Splitting with Anarchism (as Opposed to Anything Else)

‘Fighting White Rage, Splitting with Anarchism?’ is a text published on the illvox site (May 13, 2008), outlining reasons not to be cheerful regarding the relationship between anarchism and people of colour in the United States. The text is below; illvox itself emerged in June 2007, is “manifested and maintained by people of color”, and to some extent replaced a previous site, Anarchist People of Color (illegalvoices.org). APOC emerged in the US in 2001 as an email list and site, and was maintained by Ernesto Aguilar (among others). The APOC network organised a few conferences, then more or less dissolved.

‘Fighting White Rage’ reproduces a short statement arguing in favour of employing the term ‘autonomous’ as opposed to ‘anarchist’ to describe the network, and condemns the (white) anarchist movement in the US for its racism. Anyway, it’s a bit of a bizarro tract, and appears to owe more than a little to Maoism — which, incidentally, a small number of former members of the Love & Rage Federation eventually joined, and by way of following a fairly similar logic.

Maybe I’ll reply to it later…

10 Reasons for APOC as “Autonomous People of Color” as Opposed to Anything Else
Negro Mankno

10. Both the Marxist and anarchist tendencies in the U.S. consistently exhibit white supremacist chauvinism, organizational cultism, leadership cultism, and historical revisionism; especially as it relates to workers of color.

9. Workers of color are the MAJORITY in the world. Here in AmeriKKKa we still think and act as a “minority.” This is one of the reasons we get what we get: crumbs and/or crucified.

8. Only we can save ourselves. If others decide to add-on and assist, that’s great. But to expect their help is bourgeois ideology. “Affirmative action” is NOT the same as “reparations.” Only our brains (and our bullets) can grant us and guarantee us our collective freedom.

7. We still spend entirely too much time spinning our wheels dealing with white anarchists and white progressives, rather than reaching out to our brothers and sisters who look like us and live like us.

6. All knowledge can trace its roots to the various cultures we originate from. The first strike for better wages and working conditions in recorded history occurred in 1170 BC in Egypt. Marxism and Bakuninist anarchism comes out of Freemasonry, which was the product of the Egyptian Mystery System. Both Marx and Bakunin were 32nd degree Masons, as was Lenin’s father and Mao’s #2, Lin Bao.

5. J. Sakai’s Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat [First edition, 1983] outlines clearly the truth of the worker’s movement. Few of us have read or digested these lessons. The real proletariat is non-white and the real proletariat is not the radicalized intelligentsia. The natural result of allowing a radicalized intelligentsia to seize state power is Stalinism, dictatorship of the party over the people. And all of us can bear witness to this dynamic in our activism; even amongst so-called “anarchists” and “anti-authoritarians.”

4. Autonomy shows our solidarity with the international working class, and our break with classic anarchism and Marxism, even as we may share some common ideas, concepts, and goals with both; like anti-KKKapitalism. True self-determination begins with answering the question: “do I have ideas…or do ideas have me?”

3. “Autonomy” demands and demonstrates a new orientation and socio/political platform for active class struggle from a non-white perspective.

2. The main reason we see clashes between communities of color, like Mexicans versus Blacks for example, is due to the interference of outside reactionary forces working in concert with reactionary forces within our communities. The reactionaries within our communities (regardless of actual economic status) who enable the larger power structure to do what it does must be singled out, neutralized, and/or ruthlessly destroyed; otherwise the revolution will never see the light of day. We must have the total support of the majority of our respective peoples or we will fail. This is what we need to focus on.

1. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So why do we seek to imitate those who routinely oppress us?

“All knowledge can trace its roots to the various cultures we originate from. The first strike for better wages and working conditions in recorded history occurred in 1170 BC in Egypt. Marxism and Bakuninist anarchism comes out of Freemasonry, which was the product of the Egyptian Mystery System. Both Marx and Bakunin were 32nd degree Masons, as was Lenin’s father and Mao’s #2, Lin Bao.”

That’s some pretty weird shit.

Presumably, the purpose of claiming that all knowledge has its roots in cultures from which people of colour originate is intended to dispel the racist myth that knowledge is an exclusively White domain. On the contrary — so the argument goes — a radical understanding of the history of ideas reveals that Africa is at the centre of human intellectual endeavour. In the long run, however, constructing another myth to take the place of Eurocentrism is not especially helpful, especially when it’s used to bolster the claim that Marxism and Bakuninist anarchism were borne of Freemasonry, in turn a product of the Egyptian Mystery System.