Juneteenth [is] widely celebrated as Freedom Day. The day commemorates June 19, 1865, when thousands of enslaved Africans held captive on plantations, farms, and other (stolen) land in Galveston, Texas, were finally emancipated two and a half years after January 1, 1863, the effective date of the Emancipation Proclamation and several months after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, intended to abolish slavery. This delay in emancipating enslaved people, despite the much-lauded legal proclamation, epitomizes the use of forced waiting as a means of temporal oppression on Black lives.
[On] June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, the arrival of Union general Granger and his troops brought the overdue news that the Civil War had been over for more than two months and that enslaved people were in fact free, had been legally free for nearly three years. The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation had declared all slaves in Confederate-held territory to be free, including Texas.
However, enslavers had increasingly expanded their operations, beginning with the prohibition of the international slave trade in 1808. The domestic trade in the United States began to grow at that time, and Texas became a key destination in this internal market, due largely to its agricultural potential. Texas offered vast tracts of fertile land suitable for cotton, which was the most profitable cash crop of the time and heavily dependent on slave labor. The promise of high cotton profits incentivized the relocation of slaveholders to Texas. This agricultural expansion directly contributed to the increase in the enslaved population as slaveholders brought enslaved people with them or purchased more upon arrival to work the land. For instance, one document reveals that Wharton County, Texas, had a population that included 2,798 enslaved individuals by a certain period, illustrating the significant presence and reliance on enslaved labor in the state.
Texas was admitted to the Union as a slave state in 1845. This legal status made it an even more attractive destination for slaveholders from the older slave states. Later, Texas’s 1861 Confederate constitution prohibiting manumission would further contribute to the expansion of slavery operations, with enforcement nearly non-existent in the state due to the low Union army presence, in part because it had been the most remote state in the Confederacy. As the Civil War progressed, many slaveholders from states more directly impacted by the conflict sought to move their slaves and operations to Texas to avoid Union raids and the increasing likelihood of emancipation. This migration was a way for slaveholders to preserve their way of life and their economic investments in slavery.
For those enslaved in Texas, this period of waiting for freedom well beyond the policy date of January 1, 1863, created an information paradox where, though they were technically emancipated by the proclamation, enslaved people were technically “un-informed” of that emancipation by the Western understanding of the term (informed: 1540s, “current in information”), amplifying the power dynamics of their captivity.
But information still flowed, even under the crushing weight of slavery. There were many other means by which enslaved people collected and disseminated information among themselves and with distant communities that evaded the enslavers’ awareness. An excerpt from Elizabeth Ross Hite’s recollections of enslavement affirmed the existence of a clandestine information network: “News? We carried news by stealin’ off. Shucks, we knew ev’rything de master talked er bout. De house girl would tell us and would pass it er round.” Another account by a woman known as Aunt Aggy alluded to kinds of knowledge that evaded conventional knowledge. “You t’inks I’m mistaken, honey! But I knows t’ings dat de wite folks wid all dar larnin’ nebber fin’s out, an’ nebber sarches fo’ nudder.” These accounts reveal that being “informed” was a fraught status for enslaved people, laden with the psychological and emotional burdens of knowing freedom was possible yet out of reach and of knowing what is necessary to know to minimize harm, even before escape. Under slavery, being informed was not solely about knowing facts but about using this knowledge to gain agency and the capacity, ability, and power to act on that knowledge.
Even with modes of communication outlawed, such as writing, drumming, and their own languages, enslaved Black people invented other methods to share information via informal networks. Work songs and field songs on plantations frequently encoded spatial and temporal markers in their lyrics. In addition to serving as technologies to address physical isolation from each other, across different areas of large plantations or with nearby plantations, to synchronize communal work, and to make time pass, these songs, cries, calls, and hollers ultimately communicated layered temporal information across multiple scales of time, in the immediate (there, in the fields) and into the future (plans for meeting or routes of escape).
In the context of the oral traditions (songs, folk tales, and other spoken word) of Black people, sounds as distinct events creating their own disturbances in space-time gain added significance, where verbal articulation of a thought is inseparable from action, and where “ideas and words are seen as part of the same reality as the events to which they refer.” Levine gives the example of the Ashanti culture, where a person who speaks about having a dream of cheating on a partner may be punished to the same extent as a person who actually cheats. In these traditions, “the medium and the message intermesh in crucial ways” in which the “dynamic living quality of the spoken word was conducive to the sense of sacred space and time characteristics of Africans and Afro-Americans in slavery.” Singing or narrating the stories of the Bible and relating them orally to dream events and visions, for example, gave them a substance and dynamism that made the stories lifelike and gave the past a contemporaneity and significance absent from the European worldview, with its “highly segmented and compartmentalized sense of time” and its predominance of the written word on an “abstracted and detached printed page,” which diluted the notions of the past. Words are seen as having the ability to manifest or bring forth different times and realities in Afrodiasporic Traditions.
The delayed report to enslaved peoples in Texas of their legal freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation and of the Civil War’s end illustrates the power of the control of information. The awareness that enslavers had of these world-transformative events, systemically kept from those they exploited, through the suppression of literacy and communication, enabled their arbitrary manipulation of waiting time in order to eke out the maximum economic benefit. The time that elapsed between the events following the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War, and the enforcement of the outcomes through the order delivered by General Granger were the result of the deliberate obstruction of information. Even when information couldn’t be manipulated and when their captives were aware, violence, force, and time itself were used to keep Black people enslaved.
Such management strategies by the slave-owning class undermined the capacity of the enslaved population to act collectively and decisively on their own behalf. This uniquely oppressive form of temporal subjugation shackled their claim to their freedom for more than two years. The strategic manipulation of waiting time by enslavers exposed the harsh reality that even awareness did not guarantee liberation. Freedom from bondage, and the end of white terrorism via slavery, was declared “fact” in a written document, which stated that “all persons held as slaves… shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”
However, Black people still had to wait for their actual freedom. They had to wait for the violence of war to end, wait for the master’s clock to strike midnight on January 1, wait for Lincoln to sign the proclamation, wait for the news to travel, wait for the sun to rise on June 19, wait to escape, wait for General Granger to leave Louisiana and march upon Galveston with his troops, then wait for him to read General Order No. 3. All of this before liberation could become “fact” and before freedom could become “truth.”
Enslaved Africans traversed time and space to liberate one another long before the date on the Emancipation Proclamation—during the time of the Civil War and after the time of so-called freedom. They ingeniously employed “waiting time” and communication in codes, symbols, songs, chants, and other means of obscuring the message—a social network relying on Afrodiasporic technologies their white colonialist human traffickers thought they had stripped them of. This network thrived on the principles of the Black folk narrative, carrying with them the weight of fact, history, and myth simultaneously. These narratives operated within a unique temporal dimension, one where the past, present, and future were interwoven into a collective memory and aspiration for true liberation.
A Continuous Struggle is the long-awaited biography of the revolutionary political prisoner who laid the foundation for contemporary abolitionist struggles and Black anarchism.
“I’ve been waiting for years for a biography of Martin Sostre worthy of its subject. This is it. Garrett Felber tells an engrossing story of a complex and committed man who dedicated his life to the struggle for liberation of the oppressed with depth and revolutionary love. A new generation will now get to know someone whose contributions have made all our lives more possible. A Continuous Struggle will be a mainstay on my shelf and my book recommendations.” —Mariame Kaba
Details and RSVP/ticketing links for all release events will be added below as they are available.
A Continuous Struggle Tour:
Wednesday, April 30th | 5PM ET / 2PM PT Haymarket Books Virtual Event Garrett Felber in conversation with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. RSVP here.
Tuesday, May 6th | 7PM NYC @ Maysles Documentary Center Screening of “Frame-up! The Imprisonment of Martin Sostre” (Pacific Street Films, 1974) Followed by Garrett Felber in conversation with Derecka Purnell & Kazembe Balagun. Tickets here.
Wednesday, May 7th | 6PM Orange, NJ @ The HUUB Screening of “Frame-up! The Imprisonment of Martin Sostre” (Pacific Street Films, 1974) Followed by a conversation with Garrett Felber and others, in remembrance of Sandy Shevack. RSVP here.
Thursday, May 8th | 7PM Rochester, NY @ Akimbo Books Screening of “Frame-up! The Imprisonment of Martin Sostre” (Pacific Street Films, 1974) Followed by Garrett Felber in conversation with Jose DiLenola & Jalil Muntaqim. Details here.
Friday, May 9th | 7PM Buffalo, NY @ Burning Books Garrett Felber in conversation with Sostre’s comrades Geraldine Pointer, Karima Amin, & Jerry Ross. RSVP here.
Saturday, May 10th | 7PM Toronto @ Another Story Garrett Felber in conversation with Robyn Maynard. Register here.
Tuesday, May 20th | 7PM ET / 4pm ET Firestorm Co-op Virtual Event Garrett Felber in conversation with William C. Anderson & Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin. Register here.
Wednesday, May 21st | 7PM Portland, OR @ Powells Garrett Felber in conversation with Dean Spade. Details here.
Saturday, May 31st | 12:30PM Berkeley, CA @ Bay Area Book Festival “Unyielding Resistance: Perspectives on Political Prisoners and the Lifelong Pursuit of Freedom” with Garrett Felber, Sharon Shoatz, & Russell Shoatz III, moderated by Claude Marks. Details here.
Saturday, June 7th | 7PM Seattle @ Ellliott Bay Book Company Garrett Felber in conversation with M. Aziz. Details here.
Saturday, July 19th | 6PM Chicago @ Pilsen Community Books Garrett Felber in conversation with Destine Phillips & Denzel Burke of REAL. Details here.
A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
Why do some processes—like aging, birth, and car crashes—occur in only one direction in time, when by the fundamental symmetry of the universe, we should experience time both forward and backward? Our dominant perception of time owes more to Western history and social order than to a fact of nature, argues writer Rasheedah Phillips, delving into Black and Afrodiasporic conceptions of time, where the past, present, and future interact in more numerous constellations.
Phillips unfolds the history of time and its legacy of racial oppression, from colonial exploration and the plantation system to the establishment of Daylight Savings. Yet Black communities have long subverted space-time through such tools of resistance as Juneteenth, tenant organizing, ritual, and time travel. What could Black liberation look like if the past were as changeable as the future?
Drawing on philosophy, archival research, quantum physics, and Phillips’s own art practice and work on housing policy, Dismantling the Master’s Clock expands the horizons of what can be imagined and, ultimately, achieved.
Details and RSVP/ticketing links for all release events will be added below as they are available.
Dismantling the Master’s Clock Tour:
Thursday, January 30th | 7PM Los Angeles, CA @ Reparations Club, in conversation with Cauleen Smith. Get your ticket here.
Monday, February 24th | 5PM PST/8PM EST Virtual Event in conversation with Re’al Christian, hosted by the Vera List Center at the New School. Register here.
Monday, March 3rd | 6PM PST Virtual Event in conversation with Fred Moten, hosted by City Lights Books, San Francisco. Register here.
Thursday, March 13th | 7PM Philadelphia, PA @ Wooden Shoe with Metropolarity: CYBORG MEMOIRS (M. Téllez), Alex Smith, and Ras Mashramani. See details here.
Saturday, March 15th | 3PM Brooklyn, NY @ The Free Black Women’s Library, in conversation with OlaRonke Akinmowo. Register here.
Monday, March 17th | 7PM New York, NY @ Triple Canopy: Fractal Rip, with Ryan C. Clarke. Register here.
Tuesday, March 18th | 7PM New York, NY @ Performance Space NY: Temporal Repair Clinic: A Performance-Reading-Workshop with Rasheedah Phillips and Black Quantum Futurism co-creator Moor Mother. Get your ticket here.
Thursday, March 20th | Baltimore, MD @ Red Emma’s: TWO EVENTS! 3PM—Spatial Futures: A workshop with Rasheedah Phillips on organizing and policy advocacy for reparative spatial justice in land and housing 7PM—Dismantling the Master’s Clock book event, in conversation with Jason Harris
Friday, March 21st | 6:30PM Washington, DC @ Sankofa Books. Register here.
New York Times–bestselling author adrienne maree brown will be touring in the US South next month to celebrate her new release, Loving Corrections: a collection of love-based adjustments and reframes to grow our movements for liberation while navigating a society deeply fractured by greed, racism, and war.
In this landmark book, brown invigorates her influential writing on belonging and accountability into the framework of “loving corrections”: a generative space where rehearsals for the revolution become the everyday norm in relating to one another.
Filled with practical wisdom on how to be a trustworthy communicator while providing bold visions for a shared future, Loving Corrections can speak to everyone caught in the crossroads of our political challenges and potential. No matter how new to the struggle, or how numerous our failures, brown’s indispensable writing is an invitation to us all.
Details and RSVP/ticketing links for all of adrienne’s Loving Corrections release events are below.
**Please wear a mask to all in-person events.**
Loving Corrections Tour:
Thursday, August 15 | 6pm: Durham, NC @Hayti Heritage Center with Alexis Pauline Gumbs & Prentis Hemphill.
Friday, August 17 | 6pm: Asheville, NC @ Firestorm Co-op with Ash Williams [Virtual Option Available]
Sunday, August 18 | 6pm: Atlanta, GA @Friends School Auditorium (Hosted by Charis Books) with Mary Hooks & Charlene Carruthers
Tuesday, August 20 | 7pm ET / 4pm PT: Virtual Event (Hosted by Source Booksellers) with J Wortham
Wednesday, August 21 | 6pm: Birmingham, AL @Trim Tab Brewery (Hosted by Burdock Book Collective) with Jordynn Wright
Thursday, August 22 | 6pm: New Orleans, LA @ 2285 Bayou Road *Note location change!* (Hosted by Community Book Center) with Aesha Rasheed
Saturday, August 24 | 2pm: Jackson, MS @Mississippi Museum of Art with Makani Themba
Thursday, August 29 | 6pm: Chapel Hill, NC @ Flyleaf Books with Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom
Wednesday, September 11 | 9pm ET / 6pm PT: Virtual Event (Hosted by City Lights Booksellers) with Matt McGorry
Thursday, September 12 | 8pm ET / 5pm PT: Virtual Event (Hosted by Loyalty Bookstore) with Janine De Novais
Saturday, September 28 | 6pm: Baltimore Book Festival (32nd Street Stage) with Ashindi Maxton. RSVP here.
Sunday, September 29 | 6–7:30pm: Philadelphia, PA@ Uncle Bobbie’s [Meet & Greet / Book Signing]. Get your ticket here.
Monday, September 30 | 7pm: NYC @ Harlem School for the Arts (Hosted by Word Up Community Bookshop) with Kimberly Drew. Get your ticket here.
Tuesday, October 1 | Washington, DC @ Busboys and Poets (Takoma location) with Aja Taylor & Nicole Newman. Register here.
Uruguayan writer, popular educator, and journalist Raúl Zibechi will be touring in the United States in support of his new English language release, Constructing Worlds Otherwise.
“A survey of sustained autonomous people’s movements in Latin America that helps us rethink survival in the context of the extractivist State. It reimagines change even as it raises the quintessential question of how to move from episodic to radical social transformation.” —Johanna Fernández, author of The Young Lords: A Radical History.
Raúl Zibechi will be joined on tour by the book’s translator, George Ygarza Quispe. Follow the links below for more information on individual events.
Constructing Worlds Otherwise Tour:
Wednesday, April 17 | 7pm: Red Emma’s, Baltimore in conversation with Christy Thornton
Friday, April 19 | Insurgent Ethnography Conference at Binghamton University [Virtual Option Available] *9:30am EDT: Dialogue with Raúl Zibechi (with Eduardo Tadem, Sardar Saadi, & Marina Sitrin *11:15am EDT: Abolition and Non-State Forms of Justice (with Yeter Tan, Dylan Rodriguez, & Marina Sitrin)
Saturday, April 20 | 12pm: Riot Act, Binghamton, NY
Saturday, April 20 | 7pm: Woodbine, Ridgewood, Queens
Sunday, April 21 | 3pm: Property Is Theft, Brooklyn in conversation with Marisa Holmes
Shane Burley will be out promoting ¡No Pasarán! in January and February. Check out the (in person and virtual) event details and an interview with Shane, below.
2/15 – Books and Books (Digitally, featuring Margaret Killjoy and Benjamin S. Case) 7:00pm EST
2/26 – Spokane Library (featuring Joan Braune and Shon Meckfessel) 2pm PST
In your 2017 book Fascism Today you said, “The center of antifascism has always been resilient communities, those that are resistant to fascist incursion because of the strength of multiculturalism and their sturdy social networks.” Can you give us a few recent examples of resilient communities whose experiences provide hope and guidance for our present moment?
Yes, I think that the mass wave of mutual aid groups that very quickly responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and other nearby crises, like the forest fires in places like Oregon and Northern California, show a real change in how people are thinking about problems. There is a consensus that the state is not naturally the place you would turn to survive these emergencies, and with such glaring failures, like the inability or unwillingness to have a massive federal response to COVID, people simply started building autonomous networks of resilience. This is a mass adoption of the thinking and methodology that many marginalized communities have used for decades, in some cases centuries, for what the Black Panther’s called “survival pending revolution.” These histories are perhaps the most vital to look to, such as how people received abortion care when it was labeled illegal, or how trans communities supported each other to get access to gender affirming care, or how communities defended themselves from white supremacists when the state both would not stop, and, in some cases, participated in the violence. Resilient communities are those that create safety and support structures that are not simply dependent on these larger systems of power, and that state failure is expanding and people are responding in kind.
The real story of the new century is these counter-networks, how communities increase resiliency outside the auspices of the state. History has shown that achieving some kind of wide-scale social democracy profound enough to solve these issues is unlikely, but more importantly, we have the ability to meet people’s needs right now and, in doing so, we create the kernels of a new revolutionary social arrangement.
Fascists in 2022 made a lot of headlines, from Patriot Front’s flash marches to Ye’s antisemitism and embrace of Hitlerism. How much do you think the movement gains traction from these viral blips versus the widespread condemnation we see in the culture?
I think they have the ability to gain a lot of ground, primarily when they operate outside of what people understand as fascism. We are seeing a few major shifts. On the one hand, the alt-right may have been destroyed and Trump may be out of office, but we are seeing a mass adoption of many of their ideas across the GOP: the National Conservatives, the MAGA movement conspiracy theorists, the massive upsurge in Christian nationalism. Because so many of these movements have institutional ties, it becomes hard for many to view them as fascist because for so long white nationalism was understood as a primarily outsider, insurgent movement. This is what has insulated people like Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who was a part of the alt-right and who ducks that allegation by pointing to the elected leaders and media commentators who happily collaborate with him, such as Paul Gosar and Marjorie Taylor Greene. At the same time, GOP figures like Steve King and Michelle Malkin are speaking at open white nationalist conferences, such as American Renaissance. So they are gaining ground by housing their movements inside of establishment communities.
The other problem is the syncretic nature of fascist movements, who often hold such profound internal contradictions that people find it hard to locate exactly what is happening politically. Ye’s behavior is a good example: a Black musician collaborating with a white nationalist and a conspiracy theorist to preach antisemitism. This feels incoherent and it is, but this is how fascist movements largely work, they bring together people of disparate identities and goals and even inculcate people who would be harmed by the political ideas they are espousing. This has only become more fractured and less ideologically constructed as the alt-right, which was a relatively complete white nationalist ideology, declines and there are few ideological thought leaders to maintain a straight forward trajectory. This will make it harder for people to really confront racist ideas since they are coming from what people read as unlikely sources.
As conservatives have normalized hate, conspiracy theories, and acceptance of political violence we see both their typical authoritarianism as well as rhetoric and action that can be labeled fascist. How do you suggest people parse out, discuss, and oppose contemporary conservatism when the overlap between business-as-usual and fascism seems to be increasing?
Yeah, this gets to what we were discussing earlier. Right now the GOP is in a battle for its future, with a segment of the party seeing how Trumpism can create unstable markets and potentially loses elections (as was seen very clearly in the midterms) and those who are unwilling to cut their MAGA ties, are declaring the election stolen, who believe COVID is largely an opportunistic hoax, whose founding ideologies are conspiracy theories, and who are moving even further to the right of where Trump was at. Figures like Wendy Rogers, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, J.D. Vance, candidates like Blake Masters, pundits like Tucker Carlson, state leaders across the country, and others, are dipping into the waters of a kind of “soft fascism” of vitriolic nationalism (though with an attempt at cosmopolitan branding), conspiracy theories (usually of the coded antisemitic variety), extreme anti-immigrant, queerphobic, and apocalyptic rhetoric. The move to demonize trans healthcare and LGBT existence is currently the sharp edge of this, but I think we can also expect a kind of ecofascist prioritization of closing the border as the climate crisis deepens and compels migration northward from the Global South.
As scholars like John S. Huntington have argued, there has always been a far-right ideological core to conservatism as a political movement, and the radicals and the more moderates still share some base ideological assumptions. As academics like George Hawley have tracked, the previous Buckleyite coalition of hawkish foreign policy, free market absolutism, and Christian-centric social conservatism has started to break down, and what we have ended up with is a choice between racist populism on the one hand, or pro-business obsessions on the other. The difference is in how certain they are that identity should determine a person’s slot in the social hierarchies, but don’t assume that makes any standard Republicans any less likely to push you off the cliff. They will just say it’s for economic rather than racial reasons.
One of the defining features of fascism is a belief in inequality. It animates its misogyny, racial and ethnic hatred, and breeds a cult of hierarchy and domination. Various “left” and radical traditions that claim to embrace equality retain subtle and not so subtle residues of inequality that impede solidarity. Who are your favorite thinkers that make the case for equality and equity as a countervail to inequality?
As Hawley also says, the left includes any movement that puts equality as its “highest value,” meaning that political and social decisions should be measured in their ability to promote equality. Surely other factors are involved, such as their ability to push scientific progress or, particularly with anarchists, to see freedom as an equally important point, but the leftist radical tradition is foundationally about the idea that we should actually live out the stated goals of liberal democracy.
The critique then from Proudhon and Marx all the way up to Occupy Wall Street is that society has failed, for structural reasons, to live up to the promise of equality that is central to the claims of the Enlightenment project, and therefore we need a cataclysmic change in our society to achieve this. The implications of this are clear in terms of economics, but we can also go at this inequality around gender, as radical feminists have, sexual orientation and gender presentation, as the revolutionary LGBT movement does, on race, as Critical Race Theory and antiracist activists have, and looking at radical, meaning foundational, ways to change society to promote equality on those metrics. It should go without saying, then, that to realize actual equality here or elsewhere we need an international revolutionary movement to change the very precepts of our society, such as those that underskirt capitalism, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and the state. Those systems are cultivated, systematized coercion meant to favor a ruling class and to keep the rest of us slotted in a hierarchy that does not ultimately serve us.
In a certain sense, the fascists get our society right. They know that we are not living in an age of equality, and they look at a society that presents itself as equalitarian and then says “it must be that not all humans are equal, after all.” So their revolutionary project (and it is fundamentally revolutionary) is to remake society to enforce that inequality along certain ideological lines, usually (but not always) focused on race. They don’t just want to move backwards, they want to intentionally codify inequality in a way that lacks the current anarchic quality of the market, which they believe promotes identity-blindness and allows some undeserving people too much control in society. The fascist approach is to pick up on the privilege of some members of the working class, such as white working men, and suggest that their problems are the result not of the rampant structural inequality imposed by an economic system that preferences the rich, but by the advances made by the left to realize equality. This is a powerful argument because people are desperate to alleviate this feeling of perpetual despair, and since the fascists can play on deeply lain biogtries that are learned through our societal training, they can take the impulse these members of the community are having to confront their own dispossession and transmuting it onto a racist, patriarchal narrative of domination.
The only thing that can make us more free is a revolutionary movement of the entire working class, and the only way to achieve that is to intentionally go after identity-based oppressions that necessarily break the solidarity necessary to build that movement. If white workers continue to choose white privilege over shared struggle with non-white people in similar situations, then we will never have the capacity to topple the system entirely. This is true of all the other forms of marginalization and dispossession that are not purely enacted economically, and they are the most effective ways of tricking workers to believe that their enemies are each other rather than those holding the purse strings. It has to be an absolute priority to confront white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, antisemitism and other forms of oppression in all instances because those very things, even when you are not the immediate receiver of the violence they cause, will harm your ability to become free. More than this, we need to bear witness to the incredible violence and suffering marginalized people are facing as this type of oppression only accelerates as economic and ecological crises transform the U.S.
¡No Pasarán! published by the Institute for Anarchist Studies and AK Press
Antifascists have used the “we go where they go” approach to stopping fascist public activity. It’s been effective in times of increased, acute fascist activity. What do you hope to see committed antifascists do in less, for lack of a better term, acute times?
There are two answers to this question, and I think it’s best to separate them from each other as much as possible.
First is continuing the antifascist work in the same way that they do, more or less, during those acute moments. This means keeping the organization functioning, doing housekeeping work, recruiting members, creating literature, all the things that are not time dependent but need to be done to maintain a functioning organization. Joint learning is also an important point of that, and political education, since this is complicated stuff, there is a lot you must know to be able to decode far-right ideas, and because antifascists offer a counter-strategy to fighting the far-right from what is generally offered by NGOs, politicians, and law enforcement. The point here is that organized antifascism needs long-term care to maintain the ability to respond effectively at all, particularly in being able to support, guide, and participate in mass mobilization moments, like those we saw in 2020, on short notice. Likewise, there are always going to be far-right groups (until we unseat the systems that create them), so there is always going to be work to do.
The second thing, and I do think this is different, is to work on the issues that create the far-right in the first place. If fascism is a response to the feelings of alienation that come from receiving inequality, such as having a precarious home life or a bad job, then working on those issues will disrupt the petri dish that grows the disease. What I think is most effective here is mutual aid organizing because this is an attempt to directly answer the issues that white nationalist and far-right groups often suggest they can fill. For example, in rural areas that do not have ambulance service, good social services, high speed internet, or other important supports, militia groups often offer those things, and thereby they become welcomed parts of the community and then supplant their narratives for where this crisis is coming from. Antifascists who are not just doing the focused and specific work of countering the far-right directly can work to build mutual aid networks, labor unions, tenant unions, and other groups that take on those foundational issues, showing people that solidarity is stronger than privilege and that fascists actually disrupt our ability to improve our situation.
That is the work that, frankly, the majority of us can, and should, be in, and then we can pivot our daily work at the behest of the antifascist organizations when they need a large mass of people and periphery to act in support. For example, if a far-right rally is planned and an antifascist group plans to disrupt it, they will need twenty times the number of members they have to show up to be able to use numbers to disrupt the event. This means that non-members are an essential part of the strategy of tight, membership-driven antifascist groups, so people need to be prepared to bridge those coalitions and support antifascist groups at peak moments, while going after some foundational, bread-and-butter issues when we are not in peak moments.
In No Pasarán, a member of Corvallis Antifa says “Many [antifascist groups] are forsaking mass mobilization and building holistic networks of community defense in favor of small-scale militant actions. Our enemies are coalescing and creating broad coalitions. We need to do the same with groups from across the left.” Do you agree about the need for mass mobilization and broad coalitions at this time?
Absolutely, I can’t say this enough. As a contributor to this book, David Renton, told me in a recent interview, there are reasons why a mass approach might not be used. For example, if you have a tiny National Socialist Movement meeting happening, maybe you don’t need a thousand people to push them out of the space. Maybe a small cadre of trained, educated, and committed people can handle disrupting the event until they leave. This is actually the approach advocated by some antifascists I’ve interviewed, who see some problems with having to rely on a mass approach each time. That is particularly true when some of the targets of antifascists are ostensibly on the left, such as antisemitic conspiracy theorists in anti-war movements, and so it can be a challenge to immediately build the consensus in the organized left to do something about it. Sometimes the antifascists have to take an unpopular position. It’s an interesting and useful debate, and we should listen to people more experienced than ourselves.
I generally think that mass approaches are best for a number of reasons. First, they are tactically effective, when we look at the inability of the alt-right to grow, and subsequently their implosion, it was because a density of protesters disallowed their access to space. They couldn’t hold their events, they couldn’t recruit, their members were doxxed and made unstable, which sent the message to less committed followers that it was not worth it, and everywhere they went they were hassled. You need a density of people to accomplish that.
Secondly, it is safer, more secure, and more inclusive, including allowing a space for those who favor strategic non-violence. When you have a large mass of people, activists are less likely to be successfully attacked and injured by the far-right, and the tactic itself is about denial of physical space and less about physical confrontation. Likewise, a large mass of people gives you different experiences, personalities, and tactics, meaning you can try so many more ideas that people have acquired from other social movements. How do labor strikes help? How does antifascist concerts and art events build power? There are a lot of options when you have a larger mass of people.
It also supports the building of larger alliances, coalitions, and the left itself, forcing organizers to talk to people about the issues and help move them along a political journey. When it is just done by a small, committed band of activists, then you do not get the opportunity to move the public along on these issues, which is a part of both inoculating them against fascist influence and to create a larger base for all social movements. We need our community, and a mass approach forces us to work with the communities we have.
Again, the counter argument to that is that what’s important in a given situation is shutting down the far-right before they metastasize and hurt people, not building the left necessarily. That is true, in acute situations, and outside of acute situations it’s good to build up those community bonds because, back into later acute situations, that community could be poised and ready to be involved in a mass strategy.
It’s also important to note that fascism requires a mass response because it is now a mass threat. We are not talking about isolated neo-Nazis groups, we are talking about white nationalism influencing mass electoral and street level politics, up to and including our last President. The scale of the problem is simply not something small groups can deal with, we have to build as big as possible. And I think we do that by having coalitions who, while working on multiple issues, have the ability to stay connected, learn what kind of solidarity they can offer to each other, and be prepared to act when called on.
Who is the most under-appreciated antifascist thinker right now that you’d like to see people engage with more?
I think Daryle Lamont Jenkins has been an incredible voice and I think deserves more of a platform, period. I think everyone featured in No Pasaran, such as Emily Gorcenski, Margaret Killjoy, Tal Lavin, Ryan Smith, Kim Kelly, so many others, have all taken different approaches to antifascism that, in their own ways, deviate from the caricature so many people have of what that word means, and because of that are all underappreciated thinkers in their own right. People considering how to take on subcultures, how to take on rural areas, how to fight within religious communities, we need to listen to them because they have authentically different experiences that hold unparalleled value.
One of the biggest problems in literature on antifascism is that it preferences white regions of the world, and largely white organizations. There is a reason for this: many of these antifascist groups took on this fight from a model of white accountability and had more access to and less vulnerability in white spaces, so there was an intentional tactical sensibility to it. But it also limits our understanding of antifascism to a white, subcultural framework. So we need to talk more about, in particular, Black antifascism (which both Mike Bento and Jeanelle Hope do in No Pasaran), with folks such as Robert F. Williams, Charles E. Cobb Jr, Robin D.G. Kelley (who graciously wrote a blurb for this book), Angela Davis and many others, who discuss Black self-defense against the Klan and other white supremacist groups. The same is true for newer organizers like Yellow Peril Tactical, organizing Asian Americans for self-defense. We have a huge gap in approaching antifascism from an international context, and we only scrape the surface in this book with essays by folks like Maia Ramnath and Mirna Wabi-Sabi. Fascist movements exist beyond the U.S. and Europe, so we want to hear more theorizing about places like South Asia, Iran, Syria, West Africa, Japan, and other places, and so I think some of the antifascist voices in those regions can be found amongst those people who are already discussing the political issues there.
I think people like Alex Di Braco, Alexandra Minna Stern, Joan Braune (also in No Pasaran), and others are bringing a clear eye at misogyny in the far-right and antifascist responses, and I think we are seeing a growing constellation of people who want to broaden how we build antifascism into a global movement. I also think going backwards more to some radical theory can be helpful, particularly in the realm of Critical Theory, with folks like Moishe Postone, Sina Arnold, Eva-Maria Ziege and Werner Bonefield helping to explain antisemitism in particular, but also the larger dynamic that births fascist movements. On the academic fascism studies side, I have found a lot of value in Roger Griffin, Janet Biehl, George E. Moose, Zeev Sternhell, Graham Macklin, Nigel Copsey (who blurbed this book), and many, many others. I think Tal Lavin has been a special influence on my work (who also wrote the Foreword), as well as Zoé Samudzi, J. Sakai and. Foundational writers on the far-right like Chip Berlet, Leonard Zeskind, and Elinor Langer are a major inspiration for how to tell these stories. Angela Saini, George Hawley, Linda Gordon, Camilla Schofield, Seyward Darby, Vegas Tenold,
Tell us about your new book with Ben Lorber and what readers can expect.
My colleague and friend Ben Lorber (a researcher at Political Research Associates) have been working on a book on antisemitism for the past three years, to be published by Melville House Books. After extensive research and interviews, we are writing about how to approach antisemitism from an intersectional, antiracist, and social justice framework, avoiding the conservative traps set by establishment Jewish organizations and “Countering Violent Extremism” groups, and bringing it right back to the movement space. We have conducted over a 150 interviews with people like Shaul Magid, Eric Ward, Magda Teter, Ben Case (also in No Pasaran), Ari Brostoff, and people from organizations like Bend the Arc, IfNotNow, Jews Against White Nationalism, Rebellious Anarchist Young Jews (RAYJ), Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and many others in an attempt to build an entirely new framework for understanding, and ultimately fighting, antisemitism. We see it as a form of structural oppression that demands solidarity as the answer for our safety.
Any predictions for their side in 2023? For ours?
This is a tough year to predict, particularly given that the election is next year. I think we will continue to see a lot of institution building on their side. People like Richard Spencer have been relegated back to the fringes, but he is building a new platform (on Substack, no less), as are a lot of the staple white nationalist publications and media projects like Counter-Currents. This includes the people from the Daily Shoah leading the National Justice Party, one of the few newer white nationalist projects that has some legs. The groyper movement and the American First Political Action Conference (AFPAC) will continue to have a lot of relevance, particularly as leader Nick Fuentes builds celebrity connections with Ye, Alex Jones, and, I suppose, Trump himself. He is the biggest remaining popular remnant of the alt-right and he has found a really solid niche that will allow him to continue building despite saying things that would have gotten him canceled from the Conservative Movement a decade ago.
While the alt-right had preferenced a kind of counter-cultural, artsy and online brand (at least early on), what’s en vogue right now is aggressive white Christian nationalism. I would say that Americanism is now back in full force and the open white nationalists are finding their energy by using a combination of MAGA language, antisemitic conspiracies that have now spread across the GOP, and Christinaity since it gives them an angle to attack queer people. I think Critical Race Theory, Drag Queen Story Hour, and trans healthcare clinics are the new “Confederate Monuments,” meaning this is where the far-right will mobilize around in an effort to pull from the slightly more moderate right that has been lured into their dog-whistle issues. I think queer spaces, particularly for trans healthcare, are the most vulnerable at the moment and there needs to be conversations about what is necessary to keep them safe (the same is true about abortion clinics, though drag shows and public LGBTQ events seem to be momentarily the focus). This has been aided by people like Chaya Raichak, Libs of Tik Tok, who is normalizing the worst homophobia we’ve seen in decades and using the disconnect with reality that conspiracism has wrought to do so.
She also represents another frightening trend: far-right Jews using antisemitism. Libs of Tik Tok mobilizes thinly veiled antisemitic conspiracy theories as a weapon against queer people, despite Raichik being an Orthodox Jew herself. There is a problem of the far-right, including white nationalist, politics in Orthodox circles, and this has included mirroring the slide into antisemitic conspiracy theories that, since they are coded, are claimed to be antisemitism-free.
You are also seeing extensive cross-racial organizing along two lines. One, antisemitism is bridging white nationalists with non-white folks who are attuned to white nationalist conspiracy theories (such as Ye), and, second, it is Jewish far-right activists collaborating with non-Jewish far-right activists in an effort to defend their whiteness or the Palestinian Occupation. As suggested earlier when discussing my book, any Jewish participation in the far-right ultimately makes Jews less safe. There is also a turn to hyperbolize “Black antisemitism” as some kind of trenchant threat, which it is not, and we need to resist efforts to use antisemitism accusations to attack communities of color.
There are a lot of conversations about tactics in antifascist circles, and I think that will continue as these internal debates are necessary for healthy movement development. More people are putting effort into mutual aid and alternative networks of care, and I think that will only continue as state services are received, healthcare becomes more inaccessible, and wealth inequality increases. The labor movement is exploding, as is tenant organizing, and we need to make these centerpieces of any coalition meant to make a better world.
This week, join the Anarchist Studies Network for the ASN 2022 Conference! This is a virtual conference. For more information regarding registration and a lineup for all speakers and workshops, click here.
Wednesday, August 24, 2022 6:45am – 8:15am (GMT+1) Anarchist Utopianism
Panelists: John Clark, Laurence Davis, Vandana Singh and Margaret Killjoy
What roles do art and literature play in envisioning anarchist futures? In this panel we explore the rich but still relatively neglected phenomenon of anarchist utopianism, especially but not exclusively in its literary forms. Unusually for a panel at an Anarchist Studies Network conference, the aim of this session is to bring together in dialogue both scholars of the anarchist utopian tradition with specialist expertise on its history and theory, and writers of contemporary speculative fiction who have engaged in original ways with anarchist or anarchistic forms of utopianism. More substantively, we aim to elucidate the distinctive ideological features of anarchist utopianism, its historical and contemporary political significance, and the imaginative challenges and affordances of crafting anarchist literary utopias in a 21st-century context. Eschewing simplistic and reductive readings of literary utopias as fixed blueprints for an ideologically defined future, we will pay particular attention to the ways in which anarchist literary utopias engage the reader in a complex dialogue about what is, what might be, and the relationship between the two, inviting us to participate in a time-sensitive journey of the utopian imagination complete with fundamental moral conflict, meaningful choice and continuing change, by the end of which we may return to the non-fictional present with a broader perspective on its latent emancipatory possibilities. Consistent with this emphasis on the importance of critical dialogue, we also hope to leave plenty of time for comments and questions, whether academic or otherwise!
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Thursday, August 25, 2022 6:45am – 8:15am (GMT+1) Nuts and Bolts of the Future Society
Panelists: Thomas Pewton – A Future Food System
Robin Hahnel, Jason Chrysostomou & Anders Sandstrom – A Participatory Economy: a vision for an anarchist economy
Bernardo De Urquidi Gonzalez – Democracy by Average – a new horizontal decision making process
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Thursday, August 25, 2022 8:30am – 10:00am (GMT+1) ‘Go Forth and Multiply’
Panelist: Carla Bergman – Trust Kids: Autonomy Begins at Home
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The Anarchist Studies Network The Anarchist Studies Network is a support network for people working on, or incorporating in their work, the field of anarchism in its many forms. We encourage the study of anarchism within academia by building links between scholars across subject areas, as well as groups located outside the official sphere of academia, including those formed for activism and public intellectual life. We support people in collaborating and create an inclusive space to share ideas, thoughts, and research. We also aim to foster an interdisciplinary dialogue between anarchists and other scholars.
ASN hosts a variety of events and activities. The biennial Anarchist Studies Network conference is our flagship event which attracts people from all over the world. The conference is a focal point for many scholars to share new research, present ideas or simply meet like-minded people in convivial settings. The conference actively supports early-career or underfunded participants with grants and is committed to working on inclusion and dismantling structures of power within the space. We also organise smaller workshops and research activities lead by our members, notably through the PSA’s annual conferences. Our members actively contribute to an informal blog for more accessible anarchist writings and share knowledge and best practice through online discussions.
“For this impressive collection, Killjoy (the Danielle Cain series) brings together 21 speculative shorts tinged with just the right amount of horror to keep readers gloriously uncomfortable… Throughout, Killjoy showcases her gift for blending cerebral speculation with visceral thrills. There’s plenty to chew on here.” —Publishers Weekly
Margaret Killjoy’s stories have appeared for years in science fiction and fantasy magazines both major and indie. Here, we have collected the best previously published work along with brand new material. Ranging in theme and tone, these imaginative tales bring the reader on a wild and moving ride. They’ll encounter a hacker who programs drones to troll CEOs into quitting; a group of LARPers who decide to live as orcs in the burned forests of Oregon; queer, teen love in a death cult; the terraforming of a climate-changed Earth; polyamorous love on an anarchist tea farm during the apocalypse; and much more. Killjoy writes fearless, mind-expanding fiction.
Margaret Killjoy is a transfeminine author born and raised in Maryland who was spent her adult life traveling with no fixed home. A 2015 graduate of Clarion West, Margaret’s short fiction has been published by Tor.com, Strange Horizons, Vice’s Terraform, and Fireside Fiction, amongst others. She is the author of A Country of Ghosts, The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion, and The Barrow Will Send What it May. She is also the host of the podcast Live Like the World is Dying and Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on iHeartRadio. She is based in rural West Virginia.
Tuesday, September 20 @ 7PM Gray Coast Guildhall 11 Old Church Road Quilcene, WA 98376
Thursday, September 22 @ 7PM Left Bank Books 92 Pike Seattle, WA 98101 *MASKS REQUIRED
Friday, September 23 @ 7PM with Robert Evans Powell’s City of Books 1005 W. Burnside Street Portland, OR 97209
Wednesday, September 28 @ 7PM Pageant Theater 351 East 6th Street Chico, CA 95928 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
VIRTUAL EVENT Thursday, September 29 @ 4PM PT /7PM ET with Cadwell Turnbull Firestorm Co-op RSVP
Saturday, October 1 @ 5PM Short Story Writing Workshop @ Sour Cherry Comics (Followed by book signing) 3187 16th St. San Francisco, CA 94103 Workshop RSVP (no RSVP necessary to attend book signing at 7PM)
Sunday, October 2 @ 6PM East Bay Booksellers 5433 College Avenue Oakland, CA 94618 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Thursday, October 6 @ 7PM Chevalier’s Books 133 N. Larchmont Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90004
Wednesday, October 12 @ 7PM BCC Tucson 101 E. Ventura Street Tucson, AZ 85705
Saturday, October 15 @ 7PM Monkeywrench Books 110 N. Loop Blvd E Austin, TX 78751 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Tuesday, October 18 @ 6:30PM The Montrose Center 401 Branard Street Room 107 Houston, TX 77006
Sunday, October 23 @ 11AM – 5PM (Reading at 2PM) A.C.A.B. Zine Fest Gasa Gasa 4920 Freret Street New Orleans, LA 70115
Tuesday, October 25 @ 6PM Atlanta Vintage Books 3660 Clairmont Road Atlanta, GA 30341
Wednesday, October 26 @ 6PM Durham County Library 300 N. Roxboro Street Durham, NC 27701 RSVP
Friday, October 28 @ 7PM Small Friend Records & Books 1 N. Lombardy Street Richmond, VA 23220 *MASKS REQUIRED
Saturday, October 29 @ 4PM (note new time!) F12 Infoshop 1740 Broadway Street Charlottesville, VA 22902
Wednesday, November 2 @ 7:30PM Lost City Books 2467 18th Street Northwest Washington, DC 20009 RSVP
Thursday, November 3 @ 7PM Red Emma’s 3128 Greenmount Avenue Baltimore, MD 21218
Wednesday, November 9 @ 7PM The Word Is Change 368 Tompkins Ave. Brooklyn, NY 11216
Friday, November 18 @ 6:30pm The Big Idea Cooperative Bookstore 4812 Liberty Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15224 *MASKS REQUIRED
Saturday, November 19 @ 7PM Rhizome House 2174 Lee Rd. Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 *MASKS ENCOURAGED
Monday, November 21 @ 7PM Burning Books 420 Connecticut St. Buffalo, NY 14213
Tuesday, November 22 @ 6PM Akimbo Books 318b East Ave. Rochester, NY 14607
This weekend on August 6th & 7th, join us for the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair. Don’t forget to swing by the AK Press table to say hi and grab some books! This event is free and open for anarchists and people curious about anarchism.
The Anarchist Bookfair takes place in two buildings, which are across from each other (maps below).
CEDA 2515, rue Delisle CEDA is an adult education and community center based in Little Burgundy/St-Henri.
The main floor of CEDA is accessible to people using wheelchairs.
Please note: The CEDA entrance for people needing to use the wheelchair ramp is via the rear parking lot to the left of 2520, avenue Lionel-Groulx, before Vinet, but after Charlevoix.
The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair venues are a few flat blocks from metro Lionel-Groulx. General information about this metro station is available online here: http://www.stm.info/english/metro/a-m36.htm#Lignes
This metro station is wheelchair accessible (there is an elevator to both platform levels). This will only be useful if you are coming from one of the 6 other wheelchair accessible metro stations (Montmorency, de la Concorde, Cartier, Berri-UQAM, Henri-Bourassa or Côte-Vertu). Please note that all of these stations are along the orange Line of the system.
Lionel-Groulx Metro is also a major hub for buses. The following buses stop at Lionel-Groulx Metro during the regular daytime schedule. Beside each is a link to the online schedule. On the schedule, wheelchair accessible buses are marked by a star ( * ).
On Wednesday, August 31st at 7:00pm EDT, join author Kung Li Sun, Mary Hooks, and Charis Books & More for a book launch event celebrating the release of Begin the World Over.
Charis welcomes Kung Li Sun in conversation with Mary Hooks for a celebration of Begin the World Over, a revolutionary tale of Black and Indigenous insurrection. History as it should have been. Begin the World Over is a counterfactual novel about the Founders’ greatest fear—that Black and Indigenous people might join forces to undo the newly formed United States of America—coming true.
In 1793, as revolutionaries in the West Indies take up arms, James Hemings has little interest in joining the fight for liberty –talented and favored, he is careful to protect his relative comforts as Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved chef. But when he meets Denmark Vesey, James is immediately smitten. The formidable first mate persuades James to board his ship, on its way to the revolt in Saint-Domingue. There and on the mainland they join forces with a diverse cast of characters, including a gender nonconforming prophetess, a formerly enslaved jockey, and a Muskogee horse trader. The resulting adventure masterfully mixes real historical figures and events with a riotous retelling of a possible history in which James must decide whether to return to his constrained but composed former life, or join the coalition of Black revolutionaries and Muskogee resistance to fight the American slavers and settlers.
Kung Li Sun is a lifelong southerner currently based on the Gulf Coast. As a public interest attorney in Atlanta, she brought class-action lawsuits on behalf of people in prisons and jails. He left lawyering to support undocumented and abolitionist organizers as a strategist and trainer, and to write. This is their first novel.
Mary Hooks is a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother and Field Secretary on the field team for the Movement for Black Lives. Mary is the former co-director of Southerners on New Ground (SONG). Mary joined SONG as a member in 2009 and began organizing with the organization in 2010. Growing up in a family that migrated from Mississippi to the Midwest, Mary’s commitment to liberation is rooted in her experiences and the impacts of the War on Drugs on her community.
This event is free and open to all people, especially to those who have no income or low income right now, but we encourage and appreciate a solidarity donation in support of the work of Charis Circle. Charis Circle’s mission is to foster sustainable feminist communities, work for social justice, and encourage the expression of diverse and marginalized voices. https://donatenow.networkforgood.org/CharisCircle?code=chariscirclepage
Please contact info@chariscircle.org or 404-524-0304 if you would like ASL interpretation at this event. If you would like to watch the event with live AI captions, you may do so by watching it in Google Chrome and enabling captions: Instructions here. If you have other accessibility needs or if you are someone who has skills in making digital events more accessible please don’t hesitate to reach out to info@chariscircle.org.
An excerpt from Dismantling the Master’s Clock by Rasheedah Phillips
A radical new treatise on time, quantum physics, and racial justice from world-renowned artist and advocate Rasheedah Phillips of Black Quantum Futurism.
