Article: Between Infoshops and Insurrection U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order

This made me think about a lot – much of which I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about before but I think this is well-written and a useful critique of today’s US-based anarchism. I do also think that there are also a lot of anarchists who are a part of movement building and while they may or may not participate in the infoshop/insurrection model, are a part of broader struggles. It’s more complicated than an either/or. Nonetheless, I think there is a lot of really good stuff here to think about…

http://www.anarchist-studies.org/node/313

Between Infoshops and Insurrection U.S. Anarchism, Movement Building, and the Racial Order By Joel Olson

Anarchism has always had a hard time dealing with race. In its classical era from the time of Proudhon in the 1840s to Goldman in the 1930s, it sought to inspire the working class to rise up against the church, the state, and capitalism. This focus on “god, government, and gold” was revolutionary, but it didn’t quite know how to confront the racial order in the United States. Most U.S. anarchist organizations and activists opposed racism in principle, but they tended to assume that it was a byproduct of class exploitation. That is, they thought that racism was a tool the bosses used to divide the working class, a tool that would disappear once capitalism was abolished. They appealed for racial unity against the bosses but they never analyzed white supremacy as a relatively autonomous form of power in its own right.

Unfortunately, contemporary anarchism (which dates roughly from Bookchin to Zerzan) has not done much better. It has expanded the classical era’s critique of class domination to a critique of hierarchy and all forms of oppression, including race. Yet with a few exceptions, the contemporary American anarchist scene still has not analyzed race as a form of power in its own right, or as a potential source of solidarity. As a consequence, anarchism remains a largely white ideology in the U.S.

Article: Anarchism and Intersectionality

i really like this. please read…

http://anarkismo.net/article/14923

Refusing to Wait: Anarchism and Intersectionality

“Without justice there can be no love.”–bell hooks

Deric Shannon (WSA/NEFAC) and J. Rogue (WSA/Common Action)

Anarchism can learn a lot from the feminist movement. In many respects it already has. Anarcha-feminists have developed analyses of patriarchy that link it to the state form. We have learned from the slogan that “the personal is political” (e.g. men who espouse equality between all genders should treat the women in their lives with dignity and respect). We have learned that no revolutionary project can be complete while men systematically dominate and exploit women; that socialism is a rather empty goal–even if it is “stateless”–if men’s domination of women is left intact.

This essay argues that anarchists can likewise learn from the theory of “intersectionality” that emerged from the feminist movement. Indeed, anarchist conceptions of class struggle have widened as a result of the rise of feminist movements, civil rights movements, gay and lesbian liberation movements (and, perhaps more contemporarily, the queer movements), disability rights movements, etc. But how do we position ourselves regarding those struggles? What is their relationship to the class struggle that undergirds the fight for socialism? Do we dismiss them as “mere identity politics” that obscure rather than clarify the historic task of the working class? If not, how might anarchists include their concerns in our political theory and work?

Article: SRLP Opposes Federal Hate Crimes Law

Below is an article that I think succinctly and eloquently exposes the reasons why the government, as a violent institution, is not the answer for the violence we see in our communities. I would like to also point out that the Hate Crimes Prevention Act mentioned here was part of a hundreds of billions of dollars bill for further militarization via the Pentagon. Check it out…

http://srlp.org/fedhatecrimelaw

SRLP opposes the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act

In October 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law. This law makes it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender and gender identity by expanding the scope of a 1968 law that applies to people attacked because of their race, religion or national origin. In support of this goal, it expands the authority of the U.S. Department of Justice to prosecute such crimes instead of or in collaboration with local authorities. The law also provides major increases in funding for the U.S. Department of Justice and local law enforcement to use in prosecuting these crimes – including special additional resources to go toward prosecution of youth for hate crimes.

The recent expansion of the federal hates crimes legislation has received extensive praise and celebration by mainstream lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organizations because it purports to “protect” LGBT people from attacks on the basis of their expressed and/or perceived identities for the first time ever on a federal level. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project does not see this as a victory. As an organization that centers racial and economic justice in our work and that understands mass imprisonment as a primary vector of violence in the lives of our constituents, we believe that hate crimes legislation is a counterproductive response to the violence faced by LGBT people.

Articles: Gavin Newsom is a Douche-Bag

below are links to the recent cover story and related editorial out of the San Francisco Bay Guardian. it is so great to see a counter point to the racist, xenophobic crap continually put out by the SF Chronicle…

EDITORIAL:
http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=9391&catid=4&volume_id=452&issue_id=458&volume_num=44&issue_num=06

High school kids in San Francisco have to live in mortal fear of deportation
By Tim Redmond

I went to a nice suburban high school in a nice suburban town, and my friends were all middle-class kids, mostly white, who were all headed for college. But at some point during our four-year stints, every one of us got in trouble.

There were fights. There was pot. There was underage drinking. There was the bowl-three-games-and run-out-the-door-without-paying plan. There was the time our poor Latin teacher fell asleep during a test and we all took our test papers and climbed out the second-floor window and ran off to a donut shop. Somebody shot out Mrs. DeLuca’s window with a Wrist-Rocket one night, and I’m not telling who.

The assistant principal got involved; parents got involved; and on a relatively frequent basis, the police got involved.

That, I think, is fairly typical of teenage life — and it’s why we generally don’t treat teens who commit minor infractions as criminals. None of my friends ever went to jail. A couple of times it got as far as Judge Bettman’s court, and he’d issue a severe lecture. But that would be the end.

I cannot imagine what it’s like to be an immigrant teen in San Francisco these days.

There’s a 15-year-old girl Sarah Phelan writes about in this week’s cover story who got in a fight with her sister at school. Not a great moment in the history of adolescent behavior, but not such a big deal, really. Somehow though, the girl was referred to the Juvenile Probation authorities, who reported her to Immigration Control and Enforcement — and without warning, she was taken away from her family, her home, her school, her community, and whisked off to an internment center in Miami. From there, she could have been deported — at 15, to a country she left as a baby.

Imagine what it’s like to be 15, a San Francisco kid who’s always been an American, suddenly flown to Mexico, turned over to that country’s child protection service, and told that you’re home. Or to be told (without access to legal counsel) that you either have to turn in your parents (who will then be deported) or spend the next three years in prison or a foster home. And the only way to get back to San Francisco, where your whole community lives, is to come up with thousands of dollars (and how do you suppose a teen is going to do that?) to pay a smuggler to take you through a perilous desert border crossing where a whole lot of people die.

I can’t imagine it. It’s too awful.

This is happening, folks, and it’s happening right under our eyes, thanks to Mayor Gavin Newsom and his approach to juvenile justice. This is the human side of the policy discussions over Sup. David Campos’ sanctuary legislation.

High school kids in San Francisco have to live in mortal fear — I’m not kidding, deportation can be a death sentence — every single day because they have brown skin and come from a family that may have entered the country without papers. I’m sorry — a kid who came across the border as a baby didn’t break any laws, and shouldn’t be punished for it.

And the “crimes” that are literally ruining these young people’s lives often amount to little or nothing — to the shit most of my friends did too, once upon a time. Except we were white.

Tuesday November 10, 2009

Crossing the Line

http://www.sfbg.com/entry.php?entry_id=9401&volume_id=452&issue_id=458&volume_num=44&issue_num=06

How Mayor Newsom’s policies are tearing apart families, imprisoning and imperiling children, and creating a climate of fear in immigrant communities

By Sarah Phelan

Estella (a fake name she used to protect her identity) is a single mother of five who came to the United States from Latin America when her oldest daughter was a baby, hoping for a better future for her family.

But thanks to a shift in San Francisco’s sanctuary policy that Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered last year, Estella’s daughter — we’ll call her Maria, now 15 — was seized by federal immigration authorities this fall, ripped from her family and community, and shipped to a detention center in Miami.

Her crime: she got in a fight with her younger, U.S.-born sister.

DRAFT: On An Anarchist Coming Out

On an anarchist coming out. Of the vast majority of radicals out there in the United States, and even the anarchists specifically, there are but a small minority who make up the young, white, black clad male that the media has sold to us – and we’ve believed. In countless TV news stories, magazine articles and even blog posts from anarchists themselves, we joined this image, violent and ridiculous, together with the definition of anarchy, anarchism. For all that we are willing to discard as told to us by the corporate media, this we’ve instead accepted like lemmings. Even many of us anarchists are ashamed of how we come across, act, exist.

But wait… if I stop and think for a moment, i know that it’s not true. I mean, sure, there are the young and black clad rolling along with their dumpsters ablaze. And I try and accept all people for what point they’re at in struggle. Of course, I’d like to dialogue about goals, strategies for meeting those goals, tactics applied as part of these strategies, etc. But I’m not also here to tell them what to do. More importantly, there are thousands and thousands of anarchists out there who are of all ages, genders, races, sexualities, abilities and dress styles. Anarchism isn’t a proscribed method, it’s the antithesis of rigid doctrines based in hierarchy, oppression and violence. We’re not all gonna get it right but we’re also not gonna try to get it all the same. And… we’re gonna try.

Additionally, and to the point, we (because of our overblown disdain of a few of us) are shamed into closeting ourselves through the world. I’m not talking about family (i.e. the one you group up with) or work or school, though those are equally important spaces in which to pose these questions. I’m talking rather about in our organizations, collectives, cooperatives, etc. I’m talking about in our political lives.

Here’s the kicker. Most of these types of spaces (outside of the authoritarian communist or socialist groups and the corporate non-profit world) are built on not only the very principles of anarchism but have instituted processes and structures and cultures directly and openly put forth by anarchism.

People and groups use words like horizontalism or non-hierarchical… what do y’all think those are synonyms for? Anarchism, anarchy. Anarchist Direct Action Network affinity groups in the 1990s were the some of the most recent proponents and disseminators of these processes.* Around the world from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico to the horizontalist movement throughout Argentina to countless autonomous movements in the Americas and beyond, people are implementing these ideas. Including a diversity and variety of groups in the US. Different cultures give them different names or no name at all and, to be honest, the ‘name’ is, on a wider scale, not that important.

The question is: why, despite our support of/admiration of these movements, can we not accept folks in the US with the same ideals because we don’t like “anarchists?” Are we that brainwashed by the corporate media that we let them define who we are for us?

And there’s more. Let’s step away from movements in other cultures and countries. In the last 10-15 years in the US, “anarchists” have come to have a particular definition – read: image. Remember, Seattle to Pittsburgh, masks and broken windows. But what about the last 150 years or more?

For decades and decades of US history, anarchists were undefinable by race or class or gender. They were immigrants from the Europe and Mexico (in fact for awhile immigration law specifically barred anarchists from entering the country), they were poor women working the looms in factories, they were black women coming out of Southern Slavery like Lucy Parsons, they were Wobblies. They fought and died for free speech and abolition and women’s liberation; for birth control, the 8-hour day and the list goes on. They were mostly working class but also academics; they were otherwise, hard to categorize.

For me, well, I carry this history, this herstory, with pride. Sure it’s not perfect and lately we screw it up sometimes. But we also have shown an undeniable capacity to learn and grown and change.

But we have found ourselves in collectives and organizations and groups where we’re respected because we’re committed to “real work.” Social change in the day-to-day, community support and creation as a way of life. Separately or simultaneously, many of us find ourselves in ideology-based groups that are isolated from other organizing. Living these parallel lives, when we are not in the safety/comfort of the group with a stronger base in anarchism, we are silent about these ideas

When we’re not, we’re often demonized. This past New Years, a young, black man in Oakland, Oscar Grant, was shot close range and killed by BART Police.* The city and area erupted in riotous response at the ongoing violence against the black community from policing forces. As organic riots broke out in fury at this, anarchists from around the bay, participated and supported people in their communities, in our communities showing their anger.

The media and (mostly white) liberal, progressive types were outraged and condemned the anarchists for provoking the response. Simultaneously pigeon-holing anarchists and condescending to the rest of the (black) crowds as if they were so blindly led astray, these “activists” and “do-gooders” of the left reinforced once again why anarchists have to fight every step of the way. This was in turn dwarfed by the clearly racist response to justified anger. Neither was acceptable. You know who gave a shit about people revolting in the Oakland streets? Community organizers including anarchists. I watched as meetings happened across lines of race, class, political and religious belief. I watch these supposed demons of young anarchists work tirelessly to try and find all arrested, do legal support and continue to push the issue of injustice handed out by the cops and state. They were an active piece of a large collaboration of many groups. At the end of the day, they were still portrayed as the bad guys. They were peace-policed by people who should’ve been comrades and were talked shit about by hipsters without context outside of the quickly dispersed racist liberal scolding.

While I’ve seen moments and examples that contradict this experience, they are rare, whereas this is one that feels all too common. So we anarchists keep quiet as we walk through a world we have been dedicated to and helped to build. And I think, haven’t some of us, haven’t most of us earned more respect than that? Hasn’t the historical legacy earned the right to have the word ‘anarchism’ taken seriously?

People on the right, in the middle, hell, all over the political spectrum always challenge: we know what you’re against but what are you for? What’s your solution? Anarchism offers a solution; better yet, it offers an infinite number of possible solutions. We’re against capitalism and neoliberalism and state violence and oppression (institutional and individual). Sounds familiar right? Most of us are on that page. Anarchism adds to that the principle of collectivism and mutual aid, the reinvention of the individual and the dismantling of all oppressions, direct democracies and consensus models. It’s a base upon which to build a new world – new worlds – and communities.

In all it’s flaws, it always has tried to be this. Anarchism is whatever we want it to be, it has a million names, a million faces. Those of us who identify with it do so with conviction and thought and hopefully self-critique. And I believe that the more we accept an openly radical alternative, the more we can build strong, diverse, powerful and long-lasting movements for social change.

I’ve never been very good at keeping closeted in any facet of my life and I’d like to believe this is no different. I’m coming out today – I’m an anarchist and I’m proud of that. I’d like to encourage all of you out there to join me in coming out and bringing an ongoing, day-to-day, hard-working, hard-organizing, radical vision to the table. May we always listen and learn and challenge ourselves to change; may we build new worlds in the shell of this dying one.

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