Situationist International – The Watts Riot, 1965 – The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy [1965] 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: 2003 Firestarter Press Zine, Translated by Ken Knabb https://www.thesparrowsnest.org.uk/collections/public_archive/4814.pdf

Study Guide: An article written by Situationists (A political current inspired by Anti-Authoritarian Marxism and Surrealism and the Dada movement) in France on the nature of the Watts riot, largely using the news and the array of condemnations by Black and left-wing political organisations to lay out an understanding of what happened, why and how. 

August 13th, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned.

Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests. Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say?

He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal Mclntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.”

And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion.

The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system.

Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation.

In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out.

It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers.

Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.” The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally.

They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects.

But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the politic of destruction. People who destroy

commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities.

The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population  women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted. . . . All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years. Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California super opulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global  spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power.

Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike [the FSM] challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role.

The spectacle promptly responded with exposes of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality, the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity.

The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to

hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates.

The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic—cultural spectacle.

By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life —- they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves.

It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general.

The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not sustained, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer tolerable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad side that initiates the struggles that change history” (The Poverty of Philosophy).

Africa has no special monopoly on that. The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people that the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because of irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere.

The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models.

This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see —- the moment they engage in a negating practice  that every hierarchy is absurd. The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values.

Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security.

They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown. Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage.

This is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks)  the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status).

It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war. A revolt against the spectacle even if limited to a single district such as Watts calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

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Chineme Ebi – The Aba Women’s War

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

https://medium.com/@stephanieebi/the-aba-womens-war-172e4c1a543c

There are some who believe that Africans openly embraced colonial domination. This is not true. Across the continent, there were several revolts against these colonialist governments, and the Aba Women’s War — incorrectly referred to often as The Aba Women’s Riot — is just one example of these. Beyond depicting one of many instances of Nigeria’s resistance to colonial rule, it also depicts the not-often-mentioned solidarity that exists between Nigerians, despite all the differences between us. It is important to note that although this war was fought mainly by women of Igbo descent, these women came from many different clans and provinces, and were also market women who are typically in competition with one another. Yet, they came together to battle the British authorities and warrant chiefs who were oppressing them, fully aware that this would have severe consequences.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the incidents surrounding this war, the contributions of this war towards promoting national unity and cohesion, and the unique resilience and togetherness possessed by Nigerians, as seen in the way these Igbo women were able to put their differences aside, unite, and offer support to one another in order to achieve a common goal.

Introduction to The Women’s War

In November 1929, a period of great political unrest began in the southeastern area of Colonial Nigeria. The unrest was in the form of massive agitations from thousands of women from various provinces and tribes, including Opobo, Ogoni, Anaang, Ibibio and Bonny, against increasingly despotic policies from the colonial government. They protested against the excessive taxing on their livestock, crops and household properties; specific plans to further tax Igbo market women; and the oppressive “warrant chiefs” of the time. The women from Calabar and Owerri are said to have led these protests which lasted for two months. This turbulent period of time is referred to as The Women’s War, the Ikot Abasi Women Rebellion, or most popularly (though most incorrectly) as the Aba Women’s Riots.

Prior to colonial rule, women were able to take part in the governing of various regions. Men and women were also previously recognized as cooperative partners when it came to housekeeping and family life as a whole, and each of their roles in maintaining a balanced domestic life was acknowledged as important. In addition, women who married elite members of society had the privilege of taking part in various political movements that occurred in the regions during that period.

The colonial authorities that invaded the Nigerian region saw these practices as chaotic and looked to change them. They implemented a society that recognized only masculine authority and effectively became patriarchal by forcefully creating political institutions that commanded authority and monopolized force, recognizing only organizations headed by men while ignoring those of women. Women naturally became unsatisfied, especially because there was an increase in educational fees. There was also a spike in the level of corruption of native officers, and forced labour became a trend.

In April 1927, direct taxation was introduced to the various regions in Nigeria. It was implemented in April 1928, but only affected men, and then in September 1929, a change in the serving district officer of the Bende division from Mr Weir to Captain J. Cook brought about some changes. Cook, noticing that the nominal roll excluded clear details about the wives, children and livestock and thus seemed inadequate for taxing purposes, decided that it needed revision.

This revision was an introduction to direct taxation for women, who were already taking care of the taxes for their husbands and supporting their families. Their political roles had been stripped from them, and thus, they had no voice in negotiating these unfavourable conditions. These women decided to take action.

The Women’s War

The war was known as Ogu Umunwanyi, and was sparked by a dispute between a woman named Nwanyeruwa and a man named Mark Emereuwa. Mark helped in making a census of the people living in the town which was controlled by the Warrant of Okugo. The financial crisis of 1929 hampered women’s trade and productivity, so they sought assurances from the colonial government that they might not need to pay taxes. Faced with a lull in political demands, the ladies decided to not pay taxes or appraise their property.

On the 18th of November, Mark approached Nwanyeruwa, who was a widow and demanded she count her goat, sheep and people. Understanding it to mean that she would have to pay tax on them, she angrily asked him if his “widow mother was counted”. This question arose because up until that point it was understood that Igbo women were exempted from paying taxes. Then they continued to exchange angry words which eventually escalated to Mark attempting to choke Nwanyeruwa. Following this exchange, she went to the town square and discussed the incident with the other women who were talking about the issue of taxing women. The Oloko women invited other women from other areas in the Bende district, Umuahia and Ngwa. They gathered nearly 10,000 women who protested at the office of Warrant Chief Okugo, demanding his resignation and calling for a trial.

Furthermore, using the traditional practice of censoring men through all-night song and dance ridicule (often called “sitting on a man”), the women chanted and danced, forcing warrant chiefs in some locations to resign their positions.

The women reportedly targeted European-owned businesses and Barclays Bank. They also targeted colonial authorities’ Native Courts, setting fire to many of them. Police and troops from the colony were dispatched. They opened fire on the crowds in Calabar and Owerri, killing more than 50 women and injuring more than 50 more. During the two-month war, at least 25,000 Igbo women were involved in protests against British officials.

The Aftermath of the War

Reports vary, but it is said that over 50 other women died during this battle; some were killed by bullets, while others drowned in the Imo River when they tried to escape. Many more were injured. Despite this, the women were successful. Massive reform was seen in the southeastern region, as the plans to tax the market women were dismissed, and the authority of the warrant chiefs was checked. A “Women’s Wing” of the Ibibio State Union was established, thus allowing women to participate more in the affairs of the region, and the Union began to actively encourage women’s education. Subsequently, a number of associations promoting the betterment of women’s lives were established, including the Family Support Programme, the Better Life for Rural Women Programme and Nka Uforo Ibaan (Women’s Development Association).

The Aba women’s rebellion banded together a whopping 25,000 women from Bende to Umahia and other parts of the east with a common goal. Prior to this, protests of this kind of magnitude were unheard of. That level of social solidarity in that time (and even now) was beyond impressive. It is particularly interesting to note that the women mobilizing in thousands was a direct reaction to an assault on one woman. The phrase “One for all and All for one” has known no truer expression in Nigeria’s history.

It is believed that the success and bravery of the Aba Women’s rebellion set the tone for the protests that followed it. People across the nation (and continent) were suddenly awoken to the strength in their numbers and the rights they had as the original owners of the land with their pre-existing traditions and customs and began to fight to re-legitimize these traditions. In 1947, a similar protest was led by Olufunmilayo Ransom Kuti in Abeokuta. The protest in this instance was also against unfair taxation of women when women did not occupy any roles in the local council. The result of this protest was the removal of the taxes and the creation of four seats for women on the local council.

Key Participants In The War

Madame Nwanyeruwa

Nwanyeruwa, also called Madame Nwanyeruwa, was an Igbo woman from the Oloko clan of Nigeria. After a fight with a male Igbo Warrant Officer, Nwanyeruwa coordinated 10,000 Nigerian ladies in a dissent against the frontier and local authorities.

She assumed a significant role in keeping the fight peaceful. She, alongside different ladies of Oloko town, motivated ladies in other Nigerian towns to begin their own political developments as well. Under her recommendation, the ladies fought in routine, “sitting” on the Warrant Chiefs until they gave up their badge of office and surrendered. As the revolt spread, different gatherings followed this example. Nwanyeruwa’s job in the Women’s War was one in a progression of activities which went about as an impetus for social and political change in Nigerian history, helping the early African patriot development around there and the development for autonomy, which finished in freedom being allowed in 1960. Her activities denoted an achievement in both African patriotism and women’s privileges in Africa.

Madam Mary Okezie

Mary Okezie was another important woman who drove the Aba Women’s Riot in 1929. She was the first Ngwa lady to acquire Western training and was instructing at the Anglican Mission School in Umuocham Aba in 1929 when the women’s revolt began. Although she wasn’t a direct protester, Madam Okezie was exceptionally helpful to the women’s motivation.

She was the one who presented the memo of complaint to the Aba Commission of Inquiry. Today, the significant essential hotspot for contemplating the riot is the Report of the Aba Commission of Inquiry. After the revolt, Madam Okezie arose as a head of Ngwa ladies and established the Ngwa Women’s Association, working for as long as she could to make women aware of their rights in Nigeria.

Adiaha Edem Udo Udoma

Commonly referred to as Madam Udo Udoma, she was one of the key fighters in the Women’s War of 1929. At that time, she was a well-known market leader in Ikot Abasi, located in present-day Akwa Ibom before she became one of the leaders of the war.

On the 16th of December, 1929, Madam Udo Udoma and hundreds of other women were protesting at the Consulate Beach, Egwanga Opobo, when the colonial troops opened fire at them using pistols, rifles, and even a machine gun, despite the fact that the women were mostly unarmed, except those who had sticks and stones. During this fight between the troops and the women, Madam Udo Udoma is reported to have grappled a rifle out of the arms of one of the soldiers and broken it in half across her knee. A statue depicting this moment of immense courage was erected in her honour and can be found at the Women’s War Memorial, Ikot Abasi.

Conclusion

The women’s war was the first stepping stone in the fight for a Nigeria independent of colonial rule. On the surface, the market women were protecting their custom against the taxation of women, but on a much grander scale, we see that this was truly a fight to recover the power snatched by the colonists when they replaced many other age-old customs with their laws. The women’s war in itself was an expression of unity and a grand one at that, however, the unifying effects of the rebellion did not stop there. It went on to inspire other uprisings in other parts of the nation (and the continent) thereby fanning the flames of nationalism in Nigeria and eventually weakening the hold of the colonial masters in various regions of the nation.

The war was also seen as the introduction of mass African nationalism — a group of political ideologies which are based on the idea that the people have the right to freely choose a body, person or institution that has ultimate authority over them in order to change an existing law or make a law. It made people understand that they can come together to make decisions about their country, and that they could govern themselves without the interference of the British colonial masters. This played an important role in the decolonization of Africa. To quote Ndanyongmong H. Ibanga, thanks to these women, “[we] do not pay tax to [any] British monarch who has no jurisdiction on our God-given corner of this globe.”

References

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  7. “Sitting on a Man”: Colonialism and the Lost Political Institutions of Igbo Women, Author: Judith van Allen, Source: Canadian Journal of African Studies, Vol. 6, №2, Special Issue: The Roles of African Women: Past, Present and Future (1972), pp. 165–181 Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/484197
  8. Falola, Toyin (2008). A History of Nigeria. Cambridge University Press. pp. 133–135. ISBN 9780511399909.
  9. Chima J. Korieh, “Gender and Peasant Resistance: Recasting the Myth of the Invisible Women in Colonial Eastern Nigeria, 1925–1945.” in The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola, ed. Andrew C. Okolie (Africa World Press, 2003), 623–46, 630
  10. Glover, Jonathan (1995). Women, Culture and development: A study of human capabilities. Oxford University. p. 449
  11. The Testimony of Nwanyoji, March 14, 1930. In The Women’s War of 1929 by Toyin Falola and Adam Paddock. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2011.
  12. Judith Van Allen, “Aba Riots or the Igbo Women’s War?-Ideology, Stratification and the Invisibility of Women.” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 6.1 (1975)

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Casey Brezik – Conditions Of Confinement [2015]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://kansascityabc.wordpress.com/2016/05/30/conditions-of-confinement-new-zine-by-kansas-city-anarchist-prisoner-casey-brezik/

Study Guide: This text is a personal account of a small prison uprising after a prisoner was assaulted by a pig, it really rings home just how limited action inside of the prison system can be. Much to my frustration, it’s almost impossible to find other writings of Casey’s anywhere… For starters his supporters site [https://web.archive.org/web/20190308175808/https://supportcasey.org/] went on a ‘Indefinite break’ in late 2019 and only a small part of his page has even been archived.  For the record, In his available political writings, Casey himself has never identified with being Black in, in a letter he wrote to Wildfire magazine & elsewhere, he identifies with being a person of colour.

Before going to prison for the stabbing, he had been in prison a few times and was living a rather transient life. Train hopping across the country and sleeping rough from time to time. He struggled to develop friendships with other people socially and at times he acted out in ways that have further alienated him.

In prison he studied maths and tutored other prisoners, got married to another prisoner in a different facility and participated in June 11th, writing a short statement in 2016 against prison reform and for prison abolition. He wrote letters in two issues of Wildfire magazine, issues 1 and 3, he wrote about Charlottesville arguing that the energy used and against street mobilizations of fascists would be better used elsewhere. His comrades held a demonstration against the very governor he went out to assassinate and held a few fundraisers for him. Producing stickers and zines of his writings.  In his later writings he theorised about space travel and starting a colony on the moon, but since then there’s not been much available about him at all. He was due for release in 2022 but pleaded guilty to assaulting a guard that year so he’s looking at a bit more time. Whatever he’s doing now, I hope it brings him joy.

Casey Brezik Conditions Of Confinement [2015]

From The Editor (Publisher)… 

 

Casey Brexik, an anarchist from Missouri, was arrested in September, 2012 for attacking and slashing the throat of the Dean of the Metropolitan community College-Penn Valley. This zine is a compilation of the personal diary entries that Casey wrote in July of 2015 surrounding the response to an assault on a fellow inmate by the CO’s. The honesty and candor is rare amongst anarchist writings. Moments of revolt.

however small, are written far too often without the depth of emotion they deserve. The text speaks of fear and confusion with a vulnerability we often lose in the overly glamorized and one-dimensional writings on revolt.

 

Allegedly, his original target was the Governor of Missouri, day Nixon, who had been scheduled to speak at the college that day, but had canceled his appearance last minute. Charged  with two counts of first-degree assault and two counts of criminal action, Casey was found “incapable” of standing trial in February 2011. He spent the following 11 months locked up in Missouri Mental Institution. In June of 2013 he was

sentenced to 12 years in prison.

 

Since his incarceration Casey has seen most of the larger anarchist milieu turn their back on him and his case for a variety of reasons. While we do not implore people on the outside to support some amorphous group or “anarchist prisoners”, we do suggest engaging in a dialogue with Casey about his life and the nearly 10 years he has cumulatively spent as both an anarchist and a prisoner. If you do want to help him transition to life outside of prison, please visit his support site or write to us to donate to his release fund.

-causerie editing crew

 

Introduction 

 

This zines purpose is to document and provide an analysis of an event for which I experienced while in segregation. I’ve been incarcerated several times in many states and even other countries. It’s understood that the conditions of confinement do tend to vary from place to place. This is to say that what’s possible in one place is not necessarily possible in another. At least not as easily. It’s also thoroughly understood that even though someone incarcerated does not mean they’re in the same position as everyone else.

 

Whether we’re on the outside or we’re stuck on the inside behind these razor wire fences, we’re all imprisoned so long as our survival is dependent on conformity to the existing system. A survival that is complacent to the roles they would have us play in their society. Complacent to their will. This zine is for

all of those among us whom are willing to say ‘no’. For all of us who are willing to break their laws designed to keep us in line. For all of those that would bite the hand that feeds.

 

Of course, this zine alone is not enough to satisfy the fires which burn within each of us. These fires can only be satisfied when they’re allowed to burn. We all must find our own ways to give our fires air to breathe and content to consume. This, nor any other zine, can grant us the freedom we so desire. This zine can only allow us to make our own analysis of an event that I felt was meaningful. My hope is that everyone can take something from it, whether that’s inspiration or simply an honest warning of what it’s like to be behind these fences so they might remember why security culture is so important.

 

These journal entries were recorded in real time. Originally I’d begun writing for a different zine with a different purpose. Afterwards, I’ll give you my thoughts on the event. Enjoy!

 

July 16th, 2015 (Thursday) 

 

This the first day of my supposed “break” from disciplinary segregation. I received a violation for writing my girlfriend in another institution a “sexually explicit” letter. In a sense, that terminology probably downplays it. They actually came to my cell two days ago and told me I was prohibited by the warden to write her anymore. Which is crazy because I love her and have 5 years left to do. She has 6. Maybe we can still get married while we’re in here. I’m not sure, we’ll have to see.

 

GROUND BREAKING NEWS!

 

I’’ve waited for this moment for 21 days. Finally, there’s unity in segregation!ll Everyone coming together! Two CO’s just assaulted an inmate on the staircase! Everyone’s coming together to assure they don’t get away with it! Something is better than nothing, so now several cells have been flooded. This is bound to be a long night. I’ll come back and write more about the day’s events. I need to assure these pigs don’t confiscate this. A sprinkler was just popped.

 

-Alright, I’m back. So the entire wing was just flooded because an inmate was assaulted by the CO’s within view of everyone. The strangest part or maybe the most inspiring is that for at least some, the injustice transcended the color barrier that’s always present here to at least some degree.

 

I’ve wanted to see unity among inmates for some time and have witnessed it today in a bittersweet sense.

 

Here’s how things played out after the cells were flooded and a sprinkler head popped. The CO’s came in looking for an inmate to clean it up. They naturally went to the wing’s walkmen (the ones paid extra food and cigarette butts from the CO’s ashtray to“clean” the module on a daily basis). Which is a questionable

job to begin with, but tolerated because it provides a means for things (tobacco) to come into the wing occasionally. They were able to pull one inmate worker. Despite the entire wing opposing the police. His celly refused to allow him back into the cell until a captain came through and threatened to write a violation, I guess. He signed an enemy waiver and allowed the “snitch” to come back into the cell. A narrative took place and a fight ensued. The “snitch” is checking out right now (the other inmate, who lost, is on the bench- a a metallic grilled bench they handcuff and shackle us to for prolonged periods of time to cause us discomfort under the guise of convenience for them.) Several inmates were written up for major violations from “inciting a riot” to “organized disobedience”. The cells that have been flooded, whether the residents were flooding their cells or were victims of other people’s toilet water flooding into their cells, were left flooded. Only the day room was squeegeed by tho CO’s and their pot. The water has been off for hours. ‘Toilets can not be flushed. CO’s are laughing. Mocking. With their major violations that have been handed out, out-dates are going to be taken. Stays have been extended because they’ve dared to stand up against injustice.

 

This was a victory in that we challenged them as one and did not stand aside while they beat a handcuffed man in front of us, but a loss in that many of us are quite possibly here for longer, owing to the parole board’s habit of pulling parole dates for major violations.

 

It was a truly amazing moment with penned-up frustrations culminating to a point and exploding all over the place only to leave us feeling depleted afterwards. We’ll be collecting ourselves for a while.

 

Now for a little backdrop into how my stay in ad-seg has been. To start with we’re allowed 3 t-shirts, 3 boxers, 3 pairs of socks, 2 shoes, 2 towels, 2 washcloths, 1 pillow case and 1 blanket. We have laundry once per week, but if your lights are covered (because the fluorescent bulbs often illuminate our cells 24 hours a day and they come around for laundry around 1am) when they come around somehow that counts as a refusal. ‘We’re given one 2 oz bar of soap per week for both showers and washing our hands. We only have showers Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Again, if your lights are covered whenever they decide to come around in the morning it counts as refusal. ‘There is no warning or notice given, you just find out when it happens to you. We have a very bright fluorescent light in our cells that frequently stays on 24 hours. Specifically, when they have an inmate in the wing that’s on suicide watch. They’re not supposed to house “suicide watches” in this wing because of the double bunks that provide a means for someone to cause themselves harm. However, for whatever excuse they have, they do so anyway.

 

They’re trying to force an inmate into a cell that hasn’t been cleaned out yet. He’s refusing to go and claiming he’s suicidal. He wants others to ride with him but the energy has dissipated. Often they ignore people’s claims about being suicidal or ‘even requesting Protective Custody (PC). Sometimes these claims are used as a means to switch cells or to do something (anything) to cure the restlessness. That’s no excuse to ignore people though. They still have a job to do. There may very well come a time when someone isn’t “crying wolf”. In fact, the 2 murders that have occurred since I’ve been here were in segregation.

 

The inmate that was being forced into the cell was kept in the dross out cages until the wee hours of the morning when most of us are asleep. The toilets had been off for a while. There just so happens to be one cell next to the dross out cages that remains open and is used as a nurses’ station. As soon as they came to move him to the suicide housing unit (8 house), he darted for the nurse’s station, while in handcuffs and leashed to one of the CO’s, he dropped his pants and took a big dookie in their toilet! The CO’s weren’t happy and ended up beating him in there. The CO called code and others responded. The inmate was heard apologizing profusely. He was bleeding from his face as he was finally escorted to the suicide unit.

 

They never offer us cleaning supplies to clean the cell with. I was very lucky to come in hero with one and a half bars of dial soap. I’ve been able to use it as a disinfectant of sorts. Others aren’t so lucky.

 

We order commissary every other week. Surprisingly, we’re able to buy some snacks, but only junk food. We’ll go next week. Til need to buy some more soap and toothpaste. I’ll probably hold out on the deodorant and use soap and a washcloth instead. I’ll have to buy what I can in food, junk or otherwise. Ramadan just ended [Editor’s note: Casey decided to fast for Ramadan in solidarity with other prisoners in the jail.]  Somehow they got away with feeding us only 2 meals per day. They’d give us an early breakfast and a sack lunch at nightfall. Sometimes the bag didn’t even contain a full meal. Often bags were shorted. I say something, but am always ignored. I write kites to the caseworker, but again, ‘m always ignored. (Kites are essentially notes or requests to the caseworkers) He’ll talk with us when he makes his rounds as though he’s done something, but he doesn’t. It’s frustrating. I’ve been missing laundry for weeks now. My bag came open after the CO failed to tie it properly. Now, I run the risk of being charged for it. They actually tried to write me up for it, but I was saved because I took the time to hand write copies of every “kite” I filed. On top of it all, I’ve lost about 10 pounds during the fast.

 

I try to keep track of everything and write it all down. Maybe there’s some way in which I can fight them eventually to bring about change. I don’t see it right now, but that doesn’t mean I give up hope, I’m afraid to even consider what that would be like, although I often feel it becoming my reality; This is a dark place meant to destroy one’s hope and render them both helpless and hopeless. It’s designed to “break” you.

 

Many have already broken. It seems like they have no hope for the future and therefore, only live in the immediate gratification of the present. The here and now that exists in this very moment. Sometimes I wonder if that isn’t the best and fullest form of freedom. For I feel in order to retain hope for something better far off in the future, I have to pacify myself in the present. A lot of times I feel that I’ve got to let an injustice go unaccounted for because I know the fight within these fortresses of theirs is frivolous. I just like to know that people are still capable of banding together and we haven’t been “all the way” pacified. Rebellion is needed from time to time, but it’s difficult to get away with.

 

‘That’s It for tonight y’all. I’m exhausted. Hopefully I can make this into a daily diary entry and keep everyone updated. Goodnight.

 

july 17th, 2015 (Friday)

 

Today I’m left reflecting about what can really be done to stop these incidents like last night’s assault from occurring. This morning after they turned the water back on for our showers, and so kindly allowed our cell to fill with shit water again while we were away (there was still flood water in the day room), I was left thinking about what I could do to demand I get some soap from them to use on my floor. There’s really nothing. Throwing a tantrum only gets you ignored, as does not throwing a tantrum. Checking into PC, demanding medical attention under false pretenses, or claiming you’re suicidal might get you out of your cell, but you’re likely to get a edv (conduct violation) to extend your stay and it’s definitely not going to got us any soap.

 

Eventually, I was forced to accept that there isn’t anything I can do about it. Even the filing of an IRR (informal request for remedy, the required step before filing a formal grievance and the official process of our expressing our complaints) seems frivolous. They make the process take forever, they never admit they’re wrong, and even if we take it all the way to court our claims are likely to be turned down if we haven’t phrased it just right. Doing so requires that we know exactly what our rights are and aren’t as defined by the courts. However, we’re not allowed to request any legal material unless we’ve already been granted a Qualified Legal Claim from the court (in other words, the courts have to say we need them). The legal process seems so long and drawn out that it doesn’t seem worth the effort or the money ($300 is quite a bit). Especially, considering how often we’re shut down as inmates. So it seems hopeless from the inside.

 

However, when I think about the fight from the outside, things don’t seem any more hopeful. The possibilities for action are more numerous, but what about a means to an end? There seems to be none in sight, nor in mind.

 

‘Today was the first day I’ve been able to go outside in 3 weeks. It was hot and I was still dehydrated from the Ramadan fast.  I managed to get some much needed exercise in the 4’x8’ rec cages they have. I was able to work on a nice little sweat even. I even did some more after lunch. I don’t have any excuses not to be exercising anymore.

 

July 18th, 2015 (Saturday)

 

I was expecting action last night but none occurred however. In the aftermath of everyone’s disappointment last night, floods have occurred once more today. Everyone that’s flooded their cells has done so to take a stand against police brutality as perpetuated by a CO named Beasley 2 nights ago against an inmate.

 

I’ve spent the morning and last night reflecting on my role in all of this from several perspectives. Most prossing is my lack of participation in these demos. They’ve been minimal, at most, despite my supporting them 100%. Frankly, I feel as though I’m a coward.

 

The first night me and my celly saw our cell Hooded. The CO’s refused to allow us to clean up. To be clear, this was not our doing, but due to our lack of planning. The water from other toilets flooded into our cell. It’s dirty water and smells of sewage. They refused to do anything, and as seems to be policy, ignored us. I hated how they were able to treat me in a way that wouldn’t even be acceptable for animals. So, it seemed the options I was poised with..well let’s just say there were a few options, but none were appealing. The consequence of participation is being treated as though we were nothing, and helpless to do anything about it. It’s frustrating especially considering that I wasn’t to blame. I’m left to account for others actions. It’s just another item to add to the list of things that serves to reinforce that it is “us vs. them.”

 

If further proof was needed, I heard CO holding a discussion with a neighbor yesterday. The inmate was getting onto tho CO for letting their “snitch” back into the cell in order to get whooped after assuring the man his safety. The inmate stressed the CO’s job of protecting the inmate. Strangely, I believe him to have meant it was his job to protect him because he’s an inmate, not because he’s their snitch. However, the CO went into a long hate-filled speech about how he didn’t give a damn about us inmates. Particularly whether or not we died. He said the world was a better place without us and expressed a sense of pride at being able to look at our dead corpses with indifference, as he had in the past. Again, it’s frustrating to be so powerless.

 

So despite every fiber in my being crying out for justice now, I refrain. My aspirations require it and I know in the larger picture this is a small demo, although the significance is great for us here and now in our frame of reference. I have to wonder if I won’t regret it.

 

They’ve kicked off a second round of flooding now today. The CO’s are at this point ignoring it. Although I’m not participating, I understand their frustrations…there’s so much to write about, I really don’t know how to organize it all. Our world is framed by abusive repression at every turn. There is injustice everywhere. We feel helpless to do anything, but destroy what’s around us. Our “homes”. For which our captors don’t care about anyway. We’ve been rendered powerless, helpless and hopeless.

 

I don’t see the fight as taking place here behind their walls. There’s only so much we can accomplish here. The reason for our fighting them needs to be limited to our not allowing them to treat us just any sort of way. Whenever they get out of line, it makes sense that we should let them know it. But aren’t they all the way out of line for holding us in these cages and treating us whatever sort of way with impunity. Further, our fighting back every time they hop out of line, is, in all reality, only slowing the transition of a progressively oppressive and increasingly unaccountable system. We’re screaming with all our might, but we’re already out of earshot.

 

I’m not participating because I want to attend the Associate of Arts program at Bonne Terre. I’ve been waiting for a transfer since mid-June. I’m not sure how long it will take, or if I will even go to Bonne Terre. I could only request it. I feel as though I’ve been pacified into my non-participation. I see the futility, yet I see the importance of giving voice to our complaints and realizing a sense of unity among the inmates. Still, T want my fight to be on the outside. I’ve fought on both the inside and out. Many times I’ve flooded my cell, been maced, and occasionally tazered. At times I’ve even attacked the guards. Once in defense of another inmate they were beating and once in an attempt to escape possibly the second worst conditions I’ve ever found myself confined in. Second only to the small jail in the mining town of Hidalgo Del Parral in Estado Chihuahua, Mexico. I could easily argue it was worse. Other times my acts of protest were merely an act of defiance accompanied by a speech to other inmates of why I felt it was so desperately important.

 

I’ve spent over 7 years incarcerated. That’s small in comparison, even for those my age. Being only 27, this means I’ve spent over a quarter of my life incarcerated. If I include the time I’ve spent under their supervision (probation/parole), that number becomes 10 years. That’s all of my “adult” life although I realize that I never came into “adulthood” until recently.

 

Most of my life has been spent avoiding responsibility and doing what I wanted. That meant fighting against injustice, but always in small ways. I want to fight on a grander seale and be more effective. I want something more than a sense of euphoria to come from my activism. I’m not extraordinarily educated, or very sociable, I know that my heart is in the right place, I just don’t possess the ability to struggle as meaningfully or effectively as I would choose. I want to get to that point. I choose to educate myself.

 

Currently I’m studying mathematics. I’ve come a long way since I arrived at this camp. This Is the first place I’ve been since Icaught my charges that has an actual library. I was ordering books on electromagnetism, electrodynamics and so forth while I was in county but they were beyond me. I needed to fill in the gaps of knowledge I was missing, I ordered a math book, but it to as beyond ma. In diagnostics (where you first enter the prison system and await transfer to a permanent camp) I washed inmates laundry everyday and muled contraband for stamps. I did everything I could to get stamps to send to this company to buy some books I’d read about. I was successful, but these too ware beyond me. Although, I’ve at least been able to hold onto them.

 

Upon arriving here I was able to gauge where T was mathematically and build from there. It turns out i was somewhere in what would be considered algebra, requiring a refresher on quadratics. I’ve been able to build on it surprisingly, this was already beyond most inmates, so it made sense for me to become a tutor. Math being the main struggling point for most. Mine being English, specifically writing. Well, I was lucky in that on my arrival here, the library ordered a textbook on college algebra and shortly after a textbook on trigonometry and then finally a book on calculus! So I’ve been able to further my studies fairly drastically. In order to study the physics books I worked for in diagnostics I need to complete calculus IIL. I’m currently in segregation, I’m able to study from a calculus workbook that emphasis bare bono essentials to understanding calculus I. It’s not a far stretch of the imagination that I should be able to test out calculus! once I’ve finished this workbook.

 

I worked 16 months as a tutor helping others receive a higher education. I spent a considerable amount of time and effort inquiring about correspondence courses, only to find they were all too expensive to obtain a degree on any wages I’m capable of earning here. Still, I’d resolved to try to obtain a better

 

paying job in order to take some courses. But was surprised to find that despite my jumping through their hoops in order to obtain the privilege I was still looked over..repeatedly. It was frustrating to the point I was giving up, but then my mother read on-line about a program being offered by St. Louis University at Bonne Terre, another Missouri prison, I went to the case worker to ask whether I was eligible and was told I’d have to get there and ask them. So, I’m trying to transfer.

 

My plan, along with my girlfriend, is to move to Albuquerque upon our release. I’ll attend UNM (University of New Mexico). They have a doctoral program for nanoscience and micro systems engineering I’m trying to pursue. That’s such a vital part of our world today, I imagine it will be of vital importance for activists to have at least some knowledge in. I’ve been studying computers in conjunction with mathematics, However, I’ve placed the priority on math because it serves as a bridge.

 

July 19th, 2015 (Sunday)

 

A third round of flooding occurred last night. Now, as participation has dwindled, I’m starting to see a pattern where people are just acting up. No longer is there unity aimed at a common cause. Now it’s merely individuals trying to assert who’s the “hardest” or “realest”. However, | did notice something spectacular. Subtle, yet spectacular. As far as I know, no one else has noticed. After the third round of flooding, the CO’s came in and were silently doing their job of cleaning up our mess. They even had the CO that started all of this in the first place cleaning up the water. What’s spectacular was that, at least for that night, they stopped ignoring us. If someone needed something while they were in here, they’d go to their door and hear them out. It’s a small concession, but it seemed profound in the sense that at least for a few hours they treated us with some dignity.

 

It’s so frustrating when they ignore us. Some people have legitimate issues that need to be tended to, while some only want to jeff around, curse at the guards, or the worst one, flash their penises at the nurses. That one gets to me. Those are sexual predators living in a delusional state where they’ve convinced themselves that these nurses and female CO’s actually want that, despite being written up for it time and again. Collectively, these issues probably lead the CO’s to feel it’s alright to ignore us all the time. Most of the time it’s not something important. I don’t think it should require that someone be dying in order for them to come to our assistance, but I see why they feel justified in implementing a policy of ignoring us. If a nurse walks into the wing to give out meds and every third cell is jacking off in their window calling her all sorts of names, how is she able to hear the soft spoken one trying to get his meds? The one she’s skipped over. Further, if even that approach has been used repeatedly to get her to  watch, then why should she trust it now? Why shouldn’t she ignore us to the best of her ability?

 

There are so many different possibilities in here, it’s difficult to come together collectively. It’s rare. Possibly, it occurs once every 3 or 4 years or so. That’s why I felt so inspired by what I saw. It has since finally fallen apart again and it’s now inmates vs. inmates in their constantly misguided struggle for power and domination over each other. I’ve come to recognize this as each inmate’s respective search for significance in an otherwise meaningless life. Society has a way of brainwashing us into accepting that we’re worthless. The only semblance of moaning many of us find lies in our accumulation of material goods and how many people we can manipulate. Every single day I hear someone bragging about how they max out on their spend limit every store day in order to belittle someone with less money. It doesn’t matter that the money they’re using was given to them by friends and family. Unless, of course they’re trying to rub in the fact that they have people out there that love them and the poorer person must not. As though love were something quantified by money. Unfortunately, in many instances it is.

 

This whole ordeal has changed me personally in another subtle yet significant manner. I’d always felt compelled to thank the CO’s whenever something was given to me or done for me. Regardless of whether that was handing me my tray or opening my cell door. I was raised to say “please” and “thank you” to everyone just as a basic decency to fellow humans, period. I believed everyone was deserving of some level of respect. For some time now I’ve been trying to break myself of that habit. I’ve been unsuccessful because the part of me conditioned to say these things held more power over me than my will to not say it. I couldn’t justify my seeming rudeness until the CO finally made me snap. They owe me at least these things. I don’t need to thank them for what they are supposed to be doing. If anything, that’s just lending credit to their fucked up mentality that allows them to think they’re doing us some sort of favor by providing us with our most basic needs for survival. As though they’re somehow giving us more than what we rightfully deserve. It reinforces that they are our masters and we their undeserving captives,  I can see this now and regret having taken the point so lightly in the past.

 

Another thing I do or don’t do, since the CO ignored me in my request for soap, because I feel far too often that I’m begging them for something in my repeated pleas that fall consistently upon deaf ears, is that Iask them for as little as possible. Hopefully that can continue to be absolutely nothing as it has for the past few days now.

 

‘My hatred for these pigs has grown tenfold. I was dormant for a while in the casual adapted comfort I’d allowed myself to find in my surroundings. It’s been reignited as I’m reminded day after day what I’m fighting for. My eyes are wide open again.

 

I think when my comrade from ——— responds to my letter I’d sent her, I’ll ask if she might be able to hold a fundraiser on my behalf so that I can order a typewriter. That would allow me to write these dispatches on my own. I can’t expect my comrades to do that for me. It doesn’t feel right that I should ask for something so grand and only put in minimal work towards seeing that it becomes a reality. I’ll feel better about myself if I can do the brunt of the work.

 

I’m not sure that my ideas are going to work, but hopefully I can adjust things as needed. Particularly, I’m concerned about the contents of my zine. It’s never really seemed like people have had much interest in what I’ve had to say. Possibly, I’ve just failed to hold their attention. I do have a few stories I can tell though. Those seem to at least make people laugh.

 

The floods actually continued today. The CO’s are visibly ‘exhausted. So much so they’ve given up on attempting to clean them up, knowing that they’re only going to start as soon as they leave the wing all over again. Now that their shift is coming to an end and they’re cleaning it up with the help of their snitch. They put down numerous small long green sandbags in front of tho doors whore tho most water has puddled at. Tho back corner I’m in has remained relatively dry since the first night. I erected a barrier out of plastic bags I’d held onto. I was able to tear thom and lay them flat. I positioned them to block the corners too. Then I placed towels and clothes on them to weigh thom down. I thought it was somewhat ingenious that I should be able to recycle what would otherwise be trash to fortify my cell. Unfortunately, it seems like I won’t get to test my engineering skills this time. Still, I’m proud of my craftiness.

 

In a sense, the wing has erupted into some degree of anarchy (if the word is to be taken to be synonymous with chaos)… possibly there’s an alarm going off right now. From what I can gather, it sounds as though they might have popped the sprinklers in another wing. ( Each housing unit has 4 wings. I’m not sure whether this was done in solidarity with our wing or not) I’m not sure it isn’t just a train passing by on the tracks.

 

Those tracks. They serve as a reminder of a freedom I once had but can never go back to. That was a time I considered my only responsibility to be staying alive. Sometimes not even that. Those were strange times. I often wonder why my acquaintances in —- — treated me the way they did. Not that they treated me particularly bad, only that they seemed to merely tolerate my presence until suddenly they just stopped. It happened all at once and I still struggle to understand why. Possibly, I was too high to understand at the time. I just don’t want to spend my entire life feeling like I’m on the outside looking in. I feel I’ve matured a lot since them, but I also realize that being incarcerated for as long as I have is bound to shaped the

 

the way I interact with others in ways I’m not able to recognize immediately.

 

I guess I’vo always been somewhat of a loner though. Not by choice. I guess those were just the cards I was dealt in life. We all make do with the hands were dealt.

 

Tomorrow is commissary day. We’ll get our order on Thursday. I’ll still be here. I’ll get to see how they decided to pay me for my last month as a tutor. | wouldn’t be surprised if they decided to pro-rate it and subtract pay for the 9 days 1 didn’t work. I made $20/month total as a tutor. $8.50 of that is what they call state tip, an amount the state’s been required to pay us for the last 30+ years. The base amount has never risen, despite the rising cost of our commissary items and the recent inclusion of sales tax to our orders. Wouldn’t be so bad if maybe they had job positions for everyone, but they don’t. Beyond that, anything over $10 is deducted 10% and placed inside of our ‘mandatory savings account’ where they won’t allow us to access it until we’re released. All the while, they’re collecting interest on the money they say is ours and will pay us eventually, Capitalist bastards.

 

For now I’m just going to ignore the few people rapping and yelling out of their doors and try and get some sleep. Hopefully there’ll be pancakes in the morning.

 

July 20th 2015 (Monday)

 

Things have already popped off early this morning. They sent a sergeant in early to go door-to-door checking with the inmates in every cell to make sure they were alright and to listen to our grievances and requests. Then they sent in the captain, a couple lieutenants and the Fum (the caseworker over the entire house) to do the exact same thing. While I was speaking with the Fum about my kites being ignored, another inmate was assaulted on the top walk. I didn’t see it, only the CO’s standing around what seemed to be a body lying on the ground. Presumably he was in handcuffs because his cell door was open as well as his “chuck-hole” door. (They call it a chuckhole because inmates chuck things out of it, LOL) It’s used to give us our food tray. They never let us out of our cell without handcuffing us, unless it’s one of those willing to work for extra trays and the cigarette butts left outside by the CO’s. Usually, that’s also their snitch.

 

Hal My neighbor across the walk just showed it to the CO asshole. Dudes are always making stupid comments…I’m feeling it now (the mace)…anyway. He’d gotten into it with CO’s earlier, Now as they walk to collect his tray he stuck his hand in the chuck-hole refusing to move it. This agitated the CO to mace him to try to get him to move his hand, so he could secure the door. Well, at the same instant the CO sprayed his mace the inmate removed his hands and put up a barrier. This caused the mace to repel back into the CO’s face! LOL. However, this particular CO is full of pride at being better than us “worthless” inmates. Therefore, there’s no way he’s just going to let this inmate get the better of him. LOL. He tried to mace him twice more! LOL. Each time getting the same results! He had to call a code requesting assistance over his walkie-talkie. When the CO’s responded, they all ran into the mace too! LOL. Now they’re all coughing with their eyes watering, hacking up mucus, noses running. LOL! The inmates just sitting on the bench, shackled there talking shit to these fools. He’s been unaffected.

 

This comes as an added bonus to the wing giving the CO’s some “act right” over the weekend. First thing this morning, as I said, they had sergeants, lieutenants, captains and fum in here going door-to-door asking if we had issues that needed to be resolved. This feels like the first victory I’ve seen the inmates win in a long time. Possibly ever. It’s a significant moment. It shows that our sustained resistance has the effect of wearing them down. Further, this recent incident with the mace shows that it’s possible to outsmart them and win victories that way too. I’m left inspired.

 

Those were my journal entries for the weekend of July 16th – 20th 2015, I told you in the beginning, I don’t feel the same about them now. Possibly, that’s only because the intensity of the experience has dissipated. I do feel that it served to inspire and motivate me to put more work into the struggle.

 

However, the significance stops there unless someone reading this is able to pull something from it.

 

Don’t get me wrong because I still see it as significant in that it needed to take place. I just don’t see it as significant in the broader scheme of things. It hasn’t changed but in that moment, in that isolated place. The world continues on as though nothing has happened. It’s just a moment in time. Can’t pull any solutions out of this. Not even suggestions. Possibly, it can serve to inspire others,

 

In the meantime, I’ll continue to struggle for solutions in here and hopefully you’ll continue to do the same out there. No one knows where the answers might come from. Maybe it’s you.

 

In solidarity comrades,

Casey M. Brezik

 

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Raven Rakia – Black Riot [2013]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://thenewinquiry.com/black-riot/  

 

Study Guide This essay was originally published on November 14, 2013, Raven Rakia is a Black freelance journalist who at the time of writing was based in New York. It was formatted into a zine by a group called Radical Paper in 2017. The zine version has several illustrations. I’ve added in a quote at the start from the zine version. archive.org/details/FugitiveDistro_BLACK_RIOT_Anonymous/mode/2up

 

“The difference between riots and protests has more to do with who and where than what”

– Julie Mehretu. Excerpt (Riot) 2003

 

As thousands in Khartoum, Sudan, and surrounding areas took the streets at the end of September and Twitter blew up under the hashtag #SudanRevolts, I waited patiently for Western media to catch up. When it finally addressed that something was happening in Sudan, their message was clear: “Amidst Riots, President Bashir won’t be attending the UN conference.” read one headline. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. Even though the same media had been enthralled by the mass protests in Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Greece, and Spain; Sudan’s mass protests received three short paragraphs, focused on their effects on the nation’s president, with “Riots” in the headline.

 

I’ve been to protests In Istanbul and Greece. I’ve seen windows smashed, graffiti drawn, Molotovs prepared, and things set alight. Still, the situations where lighter skinned people were filling the photographs: protests. When darker skinned people are involved? Riots. The decision to call one riots and the other protests has nothing to do with the amount of violence in the demonstrations. Violence is a realistic factor, and sometimes, a tactic, in all of these protests. Resisting is never peaceful. If the State fears you, it will crack down on you violently, despite your kumbaya circle.

 

Protesters’ natural response to a State’s violent crackdown (usually police brutality) is self-defense. The self-defense is often barricades — blocking the police from getting to the crowd of people. Barricades can be formed with large objects, fires, or human beings. Those on the front lines can use their bodies as buffers between the police and the rest of the crowd, stopping the police from getting to the masses. Rocks may be thrown at the police to push them back. In the face of police brutality, without self-defense, a protest usually cannot survive.

 

With the destruction of property, violence can turn from an aspect of self-defense to a useful offensive tactic. Nothing gets the attention of the elite like taking away or destroying what they value above all else: property. In America, property is racial. It always has been. Consider the racist violence which stretches from slavery to lynching to the ongoing extrajudicial killings of black men and women. For 300 years, the very idea of a black person’s freedom was a direct threat to white men’s property. After slavery, lynchings were often targeted at blacks who had gained relative wealth and therefore, challenged the wealth and property of white men. This year, George Zimmerman was found not guilty for killing an unarmed black child-who he assumed was breaking into homes in his gated, white community, or threatening the property of his white neighborhood. When property is destroyed by black protesters, it must always be understood in the context of the historical racialization of property. When the same system that refuses to protect black children comes out to protect windows, what is valued over black people in America becomes very clear.

 

One cannot discuss the immorality of damaging property without devaluing the rage that brought protesters to this point. You, too, have to decide which one you value more: human life or property. As Vinz so eloquently says in the film La Haine, when rage spills into the streets after a brutal police beating left a young man from the ghetto on life support: “A homeboy’s dying; fuck your car.”

 

In Sudan, where IMF-backed austerity measures have hiked gas prices so high that the average person can’t afford to get to work or eat a basic meal, destroying gas stations and signs of wealth has an obvious symbolic significance. Forcing the question once more, who do you answer to: starved citizens or a fancy building?

 

But for the darker skinned (Africans and Blacks in the Diaspora), the violence of a few always represents the actions of the whole. In fact, it is our entire colonized history in a nutshell. For us, there is no nuance. No acknowledgement that in a group of thousands, a handful of people decided to break a window. Compare this to Greece, where media takes the time to emphasize that “99 percent of the protests in Greece are completely peaceful.”

 

To say that what’s happening in Greece or Istanbul are protests that involve violence is to say that they are fighting non-peacefully for a greater cause. This is, from what I saw, true. But to diminish Sudan’s protests as “riots” because of their violence is to say the people protesting are violent beings absent of complex thinking and tactical strategies. In short, it’s racist.

 

The term “riot” implies disorganization, running amok with no end means, goals or demands outside of individual gain. Rioting implies you’re not on the streets for a greater cause or a greater advancement. It implies you’re more interested in looting a store for a television than breaking and taking property as a subversive act. It reproduces the racist claims about black subjects: that they are violent, ignorant, selfish, and depoliticized.

 

Many on the left called the predominantly black 2011 London uprisings a “consumer riot,” arguing that they were not a moment of resistance but a reflection of greed run amok. Breaking and taking property happens in pairs. Since the elite detest both, they are equally effective. But for black protests, it’s easy for others to fixate their colonial gaze and forget the breaking aspect while focusing in on the looting since, you know, black people steal. The historical context is, of course, conveniently ignored. Since colonization and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, white wealth has been and continues to be built off the backs of black labor, off the exploitation of African resources and bodies. But wait for the courts to grant reparations, and remain waiting. Looting is the opposite of apolitical; it is a direct redistribution of wealth. And yet, even on the left, when a black or African protester destroys and takes property, they are stripped of the tactical or historical will inherent in the decision. It is instead understood through the colonial conception of the political backwardness of black communities: they become apolitical rioters, pure and simple.

 

The media’s method is clear with regards to African resistance: quietly declare the demonstrations “riots” and then move on to the next piece of news. No more than three paragraphs, if that. No nuance, no debate, no critical thinking so that it is an easy argument to make when the state puts rioters down like one would a rabid dog. Like in Newark, 1967, where the National Guard occupied the city, complete with snipers on rooftops that shot and killed black people for looting, or running, or coming out of their homes. Or in Sudan, where police forces opened live ammunition on demonstrations and killed over 200 people in a week. State-sanctioned killing and military force is all of a sudden a “complicated” issue where there is no clear “good” side. Yet, while one group is destroying property, the other group is murdering human beings. When oppression from the state breeds outrage that is then silenced with state murder, how do we respond? Do we internalize and blame ourselves or are we persistent in our refusal to back down? At times some say protesters are “provoking” the police based on their tactics but how do we equate people destroying property to the state mass murdering its people? Why is property on the same level as living, and breathing human beings? When the state kills, we must ask ourselves how we got to the point where the blame is on anyone but the state and its actors.

 

Throughout the 20th century, the KKK and white rioters destroyed massive swaths of black property, not to mention murdering black people, usually with implicit or actual state support. More recently, the Greek Neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn would go into immigrant neighborhoods in Athens and destroy their stalls and storefronts (and also, murder immigrants), with little state resistance (indeed, many Athenian police are Golden Dawn supporters). The destruction of property is a red herring, used to divert attention from the fact that it is the goals, not the methods, of the protests that the media and the state object to.

 

“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” 

-Assata Shakur

 

Most resistance is nonviolent, but those who choose to be nonviolent should not dismiss or distance themselves from others who use violence strategically. When demanding change, all tactics must be brought to the table. Selective historians consider this unnecessary; they will use the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent resistance as an example. They will demand that you stand perfectly still as you get sprayed by water hoses and attacked by police dogs. They’ll conveniently forget to mention that while MLK was leading non-violent resistance in the form of sit-ins and marches, “riots” were raging through America’s black ghettos. It was the potential for more riots, like those that exploded in Birmingham in 1963 as the freedom riders campaign grew increasingly resistant to police violence, that had Robert Kennedy convincing his brother to pass Civil Rights legislation, lest the whole country follow suit.

 

In a world where blacks are forced to wear their perceived violence on their skin, many will see violent tactics as moving backwards. Some will caution the masses against using violence towards property as a tactic. They will ask everyone to stay calm and collected. Pay attention to where they are yelling from (their luxury apartment, perhaps). The State and the elite are counting on this: the notion that all (black) violence is uncivilized or barbaric. But what is more realistically threatening than “moving backwards” is staying right where we are. In a society where black people are always-already guilty, pleading for change instead of demanding it will do just that.

 

Trying to change tactics in a desperate attempt to fit the media’s narrative is not an option, because the media’s narrative always ends with the world fundamentally unchanged. The media is obsessed with protests that receive a large scale of police brutality and at the same time, uncompromising in the idea that protesters must be “peaceful” by all means necessary. It’s pretty obvious that one cannot both defend themselves and fit this accepted profile. It’s almost as obvious that one can barely survive— both individually and as a movement— and fit this profile. The state kills us; the media wants us silent.

 

All this begs the question: Is mainstream media needed? Do we need its support? Despite media’s non-coverage, when the government in Sudan realized protesters weren’t going home after a week (despite the threat of death from live ammunition), they first promised they would give cash out to needy families and raise salaries. This, of course, didn’t stop the protests. When people still didn’t go home the government then arrested and detained 800 activists and journalists. This crackdown-generosity-crackdown vacillation is a tactic often used by the state when those in the streets have a chance of winning.

 

Instead, in order to win support, we should look no further than our communities. Protesting, after all, is just one form of resistance. When thousands aren’t out on the streets (or preferably, while thousands are out on the streets), we should be working on building and existing in the type of world we’d like to see. Our communities should always be at the forefront of our minds. So these questions must always be asked: Which windows are being broken? Who are we hurting? What exactly are we destroying?

 

There was a great moment in Istanbul that happened over and over again. Police would shoot tear gas canisters into a crowd of people. People would panic and start running. To escape the gas, they would duck into a nearby building, all the while coughing, spitting, eyes watering. Ten minutes later, with lingering tear gas still in the air, the crowd would re-emerge, smiles wide and looks that said, “we’re still here.” They would start moving forward, chanting louder, clapping in rhythm.

 

It’s no wonder that shooting protesters dead in Sudan only resulted in more people out on the streets. After being detained, beaten, tortured and threatened with rape by security forces in Sudan, Rania Mamoun said, “Some experiences strengthen you, while others break you. When you’re beaten to a pulp, your dignity is assaulted, your safety compromised, your freedom stolen, there is only one way forward – to continue what others initiated. There is no return, we can only go ahead, and that’s what they do not know. Your beating and your torture does not frighten me nor break me. It will not force me to retreat…You ask me: Are you not afraid? And I say: I’ve become stronger.”

 

When our bodies are beaten and dismissed, our survival is dependent on our persistence. We don’t need the mainstream media; instead, we should recognize that the media is a part of what we’re up against: the dismissal of our dead bodies, the excuses for the hands that kill us.

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Anon – Take Your Freedom – Black Autonomy & Abolition Is Our Birthright [2022]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/129.-take-your-freedom.pdf

 

Study Guide: This zine makes an argument for an insurrectionary approach to activism and organising, rejecting ‘formal’ organisation, on top of this, it presents a rather neat blueprint for types of actions a group can take and pointed criticisms of NGOs and your typical left-wing organisations.  Following the first section, there is a graphic called “The Police/Prisons State Is…” is stylised in a whirl pattern here which due to formatting I cannot reproduce, please see the source for the actual image. June Jordan’s poem ‘Poem About My Rights’ has been omitted. Date taken from publishers 2022 catalogue. https://trueleappress.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/additions-to-the-catalog-booklet.pdf

 

If the abolition of slave-manacles began as a vision of hands without manacles, then this is the year; if the shutdown of extermination camps began as imagination of a land without barbed wire or the crematorium, then this is the year; if every rebellion begins with the idea that conquerors on horseback are not man-legged gods, that they too drown if plunged in the river, then this is the year. -Martin Espada 

 

Why We Are Abolitionists 

 

When they walked off the beach and into the ocean at Igbo landing, when they leapt from the decks of slave ships in the Middle Passage, when they ran from plantations knowing they could be killed for the crime of stealing back their own freedom, when they escaped and established marriages and kilombos: free communities of fugitives and indigenous people, our ancestors chose freedom and autonomy in the next world rather than enslavement in this one.

 

Abolition is our birthright and it is the debt we owe our ancestors. We know that police forces in the United States evolved directly out of slave patrols, and that laws, prisons and jails were established for the explicit purpose of preserving the institution of slavery: that’s why the 13th amendment includes the clause “except as punishment for a crime.” We will never be free, and our ancestors will never be at peace, until every cell is empty and every cop is strapped of badge and gun and every law is nothing but a scary story for teenagers to whisper around campfires.

 

Until we abolish the police, prisons, laws, and borders, no Black person is free.

 

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for – June Jordan

 

What Is Autonomy? 

 

Autonomy is freedom. Autonomy is what the rebels and angelic troublemakers among our ancestors chose over life itself. Autonomy is the right of each and every living creature to do what we want with our bodies and our lives, and to live our lives on our own terms.

 

Autonomy is being free:

-To get what we need to survive, no matter what.

-To live wherever we want, however we want, with whoever we want

-To define our genders and sexualities for ourselves

-To connect to spirituality and tradition of and how we want to

-To create families if and however we want

-To address conflict and harm in the ways we want

-To have abortions, access hormones and/or surgery , to choose freely form the full range of options for all types of medicine, healthcare, mobility aids, etc that we need.

-From racism, misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, capitalism, and every other system that gives anyone the power to steal anyone else’s freedom.

 

All About Autonomist Politics

 

Autonomist politics are based in the truth that the freedom and autonomy of every living creature is sacred. Anarchy, Anarcha-transfeminism, Anarkata, insurrectionism, and Anti-Authoritarianism are all different names for autonomous politics: but the books we read and the labels we use don’t really matter. What’s important is that we believe in abolition: abolishing police, prisons, borders, laws, and all forms of social control and domination. There are three essential parts to every type of autonomist political practice: 

 

  1. Self-Determination & Decentralization 

 

Self-Determination means that not only is every individual free to choose how they engage in the work of abolition and who they do it with, but every community is free to determine what their collective needs are, how they would like to work together to meet them, and what they want abolition to look like, based on their particular geography, history, culture, traditions and spiritual wisdom; and that every single member of every community participates directly in making those decisions. It means that there is no singular right way to do things, and that no organizational or bureaucratic structure is more important than the rights and autonomy of each individual or community, so we don’t operate in formal organization structures subject one another to social hierarchies. Self-Determination means that everyone is respected as a leader and no one can be forced to obey anyone else.

 

  1. Mutual Aid

 

Mutual aid projects are long-term commitments by communities to meet their own survival outside of of the systems of capitalism and the law. Mutual aid is also, necessarily, mutual: it’s people who are being harmed by the same systems working together to defend themselves from the violence of those systems. It recognizes that the reasons we all struggle to meet our survival needs is not because there’s anything wrong with us, but because of everything that is wrong with the society we live in. Mutual aid projects are co-stewared collectively, and there is no authority deciding who deserves support and who doesn’t. Mutual aid projects can be things like free food distros, jail and prison letter-writing projects, eviction defense, community distros, jail and prison letter-writing projects, eviction defense, community skill-shares and political education, even free house parties where folks can enjoy music and friendship without having to pay an expensive cover. There are as many opportunities for mutual aid as there are things we all need, deserve and enjoy!

 

  1. Direct Action

Direct action is when we act like we are already free, and directly change things about our environments and communities in ways that make us more free. Mutual Aid is a type of direct action. This can look like liberating the food and resources we need from stores owned by big corporations and distributing it for free in our neighborhoods. Direct action is both creative and destructive: we destroy the symbols and institutions of white supremacy, like police ars and jails and corporate businesses; and we build infrastructure to support autonomy by doing things like bailing our friends out of jail, creating public art without permission, taking over abandoned houses and buildings so people can live there for free, sharing in the raising of the kids in our community without following the rules of legal guardianship or involving CPS.

 

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers. – Bayard Austin 

 

What Does Autonomous Action Look Like?

 

Autonomous Actions can be really big, like marches with thousands of people. Mass autonomous actions like this when communities take direct action as a collective, without being led by any singular person, nonprofit, or other type of organization. Autonomous action means everyone is looking out for each other’s safety, access, and needs while we’re in the streets together; and no one is “in charge” of policing people’s  behavior or telling a crowd what to do. Anyone can call for an autonomous action: you don’t have to have any “organizing” experience, political connections, or clout to have the right to call on your community to take direct action. Sometimes autonomous actions are called for by individuals, sometimes they are called for by underground networks or collectives, and often they are called for anonymously.

 

They can also start out as actions that an organization or “leader” has called for and is trying to control. Any Black person who shows up in the streets has the right to be free and encourage others to exercise their autonomy as well. This means that even if the “organizers” of an action are trying to tell folks what they can and can’t do, we don’t have to listen. Sometimes folks who don’t want to be told how to act can even initiate marches that break away from actions that are being controlled by nonprofits or celebrity activists.

 

Autonomous Actions Can Also Be Small: 

 

Something you do alone or with a small group of trusted friends, sometimes even in secret. Sometimes individuals and small group can agree to coordinate a specific date when everyone will take lots of different and separate actions. Mutual aid projects like court and jail support, food and grocery distros, eviction defense, and community gardens in abandoned lots are all autonomous actions. Graffiti, stealing of confederate flags, guerrilla theater, and puppet shows are also types of creative autonomous action. Autonomous action can be anything you can dream up!

 

Why Are Some Actions Called Anonymously? 

 

  1. COINTELPRO showed us how easily state can target and destroy militant movements when “leaders” and organizations are highly visible and publicly identifiable. Anonymity is a counter-surveillance safety measure.

 

  1. Nonprofits and political organizations have betrayed and co-opted social movements in ways that deeply harm and endanger our communities, so many people are starting to move away from formal organization as a framework for taking direct action. Most autonomous actions are just called by small groups of friends with no formal association to each other, so there isn’t really any name that would make sense to put on flyers and social media graphics.

 

  1. Creating a culture where communities show up for direct actions even when they don’t personally know the people calling for them helps more people feel empowered to organize direct actions, and disrupts the culture of “activist celebrities.”

 

What Are The Demands Of An Autonomous Action?

 

Nonprofit organizations have warped our understanding of what direct action is. They define direct action as something people do to put pressure on political “targets” like elected officials, to meet “demands” by making policy changes. But that’s not what direct action really is: it’s about using our collective power as regular people to change the world around us DIRECTLY, instead of relying on “targets” to change things for us.

 

Autonomous actions don’t have any one person or organization dictating the “message.” People come to actions with lots of different ideas about how to get free, and autonomous actions leave space for us to make and meet many demands at once.

 

How Do I Know An Autonomous Action Is Safe?

 

You don’t. There is no safe way to fight back against police violence. As Black folks, we know we aren’t safe in public no matter what we are doing, wearing, or saying. Our abolitionist ancestors were courageous and bold because they knew we have never had anything to lose but our chains, that there has never been and will never be any safety for us in this world until we abolish the state. “Peaceful” and “nonviolent” protests are often extremely violent and unsafe, because police don’t care whether or not protesters are following the law and attack people for gathering to protest regardless of how they do it.

 

While there is no way to guarantee everyone’s safety, it is on all of us to look out for one another and do what we can to protect each, and there’s lots of stuff we can all do to keep ourselves and each other safe. Even though we are never safe, we can always be careful with each other and dangerous together. It’s important to think carefully and prepare for the risks associated with taking direct action, including the possibility of arrest and catching charges. If you can’t trust yourself to stay silent under questioning, or to reject plea deals that sell out other people and damage the movement, you shouldn’t be taking direct action with other people.

 

We are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond. 

– Gwendolyn Brooks  

 

We Keep Us Safe 

 

Anti-Repression Work is the work we do to build up the strength and knowledge of our communities to resist attacks from the state in the form of policing, surveillance, militarization, imprisonment and legislation.

 

Communities of color face repression and violence from the police and the state all the time in the form of ICE raids, and surveillance of Black and Brown neighborhoods, and surveillance of immigrant and muslim communities. Communities of color that take political action face even more repression in the form of political arrests, trumped-up charges, surveillance, incarceration, and infiltration.

 

Anti Repression work look like jail and court support, prisoner support; educating one another about our rights and about how to fight charges and practice non-cooperation with the state in court; and building our capacity for handling conflict.

 

Ways We Can Protect Each Other In The Streets

 

  1. Write down and share your local National Lawyers Guild Mass Defense Legal Support hotline number, which you can find here nlg.org/massdefenseprogram

 

  1. If a march is going too fast and people are getting left a behind, start a chant like, “Slow down, tighten up!” to encourange the crowd to find a pace that everyone can keep up with.

 

  1. Always roll with a buddy or a crew. If you see someone there alone who looks like they could use company and support, and you have some street experience, offer to be their buddy!

 

  1. NEVER record anything, not even speeches or “peaceful” actions where nobody is doing anything illegal. Police and the state target people they identify in footage from protests, with charges and sometimes even with killings in the cases of many Black activists who were disappeared after the Ferguson uprisings. If someone else is taking pictures of video, ask them to stop and if they refuse, hold up a sign , banner or umbrella to block the camera and /or hide people’s faces.

 

  1. If police are coming in to make arrests, help undocumented folks and others who can’t risk arrest get away from the scene however you can. Practice and skill up in de-arresting so you can help folks get away. Have conversations about de-arrest and ask your buddies if that’s an intervention they’d like you to make if they get grabbed.

 

  1. If you see someone get arrested, try to get the legal name and date of death, so it’s easier to find them and bail them out. If there are arrests at the action, show up to do jail support afterwards! Bring water, snacks, food, and/or cigarettes if you can.

 

  1. If you have the meansand are br protective supplies like water bottles, goggles, heat-resistant gloves, bandannas, etc., bring enough to share and offer them to others.

 

  1. NEVER talk to cops. If you are stopped and /or questioned, ask, “Am I free to go?” and if you’re being detained, say, “I choose to remain silent.”

 

  1. NEVER bring your phone to an action. Leave your phone at home, or at least in your car!

 

  1. NEVER help ANYONE identify another protester. Do not police anyone else’s behavior, or accuse people of being undercover cops unless you know for a FACT they are.

 

Street Actions:

 

  1. Start bail funds and jail and court support projects in your community: ones that serve everyone, not just protesters.

 

  1. Start a prisoner letter writing project, and talk to your community about how y’all can support the families of incarcerated people in your area.

 

  1. Cultivate strong, trusting relationships and build bridges between activist communities and other communities facing repression. Educate yourself and your community about different transformative justice practices; and use them to handle conflict without involving the state.

 

  1. Educate yourself and your community about digital security, anti-repression cultural practices, your legal rights, and how to resist surviellance and counterinsurgency programs like CVE (Countering Violent Extremism) in Black, immigrant, and Muslim communities..

 

  1. Start ICE watch and cop watch projects.

 

  1. Root out patriarchy, misogynoir, transphobia, classism, colorism and ableism is your community. Misogynists and others who use their privilege to dominate others and control spaces are the state’s best tools for destroying communities and movements.

 

  1. Reject respectability politics: don’t allow those who victim-blame to have a platform. Don’t entertain “good protester/bad protester” rhetoric or language that justifies the criminalization of any community.

 

  1. Create networks of community care, peer support, and mutual aid.

 

  1. Support your friends who get arrested, are facing charges, or are doing time, and call on your community to help support them. Remember that all prisoners are political prisoners!

 

  1. Have noise demos and/or sign outside prisons and jails to let those inside know they’re on folks minds.

 

All kinds of kids will die 

Who don’t believe in lies, and bribes, and contentment 

And a lousy peace. 

Of course, the wise and the learned

Who pen editorials in the papers, and the gentelement with Dr. In front of their names 

White and black, 

Who make surveys and write books

Will live on weaving words to smother the kids who die 

And the sleazy courts, 

And the bribe-reaching police, 

And the blood-loving generals, 

And the money-loving preachers

Will all raise their hands against the kids who die, 

Beating them with laws and clubs and bayonets and bullets

To fighting the people- 

For the kids who die are like iron in the blood of the people-

And the old and rich don’t want the people

To taste the iron of the kids who die,

Don’t want the people to get wise to their own power, 

-Langston Hughes 

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Baker Baron – Beating back Mosley in Notting Hill, 1958 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: Forbidden Britain, Steve Humphries and Pamela Gordon, BBC Books, 1994

Study Guide: Baker Baron, born in 1925 in Port Antonia, Jamaica, had three brothers and a sister. Their father was a wharf official. Baron joined the Royal Air Force when he was fifteen by telling them that he was a year older. in 1944, after serving in the RAF for four years, he arrived in Britain and settled in London where he got a job working as a labourer on the railways. In 1958 at the time of the riots Baron was living in Notting Hill where he was involved in anti-fascist activities and in the campaign for better housing for the West Indian community. He still lives in West London.

 

Mosley tried to stir up a conflict between the blacks and the whites because his aim was to drive the blacks frorn North Kensington, to drive them from the shores of England. I wasn’t for that because I came here to fight for the mother country… Mosley was stirring up a hate campaign, his supporters, the Teddy boys running around with bicycle chains and ‘Keep Britain White, Keep Britain White’. They were going around in groups seeking out a coloured and beating him up, fighting, repressing coloured man or coloured woman, they go round kicking them about and beating them up.

 

Well, black people were so frightened at that time that they wouldn’t leave their houses, they wouldn’t come out, they wouldn’t walk the streets of Portobello Road. So we decided to form a defence force to fight against that type of behaviour and we did. We organized a force to take home coloured people wherever they were living in the area. We were not leaving our homes and going out attacking anyone, but if you attack our homes you would be met, that was the type of defence force we had. We were warned when they were coming and we had a posse to guard our headquarters.

 

When they told us that they were coming to attack that night I went around and told all the people that was living in the area to withdraw that night. The women I told them to keep pots, kettles of hot water boiling, get some caustic soda and if anyone tried to break down the door and come in, to just lash out with them. The men, well we were armed. During the day they went out and got milk bottles, got what they could find and got the ingredients of making the Molotov cocktail bombs. Make no mistake, there were iron bars, there were machetes, there were all kinds of arms, weapons, we had guns.

 

We made preparations at the headquarters for the attack. We had men on the housetop waiting for them, I was standing on the second floor with the lights out as look-out when I saw a massive lot of people out there. I was observing the behaviour of the crowd outside from behind the curtains upstairs and they say, ‘Let’s burn the niggers, let’s lynch the niggers.’ That’s the time I gave the order for the gates to open and throw them back to where they were coming from. I was an ex-serviceman, I knew guerrilla warfare, I knew all about their game and it was very, very effective.

 

I says, ‘Start bombing them.’ When they saw the Molotov cocktails coming and they start to panic and run. It was a very serious bit of fighting that night, we were determined to use any means, any weapon, anything at our disposal for our freedom. We were not prepared to go down like dying dogs. But it did work, we gave Sir Oswald Mosley and his Teddy boys such a whipping they never come back in Notting Hill. I knew one thing, the following morning we walked the streets free because they knew we were not going to stand for that type of behaviour.”

 

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Some black anarchists in Philly – Notes on September 26th: Reflections on looting, black liberation and anarchism [2023] 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Notes on September 26th: Reflections on looting, black liberation and anarchism [2023] 

Some black anarchists in Philly

Source: https://phlanticap.noblogs.org/notes-on-september-26th-reflections-on-looting-black-liberation-and-anarchism/ 

 

Study Guide: An anonymous submission written by a group of Black anarchists which talks about the dynamics of the rioting and how it compares to the George Floyd rebellion of 2020.  Another group of anarchists in the city wrote a report back to the same page 3 days after the riots, this action, a report back which illustrates what the anonymous submitters were likely referencing was linked in a Itsgoingdown upload of the text, which for some reason changed the title to “Revolt Across Philadelphia: Black Liberation and the Police Murder of Eddie Irizarry” and some of the language, notably “attack” was changed to “actions” in the last paragraph. [https://itsgoingdown.org/revolt-across-philadelphia-report/]

 

[1] The WEB DuBois School of Abolition are critiqued further in the article “What the Fuck Does Reconstruction Even Mean to Y’all? A Critique of W.E.B. DuBois Movement School & the Black Left in Philadelphia” which is also featured in this reader.

 

[2] “On Tuesday, September 26, during the widespread looting, a small group attacked Clarkville. It’s another business that’s gentrifying West Philly and exploits its workers. After hearing about the looting we decided it was an easy way to contribute to the chaos. We read a cool zine called Toward Insurrection [*], in that zine they talk about anarchists interfacing with the riot. One way to do that is targeting our enemies just outside of where the riots are happening to overextend the police. Hopefully actions like these will grow the general disorder. We encourage other like-minded individuals to take action similar to this one next time.”

[https://phlanticap.noblogs.org/clarkvilled-attacked-during-eddie-irizarry-riots/]

 

[*] Toward Insurrection is a zine written two years prior, it also illuminates the complex relationships present in Black revolts in Philadelphia and the (often white) anarchist participants in them. This segment is a highlight that really shows just how disconnected the Black lumpen and white anarchist communities were at the time.

 

“In Philly, anarchists were far from being the main character of the 2020 uprisings. Most anarchists attended the Walter Wallace riots around 52nd St in October in an observational or supportive role, joining the fierce street fighting initiated by the majority-black residents of that neighborhood. In that context, those who arrived in black bloc were met with skepticism and occasionally with violence. At least one group of anarchists in bloc got jumped near 52nd St, while another pair were accused of being cops, then agitators, and narrowly avoided being attacked.

 

It was heartwarming to see multi-racial groups of people coming together to fight cops in the streets and set things on fire — this happened especially in May, when riots erupted in the wealthier downtown, commercial zone where none of us had anything at stake and everything felt up for grabs. The antipathy towards anarchists in bloc, though, when the riots moved to West Philly — a gentrifying neighborhood where many of us live, but are not originally from — shows us that these multi-racial moments of struggle are far from doing away the real hierarchies and differences between us, even in the joy and chaos of the moment. Many of us who are white anarchists severely underestimate the extent to which non-white people, whether rebels or reactionaries, distrust white people, regardless of what they hear us say about our politics. This distrust is heightened when they see us in their places of residence.”

[https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/towardsinsurrection-riseup-net-toward-insurrection#toc3]

 

Notes on September 26th: Reflections on looting, black liberation and anarchism [2023] 

 

On Monday August 14th 2023, Philadelphia police officer Mark Dial shot and killed Eddie Irizarry as he sat in his car. Police initially lied saying that Eddie attacked the cop with a knife, but video footage showed that Eddie was shot in mere seconds while seated in his car with the window up. Following this Dial was suspended for 30 days pending termination. In early September Dial was charged with a number of crimes including murder but the presiding judge would eventually dismiss his charges. The cops who attended the court date in uniform cheered and celebrated when the charges were dropped. On September 26th, that same day Eddie’s family and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (alongside Black leftist groups like Black Alliance for Peace and the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School) organized a peaceful march through Center City protesting the decision. That demonstration dispersed after a couple hours but was followed by looting, initially in Center City before spreading to West, North, and Northeast Philly as the night went on.

The Black liberation movement is alive! Those who say it’s dead are either racist or not in the street and these revolts are the proof. Although the number of people in the streets was smaller than in 2020, there was widespread revolt across Philadelphia. Police killed Eddie Irizarry, a non-Black Puerto Rican, and Black people responded with revolt. Similarly in 2020 in Kenosha, WI when Kyle Rittenhouse killed two white people in the midst of a riot against police and later had his charges dropped, Black people rioted in the Bay Area. These are both examples of a Black consciousness that recognizes anti-Black systems regardless of if they are targeting Black people in a specific instance.

Here in Philly looters and rioters were well prepared. People were overwhelmingly masked, wearing black clothes, and many were brandishing tools. The looting was organized spontaneously over social media the same day as it took place. People used police scanners to monitor police and prepare for their responses. Numerous businesses, car lots, and ATMs were targeted throughout the city, spreading the PPD thin. Many participants used cars to move between businesses, as getaways, and to generally stay mobile.

It is a far too common belief among radicals that the state is omniscient. This night of rebellion proves otherwise, that opportunity is abundant for insurrectionary activity! As Black radicals (and generally for “political” people) we need to understand it’s possible to get away with things if we plan on challenging the state. Many ordinary people already know this and behaved accordingly.

The riots on Tuesday night into Wednesday are an image from the future. Sprawling and scattered rebellions are becoming the norm. Better prepared participants spread across the city, overwhelming police forces that feel they cannot defend everything at once. What moves do we want to make in this new context?

After the run on the Apple store, as people saw that their looted iPhones and iPads were being tracked and bricked by security systems, they smashed them immediately. Poured orange juice on them. Dropped them into the sewers. A beautiful display of how commodities are bullshit. Destroying anti-Blackness necessarily involves attacking property and the relations needed to maintain it, whether commodities or capital. Black consciousness cannot be separated from class consciousness.

It is important to note that this revolt and the George Floyd Uprising (including the Walter Wallace rebellion nestled within it) hold key differences. This recent riot was overwhelmingly Black with minor Latine participation in the Northeast, as opposed to the multiracial character of 2020. This lines up with the reality of Black people being the most advanced in struggle against the so-called United States. September’s revolt also saw a more chill vibe with little focus on fighting police, as looters helped each other attack property and evade capture. They seemed to have a more collaborative and joyous attitude compared to the Walter Wallace rebellion of October 2020, which saw more skepticism and lateral violence amongst participants. Another interesting difference from those events was that September 2023 saw Black people of various ideologies and walks of life moving together in insurrection. As a result the revolt rejected a conventional political character while still maintaining an inherent black consciousness (best exemplified by the occasional Black Trump supporter joining in on the smash-and-grab).

The second day, looting continued in a smaller capacity although the larger crowds that gathered were noticeably absent. Instead, people mostly used their cars to do smash and grabs. The police were also more prepared and mobilized on the second day. Understandly, this probably meant a lot more people stayed home because the police presence was far more intense on the street.

The Left was either too afraid of or uninterested in participating in the Black revolt, sidestepped and left behind by young people who organized themselves via social media. These socialist groups constantly talk about the need for organziation. But young Black people on the 26th were ready to go. They didn’t need any self appointed community organizers then and they don’t now. The looting on September 26th is just a form of self organization that the Left refuses to take seriously. At best we saw boilerplate analyses that looting pales in comparison to corporate wage theft. The WEB DuBois School of Abolition went so far as to make a statement saying [1] “it isn’t our task to either celebrate or condemn the actions” of the looters. The inability (and cowardice) of leftist groups to even consider publicly celebrating attacks on capital by young Black people speaks to a real division between what Black people are doing versus what the Left is doing. The issue of how to include more activist and leftist organizations is as irrelevant as ever, the question now is how do we continue to sidestep the left and add to the growth of ever more terrible revolts?

Anarchists made an effort to add to the situation. Anarchists were not only present during the riots (albeit to a limited degree), some also carried out attacks [2]. Although anarchists were largely late to the game in terms of intentionally participating, a good amount of anarchists showed up. Segregation and being in different social networks may have played a part in why our response as anarchists was delayed. A proposal of dispersed attacks was made and followed through on. That said, an opportunity to raise morale was missed by prioritizing atomized attack over group action. The anarchist space in Philadelphia is growing right now, and tempering cautious attitudes with encouragement and support can further encourage that growth. Black clothes are cool again, anarchists need not worry about alienating others with monochrome outfits, though some sportswear brands (Nike, Adidas, and Champion were common) might go a long way.

This moment felt like an opening salvo of mass revolts to come. Let’s stay ready for next time.

– Some black anarchists in Philly

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Prince Imari A. Obadele – New Afrikan, Revolutionary Nationalist … and Anarchist [1996]

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20100604003156/http://illvox.org/2007/10/new-afrikan-revolutionary-nationalist-and-anarchist/

[…] to your question about my perspective of anarchism, i really don’t know enough about it to mack it to you properly, Cuz. But from what i think i understand about anarchism i don’t see where it’s inconsistent with what We’re about as Reparators. In fact, the basic tenets of anarchism – as i am aware of them – and, if i’m correct about what i think i know, then, me thinks me’s an anarchist!

Now, “real” anarchist (meaning those who have chosen anarchism as a way of life and are true to the game) probably wouldn’t consider me an anarchist. They would, no doubt, find it a contradiction my being an elected official of a New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalist, pre-independence government. But, i guess the same thing can be said about some Black Nationalists who probably wouldn’t consider me a nationalist, either. After all, i eat pork, hang in after-hour joints, and run with muggers, druggers and thieves. Nationalists don’t fuck with the “lumpen”. So, i guess what it gets down to is a matter of definition, and who’s doing the defining. i have a good track-record, and i’m relatively intelligent, so, i’ll try to make what i’m about to say coherent enough to be able to make some sense out of it. i have to tell you, though, i have no written material on anarchism so most of my analysis is based upon what i’ve been able to gather from reading anarchist newspapers. If i am not mistaken, anarchists struggle for a world with no nations, no states, no exploitation, no racism, no sexism (which includes no homophobia), no repression, no oppression, no forms of aggression and so on and they believe in agitation and confrontation with the “state” and other arms of repression and oppression to reach the ultimate state of liberty. i’m up for all that, and some!

One of the major principles of Amistad-March 31 is: “We believe in personal liberties guided by collective responsibility.” That basically breaks down to this: as long as what one does does not cause anyone else pain and discomfort (spiritually, physically and mentally), or, as in Our case, affect the work of the struggle, no one is going to fuck with another about personal preferences. Our Declaration unequivocally commits and demands of Us active confrontation with oppressive powers, for the express purpose of creating a better world. We just happen to say it in a different way; everything is reparations with Us. This helps to keep Us from getting bogged down in debates and polemics about specific ideologies and what they’re supposed to be and pins Us down to specific work with encompasses almost ALL ideologies.

The New Afrikan Declaration of Independence (which is is what most of Our philosophy is based on) likewise commits Us, indeed, every New Afrikan who has affirmed the Declaration and Creed, to this: socialist, world-wide revolution. And to, in my opinion, the ultimate state of liberty; where there are no laws and repressive governments and other agencies to enforce them; no exploitation of the land and people; where everyone is in harmony, thus no oppression and exploitation being necessary.

The New Afrikan Declaration of Independence says: “…in consequence of Our raging desire to be free of this oppression, to destroy this oppression wherever it assaults mankind in the world, and in consequence of Our inextinguishable determination to go a different way, to build a new and better world…”

Paragraph #3 begins: “Our’s is a revolution against oppression – Our Own oppression and that of all people in the world. In another place: “To support and wage the World Revolution until all people everywhere are so free…”

“To end exploitation…”

“To assure equality of rights for the sexes…” “To end color and class discrimination, while not abolishing salubrious diversity, and to promote self-respect and mutual respect among all people in the society…”

“To place the major means of production and trade in the trust of the state and to assure the benefits of this earth and man’s genius and labor to society and all its members.

“(Note: This is [from] the verbatim document written and signed on
31 March 1968. In light of Our revolution’s present consciousness of the historic oppression of [wimmin] and the concepts and terminology which have supported that oppression, the use of the male-centered language seems a curious anachronism. Our awareness of the inappropriateness of this male-centeredness is a sign of the growth which laboring toward independence has brought Us. Dr. IAO, 1991).”

On the surface, it would appear that it is contradictory for me to interpret a socialist/nationalist/revolutionary document as an anarchist philosophy and to call myself an anarchist. On the surface it would appear so! But, just as some enemies of the NAIM would interpret a Black, or Red Nationalist who is socialist as being the same as a National-Socialist / Nazi (which is White Nationalism, which is White Supremacy, which is racism), or would compare segregation (an oppressive condition imposed upon Us by Our enemy) with separation (an act by Us to relieve Ourselves of that oppressive condition), or the violence of the oppressor with the violence of the oppressed, one would be as wrong as two left shoes on a snake to say that it is a contradiction for a New Afrikan Independence fighter/nation-builder to be an anarchist!

Here is the hit: Political power, indeed life, is a process. Ideally We move from a bad state of existence to a higher, or better, state of existence. Marxists put it this way: We move from capitalism, to socialism, to communism. According to them, communism being the highest level of existence that people as societies can obtain. The anarchist takes the process a step further. The anarchist believes that people can obtain a level of existence without any dictatorship. (The Marxists believe that the governmental structure must still exist and that the ideal situation is that the proletariat becomes the government hence the dictatorship of the worker.) i’m for no government at all! Ultimately.

i say ultimately because, at this stage in the process of Reparating there have to be organized entities to mash on suckers who want to oppress the rest of Us, and i’m talking about all forms of oppression: political, social, economic and religious. Which brings Us to the absolute necessity of New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism, and why Black Nationalism is beginning to be more appealing to the masses of Blacks.

Da Doc (Dr. Obadele, PGRNA) puts it this way: “[There is] the reality of an underlying dynamic in America. People make events and history, but they do not make events or history in a vacuum. White control of the information media and the schools has always been a factor operating against Us. …It is clear to most of Our people that the strategy of using electoral politics to gain Our larger goals has failed Us. Our youth in the public schools are being ‘pushed out’ in large, unacceptable numbers, and those who remain are being assaulted and often damaged physically by White supremacist teaching and an abundance of White, female teachers who know nothing of Black love and are supported by a dominating abundance of purposeful White male and female supervisors. The drug economy has become pervasive in Our necessary pattern of producing, earning and exchanging. …Many of Our people – not just teenagers – are without either self-confidence or hope. “The u.s. congress is boldly and openly pursuing an anti-New Afrikan agenda, symbolized by its prison campaign and its refusal to deal, so far, with reparations. The u.s. supreme court’s gutting of Black Congressional and judicial districts is being done, in the words of Sandra Day O’Connor, to save Us from segregation.

“The Congressional Black Caucus today demonstrates neither comprehensive vision nor a willingness to fight. The NAACP has so far failed to move beyond palliatives.

“The united [snakes] staged an armed attack [several of them] on the RNA Provisional Government in mississippi and then jailed several leaders. ..Along with the killing of Black Panthers and George Jackson and the assault on Attica…

“We may say today that while the Provisional Government has not been simply waiting, the enemy, as predicted, is driving Our people toward Us.” That pretty much says it relative to the necessity and appeal of Nationalism to the masses of Blacks.

The White Supremacy Power System is driving people to Nationalism. It also says that We did not create the conditions and that in spite of all our efforts to “get along,” as Rodney King would have it, Whites don’t want to get along with Us and they have made that perfectly clear enough for even the dumbest trick to understand. We must not forget that power is a process AND that people are moved more by conditions and events than it is that they make conditions and events. We did not create these conditions. The White Power system did.

Oppression, by its very nature, means that we have to work within the framework of oppression until We can bust out of it. What i mean by that is as long as We don’t control Our lives everything We do in the attempt to control Our lives is dictated by the oppressive conditions that the oppressor created. Yeah, Cuz, me thinks me’s an anarchist, but at this stage of the game where i have to work from is, and must be, Black Revolutionary Nationalism. It is the only effective counter-measure to oppression for Us at this time. Anarchism is the IDEAL state of existence, but it is the last step in the process. So, theoretically, i am an anarchist, but practically speaking, i’m a Reparator. With all the problems that Black people are beset with, and all of them are racially based; internally WE have Our niggahs, bitches and boys. Externally We have the multi-faceted assaults on Black by Whites, and there is the attitude that people have that people cannot control themselves without being controlled.

With all these things facing Us we have to deal with the separation of idealism and practice. We’ve got too much ass to kick right now. i mean, WE’ve got a lot of reparating to do. So, that’s my perspective on anarchism. i believe in and struggle for an anarchist society. But i don’t control the existing conditions, so i practice New Afrikan Revolutionary Nationalism.

Posted in General | Comments Closed

Ikemba Kuti – The 4th Precinct: A Black Anarchist’s Perspective on Struggle in Minneapolis’ Northside Streets 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20210413095620/http://m1aa.org/?p=1169 

4thPrecinctPamphlet

 

Study Guide: The author of this piece was a member of the (now defunct) 1st Of May Anarchist organisation The article articulates a familiar scene for many of us. The idea that anyone ‘kicking off’ at a protest is a white, outside agitator. Ignoring the history of Black insurgent movements and tradition. Any re-telling of this tale-as-old-as-time will conjure images of the West Indies Regiment made up of Black troops who put down slave uprisings. Of the Black cops defending the white state, of Black politicians dressed up to the nines demanding we ‘keep it peaceful’ as their paycheck depends on it. Our struggle is not just against the state, capital & racist white political organisations but also against our self-appointed leadership, whatever shape they take or label they use.

 

I came across this text after reading about a similar story in a reupload of a Unicorn Riot article on Itsgoingdown, this extract I think will serve as a great introduction to the piece;

 

On July 9th, 2016 Black Lives Matter Minneapolis (BLM-Mpls), along with members of other groups and non-group affiliated young people, led a protest march and shutdown of highway I-94 In St Paul, MN to demand justice for Philando Castile [A black man in his 30s who was murdered by police]

 

During the shutdown, a multi-jurisdiction task force fired multiple rounds of rubber bullets, flash bangs, CS gas, rubber ball grenades, 40mm marker rounds, and pepper spray at protesters. In response, water bottles, rocks, and firecrackers were hurled back by numerous protesters towards police lines.

 

In recent days, as tensions have grown over issues such as noise levels at occupations and defense against white supremacists, questions of militancy, anarchism, direct action, and community self-defense have shot to the front of public conversation.

 

During and after the action, prominent BLM-Mpls activists and others made statements asserting that it was solely outside individuals who were instigating self-defense against police.

 

A twitter user named @BlackVisionsMN wrote the following day;

“White anarchists and agent provocateurs have been endangering Black lives this entire shutdown.” 

 

An organizer also stated through a loudspeaker that “white anarchists” were throwing fireworks onto the highway and thus “endangering black lives”.

Throughout the action, white protesters presumed to be anarchists based on their protective facial masks were verbally pressured and confronted by some BLM-Mpls allies and activists. Black anarchists and others were seen coming to the defense of their white friends before, during, and after the I-94 demonstrations, arguing the importance of focusing energy on fighting for social and economic justice instead of blaming their own allies for police repression.

An anonymous black anarchist organizer summed up their frustration and stance on militancy by stating:

“I’m tired of this. Honestly. I’m gonna say some shit and I’m not gonna censor anything and you need to understand. Niggas been fuckin’ shit up. And by this I mean both at the 4th precinct and at 1-94. The militance that I’ve witnessed has been by hood niggas … with no politics and with no fucks given. I’m starting to understand that white liberals’ quest to seem so “not racist” and “POC-friendly,” and black leaders’ internalized respectability, has people completely ignoring the existence of black militance. That’s what I’ve seen. At the same time, I was too busy trying not to get hit with marker rounds up front to see everything, but if they were doing anything, white anarchists certainly weren’t alone.”

 

The implied targets of BLM-Mpls criticism and their supporters expressed their own frustration of BLM-Mpls’s statements. “Phillip”, an organizer with the IWW’s General Defense Committee (GDC), stated;

 

“White ally means fighting back. It doesn’t mean taking orders from some leader/authority on the megaphone. It means fighting back SIDE BY SIDE with our melanated comrades, not standing in front of them and snitching to the peace police that people are picking up rocks.”

 

Ikemba Kuti – The 4th Precinct: A Black Anarchist’s Perspective on Struggle in Minneapolis’ Northside Streets 

 

“As an anarchist, of African descent, I argue that we need revolutionary struggle controlled by the grassroots and not by top-down leaders. It was the domination of top-down leadership from BLM-Minneapolis, and their seemingly unconscious commitment to the system, that effectively steered Northside community militants away from 1) the encampment, 2) becoming further politicized, and 3) in playing any role in the organizing of their own communities self-determination. Their voices were effectively hushed; just as the system we function under has done for centuries to oppressed people of color.”

Jamar Clark

On November 15th, 2015, police executed Jamar Clark in North Minneapolis, MN. Several witnesses claim that Mr. Clark was handcuffed and on the ground when he was shot in the head. Following the execution, an occupation of the 4th precinct police station took place on Plymouth Avenue.

The call for the encampment and occupation came from Black Lives Matter – Minneapolis. BLM-MPLS, is a part of the nation-wide organization of chapters that is backed by the Democratic Party of the same system that ensures black and brown communities are hyper-policed. BLM-St. Paul is not a part of the nation-wide organization, and has even been condemned for making Black Lives Matter as a whole “look bad” for simply chanting “Pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon…” while they are not a chartered chapter.

BLM-MPLS’ call for the encampment resulted in BLM organizers heading the movement with little to no democratic process until later in the struggle. The encampment also generated tensions arising from different agendas, ideologies, levels of anger, and an array of different tactics that different organizations and members of the community aimed to use.

The nationally connected Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis did, and does, great work at getting people to come out. Unfortunately, they also do great work channeling that revolutionary energy into their dogmatic nonviolent reformism due to an undeniable affiliation with the Democratic Party (the system), which must be noted by those interested in liberation of the people, and which is quickly revealed through research on those who are heading #CampaignZero (Black Lives Matter flow chart to attain a world with limited police terror).

Take note of campaign zero’s four person “planning team” these are important facts: “In 2014, Brittany helped bring community voice to the Ferguson Commission and President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing as an appointee to each. She’s been named one of TIME Magazine’s 12 New Faces of Black Leadership”. This individual works directly for the president.

The remaining three are also heavily connected to non-profits such as Teach for America (TFA), which is also historically connected to maintaining the system. For example: TFA was recently given a grant to continue to project their brand through the media.  Furthermore, another member of this four-person team was the other recipient; she is the director of St Louis TFA. TFA is, effectively, the leading edge of the neoliberal attempts to gut city schools and further hinder education equity, which in turn systemically hinders black and brown kids educational achievement under the guise of helping those kids.

As an anarchist, of African descent, I argue that we need revolutionary struggle controlled by the grassroots and not by top-down leaders. It was the domination of top-down leadership from BLM-Minneapolis, and their seemingly unconscious commitment to the system, that effectively steered Northside community militants away from 1) the encampment, 2) becoming further politicized, and 3) in playing any role in the organizing of their own communities self-determination. Their voices were effectively hushed; just as the system we function under has done for centuries to oppressed people of color.

Non-Profits and Their Agenda

Building off of the last section, it is easy to see how chartered Black Lives Matter organizers (not the people who come out to support and demonstrate), along with other reformist non-profits, can build movements through agitation. However, movements are more than just people in the streets. Non profit-ism is, more often than not, directly connected to government co-optation of a could-be movement; many times non-profits hijack a movement into electoral politics for Sanders, Clinton, or whoever claims that they are creating change for you while they are lining their pockets. You create change for you – we create change for we – from the grassroots.

These problems arose for many reasons. While it was great that people were in the streets, it is unacceptable to suppress the voices of the people who are terrorized by the police daily. We must come to terms with the fact that Democratic Party-aligned non-profits, while they look helpful, are in fact a hindrance to the movement. Many times, and historically, they co-opt movements. Non-Profits are one of the system’s many witty tactics that aids in halting militant actions and restrains the revolutionary spirit created by a rage that comes out of shared or comparable traumatizing experiences.

Minnesota calls itself the Land of 10,000 Lakes, but it’s also full of Non-Profits. The tendency of non-profits to co-opt, channel, and restrain revolutionary movements is not new to radical organizers in the Land of 10,000 Non-Profits. Many of these organizers have been pushed out of non-profits when their ideologies differed with those of the non-profit leadership in ways that resemble how community members were expelled, alienated, or made to feel unwelcome from the 4th Precinct encampment.  This happened many times, once on the first night of struggle when family, as well as community members wanted to see something other than the singing of “slave songs”, as one Northside resident put it.  At another moment during the occupation, police came outside and asked BLM-MPLS organizers if they could have protestors move a fire because the smoke from the fire was blocking vision of a police camera. Disgruntled working class community members attempted to dissent the BLM-MPLS protest police, as well as the real police who BLM-MPLS organizers were conforming to while at an action that was to oppose police.

Non-profits are constrained by their grants, money “for the community”, and paid organizing jobs that go on along with the continued oppression of those they are “fighting” to relieve. Paid organizer positions are unethical; a paid organizer continues to get paid at the expense of those they are fighting for. An anti-police paid organizer’s job continues, or BLM-the-brand, only exists because of the existence of police brutality, and the police in general. Non-Profits are extremely limited in their politics and actions because of their ties to the ruling class and the system that is killing the people.

Towards the end of the occupation, I had a conversation with family members of Jamar Clark. They voiced, with the support of people from that community, that they wanted to continue occupying the precinct. However, they were told by Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis organizers that when they would be told to leave by police, that BLM, which also means a large portion of the resources, were going to be obedient to the police, and desert the community who they called to action. Once again, ignoring and hushing the community that police violence is most prevalent in. Since the occupation, many but not all BLM-MPLS organizers have virtually gone A-wall in the midst of struggle when leadership is needed most and while the planning for future actions to obtain justice for Jamar Clark, which continues to this day and will continue against police terrorism even if the police in this case are prosecuted.

Who Came Out

There seemed to be three main groups that made up the 4th precinct occupation, which always had a multiracial character, and was always composed of both young and old people. Many protestors were not from the neighborhood. The three groups most represented at the precinct seemed to be (1) Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis and their following, which is multiracial, but predominantly made up of college students; (2) Northside community members; and (3) the revolutionary militant left. Already by the end of the first night of the occupation, one could see the polarization between working class black folks and “middle class” black folks, which seemed to occur because several people, including family members of Jamar Clark, were displeased with the celebratory tone of the night’s demonstrations.

High Points in Militancy – Wednesday

Wednesday, November 18th was different from the majority of the occupation – things were a bit more heated on this night. The escalation began when police complained about not being able to go home, and asked Black Lives Matter organizers if demonstrators could move away from the gates that allowed cars in and out of the precinct. They asked this in order for the police to leave and go home to their families, while Jamar Clark and the thousands of others slain by police will never be allowed to return home to their families. Demonstrators began to ensure that police were unable to go home that night. Protestors blocked exits by standing in front of them and linking arms.

As we know, even when we are peaceful, police use violence – because violence is all that they know. Police used mace on peaceful masses, and shot green marker rounds and rubber bullets at protestors. Only after police used their one and only tactic, violence, even when protestors were peaceful, did rocks begin to be thrown at police. Struggle began at the West side of the precinct. It shifted towards the East side of the complex after the police used enough force to regain the West side and demanded that they be allowed to go home.

After the police made these demands, and the struggle shifted from the West side of the building to the East the level of militancy rose. It was raised by the autonomous actions of a united front of Northside gangs as well as your “average Jamar” Northside community members who have lived with the feeling of being hunted by police since their innocent youth. Siege warfare tactics were used against the police station.

Two groups acted throughout the night, but not necessarily in accord with each other: BLM-MPLS organizers on the one hand, and a handful of radicals and community militants, on the other. Some BLM-MPLS organizers did use their bodies to prevent police from going home; they also pointed people out to be targets of police violence, because these people were not adhering to BLM-MPLS’ dogmatic non-violence.

No more that 20-30 feet from the BLM group, community militants threw stones and erected barricades. BLM-MPLS’ claims about these community militants became so absurd that at one point an organizer yelled at community members to “stop ruining our/your community,” when they tore down a mobile police camera. The brothers from that block promptly hushed him and the large camera was quickly used as a barricade to keep the police from coming out of their pigpen.

Later in the night, militancy rose to even higher levels. Molotovs were made and thrown, and shots fired at the police station. The siege lasted for 3 hours. During those 3 hours militant action of community members and the United Front of Northside gangs would match the police’s use of heightened militant repression on demonstrators. Elevated militant pushback by demonstrators took place in waves, because it matched the waves of police repression: when the police used violence as a terror tactic to scare protestors away, those committed to struggle used community self defense against the police, so that demonstrators could go peacefully back out, and not allow the police force occupying their neighborhood to go home.

After the shots were fired the crowd started to dissipate. Police found nothing that they could use as evidence, and no one was arrested on this night. However, the cops demonstrated their force by occupying all of the streets on the South end of the precinct in military fashion, with locked and loaded assault rifles. $40,000 of damage, carried out strictly and solely against police property, was done on that Wednesday, after Jamar Clark was handcuffed and executed.

Inner Movement Pushback

Organizers from Black Lives Matter-Minneapolis – along with the Chief of Police and the Mayor – condemned militant actions as a part of protest. They have claimed, for instance, that property damage, and the throwing of bricks and bottles, was due to the presence of “outside agitators.” These reformist organizers and city officials specifically referred to “white anarchists.” The lies also included accusations of non-BLM aligned demonstrators actually being police officers – as one vouched for the other; each was accused of being a police officer.

There are several problems with the line that was and is being pushed. First, Black Lives Matter-MPLS and city officials ignore the autonomous militant action of the North Minneapolis community. The community doesn’t need “white anarchists” or any other “agitators” to tell them to be angry, or how to take action. The purpose of these accusations was to maintain the system’s current agenda of BLM nationwide, and in this case BLM-MPLS’ monopolization of the anti-police brutality movement. This has become a part of BLM-MPLS’ program in the fight against police terrorism. As with other non-profits, BLM-MPLS and police officials actively tried to push revolutionaries and militants out of this movement, with no care for the repercussions these faulty accusations could cause the victims of their snitch-jacketing.

Fascist Pushback

Monday, November 23rd, 2016 neo-Nazis violently took their organizing to the streets and shot 5 demonstrators outside of the 4th precinct. The night of the attack neo-Nazis got into an altercation with demonstrators after being asked to leave. The altercation successfully lured several demonstrators Northeast of the precinct and Plymouth Avenue onto Morgan Avenue. It was significantly darker on the north side of Plymouth Ave and easy to flee northbound away from the precinct. That is when the 5, African-American, demonstrators were shot. Police and paramedics came to the scene after a lengthy wait, especially since this took place in front of the precinct. The police rejected to give medical aid to the wounded protesters when they were asked by other protestors to use their medic training, and instead established a cordon to prevent protesters from pursuing the attackers, who escaped (they were arrested later, after one of them negotiated his surrender via a high school friend who is now a police officer).

Lance Scarsella, a 23-year-old white male from Lakeville, Minnesota is the man who pulled the trigger, but not the only organizer. Events leading to the Nazi attack are interesting. First and foremost the shooter, Scarsella, is a white nationalist with white supremacist ideology and now action. There are also pictures that surfaced of the group who led the fascist attack at the 4th precinct toting guns with the confederate flag in the background. Much of the organizing for this attack took place on 4chan, which is described online as ‘a simple image-based bulletin board where anyone can post comments and share images anonymously.’ Those who accompanied Allen Lawrence “Lance” Scarsella III, 23, were Nathan Gustavsson, 21, of Hermantown, Daniel Macey, 26, of Pine City, Joseph Backman, 27, of Eagan, and Julio Suarez, a 32 year old Hispanic (and believed to be ex-marine) was also briefly held in custody.

The Friday before the attack, November 20th, the shooters infiltrated the encampment. This is known for two reasons: 1) the attackers posted on 4chan using code names that have surfaced throughout the investigation (‘Black Powder Ranger’ being the one of the shooter) stating that they were heading to the 4th precinct to “knock this shit out” while holding a gun in the video. They urged for people to keep watching the stream as they logged off by saying: “stay white”. 2) People of the community that was created by the encampment caught on to the infiltrators during, what was ultimately their recon mission, which allowed them to execute their attack with precision. When they were identified, they were asked to leave. After the infiltration there were messages sent out on 4chan that read descriptions of specific individuals that were “high profile” targets. Those who were participants in the attack were told to “Remember to wear camo /k/lansmen, we will open fire on anyone who isn’t wearing camo.”

Fascism in the United States is a reality. The fact that Donald is polling so well after some of the most outlandish fascist remarks he has made, and after neo-Nazis carried out a successful violent terrorist attack on black protestors at the 4th precinct in Minneapolis, MN, there is simply no denying it. Throughout the 4th precinct shutdown individuals were forced to adapt and learn quickly. We were forced to understand violence and push back from police, white activists, and black activists. While most radicals are aware of neo-Nazism and it’s reality, I think those who are unaware of their activity both politically and on the street level were shocked that the white supremacists followed up their threat and took it to that level.

White supremacists and neo-Nazis terrorized the encampment for the next 4 days, at least. The day following the attacks, four shots were fired in an alley just South of the precinct. United fronts of gang members and others teamed up again to create a united front for armed security in the name of Community Self Defense. Many demonstrators had pointed out that the shooters had had tactical police equipment with them, and shared the sentiment that the police were connected to the shooting. This feeling was widely shared, firstly because community members saw police’s limited and near total neglect of the shooting victims while they were suffering and secondly, because of the common knowledge that the president of the police union, Bob Kroll, was a member of a white supremacist biker gang.

While Scarsella executed the attack, we must maintain an understanding that Nazis are building a nationwide movement similar to BLM or that of the revolutionary left. This is not an isolated occurrence or attack. Fascism, or more simply put – hate – is organizing to take similar action nationwide and globally.

Neighborhood Networks – Community Self Defense

After fascists came and the police refused to protect and serve the Northside community, an acquired taste for self-defense emerged. Members of the community came out and began organizing legitimate security to protect the encampment. This protection was not simply for protection from white supremacists, but also from some individuals from the neighborhood who were coming to the encampment for the wrong reasons; for example, amongst those wrong reasons were that of cat calling (harassment of women) as well as thievery while demonstrators were asleep. I recall one individual, who was affiliated with the Vice Lords stating that he had stopped people from stealing and even reclaimed phones as he proudly stated afterwards “I aint ‘bout that, I’m here to do a job… I’m an honest security guard.” It seemed as though an understanding swept across a large portion of the encampment and people realized that policing is violence and police are a reactionary force. Therefore, if they won’t protect us, we should.

November 15th, police executed a man in North Minneapolis, MN during an altercation where several of witnesses stated that Jamar Clark, the man whose life was stolen by Minneapolis police, was handcuffed and on the ground. Who is to protect us when those who are meant to protect and serve the people, the police, have a monopoly on the “legitimate” use of violence and therefore use that as an excuse to partake in year round human hunting? The occupation of the Fourth Precinct in Minneapolis pushed many to understand that liberalism and non-profit reforms are not ridding our societies of systemic killings of black and brown people. It forced people to recognize fascism, and that white supremacists are a real threat to our existence; through the Nazi attacks, and the dissent towards those who police “protect and serve”, which police showed when not one officer protected community members from the attack and not one officer rushed to medical aid after the attack, illustrates that community self defense is a key step to self determination.

Is the time now for community self defense? Through studying historical social change movements it is evident that movements have phases. With police rapidly militarizing themselves, militant neo-Nazis such as the ones who shot five black protestors in Minneapolis, and demagogue fascist leaders like Donald gaining massive amounts of support, we have no need to ask whether the time is now. We can see that the time is now; phase one of a mass social change movement is nearing its end. It’s time – as anarchists – to take matters in our own hands; we must acknowledge that the time is now and start creating opportunities for community self defense outside of non-profits and other mainstream reformist “liberation” campaigns.

 

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Sam Thompson & Norman Abraham  – South Africa 1985: The Organisation Of Power In Black And White [1985] 

January 22nd, 2025 by muntjac

Source: BM Combustion Zine

Study Guide: A reprint of a situationist-inspired article written and published in the US by exiled Black South Africans, Norman Abraham and American Revolutionary Sam Thompson talking about the tension present in the streets and townships of South Africa, describing the political landscape decade before apartheid ended. This printing by Anarchist publisher BM Combustion adds an additional quote in the UDF section.

 

“South Africa! South Africa!” – Tottenham rioters.

“Tottenham! Tottenham!” – shouted at Anti-Apartheid mini-riot, Nov.2nd.

 

“We want Johannesburg to remain the beautiful and thriving city that it is now. Therefore, we are willing to maintain separate living until there are enough new employment opportunities and new homes to allow blacks to move into Johannesburg with dignity.” – Nelson Mandella

 

Introduction: 

 

Black and white policemen, armed with automatic rifles, come in and out. There are massive vehicles; army vehicles adapted to riot conditions. There are funny looking tear-gas machines.

Many shops have gone up in smoke. Houses have been destroyed. The burnt-out shells of cars, lorries and buses litter the streets.

Black policemen no longer live in their homes. Those who have not been killed have fled, living either on police property or elsewhere in hiding. All local black councillors are objects of attack because of their collaboration with the state.

Being a town councillor is like committing suicide. Those who have not yet been killed live in constant fear. When they move around they are escorted by soldiers.

Every day there are clashes between soldiers and police on the one hand and the people on the other. Tear gas explodes in the sky. Rifles crack. Rubber bullets and bird shot fly. People are injured. People are killed. Crowds of hundreds, often thousands are scattered and dispersed. Then they play cat and mouse with the authorities; shouting slogans, throwing stones, hurling petrol bombs, looting cars, burning shops, killing anyone they suspect of collaboration with the government or even white business, or anyone who disobeys the mood of the people on the streets.

The soldiers are everywhere. So are the police. They attack people indiscriminately. They have the guns and ammunition. They ride in armoured cars. They have batons, whips and tear gas. The people are not cowed. They get angrier and angrier.

This is the situation in Langa, NewBrighton, Kwa Nobuhle, Kwazakhele, LittleSoweto, Fort Beaufort, Lingelihle in the Eastern Cape. This is the situation in Duduza, Daveyton, Sebokeng, Evaton, Tembisa, Kwathema and Katlehong in the Transvaal.

The army and the police have a massive presence in these townships. UDF(United Democratic Front) organisations are very active. Its leaders have taken a high profile and they have paid the price by being cut down left and right by the system and its paid assassins. On a lesser scale, but no less aggressively and desperately, AZAPO is taking militant steps. Even some ANC infiltrators are operating clandestinely. But in reality no one controls these townships.

The army and the police intimidate and cordon using everything from dragnets to death squads to provoke fear and uncertainty. They do not attempt to establish order. UDF and AZAPO organise tirelessly, but fail to establish these areas as zones under their leadership.

The townships are battlegrounds between the system and just about anybody who is on the streets on any given day. The people of the townships are fighting because they are bitter and angry, because they want to end their oppression, but mostly because they have to. If you are on the streets when the police and army arrive you have three choices: to collaborate with the system and then face the risk of a violent death at the hands of people in the community; or you can run away and hide in your home where you are still not safe from the bullets, the teargas, and the spies; or otherwise, you go with the flow and you fight back, in whichever way you can – with rocks and with petrol bombs, with fists and with fire.

The situation makes people defiant and courageous. They are not armed, but they are the toughest, most politicised, most rebellious proletariat in the world today. The youth are engaged in a potlatch, flaunting their fearlessness, dancing and gyrating through the ruins of their ghettoes, in an effusion of intensity, defiance and libido.

This is what is happening on the streets of South Africa’s townships. It is shaping the everyday reality of life in South Africa, of life in a country where a revolution is raging.

At the same time another war is being waged. It is a war of ideology and propaganda, It is a battle for hierarchical power, not a battle against it. At the moment there are five major protagonists. Each warrants close examination.

The State 

 

As beleaguered as it might be, the white apartheid government is still very much, in power.

Most of the faces in the government, with a few important exceptions, are the same today as they were a decade ago.

The state has effectively dealt with the military threat from outside its borders. In spite of increased terrorist attacks this year, the ANC was dealt a severe blow militarily by the Nkomati Accord signed in 1983. South Africa has rendered the ANC guerrilla war even more ridiculous than ever before. It has simply bullied into submission the frontline states, on whom the ANC is dependant for bases & for launching pads for its attacks.

Inside its borders the state has sporadically stumbled upon the path of some reforms required for the improved functioning of large capital. The expansion of a black middle class was not exclusively a political creation, but also responded to a real need for a stable skilled workforce in the private sector.

Despite obvious reluctance, complete disinclination, and having bitten off more than it could chew, the state legalised black trade unions, giving capital a more predictable context in which to operate. At the same time this answered a pressing political need from black workers who were already forming unions, legally or not.

In short, the state has adjusted its methods of control.

Internationally, the battle against external pressure has, for the most part, resolved itself in a stalemate. A stalemate is exactly what Pretoria wants, and, at any rate, is the best it can hope for. Minor statutory and social concessions are broadcast at full volume internationally, in order to promote the image of reform. But beyond this, the attitudes of foreign governments are relatively low on the state’s list of priorities. First and foremost, it must stop revolution. Satisfying the needs of domestic capital is second in line. Foreign capital already in the country is far more important than Pretoria’s popularity rating in the capitals of the western world, and is even expendable if the ‘worst comes to the worst’.

The current international outcry against the South African regime is presented to the western public as a moral reaction. Since World War II virtually every nation in the world except South Africa has rejected racism as official policy. Power has discovered that there is more mileage to be gained from criticising racism than there is from organising it. The international sympathisers, motivated by a moral outlook, sooner or later evoke the same plea as their heads of state; if something isn’t done, things will get really bad. They say they fear bloodshed, which they propose to stop by asking some authority or other to do something. What they all really fear is revolution. And not only in South Africa.

Internal revolution is the arsenic in the government’s boerwors. It can try whatever it likes. A point has been reached where just about any step the government takes, either by means of increased repression or by means of reform, merely incurs the wrath of young black South Africans. The state sets up a tricameral Parliament; all participants from the coloured and Indian communities instantly lose credibility. It gives more power to local black councillors in the townships. More power doesn’t save the government lackeys from petrol bombings and from lynchings.

The police and the army march through the townships in a show of force shooting and arresting people virtually at random. All that does is increase the anger in the black community, galvanising into action people who were previously unpoliticised.

The declaration of a state of emergency on 2Oth July did not give the police & the military much in the way of new powers. It simply gave them the go-ahead to freely use the powers they already enjoy, and which, as a necessary complement to reform have built up to an unprecedented level over the last ten years.

The mass arrests and intensified intimidation have most definitely had a serious impact on the affected black communities.

The shaky balance between reform and repression has, for the present, been tipped towards the latter.

The state of emergency also gave some foreign bureaucracies a convenient opportunity to suspend relations, and at the same stroke to expunge the bad image of having been there in the first place.

The international sympathisers, motivated by a moral outlook, sooner or later evoke the same plea as their heads of state; if something isn’t done, things will get really bad. They say they fear bloodshed, which they propose to stop by asking some authority or other to do something. What they all really fear is revolution. And not only in South Africa.

“There are, of course, two characteristic snags with which we are constantly confronted; the conflicting requirements of a total strategy and a democratic system of government. The fact is that strategy is dynamic and requires constant and continued adaptation. A ‘game-plan’ is, of course, the theoretical ideal. We are working towards something like it within the restrictions inherent in our democratic institutions…

The time for a ‘rethink’ of all our national resources is now. This ‘rethink’ definitely does not mean changes in the Constitution or social system, but it aims at a reorientation of activities within the framework of the prevailing order…For whites, moderate blacks and co-operative tribal leaders, the issue at stake is survival” – General Magnus Malan, South African Minister Of Defence.

The Clergy

Certain denominations of the church in South Africa are trying to make miracles, but no one who makes a practical difference is taking them very seriously. South Africa’s holy trinity of Desmond Tutu, Byers Naude and Allan Boesak rattle their teeth throughout the land, preaching non-violence at the daily funerals of black people killed by the police.

Strictly speaking these three clerics are enemies of the South African State. But in every crisis they exert themselves to dissuade violence, and sometimes even to prevent it. From the government’s point of view this means dissuading or preventing any effective action whatever. Besides, they are calling upon whites to repent or be damned, Tutu emphasising the repentance bit because he is Anglican, Boesak and Naude stressing damnation, a predeliction they share because of their Afrikaans background. Surely the government and the whites find these men a lot less dangerous than the people all three of them are urging to be non-violent.

“Obviously, those who advocate peaceful change will have their credibility very drastically eroded because they have nothing to show for all their advocacy. We ought to be jettisoned very quickly. We are merely saying that our people must accept they have to be victims of this vicious policy.”  -Bishop Desmond Tutu

The African National Congress (ANC)

We want Johannesburg to remain the beautiful and thriving city that it is now. Therefore, we are willing to maintain separate living until there are enough new employment opportunities and new homes to allow blacks to move into Johannesburg with dignity. -Nelson Mandela

For the past quarter century, the ANC has been the foremost surrogate government of South Africa. It has earned a name for its rhetoric and its ravings, and has been over-generous with its praises for the Russian bureaucracy. But beneath the ideological bombast, it has developed a bureaucracy more capable than any other of replacing the apartheid state and of successfully negotiating in the international corridors of power.

For decades, the ANC advocated guerrilla war as the only viable salvation for black South Africans. During the uprisings of 1976-7 and 1980, the ANC was conspicuously absent from the heat of struggle. ANC even went so far as to minimise the importance of these struggles as leaderless, anarchic and even infantile.

The events of the last year have led ANC to abruptly change its tune: it now recognises internal revolt as the threat to the white state, and the only viable avenue for an ascent to power. This recognition coincides with an admission by the State that the centre of its problems lie within the country, not outside.

A number of factors combined to allow ANC to keep its hat in the ring despite its ineffectiveness.

No small credit can be given to the South African government, which, for 20 years defined the ANC as the enemy, both for self-serving reasons and because of the government’s own illusions.

The prestige of being the oldest liberation movement, with well-known figures and martyrs, played a part.

The hope of blacks for an outside solution, similar to the hope of religious people for salvation from on high, also had a role. Along with this often went the constantly frustrated desire for arms. Weapons came not in a flood but a trickle always in the hands of loyal cadres, and mostly squandered on terrorist acts. But although desperate people saw no significant delivery of the goods, ANC remained the only potential game in town.

Though the build-up of a bureaucracy inevitably goes hand in hand with calcified, hierarchical thinking, the ANC managed to avoid the fate of the Pan-African Congress, which committed suicide by choking on its own dogma.

The ANC has not lost sight of its sole real practical objective: the seizure of power in South Africa. This is the fundamental requirement of an effective Leninist organisation. ANC has crossed many bridges but burnt very few. One example of this is that, despite its relationships with the Stalinists of the eastern bloc, it has remained foremost a nationalist group. There is no doubt that the ANC would be internally Stalinist in the unlikely event of a coup, negotiated or otherwise. But that an ANC government would become a simple Russian satelite, along the lines of MPLA in Angola, is rather implausible.

It is wrong to say that events “forced” the ANC to do anything. The new ANC outlook is an opportunistic move, notable not for being opportunistic, but for being successfully so.

The success has been spectacular. After years of hollow claims and dirty deeds, all is forgotten and ANC is very much in the running again. It is gaining confidence almost to the point of euphoria. For the first time, there is evidence among those actually fighting the Police of a significant spontaneous support for ANC. Passive support is at an all-time high. It is the only oppositional organisation with a highly developed bureaucracy and wide-scale international recognition. Best of all, it must only prescribe activities to the masses after they have already happened in order to maintain its position. The townships have become ungovernable? The ANC must only announce the slogan, “Make the townships ungovernable,” and its popularity skyrockets.

ANC will continue to conduct terrorist activities and even intensify them if it can. It must maintain a visible profile, and keep up morale and dedication amongst its armed wing. But for most of those in the ANC military camps, the future after the glorious event, if it comes, is more mundane: as the elite of the ANC police.

As is the case with the State, ANC does not know where it will be swept in the course of revolution. In spite of a definite growth in support, ANC finds events out of its control. Wild speculation abounds about navigating from London and Lusaka to Pretoria. But some basic points can and must be made.

In a particularly revealing moment, the mystical Nelson Mandela, jailed demigod of the ANC, recently said:

We want Johannesburg to remain the beautiful and thriving city that it is now. Therefore, we are willing to maintain separate living until there are enough new employment opportunities and new homes to allow blacks to move into Johannesburg with dignity.

Though bitter enemies, with profoundly opposing interests, the ANC and the white state are united in at least this: the infrastructure of the economy must be saved. Ownership, personnel and the style of administration are what is at stake here.

For the ANC to come to power in South Africa then, at some point in time & preferably somewhere, the revolution must stop.

The Black Consciousness Movement

The history of AZAPO and UDF, and the reality of what they are today cannot be understood without recalling the origins of Black Consciousness, whose legacy AZAPO claims to inherit, and whose form of organisation and whose political prominence UDF has usurped.

When Steve Biko launched Black Consciousness with the proclamation, “Black man you are on your own” he came up with a master stroke of strategy. The impasse of fifteen years of waiting for the ANC was thrust aside. Biko restored radical subjectivity to the revolutionary terrain by switching the focus from the passive waiting for liberation from outside to the realm of individual consciousness.

Clearly, this was not consciousness according to the academic notion of what you think when someone asks you. It was inseparably linked to action, on the level that is accessible to everyone: that of his or her own daily life. Political struggle was not denied, but rather, put back on its feet. Action in daily life was posed not as a substitute for political action, but as the foundation that makes contesting power conceivable. Biko posed a simple question: how can one oppose apartheid and the white State when one, everyday, gives in to the most basic humiliations? How can a person who is constantly ready to say, “Ja, my baas,” effectively confront the entire social system?

The initial Black Consciousness decision not to co-operate with white opponents of apartheid must be understood in this precise context. Though Biko and his associates recognised that certain whites had come to play a role in, for instance, the Congress of Democrats leadership far out of proportion to the Congress’s constituency, this was not the primary focus of their decision. The point was not to create an ideology, tactic or programme that was attractive to blacks, or even to create an all-black leadership. Rather, it was a by-product of the very centre of Black Consciousness thinking, its focus on the individual black man & his need to begin from a positive self-definition, based on his own situation as he himself determined it.

The early Black Consciousness organisations, e.g. SASO (South African Students Organisation), were limited in scope and were often specific to particular projects, as in BCP (Black Community Programmes). No sort of comprehensive organisation which might compete with ANC was envisaged. It is worth noting in this context that Biko himself made a continual effort to avoid any sort of personality cult, any role that would make him indispensible to the fulfilment of the outlook which he did so much to develop.

This is not to say that the partisans of Black Consciousness definitively broke with the notion of a hierarchical, Leninist-type organisation. It is more accurate to say that they proceeded not against it, but without it. This was in large part a tactical choice, to avoid leaders being singled out and eliminated by the State.

During the early 1970s, a Black Consciousness organisational framework began to take shape. The number of Black Consciousness organisations increased. Some of them grew out of the struggle itself. Existing groups increased rapidly in size. Co-ordination of these groups was loosely formalised in the notion of an ‘umbrella’ structure. Each member group was allowed to conduct its activities free of centralised control. But though explicitly not monolithic or dogmatic, the umbrella notion added a decisive new element to Black Consciousness.

One began to hear more and more of the Black Consciousness Movement. This referred at once to the general social unrest sweeping the country and to the organisations formally united in the Black Consciousness umbrella. A tension between these conceptions emerged and in time developed. On the one hand, Black Consciousness was a “way of life”, reflecting and, in some vague sense, uniting the actions of autonomous individuals in their struggles at all levels. On the other hand, Black Consciousness was becoming a separate entity, not merely the general movement but a distinct, organised part of it. The tendency became for the BCM leaders to see the unorganised movement in the terms of the organised one, where what was ‘autonomous’ was no longer the individual, but rather, the various organisations.

The duality between the two conceptions of Black Consciousness was solidified with the BCM leaders’ new ideology of “mass support”. This ideology developed something like this. First, there was the fact of parallel and even joint action between the organised and unorganised elements of the “movement”. Second, in the general upheaval, the division between formal BCM activists and the actions of others blurred to the point of invisibility, notably in the eyes of the State. Third, there was widespread popularity of the notion of Black Consciousness in the broadest sense.

The ideology of “mass support” turned these realisations upside down. While apparently reaffirming the non-authoritarian nature of Black Consciousness, it recast the “masses” in the terms of organisational forms. No longer were the actions of unorganised blacks merely distinct from the organised BCM, in importance if not administratively.

Biko said, in one of his “Frank Talk” articles, that as the struggle progresses, we need to talk more and more of blacks and less of whites. But by the time BCM was banned, the watchword had become, we need to talk more and more of organisations, and less of individual blacks!

This was roughly the situation at the time the BCM was banned in 1977. When the State cut things short, the Black People’s Convention was already setting itself up as an elite of cadres, the bureaucratic centre of BCM both administratively and in terms of establishing an implicit ideological programme.[b]

AZAPO

AZAPO was founded in 1977, after the existing Black Consciousness groups were banned. Many BCM activists joined AZAPO then. If AZAPO is in some sense what it claims to be, the inheritor of Black Consciousness, then it is in this sense: AZAPO assumed the legacy of the bureaucratic tendencies that were developing in BCM at the time of the banning.

With the gradual restoration of order in South Africa in 1977, any number of superficial critiques of What Went Wrong emerged., One of the most frequent and vocal of these was the struggles of ’76-’77 lacked organisation, and more specifically, a professional, disciplined leadership. This is a predictable response that has followed almost every proletarian explosion the world over, made mostly by aspiring bureaucrats who have at best led nothing.

The actual formation of AZAPO, with its cadres of committed and unswervingly loyal militants, was the practical crystallisation of this sad outlook.

One of AZAPO’s appeals was, no doubt, that it scrapped some of the baggage that had been awkwardly carried along in the loose umbrella structure of BCM. Whereas sheep in wolves clothing like Buthelezi and Motlana had been able to dress their sorry reformism in Black Consciousness attire, AZAPO sent them packing.

Already in 1977, the Black Consciousness philosophy had lost much of its initial practical basis. Thousands upon thousands of black South Africans had in the past two years become prepared to fight the State, angry and amazingly conscious of their situation. Today, in 1985, the black man who says “Ja baas” to the white man’s face and then curses him in the toilet belongs to an endangered species.

“Black Consciousness” in the hands of AZAPO has become a simple programmatic label. It provides a reassuring link with past struggles, with which many people identify in some sense. But, most of all, it serves to distinguish AZAPO

from other organisations with whom it is engaged in a power struggle for the imagined proprietorship of the South African revolution. AZAPO clings to black exclusiveness not from theoretical strategy but for tactical reasons: it figures this will have a broad appeal. It also counts on this exclusiveness to help maintain commitment and militancy within its ranks of believers.

AZAPO’s ideological programme, in keeping with its practical outlook, is slightly more militant and daring than those of its principal rivals ANC and UDF. It is basically an amalgam of shop-worn Leninist phraseology , heavily emphasising the working class, with the usual paeans to anti-racism and anti-imperialism. It explicitly calls for popular control of the means of production. Black Consciousness reworked into an anaemic pan-Africanist nationalism. But all this has little practical impact. AZAPO is at root an organisational form in search of a content. All in all, there are no goals in the AZAPO programme that UDF or ANC could not comfortably live with. If UDF and ANC tone down their propaganda a bit its because of different tactical approach not a different theoretical one.

The widely publicised attacks by AZAPO militants on UDF militants and vice versa initially served the interests more of AZAPO than UDF. This is simply because UDF is by far the stronger organisation, which is graphically demonstrated by the fact that the State of Emergency has seen hundreds of UDF militants rounded up by the police and almost no members of AZAPO. One on one battles give AZAPO the appearance of being on a more equal footing with UDF than is actually the case. For a period of time, the relative militancy of AZAPO cadres can, in direct battles, compensate for the far greater number of UDF supporters.

Almost everyone who has publicly commented on the matter has pointed out that the UDF v. AZAPO attacks have as their main beneficiary the white State. In the sense that this has allowed the State to murder UDF members and blame AZAPO, this is tragically true.

But in general, those who decried the attacks have done so from the point of view of a hollow black unity. This viewpoint contains a fundamental misunderstanding. The proletariat is not weak because it is divided it is divided because it is weak. Though perhaps stronger today than ever before, the South African proletariat has still not yet shown itself strong enough to throw off the chains of bureaucratic opposition to capitalism. The greatest tragedy of the UDF-AZAPO conflict & the violence that has accompanied it, is that it hasn’t brought the oppressed one millimetre closer to greater clarity, to new forms of struggle, to the critical self-evaluation that is needed so desperately. It’s all been lost in a power struggle between rival bureaucracies.

The United Democratic Front (UDF)

“The Principal of organisation does not lie in a determined accord between determined activities; it does not translate the really organisable element of individuals’ activity, but is the inversion of this point of view: it is a real and potential global activity, the very substance of individuals, working to organise the organisation”

– Daniel Denevert, 1976.

In January 1982, a steering committee was setup to establish the United Democratic Front. This had been prompted by a call from Dr. AlIan Boesak, president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches, for progressive forces to unite in resistance against the government’s constitutional plans.

In the months of May, June & July, general councils of the UDF were established in Natal, the Transvaal & the Cape Province.

The aim of the UDF was to achieve maximum unity among “all democratic peace-loving people”, as a response to the government’s plans to divide people and entrench apartheid.

At a press conference in early August, the national interim executive of the UDF emphasised that while it articulated the view point of a broad cross-section of people, it accepted that the main burden of exploitation and discrimination fell on the working class.

On August 2Oth, the UDF was launched nationally when a thousand delegates,

representing some 575 organisations, met at Mitchell’s Plain in the Western Cape. Many highly visible organisations were in attendance. These included:

AZASO (Azanian Students Organisation), T1C (Transvaal Indian Congress), COSAS (Congress of SA students), SAAWU (SA Allied Workers Union), Federation of SA women, Black Sash, Soweto Committee of Ten, DPSUC (Detainees Parents Support Committee), Release Mandela Committee, SASPU (SA student Press Union) & hundreds of youth organisations & action committees.

The UDF conference adopted a declaration which stated as its aim the creation of a united democratic South Africa, free of bantustans and group areas & based on the will of the people. The need for ‘unity in struggle through which all democrats, regardless of race, religion or colour shall take part together’ was recognised.

The UDF pledged to organise community, women’s, students’, religious, sporting and other organisations, to build and strengthen these organisations, to consult with people regularly to represent their views, to educate people about the ‘coming dangers’, and to ‘unite in action’ against the constitution and other day-to-day problems of the people.

As a front rather than an organisation UDF exerts an ephemeral control over its affiliates, and does not make them tow a particular line. Nevertheless, a common ideological thread that more or less binds all UDF groups together is the tacit acceptance of the Freedom Charter as a policy manifesto. The Freedom Charter serves several important functions for the UDF. It gives some ideological content to the UDF’s organisational form. It is sufficiently diluted to appease the moderates in its broad coalition, and just vaguely socialist enough not to be rejected by the more militant. Since the Freedom Charter was a Congress of Democrats manifesto, & the ANC belonged to the COD, by waving it as a banner the UDF enforces it image of following in the line of historical liberation movements. The UDF does not claim to be the same as the ANC simply because it isn’t. It does, however, want to make it quite clear that it is of the same pedigree, and it is true that both organisations have to some degree relied upon the image of the other for their current credibility.

Unlike its immediate historical predecessor, the Black Consciousness Movement, which was rooted in the activity of the masses at the level of their everyday life, UDF starts out at the level of the organisation. UDF is the product of a more classical form of organisation. Its specific form is a federation of active and visible mini-parties, many of whom enjoy an intimate and immediate interaction with their constituents. Superimposed upon this umbrella structure is a bureaucracy with no other reason for existing other than to supervise the unity of the front.

Since UDF has, until recently, operated in a relatively tolerant political climate, it has used ritualised symbols from an earlier epoch as an ideological glue. Much of this symbolism does not belong to the history of the proletariat as much as it belongs to the history of the ANC. UDF is not a screen for the ANC, but by trotting out old ANC symbols and by using these symbols to help set itself up as mediator between anti-government groups, the UDF has given the ANC a desperately needed shot in the arm.

The adoption, implicit or otherwise, of the Freedom Charter was not the first tie that bound together affiliates of the UDF. The first alloy was a far more pragmatic one. It was opposition to the government’s constitutional proposals. That, however, was an organisational tactic, destined at birth to be short-lived, since the issue of constitutional dispensation was to be resolved practically.

By the time the campaign against the constitutional reforms was over two of the most pathetic bunches of Uncle Toms the world has ever seen were exercising their vocal cords in the non-white Houses of Parliament, as well as the 7% [5] mandate given them by their respective coloured and Indian constituencies.

The original rationale for the creation of a united democratic front was dead and buried in two tiers of the South African government. But UDF did not dissolve. New and more permanent reasons for its self-perpetuation were already in place.

The Black Consciousness Movement was able to lay claim to all revolutionary acts during 1976/7 because all blacks who were willing to oppose the system could identify immediately with its message which was pitched at the level of daily life. UDF, on the other hand, did not have any popular philosophy which it could use to claim the right to become the liberation organisation of South Africa. What it did have was a reformist political climate in which to operate. This enabled it from the start to use symbols, tactics and allusions that no-one would have dared to use in the 1960s and the 1970s.

It is impossible not to be angered by the spine-chilling fate that UDF leaders have experienced at the hands of the State and its cohorts. There is a barbarism to the acts of detention, disappearance and death that no string of adjectives can describe. The intention is not to downplay the agony of the victims. Rather the point is to refuse to make them into something more than they are. If the State of Emergency has shown anything, it is just how dispensable UDF is. The momentum and intensity of the struggle against apartheid is not being generated by the leaders of UDF .

Out on the streets is a mass of young rebels. Growing up in the townships, they have never known a “normal existence”. Rebellion has been a way of life from the earliest years. They have little interest in ideology. They do not think of revolt as a political or economic act, but rather as a necessary and unavoidable response to the constraints imposed upon them by power.

For the past ten years the children of the townships have shown their maturity. They have zeroed in on their enemies with uncanny accuracy. They attack with equal vigour the state and its collaborators. They show no respect for private property. They do not allow leaders to control their actions. They refuse to participate in a dialogue with power. They set no goals for themselves other than their total emancipation.

Many obstacles remain. The frantic optimism expressed by the ANC, for example, is precisely the kind of attitude that must be done away with. The process of proletarian revolution is not neat and even. Mistakes are made. Hesitations occur. Impasses are met. The enemy is formidable and not only in arms. The state is being increasingly intelligent in defending its stupidity.

Criticism is needed. Not grandiose treatises or manifestos, but practical consciousness that will put the pitfalls behind; and develop forms of struggle that will overcome odds which seem to overwhelm those who gamble on freedom.

“Society does not develop in a continuous way, free from setbacks, but through conflicts and antagonisms. While the working class battle is widening in scope, the enemy’s strength is increasing. Uncertainty about the way to be followed constantly and repeatedly troubles the minds of the combatants; and doubt is a factor in division, of internal quarrels and conflicts within the workers’ movement.

“It is useless to deplore these conflicts as creating a pernicious situation that should not exist and which is making the working class powerless. As has often been pointed out, the working class is not weak because it is divided; on the contrary , it is divided because it is weak. And the reason why the proletariat ought to seek new ways is that the enemy has strength of such a kind that the old methods are ineffectual. The working class will not secure these ways by magic, but through a great effort, deep reflection, through the clash of divergent opinions and the conflict of impassioned ideas. It is incumbent upon it to find its own way, and precisely therein is the raison d’etre of the internal differences and conflicts. It is forced to renounce outmoded ideas and old chimeras, and it is indeed the difficulty of this task that engenders such big divisions.”

 

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