The following talk was given by William C. Anderson on November 14, 2024 through Workshops4Gaza. We are producing and sharing a transcript of the talk here given the urgency and relevance of its ideas for our current moment. We encourage everyone to sit with William’s ideas, check out the references linked at the end, and let it shift how they approach their ideas around organizing and social change. https://workshops4gaza.substack.com/p/state-of-disarray-proactive-self
Thank you for having me, really appreciate it. Ok, let me get situated here and then we’ll dive right into it. There is a lot of ground to cover, a lot of different things I want to talk about tonight and I’m really excited to have this conversation because of its relevance at this particular moment in time. I’m going to be doing a little bit of reading and talking, some of it will be freestyle and some of it will be more structured. Just work with me and then at the end we can try to get some questions in and have a little bit of an exchange.
The first thing I want to say first and foremost is all love and solidarity to the Palestinian people, to everyone who is trying to survive and resist the genocide. We’re going to have a robust conversation and hopefully this will lead to some action. I’m not going to be up here tonight talking just for the sake of talking. This for me is about praxis and not just theory. So I’m going to run down some theory too but the reason we’re talking about some of the theoretical topics that we’ll cover is so that we can move toward actionable steps.
So I want to break this into three sections tonight, and I’ll tell you what those are as we’re crossing into different aspects of the territory of this conversation. The first thing I want to get into with everybody is how I’m going to be talking about survival programs and self-organization, self-governance, self-activity. And how I’m going to talk about these things might be something that some folks are familiar with and others not. But what I want to do is I want to frame this from below. And I want to do this in order to resist “great man” history, and a sort of default to thinking about things in centralized form. And I’m going to go into detail about what I’m saying here.
So when we talk about the past and the present, there’s an overemphasis on leadership and messianic models and centralization. And so I’m speaking to you tonight in a way that looks at the little people, the rank and file. This is history from below, as opposed to history from above.
So what do I mean when I say this isn’t history from above? What I mean is that in order to see the utility of a program, a cause or a purpose, we have to be able to see the collectivity that made it work instead of focusing too much on one area. And we also don’t want to focus too much on one person, place or thing. So when I say centralization, I’m talking about concentrating power under a certain individual, authority or location. So I just want to break down some of these terms that I’m going to be using frequently.
I’m also going to be talking about self-organization and self-direction, self-management and self-governance. And when I talk about those things what I’m really speaking about is autonomy.
And this is the ability for people to come together and assess conditions for themselves and come up with solutions for their own betterment. And that can happen spontaneously or not. That can also be something that’s more directed. And so when I use these terms like self-organization and self-government, or self-activity. I want to make sure that I emphasize here that I’m not talking about individualism. Tonight, we’re not going to be scared of the word self.
So please, when you hear that word, think beyond just an individual or a person that’s focusing inward when we’re actually talking about collective self-governance and awakening. It’s quite the contrary.
Someone like Karl Marx could help us understand this by breaking down his theory of alienation where people are detached from themselves and their labor. And so we need our own agency to see our own value and our own worth in addition to those around us so that we can have collective consciousness. And so having that agency and that ability to see our own value and how we contribute to a broader movement and a broader struggle–it’s not about us centering ourselves as an individual or as a consumer or somebody who is self-centered. It’s about us seeing what role we play in a much more dynamic movement or cause or struggle.
So this is part of a really important way that we start to understand how we organize and what our contributions are, rather than just having these sort of reflexive ideas about what we’re doing and what we’re building based on maybe sort of a default that we go to in our minds. We need to be able to see what our contributions are, and what we’re doing to aid struggle.
So since we’re talking from below, I want to give some examples of how when we look at history to learn and to inform what we’re doing now, we have to be able to see the way people made things happen as individuals and as people contributing to struggle. So for one example, I love to bring up W.E.B. Du Bois and his monumental work Black Reconstruction, which many of you have probably heard of.
And to give you a reference that you can check out after this, the historian Marcus Rediker has a great lecture titled “The Democratic Power of History from Below,” where he gives some great reflections on all this. And you can watch it on YouTube. So make a note of that because everybody should also check that out. And he talks about history from below in a way that I think is really relevant here because he talks about it as a continuing battle of ideas. And he points to Du Bois’ concept of the general strike as a good example in this regard.
So what is the general strike? Well, when we think about the Civil War, and the Civil War in the United States and enslaved people, one of the examples he raises is how some people might say, “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves.” We might have heard that in school, we might hear that in a dominant telling of this history, and we might see it in museums or other places of historical record.
But what Du Bois points out with his concept of the general strike is that when enslaved people stopped working and producing during the Civil War, it negatively impacted the Confederate Army. And it made it harder for them to feed soldiers, and it led to disruptions, like desertion. And because enslaved people were thinking about their own agency, coming back to this agency piece again, it led them to make decisions, whether it was about their labor or whether it was a decision to run away, and those decisions collectively among enslaved people, this general strike, had a big impact on the Confederacy.
So this is one way we could think about enslaved people self-organizing to shift conditions and bring about their freedom. So since I’m talking about this aspect of self-organization with regard to enslaved people and with regard to the Civil War, it gives us the opportunity to think about how if you were looking at that from above, if you were just saying “Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves,” or “Ulysses S. Grant was a general that was a savior and fought valiantly and led the Union Army to act on enslaved people’s behalf,” it would erase those things that enslaved people were doing on their own.
So we don’t want to have an over-reliance on history from above when we talk about this history tonight, because it can lead to false narratives and it can lead to framing that’s disempowering. So as we’re moving towards talking about survival programs and building autonomy, we want to make sure that we understand our contributions again.
Another example of history from below that observes collectivity and self-organization I like to point to is Russell Maroon Schoatz’s work, “The Dragon and the Hydra.” Russell Maroon Schoatz was a Black radical and revolutionary who was a member of the party and Black Liberation Army. And Russell Maroon Schoatz created an investigation looking into–he was also a political prisoner, by the way, and a fantastic writer–but he had an investigation looking at the methods of organization that were utilized in the maroons, which were rebel slave communities in Suriname and Jamaica.
He also examines the conflict between hierarchical and decentralized forms of organization in the Haitian Revolution. And Russell Maroon Schoatz concludes that decentralization was a tactical advantage based on his investigation and his writing. And I want to quote him here, I’m going to just read you a quote from this investigation, and this is again from “The Dragon and Hydra.”
He says: “First off, let me state that I’m not an anarchist. Yet, a lot of what I’ll read here is going to look a whole lot like anarchism. To that, I will only quote the unknown ancient, who after racking his brain to formulate answers to vexing problems, only later to discover that those who had come along before him had already expounded on what he thought were his intellectual inventions is supposed to be, blurted, ‘Confound those ancients. They’ve stolen all our best ideas.’ Therefore, to the anarchist reader, what follows cannot properly be termed anarchism, simply because the practitioners themselves never knew that word, nor were they in contact with people of that view, as anarchism is a European ideology, and these parties for the most part were Africans, Amerindians, with a very limited input by a small number of outcast Europeans. Further, all the struggles here written about had pretty much taken off and gained success prior to their concept spread. Under its classical anarchist thinkers and practitioners. Still the affinity between anarchism and the following is not rejected. On the contrary, it’s welcomed as a sister set of ideas, beliefs and concepts. As long as anarchists understand that they stand on equal footing in a spirit of intercommunal self-determination.”
And we’re going to come back to that term, “intercommunal self-determination.” That’s going to be really important as we move into the next parts of this. So basically just to give a quick summary of what Russell Maroon Shoatz was getting at there is he’s making a note that even though in this study that I’m mentioning, “The Dragon and the Hydra,” he’s saying a lot of things that could be considered anarchist or labeled that way ideologically, that it was bigger than that, and that people have had ways of self-organizing and having self-activity that we’re not necessarily driven by the ideological pursuits that some people might assign to these things historically.
And so I’m bringing this up too because of the piece I just mentioned about looking at history from below, which is what he does in this investigation I mentioned. But I’m also bringing it up because I’m going to talk a lot about anarchism tonight as well. But I don’t want everyone who’s here to think that I’m proselytizing or that I’m trying to convert people to anarchism. I always have to say this because this is a problem we run into with a lot of, you know, things that are, you know, different factions of the left. This isn’t the way my politics work and function. My relationship to anarchism is much more complex than that. What we have to be able to do when we’re looking at this history from below is see how multiple factors contributed instead of just turning this into a process of conversion to make people think that this is some sort of sectarianism. It’s not that. That’s not what’s happening. And again, we’re going to come back to that piece with anarchism and intercommunal self-determination.
And finally, for this last part of this section, I want to mention a man named Kimathi Mohammed. And he was a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and a student of the great Black Caribbean intellectual CLR James. And also as a theorist of the Black Power Movement, Kimathi was someone who emphasized this self-organization and self-direction of Black people during these eras when he talks about this history in his writing. And he was critical of self-proclaimed vanguards of the time and self-proclaimed leadership of these movements. And he tried to do work to actually talk about how Black people were self-organizing and were not just following the leadership and direction of some supposed vanguard or leader or anything like that.
And this is, again, important because he’s looking at history from below. And he’s saying, this is people acting oftentimes spontaneously, and coming together and figuring things out for themselves. They’re not just taking orders. They’re not just all joining an organization and following the direction of a leader or a single authority. And so he has some quotes here that I want to share too from his text, “Organization and Spontaneity.”
He says: “Spontaneity organizes. That is something few political leaders and students of politics recognize. They don’t see that because organization is foremost in their heads the type of organization that they are accustomed to as their only conception of organization. To them, organization is something fixed, permanent, and holy. It is structured with an identifiable leadership separate from the rank and file.”
The rank and file, those regular people.
“And the most concrete form of organization in political leaders’ minds is a political party. Organization does not necessarily mean, however, a vanguard or a mass political party. The specific and concrete form organization takes varies in accordance with the objective situation and historical experiences confronting those oppressed and exploited people who discard their petty differences and engage in collective thought and action.”
He also says: “The mistake most Black political leaders make is to view the Black masses as backward, unorganized and undisciplined. It is also the attitude which literally destroyed the momentum of the Black power movement.”
And this is somebody who’s in the mix during this time, he’s not, you know, commenting from the outside. He’s involved, again, in the Revolutionary Black Labor Movement that’s happening in Detroit at the time during the Black Power era.
And another person that we can look to to understand even more perspective is Field Marshal Don Cox. And I’m going to talk about him a little bit, and something he says that’s important for this conversation, and then we’re going to move into this next section. So what Field Marshall Don Cox says, similarly to Kimathi Mohammed is, and this is the field marshal for the Black Panther Party, mind you, he says:
“Given the present state of our social development, in which power is often centered in small groups, we must be extremely vigilant. Progressive organizations that presume to move in the interest of the masses must constantly confront the psychology of power. In some form or fashion, they must devise checks and balances to control the madness that seems to arise whenever power is concentrated in the hands of a few individuals. Democratic centralism is not the answer. Inevitably, when this form of organizational structure is adopted, centralism is emphasized often to the detriment of democracy. And that leads to authoritarianism, to bureaucracy, and to dictatorship.”
And so the reason I’m pointing all this out is because there’s an underappreciated strain of dissent and divergence when it comes to the Black Panther Party, the Black Radical Tradition, to Black power, to the Civil Rights movement. And these reflections on autonomy, these critiques of centralization, and this emphasis on self-governing socialism from below led to the development of Black anarchisms, as well as turns within the way people were speaking and thinking, the language they were using at that time.
And I’m bringing all this up so that we can understand this is a record. This is the rank and file history. This is the history from below that points to a current within the Black power movement that was moving away from defaulting to centralization. And intercommunalism is an interesting development alongside this. And we’re going to get into what intercommunalism is now. So I want to move into the second piece, the second section.
So what is a survival program? What is intercommunalism? What do they matter now? So when we think about intercommunalism, one of the first people that comes to mind is Huey P. Newton and his leadership in the Black Panther Party. And Huey P. Newton at Boston College in 1970 introduces the concept of intercommunalism and talks about how it worked for the Black Panther Party. And when he’s introducing in this speech, which you can also read online, highly suggest everybody check that out after this, when you read Huey’s introduction to intercommunalism, he’s talking about all of these different developments that the Black Panther Party went through over time. And he’s talking about their mistakes. He’s talking about their evolution. The things that they were going to be doing differently, the things that they used to do that they had changed and altered.
And he makes a lot of distinct statements that are very critical of the place that they’re coming from. And he talks about reactionary versus revolutionary intercommunalism, which I’ll get into some. He critiques nationalism. He critiques Marxist-Leninism, these things that are oftentimes uncritically put onto the Black Panther Party, which is a multi-chapter organization with different people who believe different things. Okay? And Huey says, introducing this concept, he says:
“We, the people, are threatened with genocide because racism and fascism are rampant in this country and throughout the world. And the ruling circle of North America is responsible. We intend to change all of that. And in order to change it, there must be a total transformation. But until we can achieve that total transformation, we must exist. In order to exist, we must survive. Therefore, we need a survival kit.”
And so this is where we bring in the Panthers’ concept of survival pending revolution. And this means that in order to have a revolution, you have to be able to survive the conditions that have been placed on you. You have to be able to survive and you have to be able to create survival programs for the people in order to overturn those conditions. People have to be able to sustain themselves.
Huey also said: “We are not mechanical Marxists and we are not historical materialists. Some people think that they are Marxist-Leninists, but they refuse to be creative, and are therefore tied to the past. They are tied to a rhetoric that does not apply to the present set of conditions.”
So this is a really dynamic speech that he gives because he really debunks a lot of the things that are kind of plastered ideologically onto the Black Panther Party as a whole. Again, this is a multi-chapter organization with different directions, with splits, with disagreements and all–you know, even when it came to intercommunalism, there were disagreements. So we have to understand that this is a good example of some of the tension that was arising amongst the rank and file people.
And by the way, when it comes to intercommunalism, which is the theoretical name for the survival programs, those were largely sustained and maintained by Black women who are a majority, a large portion, of the Panthers’ membership. So even though I’m bringing up Huey and I’m talking about the importance of history from below, I want to be true to that by acknowledging that though someone like Huey might get credit for this theory and this language that we use to talk about the survival programs, that it was the work and the sweat and the often unrecognized and unappreciated labor of Black women that made this happen. JoNina Abron-Ervin, the last editor of the Intercommunal News Service or the Black Panther Party newspaper, and also now Black anarchist, has made it clear in her work that women were what made these programs functional.
And another person who we can look to here for some historical understanding is the scholar Joy James. In “Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency,” Joy James notes: “Hundreds of women, including Assata Shakur, before she was forced underground, served in the Black Panther Party’s rank and file.”
There we are again, the rank and file. This term keeps coming up.
“Implementing the medical housing, clothing, free breakfast, and education programs, female panthers displayed an agency,” there’s that word again, “that reshaped American politics, although their stories recede in popular culture before the narratives of elites or icons.”
What are those elites or icons? That’s history from above. So when we talk about the history of the Black Panther Party and the survival program, it’s important that we recognize that we need to be thinking from below. How did those people come together? How did those women come together? What did they do when they came together collectively to build these programs? Alright? So they left an amazing legacy through their labor and through their work that we’re looking to right now in this present moment in the United States and trying to draw inspiration from. Because we’re going to need to be able to sustain ourselves knowing that we’re in a moment where nothing is guaranteed. Nothing’s ever guaranteed. But we certainly know things are going to get much worse. And when it comes to the state, we know that there’s a lot of repression headed our way.
So let’s talk about some of these survival programs. Let’s just list out a few of them real quick.
When it comes to the Black Panther Party, these chapters created different community programs to meet needs. Some of these programs were things like the free ambulance program. They had a free breakfast program for children, which we know is probably the most famous for anybody that’s familiar with this history and was said to have been appropriated and adopted by the U.S. government. They had a free busing to prisons program. They had a free clothing program. They had a free commissary for prisoners program. They had a free dental program, a free employment program, free food program, free film series, free furniture program, free health clinics, free housing cooperatives program, free food cooperative program, free optometry program, community forums, free pest control, free ambulance, free clothing, free food, sickle cell anemia research–which the Black Panthers were pivotal in the work done around sickle cell anemia. They have police patrols. And they also did work with seniors called Seniors Against the Fearful Environment, where they were helping elders who needed to feel safe in their communities.
That’s a lot of stuff. That’s not even all of it. Those are just some of them. And then you hear that they’re all free. They’re setting up the model for a self-sustaining socialism. They’re setting up the model to build from below. Alright? And this is something that is extremely important because when we think about this moment that we’re currently in, one of the things that maybe could come to mind, for example, is we have now a person coming into office, entering into the White House, that’s saying they’re going to abolish the Department of Education. We already know that education has been under attack at the university level, all the way up to the university level from grade school, everything is under attack in terms of education and the writing of history and the understanding of history in this country.
So something I will say just to ask people to think right now about this current moment is what could a survival program look like that meets the needs that are going to inevitably arise for a self-sustaining education, for an organic education that people can receive in their community that they can receive that is going to meet needs in spite of the fact that there’s going to be so many attacks on how we understand our history, how we learn, how young people grow and receive all of the information that they need to thrive.
So what could that look like? What could a freedom school, you know, there’s such a rich history in the Black radical tradition of creating schools, of self-sustaining schools. What could a survival program look like that actually addresses what’s coming in terms of the attacks on education? Because again, this is what we’re talking about. We’re thinking tonight about how we can actually build things in our community that sustain themselves for the attacks that we know, this is proactive organizing so we’re not just reacting to everything that’s happening. We’re being proactive and meeting the need so that we can have survival pending revolution.
Now let’s go back to reactionary versus revolutionary intercommunalism because there’s a distinction there. And when it comes to this distinction that Huey P. Newton makes when he’s talking about intracommunalism, the reactionary intercommunalism that he says is the current state that people are in, is what I’m talking about getting past, transcending. Reactionary intercommunalism is when people are stuck in this perpetual mode of not being able to overcome the conditions, they’re just reacting, and they are not actually being able to get to place where they can then work to have this true power that they’ve built collectively to overturn those conditions which will be a revolutionary anti-communalism where people can have not just these different things that are reacting all over the place, but a network and a creation of a new thriving transformation based on those different collectives coming together, those different programs coming together to work to build revolutionary power.
So instead of just reacting, reacting, reacting, jumping around this sort of maybe like revolutionary tourism that we see sometimes where people go from this to that to this to that to this to that, instead of building and being committed, we’re talking about actually having a sustained, concentrated, focused, proactive way that we’re addressing and approaching struggle. All of these programs of the Black Panther Party met a need. So what needs can we respond to in this moment? That’s the question. Okay? How can we serve material needs and build power? Because this is not about charity. The survival program is not just about charity. I’m going to go into that more here in a second.
So this workshop is named after an essay that I wrote about intercommunalism in response to climate crisis. And I’ve been thinking about this for several years now. And I sent that over, that was one of the pre-readings if some of y’all got a chance to check it out. But in that essay, I talk about former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon saying that Trump’s choices for his cabinet would be aimed at the deconstruction of the administrative state. And Bannon also said in 2013, “I’m a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state. That’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
So we’re going to come back to that too, because, you know, he was really trying to be ironic and, you know, deceive people with that comparison. Which is utterly ridiculous. But the reason that it’s relevant is because a lot of this has to do with our understanding of the state. And in that essay, I use language that I’ve moved away from and started to think differently about. I’ve moved away from using the term “failed state,” for instance, for the same reason that I don’t say “the criminal justice system is broken.” I no longer describe any colonial trappings as malfunctioning because they’re operating according to their origins. So while I wrote that essay talking about the state’s supposed shortcomings, I should clarify that this sort of abandonment that we’re talking about that’s coming, that’s happening, is not just coming, I don’t want to make this seem like it’s in some future, these things are always happening, this sort of abandonment is inherent in this form of organization we know as the state because of its monopoly on violence.
And so when I began this work in 2017, I pointed out that the climate crisis would force our hands because of its increasing intensity. And so in “The Climate Crisis and the State of Disarray,” which is what this workshop is named after, I drew on the conclusions that I reached with Zoe Samudzi when we co-authored an essay that we wrote together called “The Anarchism of Blackness.” And one of the central points of this latter essay is that Black people and other marginalized and racialized populations had a historical record of governmental neglect and it forced us to engage in anarchistic self-organization whether we call it that or not.
And so in “Climate Crisis and the State of Disarray,” I moved from there and I suggest that the neglect that was happening in this case would be something that we could think about in terms of how to proactively build. And proactively build an intercommunal framework that connects a network of survival programs that respond to climate catastrophe.
And so this is extremely relevant too because of, you know, everything that’s been happening with the recent hurricanes, for example. There was a spate of hurricanes that had happened when I wrote that essay and I was looking at how people were self-organizing in Puerto Rico, how people were responding in these anarchistic ways and through self-activity and self-organization without even necessarily calling it that all the time. Some people did, some people didn’t. But this is why I look to a Black anarchist like Lorenzo Kom’boa Irvin when he talks about building a survival economy. He uses the term dual power. And he uses this term as used by Lenin to describe an anarchist departure from the ways that we currently organize.
So what is dual power? You’re essentially talking about institutions vying for legitimacy. Those that are autonomous and those that build through self-activity of masses of people versus those institutions that are enshrined within the state. And I should note here that he uses this term that is debated by anarchists, and it’s debated by anarchists for a few reasons. Some anarchists don’t use it because of Lenin and his history of the reformation of the state, which is not the goal of anarchists. But then there are others like Irvin who might use it and find some use in it.
And there’s also similar phenomena that is used by anarchists like the French socialists Pierre Joseph Proudon. And, you know, this sort of phenomena was similarly described even by forces like the IWW.
But Proudhon, for example, said:
“In the shadow of political institutions, out of the sight of statesmen and priests, society is producing its own organism, slowly and silently; and constructing a new order, the expression of its vitality and autonomy, and the denial of the old politics, as well as of the old religion.”
So this brings up a schism that I want to quickly address. And this is the split within the socialist movement. So as we’re talking about these different approaches just to give a really quick summary, the socialist movement, like the Black Panther Party, when you look at it from below, when you look at that history from below, the socialist movement was a varied movement. There was different types of socialists, different types of socialisms. And oftentimes when we reflect on this history, we tend to overemphasize the man who I was talking about earlier called Marx. We might overemphasize Engels and think that these were these great thinkers who just dropped socialism from the sky.
But this was a movement full of different factions and different people debating on how socialism would look. And this is also the movement that anarchism comes out of. And so a lot of times when you talk about anarchism, there’s a misunderstanding that anarchism is in contrast or competition with socialism, but anarchism comes out of the socialist movement. Anarchism was a type of socialism that was trying to build without relying on the state.
So when we’re having this conversation tonight, when we think about anarchism, particularly in moments of crisis and moments of catastrophe, this history becomes extremely relevant. Because what are we confronting? We’re confronting the abandonment, the negligence, and the violence of the state. And so since we can’t just magically go from this position that we’re in to seize or control the state in the way that some people would maybe advocate for, what we’re talking about is looking at alternatives and the variations within socialist history based on the conditions that we’re currently in. And that’s why anarchism becomes very important for the work that I do, for the work that others do. And for a historical moment like this, because so much of what we’re dealing with is trying to build this power from below, this anti-state socialism.
Some people who are anarchists may not identify with socialism in that way. I don’t want to make blanket statements. There’s all types of different anarchists. But there are still many, obviously, who identify with that tradition. And I think that it’s important to observe in a moment like this. And so I want to get into this last piece here, and then maybe we can get a few questions.
But this is about resisting repetition. And what I mean by that is when I’m talking about all this history, all of these things that people have said, all these things people have done, I want us to understand that when we look at history from below, when we look at everything that’s transpired, when we are able to see all of the variations, all the complexities, all the conflicts, all of the contradictions, that we’re not just looking at history just to repeat what’s already been done. We’re looking at survival programs in their essence and how they work as a way of thinking about how we can actually innovate and be creative, rather than just do what’s already been done or repeat failures and past mistakes.
It’s crucial that when you are done with this tonight, when you’re thinking about it, if you decide to go somewhere and maybe try to do something with some comrades or if you try to think critically about where we’re headed from here, it’s important that we understand that this moment, as Huey P. Newton said in that introduction of Intercommunalism, is going to require us to look at our unique set of conditions and not be static and not be stuck in the past, not be dogmatic, not be religious, not be orthodox.
We’re not sitting up here just to quote and talk about these people from the past and what they did just so we can mimic it. We have to actually be involved in community and we actually have to have political intentions that we understand because of the work that we do, because of that praxis. So that’s dictated to us by the work. You don’t get on Wikipedia or look in a book and say, oh, I’m this because I read that. You go out into the community and you do work and you let the conditions tell you what’s needed based on what you’re doing with the collective, what you’re doing with the others around you. That’s how we figure out what works and what doesn’t work.
And we look also at the past for information about what’s been tried and what’s been thought through to inform that as well.
So identifying your need, the need in the community, is serving to build power and not simply be charitable. A lot of the understanding we have of mutual aid now that’s been distorted is about charity. And that’s not what mutual aid is about. This is what also happens with survival programs. So this is actually about having a political purpose to build power. We’re not just trying to do charity work and say this is just to be doing something nice and good. We’re trying to overturn conditions. And we build that power by serving and meeting material needs and by bringing people in by meeting their needs and our needs collectively, so that we can get bigger and bigger and bigger till we have enough power to start forcing better conditions for ourselves.
Okay?
So some of the lingering questions that might arise and that maybe we can think through as we’re wrapping this up, are what are the limits of survival programs? How do we avoid liberal capture of the idea of survival programs and intercommunalism? How do we fund survival programs? How do we resist repression of survival programs? What programs already exist around you? What are they building? Okay? Are they building self-organized, self-sustaining movements? Or are they practicing a self-proclaimed leadership and vanguardism? Alright? So we’re talking about organizing differently. We’re talking about being ungovernable. Which has become a meme online but ungovernable is something that we need to be able to examine in its true origins as a politic. What is ungovernability?
Well, the new African anarchist Kuwasi Balagoon once wrote:
“There is no one act that an individual can perform that can change these things in an instant and nothing that a small group of people can do except begin to create ways of defending themselves and more importantly, organize and initiate organizing of large groups of people in the neighborhood and area. As in all neighborhoods and areas. The main thing is to focus on your lives collectively rather than just accept definitions and descriptions of others.”
So this doesn’t necessarily mean just joining an organization or mindlessly following past models that worked in different conditions at different times. Again. Balagoon continued:
“The things that you can confirm through your experiences must be more credible than the things that you cannot. There is no book that will liberate anyone. A book may give ideas but it takes people to apply and adapt, and if they don’t work, disregard and develop and find new ones.”
This next quote is Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Black anarchist, former member of the Black Panther Party. He says:
“We as activists and as organizers have to make ourselves and our communities ungovernable. I know you’ve heard that term before. That means what it says. We have to make it so that we create a new kind of political system of our own, whether it’s dual power or revolutionary direct democracy.”
We might not know the distinction between direct and representative democracy. But direct democracy is about autonomy in this frame, all right?
He says: “Whatever we want to call it in this period, we need to create that kind of movement, a mass anti-fascist movement on one hand and on the other hand, we need to have the capacity of on a mass scale to build a community-based mass, economic survival tendency based on cooperatives in the ghetto for housing for the poor, rebuilding cities, taking care of material needs of the poor. We need to be able to build that.”
And to end this with this last quote. Lorenzo also says:
“We are in a period where there are some people who understand or are practicing mutual aid but the masses do not. We need to go beyond, ‘just helping’ to working towards some sort of different economy. A survival economy on the way to full anarchist communism. Maybe that’s the name we know of as anarchists but in some parts of the world, it may be called solidarity economy to help them survive capitalism. Whatever it’s called, we need to have that so we’re not totally dependent on the capitalist state.”
So as I kind of wrap up here and I want to try to have some questions and exchange and conversation because I’d love to hear what y’all are thinking about, I just want to put out there that one of the things I would love for people to explore about this is thinking about what Ervin was talking about when he says survival economy. This is something that is a development towards building that mass power that is actually channeled through those collectives, those survival programs, coming together. That’s one conception of the way this could all work.
There’s a lot of different approaches. There’s a lot of different thoughts. And so I would encourage everybody to check out all of the different people I’ve been talking about and their ideas as it relates to survival and self-organization and self-activity.
But the main takeaway I wanted us to have tonight is that when we’re thinking about this political moment, it’s important for us to think about having revolutionary and radical autonomy so that we can actually meet needs in our community and create networks of people who are doing that in their communities respectively, and bring those together so that we are able to actually have real radical and revolutionary power that transforms this society through showing people that we can care about one another, that we can work towards serving one another, and we can be selfless in a way that isn’t opportunistic, that isn’t about political pandering, that isn’t about disempowering party politics, but that’s about actually creating and building from below.
So, yeah, I would encourage people to check out all of the references. I’ll tell the folks with Workshops for Gaza to try to send around some more resources that might come to mind if we can. And I really appreciate everybody for coming out tonight and even folks who stayed a little bit longer. I’m really appreciative that so many folks showed up and that we were able to raise all this money for folks in Gaza, this has been really a pleasure and an honor. I respect y’all so much for sitting through me rambling about these things. But yeah, it’s really been an honor and it’s been great. And I hope that we can all continue this conversation. I will encourage you too, if you would like to continue this conversation, I respond to my email as much as possible. You can email me. And I’d love to be in touch.
Thank you all for coming.
Works Cited
Anderson, William C. “Climate Crisis and the State of Disarray.” ROAR Magazine. Retrieved March 18, 2025. https://roarmag.org/magazine/climate-crisis-disaster-response-epa-fema/
Anderson, William C. and Zoe Samudzi. “The Anarchism of Blackness.” ROAR Magazine. Retrieved March 18, 2025. https://roarmag.org/magazine/black-liberation-anti-fascism/
Anderson, William C. “Ungovernable: An Interview with Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin.” Offshoot. January 7, 2021. https://offshootjournal.org/ungovernable-an-interview-with-lorenzo-komboa-ervin/
Balagoon, Kuwasi. A Soldier’s Story: Writings by a Revolutionary Black Anarchist. Binghamton: PM Press, 2019.
Cox, Don. Making Revolution: My Life in the Black Panther Party. Berekely: Heyday Books, 2021.
Dubois, W.E.B., Black Reconstruction. New York: Free Press, 1998.
James, Joy. “Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency” in Jeanne TheoHarris and Komozi Woodard, eds. Women in the Black Revolt. New York: NYU Press, 2009.
Mohammed, Kimathi, “Organization and Spontaneity.” The Anarchist Library. 1974. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kimathi-mohammed-organization-and-spontaneity
Newton, Huey. “Revolutionary Intercommunalism.” Libcom. November 18, 1970. https://libcom.org/article/huey-newton-introduces-revolutionary-intercommunalism-boston-college-november-18-1970
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. “The General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century,” trans. John Beverly Robinson. The Anarchist Library. 1851.
Rediker, Marcus. “The Democratic Power of History from Below.” The Better Tomorrow Speaker Series, University of Hawaii at Manoa, filmed May 15, 2024.
Schoatz, Russell Maroon, “The Dragon and the Hydra: A Historical Study of Organizational Methods.” The Anarchist Library. July 23, 2010. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/russell-maroon-shoats-the-dragon-and-the-hydra
