Introduction

This roundtable is a part of our evolving “Movement Inquiry” feature, which opened with an investigations of housing struggles in the US and Black Liberation in higher education. If you would like to get involved, email us at roundtables AT viewpointmag DOT com.



Ferguson’s August uprising wasn’t the first to follow a police murder, not even in recent memory. But unlike the 2009 Oscar Grant rebellion, or the actions in Flatbush after the murder of Kimani Gray in 2013, the street militancy exhibited by that small suburb of St. Louis endured long enough to inspire a national movement for black lives and liberation. We should pause to reflect on the tremendous ground that’s been covered in these first seventeen months. How distant do the denunciations of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson now seem? Or the simultaneous outpouring of hundreds of thousands of people into the streets and highways of every major American city? Those earliest debates establishing black leadership and the urgent defenses of rioting now carry an air of inevitability to them, but just over a year ago, they remained open questions.

That the movement has developed at such a breakneck speed has posed unique challenges for our inquiry. Trying to keep pace has often a been dizzying task, as new questions and conjectures arise with startling quickness. Celebrity activists and NGO luminaries are designated and in due time discredited, as battles over scarce seats at the table carry on when the mass mobilizations begin to recede. The cycles of co-optation and repression can move many of us to cynicism, but neither has proved capable of exhausting the dynamism of the grassroots. For every Teach for America operation, there’s a Twin Cities’ riot.

With equal difficulty, we have had to confront the incredible political diversity of this moment, which has included everyone from the Nation of Islam, nonprofit executives, and unaffiliated liberals, to afropessimists, oath keepers, and yes, revolutionary communists. And while the political composition of many participants stretches across those camps, it is hard not to sense that the movement is entering a new juncture in which the lines of demarcation are being drawn a little more clearly. With each day the gap between those who frequent the executive offices of Silicon Valley, and those who maintain fealty to the black radical tradition, grows.

The eleven groups featured below constitute part of what may be an emerging radical pole in the struggle for black liberation. Even in their analytical divergence and organizational heterogeneity, they yield the outlines of a revolutionary unity, opposed to separatism, whose ambitions exceed that of the misleadership both new and old.

We hope that this roundtable on “Strategy after Ferguson” is an opening to further dialogue and debate. We welcome your ideas, feedback, critiques, as well as your support in sharing this resource – with friends and comrades, in workplaces and organizing meetings, at rallies and direct actions, and beyond. To get involved, please email us at roundtables AT viewpointmag DOT com.

- Ben Mabie

UNITY & STRUGGLE



“Rather than calling for ‘black and white, unite and fight’ as if both sides were equal players in a given whole, we say the specific struggles of black proletarians are in all of our interests, and make it possible for us to win together, and we relate to them as such.”





What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future?



Unity and Struggle is a small communist collective, primarily located in Atlanta, Houston, and New York City. We have reformed and reshaped our grouping many times over the years, though our lineage goes back to Love and Rage Anarchist Federation in the 1990s. Our group has shifted most sharply around Marx’s ideas; we spent the last several years grounding ourselves in a Marxist framework. Unity and Struggle is primarily a propaganda circle, but it is expected that our members engage in organizing projects and study. We’ve been involved in a wide variety of projects over the years, including student struggles around Palestine solidarity, anti-austerity, and worker/student campaigns; queer liberation struggles; antifascist organizing; immigrant organizing; and tenant, neighborhood and workplace organizing. Most recently, we participated in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) wave, starting with Trayvon Martin but really gearing up during Ferguson. On the local level, we’re working to transition the initial crest in BLM activity into sustained organizing in different cities, in whatever form(s) that may take. Our members are currently helping to build small fighting organizations that challenge policing in our neighborhoods by building milieus, hosting Know Your Rights trainings and anti-police educational events, developing solidarity networks, etc. We have discussed the possibility of organizing around the demand to “Disempower, Disarm and Disband” police everywhere. Nationally, we will be connecting with others involved in BLM through writing projects, coordinating events, traveling to cities with new radicalizing layers and coordinating organizing projects regionally and nationally. On September 25, 2013, a 12 year old black girl named Laporshia Massey died of asthma in a Philadelphia school, since there was no nurse there to treat her. She died saying “I can’t breathe.” She was only one of several children in Philadelphia who have died as a result of systematic, racialized poverty and the city budget cuts that have recently deepened it. This is a kind of murder by poverty and urban segregation; it hasn’t received as much attention in the national media as the recent police murders, but it’s a fundamental and ongoing element of American racism. What is the strategic value of centering antagonism towards the police? How have you been able to link up this movement against the police to other related struggles, such as the Fight for $15, anti-gentrification, anti-austerity, and prison abolition work? These are always guesses, but many of us have a sense that anti-police work is strategic because (1) police brutality is a site of class struggle that is shared across a growing swath of the working class, and (2) police brutality is a mechanism the system cannot help but continue to employ for the foreseeable future, thus trapping itself between a rock and a hard place. In the first place, the historical origins of the police as slave catchers and strike breakers indicates their ongoing role in capitalist accumulation. The police have been the means to attack and discipline the social and political power of the proletariat and oppressed people, and ultimately, determine the overall conditions of labor. In our current moment, the economic crisis is forcing ever greater numbers of us into potential conflict with the cops, which thus appears as the first sign of the objective power of capital over our lives. The police have been the blunt end of the shift toward precarity as a universal social condition. Of course cops have been there for at least a century, backing up the manager and the boss. But to the degree deepening inequality and class antagonism are accompanied by widespread precarity, lumpenization (hustling on the side to survive), and “team management” bullshit in many workplaces, police may become the most explicit form of appearance of the capital relation. The police are therefore something widely encountered across the proletariat, the key mechanism that ensures the reproduction of class relations by force. Here we vibe a bit with Théorie Communiste, when they say “the police is the force which, in the last instance, is our own existence as a class as limit.” Police prevent us from simply taking the means of subsistence and production we need to survive, and thereby abolishing ourselves as a class. Of course this is not the only way class struggle is expressed in our moment – there are mass strike waves happening in East and Southeast Asia, sparked by confrontations with employers – but it is a major dimension of the proletarian experience right now from Rio to Cape Town to Mumbai. Secondly, the U.S. ruling class will have a hell of a time reforming the police in a manner sufficient to contain the unrest. True, there is a “decarceration” tendency in the progressive ruling class, which aims to lower the prison population and shift funding toward alternatives to incarceration, compulsory job and housing placements, and individualized monitoring and surveillance. This program could conceivably synch up with “community policing” reforms, and dampen the revolt against police violence and mass incarceration. But realizing this tendency would require a huge overhaul of police, penal, and welfare agencies, and it might introduce more social instability in the process. Also, at least for the black struggle, there exists no adequate “patronage system” to broker such a transition. The old civil rights leadership is aging out, and the new black petit-bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie is separated geographically, culturally, and institutionally from the black proletariat, leaving in their wake a gaping crisis of legitimacy. Of course, anti-police work contains its own limits – this connects to the question about linking up different movements. For most of Unity and Struggle, connecting movements is not only about relating to them rhetorically (“cops taze people on the street, and students get tazed on campus”) or analytically (“the surplus value workers make in factories is tapped by merchants in sales and landlords in rent”), though these are important. It is also very practical and relational: how do we weave together the milieus that develop around our different areas of work? How do we connect people who have radicalized in one context – say, BLM protests – and introduce them to new and different kinds of activity, as things pop off in different areas and around different issues? Unity and Struggle members generally believe “activity precedes consciousness”: our sense of ourselves as members of a global working class is shaped through practical experiences of collective coordination and power, and not simply through reasoned argumentation or propaganda. So cultivating collaboration between, say, people fighting police violence and people fighting slumlords – and through it imagining how these struggles might influence one another materially – is one way to lay the seeds for class unity to emerge in the future. In Houston, this has involved inviting folks we met in the streets during the Ferguson protests to accompany us when we visited pickets during the February oil strike, and to get involved in a local solidarity network that can pivot between anti-boss, -landlord, and -cop organizing. The goal remains to develop continuity between waves of struggle by connecting organic militants we meet in struggles and developing ties across different sectors. The older syndicalist, socialist and communist tradition had its set of organizational forms to do this, and we need new forms to do so across struggles at different points of production and reproduction. We are playing with S. Nappolos’ “intermediate organization” idea to help us think through doing this today. “Intermediate” groups bring together committed revolutionaries and working class militants beyond the single-issue or single-sector focus of mass organizations, like trade unions or activist coalitions. They may operate within existing mass groups (like independent workplace committees within a union) or on their own as independent collectives. In an era where union density is declining, while small autonomous groups are able to initiate and drive activity using the internet, we can explore “intermediate” groups as a type of organization with their own potentials. An important turning point for the black freedom struggle in the 1960s were the urban rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other cities, which involved a great deal of property destruction and looting. Much has changed since then, but the political economy of urban development is still a central dynamic of racial inequality in places like Baltimore, Oakland and Ferguson. Are riots also still politically relevant, or has their meaning changed? And what about those places with similar conditions where major riots have not happened, like New York or Philadelphia? What other metrics might we use to measure the development of struggle beyond street militancy? Most of us have partial agreement with Blaumachen’s “Era of Riots” thesis, in the sense that urban riots are a major dimension of class struggle in the current period (taking into account the varying development and class composition around the globe, and their different tactical repertoires). We think these riots are politically relevant in the U.S. because they send shockwaves across the society; they fracture dominant ideology, and spark mass questioning of the system beyond their immediate social base; they expose internal divisions within the class, and point to their possible resolution. Of course riots do not immediately produce class unity – depending on the staying power of (white) workers’ reformism, internal divisions could even deepen. But they establish the conditions for a higher unity to emerge, and for class recomposition to occur. We agree with C.L.R. James that autonomous black struggle has the potential to “bring the proletariat on the scene.” Still, riots only create openings. People have to build around that opening and develop the ability for struggles to deepen and broaden. We don’t mean this just in a military sense, in terms of what tactics we use in the streets, but also in a political sense. To prevent the class base that launched a riot from being outright repressed, or simply contained, exhausted and co-opted, we need to help riots sustain in time, leap across sectors (like when the urban rebellions of the late 1960s fueled the wildcat strike waves of 1970 and 1974), and take on a “combined and uneven” character of riots, strikes, occupations at once. This involves all kinds of organizational, strategic and tactical challenges, but also political ones. How do we seed the kind of class consciousness that will facilitate these leaps when they are possible, and unveil the ways our lives are bound together under the forms of appearance imposed on us by capital? In terms of the political economy of urban development, there have been some good posts on this. We’ve seen flashpoints in “weak links” like Ferguson, and suburbs like McKinney or where Trayvon was killed. All these were racial border zones outside the urban cores, which brought white security forces into contact with the black proletariat and petit-bourgeoisie in new ways. Similar things could happen in sprawl cities like Houston, where the development of the black political elite has not kept up with the growth of the city. Existing patronage networks there are fixed to historically black neighborhoods, whose proletarian black population is being pushed into other areas, such as southwest Houston. This creates potential openings for struggle that can’t be immediately subsumed by the black political elite. In Baltimore by contrast, rioting broke out in a black urban center – one of the most immiserated on the East Coast – but it was contained by black middle class leadership (the Nation of Islam, black politicians, the young black state prosecutor who brought charges against the cop, with whom many people sympathized). Places like New York City haven’t even seen that much, because while you have a brutal police-army, you also have a robust NGO complex with a still hegemonic petit-bourgeois left, and a “progressive” multi-racial city bureaucracy with its patronage systems still fairly intact. The social decay is more contained in there, despite flashpoints like the 2013 Flatbush riot. In Atlanta, black respectability politics still dominates much of the discourse of the media and political elite. Although this is being challenged by an increasingly radicalized BLM movement, there is a strong precedent of respectable protesting and “shouting truth to power.” Similarly in Philly you have a very long-established black political elite, and a police chief (Ramsey) renowned as a velvet glove specialist – though Philly is crazy immiserated, so a Baltimore scenario could be possible there too. Regarding metrics for struggle, most of us would agree you have to measure movements by more than their street militancy. We would say you also have to look beyond the numbers of members in established left organizations. Some criteria for a growing movement might be the amount of independent organization and class consciousness it’s leaving in its wake: how many new grouplets mushroomed up in the course of the wave? How many have persisted? How profound is the sense that “something is wrong with this society,” and how deeply are people searching for political answers? How much did people develop a sense that, collectively, we can drive the course of history? The movements of the 1960s and 1970s against racism and police violence led to the emergence of new kinds of organizations – including, just to name a few, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and, for white radicals, the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1970s these groups transformed into new revolutionary organizations, which were often multi-racial alliances between black, [email protected], Puerto Rican, and Asian groups. Do you see new organizations emerging today, and if so, what is their relationship to the broader Black Lives Matter movement? New kinds of organization inevitably emerge in a mass movement, although, given the recent lull in activity, the trajectories of the new groups formed out of BLM aren’t entirely clear. To make our best guess at where things will head, we have to be attuned to the objective basis of these new forms of organization, and understand how their development unfolds in different conditions than the 1960s and 1970s. Historically, like all mass movements in capitalist society, the black struggle has had contradictory expressions. On the one hand, black movements have been struggles for entry into the wage relation, the labor market, and civil society. On the other hand, they have revealed the arbitrary and historical character of race and the social and political institutions that reproduce it, and so have drawn modern capitalist society into question. In each period of black struggle, from the slave revolts, to Reconstruction, to the Great Migration, to Civil Rights, these contradictory potentials have been continually re-presented. We’ve written a bit elsewhere about the dual character of the black movement from the 50s-70s, and how it played out. Suffice it to say, this movement destroyed Jim Crow, and gave rise to the so-called “post-racial” situation we have today. This new era was characterized by the haphazard entry of some blacks into factory, public sector, and white collar jobs, followed by downsizing; the breakout of black capitalists into integrated markets; and the formal acceptance of black politicians into the political system. In the process, the old black community, shaped by decades of legal and de facto segregation, was riven with growing class antagonism. Some people moved on up, while the black working class endured deindustrialization, white flight, the drug war, mass incarceration, and resurgent precarity. Today a reinvented “colorblind racist” discourse surrounds the black working class, whose class position is rationalized as a result of their nature as inherently criminal, unemployable, shiftless, incapable of maintaining nuclear families, etc. The black upper-middle class and bourgeoisie encounter prejudice in the integrated universities, professions, and neighborhoods they have gained access to. They occasionally catch shit from institutions geared toward repressing the black proletariat (for example, when New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s son, a student at Yale, was stopped by campus security with guns drawn). The universities and NGOs bring these layers together, in different combinations. There are many small groupings developing out of the BLM movement, and all of them are shaped by these conditions, and express their contradictions. That said, the movement is still unfolding and its trajectory is open. No single political perspective or class fraction holds hegemony. While young middle-class people are shaping the movement’s direction nationally (outside moments of rioting), this layer itself is internally contradictory, and pulls in different directions. Some of the new groups are more working class or lumpen in character (say, Lost Voices in Ferguson), while some are more middle class in character (some of the “official” #BLM groups, it seems to us, are comprised of grad/students or people with some connection to nonprofit staff). Some are exclusively black, while others are multiracial in composition, if usually majority non-white. Across the board, the new groups are autonomous from the old black patronage system forged out of Civil Rights, and rely on their disruptive potential in the streets for political leverage, rather than the city, state, or federal political connections employed by the old guard. They have been acting as “networked Leninists” (see Rodrigo Nuñes 1, 2) by jump-starting mass protests through loose networks, and driving popular discussion. Progressive capitalists have already made overtures to draw these new groups into the fold: Soros donated $33 million to BLM groups last year, for example. So far their control is weak, and the recent statement repudiating the Democratic Party is a good sign. Nevertheless, we find many BLM groups operating outside the nonprofits still reproduce their logic in rhetoric and strategy. For example, many new groups are doing direct actions, but remain stuck in a moral critique of racism and capitalism that leaves room for the parties and NGOs to step in with “real” solutions. We saw this in the backstage discussion with Hillary. So young people have leapt beyond the parties and NGOs in the streets, but they don’t yet have a revolutionary analysis of society to definitively separate themselves from the latter, and they aren’t yet able to consolidate their own fighting organizations. In the vacuum, possible political differences continue to emerge. One emerging divide is a between black feminist, queer and trans politics on the one side, and a kind of pseudo-black nationalist patriarchal politics on the other. We saw this play out in the #SayHerName protests, especially in Philly, and in the critique of hotep dudes online (1,2). Another is the divide between parts of the movement sympathetic to social democracy (say, BLM groups that want to be polite to Bernie Sanders), and parts moving in more revolutionary directions. Some of us feel the bubbling popularity of Afro-pessimism among BLM activists in college is a reflection of this search for a total critique of society. Unity and Struggle is trying to keep track of this dizzying and uneven development across the country, and highlight any lines of coherence that tend in a revolutionary direction. We have been working with the “Disempower, Disarm and Disband” slogan as one way to encapsulate the revolutionary perspective that is out there right now, but has yet to cohere in a distinct pole. Of course, disarming and disbanding the police is a long-term goal (while we could see de-militarization, and the disbanding of particular units, sooner). But “disempowering” the police is already happening on a mass level, for example in the video of the women in New York City preventing a young girl from being arrested. And this emerging militancy is reflected in the “official” BLM movement too, for example in the de-arrest that happened at their conference in Cleveland. We can help this activity spread and formalize. Generally, we see the role of revolutionaries being to recognize this pole in formation, and help it cohere politically and organizationally across the country. Our hunch is, the contours of this pole include some kind of anti-capitalism, a rejection of bourgeois parties, and an attempt to grapple with race and white supremacy as a system endemic to capitalism.

Since the uprising in Ferguson, we’ve seen racist, right-wing terrorism flare up with the bombing of an NAACP office in Colorado and the tragic and murderous attack on a historic Black Church in South Carolina. The shooting of two police officers in New York seems to have encouraged NYPD members to openly defy the city’s mayor, hamstringing his own agenda. And elsewhere, politicians and police have started to use the specter of Ferguson and Baltimore to justify preemptive police repression and mobilize support for curfews. Might these movements and uprisings provoke a right-wing resurgence? Do you see examples of this happening where you organize? What can we do to rout these efforts? Polarization is definitely part of the dynamic right now, with resurgent black and left-wing movements prompting a right-wing response in turn. It has a contrapuntal character: the BLM movement crests and begins to fall, and then a conservative reaction happens. At times the reaction is premised on individuals who haul off and shoot cops for a variety of reasons, maybe related to mass frustration at the inability of the movement to achieve deep gains (cop shootings like this happened after the BLM crest in NYC, but also LA and recently Texas). Part of the reaction comes from within the state itself, with politicians calling for the movement to discipline itself under respectable leadership, and police agencies rolling out new surveillance programs. But part of it also emerges “from below” and is semi-autonomous from the state. This includes the rank-and-file rebellion within the police unions, isolated fascist shooters like Dylan Roof, organized fascist activity like the Nazis in Olympia or the Klan in Charleston, and broader right-populist mobilizations like the Oath Keepers going to Ferguson. In this area, we are still establishing a common framework to discuss the questions at hand, and comparing conclusions from practice and study. One line of discussion we are having relates to the concept of the “united front,” and another relates to the political dynamics of right-populism. The “united front” discussion is about how to smash the far right, without being isolated and targeted by the state, nor being absorbed by the liberal response to the right. This includes strategic and tactical questions like: what is the best balance between smashing fascists militarily vs. out-organizing their base? How to avoid state repression of revolutionary antifascism? When and how to cohere a broad front against right-wing attacks, including liberals? How to pivot from defensive moments, where we are fending off right wing attacks, to offensive moments, where we emerge as a strengthened, independent revolutionary pole? We haven’t come to a common position on these questions yet. But we are learning in practice through successive moments of right-wing reaction, and through historical study of “united fronts” in the communist and anarchist traditions. Another discussion is about how we should understand the populist right, particularly the broad Patriot movement. One perspective says the Patriot movement is more dangerous than the ideologically committed fascists, because of their broader political legitimacy, and their open use of arms in the streets. On top of this, we are also weighing the significance of the internal contradictions within the Patriot movement, and whether any fragments of it could potentially swing to the left – and if so, how we should then confront Patriots in the streets. Finally, we are wondering if there is a possibility of an alliance between elements of the Patriot movement and conservative black groups like the New Black Panther Party or Detroit 300, like a contemporary mutation of the historical talks between Garvey and the Klan. We’re paying close attention to developments like the recent split in the Oath Keepers over the proposed black open carry protest in Ferguson, and listening to what the rest of the revolutionary antifascist left is saying. We don’t have a common position on these questions yet, either. Last May, we published an analysis of the uprising in Baltimore, focusing in on the dynamics of white solidarity. The essay confronted a tension pervasive throughout the movement, on the simultaneous necessity of strategic alliances between different struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples, and the possibility that including other groups might obviate the specificity of anti-Black racism. As the movement has developed, it’s proven to have strong resonances with non-black people, drawing in participation and support from a range of different sectors and struggles and sometimes offering models for others. How do we maintain the resonance between different struggles with shared antagonisms, without effacing what is specific to this movement? Most of Unity and Struggle agrees there are differences of power within the working class, with some sections (men, whites, citizens, etc.) able to gain benefits at the expense of other sections, but at the cost of class solidarity and posing a challenge to capitalism as a whole. The autonomous movement of black proletarians, even as it prompts the black bourgeoisie and political elite to make their own moves, also challenges these internal divisions within the class, and so lays the groundwork for a renewed struggle against both race and capital. Non-black working class people thus have reason to support and participate in black struggles – not only from an ethical perspective, but also in order to realize their class interests, which requires abolishing race as we have known it. We vibe with Sojourner Truth Organization’s ideas from back in the day: rather than calling for “black and white, unite and fight” as if both sides were equal players in a given whole, we say the specific struggles of black proletarians are in all of our interests, and make it possible for us to win together, and we relate to them as such. Our take on non-black participation in the BLM movement jumps off from this perspective. If the BLM movement inspires non-black people to participate, they can and should do so, while highlighting how the success or failure of the black struggle bears on their own liberation. They can and should discuss any disagreements they have, if they believe these ideas undermine the self-movement of the black proletariat, and therefore, the class struggle. They can and should connect the black movement (rhetorically, analytically, practically) to other areas of organizing, while confronting any developments that would undercut the black movement in turn. Most of us think “ally” politics is too limited to capture this: it assumes a liberal horizon of rights and inclusion, reifies racial categories, and lends legitimacy to black bourgeois forces. From this perspective, black groups calling for black-owned businesses ought to be supported unquestioningly by white allies. Non-black militants supporting black youth in the streets against NGOs should be “called out” for endangering the directly affected. All of us should “stay in our lane” based on our identity category, with a fixed tactical playbook assigned accordingly. We generally support autonomous organization based on shared experience, as a way to develop new theory and practice that the broader movement has undermined. At the same time, we hold up the usefulness of multi-racial, multi-gender organization as a venue to synthesize autonomous experiences. These are moments that move back and forth, dynamically and historically. There will be periods of discontinuity and tension between black and non-black militants, so long as the real differences between us aren’t yet undermined in practice and struggle. But there will also be times when unified action, or the initiatives and ideas of non-black people, will be useful for the black movement. There is no “one size fits all” way white people should relate to black struggles, or vice versa. As Selma James described very well, there is instead a continual process of development, that creates the possibility for ever higher levels of unity and struggle.



ANN ARBOR ALLIANCE FOR BLACK LIVES

by some members of Ann Arbor Alliance for Black Lives

“Our experiences in this and other movements have clearly demonstrated to us that the concept of allyship is dead or at least dying. The key is to remember that while we may have similar enemies, we do not have the same reasons for our antagonisms.”



BALTIMORE BLOC

by Ralikh Hayes

“The Civil Rights Movement and all those organizing for Black liberation never actually stopped, even as the 1960s winded down. This is a long struggle that was submerged beneath the surface for the last few decades, only emerging as a mass movement again recently.”



What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future? Baltimore Bloc is a fairly new organization, who in the wake of the Mike Brown verdict, decided to come together as a more formal collective. We had a prior history as a looser group of likeminded individuals, who shared outrage with how the police treated people, and provided information about that kind of terror. We informally did stuff like watching the police, and providing information to the public. We interviewed the families immediately affected by this kind of violence and started to build relationships with them. There are a few things that make us unique in Baltimore. While there are many groups promoting and planning protest activity, we’re the only one following the spirit of Students for Nonviolence Coordinating Committee and Ella Baker. We’re still in the process of group formation, so as we try to achieve consensus on these organizational questions, I’ll describe a bit more of what our group does. Right now, we’re a small group of people, trying to be in community with people, to organize themselves with the tools we have experience in. Primarily, our aim is to support the families of the victims of police brutality. With the new following that we have in Baltimore following the uprising, we’ve worked as a source of media for some, and a platform for others to get their stories out. We also aim to get others involved in these struggles, to provide both knowledge and resources to the people. We’ve worked closely with many families, including the family of Freddie Grey. We’re proud to have been organizing with Tawanda Jones and the West family, following the murder of Tyrone West. We’ve been helping organize protests and speak outs every Wednesday, but really, we support however we can, on a case by case basis. So if a family decides they want to host a fundraiser, we’re right alongside them. If they want to plan a protest, we do that. We’re trying to build up a community of activists and organizers, by spreading the knowledge and skills we have, developing our collective capacity together. Already, we’ve participated in and planned over a 100 demonstrations in Baltimore city, repeatedly taking the streets and the highway. We’ve seen the people of this city prevent multiple arrests in the last few months, but we’re willing to use arrestable actions to advance our cause. But now there’s a new police commissioner, who seems harsher, and it looks like we may have a new mayor soon, too. Despite these changes, in the future we will continue to fight against the systematic oppression that Black and Brown people face.



An important turning point for the black freedom struggle in the 1960s were the urban rebellions in Watts, Detroit, Newark, and dozens of other cities, which involved a great deal of property destruction and looting. Much has changed since then, but the political economy of urban development is still a central dynamic of racial inequality in places like Baltimore, Oakland and Ferguson. Are riots also still politically relevant, or has their meaning changed? And what about those places with similar conditions where major riots have not happened, like New York or Philadelphia? What other metrics might we use to measure the development of struggle beyond street militancy? As a starting point, we need to recognize that the Civil Rights Movement and all those organizing for Black liberation never actually stopped, even as the 1960s winded down. The most prominent organizations might have collapsed due to state repression, but this is a long struggle that was submerged beneath the surface for the last few decades, only emerging as a mass movement again recently. Then, as now, street militancy is a good indicator of where the movement in a particular city is at. It’s often a sure sign of how developed the local struggles are. Those uprisings were very important in the 1960s, and then, they were more widespread than they are today. This isn’t to say that there aren’t similar instances now, but I don’t think we’ve hit that threshold. For instance, even in Baltimore, the level of property damage was pretty minimal. So, at times, I’m even hesitant to call it a riot. There was certainly an outpouring of emotion, but state repression stopped it pretty quick. Still, it was pretty effective response to the hyper-militarized actions of the state. The people were merely responding in kind. In previous protests, one could detect the level of militancy and courage in people’s movements, and they weren’t moving too aggressively. But something changed last spring, where, just as it happened in Ferguson, we were like a tiger, provoked and cornered. I remember thinking that the mobilizations following the murder of Trayvon Martin would be that kind of moment. There was a massive rally, and it was one of the biggest I had seen in ten years, but it didn’t develop into what we had expected. Still, I believe it was preparing us for Mike Brown. And then with the circulation of video footage of police brutality and murder confirming how rapidly this kind of violence was occurring, was another kind of development that prepared us for the uprising. It’s not just something that happened by chance – it was a result of the deep resonance of those kinds of tactics from the community itself, when they choose to take part in much greater numbers than anything we’ve seen here in decades. The fate of the kind of politics we’re practicing do rely on how quickly people cling to the question of power as Black people. And often, rage in all of its tactical expressions, become an easy entrance to that politics, and present it with a chance of leaping forward in its development. But that doesn’t discount the fact that there were plenty of people who have been organizing before this year, and that they were the ones laying the groundwork for the uprising to take place at the scale that it did. That’s why it’s important to acknowledge the deep continuity with earlier cycles of struggle, because they continue to provide the conditions of possibility for the work we do today. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s against racism and police violence led to the emergence of new kinds of organizations – including, just to name a few, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and, for white radicals, the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1970s these groups transformed into new revolutionary organizations, which were often multi-racial alliances between black, [email protected], Puerto Rican, and Asian groups. Do you see new organizations emerging today, and if so, what is their relationship to the broader Black Lives Matter movement? While there are certainly new groups forming across the country, most are not “mass” organizations yet. From my vantage point, these are groups are primarily forming as a reaction to crisis situations that have erupted across the nation in the last few years. They often exist without an infrastructure typical of an organizing body, but are bound together instead by some shared politics and projects. This is the case for Baltimore Bloc. When the uprising first began, we were simply not ready for it. In fact, when it had started, we were in the middle of our monthly meeting and we got a call from one of our members who was with the family of Freddie Grey, who asked us to come out and support this kind of spontaneous gathering. It snowballed quickly after that. We didn’t have time to develop a plan on how to get people engaged in longer term organizing projects. With limited resources or preparation, we were asking: how do we keep people safe so that they can continue to lead this resistance? When turning back to the history of our movements, we must remember that they were not monolithic, but comprised of these small, but absolutely essential organizations. While we’re all organizing for Black liberation, there are differences in how people strategically pursue that, making decisions on the basis of their own lived experience. To be sure, there are times when it will be necessary to mount larger-scale collective action, and we will need to hammer out a shared analysis to unite these different tendencies within the movement. And while the nationwide convergences and conference calls are certainly aiding those efforts, the real point of unity for us, across the differences between smaller, local organizations is our relationship to the people in the streets. That’s what propels us to come to Ferguson, Florida, Baltimore, and Cleveland. But it must be emphasized that this is not one centralized movement, with a single figure head, but a multitude of collective and independent organizations based in our own communities. Because while we are motivated by shared conditions, those conditions manifest themselves differently within specific locales. Laws and history of cities changes the field of action, the needs of community, the tactics appropriate. Our first job is to respond to those local conditions. I believe that this “decentralized” style of organization is a positive thing, as we don’t know exactly what black liberation or the liberation of people of color exactly looks like just yet. We need to continue to dream, hope, and discuss with one another, but ultimately, people will find their own way. There is no “correct” way to organize – everyone can be their own leader. We’ll have to craft our own pathways to self-determination. And that’s why you see such a variety in tactics used across the country, as different groupings of organizers are testing out new forms of disruption specific to their cities. Sometimes, when it seems like tactics have some utility elsewhere, they’re taken up and shared. And so you see there’s still some collectivity in this, as tactics circulate, even if there are lots of independent organizations. Black Brunches in the Bay Area are a good example of this. They’ve spread across the country, pretty autonomously, because it’s an attempt to adapt to the contemporary conditions we live under that resonated with a lot of people. We cannot use the same tactics as the older generation. Yes, they had their victories, but we are still not free.This last year was a major turning point. As we continue to seek out the elders and learn our history, we must also dream and rethink a liberatory strategy in new ways. What of the old can we retain? What must we invent for ourselves? That’s why the multiplication of smaller organizations is important. There is a long history of solidarity between radical black movements in the United States and anti-imperialist and anti-colonial struggles abroad, including Algeria, Cuba, China, and Vietnam. Members of the Detroit-based League of Revolutionary Black Workers were in contact with Palestinian guerrillas in the early 1970s. The Black Panther Party had an international office in Algeria. How does international solidarity figure in the movement today? Beyond the rhetoric of a shared struggle, what could material support across borders between movements look like? And most specifically, how does today’s movement connect with the struggle in Palestine? We agree that internationalism is an essential perspective to maintain in this struggle, but there are two things we need to understand. First, this movement is always most effectively led by young people, even though they are still learning this history of internationalism, and the global visions that those politics had. They shouldn’t be punished for this learning. After all, with the issues in their own “backyard,” with their communities being destroyed, it makes sense that their own neighborhoods should come first. But secondly, even in these earlier waves of action, the many elders in the movement barely scratched the surface of international solidarity. What’s important is that capitalism causes oppression all over the world, and US imperialism is a driver of those dynamics. We saw this clearly when Mike Brown died, and there were people in Palestine tweeting about how to deal with tear gas. They’ve experienced a level of oppression that at times is more poignant than ours. There is racial oppression in this country, but it’s not the same as the state regularly shooting whole groups of protesters, or authorizing lethal bombings regularly, or censuring media. Yes, we’ve seen examples of that kind of violence, with the case of Minneapolis, being the most recent, and elsewhere we have actually seen similar behavior by local racists, but that kind of violence doesn’t happen to the same extent in the US. And I think that implies that we’ve got to figure out how else we can help other people in other countries. There’s a lot to learn and grow as we build with people internationally. There’s a rush to figure out all of these strategic questions immediately. The fact that there were people doing this work before, prepared us for where we are now in Baltimore. If we hadn’t had some experience and connections with allies nationally, for instance, we couldn’t have created the infrastructure we did to help with the uprising. Effective struggle requires, masses, and passion, and a commitment to shared principles but there are few people with that kind of expertise. Often, you have ten or so people trying to direct things for a whole city, and so organizing becomes difficult. Some months after the uprising, we’ve got some more people ready, now. I don’t believe Baltimore is the last uprising we’re going to see, not even within our own city, as this movement continues to grow stronger. But in many places, there’s very little infrastructure in place. What does it look like to create information for jail support or to train street medics when there isn’t a strong movement culture? We’ve got to develop those capacities pretty rapidly, and we have in response to recent actions. But when we think of these questions of international solidarity, the local stuff has to be in mind as well. Last May, we published an analysis of the uprising in Baltimore, focusing in on the dynamics of white solidarity. The essay confronted a tension pervasive throughout the movement, on the simultaneous necessity of strategic alliances between different struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples, and the possibility that including other groups might obviate the specificity of anti-Black racism. As the movement has developed, it’s proven to have strong resonances with non-black people, drawing in participation and support from a range of different sectors and struggles and sometimes offering models for others. How do we maintain the resonance between different struggles with shared antagonisms, without effacing what is specific to this movement? I think it’s understanding that race is an important social construct, and that class is important as well. At the end of the day, there are levels of privilege amongst the people. And it’s about understanding how your privilege and your social location fits into the spectrum of other people. For instance, I’m a cis black male, so I have cis-male privilege. There are a lot of brilliant black women in the BLOC, and 9 times out of 10, even if I’m not the leader that day, people will come to me for decisions. This happens even if they don’t know me! But the same things happening now have happened in other movements, as well. Non-black people should relate to the issues addressed by the movement on the basis of their own experience. How does your privilege, your oppression, and your leadership relate to the overall movement. People truly are oppressed all over the world: where are you situated within that? We can understand and be in solidarity with other struggles, but you can only lead movements based on your own experience. In the BLOC, we try to make space to think and talk about this question. This is about the political development of our members on the leadership question, and it’s important. The BLOC is a Black-led organization or POC-led organization, and we start from the position that our interests are all interconnected. We’re not going to turn down your membership in the organization because of your race. It’s about sharing in the work that we’re all committed to. White members know that it’s not their place within this movement to direct the struggle. They have leadership roles within the organization, but that’s different from leading the movement. It’s not like being white means you can’t conduct an interview on behalf of the organization, or something like that. That’s not something we would do, because we think this work should be shared. While every struggle is important, right now, we’re trying to put those of Black people at the forefront. And it’s not a monolithic blackness but all black people no matter how they identify, but one that can understand all of the other struggles from the viewpoint of the most oppressed group in the United States. Whatever work you’re doing, on whatever terrain, you make your strategic focus the most oppressed people, so that you might uplift everyone else in the process. That’s why you see nonblack people supporting this movement, because their own liberation is at stake.



CHICAGO ALLIANCE AGAINST RACIST AND POLITICAL REPRESSION

by Mike Siviwe Elliott





“The police are just one front of the attack on poor and working people. We fight there because it’s an important part of this larger fight, one that speaks immediately to the needs and interests of those in oppressed communities. But even our strategy to build up this particular fight around community control of the police is based on participating in and supporting other struggles.”





What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future? Our organization was founded in 1973 by Angela Davis, Choline Michel, and several other activists. We were initially brought together by the Davis trial, but developed into an organization as we were committed to continuing to address the issues of political prisoners and police repression. Given what Davis and Michel had experienced under COINTELPRO, and the rise of mass incarceration and prison expansion, this work seemed all the more pressing. We have stuck to those tasks throughout the years and have organized a range of actions for them. In recent years, we have been focusing on establishing an elected civilian police accountability council. Currently, Chicago has an independent police review authority that investigates all incidents of police misconduct and shootings, but it is overseen by the police board and internal review department, and most importantly, all members are handpicked by the major and are affiliated with law enforcement. Our organization is at the forefront of advancing a concrete alternative: the Citizens’ Police Accountability Council (CPAC). We believe that such an institution would empower people in the community to control how their neighborhoods are policed, by granting them powers to rewrite the rules of conduct, powers to appoint or fire the police superintendent, the power to call for a federal indictment of officer, and the power to bypasses the county prosecutor, who is notoriously on the side of the police throughout Chicago’s history. Towards that end, we’ve just organized a big march on August 29th, where between 2,500 and 3,000 people disrupted traffic and marched on city hall, demanding a Civilian police accountability council. What was most hopeful was the diversity of participants: there was a very strong contingents of neighborhood organizations, the Palestinian, the Filipino and [email protected] communities, young white activists, churches and community groups, the Black Lives Matter movement, along with a lot of support from labor. I believe this displays the power of our demand. During the Millions March in Washington DC, many of the young grassroots organizers who have driven the direct actions against police violence were prevented from speaking by the older leadership. This pattern has continued. What are the politics behind this clash – why is the older, local black political and clerical leadership trying to keep protests contained and controlled, and what kind of alternative strategies can younger militants put forward? Why is the older black leadership acting in this fashion? First, I think that they’ve forgotten that civil disobedience and other forms of disruption is an effective way advance our interests and have our issues addressed. This older generation of Civil Rights types – the Al Sharpton’s – have gotten comfortable as they’ve settled into the institutions we should be disrupting. But our alliances are always ready to move in a more revolutionary fashion, in a more creative way. I believed that they’re threatened by this approach, and so they stress the development of movement icons and individual leaders. What they can’t grasp – and what a lot of older or more conservative black folks more generally don’t grasp – is that this movement is led by black women across the board. Not only that, this movement doesn’t have an icon as a leader, but has deep collective leadership. To take us as just one example, almost everyone in our organization can articulate the purpose of their protest, and the direction of the movement. Rather than centralizing the leadership, we see a more collective kind of practice. We’re a multigenerational group, and I think this is incredibly important for organizations today. So, we definitely don’t approach this like many of the older organizations. Even if some of us are of the same age as the established black leadership, we aren’t of the same mentality. We welcome and value the creative input of younger activists, we honor their leadership. That’s why they respect us! We have young folks on our board and within our organization who are members of the Black Lives Matter Movement. The youth have taught us how to tweet, how to use new tactics, and of course we’ve taught them a lot, too. As more veteran organizers, we always let them know how much we’re learning from them, and the impact that they’re having on us, at the same time that we’re relaying lessons from our history. A multigenerational movement is being built in Chicago, and our organization has been leading that effort. We’ve been welcomed and earned the trust of younger activists, without question. On September 25, 2013, a 12 year old black girl named Laporshia Massey died of asthma in a Philadelphia school, since there was no nurse there to treat her. She died saying “I can’t breathe.” She was only one of several children in Philadelphia who have died as a result of systematic, racialized poverty and the city budget cuts that have recently deepened it. This is a kind of murder by poverty and urban segregation; it hasn’t received as much attention in the national media as the recent police murders, but it’s a fundamental and ongoing element of American racism. What is the strategic value of centering antagonism towards the police? How have you been able to link up this movement against the police to other related struggles, such as the Fight for $15, anti-gentrification, anti-austerity, and prison abolition work? The police are just one front of the attack on poor and working people, alongside the other issues that you mention. We fight there because it’s an important part of this larger fight, one that speaks immediately to the needs and interests of those in oppressed communities. But even our strategy to build up this particular fight around community control of the police is based on participating in and supporting other struggles in housing, schools, and workplaces, against austerity, and against exploitation. It’s these efforts of linking up with other struggles, building coalitions across the board, that help us grow our movement. That’s what produces the turnout we saw on August 29th. And we’ve been very successful with that. Perhaps the best example is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), who we’ve had great support from. Part of building up this alliance involved publishing articles linking issues of labor and education together around the issue of policing and prisons. The teachers have been very clear about how this all relates to the school to prison pipeline and the really vicious budget cuts school workers and young people have to face. Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been cutting precisely the type of health professional you mention in your question! At least in predominantly Black and Latino schools, though not in the white communities. And it’s not just the physical health of these students, but their emotional health as well, as they’re laying off counselors and social workers. Those people that did social work are no longer going to be available to the kids. You can see right here, in the direct relationship between prisons and budget cuts, their strategy of making conditions more difficult for poor and working people to live and organize. We’ve also linked up to the anti-eviction campaign, because we know that this issue also means violence against our community. And the Fight for $15 is a major partner of ours. Those fast food workers are from the same oppressed communities dealing with the police! They can relate to what we’re calling for, and they can see how it’s going to benefit their lives. Ultimately, we view the whole system was one that puts profit over people, and that all of the aspects we are fight are part of this bigger system that doesn’t give a damn about the lives of poor and working people. To fight back, we’ve got to have all the bases covered. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s against racism and police violence led to the emergence of new kinds of organizations – including, just to name a few, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and, for white radicals, the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1970s these groups transformed into new revolutionary organizations, which were often multi-racial alliances between black, [email protected], Puerto Rican, and Asian groups. Do you see new organizations emerging today, and if so, what is their relationship to the broader Black Lives Matter movement? Well, I can say that our organization is very much intimately a part of that history you’ve just described. Our organization represents that multi-racial merger today. Our organization is diverse, both racially and culturally, but it’s led principally by black folks. Though we come from many different racial and ethnic groups, we all respect what we do, with an understanding that the people most impacted are black people and [email protected] people. So everyone respects us as leaders and defends us when that’s challenged. We feel very strongly that the Black Lives Matter movement is the major social justice struggle in this nation today. We’re proud to be an active part of this movement. And we make sure that we are clear in saying we’re apart of this movement, even though we’ve been doing this work long before that term was ever developed, in a different political context of the Black Power movement. And so, we’ve been thrilled to see the emergence of this new cycle, this new movement. It has elevated the level of involvement of black youth in fighting against oppression. It’s been a resource to mobilizing lots of folks onto the streets and to educate them about the power that we have as people. As a result, a lot of young people now know now to navigate police harassment more than they did before, which is important when you consider how frequently some are stopped on the street. The coalition work that we’re involved in, and our demands around the Citizen’s Police Accountability Council represent a big part of our efforts in the movement. But we also have been building with other partners and organizations who contribute in their own way. For instance, First Defense Legal Aid is the only group in the nation that will legally represent you for the first 48 hours after your arrest. They’ll come to the police station at 4 in the morning if you call them. They check in you, they get information from the cops, and put the police back on their heels. As a result, you’re treated very differently in jail, so they’re very effective. This group is deeply involved in our coalition, and it provides a concrete example of ways that our organizations have related not only to the movement in the streets, but also in the daily lives of people who are struggling. What’s really exciting about this period, is that we’re taking a base organization and building larger coalitions that aren’t just city-wide and national in its connections, but even international. In the week leading up to our action on August 29, we hosted organizers from California, Florida, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in our houses, and they helped us turn out support for the demonstration and get out the information. We even have black activists from Paris out here. We’ve been building a lot of good relationships that will be necessary to develop our power. We understand that our next steps have to never take any of these relationships for granted. And so we stay very vigilant about constantly reinforcing our alliances. And this doesn’t just happen formally, but often interpersonally. We’re not just partners in organizing, because in many cases we become close friends and even family with these people. In fact, a lot of people in the movement are my personal friends. We socialize together, we strengthen our bonds with one another, and it’s important to do that as a part of our strategy. I think you see that reflected in our organization.



COOPERATION JACKSON

by Kali Akuno



“Organizing against state repression and police terror are cornerstones of the self-defense work that Black people must engage in out of pure necessity in the United States. However, we have to recognize that defense work of this nature, in and of itself, is not transformative.”



What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future?

Cooperation Jackson is a relatively young organization. It was officially launched in May 2014, at the Jackson Rising: New Economies Conference, which took place Friday, May 2nd through Sunday, May 3rd at Jackson State University. So, we are just over one year old. However, the vision and planning for Cooperation Jackson has been years in the making. Cooperation Jackson was born as an instrument of the Jackson-Kush Plan, a plan first developed by the New Afrikan People’s Organization and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement that seeks to facilitate the development of a vibrant solidarity economy in Jackson, by building an integrated network of cooperative and community owned enterprises that would provide sustainable, living-wage jobs. The objective in building a strong local solidarity economy is to advance the development of economic democracy as a transformative and transitional socio-economic system based on worker self-management and the direct ownership of the means of production and distribution. In our short year of existence, we obtained several significant accomplishments. We have acquired a fair amount of land and properties in West Jackson that we are working to transform into a Community Land Trust. This will be home to a live-work Eco-Village – a living complex devoted to ecological and climate sustainability in its design and operation, particularly how it utilizes and produces energy – with cooperative housing and a number of integrated cooperative businesses. The most noted of these properties is the Chokwe Lumumba Center for Economic Democracy and Development, which serves as the operating base of Cooperation Jackson, and the home of several of our emerging cooperatives. We also were able to get the City Council to pass a resolution calling for the creation of a Human Rights Charter for the City of Jackson, and a Human Rights Commission to enforce it. This is a very significant victory, one that unfortunately has not received the attention we think it deserves on a national and international level. When implemented the charter and commission will make Jackson the only city in the United States that attempts govern itself in accordance with all of the fundamental human rights conventions, covenants, treaties, protocols and standards. We hope that it will serve as a model to strengthen social movements throughout the US in the struggle to radically transform this society. We anticipate a high level of resistance to the full implementation of the charter by reactionary forces in Mississippi and throughout the country, and we are doing all we can to prepare for that in an offensive manner as well. We are building the Charter and the Commission through the Jackson Human Rights Institute (JHRI). The Institute is a training and coordinating center committed to making Jackson a Human Rights City. The Institute was launched in the fall of 2014 to strengthen the local human rights social movement, expand its base, and facilitate the drafting of the Charter and the structure of the Institute. We are also a pilot-site for the Our Power Campaign, developed by the Climate Justice Alliance. This past June, we held a Southern People’s Movement Assembly for a Just Transition to launch a local campaign to make Jackson a “Sustainable City,” committed to eliminating its ecological footprint over the next decade. Over the course of the next year, we are going to focus on opening and stabilizing several cooperatives, founding our Community Land Trust, developing the Human Rights Charter, and moving the City to adopt key aspects of our Just Transition climate justice policy framework.



On September 25, 2013, a 12 year old black girl named Laporshia Massey died of asthma in a Philadelphia school, since there was no nurse there to treat her. She died saying “I can’t breathe.” She was only one of several children in Philadelphia who have died as a result of systematic, racialized poverty and the city budget cuts that have recently deepened it. This is a kind of murder by poverty and urban segregation; it hasn’t received as much attention in the national media as the recent police murders, but it’s a fundamental and ongoing element of American racism. What is the strategic value of centering antagonism towards the police? How have you been able to link up this movement against the police to other related struggles, such as the Fight for $15, anti-gentrification, anti-austerity, and prison abolition work? The Jackson-Kush Plan is a transitional vision and strategy for the attainment of Black self-determination developed by the New Afrikan People’s Organization (NAPO) and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM). This is critical to mention, because the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement is perhaps best known for its decades of organizing on a national level against state repression and police terror against Black people. However, it should also be noted that despite the visibility of the work against state repression and police terror, the organization never upheld it as being central to the achievement of self-determination. NAPO and MXGM always emphasized obtaining self-determination for people of African descent in the United States, which in Mississippi and throughout the South centers on two objectives. First, on building economic democracy through solidarity and regenerative economic organization, and second, on building political power through the construction of autonomous people’s assemblies and independent political parties. Organizing against state repression and police terror are cornerstones of the self-defense work that Black people must engage in out of pure necessity in the United States. However, we have to recognize that defense work of this nature, in and of itself, is not transformative. At its best, this type of self-defense work might stall the blows of the state’s iron fist, but the carrots of the state and capital are just as, if not even more so, deadly. Now our people and our movement must never abandon its defenses (in fact we would do well to build them even stronger). But, we have to be more strategic and try to get at the economic roots of our problem. To this end, we have and will continue to support campaigns like the Fight for $15 and the organization of the workers at the Nissan plant in Canton, MS. But, we have to go further. In the disposable era that we are in, where neither the multinational corporations or the state have the financial interest or the political will to create jobs for the millions that are under and unemployed, working people must seize the initiative by simultaneously collectivizing our resources to produce the jobs that we need and by seizing control of the existing means production, distribution, and consumption by any and all democratic means at our disposal. Part of the reason Cooperation Jackson was born, was to facilitate working people in Jackson developing their own capacity to impact, if not control, their own economic circumstances and to fight for the democratization of the economy. In this effort, we have consciously tried to link the overall struggle against white supremacy, colonialism, and state repression to the struggle for economic justice, political independence, and self-determination. The most concrete way we have done this is by building the Human Rights Institute. Promoting a people-centered human rights agenda has long been an objective of the forces advancing the Jackson-Kush Plan. One of the key elements that we were set to implement under the Mayoral administration of Chokwe Lumumba, was the introduction of a Human Rights Charter and a Human Rights Commission. When Mayor Lumumba unexpectedly passed in February 2014, this initiative returned to the social movement. In December 2014, these forces took the initiative, first by organizing a highway blockade in Downtown Jackson to draw attention to the exoneration of the murderers of Mike Brown and Eric Gardner. Then by waging an action on City Hall to move it to commit to creating and implementing a comprehensive Human Rights Charter, with strong enforcement mechanisms for the protection of economic, social and cultural rights (ESC Rights such as dignified employment, quality housing, health care, water, etc.) and a Police Control Board democratically elected by the residents of the City. The City Council passed a resolution committing the City to the creation and implementation of a Human Rights Charter and Commission. Now the struggle is to broaden the base of support for this initiative, build the charter with the people, and to see its implementation through municipal government to completion. Cooperation Jackson and the Jackson Human Rights Institute are concrete ways we’ve been making a contribution towards the development and implementation of a intersectional strategy of social liberation. We think that there are lessons to be learned from our work. And we think that there are some broad strategies and methods of struggle that can be applied throughout the US empire. We maintain that we need to build a mass movement that focuses as much on building autonomous, self-organized and executed social projects as it focuses on campaigns and initiatives that apply transformative pressure on the government and the forces of economic exploitation and domination. This is imperative, especially when we clearly understand the dynamics internal to the capitalist system we are fighting against. Autonomous projects are initiatives not supported or organized by the government (state) or some variant of monopoly capital (finance or corporate industrial or mercantile capital). These are initiatives that directly seek to create a democratic “economy of need” around organizing sustainable institutions that satisfy people’s basic needs around principles of social solidarity and participatory or direct democracy that intentionally put the needs of people before the needs of profit. These initiatives are built and sustained by people organizing themselves and collectivizing their resources through dues paying membership structures, income sharing, resource sharing, time banking, etc., to amass the initial resources needed to start and sustain our initiatives. These types of projects range from organizing community farms (focused on developing the capacity to feed thousands of people) to forming people’s self-defense networks to organizing non-market housing projects to building cooperatives to fulfill our material needs. To ensure that these are not mere Black or “ethnic” capitalist enterprises, these initiatives must be built democratically from the ground up and must be owned, operated, and controlled by their workers and consumers. These are essentially “serve the people” or “survival programs” that help the people to sustain and attain a degree of autonomy and self-rule. Our pressure exerting initiatives must be focused on creating enough democratic and social space for us to organize ourselves in a self-determined manner. We should be under no illusion that the system can be reformed, it cannot. Capitalism and its bourgeois national-states, the US government being the most dominant amongst them, have demonstrated a tremendous ability to adapt to and absorb disruptive social forces and their demands – when it has ample surpluses. The capitalist system has essentially run out of surpluses, and therefore does not possess the flexibility that it once did. Because real profits have declined since the late 1960’s, capitalism has resorted to operating largely on a parasitic basis, commonly referred to as neo-liberalism, which calls for the dismantling of the social welfare state, privatizing the social resources of the state, eliminating institutions of social solidarity (like trade unions), eliminating safety standards and protections, promoting the monopoly of trade by corporations, and running financial markets like casinos. Our objectives therefore, must be structural and necessitate nothing less than complete social transformation. To press for our goals we must seek to exert maximum pressure by organizing mass campaigns that are strategic and tactically flexible, including mass action (protest) methods, direct action methods, boycotts, non-compliance methods, occupations, and various types of people’s or popular assemblies. The challenges here are not becoming sidelined and subordinated to someone else’s agenda – in particular that of the Democratic party (which has been the grave of social movements for generations) – and not getting distracted by symbolic reforms or losing sight of the strategic in the pursuit of the expedient. There are other tendencies that may be in a position to co-opt the movement –it is widely noted that nonprofits play a demobilizing role in social movements, mediating between action in the streets and municipal city governments whose funding they depend on. Because nonprofits have resources that grassroots initiatives often don’t, they position themselves as the leadership, while constituting social bases of support in ways that are more difficult for radicals. How can this co-opting be avoided? How can radicals develop the same bases of support that many nonprofits enjoy?

First things first, we believe that you have to make a distinction between the system’s legitimization of nonprofit organizations and their actual level of support amongst the people. People often give deference to the legitimacy conferred upon nonprofit organizations because most do provide services that working and poor people need. But, the utilization of these services doesn’t mean that the people are in any way loyal to these organizations, as folks will seek support from contradictory sources when they need it. Radical forces have to take a long-term view towards base building and community organizing. We have to call on the people to build and support their own independent organizations, organizations that are not dependent on foundations or reformist electoral parties for their resources or their legitimacy. We, the people and the social movements, have to resource our own organizations, so that we own and control their politics, programs, and agendas. Self-organization can often be difficult, but it isn’t foreign to many. After all, many people in our communities regularly give to their spiritual institutions and to other types of charities. We have to move folks to give in this same manner to their own political and economic development institutions. The primary thing that we must do, is to remain focused, principled, and disciplined, while at the same time being flexible enough to deal with new dynamics, be they opportunities or challenges. The movements of the 1960s and 1970s against racism and police violence led to the emergence of new kinds of organizations – including, just to name a few, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Revolutionary Action Movement, the Black Panther Party, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and, for white radicals, the Students for a Democratic Society. In the 1970s these groups transformed into new revolutionary organizations, which were often multi-racial alliances between black, [email protected], Puerto Rican, and Asian groups. Do you see new organizations emerging today, and if so, what is their relationship to the broader Black Lives Matter movement? Over the past 4 years, we’ve seen an explosion of new organizations. From Occupy the Hood, to the Million Hoodies Movement, to the Dream Defenders, to BYP100, We Charge Genocide, Black Lives Matter to the plethora of organizations that emerged in the greater St. Louis region after the Ferguson rebellion in 2014. It is our view that this rising tide of activity has been brewing for well over a decade. It is the product of a generation’s response to the horror of Hurricane Katrina, and what it indicated about the value of Black life in this society. Black Lives Matter has become the rallying cry of this generation, but what this call represents is a passing of the torch in the Black Liberation Movement. However, it is still too early to ascertain clearly where many of these organizations are headed. Will they move further to the left in a revolutionary direction, or will they head in a more reformist direction? It is still too early to tell. There are positive signs that large numbers of those who have been called to action during this upsurge are developing a revolutionary consciousness. But, it will take some considerable work on the part of these individuals to turn their organizations into revolutionary vehicles, particularly given all of the pressures and distractions they have to confront, like attempted buy-off’s from the Democratic party and major foundations and philanthropists, opportunism of publically visible members of the movement, and personal differences amongst the movements leaders disguised as political difference. The level of solidarity exhibited by non-Black activists in Ferguson, Baltimore, and with the movement for Black Lives overall has also been very encouraging. There are some signs, such some of the direct engagement of Arab, South and Asian, and [email protected] in many of the actions and initiatives of current Black upsurge, that this solidarity could foster the development of new multi-racial, multi-national revolutionary formations in the near future. But, it will take some very focused work on the part of all of the forces involved. Cooperation Jackson is built to serve the needs of the Black working class majority of Jackson, MS. It is designed to provide stable employment, equity, democratic control and dignity to Black workers. However, it is a multinational organization and intentionally so. We attempting to demonstrate, in practice, that white workers can be principled democratic actors under Black leadership and be agents in the struggle against white supremacy. We are also explicit in our attempt to build “Black-Brown” unity by doing outreach to the growing immigrant communities in Mississippi, particularly from Central and South America, to intervene in and defeat the many divide and conquer strategies and tactics used to keep the working class fragmented and isolated.

Last May, we published an analysis of the uprising in Baltimore, focusing in on the dynamics of white solidarity. The essay confronted a tension pervasive throughout the movement, on the simultaneous necessity of strategic alliances between different struggles of oppressed and exploited peoples, and the possibility that including other groups might obviate the specificity of anti-Black racism. As the movement has developed, it’s proven to have strong resonances with non-black people, drawing in participation and support from a range of different sectors and struggles and sometimes offering models for others. How do we maintain the resonance between different struggles with shared antagonisms, without effacing what is specific to this movement? This is a very critical question for the development of a transformative force in the US. In order to maintain and advance this resonance, each people and movement must be open to processes of critical educational engagement with each other. We are attempting to do this in Jackson by intentionally bringing the movement for Black self-determination into constant contact and engagement via joint study, strategy development and struggle with the solidarity economy movement, the trade union movement, the immigrant rights movement, the queer movement and the climate justice movement. Our movements must understand the nuances, intersections and particularities that different people’s, social sectors, genders and sexual communities each confront in battling the systems of oppression that structure our lives. If we don’t come to some critical understandings on how we are each positioned in the capitalist world-system, will remain subject to the whims of our oppressors and manipulators, and the many systems and, techniques they employ to keep us divided. In short, we’ll be unable to develop a comprehensive strategy of social transformation and liberation that will free us all.



#ITSBIGGERTHANYOU

by Aurielle Lucier

“This older leadership class is clearly invested in the power they’ve obtained for themselves with a seat at the table, and they mistake that seat as real liberation for Black people. Since the 1970s, there’s been no accountability of Black leadership to the community they claim to represent, and those legacies of protest and movement building weren’t passed down, but were forgotten.”



What is the history of your group? What actions have you organized, how has your group changed, and what are your plans for the future? #itsbiggerthanyou was formed in the wake of the execution of Michael Brown and the unrest in Ferguson. We’re a grassroots organization, comprised of activists from other Atlanta based groups, most notably in coalition with folks from the three local HBCU’s. Our group involves a large number of students, as well as other young adults, young entrepreneurs, and organizers. We mobilized over 5,000 people in Atlanta to protest in resistance to police abuse and the criminalization of black people. We have organized dozens of protests, including a highway shut-down and a conference dedicated to action-based learning around reforming policing. What are we pushing for? We’re behind the demands: disempower, disarm, and disband. We’ve been quite public about our position, but we’re trying to figure out how to realize it. In some ways, taking up those particular demands has been put on the backburner while we do research, but in the meantime we’ve been exploring and experimenting with cameras on cops initiatives, and calling for a slew of other demands. We’re for giving more power to community accountability boards, providing them with some leverage against police, so that they’re not just a forum for speaking their mind, but as bodies that could call for an investigation and indict cops. Since the uprising in Ferguson, we’ve seen racist, right-wing terrorism flare up with the bombing of an NAACP office in Colorado and the tragic and murderous attack on a historic Black Church in South Carolina. The shooting of two police officers in New York seems to have encouraged NYPD members to openly defy the city’s mayor, hamstringing his own agenda. And elsewhere, politicians and police have started to use the specter of Ferguson and Baltimore to justify preemptive police repression and mobilize support for curfews. Might these movements and uprisings provoke a right-wing resurgence? Do you see examples of this happening where you organize? What can we do to rout these efforts? I think many of us were taken by surprise by the response from the right-wing, as well as the repression from the state. There was this sense that if we exposed white supremacy – initiating these tough conversations and promoting the right legislation – the veil of colorblindness would fall off. We’re learning now how important it is to not underestimate white supremacy. Within our group, there has already been a huge flux in membership and participation, in part because of a group split that divided our numbers after it was discovered that our group was susceptible to surveillance. There were some ideological differences from the get go, both in terms of big picture stuff, like how we were imagining liberation, but also differences in how we should relate to the media. Even though talking with elders from the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement was essential in working through some of those gaps, the stresses amplified by repression made the split inevitable. The blowback from our work on college campuses and off led to police following many of us, often pulled over without a reason, with the officer using your first name. With such intense repression taking place, it became difficult to come to a consensus around such divergent politics. Repression led to a major recalibration of where people stood around militant action. For many, it was an emotionally draining experience. But when people step back, it becomes easier to isolate the remaining leadership. I believe I was targeted for those reasons, kidnapped by police for ten hours when our work was just getting started. I’m the co-founder of our organization, and for a long time was the only spokesperson, and that concentration of authority ran some obvious risks. We need to move in the direction of group-centered leadership, to make visible the wide array of black identities. This meant accounting for ideological differences, too. Beyond collectivizing leadership, our best bet is to double down on commitments to transparency. There’s a lot of miscommunication between “the movement,” between mass media, and different sectors of society. Black Lives Matter is simultaneously a movement, an organization, and a battle cry on the streets of Ferguson, but that kind of fuzziness causes distrust, creates fraction, divides and sections off our power. And as any organizer knows, the same kinds of tensions and impasses happen in small, local organizing circles, too. These kinds of divisions are what repression aims to produce, and they make further repression possible. We look at the Black Panther Party and what a point of inspiration it is for us today. But even it ended with an extreme level of distrust. That’s why it’s critical for us to be brutally and radically honest with each other, to make space for disagreement and debate. It’s saving us in Atlanta. It takes all the guesswork out of organizing, and helps minimize the effects of repression and the attacks from the right-wing. During the Millions March in Washington DC, many of the young grassroots organizers who have driven the direct actions against police violence were prevented from speaking by the older leadership. This pattern has continued. What are the politics behind this clash – why is the older, local black political and clerical leadership trying to keep protests contained and controlled, and what kind of alternative strategies can younger militants put forward? As an organization, we don’t collaborate with the older, established civil rights leadership, though we work closely with those we consider to be our elders. In Atlanta, there’s a thick legacy of the civil rights movement, whose veterans and memory that try to dictate the actions of this movement. We have to be steadfast in our criticism, though, and vigilant about how power has afflicted our willingness to sacrifice for liberation work. Many civil rights organizers and leaders were put into positions of power after after the 1960s, and the possibility of negotiation with white supremacy is clearly seductive. That’s why you see older folks prescribing acceptable decorum for black organizers, upholding the politics of respectability, and distancing themselves from actions on the streets. This older leadership class is clearly invested in the power they’ve obtained for themselves with a seat at the table, and they mistake that seat as real liberation for Black people. So when we’re resisting in the streets, that’s jeopardizing their strategy. We’re risking what that power did for them, rather than what that power actually did for the Black community. Since the 1970s, there’s been no accountability of Black leadership to the community they claim to represent, and those legacies of protest and movement building weren’t passed down, but were forgotten. When they do engage with the movement, or try to show support, they ask us to mimic their tactics. That’s just a silly request that can’t be honored, and our elders and mentors, apart from that leadership class, truly understand that. Our new movement is learning how to jeopardize commerce, to threaten the mutually reinforcing systems of capitalism and white supremacy. We saw how quickly things moved once we started threatening commerce. Black Friday actions back in the Fall of 2014 contributed to a ten percent drop in sales from the trends of the last ten years! That’s the kind of power we’re looking to build. On September 25, 2013, a 12 year old black girl named Laporshia Massey died of asthma in a Philadelphia school, since there was no nurse there to treat her. She died saying “I can’t breathe.” She was only one of several children in Philadelphia who have died as a result of systematic, racialized poverty and the city budget cuts that have recently deepened it. This is a kind of murder by poverty and urban segregation; it hasn’t received as much attention in the national media as the recent police murders, but it’s a fundamental and ongoing element of American racism. What is the strategic value of centering antagonism towards the police? How have you been able to link up this movement against the police to other related struggles, such as the Fight for $15, anti-gentrification, anti-austerity, and prison abolition work? Police brutality is a perfect storm in that it is a physically apparent, emotionally and socially confrontational issue rooted in racism and white supremacy. In a world where organizers fight against the rhetoric that the very idea of racism doesn’t exist, police brutality offers a clear view into the world of anti-black violence. This paves the way for conversations, policy changes, and legislation shifts. We know that white supremacy is an anti-black, violent belief system that works its way through the many systems that work in tandem with it. Capitalism, patriarchy, and racism each feed off of the marginalization of poor black folks, black working mothers, and the black community. These systems work alongside mass incarceration, since high poverty areas usually suffer from higher desperation-driven crime (drug sales, theft, assault, etc). So in a way, targeting one, is targeting all, so long as it doesn’t stop there. And our work often doesn’t. Yes, police brutality is often deployed as a metaphor for all kinds of racist state violence. When you try to talk about how the state oppresses black folks, it is most easily perceived through the videos of police terror. We live in such a sensationalized culture, and economic exploitation or redlining don’t have the same visual expressions that these videos do. Instead, they’re difficult and complicated issues to talk about. Even mass incarceration and the school to prison pipeline can be difficult to represent and break down in conversation, since the pathways to it can be so incremental. But the physical violence of police often happens in a matter of seconds. They are aggravating and difficult to stomach, and when you show it to someone who is doubting the scope of racism in America, I’ve found that it’s often easier for them to understand the scope white supremacy through those brutal clips. I think the success of this strategy is what unpins the dramatic raising of consciousness we’ve seen in the last year. I think that it’s responsible for the huge leaps we’ve made in the fight for 15 movement, the significant shifts we’ve seen in corporate policies around race in workplaces, and the sizable changes within the LGBTQ movement. These effects rippled from the Black Lives Matter movement pushing this specific bit with the justice system. That said, we’ve been experimenting with developing coalitions with other movements. Black Friday was one opportunity for that. The way that black folks are policed in retail environments, with mall cops and security harassing and harming black people, can link up in a tangible way to the fight for better wages and working conditions being undertaken by retain workers, many of whom are black. These kinds of alliances can amplify and expand efforts to raise the minimum wage, win support for our demands around police violence, and help us think systemically about how these issues relate. It’s our lack of economic security that often makes police violence possible, and the work of the police to demonize and harass us also makes it more difficult to come up on a living wage. So, these elements work together to produce highly exploited black communities. We’ve got to confront these intersections intentionally. Alongside repression, the Black Panther Party’s handling of gender and sexuality is often named as one of the central reasons for their decline. In fact, it’s one of the few arguments that different factions of the Panthers can agree upon – Elaine Brown and Assata Shakur have made remarkably similar observations about patriarchy in the party. Some have even drawn a causal link between the force of repression and the dangerous practice of patriarchy that was active in some quarters, showing how “misogynists make great informants.” And yet, recent scholarship has shown that the revolutionary activism carried out by so many rank and file women Party members made the survival programs possible. Women’s political work and leadership around issues of housing rights, health care access, education, and other community services transported the struggle for black liberation onto a much broader terrain. It’s often noted today that Black Lives Matter is largely not led by cis men but by black women, trans* women and men and queer organizers); if this is the case, what’s the significance of this leadership? Does this leadership signal a potential change in the content and direction of this movement? Young people, black liberation organizers, have realized that a cis-gendered male dominated movement cripples the impact of work, because it supports (uplifts, even) white supremacist, cis-hetero patriarchy that has enacted violence against us for centuries. Liberation must be intersectional. If we are not centering women, black trans women, and queer folks in our work, we are doomed to build a legacy that will surely crumble beneath us. The “least of us,” those who have been forgotten, neglected, and marginalized, are often the ones most willing to put their bodies and lives on the line to gain freedom. Allowing them to participate in that sacrifice, without demanding their liberation inside of our black struggle, creates a cycle of violence and regression that won’t end until we enforce intersectionality. The Black Panther Party is often called one of the most misogynistic organizations from their period, but they also boasted the leadership of badass women who weren’t taking no shit. Compare that to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who upheld patriarchal leadership in a way that didn’t allow for women’s voices, or queer voices, to be uplifted, supported, or amplified. This shift, made possible by Panther women, can be seen all over this time around. We also owe a lot to women, queer, and trans people who have be doing work since the Panthers. The people at Southerners on New Ground have been doing this kind of essential organizing for decades, and that’s reflected in the leadership of much of the movement today. I came out as queer last November, three months into our organizing with #itsbiggerthanyou. I came out because I saw how older patterns of organizing and leadership were excluding voices that needed to be heard as a part of this movement. After all, queer folks come out to every protests, and it’s important for them to be visible and reflected in the work we do. If we don’t actively promote that kind of leadership, we’ll be building a movement that will be ineffectual to many black people. If we were just organizing for black men, we’d do a disservice for all black folks – including those men – since our movement wouldn’t be as strong, or as deep as it would need to be. Just as the struggle against anti-blackness is in the interests of all folks of color, our movement against white supremacy must have a stake in 