Anarchism has long seen the establishment of an organized movement as a necessity for bringing about an anarchist society. Direct action and committed, sustained activism often manifest in organizations in order to have a critical cadre of bodies willing to put in work for the movement’s goals. As movement-oriented, or at least oriented toward understanding the importance of collectives and communes with substantive numbers to stave off political quashing, anarchism bears deep affinities to Black queer and trans movements to bring about social justice. Surely there have been many demographics who have organized in order to change society, so movement orientation is not unique to Black people. My point is that the Black Radical Tradition has consistently rejected the seemingly stark divide between theory and practice, refusing the false assumption that “one could separate the articulation of ideas that would govern how we envision the future from actually enacting that future.”Anarchism, too, “has traditionally drawn upon ideas of coherence between theory and practice,” which is to say that doing theory is a critical praxis, that what we seek to engender in the world on a material level is itself a profound theoretical apparatus.
Movement-oriented politics often orbit around the concept of domination. They also, though, orbit around conceptions of world-making and futurity—that is, not only the plights of the current moment but also the world in which we envision ourselves after and in excess of the plight. Radical feminist, queer, and Black liberationist movements from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (BPP) to Black Lives Matter (BLM) to Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) all, because of their resistance to domination and imagining of a radical futurity, bear affinities with anarchism. In line with the recalibrating work of the Black anarchism expressed in this text, one might argue that Black movements like Black Power and the BPP—though at times, from some of their more Marxist-Leninist perspectives, critical of anarchism proper—are anarchic despite not having been affiliated with anarchism, precisely because “Black anarchism did not originate within anarchism, but external to it.” The Black anarchism of, say, the Black Panthers is one in which they “blended anarchist positions with their revolutionary nationalism,” though there is a distinction to be made: Black anarchists do not hold on to a nationalist conception of an exclusionary, bordered State, as Marxist-Leninist Black Panthers do. Nationalism should be understood as anathema to anarchist sentiments, and the Black anarchism of someone like Kuwasi Balagoon seeks to get rid of borders: “it seems to me that Anarchy would have to be anti-imperialist, that there’s no other ideology that refuses to recognize borders,” he says in his July 28, 1984 letter from prison. The link between anarchism and Black Power/the Black Panthers is given more strength by that fact that many of the key figures in expressed Black anarchism—Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin, Ojore Lutalo—were members of the Panthers. Although it is crucial to note that these thinkers and activists, and the organizations they were a part of, do not necessarily possess the “right” conception of (Black) anarchism, they can be thought of as instances of the work Blackness does to anarchism.
–Marquis Bey, “Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism” (2020)
Some Black radicals, including Ervin, Ashanti Alston, who today serves on the steering committee of the National Jericho Movement to free U.S. political prisoners, and Kuwasi Balagoon, a former member of the militant Black Liberation Army, first encountered anarchist ideas in prison. Like some white European anarchists, they saw the ideology as an antidote to the corrupting influence of power within left organizations. As Alston wrote in 1999:
Top-down organizations [and] leadership organization[s] are relationships based on some being the brains and most being brainless and therefore IN NEED OF those with the brains. I reject that. I love myself and I love People and therefore we all got brains and together are smarter than any small group of muthafuckas claiming to be my/our leaders.
Balagoon, who came to identify as a New Afrikan anarchist, pointed out that anarchists’ anti-state orientation made them anti-imperialists. Ervin, meanwhile, argued that anarchism opposes all forms of oppression, including 'patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, state communism, religious dictates, gay discrimination, etc.' He supported community-based mutual aid societies, worker-controlled food systems, tax refusal, rent strikes, and opposition to police brutality.
While anarchism never became central to Black radical thought, Williams notes that many major figures, including Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Audre Lorde, have analyzed political issues in anti-authoritarian ways. These ideas continue to influence today’s Black-led anti-racist protests, many of which embrace local mutual aid strategies, policy goals like police and prison abolition, and non-hierarchical 'leader-ful' structures.
–Livia Gershon, "The Real Story of Black Anarchists" (2020)
Panther anarchism is ready, willing and able to challenge old nationalist and revolutionary notions that have been accepted as ‘common-sense.’ It also challenges the bullshit in our lives and in the so-called movement that holds us back from building a genuine movement based on the enjoyment of life, diversity, practical self-determination and multi-faceted resistance to the Babylonian Pigocracy. This Pigocracy is in our ‘heads,’ our relationships as well as in the institutions that have a vested interest in our eternal domination.
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