Originally published in volume 10, issue 1 of Anathema: A Philadelphia Anarchist Periodical. Hyperlinks have been added to some sources mentioned in the original text.
I read a report-back from some Black anarchists recently about the Eddie Izirrary riots. While I had some disagreements with that text, I thought it was interesting how they critiqued the W.E.B. DuBois Movement School's statement. I decided to do a deeper dive. The W.E.B. DuBois Movement School for Abolition and Reconstruction sounded cool to me. From the name, it is clear that they root themselves in the Black Radical Tradition as they write about "abolition" and "reconstruction." That's my tradition. I love Black Reconstruction. The first time I read that book, it blew my mind. However, after reading their website, I was deeply unimpressed especially as it was clear that their politics were reflective of a tendency with the Black liberation movement that comrades and I have been critiquing for years. For this essay, I am going to critique their project and talk about what that means in a broader sense for the broader Black left and those who are non-black but see themselves aligned with the Black liberation movement.
On Criticism
Why are you doing this, naysayers will ask? Why are you dividing our movement? Why don't you join the project and offer internal criticism?
Well, there's a couple of a reasons. As a New Afrikan communist-anarchist, I was encouraged to see a project coming about that seemed to be mostly (Geo Maher is a whole white man) Black-led and orientated to DuBois, a scholar who has deeply impacted my own way of thought. However, unfortunately, from glancing at the website the W.E.B. DuBois Movement school seems to have many of the same problems that has plagued the Black Left and broader social movements since the 60s.
Despite this, I often have a reluctance to critique projects such as the W.E.B. DuBois School because I tend to be excited when there are projects that are mostly Black and draw from a tradition I consider to be my own. Despite this, the time for in-house critiques is over. The Black liberation movement has splintered into the black nonprofiteers, the black authoritarians and isolated few of us black revolutionaries who continue to stumble, walk and run alongside the isolated Black masses or on our own. I think that Black anarchists and militants should try to intervene from the outside of these spaces that capture our time and energy while building our own thing. Learning from elders such as Ashanti Alston and Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin, who were involved in the nonprofit sphere and black authoritarian spaces has made me understand that generally intervening in those spaces has been a waste of our time for Black anarchists over the past 30 years.
To make my position completely clear, I am someone who aspires to an anarchist movement that is not plagued by whiteness, petty bourgeois sub-cultural politics, ageism and various other problems. I don't want to be accused of being a critic of Black leftists while not critiquing the mostly White anarchist movement. To be completely clear, I believe that the ONLY WAY for anarchism as a movement in the United States to have any teeth, is for it to unify with the black liberation movement. That's why I personally continue to pay attention (even if it's critical) to Black leftist projects like the W.E.B. DuBois Movement for Abolition and Reconstruction while many of my Black anarchist comrades just keep it pushing. These projects despite my critiques represent an earnest and important attempt to engage with the Black Radical Tradition which is deeply important in my view. But the Black Radical Tradition has been full of debates from the debates between Garvey and DuBois to the debates between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Sanyika Shakur used to roast the New Afrikan BPP. Hell, even Cedric Robinson wrote critiques of the Nation of Islam. Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin wrote critiques of Black socialist groups in Atlanta. There's a long history of this. The Black Left needs to be more okay with political differences and critique. Black leftists have constantly been in debates with one another. We flex our intellectual muscles and sharpen our praxis through critique.
What does Reconstruction mean to ya'll?
Aight, time to go in. Let's start with this quote from the website.
This we know more clearly today than ever before: that there can be no true abolition without reconstruction. We cannot hope to tear down oppressive, carceral institutions without radically rethinking—and rebuilding—the violently racist and patriarchal capitalist world that called them into being.
Reconstruction sounds nice. It does. But I don't understand how we even talking about Reconstruction when we're nowhere close to tearing down any sort of carceral or oppressive institutions. It's cool to do conjecture about the need for Reconstruction in the future but especially as organizers who claim to be "deeply rooted in local struggles" the idea that especially here in Philadelphia that we're anywhere close to destroying carceral institutions is honestly a big joke. The police continue to murder Black folks with impunity, Black people continue to be incarcerated, the gentrifiers continue to turn Philadelphia into the 6th borough of their NYC gentrification project. We are nowhere close to any sorta abolition. Why then, do folks like the Abolition school feel the need to "rethink" and "rebuild" when we are nowhere close to destruction of the violently racist and patriarchal capitalist world? Well, the reason is simple. The emphasis on "rebuilding" and "rethinking" is a way for folks in the project to distance themselves from the actual revolutionary activity that is happening when Black youth fight the police and destroy property. This places the project as the managers of the revolution "teaching and educating the masses" rather than building alongside and learning from them in their process of destroying the world. Furthermore, I think these desires for "rethinking and rebuilding" are ultimately utopian in their aims.
Phil Neel discusses this in his recent Endnotes text "Forest and Factory." I think we need (especially as anarchists) to let go of trying to prefigure any sort of revolutionary society when we are so utterly immersed within capitalist realism. As Neel describes,
We would instead emphasize that a communist revolution is, fundamentally, an anthropological revolution. This means that it is genuinely difficult to understand what a better world would look like at the quotidian level, because such a world would also reshape those who inhabit it. The identifiable material and social prerequisites of this world (such as and end to scarcity in all essentials, ecological rehabilitation, and non-domination) would enable the blooming of new cultures and lifeways that are difficult or impossible for us to fully imagine.
Fundamentally for me, I think that if we understand revolution as anthropological then the idea of "rebuilding" or "re-envisioning" as the primary work of the Left is an authoritarian project. As subjects thoroughly immersed in capitalism, the idea that small groups of leftists can simply "rethink" capitalism is ridiculous and naive. Revolution isn't made by small groups of people, it is made by the self-activity of the oppressed and exploited. By millions of people. Revolutionaries ourselves are only a small segment of that group of people so to hoist all of the "rethinking" as the primary purpose of a revolutionary education project is wack. Rather our goal should be study the self-activity of masses themselves.
I got another beef with their website that I'm gonna point to cause I feel like it's an ahistorical claim.
This is the lesson of 150 years of US history, in which slavery was mostly abolished through the courageous action of enslaved people and abolitionist militants, but after which little else changed. Capitalist exploitation and racist fear conspired to build new institutions to replace the old, from convict leasing to Jim Crow, segregation, hyper-policing and mass incarceration.
It seems a bit bizarre and lowkey wrong to point to the failure of the slavery abolition movement to completely transform society due to people not "radically rethinking" as the website implies. In fact, the real reason that Reconstruction did not succeed was due in many ways to the white counter-revolution that murdered countless Black people across the South as well as the treachery of the federal government. It wasn't because there was a lack of "rethinking or rebuilding"...in fact the Black people who had quite literally built America were in the process of building a new society and were instead crushed by white counter-revolution. DuBois describes various new forms of social organization that were developed during Reconstruction by Black freedmen. It is honestly disrespectful to Black history when paramilitary white groups like the Klan working in a cross alliance with the Planter class actively repressed Black people. But again, the invocation of DuBois and the broader Black historical lineage is simply a rhetorical point, not a serious engagement with what his work means in our current context. Essentially, the use of DuBois and other Black revolutionaries is just window-dressing for more boring activist subculture with authoritarian impulses.
Failures and Cowardice of Vanguards
This leads into a quote from a lesser known Black revolutionary Kimathi Mohammed about how organization relates to spontaneity. Kimathi Mohammed wrote a great little book called "Organization and Spontaneity" that I really like. I think his book helps elucidate the failings of groups like The W.E.B. DuBois Movement School when it comes to real struggle.
The most serious mistake every political leader has made is not confiding in the masses. Instead they have placed their confidence in organization. But the type of organization that is essential for a transformation of any society can only be created through Spontaneity. That is, the people at the point of production and the exchange process are the only ones who can straighten out the mess created by the capitalist mode of production. They are the only ones that can organize a new society.
- Kiamathi Mohammed
This quote underlies the politics inherent in the W.E.B. DuBois Movement school in Philly. The implication in their work is the masses are incapable of fighting or transforming the world on their own terms without the proper guidance. Their whole premise of political education is based upon the idea that "political education" is lacking in Philly's movements. While I'm in favor of people reading (I've been involved in more reading groups than I can count), we learn how to act through acting. Ideally, we act alongside the most oppressed in their struggles when they decide to fight. I am in agreement with Kiamathi Mohammed, the most important type of organization that transforms society is spontaneity. The only ones who can create a new society are the ones who are currently trying to destroy it.
Community Organizing is not Revolutionary Organizing
But well, a naysayer would say, we at the Abolition School do act alongside the masses. We study the world to change it they would say. Well how does the W.E.B. DuBois movement school think about working alongside the masses and the most oppressed?
Unfortunately, the way they think about struggle alongside the masses is through the lens of community based activist campaigns as opposed to non-activist mediated struggle such as riots or blockades. This is indicative of the different groups involved in the initial meetup that was reported on the website. They reference a couple different organizations including Sunrise Movement, Students for the Preservation of Chinatown, and The People's UC Townhomes. These formations are all plagued by the activist campaign-based model. In Movement for No Society, this model is critiqued in a good way.
The key problem with the activist campaign model is that its strategy is to build mass support, which means the organizers are always attempting to adapt their ideas and tactics to a public audience that they imagine to be less radical. Ultimately, we have little control over how an anti-authoritarian project is being represented by people and institutions with power, since most of those people that the campaign wants to appeal to, including much of the public, have interests that are ultimately antagonistic to ours. But for activists, caring about a campaign's image inevitably becomes a form of self-imposed control, constraining what activists are willing to do or talk about. Developing a mass social movement becomes the goal, rather than a strategy.
Despite this strategy's flaws, today when most people think of resistance, they think of a mass movement campaign that makes demands of our authoritarian overlords. The idea that other forms of resistance are possible — and are happening everywhere — is being erased from public memory.
This is important. The three organizations (Sunrise Movement, Students for the Preservation of Chinatown, and The People's UC Townhomes) previously all follow this model described in the above quotation. They remain struggles that mostly involve a small activist clique that tends to orient its "radical activity" through protests, speeches, and occasionally non-violent direct action such as sit ins or something. Mostly student-based in the case of all three. And student-led definitely in the case of the first two. Students, while marginalized in some ways, are not the most oppressed group of people. Anarchists like me are opposed to the management of struggle by organizers especially by those who claim to have more education. We believe that organization is ultimately about the ability to act together to take action which often runs counter to the more traditional activist/organizer approaches.
On the Qualitative Differences Internal to the Black Struggle
However, the naysayers will shout, The People's UC Townhomes struggle is black-led, how can you critique that? Well, our friends who wrote the campaign based strategy critique have an answer for that as well.
In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, many anarchists have chosen an activist strategy of community organizing and reform, usually following the self-appointed leaders of marginalized communities. Many bank on building a mass movement, which has involved them policing the initiatives of more conflictual anarchists, refusing to explain, engage with or otherwise support the insurrectionary activities that have become more prevalent in this city over the past few years. As we have discussed, even if some radicals did wish to support activities that the state deems illegal, their organizations are structurally positioned so that they genuinely cannot encourage such activities without losing the legitimacy on which their whole strategy is based.
- from Movement for No Society
This is important. Many activists and radicals especially those claiming to support Black liberation will tout the importance of "black-led" struggles as the key to a mass movement. While I do not disagree with the importance of Black-led struggles, not all Black-led struggles have the same politics. Black people are not a monolith as it happens. A good example of this is the George Floyd uprising as well as the Eddie Izizarry looting on September 26th. In those uprisings, large numbers of people fought the police or attacked capital. These actions were illegal and insurrectionary. These uprisings were qualitatively different from the UC Townhomes struggle in how people acted and what type of people those struggles attracted. Many of the people who fought in the uprising were Black. In fact, the W.E.B. DuBois website literally promotes a black-led militant struggle with the photo of a burning precinct in Minneapolis. But it contradicts itself while promoting safe reformist struggles such as the People's UC Townhomes that are legible for middle-class activists. It is critical to understand the qualitative differences in tactics between the activist campaigns (even if they are led by Black people) and Black uprisings where proletarians fight the state and capital. Again, it's okay if people use different tactics but as an anarchist and revolutionary, I am wholly uninterested in reformist struggles without a militant capacity when it's clear that other segments of the Black working class in Philadelphia are capable of fighting in more militant ways. I'll refer back to Phil Neel again in his recent interview published on Brooklyn Rail.
So the most basic precondition is that you absolutely have to be involved in those major events of mass politics that exceed the status quo. If you consider yourself a communist (or a socialist or an anarchist or whatever) you can't fucking stay home and do nothing when there's a big riot or a major strike in your city, posting "smart" commentary about it online afterwards. Obviously, we're all going to have certain limits of safety, ability, and responsibility (to our kids, our families, our friends, etc.) when it comes to such things, and I'm not saying you need to go and do something that's going to get you arrested. Just that you have to show up if you can and, if you can't, you have to be supportive and open to what is happening, understanding that it will be messy and ugly at times. And the point is not just to physically be present and observe or to "support" in the sense of posting a BLM hashtag on your Instagram, but to materially support those uncontrollable and excessive elements that make the whole thing threatening in the first place, rather than trying to rein these things in—so you can't show up and try to lead a fucking march to city hall when people have just been burning police stations and looting the shopping district, because even though you may think that you're trying to push the movement to take a step forward in political awareness, you're actually standing in front of it and pushing it backwards in the more important practical sense, which then means that you are, in fact, pushing it backward politically as well
(Neel 2023).
Again, I would place the W.E.B. DuBois School and most of the Black left in Philadelphia within the second group of people that Neel describes in this text. This is most clearly indicated by how these Black leftist forces were completely absent during the most recent mass Black rebellion in late 2023. This is embarrassing to me as a black revolutionary that most of our organizations are irrelevant to the Black rebellion. But again, the dominant academic, vanguardist and careerist orientation of these leftists makes them unwilling and unable to interact with the "uncontrollable and excessive" elements that are leading the Black revolt. By highlighting the work of small activist organizations rather than studying the methods and character of mass revolts, these Black leftist groups show their irrelevance to the broader social struggle. And to be quite honest, these groups are incapable of interacting with the "uncontrollable and excessive elements" because if they were involved in those struggles, they'd realize broadly their own irrelevance so it is easier and safer to stay within an activist framework that caters largely to college students and academics.
In Closing
I often find myself at odds (in jest most of the time) with many of my comrades as someone who locates themselves within the insurrectionary anarchist milieu when it comes to the question of organizing. So on the face of things, a movement school is something that I should agree with. Unfortunately, the Movement school doesn't seem to be anything new. While political education is critical, simply replicating the same boring activist orientated struggles as your political conclusion from study isn't interesting at all. I hope we can develop political education structures that instead try to focus upon teaching people how to think and how to act in ways that don't replicate the activist logics mentioned earlier.
The issues I've discussed here in this article, while specific to a Black Philly activist subculture, need to be understood as a broader problem as it relates to the Black Left as it exists across the country. The Black Left is largely academic, activist oriented, and career focused. These qualities alongside their cowardice is why they remain irrelevant to the real movement to abolish the present state of things.
We learn how to act by acting. Anarchists in Philly and around the country have been doing this for a while. We train, we fight, we study and we support our people who get locked up. I think there's a lot of problems with the anarchist milieu but labeling the anarchist scene as "white" or "sub-cultural" or "overly critical" is honestly corny and increasingly untrue. I also don't think the Black Left which is deeply wedded (apart from the Black nationalists) to multi-racial organizing has ANY place to speak on subcultural politics that cater to whites or Non-Black POC. However, I think anarchists in Philly (and across the country) could stand to work more on building deeper connections between the Black liberation movement. Some of the work that RAM-Philly did back in 2019 was attempting that. Before they folded, the organization SM28 pushed the perspective that Black liberation was the vanguard struggle. Not vanguard in the authoritarian sense but in the sense that Black struggle was the leading force for resistance movements in the United States. Despite my reluctance about the DuBois School, I think a renewal in anarchist study groups that provide alternatives to spaces like the DuBois School is important so we can provide frameworks around Black liberation that aren't rooted in an activist nonprofit orientation. And so we can add to the "terrible revolts" as the comrades in the Eddie Izizarry text discuss.
Finally, one last quote from Phil Neel.
Communism is not the loving daydream of a better world, then, but something cultivated first from rage at what the world is not. We do not glimpse it. We feel it in moments of fever—of cities burning, of order breaking down, of loved ones dying slow and unremarkable deaths...Because a better world is not built backwards from the future but from where we stand now, at the peak of the mountain of bones that constitutes the pre-history of the human species.
As DuBois documents in Black Reconstruction, the former slaves built the world in the South that they desired after the Black General Strike, we must build the world we want from where we stand now. But that cannot begin if we believe that revolution occurs through speeches, book talks and panels. It is only through acting that we become revolutionary. Regardless of how much Fanon, CLR James or DuBois books you read, those unwilling to act courageously alongside the oppressed will be relegated to the dustbins of history.
Suggestions for reading:
Spontaneity and Organization by Kiamathi Mohammed1 (Please actually read it cause so many of yall dont read anything in the 60s that wasn't Huey Newton)
The Black Jacobins by CLR James
Black Movements in America by Cedric Robinson (whole text is dope)
Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson (actually read it, don't just use Black Radical Tradition out of context)
Movement for No Society1 (mostly the chapters on Black Struggle and Activism, I'm less into some of the other stuff)
Maroon The Implacable (Philly classic)
Dreams of Black Revolt (another banger)