Today's Topics:
1. Federação Anarquista do Rio de Janeiro (FARJ) - Our
Conception of Anarchist Organisation (a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
2. US, First of May Anarchist Alliance Minneapolis Collective -
ABERRATIONS IN BLACK – A REVIEW by Miriam, Detroit
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
3. US, What is at Stake in North Minneapolis and #Justice4Jamar
By db, First of May Anarchist Alliance Minneapolis Collective
(a-infos-en@ainfos.ca)
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Message: 1
We opted for the specific model of organisation - known by other names as “especifismo” or
organisational anarchism - largely inspired by the Uruguayan Anarchist Federation (FAU).
Through the discussions that we had, we came to the conclusion that it would be essential
to work with popular social movements, and that, for this, we should create an
organisation with an emphasis on militant commitment. An organisation in this model
defends some clear positions: the organisation as active minority, the emphasis on the
need for organisation, theoretical unity and unity of action, the production of theory,
the need for social work and social insertion; an understanding of anarchism as a tool for
the class struggle in pursuit of a libertarian socialist project, the differentiation
between the levels of political action (the anarchist organisation) and social action (the
popular movements), and the defence of a strategically made militancy. Obviously, the
organisation was not born functioning with all these concepts, but we have improved our
work in this direction, over the years.
The Specific Anarchist Organisation
This model of organisation maintains that the function of the specific anarchist
organisation is to bring together and coordinate the forces stemming from militant
activities, building a tool for solid and consistent struggle, which seeks a finalist
objective: social revolution and libertarian socialism. We believe that work without (or
with little) organisation, in which each one does what they want, poorly articulated or
even isolated, is inefficient. The model of organisation we advocate seeks to multiply the
result and effectiveness of militant forces.
Active Minority
In this model, the specific anarchist organisation works as an active minority, or a group
of anarchists that, organised on the political and ideological level, partakes in actions
on the social level – in social movements, unions etc. In this work, the organisation of
active minority works to influence the movements and struggles in which it is involved, in
order that they function in the most libertarian way possible. Always acting on the social
level, the active minority does not seek positions of privilege, does not impose its will,
nor fight for social movements, but with them, as such differentiating itself from the
Marxist-Leninist “vanguard”. It is thus the ideology within the social movement, and not
the reverse.
Theoretical Unity and Unity of Action
We understand theoretical unity as necessary, because the organisation cannot work with
any theory, or with multiple theories; this leads to a lack of articulation, or even to a
conflicting articulation of a set of concepts that leads, without doubt, to wrong
practice, confusing or very inefficient. This unity is always achieved collectively and in
a horizontal way within the organisation. The theoretical unity goes together with unity
of action. Through it, the organisation works to implement the actions that were
established within the strategy of struggle. Having defined a theoretical and ideological
line and a strategic programme, all militants – hence the organisation as a whole – have
an obligation to carry out tactical actions established by the strategic programme. In
sum, everyone should be “rowing the boat in the same direction.”
Need for Social Work and Social Insertion
This type of organisation is known, still, by giving emphasis to the need for social work
and social insertion. Social work is the activity that organised anarchists realise in the
popular social movements, and social insertion is the insertion of libertarian ideas and
concepts in such movements. If we want to struggle for a society without exploitation and
domination, there is no consistency in doing this without the involvement of those who are
the main victims of capitalist class society: the exploited and dominated people. Taking
this position does not mean idolising the people or believing that they are revolutionary
in essence, but only to agree with the idea that the fight against exploitation must
proceed with the involvement of those who are the most exploited. Hence, we strongly
encourage action in autonomous and combative popular social movements of their own
creation. We believe that anarchism, in order to flourish, should be used as a tool for
class struggle.
Political and Social Levels
Another characteristic of this model of organisation is the differentiation between the
political and social levels of action. We do not believe that there is a hierarchy of
political organisation above the social movement (as it is for the authoritarians); for
us, this is a complementary and dialectic relationship, essential to both. Thus, the
political level of the anarchist organisation must act at the social level, in social
movements organised around pragmatic issues for improving the living conditions of the
exploited class.
Strategy and Tactics
To do so with consistency, its develops strategy within the anarchist organisation: it is
in this context that analyses are made, that is in the global, national and regional
context; that we analyse the movements and popular forces in play, their influences and
potential; the questions of institutional policy that have influence on the environments
in which we propose to act. In the context of the specific organisation, occur reflections
on the long-term goals, or, we forge our conceptions of social revolution and libertarian
socialism. After this, the most complicated: thinking of a proposal of action in search of
attaining these goals, or at least to make them become more tangible. The strategy will
have to answer the following question: how to get from where we are to where we want to
be? This “macro” line (Diagnostic, goals for the short, medium and long term) we call
strategy and our major goals, the strategic goals. The strategy then is detailed in a more
“micro” line, or tactics, which determine the actions that will be put into practice by
militants or groups of militants who seek to achieve tactical objectives. Clearly, the
attainment of tactical objectives brings us closer in an important way to the major
strategic goals.
Level of Commitment
Therefore, this choice of organisation requires a high level of commitment from the militants.
*Excerpt from “Interview with the Rio de Janeiro Anarchist Federation (FARJ)” by Thierry
Libertad.
http://libcomgrp.weebly.com/blog/federacao-anarquista-do-rio-de-janeiro-farj-our-conception-of-anarchist-organisation
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Message: 2
Ferguson, Roderick A. Aberrations in Black. Toward a Queer of Color Critique.
(Minneapolis, London. University of Minnesota Press. 2004. Critical American Studies
Series.) ---- I was drawn to this book because of the critical connections it makes
between capitalism and left movements that claim to oppose capitalism: liberalism, marxism
and revolutionary nationalism. It shows how the acceptance and defense of patriarchy and
“normative” behavior serves the needs of capital. It starts from the point of view of
people whose self definitions, behaviors and practices are seen as outside respectable,
acceptable society: transpeople, people of color, queers, single women, juvenile
delinquents, immigrants, prisoners – all of the “others” who have been repeatedly erased,
their lives and experiences denied. The cultural site they/we occupy allows us to put
forward strategies to demolish capitalism. If our needs are met, if we are a part of the
liberatory force, with full respect and dignity, in coalition with others, we have a
better chance to avoid cooptation by capitalist forces.
A part of the failure of the marxist and revolutionary nationalist left can be directly
tied to their support of patriarchy, their erasure of the needs and experiences of queers
and women, their valuing of the nation state as a positive good, able and necessary to
achieve stability.
The movement against patriarchy expressed by the predominantly white women’s movement was
limited in that it ignored class, gender and racial divisions. It sought to erase the
experiences of many women by claiming that all women could achieve equality when the
demands specific to their white, middle class experience were met. Victory was tied to the
state, as the main demand of that movement was for passage of an equal rights amendment.
The need for free, safe abortions, the right to a living wage, demands to meet child care
needs, the struggle against rape and violence and for respect etc. were ignored,
downplayed, not credited as “winnable” or “reasonable,” often cited as counter-revolutionary.
The gay liberation movement has fought for years for gay people to be treated with
respect, not be placed under arrest for their relationship/life/identity choices. The
“crowning victory” is the recent passage of the law allowing gay people to marry. This
totally ties the movement to the state, to society’s view of what is normal and
acceptable. We in M-1 support the right of gay marriage; we support the right of people to
express their relationships in whatever manner they wish; we do not confuse this with
liberation as we see marriage as the legalized and respectable form the state has
designated specifically for intimate relationships. Relationships outside marriage are
seen as deviant; partially, the urge toward marriage is the desire to be in a safe,
protected relationship with all the citizenship rights granted to straight people.
This book was extremely difficult to read, using vocabulary and language that is
sociological and academic – it sent me to the dictionary many times. I struggled to fit
meaning into context. For example, “As an epistemological intervention, queer of color
analysis denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies that have helped to
constitute marxism, revolutionary nationalism and liberal pluralism.” (3)
In spite of this difficulty, the book is well worth study. I have not found this analysis
drawn out anywhere else with the clarity and precision presented by Ferguson.
He does not write about anarchism, nor does he present a direction toward a revolutionary
overthrow of society. However, as anarchists with a definite purpose to overthrow
capitalism and replace it with a free society, we will do well to take into account the
connections he draws. We must not erase all of us drawn outside society’s definitions of
normal – all of us, people of color, women who do not tie their identity to a man, queers,
trans people, immigrants, disabled, prisoners, all the varieties of gender and sexuality
choice that are available to us as creative people true to our own feelings, identities
and pursuits of happiness and liberation.
We start from the point of view of the trans person of color, representing all the people
and categories that are denied status, citizenship rights and protections.
Marxism, revolutionary nationalism and liberalism all assume that the heterosexual
patriarchal family is the natural and normal relationship within which women find their
true satisfaction and men find peace and contentment. This is the place where all the
fears and hurts of living are soothed, where comfort can be found. This is where morality
and values are taught. This is also the source of economic support, where the man’s wage
is intended to maintain the entire family. The unpaid labor of the housewife, cleaning and
maintaining the home, raising the children, providing sex and comfort is her contribution
to this effort. Inside this fiction, woman’s place is in the home, man’s place is in
public. Any woman stepping out into public becomes fair game, an unmoral woman, a prostitute.
Identities, relationships and practices that diverge from this are labeled deviant and
pathological. Their presence is erased and/or regulated.
The intersections of class, race, sexuality and gender provide a place to open up
discussion of how these different ideologies are all used to facilitate the needs of
capital. By opening up what has been kept closed, we can point our critique at one of the
root causes of our oppression. We can find ways to critique and counter this oppression,
thus strengthening our own movement of opposition.
Marx uncritically accepted the bourgeois attitudes of the 19th century British middle
class. He saw the growth of industrial capitalism as a disruption of man’s natural
division of labor, that of the heterosexual patriarchal family. Marx used the symbol of
the prostitute to represent this disruption.
Prostitution is the symbol of man’s feminization, the removal of his manly essence. Wage
labor didn’t allow a man to be himself; the wage laborer prostituted himself, sold
himself, to the capitalist.
Capital needs a ready supply of labor. In its expansion, it encouraged movement from rural
areas to the cities. Capital doesn’t really care about social costs and leaves it to the
state to handle the social anxieties and disruptions that are caused by migrations. When
the social regulations of homogeneous rural areas are disrupted, the bourgeoisie look to
the state to maintain social order. Some of this takes place as laws, some as culture,
what is generally acceptable behavior.
In 19th century Britain, white working class girls were seen by the middle class as
pathologically sexual, rootless and uncontrolled. (9) Their desires for commodity items,
clothes and hair ribbons were seen as awakening their sexual appetites, driving them into
prostitution. At this same time, the Hottentot Venus (Sarah Bartmann) was put on display
in venues around London, tying the middle class fear of sexuality to Black women’s bodies.
In 19th century United States, Chinese laborers were imported to lay track for the
railroads. Immigration of Asian women was prohibited by exclusion laws, resulting in
mostly male communities. They were marked as deviant, not normal, their deviance tied to
their race as well as their class and sexual situation.
Industrial expansion in the southwest part of the United States in the early 20th century
created the demand for low wage labor. Over 1 million Mexicans immigrated to the United
States. “Americanization” programs were designed and used to train Mexican women to be
acceptable as domestic workers within white households.
The demands of northern capital, as well as the horrors of post-slavery,
defeated-Reconstruction life in the south, led to the mass migration of African Americans
from the south to the northern cities. Upon arrival, they were restricted to living in
ghetto sections of the city and limited in what jobs were available. Vice sections were
moved from suburbs and concentrated in the African American area of the cities. This
identified vice with African Americans and vice versa.
“The state’s regulation of nonwhite gender and sexual practices through Americanization
programs, vice commissions, residential segregation and immigration exclusion attempted to
press nonwhites into gender and sexual conformity, despite the gender and racial diversity
of those racialized groups.” (14)
Canonical sociology provided the language to discuss the changes occurring in the United
States. It defined African American culture as a culture of difference and deviance. “The.
. . writings about race. . . served. . . to organize and alter the aspects of social life
they reported on or analyzed.” (19)
They no longer labeled African Americans as biologically inferior; they now were labeled
as culturally inadequate. Their culture was blamed for the poverty and all the social
dysfunction experienced by the community. Black households, especially female headed
households, were seen as incapable of socializing their members into socially acceptable
behavior. (19)
The higher economic and social costs of living in cities were displaced onto the family.
Well paid wage labor was reserved for white men; African Americans were limited to
temporary, low wage, service types of employment, or the dirtiest and hardest manual
labor. Child raising remains the responsibility of African American women, who must also
work for wages.
The state demands that the family absorb the costs that capital will not pay for –
economic like providing food, shelter, clothes and social, like child raising, emotional
connection, love and sexuality.
“By naturalizing heterosexuality as the only possible, sensible and desirable organizing
principle by which society and social relations can function, canonical sociology aligned
itself with the regulatory imperatives of the state against African Americans.” (20)
The concentration of the vice and entertainment district in the African American community
also allowed for the emergence of a space that was outside the regulated and normative
spaces of acceptable society. Here was a place where Black and white could mingle,
homosexual and heterosexual, trans people could all be together. This did not, of course,
leave systemic and individual racist and sexist attitudes and practices behind, but it did
provide a place of connection, a space where one could be themselves, in company with
others like them. In this place, a critical view could be developed, connections could be
made, an opening wedge formed against the narrow exclusions of society.
African American literature first developed as a way to assert humanity, the right of
African Americans to be treated as equal men and women. It also opens up the many and
varied possibilities of cultural forms outside the acceptable. Literature can be used to
regulate behavior, to define what is/is not pathological, to set boundaries. It can also
rupture those boundaries, present and explore new possibilities and ways of being.
The chapters in this book are organized to present classical works of African American
literature, situating each of them in their own context and period. Ferguson draws out the
dynamic connections between each work, how it reflects the needs of liberal capitalism in
each specific period, and how it is used to bolster (or critique) the system. Chapter one
discusses Richard Wright’s Native Son in the context of the influence of the Chicago
School of Sociology and the New Deal. Chapter two discusses Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
and the role of education and college in acculturating African Americans into a white
middle class citizenship ideal. Chapter three sets James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On the
Mountain against Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma. It discusses rationality and the
drive of the United States to represent itself as the ideal expression of rationality and
world morality. Chapter four uses Toni Morrison’s Sula to open the discussion of Black
women’s feminism and lesbian feminist organizing and theorizing toward coalition of openly
expressed differences. He discusses the Black Panther Party and how revolutionary
nationalism also naturalizes hetero patriarchy, forming an alliance with liberal
capitalism. He finishes the book with a discussion of post American studies and how a
critique of the normative in all its aspects is crucial to an understanding of the
globalization phase of capitalist expansion.
Capitalism has continually found ways to co-opt movements ostensibly against it; it has
set “respectability standards” that allow a few working class and/or people of color
and/or homosexuals to pass through and win their citizenship rights by helping to regulate
the rest.
Chapter one. The Chicago School of Sociology, Richard Wright, Native Son, New Deal
liberalism and Wright’s understanding of Marxism all share the same assumptions about what
are normal expressions of gender and sexuality. For New Dealers, social policy was tied to
“responsible intimacy.” (27)
Benefits were allocated on the basis of women’s status as wives and mothers. Women’s
economic security was tied to men’s wages, ADC, widow’s benefits. White men’s economic
security was tied to fair wages, guaranteed by unions, and social insurance.
Female headed households in the African American community were regarded as immoral and
were excluded from New Deal policy gains. The Feds deferred to the States to determine
need and fitness for benefits. State’s laws against unwed motherhood justified the denial
of benefits and protection. The Social Security Act excluded domestic and service workers,
along with casual and agricultural workers. These types of employment were tracked
according to race and so the exclusions became racial exclusions.
They were also subject to relentless observation, surveillance and regulation. There are
many stories of welfare workers looking for signs of a man’s presence in a female headed
home. Ford used the same surveillance tactic to control his workforce, requiring church
attendance and a Bible in each home. Single mothers in public housing today are also
subject to this same observation, surveillance and regulation.
White women were discouraged from wage earning work in order to guarantee the stability of
the household. Her unpaid work was necessary to the stability of the family unit. In our
current period, white women are allowed to work outside the home, being normalized and
accepted as citizens because they are white.
African American women were seen as appropriate wage earners, keeping them in the public
and accessible to white men. This also prevented them from sustaining hetero patriarchal
households. They were sexualized so that their Black bodies represented sexual
availability, immorality and deviance, unrespectability. The desire of African American
women to express their felt sexuality has been in constant conflict with the desire of the
community to present itself as respectable.
Because “non white communities were racialized as non hetero normative, hetero patriarchal
regulation enforced the racialized boundaries of neighborhood and community.” (39) The
limiting of vice to African American neighborhoods worked together with residential
segregation. This established a formal relationship between racial exclusion and sexual
regulation.
Richard Wright saw Marxism as the revolutionary force that could unite all the different
ethnic groups he saw pouring into Chicago, working together in the steel mills and
slaughter yards. In his text, Native Son, he sees what he considers the perversions of his
own community as a part of the feminizing, castrating effects of capital on the worker.
“Economic subordination intersected with racial subordination through the denial of
patriarchal status to Black men.” (44) Wright used sociology and scientific findings,
highly valued throughout the progressive and liberal community, to describe vice districts
as social disorganization, the juvenile delinquent and homosexual as perversions. Wright
and marxists and revolutionary nationalists all call for a specifically masculine
revolutionary agency to oppose the feminization caused by capital.
They work to erase sexual and gender diversity, thereby serving the needs of the liberal
state in its attempts to universalize lived experience as class and race, ignoring the
subjective experience of sexuality and gender. In their view, the virile and masculine
folk hero has to emerge to replace the deviant and dysfunctional female head of household.
Native Son develops the theme of juvenile delinquency, located in lower class African
American families headed by women. Bigger (the juvenile delinquent) is feminized,
humiliated as a worker, and infantilized as his mother’s son. He is unable to get beyond
or transcend social disorganization and is linked with other representations of
dysfunction – unwed mothers, transpeople, criminals, homosexuals, delinquents. He is not a
“stable representative of African American revolutionary nationalism.” (53)
Chapter two discusses Ralph Ellison’s classic novel, Invisible Man, using a chapter that
was removed from the final version before publication and found in the Ralph Ellison
Papers in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. In this unpublished chapter, the main
character, Woodbridge is an African American homosexual, a teacher warning his student of
the dangers of stepping outside the normative bounds of the college. Self regulation is
promoted as the key to progress, maturity and the rights of citizenship. Woodbridge
represents the nonconformity that educational institutions, along with Americanization
programs and citizen-preparation classes are designed to erase. These narratives, at the
center of Invisible Man, construct African Americans as people who might fit into the
normative bounds of citizenship (55), if they are regulated, either by themselves or by an
outside agency.
“A fundamental feature of canonical formation is their attempt to unify aesthetic and
intellectual culture by reconciling material differences. This fails because material
differences themselves contradict pronouncements of unity.” (55) This false unity forms
the basis of national identification – we are all citizens.
College promises to rid its students of any differences that interfere with their
transformation into acceptable citizens. In particular, the HBCUs (historically Black
colleges and universities) were driven by the unspoken anxieties about their own
non-normativity. (60) Heterosexual regulation is part of the racial regulation of an
African American college student. (62)
Institutions were also used to discipline immigrants, non-Western populations to make them
conform to national ideals, set by the liberal state.
Promises of the benefits of citizenship are in fact techniques of discipline. (65) Self
regulation, which is in fact self negation, is how one is told to achieve progress. The
right to citizenship is achieved through hetero normative regulation.
The concept of diversity arises out of liberal ideology. Rather than “resolving the
inequality that characterizes liberal capitalism,” (71) it works to conceal capitalism’s
economic and social contradictions. The state and capital use class, racial, sexual and
gender difference to exclude people from the rights of citizenship. The “rhetoric of
diversity” (71) conceals that exclusion. It pretends that capitalism can solve its own
problems.
Ferguson cites Foucault in his discussion of the confessional as the way to truth of
sexual practices.
The sociologists turned these interior features of consciousness into exterior features,
using neighborhoods, intimate arrangements, gender formations to “articulate the sexual
truth of racialized subjectivity.” (74)
The moral and subjective life of African Americans was subjected to intense surveillance,
speculation and discussion. They were presented as unpredictable figures in need of moral
regulation by bourgeois culture.
African American middle class persons had to publicly demonstrate compliance with hetero
patriarchal cultural standards in order to prove their distance from lower class African
Americans, as a way of claiming access to citizenship.
African Americans seeking normalization were told by, for example, the Urban League to
exhibit “restrained and disciplined behavior” and make themselves available for
surveillance in the name of recognition and normativity. (75)
“Statistics emerged as apparatus for tallying African American’s cultural dysfunction for
the good of liberal capitalist stability. Statistics were used as a “technology of race.”
(76) Statistics are gained by surveillance, itself defined as scientifically acceptable
and as a socially necessary practice. Housing and neighborhood conditions, illiteracy and
poverty became omens of pathology. For African Americans the body itself became identified
as the site of these pathologies.
“By making the social a sign that had to be disciplined for its racial gender and sexual
truths, it became possible for racialized surveillance to operate as a scientific
discourse.” (78)
The resolution of any ideosyncracies was determined to be through state intervention. This
is tied to an “hysterization” of Black women’s reproductivity. Marriage was the factor
that determined whether reproduction was healthy or a sign of social disintegration.
“Sociology made the production of racial knowledge about African Americans into a
political economy of sexual knowledge in which Blacks could be used to justify the
extension and support of normative presumptions about American citizenship. Sociology
helped to corroborate the expansion of state power by legitimating surveillance as a vital
scientific and social endeavor. During and after World War II canonical sociology would
proceed to crown the United States nation state as the heir to Western rationality,
sketching it against a discursively manufactured African American Other.” (81)
Chapter three sets James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain against Gunnar Myrdal’s An
American Dilemma.
In this post world war II period, cracks were appearing in the monolith presented by the
United States. Women were found more often in the public sphere, not willing to give up
the jobs and freedom they represented. African Americans were stepping up their struggles
for civil rights. National liberation struggles around the world were gaining support.
Social order depends on the suppression of the intersections of race class gender and
sexuality. Baldwin exposes these differences; Myrdal conceals them in his efforts to
portray the United States as the epitome of Western rationality.
Ferguson discusses Max Weber and his theories of rationality. Rationality operates by
regulating sexual expression through hetero patriarchal intimate relations. He discusses
the relation of sex to religion, once very intimate, later divided through the
intervention of the “cultic priesthood” (84) regulating sex through marriage.
Slave emancipation in the United States enacted a demand for sexual regulation. It was a
foremost concern of the Freedman’s Bureau. “Those newly freed African Americans who
rejected marriage and monogamy were imprisoned and/or denied pension payments.” (86)
“Future material contradictions could be displaced onto African American intimate
relations as the state regulated heterosexual marriage, making the husband legally
responsible for the function and care of the household. By doing so, the state could shift
the care of freed slaves from the state and former slavemasters.” (86)
Chapter four discusses the important emergence of Black women’s feminism as a different
way of approaching the particular experiences that are left out of revolutionary
nationalism, marxism and (white) feminism. It shows how these movements, in their
erasures, serve the liberal capitalist state.
Women of color and Black lesbian feminist theorists noted the importance of expressing
difference, and bringing different people together in coalition, without erasing those
differences.
“We may also situate women of color feminism within the limitations of national liberation
movements and at the cusp of global capital’s commodification of third world and immigrant
labor. . . .The discourse of [Moynihan’s] Black matriarchy justified and promoted the
regulatory practices of the state and the exploitative practices of global capital as the
United States nation state began to absorb women of color labor from the United States and
the third world as part of capital’s new regimes of exploitation.” (111)
Women of color feminism emerged “after the period that Immanuel Wallerstein dubs the
“second apotheosis of liberalism,” from 1945-1970, when liberal ideology seemed to have
flourished globally.” (112)
Western nations were turning away from past blatant oppressions, national liberation
movements were coming to power. The United States claimed a commitment to civil rights,
passing a range of civil rights legislation. Revolutionary nationalist organizations, like
the Black Panther Party, rose to challenge the claims of the United States. However, they
maintained an “investment in heteropatriarchy.” (113)
Ferguson develops the idea that the national liberationist drive to “preserve the positive
values” in developing the new nation aligns it with a view that is against the non
normative. It accepts liberal capital’s definitions of normal, in much the same way Marx
uncritically accepted the bourgeois values of his time.
Exploitation and colonialism is seen to disrupt the natural hetero patriarchal status of
the man; to feminize, humiliate and demean him. He can only achieve liberation with the
reestablishment of the natural order. Ferguson quotes Huey Newton: “If he can only
recapture his mind, recapture his balls, then he will lose all fear and will be free to
determine his destiny.” (115)
In fact the revolutionary nationalist movement boxed women into acceptable roles and
erased the homosexual. Because of this denial, women and gay people had to speak for
themselves, began to write their own truths and developed their own movements.
In the United States the emerging (white) women’s movement “engaged in racial and class
exclusions. . normalizing white citizenship; the civil rights movement complied with
liberal exclusions through its sexist ideologies and practices, thereby normalizing hetero
patriarchal citizenship.” (115)
Despite antagonism to liberalism, [revolutionary nationalism] “facilitated liberalism’s
triumph.” (115)
It is the women of color movement that has called out these problems in the movements
against United States domination. They have addressed the convergence of Black power,
civil rights and United States nationalism by making the distinctions of identity that
these other movements have tried to erase. They have challenged state power and the right
of the state to exercise its power. They have claimed the right to identity without making
that identity a condition for coalition or struggle. They have sought to express the truth
of their own lived experience and use these truths to expose the hypocritical nature of
liberal capitalism and the inadequacy of nationalist and liberal movements to combat
capitalism.
The Moynihan Report, “framing itself as a document interested in advancing the gains of
civil rights,” (119) presented the discourse of the Black matriarchy. It claimed that the
fundamental roadblock to the attainment of full civil rights for the African American was
the matriarchal family structure found in the African American community. Civil rights
legislation, job programs and the like all provided opportunity, but did not ensure
results. “Equality of outcome. . .depended on the gender and sexual compliance of African
American culture.” (121)
This “discourse facilitated a conservative blockade of social welfare policy.” “Displacing
the contradictions of capital onto African American female headed households established
the moral grammar and the political practices of the very neoconservative formations that
would roll back the gains of civil rights in the 1980s and 1990s and undermine the well
being of Black poor and working class families.” (124)
Neoconservatives explicitly based their objections to public spending on the discourse of
Black matriarchy, arguing that “welfare queens” were “getting fat off liberal social
policies.” (125)
It is during this period that Black women’s writing and Black lesbian feminist writing in
particular entered the cultural battles. By arguing that “if identity is posed, it must be
constantly contravened,” (127) it exposed the contradictions that nationalism strives to
conceal. “Rather than naming an identity, “lesbian” actually identifies a set of social
relations that point to the instability of heteropatriarchy and to a possible critical
emergence within that instability.” (127)
Black lesbian feminist organizations and activists came from a diverse range of social
movements – women, anti war, civil rights, Black power. The Combahee River Collective,
formed in Boston in 1974 had a notion of Black women as queer, anti racist, feminist and
socialist. The Salsa Soul Sisters Third World Womyn Inc., also formed in 1974 were
comprised of African American, African, Caribbean, Asian American and Latina women. “The
class, national, ethnic, political, sexual and racial diversity that made up Black lesbian
feminist organizations compelled articulations of Black feminism and Black womanhood that
allowed for such multiplicity.” (129) This heterogeneous composition inspired a politics
of difference that could critique nationalist underpinnings of identity. It challenged
racial regulation and gender and sexual normativity. They dealt with the questions of how
an oppressed subject can also be an oppressing subject, often within the difficult context
of coalition work.
Toni Morrison’s Sula was published within the period that occasioned the upward and
downward expansion of Black social structures. The economic changes of the 1970s launched
some African Americans into middle class lifestyles and locked others into poverty. (130)
This was part of a global trend as the economies of highly industrialized countries
shifted toward service economies. The redeployment of manufacturing and office jobs to
less developed areas created a significant increase in low wage jobs, particularly
female-typed jobs in highly developed countries.
The discourse of Black matriarchy helped constitute the upward and downward expansion of
African American social structure as the polarization of hetero normative and non hetero
normative African American social formations. (131) The single Black mother and the Black
lesbian were the female-outsiders as against normative Black middle class women who claim
legitimacy within African American communities. This middle class formation negotiated the
upward and downward expansion by regulating and differentiating the other.
In his conclusion, Ferguson states that “our current moment requires an analysis of social
formations that can illuminate how the intersections of gender, class and sexuality
variegate racial and national formations within the current phase of capital.” (137) The
negation of normativity and nationalism is the condition for the development of critical
knowledge.
National liberation’s investment in hetero patriarchal ideals produced present day
conditions in which advanced capitalism and post colonial formations intersect through
hetero normative regulation through the creation of a regulatory middle class. Post
colonial middle classes have based managerial legitimacy on their ability to deliver
indigenous economies and labor over to the needs of multinational corporations. That
legitimacy cannot be separated from the needs of elites to construct themselves as ideally
hetero sexual and patriarchal, and therefore, fit for governance.
In the United States, the transition from an industrial economy to a post industrial
economy has led to the decline in manufacturing jobs, an increase in service jobs, along
with an increase in private sector and government jobs, which promotes the development of
elite formations among African Americans.
This “new” African American middle class bases its legitimacy on its ideological and often
administrative role as the overseer of queer, poor, HIV-positive, drug addicted persons in
African American communities, becoming the normative antithesis to deviant African
American subjects. (145)
Immigration policy is also being shaped within the context of struggles over queerness,
race and normativity.
I am hoping that the above discussion will inform our politics as we struggle to create a
revolutionary anarchism that can speak to and for all of the “others” labeled as deviant,
criminals, thugs, outside the acceptable boundaries of respectable behavior. We in M-1 are
a “coalition” of women, men, other-gender-identified, gay, straight, other-sexually
identified, all races, religions, ethnic backgrounds, poor and middle class, working class
people. We are united around a common politics and a shared commitment to the
revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. We are against states and governments and all forms
of regulation that limit our development as free creative and expressive persons
determining our own lives and futures.
http://m1aa.org/?p=1105
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Message: 3
This article is written by member, db, a new school teacher and resident in North
Minneapolis. The lessons and realities here come from conversations with hundreds of
residents, students, neighbors, and protesters. As you’ll see the situation in N Mpls
shares much in common with a city near you. ---- The horrific execution of an unarmed,
handcuffed, on the ground black man in front of dozens of witnesses has led to an outburst
of struggle whose fire is not spent and whose meaning is still being defined. In this
article, I will argue that what is at stake in this struggle is the future of North
Minneapolis, which, in miniature, is a question of the future of our cities and of working
class people across the country.
Without going too deeply into one man’s life, we can see the overlapping forces of a city,
state, and nation who choose to disinvest in his neighborhood, a school system that failed
to provide him with sufficient opportunities or political consciousness, a prison system
that would be happy to wastefully consume much of his life, and a status quo that wishes
to see all people like him literally gone from the city, and perhaps the world. By the
hand of a gun. By sentence to a prison cell, and the shift from freedom to actual existing
slavery. By economic disinvestment and displacement, including fleeing the real and
imagined school failures undermined by those seeking to make money off poor areas cleared
of poor people.
Or rather, before addressing Minneapolis in particular, let us note that in all US inner
city neighborhoods today there is a parallel history of:
Decades of deindustrialization, redlining, and disinvestment, such that neighborhoods were
unable to improve themselves as jobs and money were taken away, while the only funding
available was from nonprofit funding streams where the problems and solutions were defined
by the people creating the problem in the first place.
This divestment contributed to the naturalizing of the drug trade as a daily means of
survival, the explosive growth of the prison system as a way to enslave rather than
meaningfully employ vasts sections of the populace, and with it the false dichotomy
between innocent church dwellers and guilty gang members. Such a dichotomy empowers a
narrative that crime is not economic or political, but that it is about controlling
inevitable human evil whether defined as poor, black, Muslim, etc, and that solutions must
be harsher measures and greater police powers, not changes, opportunities, or investments.
We are now seeing a nationwide wave of economic displacement (gentrification), built on
the years of divestment, where developers, investment funds, corporations, and middle
class, typically white, people can buy up properties cheap, raise rents, and make
incredible profits, as well as displacing ‘undesirable’ populations out of the center of
the city, often through school closings and other rigged failures, to provide city with
taxes and ‘green city information economy lifestyles’.
Gentrification: Economic Displacement
In North Minneapolis, families have been getting displaced–largely prior to an upcoming
wave of development–as the increasing shift of suburban and outstate white people to the
city and the gentrification of Uptown and Northeast is creating a funnel effect whereby
lower income people are pushed into new neighborhoods, rents are raised, and more people
are displaced. 50% of people of color now live in the suburbs. A city council member held
a forum on the question of “Who Will Get to Live in Minneapolis by 2020?” which was
largely attended by young college educated white people. Displacement and its responses
then are both rapid and necessary.
We are akin to frogs being cooked, the slow increase of heat prevents us from acting until
we have been eaten–only by creating insistent, militant conflicts over control of space,
price of rents, ownership of the neighborhood, and purpose of development can we alter
this process.
Police Murder and Displacement
In North Minneapolis, the death of working class black people is seen as natural and
inevitable, like their displacement from Minneapolis city limits. Murders are things that
the city “withstands” not feels, or are outraged by, and the shift in Minneapolis,
Chicago, and elsewhere from drug territory based gangs to explosive unfocused clique
violence has almost surely been empowered by police and the city with the shift of their
goals from containment to displacement. Moreover, the significant non-response to the
ongoing deaths of black teenagers, from the slow arrival of police, to the racism of
policing and prisons as a solution to social problems is an extension of and directly
connected to the outright police murder of harmless citizens and the assault on their
terms of credit, schools, consciousness, and more.
Redlining and the Character of Recent Development
The recent, rapid, and soon to be here explosion of white development for middle class
overwhelmingly white people–from breweries and German no chlorine swimming pools to
hometown basketball star invested apartments and previous university and nonprofit service
centers–makes clear the ways in which capital and credit have been intentionally excluded
from black, indigenous, immigrants and others working class living in North Minneapolis,
and about the clear desire to remove them, rather than facilitating the creation of a
viable neighborhood grown from its own impressive cultural, political, and economic
potentials.
North Minneapolis has been defined by the powers that be as a service center, a nonprofit
job hub, a data cow for poverty pimps, a place to stay not to live, even as the community
has consistently overwhelmed narrow definitions, and created life worth celebrating. If
there is money for development it should be developed by, and in the interest of working
class Northside residents.
Schools and Prisons
The state of education on the Northside, while both terrible and terribly slandered is
perhaps best understood by the giant and near empty Harrison/Riverbend complex, where a
fabulous facility has been turned into a prison for a few students most in need of an
education for the world described above. Even as “emotional and behavioral disorder” as a
political special education diagnosis has the financial resources to provide a valuable
education, just not a philosophy of liberation to do so. Similarly, as the death of
working class people is seen as a policing, not an opportunity problem, so is misbehavior
in schools often seen as requiring more punishment and character slander, rather than
addressing what schools are, or are not, bringing to working class communities of color.
Minneapolis Public Schools are divided between a first, highly successful majority middle
to upper class white schools and programs, and a second, significantly less successful
majority working class people of color schools and programs. This second school system is
sabotaged at every turn, through poisonous test prep initiatives that take staff time away
from and distort the purpose of teaching and learning, employee churn due to the threat of
anytime job loss working in a school with “low test scores”, the intentional closing down
of successful initiatives, and the slow delivery of resources or programs or sometimes
just…not renovating a building for a month in the summer.
Sadly, charter schools, even the so called “highly successful” ones are an even worse
failure, despite fuller corporate grant sources and systematically kicking out special ed
children and others who fail to comply with their test score goals. Particularly important
is the way in which these schools are sabotaged by non-organized working conditions that
prevent staff continuity, including lack of staff voice, long hours, highly authoritarian
and often toxic climates, and a much larger percentage of the money coming in going to
people at the top.
On top of this, last time I checked, Minnesota spends roughly 50K per person, per year, to
keep people in cages, much of this money spent to enslave, rather than succeed thousands
of people from North Minneapolis. Like economic displacement and misallocation of
resources, the community needs to seize control of our schools and transform them, engage
in militant direct action to change the course of history our schools and prisons, and
demand control over, more, and better use of resources supposedly tied to community
safety, education, and well-being.
What is Needed: Organized Community Self Defense and Mass Action
It is in this context the call for #Justice4Jamar must include but go beyond prosecuting
the police officers that shot him, and the mass disruptive action that will require.
We must understand this fight as being intimately connected with and having the
possibility of connecting and creating both organized working class community self defense
via community patrols, block, workplace, school, or church committees–to protect against
the police and anti-social violence, individual instances of economic displacement,
miseducation and the misjustice, and to train ourselves to succeed at doing so–to united
fronts for community wide mass actions against injustice and for rent control, seizing of
vacant, dormant, or withheld property for community use, taking control of our schools and
their hiring and curriculum, demanding or taking access to credit and the direction of
development from middle class white development for middle class white people to community
development for community people.
Doing so must intentionally name and avoid the pitfalls of being controlled by the
interests of professional middle class leadership, black or otherwise, whose interests are
not the communities’–be they nonprofit leaders, landlords, pastors, and so on.
Nor should we believe the mechanisms the system sets up to control dissent–electoralism,
public comment meetings, system-funded nonprofits, university experts, polite lobbying,
and so on–will be sufficient. This should not discount the need to monitor or disrupt such
sites to push our agenda and the importance of well organized united fronts that can draw
on the talents, connections, and resources of all people that understand their side and
place in the struggle.
That said, our core power is our ability to disrupt the system that relies on our silent
consent–on the streets, neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and prisons–and the ways in
which such sites are run by or require us and should therefore be under our control and
run in our interest. It is only through such struggles that we can create the a truly
vibrant multi-cultural “one Minneapolis” and the revolutionary consciousness needed to
bring changes to our communities and work for the overthrow of this violent system.
The power needed to address or defend our daily needs is the same power that can create
build a revolutionary movement for freedom that serves both our daily needs and glorious
human potentials. For freedom, justice, and equality! For anarchy!
http://m1aa.org/?p=1114
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