 million and growing today.
There are also instances of open defiance to the global hegemonic capitalist order in the histories of the African diaspora. From the Maroon societies all across the Caribbean from Jamaica to Martinique, to the Mocambos in Brazil and the Palenques all over the Spanish-speaking Americas, even to the Dismal Swamp of the southern United States, whether short-lived or centuries-old, existing even into the modern day.
The modern era of black radicals, especially in the United States post 1960, also took anarchist theory in new directions and developed a potent strand of anarchism largely away from their white anarchist counterparts.
A man who gets little mention amongst anarchists of all ethnic backgrounds is Martin Sostre. A towering figure in the prisoner rights movement and an ardent anarchist, his ire for exploitation crystallising after a stint in prison in the early 1960s and after taking up and then discarding because of their ineffectiveness, ideologies as varied as Black Islam and Internationalism. After opening up and Afro-Asian bookstore, it saw brief success in Buffalo, New York. Sostre was known to give out anarchist pamphlets to those who could not afford books and made the place a hotbed of radical ideas. He was falsely imprisoned in a COINTELPRO sting, a frequently used tactic by the State to crush any semblance of a black radical upsurge. He did not let himself succumb to despair. Sostre became a jailhouse lawyer, acting as legal counsel to the worst off in our society, those damned poor folk who have been caught up in the jaws of the law. And he was damn good, winning not one, but two landmark legal cases involving prisoners rights. Inverting the ancestor Audre Lorde’s famous maxim, Sostre had dismantled the master house, with its tools. Withstanding the horrors of solitary confinement, he managed to continue to secure wins for the underclass against the state, granting them some measure of dignity in an otherwise inhuman system. He introduced Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin to anarchism, and after becoming the most famous political prisoner in the world, was released in 1976.
Lorenzo Kom’Boa Ervin, while learning about anarchism from Sostre, was not overlooked like his predecessor was. Author of the seminal text Anarchism and The Black Revolution, one of the best and most widely read Anarchist works. Ervin was a Black Panther and his insane story, of hijacking a plane to Cuba to avoid jail for the attempted killing of a Ku Klux Klan member, and his mistreatment in Cuba, deportation to Czechoslovakia, escape from a Czechoslovakian jail, only to be captured in East Germany, tortured in Berlin and returned to the USA to spend the rest of his life in jail, has become stuff of legend. Spoilers: he doesn’t die in prison. As Saint Andrew says in his essay What Is Black Anarchism “While in those so-called socialist countries, he became disillusioned with what was clearly a dictatorship, not some “dictatorship of the proletariat.”” Saint Andrew continues “His case was adopted by the Anarchist Black Cross and a Dutch Anarchist group called Help A Prisoner Oppose Torture Organizing Committee. They coordinated an international campaign petitioning for his release. Of course, he took issue with middle class hyperindividualism of many white American anarchists at the time, but he still worked with anarchists around the world who continued to support him and write to him while in prison. He began writing Anarchism and the Black Revolution and published it in 1979. It remains one of the best and most widely read works on anarchism today.
His prison writings garnered him a following in Europe, Africa, and among Australian Aboriginals. He was finally released nearly 15 years after his sentence, in 1983.” If you haven’t got a copy of Anarchism and The Black Revolution, get one this year at the bookfair, or steal one from your local bookshop/borrow from your local library. It is a treasure trove of insights.
Ervin was not the only Black Panther to have turned away from their political program and embraced Anarchism. Kuwasi Balagoon, an openly bisexual man (both hard and easy to be in the Black Radical Tradition, ask James Baldwin) joined the Panthers in 1967, having been radicalised in London. In 1969 he was arrested and indicted for a piece of propaganda by the deed. The trial was known as that of the Panther 21 and was at the time, the most expensive trial in New York State history. Though the trial collapsed, the state was determined to do whatever it could to crush this black rebel and had him sent to jail for 23 years of a bank robbery in New Jersey. It was in prison that Balagoon, disillusioned by the in-fighting of the Panthers and their pivot away from the people embraced anarchism and joined the broadly anarchist Black Liberation Army. Balagoon would escape prison twice and on the second attempt aid Assata Shakur in her famed escape, but would ultimately die in prison from AIDS-related pneumonia, a warrior and a revolutionary. Rest in Power. As I hope I’ve shown above, both Ervin, Sostre and Baloogun developed their blend of anarchism, not with input from white anarchists who would have and should have been in their milieu, but both from space and time away from the struggle for an egalitarian society, in prison. All were steeped in the famed black radical tradition, Ervin and Baloogun with the Panthers and Sostre with the Afro-Asian Bookstore, but both found flaws in ideology that the Black Radical Tradition normally espoused, like Islam, The Black Panthers, Marxist-Leninists, Maoists, The Democratic Party. Both discarded those tired old ideas and grappled with a philosophy that until the mid-20th century had been an overwhelmingly European one. Not only did they grapple, they made it their own. I for one, don’t think I’m nearly as courageous as these men. I really don’t think it is necessary for black men and women to go to jail (or die there) to realise that anarchism is the only viable solution to our Problems.
So, what is to be done about Black Anarchists in the UK context? As we have shown earlier on, though the ideology may not have taken root among the diaspora in concrete terms until the 60s in the US, the lived practice has long been a part of African and Diaspora communities. Anti colonialism and anti-racism need anti statism, which makes anarchists and black radicals natural bedfellows. So why are there so few of us? Why as my quote from earlier describes are we “puzzling over why Black Britons….remain distant”?
One part of it, I assume, is ignorance of the true aims of the philosophy, that it espouses chaos, or more likely, it’s plain dismissal as ‘cool, but idealistic/unrealistic/never gonna happen’. Another reason is that our intellectuals and culture heroes on the black left only talk of some sort of Scandinavian Social Democracy or a creeping, still undercover authoritarian leftism. This is a hangup of global extraction. From the revolutionary Richard Wright and W.E.B. DuBois to the Panther leadership, Marxist Leninists and Maoists made great overtures to the plight of black people in the United States for most of the 20th Century. A lot of the independence movements in Africa during the 1950s and 60s and their support from the USSR, was responsible for cementing the image of socialism in the minds of Africans on the continent (and possibly destroying it, but that’s a topic for another time). But we as anarchists and you as white anarchists need to ask, still more questions. There’s nothing to be said, for what we could have done in the past, what are we doing now? Where is the black block, the sight of the black flag at The Sudanese and Congo protests? Where are the stickers and the posters and the Zines, highlighting the plight of Haitians dying right now? Why is the most famous political prisoner in the UK not a young (or old) black man or woman? Especially, as I’ll show later, with our over representation in the carceral system. And what can be done by comrades, white and black alike to increase our presence in black radical movements and the black radical tradition in the country? I believe, the answer lies in Especifismo and its particular brand of anarchist praxis, including social insertion.
Especifismo grew out of the 1920s Platformist movement, who stressed organisation to combat the creep of bolshevism on social movements (sound familiar?). It was created by the Federacion Anarquista Uruguay in the 1950s and was instrumental in surviving the US-backed right-wing despotism that strangled the country from the 1970s to the 1980s. It was further developed by Brazil’s Federacao Anarquista Gaucho and Rio De Janeiro during their countries right-wing junta in the 1980s. It should be noted here that, Brazil has the largest African Diaspora in the world. Forged in the crucible of right-wing reaction, Especifismo has gone on to find roots all over Latin America, in Africa and in the United States.
Especifismo emphasizes
- The need for a specific anarchist organisation built around a unity of ideas and praxis
- The use of said organisation, to theorize and develop political and organising work
- An active involvement in and building of autonomous and popular social movements.
Especifist anarchists understand that they cannot just work with everyone. Almost every political movement has its own end goals and means to getting there. As means and ends are of paramount importance to anarchists, Especifists believe that a specific anarchist organisation is needed to begin using especifist strategy, one where there is a unity on interpretation of theory, the generation and consensus-making of ideas, as well as the implementation of praxis.
These organisations, will most likely have a unique outlook on the situations that beleaguer their communities. They can be all-black, all-white, or a mixture of both, the racial makeup of the espicifist organisation is not the point, it is a unity of ideas. With this unity in place, the organisation must work to build their own theories around politics and organisation in their unique context, and develop this into practical action. All this might sound familiar to you if you’re organising already. If you are and implement the third point, you may well be an Especifist without knowing it.
The third point is called social insertion and its one I’d like to stress. Social insertion is NOT, some kind of watered-down Left Unity, it is also NOT a one-time single-issue anarchist tack on, to use your position as an anarchist to give liberal or authoritarian leftists a moral rubber stamp. It is an active, continual involvement in movement, particularly mass movements, where different groups come together based on shared exploitation. Shared ideology comes from the especifist group you already represent. A great example of these mass-movements that have large groups of black people, are local assemblies, tenant unions, prison unions and housing co-operatives. Inside these movements especifists are able to promote, advocate for and put into practice the anarchist principles they have taken from their original groups and to do so honestly, to show that anarchist methods of organising are effective.
Small and larger anarchist organisations will always make up a minority in the populace, so to fight off the spectre of vanguardism, we must bring the staples of Especifismo into the 21st Century, including social insertion. As long as we’re not working with people at cross purposes to us such as Marxist Leninists and other Authoritarian Leftists, we should take it upon ourselves not to self-isolate and to hold our noses, so to speak, when coming into contact with other radical and maybe even liberal organisations. Remember, this should not be a recruitment tool, but a tool to find and highlight anarchist tendencies in these organisations and bring them to the fore with hard work without compromising our own particular anarchist organising strategies. The success of our tactics as especifist, will draw people already organising in the Black Radical Tradition toward anarchism and away from authoritarian leftism. And where black radicals are, you can bet the rest of the black community are not behind.
We can aid black radicals on a variety of fronts, as many of their concerns with society intersect with our own as anarchists. A rather glaring example is one of prison abolition. According to the Prison Reform Trust, ethnic minorities make up 27% of the prison population, despite people of African heritage making up only 4.2% of the general population. Black people are also far more likely to be sentenced at the Crown Court and Black people receive far longer sentences on average than their white counterparts, as well as spending longer in custody as part of their sentence. Not only is this a glaring miscarriage of justice, this can be a prime recruiting tool in the fight for prison abolition, the families, friends and loved ones of those incarcerated know intimately the importance of this fight. And it’s not only prison abolition, there are the outcomes in psychiatry, the medical outcomes, access to housing in their communities and so on. The list of potential points of unity abounds.
So yes, share a book, reblog and repost all you can, deface that wall in the name of Haiti, or Congo, or Sudan, but most importantly in my opinion, become an Especifist. Join that black mass-movement with the intent to turn people to our point of view with the strength of our ideas and the depth of your anarchist organisations methods. Organise, organise, organise.
Thank you.
This is a script of a talk given in 2024 at the Common Press bookshop as part of the Anarchist Bookfair In London. Daniel Adediran is a Black, disabled writer of Speculative Fiction, poetry and essays.