William C. Anderson - The Nation on No Map - Black Anarchism and Abolition

Anarchism is an open word whose contours and meaning are shaped by the long struggle for Black liberation, by the centuries-long resistance to racial slavery, settler colonialism, capitalism, state violence, genocide, and anti-Blackness. Anarchism gathers and names the practices of mutual aid and the programs for survival that have sustained us in the face unimaginable violence. It unfolds with and as Black feminism and Indigenous struggle. It offers a blueprint for radical transformation, for the possibilities of existence beyond the world of scarcity and managed depletion, enclosure, and premature death. In The Nation on No Map , William C. Anderson elaborates the anarchism of Blackness, joining a cohort of radical thinkers devoted to dreaming and rehearsing how we might live otherwise in the present and break with the fatal terms of the given, the brutal imposed order of things. The Nation on No Map is a compact and expansive text that sketches the long history of Black struggle against racial slavery, U.S. apartheid, and the settler state and asks us to consider a vision of politics that no longer has the state as its object or horizon and eschews the calcified forms of politics as usual.

What shape might the radical imagination assume when the state is no longer the horizon of possibility or the telos of struggle?, asks Anderson. The goal identified in these pages isnt to negate the state and preserve it on a higher level but to abolish it altogether. It is no longer a matter of trying to hold it accountable or appealing to it or striving to assume its power. We know better. There is too much history, too much blood to imagine that the apparatus of terror and violence might avail itself for our liberation or lend itself to uses other than policing and extraction, militarism and death.

Whither the state? In answering this question, Anderson reminds us that as Black folks our existence has been relegated outside the state and the social contract. For centuries, we have been abandoned by the state and not included within the embrace of person or citizen. We have lived inside the nation as eternal alien, as resource to be extracted, as property, as disposable population. We have been the tool and the implement of the settler and the master; we have existed as the matrix of capitalist accumulation and social reproduction; we have been the not human that enabled the ascendancy of Man. Our relation to the state has been defined primarily by violence. Our deaths, spectacular and uneventful, have provided the bedrock of the white republic.

This history explains how we have arrived at anarchism. Blackness is anarchic, writes Anderson, and Black people have been engaged in anarchistic resistances since our very arrival in the Americas. All without necessarily laying claim to anarchism as a set of politics. The anarchism of Blackness emerges in the condition of statelessness experienced by Black people in the United States. Any pledge of allegiance is eclipsed by the charge of genocide and massacre, by stolen life and surplus death. From the nonevent of emancipation to the afterlife of slavery, Black America has been required to consistently think outside of the state because the state has consistently been our oppressor. Statelessness, as Anderson explains, is more than a lack of citizenship: it renders you nonexistent, a shadow. So why not embrace the darkness were in, the darkness we are, and organize through it and with it? Our struggles have challenged the authority and legitimacy of the state for as long as we have been in the Americas. With this in mind, Anderson asks that we imagine possibilities for radical transformation that no longer see the state as the arbiter of the possible or as the ultimate vehicle and realization of freedom.

What might be possible when our freedom dreams are not tethered to old forms? At the very least, the vision of what is and what might be are transformed, no longer yoked to the nation and capital. Other blueprints of the future emerge, Anderson suggests, when we are not stuck repeating the exhausted and failed strategies of the past. Invoking an oft-quoted line from Marxs The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Anderson beseeches us to seek our poetry from the future rather than the past. Anarchism is one form of this poetry of the future.

Anarchism is an open and incomplete word, and in this resides its potential. It is to perceive possibilities not yet recognizable; it hints at what might be, at modes of living and relation that are unthinkable in the old frameworks. The goal isnt to establish a new orthodoxy or a new vanguard. Nor does Anderson attempt to integrate Black anarchism into the canon of European anarchist thought or to make it legible in its terms, or to convince disbelieving others of the significant lessons offered by the successive movements against state and empire and capital. Black anarchism is anarchism otherwise, and its goal is the reconstruction of everything. Anarchism is just a name, Anderson writes. Our revolution can be great no matter what we call it. The goal is transformation, to become ungovernable masses to create a society where safety and abundance rule over us, not violence.

To be stateless, to be nowhere, is, for Anderson, to be situated in a transversal relation, a rhizomatic network of struggle everywhere. In sketching out the possibilities inherent in Black anarchism as a framework or moment for a global struggle against racial capitalism, settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and empire, anti-Blackness and statelessness provide the pivotal terms of his argument. Here there is no false opposition or impasse between the critique of anti-Blackness and a radical planetary vision. The task is to imagine change and work in the everyday for radical transformation, however it might be named: as riot, as insurrection, as rebellion, as intifada. So, what is necessary to achieve autonomy and liberation? A first step, Anderson notes, is to abandon the eternal verities and the old orthodoxies in their Marxist and Black nationalist forms, because they make the state the vessel of their ideality. The second is to embrace poetry from the future because only it can embrace the vision of another set of planetary arrangements, other possibilities of relation not predicated on hierarchy and centralized authority. The third is to create liberated or temporary autonomous zones, Black geographies of freedom that might be called the commune or the clearing.