Category: Anti-racism

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Anarchist Cuba : Countercultural Politics in the Early 20th Century (2019)

Author(s)

Kirwin Shaffer

Contents

“By taking a sociocultural approach—an approach detailed later in this introduction and in chapter 1—this book arrives at three overarching conclusions.

First, when anarchists challenged the cultural, economic, political, and religious institutions, they did so not only during the eight-to fourteen-hour workday in the workplace but also through their writings, rallies, and alternative health and educational initiatives; anarchists challenged Cuba’s power holders throughout the rest of the day outside the workplace and inside the daily cultural milieu.

Second, this anarchist challenge reflected how the international anarchist movement operated within the context of a unique national situation in which Cuba’s political culture was shaped by the wars for independence, the U.S. occupations following independence, and the foreign domination of the economy. As anarchists engaged and criticized the larger hegemonic culture and created their own counterculture, anarchists modified the larger impulses and issues of international anarchism to fit the specific cultural, ethnic, and political realities on the island; thus, they “Cubanized” anarchism. As a result, one becomes aware of how anarchists, via their cultural critiques and initiatives, struggled to create their own specific sense of cubanidad (Cubanness).

Third, this study sheds light on Cuba’s leftist revolutionary heritage by illustrating an important but largely ignored early chapter of that heritage. In the early twentieth century, Cuba’s anarchists played important roles in shaping the Cuban Left by agitating for not only labor reforms but also socialist internationalism, worker-initiated health reforms, radical education, revolutionary motherhood, and gender equity while rejecting the political system, capitalism, and religion.”

Kirwin Shaffer

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Anarchy Works (2010)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“Anarchism is the boldest of revolutionary social movements to emerge from the struggle against capitalism—it aims for a world free from all forms of domination and exploitation. But at its heart is a simple and convincing proposition: people know how to live their own lives and organize themselves better than any expert could.

Others cynically claim that people do not know what is in their best interests, that they need a government to protect them, that the ascension of some political party could somehow secure the interests of all members of society.

Anarchists counter that decision-making should not be centralized in the hands of any government, but instead power should be decentralized: that is to say, each person should be the center of society, and all should be free to build the networks and associations they need to meet their needs in common with others.

Anarchy means different things to different people. However, here are some basic principles most anarchists agree on.

– Autonomy and Horizontality : All people deserve the freedom to define and organize themselves on their own terms. Decision-making structures should be horizontal rather than vertical, so no one dominates anyone else; they should foster power to act freely rather than power over others. Anarchism opposes all coercive hierarchies, including capitalism, the state, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

– Mutual Aid : People should help one another voluntarily; bonds of solidarity and generosity form a stronger social glue than the fear inspired by laws, borders, prisons, and armies. Mutual aid is neither a form of charity nor of zero-sum exchange; both giver and receiver are equal and interchangeable. Since neither holds power over the other, they increase their collective power by creating opportunities to work together.

– Voluntary Association : People should be free to cooperate with whomever they want, however they see fit; likewise, they should be free to refuse any relationship or arrangement they do not judge to be in their interest. Everyone should be able to move freely, both physically and socially. Anarchists oppose borders of all kinds and involuntary categorization by citizenship, gender, or race.

– Direct Action : It is more empowering and effective to accomplish goals directly than to rely on authorities or representatives. Free people do not request the changes they want to see in the world; they make those changes.

– Revolution : Today’s entrenched systems of repression cannot be reformed away. Those who hold power in a hierarchical system are the ones who institute reforms, and they generally do so in ways that preserve or even amplify their power. Systems like capitalism and white supremacy are forms of warfare waged by elites; anarchist revolution means fighting to overthrow these elites in order to create a free society.

– Self-liberation : ‘The liberation of the workers is the duty of the workers themselves,’ as the old slogan goes. This applies to other groups as well: people must be at the forefront of their own liberation. Freedom cannot be given; it must be taken.”

Peter Gelderloos

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Worshiping Power – An Anarchist view of Early State Formation (2017)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“The question of how and why states were formed is the keystone of Western civilization’s creation mythology. Most readers will share my experience of having been brought up in a society where history begins with the appearance ofthe State.

Anything outside its domain is a Dark Age, terra incognita, a savage and barbarian land. We are taught that communities created the hierarchical structures of territorial governance that would eventually solidify as states out of a need to organize more efficiently, to respond to natural disasters or population growth, to administer large-scale infrastructure, to defend against hostile outsiders, to protect individual rights through a social contract, or to regulate economic production and surplus value.

All of these hypotheses are demonstrably false, yet we are continually indoctrinated to accept them, to keep us from grasping the predatory, parasitic, elitist, and completely unnecessary nature of the State.

[…] Thanks to social movements and anti-authoritarian struggles in the streets, and a growing recognition—starting with the near nuclear disasters of the Cold War and accelerating with climate change and mass extinction—that the State may well be the death of us all, room has finally been created for the scholarship that backs up what has been obvious for centuries: that the State is the enemy of freedom, human well-being, and the health of the planet.”

Peter Gelderloos

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How Non-violence Protects the State (2007)

Author(s)

Peter Gelderloos

Contents

“Because of the hegemony advocates of nonviolence exert, criticisms of nonviolence are excluded from the major periodicals, alternative media, and other forums accessed by anti-authoritarians. Nonviolence is maintained as an article of faith, and as a key to full inclusion within the movement.

Anti-authoritarians and anti-capitalists who suggest or practice militancy suddenly find themselves abandoned by the same pacifists they’ve just marched with at the latest protest. Once isolated, militants lose access to resources, and they lose protection from being scapegoated by the media or criminalized by the government. Within these dynamics caused by the knee-jerk isolation of those who do not conform to nonviolence, there is no possibility for a healthy or critical discourse to evaluate our chosen strategies.

[…] This book will show that nonviolence, in its current manifestations, is based on falsified histories of struggle. It has implicit and explicit connections to white people’s manipulations of the struggles of people of color. Its methods are wrapped in authoritarian dynamics, and its results are harnessed to meet government objectives over popular objectives. It masks and even encourages patriarchal assumptions and power dynamics. Its strategic options invariably lead to dead ends. And its practitioners delude themselves on a number of key points.

Given these conclusions, if our movements are to have any possibility of destroying oppressive systems such as capitalism and white supremacy and building a free and healthy world, we must spread these criticisms and end the stranglehold of nonviolence over discourse while developing more effective forms of struggle.”

Peter Gelderloos

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Black on Both Sides : A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017)

Author(s)

C. Riley Snorton

Contents

“Although the perception that “race” and “gender” are fixed and knowable terms is the dominant logic of identity, in this book ‘trans’ is more about a movement with no clear origin and no point of arrival, and ‘blackness’ signifies upon an enveloping environment and condition of possibility. Here, trans—in each of its permutations—finds expression and continuous circulation within blackness, and blackness is transected by embodied procedures that fall under the sign of gender.

[…] Black on Both Sides is a meditation on an eclectic collection of materials, including mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive-slave narratives, Afromodernist literature, twentieth-century journalistic accounts of black people ‘exposed’ as living in/as different genders, true-crime books, documentary film, and poetry. As with any archive or historiographical project, its organization is political.

[…] What is necessary, then, are theoretical and historical trajectories that further imaginative capacities to construct more livable black and trans worlds.”

C. Riley Snorton

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To Exist is to Resist – Black Feminism in Europe (2019)

Author(s)

Akwugo Emejulu

Francesca Sobande

Contents

“How might we theorise and practise Black feminism and Afrofeminism in Europe today? This is a provocative question for Black women, as our politics are too often erased from or misrecognised in the European imagination.

We define Black feminism as a praxis that identifies women racialised as Black as knowing agents for social change. Black feminism is both a theory and a politics of affirmation and liberation. Black feminism names and valorises the knowledge production and lived experiences of different Black women derived from our class, gender identity, legal status and sexuality, for example.

This insistence on Black women as human, as agents and as knowers is critical to any kind of Black feminist thought. It radically dissents from and subverts the hegemonic con-structions of Black women as either irrelevant and invisible objects or alien Others who disrupt the taken for granted racialised and gendered social and economic order. Crucially, Black feminism is also a politics of liberation. Our struggle for our humanity is revolutionary political action that imagines another world is possible beyond the plunder, exploitation and expropriation that are the bedrock of liberal democracies.

It is important to stress that Black feminism does not merely operate against violence and exclusion but creates and fosters a different way of seeing and being in this world. Black feminism is always a creative and dynamic production of thinking and living otherwise.”

Akwugo Emejulu & Francesca Sobande

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Anarchism and the Black Revolution (1993)

Author(s)

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

Contents

“From Detroit, Michigan to Durban, South Africa, from the Caribbean to Australia, from Brazilto England, Black workers are universally oppressed and exploited. The Black working class needs its own world labor organization. There is no racial group more borne down by social restraint than Black workers; they are oppressed as workers and as a people.

Because of these dual forms of oppression and the fact that most trade unions exclude or do not struggle for Black laborer’s rights, we must organize for our own rights and liberation. Even though in many African and Caribbean countries there are “Black” labor federations, they are reformist or government-controlled. There is a large working class in many of these countries, but they have no militant labor organizations to lead the struggle.

The building of a Black workers’ movement for revolutionary industrial sabotage and a general strike, or organize the workers for self-management of production, and so undermine and overthrow the government is the number one priority.”

Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

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The Next Revolution (2015)

Author(s)

Murray Bookchin

Debbie Bookchin (editor)

Blair Taylor (editor)

Ursula K. Le Guin (foreword)

Contents

“Murray Bookchin spent a lifetime opposing the rapacious ethos of grow-or-die capitalism. The nine essays in this book represent the culmination of that labor: the theoretical underpinning for an egalitarian and directly democratic ecological society, with a practical approach for how to build it.

He critiques the failures of past movements for social change, resurrects the promise of direct democracy and, in the last essay in this book, sketches his hope of how we might turn the environmental crisis into a moment of true choice—a chance to transcend the paralyzing hierarchies of gender, race, class, nation, a chance to find a radical cure for the radical evil of our social system.

Reading it, I was moved and grateful, as I have so often been in reading Murray Bookchin. He was a true son ofthe Enlightenment in his respect for clear thought and moral responsibility and in his honest, uncompromising search for a realistic hope.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (Foreword)

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Between Earth and Empire : From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community (2019)

Author(s)

John P. Clark

Peter Marshall (Foreword)

Contents

“Having already edited a collection of his writings, Clark is inspired by the French nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus, whom he claims as an anarchist ‘discovered the Earth’ and opposed, as Clark does, all forms of social and ecological domination.

He recognizes that humanity is an integral part of nature; indeed, in his words ‘nature becoming self-conscious’

(‘L’Homme est la Nature prenant conscience d’elle-même’).

In other words, the Earth is in ourselves and we are the Earth.

He conceived anarchy as a critique of class, patriarchal, racial, technological, and state domination while recognizing past and present human domination of other species and nature itself. His form of “anarchography,” which Clark approves, is at once the writing of the universal and of the particular, of the ecosystem and of the stream.

He was prophetic in seeing the possibility of an egalitarian, libertarian, and communitarian society based on mutual aid as well as a process of globalization from below in which nature and humanity become one.”

Peter Marshall

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Our History is the Future (2019)

Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
Author(s)

Nick Estes

Contents

“Thanksgiving is the quintessential origin story a settler nation tells itself : ‘peace’ was achieved between Natives and settlers at Plymouth, Massachusetts, where Mayflower pilgrims established a colony in 1620, over roast turkey and yams.

To consummate the wanton slaughter of some 700 Pequots, in 1637 the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford, proclaimed that Thanksgiving Day be celebrated ‘in honor of the bloody victory, thanking God that the battle had been won’.

Peace on stolen land is borne of genocide.

[…] But as colonialism changes throughout time, so too does resistance to it. By drawing upon earlier struggles and incorporating elements of them into their own experience, each generation continues to build dynamic and vital traditions of resistance. Such collective experiences build up over time and are grounded in specific Indigenous territories and nations.”

Nick Estes

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