In 1979, a man named Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin sat in a cell at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, serving a life sentence, and wrote a pamphlet arguing that Black liberation did not need a new state built in place of the old one. He called the alternative the Black Commune. He did not arrive at that idea through a European text. He arrived at it through SNCC, the Black Panther Party, and years of watching the American state hunt him personally.
Ervin's argument runs through Kuwasi Balagoon, a Black Panther and Panther 21 defendant who called himself a New Afrikan anarchist and was also, openly, bisexual at a moment when almost no one in the armed Black liberation movement was saying that in public; through Ashanti Alston's insight that the Panthers' own slogan, \"all power to the people,\" was already anarchistic before he ever read the theory; and into the present, at Cooperation Jackson, a federation of worker cooperatives built in Jackson, Mississippi on the same argument Ervin made forty-five years earlier.
Two centuries earlier, at Quilombo dos Palmares, a self-governing Brazilian community survived six Portuguese military expeditions and lasted nearly ninety years. And there's the Haitian Revolution, the only nation in world history founded by a successful uprising of enslaved people, forced afterward to pay for the privilege of having won.
Further reading: Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Anarchism and the Black Revolution: The Definitive Edition (Pluto Press, 2021) Kuwasi Balagoon, A Soldier's Story: Revolutionary Writings by a New Afrikan Anarchist (Kersplebedeb/PM Press) William C. Anderson and Zoé Samudzi, As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (AK Press, 2018) BlackPast.org, \"Palmares (ca. 1605-1694)\" and \"Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)\" Cooperation Jackson — cooperationjackson.org
Tags: Black anarchism, Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, Kuwasi Balagoon, Ashanti Alston, Black Panther Party, New Afrikan anarchism, Palmares, Zumbi, Haitian Revolution, Cooperation Jackson, Anarchist People of Colour, Black radical tradition, anarchism
Show notes: Black Anarchism: The Tradition the White Left Keeps Forgetting. A Thousand Small Fires, Season 2, Episode 4
The anarchist canon this show quotes most either ignored Black radical thought entirely or engaged with it only once it had been filtered through a European vocabulary — this one follows the radicals who built anti-authoritarian politics from lived experience of the state, and the self-governing communities that predate the theory by centuries.
In this episode: