[Introduction to Our Culture, Our Resistance: People of Color Speak Out on Anarchism, Race, Class and Gender, 2004]
The white fathers told us, "I think, therefore, I am" and the black mother within each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams, I feel, therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and chart this revolutionary demand.
– Audre Lorde
Here we are, and the APOC phenomena continues. From the Detroit Conference to the build-up for the Republican convention and onward, folks of color with anarchist and anti-authoritarian politics are making a presence. And it couldn't happen at a better time!
If I may pull my age card for a moment: I am a very proud product of the 1960s' Revolution. It was that time when all things seemed possible, like Revolution in the very belly of this beast. It was in the air and folks from all walks of life were joining up. Some movements in particular were grounding the charge. The American Indian Movement, the Chicano Liberation Movement and the Black Liberation Movement. And why do I say "grounding?" Because without the recognition of these movements having to deal with the very structure of the Empire of the U.S., the anti-war movement would only fight for reform and reform would mean the wholesale selling out of those of us at the very bottom for the interest of well-meaning white folks. It would be just another version of selling out folks of color as throughout the history of our struggles from the moment of European invasion. For the same reason, folks of color decide that it is necessary to close ranks, so to speak, and figure out how to ensure our different freedoms.
Living in the '60s and '70s meant living at a time when modern technology, especially the revolution in communications and transportation, meant that the "world" got smaller. A teenage boy in New Jersey could turn on the TV set and watch his folks in that Black Nation called Down South get waterhosed and beaten by rednecks because they dared protest for the right to be free from racism and terror. It also meant that we got to see televised accounts of the U.S. invasion of the Vietnamese people and sometimes even an African revolutionary diplomat speaking eloquently on a newly independent nation or liberation struggle on the verge of victory. Come to find out that your very own revolutionaries here, like Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Stokeley Carmichael, the Panthers and even folks like Maya Angelou had been traveling overseas to visit and learn from these other kindred struggles. Cuba, Vietnam, China, Algeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria. Folks were reporting back new information before they could even get back. And folks here were just moved. It was the true beginnings of the anti-globalization movement. But folks of color revolutionaries here weren't hopping from one revolutionary uprising to another like it was fun, and no doubt it was exciting. But folks belonged, for the most part, to organizations on the ground level who needed, wanted to know what thinking and organizing styles seemed to be working for others around the world so that we might incorporate them, like in jazz improvisation, into our movements and move forward. Communications and transportation technologies were being used by the slaves to hook up with other revolutionary slaves around the world in the hope that we would all be on the same page in bringing down The Beast. The Babylonian Monster.
Interesting about this '60s period that is so instructional for those of us today who are bringing anarchist and anti-authoritarian revolution to our communities, is that '60s revolution began as a rejection of old revolutionary thinking and styles of organizing. When we research that early period we find that young folks, regardless of racial background, were tired of the various communist and Marxist parties, and the liberal organizations. They were not lonely, led by old folks but displayed such a rigid, Catholic adherence to dead white male revolutionary thinking that it felt like parents. It felt like parental rule that upheld hypocrisy and materialism and individualism and willful blindness to racism, war and class privilege. So, on their own, young folks were searching for more egalitarian, communal and spontaneous ways of just being in the world and of making revolution in the US, in concert with other struggles around the world: the Congo, 1964, France, May ,1968, and Mexico, 1968.
In this early period, the anti-authoritarian spirit was dominant. It was organizationally expressed in early Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Student Nonviolence Coordinating Committee (SNCC). It was expressed in terms of creating a vision of a "Beloved Community". Revolutionaries like Elder Ella Jo Baker were able to impart to young folks in the South to look to themselves for leadership and to help Southern communities raise up their own indigenous leadership instead of relying on the privileged ministries and old liberal guard to guide them. SNCC, as just one example, took Ella's advise to heart and was able to help build a dynamic revolutionary movement for voter registration and community liberation like the racist, fortress South had never saw. And when we look further into this period, we can see that as long as folks kept to egalitarian, participatory democratic and grand visionary politics, the movements kept a vibrancy and growth. But as we go further, we also see that at the same time the more rigid liberal and revolutionary influences had not given up their religious fight to lead the movements: Black, Native American, Chicano, Asian, Puerto Rican and white "worker."
As the battle for ideological leadership, organizing style and revolutionary "agency" grew, folks were hitting normal growth roadblocks. These had to do with membership growth, the constantly changing picture of the system we were up against and its fascism against us, questions of allies, weapons of fight-back, etc. Folks needed answers. The pressure was on. Revolution now. Seems like quick fast solutions were needed and folks were leaning more to the "scientific" approaches coming from the Marxists, communists and Third World revolutionaries. And the Third World revolutionaries were taking on more Marxist and communist ideas. Eurocentric ideas. Scientific ideas. Modern ideas of making a revolution in their respective nations. And being that the liberation movements were succeeding so quickly in kicking out their imperial masters, then it seems to make sense that we take on that kind of thinking and style. We did. As our movements here became more Marxist, we will see that they also became less inclusive, less spontaneous, less democratically participatory. One did not continue to pursue the Beloved Community; one now increasingly talked about "scientific socialism". One did not try to discover new ways to deepen the participatory democracy which "took too long" or contained too many different ideologies; one went for the more serious "vanguard"; small, tight-knit organization of the more brilliant speakers, theoreticians and organizers who knew what to do, because they had read more, traveled more and spoke more.
The Women Uprising within SNCC and SDS and other organizations would be stifled because, I don't care how you look at it, this new revolution would boil down to men shit. And though it may have been a blessing in disguise, because a women's revolutionary movement would seriously take off at this point, the overall movements would fragment in a not-good way while the Monster would recover and its Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) shored up its fascist work. In this sense, though a lot of great resistance was waged under the growing Marxist-Leninist-Trotskyist- Maoist direction of grassroots movement, overall, it killed our spirit, our spontaneity and our faith in our own indigenous knowledge production.
Within the Empire, be we folks of color, workers, students, we have histories and herstories of resistance nurtured by visions of freedom. We have ways of knowing and figuring things out that have allowed us to draw from Iroquois to Franz Fanon and Herbert Marcuse. Why I originally said that all this was instructional for us today is because it was that anarchist and anti-authoritarian spirit of the early '60s that gave that period its revolutionary dynamism, its originality. Folks were so inspired by international movements but more so by our own folks of color movements here in the belly. But we lost it. All of us. And in many ways, their ain't been a comparative movement or movements since. By the early 70s, for all intents and purposes, we were not able to sustain our growth to effective challenge the Empire and COINTELPRO, and the mass media wrote the rest of the story.
But then out of nowhere, seemingly, comes Seattle and the WTO battles and we begin to hear faint sounds of revolution again and some of them voices are ours. Ours. Folks of the Tribes, indigenous to Turtle Island, here by way of the slave ships, here by southwestern wars of U.S. annexation, World War Two koncentration kamps descent and then our more recent immigrant communities of color who take their turn at becoming the latest fall-guys diverting attention from the real empire designs of world domination. Our anarchism has meant for us a return to something old yet so new, Not only in terms of our people's ancient stories of stateless times but just being here now knowing that even within the resistance stories there has always been the spirit of freedom, direct action, participatory democracy and communalism. We, like the Zapatistas, are both ancient and new, embracing cutting edge thinking on our own terms, i.e. not slavishly. We will use both the drum and the Internet, the sacred prayer and the gun; and we will be as grandly and wildly visionary in drawing new worlds as we wanna be.
Folks wanna know what anarchism is? It's freedom, it's creativity, it's culture. It's people and people's diversity. It's people finding themselves right now from all walks of life here in the belly of the beast and not giving a damn about how we got here via the Empire but deciding that it is gonna be here where we plot the Empire's demise. Fuck ya bourgie-ass white rights, borders, patriotism, their weapons of mass distraction and destruction. On to the return of an old family grandchild to home: Revolution anarchist-style, communal, earth-loving, dancing, throwing bricks, squatting abandoned building, creating quilombos. In the hands of your soulful playmate, we APOC are here. Let the games begin!
PS – Thank you for letting an ole man hang with y'all. Because of you, I still believe that with the torch in your hands, we can kick ass and help make this world of worlds … free.
Behold, I am Funkadelic. I am not of your world. But fear me not. I will do you no harm. Loan me your funky mind and I shall play with it. For nothing is good unless you play with it. And all that is good, is nasty!
"What is Soul," Funkadelic, 1969
GOOD MORNING, REVOLUTION, you nasty cat you! Sorta Langston Hughes, uh-hun.
