Blackness, Anarchism, and Social Ecology
On 13 October 2018, prolific author and activist Modibo Kadalie participated in a public discussion with William C. Anderson, co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press, 2018). This community conversation occurred at the third annual Atlanta Radical Book Fair, which was held at the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Cublaure and History. The two speakers presented their independent research and discussed the ecological aspects of Black struggle against capitalism and state power throughout history and into the present day. The conversation was led and moderated by Clara Mejia-Gamboa. Kadalie’s contributions to that discussion are transcribed below.
Greetings to you all. I’m so glad that you’re here at the Atlanta Radical Book Fair. This is a very important event. It’s more important than what goes on at church or at school, because here we have freely come together to ask and answer questions that concern us all and we have committed ourselves to sitting down and reading about them. You have got to put in the “butt-time”—you need to sit down and read if you want to answer these questions.
I want to thank all the organizers for inviting me back, including a former professional football player turned librarian named Morris Gardner, who heads the programming division here at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. I think this facility could eventually be as important as the Schaumberg Library in New York through Morris’s leadership and extensive outreach efforts. Please do not hesitate to volunteer some time at the library to help Morris out. He is a personal hero of mine. I usually don’t yenerate individual people at all, but Morris Gardner is very special.
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The topic of this conversation is the intersection of Blackness, anarchism, and social ecology and I want to make sure that you can understand the connection between these three topics—the state.
When I’m talking about the state, I don’t mean just the central apparatus of the government, but I’m talking about the police, the education system, and all the institutions and systems that control us,
whether physically by coercive measures or mentally through these backward educational institutions. Of course there is the TV as well, which filters discourse through the politics of the Republican and Democratic parties and then we have to listen to these people talk all day long about nothing [audience laughter].
I want to challenge the concept of the nation-state in a way that everyone can understand without belaboring the issue: it is mathematically absurd that approximately five hundred people in Washington, D.C. can make laws for over 350 million people in the United States. To make matters worse, these five hundred people are already hand-picked by the major capitalists anyway and the political discourse is channeled through their interests.
With that in mind, I want to briefly define anarchism, because I know some of you have a negative view of it, just like I did once. But when these capitalists and politicians tell me something is bad, evil, or strange, then I know I’m looking at something really good, because I can see who is trying to turn me away from it.
Anarchism is the idea that the state, or any type of coercive authority from the top down, is the enemy of ordinary people and is the source of all social violence, human against human, that we see in the world today, Nation-states are the enemy of social progress. That’s why I don’t consider myself a citizen of the United States. I have a passport—that’s all I want from this country [audience laughs].
Nation-states have armies. They fight one another all the time and they have us fighting one another. They would try to make me think that I had an enemy on the streets of Saigon, who was just trying to make a living the same as I am.
Intellectually, nation-states are very hard to overcome because their logic so thoroughly permeates our identities. That’s why they want us to stand when they play the “Star-Spangled Banana” [audience laughs]. They want us to pay homage to all of this symbolism so that they can get inside our heads. Then they’ll declare war someplace like Iraq and ordinary people will say things like “We are in Iraq.” No, you’re not in Iraq unless you actually went there. The policy makers and lawgivers declare these wars and make these laws, not you or me. We need to stop identifying ourselves with these politicians and their destructive policies.
Now, I want to address today’s most vital topic, social ecology, which generally refers to the relationship that human society shares with the rest of the natural world. Understanding this relationship is the most critically important question that a human being can ask today, since it should be obvious to all of us by now that the intensity of storms, especially hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, has dramatically increased in recent years due to seawater warming. This is a direct result of human social inequality and an economic and industrial system that pollutes the water and air.
In order to overcome these enormous social and ecological challenges, we need to understand that humans have always resisted oppression and exploitation. People have always sought escape from empire, whether it’s the Roman empire or the older Greek city-states, or somewhere else. Historians write about such places, but this is not where history occurs. Rather, history occurs in the little corners and peripheral places where people try to create their own societies where they can manage their own lives, working things out together amongst themselves, face to face.
In the eighteenth century, the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina were filled with plantations where enslaved African people were forced to produce monocrops like rice for international trade and the white landowner’s profit. However, there were also enslaved people who ran away from the plantations. They emancipated themselves and founded their own communities in places like Fort Mosé, just outside of St. Augustine, Florida.
Similarly, in the Mississippi Valley around the year 1150 CE. well before European colonization, there was a place called Cahokia. This was a massive hierarchical state that was later abandoned sometime in its hictory [circa 1350 CE]. Archeologists, anthropologists, and historians who research this site are all interested in what was happening inside that state, its particular forms of statecraft. I don’t really give a damn about Cahokia’s statecraft, but I’m very interested in the stories of the people who left that
place and sought freedom elsewhere.
I hope that my Pan-Africanist comrades will also remember that the empires of Mali, Songhay, and the Kingdom of Ghana were oppressive, too. If you look at the history of West Africa, you can see that people migrated away from those centers of power in wave after wave over time toward the Atlantic coast.
These examples help us to investigate how humans throughout history have formed societies where they can live in greater harmony with one another and, in so doing, live in greater harmony with the natural world. Human society is natural. It must be studied and understood as an aspect of nature so that we can begin to create the type of society an aspect wherein everyone’s needs are provided for. It can be done, but we must first rethink how we relate to the natural world. That doesn’t mean reiecting technology. Rather, it’s important to understand that we are all, each of us, scientists and the task of science should be to integrate technology into society in such a way that provides for an ecologically sound world, a world in which we won’t be shooting at one another all the time. A world without these giant prisons.
Every ecological crisis is caused by an underpinning social crisis. If it wasn’t for the pollution of the atmosphere and the oceans, which has been directly caused by capitalist industry and the private ownership of property for a wealthy minority—the British Petroleum Company for example—we would not be in the dire situation in which we find our selves today. The environment is being degraded at a rapid pace and we are reaching a tipping point, but you and I as individuals did not create this problem. The rulers of society, the state and capitalist powers, caused this disaster for their own profit. It’s an ongoing struggle, but we really must stop this disaster before it’s too late.
Anarchist writer and activist Cindy Milstein was present in the audience and asked the panelists to offer some tangible examples of mutual aid in moments of disaster relief. Kadalie’s response is transcribed below.
People helping one another is not a new phenomenon at all. There are many examples of ordinary people supporting each other in times of crisis throughout history. Our task is to learn from what people do in those moments, regardless of how the state labels them. For example, if some one in New Orleans in the aftermath of a hurricane knows where to find diapers and takes them from a vacant store and helps distribute them to parents in need, the state calls that person a looter, but
he is doing exactly what he’s supposed to be doing in that situation.
I was living in Canada while the Detroit Rebellion was going on in 1967. I couldn’t get into Detroit while the rebellion was happening, but afterward I went to visit my cousin there. He said that the boys in the community looted the Safeway grocery store in his neighborhood. I asked him, “What exactly did they do?”
He told me they broke into the store and within two hours they had taken all of the food out and had distributed it to all of the elderly people in the community.
We have to learn from these moments and examples of mutual aid in practice. This is also why history needs to be rewritten to center such efforts as part of the broader movement for human freedom that contin ues from one generation to the next.
In these disasters, people disregard the state and find creative ways to be accountable to one another, but this mutual aid does not only exist between humans and other humans, it also extends to the natural world. We have to stop thinking of nature in terms of resources that can be extracted and allocated to various human interests. Instead, we need to learn from some of the Indigenous relationships to ecology that have been overlooked and then allow our societies and the planet to teach us how to
move forward.
We also have to fight these charismatic leaders in our movements who want us to follow them, just like we have to fight authoritarian rulers and the people they put into power. We have to open up our local institutions and forums so that everyone has something to say, but also so that everyone can take responsibility for what goes on in their community.
If you find yourself in an organization where one charismatic leader is telling everybody what to do, you are wasting your time. You might as well go home. If there is no direct democracy in a movement, then you can’t address whatever problems may arise. You have to insist upon that accountability every step of the way, but it can be difficult because that means that everyone in the organization must take equal responsibility for the work they are trying to accomplish.
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