Three important notes about this file

xt: no alt bad

Responsibility for actual alternative or failure is inev

Day 9

(Christopher, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project, http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/historical_failure_of_aanarchism_chris_day_kasama.pdf ajones)

Finally revolutionaries have a responsibility to have a plausible plan for making revolution. Obviously there are not enough revolutionaries to make a revolution at this moment. We can reasonably anticipate that the future will bring upsurges in popular opposition to the existing system. Without being any more specific about where those upsurges might occur it seems clear that it is from the ranks of such upsurges that the numbers of the revolutionary movement will be increased, eventually leading to a revolutionary situation (which is distinguished from the normal crises of the current order only by the existence of a revolutionary movement ready to push things further). People who are fed up with the existing system and who are willing to commit themselves to its overthrow will look around for likeminded people who have an idea of what to do. If we don’t have a plausible plan for making revolution we can be sure that there will be somebody else there who will. There is no guarantee that revolutionary-minded people will be spontaneously drawn to anti-authoritarian politics. The plan doesn’t have to be an exact blueprint. It shouldn’t be treated as something sacred. It should be subject to constant revision in light of experience and debate. But at the very least it needs to be able to answer questions that have been posed concretely in the past. We know that we will never confront the exact same circumstances as previous revolutions. But we should also know that certain problems are persistent ones and that if we can’t say what we would have done in the past we should not expect people to think much of our ability to face the future. There is a widespread tendency in the anarchist movement (and on the left in general) to say that the question of how we are going to actually make a revolution is too distant and therefore too abstract to deal with now. Instead it is asserted that we should focus on practical projects or immediate struggles. But the practical projects or immediate struggles we decide to focus on are precisely what will determine if we ever move any closer to making revolution. If we abdicate our responsibility to try to figure out what it will take to actually make revolution and to direct our current work accordingly we will be caught up in an endless succession of “practical projects and immediate struggles” and when confronted with a potentially revolutionary situation we will be pushed to the side by more politically prepared forces (who undoubtedly we will accuse of “betraying” the revolution if they don’t shoot all of us). We will be carried by the tide of history instead of attempting to steer our own course. And by allowing this to happen again it will be we who have really betrayed the revolution. The net result of the refusal to deal with what it will actually take to make a revolution is that anarchism has become a sort of directionless but militant reformism. We are either building various “counter-institutions” that resemble nothing so much as grungier versions of the social services administered by different churches; or we are throwing ourself into some largely reactive social struggle in which our actions are frequently bold and courageous, but from which we never build any sort of ongoing social movement (let alone a revolutionary organization).

at: antiblackness

“anti-blackness” vs “whiteness studies” is a distinction without a difference. The effects and political mechanisms are indistinguishable

Sullivan ‘1 - Associate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at Penn State at University Park (Shannon “Living Across & Through Skins : Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism & Feminism”06/2001 p161-162 ajones)

This experiment demonstrates that pro-whiteness and anti-blackness can be distinguished psychologically. The different ways in which the egalitarian nonracist participants responded to the inadmissible confession in the case of white and black defendants shows that those participants were not biased against blackness, but were biased in favor of whiteness. However, in support of Ignatiev’s position against thinking of whiteness as preserved, the experiment also demonstrates that the effects of pro-whiteness and anti-blackness disadvantage black people in equivalent ways. Even though the distinction between anti-blackness and pro-whiteness can be useful for distinguishing different types of psychological reactions to situations involving race, it does not mean that pro-whiteness does not have adverse effects on people of color. This is signi¤cant because the effects, not the mere psychology, of pro-whiteness are most relevant to racism and its elimination. As compared to a black defendant who made no incriminating confession, a black defendant who did make such a confession was treated fairly by the egalitarian white participants. Compared to a white defendant who made such a confession, the black defendant who confessed was not treated fairly by the white egalitarians. The white defendant received bene¤cial treatment that the black defendant did not, disadvantaging the black defendant in a signi¤cant way— solely because of the defendant’s race. Even if one claims that the black defendant received justice while the white defendant received mercy, the verdicts are racist because they awarded special treatment to the white defendant because he or she was white. While the anti-outgroup bias of traditional racists and the proingroup bias of egalitarian nonracists do so in different ways, both unfairly discriminate based on race. Both pro-whiteness and anti-blackness attitudes are racist because they have racist effects.

Wilderson is ahistorical-- he assumes that anti-black animus arises from nothingness but its caught up in a broader web of historical power relationships like Islamophobia and nativism

Charoenying (citing Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Prof of Ethnic Studies, UC Berkeley) 8

(Timothy, Islamophobia & Anti-Blackness: A Genealogical Approach, http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia-anti-blackness-genealogical-approach)

The year 1492 marked a major  turning point in the trajectory of Western Civilization. Elementary age children are taught this as the year Columbus famously crossed the Atlantic. An equally significant event that year, was the Spanish conquest of al-Andalus–a Moorish province on the southern Iberian peninsula established eight centuries earlier–and more importantly, the last major Muslim stronghold on the European continent. Critical race scholars have argued that these two events would not only shift the geopolitical balance of power from the Orient to the Occident, but fundamentally alter conceptions about religious and racial identity. According to Nelson Maldonado-Torres, of the University of California, Berkeley, the expulsion of the Moors from continental Europe marked a transition from an age of imperial relations between Christian and Muslim empires, to an age of European colonial expansion throughout the known world. The “discovery” of “godless” natives in the Americas would also inspire the great debates between Las Casas and Sepúlveda in 1550 on the nature of the human soul. Such a geopolitical and philosophical shift, Maldonado-Torres argues, would lead to a Eurocentric, re-categorization of humanity based upon religous—and ultimately racial—differences. Maldonado-Torres has proposed that anti-black racism is not simply an extension of some historical bias against blacks, but rather, is an amalgam of old-world Islamophobia linked to the history of the Iberian peninsula, and to the notion of souless beings embodied in popular  conceptions about the indigenous natives of the Americas. These beliefs would contribute to an ideological basis for, and justification of, colonial conquests in the name of cultural and religious conversion, as well as pave the way for the enslavement and human trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans.