Anarcho Blackness

Anarcho-Blackness seeks to define the shape of a Black anarchism. Classical anarchism tended to avoid questions of race—specifically Blackness—as well as the intersections of race and gender. Bey addresses this lack, not by constructing a new cannon of Black anarchists but by outlining how anarchism and Blackness already share a certain subjective relationship to power, a way of understanding and inhabiting the world. Through the lens of Black feminist and transgender theory, he explores what we can learn by making this kinship explicit, including how anarchism itself is transformed by the encounter. If the state is predicated on a racialized and gendered capitalism, its undoing can only be imagined and undertaken by a political theory that takes race and gender seriously.

Black Anarchism and the Black Radical Tradition deals with three distinct radical orientations: the anarchist movement in Europe and the United States, the Black Radical Tradition, and Black anarchism. Importantly, Black anarchism owes more to the Black Radical Tradition than the European anarchist movement. Often, Black anarchists are not acknowledged within the Black Radical Tradition for their contributions to revolutionary theory as well as struggle. We seek to change that by discussing Black anarchist theorists and to shed light on the resonances and differences among them. We are in the midst of the largest Black uprising since the 1960s. Increasingly, the resonances between anarchist struggle and Black rebellion (with a common enemy in the capitalist state) are becoming clear. Over the past ten years, within radical networks and academic milieus, there has been renewed interest in clarifying these resonances. The Black Radical Tradition, as coined by the late great Black scholar Cedric Robinson, and its interactions with U.S. anarchism are what this project is attempting to map and explain. Our book engages with two waves of Black anarchists, including Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Kom''boa Ervin, and Ashanti Alston in the first wave, and Zoe Samudzi, William C. Anderson, and the Anarkatas in the second wave. We investigate why there has been dissonance between anarchists and Black radicals, partly by engaging relevant work and thought of anarchists such as Emma Goldman and David Graeber. The book makes the argument that anarchist theory can be "stretched'' to Black people in the United States and other countries, in the way that Frantz Fanon stretched Marxism to the Global South. Black anarchism is not simply anarchism being practiced by people who are Black, but rather a tradition of autonomy, mutual aid, and militant resistance that emerges out of Black historical struggle. It is clear there are resonances between Black radicalism and anarchism, especially in the wake of the great uprising of 2020. In this project, we seek to clarify those resonances. Black anarchism needs to be written and understood partly as a theoretical project and partly as a project of radical political action. There has been a renewed interest in Black anarchism. Books such as As Black As Resistance or Anarcho-Blackness published in the past couple of years show that interest. However, our book differs in several ways. Importantly, we seek to engage more directly and to critique texts within the anarchist canon as well as engaging with scholars such as Fanon and Robinson, who are both located in anti-colonial movements of the 1960s. By using Fanon and Robinson to engage with the European anarchist canon, we hope to explain the resonances between long standing Black radicals and anarchism. In addition, by engaging fully with leading writers in the two waves of Black anarchism, we hope to bring more clarity to the project that is Black anarchism. This work Is an important achievement in clarifying the history and current importance of Black anarchism. The information that the book presents will be new to many readers. For instance, one important component involves the explanations of how hierarchical principles within the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army helped generate the emergence of Black anarchism among key party members who later developed their ideas and strategies while in prison. Likewise, the book breaks new ground in demonstrating that Black anarchism has emerged not from the European/ North American anarchist traditions but rather from roots in Pan-Africanism, the Black radical tradition focusing on racial capitalism and the work of Cedric Robinson, and grassroots struggles partly in the U.S. South. An in-depth analysis of the somewhat different but complementary focuses within the two generations of Black anarchism also is very helpful. Finally, the book highlights concrete, contemporary implications for revolutionary strategy, including a perceptive analysis of the compatibilities between socialist and Black anarchist approaches to current transformative struggles. This publication will become widely known and used, because it brings enlightening new ways to understand and to act on the intertwined structures of racial capitalism and the capitalist state.

This timely book introduces readers to anarchism's relationship to broader history, offering not only a history of anarchism in the modern period, but a critical introduction to debates on anarchist history. Attention thus far has been biased towards intellectual history and key thinkers such as Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin, but these studies have neglected the social movements and spaces which have seen 'anarchy in action' and marginalised the role of women and voices beyond Europe and the United States. Debating Anarchism offers a different perspective, engaging with women's anarchist experiences and grounding recent historical work on anarchism in a global perspective. Interrogating anarchism as a concept, a movement and a social reality the author guides the reader through the origins of anarchism in the age of revolutions, assessing experiences of anarchy in Russia, Spain, India and beyond. Tracing the development of 'the beautiful idea' through the 20th century, Finn explores anarchism in the Cold War world through to postmodernity and the 21st century. This volume situates anarchism in the broader historiographies of the modern world, offering a unique starting point for students of history, politics and philosophy seeking to understand the abiding power of 'the beautiful idea' – a society without government.

A revolutionary classic that introduced the Black movement to anarchist ideals

In Black Trans Feminism Marquis Bey offers a meditation on blackness and gender nonnormativity in ways that recalibrate traditional understandings of each. Theorizing black trans feminism from the vantages of abolition and gender radicality, Bey articulates blackness as a mutiny against racializing categorizations; transness as a nonpredetermined, wayward, and deregulated movement that works toward gender’s destruction; and black feminism as an epistemological method to fracture hegemonic modes of racialized gender. In readings of the essays, interviews, and poems of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, jayy dodd, and Venus Di’Khadijah Selenite, Bey turns black trans feminism away from a politics of gendered embodiment and toward a conception of it as a politics grounded in fugitivity and the subversion of power. Together, blackness and transness actualize themselves as on the run from gender. In this way, Bey presents black trans feminism as a mode of enacting the wholesale dismantling of the world we have been given.

A reply to, and an assault on, Murray Bookchin's 'Social Anarchism Or Lifestyle Anarchism, ' Bookchin himself, Bookchinism, and so called 'anarcho-leftism.'

"Interrupting our political orthodoxies and engaging an alternative origin story of the modern carceral state, Jump attends to the disruptions of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world and proposes a black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew"--