A Case For Direct Action

By Mike Farrell & Dylan Jones

Direct action is an underused and underemphasized means of political and social change. Rather than advocate change through wealthy political representatives, direct action promotes acting to advance your interests yourself. It means using you and your community’s own means to advance your political, social, and economic interests instead of appealing to existing power structures. Direct action can include many things, including but not limited to community outreach, community projects, protesting, occupying, and squatting. Mainstream discourses constructed by corporate media advocate voting, calling representatives, and public testimony as the ultimate activism. They ignore or condescend to other means of social, political, and economic change like direct action as brutish. In full disclosure, your authors all vote; we only want to put typical representational politics in perspective with direct action. Despite constant emphasis and investment, working through congressional representatives will not disrupt structures of white-supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. To challenge social, political, and economic issues at their roots, we need to use direct action.

Unlike representational politics, direct action can address imperialism and so-called “green” development. You and I have no sway in US backed right-wing violence against Bolivia’s democratically elected leader Evo Morales, or its connection with Tesla’s need for Lithium. US sanctions against Venezuela, which have killed tens of thousands of Venezuelans, are not up for critique on the senate floor. In this way, US-perpetrated and US-supported violence in the Global South are the grim underside of a capitalist green energy movement that is central to the democratic platform. These examples show how the capitalist and colonial interests shape what is acceptable to hold a vote over and what is simply ‘reality’. They show how voting is incapable of addressing the gross violations of human rights and sheer violence of US imperialism.

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Disenfranchisement also weakens the influence of voting. Criminalization of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities repeals and/or creates more barriers to these groups' right to vote, sometimes permanently. On a single day in December, 2020, 1 in 301 white men and 1 in 53 Black men were incarcerated. Indigenous and hispanic people are also disproportionately incarcerated. This data shows how voting is a racially exclusive means of political participation. You might ask, what should we do if not vote and lobby for change? This is not a call for nihilistic withdrawal from politics or a justification to be idle. This illustration of the innate flaws of American “democracy,” shows how it cannot address your material interests, because it is designed to facilitate the interests of the ruling class. Rather than invest more in American “democracy,” we should use the most effective tool available, direct action.

Direct action is the most effective way to change the conditions of our communities. Just last month, Enei Begaye and other members of Alaska-based Native Movement created a physical blockade after work started on an agricultural project that was proposing to expand a road through Nenana traditional territory, hunting, and fishing grounds. Members of Native Movement and the Nenana Native Association and Village Council effectively organized and physically blockaded the road before any equipment was able to move through. This is direct action. Anchorage’s first community fridge opened this past May joining a national grassroots movement to fight food insecurity through a neighborhood refrigerator filled with fresh food that community members can access without any paperwork or identification. This is direct action. Rather than solely pleading with representatives, the community fridge and Native Movement organizers use their own means to physically block access to the road and distribute food to people in hunger.

Larger national examples of direct action include Stonewall Riots of 1969 when patrons of a gay night club in New York refused to comply with police overreach, harrassment, and a raid, sparking LGBTQ groups across the nation to organize and mobilize laying foundations for LGBTQ rights. Similarly, Indians of All Tribes (IOAT) took direct action by occupying Alcatraz Island from November 1969 - June 1971 during a time that Native American cultures were being attacked by termination policies that terminated the status of over 100 tribes whilst seizing millions of acres of Native Land. IOAT’s occupation was rooted in liberation theology with hopes of sparking a global indigenous rights movement. The occupation served as direct action by using the group’s own means to create a better city and community that honored indigenous land, autonomy, and self determination.

Rather than lobbying or pleading with representatives, these examples highlight the power of direct action to create the material changes our so-called “representatives” deny us. By directly meeting needs and attacking colonial, white-supremacist, imperialist, hetero-patriarchal, and capitalist structures, we can help build communities and institutions that meet the needs of all people rather than serving the ruling class. Ruth Wilson Gilmore writes “abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Direct action is how we address colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism and build life affirming communities and worlds.

Burning Down the American Plantation: An Interview with the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

By Colin Jenkins

The following is an interview with members of the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM), conducted over the course of a month between July and August of 2017. We discuss their formation, vision and goals for the future, and what they are doing to spark a reawakening of revolutionary politics grounded in black liberation, anarchism, and direct action.

First, can you tell us how and why the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) came to fruition?

The political situation in the United States, and the world at large, is really dire and after many years of organizing, discussion, and reflection we came to the conclusion that we should lay out the foundational text for organizing that could lend some direction to the revolutionary movement in the country. If we look at the political and social problems in the US today, we can immediately see there is a gap between the activities of revolutionary organizations and the fortitude, seriousness, and capacity that must be developed to contend with the current situation.

There are huge sweeping political problems in the US, which could be resolved through reformist measures. The centralization of political power in two rather similar parties, the remarkable concentration of wealth into a few dozen people's hands (making this one of the most unequal countries in the world), and military industrial complex, which ties it all together, are some of the more acute political problems. One could imagine how there could be a structural change to deal with these - permitting other political parties, redistributing wealth, or ending the bloated military industry.

However, the most consistent and unresolvable feature of American life has been the dehumanization and destruction of black life. The trans-atlantic slave trade was the process that shaped the modern world, and particularly the US. The slave system pushed the country to civil war, though not to abolish it, simply because it was financially untenable. Immediately after the civil war the US did everything it could to reinstitute slavery, which today has been transformed into the prison industrial complex. So, in essence, the conflict in the 19th century is the same conflict we are fighting for today. Black Lives Matter was just a recent iteration of a war that never ended. It is in this context that we find ourselves.

As organizers, we come from The Base in Brooklyn. Many of us have been organizing for several years, and have been a part of various revolutionary projects and milieus. However, there is a trajectory of protest movements in the US that has become all too familiar and not too effective. If we look at the anti-globalization period, or the Iraq War, Occupy Wall Street, Standing Rock, or Black Lives Matter, there are clear trends and outliers. In each of these there were horrendous indignities that had to be addressed. People took the streets, had beautiful moments, and demonstrated extremely courageous acts of resistance. But these periods did not create the requisite revolutionary movements necessary to overthrow the state and capital, or to gain the strength to destroy their primary manifestations.

Unfortunately, the cycle of protest has become routine and familiar; lessons aren't passed down well to new militants, and older militants burn out without organizational coherence to keep the political ground firm. We felt we had to lay out a vision for the future and to begin the process of making a revolutionary organization that puts black liberation at the forefront. We intend to learn from the lessons of the past few decades and create a genuinely militant resistance that can eventually begin to garner the capacity to overthrow the state and capital.

Resistance movements throughout history include both underground and above-ground organizations. What do you view as the pros and cons of each? Despite the inherent risks, why are above-ground operations so important?

We believe that revolutionary political organizations must have both, and they must correspond. Black Liberation Army fighter, Russell Maroon Shoatz, argued that the Black Panther Party and the Black Liberation Army had ceased to function accordingly, which he says was one of the main reasons the liberation movement was overwhelmed. The Party, according to Shoatz, didn't have a strategy for war before they started organizing, so when the underground army came into existence, the above-ground organization was already engulfed in a conflict they were unprepared for. Due to the above-ground organization being routed, the underground could no longer get new recruits and then it was only a matter of time until it was eradicated.

So for a revolutionary political organization to maintain its relations with the public, to push a coherent political line about important matters, and to develop new militants, an above-ground strategy is paramount. However, people associated with above-ground apparatuses are unable to engage in militant action. They are the ones who make their faces and names public, and therefore must be careful about doing activities where they could be implicated and targeted with long jail sentences or assassination. This work is essential to bring new people into new ways of organizing, from setting up neighborhood councils, to political education, to defense.

In short, we need both to be effective. The militant work gives teeth to the political organizing, and allows the movement to make good on its intentions. The public spaces and infrastructure allow the militants to continue their offenses, paving the way for liberated organizations to take root.

Your political program is laid out in the pamphlet, " Burn Down the American Plantation: Call for a Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement ." In talking about learning from militant struggles of the past, you mention" debilitating switch-backs between the two formations that Shoatz refers to as the 'hydra' and the 'dragon'." Can you talk about these two formations? Is there one formation that is more desirable than the other? If so, why?

Russell Maroon Shoatz illustrates the difference between the 'dragon' and 'the hydra' using examples from the Haitian Revolution. He describes the hydra as multi-headed, decentralized uprisings, and the dragon as an oppositional force with a hierarchical structure and leadership. The problems that arose from the dragon-style militias was that 1) a single leader could be corrupted or killed by the colonial power, thwarting its revolutionary potential, 2) once a leader took control of the country, the logical results of maintaining power: suppression of the governed populace, unequal distribution of resources, etc, led to the leader being deposed by the population. Shoatz concludes that the hydra-style organization is superior both militarily and in terms of revolutionary results; that is by organizing in a decentralized manner from the beginning, dispersal of power throughout the previously oppressed population ensures that self-governance will be built into the foundations of the revolution, and the result of the uprisings will be a society that has the integrity to defeat the colonial system.

In recent years we have seen a few mainstream instances of exposing how the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution kept chattel slavery alive by simply transferring it to the criminal punishment system, i.e. slavery is still legal under a code of criminality. While you point to this in your political program, you also seem to present a deeper analysis on the effects of whiteness and blackness, stating that "the first obstacle to addressing slavery in the US is the misconception that relates slavery with a specific labor code, rather than a system, a lineage, and a stratified code of bondage, dehumanization and captivity." Can you talk about what you mean here?

Slavery, in the US, is typically thought of as a coercive labor arrangement where black people were forced to work for free. While this, clearly, is true, it hardly addresses the dynamic and all-encompassing role of slavery as a social system and the role of anti-blackness in shaping human relations and creating what, as theorist Frank Wilderson calls, the non-human/human relationship. The modern world, in many ways, was established through the colonial process, and particularly through the slave trade. Most of the terms we use to understand and discuss the world were established through this process like Europe, Africa, capitalism, state, white/black, etc. With the advent of capitalism and state formation, the left typically argues that the exploitation of labor is born here, but in reality, the relation of terror from the slave process is closer to the core of this world system. Furthermore, the establishment of who is permitted into the family of human and who is forced into the non-human category is solidified through these formulations. So blackness becomes tied into the reality of non-human, which is called social death.

The black position in America becomes entangled in an all-encompassing web of violence that is perpetuated by state violence, self-hatred, and more importantly the deputization of the entire society, and civil society at large, against black life. While the state has blatant forms of repression: the prison/slave system, police violence, etc, civil society is also a killing field, or a battleground where every interaction with white supremacist society and its junior partners becomes a potential avenue where black life can be exterminated or put onto the plantation.

With the 13th amendment and other legal codes we see the growth of the slave system; so when chattel slavery was abolished for economic reasons, the state wanted to ensure that white supremacist society not only remained intact, but that the human/non-human relation continued, culminating in the eventual growth of the prison industrial complex.

This explains why social movements, even revolutionary ones, are often so empty in regards to black liberation. These movements typically have a goal of reinforcing civil society, or strengthening society to make it more democratic, or promoting goals like workplace democracy, community control over resources or policing, etc. In the black experience, civil society itself is the battleground. So, in effect, these coalition politics with reformist groups inadvertently strengthens white supremacy in unexpected ways. We believe that a politics of abolition and revolution in the US must start with the acknowledgement that civil society itself is where this war must be fought. Our political project, while attempting to strengthen embattled communities and build revolutionary militants, also underwrites everything that we are doing explicitly with the intention of building up the requisite capacity to destroy the physical and mental apparatuses that create the human/non-human relationships.

On activist milieus, Wilderson states, "They remain coalitions operating within the logic of civil society and function less as revolutionary promises than as crowding out scenarios of Black antagonisms, simply feeding our frustration... From the coherence of civil society, the Black subject beckons with the incoherence of civil war." We believe we need to position ourselves within this incoherence and create the capacity to destroy plantation society permanently.

Speaking of this relationship between revolution and reform, socialist movements in the US often seem to focus on one of two approaches: (1) reforming our current systems through outside pressure (voting, protesting), or (2) gaining inroads to our current systems (usually electorally) and revolutionizing them from within. By embracing direct action, anarchists do neither; but rather attempt to make these dominant systems irrelevant. Much of RAM's vision seems to be rooted in this approach, drawing inspiration from the Maroon communities of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, and the current project in Rojava (northern Syria). Can you tell readers about the vision here? What would this type of community look like in the modern US?

What we're hoping is that through this method of organizing from the ground-up, putting in place the communal structures of self-governance and defense, and building infrastructure outside of white supremacist, capitalist, and statist regimes, the colonial and imperial power that is the United States will, one day, no longer exist. To be able to create a different society, it is necessary to do so completely outside the legal and political parameters of this current one. For example, the judicial system cannot be reformed because its entire purpose -- racial sublimation and modern slavery, punitive measures, and warehousing of the poor -- is entirely contrary to the type of society we are working towards, and frankly it is an affront to humanity.

Even measures of soft power that masquerade as vehicles for social betterment, such as non-profits (which are usually funded by the democratic party) in fact operate as counter-insurgent tools. These organizations are meant to tie people into a charity relationship, and intentionally never give people the tools they need to be able to meet their own needs. The more people take control of their neighborhoods, the more people who join the movement and bring the skills they already have, the more concertedly we can build up the defenses necessary to defend these gains, the stronger the movement will grow.

Any time an organizer leaves to run for office, makes a career off writing about the movement, or feeds momentum back into capitalist, statist, or counter-revolutionary organizations, they are taking away from the skills, and communal resources, that people have committed to building towards free life. The first, and perhaps most important point, is to build up a visible political organization where people can develop the skills they need to build a different kind of society.

I have always believed that the original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense had it all figured out . They effectively placed the struggle for black liberation within the broader class struggle against capitalism, set forth a specific political program rooted in theory and education, and carried out real self-defense measures against police and white supremacists, all while providing crucial social services to the community. Despite the obvious ideological differences (Anarchist vs. Marxist-Leninist-Maoist), has RAM's political program drawn anything from the original BPP? If so, in which ways? And what improvements do you think can be made to their approach?

RAM owes a huge amount of its political vision to the Black Panthers, their fighters, and their coupling of education, defense, and community organization. The Black Liberation Army, and the Panthers, are undoubtedly the most important political force in recent US revolutionary history. Their focus on political education is something we find really important. In recent years, militants have accepted a more formal understanding of politics; but without a heightened political struggle, as exists in Greece for example, the lack of education has really disastrous effects for establishing any kind of continuity. We also appreciate how the Panthers had established a mentality of absolute struggle. In our current climate people focus on their political activities part time, and spend most of their time at work, or socializing which lends itself to careless thought and action.

The problems with the Panthers are well known, and a lot of their former members have written in great detail about them. The Panthers were an extremely hierarchical organization, which invariably leads to poisonous social relations amongst the members. The leadership was targeted by the government and a wedge was driven between them which made the organization weaker. Furthermore, huge amounts of party funds went to the leadership while lower level cadre struggled in prison. The Panthers had a lot of women in their organization but never fully grappled with feminism, like many revolutionary groups, until the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. Also, a split between the left and right in the organization developed, and some members wanted to further promote social programs, and go down an electoral route, while other members were immersed in the armed struggle and knew there could be no halt.

We believe collective decision making is paramount to revolutionary social relationships. We also believe that revolutionaries must have a complete and total rejection of electoral politics. As anarchists we argue that the state apparatus must be destroyed. But also pragmatically one must ask, what is the revolutionary's position in slave society? If we intend to end the slave system and capitalism then seizing, or being elected into, the very machinery that permits and enforces this oppression seems deceptive and duplicitous.

Where does self-defense fit into RAM's program? How is it carried out in real terms? Are there specific steps that need to be taken in this process of creating a viable self-defense apparatus?

Defense is an essential pillar and the first one we discuss in "Burn Down the American Plantation," because any political initiative, from neighborhood councils to anarchist infrastructure to the simple proposition of anti-state politics, will not be able to succeed if the requisite level of defense isn't able to protect its gains. On the one hand, defense is a social and communal process, tied deeply to revolutionary goals and organizations of self-governance. It is a fundamental paradigm shift for building a revolutionary society. One way to think about it is that the state pretends to take on the responsibility of defending its 'citizens' but in actuality fails in these duties, and is in actuality an apparatus for repression. The ability to defend oneself marks a departure from the role of victim in statist society. In fact, the ability to defend oneself and one's community is the only way to escape the state's carceral intentions. From Harriet Tubman to Assata Shakur, we see the continuation of movements as individuals become actualized and powerful when they are able to release themselves and others from bondage. Defense is essential for the development of individuals, and also for the revolutionary intentions as a whole. That being said, for defense to be successful, it's not just about being able to fight or break people out of confinement, but essential for it to be organized around revolutionary principles and relationships. The stronger the bonds of trust are between participants, the stronger the defense will be.

There are already very successful Antifa groups, guns clubs, and fight trainings going on around the country. We're hoping that by connecting these groups and projects together by underpinning them with specific revolutionary goals and strong political principles, we will be able to not only be legible to the broader public, but begin tying these groups to civic initiatives, and building towards a more impenetrable movement.

For our part, we've been doing a month-long education program called The Kuwasi Balagoon Liberation School that offers the foundational premise for RAM, study groups, pragmatic workshops, fight trainings, and skills like first aid, tech security, etc. As we expand the political body of RAM through this process, we are also working on building a defense team that strives for similar relationships and goals. The purpose of this defense team at this point is to literally be on call to defend our center from fascists, and to defend other political infrastructure we are building, such as safe houses or the Rapid Response Network. We are hoping that if we can establish good modes of operation, this team can eventually train neighborhood teams in self-defense and political organization.

The left in the US is fragmented by ideological differences, some of which are often very nuanced. The labels are endless: socialists, Marxists, anarchists, communists, democratic-socialists, Leninists, Maoists, Stalinists, MLMs, etc. RAM has chosen to orient itself in Abolitionism. Can you explain why this choice was made and how it can be beneficial to the broader movement?

We wanted to tie abolitionism to revolutionary goals, because to achieve the abolition of modern slavery, we have to completely restructure our society institutionally and psychologically. It is impossible to end prisons, structural oppression, institutionalized white supremacy without also abolishing the judicial system, police, and the state itself. Our proposal is not just a negation, but a proposal for how to construct relationships, and therefore social organization in a way that these things can no longer exist.

We also felt that there are so many dedicated individuals and groups, already doing important work, who may already agree with the revolutionary horizon we outlined in the text. If that is the case, then we hope that the long term intentions behind RAM will appeal to people from a broad range of backgrounds and projects and provide the foundation necessary for us to complement each other's work.

In the US we are fighting an uphill battle against the degradation of life under capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy that the need for a concerted revolutionary strategy was clearly apparent. There are so many different battle fronts to fight on, and rightly so. Rather than tying tactics to specific political tendencies, and arguing that one is superior to another, we feel that to achieve a revolutionary outcome, all tactics must be deployed strategically in conjunction with one another. We hope that this initiative will provide the foundation to do so, so that people in groups from various political tendencies can support each other's work. One way to look at it is that to begin to develop revolutionary relationships, that is ones built on trust, longevity, and commitment, there must be a way to overcome rivalries that develop through the struggle, and which, it could be argued, stem from the mentality of capitalism. The foundations of the society we are constructing must be built through the quality of our relationships.

What do you view as the benefits of an anarchist approach, as opposed to other leftist orientations?

Revolutionary anarchism is the foundational core of RAM, however, we also view the project as being largely non-sectarian and open to those who have similar political and social objectives. Anarchism is the only political theory that accurately addresses a wide array of oppressions. Furthermore, anarchism as a revolutionary practice offers a way out of the conundrum many 20th century revolutionary movements faced. The Leninist notion of attaining state power and wielding it ruthlessly has proven to be bankrupt, and today, the anarchist question is again at the forefront. The anarchist approach is the only ideological stance that demands the abolition of the nation-state, which we find tantamount to truly being a revolutionary movement. When we use the term abolition we are not only speaking of prisons, or courts, or singular institutions; we intend to abolish the prisons, patriarchy, the state, capitalism, and white supremacist society entirely.

As anarchists, we view revolution our central reference point, and all of our activity is centered on this vantage point. The revolution in Rojava also offers a current, ongoing example for anti-state struggle. With a history of armed struggle against the Turkish state, Kurdish guerrillas had created a culture of struggle unlike anywhere else in the world; coupling this with anarchist, feminist, and libertarian ideas they have made a living example for anarchists worldwide. The guerrillas also, wisely, waited for the best time to launch the struggle, and have made the only sustained revolution through the entire Arab Spring, expanding past the insurrectionary model of revolution.

The recent emergence of Bernie Sanders brought the term "socialism" back into mainstream discussions. Groups like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have gained momentum as a result, and are currently strategizing on ways to affect change through our political system. You have mentioned that RAM does not view our current political system as a viable avenue for resistance or change. Can you elaborate on why this attempt to change the system from within is bound to fail?

The current political system must be destroyed in order for any of RAM's pillars, from the neighborhood councils, to self-defense, to conflict resolution, to the co-operative economy to grow. Furthermore, the current political system, and civil society at large is already a state of emergency for black people in the US. We are living in a permanent state of conflict for huge swathes of people, and integration into that system is synonymous with defeat.

In regards to the dominant political system, it is primarily designed to give people the illusion of participation, to keep the poor away from the apparatuses of political determination, and to reinforce the state. The greater the level of participation in the political system the stronger the governing apparatuses become, which in effect bargain away people's potential for liberation.

Socialist and grassroots candidates, unfortunately, end up redirecting popular energy back into the very system that is maintaining our oppression. Often revolutionary momentum, which could have been put towards an actual paradigm shift or the beginning of a prolonged revolutionary conflict, instead reinforce the status quo by giving the illusion of opposition to the police, the judicial system, capitalist barbarism, etc. The political system (with complicity from the left) then perfects methods of repression, and revolutionaries begin having a difficult time recognizing genuine action from counterinsurgent action. So for us to build for revolution we must be opposed to the system and not pretend we can use it for our benefit.

Anarchists often refer to a diversity of tactics that must be deployed in our collective struggle for liberation. Do you believe in this approach? If so, can you explain to the readers what these tactics look like and how they interrelate with one another?

A diversity of tactics certainly is necessary for, on the one hand building new modes for society, and on the other tearing down oppressive relations and institutions. It's essential to get outside of the narrow framework that unfortunately liberal discourse has relegated this conversation to: it's not a question of violence or non-violence as a tactic, which is funny because this question seems to often arise from a liberal fear of reprisals, or more horrifically, a liberal fear of the success of a truly liberating revolution. Instead, we urge people to look at this struggle from the perspective of an insurgency. By studying insurgencies from around the world, especially the more successful ones, it becomes clear that multiple tactics are employed. The key is having an agreement about what we're working towards, and the principles that underline it. If that is the case, tactics are freed up from being associated with one political tendency or another and can be employed across multiple planes of struggle. You can see how useful it will be to have revolutionaries in place in workplace struggles, in the battlefield, in protests, in legal support, in blockades, in neighborhood organizing. If all these people are working in tandem, they can be mutually supportive by strategically coordinating to apply pressure at certain key moments to our enemy, while also building up the powerful relationships of trust necessary for this movement. The key is that all are committed to the revolution and uncompromising in this. The other positive side is that with a revolutionary horizon in sight, everybody, no matter what their level of engagement, can contribute to it.

There is a beautiful story about the Peace Mothers in Turkey, who found themselves on a hillside blockading Turkish tanks. It became a bit of a standoff, so to kill the time, they began dismantling landmines they found in the area. I love this story because in the US context 'peace' might infer that those mothers should not touch the landmines, like how liberals argue anarchists should not confront police or break windows. Similarly, mothers trapped in Cizre and Nusaybin during the Turkish siege brought tea to the youth brigades who were defending the neighborhoods with barricades and Kalashnikovs.

As long as there is the framework to build strong relationships, and everyone agrees on a revolutionary solution, every action becomes a militant action, and the impacts of individual initiatives is multiplied.

This brings me to one of your primary calls to action, where you state," The resistance in the United States now has a choice. It must rise beyond the limits of the protest movements that we have become accustomed to and organize revolutionary bodies with the intention of combatting the State, assisting the populace, and expanding our forces both quantitatively and qualitatively." Can you talk more about the limits of protest movements and the need to rise beyond them.

We have all participated in a variety of protest movements from the anti-globalization period to Black Lives Matter. It became clear, quite some time ago, that with the peaks and troughs of explosive momentum in the streets with its following repression, the movements didn't seem to be making any material headway. The stark reality of this conclusion came in the context of the Ferguson and Baltimore riots. They were by far the most aggressive street uprisings, with the strongest levels of solidarity and mutual aid, the US has seen for years. Yet they were quelled by a combination of brute force and, as mentioned before, counterinsurgent tactics in the form of self-policing 'community' groups, non-profits, and liberal protest actors. Regular life under the white supremacist state came back to those communities and many young participants ended up with long jail sentences, or died under mysterious circumstances.

There is an illustrative example from the Middle East. While many countries erupted in mass protests as part of the Arab Spring, these protests did not have a unifying revolutionary vision, and in most cases resulted in more reactionary political groups coming to power. Meanwhile, the forces of the YPG and YPJ in Northern Syria were slowly and methodically preparing, like the Zapatistas in Mexico, with strong educational programs, clear revolutionary goals, and building up their numbers very concertedly to establish a capable and determined militant organization.

When Assad's forces were weakened in Northern Syria due to the civil war, the YPG and YPJ were able to effectively take over the region and expel most of the remaining reactionary forces. They were prepared organizationally and politically, and chose only to act when they had the most advantageous circumstances. Immediately they were able to start implementing neighborhood communes, and co-operatives, because they already had a clear political intention to help restore people's capacity to meet their own needs.

This is a good lesson for us and shows a liberatory counter-proposal to the problem of exclusively participating in street demonstrations.

Speaking of reactionary forces, you talk about the "rise to prominence of the far right around the world and in the United States." In the US specifically, some ( myself included ) have characterized this rise as an inevitable conclusion to a national project with fascist tendencies deeply rooted in settler-colonialism, capitalism, and white supremacy. How do you see this trajectory playing out in the US? What are the immediate dangers of this rise and how can they be combatted by those of us on the left?

From Duterte in the Philippines to Golden Dawn in Greece, and Donald Trump at home, we see worldwide that fascist and far right parties and candidates have been coming to power. In many of these places previously, far right movements existed but were underground. But today, these organizations, inspired by international chaos and a changing world system, believe they can grow and offer an alternative world based on xenophobia, patriarchy, capitalism, and an extraordinarily powerful nation-state.

It is true that the state form is prefaced on its ability to oppress its population in order to govern. The US, like many states, was founded, and maintained, by denying the humanity of entire swathes of the population. The rise of fascism then is not an anomaly but a logical conclusion of the state form, the disorder of capitalist society, and the underlying foundation which is white supremacy.

When these far right leaders gain power, and exalt their xenophobic and fascist rhetoric, from Trump to Erdogan, their support base gets emboldened and takes action which necessitates a response. We have seen Kurdish people beaten to death in Turkey, a homeless black man stabbed to death in NYC by a white nationalist, the KKK marching and organizing nationwide, refugees being attacked in Europe, while government agencies now act with less fear of repercussions, like ICE and border patrol agents, and the police being encouraged to take extra legal measures by the executive branch.

Despite this barbaric climate, antifa groups have risen to the occasion and are fighting these groups back, preventing them from marching and organizing, shutting down their speaking engagements, and getting them fired from their jobs. Antifa groups have organized themselves and put their lives on the line, and even been severely injured and killed, while saving the lives of so many. This is very encouraging that so many are willing to risk so much to make their neighborhoods safe for the most vulnerable.

If we look at how to expand on this self-organized, militant activity, we can see an intersection between the underground railroad and self-defense units, while connecting all these activities and organizational structures through a political framework. If we are working towards revolutionary goals, anti-fascists, participants in the underground railroad, and neighborhood defense groups won't simply be a stop-gap measure, but ones that are learning how, and gaining the resources, to go on the offensive when it is possible.

Keeping the focus on neighborhoods, one of the five points of RAM's political vision is self-governance in the form of neighborhood councils. Can you describe what these councils look like in modern terms? How do we go about creating them?

There are so many different kinds of neighborhoods, from city to suburban to rural that how the councils work and what they deal with on a day-to-day basis must vary widely. It's helpful that we have a lot of examples to draw from, from the rural ones in Chiapas to the more urban examples in Bakur (Southeastern Turkey). Its useful to examine these, and how they are implemented, to have some vision. However, how they pan out in different towns, cities, regions, and blocks is going to be very different.

The one thing that should be universal is the political principles. For example, if there is a neighborhood association committed to working with the police then they are not engaged in the same political project. Due to this reason, we suggest that one way we build towards neighborhood councils is through establishing an underground railroad network. These connections must be built on clear political principles, and outside of state institutions. We also suggest that we can build towards neighborhood councils through pragmatic projects, oriented towards those facing oppression. For example, a tenant's solidarity network that is actively working against rent increases and built on horizontal solidarity can help renters in the short term and provide the experiences for working together as a commune. This is just one idea, and may or may not be relevant to every situation, however multiple projects can be attempted until groups find the right one. It's also important to note that any solidarity or autonomy achieved through these preliminary organizations must be defended; so whatever that necessitates, should be built simultaneously.

Another point of RAM's political vision is based in "conflict resolution and revolutionary justice." Can you tell readers what these mean and give example(s) on how they would look in practice?

Conflict resolution is intended for comrades, and for oppressed peoples who come into contact with our organizations, while revolutionary justice is the actions used by the oppressed in order to extricate themselves from their chains.

The premise of conflict resolution is built into the roots of revolutionary organizations, and prefaced on the idea of resolving problems before they start. The perspective differs from our judicial system in that it is not punitive; instead it's founded on the desire to restore the social fabric, and also to help each other develop as better people. This means that all the participants in conflict resolution are profoundly invested in each other.

There are multiple wonderful examples of how this can work: looking at the Zapatistas and their use of a mediator and agreement on restitution by every participant, or at civil society in Rojava with a group of neighbors based at the Mala Gel (people's house), or the tekmil of the YPG/YPJ, where participants offer reflections after every training. However, developing this for our particular circumstances will probably not be a matter of copying methods from other groups, but engaging the foundational premises of conflict resolution, and then doing a lot of trial and error.

We also believe establishing healthier means of conflict resolution is paramount for revolutionary organizations in the US. Personal conflict and infighting have destroyed most groups, so finding a method of resolving problems is incredibly important.

Revolutionary justice is already happening, in the form of riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, in prison uprisings, revolts in detention centers. It is important to recognize when it is happening and figure out ways to support it, both in the long and short terms.

How does RAM feel about working with other organizations? Socialist parties? Resistance movements? Are there specific criteria you have in considering potential allies and/or partners? Is there a line that must be drawn when considering these alliances?

At the moment there is very little infrastructure outside the state and capitalist enterprises, and even less knowledge about anarchism, abolition, and liberatory history and proposals. The most important first step is to build a solid political foundation to organize from. This means finding other revolutionaries through education and invitation to join organizing projects. This necessarily has to be a slow process, but it's important to do it right. The stronger, and more trusting, our relationships and organizations are, the more risks and assertive actions we can take. People should come to the movement and feel like they are removing the shackles of their previous life, are treated respectfully, and can develop new skills necessary for revolutionary change.

At the same time, it's important to spread knowledge among the general public, by education and programs, so that we spread throughout society and build new infrastructure. When it comes time for actions, they should be legible to broad swathes of the population; people should know who is doing these actions and why they are doing them.

The most important thing to do right from the start is to build up a strong foundation for our political proposals. The question of working with other organizations is only relevant once we have established ourselves and built up material gains. As we expand, and make our political intentions more widespread, we hope people who are committed to liberatory solutions will join the call for a Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement. The main intention behind the project is for individuals and organizations to join the movement and expand if they agree with the political principles. So hopefully it will be a matter of working alongside new participants.

Finally, as we move forward in our collective fight, what do you see as the most immediate concerns that must be addressed? Where do you see RAM in another year? Where do you see RAM in five years?

The political situation in the US, and in effect, the larger world, is so unstable and dangerous that our activities and their success is essential. Ordinary life in the US, for the black population especially, has always been a state of crisis and war. The conflict from the Middle Passage to the Civil War to Black Lives Matter has been continuous, and the struggle against social death, against being treated and perceived as less than human, continues unbroken. The difference today is that the US state is collapsing internally, and its power has been thoroughly eroded internationally, making the country one of the most dangerous entities in world history.

Revolutionaries in the US, then, must be prepared to fight and throw our entire lives into the struggle no matter where we are. For huge swathes of the population, slavery, constant conflict, and death are the norms, and as the country spirals into the unknown, this misery will become more pronounced. It is our place to fight side by side with those facing oppression, and to create alternatives so people can live with dignity.

With this in mind, the most important first step is to build RAM organization all around the country. The intention behind this process is to create a strong political foundation for our resistance. This allows all of our activities to become legible to the broader public and it connects disparate projects through a greater political trajectory. In one sense the political foundation should also be a development of the social: it is an invitation for comrades with similar levels of seriousness, commitment, and humility to begin working together. By joining this movement, people should be able to develop new skills, better ways of relating to one another, and chart out a path towards revolutionary relationships.

While acknowledging white supremacy as the foundation of the US and the larger world-system, we believe destroying its appendages and helping people flee bondage are some immediate guidelines RAM groups should follow. As we build stronger revolutionary relationships, we should also assist people in staying free, culminating in the establishment of a new underground railroad and a vastly stronger revolutionary movement.

We also would encourage RAM groups to create educational projects and public projects to articulate what we are fighting for, what we are offering, and what it means to become a revolutionary. As we expand we can help communities liberate themselves, and we will begin creating the political infrastructure to challenge and eventually overthrow the capitalist state. So the immediate objectives are for chapters to form, create educational infrastructure, and begin engaging with those affected by the worst aspects of the state and white supremacist society (prisoners, ICE detainees, shelters, etc.), eventually developing a modern underground railroad. People should also begin developing militant means of defense to protect these projects.

To conclude, RAM is also revolutionary strategy that is intending for long term objectives. We don't see this as daunting though; instead we view it as a relief. We don't need to rush against an impenetrable enemy every time the cops do something obscene; we don't need a pressure valve every time there is an indignity. Instead, we plan to build slowly and methodically so that we can gain the capacity to act decisively at a time and place of our choosing. We want to be as ready as possible to aid and assist those in revolt, provide infrastructure and resources, and also have new modes of operating in place, such as the councils or conflict resolution bodies, so that as the riot wanes, no one has to go back to a life of oppression, and we can push past revolt and into revolution.

Visit RAM's website, Facebook page , and Twitter.

Visit The Base's website,Facebook page, and Twitter.

The Party's Over: Beyond Politics, Beyond Democracy

By Crimethinc

Nowadays, democracy rules the world. Communism is long dead, elections are taking place even in Afghanistan and Iraq, and world leaders are meeting to plan the "global community" we hear so much about. So why isn't everybody happy, finally? For that matter-why do so few of the eligible voters in the United States, the world's flagship democracy, even bother to vote?

Could it be that democracy, long the catchword of every revolution and rebellion, is simply not democratic enough? What could be the problem?

Every little child can grow up to be President

No, they can't. Being President means occupying a position of hierarchical power, just like being a billionaire: for every person who is President, there have to be millions who are not. It's no coincidence that billionaires and Presidents tend to rub shoulders; both exist in a privileged world off limits to the rest of us. Speaking of billionaires, our economy isn't exactly democratic-capitalism distributes resources in absurdly unequal proportions, and you have to start with resources if you're ever going to get elected.

Even if it was true that anyone could grow up to be President, that wouldn't help the millions who inevitably don't, who must still live in the shadow of that power. This imbalance is intrinsic to the structure of representative democracy, at the local level as much as at the top. The professional politicians of a town council discuss municipal affairs and pass ordinances all day without consulting the citizens of the town, who have to be at work; when one of those ordinances displeases citizens, they have to use what little leisure time they have to contest it, and then they're back at work again the next time the town council meets. In theory, the citizens could elect a different town council from the available pool of politicians and would-be politicians, but the interests of politicians as a class always remain essentially at odds with their own-besides, voting fraud, gerrymandering, and inane party loyalty usually prevent them from going that far. Even in the unlikely scenario that a whole new government was elected consisting of firebrands intent on undoing the imbalance of power between politicians and citizens, they would inevitably perpetuate it simply by accepting roles in the system-for the political apparatus itself is the foundation of that imbalance. To succeed in their objective, they would have to dissolve the government and join the rest of the populace in restructuring society from the roots up.

But even if there were no Presidents or town councils, democracy as we know it would still be an impediment to freedom. Corruption, privilege, and hierarchy aside, majority rule is not only inherently oppressive but also paradoxically divisive and homogenizing at the same time.

The Tyranny of the Majority

If you ever found yourself in a vastly outnumbered minority, and the majority voted that you had to give up something as necessary to your life as water and air, would you comply? When it comes down to it, does anyone really believe it makes sense to accept the authority of a group simply on the grounds that they outnumber everyone else? We accept majority rule because we do not believe it will threaten us-and those it does threaten are already silenced before anyone can hear their misgivings.

The average self-professed law-abiding citizen does not consider himself threatened by majority rule because, consciously or not, he conceives of himself as having the power and moral authority of the majority: if not in fact, by virtue of his being politically and socially "moderate," then in theory, because he believes everyone would be convinced by his arguments if only he had the opportunity to present them. Majority-rule democracy has always rested on the conviction that if all the facts were known, everyone could be made to see that there is only one right course of action-without this belief, it amounts to nothing more than the dictatorship of the herd. But even if "the" facts could be made equally clear to everyone, assuming such a thing were possible, people still would have their individual perspectives and motivations and needs. We need social and political structures that take this into account, in which we are free from the mob rule of the majority as well as the ascendancy of the privileged class.

Living under democratic rule teaches people to think in terms of quantity, to focus more on public opinion than on what their consciences tell them, to see themselves as powerless unless they are immersed in a mass. The root of majority-rule democracy is competition: competition to persuade everyone else to your position whether or not it is in their best interest, competition to constitute a majority to wield power before others outmaneuver you to do the same-and the losers (that is to say, the minorities) be damned. At the same time, majority rule forces those who wish for power to appeal to the lowest common denominator, precipitating a race to the bottom that rewards the most bland, superficial, and demagogic; under democracy, power itself comes to be associated with conformity rather than individuality. And the more power is concentrated in the hands of the majority, the less any individual can do on her own, whether she is inside or outside that majority.

In purporting to give everyone an opportunity to participate, majority-rule democracy offers a perfect justification for repressing those who don't abide by its dictates: if they don't like the government, why don't they go into politics themselves? And if they don't win at the game of building up a majority to wield power, didn't they get their chance? This is the same blame-the-victim reasoning used to justify capitalism: if the dishwasher isn't happy with his salary, he should work harder so he too can own a restaurant chain. Sure, everyone gets a chance to compete, however unequal-but what about those of us who don't want to compete, who never wanted power to be centralized in the hands of a government in the first place? What if we don't care to rule or be ruled?

That's what police are for-and courts and judges and prisons.

The Rule of Law

Even if you don't believe their purpose is to grind out nonconformity wherever it appears, you have to acknowledge that legal institutions are no substitute for fairness, mutual respect, and good will. The rule of "just and equal law," as fetishized by the stockholders and landlords whose interests it protects, offers no guarantees against injustice; it simply creates another arena of specialization, in which power and responsibility are ceded to expensive lawyers and pompous judges. Rather than serving to protect our communities and work out conflicts, this arrangement ensures that our communities' skills for conflict resolution and self-defense atrophy-and that those whose profession it supposedly is to discourage crime have a stake in it proliferating, since their careers depend upon it.

Ironically, we are told that we need these institutions to protect the rights of minorities-even though the implicit function of the courts is, at best, to impose the legislation of the majority on the minority. In actuality, a person is only able to use the courts to defend his rights when he can bring sufficient force to bear upon them in a currency they recognize; thanks to capitalism, only a minority can do this, so in a roundabout way it turns out that, indeed, the courts exist to protect the rights of at least a certain minority.

Justice cannot be established through the mere drawing up and enforcement of laws; such laws can only institutionalize what is already the rule in a society. Common sense and compassion are always preferable to the enforcement of strict, impersonal regulations. Where the law is the private province of an elite invested in its own perpetuation, the sensible and compassionate are bound to end up as defendants; we need a social system that fosters and rewards those qualities rather than blind obedience and impassivity.

Who Loses?

In contrast to forms of decision-making in which everyone's needs matter, the disempowerment of losers and out-groups is central to democracy. It is well known that in ancient Athens, the "cradle of democracy," scarcely an eighth of the population was permitted to vote, as women, foreigners, slaves, and others were excluded from citizenship. This is generally regarded as an early kink that time has ironed out, but one could also conclude that exclusion itself is the most essential and abiding characteristic of democracy: millions who live in the United States today are not permitted to vote either, and the distinctions between citizen and non-citizen have not eroded significantly in 2500 years. Every bourgeois property owner can come up with a thousand reasons why it isn't practical to allow everyone who is affected to share in decision making, just as no boss or bureaucrat would dream of giving his employees an equal say in their workplace, but that doesn't make it any less exclusive. What if democracy arose in Greece not as a step in Man's Progress Towards Freedom, but as a way of keeping power out of certain hands?

Democracy is the most sustainable way to maintain the division between powerful and powerless because it gives the greatest possible number of people incentive to defend that division.

That's why the high-water mark of democracy-its current ascendancy around the globe-corresponds with unprecedented inequalities in the distribution of resources and power. Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man the opportunity to be a dictator, to be able to force the "will of the majority" upon his fellows rather than work through disagreements like a mature adult, and you can build a common front of destructive self-interest against the cooperation and collectivity that make individual freedom possible. All the better if there are even more repressive dictatorships around to point to as "the" alternative, so you can glorify all this in the rhetoric of liberty.

Capitalism and Democracy

Now let's suspend our misgivings about democracy long enough to consider whether, if it were an effective means for people to share power over their lives, it could be compatible with capitalism. In a democracy, informed citizens are supposed to vote according to their enlightened self-interest-but who controls the flow of information, if not wealthy executives? They can't help but skew their coverage according to their class interests, and you can hardly blame them-the newspapers and networks that didn't flinch at alienating corporate advertisers were run out of business long ago by competitors with fewer scruples.

Likewise, voting means choosing between options, according to which possibilities seem most desirable-but who sets the options, who establishes what is considered possible, who constructs desire itself but the wealthy patriarchs of the political establishment, and their nephews in advertising and public relations firms? In the United States, the two-party system has reduced politics to choosing the lesser of two identical evils, both of which answer to their funders before anyone else. Sure, the parties differ over exactly how much to repress personal freedoms or spend on bombs-but do we ever get to vote on who controls "public" spaces such as shopping malls, or whether workers are entitled to the full product of their labor, or any other question that could seriously change the way we live? In such a state of affairs, the essential function of the democratic process is to limit the appearance of what is possible to the narrow spectrum debated by candidates for office. This demoralizes dissidents and contributes to the general impression that they are impotent utopians-when nothing is more utopian than trusting representatives from the owning class to solve the problems caused by their own dominance, and nothing more impotent than accepting their political system as the only possible system.

Ultimately, the most transparent democratic political process will always be trumped by economic matters such as property ownership. Even if we could convene everyone, capitalists and convicts alike, in one vast general assembly, what would prevent the same dynamics that rule the marketplace from spilling over into that space? So long as resources are unevenly distributed, the rich can always buy others' votes: either literally, or by promising them a piece of the pie, or else by means of propaganda and intimidation. Intimidation may be oblique-"Those radicals want to take away your hard-earned property"-or as overt as the bloody gang wars that accompanied electoral campaigns in nineteenth century America.

Thus, even at best, democracy can only serve its purported purpose if it occurs among those who explicitly oppose capitalism and foreswear its prizes-and in those circles, there are alternatives that make a lot more sense than majority rule.

It's no coincidence freedom is not on the ballot

Freedom is a quality of activity, not a condition that exists in a vacuum: it is a prize to be won daily, not a possession that can be kept in the basement and taken out and polished up for parades. Freedom cannot be given-the most you can hope is to free others from the forces that prevent them from finding it themselves. Real freedom has nothing to do with voting; being free doesn't mean simply being able to choose between options, but actively participating in establishing the options in the first place.

If the freedom for which so many generations have fought and died is best exemplified by a man in a voting booth checking a box on a ballot before returning to work in an environment no more under his control than it was before, then the heritage our emancipating forefathers and suffragette grandmothers have left us is nothing but a sham substitute for the liberty they sought.

For a better illustration of real freedom in action, look at the musician in the act of improvising with her companions: in joyous, seemingly effortless cooperation, they create a sonic and emotional environment, transforming the world that in turn transforms them. Take this model and extend it to every one of our interactions with each other and you would have something qualitatively different from our present system-a harmony in human relationships and activity. To get there from here, we have to dispense with voting as the archetypal expression of freedom and participation.

Representative democracy is a contradiction.

No one can represent your power and interests for you-you can only have power by wielding it, you can only learn what your interests are by getting involved. Politicians make careers out of claiming to represent others, as if freedom and political power could be held by proxy; in fact, they are a priest class that answers only to itself, and their very existence is proof of our disenfranchisement.

Voting in elections is an expression of our powerlessness: it is an admission that we can only approach the resources and capabilities of our own society through the mediation of that priest caste. When we let them prefabricate our options for us, we relinquish control of our communities to these politicians in the same way that we have ceded technology to engineers, health care to doctors, and control of our living environments to city planners and private real estate developers. We end up living in a world that is alien to us, even though our labor has built it, for we have acted like sleepwalkers hypnotized by the monopoly our leaders and specialists hold on setting the possibilities.

But we don't have to simply choose between presidential candidates, soft drink brands, television shows, and political ideologies. We can make our own decisions as individuals and communities, we can make our own delicious beverages and social structures and power, we can establish a new society on the basis of freedom and cooperation.

Sometimes a candidate appears who says everything people have been saying to each other for a long time-he seems to have appeared from outside the world of politics, to really be one of us. By persuasively critiquing the system within its own logic, he subtly persuades people that the system can be reformed-that it could work, if only the right people were in power. Thus a lot of energy that would have gone into challenging the system itself is redirected into backing yet another candidate for office, who inevitably fails to deliver.

But where do these candidates-and more importantly, their ideas and momentum-come from? How do they rise into the spotlight? They only receive so much attention because they are drawing on popular sentiments; often, they are explicitly trying to divert energy from existing grass-roots movements. So should we put our energy into supporting them, or into building on the momentum that forced them to take radical stances in the first place?

More frequently, we are terrorized into focusing on the electoral spectacle by the prospect of being ruled by the worst possible candidates. "What if he gets into power?" To think that things could get even worse!

But the problem is that the government has so much power in the first place-otherwise, it wouldn't matter as much who held the reigns. So long as this is the case, there will always be tyrants. This is why it is all the more important that we put our energy into the lasting solution of opposing the power of the state.

But what are the alternatives to democracy?

Consensus

Consensus-based decision-making is already practiced around the globe, from indigenous communities in Latin America and direct action groups in Europe to organic farming cooperatives in Australia. In contrast to representative democracy, the participants take part in the decision-making process on an ongoing basis and exercise real control over their daily lives. Unlike majority-rule democracy, consensus process values the needs and concerns of each individual equally; if one person is unhappy with a resolution, it is everyone's responsibility to find a new solution that is acceptable to all. Consensus-based decision-making does not demand that any person accept others' power over her, though it does require that everybody consider everyone else's needs; what it loses in efficiency it makes up tenfold in freedom and accountability. Instead of asking that people accept leaders or find common cause by homogenizing themselves, proper consensus process integrates everyone into a working whole while allowing each to retain his or her own autonomy.

Autonomy

To be free, you must have control over your immediate surroundings and the basic matters of your life. No one is more qualified than you are to decide how you live; no one should be able to vote on what you do with your time and your potential unless you invite them to. To claim these privileges for yourself and respect them in others is to cultivate autonomy.

Autonomy is not to be confused with so-called independence: in actuality, no one is independent, since our lives all depend on each other. The glamorization of self-sufficiency in competitive society is an underhanded way to accuse those who will not exploit others of being responsible for their own poverty; as such, it is one of the most significant obstacles to building community.

In contrast to this Western mirage, autonomy offers a free interdependence between people who share consensus.

Autonomy is the antithesis of bureaucracy. There is nothing more efficient than people acting on their own initiative as they see fit, and nothing more inefficient than attempting to dictate everyone's actions from above-that is, unless your fundamental goal is to control other people. Top-down coordination is only necessary when people must be made to do something they would never do of their own accord; likewise, obligatory uniformity, however horizontally it is imposed, can only empower a group by disempowering the individuals who comprise it. Consensus can be as repressive as democracy unless the participants retain their autonomy.

Autonomous individuals can cooperate without agreeing on a shared agenda, so long as everyone benefits from everyone else's participation. Groups that cooperate thus can contain conflicts and contradictions, just as each of us does individually, and still empower the participants. Let's leave marching under a single flag to the military.

Finally, autonomy entails self-defense. Autonomous groups have a stake in defending themselves against the encroachments of those who do not recognize their right to self-determination, and in expanding the territory of autonomy and consensus by doing everything in their power to destroy coercive structures.

Topless Federations

Independent autonomous groups can work together in federations without any of them wielding authority. Such a structure sounds utopian, but it can actually be quite practical and efficient. International mail delivery and railway travel both work on this system, to name two examples: while individual postal and transportation systems are internally hierarchical, they all cooperate together to get mail or rail passengers from one nation to another without an ultimate authority being necessary at any point in the process. Similarly, individuals who cannot agree enough to work together within one collective can still coexist in separate groups. For this to work in the long run, of course, we need to instill values of cooperation, consideration, and tolerance in the coming generations-but that's exactly what we are proposing, and we can hardly do worse at this task than the partisans of capitalism and hierarchy have.

Direct Action

Autonomy necessitates that you act for yourself: that rather than waiting for requests to pass through the established channels only to bog down in paperwork and endless negotiations, establish your own channels instead. This is called direct action. If you want hungry people to have food to eat, don't just give money to a bureaucratic charity organization-find out where food is going to waste, collect it, and share. If you want affordable housing, don't try to get the town council to pass a bill-that will take years, while people sleep outside every night; take over abandoned buildings, open them up to the public, and organize groups to defend them when the thugs of the absentee landlords show up. If you want corporations to have less power, don't petition the politicians they bought to put limits on their own masters-take that power from them yourself. Don't buy their products, don't work for them, sabotage their billboards and offices, prevent their meetings from taking place and their merchandise from being delivered. They use similar tactics to exert their power over you, too-it only looks valid because they bought up the laws and values of your society long before you were born.

Don't wait for permission or leadership from some outside authority, don't beg some higher power to organize your life for you. Take the initiative!

How to Solve Disagreements without Calling the Authorities

In a social arrangement that is truly in the best interest of each participating individual, the threat of exclusion should be enough to discourage most destructive or disrespectful behavior. Even when it is impossible to avoid, exclusion is certainly a more humanitarian approach than prisons and executions, which corrupt police and judges as much as they embitter criminals. Those who refuse to respect others' needs, who will not integrate themselves into any community, may find themselves banished from social life-but that is still better than exile in the mental ward or on death row, two of the possibilities awaiting such people today. Violence should only be used by communities in self-defense, not with the smug sense of entitlement with which it is applied by our present injustice system. Unfortunately, in a world governed by force, autonomous consensus-based groups are likely to find themselves at odds with those who do not abide by cooperative or tolerant values; they must be careful not to lose those values themselves in the process of defending them.

Serious disagreements within communities can be solved in many cases by reorganizing or subdividing groups. Often individuals who can't get along in one social configuration have more success cooperating in another setting or as members of parallel communities. If consensus cannot be reached within a group, that group can split into smaller groups that can achieve it internally-such a thing may be inconvenient and frustrating, but it is better than group decisions ultimately being made by force by those who have the most power. As with individuals and society, so with different collectives: if the benefits of working together outweigh the frustrations, that should be incentive enough for people to sort out their differences. Even drastically dissimilar communities still have it in their best interest to coexist peacefully, and must somehow negotiate ways to achieve this…

Living Without Permission

…that's the most difficult part, of course. But we're not talking about just another social system here, we're talking about a total transformation of human relations-for it will take nothing less to solve the problems our species faces today. Let's not kid ourselves-until we can achieve this, the violence and strife inherent in conflict-based relations will continue to intensify, and no law or system will be able to protect us. In consensus-based structures, there are no fake solutions, no ways to suppress conflict without resolving it; those who participate in them must learn to coexist without coercion and submission.

The first precious grains of this new world can be found in your friendships and love affairs whenever they are free from power dynamics, whenever cooperation occurs naturally. Imagine those moments expanded to the scale of our entire society-that's the life that waits beyond democracy.

It may feel like we are separated from that world by an uncrossable chasm, but the wonderful thing about consensus and autonomy is that you don't have to wait for the government to vote for them-you can practice them right now with the people around you. Put into practice, the virtues of this way of living are clear. Form your own autonomous group, answering to no power but your own, and chase down freedom for yourselves, if your representatives will not do it for you-since they cannot do it for you.

Appendix: A Fable

Three wolves and six goats are discussing what to have for dinner. One courageous goat makes an impassioned case: "We should put it to a vote!" The other goats fear for his life, but surprisingly, the wolves acquiesce. But when everyone is preparing to vote, the wolves take three of the goats aside.

"Vote with us to make the other three goats dinner," they threaten. "Otherwise, vote or no vote, we'll eat you."

The other three goats are shocked by the outcome of the election: a majority, including their comrades, has voted for them to be killed and eaten. They protest in outrage and terror, but the goat who first suggested the vote rebukes them: "Be thankful you live in a democracy! At least we got to have a say in this!"

This was originally published by Crimethinc.

Misunderstanding the Civil Rights Movement and Diversity of Tactics

By Lorenzo Raymond

It's gotten to be a pattern on the Left. When Black protest erupts into insurrection, as it did in Ferguson and Baltimore, most liberals and white radicals express empathy for the cathartic release of anger, but urge the oppressed that this is not the way. This is "not strategic," says the leftist concern-troll. This is "what the police want." Most of the time they manage to stop short of asking "why are they burning down their own neighborhood?" -if only to be mindful of clichés-but some can't even help themselves there. In the aftermath,Amy Goodman (seemingly channeling Alex Jones) will spread conspiracy theories on how the government "orchestrated" the rioting.¹ The respectability politics of nonviolence will return.

It's hard to believe that anyone who has paid attention to Black Lives Matter takes these positions in good faith because, of course, the riots in Ferguson were objectively the best thing that happened to a movement that was already more than a year old. In August 2014, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had been almost completely forgotten by white America except as grim punchlines, while national civil rights leaders were more concerned with Chicago's gang killings than with the national wave of police terror. Yet by December, in the wake of recurring rioting in both Ferguson and the Bay Area, the Ferguson PD was under investigation by Amnesty International, the Justice Department and the United Nations ( and #BlackLivesMatter had been named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society ).

This month the pushback comes with Jonathan Chait's promotion of a scholarly paper on the effects of rioting on Black liberation in the 1960s. Chait's argument can be critiqued on just about every level: the paper has a distorted idea of what liberation is (apparently, it means electing Democrats), an undefined idea of what rioting is, and on top of that the paper isn't even accredited scholarship, in the sense that it hasn't been peer-reviewed by anyone (except of course by Jonathan Chait).

Chait first got uptight about this subject last year, when he and Ta-Nehesi Coates had an indirect back-and-forth over the efficacy of Black insurrection. Chait wrote regarding Ferguson that "Property damage and looting impede social progress." Coates replied with a concise historical sketch of militancy in the civil rights era:

The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968-the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books-is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" saidSNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!"

But now Chait claims that a draft research paper by Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, fills in the blanks left within the broad strokes of that sketch. "And his answer is clear," Chait announces. "Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind."

Chait and Wasow's position is a restatement of the timeworn "backlash thesis." Over the years, this thesis has been largely discredited by various studies (studieswhich, unlike Wasow's, were peer-reviewed). The weakness with the thesis is not that there was no serious white backlash to the anti-racist movement, but that the backlash started as soon as the civil rights struggle began in the mid-1950s, not suddenly after the mid-60s Northern rebellions.

The Limits of Nonviolence

Take for instance Michael Klarman's book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (which one reviewer calls "the first great and indispensable work of American constitutional history in the twenty-first century"). Klarman demonstrates that Brown vs. Board of Education didn't inspire an unambiguously effective civil rights movement; it inspired an uncertain experiment in passive resistance which in turn provoked the segregationist " massive resistance" movement. And just as Brown didn't lead to widespread desegregated schools, the Supreme Court decision that emerged from the Montgomery bus boycott didn't lead to widespread desegregated buses-most Southern municipalities simply ignored it, and launched highly effective repression against Black activism and liberalism generally. Montgomery itself enactednew segregation laws after the boycott victory, andterrorized both moderate and radical political figures ( Rosa Parks fled the city after the campaign, both because she was blacklisted from work and because of credible death threats). On the rare instances where the federal government stood up for school desegregation, like in Little Rock in 1958, the conservatives were strong enough to wait out the withdrawal of troops, or else simply shut down the schools rather than comply.

A new hope seemed to emerge in the early 1960s with the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Mississippi voter registration drives. But the sit-in movement only led to the desegregation of Woolworth's luncheonettes-most Southern eateries remained Jim Crow. The Freedom Rides were actually unpopular with the American public, most of whom thought Blacks were moving too fast. And the Freedom Rides led to yet another federal decision that was seldom honored in the South. The Mississippi movement provoked a wave of lynchings that the Kennedy administration did nothing to prevent. Klarman noted that the early civil rights movement had a "backlash-counterbacklash" dynamic.

Klarman's work builds on that of scholar Gerald Rosenberg who demonstrated that no dramatic change for Black liberation occurred until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The direct impetus for that law was rioting in Birmingham inMay of 1963: thousands of local blacksdefied Martin Luther King's exhortations to nonviolence, set fire to nine square blocks of downtown, and sent a police officer to the operating room. The author of the most comprehensive study of President Kennedy's civil rights policy, Nicholas Bryant, noted that

It was the black-on-white violence of May 11 - not [the nonviolence of the previous weeks] - that represented the real watershed in Kennedy's thinking…Kennedy had grown used to segregationist attacks against civil rights protesters. But he - along with his brother and other administration officials - was far more troubled by black mobs running amok.²

Birmingham wasn't an isolated episode; Black insurrection flared across the country for the rest of 1963 and into 1964. Sometimes it was milder than Birmingham and sometimes it was more explosive. SNCC leader Gloria Richardson recalls that in her campaign in Cambridge, Maryland, activists exchanged gunfire with National Guardsmen just a few months prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

"Burning in every city, North and South"

President Kennedy's response to Birmingham is the key historical moment of the movement. According to White House tapes, the president initially thought about sending federal troops to Alabama in May 1963 with the idea of acting against Blacks if the rioting continued-not against Bull Connor. He ultimately kept the troops on stand-by. As the month wore on and Kennedy saw Black rebellion spread to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, he eventually concluded he would have to make a major gesture of support for African-Americans. On June 11, he gave his landmark Civil Rights Address, in which he first proposed the Civil Rights Act. The Address acknowledged the role of riots:

This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety… The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

Kennedy's speech is the first time the federal government even acknowledged it had a major racial problem in the North. The post-Birmingham uprisings were indeed the root of the nationwide white backlash, but they were also the beginningof a truly nationwide civil rights movement. And they proved to be the first real federal breakthrough in either the North or South.

Some of Professor Wasow's charts actually illustrate my points better than they illustrate his:

We can see in this chart that there was little violent activity in the early sixties movement-but we can also see that there was very littlenonviolent activity in the movement either. The marked decline of nonviolent protest shown in 1962 confirms Malcolm X's characterization in his " Message to the Grassroots" speech that the movement seemed to be on its last legs that year. Then, in 1963, we see violent and nonviolent activity spike in unison-if anything violent protest leads the trend. The riotous tendency in that year helped to stimulate nonviolent protest (including preparations for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom). And as we've already seen, it directly inspired Kennedy's Civil Rights Address and proposal of his civil rights bill.

The chart also shows a smaller but still significant curve towards violence in 1964. The peak of this curve appears to be June 1964- the month the Civil Rights Act was finally passed. And once again, riots and peaceful protests rose and fell together in similar timeframes. Also note that the Watts rebellion doesn't spring out of nowhere in August 1965; it's part of a general increase in militancy that begins in the first half of the year, which means that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is also inseparable from the threat of riots (Note too that the overall rates of violent protest in 1965 and 1963 are nearly the same).

Wasow doesn't mention the Birmingham riot, or the Cambridge riot, or the "fires of frustration and discord…burning in every city, North and South," in 1963. They don't help his case. But they do prove the case of the anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos, who's noted for years that the civil rights movement at its strongest was a model of diversity of tactics.

The underlying premise of Wasow and Chait seems to be that since it's dangerous to win (there's a backlash) it's much better to lose. In his study of the struggle for the Civil Rights Act, legal historian Gerald Rosenberg has a more heartening message:

"Overcoming discrimination is a good news/bad news story.The bad news is that discrimination is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American life; it is hard to change. But there is good news. The good news is that change is possible."

Originally posted at Lorenzo's blog, Diversity of Tactics.

Notes

Democracy Now uncritically publicized the idea that the National Guard stood down in Ferguson in order to encourage rioting - http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/25/riot_as_the_language_of_the - However, it was documented later that the officials' motivation was concern about the public image of militarized policing - http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/revelations-about-national-guard-mission-in-ferguson-anger-local-businesses/article_1532b2bd-ca7e-5f3d-8a38-a379a4cb5b6a.html

Nicholas Andrew Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy And the Struggle for Black Equality (Basic Books, 2006), p. 393

Juxtaposing Anarchy: From Chaos to Cause

By Colin Jenkins

Anarchy is synonymous with chaos and disorder. It is a term that stands in direct contrast to the archetype of society we have become accustomed to: hierarchical, highly-structured, and authoritative. Because of this, it carries negative connotations. Merriam-Webster, the consensus source of meaning within the dominant paradigm, defines anarchy as: a situation of confusion and wild behavior in which the people in a country, group, organization, etc., are not controlled by rules or laws; or, a state of disorder due to absence or non-recognition of authority. The implications made in these definitions are clear - any absence of authority, structure, or control most surely amounts to confusion, wild behavior, and disorder. In other words, human beings are incapable of controlling themselves, maintaining order, and living peacefully amongst one another. So we are to believe.

Far removed from the general presentation of anarchy is anarchism, a political philosophy rich in intellectual and theoretical tradition. Again turning to Merriam-Webster, we are told that anarchism is: a political theory holding all forms of governmental authority to be unnecessary and undesirable and advocating a society based on voluntary cooperation and free association of individuals and groups. Even from within the dominant paradigm, we see a wide range of divergence between anarchism, which is presented strictly as an idea, and anarchy, which is presented as the real and absolute consequence (though hypothetical) of transforming this idea to praxis. Juxtaposing these terms, injecting historical perspective to their meaning, and realizing the differences between their usage within the modern lexicon and their philosophical substance should be a worthy endeavor, especially for anyone who feels that future attempts at shaping a more just society will be fueled by ideas, both from the past and present.

While comparing and contrasting the various ways in which anarchy is deployed, we recognize three arenas: 1) Popular culture, which embraces and markets the association of chaos, wild behavior, and disorder; 2) Corporate politics, which uses the term as a pejorative, mostly to describe dominant right-wing platforms like the Tea Party and USAmerican libertarian movement; and 3) In activist and theoretical circles, where anarchism is understood as an authentic and legitimate political philosophy with roots firmly placed in the Enlightenment.

Pop Anarchy and Nihilism: Rebels without a Cause

The anti-authoritarian tendencies of anarchism are understandably attractive in a world that is overwhelmingly authoritative, intensely conformist, and socially restrictive. The conservative nature of American culture, which is notorious for repressing attitudes and beliefs that form outside of the dominant "white, Judeo-Christian" standard, begs for the existence of a thriving subculture that is based on rebellion, if only as an avenue of personal liberation and expression. The 1955 James Dean movie, Rebel without a Cause, offered a first glimpse into this nihilistic backlash against the deadening and soulless culture of conformity as it showcased the contradictory and often confusing nature of adolescence in white, middle-class suburbia.

On the heels of Dean was a baby-boomer revolution fueled by radical inquiry, hippie culture, bohemian lifestyles, and a "British Invasion." For the better part of a decade, the counterculture movement in the US that came to be known quite simply as "the '60s" boasted a wide array of meaningful causes, addressing everything from poverty to institutional racism and segregation to war. However, this brief period of revolutionary cause dissipated into a new and distinctly different counterculture through the 1970s and 80s, taking on a rebellious yet counterrevolutionary identity. In contrast to the existentialist nature of the 60s, which sought answers through philosophical exploration, the collective angst that developed in subsequent decades sought individual freedom through nihilism, self-destruction, and chronic apathy. Not giving a shit about detrimental traditions transformed into not giving a shit about anything. In turn, acts of defiance morphed from politically conscious and strategic opposition to oppressive structures to spiteful and self-destructive nothingness.

The revolutionary uprising of the 1960s, which had been stomped out by government suppression and maligned as an "excess of democracy," was effectively replaced by a reactionary insurrection bankrupt of any constructive analysis or productive goal. This nothingness was embraced by a significant counterculture that developed alongside the punk rock music scene, which flirted with anarchist politics before descending into an egoistic and narrow identity based in privilege. What followed was a brand of "pop anarchy" devoid any meaning beyond contrived images. Acts of rebellion were central, but a cause was neither constructed nor needed. The anarchist and revolutionary symbolism that screamed for meaning was reduced to shallow marketing schemes as remnants of legitimate angst were redirected into childish rants against parents, teachers, "the man," and "the system" - terms that often carried little meaning for those who used them. The exclusivity that developed made political organizing virtually impossible, and had an alienating effect on many. "Looking at the fact that most people who rear their heads at anarchist 'movement' events are roughly between 16-30 years old, with background influences of 'punk' or other 'alternative' persuasions," explains one former anarchist from the punk scene, "it is easy to understand why such 'movements' tend to alienate most people than interest them." A major problem that was exposed was demographics. "Punk primarily appealed to middle-class, staright white boys, who, thought they were 'too smart' for the rock music pushed by the corporations, still wanted to 'rock out.' It is also a culture that was associated with alienating oneself from the rest of society, often times in order to rebel against one's privileged background or parents." Because of this, "we have to admit that it was (and still is) exclusive."

By contrasting US punk culture of this time with its British counterpart, one could see the development of a counterculture that lacked revolutionary meaning or class context. As Neil Eriksen explains:

"The distinctions between US and British punk rock are based solidly on differences in the audience. In the US the counter-cultural character of punk is evident in the primary emphasis on style of dress and posturing. 'Middle class' youth can copy the style of the British punks and are afforded the economic and ideological space to make it a whole lifestyle, similar to the way the hippies dropped out, turned on and tuned in. It is primarily those who do not have to work for a living who can afford the outrageous blue, green and orange punk hair styles and gold safety pins. The working class generally cannot choose to go to work with orange hair. In England punk is much more complex, especially given the history of other sub-cultures such as the Mods, Rockers and Skinheads. British punks find in their sub-cultural expressions of music and attitudes, as well as styles, more of an organic indication of their experiences as under- or unemployed youth. In the US, punk has few organic working class roots, and it thus functions as a broad counter-cultural milieu that does not indict the system for lack of jobs, but tends toward nihilism and mindlessness."

The counterculture described above was a favorable, and almost inevitable, result of both appropriation from above and cooptation at the hands of capitalist profit. Revolutionary politics, in its authentic form, is not a profitable commodity. Instead, the radical roots of anarchist philosophy, which are briefly described in the definition of "anarchism" provided by Merriam-Webster, serve as a threat to any society that possesses extreme divisions of power and wealth. The United States - with its hierarchical governmental structure, no-holds-barred corporate landscape, and extreme divisions between the wealthy and everyone else (20% of the population owns 90% of the wealth) is no exception. For this reason, anarchism has (historically) been appropriated by the dominant culture (which is shaped by this 20%), diluted to anarchy, and served to the masses in the form of entertainment. This process has led to "gradual appearances in mainstream culture over the course of several years, at times far removed from its political origin (described by Situationists as " recuperation"). These appearances typically connected it with anarchy and were intended as sensationalist marketing ploys, playing off the mainstream association of anarchy with chaos."libertarianism

The most recent form of this appropriation has come in the popular television series, Sons of Anarchy, which depicts a California biker gang inundated with drama, drug abuse, senseless murders, gun-running, and gang activity. Despite glimpses and a few mentions of the fictional founder's manifesto, which included some scattered words by genuine anarchists like Emma Goldman and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, the show clearly chooses chaos and senseless, self-serving crime as its theme. The pinnacle of this appropriation, and ignorance of the rich history of philosophical anarchism, concludes with reviews that refer to one of the show's main characters, a ruthless, murderous, and power-hungry leader by the name of Clay Morrow, as a " true anarchist."

Liberal Enablers and the Right's Appropriation of Libertarianism

In the midst of the US government shutdown in October of 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid took to the Senate floor to criticize the move. "We have a situation where we have a good day with the anarchists," Reid said. "Why? Because the government is closed." Reid's comment was meant as a jab to the Republican Party, which was largely responsible for allowing the shutdown to take place, purely as a political ploy. A few days later, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren referred to "anarchist tirades" and "thinly veiled calls for anarchy in Washington" coming from Tea Party members in the House as the impetus for the shutdown. Warren even went as far as equating anarchists with "pessimists and ideologues whose motto is, 'I've got mine, the rest of you are on your own,' while ironically tying in neoliberal deregulation that "tolerates dangerous drugs, unsafe meat, dirty air, or toxic mortgages," as an "anarchists' dream."

"Anarchy" has maintained its status as a pejorative in the modern American liberal lexicon, but not by choice. Borrowing from the nihilism of pop anarchy, it embraces misconceptions, ignores historical roots, and guts the term of genuine meaning. Considering that such rhetoric is coming from folks who have advanced degrees in political science, careers as political pundits, and a working knowledge of history, it can only be explained as calculated fear-mongering. The fact of the matter is that the Republican Party is just as "statist" as the Democratic Party, if only in different ways. And while the approach of political sects like the Tea Party and USAmerican "libertarian" movements present a less-statist platform than their counterparts from within the establishment, their philosophical make-ups (if you can even call them that) include a blatant disregard for the public at-large, an underlying racism that is dangerously oppressive, a love affair with capitalism, a childish refusal to recognize needs outside of privileged interests, a fanatical support for gun rights, and a narrow-minded obsession with protecting private property and personal wealth - beliefs that are more in line with the self-absorbed, reactionary nature of fascism than with the revolutionary, "cooperative individualism" of anarchism. Ultimately, the Tea Party, much like the USAmerican "libertarian" movement, is focused on one goal: protecting an embedded array of privilege and maintaining the status quo; and the means to their end (at least, theoretically) is the coercive power structure of the market, as opposed to that of the state. If and only when the market hierarchy is threatened by, say, a popular uprising, a workers strike, or a movement for civil rights, this brand of "libertarian" views the state - in the form of domestic police and military forces - as a necessary component. In other words, these so-called "anarchists" are really nothing of the sort. Instead, they are more than willing to use state power to uphold historically-based inequities related to wealth accumulation, racism, and class division.

If the cheap political jabs used by liberals were packed with historical context, they could be closer to the truth. However, this would defeat the purpose. Parts of the right-wing have, in fact, appropriated and twisted anarchist philosophy, mostly through a concerted effort to adopt an ahistorical version of "libertarianism." In his "anarcho-capitalist" manifesto, Betrayal of the American Right, Murray Rothbard explained this intent:

"One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy. Other words, such as 'liberal,' had been originally identified with laissez-faire libertarians, but had been captured by left-wing statists, forcing us in the 1940s to call ourselves rather feebly 'true' or 'classical' liberals. 'Libertarians,' in contrast, had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchist; that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over, and more properly from the view of etymology; since we were proponents of individual liberty and therefore of the individual's right to his property."

Of course, like all others who claim this contradictory title of anarcho-capitalist, Rothbard either failed to recognize "how property results in similar social relations and restrictions in liberty as the state," or simply believed that "liberty" was synonymous with feudalistic ideals. As one anarchist (of the authentic variety) writer laments, the thought process of this faux-anarchism is that a "capitalist or landlord restricting the freedom of their wage-workers and tenants" is ok, but any such restrictions from "the state" is not. "It's an oddity that in the United States, the main current of libertarian thought has been twisted and inverted into a kind of monstrous stepchild," explains Nathan Schneider. "Rather than seeking an end to all forms of oppression, our libertarians want to do away with only the government kind, leaving the rest of us vulnerable to the forces of corporate greed, racial discrimination, and environmental destruction."

Since the Democratic Party's use of the term borrows from the simplistic, nihilistic version of "pop anarchy," rather than the complex, philosophical version of anarchism, it becomes useful within the modern political arena. The true right-wing appropriation of anarchism as noted by Rothbard, which is fabricated in its own right, becomes buried under the fear-mongering and falsely implied association by the likes of Reid and Warren. Historically, this same type of fear-mongering has allowed for fascist scapegoating (Reichstag Fire), capitalist scapegoating (Haymarket Affair), and unlawful state executions ( Sacco and Vanzetti), all designed to exploit widespread ignorance regarding anarchist beliefs and prevent authentic libertarian movements from spreading through the populace. "The figure of the anarchist has long dominated our national imagination," explains Heather Gautney. "It's a word that conjures up the lawless, the nihilistic and even the violent. It's the image Senators Reid and Warren invoked in their talking points against the Republicans." It's also an image devoid any real meaning. By removing its substance and demonizing its association, the establishment wins.

Anarcho-Punk, Underground Hip Hop, and Conscious Chaos: Rebels with a Cause

While "pop anarchy" took over much of the American punk scene in the '70s and '80s, it was only part of the story. Punk culture still served what Henry Rollins once succinctly described as "the perfect expression of postmodern angst in a decadent society," creating an outlet for rebellious urges seeping from the dominant culture. It also served as a catalyst for pockets of revolutionary politics. When done right, it was the perfect combination of expression and meaning. The hard, edgy, and chaotic sounds spilling from the music represented a form of liberation that was desperately needed, while the lyrics roared against the establishment and aimed at deadening conformity and the music industry's increasingly corporatized and cookie-cutter production value. The UK provided an example of this perfection when it birthed anarcho-punk.

"From the numerous situationist slogans that graced the lyrics of early punk bands, to the proliferation of anarcho-punk bands such as Crass and Conflict in the early eighties, punk rock as a subculture has had a unique history of having a strong relationship with explicitly anarchist and anti-capitalist political content over the years," explains an anonymous Colours of Resistance blogger . "Many anarchists today, including myself, are by-products of punk rock, where most become politicized from being exposed to angry, passionate lyrics of anarcho-punk bands, "do-it-yourself" zines, and countless other sources of information that are circulated within the underground punk distribution networks. Some are introduced to punk through the introduction to the anarchist social circles. Regardless of which comes first, the correlation between the punk scene and the anarchist scene is hard to miss, especially at most anarchist gatherings and conferences."

Within the anarcho-punk movement, "the possibilities for advances in popular culture in the dissolution of capitalist hegemony and in building working class hegemony" began to surface. "The fact that punk rock validated political themes in popular music once again," Eriksen suggests, "opened the field" for the left libertarian movements. As an example, punk initiatives like "Rock Against Racism were able to sponsor Carnivals with the Anti-Nazi League drawing thousands of people and many popular bands to rally against racism and fascism" and "openly socialist bands like the Gang of Four were taken seriously by mainstream rock critics and record companies, and thereby were able to reach a broad audience with progressive entertainment."

Punk ideologies that arose from this era touched on concepts like anti-establishment, equality, freedom, anti-authoritarianism, individualism, direct action, free thought, and non-conformity - many ideas that are synonymous with historical-anarchist thought. This social consciousness naturally led to activism, and specifically, acts of direct action, protests, boycotts, and squatting. These elements represented authentic anarchist philosophy and served as a counter to nihilistic and empty "pop anarchy," while politicizing many.

Another form of "rebellion with a cause" came from American hip-hop and rap. The rise of hip-hop in the US paralleled that of the punk scene, and shared many of the same revolutionary tendencies. While not explicitly anarchist, hip-hop took on an identity that mirrored authentic anarchist philosophy. Its anti-authoritarian nature was far from nihilistic, but rather survivalist; born in response to centuries of racial subjugation, economic strangulation, and violent oppression at the hands of domestic police forces. Hip-hop's birthplace, the Bronx (NYC), characterized its development. "Heavily influenced by the economically and socially oppressed ghettoes, along with the echoes of the last generation's movements for liberation and the street gangs that filled in the void they left," Derek Ide tells us, "the South Bronx provided the perfect matrix in which marginalized youth could find a way to articulate the story of their own lives and the world around them. In this historically unique context, a culture would be created through an organic explosion of the pent-up, creative energies of America's forgotten youth. It was a culture that would reach every corner of the world in only a couple decades.."

In the end, hip-hop and gangsta rap provided endless displays of socially-conscious and revolutionary tracks throughout the '80s and '90s, and combined with the punk scene to construct a form of "conscious chaos" that provided valuable social and cultural analyses as well as revolutionary goals that sought to establish a more just world. These counter-cultural movements represented an important about-turn from the contrived nihilism and "pop anarchy" that had surfaced in response to the "excess of democracy" in the '60s, and displayed elements that echoed authentic anarchism, as a revolutionary libertarian philosophy.

Authentic Anarchism and Its Philosophical Roots

The roots of Anarchism, as a school of thought, are firmly placed in the Age of Enlightenment and, specifically, within two major themes stemming from that period: liberalism and socialism. In a sea of definitions, one of the most concise and encompassing is offered by Lucien van der Walt and Michael Schmidt in their 2009 book, "Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism." In it, they describe anarchism as "a revolutionary and libertarian socialist doctrine" that "advocates individual freedom through a free society" and "aims to create a democratic, egalitarian, and stateless socialist order through an international and internationalist social revolution, abolishing capitalism, landlordism, and the state." [1]

Anarchism's roots in the Enlightenment are undeniable. From Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Discourse on Inequality" to Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Limits of State Action," the libertarian strain born of this time served as the precursor to the anarchist thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Their similarities are found in a philosophical examination of social inequities like personal wealth, private property, political power, and all forms of authority established within human societies - elements that are heavily scrutinized by anarchists. However, despite these roots, Schmidt and van der Walt tell us that anarchism should be considered "a relatively recent phenomenon" that emerged specifically "from the 1860s onward within the context of the modern working-class and socialist movement, within the womb of the First International." [2] For this reason, anarchism can most aptly be described as "socialism from below." In fact, the demarcation between enlightenment philosophy and anarchist thought is generally found in their distinct reactions to hierarchies created by systems of monarchy, feudalism, and theocracy (enlightenment) and hierarchies created by the exploitative nature of capitalism and the modern liberal, democratic state (anarchism).

The development and separation of anarchism from the Enlightenment was made clear by prominent anarchist thinkers at and around the turn of the 20 th century. In the years following the Paris Commune, Russian revolutionary anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, expressed his disgust with the idea of a "purely formal liberty conceded, measured out and regulated by the State, an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest," and "the shabby and fictitious liberty extolled by the School of J-J Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism, which considers the would-be rights of all men, represented by the State which limits the rights of each - an idea that leads inevitably to the reduction of the rights of each to zero."[3] A few decades later, in a critique of liberalism, Peter Kropotkin denounced the aim of all so-called "superior civilizations," which was "not to permit all members of the community to develop in a normal way," but rather "to permit certain, better-endowed individuals fully to develop, even at the cost of the happiness and the very existence of the mass of mankind." This separation had much to do with the newly developed social constraints stemming from capitalism. As Noam Chomsky explains, "It is true that classical libertarian thought is opposed to state intervention in social life, as a consequence of deeper assumptions about the human need for liberty, diversity, and free association..." however, "on the same assumptions, capitalist relations of production, wage labor, competitiveness, and the ideology of 'possessive individualism' all must be regarded as fundamentally antihuman" as well. For this reason, he suggests, "libertarian socialism is properly regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment," while it also embraces its own identity through the inclusion of a class analysis and critique of the coercive structures stemming from the capitalist hierarchy.[4]

The socialist nature of anarchism represents a fundamental current in both its thought and process, yet is often overlooked by many who claim to be anarchists, especially in the United States. This misunderstanding is caused by both pro-market (and even pro-capitalist) "libertarian" movements that are ahistorical and seemingly blind to the authoritative structures of modern, industrial capitalism, as well as by the abovementioned "pop anarchy" phenomenon and "liberal enabling" that falsely limit anarchism to a vague and unsophisticated "anti-government" stance. Superficial dualities that have captured consensus thought, most notably that of "collectivism vs. individualism," are also largely responsible for this misinterpretation. Because of this, the virtual disappearance of class analysis from modern libertarian thought in the United States not only represents a significant departure from nearly two centuries of libertarianism, but also neglects to address a highly-authoritative and hierarchical private structure that has long surpassed its governmental counterpart. Schmidt and van der Walt explain the importance of rejecting "pop anarchy" stereotypes and maintaining this class analysis within anarchist thought:

"For anarchists, individual freedom is the highest good, and individuality is valuable in itself, but such freedom can only be achieved within and through a new type of society. Contending that a class system prevents the full development of individuality, anarchists advocate class struggle from below to create a better world. In this ideal new order, individual freedom will be harmonised with communal obligations through cooperation, democratic decision-making, and social and economic equality. Anarchism rejects the state as a centralised structure of domination and an instrument of class rule, not simply because it constrains the individual or because anarchists dislike regulations. On the contrary, anarchists believe rights arise from the fulfilment of obligations to society and that there is a place for a certain amount of legitimate coercive power, if derived from collective and democratic decision making.

The practice of defining anarchism simply as hostility to the state has a further consequence: that a range of quite different and often contradictory ideas and movements get conflated. By defining anarchism more narrowly, however, we are able to bring its key ideas into a sharper focus, lay the basis for our examination of the main debates in the broad anarchist tradition in subsequent chapters, and see what ideas are relevant to current struggles against neoliberalism."[5]

When considering and rejecting both public and private forms of restriction, the most fundamental element of authentic anarchism clearly becomes cooperation. This theme was thoroughly established by Kropotkin in his 1902 classic, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, in which he pointed to "the practice of mutual aid, which we can retrace to the earliest beginnings of evolution, we thus find the positive and undoubted origin of our ethical conceptions; and we can affirm that in the ethical progress of man, mutual support not mutual struggle - has had the leading part. In its wide extension, even at the present time, we also see the best guarantee of a still loftier evolution of our race." This theme was echoed by Rudolf Rocker in his 1938 treatise on Anarcho-Syndicalism. Said Rocker, "Anarchism is a definite intellectual current in the life of our time, whose adherents advocate the abolition of economic monopolies and of all political and social coercive institutions within society" while calling on "a free association of all productive forces based upon cooperative labor" to replace "the present capitalistic economic order."[6]

Why Does this Matter?

The importance of Anarchist theory lies in its critique of hierarchies and the uneven distribution of power emanating from such. This makes this school of thought an important component as we move forward in attempting to address the pervasive ills of society, whether coming from the state or corporate structures that tower over us. The mere questioning of these "authorities" is crucial in itself. As Chomsky tells us:

"… any structure of hierarchy and authority carries a heavy burden of justification, whether it involves personal relations or a large social order. If it cannot bear that burden - sometimes it can - then it is illegitimate and should be dismantled. When honestly posed and squarely faced, that challenge can rarely be sustained. Genuine libertarians have their work cut out for them." <[7]

While many socialist-oriented strains incorporate this same analysis, some do not. Essentially, regarding the formation of class-consciousness, anarchist theory of all varieties (syndicalism, mutualism, communism, etc.) act as ideal compliments to historically strong currents of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and Trotskyism, and should be included within all such theoretical considerations. When transforming theory to praxis, anarchism's inclusion of worker collectivization in the form of labor or trade unions prove valuable in this regard. In his treatise on Syndicalism, Rocker made a compelling argument for the usefulness of this brand of anarchism as a component to working-class emancipation. For the Anarcho-Syndicalists," says Rocker, "the trade union is by no means a mere transitory phenomenon bound up with the duration of capitalist society, it is the germ of the socialist economy of the future, the elementary school of socialism in general." He continues, "Every new social structure makes organs for itself in the body of the old organism. Without this preliminary, any social evolution is unthinkable. Even revolutions can only develop and mature the germs which already exist and have made their way into the consciousness of men (and presumably, women); they cannot themselves create these germs or generate new worlds out of nothing." [8]

Putting this philosophy into action is still of utmost importance. Creating a brand that is palatable and accessible to the working-class majority, without sacrificing its revolutionary tone and message, is also crucial. In his 2013 book, "Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street," Mark Bray stresses the importance of deploying a practical anarchism which avoids the esoteric idealism that so many genuine and well-intentioned anarchists get bogged down in. This pragmatic approach is perhaps most important when attempting to relay information via short interviews and sound bites. Bray points to three specific lessons he learned while interacting with mainstream media during his time at Zuccotti Park:

"First, I learned the value of presenting my revolutionary ideas in an accessible format. How I dress, the words I choose, and how I articulate them affect how I am received, so if my primary goal is to convince people of what I am saying, then it's often useful to shed my "inessential weirdness." Second, I realized the usefulness of letting tangible examples sketch the outline of my ideas without encumbering them with explicit ideological baggage. Finally, I concluded that the importance that Americans place on the electoral system dictates that any systematic critique should start with the corporate nature of both parties. Like it or not, that's where most people are at in terms of their political framework, so if you skip past the candidates to alternative institutions, for example, without convincing them of the bankrupt nature of the electoral system, you'll lose them." [9]

Essentially, anarchism is what democracy is supposed to be - self-governance. In this sense, anyone even remotely involved in the Occupy movement had the privilege, likely for the first time in their lives, to truly witness democracy (anarchism) in action. "This is not the first time a movement based on fundamentally anarchist principles - direct action, direct democracy, a rejection of existing political institutions and attempt to create alternative ones - has cropped up in the US," explains David Graeber. "The civil rights movement (at least, its more radical branches), the anti-nuclear movement, the global justice movement … all took similar directions." And, in a country where a large majority of citizens have given up on and/or no longer believe in their representatives, a little democracy may be exactly what we need, even if it's not what our white, wealthy, slave-owning "founding fathers" wanted. "Most (of the founding fathers) defined 'democracy' as collective self-governance by popular assemblies, and as such, they were dead set against it, arguing it would be prejudicial against the interests of minorities (the particular minority that was had in mind here being the rich)," Graeber tells us. "They only came to redefine their own republic - modeled not on Athens, but on Rome - as a 'democracy' because ordinary Americans seemed to like the word so much."

In our inevitable and necessary escape from the faux democracy of America's colonists and founders, anarchist thought will undoubtedly play a role. It is, after all, the only school of thought that can be described as authentic, class-based libertarianism. Its foundation is the reasonable expectation that all structures of dominance, authority, and hierarchy must justify themselves; and, if they cannot, they must be dismantled.

This covers ALL coercive institutions - not only governments, the state, police, and military, but also cultural phenomena like patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy, and most importantly, economic systems like capitalism. Unlike modern forms of "libertarianism" in the US, which ignore racist structures and the historical formations behind them, and falsely view the labor-capital relationship inherent in capitalism as a "choice," authentic Anarchism correctly views such elements as coercive and forced; and seeks to dismantle them in order to move forward with constructing a society based on free association, where all human beings have a healthy degree of control over their lives, families, and communities.

Contrary to consensus thought (propaganda), such as those rooted in "rugged individualism" and "American exceptionalism," there is a collective and cooperative nature to true liberty. We simply cannot gain control over our lives until we learn to respect the lives of all others. This is the essence of community. And we cannot begin to do this until we deconstruct illegitimate hierarchies of wealth and power, which have been constructed through illegal and immoral means over the course of centuries. Recognizing these structures and realizing that they are NOT legitimate, and therefore do not deserve to exist, is the first step in this process. Embracing contributions from this school of thought is crucial in this regard.

Fundamentally, Anarchism is a working-class ideology. Occupy Wall Street was largely influenced by it. Workers' co-ops are largely influenced by it. Any action that attempts to establish free association within society can learn much from it. Its foundational requirement of organic human cooperation and peaceful co-existence has been tried and tested throughout history - from hunter-gatherer societies across the world to Native American communities to the Paris Commune to revolutionary Catalonia to Chiapas. It provides a philosophical foundation - not a rigid blueprint - that allows for limitless potential in attempting to solve our problems, collectively, while trying to carve out a meaningful human experience for everyone. It may not provide all answers, or even most, but its foundation is worthy of building from, or at least considering. Its true value is found in its inclusion of historical formations as well as its role as a catalyst for new ideas and action - something we desperately need, moving forward.

Notes

[1] Schmidt, Michael & van der Walt, Lucien. Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism. AK Press, 2009, p. 33

[2] Schmidt & van der Walt, p. 34

[3] Guerin, Daniel. "Anarchism: From Theory to Practice." Monthly Review Press, 1970. Taken from the Preface by Noam Chomsky.

[4] Chomsky on Anarchism , selected and edited by Barry Pateman. AK Press: 2005, p. 122-123

[5] Schmidt and van der Walt, p. 33

[6] Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice, 6th edition. AK Press, 2004. P. 1

[7] Chomsky on Anarchism , p. 192.

[8] Rocker, P. 59.

[9] Mark Bray, Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. Zero Books, 2013.