Anarchism
Anarchism and anarchists and anything associated with the thinking, the people, or the history generally get a raw deal from the media and even mainstream historians. It is true that anarchism is profoundly anti-authoritarian, but its popular association with violence (wild-eyed bearded men throwing bombs) is exaggerated, even fictionalized by the very forces threatened by it, namely governments and the media with vested interests in things as they are.
As with any subversive political and economic movement, some proponents became impatient and felt justified in striking out in vengeance or justice. Thus you have Alexander Berkman and his attempted assassination of Pennsylvanian Henry Clay Frick in 1892 and Leon Czolgosz and his successful assassination of President William McKinley in 1901. Berkman, however, served his time in jail, wrote a deep and insightful account of his experience and went on to write more worthwhile books on the subject which possessed his life. (Czolgosz did not have that opportunity, being executed forty-five days after the death of his victim.)
Anarchism survived its dramatic beginnings in the 19th Century, however, and interested readers can find its articulate concern with agricultural reform, labor rights, and prophetic worries about the growth of the surveillance state in many excellent books. Here you will find books and a superb documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti (as well as Woody Guthrie's cd of his investigation into the miscarriage of justice). Here you will find histories, biographies, anthologies, memoirs, and fiction. It is a rich tradition, relevant to this day and to the future.
As Black As Resistance
As Black As Resistance
“As Black as Resistance is an urgently needed book . . . a call to action through an embrace of the anarchy of blackness as a recognition and a refusal of the deathly logics of liberalism and consumption. In the face of the ever expanding carceral state, levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and resurgent fascism, this book offers a map to imagining the liberated futures that we can and must and do make.” —Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
In the United States, both struggles against oppression and the gains made by various movements for equality have often been led by Black people. Still, though progress has regularly been fueled by radical Black efforts, liberal politics are based on ideas and practices that impede the continued progress of Black America. Building on their original essay “The Anarchism of Blackness,” Samudzi and Anderson show the centrality of anti-Blackness to the foundational violence of the United States and to the racial structures upon which it is based as a nation. Racism is not, they say, simply a product of capitalism. Rather, we must understand how anti-Blackness shaped the contours and logics of European colonialism and its many legacies, to the extent that “Blackness” and “citizenship” are exclusive categories.
As Black As Resistance makes the case for a new program of self-defense and transformative politics for Black Americans, one rooted in an anarchistic framework that the authors liken to the Black experience itself. This book argues against compromise and negotiation with intolerance. It is a manifesto for everyone who is ready to continue progressing towards liberation.
With a Foreword by Mariame Kaba.
Zoé Samudzi is a writer and doctoral student in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco.
William C. Anderson is a freelance writer whose work has been published by the Guardian, MTV, Truthout, and Pitchfork, among others.
Mariame Kaba is an organizer, educator and the founder and director of Project NIA, a grassroots organization with a vision to end youth incarceration.