Ex-Black Panthers including Ashanti Alston, Kuwasi Balagoon, and Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin theorized Black/New Afrikan Anarchism as a new political ideology for revolutionary Black struggle in the late twentieth century.
Black/New Afrikan Anarchists criticized what they perceived to be shortcomings of the Black Panthers, synthesized anarchism with Black Nationalism, and theorized the Black Commune as the revolutionary form of Black self-determination. While they lauded the Panthers as the leading organization of the long 1960s, they criticized the party’s authoritarianism and hierarchical and patriarchal tendencies. Their disillusionment with the Black Panthers led to a wider critique of the Marxist-Leninist approach to Black Nationalism that informed their turn towards anarchism.
The Black/New Afrikan Anarchist synthesis of Black Nationalism and anarchism upheld an anti-state nationalism. They contend that Black Americans are an oppressed nation, but that national liberation can and must take place without establishing a new nation-state. Ashanti Alston argues that revolutionaries must go “beyond nationalism, but not without it.” As he remarks, revolutionary Black Nationalists in the Panthers had perhaps the most advanced politics of the era. However, Alston emphasizes that we must learn from their mistakes and articulate national self-determination in a non-hierarchical manner so that it does not get captured in the state.
In “Anarchism and the Black Revolution,” first written from prison in 1979 as a series of pamphlets, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin lays out a program for a “Black Commune” consisting of local community control coordinated through federations of nested communes (the classic anarchist “commune of communes” with a focus on Black Liberation). After his release from prison, Ervin promoted a new edition of the book on a 1993 speaking tour coordinated by the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, which also featured excerpts of the book in its newspaper. Although he soon broke from Love and Rage, Ervin remained active in the anarchist movement and his work provided a major foundation for the Anarchist People of Color organization and tendency.
It is striking that each of the leading theorists of Black Anarchism were ex-Black Panthers who critiqued the hierarchies of Black Nationalist and Marxist-Leninist parties from within prison walls. Black/New Afrikan Anarchism arose as a product of the counterrevolution and the struggle against it. Although they were quite marginal within Black social movements in the late twentieth century, Black/New Afrikan Anarchist theorists in this era laid some of the groundwork (alongside larger tendencies like Black Feminism and Black Marxism) for the recent popularization of Black Anarchism and abolitionism.
This is an excerpt from my article in the Anarchist Studies journal, “From the Ashes of the Old: Anarchism Reborn in a Counterrevolutionary Age (1970s-1990s).“
