Sudanese Anarchist Gathering – Dispatches From Khartoum

Posted on 15/01/2025 - 20/01/2025 by muntjac

10 communiques from anarchists in Khatroum, Sudan sent to British anarchist magazine organise.

Avalible as a zine to read and print here. Also avalible on our Ko-fi

Call For Submissions! Issue 2: Insurgency & Counter Insurgency

Posted on 12/01/2025 - 12/01/2025 by muntjac

We’re really grateful for how popular the first issue of the magazine has been! It kinda took us by surprise and made us scramble a little bit to get it out on time (Well, a whole season late) Thank you everyone who shared, printed, wrote, subscribed or bought the magazine!!

A4 Printable Version

For this second issue, we’re looking for texts on Insurgency & Counter Insurgency.

Please try to have your proofread submissions in by April 1st, the magazine will be out on the 1st of May.

Essays, Reportbacks, Critiques, Poetry and Interviews* by Global Majority** anarchists and anti-authoritarians that present a critical look at ‘the social movement’ and anarchists & other radical’s relationship to it. Let’s talk about the repressive tactics the police, their defenders and their false critics have used against anarchists and others looking to do more than pose for photographs.

We’re tired of failing, we’re all sick of the pointless A-to-B marches in broad daylight that get us little more than photographed and kettled.

We’re bored of endless meetings that split hairs in four and overly waffle-filled analysis that benefits no one besides the person writing it.

We know there’s a better way to fight and that people are already at it. We just need to educate each other on how to turn the heat up.

You do NOT need to write in an academic register.
There is no minimum length, but a maximum would be around 4000 words, anything larger than that might be better off as an individual zine. (Which we’d love to help with!)
Off topic pieces are okay as long as they’re bangers.

*We can conduct these, over signal, over email or in person if given enough time, context and suggestions.

**Global Majority in this context refers to the people(s) who make up the majority of the world’s population, i.e. everyone but white people.

Submission Tips

Please send your articles as Plain Text inside of the email itself, having to re-format these from PDFs or Word/OpenOffice files takes time and slows down our emails.

Currently we are not accepting images as this would drive the print cost too high, sorry!

Our editorial crew’s first language is mostly English, but you can submit in other languages as long as we can get it translated.

fawnarchy@grrlz.net

Dedan Kemaathi – Harehills & The Roma-led Uprising in England

Posted on 11/01/2025 - 18/01/2025 by muntjac

Published as a collaboration between ourselves and the Malcom X Movement, follow them on Twitter or their website; mxmovement.blogspot.com

The peice is also avalible as a zine in readable and printable formats. Its also being sold on our Ko-Fi with the proceeds going towards the MX Movment.

Mischaracterisation and misrepresentation of the Roma community by the state has crept into the thinking of all marginalised groups argues Dedan Kemaathi. As a result, the July unrest and protests in Leeds have been misunderstood and a chance for unity against the racist state lost.

Introduction

After 14 years of intensifying far-right Tory government attacks on the poor and rising racism by the government and state, on the 18th of July the Roma community of Harehills area of Leeds conducted a protest and uprising against the police and authorities over the forced removal of four Roma children between the ages of 7 and 14 from their family home. Police forcibly dragged the children resisting and crying into a marked police van in front of many the children’s family and Roma residents. The depth of anger was clear on the streets as police struggled to deal with hundreds of very angry people who attacked the police using stones and bottles etc and burned down a local bus and set-up burning barricades. Police several times had to retreat from the resistance, indicating that it was one of the most intense outbreaks of resistance against the state seen in years.

Instances of non-white people in Leeds rising-up against police brutality and racism has happened at least five times since 1981. However, the root causes that trigger these social reactions from the poor and oppressed have not gone away but continue to intensify as we see the continuing rise of the far-right linked to the growing global crises of colonial-capitalism which seeks growing fascist measures to ensure its monopoly of power and pursuit of super-profits by means of increasing immiseration and division of working-class people.

The Roma are one of the most oppressed racialised groups of people in Europe and beyond. The Roma in Harehills are mostly from Romania (the terms ‘Roma’ and ‘Romania’ are not interchangeable and denote different identities, but one can be a Roma from Romania), but Roma are a dispersed oppressed group scattered across mostly West Asia, Europe and North America, especially the USA. Ignorance or wilful ignorance towards the Roma in Harehills has meant right-wing and far-right forces (but also some in the Muslim community inadvertently or deliberately platforming far-right figures) have been able to exacerbate the instrumentalisation of the Roma community to advance their narrow agendas.

The Roma uprising in Harehills came about less than two weeks into a Labour government led by the new Prime Minister Kier Starmer, after 14 years of growing far-right politics and culture by Tory governments, not least the formalisation of far-right politics into the British state with the Brexit victory in June 2016 which launched new offensives on oppressed working class people including the ‘hostile environment policy’ push that saw the targeting of different migrant communities including the Windrush scandal, the Rwanda expulsion policy, the Bibby Stockholm barge, the scapegoating of migrants in temporary accommodation including hotels and the weaponisation of crossings over of migrants on small boats in the English Channel.

The Roma uprising in Harehills pointed towards a potential strength of united oppressed working-class struggle for collective rights and demands, but the impact of growing far-right culture in Britain has meant that oppressed communities have divided and demobilised. At the same time this is a constructed situation in relation to an organised and insurgent racist community seeking to ‘get Brexit done’, a challenge that was presented to them by the Tories and other far-right leaders such as Nigel Farage that ‘getting Brexit done’ meant basically the total expulsion of those deemed to be non-white in Britain. Instead, British mass racism saw more Africans and Asians arriving as some East European people left, with organised and British-state and media feeding this racist scapegoating and division.

By the end of July the mass racist British mob had been whipped-up in its hysteria to such an extent that a five-day race-riot of racist mobs broke out across mostly northern England: targeting families in their homes; attacking mosques; storming or attempting to burn down at least two hotels housing asylum seekers[1]; and attacking non-white people as they travelled in their cars. The Roma-led Harehills uprising was central to the most recent incidents that were then manipulated by racists that culminated in the pogrom-style racist attacks at the end of July.

Histories of Uprisings in Leeds

Leeds is a major town in north England in the county of Yorkshire. Like many other similar places of former industrial production and factories, it saw the decline of the industrial base which was speeded up as new and larger numbers of people from the global south diaspora were invited here by the British state to service the post-war economy from the late 1950s onwards. Migrants from the former British colonies were brought here to do the jobs that British workers were reluctant to do. Experiencing institutional racism at all levels of society – in education, policing, local authorities and so on – Caribbean and Asian heritage and other African and Asian working class youth became radicalised and conducted their first uprising against their conditions on November 5th 1975 in Chapeltown, a working class area most known for its residents of Caribbean heritage. The resistance was targeted intensely at police, with Caribbean youth being mobilised and inspired by the global surge against racism and colonialism and in its specific inspiration towards resistance and justice by anti-colonial Rastafarianism (a form of Pan-Africanism) and related Reggae.

Again, in July 1981 Caribbean working class youth led another bout of resistance in Chapeltown, which was at a similar time between 1979-1981 when African, Caribbean and South Asian youth were rising up in a dozen urban centres across England and resisting their conditions of growing poverty and racism. There was another clash in Chapeltown in June 1987 after 17 year-old Marcus Skellington suffered racist police brutality, followed by days of resistance. Then on 10th of July 1995, after several heavy-handed police raids on homes, the deprived, mixed Caribbean and South Asian area of Hyde Park saw another uprising by local youth. On 5 June 2001, South Asian, mostly Muslim youth rose up against the police and with violent protests against, once again, police brutality. On this occasion, South Asian Muslim youth felt that the time to stand-up for themselves had arrived, as similar resistance was being conducted by their counterparts in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley that summer. In addition to racist police brutality, poor housing and poverty they also faced the added pressure of rising racism amongst the white English community who in the period of 1993 until 2018, voted in scores of councillors from the far-right racist and Neo-Nazi British Nationalist Party. For the next near quarter of a century, all these problems of growing fragmentation and alienation of non-white people, increasing racist hostility from the British state and population and rising poverty, continued apace. The Roma community in Harehills are subjected to the same racist oppression that Caribbean, African and Asian communities suffer, but with perhaps even more institutional and mass prejudice against this little understood community.

Who are the Roma?

The Roma, sometimes referred to as ‘Romany’/’Romani’, are widely understood to be a people who originate from present-day North India and Pakistan (Pakistan is a state formed in 1947). They are said to be possibly from the regions of Rajasthan, Kashmir and Sindh provinces. Research suggests they migrated out of India westwards from around the 10th century, with perhaps this migration starting earlier. They retain a considerable amount of the Indic influence in Romany languages (particularly Gujarati, Punjabi and Rajasthani) and the cultural beliefs of many retain elements of Hinduism. In European settings, they are often either Christian or Muslim by confession and have been for many centuries. Since their arrival in European countries they have been treated as outsiders, sometimes their experiences are compared to the oppression of Jews historically in Europe. Roma often look visibly as outsiders in whiteness as they are non-white, although in the UK census of 2011 the category of ‘Roma’ was added for the first time but in a sub-category under the “white” ethnic group.

The fact that the British state decided to give the only option to Roma respondents to identify themselves under a “white” category is typically manipulative of the British state’s colonial approach. Many Roma are clearly not visibly ‘white’, and also they are treated as a non-white group, ie., outside of whiteness in their overwhelmingly racist treatment. The British state has for a long time, and especially since the Second World War tried to co-opt sections of the Roma community. Obliging Roma to put themselves down as ‘white’ in the census will add to the British colonial divide and rule policy, in part to prevent the Roma from identifying with other non-white oppressed communities.

Looking back at their histories in Britain, it was in 1530 that the first laws expelling Roma from England were introduced under King Henry VIII. Often Roma people are termed as ‘gypsies’, something that is generally not accepted by Roma. In 1554 during the rule of Queen Mary, the English Parliament passed the first Egyptians Act which made meant anyone found to be a ‘gypsy’ could be punished by death. This legislation was not repealed until 1780. Other similar laws with a similarly genocidal framework also occurred in other European countries from the 16th century until 1945. In 1783 Heinrich Moritz Gottlieb Grellmann developed so-called ‘scientific racism’ in relation to the Roma people. The 1800s saw a million East European Roma migrate to the USA. In 1899, the Bavarian police (now in present-day Germany) established the “Central Office for Fighting the Gypsy Plague” in Munich, which was a way of monitoring and oppressing the movements of the Roma people. The period of Nazi persecution and genocide saw somewhere between 500,000 and 1.5 million Roma lives being lost. From 1956 attempts were made by different states to forcibly settle the few remaining nomadic Roma.

With the 2004 enlargement of the European Union (EU), countries with sizeable Roma communities saw some of them migrate to Britain. These countries included: Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. In 2007, Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU, a move which saw some Roma migrate from these two states to Britain.

In Leeds more than one in five residents live in poverty (176,376 people), while 31.3 percent of the city’s children and young people (55,780 youngsters) live in poverty (above the national average of 29 percent). 38 percent of residents of Harehills and neighbouring Gipton described themselves in the most recent Census as being from Asian backgrounds, 36 percent white and 17 percent black. Roma people live 10 years less on average than non-Roma, and experience more of the risk factors in and around mental health challenges. There are estimated to be over 5000 Roma people in Leeds, but there has been little information on the conditions of health and other life experiences. According to census analysis, almost 20% of Roma people live in the most deprived 10% of England (higher than the national average). One in three work in ‘elementary’ jobs, and nearly two in five adults report no educational qualifications at all. According to one study conducted in 2023 by Lancaster University, Anglia Ruskin University and Law for Life, Roma residents in Leeds struggle to understand government and other services due to the language barrier. The study found insufficient translators being available and Roma needing to use their children to translate for them. Some had difficulties accessing translators, and had been put under pressure to use family members to interpret. These were extra barriers to the support they needed.

As the Roma uprising in Harehills was triggered by racist behaviour of social services and police, the report from 2023 also focused on this aspect as data shows an increasing number of Roma children in the care system. While in 2009, there were around 30 Gypsy/Roma children who were ‘looked after’, by 2015 this had risen to 250. The figure stood at around 600 in 2023. The report stated that:

“a lack of trust, based on historic discrimination, has damaged the relationship between Roma families and children’s services in England … The research found that Roma communities tend to mistrust and fear authorities due to their experiences of historic persecution across Europe. It also found that social workers, when dealing with Roma children, frequently conflate the impacts of poverty with neglect. The challenges faced by Roma families in their interactions with children’s services are deeply rooted in experiences of historical discrimination, societal biases, and systemic failures in processes.”

Co-author of the report Professor Margaret Greenfields, of Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said:

“The trajectory of Roma history in Europe has included centuries of marginalisation and discrimination, including attempts at cultural annihilation involving the forced sterilisation of women and removal of children to the care of non-Roma families and placing of children in ‘special schools’. For many Roma people, both in the UK and internationally, these experiences create an often well-grounded fear of authority.”

Another report suggests addressing these issues requires a comprehensive approach, including cultural sensitivity and competence training for professionals, “addressing discriminatory practices and combating wide-spread negative stereotypes, supporting the legal empowerment of Roma families, and conducting further research to understand and respond to the specific needs of the Roma community in the British context.”

Can the System Cater to the interests of the Roma and Other Oppressed? Reform or Rebellion under Growing Racism?

For those who are seeking empowerment for the Roma and other oppressed communities by colonial states; for those who are seeking a society that is actually re-organised to serve the interests of the oppressed rather than the oppressors, it is important to primarily focus our minds and conversations around the challenges or even possibilities of reforming a white supremacist colonial system and state. The debate over reforming the colonial system or smashing it and replacing it with an anti-colonial society is an old one that is most graphically illustrated in the popular mind between the reformist civil rights approach in the USA context in the 1960s of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the more revolutionary approach of Malcolm X / Malik El-Hajj Shabazz and the ‘daughters and sons of Malcolm X’, the Black Panther Party/Black Liberation Army. A nuance here is that Dr King himself came over more to the position that the USA racist system could not be reformed. If we look rationally at the situation whereby working class oppressed people are being increasingly stripped of their political, cultural, social and economic rights and conditions, we can understand that the colonial-capitalist system is unable to provide for the oppressed, that its existence is predicated on the growing exploitation, oppression and monopolisation of power away from and against oppressed communities.

Both wings of the colonial system. – Democrat/Republican, Labour/Tory, liberal/right-wingers – are wings of the same system, and both wings feed the same system and the same global white supremacist global ruling classes. We have to be honest with our communities that there has been nothing but general deterioration on every level for them/us globally and in the ‘colonial centre’ in places like England for many decades, and more pressure and injury and death is being imposed by the system as we go forward.

In certain moments when the contradiction between the oppressed and the oppressor is magnified and results in a larger social reaction, we can see that the oppressed do act in these moments that they understand this perfectly, and that is what happened in the different uprisings in Leeds including the one led by the Roma in Harehills on 18th July this year. The intensity of the resistance against the police in the uprising showed in direct action that the oppressed reject their treatment by this racist state, that there is no negotiation with the colonial state on the latter’s terms but in this moment on the independent terms of the oppressed.

The state is directly and indirectly employing the far-right and extreme racist forces and frameworks to keep oppressed communities insecure, anxious and divided, and as such they are unable to really attempt to come together around what they have in common. A central part of this in the wake of the Roma uprising in Harehills was to state that the violent protest is just born out of some innate cultural or biological propensity to senseless violence. The racists and politics in general has for years tended towards a place where there is no ‘seeking truth from facts’ but the near total construction of all manner of lies and fabrications, untruths, manipulations and racist conspiracies which are believed by massive sections of society. This racist and far-right industry of lies and false conspiracies has also recruited a considerable section of non-white people, which is also one of the aims of these racist projects, especially if they are far-right racist in a ‘civic nationalist’ sense and not a racialist neo-Nazi type.

Nigel Farage is a leading politician in Britain, perhaps the most popular politician amongst Brits. He is also a leading racist. In response to the Harehills uprising Mr Farage asserted that “the politics of the subcontinent are currently playing out on the streets of Leeds”. The Roma haven’t resided in the Indian subcontinent for at least 1000 years. It was Nigel Farage who literally defined the mass meaning of Brexit as a mass influx of non-white immigrants to Britain in the now infamous Brexit poster. The point of this racism is to squeeze all non-white people into one category of the dehumanised other and outsider who needs to be expelled to ‘save’ Britishness and Britain. Another leading racist and former far-right Tory MP, now far-right Reform Party MP Lee Anderson, conjured up yet more ‘invasion to the land of milk and honey’ fantasies stating:

“import[ing] a third world culture and you get third world behaviour … I want my country back.” The former Tory minister for immigration Robert Jenrick, victim-blamed the Roma for ‘their’ failure to integrate into a system that doesn’t and can’t ‘integrate’ them.”

The Roma were framed by the far-right as Asians and especially as Asian Muslims, in line with their fear-mongering racist lies about Muslims and Islam that has been a mainstay of their messaging for decades if not generations. Roma have different religious beliefs. Some are Muslims, some are Christians. The Roma in Leeds tend to be mostly Christians. The potential and actual strengths of the oppressed has always been unity based on being oppressed under the white supremacist colonial system and not solely and narrowly around factions of tribe, region, religion and nationality. Some voices in the Muslim community, reacted to the far-right lies that the Roma involved in what was happening in Harehills were Muslims, by saying that actually the Roma are ‘European and Christian’. Whilst this was obviously done to expose the inconsistency of far-right narratives, it also had the unintended consequence of implying ‘Roma are actually part of your problematic camp of European Christians.’ This perpetuates the exact colonially divisive framework that the racists use.

Local resident in Harehills and Green Party councillor Mothin Ali caught the attention of another leading far-right racist figure Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, when at the conclusion of the election count for local council elections in May earlier this year, Ali stated that his victory was dedicated to the Palestinians and proclaimed ‘Allahu Akbar’ in his victory speech. The protests for Palestine have been used centrally by the state and the wider British racist community to heighten racist pressure on communities, especially Muslim communities. Ali’s comments on Palestine and his open Islamic affiliation were piled on by Yaxley-Lennon and his supporters on social media. The Daily Mail, which has promoted all manner of British colonial filth for more than a century, chimed in, accusing Ali of “causing outrage” with his comments, when the real cause of outrage is racism being internalised across the British population. Ali explained his experience around this:

“It got really, really threatening after that. My phone started going off every few minutes, it was ‘die [P-word], die’ and ‘I’m gonna kill you’. They started posting pictures of my kids and all that sort of thing. I shut my social media down. I deleted Twitter, I came off Facebook. I wasn’t expecting it, I thought probably I’d get some criticism afterwards but I never thought it would be as crazy as it was. It was relentless, day after day. There was an incident where someone turned up at my house, someone let my tyres down, someone phoned the police and made a death threat and was asking about my security. It’s just horrible, absolutely horrible. But people here know what I’m about.”

When the Roma uprising occurred, videos of Ali walking amongst the protestors were twisted into a lie by this far-right community wrongly claiming that Ali was engaged in stoking the violent protests. In fact, Ali was not inciting or rioting, but was trying to protect the police, and stop people throwing bins and crates on the blazing barricades. He himself gathered water from nearby homes and was filmed hand-cupping water to throw onto the burning barricades. The metaphor here is very apt speaking to James Baldwin’s ‘The Fire Next Time’ which spoke of the righteous violent resistance and uprisings of Black people. However, ironically it is Ali in this metaphor who is the one who wants to put out all the righteous fires of the oppressed that are beacons toward liberation and freedom.

Ali argued: “some of the police officers over the last few years I’ve got to know and I didn’t want them to get hurt. I thought, this is what a councillor is supposed to do.” Isn’t protecting police officers that you like and are friendly with – from an institution that is proven to be institutionally rapist, racist and homophobic – something that a councillor is supposed to do? According to the colonialists and its system: yes. In the liberal and the reformist position borne out by the colonial state, advocating for the protection of the police and trying to make a racist system work for victims of racism is the only thing available to oppressed people.

Ali argues further:

“We need to be able to reach out to the communities, people who are quite isolated, bring them into the system, and say ‘Look, this is the value of voting, this is the value of education, the schools aren’t your enemies, the teachers are trying to help you.’ Build that level of trust, because there is a massive level of distrust. And we’ve got to make sure they’re welcomed into the system, not forced into the system.”

Who is the pronoun ‘we’ in these regards? It seems to be those who are trying to make the system ‘work’ alongside the system itself, but isn’t a capitalist, white supremacist racist and colonial system doing what it is supposed to do in oppressing and exploiting? People have been voting, but every government, councillor and MP does not and cannot do anything for the poorest and most oppressed because the system makes it impossible, because the system is functioning as it is designed to function. With the growing insurgency of racist Britons, with the state and government folding into every rise in the level of fascism, everyone is being targeted for greater dehumanisation.

Whatever the best intentions of those trying to engage with the state, recent events have made clear in quick succession that the state and its institutions are the issue that requires change. Conformity from oppressed communities can no longer be seen as a solution to their problems. As Malcolm X explains, only total separation away from the colonial system is the means by which oppressed communities can achieve anything for themselves collectively. The oppressed who have relatively little to lose ‘in the fields’ have to contend with the colonial buffer class ‘in the house’ that is in many ways the first line of protection of the oppressors. So what are the situations around the challenges of oppressed communities asserting their own rights in such a struggle for dignity and liberation as it relates to the situation of the Roma oppressed community and others?

Conclusion: Challenges of Unity & Struggle in Growing Coloniality

As is often the case in community uprisings of the colonised, and similar to the Roma-led uprising in Harehills what we see are other demographics of the colonised joining in the uprising and resistance in many ways. People from other colonised backgrounds who were not Roma joined in the uprising on 18th July. In Britain before the Brexit victory and especially after it, Brexit (or “Empire 2.0” as it was known in the British civil service) was and is employed by the British state to ensure the division and taming of oppressed communities. This new Brexit order is meant to keep and has kept pushing racist divisions so colonised people don’t reach-out and find the actual truth of their condition that uniting and struggling together against the entire racist system is in their immediate interests. In this context, are there any political realities and forces that exist in Britain that seek to unite and develop a political struggle in a united anti-colonial manner? The tragic but honest answer to this is no.

The examples of successful struggles that unite colonised communities in the context of a state in the ‘West’ are arguably those led in the late 1960s by the Black Panther Party such as the Chicago-based ‘Rainbow Coalition’ and the BPP’s initiative of things like the United Front Against Fascism conference organised by the Black Panther Party and held in Oakland, California, from July 18th to 21st 1969. The BPP had hundreds of African (‘-American’) people organised into an efficient community and self-defence struggle drawing in hundreds of thousands of others and people from other racialised communities including Native Americans, Asians, and those in the white community who rejected white supremacy and colonialism. The challenge is to develop a program of engagement on council estates and high streets (as Leila Khaled has argued in her biography) to serve the people, love the people, and become a part of them in a framework of radical anti-colonial grassroots self-organising. The uprising in Harehills and then community resistance (mostly by street organisations of young people or ‘crews’ etc) against the mob attacks a few weeks later showed that openings for uniting the oppressed come out regularly around once or twice a year. The problem is that there are people few and far between attempting to increase capacity at the grassroots towards developing the relationship-building required to articulate a new social movement of solidarity and resistance.

Going forward we still have a growing racist mass mob in Britain that seeks nothing but the mass expulsion of non-white people, something which the Tories directly stoked and fed with their Rwanda removal policy, Bibby Stockholm barge and attack on Windrush migrants from the Caribbean, as well as their demonising narratives around Muslims and migrants more generally. Calls for mass expulsion of our communities are growing in Britain. British PM Kier Starmer has insisted that sharp draconian sentences are passed on some of the racist mob which has slowed down some of the bigger organised racist attacks although smaller level racist attacks continue. At the same time the new Labour government has to be on the defensive as most Britons are demanding more racist policies and accusing Starmer of being ‘two tier Kier’ which is a popular far-right slogan that asserts that there is one standard of policing for non-white people and another more repressive one for white Britons. This is of course a totally fabricated nonsense, but what it means is that non-white communities will be seeing (even more) harsher policing.

This entire situation clearly indicates the growing exposure of the contradictions of the system. Thus far, the colonial state is effectively managing communities in a way that is resulting in further social depression and fragmentation as the state and its non-state racists close in ever further around the proverbial neck of our communities. Examples of unity and resistance exist in the world today, not least in Palestine which sees a Palestinian people made up of people from different backgrounds united in a struggle against a white supremacist colonial settler entity. In the colonial centre we have also seen examples of this framework. Will we see new generations and forces pick up the challenges that lie in front of us?

[1] Protests outside such hotels by far-right groups have become frequent and normalised in recent years: according to The Guardian newspaper, in 2022 there 253 such ‘visits’ by the far-right to hotels accommodating asylum seekers, twice as many as the year before.

Liao – The Equality Society: A Preliminary Archival Reconstruction of The Chinese American Anarchist Movement

Posted on 10/01/2025 - 10/01/2025 by muntjac

Kindly borrowed from;

https://www.thecommoner.org.uk/the-equality-society-a-preliminary-archival-reconstruction-of-the-chinese-american-anarchist-movement/

“Anarchism is still the most beautiful ideal, and I think someday it will come,” wrote Lau Chung-Si (Ray Jones) from a small apartment in San Francisco. At the time he put these words to paper in 1974, he was a relic of another time. Jones was a Chinese man who, in 1909, immigrated to the United States and quickly became enamoured with the ideas of anarchism. He was involved in a collective of Chinese American anarchists in San Francisco named Pingsheh (Equality Society). He also attended meetings held by other anarchist organisations, as well as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). To date, not much has been written about the Chinese anarchists in America, but what has been written has focused on Ray Jones and the Equality Society. While acknowledging and continuing to use the Equality Society as a focal point, I am putting forward a preliminary analysis of the beliefs and praxis of Chinese American anarchists and their international connections as a part of a broader project of conceptualising Asian anarchism.

Information regarding Chinese American anarchists in America is fractured and spread far and wide. Most of the information analysed here was sourced from the Ray Jones Papers and the Him Mark Lai Collection at the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies library. By cross-referencing of multiple sources, including first-hand accounts by the Chinese immigrants, newspapers distributed by the Chinese anarchist collectives, the writings of contemporaneous socialists and IWW members, and other miscellaneous materials, it is possible to reconstruct an image of the Chinese American anarchist movement, its involvement in the revolutionary struggle for anarchy, and their relationships to other political groups.

Racism & Radicalization

The Chinese American anarchist movement was born from the unique condition of being Asian immigrants who were exploited by American capitalists and unfairly excluded from unions by Marxists and reactionary trade unions such as the American Federation of Labor. It was the IWW’s acceptance of Chinese immigrants that ultimately led them to the philosophy of anarchism. These Chinese Americans deeply held anti-State and anti-capitalist principles and were in favour of anarchist communism, under which they engaged in the praxis of direct action. These Chinese American anarchists worked with groups within the larger anarchist movement on local, national, and international levels. Their adherence to anarchist principles and collaboration with other groups led to struggles locally with capitalist and State repression along with alienation from their homeland due to hostility from the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) and the Chinese Communist Party.

Chinese immigrants failed in their attempts to join labour unions to combat the abysmal material conditions and exploitation that they faced under capitalism. A dogmatic belief in perverted formulation of Marx’s theories led many Marxists and like-minded socialists to exclude the Chinese immigrant proletariat from socialist labour unions and movements. In the 1900s, the Socialist Party of America was one of the largest socialist organisations in the United States. Their stance on Asian labourers was made clear by the “Summary of the Majority Report” at the 1910 Socialist Conference, which advocated for the:

‘…unconditional exclusion of Chinese, Japanese, Coreans [sic] and Hindus, not as races per se, not as peoples with definite physiological characteristics—but for the evident reason that these peoples occupy definite portions of the earth which are so far behind the general modern development of industry, psychologically as well as economically, that they constitute a drawback, an obstacle and menace to the progress of the most aggressive, militant and intelligent elements of our working class population.’

This is indicative of how many Marxists and adjacent socialists grouped Asian labourers as impediments to the revolution due to some perceived underdeveloped psychological and economic conditions. This line of thinking can largely be attributed to their understanding of Marx’s theory of historical materialism, which posits that a society needed to reach a certain stage of capitalist development before widespread class consciousness and revolutionary potential is possible. Since Marxists did not see Asian countries as having already reached that state of capitalism, they viewed the incorporation of Asian labourers as “fruitless and reactionary” and against the interest of the American working class as it would only hamper their revolutionary potential. However, the refusal to accept Asian labourers into unions cannot solely be attributed to racist revisions to Marx’s theories.

White supremacy was extremely prevalent in America which allowed those influenced by racism and xenophobia to add to the ongoing exclusion of Asian labourers. At the Socialist Conference, “Comrade Untermann … claimed that it was impossible to get the Asiatic laborers to understand the principles of labor organisation, much less of socialism.” This attitude demonstrates a belief of the racial inferiority of the Asian workers in comparison to their counterparts. While this supremacist view was common at the time, other socialists at the Socialist Conference challenged this thinking for being inherently racist — but to no avail. The anti-racist advocates were a minority at the Conference.

Despite anti-Asian biases being quite common amongst the American proletariat and socialist organisations, the heavily anarcho-syndicalist-adjacent IWW staunchly rejected any such sentiment as untrue and instead welcomed Asian labourers. The IWW’s view was articulated in the Industrial Union Bulletin’s coverage of The Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention’s “Resolution on Anti-Asiatic Persecution”:

‘In the past year several riots have occurred on the Pacific Coast directed against Asiatics on the ground that they are cheap labor … These Asiatics have, whenever an attempt has been made, shown their ability to organize, better their conditions and to stand true to their class … The interests of the working class are the same no matter what their race, creed and color and are diametrically opposed to the interests of the capitalist class, and … these outbreaks but serve to further divide the workers where they should be united, and therefore serve the interest of the master class, therefore, be it resolved … that we condemn the A.F. of L. [American Federation of Labor] as well as other so-called labor organizations who have in this respect aided the masters.’

The treatment of Chinese labourers as “cheap labor” by the bourgeoisie served as a means to cause conflict within the proletariat. By paying the Chinese little and engaging them primarily for physical labour, the bourgeoisie encouraged white workers to see them as inferior yet simultaneously as a threat to their economic position. This, in turn, caused division within the proletariat on racial lines which only benefited the capitalist class. The discrimination against Asian workers manifested in their exclusion from unions such as the American Federation of Labor and was countered in part by the IWW’s condemnation of labour unions that excluded Asian labourers.

The IWW accepted Chinese immigrants into its ranks and was “the only organisation that [had] ever done any organising among the Japanese and Chinese in [America].” The Asian labourers acted as other proletarians and had effectively organised for better conditions as described in the Industrial Union Bulletins (IUB):

‘None of the Japanese or Chinese who become members fail to realise their duty as to paying their dues and keeping in good standing. This cannot be said, truthfully, of all the “whites.” The Japanese and Chinese can be organised as rapidly as any other nationality. and when once pledged to stand with you, no fear or doubt needs to be entertained as to them, during labour trouble.’

The IUB emphasised that Asian labourers were just as effective and trustworthy as the white labourers, and were easily organised. Their actions showed that Marxist analysis of the revolutionary potential of the Asian immigrant proletariat was false and that the IWW’s recognition that the proletariat should be united by class against capital, regardless of race, was correct. Acceptance of Asian immigrants by the IWW led to the immigrants not only joining the IWW, but also adopting anarchist ideals in their own union called the Unionist Guild of America in order to focus on struggles more specific to their material conditions.

Praxis & Principles

The principle at the core of anarchism is that all hierarchies are inherently oppressive and must be abolished. While the Chinese American anarchists fought for the deconstruction of all hierarchies, they placed an emphasis on critiquing the interconnected systemic oppression caused by the hierarchical structures of the State and capital. In their publication, Anarcho-Communist Monthly (ACM), they wrote:

‘[The private property system (Capitalism)] is when capitalists monopolise all production tools and production items, use the monetary system, and force us workers to be their wage slaves. We workers were forced by hunger and cold, so we sold our precious labour to them to do everything for them. We workers make everything in factories and cultivate various plants on farmland. However, everything we produce is owned by the capitalists.’

They viewed capitalism as a form of slavery under which they rented out their bodies in exchange for monetary compensation. Despite the workers labouring tirelessly to manufacture and farm goods, in actuality, they owned none of what they produced. Instead, their labour was stolen by the capitalist system under which both themselves and their labour were owned. However, besides capital, they acknowledged another hierarchical structure that contributed to the disparity between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: the State.

The Chinese American anarchists acknowledged that the State was a tool wielded by the bourgeoisie to oppress the proletariat. In ACM, they wrote that:

‘Capitalists have occupied all production machines, not making them available to society, and depriving workers of their blood, sweat and lives … however, the government continues to defend the capitalists; if the workers have some demands on the capitalists, the government will immediately do its best to suppress our workers, intimidation, and even killing … the government must be overthrown and cannot be allowed to continue!’

Their analysis of society continued to critique the private ownership of the means of production by the bourgeoisie as it made the workers’ lives significantly worse. Furthermore, they added that the State always defended the interests of the ruling class. As the proletariat agitated through strikes and unionisation for better working conditions, the State would suppress the workers through tactics ranging anywhere from intimidation to full on massacres. Hence, the hierarchical structures of capital and the State were intertwined, and so, the Chinese American anarchists advocated the abolition of both.

The Chinese American anarchists desired to see a world antithetical to the current one with the State and capital replaced by anarchy and communism. In opposition to both the current system and their authoritarian counterparts on the left, they advocated for “free communism.” The Chinese anarchists described free communism as following the principle of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and how it could manifest in society:

‘That returns all property … to the common people, and the land to farmers. The villagers’ and peasants’ associations plan production, and the factories belong to the workers. The labor unions organized by the workers plan production, and distribution … Everyone works, everyone participates in all life decisions, there is no ruler, everyone freely enjoys the common products, and makes the best use of their talents and abilities.’

This conception of society aligns with the anarchist communism described by their primary inspiration, Pytor Kropotkin, as well as other classical anarchists while implementing elements of anarcho-syndicalism that were likely picked up from their work with the IWW. They wanted well-being for all, meaning that all needs would be fulfilled and work would be enjoyable. Additionally, these Chinese American anarchists wanted horizontal organisations in which each person had a say in the decisions made by their communities. This typically took the form of federated council structures that would elect a secretary to represent them for a limited time; these secretaries would advocate for their council’s position in larger district, provincial, and national gatherings. They believed that this could only be achieved through a society in which the proletariat owned the means of production with relationships characterised by free association.

As anarchism is a philosophy of praxis, the Chinese American anarchists’ means of abolishing hierarchies were intrinsically unified with their ends. They aimed for social revolution through the spreading of class consciousness and by using direct action to work toward their goals in a material way. The Equality Society published two newspapers: ACM and Equality. The purpose of these newspapers was to be the Chinese American anarchists’ “cry, [their] flag, and the sound of a bell that [aroused their] comrades” that “[promoted] anarchism and [recorded] news about the anarchist movement … [and] paid attention to the situation of Chinese workers in Europe and the United States.” The distribution of this literature was used to foster class consciousness within the Chinese immigrant proletariat by means of education. The content of a typical issue of either publication ranged from informative essays on the injustices of hierarchies of State and capital, to explanations of the ideas of anarchist communism, to critiques of Marxist-Leninist ideology, and to discussions on current events within their community and the broader anarchist movement. However, the “small monthly publication with black characters printed on white paper [was] not [their] main job, nor [was] it [their] only weapon.”

The primary form of direct action that the Equality Society took to fight against the State and capital was aiding unions and strikes. They distributed notices with support for the 1934 West Coast Waterfront Strike and the The National Dollar Stores Strike, among others. While the Chinese American anarchists critiqued the strikes on issues like “the capitalist collaboration with the union leaders” and were “not yet satisfied with the limits of their demands,” they were otherwise extremely supportive of these strikes, “viewing them as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for [the] Chinese workers to liberate themselves.” Additionally, they viewed strikes as a way to:

‘…spread [their] own ideals among the working class. In order to promote the class consciousness of workers, consolidate partial strikes into general strikes, and transform the general strike mechanism into an armed revolution of the working class against capitalism and the state! This is the solution!’

For them, strikes held a two-fold purpose, the first and more obvious one being to agitate for better working conditions and the second being for the further spread of class consciousness. The Chinese American anarchists viewed strikes in individual industries as a path to a general strike federated between all industries which would give rise to the proletariat’s revolutionary potential. The revolutionary potential could then be harnessed by the proletariat to enact a social revolution to dismantle the oppressive systems of the State and capital, which they viewed as the solution to oppression.

Comrades & Connections

However, for any revolutionary movement to exist, there needs to be more than a single group working toward it. While the Equality Society was certainly the largest group of Chinese American anarchists, there was another notable collective based on the other coast. The New York-based Jue She (Awakeness Society) was established by:

‘…[t]he Chinese in New York [that] have always expressed sympathy for the anarchist communists. Recently … some of the hard-working elements among them established the Awakeness Society in order to study knowledge, increase their knowledge, explore the truth, and transform society.’

These Chinese American anarchists from New York performed essentially the same tasks as that of the Equality Society, their primary difference being geographic location. Interestingly, according to the historian Paul Avrich, “Its main figures were Yat Tone and Eddie Wong, who had come to New York from the Equality Group in San Francisco.” While there were other notable members, such as Gray Wu, who were not part of the Equality Society, the Chinese American anarchists in New York drew much of their inspiration and praxis from the experiences of the Equality Society in San Francisco. This established transcontinental connections between the Chinese American anarchists on both coasts, though their reach went well beyond just these two groups.

The Chinese American anarchists embraced proletarian unity and worked with a variety of different groups to achieve their revolutionary ends. The Equality Society most frequently worked with the IWW and local anarchist groups, primarily from immigrant communities. As noted in Equality:

‘The city’s Jewish, Russian, Italian, and Chinese anarchist comrades … picnic meeting on the 23rd of last month in this city … In addition to speeches, there were also music and ball games to add to the fun. It was also suggested by a Russian comrade that the four groups should unite in the future and hold a regular meeting every Saturday night to facilitate communication.’

The collaboration with other immigrant groups allowed for the Chinese American anarchists to create solidarity within their area through meetings. The purpose of these meetings was to foster bonds between the groups in order to build community rather than wholly being focused on their revolutionary project. Meanwhile, the Awakeness Society had a cooperative restaurant called Jade Mountain that “[raised] money for The Road to Freedom.” Connections with other anarchist groups allowed for solidarity and organisation in their communities. However, these networks spanned far beyond just locally.

The Chinese American anarchists were also connected to anarchists abroad. For example, they were in correspondence with Emma Goldman and the Equality publication was “co-organized by our comrades who live in Europe and the United States.” Additionally, the Equality Society was in frequent contact with the noted anarchist translator and writer Ba Jin and the mainland Chinese anarchists, as well as anarchists in Japan. Jones in particular corresponded with Ba Jin on current events in China and the publication of the Equality in Shanghai, as well. Meanwhile, analyses and overviews of the material conditions and revolutionary movements in China and Japan were frequently published in Equality and ACM, such as “Chinese Anarchism and Organizational Issues” and “The Anarcho-Syndicalist Movement in Japan.” Yet while these transnational connections allowed for communication and solidarity with the wider anarchist movement, it also came with consequences.

Opposition & Obstruction

Chinese American anarchist activities in China led to oppression as their anti-hierarchical beliefs put them in opposition to both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese American anarchists described their position in Equality:

‘In the past, the Communist Party and the Kuomintang both wanted to help [people]. Now, although the Communist Party is still active everywhere and the Kuomintang is still in dictatorship … and the general public have nothing but resentment and resistance towards them.’

The Chinese populace viewed both the Kuomintang and Communist Party as having abandoned the people, instead prioritising their party’s political revolution to gain power. This led not only anarchists but also the general public to resent both parties instead of siding with either. In the ensuing clash with the Kuomintang, various anarchist operations were crushed by the party. Work on the aforementioned Shanghai-based edition of Equality was put to an end after “[their] distributing site [was] discovered by the Kuomintang.” The Chinese State decided to target these anarchists because they presented a threat to the status quo.

Chinese American anarchists’ principles also led them to trouble within the community of Chinese Americans in the United States. During the Sino-Japanese War, Ray Jones stuck to the anarchist principle of being anti-war as “the army, navy, air force … are all used to fight for the property of the country’s [bourgeoisie], and to … kill … the people.” As the anarchists deviated from the nationalistic tendencies harboured by their fellow immigrants, they faced consequences. Jones’ adherence to his beliefs led to him being physically assaulted at the San Francisco branch of Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association due to his refusal to contribute to the war fund.

Due to the Chinese American anarchists’ spread of libertarian ideas that opposed State and capital, they faced repression at the hands of the United States government. In many cases there was collaboration between the State and capital as Chinatown “employers … turned to the headquarters of the persecution for assistance, which was, of course, cheerfully rendered.” In this, the Chinese American anarchists’ analysis of the State as a protector of bourgeoisie class interests was shown to be true. The actions against the Equality Society mostly took the form of police raids upon their headquarters and arrests of their members. In a 1928 issue of Chung Sai Yat Po, a local news publication, it was reported that:

Two Chinese people were arrested: they were brought to the precinct. The prosecution’s case against them accused them of illegally distributing leaflets … The Immigration Bureau sent translators to translate the “May Day Special Issue” and “Equality” pamphlets. Many of them were printed by the Equality Society … The group is suspected of spreading anarchism.

The United States government targeted the Chinese American anarchists for raising class consciousness through the distribution of literature. This was indicative that the United States government was somewhat threatened by the Chinese American anarchists’ efforts to educate the proletariat on the ideas of anarchism, pushing for an understanding that would endanger its monopoly of violence. Yet despite the arrests of the Equality Society’s members and confiscation of their literature by the police, they were “still determined to work hard on [their] work as usual.” The Chinese American anarchists were unyielding in their pursuit of the anarchist cause.

Conclusions

Though these hopeful revolutionaries made meaningful change and supported the proletariat to the best of their ability, the Chinese American anarchist movement died out following World War II. It was likely that this happened due to a combination of factors: continued repression by the State and capital, the Chinese immigrant proletariat embracing rising Maoist currents, and the general decline of the international anarchist movement.

The Chinese American anarchist movement was one that was uniquely formed from the exclusion of the Chinese immigrants from the wider American Left. Once they had adopted anarchism, they were steadfast in their anti-hierarchical beliefs, demonstrated through their attempts to move closer toward equality by the use of direct action. The international connections of the Chinese American anarchists allowed for them to communicate with the wider anarchist movement, although this sometimes resulted in additional state repression both in China and the United States. The work of the Chinese American anarchists remains relevant to this day, demonstrating that while the revolution may not come tomorrow, it is essential to continue grassroots efforts to organise and educate communities on the oppressive nature of hierarchies and how to combat them, both individually and collectively. Those who strive toward a more egalitarian world must not give up hope. In the words of Jones, “In this dark world … I seek brightness.”

Bibliography

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “告工人” [Tell Workers]. June 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “奴隸問題” [On the Slavery Problem]. August 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “紐約覺社成立” [New York Awakeness Society Established]. November 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “告民眾” [Inform the People]. November 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “奴隸問題” [On the Slavery Problem]. July 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Anarcho-Communist Monthly (San Francisco, CA). “三藩市總罷工失敗的檢討” [Reflection on the Failure of the San Francisco General Strike]. September 1934. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 35, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Avrich, Paul. Anarchist Voices. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Accessed February 10, 2024.

Burgess, David. “Workers and Racial Hate.” Industrial Worker (Seattle, WA), June 4, 1910. Accessed February 10, 2024.

Chung Sai Yat Po (San Francisco, CA). “所聞之文字嫌疑,本埠警差前晚” [Rumors Heard, Local Police Dispatched Last Night]. March 23, 1928. East Asian Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality. “敬告勞動民眾” [Warning to Working People]. n.d. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Box 1, Folder 18, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “我們的宣言” [Our Manifesto]. July 1927. Translated by Liao (April 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “無政黨與共產黨不同” [The Difference Between Anarchism and Marxism]. n.d. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Box 1, Folder 18, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “本刊啓事” [About this Publication]. July 1927. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “中國無政府主義與組織問題” [Chinese Anarchism and Organizational Issues]. August 1927. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “一個問題的問答” [Questions and Answers]. September 1929. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “小消息” [Some News]. November 1927. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “消息” [Notice]. July 1928. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Equality (San Francisco, CA). “我們現在應該怎樣做呢?” [What Should We Do Now?]. July 1928. Translated by Liao (April, 2024). Carton 1, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Industrial Union Bulletin (Chicago, IL). “Japanese and Chinese Exclusion or Industrial Organization, Which?” April 11, 1908, 3. Accessed February 10, 2024.

Industrial Union Bulletin (Chicago, IL). “Local Executive Board.” March 9, 1907, 3. Accessed February 10, 2024.

Industrial Union Bulletin (Chicago, IL). “Proceedings of the Third Annual Convention.” 1907, 400-08. Accessed January 11, 2024.

Industrial Union Bulletin (Chicago, IL). “Roumanian Workers’ Response.” July 13, 1907, 3. Accessed February 10, 2024.

The International Socialist Review (Chicago, IL), June 1910. Accessed January 11, 2024.

Jin, Ba. Letter to Ray Jones, “R. Jones Archives at Asian American Studies, University of California, Berkeley [Letters],” 1920-1950. Transcribed by Yamayuchi Mamory (October, 1995). Box 1, Folder 5, Ray Jones Papers, Him Mark Lai Collection, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

Jones, Ray. Interview by Him Mark Lai. San Francisco, CA. January 14, 1973. Box 121, Folder 34, Him Mark Lai Papers, Asian American Studies Archive, Ethnic Studies Library, University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, CA.

The One Big Union Monthly (Chicago, IL). “The Chinese and the I.W.W.” March 1, 1919, 8.

Shuyao. History of the Meizhou Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui (Unionist Guild of America). Translated by Him Mark Lai. San Francisco, CA: Chinese Historical Society of America, 2008. EPUB.

Kropotkin, Pytor. The Conquest of Bread. Paris, France: Tresse et Stock, 1892. Accessed April 11, 2024.

Wong, Jane Mee. “Retrieving an Asian American Anarchist tradition.” The Anarchist Library. Last modified March 4, 2008.

Zimmer, Kenyon. “‘No Right to Exist Anywhere on This Earth’: Anarchism in Crisis.” In Immigrants Against the State: Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America, 166-205. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. PDF.

Zimmer, Kenyon. “Positively Stateless: Marcus Graham, the Ferrero-Sallitto Case, and Anarchist Challenges to Race and Deportation.” In The Rising Tide of Color: Race, State Violence, and Radical Movements across the Pacific, edited by Moon-Ho Jung, 128-58. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2014. PDF.

“We Shall Prevail” – Lessons from the Sudanese resistance committees

Posted on 09/01/2025 - 10/01/2025 by muntjac

This short peice is also avalible as a flyer in readable and printable formats. Its also on our kofi to order in sets of three.

The Sudanese working class have always stood and fought for their freedom, from the multi-century struggle against British, Ottoman and Egyptian imperialism to the ongoing struggle against the neocolonialism of the UAE. In recent history, the Sudanese working class have come together to topple dictatorship after dictatorship. October 1964: Ibrahim Abbud’s regime was brought down by a general strike. 1985: Muhammad Numeiri’s dictatorship felt the same fate following years of industrial action across many sectors, often tied together with the student movement.

December 2018-19: President al-Bashir was deposed following a relentless campaign of strikes and sit-ins, many of which were brutally suppressed by the Army and Police. Most notably a demonstration outside the armed forces headquarters being massacred by the army, 100 people were martyred. The military coup of the civilian government that took over after the 2019 revolution is what led to the ongoing war and the displacement of millions. Despite this the workers, students and youth of Sudan have formed resistance committees, direct-democratic assemblies, often organised online, these initiatives have helped get food and medicine to people who needed it while steering people away from siding with government forces or the RSF—two sides of the colonialist, genocidal coin.

تسقط بس
Just Fall

“We, anarchists of Khartoum, are members of the “resistance committees” and we raise our flags during marches with the rest of the revolutionaries, and we promote anarchy by writing graffiti on the walls. We oppose all types of authoritarianism. We are for freedom of expression and individual autonomy.”

Sudan: Anarchists Against the Military Dictatorship

لا تفاوض، لا شراكة، لا شرع
No Negotiation, No Partnership, No Haggling

In December 2018, students in the city of Atbara, furious over an overnight doubling of bread prices, took to the streets in protest. Their actions ignited demonstrations across Sudan, as widespread anger over the economic conditions under the dictatorial regime boiled over. The SPA—a coalition of several labour unions and others—called for widespread protests forcing the regime to begin to crumble. The informal unions and political parties who took a leadership role in the early parts of the uprising later on became co-opted by the military forces. The emergence of the Sudanese anarchist movement in late 2019 as well as the learnings from the repression from the 2013 uprising, influenced the broader politics of the resistance movement in the streets.

To avoid state repression of the protects, the people organising in the neighbourhoods—called for the formation of neighbourhood resistance committees (RCs). Localised committees of people that would organise and coordinate protests in their areas. Initially, the RCs served primarily as a tactical response: grassroots cells that stretch security forces’ resources across multiple areas, thereby reducing the risk of brutal repression. Over time, the committees evolved into spaces for local people in the neighbourhoods to express their political demands. While the competing neo-colonial interests fought for control of the political narrative, the RCs positioned themselves as independent political actors. Beyond organising protests, the resistance committees took on additional responsibilities, such as providing basic services and coordinating public actions.

Even though the RCs were operating leaderless, the nature of post-colonial nationalism that’s present in modern Sudan limited opportunities for going beyond nation-statehood. A severing with the state once and for all. Furthermore, Due in part to social constraints around women’s late-night involvement, the people who tended to be at the late-night meetings were mostly young men. Meanwhile, in the protest actions themselves, women and girls often outnumbered men.

For now, the resistance committees provide an example of local spaces where people can encounter each other.

السلطةسلطةشعب
Power is the power of the people

Following the outbreak of conflict in April 2023 between rival armed factions, Emergency Response Rooms (often referred to as ERs) emerged in many parts of Sudan. Modelled loosely on the local, grassroots structure of the RCs, the ERs quickly provided vital humanitarian relief. The Emergency Response Rooms illustrated a new phase in the social revolution as local emergency response people organised statelessly and autonomously against the conflict. Without state institutions, they assumed responsibility for operating health facilities independently. Over time, the scope of the ERs expanded, encompassing assistance for people fleeing active conflict zones, mobilising communities to repair or maintain water and electricity infrastructure damaged by ongoing clashes, operating community kitchens, and distributing emergency rations—often with the support of local and diaspora donations.

السلام والحرية والتضامن
Peace, freedom and solidarity

References

“Flowers Will Emerge from the Desert”: Interviews and Communiqués from Sudanese Anarchists Available at: https://muntjacmag.noblogs.org/files/2024/12/Flowers-Sudan.pdf

Khartoum City Resistance Committees Coordination Press Release Available at: https://resistancecommittee.com/en/press-release-august-31-march-khartoum-city-resistance-committees-coordination/

You’re Always on That Phone: How Being Online Sustained Sudan’s Youth Revolution

Available at: https://logicmag.io/issue-21-medicine-and-the-body/youre-always-on-that-phone-how-being-online-sustained-sudans-youth/

Sudan: Anarchists Against the Military Dictatorship Available at: https://cs.crimethinc.com/2021/12/31/sudan-anarchists-against-the-military-dictatorship-an-interview-with-sudanese-anarchists-gathering

The Revolution in Sudan: Interview with a Resistance Committee Organizer Available at: https://itsgoingdown.org/the-revolution-in-sudan-interview-with-a-resistance-committee-organizer/

Organising under a Military Dictatorship: An Interview with Sudanese Anarchists Available at: https://libcom.org/article/organising-under-military-dictatorship-interview-sudanese-anarchist-gathering

The Future of the Resistance Committees in Sudan Available at: https://spectrejournal.com/the-future-of-the-resistance-committees-in-sudan 

Barbarism in Sudan: a desperate appeal for help from Sudan’s anarchists! Available at: https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/04/22/barbarism-in-sudan-a-desperate-appeal-for-help-from-sudans-anarchists/

Written by Sunwo and Mutt.

Support the Sudanese Anarchist Gathering

Posted on 02/01/2025 - 08/01/2025 by muntjac

The Sudanese Anarchist Gathering formed in 2018 during the December Revolution. They are a group of young men and women that met during demonstrations and in universities despite political repression against student organising.

We have prepared a zine of texts by sudanese anarchists which can be downloaded for free or ordered from our ko-fi, with proceeds being donated to the Sudanese Anarchsit Gathering.

If you are an org or group of friends who want to put on an event to support the Sudanese Anarchist Gathering or other Sudanese people resisting war and genocide, get in touch and we can send you a box of the zine for free.

Below is a post we are sharing from the CNT-AIT, cut and paste from a repost by Freedom Press

Translated from Actualité de l’Anarchosyndicalisme.

Content warning: contains accounts of war crimes, including rape.

In the previous issue of Anarchosyndicalisme, the CNT-AIT echoed the call for solidarity from anarchists in Sudan.

Since a terrible war broke out on 15 April 2023 between two military factions – the Rapid Support Forces (or Janjaweed militias) against the official army – civilians have been living in a climate of “pure terror” because of a “ruthless and senseless conflict”, denounced by the UN with general indifference. At least 15,000 people have died, and more than 26,000 have been injured, but these figures are certainly underestimates.

There are 11 million internally displaced people, 1.8 million people in exile, and 18 million people at acute risk of starvation. 8 million workers have lost their jobs and their income. 70% of areas no longer have water or electricity, 75% of hospitals have been destroyed, 19 million students have stopped studying, 600 industrial plants have been destroyed and looted, as have 110 banks, 65% of agriculture has been destroyed, 80% of inputs (fertilisers, pesticides, agricultural machinery and harvesters) in the Geziera irrigated area – the largest in the world – have been looted and destroyed, etc.

The media and activist silence surrounding Sudan is allowing soldiers on both sides to commit genocide with impunity. The conflict between the two clans has many components: ethnic, with its trail of reciprocal genocides (according to the UN); “imperialist”, because each of the two opposing groups is supported by various foreign powers that covet Sudan for its natural resources and its strategic location. But above all, it is a “counter-revolutionary” war. By putting the country to fire and blood, it has crushed the hopes of the civil and democratic revolution. And drove many of the revolution’s activists into exile. By completely destabilising the country, this war has enabled the leaders of the former regime to remain in power without being tried for the crimes they committed over decades (during the military dictatorship and then the coup d’état).

The Revolutionary Committees, in which our anarchist companions participate, are trying to maintain their activity, but this is becoming increasingly difficult with the escalation of violence by the two military factions.

Following the appeal for solidarity, we received more than 1,200 euros (including 200 euros from the companions of the Kurdish-language anarchist forum, KAF), which we were able to pass on to our Sudanese companions. This solidarity enabled them to organise humanitarian distributions of blankets, hygiene products (sanitary pads, soap, toothpaste) and infant milk. A reception area for children was organised, with drawing materials and elementary classes, giving the children a chance to escape the madness of war.

But today, the situation is becoming impossible. The violence of the military groups is unleashed. The Janjaweed militias are behaving like barbarians towards civilians. They murdered our companion Sarah after raping her. For their part, the soldiers are arresting and torturing revolutionaries, accusing them of being allied with the Janjaweed. Our companions urgently need to seek shelter in neighbouring countries. We are relaying their desperate appeal to the international anarchist movement.

If you would like to make a contribution, please send cheques made payable to CNT AIT to CNT-AIT 7 rue St Rémésy 31000 TOULOUSE, or via PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/cntait1

Greetings from the revolutionary comrades of Sudan to all the anarchists of the world!

After the regime attempted to destroy and dismantle the glorious December Revolution, the outbreak of the 15 April war caused the displacement of 15 million Sudanese, the suffering of the entire population, the onset of famine and the deterioration of the humanitarian situation. And now the Islamic brigades have launched campaigns targeting revolutionaries and have made numerous arrests and surrenders.

The group of Sudanese anarchists invites you to show solidarity with it so that it can continue its great liberation activity and take it up again, including from abroad.

We would like you to help us get some of our companions out of the country, where they are threatened with arbitrary arrest.

Down with the fascist military regime, down with the Janjaweed brigades!

No to the arrest of revolutionaries, No to the torture of revolutionaries!

Long live the Free Revolution of December!

=======

WHAT CAN YOU DO IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PEOPLE OF SUDAN?

You can do a lot, individually or with a few people. The important thing is to talk about Sudan so that as many people as possible are informed about what is happening there!

1) Keep up to date with the situation in Sudan via the SudfaMedia [French].

2) Send messages of solidarity to contact@cnt-ait.info, and we’ll pass them on to our fellow anarchists in Sudan.

3) Talk on social media to your family, your friends, and your work colleagues about Sudan, its revolution and the abomination of the army, the rapid forces and the Islamists. A 4-page explanation of the situation can be downloaded here [in French].

4) Organise leaflet distributions [French], press tables, solidarity collections and events in solidarity with the Sudanese people and against the massacres.

======

**العسكرللثكناتوالجنجويد_يتحل**

Military in barracks and militias (janjawid) must disband

**لاتفاوضلاشراكةلامساومة**

No negotiation, no partnership, no haggling

ضد_الحرب

Against war

**السلطةسلطةشعب**

Power is the power of the people

السلام والحرية والتضامن

Peace, freedom and solidarity

Let us not abandon the anarchists of Sudan! Solidarity and mutual support make us stronger!

What Are The Deer Reading In 2025?

Posted on 01/01/2025 - 01/01/2025 by muntjac

Shola Von Reinhold – LOTE
A masterclass in execution of anarchist literature in form and politic. About the archive, doing crimes, & the extraction of Black radical thought from Black trans women

Michael Rolph Troulil – Stirring the Pot of Haitian History
A history of the Haitian revolution and counterrevolution

Hashi Kenneth Tafira – Black Nationalist Thought In South Africa
How Black nationalist thought came to be and transformed thru tha times

Diana Block – Clandestine Occupations: An Imaginary History
Fiction about a woman who goes underground in america during the 70s – about those guerilla groups that popped up at this time

Darcus Howe – From Bobby to Babylon: Blacks & the British Police
Produced in the aftermath of the uprisings that shook Britain in 1981 and how they arose out of systematic racism, poverty, unemployment and rage against the police.

Mohammed El-Kurd – Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal

Hybachi LeMar – The Ghetto Bred Anarchist

Felwine Sarr – Afroutopia

Orisanmi Burton – Tip Of The Spear

Odile – The Revolts Following The Death Of Nahel

Posted on 27/12/2024 - 27/12/2024 by muntjac

Source: http://oclibertaire.lautre.net/spip.php?article4261 & https://www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos52441.html

Introduction

France is no stranger to uprisings of racialized youth following murders of their brethren at the hands of the police.

October 27th, 2005, three Black and Arab youths flee from a police patrol, knowing that they will be subject to an identity check and possible detention for hours at a police station. The police terrify them and force them into an electrical substation. Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré are killed while the third child Muhittin Altun survives but is severely injured.

February 4th, 2017, french cops rape and humiliate Théodore Luhaka, a Black man. In March of that same year Liu Shaoyao, a Chinese Man, was murdered by French police who claimed he came at them with a pair of scissors.

June 27th, 2023, Nahel Merzouk, a North African teenager, is murdered by police, the murder is filmed from several angles and shared widely online.

December 10th, 2024, Abdoulaye, a Black man who suffered with mental health conditions was murdered in police custody, in 2023 he was the center of a viral video in which he was struck by an unmarked police car before being leapt on by cops in body armour.

The response to these atrocities is always the same;

-fascists raise money for the cops, raising millions of euros

-the police are given new powers of search, detention and exclusion,

-liberals, civil society organisations, Black/Asian/Arab/Muslim “rights” orgs (assimilationists) stand in a square and talk into megaphones about “justice” and “accountability”

-leftists propose something between police “reform” and forced employment

-right wingers propose immigration restrictions

-shop owners buy new security equipment (cameras, shutters)

-lumpen, anarchists and militant members of the mourning communities take to the streets, fight the police, burn cars, loot shops, start fires.

-the family of the deceased appear on national television, demanding peace with tears in their eyes.

Mutt.

The Revolts Following The Death Of Nahel

At the OCL (Organisation Communiste Libertaire) meetings this summer, a discussion was organized, based on the presentation of the brochure “Souffleur sur les braises” on the revolts following the death of Nahel, in Nanterre last summer. —- This brochure gives the floor to 5 people who live in Hérouville, a suburb of Caen, and participated in the fiery nights of their neighborhood. Some people were known for a long time, or crossed paths in the Yellow Vests (GJ) or more recent struggles, others were unknown before this meeting. The desire was to show solidarity and undo the distance between the revolutionary movements and these revolts.

Nahel, a 17-year-old, was killed by a police officer in Nanterre on June 27, 2023, the day after riots broke out in Nanterre, then the day after that everywhere in France. The comparison with 2005 does not seem relevant to the authors of the brochure, because at the time the revolt was confined to the suburbs of large cities and especially in the Paris region. In 2023, riots broke out in small towns of 4/5000 inhabitants, where police stations were attacked with Molotov cocktails, tobacco shops looted, cars burned. A generalized revolt that lasted 5/6 nights, with attacks by cops using mortars, damage to public buildings or banks, looting of stores, often with redistribution to the population, as happened in Caen in 3 working-class neighborhoods.

The Ministry of the Interior counts 23,878 fires, 12,000 vehicles set on fire, 2,500 public buildings damaged including 273 police and gendarmerie premises, 105 town halls, 168 schools. The Medef speaks of a billion euros of deficit for companies following the damage. By comparison, during the movement against the pension reform which lasted several weeks, there were 299 attacks against public institutions. This shows the degree of intensity of these few nights of revolts and everywhere in France.

Why did it explode this time?

Indeed, this is not the first time that a young person has been shot by the police and the reactions are rarely of such magnitude. There are at least 3 elements that can explain these riots. First, a saturation effect due to the increase in the number of people injured or killed by gunfire since the 2017 laws that give cops more possibilities to shoot, then the very shocking video of Nahel’s death that circulated very quickly on social networks and finally references to the film Athena (1), “we do like Athena!” shouted the rioters.

The organization was done in small groups with young people aged 13/14, the older ones came to support them. They also dropped them off by car in other places in the city, so that it would be faster. The interviewees are 20/25 and are clearly among the oldest. As an anecdote, two 50-year-old friends who wanted to participate were accosted and searched by the young people, who did not know them and suspected them of being cops. A whole neighborhood solidarity was set up, with the older brothers, the families who reported where the cops were and left the doors of the buildings open so that the young people could take shelter. Links between the neighborhoods that are usually opposed, made it possible to start all at the same time and thus disperse the cops, but also to exchange information on the cops and for the mortars. The mortars were brought back from Poland and Germany by go-fasts like the dealer, and then distributed in the different neighborhoods.

From the start, a call was made: “we don’t touch people’s vehicles, but public things”. The targets were surveillance cameras, streetlights to avoid being spotted, schools, town halls, bus and tram companies, shopping centers on the edge of neighborhoods, tobacconists (436 in France), sports shops, banks. In Hérouville, there weren’t enough cops, about thirty, and they could only hold the central square, where there are shops, a theater, and also a market square. At one point, the cops left, telling the young people, “you’re burning down your neighborhood anyway, we don’t care”. As soon as they left, the young people attacked the bank and managed to get in. The cops came back immediately and charged, there was no question of letting them touch the banks.

In Hérouville, as everywhere, the repression caused a lot of injuries from flashballs and stun grenades, there were at least 3 arrests. It was the first time that the GIGN was present, as well as many drones. In France, there were 1,300 arrests, followed by 762 convictions to a firm sentence, on average 8 months of incarceration. The GIGN and sometimes the RAID intervened everywhere in France and drones were widely used. Curfews were introduced, in Caen buses and trams stopped their service from 7 p.m. and gas stations also closed at 7 p.m.

The Yellow Vests of Caen were for many people from working class neighborhoods. From this movement, there remain in Hérouville informal collectives, for example a garden at the foot of the towers where there are aperitifs, food recovery and solidarity. Since the riots, 4 cameras planted at the top of the towers, monitor the garden permanently.

There were attempts by activists to make connections in a more or less clumsy way. A demonstration was called in the city center, many people from the neighborhoods came. The people who called for the demonstration took the lead of the procession with somewhat angry slogans: “we’re going to smash everything, we’re going to do our shopping”. By saying we’re going to do our shopping, they announce we’re going to loot and in fact they don’t do it. The people from the neighborhoods who have been looting for several nights are disgusted and announce that they won’t come back. At the next demonstration, there will only be 50 people. They weren’t given the lead of the procession, nor the megaphones, and in addition 4 people were arrested, they were a bit bitter. They feel more vulnerable in the city center and don’t know where to hide unlike in the neighborhood. The left-wing organizations organized a solidarity demonstration in September in Caen. She leaves from the only working-class neighborhood where nothing happened at the end of June, pure coincidence?

If it only lasted a few nights and if some places were not attacked, it is probably so as not to disturb business. This is a reality of the neighborhoods that the struggles are confronted with. It is also due to the lack of mortars that were used to keep the cops at a distance, and also of course because of the repression. People died during these riots, including one in Marseille from a flashball shot at point-blank range.

We have every interest in getting closer to the people who revolted because they are cool, even if there are lots of contradictions.

In other cities

In Reims , a city of 220,000 inhabitants, in a district of 30,000 inhabitants, average income 890 euros, 37% of unemployed under 25s, 27% of single-parent families, priority district of the city, there is a small tradition of riots, notably during the acquittal of a baker from the FN who had killed a young man who had stolen croissants from her. These are the images we see at the beginning of the film “La haine”. Last year, there were 2 days of riots, with very young participants and adults who followed them, without being masked, and sometimes regulated, preventing them from attacking certain places, such as the Post Office where they receive their RSA. A store was targeted, but not the one run by the Chechens, nor the Kabyles’ tobacco shop where the old men play PMU. The police station, which is empty at night, was attacked, but not the national police academy or the CRS barracks near the neighborhood. Contacts were made via Snapchat or Instagram loops, already created at the high school or elsewhere. The looting is anecdotal: coke, Yop, sweets, and the next morning the mothers came to stock up on the groceries necessary for survival, then later it was the alcohol that was stolen. The HLM office was attacked, we don’t know by whom, but certainly not by the kids. The police remained very discreet, no major clashes as long as it remained in the neighborhood. On the other hand, roadblocks were set up in the city center to prevent people from going there.

In the 93 , the riots were less significant than in 2005. Some things are surprising. In Bobigny, for example, the looting was more of their mother’s shopping. Rosny 2, the largest shopping center in the 93, was apparently looted by young people from residential areas. The darons who protect certain buildings already existed in 2005, but it was more organized in 2023. In Blanc-Mesnil, mothers had meals in front of the municipal swimming pool to protect it. Everything was burning around it, but the general high school, which has a glass facade and would have been an easy target, was not hit, the vocational high school was. The silent march for Nahel’s death in the city center of Nanterre attracted an impressive crowd, very calm and family-oriented. It degenerated as they approached the prefecture, surely by provocation from the many police officers, to prevent Nahel’s family from speaking out.

Mantes la Jolie , 40,000 inhabitants, is known because it is where the 151 high school students were forced to stay on their knees, hands on their heads, while they blocked their high school to oppose the reform of the baccalaureate and Parcoursup, but also in support of the Yellow Vests. There was little solidarity for these high school students, despite the collective for the defense of young people from Mantois that was created on this occasion, 150 people at the demonstrations, mainly the left and the far left. The situation was identical in June, just a demonstration of 30 people called by Solidaires where there were twice as many cops. An attempt to create union solidarity, by explaining that the rioters do not come out anywhere, that they are from our class, the children of our friends, of our colleagues, remained very much in the minority. On the possibility of getting involved, same thing as in Caen when you are over 30, it leaves a feeling of unease. There are very few political forces left in the neighborhoods. The MIB (2) or the collective against double punishment, which could, in their time, provide a link between political forces and the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods, no longer exist.

In Toulouse , we quickly realized that the neighborhoods were already structured into teams, and that there was no place to join them, unlike the GJ where you could join a roundabout. So, we wanted to do public and reachable things, with the idea of extending the fight, taking it out of the ghetto, multiplying the offensives, this resulted in a demonstration of 400 activists completely supervised by the cops. We would have done better to do things on our own, block things. We must stop asking ourselves the question of the outside or even of solidarity, but rather that of how we get into the fight and not how we support. It is certainly easier to do anti-repression than to get involved.

There were agreements with the dealers not to start the riots too early, so that they could sell. We also saw people patrolling the neighborhoods to watch their cars.

In the 92 in Chatenay Malabry , the Butte Rouge is a very important 100% HLM city, with projects for rehabilitation, destruction, privatization. There were no riots in 2005, but there, the annex town hall burned and the tramway – an important element of gentrification to bring more affluent people to the city – was damaged. In the 1970s, there were lots of associations, the Fasti, the Gisti (3) …, a MJC managed by the inhabitants and the Communist Party. Now there is nothing left, the opposition is 20 people in a city of 35,000 inhabitants. There is no political life, but clientelism with gentrification and the urban planning where everyone is gorging themselves. When we created a collective to resist the reconstructions in the Butte Rouge neighborhood, we couldn’t get a room, or at the last minute. The posters were taken down the same day. People are afraid that they won’t be given housing or that they’ll be evicted, so they don’t resist much. And the mayors are going to have even more power to allocate social housing. The associations are hyper legalistic. To buy social peace, all the communities have their own room and subsidies. These 40 years of depoliticizing the neighborhoods explain why things are going to explode. In 2005, we won, what, a police station in the center of the neighborhood.

On the issue of the presence of girls and women in the riots

In the Yellow Vests, women were very present and it lasted for more than a year with a lot of discussions. What about these riots? For some, it is a spontaneous revolt of anger by people who are used to occupying the streets, who find it legitimate to do so. For others, girls are less present than guys in the riots, but it is no different from what happens elsewhere. Guys have a strong feeling of anger, because they are the ones who are always arrested and hassled by the police.

There were young and older women in the demonstrations. In Hérouville, women and children walked around the neighborhood to watch the cops and protect from afar.

In Rennes, girls were discussing how to make Molotov cocktails with tampons. They were taking part in looting stores. The rioters were quite young, and there is repression within the family. Who lets their daughters out at night? And that is not the same as saying that the street was forbidden to girls.

The repression

We see that the Senate was expecting a revolt, thanks to the surveillance of social networks, but not who, where and how. We find a lot of interesting information on the Senate Information Mission. It notes at least one incident in 330 cities, including cities that have never seen this kind of riots like Vierzon. In Montargis people went to destroy the city center. Those who are convicted are first-time offenders with an average age of 14, the youngest is 12 years old for a firm sentence.

In Reims, there were convictions in immediate appearance and probably bans from the territory for some of the accused who were not seen again in the neighborhood. There was no solidarity from the left or the far left, no follow-up of the trials. The residents of the neighborhood were punished collectively, no public transport for 6 weeks, the renovation of the bus shelters took more than 4 months. The mayor of Reims proposed to punish the parents of the rioters by depriving them of social housing and family allowances.

All the inhabitants of the 93 have suffered collective punishment: no more buses throughout the department from 9 p.m. and then 7 p.m. The festivities normally present during the summer have been cancelled, notably on July 14.

What could have been the tipping points for this movement to gain momentum and be joined by other struggles?

These riots were a little better perceived than those of 2005, because there was a general anger after the demonstrations on pensions and Sainte Soline, which can help to better understand this movement.

For there to be a connection, forces are needed, but the revolutionary movement no longer exists. The first phase would be to create a link, but relatively few activists live in these working-class neighborhoods.

With the yellow vests, there was no need for revolutionary organizations to create these links, it happened quite naturally on the roundabouts.

There was a social explosion with a speech and demands among the GJ. A fairly political movement and bearer of projects, which temporarily put the cogs of the state in difficulty and managed to get 7 billion while the state coffers were supposedly empty. Most of the parties and union organizations refused to analyze the GJ as a political revolt.

Participating in a riot is part of the culture of young people in the neighborhood. They defend their territories, it is anger expressed in actions. Young people say “there are no slogans, we just act”, but it is not just anger, the message is clear, a guy is getting killed, we have to react so that the next one is not me. And we are tired of being victims of this increasingly racist police.

Working-class neighborhoods are more often stigmatized, especially during Covid, and more recently for the defense of terrorism because of support for Palestine and at the time of the Olympic Games, there was a lot of repression, searches and house arrests.

But the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods also participate in the struggles, notably in the mobilizations for Palestine; there are many people from the neighborhoods and few political organizations.

If the left had made immigrants vote as it had promised in 81, politicians would care more about the inhabitants of the suburbs. During the strike at Talbot in June and July 1982, in addition to wage demands and improved working conditions, skilled workers of immigrant origin fought for their union freedoms. The Mauroy government (socialist) denounced them as being manipulated by Islamists, to discredit their struggles and demands.

Since then, the Islamists have taken up a lot of space, and the dealers regulate the economy and regulate the neighborhoods, it is one of the cogs of the system.

The targets were also clear in the 93 all the companies in the free zone burned down. Many public institutions and banks were attacked. And if the school burns down it is perhaps because it is raining in the classrooms. The school is also one of the places of social discrimination and reproduction of the dominant ideology. And it also serves as a daycare, to get parents back to work, as we saw during Covid.

And after?

These events have had a strong impact on people and minds. There were discussions between young people and other residents in many neighborhoods after the riots.

It is a continuation of other movements. All actions, whether ecological, riots, GJ, anti-pension, feed off each other. A wealth is created, and something remains, it is added to what happened before. For example, the demonstrations after the yellow vests were modeled, took the same form as that of the GJ.

For the moment these different movements do not really look at each other, they remain very separate. It is our job to create links. We could have helped them on the question of repression, it was an opportunity to bring a clear political point of view by showing solidarity and saying that we are right to revolt, that the riot is legitimate.

The Yellow Vests are not joining the demonstrations of support, probably because of the trauma caused by the enormous police repression still underway. There are still trials and the families are affected by the injured. They are not putting themselves forward, even if some are still in the movements. It is a missed opportunity, people did not come out, they left the kids all alone.

The media sets the pace and delivers a discourse. We see this in the difference in treatment with the farmers’ riots that went as far as Paris.

There is another component missing, something stronger than the riot. The form was liked, being where the cops are not, but it is difficult to continue when the government sends tanks against the rioters.

We are not just in solidarity, but we fight to change the world for us too, where we are. It was complicated to mobilize even in the union organizations.

There were calls to go to court where the young people were appearing immediately, but they were well guarded. In addition, the majority were summoned to the juvenile court, therefore without an audience. In Bobigny, you had to know in which room the trial was taking place in order to be able to enter, and since the clerks were also on strike, there was no indication of the room. However, there were many more people at the trials than in 2005.

Some anti-repression groups spend more time dealing with the left and have missed the riots. Nevertheless, an anti-repression and anti-racist fund has been created.

On the relationship to the image , we keep saying that we should not film during demonstrations or other things, while we see that the movement began thanks to the video of Nahel’s death and that perhaps without this shocking video, nothing would have happened. Can’t the videos serve as an archive of what happened, scenes of looting, cop attacks, the jubilation…? So as not to forget.

Odile

Notes

1- The film Athena – Athena is a French film released on Netflix in 2022 and directed by Romain Gavras. Grandson of an Algerian rifleman, Abdel is a young lieutenant in the French army, engaged in Mali. He returns following the death of his youngest brother Idir, apparently deceased as a result of a police blunder. Abdel finds his family torn apart, between the desire for revenge of his little brother Karim and the business in peril of his big brother dealer Moktar, he tries to calm the tensions. Minute by minute, the Athena city plunges into chaos, then the situation degenerates into civil war throughout France… The end of the film reveals that a small far-right group staged the fake police blunder that cost Idir his life.

2- Immigration and Suburbs Movement

3- FASTI Federation of ASTI- Associations of Solidarity with All Immigrants. GISTI Information and Support Group for Immigrants

Further Reading

https://infokiosques.net/spip.php?page=lire&id_article=2061

muntjacmag.noblogs.org/post/2024/10/22/actforfreedomnow-france-june-july-2023-chronicle-of-attacks-after-the-murder-of-nahel-m/

https://illwill.com/nothing-left-to-loot

Anon – Freedom fighters North London & Worldwide

Posted on 20/12/2024 - 26/12/2024 by muntjac

20/12/2024

On the 27th November dozens of riot police carried out dawn raids on the Kurdish Community Centre (KCC) in Harringey, North London, and several home addresses across the capital.

A number of anti-genocide activists from the Kurdish refugee community were arrested under terrorism charges, several more comrades were arrested the same day on protest related charges. A wave of protests, an occupation and hunger strikes followed until KCC was returned to the community. Under constant pressure the return took place over a week earlier then planned, despite what appears to have been a multi-million pound policing operation.

The dawn raids came just weeks after Turkey’s minister of foreign affairs Hakan Fidan, a leading fascist in Erdogan’s AKP party, met with Britain’s foreign secretary David Lammy, also the local MP for Harringey. This attack on the Kurdish community seems to clearly be part of agreed negotiations, in exchange for Turkey’s continued support as a NATO member for western Imperialism, in particular Israeli aggression.

These raids must also be seen in the geopolitical context as part of the handover negotiations, from Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship, to a coalition made up mostly of Jihadists, including former ISIS and Al-Qaida (now known in Syria as HTS) fighters, and Turkish funded and trained militias. These militias have been taking a passive approach to Israeli aggression in the Middle East, and attacks on Syrian land, earning them support from the Western ruling class despite their political ideology.

Today (20/12/24) 6 of the Kurdish activists taken in the dawn raids had a court hearing at the old Bailey. A comrade who sometimes writes for Muntjac has written the following report from todays trial:

The 6 people charged with terror offences have been bailed for a trial date in January 2026.

In the meantime they are released on tag under house arrest and with draconian bail conditions. They have to report to the police station between 12 and 2 daily, making it hard for them to work and study, and bail conditions barring them from the area around KCC means they can’t use the Piccadilly line which goes underneath KCC or the overground line going next to it.

Kurdish activists have been asking supporters to brainstorm ways in which our networks can keep supporting the Kurdish community through this. They’ve said probably the way people can support them the most is by extending revolutionary social changes from Rojava into our countries through local neighbourhood direct democracy, environmentalism and women led liberation.

It must surely be assumed that if these people genuinely were directing a “terrorist organisation”, posing an immediate threat to life, the system would be locking them up straight away and not bailing them until 2026 under house arrest. This gives us time to turn things around, the Turkish state will be ramping up pressure on the British government to deliver long sentences. Collectively we can put greater pressure on UK politicians to put a stop to these show trials and stop supporting the genocide being waged against the only real democracy in the Middle East.

If these freedom fighters are to be given 10 year sentences, this will represent yet another grave injustice in British colonialism’s long and shameful history. What can be certain is that like every other empire before it, this systematic corruption will not be continuing indefinitely.

Darcus Howe on ‘third world “socialism”

Posted on 18/12/2024 by muntjac

http://www.sojournertruth.net/interview1.html

Extracted from^

The political struggle for working class emancipation would be led by a political party of intellectuals drawn from the middle classes with a handful of advanced workers in tow. Once in government the leadership would provide proper welfare, organize the workers to produce more in order to meet the costs, the workers to be motivated either by incentives, the moral whip or Siberia. The surplus goes towards projects sanctioned by the leadership and the massive bureaucracy which hangs over to corrupt the new. Surplus for guns, travelling expenses for bureaucrats to beg loans abroad. From time to time, with less regularity as the years go by, the working class would be called to large gatherings then sent home after being told of the latest in the development plan to which they must shout their assent. All this is spiced with revolutionary slogans All independent attempts at working class and peasant organization are to be squashed with a ferocity which surpasses that meted out by previous colonial masters.